Majesty

by Katharine McGee

  Far off in the distance Nina heard the low rumble of conversation. Probably gossip about the royal wedding, making its slow way through the capital. That was Washington, she thought: so crowded, so hungry, so merciless.

  She lifted her eyes to Ethan’s. His face was pale and vulnerable in the afternoon sunlight. Nina couldn’t help it; she stepped forward into his arms.

  Ethan made a strangled noise and pulled her in to his chest. He held on to her tightly—not as if he wanted to kiss her, but as if to reassure himself that she was still here, that she hadn’t run off and left him.

  “Please believe me,” Ethan murmured, and Nina felt her resolve melting. She loved the feel of his breath against her skin.

  “I do believe you,” she said at last, detangling herself from his arms.

  He broke into a broad, relieved smile, but it faltered when he saw the look on Nina’s face.

  “I believe you, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to trust you,” she explained. Not when he’d originally gotten close to her because he was following Daphne’s orders.

  Ethan shook his head. “Don’t you see, this is exactly what Daphne intended. She attacked you like that because she wanted to break us up!”

  “Just like she broke up me and Jeff at the last big palace event? I would say that history is repeating itself, but I’ve figured out by now that this is Daphne’s signature move!”

  “She can be…very ruthless when it comes to the people she cares about,” Ethan agreed.

  “I think you mean the people who are in the way of what she wants.” Nina bit her lip. “You know, I used to wonder why you and Jeff never dated that many people, even during the time he was broken up from her. Now I’ve figured out why! It’s because Daphne thinks she has claim to both of you. Whenever either of you gets too close to someone else, she swoops in to chase them off. And the worst part is, you let her!”

  That hurt more than anything else: the realization that, in the end, the only two men Nina had ever loved had both been under Daphne’s thumb.

  Daphne was like a spider, beautiful and insidious, spinning her webs around people with such dexterity that they never realized they’d been caught until it was too late.

  “Please don’t let Daphne come between us,” Ethan said again. “There must be something I can do to prove that I’ve changed.”

  Nina’s eyes burned, and she stared down at the walkway, tracing a crack in one of the stones with her shoe. “I just…I need time.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right, to show you that—”

  “I need time without you, Ethan.”

  Nina had some thinking to do—about everything she and Ethan had done, the mistakes they had both made. About how Daphne and Jeff fit into all this.

  It sickened her, how painfully tangled the four of them had become.

  “I understand,” Ethan told her, his voice surprisingly formal. “Take as much time as you need. I just hope…I just hope that you’ll come find me afterward.”

  He took a step back, and the distance stretched out between them. Nina had to fight the urge to step forward and pull him close again.

  “I’ll see you around,” she replied, through a tightness in her throat.

  She turned and started across the lawn toward the garage, squaring her shoulders. She knew Ethan was watching, but didn’t dare look back at him.

  And somehow, as she walked, each step became slightly easier than the last.

  Later that afternoon, Samantha headed up the staircase of Nina’s dorm. She was wearing oversized sunglasses and a scarf, though now that the semester had ended, the campus was so empty of students that she almost hadn’t bothered.

  The last bewildered guests had finally left the throne room, but the palace was still in an uproar. Sam’s mom had retreated upstairs to her room, stunned and emotionally drained by the day’s events. Meanwhile Robert’s assistant, Jane—who’d been abruptly promoted to Lady Chamberlain—kept telling the press the same thing over and over: “The palace is not prepared to make a statement at this time. We will let you know when we have plans to move forward with the wedding.” Which, of course, only fueled the rumors.

  At Nina’s room, Sam tapped out the old one-two-three knock they’d invented when they were children. The door swung open, revealing not Nina, but her mom.

  “Oh—hi,” Sam said, surprised. She glanced behind Julie and saw that the whole family was here, all three of them packing up Nina’s things to move her out.

  “Samantha. It’s good to see you.” Julie held open the door with a faint smile.

  Sam loved that Nina’s parents always called her by her first name—that they didn’t gossip, didn’t even ask what had happened this morning to call off the wedding. They just treated her like any other, ordinary friend of their daughter.

  “Sam?” Nina was kneeling on the floor, halfheartedly folding a sweater in her lap. Sam noted with amusement that she and Nina had both changed into the same sweatpants, matching leopard-print ones that they’d bought together last fall.

  Nina rose to her feet, letting the sweater crumple to the floor. Her mamá—who stood near the window, wrestling tape over a large cardboard box—watched as she pulled Samantha into a hug.

  It was a hug that Sam needed as much as Nina. After everything that had happened today, the strange whirlwind of Beatrice’s almost-wedding and that tumultuous car ride with Marshall, she felt disoriented. As if she was still reeling from emotional whiplash.

  When they stepped apart, Sam scoured her friend’s face. Nina looked upset, her eyes wider and glassier than normal, but she attempted an apologetic half smile.

  Sam wasn’t sure what had happened to Nina earlier, but whatever it was, she suspected that it had to do with Ethan. Or maybe Jeff. All she knew for certain was that Caleb had seen Nina run off, close to tears, before she’d apparently torn out of the garage in Samantha’s car.

  “Sorry I borrowed Albert,” Nina said, reading her mind. “He’s parked in lot twenty-three. I can get him now, if you want.”

  “No, I mean…keep Albert. I don’t care.” Sam glanced around the dorm room. It looked oddly forlorn like this, stripped of everything that had given it personality: the colorful photo boards, the vinyl jewelry boxes where Nina had organized her cocktail rings. Now it was all just bare white walls and unflattering fluorescent lighting, a few stray hangers sticking out of the empty closet.

  The whole campus felt listless right now. A few people were still here: parents dragging suitcases to cars, students who’d waited until the last minute to clear out their dorm rooms, before university staff reassigned them to summer school. But mostly, King’s College was silent.

  “I wanted to check on you,” Sam went on. “Is everything okay?”

  “Julie…,” Isabella said meaningfully, exchanging a look with her wife. “We’re going to need a couple more boxes. And packing tape. Why don’t we run out and get some?”

  “Good thinking. We’ll be back soon,” Nina’s mom announced, slinging her purse over her shoulder before heading out.

  When the door shut behind them, Nina climbed onto the bare mattress, pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged. The ceiling fan clicked overhead, lifting the air of the room and letting it settle back down again.

  Tentatively, Sam took the opposite side of the bed. “Did something happen today?”

  “It’s Ethan,” Nina admitted, and the pain in those two words set Sam instantly on the defensive.

  “Did he hurt you?” she cried out. “Should I have Caleb go beat him up? Or Beatrice could exile him to Canada, or—”

  Nina cut her off with a strangled laugh. “Slow down, Sam. Ethan may have hurt me, but I’m not sure I want him gone, either.”

  “What happened? Did you break up?”

  “I don’t know.”
Nina pulled a pillow into her lap and hugged it. “I need some time to figure things out.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sam breathed, meaning it. Even if she’d thought the Ethan thing was weird at first, even if she hadn’t fully understood, all she’d ever wanted was for her friend to be happy. It felt especially unfair that Nina should feel such anguished confusion today, when Sam’s relationship with Marshall was finally, blissfully clear.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she ventured.

  “It’s a long story. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell it yet.”

  There was an edge to Nina’s voice that kept Sam from pressing further. She just nodded, reaching a hand beneath her bracelet—the one from the Crown Jewels collection, which she’d forgotten to take off after this morning—and sliding it up and down her forearm. The diamonds felt deliciously cool against her skin.

  “I want to forgive him,” Nina added, so quietly that it was almost a whisper. “I’m just…I’m scared of being hurt again. I wish I was as brave as you are.”

  “I’m not that brave.”

  “You’re the bravest person I know!”

  “It’s easy to seem that way when you don’t care what people think of you. That isn’t courage; it’s just recklessness,” Sam said quietly. “I of all people know the difference.”

  Nina glanced over. “But you do care what people think of you, Sam. You just pretend not to.”

  Sam sighed. She’d learned her lesson about pretending. “Maybe it’s inevitable that we’re going to be hurt, when we let other people in. Maybe we can’t care deeply for someone without being hurt by them, too,” she said softly. Certainly she and Marshall had caused each other pain, alongside all the joy. The same with Beatrice and Teddy.

  What was that saying, grief is the price we pay for love?

  Nina nodded slowly. She seemed pensive, all her attention curled inward. “It’s just…it’s easier to believe in things, believe in people, when you read about them in books. They’re so much safer when they’re fictional. The real-life ones…I’m still not sure how to handle them.”

  Sam let her head fall all the way back onto her friend’s mattress, lacing her hands tranquilly over her stomach. Next to her she felt Nina doing the same thing.

  They both looked out the window at the blue square of sky dotted with fluffy wisps of cloud.

  “Remember when we used to go cloud-watching?” Nina asked.

  Sam nodded, the hairsprayed coils of her hair crunching a bit at the motion. She and Nina used to sprawl out in the tree house in the orchard and name the shapes they saw drifting overhead—birds, stars, smiling faces that broke apart and re-formed on the current of the wind.

  Nina shifted so that she was lying on her side. “I always pretended they were ships, like pirate ships far up in the sky. I liked to imagine that someday I would find my way onto one, and let it sweep me off into some epic story.”

  “Really?”

  “Over the last year, I feel like I have lived through a story. I dated my best friend’s brother—who is a prince—and then his best friend!” Nina sighed. “When I daydreamed about getting swept up in a story, it was always my story. But that’s not how it played out.”

  Sam kept staring up at the sky, where the clouds—which, come to think of it, did look remarkably like ships—sailed serenely onward. Her chest ached at the realization that Nina still felt this way. Like a supporting character in someone else’s narrative.

  Nina was far too bright, too fiercely self-assured, to play the role of a damsel waiting around for anyone. Nina should be the heroine of her own story.

  Hadn’t Sam felt something similar? For years she’d struggled with her own identity, because she’d always defined herself in relation to someone else—to whatever boy she was hooking up with, or to her brother, or most of all in relation to Beatrice. When, the entire time, she’d needed to figure out who she was, herself.

  She sat up abruptly, seized by an idea.

  “Nina—will you come on a royal tour with me?”

  Her friend pushed up to a sitting position, tugging a hand through her hair. “A royal tour?”

  “Now that the wedding is postponed, Beatrice asked me to do this summer’s royal tour on her behalf. Just think,” Sam pleaded. “You said you needed time to figure things out! What better way to sort through it all than road-tripping with your best friend?”

  “But…what are you going to do the whole time?”

  “Talk to people.”

  It sounded so simple, yet it wasn’t. There were so many people out there—in the world, yes, but also right here in this country—people who all wanted different things. Some thrived on uncertainty; some craved stability. Some lived on dreams and some were relentlessly practical. Some wanted the government to take charge of everything; others wanted the government to leave them alone.

  Beatrice’s job—and now Sam’s, too—was to understand them all. Despite all those clashing desires and viewpoints and opinions, she had to find a way to work on behalf of all of them.

  The prospect sparked a strange feeling in her, as if her bones were stretching and reshaping themselves; or maybe the world was stretching, tugging her outward like a rubber band.

  The wind rustled through the trees in the courtyard. Sam imagined she could hear it whispering, urging her and Nina to go go go.

  There were still so many things that she and her best friend needed to talk about. Sam longed to tell her everything—how she’d set off the emergency alarm, her moment of truce with Teddy, and the misunderstanding it had caused with Marshall. And she wanted to hear what had happened between Nina and Ethan.

  “We’re overdue for an adventure,” she insisted, and saw her friend’s eyes sparkle at the word.

  “You and me, traveling together, all summer,” Nina said slowly, a smile tugging at her mouth. “It’s madness.”

  “Utter foolishness,” Sam agreed.

  “There’s no way I’ll be able to keep you in line.”

  “I’m sure you’ll regret it partway through.”

  “Trust me, I’m already regretting it,” Nina said, grinning.

  Sam let out an actual yelp of excitement. “Is that a yes? Are you coming with me?”

  To her relief, Nina laughed. And then they were both laughing—a bright, mischievous, complicit laugh, the way they had laughed when they were children, and knew that they were up to no good.

  “Yes, I’m coming,” Nina declared at last, wiping her eyes. “You’re right about one thing. You and I are overdue for an adventure.”

  Daphne was in her bedroom when the town car pulled up outside. It was missing the American flags that usually fluttered near its headlights, but she recognized it as one of the royal fleet.

  Jefferson had come to see her.

  For some reason she didn’t move from her spot near the window. The heels of her stilettos seemed to have grown roots, twining down through the carpet and floorboards so that she would be planted here forever, like the tree nymph she’d been named for.

  “Daphne!” Her mother flung open the door, and was across the room in a few brisk strides. “You need to get downstairs. The prince is here.”

  Rebecca’s beautiful features were twisted—with hunger, Daphne realized, and ruthlessness. Her father followed in her mother’s steps. He cleared his throat, but when neither woman looked his way, he said nothing.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Her mother’s bright green eyes narrowed. “You look terrible.”

  “I’m just tired.”

  Rebecca grabbed Daphne by the shoulders and steered her to her vanity, where her makeup brushes and pots of color were scattered, a great tapestry of illusion. She grabbed her daughter’s chin and tilted her face up, to darken her lashes with mascara, paint a deep red gloss on her lips. Daphne held herself utterly still. Her moth
er’s movements were as expert and as fast as those of any makeup artist, a legacy from her time as a runway model.

  When she stepped back, Rebecca looked at her daughter with cool appraisal. “Better,” she said gruffly.

  Daphne’s eyes lifted to the mirror. There she was, as deadly beautiful as ever, her hair licking down her back like red-gold flame. The sight of her reflection should have steadied her, but for once, it didn’t.

  When she got downstairs, she found the prince loitering in the entrance hall. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured; royalty never waited for anyone.

  “Daphne! I’m so glad you’re here,” he replied, following her into the living room. Out of habit, she sank onto the sofa, and he settled down next to her. She felt oddly hollow, as if her insides had been scraped clean by the flat of a blade, and now all that remained of her was a beautiful, empty shell.

  Not that Jefferson could tell the difference. He only saw the shell—because it was all that Daphne had ever shown him.

  For a while they chatted about the wedding and the security scare. Daphne could hardly follow, but somehow she kept nodding at the appropriate times and murmuring vague responses.

  “I’m really glad you were my date today, even if the wedding didn’t actually happen,” Jefferson was saying, and she snapped back to attention. “I know you wanted to go as friends. That you didn’t want to date again unless we were serious. And…I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  Daphne’s mouth, which her mother had so helpfully lip-glossed for her, fell open in surprise. She quickly shut it. Outside the doors to the hallway, she heard a muffled footstep, a hiss of excitement. Her parents clearly felt entitled to listen in on this conversation. After all, it was the moment of their family’s great triumph.

  “You have?” she managed.

  Jefferson flashed her his brilliant, princely smile. “You’re amazing, Daphne. You’re so good to me, and to everyone I care about. I know it wasn’t that serious between us before—I mean, I wasn’t that serious,” he amended clumsily. “I was young and stupid. I took everything for granted, especially you. But after everything that’s happened, I know better. I’m ready now,” he added. “This time, I’ll be serious about us.”