She was still freezing as she slid out of the car at the store, but this was going to be worth it. Max appeared at her side with the blanket and settled it over her shoulders. Her first impulse was to refuse it, to protest that she would look like an idiot standing on the street with a blanket around her shoulders. But, really, who cared? They strolled, taking in the mannequins in crazy scenarios and even crazier clothing.

“This is what I mean about New York,” Max said, gesturing first at a mannequin wearing a silver ballgown riding a mythical creature of some sort over a cityscape made out of gears—and then at a person viewing the scene dressed in an Elmo costume. “New York is a goddamn delight.”

Back in the car, Max gave the driver her address and raised the privacy screen between the front and back seats.

“We’ll drop you at your hotel first, though, right?” she asked. It was a few blocks away.

“I’ll ride along with you.” He tucked the blanket around her legs and started fiddling with the heat vents so they were aiming at her.

“There’s no need.”

“I want to.”

“Why?”

“I like you.”

“You are so weird.” She couldn’t help but smile inwardly, though. It was still kind of painful to hear such an earnest expression of fondness, but it was turning into a good sort of pain. Anyway, here was her chance to ask him about his life.

“So you grew up with Marie?”

“Not literally. She’s in a village called Witten. Well, she’s actually in a palace on a hill next to the village, of course.”

“Of course.”

“My family is in Riems, which is on the other side of the country. Not to be confused with the island of the same name in the Baltic.”

“I wouldn’t dream of confusing them.”

He smiled. “Eldovia is bisected by a mountain range. Marie—and the capital—are on one side, and I’m on the other. It’s not a large country, but to get from one side to the other, you have to drive over the mountains along a series of switchbacks. So while we saw Marie and her family quite a bit when I was young, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. But our fathers were friends.”

“Yes, I heard. They wanted you and Marie to get married in order to ‘unite the houses’?” It boggled the mind.

“Indeed. The houses of Accola and Aquilla had bad blood going back centuries. It hadn’t been active bad blood, mind you, since the nineteenth.”

It was such a strange thing, to be able to trace one’s family so far. Dani, with her immigrant parents, knew the grandparents on each side, and her dad’s mom talked a lot about her own mother, but that was as far back as she had any meaningful knowledge.