That afternoon she’d improved a bit, sitting up with her back to the wall, reading some dirty old book in the low light. She glanced up as he ducked under the threshold, sitting at the end of her bed—his proper mother and her opinions about boys and girls far from here.
“How’s the world outside?”
“Still moving?”
She flinched. He didn’t blame her, he’d nearly flinched too.
Whenever anyone called him a hero for saving the life in front of him, his stomach curdled with the knowledge that he wasn’t quite heroic enough. Everyone had seen Iker pull him from the water. He’d been stopped, but everyone assumed he’d failed. Everyone, including Evie. He saw it in her eyes, wells underneath them as dark as this room.
Guilt was there too. It filled the space where Anna had been, just as large and unwieldy as an eleven-year-old girl. His guilt lay in his failure to save her, her guilt in the fact that she’d put Anna in danger in the first place. In some other part of Havnestad’s world, there was disappointment there too—that he’d saved the fisherman’s spawn instead of a friherrinde. He was a hero, but in dark rooms and hushed conversation, he was a traitor to his class as well.
“As are you, Evie. You’re here. There is so much outside these walls.”
To put a point on it, he took a tentative step forward into the tiny room. She watched him as if he might bust through the roof. But he made it carefully to the window, pulling back the curtain she had draped there, letting a sliver of sunlight stream in, blinding and white. The girl blinked so hard, her eyes stayed shut. He waited to speak again until she had the will to open them.
“The world is out there. It misses you.”
“That’s a lie.” And it might have been. But he didn’t care about the world. He missed her.
It took four more days of those visits, but he drew her out.
They avoided the beach and the cove, sticking to the market streets—at first. Even though he was there to shield her as much as he could, buying honey buns and the sweet man’s fresh saltlakrids with all the joy of a summer day. It didn’t stop the stares. Judgment radiated out of every street corner and doorway.
“Acts as if she were the one who drowned.”
“The sea takes as much as it gives; it’s just the way of things, young lady.”
“Saved by a prince and still can’t put a smile on that lucky face.”
Evie’s eyes kept to the cobblestones. There was no way she could enjoy the sun with those stares—even with him by her side.
So he took her away.
He tugged her wrist toward the mountains. Up and up they hiked, the trail twisting toward Lille Bjerg Pass.
There, in a clearing, a mile from the cobblestones, he’d found a sturdy log. One with a particular view of the farmlands sprawling out in the valley below, the sea and its troubles at their backs. They’d never truly been alone like this. Not since they were children, and even then Anna had been there nearly every moment.
Paper bag rustling, he offered her saltlakrids and a smile.
“Salty licorice for your thoughts?”
She didn’t touch the bag.
“I knew that was how they’d react.” She gestured aimlessly behind her, the entire town in a sweep of her palm.
There was no use in denying it—he’d seen and heard it too. He nodded. She went on.
“They were the same after Mother died and Father would take me to the market, unaware of how to buy for a household with Tante Hansa still away.”
She was six at the time, the hero knew. Old enough for memories to truly settle. She looked away from him then, out to the summer-burned pastures below.
“I just want to steal a ship and leave it all. I just want to be me—” She almost said more, but then he snatched her hand in his and gathered the treats in the other.
“Come, then, to the docks. Let’s go.”
She skipped along beside him, her joyful urgency closer to matching his with each step.
“Where shall we go? Copenhagen? Stockholm? Oslo? Amsterdam? Brighton? Name the place you want to be!”
“Anywhere but here.”
“Then anywhere it is.”
The hero and the girl made it across the strait and to Rigeby Bay that day. The hero’s aunt, uncle, and cousin greeted them first with surprise—both at their arrival and that they’d come alone—and then with dinner.
His mother was the angriest when he arrived back at the castle two days later, wearing his cousin’s clothes—loose at the shoulders, short in the arms.
Still, his mind wandered to the time they’d had—Evie, Iker, and himself, across the strait—even as his parents dressed him down in the royal apartments, far from where any servant could hear.
Beach walks with hvidt?l (his first taste), his cousin’s seafaring stories, and Evie’s hair blowing over her shoulders in the bay’s famous wind. It was the first time they’d all been together since the day Anna died. His cousin drank enough hvidt?l to become wobbly on his feet; the hero stopped short of a full glass.
“You are twelve and an heir, what were you thinking?”
The three of them collecting sap for syrup in the deep forests, the shadows thicker than clouds under a knot of pine.
“You have duties in Havnestad to your people and your father. You are too old to be running off. Too smart, too important for such whims.”
Her grin, crumbs on her lips, at the queen’s insistence on butter cookies at every meal to fatten her up.
“Evelyn is a sweet girl, but you care far too much. Believe me when I say you will only get hurt.”
His cousin escorting the two of them home, ordering his minder down below as the three of them ran the sails, capable hands all.
“Nik, listen to me. I was young once. I know what it’s like to love someone you cannot have.”
The hero blinked then, eyes focusing on the queen. “She’s my friend, Mother,” though he knew the words sounded flat, not at all how he felt.
“I don’t think you should see her anymore. It’s for the best. It’s the only wa—”
“No!” the hero shouted.
“Let him be,” said his father, moving out from a shadow in the room. “She is a good girl, Evelyn. Neither I nor Nik nor you, my dear wife, would be here were it not for Hansa. They can be friends. Just friends. Isn’t that right, Son?”
The hero nodded. “Yes, Father.”
21
THE SUN HAS NEARLY SET, TENDRILS OF GOLDEN LIGHT spraying the beach, when it is time for the close of today’s games. The crowd is thrumming with hvidt?l and excitement for the finale—the rock carry championship. The brine of sweaty bodies mixes with the musk of the king’s summer wine and the fatty scent of fresh-fried torsk.
Annemette and I pick at the remains of a fruit-and-cheese plate—grapes, a few slivers of rye left alongside crumbles of sams? and Havarti that somehow escaped our lips. We share a cup of honeyed sun tea as well—something I badly need to help calm my nerves.
Iker and Nik are warming up in the inner circle, jogging paces down the course, a hundred yards long. With them are six winners of earlier heats, ready to run one more time today after winning two earlier eliminations to get to this point. The princes, of course, get to run just in the final round. Nik hates the special treatment, but it makes the people happy to see him run, so he complies.
The rocks that they must carry are all beached at the end closest to where we’re sitting. They are heavy, each roughly five stone in weight, though they vary in shape.
Little Johan Olsen is getting ready to compete again too. Nik was right: he is a sight. He’s so large, he rivals Nik in height and Iker in strength. The oldest of the finalists is Malvina’s father, Greve Leopold Christensen. His daughters sit across the arena from our side, Malvina ignoring us, her attention either on her father or the hand pie in her fingers. The other four competitors are fishermen I see on the docks in the morning—in their twenties and thirties, the lot of them.
“What happens if they drop the rock on their foot or some such thing?” Annemette asks, watching Nik practice his start by repeatedly hauling the rock to his right shoulder from a dead lift. She’s been nearly silent since the boys left us.
“They pick it up.”