“No, of course not.”
Finn’s hand pressed warm on my back, and I felt the dress loosen as he pulled the zipper down. I wrapped my arms around myself to keep it up, then turned to look at him. Some part of me was distinctly aware that we were only a few inches apart, my dress was barely on, and his dark eyes were fixed on me.
“You did exactly what I told you,” Finn said. “If anyone ruined things, it was me. But the night wasn’t ruined. Elora is just sensitive about the Kroners.”
“Why? Why does she let them get to her so much? She’s the Queen.”
“Monarchs have been overthrown before,” Finn answered calmly. “If you seem unfit for the position, the next in line can contest it and petition to take the title.”
All the color drained from my face. There was suddenly way too much pressure on me to perform. I felt sick, and I swallowed hard. The ball had scared me enough before I knew that, if I failed, my mother could be overthrown.
“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.” His expression saddened again, and he added quietly, “Elora has a plan to appease them.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Instead of answering, his eyes got far away and his expression blanked. His brow furrowed, and then he nodded.
“I am sorry,” Finn said. “You’re going to have to excuse me. Elora requires assistance in her room.”
“Elora called you to her room?” I stumbled over the question, unable to hide my shock.
Somehow it seemed vaguely inappropriate that Finn would be making a late-night visit to her room. Maybe it was because she had just asked him inside his head, and I couldn’t get a read on the exact nature of their relationship.
The fact that I was feeling jealous of my own mother was more than a little creepy, and that added a nauseous feeling on top of everything else.
“Yes. Her migraine is quite severe.” Finn took a step away from me.
“All right, well, have fun with that,” I muttered.
The door closed softly behind him, and I went into the bathroom to take off my jewelry and change into baggy pajamas. Sleep was difficult for me that night. I was too anxious about all the things I was expected to accomplish.
I knew nothing about this world or these people, and yet I was supposed to rule over them someday. That wouldn’t have been so bad, except that I was supposed to master everything in less than a week so they would believe that I could rule.
If I didn’t, everything my mother had worked so hard for would be taken away. Even though I wasn’t that fond of Elora, I was even less fond of Aurora, and I didn’t like the idea of ruining my family’s entire legacy.
THIRTEEN
being trylle
Lazy Sundays happened even in Förening, thankfully. I woke up late and was happy to learn the chef was still on hand to make breakfast. I saw Finn briefly, passing him in the hall, but it was no more than a nod hello.
I flopped back onto my bed, thinking I would spend the day bored out of my mind. Then Rhys knocked on my door, interrupting my plans for moping, and invited me over to his room to watch movies with him and Rhiannon.
His room was a masculine version of mine, which made sense since he had decorated my room. A huge overstuffed couch sat in front of his TV, the one big difference between our rooms. We ended up watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy because Rhys insisted it was much funnier once I’d spent time with actual trolls.
Rhys sat between us on the couch. When the first movie started, he was directly in the middle, but somewhere around three or four hours into the marathon I noticed he’d moved closer to me, not that I minded.
He talked and joked a lot with Rhiannon, and they had a way of making me feel comfortable. After spending the weekend failing to be the perfect little Princess Elora wanted me to be, it felt good to just relax and laugh.
Rhiannon left right after the third movie started, saying she had to get up early in the morning. Even after she’d gone, Rhys didn’t move away from me. He sat so close to me on the couch that his leg pressed against mine.
I thought about moving away, but I didn’t really have any reason to. The movie was fun, he was foxy, and I enjoyed being with him. It wasn’t too long before his arm “casually” went around my shoulders, and I almost laughed.
He didn’t make my heart race, not the way Finn did, but his arm felt nice. Rhys made me feel normal in a way that I never had before, and I couldn’t help but like him for it. Eventually I leaned in to him and rested my head on his shoulder.
What I didn’t realize was that watching all three extended-edition versions of Lord of the Rings in one sitting ends up being over eleven hours of movie viewing. At one in the afternoon on a boring Sunday, that sounded genius. But by the time midnight rolled around, it became a war on sleep, and I eventually lost.
In the morning, while I slept soundly on the couch in Rhys’s room, I had no idea that a commotion was going on in the house. I would’ve been happy to sleep through it too, but Finn threw open the door in a panic, jolting me awake.
“Oh, my gosh!” I shouted, jumping up off the couch. Finn had scared the hell out of me, and my heart pounded in my chest. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
Instead of answering, Finn just stood there glaring at me. Behind me, Rhys was waking up much more slowly. Apparently, Finn hadn’t terrified him the way he had me.
I glanced back at Rhys, who was dressed in a T-shirt and sweats that somehow managed to look good on him, and it dawned on me how this must have looked to Finn when he first burst in.
I still wore my lazy-day comfy clothes, but Rhys and I had been curled up together. And even if Finn hadn’t noticed that detail, there was no denying that I’d spent the night in here. My mind scrambled to think of an excuse, but at that moment even the innocent truth escaped me.
“She’s in here!” Finn called out flatly.
Rhys groaned, so I knew things weren’t good. He looked completely alert now, and he stood sheepishly next to me. I wanted to ask what was going on and why Finn looked so pissed off, but Elora didn’t give me a chance.
She appeared in the doorway, her emerald robe flaring out behind her in a dramatic billow, and her hair hung down her back in a thick braid. She stood behind Finn, but she somehow managed to eclipse everything else.
Several times before I had thought she looked unhappy, but that was nothing compared to the severe expression she had on now. She scowled so deep it looked painful, and her eyes were filled with fury.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Elora’s voice echoed painfully inside my head, and she had added some of her psychic voice to make it more intense.
“Sorry,” I said. “We were just watching movies and fell asleep.”
“It was my fault,” Rhys added. “I put the—”
“I don’t care what you were doing! Do you have any idea how inappropriate this behavior is?” Her eyes narrowed on Rhys, and he shrank back even more. “Rhys, you know this was completely unacceptable.” She rubbed her temples as if this were giving her another headache, and Finn looked at her with concern. “I don’t even want to deal with you. Get ready for school, and stay out of my sight!”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rhys nodded. “Sorry.”
“As for you—” Elora pointed a finger at me but couldn’t find the words to finish. She just looked so disappointed and disgusted with me. “I don’t care how you were raised before you came here. You still know what kind of behavior is ladylike and what isn’t.”
“I wasn’t—” I began, but she held up her hand to silence me.
“But to be honest, Finn, you disappoint me the most.” She had stopped yelling, and when she looked at Finn, she just sounded tired. He lowered his eyes in shame, and she shook her head. “I can’t believe you allowed this to happen. You know you need to keep your eyes on her at all times.”
“I know. I won’t let it happen again.” Finn bowed apologetically to her.
“You most certainly won’t. Now fix this
mess by educating her in the ways of the Trylle. In the meantime, I do not want to see any of you for the rest of the day.” She held her hands up, like she was done with the lot of us, and then shook her head and left the room.
“I am so sorry,” Rhys apologized emphatically. His cheeks were red with shame, and somehow that only made him cuter.
Not that I was really paying attention to how he looked just then. My stomach was twisted in knots, and I was thankful that I hadn’t started to cry. I didn’t even fully understand what I’d done. I knew sleeping in a boy’s room wasn’t ideal, but they were acting like it was a capital offense.
“You need to get ready for school,” Finn snapped, glaring at Rhys. Then he pointed to the hall and turned to me. “You. Out. Now.”
I gave him a wide berth on my way out the door. Normally I loved being close to him, but not today. My heart pounded erratically, but not for any pleasurable reason. Finn tried to keep his face expressionless, but tension and anger radiated from his body. I slunk across the hall to my room, and Finn barked something at Rhys about behaving himself.
“Where are you going?” Finn demanded when I opened my bedroom door. He had just emerged from Rhys’s room and slammed the door behind him, making me jump.
“To my room?” I pointed at my room and looked confused.
“No. You need to come to my room with me,” Finn said.
“What? Why?” I asked.
A very small part of me felt excited about the prospect of going to his room with him. That sounded like the start of a fantasy I might have. But the way he was looking at me now, I was afraid he might kill me once we were in private.
“I need to get ready for the day, and I can’t very well let you out of my sight.” He wore pajama pants and a T-shirt, and his dark hair wasn’t as sleek as it normally was.
I nodded and hurried after him. He walked fast and pissed off, and I fell about a step or two behind.
“I really am sorry, you know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep there. We were just watching movies, and it got late. If I had known it would be like this, I would’ve made sure I was in my room.”
“You should’ve known, Wendy!” Finn exclaimed, exasperated. “You should know that your actions have consequences and the things you do matter!”
“I am sorry!” I repeated. “Yesterday was so boring and I just wanted to do something.”
Finn whirled on me suddenly, startling me so I took a step backward. My back hit the wall, but he stepped closer to me. He rested an arm against the wall on the side of me, his face only a few inches from mine. His dark eyes were blazing, but somehow his voice remained calm and even.
“You know how it looks when a girl spends the night alone with a boy. I know you understand that. But it is so much worse when a Princess spends the night alone with a mänsklig. It could put everything in jeopardy.”
“I-I don’t know what that means,” I fumbled. “None of you will tell me.”
Finn continued to glare at me for another painful minute, then sighed and took a step back. As he stood there, rubbing his eyes, I swallowed back tears and caught my breath.
When he looked back at me, his eyes had softened a bit, but he didn’t say anything. He just walked to his room and, uncertainly, I followed him.
His room was smaller than mine, but a much more comfortable size. Even though the blinds were shut, I could tell one of his walls was made entirely of glass. Dark blankets covered his bed, and books overflowed from several bookshelves. In one corner he had a small desk with a laptop on it.
Like me, he had an adjoining bathroom. When he went in it, he left the door open, and I heard the sound of him brushing his teeth. Tentatively, I sat on the edge of his bed and looked around.
“You must stay here a lot,” I commented. I knew that he stayed here on and off, but to have a room full of stuff implied a more permanent living situation.
“I live here when I’m not tracking,” Finn said.
“My mother is quite fond of you,” I said dimly.
“Not right now she’s not.” Finn turned off the water and came out, leaning on the doorframe to his bathroom. Sighing, he lowered his eyes. “I’m sorry for yelling at you.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. I still didn’t understand why he’d been that mad, but he had a point. I was a Princess now, and I had to start behaving like one.
“No, you didn’t deserve it.” He scratched his temple and shook his head. “My anger was misdirected. When you weren’t in your room this morning, I panicked. With everything going on with the Vittra . . .” He shook his head again.
“What’s going on with the Vittra?” I asked, my heart speeding up.
“It’s nothing to concern yourself with,” Finn said. “My point is that my emotions were high when I couldn’t find you, and I snapped at you. I apologize.”
“No, it’s my fault. You guys were right,” I said. Finn just stood there looking away from me, and then I realized something. “How did you even know I wasn’t in my room?”
“I checked on you.” Finn gave me a look like I was an idiot. “I check on you every morning.”
“You check on me when I’m sleeping?” I gaped at him. “Every morning?”
He nodded.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you know that? You’re sleeping,” Finn pointed out.
“Well . . . it just feels weird.” I shook my head. Matt and Maggie used to check on me, but it felt strange knowing that Finn would come in and watch me sleep, even if it was only for a second.
“I have to make sure you’re safe and sound. It’s part of my job.”
“You sound like a broken record sometimes,” I muttered wearily. “You’re always just doing your job.”
“What else do you want me to say?” Finn countered, looking at me evenly.
I just shook my head and looked away. My pants suddenly became very fascinating, and I picked lint off them. Finn kept looking at me, and I expected him to finish getting ready. When he didn’t, I decided that I had to fill the silence.
“What is a mänsklig?” I looked at Finn again, and he exhaled.
“The literal translation for mänsklig is ‘human.’” He tilted his head, resting it against the doorframe, and watched me. “Rhys is human.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Why is he around?”
“Because of you,” Finn said, and that only confused me more. “You’re a changeling, Wendy. You were switched at birth. Meaning that when you took the place of another baby, that baby had to go somewhere else.”
“You mean . . .” I trailed off, but it was incredibly obvious once Finn said it. “Rhys is Michael!”
Suddenly my crush on him felt very weird. He wasn’t my blood brother, but he was my brother’s brother, even though Matt wasn’t really my brother either. It still felt . . . not right, somehow.
And really, I should’ve noticed sooner. I couldn’t believe I didn’t. Rhys and Matt looked so much alike—their sandy hair, blue eyes, even the way their faces were shaped. But Matt’s worry had hardened him, while Rhys was quick to smile and laugh.
Maybe that’s why I hadn’t noticed it. The complete contrast between their personalities had thrown me off.
“Michael?” Finn looked perplexed.
“Yeah, that’s what my mother—Kim, my fake mom—named him. She knew she had a son, and that’s Rhys.” My mind swirled. “But how . . . how did they do it? How did they switch us?”
“It’s relatively simple,” Finn explained, almost tiredly. “After Rhys was born, Elora induced labor with you, and using persuasion on the family and hospital staff, she switched you out for him.”
“It can’t be that simple. The persuasion didn’t really work on Kim,” I pointed out.
“We normally do same-sex exchanges, a girl for a girl, a boy for a boy, but Elora had her mind set on the Everlys. It doesn’t work as well when you do a boy-to-girl switch like that. Mothers are more likely
to pick up on something being wrong, as was the case with your host mother.”
“Wait, wait!” I held up my hands and looked at him. “She knew it was more dangerous, that Kim would be more likely to snap? But she did it anyway?”
“Elora believed that the Everlys would be the best for you,” Finn maintained. “And she wasn’t completely wrong. Even you freely admit that the aunt and the brother were good to you.”
I had always kind of hated Kim. I thought she had been terrible and cruel like so many of my classmates, but she had known that I wasn’t her child. Kim had actually been an insanely good mother. She had remembered her son, even when she shouldn’t have been able to, and she refused to give up on him. The whole thing was tragic, when I thought about it.
“So that’s why they don’t want me with the mänsklig? ’Cause he’s like a stepbrother?” I wrinkled my nose at the thought.
“He’s not your brother,” Finn emphasized. “Trylle and mänsklig have absolutely no relation. The problem is that they’re human.”
“Are we, like . . . physically incompatible?” I asked carefully.
“No. Many Trylle have left the compound to live with humans and have normal offspring,” Finn said. “That’s part of the reason our populations are going down.”
“What happens to Rhys now that I’m back?” I asked, ignoring the clinical way Finn addressed everything. He was nothing if not professional.
“Nothing. He can live here for as long as he wants. Leave if he decides to. Whatever he chooses.” Finn shrugged. “Mänsklig aren’t treated badly here. For example, Rhiannon is Willa’s mänsklig.”
“That makes sense.” I nodded. Rhiannon seemed so skittish and nervous, but also rather normal, unlike everyone else. “So . . . what do they do with mänsklig?”
“They aren’t exactly raised as real children, but they are given everything to keep them happy and content,” Finn said. “We have schools set up for the mänsklig, and while they aren’t as nice as the schools you’ve gone to, the mänks do get an education. They even have a small trust fund set up for them. When they’re eighteen, they’re free to do as they please.”
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