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The eighteen hours of travel time, including layovers, didn’t give me enough time to wrap my head around my adventure. I stepped out of the green taxi with a goat crest on the hood and stared up at the palace gates.
I still couldn’t believe it. Fitz was a prince. If there were ever any doubts, the monstrous Nolcovian palace that looked an awful lot like a castle erased them from my mind.
“You sure you’re in the right place?” The cab driver stuck his head out the window and peered up at me. “Tours don’t start for a few more hours. Awful cold to stand out here on the curb.”
“Yes,” I tightened my grip on my luggage and tried to sound confident, “I’m friends with the prince.”
His chin dropped, his eyebrows rose, and he stared deadpan. “Right, and I’m late for tea with the Pope.” With a wave, he sent me on my way. “Good luck, lady.”
Ignoring his skepticism, I chewed on the inside of my lip and turned my focus on the palace. I told Fitz I’d landed, and even though he asked me to get a cab, I thought he would meet me. Granted, with his royal lifestyle, he likely had people who did that sort of thing for him. But the towering gates remained shut and no one, not Fitz or an assistant of any kind, waited for me.
“Hello?” I called through the wrought iron rails for anyone who might hear. “I’m supposed to meet Prince Fitzborough.” I leaned forward to peer between the gaps. “Is anyone there?”
Discouraged by the lack of reply, I tried to think it through logically. Maybe Fitz got busy and had forgotten to tell someone I was coming. If he lived in a normal house, I would knock on the front door, but his front door was still a good three hundred feet away. To be honest, I expected a drawbridge and a moat. Maybe a few crocodiles for good measure. Did they have crocodiles in Nolcovia?
I tried Fitz’s number, but no answer. My savings account was at risk of being devoured by a swam of piranhas with these international phone calls. My phone buzzed in my hand, gaining my attention again.
Fitz: I got held up. Come through the gate. Reginald will show you in.
Even after I read the message two more times, it made no sense. The gate? The twenty-foot wrought iron gate that served the sole purpose of yelling ‘stay out’ without ever making a sound?
That gate?
I examined it again, noting that the gaps between the bars were larger than expected. Testing a theory, I slipped my suitcase through the gap. Sure, my luggage fit, but Fitz couldn’t mean that I needed to slide through myself, did he?
But my memory flashed back to a time when my neighbors, the Detweller’s, were out of town. They’d told us we could use their pool, but they forgot to leave the key to the gate. Fitz looked about as dejected as a forlorn puppy, and I couldn’t let it stand. Wriggling, squeezing, and with a fair dash of shimmy, I got through the gate and found the key on the patio table. That smile on his face as I opened the gate to our backyard pool party paradise still lived rent-free in my head all these years later. We weren’t doing anything wrong because we had permission, but life got in the way. Maybe this was one of those situations and Fitz needed me to wriggle my way around it.
Exhaling hard, I slipped my arm through first. My shoulder barely caught, but as I twisted my angle the pressure eased. I didn’t have any problems slipping my leg through, but as my bum caught, I had to contort my body a bit to ease through. This was all quite easier as a flat-chested beanpole of a twelve-year-old. Without thinking, I pulled my other leg through, leaving me with three-quarters of my body on one side of the gate and one-quarter on the outside. Of course, I had a few issues with my chest. Size differences had never been more apparent than when I was smooshing myself through metal bars. With a shimmy, I tried to free myself from the bottleneck position, but no matter if I went up or down, curved right, curved left, I remained jammed, head craned far to the side, arm tweaked at an angle, about an eighth of me still outside the gate. At the height of my struggle, with my nose pointed toward the ground, an arm contorted skyward, and my backside serving as the highest point and pinnacle of awkwardness, a voice boomed behind me.
“And what, pray tell, may I ask you are doing, madam?” His voice came out of nowhere, proper, stern, but almost like God was looking down to question all of my poor decisions. I couldn’t blame Him if He was. I twisted, bringing my head to stare through the bars in search of my audience. No deity in sight, but a man in a suit watched me with the deepest frown I’d ever seen.
“Hi.” I waved with my good arm, not the contorted one. “I’m supposed to meet the prince and he said to go through the gate, but I feel like maybe he misjudged the,” I cleared my throat, “practicality of that suggestion.”
“Of course.” The frown puckered into a scowl. “You’re the American.”
Geez. That one word carried a lot of disdain. He might as well have said: You’re the redneck, or you’re the trash panda in our garbage bins.
Not that raccoons didn’t have their merit. I found them to be cute little rodent bandits… from a distance. But clearly this guy didn’t find me, or likely a raccoon, very cute. Granted, there I was, embarrassingly wedged between the railings of his gate, my rear elevated in an undignified manner. It was definitely not a flattering sight. I preferred meeting people face-to-face, not face to… uh… rump.
“Yes, I’m Michaela Caldwell.” I straightened and squared my shoulders the best I could between the bars. “I’m here to meet the prince.”
Grey hair dusted both temples and frosted the ring of hair that circled his bald scalp. I wondered how much of it Fitz had put there and if I was about to add my share. “Miss Caldwell, in the future, I would suggest you learn to operate the hinges of the gates.” His right eyebrow twitched. “You see, they cause the gates to open and close, thus eliminating the need to slip between the bars like a criminal.” I was about to explain why I’d landed in the predicament he’d described, but the fancy fella kept talking. “Are you able to free yourself? Or must I get the blow torch?”
Something about an open flame in the hands of a guy who clearly thought little of me motivated me to pop back the way I’d come in a matter of seconds. Free of the wrought iron rods, I straightened my clothes and smoothed my jacket.
“For the record, Fitz told me to come in through the gate. I never would have otherwise, but you see, when we were kids, I slid through a gate like this to open it for him, so I thought that was what he wanted me to do this time.”
His scowl only deepened. “Fitz?”
“Oh.” I realized my mistake. “That’s what we called him in the States. Fitz. Short for Fitzborough.”
It was like I was digging my own grave with a shovel before, but that had switched it out for a backhoe. The redness started in his nose and then spread like lava until it covered even the top of his shiny head.
“His name is the Royal Highness Leonidas Ignatius Fitzborough III, Crown Prince of Nolcovia.” Nostrils flaring, the man in the fancy suit stared me down. “And it would do you well to remember that.”
On the inside, I knew that was easier said than done. I’d called him Leonidas maybe three times… ever. But, on the outside, I wasn’t looking to make an enemy. “Got it. Thanks for the tip.” I leaned to the left, eyeing my suitcase on his side. “Do you mind opening the gate and letting me in since you’re here? Fit—um, the prince must have thought it was open already.”
“No.” His chilly reception continued. “He wasn’t mistaken. You were. The rest of the women are entering at the west gate. You are at the south gate.” With no direction on his part, he picked up my suitcase and started walking. Instinct said to follow. I monitored him and trailed after him with my other suitcase in tow. I lost sight of his navy jacket at the corner and my heart dropped. At least until I made the same turn.
