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Chapter Four

I pushed aside a stack of blot papers, a bowl filled with garden thyme and pulled the book off the shelf, a slim white volume that smelled like grass. The lettering in the title might have been silver, or it might have been gold, but all that had been rubbed away by years of hands, years of tracing thumbs, and now all that was left was the soft indent of the words Index Catalogue embossed in leather.

I flipped to the section on M . M for madness, M for mind, M for maybe, because maybe if I’d given King Christian s?ven instead of vinegar, I could have stopped him from stripping. That was the worst part. The stripping. We could try to explain the nonsense about the dark devil, the way he’d lapped up his wine like a dog, but that?

And the steward knew it was my fault. He would tell, of course he would. If Jens-Kjeld found out…

I shook my head.

When Jens-Kjeld found out, his eyes would darken. He’d tsk his tongue, shake his head, and say the next royal physician couldn’t make such a mistake.

I followed the words, tight text that seemed to crab across the page.

Outside, the rain still pattered, fogging up the apothecary windows, beading along the glass. Beyond it, a ribbon of green flecked with white and the whistles of goose girls herding their flocks.

The door creaked.

“I did your job,” I said, slipping the book into a drawer and dropping to the cabinet below the long worktable. “You can thank me later. Also, we need more valerian.” I rummaged through the empty gray-green bottles.

Sometimes I forgot it was a competition between Stefan and me, that Jens-Kjeld would choose just one of us to be his successor and the other would be sent home. Stefan, with his wide forehead and easy smile. Stefan, who knew exactly what to say to make a bad day better. Stefan, who was more like a brother than my real ones.

And I wanted to be the next royal physician, I did. I wanted it so bad my heart clenched and my ribs ached, but there was a reason Stefan was taking care of the king and I, the queen. There was a reason he could get away with disappearing for hours at a time, and I had to be there the moment the queen woke. Stefan, who was so kind-hearted, so easy to love. And me?

The queen’s words from this morning slipped into my mind the way wind slips through eves.

Tell him it’s not enough .

Would she have said that to Stefan?

I swallowed the lump forming in my throat and found the crackle glass vase stashed near the back of the cabinet. “I guess I should tell you the king is about the same as yesterday,” I continued. “Any word from Jens-Kjeld?”

I glanced up. But it wasn’t Stefan.

It was Hans.

He leaned against the wood doorframe, hands in his pockets, his faded sea foam staff jacket rolled to his elbows, dark curls matted from the rain.

“You’re not with your pigeons,” I said. A stupid thing to say. Of course he wasn’t with his pigeons. He was here.

With me.

A smile tugged at his lips. “Katrina sent me.”

I placed the poppy from this morning’s walk in the vase, grabbed a pitcher from the windowsill, and eased the belly to let out a thin stream of water. “You can tell her the Volds use cups.”

He shrugged. “I know.”

“You know?”

“That’s why she sent me, but that’s not why I came.”

“Why did you come?”

He paused, fiddling with the button on his jacket. Then—

“You found a poppy.” He reached for it or maybe it was my hand he was reaching for. His fingers folded over mine, his pulse quick.

My heart knocked against my ribs, and I noticed the two buttons still open at my throat. I tugged my hand away and retreated to the window.

Hans took a step back and shoved his fists into his pockets. “Gustav has a fishing boat. We could take it out to Catchfly Cove. Go swimming?”

I opened my mouth to say the queen needed her feet cleaned and bandaged every morning, that most of the guards were still sick with the stomach flu, that one of the royal singers had a nose condition and needed spearmint steams twice daily.

“Katrina, too,” Hans added. “If you want her to come. I mean, she definitely doesn’t have to come, but—”

“Hans, I—”

“You know what?” He opened and shut his fingers, wiped a hand on his pants, turned and studied a shelf full of pinkish shells and pearlescent powders. “Maybe we should invite her. We don’t want her to feel left out, and—”

“I can’t.” When Hans didn’t reply, I added, “I tried to give the king vinegar instead of s?ven. I have to double down. Work harder.” Find a cure for his madness.

Hans fiddled with a bottle of poppy seeds. His jaw tensed, then relaxed, tensed, then relaxed, then—

“Do you really think you’ll be happy spending the rest of your life taking care of the queen’s feet?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“You don’t have to prove yourself.”

I grabbed a ball of twine and a bunch of rosemary cuttings. “I’m not trying to prove myself.”

“You’re telling me your fixation on being royal physician has nothing to do with sticking it to your louse of a father?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Uh huh.”

“Really.”

“But your father—”

I looped the twine so tight, the stems snapped. The air filled with a bright, lemony scent. “My father doesn’t matter.”

And he didn’t. Of course, he didn’t. My father, the best physician in Hjern, who taught me to use wormwood for an upset stomach, white willow for pain, who promised I could help run his practice when I was just a little older, the two of us, always just the two of us.

After he left, Hans had found me crying behind the chicken coop, red-faced and raw, barely thirteen-years-old, knees pulled to my chest.

“He abandoned us,” I’d said, resting my cheek against the splintered wood. “He abandoned us because we weren’t enough.”

“You are enough,” Hans had replied, running his fingers through my hair. The gesture might have been sweet, except he’d been thirteen and awkward, too. “You’ll always be enough. And I will never leave you.”

So far, he’d kept that promise.

The day I turned sixteen, Mama gave me her fringed shawl, a rind of cheese, and five gyllis for the coach. “Find work and write home.” Her sun-spotted hand slipped down the side of my face. “Be safe.”

When Hans found out, he begged and begged his father to let him follow, then chased after the coach, running barefoot down the lane and waving like a madman until the driver stopped.

“Someone has to keep you out of trouble,” he’d said when he climbed aboard, as if I was the one in our friendship trio who needed that sort of help.

Although I never admitted it, I was glad he came. His presence was a balm that soothed the angry sting of leaving home. Back then, he smelled like sea and wind, and that smell clung to his clothes and his curls and made the entire ride less miserable.

I wanted to tell Hans, See? My father has nothing to do with it. See? This isn’t about making him regret his decision to leave. It didn’t tear my world in two. My vision didn’t line red and I’m not trying to hurt him, I’m not. I’m not trying to show him I can be better than him—the best physician in our little town—by becoming the best physician in the whole damn country.

There was a knock at the apothecary door.

I pulled it open and took the pail of milk delivered by a rain-drenched dairy maid. “Are you happy sorting letters and cleaning pigeon poop?”

Hans crossed his arms and shouldered the wall. His dark hair and jacket set him off against the sun-bleached paint. “Royal postmaster is not what I want from life.”

“And what do you want?” The question was a mistake. I realized as soon as I asked.

His blue eyes found mine, and there was something so cautious in them. He opened his mouth then closed it, bit the inside of his lip. “A fishing boat,” he said after a moment. “I want a fishing boat.”

I glanced down at the milk, cloudy with rain, and caught my own eyes, the wide shape of them, a freckled black-brown, just like my father’s. Just like his babies. Water pilled along the pail, slipped down the side.

Tell him it’s not enough—

Hans’s face fell and he took a seat at the long table. “Just…tell me about this vinegar-s?ven mix up.”

I kept my gaze on my hands. I’d simmer the milk with tansy and twinflowers to make a slurry for the sick guards.

“Isy,” Hans said, a note of exasperation in his voice. “You can talk to me. I’m basically assistant secret keeper.”

He was. As assistant postmaster, he saw most correspondence others preferred to keep quiet—trysts between lovers, treaties, alliances, backroom business deals perfumed with patchouli and pipe smoke. Sometimes I wondered what secrets Hans kept locked between his lips.

A strand of hair slipped out of my braid, curling at the corner of my vision. I swiped it away. “It’s nothing. Just—I have to work harder.”

Hans snorted. “There are at least a dozen solutions that aren’t ‘work harder.’”

“Like, write Jens-Kjeld and ask him to forgive me? Because I’m pretty sure that would get me fired.”

“That’s one option. Or you could bribe the steward to keep quiet.”

“People do that?”

He shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Everyone wants something.” For a moment, his expression was so bare, every hope, every dream, every want written in his features.

Something hard lodged in the back of my throat and I wanted to be somewhere else— anywhere else, not here, not now, not with him.

I tore myself away, placed a fresh log in the hearth, struck the strike once, twice. A fire roared and I felt Hans’s steady gaze, felt the way he watched me with that cautious hope.

I wanted to tear it out.

Rain drummed the roof, slipped down the windows and that soft patter, patter was the only thing that broke the silence.

I turned to Hans, the yellow-tongued fire warming my back. As much as I wanted him to go, to leave, he had a point about the steward. Everyone wanted something.

But if I tried to bribe the steward, he could ask for anything and I’d be at his mercy. Was that better than Jens-Kjeld finding out? Better than the whole of Karlsborn Castle learning I’d let the king pull down his pants in front of the Volds?

Maybe.

And if I could buy the steward’s silence, maybe I wasn’t as doomed as I thought.

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