“It’s no problem,” I told her hurriedly, eager to get on with the conversation.
Ulla and I had taken off our jackets and sat down at the table while Kate prepared the tea. The metal teapot had begun to whistle, so she came over and poured hot water over the tea bags into chipped ceramic mugs.
“We’ve had problems with nanuqs this year, coming too close to the house and getting more aggressive than normal. The long winter’s been hard on them,” Kate explained as she sat down across from us.
Nanuq was one of the few Inuktitut words I remembered—it meant “polar bear.” We had plenty of polar bears that lived around Doldastam, but they were almost never hostile. Still, I didn’t want to start my interactions with Kate by doubting her claims.
“They call me Kate Kissipsi, but that’s not really my name,” she began, staring down at the mug. The larger of the two wolves lay close to the wood-burning stove, while the other lay on her feet. “We came here when I was seven, and nobody here wanted to take in orphaned children.”
She looked up at Ulla then, who nodded solemnly.
“Too many babies and kids are dropped off here,” Ulla said. “There aren’t a lot of open hearts or open doors anymore.”
“None of the Kanin would have us here, but we were eventually taken in by an Inuit family that lived nearby,” Kate said. “That’s when I adopted the name Kissipsi—it means ‘alone’ in Inuktitut, and that seems like the best word to describe my life.
“Arvinge isn’t really Mina’s last name either,” she added.
As soon as she said it, it clicked with me. The Kanin had taken to using many Swedish words for official titles and names, even adopting them as surnames. It was so common, I hadn’t thought anything of Mina’s alleged maiden name until now.
“Arvinge means ‘heir’ in Swedish,” I said, thinking aloud. And then everything began falling into place “And you came here when you were seven? It was in 1999, wasn’t it?”
Kate nodded, but she hadn’t even needed to confirm it. It all made sense.
I leaned back in my chair. “Holy shit. You’re Viktor D?lig’s daughters.”
“ ‘Mina’ was my dad’s pet name for Karmin,” Kate said. “She was the only one he gave a pet name to, but she was the oldest and his favorite.” She let out an embittered sigh. “As soon as we got here, she started going by Mina Arvinge, trying to separate herself from the bad reputation our real name had garnered.”
After Viktor had attempted to kill the King fifteen years ago, he’d been sentenced to death, but many felt that the harshest punishment had been saved for his three girls. Since the whole attack had been based on the fact that he felt that his oldest daughter, Karmin aka Mina, was the rightful heir to the throne, King Evert believed that his kids should be punished severely, even though they were only children.
All three of Viktor’s daughters were stripped of the titles, their inheritance, and banished from the kingdom. Karmin was oldest, and she was only ten at the time. With their mother dead and their father on the run from the law, she had been left in charge of her younger sisters.
“After we were exiled, we had nowhere to go,” Kate said. “We’d never been changelings. We’d lived our whole lives in Doldastam, and unlike trackers, who are trained in the human world, we knew nothing about it.
“Before we were sent away, the Chancellor brought us a bag of clothes and some money,” she went on. “He told us to go to Iskyla. He said its people hardly ever followed the rules of the kingdom and no one here would even know who we were. And he was right.”
The Chancellor at the time had fallen ill, which meant that my dad was working in his place. My dad had been the one to help the girls and send them somewhere safe. Years later, even knowing that he’d tried to help them, Mina would still send Konstantin to kill him in revenge for not crowning her Queen.
“Our father stayed away for a long time, and honestly, that’s just as well,” Kate said. “I wished he’d never come back.”
Ulla leaned forward, resting her arms on the table. “Why? I would love it if my father visited, even once.”
“Your father probably isn’t completely obsessed with revenge,” Kate countered. “To be fair, Mina was already preoccupied with it before he showed up. But once he came here around six or seven years ago, her preoccupation turned into her solitary drive. They talked only about how they would make everyone pay.”
“How were they planning to make everyone pay?” I asked.