Maggie easily could’ve lived like this. A beautiful house somewhere with a nanny raising Matt and me. She could’ve had the best cars, and paid off every school that tried to expel me. As it was, she had never really fought any of my punishments because she thought they were fair and I needed to learn something. She could’ve just added a wing to a school, and sent me off there to work it out myself. Instead, she had made the choice that taking care of me herself was more important than spending money. Before she had custody of me, she had been working because she wanted to, not because she needed to.
She had made a choice that my own mother never would have.
“So you like shitake mushrooms, right?” Rhys was saying. He had been pulling things out of the fridge, but I had been too lost in thought to notice. His arms were overflowing with vegetables.
“Uh, yeah, I love mushrooms.” I straightened up and tried see what all he had, but for the most part, it looked like things I enjoyed.
“Excellent.” Rhys grinned at me and dropped his armload of food into the kitchen sink. “I’m going to make you the best stir fry you’ve ever tasted.”
He went about chopping things up, and I offered to help him, but he insisted that he could handle it. The whole time, he talked amicably about his new motorcycle he’d gotten last week. He’d taken it out for a spin just before he came in, and he mentioned all sorts of technical terms that I didn’t understand. I tried to keep up with it, but all I ever knew about motorcycles is that they went fast and I liked it.
“What are you making in here?” Finn came into the kitchen, sounding vaguely disgusted. His hair was damp from a recent shower, and he smelled like the grass after a rain, only sweeter. He walked past me without even a glance in my direction and went over to where Rhys had thrown everything into a wok on the stove.
“Stir fry!” Rhys proclaimed.
“Really?” Finn leaned over his shoulder and peered down at the ingredients in the pan. Rhys moved to the side a little so Finn could reach in and grab something out of it. He sniffed it, then popped it into his mouth.
“Well, it’s not terrible.”
“Stop my beating heart!” Rhys put his hand over his heart and feigned astonishment. “Has my food passed the test of the hardest food critic in the land?”
“No. I just said it wasn’t terrible.” Finn shook his head at Rhys’s dramatics and went to the fridge to get a bottle of water. “And I’m certain that Elora is a much harsher food critic than I’ll ever be.”
“That’s probably true, but she’s never let me cook for her,” Rhys admitted, shaking the wok to stir up the vegetables more.
“You really shouldn’t let him cook for you,” Finn advised, looking at me for the first time. “He gave me food poisoning once.”
“You cannot get food poisoning from an orange!” Rhys protested and looked back at him. “It’s just not possible! And even if you can, I just handed you the orange. I didn’t even have a chance to contaminate it!”
“I don’t know.” Finn shrugged. A smile was creeping up, and I could tell he was amused by how much Rhys was getting worked up.
“You don’t even eat the part I touched! You peeled it and threw the skin away!” Rhys sounded exasperated. He wasn’t paying attention to the wok as he struggled to convince us of his innocence, and a flame licked up from the food.
“Food’s on fire,” Finn nodded to the stove.
“Dammit!” Rhys got a glass of water and splashed it in the stir fry, and I was starting to question how good this was going to taste when he was done with it.
“See?” Finn looked at me, and I smiled. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Yeah, I slept great,” I nodded.
“Good.” He was standing next to me, looking as if he wanted to say something but thought better of it. He just nodded and walked out of the kitchen.
When Rhys finished cooking, his food was only moderately edible, but I picked at it anyway. He pulled stools up to the island, explaining that he only ate in the dining room when it was absolutely required. He soaked his food in some kind of sauce, but it didn’t smell at all appetizing. He downed his Mountain Dew with fervor, but I just sipped at my water.
“So what do you think?” Rhys nodded at the plate of food I was trying to eat.
“It’s pretty good,” I lied. He had obviously worked hard on it, and his blue eyes showed how proud he was of it, so I couldn’t let him down. To prove my point, I took a bite and smiled.
“Good. You guys are hard to cook for,” Rhys admitted sourly and took a mouthful of his own food. “I don’t know how you can eat this plain, though.”
“I don’t know how you can eat it with sauce.” I wrinkled my nose at the smell of it.
“To each his own, I guess,” Rhys laughed lightly. When he looked down at his plate, his sandy hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it away.
“So… you know Finn pretty well?” I asked carefully, stabbing my fork into a mushroom.
Their banter earlier had left me curious. Finn seemed to genuinely enjoy Rhys, even if he didn’t approve of his cooking, and I had never seen Finn enjoy anybody. Patrick, he had kind of liked, but I think that had been more of a means of getting closer to me. He openly looked down on Matt, and while he respected and obeyed Elora, I didn’t think he really liked her.
“I guess.” Rhys shrugged like he hadn’t really thought about it. “He’s just around a lot.”
“Like how often?” I pressed as casually as I could.
“I don’t know.” He took a bite and thought for a minute. “It’s hard to say. Storks move around a lot.”
“Storks?”
“Yeah, trackers,” Rhys smiled sheepishly. “You know how you tell little kids that a stork brings the babies? Well, trackers bring the babies here. So we call them storks. Not to their faces, though. They don’t like it that much.”
“I see.” I wondered what kind of nickname they had for people like me, but I didn’t think that now was the best time to ask. “So they move around a lot?”
“Well, yeah. They’re gone tracking a lot, and Finn is in pretty high demand because he’s so good at it,” Rhys explained. “His parents were some of the best, I guess. And then when they come back, a lot of them stay with some of the more prestigious families. Finn’s been here off and on for like the past five years or so. But when he’s not here, somebody else usually is.”
“So he’s like a bodyguard?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Rhys nodded.
“But what do they need bodyguards for?” I thought back to the rod iron gate and security guards that had allowed our entrance into Förening in the first place. When I had looked around the entryway, I remembered seeing a fancy alarm system by the front door. This all seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a small community hidden in the bluffs.
“She’s the Queen. It’s just standard procedure,” Rhys answered evasively, and he purposely stared down at his plate. He tried to erase his anxiety before I noticed and forced a smile at me. “So how does it feel being a Princess?”
“Honestly? Not as awesome as I thought it would be,” I replied, and he laughed heartily at that.
Rhys kind of straightened up the kitchen after we finished eating, but he explained the maid would be in tomorrow at ten to take care of the rest of it.
He gave me a brief tour of the house, showing me all the ridiculous antiquities that had been passed down from generation to generation. There was room that only had pictures of previous Kings and Queens. When I asked where a picture of my father was, Rhys just shook his head and said he didn’t know anything about it.
Eventually, we parted ways. He cited some homework he had to get done, and he had to get to bed because he had school in the morning. I wandered around the house a bit more, but I never saw either Finn or Elora. I played around with the stuff in my room, but I quickly tired of it. Feeling restless and bored, I tried to get some sleep, but I had slept too late in the afternoon.
On top of all that, I felt incredibly homesick. I longed for the familiar comfort of my regular sized house with all my ordinary things. For Maggie’s suppers that she worked so hard on, and the way she always sang when she did the dishes. If I were at home, Matt would be sitting in the living room, reading a book under the glow of the lamp light. He’d be telling me to get to bed, and I’d be trying to convince him that we should stay up all night and watch The Gladiator again. I didn’t really like the movie that much, but Matt loved the architecture, so he would sometimes cave.
Right now, he was probably sitting in the kitchen, staring at the phone.
Or driving around. He had probably tracked down Patrick and threatened injury on him. Maggie was probably crying her eyes out, and I know Matt blamed himself for it. If he hadn’t let me go see Mom, I’d still be there. Or at least that’s what he thought, and it really wasn’t that far from the truth. But he hadn’t actually let me go see her. I’d made it so he didn’t have a choice.
My actual mother was somewhere in this house, or I assumed she was, anyway. She had abandoned me with a family that she knew nothing about except that they were loaded, and she knew there was a risk that my mother could kill me. It happens sometimes. That’s what she said. When I came back, after all these years away from me, she hadn’t hugged me, or even been that happy to see me.