For Both of Us

The fire on the hearth crackles and flickers, casting a warm glow around Ingemar’s sick chamber. He sits in a well-cushioned rocking chair in front of the fireplace, grateful for its warmth on this cold winter night. Although his windows are shuttered and barred against the bitter chills outside, drafts still pierce through his nightclothes wherever furs don’t cover him. His bony hands tremble as he pulls the furs tighter around himself.

“Maybe getting out of bed was a mistake,” he muses in a voice raspy from disuse, and then a deep, hacking cough rattles his chest and shakes his whole body, making his bones ache. Ingemar groans softly, hoping no one’s heard him. He’s tired of being so ill, tired of being a burden, tired of other people having to take care of him all the time.

A knock at his chamber door startles him out of his self-pitying reverie. Lifting his head and looking towards the door takes more effort than he wants it to.

“Come in,” he croaks, hating the way his voice sounds. The heavy door swings open, easily propelled by his twin sister, Solveig. One corner of his mouth turns up at the sight of her. They’ve always been close, and all the more so since she came back to Nulmyr from Adelhyod to care for him when he fell ill. Even so, he feels a twinge of jealousy that she is healthy and strong while he wastes away.

“I have news, Brother,” she tells him, crossing the wooden floor of his chamber with quick, noiseless steps before pulling a chair next to his in the firelight. She holds a roll of parchment towards him.

“From the palace,” he observes, brushing the red wax seal with his fingertips. “Read it to me?”

“No need for that. A bunch of formal drivel. Faster just to summarize. Princess Wilhelmina’s Quest for Favor will be in Bretor, a little over three months from now. All eligible noblemen of Aethyrozia are invited to compete.”

Ingemar wants to laugh, but he coughs instead. Something in his chest rattles. “What’s that to me?”

“You’re an eligible nobleman, are you not? You have to compete for her hand.”

“Solveig. Look at me.” Her bright amber eyes meet his, which are listless and sunken into his skull. “I can’t. Not like this.”

“Perhaps you’ll be well by then. Father found another cybrinn who’s willing to come here, he told me. Maybe he’ll know something the other one and the priests don’t.”

“Maybe.” Ingemar coughs again, fumbling to get a handkerchief in front of his chapped lips as bloody phlegm spatters between them. Solveig looks at him with pity.

“Can I do anything for you?” she asks, as she does every time she comes to see him, even though they both know the answer. He shakes his head slowly. Nothing anyone has done has helped–not the prayers to Chuezoh, not the apothecaries with their medicines and bloodletting, not the cybrinn with his strange chants and poultices. All anyone has been able to tell him is “Pray and rest, wait and see.” But their mother passed away from an illness like this one a few years ago, and Ingemar has all but given up hope that he will ever get better.

“Well. Maybe there’s something I can do. For both of us,” Solveig says as she reads over the parchment in her hands again, after a few long moments of no sounds but the crackling of the fire and Ingemar’s wheezy, labored breaths.

“What?” Ingemar asks, fearing the answer. The crafty tone in Solveig’s voice and the determined glint in her eyes spell trouble for someone.

“We’re twins, right? Same height, same frame.”

“Solveig…” He sees where she’s going with this line of reasoning, but he’s too weak to argue the way he should.

“If I cut my hair, bind my chest, and borrow your clothes, I think we’d look just alike. Or, well, I’d look like you should, if it weren’t for this dratted illness.”

“Solveig, you can’t. If anyone finds out–”

“No one will guess. I can speak low–” she pitches her voice down “--and learn some tricks with cosmetics to make it look like I can grow a beard.”

“You think you can fool the whole court?” Another coughing fit wracks his emaciated frame. “And Princess Wilhelmina? You worked in her household–”

“She won’t suspect a thing. I have months to prepare yet. Her younger sister is the one who might notice, but she’d ask me about it before she told on me, and I don’t think she’d give me up once she knew my reasons. She’s never been much for following protocol.”

“This is crazy, Solveig. We’d be better off…if Father went.”

“But Father won’t go. He can’t look you in the face, but he won’t leave the manor house, in case you should take a turn for the worse in his absence.” Solveig barks out a short, bitter laugh, then bites her lip to hold back the tears that glisten in her eyes. “And anyway, Princess Wilhelmina would never choose him. He’s still grieving our mother, and he’s as old as her father, balding, with a belly and a temper from too much drink and missing fingers from his construction projects here. And they have nothing in common. And he’s only a baron.”

“And I’m only a baron’s son. If rank matters–”

“It does, but we are more attractive and charming than our father, and near the same age as the Princess, which are all points in our favor. It’s happened before, in Aethyrozia’s history, that a man’s charms have outweighed the circumstances of his birth in the Quest for Favor.”

“You think you can charm her that way? And pretend to be me?”

“As you said, I’ve worked in her household. I know what matters to her. I can be exactly what she’s looking for in a husband, your rank notwithstanding.”

“And if you succeed. You get engaged to her. Married to her. What then?”

“She’ll be married to you, Brother. It will be me at the altar, saying the vows, but you in the marriage bed.”

A gasp tries to escape Ingemar’s throat, but another bout of coughing strangles it. “Solveig, really. I can’t–”

“You’ll have to. That’s the one thing I can’t do in your place.”

Ingemar shakes his head, wrapping his arms around his torso in a vain effort to find respite from the insanity of his sister’s ideas. Feeling how his ribs stick out only deepens his despair.

“You’ll have months. More months than I’ll have to learn to play your part. You can be healthy enough in time. I’m sure of it,” Solveig continues with dizzying optimism.

“You’ve made up your mind.” Ingemar sighs, and for once no coughing follows it. “I can’t dissuade you.”

“What better chance do we have? I don’t want to spend the rest of my life rotting in this house. You shouldn’t, either. Father’s doing his best, but it’s not enough. Someone has to do something, and right now, I’m the only someone who can.”

“Not alone,” Ingemar tells her, and his voice sounds almost normal instead of raspy and sickly. “Get Bertand to help you.”

Solveig nods, but she has one eyebrow arched. “You think he can keep this secret?”

“He’ll have to. Or you’ll be found out at Court…and then executed. He’ll hold his tongue to save you.”

“Good. A few months working with him and with you, I can master walking like you and dancing lead and everything else I’ll need to know in time for the Quest for Favor.” She smiles at him, brilliant and confident. I wish I could be that strong, he thinks. I wish she didn’t have to risk herself like this, just because I’m–

He coughs again, hard and phlegmy, shooting pain through his back and chest.

“Don’t worry, Brother,” Solveig assures Ingemar, touching his hand gently. “Just take care of yourself and focus on getting better. Bertrand and I will handle the rest. Everything is going to be all right.”