Even though it is the weekend, meaning that the royal family is typically not working and likely attending one of their many social functions, Prince Edgar’s hangover will put him out of commission well into Saturday afternoon. I expect that, upon gaining consciousness, he will immediately rush to his office and ensure that nothing is out of place—he will find that everything is back in order, but that nothing is missing. In my cleaning, I threw nothing away except the spoiled food in the garbage can. Even the most crumpled drafts of Edgar’s letters have been smoothed flat, sorted chronologically, and placed into a single manila folder bearing a crisp red CONFIDENTIAL stamp . That manila folder sits in the center of his desk, not a single page missing.
So I am expecting a meeting. I am not expecting an invitation to dinner. I still don’t have an office, so I have been working out of my bedroom in the records department basement, and am writing a letter to Mom when the errand boy arrives with the invitation. The boy, a nervous child of about twelve, is quick to explain:
“His Highness usually invites ‘is clerk to dinner, once or twice a week. Mr. Pym, I think he was? I ‘eard he wasn’t—well—I just ‘eard rumors that somethin’ awful went on—”
“Yes,” I say carefully, “something awful indeed. What’s your name, boy?”
“My name’s Roger, milady.”
“Roger. I take it you’re a new hire?”
“How…how’d you know?”
I turn the invitation over in my hands. It is a simple, small slip of cardstock with the date, room, and time handwritten on it. The back of the card is embossed with the royal crest. Hundreds of these reminder cards fly around the palace every single day; they are disposable and expendable, easily lost and rarely found again.
“Well, I’m also new,” I explain to Roger. “I have been here…oh, a bit over a month now. Only a little longer than you have, I reckon—I first saw you running around the halls three weeks ago. But let me tell you some advice that I don’t think you have learned yet.”
I lean forward and beckon him closer.
“ Keep your mouth shut. Make your deliveries, answer questions if you must, but when it comes to ‘rumors’—keep your mouth shut.”
His eyes are wide. Then he opens his mouth to start explaining himself, rambling, “I ‘ad a feeling I wasn’t s’posed to say anything, but I didn’t know for sure, and I—”
“Ah! No. You’re fucking up already. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Roger? If you get that ‘feeling,’ even a little tiny bit, then keep. Your mouth. Shut. Do you understand, Roger? A yes or no will do.”
Again, he opens his mouth. I glare. He shuts it, then nods.
“Good.” I reach into my pocket and find a six pence. “Tell Prince Edgar that I will attend. After you have told him, deliver this slip to Jarl Thorunn, in guest suite 315.”
I flip over the card to its embossed, but otherwise blank, back side. I write one word: Standby. Then I hand the card and the six pence to Roger, and I send him on his way.
When the time comes, I report to Edgar’s dining room. The palace is so big that each member of the royal family has their own separate dining and entertaining room adjacent to their actual living quarters—as if having just one dining room is not enough, and they must all host events in separate wings of the building so that they never have to see each other. I usually will scoff at this practice as an unnecessary waste of taxpayer dollars, but I am grateful today. I much prefer Edgar’s private dining room, which is the size of my entire house on Lavendel Road, but vastly smaller and less extravagant than the family’s formal dining hall, approximately the size of the whole neighborhood. And I can do without the dozen or so portraits of Queen Philomena glowering down throughout the formal dining hall.
Edgar is looking much better than the last time I saw him. His hair is brushed, his face is shaven, and he is wearing a navy blue suit instead of wrinkled, stained nightclothes. This is closer to how he appeared before his Pym-induced meltdown. Somehow, though, he appears to have aged by five years since then. The dark circles remain under his eyes, and his persistent frown seems to bear new wrinkles. For only thirty-six years old, he is looking rather rough around the edges.
Once I am seated and the food is served, Edgar waves his hands to the guards and butler. “Leave us.”
I wait for him to start eating, but he doesn’t. A shame. Although I studied plenty of books on royal etiquette as a child, I am rusty on formal table manners. Certainly, if he is scrutinizing me, he will notice that I do not know which of the six forks is the right one for the fish fillet in front of me. I pick a medium-sized one and hope he does not point it out.
“I see that you’re not formally educated,” Edgar observes.
Well. That took approximately two seconds. I swallow my first bite (ye gods, is this what the royals eat every day? No wonder Mom wanted to become a princess!) and exhale. “I’m afraid not, Your Highness.”
“Did you go to any school?”
“No, Your Highness.”
“Your last name. Odric. One of my financial advisors was Sibelius Odric—do you know him?”
I had anticipated this question. After a gentle sip of wine, I respond, “A distant relation, though no small part in how I came to work for the palace. He wrote my letter of recommendation.”
“Ah,” Edgar raises an eyebrow. “How is he, by the way? How’s his wife?”
I return a wry smile. “As nonexistent as ever, Your Highness.”
“Oh?”
“The Master Odric I know is a career bachelor, sailing the nine seas in search of…other career bachelors.”
“So you do know him!” Edgar grins. He takes his wine glass and holds it up. We are separated by about ten feet of an unnecessarily long table, but I hold mine as well, mimicking a cheers. “My apologies for the little test. You must understand, when Martha informed me of your age and inexperience, I thought, ‘that can’t possibly be right, you don’t act like you’re only twenty,’ so I had to see for myself. If Sibelius trained you, well, then that explains everything!”
His jovial tone does not pierce the stiff discomfort on my end of the table. Twenty? Martha told him that I am twenty years old? Whatever for? I manage a shallow laugh, but he catches its insincerity at once. His smile drops. He lets the wine glass rest back on the table, then leans forward with his hands folded.
“I also apologize for my earlier conduct, Miss Odric,” he says, all pretenses of lightheartedness gone. “I do not recall any of it, though I have been informed that I was…quite drunk. You handled it well.”
“If I may speak bluntly, Your Highness?” I ask.
“Yes. Of course.”
“I accept your apology. But you’re lucky that I did not simply call for a maid.”
This is a weighty response. I am not afraid to swing it, and I level my gaze at Edgar to let him know precisely what it means. Had I responded to his extremely drunken condition by calling for a maid—which, being a clerk, not a trained housekeeper, I would have been expected to do—those letters would be swept up and taken out with the trash, where they could be either lost forever or read by anyone. Both spell disaster.
Edgar breaks eye contact first. With a heavy sigh, he turns to his yet-untouched meal and starts to eat. It is dead silent between us until we are both finished, our plates cleared, our wine glasses empty.
This is approximately how I thought my first dinner with my father would go. Even if he did know who I am, I would expect nothing more than an initial, fruitless attempt to break the ice with humor and then fifteen minutes of awkward silence. The only thing that keeps me from standing up and leaving—and, I am sure, the only thing that prevents Edgar from doing the same—is that we have unfinished business.
As Edgar leans back, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, I figure that it is better to get ahead of him. “So,” I say, “Imogen and Elizabeth.”
He coughs. Clearly, he was not expecting me to say their names out of the blue.
“A secret lover and daughter, I take it?” I ask.
“Mm.”
“And it is my job, like it was Pym’s job before me, to ensure your letters to them are sent, that your gifts are delivered, and that records of these transactions are kept.”
“Except that Pym failed in each and every metric—letters shredded, gifts stolen, records burned.”
“And you hired me because you want someone who will help reverse the damage he did.”
“That is…correct.”
“There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Your Highness.” I pause, as if I am thinking of how to phrase this question—as if it has not been the only thing swirling around my head for hours. “If they are so secret, why preserve a paper trail at all?”
He tilts his head back. It is becoming progressively clear that he has not worked off all of his hangover. I recognize the off-kilter blinking and stretching of his neck to hint at a raging headache. But even through the pain, he manages a wry smile.
“When I was about your age,” says Edgar, “I had an idea. A crazy, stupid, impossible idea—the kind that only a boy blinded by love can conjure up, the kind of idea that’s never been done before and can probably never be done again. I obsessed over this idea. I dedicated my life to this idea. I read dozens of law books, religious scriptures, and philosophy treatises in pursuit of this idea. Hell, I even changed my course of study—I went to seminary and became a goddamned priest because I just had to know if this was possible.”
He’s doing it on purpose, keeping me in suspense like this. And it is absolutely working.
“And?” I ask. “What was it?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t possible, and it wouldn’t work anyway.” Edgar shakes his head. “I was looking for some way to reverse the annulment of a marriage. No dice, by the way. But in looking for that, I found something else. A weird, esoteric little law of probate and estates. If a man with a title has no spouse or legitimate heirs, he may assign the inheritance of that title to a bastard child, once two conditions are met—first, only after the child turns eighteen, and second, with a showing of proof that the child has been financially supported for the full eighteen years. Now, I couldn’t find any record that this has happened yet—the law was really just developed to prevent infertile lords from picking random orphans off the street as their heir—though I have a good feeling that…”
He rambles on. But I am no longer listening. Everything I knew about my father has been toppled, collapsed to the ground, been rebuilt, and toppled all over again a dozen times over in the past couple of weeks. This is no exception. But this is the last time there will be anything left to topple. This revelation is so far beyond anything I expected that the whole foundation must be faulty.
Eventually, Edgar seems to realize that he has lost me. “The long and short of it is,” he says, a crazed glint in his eye, “I kept all those records because I still have something to prove. I want to prove that I’m still married to Imogen Rossach, and that my daughter—my Ellie—is in line for the throne.”