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“Ah. I see.”
He scowled. And she couldn’t help but be amused by how boyish he looked then.
She took a bite of the steak in front of her, and nearly melted beneath the table. It was so glorious.
“This is wonderful.”
This was so strange. It wasn’t like a plane crashed into a remote mountainside was her domain, but it was certainly more hers than his.
He had always been a man in possession of power, it was unquestionable. She had seen it from the first. But here, in this vast place where she felt small, not in the way the wilderness made her feel small, he seemed to expand.
There was nothing here he wasn’t in command of. Different, she thought, than when they had been at the mercy of the elements.
He was at the mercy of nothing.
She didn’t know why but it made her feel sad. Because it was as if he was an entirely different man from the one that she had first kissed. From the one that she had made love to. But this was the man that she had agreed to marry, in this place that was so wholly foreign to her, foreign in a way that had nothing to do with language or food or location.
She felt disoriented for a moment. It was impossible to figure out exactly how she had gotten here.
How she was on the verge of becoming a wife, which was big and difficult to try and wrap her head around all on its own. But it was more than that. It was being a wife. Being a princess. Princesses might as well have been unicorns to her growing up in Montana. The stuff of myth and legend, and entirely not real.
She swallowed hard. “When is that… When exactly are we…”
“Next month. We will announce the engagement shortly, and we will keep it brief. It’s for the best. I was prepared to marry Drusilla after all, only two weeks ago, and it is time for me to fulfill that obligation. My father will not live much longer.”
She felt like she had been punched. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t realize.”
“I didn’t tell you. Why should you realize?”
“I am very sorry. I didn’t realize he was not well.”
“He has been. For some time. It doesn’t matter how much money you have sometimes. If disease is going to ravage you, then it will.”
“I suppose,” she said. “Although, I only know it from the other side. Where medical bills make living hard for everyone else too. But I guess in the end… It’s all the same.”
“I suppose in the end we are all the same,” he said. “That’s a bleak thought.”
She shrugged. “Is it bleak? Or is it just one of those immutable truths? The kind that actually makes people feel a little bit closer, rather than like we are completely different species. I would rather know that we’re made of the same stuff. Flesh and blood and bone.”
“And I would rather be immortal. But… I had to face the fact that I was not, only recently.”
“Yeah. I felt that one too.”
For a moment, they smiled at each other, and it felt familiar. She wanted to call him Clem.
Yeah. She had spent a few days in the snow with a prince. And they had felt the same.
And now she was in his palace, and she really didn’t. She was sorry, though, about his father.
“So we’re both losing our dads, then.”
He nodded. “Another thing that serves as a reminder that we perhaps have more in common than we don’t.”
“Well, I wish we didn’t have that in common.”
“Tomorrow,” he said, his body language signaling an abrupt change of subject, “you will begin etiquette lessons.”
“Is my family arriving?”