But he wasn’t just her Sebastian anymore.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “Everyone wants to talk to me.” His eyes were frantic, a little angry, but mostly sad.
“Is Freddy alive, too?”
“He is, though he’s caught a cold. He’ll be fine. I just hope I will.” He scowled at the window.
“Everyone said you couldn’t possibly have lived.”
“Well, they don’t have very good imaginations! Or much patience. You didn’t think to wait a day? A week, even? Give a man a chance to climb out of the damned frozen river and warm up? I told you not to let Marlis do anything crazy!”
The crowd outside was no longer crying, but shouting his name or “Your Majesty!”
“Truly, it didn’t matter if you had lived or not,” Thea said. “When the men came back with the weapons but you weren’t with them, Marlis had to do something to keep Brunner from taking them. When she told everyone you were Prince Rupert, the mood shifted immediately and it would have made him look bad to demand them from her right then.”
“Yes, well…” He looked over his shoulder, as if the past were a person hovering behind him. “I see her reasoning, but…” His hands had dropped to her arms, sitting heavily a moment before grasping. She had seen the way people had simply appeared at the first mention of his name, with pictures they must have kept all this years, and faces of sorrow for someone they had never known.
She had already understood why he didn’t want to be Prince Rupert, but she hadn’t grasped just how scary it could be to have people love you. Not when they wanted something. Not when they loved the idea of you, and not the reality.
A warm bed had never felt so good. Freddy was dull-headed with fever. His throat was scratchy, and piles of blankets couldn’t stop him from shivering. Climbing the stairs to his room had been an effort, but now he was safe in familiar surroundings and someone had handed him a letter from his parents.
They were alive and so was he. He didn’t want to think about where to go from there, how to close the immense gap of unfamiliarity between them, but it was enough for now to know he had a chance.
Still, the sickness only added to the feeling that he was weak. Of course he caught a fever while Sebastian came back unscathed.
When Thea walked in his room with a tray, he barely opened his burning-hot eyes to see her before closing them again.
“Freddy? I brought you something.”
“I don’t want anything now,” he said, figuring it was tea or soup, but then he heard a tiny peep of protest and opened his eyes again. Thea put a kitten on the bed and took a step back, looking nervous.
“If you don’t want her, I’ll keep her. But I was thinking about how you had brought your old cat back from the dead—”
“Amsel,” he said. The kitten was stumbling over the covers now, wiry tail in the air. He couldn’t even remember when Amsel had been this little. The kitten let out another small cry, and he slid his finger under the covers. It immediately developed an interest in the mysterious motion, getting very still, eyes riveted.
“Does she have a name?” he asked.
“Of course not, I got her for you. Do you like her?”
The kitten certainly wasn’t Amsel, who had been big, black, and lazy. “I like her,” he said. “Thank you.” He coughed, and the kitten dropped off the bed in blind terror at the sound.
Thea laughed and scooped her up. “She’s shy, but she falls asleep on my lap now. She’s already been in your room a lot because I wanted her to be comfortable here. I brought you some tea, too.”
“Thanks.” He sat up a little more. He wanted to say something to her, he just wasn’t sure what. “Thea…”
She was lingering, too, her pose pensive, ankles and arms half-crossed. “Freddy, I’m so glad you’re safe. I need to talk to you.”
“Sebastian told me about you two.”
She looked at the floor. Then at him again, with a slight frown. “I should have been honest with you. But I didn’t know how. I still don’t. Marlis said I don’t even know you, but I don’t think that’s true. I think I’ve seen your essential character, and based on that, I’d trust you with my life. We shared things that no one else will know or could understand.”
“Yes.”
“But I shouldn’t have kissed you. I feel like I misled you. I mean, I wanted to kiss you.” She scratched her head. “Hell, I don’t know how to say it. I kissed you because I wanted to feel like something good came out of all those terrible things.”
“We’re both new to this,” he said. “Life’s too short to feel bad about this. I almost died. And so did Sebastian. So, really. We’re fine.” Everything he said was true, but she was also so sweet to have brought him a kitten and so beautiful that he felt like he’d swallowed shards of glass.
She stepped closer and put a hand on his head. “I don’t have a lot of people in my life either. I think that’s why this is so hard. I’m really scared to lose you, Freddy.”
“You won’t.” He gave her a slightly pained smile. “I mean, now you’re the mother of my kitten.”
She laughed. “I hope so. We’ve gotten close, kitty and I.”
He dropped his head back onto the pillow, trying to cover his hurt with exhaustion, and she left quietly. He tried to sleep, as best he could with a kitten who decided it was now time to jump all over him, climb the curtains, and swat all the objects off the desk, just like Amsel used to do.
Marlis came to check on him some hours later. She didn’t bring kittens and tea, but she did look worried. “How are you feeling, Freddy?”
“I’ll live. You don’t have to check on me.”
“Well, someone should, in the absence of proper servants. Has anyone taken your temperature?”
“Right,” he said. “I forgot you’re Miss Hospital Volunteer.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I thought—” She stopped.
He sat up again and tried to rake his hair into a semblance of respectability. Marlis was not someone he wanted to see when he was sick in bed.
“I never told you I was sorry,” she said. “For forcing you to revive my father, and treating you the way I did.”
He shook his head. “You were grieving—”
“No. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry that—when we were growing up together—I knew my father was killing you and I didn’t tell you. You were one of the only kids who would play with me, and I didn’t treat you like an equal—I treated you like a servant. I shouldn’t have even treated the servants like servants, but especially not you. Please forgive me.”
“It’s fine.” He felt uncomfortable at this declaration. “I appreciate the apology, but we were also kids, so don’t beat yourself up.”
“I’m not a kid, I was never a kid, I’m hundreds of years old!” she cried, and then her face crumpled slightly.
“You didn’t remember being hundreds of years old. You had a tantrum when I grabbed your trains, you pretended the sofa was a horse, and you slid down banisters. You were a kid.”
“I had a tantrum because you broke my train.”
“I didn’t break your train. That was Peter von Dorin. I just made it worse when I tried to fix it.”
“You made it a lot worse. It came apart.” She clasped her hands behind her back and tapped her foot restlessly. “We grew up together, you know.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m not sure I did. I was so caught up in wanting to be smart and successful and make my parents proud, and you didn’t seem like you had anything to do with my ambitions. So I didn’t think about you much.”
He shrugged, and suppressed a cough. “I’m sure your father and the Valkenraths would have been alarmed if we’d gotten close, anyway.”
“But it was nice, actually, when we did just have fun. I wish I’d enjoyed myself more often.”
He was surprised at how long she was talking to him like this. Of course, he had seen a change in her since her father died, bu
t for once she really looked like a young girl, awkward and shy.
“Thea gave you the letter from your parents, didn’t she?” Marlis asked.
“Someone did, as soon as I walked in.”
“Do you think you’ll go back to them, once this is over?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you might finally get a chance to be a clockmaker.”
“But my father stopped making clocks when the Valkenraths were giving my parents money. I guess he didn’t really love clocks that much. Maybe he’ll do it again, since they’ve probably lost everything, but I’m not sure I want to be his apprentice if he gave it up himself. I love clocks because they reminded me of him, and that might ruin it for me. I don’t think I’m meant to make clocks.”
“What, then, I wonder? If your magic is gone? It’s hard to imagine you without it.”
“It is, isn’t it?” He didn’t like to talk about that. “Well, you might laugh at this, but I was thinking I’d like to learn more about gardening.”
“Why would I laugh?”
“Because it’s rustic and peasantish, and it’s not some grand ambition. If I’m lucky enough to grow old at all, I’m afraid I’ll be referred to as ‘the kindly old gardener.’”
She smiled wryly. “My mother was very interested in plants, learning about their medicinal purposes, or how to develop new species, or more efficient ways to grow food. All sorts of things. Plants are quite powerful.”
“Urd would know, eh?”
“Urd would know. But I’m still figuring it all out.”
As news spread of Prince Rupert’s heroic life and dramatic near-death saving the Lingfeldt weaponry, so many people thronged the street around the Schiff house that the city police had to assist in managing the crowd. The newspapers and radio spoke of nothing else, and reporters swarmed the house trying to speak to him. No matter where Thea went inside, she heard people screaming and crying outside, and although she knew they were supporters and not enemies, after a while the sound made her feel so rattled that her hands were shaking.
Sebastian stepped onto the balcony of the house to address the throng. Thea stayed well behind him, out of sight of the crowd. He still wore his ordinary, rumpled revolutionary clothes. She heard the roar of excitement when he appeared. Women screamed both his names.
Sebastian held out his arms, trying to quiet them. “Good afternoon!” he projected over the din. But that wasn’t enough. “Good afternoon!” Finally, “Listen! Listen, listen.”
The roar of chanting and cheering cut in half. Several indecipherable questions were screamed at him.
Thea imagined that most people still wouldn’t be able to hear the speech, but he just forged ahead, confirming the stories and rumors. He was Prince Rupert, he had faked his own death in Irminau, and he had come here as Sebastian Hirsch to aid in the revolutionary effort.
The speech was tentative at first, but his confidence seemed to build with the crowd’s enthusiasm, and at the end, he was starting to sound like himself, but with an extra dose of swagger. “King Otto might have superior numbers now, but I know we can hold him off if we mobilize. How many of you were born in Irminau? Well, you probably left for some of the same reasons I did. Growing up, I always heard stories of Urobrun: It seemed like they had all the newest and shiniest stuff, and I wondered why we were so behind. I wanted to find out what made this place tick, and then when I did, it was terrifying. But we have a chance to make this place what we hoped it would be. We need willing people, hard work, efficient government.”
His style of oration was more laid-back than Marlis’s, with occasional jokes. He was the same person she had grown to know and love over these past months, but it was so strange to see him engage with people this way.
When he finished speaking, he walked back into the room from the balcony slowly and was greeted by a round of compliments from his advisers, who seemed relieved he wasn’t trying to run away from his identity. He met Thea’s eyes before slipping off to his office without talking to anyone.
The next few days were such chaos that she barely saw him. He accepted some of the requests for interviews and spoke on the radio and had meetings with more potential allies and government officials. The meetings had grown too serious for her to be sitting in like she once did. Thea continued going to work, and the mood had changed drastically. She couldn’t believe how jubilant people seemed. The conversation was similar at so many tables:
“Brunner’s a good chap, but he’s soft. Rupert, on the other hand, he has a real backbone, going to Lingfeldt like that.”
“He ought to know just how to deal with Otto, wouldn’t you think?”
“I’d sure like to see Otto’s face when he heard about this.”
“God wouldn’t have saved him from that river if he wasn’t meant to save this country, I’m sure of that.”
Thea felt a little like the ant beneath Sebastian’s feet the way people spoke of him and barely paid attention to her. She didn’t want attention, but he didn’t either, and here it was, everywhere she turned.
But the excitement was also infectious. Sebastian could really do something wonderful if he harnessed the power of so many people’s hopes and dreams. She would never rule the country or command an army, but she had a part to play. Even when she feared Sebastian was lost, she still felt an independent sense of belonging—that the revolution meant something to her, and she meant something to it.
Thea saw her reflection in the washroom, radiant and bright-eyed. She felt beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with a new dress or the way she fixed her hair. It burned inside her like a light switched on.
Returning home, she found Sebastian sleeping at his desk, head in his arms like he’d meant to just rest for a moment, but he was breathing so deeply she thought he might be dreaming. She ran her hand through his hair, which was shorter now; he’d finally gotten it cut to appear more professional for the public.
He suddenly flinched, jerking his head up.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, “but maybe you should actually sleep in a bed.”
“I can’t. I just lay there and panic. It’s better here.”
“You’re doing a wonderful job,” she said. “Everyone loves you. It’s all anyone could talk about at work today.”
He stretched and yawned. “They love this Prince Rupert persona.”
“You’ve put in a lot of hard work. Give yourself some credit.”
He took her hand, kissed it, held it to his lips. “If our relationship was public, you couldn’t work anymore. You’d be scrutinized. People will say I need to make a strategic match. I don’t want to lose you over this.”
“You want to lose me over something else?” she teased.
He raised an eyebrow at her. “The potential of taking the throne, it’s huge.”
“But you’re prepared for it, aren’t you? I know this is scary to you, but you said yourself, you like the work. You can do this, and I think you should.”
“It doesn’t scare you because you don’t know what it’s like yet,” he said. “You’re still anonymous, but if that stopped, everyone would know your name, and no one would see you as a person anymore.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t scared.” She straightened a mess of papers on his desk, thinking of the right words. “I thought my father died when I was eight years old, but he didn’t. It was so much worse. My mother developed bound-sickness, and I had to care for her like she was the child. This country should be ruled by someone who is good, who wouldn’t have done that to my family. And I will do anything to have a world where that doesn’t happen, even if it means that I’m scrutinized. Even if it means I lose you. Who have you done all this work for?”
He was quiet for a long stretch.
“Not for Ingrid?” she said.
“No.” He looked down, his glasses reflecting the lamplight and hiding his eyes. “My first nurse, Jenny, the woman I told Nan to look for in Irminau? She was like a m
other to me. My own mother was distant, but Jenny was always there. She played with me, she taught me to read, sang me songs, held me when I cried. But she was also a skilled healer. She was the one who healed all my cuts and scrapes. The magic aged her, and finally, my father replaced her.”
“And she went to this place—what did you call it?” Thea remembered the name had been ominous, but that night was a blur.
“The Mausoleum. In the north wing of the palace was a row of lovely, expensively furnished rooms. I had never seen them until I heard they had taken Jenny there. I snuck in to see her and found…” He faltered a little, the memory still painful. “Jenny was too sick to leave her bed. She comforted me as best she could, but she told me never to come back. She didn’t want me to see her like that. And what must she have felt, an invalid at such a young age? Ingrid helped me to forget she ever existed.”
Thea put her arms around him, but he had gone rigid. “You’re right, Thea. This is bigger than us.”
It took three harrowing weeks for Nan and Sigi to make it back to the threshold of the revolutionary headquarters. When Ingrid let them go, they had almost nothing of value. They found a place to exchange Sigi’s Urobrunian money for Irminau coins, but it still wasn’t much, and miles of rural country pelted by frequent snowstorms stood between them and the border. They walked down country roads, praying not to be caught in a blizzard. They washed dishes at an inn in exchange for a bed. They went out of their way to avoid Irminau guards, in case Ingrid had changed her mind.
News was often sparse in Irminau; they heard word of Prince Rupert, but in Irminau’s papers he was described as “the treasonous prince.” Nan didn’t really know what had been happening at home, but as she and Sigi came into the city, she immediately noticed posters of Sebastian and newspaper headlines that stated 5,000 TROOPS TO JOIN PRINCE RUPERT, and they both picked up their pace.
“Nan! Nan!” Nan had just stepped in the door when Thea came rushing down the stairs and threw her arms around her. “You’re safe!”
“Yes!” Nan broke into a spontaneous smile, realizing Thea seemed happy. “And you—you all seem safe as well?”
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