No Exceptions

I’m fucked. I’m so fucked. And not in the way I wanted to be tonight.

Thorunn is fluttering around me like an anxious mother hen around her chicks, checking me up and down for other injury, fumbling around in his pockets for a handkerchief. I reach up to check the damage for myself, and it isn’t much. Just a small trickle of fresh blood, having escaped the cotton padding I tucked inside the ribbon to staunch the flow. The clots probably reopened during our…recent physical exertions.

“Thorunn,” I say firmly, and when he doesn’t seem to hear, I reach out and grab his hand. “Thorunn! I’m fine.”

“Your throat is bleeding!” he cries. “That is not ‘fine.’ I’ll fetch a doctor—”

“No!” I yelp.

“What?”

“No, please, don’t. It’s not a serious wound, I promise. It’s old—very old. And it’s not dangerous. It just…sometimes opens up.”

He looks doubtful, but seems to relax somewhat. “I’ll take you inside, then,” he determines. “This was foolish of me. I didn’t know you were injured.”

I sigh. One day, Thorunn will need to stop taking responsibility for injuring me when it is clearly not his fault, but I doubt that today will be the day that I convince him out of it. So I let him pick me up in his arms and carry me inside the palace.

Fortunately, it is very late by now, too late for anyone to really be around. Even though the guards will record our entrance together, I have struck up a convenient agreement with Ezra’s records clerk, Mr. Kleinfeldt, where I bring him his midday coffee and he looks the other way while I destroy castle watch logs. I wonder how much that will change with the proxy engagement in place. Will I have to start bribing him with lunch, too?

Once inside his guest room, Thorunn lays me down on the bed and turns on the bedside light. He is surprisingly thorough in his examination. First things first, he washes his hands with soap and dries with a clean new towel; then makes a big fuss searching for a second clean towel and rubbing alcohol; and finally, peeling back the ribbon and cotton to get a better look at the wound. Several times, I try to sit up and help, but he insists that I should lie still and not touch anything.

“Well,” he finally says, “you weren’t wrong. It is not serious. Your carotid arteries seem unharmed, and the wound itself is clotting up well.”

“Carotid arteries? Recent crossword answer, I presume?”

A weak smile. “My father was a physician,” Thorunn explains. “Before I knew I was in line to be Oberjarl, I practiced under him. In my native tongue, we have many loanwords for scientific terms, since there are rarely direct equivalents in Nordic. Most words for human anatomy; names of chemical compounds and medicines; words describing symptoms, injury, or disease. Like so many of the things my country owns, we pillaged these words from our neighbors.”

“You wouldn’t be alone in that,” I remark. “I am pretty sure most scientific terms aren’t Saelic in origin, either. So if your country is a linguistic thief, then mine is hardly better.”

I never even imagined that Thorunn had a background in medicine. Had he intended to become a doctor? I had assumed Thorunn grew up like my father did—distant from the throne, but prepared since birth for a career in government anyway. But if Thorunn had been old enough to practice medicine as an apprentice before even finding out he was next in line, then this must have been a very recent development.

He dips the towel into the rubbing alcohol and dabs it gently against my throat. I hide my pained grimace. As he patches up the open wound with a bandage, he is careful to cut the strips of adhesive thin enough that I might be able to hide the bandage entirely with a wider ribbon. At some point, though, he must have taken the original ribbon away, as I look around and do not see it anywhere.

“It is…a frightening scar, though,” Thorunn adds.

I sigh heavily. I had half hoped that only Mom and I could see the scar, perhaps through some sort of regression-related illusion, but as Thorunn’s thumb traces the exact circumference of the scar tissue, I am certain that he can see all of it. “I know,” I tell him.

He waits. I say nothing more. Slowly, he sits back on his heels to rest his arms and head on the edge of the bed.

“Why do I feel like you’re not going to explain it?” he murmurs.

“I never said that.”

“You haven’t said anything.”

He is not wrong. I can’t tell him. Even if I wanted to, how could I? It’s a permanent reminder that you lopped off my head with an axe in a past life. Only minutes ago did Thorunn open up to me about his fear of hurting me. If I tell him the truth, it will unravel that newfound confidence right down to the fibers, possibly never to be mended again. And there is an even deeper paranoia: that the more people I tell of my regression, the more likely it is to fail.

“When did it happen?” he asks.

I hesitate, then respond, “Before we knew each other. Long before.”

“Is it just one?”

“What do you mean?”

“The scar. Is it just one scar? There are parts of it that seem older…many years older, based on the smoothness of the scar tissue. But other parts seem brand new.”

A cruel trick of my curse, opening up just enough of the scar at a time to call my attention to it. It does not age or reopen in a natural fashion, not like a real scar. Who knows? It could heal right back up tomorrow like nothing happened at all. “It’s just one. All the same incident. Some parts just…never scarred right.”

“An incident?”

“Ah…” My mind races. I think back to what Mom said, when she helped me tie the ribbon for the first time. “A garrote wire. That’s what it was.”

Instantly, nausea racks my body at the blatant lie. But I swallow and try to monitor Thorunn’s face. He frowns. The word is vaguely familiar to him, but he cannot place it at first. His eyes widen as he finally remembers. “You were strangled? Someone tried to—who? What monster would do such a thing? Eloise, tell me!”

“I can’t! I don’t—I didn’t see—I can’t tell you.” Don’t lie to him. He doesn’t deserve that. Just…avoid it. “I—I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”

“No!” he snaps. Instantly, he flinches back, as if startled by the sound of his own voice, but quickly shakes his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t let this go, Eloise. Someone tried to kill you, and but for the grace of the gods they would have succeeded. I need to know. You need to tell me.”

“It is in the past , Thorunn. You can’t change it, and you can’t fix it.”

“What if I try?’

“You can’t.” I pull my knees close to my chest. “It’s over. And I know what you’re thinking. There is no killer to catch, no vengeance to be wrought, no justice to be served. The man who did this to me no longer exists. He is not a two-dimensional villain that can be dispatched with another swing of your axe. He is gone . Only I remain. And this—this bleeding wound—this is all that is left of him.”

For a while, he is silent. His gaze fixates on the scar. Finally, he says, “But that isn’t true. He haunts you, Eloise. His presence…I can feel it. It sickens me.”

He is right. Everpresent in my shadow, tightening the string of fate around my neck, is the callous Northman who pressed his hand into my back and forced me to kneel before my father’s throne. The man may be gone, restricted to his own timeline, but his ghost remains.

“Then drown him out,” I tell Thorunn. “You are more of a man than he is—than he ever was. So drown him out. Do not dignify him with horrified silence. Overwhelm him until all I can feel is you .”

I cup his face in both of my hands and kiss him. There is a reticence, though, in how he returns the kiss which I cannot ignore. I trust you, I told him only a few minutes ago, and now, I add, except for this.

Memorandum

I write this by hand in the dying light of the bedside oil lamp. Thorunn sleeps soundly beside me, still in his war paint and costume. As always, when we share a bed, he lies respectfully on top of the bedspread, allowing me to stay warm beneath the covers and providing a “proper” barrier between us. Were I not shaken from the events of the last half hour, I would likely roll my eyes at myself. If not for my damn scar, Thorunn and I might be under the covers together. But he stubbornly refused to continue while I was still shaken and wounded, and fell asleep shortly after lying down.

He is partially right, though. I do not wish to surrender my maidenhood while racked with regret and fear. My head is spinning and my heart pounding, even though the rest of my body is exhausted from the long day. I yearn for my typewriter. The words feel more concrete once they are stamped in ink; I feel as if my thoughts can be not just expressed but settled; the narrative is not nearly as spiraling and abstract as it is when I jot it down in my notepad for the first time. But I dare not write anything here that could be found. In my office, I can file away the typed memorandums in their locked metal cabinets, to which only I know the combination code. Here, I can only be assured in their secrecy once they are burned.

Thorunn, my love. How could I possibly explain this to you? I see in your eyes how much my secrecy wounds you, but no rational man could imagine the perils of this strange second life — I cannot bear to place upon your shoulders the burdensome knowledge that every possible action could have fatal consequences for the people you love. I am grateful to whatever gods are still out there for granting me this second chance . . . but with that privilege comes the responsibility of walking this path alone.

What I have told Thorunn to divert his suspicions is not exactly a lie. It is true that the man who gave me this scar is no more. Something within me revolts at an outright fabrication. Whether that is my own conscience or a condition of my regression, I am not sure. There is also a question as to the scar’s base purpose. If it punishes me when I lie about its origin, but bleeds to catch the attention of people around me, does it . . . WANT to be found? Logically, that should be out of the question. I would catch more attention by outing myself as a regressor than if I admitted to being “Grand Duchess Elizabeth.” Publicity is the last thing I want.

Perhaps I should also be more concerned about the attention drawn to my involvement in this case: the fact that, barely hours after the petition was filed, a random trolley operator knows me by name and affords me minor celebrity status . . . is nothing short of unsettling. Soon, I imagine, word will spread that I am the proxy stand-in for the Grand Duchess’s political marriage, and more attention will arise from that.

When I write these memoranda, I often feel as if I am writing to a silent audience. But it is the silence and unresponsiveness of that audience that frees me to complete honesty. If I bear my soul to my beloved Thorunn — if I step into the public eye — if I take up the mantle of the Grand Duchess, even in proxy — I fear that my audience will soon become quite real and quite vocal. Even if that audience fills with only people who love and adore me, I cannot fathom that I could freely speak the truth.