Page 30 of The Broken Dawn

"And what would you be, if you could be something entirely different?"

Invisible, Harald thought, but that wasn't really the answer either. The question hung between them, heavy with possibility. Harald swallowed hard, watching the way Jakob's dark curls fell across his forehead. "Just... me. Whoever that is. I'm honestly not sure that I know."

"Perhaps it's you who should be reading Hegel." Jakob smiled. And then, after a long moment, he said. "I think I'd like to meet him, though." Jakob's voice dropped lower, intimate. "I can see him a bit when you smile at me. He's in there... the real Hal."

Their hands were touching again, and this time neither pulled away. The hay scratched against Harald's bare arms, but he barely noticed, lost in the warmth of Jakob's gaze and the electricity crackling between them.

"What about you?" Harald asked. "Have you always lived here, in this same town?"

Jakob shook his head. "I grew up in Leningrad. Well, Saint Petersburg." His voice was soft, almost dreamy. "We came here when I was twelve."

"What was it like?" Harald asked, his voice barely above a whisper. He shifted closer, drawn in by the way Jakob's eyes seemed to look far away, beyond the dusty hay loft and into the past.

"Cold," Jakob said. "But beautiful. Ice like glass. The winters turned everything white and clean, and the summer nights never really got dark." His fingers traced abstract patterns in the hay between them. "I would walk with my father to Nevsky Prospekt - that's the main street. There were these grand buildings with gold domes that caught the sun. Sometimes when it snowed, the whole city felt like it was made of crystal."

Harald watched Jakob's face as he spoke, captivated by the play of emotions across his features. His eyes had softened into something wistful.

"I remember the sounds most clearly," Jakob continued. "Sleigh bells in winter. The clip-clop of horses on cobblestones. Street vendors calling out in Russian. And music - there was always music somewhere. My father would take me to see the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre."

"You saw the Russian Ballet?" Harald couldn't hide his surprise.

A shadow passed over Jakob's face. "Before everything changed, yes. We weren't always..." He trailed off, then gave a small shrug. "Well, we had a different kind of a life there."

Harald wanted to reach out, to touch Jakob's hand where it rested between them, but he held back. Instead, he asked, "Do you miss it?"

"Sometimes. But it's not really my home anymore." Jakob's voice grew quieter. "It's like remembering a dream - everything gilded and perfect in memory, but you know it wasn't really like that."

"Why did you leave?" Harald asked.

Jakob sighed. "I'm not completely sure. My father taught political philosophy at the University there. I remember at night," he continued, his eyes growing distant, "I'd lie in my little bed under these old quilts mama made. They always smelled like her washing - lavender and lye. And below, through the floor, I could hear them all talking."

"Your father and his friends?"

"Yes. They'd debate for hours - politics, philosophy, their dreams of changing everything." Jakob smiled at the memory. "I fell asleep to the sound of their voices, all those ideas about making the world better. And then, one day we left. We just... went to the train station with what we could carry and never went back."

Harald watched the play of emotions across Jakob's face, the matter-of-fact way that he talked about something that must have been so frightening and unnerving. He felt closer to Jakob now in their haven of sweet-smelling hay than he had to anyone in years.

"I remember arriving here — I couldn't understand anything; Swedish is nothing like Russian or Yiddish. And all of a sudden there was no more townhouse or beautiful ice-covered city, and someone was trying to tell me how to milk a cow who looked like she was just waiting to step on me."

"That sounds horrible." Harald said, reaching out to smooth the edge of his finger across the softness of Jakob's hand.

"I adapted." Jakob said, his warm hand closing around Harald's fingers in a brief squeeze. "Honestly, I think that disappointed my father the most; that I adapted to living here, and he never could. He spoke no Swedish until he died, and left it to my mother and I to run the farm. He sat inside at his books and his letters and his notes, and raised my sister to be the same."

"It still sounds lonely." Harald said, wishing he could reach out and touch again.

Jakob shrugged. "It's not like I was alone, really. There were friends, other people from the village around."

"Of course." Harald said. "But sometimes - for me, at least -- the worst loneliness isn't being alone, it's being with other people who don't see you, so that you feel just as alone."

"It sounds like you know something about that kind of loneliness, Your Highness." Jakob said, reaching out as if to touch Harald's hand again.

"I don't know how much you know about my family..." he began.

Jakob looked up. "Nothing, really. I don't follow the crown. I never really had a reason to be interested before..." his voice trailed off and Harald found himself desperately wanting him to finish that sentence, to know if it would have ended with "...before now." or even "...before you."

"My father and my Uncle Haakon were twins." He started. "Born about twelve minutes apart. My grandmother used to tell the story that all throughout her pregnancy the babies had shifted places within her belly, almost as if they were fighting for who would come first. In the end, father was born first and so he's the King. I don't think that uncle Haakon ever forgave him. I don't remember them ever doing anything but fighting, anyway. Haakon fell into drink and dissolution — he never married, but he had my cousin, Christian with a mistress and raised him as his heir until he died when I was twelve."

Jakob looked at him intently, waiting for him to go on.