Long May She Reign(4)

The world slowly came back into focus. The vast lawn had been decorated with floating lanterns and glistening ice statues, and couples walked between them, hands entwined, faces close.

The river meandered through the garden at the bottom of a slight incline, reflecting the lanterns and the stars. I staggered toward it, listening to the gurgle, looking at the lights. I was calm. I was calm.

Naomi hovered about a foot away, watching me closely. “Are you all right?”

I nodded. “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” If I said it enough, it had to be true.

“You don’t have to be fine, you know. If you’re not.”

Naomi said that every time this happened, and I always nodded, like I actually believed her. It was one thing to be uncomfortable in court, to hate all the pretenses and be desperate to leave. It was quite another to panic, to become so frightened of the people around me that I forgot how to breathe.

But she understood. She said her father reacted the same way to court, or to anything too crowded. That was why her parents lived out in the country, while she and her brother represented the family in the capital. Whenever I panicked, she would appear beside me, ready to talk me back to reality.

She swept her thirty-six layers of skirts forward and sank onto the grass. It must have been cold, but she simply looked up at me with a smile until I settled beside her.

At least I could breathe again. The chatter and music floated through the hall’s open door, but it felt safer now, farther away.

“Want me to take your hair down?” Naomi asked.

I nodded. Naomi moved behind me and began pulling the pins loose with quick fingers. With every tug, my lungs relaxed, just a little.

“How’s the experiment going?” she said. “Any luck?”

I shook my head. I’d been working on a way to create portable heat for weeks, something that could keep your hands warm and perhaps even banish the cold from my laboratory without fire. So far, all I had for my efforts were a whole lot of notes, and a whole lot of burns.

I plucked one of the loose hairpins from the grass and began to twist it between my fingers. The diamonds gleamed. “I’ve been experimenting with different metals,” I said. “But nothing yet. I’ll figure it out.” Naomi tugged the last of my hair free, and I leaned back, falling onto the grass beside her.

“When you figure it out, you’ll be famous.” She wrapped a loose strand of my hair around her fingers, moving it gently back and forth. Prickles ran across my scalp, and I closed my eyes.

“Of course.”

“Cold hands are the worst, Freya. People’ll pay you a lot of money if you figure it out. You could do anything you wanted after that.”

I shook my head. But secretly, I agreed. Not that I’d be famous, perhaps, but that this would work, that this was my solution. If I could solve this, and sell it, I’d have my own money. I could travel wherever I pleased. Travel to the continent, convince a scientist to teach me there. Stop living on the edge of other people’s lives and start living my own.

I couldn’t admit it, though. Not even to Naomi. The thought was too thrilling and terrifying to share. If I said it out loud, even nodded at Naomi’s suggestion, I felt, madly, irrationally, that it would be snatched away from me, just to punish me for believing.

Naomi tucked her legs underneath her. “Well, you can be boring and unromantic if you like. I believe it’ll happen. I’ll miss you, though. When you’re gone.”

“I won’t leave you.” It was the one downside to the plan, the one detail that made me hesitate. I wouldn’t know what to do without Naomi beside me. “You’ll come with me.”

I knew she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, not with her parents’ approval, at least. But I wanted to pretend.

“I suppose I would like to see the continent. But what would Jacob do without me? He gets into too much trouble as it is.”

“He’ll have to come and help you on your adventures,” I said. “Rescue you when that dashing rogue you meet turns out to like girl-bone soup.”

“Because of course that’ll happen to me.”

“It happens to all the best heroines. And if your brother doesn’t have to rush to your aid, how will he employ that handsome stranger to assist him who falls madly in love at the sight of you?”

She laughed. “Well, when you put it like that.” She glanced toward the palace. “Should we go back inside soon? They’ll be missing us.”

“They won’t miss us.” Everyone had already seen us go, and my father was going to be furious about that, whatever I did. At this point, I might as well leave entirely.

I tapped my fingernail on the hairpin. Brand-new, special for the banquet. Made from aluminum, which was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Someone on the continent had discovered a new metal, and what did everyone here do? Rush to make it into jewelry, without a thought to what better uses it might have.

I’d be there soon. On the continent, with real intellectuals, with people who actually cared, rather than the vapid, fashion-hungry mob here. I just had to solve this one problem.

Another tap of the hairpin. Metal hadn’t worked. Not even close.

But I hadn’t tried aluminum.

I sat up.

“What is it?” Naomi said.

“Aluminum. I haven’t tried it yet. For my experiment.” My thoughts were racing. “What if—what if I combined it with something? Maybe iodine?” Yes. Yes. That would produce heat. Wouldn’t it?