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“Thank your God my brother is a wise man after all,” that awful woman hollered after me. I just kept walking.
“Bad luck, Princess. You’d have had it much better with him than whomever your father picks next.”
“Henrike, enough,” Sarolf scolded his sister. But I didn’t care. I rushed back to my room. Frida was still there, sitting on the couch next to the fire, still crying.
“Would you stop that?” I insisted.
“Your Highness.” She looked up at me. “Did it all turn out to be a misunderstanding?”
I bit my lower lip.
Frida threw her head into her hands again. “How terrible. How can the lord let something like this happen?”
“The lord? You mean my father.”
“He will come to his senses,” Frida insisted.
The picture of him standing in the library, staring at the floor, flashed in front of my eyes.
“Will he?” I doubted it. I was at the mercy of a man whose loss of his wife had taken his sanity. Maybe I was wrong to ridicule the suitors like this. Maybe I should have played along and politely said no to all the offers to buy myself time for a better plan. I could have pretended to look at suitors elsewhere, to stall for a few months in order to buy time to undo my father’s plan peacefully. But a cornered woman sometimes does things she regrets. There was no use in regretting it now.
Looking at my reflection in one of the large golden mirrors, that awful woman’s words echoed in my mind again.You’d have had it much better with him than whomever your father picks next.
“What if she is right?” I said out loud.
“Who?” Frida asked.
“Nobody. What I’m trying to say is, what if my father actually marries me off to the next stranger who asks? Word of this will spread fast. It’s only a matter of hours before someone will try.”
“Hours? If the fishmonger doesn’t get you, it will take minutes for suitors to come running,” Frida said. “Every guard and stable boy will beg for your hand in marriage should they believe your father will consider it.”
I pictured the wine-barrel man with his lusting eyes and greasy hands. I felt sick.
“My God, I have to leave.” I ran to my closet.
“But Your Highness can’t just leave.”
“Of course I can. I have to.” I grabbed a few dresses and pulled them off their hangers. Then I froze, dresses still in hand. I had no idea how to pack. And where would I go?
“But where would you go?” Frida said as if she’d read my mind. “Her Highness has no relatives outside of her father’s kingdom.” I looked at the endless rows of dresses, realizing for the first time how many I had. I could wear a different one every day for years. When had they become so many?
“There is a cousin on my mother’s side,” I said, surprising myself.
“The distant cousin in the far north?”
I almost laughed. The very place I had rejected so fiercely was now my only sanctuary.“It would only be temporarily. To give my father a good scare. Bring him to his senses.”
I grabbed more dresses from the hangers and handed them to Frida.
“But the roads to the North are dangerous. Littered with thieves and worse.”
“I will travel with a different name.”
Frida sighed loudly. “Even so, you are still a woman. One of noble birth. Your every move will give you away. You have never been on those roads.”
“I have traveled to festivals all over the kingdom.”
“Under the king’s emblem and with guards. Not alone!” For the first time since I’d known her, Frida was actually yelling at me.
