"So, uh, you and the queen?"
"No."
"Oh. But—"
"I was twenty when I was taken into the royal service and appointed her bodyguard. She was sixteen years old. She was a child. I looked at her as a child. Then she grew up and I began to look at her as a woman."
"She must be hot. I mean she's Ana's mom. Wow this is awkward."
"No. She is cold as ice."
"Oh. So what—?"
"She was warm once, but there was a boy like you who broke her heart."
I swallow, hard. "Uh, yeah. Okay. I'm not going to do anything to Ana. Well, I am, but not bad things. I mean I will if she asks me, but—"
"Dude, shut up," Akele says.
I grip the sides of the seat as the plane starts to speed up.
Have I mentioned I hate flying?
Thorlief gives me an amused look. "Afraid of planes?"
"No, afraid of crashing."
He laughs. It sounds like a mountain crashing into another, slightly larger mountain.
"Who isn't?"
There's a pause, and then he says, "I'm not."
I white-knuckle my way through the takeoff and finally start to feel my heart slow when the plane levels out. I don't dare look out the window. I don't like heights much, either.
If I had to sit on the nose of the plane, I would. Anything for Ana.
"So you, ah," I start, half-mumbling, "you had a thing for the queen."
"Have."
"Oh. Must be tough. You were around her a lot?"
"Until I became Anastasia's bodyguard. Before that I was in her presence at all times except when she was alone in her apartments in the castle, when I stood guard outside the door. I was only apart from her then, and when I was asleep."
"Wow. What's she like? Ana's mom."
"Cold. Severe. Stern. Focused. Her country is everything to her. Her legacy is everything to her. Ana is everything to her."
"Really? Ana never talked about her."
"There is a rift between them. The queen does not wish to see Anastasia repeat her mistakes."
I chew on that for a while. "What do you wish?"
"I wish to see her happy."
"So when you see the queen—"
He shifts in his seat. "I have not seen her in almost three years, since Anastasia came to the United States. I have seen her in pictures. Spoken to her, but she speaks to me as she would any of her servants. I am nothing to her."
"That ain't right, man. You're totally carrying a torch."
"Yes. Others look at her and see only the hardness on the surface. The glacier. I see what lies beneath but was once on the surface. The softness beneath the armor."
"So why don't you tell her?"
"Me? I am no one. A queen is above my station."
"I'm pretty sure a princess is above my station."
"You do not actually have a station."
"Whatever, the point is—"
"I see the point. It means nothing."
"You should tell her how you feel."
He shifts in the seat again and folds his huge hands in his lap. Good, I was getting a little crowded even in the big first-class seats.
"I can't."
"Why?"
"I can't."
"That's not a reason. You just repeated yourself."
He growls. Literally growls, a deep rumble from inside his chest.
I shrug. "You don't actually have a reason, do you?"
"It doesn't matter. It's too late."
"Is it? It's not too late until you die, dude. The only shot you know you'll miss is the one you don't take."
"That is easy for you to say."
"Yeah, it is. I bagged a princess."
He turns to me with a sharp look. "If you use that word again—"
"Sorry. Look, all I'm trying to say is that you need to take a chance, man. How do you know she doesn't feel the same way about you?"
"She doesn't."
"What if she does?"
"Why would she?"
"Hell, I don't know. Does anyone understand women?"
"No," Konstantin breaks in, laughing.
I hear some scoffs and snorts from farther back on the plane.
The cheerleading squad heard that too.
"Smooth, guys," Akele says.
"You should talk," Dee sighs.
Aheahe snorts loudly.
This is going to be a long flight.
Ana
Mother enters dressed in a simple black gown. Black has ever been her color since father died; she never cast off her mourning clothes. The gown makes a stark contrast against her pale face and snowy hair that hangs loose to her back, bound only by the simple circlet she wears tucked in her hair when she is not required to wear the ceremonial crown that rests in a vault below the castle.
"Step away from there."
I tremble in place, gripping the old stone. How many princesses before me have done the same, I wonder? Is it such a terrible thing, to be royalty? To utterly belong to your people?
Truly it is terrible. I am not sure I can survive it.
"Anastasia, step away from there and come inside. Sit on the bed."
Even now, I dare not prompt her to command me a third time.
I walk to the bed sullen and sit down. Mother strides over and seats herself beside me, smoothing her dress over her legs. We look so much alike, we could be twins but for the crow’s feet around her eyes, and the sadness that stains them like blood on water.
A gasp strikes me as she rests her hand on my back, tenderly.
"Anastasia," she sighs, "I so wished to spare you this. I wish I had never sent you to America at all."
I look down at my feet and say nothing for a while.
"That is an awful thing to say."
"Why, daughter?"
"Then I never would have met him. I was happy for a time. Happier than I have ever been. I have never been happy. Only lost and lonely. He made me feel what a human being feels. I thought I was turning into a star."
The words fall out of me and shatter on the floor, like a glass slipping from a drunkard's hand.
The sobs comes a moment later.
Mother does something she has never done before in my entire life. She puts her arms around me and pulls my head to her chest.
"Cry," she says. "Cry, child. I'm here."
I want to push her away, but I can't. I need the embrace, I need the softness of her to weep into bitterly. I hug her as though I never have before—in truth, I never really have—and tighten my arms, holding on to the only thing that is still solid in my life.
Despite all that she is, she is still my mother. She pats my head and strokes my hair, and hugs me back.
"I've failed you," she says with a deep, withering sigh. "I never wanted this to happen. I wanted us to be closer, but there was so much. Always so much."
"I don't want to be queen," I moan.
"I once told my father the same," she says. "In much the same circumstances. When I was to be wed to your father. There was—"
"A man. In America. Did you sleep with him?"
She sighs. "Yes. I did. He took my virginity, and I gave him my heart. He was the world to me. He was kind and good and made me feel like no one else ever had. He made me feel like I mattered. The person, not the title. Not the crown. It was a magical feeling. It made me feel invincible, perfect. I thought of all the changes I would make with him by my side, how I would be the one to change the tradition."
I push her away and sit up.
"Now you want me to marry a man I loathe for 'reasons of state.'" I throw her own words over the phone back at her.
"I want you to be queen. It's a hard lesson, and yet you still clearly needed to learn it. You don't have a life, Ana. You have a crown. You have no right to shirk your responsibilities—"
"What does my love life have to do with my responsibilities?" I shout, rising to my feet. "What does it matter, tell me? Can I not approve a budget or write a law if I am taking the wro
ng cock in the bedroom? I already know what your life is like. Hours and hours and hours every day of matters of state from the small hours of the morning until nighttime, and then what? An empty bed filled with the memory of a man you despised? I know you, Mother! You can wear mourning blacks until you die, but I know you never shed a single tear for my father."
"Neither did you," she hisses.
"Why should I? I barely knew him. He was nothing more than a stud to you. I never played with him or danced with him or listened to a story from him, and I never did any of those things with you. People who have known me for a few months know me better than my own mother. What is my favorite color? My favorite food? Book? Film? What is my boyfriend's name that you hate so much?"
"His name is irrelevant," she snaps. "He's common. He's nothing."
"You don't believe that, you fucking hypocrite. Your man wasn't nothing. Thorlief deserves better than you. I can't believe he told me he's in love with you."
She blinks. "What?"
"My guardian, Thorlief. You know him—"
"Of course I know him. He guarded me when I was a girl too. He—"
"He loves you," I throw at her, clenching my fists. "You threw him away like trash and ruined him, and why? Over something I did. I wasn't tricked, Mother, I wasn't seduced or confused or whatever other excuse you want to feed yourself. I fell in love with a man! I slept with him! I did things with him!"
My voice echoes off the ceiling. My screams tear at my throat.
"He loved me more in a week than you have in your entire life. I'm just a tool to you. A legacy. All you care about is that I take care of your damned country."
"Because it's all I have," she shrieks, rising to her feet, looming over me. Even now, she still tops me by several inches. "They took everything else away from me."
"Now you're doing the same thing."
"He betrayed you," she screams. "He fucked another woman while he was sleeping with you. I saw the evidence myself. That bitch professor in the article described his damned body. Do you think I wanted that for you? I did everything I could to protect you from some pig with more cock than brains, and look what happened when you defied me. He ruined you. You're soiled."
My mouth falls open.
"I am not soiled," I snarl. "I made love to a man who loves me. Perhaps you should try it sometime. It might make you less of a scheming, arrogant bitch."
She slaps me, hard, across the face. I scowl at her.
"Eventually you'll realize I'm right and you're wrong. He doesn't love you. He never did."
"I'm not marrying that pig Mortimer. You can't make me."
"Yes I can. I'll read your vows for you and shove the ring on your finger myself if need be. I tire of this idiotic defiance. You'll be a proper queen, and that is the end of that. I'm through with this. I came here to comfort you and all you do is throw your entire life in my face."
"I don't want my life," I rage at her. "I don't want to be queen. I don't want any of it. I want to go back where I belong."
She turns to me with an icy stare, and I almost feel my blood freeze in my veins.
"Perhaps I should give it to you. Perhaps I should have you dropped in America with nothing I haven't given you. No well-appointed house, no education I paid for, no food, no resources. Oh, and your clothes, I paid for those too. I own all of it. We should see how long you last that way."
I take a step back from her withering gaze. Her look is like a pressure, pushing on me. I look down at the floor.
"I'll have the seamstress here in a few hours. The wedding is tomorrow. You'll marry Mortimer and you'll keep your mouth shut. You don't have to love him, you just have to breed with him. Pop out a few children and you can send him away, it doesn't matter to me."
"So I can raise them like you?"
"In wealth and luxury, yes. No more theatrics, Ana."
She turns on her heel and struts out of the room, and the door closes behind her. It always felt like a prison door, but even more so now with all its weight and finality.
I collapse to the floor in a heap.
Jason
You know what I hate worse than flying?
Landing.
I thought the taking off was bad. My knuckles turn white gripping the sides of my seat and my heart races as the plane begins to descend. It leans backward, which throws me as it happens and I start to shake.
"We must move quickly," Konstantin says. "Let me do the talking."
I chance a look out the window. I can see the island.
It's just as breathtaking as Ana made it sound. My jaw drops. The ocean is a dark, steely blue, except where the waves foam against the stony shore. The island is a giant, rocky cone sheared in half, and the interior is a vibrant, pastoral green with rolling hills and fields. The tiny, white specks must be sheep.
Like she said, the castle stands at one end of the island, surrounded by a quaint-looking town. Little fishing boats bob like toys in the ocean, and in the distance, so far away they look hazy, the oil rigs blink with red warning lights. The plane turns and levels out, and I press back into my seat and close my eyes.
My heart tries to escape through my mouth when the wheels touch down. It feels like five minutes between the back landing gear making contact and the front landing gear touching down with a sharp, angry squeal. The plane shudders and jerks left and right, and finally starts to slow down with such force that it feels like a giant hand pressing into my chest.
Man, fuck flying.
When it finally stops, Konstantin leaps to his feet and rushes forward, yanking open the cockpit. He steps back out a few seconds later.
"Everybody ready to getting off."
"Uh," Aheahe says.
Dee snorts and rolls her eyes.
"He means take your seat belts off," I shout, rising. I grab the seat to steady myself and take a deep breath.
They're all looking at me.
"Look, everybody. I know this is a huge thing you've done for me. It's a huge thing we're doing. Never in my life did I expect to go somewhere like this, do something like this, experience something like this. You've all come this far, but I have to say it.
"If you don't want to come with me, you don't have to. I'm not going to judge anybody for staying behind. I'm not going to hold it against anyone who doesn't want to go any farther. We're in a foreign country and we're about to break like fifteen different laws. If we get arrested, our parents aren't going to come pick us up and pay our bail. Also, midterms are in two weeks."
There's a hush. I cough.
"I'm going to get my girl. Anybody that wants to come, come with me. Let's go."
The cheer that rises in the airplane shakes the windows and hurts my eyes. I turn and walk down the stairs with Konstantin, and I don't need to look back; I can feel them piling out behind me.
"What the hell do we do now?"
Konstantin shrugs. "I am having a plan!"
"Great, that's fantastic. Let's do it."
"Do you not wanting to know what it is?"
"Fill me in as we go along."
I take my first look around the airfield.
This is definitely an airfield, not an airport. The prince's plane isn't huge as commercial jets go, and I can tell the airfield can barely handle it. There's one control tower and a concourse, and big hangars with curved roofs. It's a lot colder here, and the wind whips hard across the landing strip.
When I turn back to Konstantin, he's on the phone. My breath catches when I see a fleet of vans driving across the tarmac toward us.
"Is that the cops?" Akele says.
"Do they have cops here?" Aheahe says.
"Of course they have cops, dumbass."
"I mean, don't they have like knights or something?"
Akele groans.
The vans roll to a stop, and the very closet driver throws her door open and runs out. A tall, busty woman with red hair in pigtail braids runs out and shouts something at Konstantin.
"What's she s
aying?"
He looks at me. "Ah, she is saying she is wanting to have my babies."
"What, seriously?"
He shrugs. "It is good to being the prince. Getting in the vans now."
There's barely enough room. The cheerleaders and band members end up sitting on player's laps, but we don't leave anybody behind. I wedge into the lead van with Konstantin. He speaks in his native tongue—it does sound like Swedish—to the driver, who gives him a saucy look and spins the van around, sending my stomach lurching to the side before she floors it.
"Where the hell are we going?"
"The castle is having a service entrance," Konstantin says. "We are needing to bring in food for the wedding. Also for tourists."
"Tourists?"
"Yes, we are selling tours of the castle. Very much money. The younger female tourists are personally escorted by the prince."
"Right."
He grins.
I look over my shoulder. There's five more vans behind us. The road is narrow and has no shoulders, with fences blurring past on either side. There's sheep. A lot of sheep. The sheep look up in silent judgement.
Quincy is still wearing his mascot costume, and the plume of his big foam-rubber knight helmet is crushed up against the van roof.
It's not a long drive. The airfield is close to the castle. I can see it through the windshield. It climbs up the side of a mountain slope, tall, round towers proudly lifting banners into the air, like in a fairy tale. It's a clear day, the sky a bright blue, the sun shining. I'm fuzzy on exactly what time it is, except it's midmorning.
The castle gets bigger and bigger as we get nearer and nearer. It's one of the largest buildings I've ever seen. The main gate must be fifty feet tall. There are guards on the walls, though they're wearing uniforms and carrying rifles rather than armor and shields.
Konstantin chatters with the driver and the vans drive along the wall, away from the main gate. They keep going until we reach a security checkpoint. The driver rolls her window down as a soldier walks up to the van door.
The man is genuinely shocked when he sees Konstantin, who barks orders at him. Moments later, the gates open.
"What did you tell them?"
"I'm bringing entertainers, for the feast. That will purchase us some hours, but it will not lasting long. Mother knows there will be no entertainers."
Player's Princess (A Royal Sports Romance) Page 24