The Morning After

The original plan was originally to meet up with Edgar as soon as possible, along with the rest of the task force—Ezra and Moretti, Lucienne and Pansy, Hilde and Svara, Mom and Thorunn, and of course myself—to debrief the previous day’s events. As the task force grows in size and the situation grows in complexity, it will be more important for everyone to be on the same page.

I am the only one, however, who seems to understand this with any urgency. When Thorunn and I arrive at my house at nine o’clock sharp, Hilde is the only one awake. She is the senior of the two Vallikyr, about Mom’s age. Something about her makes me think that Hilde and Mom will become fast friends. When I find her, she is in the kitchen, unpacking newly-delivered china and cutlery.

“Ahh, Hilde, you don’t need to do that,” I tell her.

Hilde smiles and waves her hand. “Oh, nonsense. I love organizing! I’d prefer to start assembling furniture, but I wouldn’t want to wake the sleeping lovebirds.”

“Don’t you dare assemble anything,” says Thorunn. “I promised Eloise we would do that together.”

“Pfft. Good luck with that,” she tells me. “This knucklehead couldn’t assemble a cardboard box. I trained him how to swing an axe, you know— twice had to explain that he can’t hold the sharp end.”

“I couldn’t hear you the first time,” Thorunn mumbles.

“You said that Edgar and Amira are still sleeping?” I ask. Hilde nods. I grimace as I add, “They didn’t give you too much…trouble, did they?”

She scrunches her nose. Both Hilde and Svara are aware of my true identity, since part of their job is also in protecting me. This makes Edgar the only person in the entire task force who doesn’t know the whole story, so we all have to maintain the deception around him. Moretti and Ezra have a flawless track record with no slip-ups, Lucienne and Pansy do not often speak up in these meetings, Hilde and Svara will be entirely silent, and Mom sometimes calls me “Ellie” on accident, though I do not think Edgar has ever noticed. Thorunn seems to have a hard time keeping the stories straight, so he also elects to stay quiet. It means that, occasionally, we need to secretly schedule two back-to-back meetings—one with Edgar and one without him—but for the most part, it has actually been very helpful for all of us to pretend that Elizabeth Rosencrantz is a real person entirely unrelated to the Eloise Odric who represents her interests. So we have determined to keep up the lie at all times, even when we think Edgar is asleep.

“I don’t believe they fell asleep until about four in the morning,” says Hilde. “I shall spare you the details. But I would not expect them until this afternoon.”

“And the others?” I ask. “Prince Ezra, Pansy, any of them?”

Hilde gives a pressed smile and shakes her head. “I assume they’re enjoying the morning after a party just as most people do.”

A tangible wedge of awkwardness pushes in between me and Thorunn. My face warms, and I can even see his ears turning pink. He knows as well as I do that, if not for my inconvenient neck wound, we may also have “enjoyed” the afterparty and slept in late this morning.

Hilde must notice it. “Why don’t you two come back later?” she suggests all of a sudden. “You’ve both been working very hard, you know. You deserve to have quality time with each other. Thorunn, I’ve heard there is a lovely café on the wharf that serves authentic Nordic coffee. Take Eloise, and don’t come back until she is convinced that we make better coffee than any other country.”

“I’ve been to that café,” Thorunn frowns. “The owners are Saelic. It’s not that authentic.”

She shoves him on the arm. “ Take. Her.”

He takes me to the café. I get the impression that Hilde’s strong recommendation was not actually because she believes the café serves authentic Nordic beverages, but the “Northern-inspired” coffee is indeed very good. And it places us at a small table, seated across from each other, in a sunny window nook away from other café guests.

“Thorunn,” I say softly. “Have you ever…killed someone?”

We sit in silence for a long time, the steam from our coffees rising gently into the air.

“Would it upset you if I said yes?” he asks.

“No. You serve a country that makes its wealth on war and piracy, and I serve a country that makes its wealth on genocide and colonization. I am hardly one to judge what you have done.”

“Then yes,” he says. “I have.”

“What did it feel like?”

He is silent for a long time.

“It doesn’t feel like anything, anymore,” he finally says. “Only once I killed and shed tears. My first. As soon as I had done the deed, I wanted to join him. I wished I had never been born. I cursed the gods for making me do such a thing, then begged for their forgiveness, pleading with them to just…turn back time and let me save him. That is the only one I remember. Now I just…black out.”

“Black out?”

He nods. “Whenever I kill. I don’t remember it. It slips from my mind like sand, no matter how hard I try to grasp. Sometimes it is just the moment of death which disappears from memory…other times, the whole day vanishes. I sleep. I wake. I learn I have taken another life.”

I am forced to break his gaze. “That sounds…truly awful, Thorunn, I’m sorry.”

He shrugs. “Perhaps it is a small mercy, not being able to remember.”

I look down at the table. I tilt my cup, watching the dark liquid cling to the porcelain. There is no pride in how Thorunn speaks of his kills. I see none of the callous disregard of the man who kicked my mother’s decapitated body aside and remarked, Haven’t killed an ‘heir’ yet today. That Thorunn…was he conscious of his actions? Or was he “blacked out” then, as well, a mindless killing machine, just going through the motions to get through to a day when he would not have to take another human life?

Slowly, I reach across the table and take his hand. His hands, like his face, are rough and scarred in spite of his young age, yet as I hold them in my own, they are soft and pliable beneath the surface.

“I’m often told that I should remember them,” he says. “But I…I can’t. Does this…upset my lady liege?” He is trying to keep his voice level, and might succeed in deceiving someone who does not know him, but I can detect the slightest tremble.

“It upsets me…only to the extent that I understand it.” I take a deep breath. “Thorunn. I must tell you, there are trials in my life—just as there are in yours—which must be endured alone. I have no latitude to ask you to remember those you have killed. I do not feel the depths of your grief, and I can never hope to grasp it. So if you say that you do not remember, then I believe you. No questions asked. I will do nothing more than to stand by your side, and offer my hand when you reach for it. And in return…I ask only that you do the same for me.”

His gaze flicks down, then briefly up, to where the high collar of my blouse obscures my scar and bandages. When he reaches across the table, I wonder at first if he will touch my neck, but instead, he merely tucks a lock of hair behind my ear.

“There’s nothing you can tell me?” Thorunn tries one last time.

I manage a pressed smile. “I’ve told you so much already. All I’m asking is to keep this one thing for myself.”

He is quiet for a long time, still considering it. “What about a doctor?” he asks. “Can’t you tell a doctor?”

“Absolutely not.”

“What about Lucienne?”

“I can’t tell Lucienne, either.”

“She’s your friend. And she knows about medicine.”

“She knows a little bit about everything, but to be honest, I wouldn’t trust her with surgery. She’s more the sort of doctor who waits until her patient is dead, zaps it with lightning, and then starts cackling, ‘ It’s aliiiiive!’ ”

Thorunn chuckles. “But if you start bleeding again,” he says, “then at the very least, will you let me patch it up?”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

He gives me a look like a kicked puppy, and I sigh.

“Alright. Yes. You may.”

Thorunn smiles. “Then that’s all I want,” he says simply. “I won’t ask. I will leave you to it. As long as I can care for you.”

As we finish our coffee and breakfast, Thorunn offers to take me shopping. He wants to buy some new chokers to help me hide my scar. Nicer ones than a cheap satin ribbon. At first, I am hesitant. I like my ribbon because it was given to me by my mother, and I am reluctant to show my scar to anyone new, even if it is just a single shopkeeper who I will never meet again. But this change is long overdue. The ribbon has begun to fray terribly from being tied and untied every single day for the past six months, so it is only a matter of time until it snaps off and becomes unusable.

With the help of a jeweler, to whom I explain away the scar as a freak warehouse accident that has never properly healed, I am fitted for six handsome velvet chokers. They are wider than my ribbon and easily able to hide the cotton bandages. At the back, each is secured with a sturdy metal buckle. Three are simple, intended for everyday use; two of those are plain black and one navy blue. The other three—bought on the insistence of Thorunn—are much fancier, in luxurious forest green, wine red, and antique gold, each embellished with beads and semiprecious stones. None of the new chokers are as soft or light as my old ribbon. But they are sturdier and admittedly prettier, more easily passed off as decorative jewelry than a cheap attempt at fashion.

We still have time to kill before the task force will recover from their hangovers, so Thorunn takes me down to the wharf and shows me his steamship. It could not be further from the primitive wooden rowboats that his country is known for. Instead, I step aboard a floating fortress. As we walk along the upper decks, three towering smokestacks soar over our heads. Since the ship is at rest in this dock until Thorunn needs to leave, only one of the funnels leaks a trickle of smoke, providing electric power to the hundreds of crewmates who live, eat, and sleep full time aboard the vessel. With the pure, joyous elation of a child, Thorunn even shows me the engine room. Catwalks twist and spiral around the massive pistons and columns of steel, like spiderwebs around the trunk of a great tree. If Master Odric and I were not so loyal to our own fleet of merchant ships, we likely would have sped around the nine seas in this massive floating beast.

“This is the future of seafaring,” Thorunn tells me. “The S.S. Skaði. Twelve thousand gross registered tons and a hybrid propulsion system, with triple-expansion steam engines and two quadruple-blade propellers capable of pushing this ship over twenty knots! And the pinnacle of safety—I could talk your ear off about her steel hull. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“She’s magnificent,” I agree, even though he has somewhat lost me. “I can’t imagine her crew is very cheap.”

“That’s the thing!” His eyes glow with excitement. “Compared to Saelic liners, they actually are. We have no arcanists aboard. The Skaði runs on harnessed steam power alone—no magic channeling required. Only cold steel, electric wiring, and simple engineering that anyone can operate, given just a little training.”

The study of economics is, in no small part, the study of human labor. Thorunn’s words resonate precisely upon this point: that, as electric-powered technology surges ahead, the labor force of skilled arcanists capable of operating them is pushed into a bottleneck. Thus, arcane operators are astronomically expensive. Even a job as mundane as Cindy’s, operating a single trolley all day, is insanely lucrative—because Cindy was lucky enough to be born with innate magic, she might only have to work for five years for both her and her entire family to be set for life. The magically-gifted have all the world’s industries wrapped around their finger. But if the Northern tribes have found a way to fully harness electric power without the use of magic…

“The future, indeed,” I echo. “Thorunn, when we get married, I think we are going to do some great things together.”

His face lights up. “You think so?”

“Yes,” I say. “We are going to become so very rich.”

But that does not seem to be what holds Thorunn’s attention. In fact, he probably could not care less about our future financial success. An hour later, as we walk down the wharf and back to my house, he is still grinning like an idiot.

“She said ‘when’, ” he says, again and again. “ When we get married! Eloise, I can’t possibly wait. I think I’ll just carry you away with me this summer, we’ll sail the seas together, and we’ll marry on the shores of my homeland. To hell with Edgar. He doesn’t need you here. I need you so much more.”