The Wild Heir(38)

“Must be nice,” she says with a tight smile. “Well, have a nice time, Ella. Sorry. I mean, Princess.” She walks off down the hall to the kitchen.

I sigh. She says it the same way Magnus does, but with less warmth. Whatever progress I’d made with them before the wine and cheese night has now been erased. It’s like I’ve gone backward, no longer someone they tolerate tagging along, but someone they don’t want anything to do with. If (when) I come back from these two weeks, I know I’m going to have a very lonely year ahead of me.

In the end, I throw pretty much everything I own into a giant suitcase, check with Jane to make sure she’s packed too, and then try and get some sleep. Our flight to Oslo is fairly early. When I said I needed two weeks, I didn’t know that the clock would start ticking so soon.

But I barely sleep.

I toss and turn.

When I do fall asleep, I have dreams.

Those same dreams again about the whales beached on the pebbled shoreline, cold wind in my hair, oil filling up the ocean.

And just like last time there is a man walking toward me. I can’t see his face—it’s too hazy, too blurry—but he’s in a suit.

His arm stretches out for mine.

And just before the haze around his face seems to clear, when I can grasp his features, the oil slides up over my mouth, my eyes, and everything is black again.

I am alone.

That loneliness clings to me when I wake up, my throat dry, my head feeling like it’s stuffed with soggy cotton balls. It doesn’t help that the weather in Scotland has taken a turn for the worse again and when I learn on the plane that it’s sunny in Oslo, I feel a twinge of excitement for the first time. If anything, maybe the next two weeks will be a nice break from my normal life.

That’s why I’m doing this, isn’t it? A chance to be someone else, to be someone in general, just for a while?

“That’s the spirit,” Jane says beside me as the plane descends over sown fields and raging rivers, doing a wide arc toward the runway.

“What?” I ask. As far as I know, I’ve been keeping everything inside my head. Where it belongs.

She studies me for a moment and then shrugs. “Oh, nothing. You just looked hopeful for one moment. Must have been the light in your eyes.”

I ignore that.

It’s not long before we get our bags and step into the limo that the family has sent for us. The drive to Thornfield Hall (officially known as Skaugum Palace, but it’s Thornfield to me now) is about an hour, along wooded mountains and rolling countryside, the leaves in the trees now red and gold. While the sun is warm, there’s a distinct chill when you’re in the shade.

After we drive down a narrow road, passing fields full of horses and a large red school with children playing outside, the driver guides the limo between a pair of gates that it barely fits through. The Royal Guards nod at us from their station house and we continue on our way down a tiny, bumpy road covered by fallen leaves from the trees above.

Then the trees diminish.

I’m not sure what I was expecting at all but I don’t think this was it. It’s actually a lot more like the Thornfield I had imagined in my head while reading Jane Eyre, rather than an opulent palace fit for royals.

It’s an L-shaped white building, two stories high, with some groomed grounds and landscaping around it, set up on a hill at the base of a bigger mountain. Simple and classy, but other than the vast view over the farmlands below, it’s nothing to write home about.

“It’s quaint,” Jane says in a chipper voice in case the limo driver will report her. Then she leans into me. “It’s definitely no Vaduz Castle.”

Vaduz is where I grew up and where my father still resides in Liechtenstein. It’s a legitimate castle with turrets and the works, built into the side of a cliff in the eleventh century.

“Definitely not,” I tell her. But actually, even though the idea of being in Magnus’s apartment put me off, the thought of being in a big, cold palace wasn’t too inviting either. This place seems right in between, the Goldilocks effect.

But there are no bears in this fairy tale. Instead, it feels like I’m about to step into the den of the very big, very bad wolf.





Nine





Magnus





Growing up, I spent a lot of summers at this estate. It was paradise, a respite from the restrictions of school, the forced learning, the structure. Here I was finally free, surrounded by fresh air and summer sun, and I had nothing to do all day except precisely what I wanted.

Which, when I wasn’t terrorizing my sisters, included a lot of sports. If I wasn’t beating Cristina’s ass at tennis matches, I was playing soccer or rugby against various butlers and guards. The only thing I didn’t do here was horseback riding—I left that to my sisters. I don’t get along with horses.

This morning, I’m on a long run through the woods and up the mountain right behind the house. I know Ella and Jane are expected at any minute and then the two-week countdown begins, but the amount of nervous energy I have coursing through me has to go somewhere.

So I run several laps around the small lake nearby until sweat is pouring off of me and my heart feels like it might burst through my chest, and finally, finally my thoughts cease. I’m no longer worried about anything—having to live with Ella for two weeks, not knowing what’s going to happen after—none of that matters. My mind is blissfully blank.