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“I’ll be here until I’m no longer in danger of being crowned king.”
“Hmm,” she says, tapping her chin. “I saw on the news today that the king announced the engagement of your older brother Etienne and that he’s to be married in less than two weeks. Don’t you want to go to the wedding?”
“No. It’s a sham,” I say. “I give it a month. Less than a month before they have it annulled.”
Stasi rears back. “A sham?”
“You have to know that all members of the royal family are arranged in marriage to some degree or another.”
“Torben’s wasn’t.”
I sigh heavily. I’m starting to think letting her eat first was a bad idea. If we’d eaten at the same time, I could have cleared my plate and gotten up from the table, and busied myself with other tasks other than conversation.
Still, there’s a tiny part of me that is enjoying this. Call me a glutton for punishment, but getting needled by Stasi isn’t so bad. Callum Black and my sister Flora are the only other humans who get to needle me.
“Torben wasn’t supposed to run away and marry an American, especially one who’s not been vetted by my mother,” I say.
“And Etienne doesn’t want to marry this Kala person?”
I chuckle ruefully. “No woman in her right mind would marry Etienne. I could see the wheels turning in my father’s eyes when Torben abdicated. There’s no way he’s letting Etienne end up king.”
Her eyes go wide. “So it’s down to you, you think?”
“No one wants a king who can barely string a sentence together at a social event,” I say.
She smiles. “You seem to be stringing sentences together very well right now. I had no idea you could talk so much.”
She’s not wrong. “I don’t know…I like talking to you.”
She cups her face with her hands and bats her eyelashes at me. “You do?”
“Quit kidding around,” I say.
She sighs. “You can’t live hide in the wilderness forever.”
“You don’t know me very well then.”
Stasi picks up her spoon and pushes the tart toward me, urging me to take a bite. “You’ll get lonely and start drawing faces on the kettle,” she says.
I laugh, this time all the way from my diaphragm. It pleases her to see me laugh.
“I have you,” I blurt.
There’s the sound of a small intake of breath as she stares at me like she’s just seen a ghost.
Ah, fuck. I screwed that up.
“I meant to say, stay if you want,” I throw out.
A few seconds pass, and I feel like I’m under a microscope. Finally, she says, “Alright. Fine. I’ll stay for the rest of my two weeks. And when it’s time for me to go, I promise I won’t tell a soul. I’ll even sign a non-disclosure agreement if you like. I like being an insider into all this palace intrigue.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” I say, digging my spoon into the summer berry tart.
The taste of it makes me groan in pleasure. The dark berries burst in my mouth, and the crust is a kind of lemony, buttery business I’ve never tasted.
“Sorceress,” I mumble, taking another bite.
I glance up, and Stasi is beaming at me.
