Only a couple of hours ago, the palace was filled with people and music and laughing and dancing. Now it is eerily quiet, the roar of the crowd outside muted. My breathing sounds too loud in my ears. The hallways are dark, lit only with occasional safety lights near the ground. I stay close to Georgie, as if I’ve become her very large shadow. She leads me down a back staircase to the service hallways.
When I was little, I used to play down here. It seemed daring to explore in these back rooms and out-of-the-way places and pretend I was a secret agent or a spy. Now it doesn’t seem exciting. The whitewashed stone walls and gray doors are cold and scary and sinister. This is not my house; this is not the home I’ve loved for twelve years. This is some strange and scary place filled with shadows and monsters that might jump out from behind any of those closed doors.
I want to ask what is going on, where everyone is, where Mam and Pap are, but then I see our parents ahead of us in the hall, talking to Marco, the head of palace security. I start to run to them, but Georgie holds me back.
“Just wait,” she whispers.
Shortly, Marco salutes and walks away. I break free from Georgie and hurry forward.
“I’ll send for you when it’s safe, or I’ll join you,” Pap says to Mam. “Either way, we won’t be separated for long.”
“Separated!” I cry, rushing to Pap and grabbing his arm as if he’s going to vanish right in front of me.
Pap puts his arms around me and holds me tight. “It will only be for a little while, Fritzi.”
“Do you promise?” I ask.
Pap looks deep into my eyes. “What have I told you about promises?”
I don’t answer. I know what he’s going to say. He doesn’t make promises, because if something happens, he doesn’t want to have to break them.
“My word is enough, right?” he asks.
I nod, my throat feeling thick.
“And I will not make promises that might be impossible to keep.”
I nod again.
“But know this. I will do everything in my power to get us together again soon.”
“You’re king. Everything is in your power.”
His smile is so sad it makes me want to cry.
“Maybe not quite everything,” he says.
“But why can’t you come with us?”
Pap holds me out at arm’s length and bends down so he’s looking me right in the eye. “I have to stay here. Like you said, I’m the king. If I leave, I’ll be giving that up. Abdicating. You don’t want that, do you?”
I stare at him in horror. Of course I don’t want that.
Georgie clears her throat. “And we’re the princesses. During the Blitz in World War Two, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret stayed in London.” She holds her head high.
“I’m glad you know your history, Georgie,” Pap says, “but you’re not staying.”
“I’m not afraid,” Georgie says. And I bet she’s not. Georgie’s not afraid of anything. Except maybe pimples. She freaks out about pimples.
I’m a little bit afraid.
Pap shakes his head. “I’m afraid for you.”
“Where are we going?” My voice sounds strange to my ears, too little, too timid, too weak.
“We have friends in America. You will go there.”
“When will we come back?” I ask, biting my lower lip. Georgie always tells me to stop doing that. She says it doesn’t look elegant. Right now, I don’t care.
Pap’s eyes meet mine. “‘Though she be but little, she is fierce,’” he says, quoting Shakespeare to me. “That is you, my fierce little Fritzi. I need you to be good and brave. You can do that, right?” he asks. “And soon we’ll all be together.”
He didn’t answer my question, but I don’t ask it again. I have a feeling that I wouldn’t really like the answer anyway.
Pap looks over his shoulder, like maybe he’s expecting the mob to break through at any minute.
“We can’t waste time,” he says and opens one of the gray doors. There’s a van backed up to it with its rear doors open. It looks like the kind of van a kidnapper might use. The kind of thing you see in movies that you know the kid should never get in but does anyway. I’m not getting in that van. I take a step back but bump into Georgie.
“You must hurry,” Pap says. He gives me a long hard hug, and I don’t ever want him to let go, but he does. Tears are streaming down my face, even though I don’t remember starting to cry. Pap helps me into the van. Soon Georgie and Mam are inside too, and the doors slam shut. Pap taps the back door four times as his way of saying a final “Ich liebe dich,” German for “I love you.”
I fall against Georgie as the van drives off, and she puts her arm around me. It’s pitch black. There isn’t even a window connecting us to the driver’s section. I don’t know who’s driving. I don’t know where we’re going. I swipe at the tears with the back of my hand, but it doesn’t make any difference. More keep falling.
The tires rattle over the gravel drive. The shouts of the protesters are louder but so mixed together I can’t make out what they are saying.
Someone bangs on the side of the van, and I jump and squeal. They want in. They want to get us. Why?
“Shh,” Georgie says. She’s always prepared for every situation, so I’m not surprised when Georgie pulls a little flashlight out of her pocket and shines it around the van. There’s a thick, padded blanket in one corner. Georgie snags it and covers us with it as I huddle close to Mam.
Now we are in the dark, in the back of a van, under a blanket. I feel a little safer, even as more people pound on the sides of the van. The van stops, and I try to make myself as small as I can under the blanket. Any minute now, I’m going to throw up, I know it.
“Let me pass,” the driver calls out. “I just dropped off a delivery. I got nothing. Let me pass.”
The back door rattles as someone tries the handle. I squeak and Mam holds me tight. The van starts moving again, slowly at first, but then with more speed. We’re past the mob. We’re safe.
Safe in the back of a dark van, fleeing from a mob at the palace. Safe is apparently quite relative.
Georgie pulls the blanket off our heads, and my heartbeat starts to go back to normal. I don’t even feel like throwing up anymore.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Mam doesn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t hear me. Georgie takes my hand in hers. “There are some people causing trouble. It’s not safe for us at the palace right now. We’re going someplace safe.”
“But why all the way to America?” I ask. “Why not just to Switzerland or France?” Those are the countries Colsteinburg is nestled between.
“We need to be farther away from our enemies than that,” Georgie says.
Enemies. My stomach does a somersault at that. We have enemies.
“But what about Pap? He isn’t safe!”
“He can take care of himself, and it’s better if he doesn’t have to worry about us,” Georgie says.
“I’ll miss school.” I was only home for the beginning of the Octocentennial, and I’d be expected back at Academie Sainte Marie tomorrow. Today.
“Can’t be helped,” Georgie says. Mam still says nothing. Maybe she’s asleep. Maybe I should sleep. I can’t sleep. I’m too wired, too worried.
I’ve never been this scared before.
I was scared when I first went off to boarding school just last month, but it was more a worry about if I would make friends and like my teachers, not that someone might hurt me.
I was scared the night my grandfather died, a little over a year ago.
We’d been playing Rummy, and after I played the winning hand, Grandpa put his hand to his heart. I thought he was just surprised I’d won, but then his face twisted up and went gray, and he collapsed, and I screamed for help.
I was pushed aside as medical personnel tried to save King George, but they couldn’t. And then Pap was king, and the world was not how it had been before.
The world is changing again.
It’s always changing.
I don’t like it.
I want to go back to when my great-grandfather was king. Everyone loved King Franz. He was king for more than sixty years. Grandpa had more time to play with me then, and not so many things to stress him out and give him a heart attack. Pap and Mam got dressed up and went out a lot, but they weren’t busy all the time either. Things were easier then.
They weren’t scary.
They’re scary now.
The van’s motion is soothing. I curl up and close my eyes, just for a moment.