Chapter Two

One and a Half Years Later Christmas Break, University Senior Year

I’m the last person in the dorm suite. None of my three roommates stays year-round, so there’s no one left to see me sprawled across the couch in our shared living room, trying to mentally transport myself to a beach in the Caribbean like one of the guys said he’ll be doing over break.

I could do it if I conjure up some mistletoe, shove it in a doorway. But all the Caribbean really makes me think about is the half-hearted Merry Christmas text Kris and I got from our mom last week—on American Thanksgiving, great timing—and the corresponding photo of her waist-deep in the ocean, not even smiling, one of those staged influencer bikini pics. What made her think her sons would want that picture of her? But the memory of it totally ruins any relaxing beach daydream.

I could always show up there. Every invitation from her has been hung with enough passive-aggressive guilt that I know she’d love holding any visit over our heads for the rest of my and Kris’s lives. “Your brother finally came to see me. Why haven’t you, Kristopher? And Nicholas, you only stayed for a week. Children who love their mothers would visit for much longer.”

I could stay at school. Pretend the rec center where I work had an influx of students skipping their winter break trips and needed me to pick up extra shifts.

My phone buzzes on the coffee table. I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes.

Yes. I could definitely get away with prioritizing minimum wage at the student rec center over my duties as Santa’s heir.

Dad said he has an announcement this year.

Something big.

Best case, he’s only decided what role I’ll be taking on under his guidance after I graduate in the spring. But a decision like that wouldn’t warrant the maddening secrecy of a big announcement, would it? He’d have his assistant text me the details, especially with my track record of fucking up any actual involvement in Christmas’s operation—Dad would avoid the tabloid fodder of letting anyone know I’m back under his training wing until I’ve proven myself.

So what’s the worst case? My mind has been chewing on the possibilities for weeks. And I don’t like any of the stuff I come up with. Which is why I’m lying on this musty couch that smells like beer—I mean, no, we definitely did not spill beer on it because this is campus housing and alcohol is strictly prohibited—and screwing my hands into my eyes until light spots dance.

“DON’T SCREAM.”

I flail off the couch with a startled cry and slam my knee into the coffee table. Pain shoots up my leg and my phone skids across the room; my suitcase, open on the table, teeters and spills my stuff all over the floor.

And my brother howls with laughter.

“You suck,” I moan from the floor.

He ignores my writhing to head into the kitchen. “I got tired of waiting for you to come home yourself. We’re going to be late as it is.” He pops open the fridge. “It’s empty.”

“Of course it’s empty. No one will be here for a month and a half. And I was getting ready to leave.”

“Clearly. Horizontal packing, wildly productive. Do you even want to come home?”

I climb to my feet, pocket my phone from where it spun across the carpet, and start balling up sweaters to shove back into my suitcase. “That is a complex question and I swore off answering complex questions after I very nearly failed Applied Quantitative Analysis this semester.”

“Is that the class you had me write that paper for?” he asks, head submerged in a cupboard that still has a few half-eaten bags of chips. He pulls back, pokes through them, makes a face, and shuts the door.

I glare at him. “I asked you to edit that paper— you chose to rewrite the last two pages because ‘my conclusion was wrong.’ On an opinion piece.”

“And it got what grade?” He pulses his eyebrows expectantly.

It passed with flying colors but he can bite me. “You don’t get enough of your own dry classes at Cambridge? You gotta come across the ocean to steal mine?”

Kris opens another cupboard.

He goes quiet.

I can never get him to talk about how his school is going beyond the fact that what should be a three-year program will, for him, be stretching into four years. Dad may have pulled all kinds of strings to force me into Yale to uphold the Claus legacy, but he left Kris to apply to a predetermined list of schools on his own.

He didn’t get into Yale.

“If you’re done being a coward.” Kris shuts the next cupboard. “We really will be late.”

I hurl a wadded-up pair of socks at him. He turns from the kitchen and it hits him square in the nose.

But he’s right.

I’m a full-on coward now. Despite my conviction about turning over a new leaf after the New Koah incident, I’ve avoided as many responsibilities back home as possible. School and my shitty jobs here have gotten the bulk of my focus, which you think would mean my grades are doing better. They aren’t. And you’d think I’d be mastering my part-time work and at least have made manager at one of those jobs. I haven’t.

But Dad also hasn’t stepped in and forced me to reassert myself with Christmas.

Until this year. With my graduation one short semester away, all the looming responsibilities of my birthright will no longer be something I can skirt around or Dad can make excuses for.

I heave all my weight on my suitcase and manage to get it zipped shut. “You deleted that text from Mom?”

Kris tosses the socks back at me and I stick them in the front pocket. “Yeah, I swear. I really don’t care that she’s dating some guy who’s a beach detector.”

“No, the Merry Christmas—” I frown up at him. “Kris.”

He looks away.

I straighten, vertebra by vertebra. “You’ve been talking with her? We promised neither of us would respond to her manipulation anymore. It was nearly a blood oath.”

He crosses his arms and rocks back on his heels, suddenly finding the ceiling very, very interesting. “I didn’t talk to her a lot. I wished her a Merry Christmas back. She told me some shit about her dating life. It was fine.”

“Talking with our mother is never fine, Kris. What’d she say to you exactly?”

He gives me an offended look, redness creeping across his face. “Nothing. It really wasn’t bad. Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t tell me not to worry about you.” It comes out harsher than I’d intended.

His eyes droop, defeated and apologetic, because he knows exactly what I’m remembering: how the last time she unloaded the full force of her guilt trip on him, I couldn’t get ahold of him for two days, and when I’d shown up in Cambridge, it was to find that he hadn’t left his room or eaten in all that time.

Kris winces like I projected the memory on the wall. “I had the flu. That doesn’t count.”

“The flu, my ass. She fucked with your head about you not being able to convince me to answer her calls, and you got so stressed out you stopped eating. So I will fucking worry.” Protectiveness rises up the back of my neck, but I keep my voice somewhat steady and ask again, “What did she say to you?”

Kris rolls his eyes. “ Nothing. I promise, I won’t talk to her again without checking with my real mother first.” He waves at me, apparently christening me his real mother, and I hold out my hand.

“Give me your phone.”

“What? Why?”

“I’m blocking her number.”

“Fuck off. I don’t need you to block her number for me.”

“So you’ll do it on your own?”

He runs his tongue across his teeth.

I grab for his arm. “Give me your phone.”

He recoils, hip slamming into the kitchen counter. “Shit, ow—no! Get off me.”

“Give it.” I reach around him, knowing he has it lodged in his back pocket. “I’ll kick your ass, Kris, I swear to god.”

“I’m not giving you my phone, dipshit.”

“Yes, you are. Drop it. Sit. Stay. Roll over.”

“No! Jesus Christ— I am not giving you my phone. It’s full of porn—”

He may have more muscle on me, but I have more height, and I try to use that advantage, cocooning him like a spider, all limbs and angles. My elbow jabs near his kidney—accidentally, sort of—and he plummets to one knee. I follow.

“Ow— fuck. This stalling tactic is pathetic, even for you,” he grumbles from underneath me.

I peel myself off, and when he looks up, I point at him.

“Don’t talk to her. I’m serious. If you need to say something to her, tell me, and I’ll do it.”

“When was the last time you even talked to her?”

“I… responded to her text.”

“Liking her pic isn’t responding.”

“It’s enough. I’m serious, Kris. If you need to talk to her, I’ll do it for you. I don’t give a shit.”

Kris stands with a cautious stare. “If I agree, can I keep my phone?”

“Depends what kind of porn you have on it.”

“Classy.”

I go back and grab my suitcase. But I pause, staring at the wall, that protective anger still hot on the back of my neck.

Kris is quiet long enough that I look at him. He’s toeing a spot on the carpet.

I wheel my suitcase over. “All right. Fine. Let’s get this over with.”

He cocks an eyebrow, relief showing, that we’re done talking about her. For now. “Sound more miserable. Iris is already there.”

“She texted me. Mostly to tell me that Lily wouldn’t be there.”

“She isn’t,” Kris assures me. “Just Iris and her dad.”

“And I’ll say the same thing to you that I told Iris— I do not care where Lily is. She’s engaged now, yeah?” Newly sold off, I mean betrothed, to a Valentine Prince.

Kris gives the same look Iris gives me no matter how many times I swear I’m fine: pity.

“It’s been almost two years!” I throw my head back. “The breakup was mutual. ”

“You had one serious relationship, got dumped publicly, then never dated again. It’s not healthy. Besides”—he drags in a quick breath—“we know Lily brings up… that night.”

I make a cracking shriek noise, half laugh, half deranged feral panther. “Back up—you wanna come at me about healthy relationships ? How many people have you dated, like ever ?”

Kris focuses on pulling mistletoe out of his pocket, fascinated by the sprig of greenery. “I date. I date plenty.”

“Sitting next to someone in the campus library doesn’t count.”

“I didn’t sit next to them —it was an arranged date.”

“You took a person to a library, Kris, a library on the campus where they also go to school.”

“We went there for an exhibit to see the—”

“Between you with your lifelong devotion to pining after Iris and Dad with whatever the hell he’s been doing since Mom left, I’m the only one in this family who even plays chicken with healthy relationships.”

Kris snorts. “Being fuck buddies with your roommate isn’t a healthy relationship .”

“You said you liked Steven!”

“I did. But you weren’t dating him. Hey, I failed my midterm, give me a blowjob isn’t a relationship. You’re stalling. Again. ”

I am stalling, so I groan and kick the floor. “It’s weird that she’s there early, right?”

The first event of the season is usually just Christmas upper crust.

Kris sticks the mistletoe in the front door of the dorm suite. “Maybe she needs a change of pace. Our classes are ramping up.”

Iris swears she’s happy in the UK alongside Kris, in the same course as him, even, but I know it was her father’s influence that pushed her to also go to Cambridge instead of a fancy art school she once waxed on about. She’s at least graduating on time, right as I will from Yale—and don’t get me started on the fact that I got stuck in a four-year program while she’s out after only three. I’d berate Kris for dragging his program out an extra year, but I know he isn’t doing it on purpose.

“Yeah. Maybe.” A weird feeling itches, something out of place I can’t make sense of.

Kris finishes with the mistletoe. He steps back, and I give a confused hum.

“What the fuck is a beach detector?”

He shrugs. “One of those people who scours beaches with metal detectors.”

“That’s— that’s the guy’s whole identifier ? Like that’s all he does? Just—no. Never mind.”

The pulse of magic from the mistletoe washes over both of us, and when Kris opens the door of my dorm suite, instead of the hallway, it shows Claus Palace in the northernmost part of frozen, tundra-coated Greenland.

If the palace’s normal state is festive, this time of year, it’s the Sugar Plum Fairy’s wet dream.

The foyer is an explosion of green trimmings with clusters of vibrant red berries. Shining ornaments in a rainbow of colors hang from every free surface, including a massive chandelier done to look like a sleigh in flight, diamond reindeer at the helm. Lit candles flicker along the brown banisters that wrap up the two identical staircases and tables hold decorative scenes of Santas and reindeer and snowmen. A miniature train belches smoke as it laps the ceiling on a meandering track, and even its chug-chugs sound jovial.

People bustle all around, staff rushing to this or that preparation—not elves, much to the chagrin of the common myth, but they’re decked out in holiday finery. And the smells —I linger behind Kris in the doorway and breathe for a beat, soaking in that scent, god I wish I could bottle it. Suddenly coming home doesn’t seem so bad, not when the air is sugar-dusted from the kitchens, and the decorations add scents of evergreen sap. Beyond it all, there’s the stinging crystalline scent of bone-shaking cold: snow.

Kris nudges me. “Careful, Coal. Someone might think you like this stuff.”

My chest kicks.

I don’t dislike it. Quite the opposite, honestly. And that’s sort of my problem.

“Oh, the horror.” I drag my suitcase through and shut the door behind us.

We’re set upon by Dad’s head assistant, Wren, tablet in hand. Her white hair is pulled into a tight bun with a candy cane shoved through it and I can’t decide whether that’s a fashion choice or if she stuck it there and forgot about it.

“The trimming started ten minutes ago.” She checks a watch, scowls, then snaps for one of the other staff. “We’ll take your bag to your room. Change, please, and quickly —everyone else is waiting.”

“Ah, jumping right into tree trimming.” I give my most charming smile. “Why the rush? Let’s catch up, Wren. How are you? How are things in North Pole City?”

She doesn’t flinch, of course. One of Dad’s right hands for years, she’s an unflappable fixture who’s morphed into an extension of his severity. “Go, please. Your outfit is laid out for you.”

Something sours on my tongue and it’s no one’s fault but my own that Wren doesn’t take my question seriously. The people who live in the city around our palace could be plotting a murderous coup and I’d be none the wiser. Dad probably knows how they’re doing, right? He keeps up on things like that?

“Stylists are waiting in the hall,” Wren continues. “You as well, Kristopher—be ready in five minutes. Five, please.”

“You know, saying please doesn’t add anything to the—hey!”

Kris hauls me towards the stairs. “Don’t antagonize her. She oversees our stylists.”

“Very wise, Kristopher,” Wren calls. “Upset me and you’ll be wearing neon corduroy for the rest of your lives.”

“Is that why you occasionally still put me in salmon— shit !” I’ve somehow found myself in a headlock. “God, Kris, I’m coming, uncle, uncle.”

Soon we’re up the stairs and down the halls and he shoves me into my suite on the way to his own.

My suite is as decked out as the rest of the palace. A Christmas tree a little taller than I am set with ornaments and lights stands guard over a desk and sitting area near the lit fireplace, and the room through a side door shows a canopied bed with a scarlet velvet comforter and perfectly fluffed pillows.

Briefly, I consider dragging out the time to be an ass. But I have tried turning over a new leaf these past years, or at least picking my battles. And fighting this, the first of many photo ops of the Claus family partaking in Christmas revelry, has no benefit beyond pissing off my dad.

So I change quickly into a relaxed blue suit with a white button-down and polished black shoes. I’ll have to thank Wren—Kris was right. Keep the woman in charge of making us look good on our side. Got it.

I open the door and stylists flurry in. They quickly fix my hair—my auburn curls are still short, and they set them from unruly and mildly frizzy to controlled and sleek. I’ve never been a big makeup guy, and they respect that with only minor touch-ups “ for photos. ”

Then I’m shuttled out the door to where Kris is already being similarly shuttled down the hall in a complementary blue suit a shade lighter, his with pinstripes.

I jut my chin at his topknot as we walk—briskly—down the halls. Magic pulses, and a candy cane appears skewered right through his hair.

He reaches up to thumb it. “Hysterical.”

“They’re all the rage this year.”

A cavalcade of staff corrals us through the palace, back across the foyer, and down another hall until we get to our destination, the epicenter of not only the cheer and decorations, but the North Pole.

The Merry Measure.

Gold striates the wide ivory marble floor, leading up to a massive brass and gold behemoth that looks like a steampunk Christmas contraption designed by H.G. Wells. Pipes lead in and out of the room, syphoning down to a switchboard with gauges keeping track of the amounts.

The only other joy meter I’ve seen is in Easter, but I know every Holiday has something similar to collect the joy they generate, log the amounts, and feed it out to their cities. Each tube that stretches over our meter is labeled in a massive gilded plate: TOY ROOM, STABLES, KITCHENS, LETTERS, LIST ROOM, and more. Some magic funnels out to Dad, Kris, and I directly, a lifeline we can tap to spread good cheer to the world—or, more often, play dumb pranks on each other. Not the best use of magic, but it’s not like it takes much to conjure a candy cane. Dad can siphon out magic to other people too, members of the noble houses or anyone in the North Pole who needs magic to do their jobs—but he’s the dam on it, the bottleneck of power that decides who gets what and what goes where.

Normally, the Merry Measure is kept under careful lock and guard, but for the first official night of the season, Dad opens it to our court—and ample press shots. This time of year, our joy gauge is off the charts, the toggle dancing at the edge of max. Carefully placing that in the background of any pictures is just one of many intentional—and not exactly subtle—flexes.

Between the door and that towering machine stand about thirty people, all as Christmas-fancy as we are, as well as a half dozen staff who circulate with refreshments. Christmas press photographers wreath the crowd, from Christmas Inquirer, Morning Yuletide Sun, and several other outlets. Music plays, an instrumental version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” while everyone mills around a comically large tree in the center of the room, its boughs twined with strands of beads and popcorn. At its trunk wait boxes of ornaments.

As Kris and I stop just outside the threshold, the crowd takes note of us, and their energy shifts from blithe chatter to an arching of intent like several dozen hawks sighting the same two mice on a field.

Kris nudges me. “Once more,” he whispers.

“Unto the breach,” I finish, and we step inside.

I spot Dad across the room, closest to the Merry Measure with Iris and her father. Iris grins and waves—but getting to her means navigating a minefield of Christmas aristocracy, so I pull up my best smile as Kris and I schmooze.

People are here from all the main houses that oversee various parts of Christmas. Jacobs, with toys and engineering; Caroler, with treats and song; Luminaria, with creatures and decorations; and Frost, winter and all the frozen shit. We may be celebrated in the southern hemisphere too, but being located where Christmas equals winter means we dip into that association more often than not. The Frosts are also Mom’s original house, and that small talk sucks the most, chatting aimlessly with a cousin about how yes I’m excited to be home and no I don’t have a favorite event I’m looking forward to, all while emphatically not mentioning Mom.

I guide Kris away after two minutes with the Frosts.

“We’ll catch up more at the next event, yes? All right. All right, yes—we’ll—yes, we’ll talk then—okay.” I spin around Kris and blow out a long exhale. He’s a little pale, and I hook my arm around his neck as photographers catch our angles at the edges of the room, and through my charming grin, I mutter, “Kill me.”

He doesn’t laugh. He takes a flute of champagne from a passing waiter and kicks it back as we finally, finally make it across the room.

“Since when do you drink champa—” I start, but I get my answer when Kris realizes you can’t shoot a whole glass of champagne, and he sputters a cough as the carbonation fizzes up his nose, cheeks billowing to keep from spluttering the whole mess down his suit.

I crowd in front of him, blocking him from any pics. “That was refined as hell.”

“Shut up.” He wipes the back of his hand against his lips. But it breaks the tension and he shakes his head with a self-deprecating smirk.

“Coal!”

I turn as Iris darts for us, and she somehow does so elegantly and in heels, her shimmery purple dress catching the light of the massive chandelier.

She throws herself at me and I catch her, grinning as much as she is. I haven’t seen her since October, when she and Kris last visited me in New Haven, and I give her a tight squeeze before setting her down.

She twists to Kris, who has recovered, and hugs him too. I’m very aware of our dads watching us, and of the snap of pictures being taken, so I behave and do not make any suggestive bedroom eyes at him over her shoulder.

Kris, though, must be able to tell I’m at least thinking of doing that, because the moment Iris steps away, he closes in on me and punches me in the thigh. A zap of cold comes with it.

He froze my pants to my leg.

I bat at the ice, breaking it apart so the cold shivers down my leg. “Dick.”

“Idiot.”

“Boys!” Dad spreads his arms like we’ll rush to him. He’s playing the Santa part with his styled white beard and scarlet suit.

I manage what hopefully passes as a cordial grin, and with Kris and Iris at my side, we join the group in front of the Merry Measure.

Dad sweeps both Kris and me into a pose for the photographers.

“Best behavior,” he says to me through his smile.

“Wouldn’t dream of anything else,” I say. “The people of Christmas will surely Marie Antoinette us if they don’t get their yearly photos of us hanging ornaments.”

His grip on my shoulder tightens. That itch of something being out of place scratches me again, and my lips flatten, but the photo is over, and Dad spins me to Iris’s father.

Who has never liked me. And the whole “dating his daughter then ruining her birthday by almost destroying a small country” thing did not help.

So when his expression of greeting is a poorly capped glower that tells me he still daydreams about popping my head off my shoulders like a dandelion, I keep my back straight and do not do anything to make the situation worse.

“Nicholas,” King Neo says. “Are you enjoying school?”

Ah, pleasantries. “Very much.” It was nicer last year when one of my roommates would fool around with me, but Steven transferred this year. Somehow I don’t think Iris’s dad would care about that tidbit.

“Your father tells me you have yet to decide on plans post-graduation.”

I haven’t? I rather thought my post-graduation plans were destined from birth. “I—”

Dad dives in. “Hardly! Nicholas will be getting his master’s in Global Affairs, just as I did.”

“I will ?” I gag.

He doesn’t look at me, but his hand pinches on my shoulder. “He’s already been accepted to the program at Yale. I’m very proud.”

Holy shit.

I stare at his profile.

This is how he tells me he’s made that choice for me? This is how he tells me he enrolled me in grad school ? Shit fuck, the doors money can open are truly grotesque, because honestly, with my grades, there’s no way in hell I have any business going near a grad school, let alone one at Yale, that I did not apply to myself.

Not to mention I do not want to get a master’s, what the fuck. I’ve taken great pains towards not being a disappointment to him and Christmas, and I think I’ve done a pretty damn good job of it—there have been almost no headlines caused by me since the gifts fiasco. So what did I do to deserve this manipulation?

He knows this is messed up. But he smiles at Neo and asks what Lily’s plans are and thorny vines grow in my stomach.

Staff begin opening the boxes of ornaments, and our court shuffles around, lifting those ornaments, hanging them, posing just so. But I can’t move as my father slaps my shoulder in faux camaraderie and I feel that plan sink in.

This has nothing to do with my behavior or a punishment. He’s trying to turn me into him. And I get an image of what that will be like as I watch my father smile too broadly, laugh too loudly, every movement honed to paint a flawless portrait of our ruling family that will be displayed to our people and other Holidays, look how mighty Christmas is, look how jolly and joyful.

When was the last time anyone in this family felt actual joy?

An echo of a conversation scurries across my brain.

Maybe you’ve been putting your weight on the wrong things.

That’s what happiness is, at the root. A foundation.

I shrug it off like I usually do. A drunken night, too fogged to really remember, I don’t actually know what happened—but I’m only lying to myself, and doing a piss poor job of it, considering I think about that conversation a lot. And that guy. And that kiss.

How he felt. How he tasted. The way he’d moaned.

But I can’t admit all that to myself so I’m going to keep living in my delusions about not really remembering where those nuggets of wisdom came from.

They don’t matter, anyway. Because I’m going to grad school, then eventually taking over the family business of bringing quote-unquote joy to the world, behold my future.

It’s suddenly very, very hot in here. This suit is too tight. The collar is too high—

Someone hands me an ornament. I go into the motion, step across to hang it on the tree; a photo snaps.

Okay, duty done, right? I can leave—

Iris eases up next to me. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” I lie. “Great. Going to grad school, apparently.”

She scoffs. “With your grades?”

“Thank you, I know, right?”

She looks back at our fathers, talking, sipping their drinks. “For what?”

“Global Affairs, because it isn’t enough to have an undergrad degree I don’t understand, let’s add a master’s too.” I tip my head back, looking up at the massive tree. “God fucking damn it. Grad school. Why didn’t I see it coming? I always underestimate him.”

“I’ve stopped trying to estimate my father at all,” Iris says. She hangs a red bulb on a branch that bends, too thin. “It’s made everything way easier.”

“Easier?” I frown at her. “Did something happen?”

“I’ve switched to taking mostly online courses. I didn’t tell you?”

“You definitely did not. Why? You’re still on campus, right?”

She shakes her head. “Dad’s pulled me into day-to-day tasks since Lily—” She stops.

“It was years ago. I’m fine. Your sister’s engaged. Continue.”

Iris looks at Kris, who comes up alongside me and hooks a gingerbread ornament onto a branch. “I see Coal’s still master of being super fine, nothing is wrong .”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Kris says. “Nothing is wrong. Coal said so.”

“Anyway.” Iris taps an ornament, a sleigh filled with gifts. “My father’s been keeping me busy getting more into the coordinating of tasks with Easter since Lily will be split between us and Valentine’s Day, and I’ll be taking over some of her duties after I graduate.”

I gape at her. Gape at Kris, who shrugs, but they’re in the same course, taking mostly the same classes, so he had to have known, right?

“You haven’t told me any of this,” I hiss at her. “Since when do you keep things from me?”

Iris gives a rather fake yet bright smile, more for the cameras than my benefit. “I don’t tell you everything.”

“I tell you everything.”

“To which I again have to remind you that you do not need to tell me everything. I don’t give a shit about the gross things your roommates do. Stop texting me pictures of them.”

“I mean everything important, Iris. You should tell me these things.” My face falls, but when I open my mouth to push her more, she sighs.

“I don’t need rescuing, Prince in Shining Armor.”

I squint when her eyes don’t meet mine, but then she remembers the cameras and crowd and pulls up an empty smile.

“Liar,” I hiss at her.

“It isn’t so bad, you know. Our jobs. Our—gasp— duties. We help make the world happy .”

No, we create a single day of one-off smiles that does nothing to stop bad shit from happening.

“Sure,” I say. “But we don’t get to be happy too?”

“I’m happy to see you and Kris,” she says. She grabs another ornament, a stuffed teddy bear, and tosses it to me. “I’m happy to spend this month with the two of you.”

Kris leans around me. “And I’ll happily beat you at sleigh racing this year.”

Iris blanches. “Oh no. Nope. Not doing that. I’ll be a spectator.”

My grin goes demonic. “Aw, why?” I look at Kris, all innocent wide eyes. “Did something happen?”

He puts his finger on his chin in exaggerated thinking. “Huh. I recall something… about sap, maybe?”

She’d gotten tossed from her sleigh and landed quite safely. In a pine tree.

Iris bats his arm. His cheeks go scarlet but he’s grinning like mad.

“You have no idea how long it takes to wash off sap,” she says.

“No, we know.” I pop a pine needle off the Christmas tree. “You told us. Repeatedly. ‘ Oh, Coal, Christmas sucks— ’”

“You’re a jerk.” Iris hangs another ornament, her smile sickly sweet for the cameras.

“I wasn’t even in the sleigh with you!”

“But you’re mocking me, ergo, jerk .” She flips her braids over her shoulder with an overembellished flair, and I bark a laugh, and Kris smiles.

The cameras snap, getting photos of us legitimately happy. I want to ask for copies, but though I swore off reading any of the paparazzi crap that comes out since the New Koah incident, I could find them online easily enough. Maybe it’s not always so bad to have reporters everywhere.

A presence looms behind us, and what happiness we’d managed to conjure evaporates. The joy we feel still goes towards Christmas’s magic like the joy from normal people, but it’s never felt particularly magical or lasting or like it has any real purpose at all.

My dad surveys the part of the tree that Iris has decorated. “Lovely, dear.”

She smiles at him, amiable as ever, but I haven’t forgiven him for dumping the grad school thing on me in the past five minutes, so I go stiff.

“Nicholas, Iris, if you would join us by the Merry Measure,” he says and starts to steer me around.

I eye her. She’s just as confused. We haven’t finished trimming the tree yet, and that’s the whole point of this evening, isn’t it?

Kris gets left behind, his brow bending as he watches the three of us gather with Iris’s dad.

The music stops, which draws a hush over the crowd, and everyone twists to us.

Iris pushes next to me. “What’s this about?”

“No clue. Probably another photo op to—”

My words fall off as the chatter of voices crashes into the room, and staff lead in a whole gaggle of reporters, way more than are usually present—and we typically have a lot of reporters present. These are from outlets beyond just our internal Christmas ones: Holiday Herald, Joy Gazette, 24-Hour Fête, Tradition Times; there’s a few specific to Easter too. They slip inside, skirting the edges to gather as close to us as possible, until we’re front and center at an impromptu press conference.

I frown at the side of my dad’s head.

Whatever he’s announcing, he wants all the other Holidays to know about it.

Staff position us quickly. Iris in front of her father. Me next to her by my dad.

Those itchy feelings of something being off coalesce.

The room silences, cameras rolling, recorders outstretched, our court whispering softly to one another, and I hate that the reporters know more about what’s happening than I do. They were summoned here for the promise of something, whereas Iris and I are being blindsided.

“The Claus family is thrilled to have the Lentora family with us as we participate in the usual festive calendar of activities that highlights the best of Christmas, culminating in our annual Christmas Eve Ball,” Dad starts, one hand on my shoulder. It’s weighing me down, making it so I can’t move. “In the spirit of unity, we have come together not only in celebration, but to make an announcement.”

Iris looks at me questioningly. I can only frown.

“Easter has begun the search for a marriage partner for Princess Iris,” my father says so easily that his tone numbs his meaning until I see horror on Iris’s face, and before I can form a reaction, Dad presses on: “I am happy to announce that Prince Nicholas has begun courting Princess Iris, and we expect an engagement by the end of the season.”