The Toast

Signe Velde arrived without the white flowers the palace had ordered for her. She was thirty-five, carried her own document case, and sent the bouquet to the hospital lobby before dinner. Edvard saw the empty place on the table and knew she meant to make somebody ask.

The proposed engagement had been discussed between their families for months. Neither had agreed to it. Signe had made that distinction every time a reporter used the word intended, and every time the reporters used it again. Her public-health annex was the real reason she had come. She wanted both countries to recognize reciprocal care for seasonal port workers. His ministers wanted a photograph of two unmarried people making a trade deal look permanent.

“If they ask for a toast,” she told him, “I will toast the clinics. I won’t toast a marriage you and I haven’t chosen.”

They had known each other since a border conference seven years before. Back then she had corrected his mother’s account of who had built a rural health network, and he had admired her for accepting the diplomatic frost that followed. They had been friendly in the intervals between other people’s plans for them. Neither had ever mistaken that friendship for a vow.

“My mother believes the announcement would steady the ministers,” he said.

“My father believes it would steady me. Both are thinking of themselves as reasonable people.”

Signe unfolded her notes. An entire article was marked in blue, each clinic named according to the hours it actually served workers. “I have spent eighteen months making this draft defensible. Yesterday your press office asked me what color flowers I preferred for the photographs. They have not asked which clinics have translators after six.”

“Runa will give you the floor tonight.”

“Runa has given me the floor all week. Whether the room listens after the first camera flash is a different question.”

Edvard had no answer that would not sound like another promise made from a high chair. He looked at the page she held. “I read the amendments. The mobile clinic in Staven is new.”

“Because Lukas Falk found twenty-eight people who could not reach the hospital before their shifts ended.” She eyed him. “You did read them.”

“I read them.”

“Then I will toast the people who changed my mind, not the people who think my hand is a seal on your treaty.”

He wanted to tell her about Talia then. He knew too little of his own feelings to make the disclosure honest yet, and too much to accept Signe’s hand for a photograph. He told her both things in plain terms: that he was drawn to someone else, and that he had no claim on Signe’s future. Signe was silent long enough to make him stay in the discomfort.

“Thank you for telling me before I had to find it in a photograph,” she said. “Now make sure your office understands I wrote article nine.”

“I will. I am sorry it took another person for me to say aloud that this arrangement was wrong.”

“It didn’t take another person for me. I have been saying it since the first proposal.”

“I heard you.”

“You heard me and hoped your family would find some other way to be satisfied. That’s different.”

He let the rebuke land. She had not been waiting for his romance to set her free; she had been making her own argument while he delayed making his. “You’re right.”

Signe put her notes in order. “I would like us still to be able to disagree about tariffs after tonight.”

“I would too.”

“Then don’t make me explain your private life in a press queue.”

“I won’t.”

She gave him a look that suggested she would keep that promise on file, then went to find Lukas before the reception. He admired the efficiency of her departure. It left him alone with the part of his own choice he could no longer outsource.

· · ·Scene break

Talia interpreted Signe’s toast that evening. There was no mention of a betrothal. Signe thanked the clinicians who would have to make the agreement real, then set down her glass. Edvard did not stand beside her for a portrait. A minister looked displeased; Signe looked relieved.

The assignment sheet had included a separate line marked possible royal announcement. Talia had read it before the reception and felt a cold, practical part of herself prepare to translate the words. She was paid to carry a speaker’s meaning, not approve of it. She had done more painful jobs than an engagement announcement between two people who seemed capable of consenting to it. Still, the thought of hearing Edvard offer a future to Signe while his eyes searched a room for Talia made her ashamed of how badly she wanted him to leave that line unread.

When Signe stepped down, the trade minister reached for the microphone. He congratulated both delegations on “a bond deeper than commerce.” Talia rendered the phrase without adding a marriage that he had not said. The man paused, looking towards Edvard for encouragement. Edvard applauded Signe’s work, then turned the discussion back to the health annex. He did not give the minister a usable picture.

Talia felt relief. She also felt the sting of recognizing that she had been waiting for a man with a crown to decide how much of her evening she could bear. She removed her headset when the speeches ended and went to the washroom to hear her own unamplified voice. At the mirror she said, very quietly, “I can go home.” The sentence was true. She could leave the reception, finish the contract, take another commission. Her career and her mother’s care did not depend on Edvard choosing her.

She stayed long enough to return the headset properly and ask Runa whether the next morning’s language review would include the safety inspector. Runa said yes. Talia put the work back at the center of the week. Only then did she allow herself to look for Edvard.

After the reception, Talia found him in the open gallery. Runa had already gone home. The public rooms were staffed, and the city beyond the windows was bright enough to make the palace feel less like an enclosure.

She had almost not gone to find him. During the toast Signe had paused over a line about the mobile clinic, and Talia had carried the pause into English instead of smoothing it away. Afterward Signe came to the booth and asked why the silence had been kept.

“Because you were waiting for the room to look at the clinicians before you named them,” Talia said.

Signe’s eyebrows lifted. “Most people fill the gap.”

“Most people are frightened of gaps.”

“And you?”

“Only of what gets put in them without my permission.”

Signe gave a quick, unguarded laugh. She asked for a copy of the interpreted text to send to her team and thanked Talia for keeping the clinicians’ names whole, including the unfamiliar ones. There was no mention of Edvard. That was a relief and a disappointment Talia disliked in herself.

When Signe left, Talia stayed to put her notes in order. She could go back to the hotel, call Marta and let the attraction become an unacted-on account of a difficult week. That was a credible path, and perhaps the sensible one. Instead she went to the gallery because she wanted Edvard to know she had admired Signe’s speech. It mattered to her that he might admire it too.

“She wrote a good annex,” Talia said.

“She did. She is tired of other people calling it a wedding present.”

“You could have corrected them.”

“I did tonight.”

The gallery windows had been left open a finger’s width. Evening rain brought the smell of the public gardens inside, earth and cut boxwood beneath the flowers set out for people who would be gone in the morning. Edvard reached to close a window and stopped. “Are you cold?”

“I like it.”

He left it open. It was a very small obedience, and because she had spent the week watching people arrange his smallest preferences before he voiced them, she found herself moved by it.

“I told my mother who you are,” Talia said.

“That must have been an odd conversation.”

“She asked if I can disagree with you and still be myself.”

He rested his hands on the sill. “What did you say?”

“So far.”

“A probationary answer.”

“An honest one.”

“I would rather have that.”

Below them a gardener put a tarpaulin over a new bed of plants. Edvard waited while she found the next words. Talia had come from the reception intending to discuss Signe’s annex. Here, alone enough to be candid but in a corridor where anyone might enter, she wanted to tell him how frightened she was of wanting something that could not be filed as work.

“My mother has been ill,” she said. “She’s getting better. I still turn every call into a list of things I’ve arranged for her. She asked me to call once just to tell her what I ate.”

“What did you eat?”

“That was her question.”

“I’m asking it too.”

“A sandwich beside a copier. Then one of Signe’s little cakes.”

“The apricot ones?”

“You noticed?”

“I ate three. I have been listening to the health annex for hours and they were my one irresponsible decision.”

She laughed. The sound came easily with him now. It was more alarming than his title.

“You could tell her about the cakes,” he said.

“I could.”

“And about correcting me.”

“She knows that. She likes it far too much.”

His expression warmed. “As do I.”

The room held that admission without giving either of them a place to hide. Talia looked down at his hands. He had ink on one knuckle, left there from Signe’s annotated speech. A man who could have had someone else carry every page had marked this one himself. She wanted to take the inked hand and see what happened to his voice.

He caught the direction of her glance. “Talia.”

“Don’t say it like a warning.”

“I was trying to say it like a question.”

“I know the answer.”

She moved half a step closer. They had spent days reading each other’s pauses; he understood this one. He did not move to touch her. She could feel the heat of him through the air between their coats, the waiting more intimate than an accidental brush would have been.

“The work is still mine tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And Signe is still a person in this room even when she’s not here.”

“I spoke to her before I came to you.”

“You told her what?”

“That there is someone I want to know. That there will be no engagement. I did not use your name.”

Talia stepped back to give herself enough air to think. The desire did not recede. The respect beneath it had a harder edge: she had asked a difficult question, and he had answered it before asking what it might get him.

He offered to walk beside her to the main gate. She accepted because she wanted the walk, then regretted how simple accepting felt. Their coats brushed as they turned a corner. He stepped away. She could still remember the warmth through the wool.

“And was telling Signe an act of courage,” she asked, “or a way to see if I would reward you?”

He met her question without a courtier’s smile. “I hope it was the first. I can’t make you prove it to me.”

She looked past him at the quiet gallery. She could have kissed him there. The wanting was strong enough to make her angry at its own timing.

“I want to,” she said, and saw him understand before she finished. “Not while I am contracted to interpret words your government has power to change.”

“I want to as well. We wait, then.”

She didn’t move away yet. The restraint was not a lack of heat. It was the shape of the choice they were making together.

At the gate he left her space to walk first. She turned back. “The blue map’s village should have sued your ancestor.”

“It refused to move. I think it won.”

They laughed, and this time she carried the sound out into the cold without checking whether anyone had heard it.