Chapter One
Princess Sabrina Mila Lena Rochat
A woman on the verge of making several
very dumb decisions in the name of love…
My family is crazy.
Yes, I realize that, at some point, everyone thinks their nearest and dearest would take home honors at a Worldwide Weirdo Pageant, but in my case, it’s actually true.
I run nature retreats for a living, but my real full-time job is making excuses for my family’s oddball behavior.
“So, it’s okay to take pictures?” The timid woman pushes her thick glasses up her nose, visibly trembling as she shoots a worried glance down the green mountain toward the castle, where my mother apparently retreated after issuing threats to my latest campers that taking pictures would “steal what’s left of the kingdom’s soul.”
“It’s absolutely okay to take pictures.” I beam my brightest smile to the assembled group of women, while mentally composing a warning to my mother to quit frightening our paying customers.
I know she enjoys regular meals and internet access as much as the rest of us, though she pretends to be a starving Bohemian who can survive on angst and poetry alone.
“I take snapshots all the time for our PicsWithFriends page. See?” Holding up my phone, I scroll slowly through the grid of literally thousands of snapshots I’ve taken of the mountain in the past five years. Sunset views from the summit, shots of flower-speckled spring glens, and hundreds of close-ups of local flora and fauna—it’s all there, as well as the occasional obligatory shot of the castle looking hazy and romantic in the distance.
Staying on royal land is part of the draw for Camping at Rochat, but our ancestral estate is best viewed from a distance. Technically, I live in a castle—the original medieval main hall and tower still stand—but the building has been added on to by so many generations of eccentric royals that it now resembles a surrealist portrait painted by a deranged toddler.
Up close, the castle’s crazy starts to show.
Much like my family’s does.
I love my parents and adore my two sisters, but it would be so nice if at least one of them knew how to behave in polite company.
“Oh, those are really good.” A taller woman with long brown-and-gray braids leans in for a closer look. “You should be a nature photographer!”
“Thank you,” I say, warmed by the compliment. “My father and sister are the real artists, but…”
“Photography is a valid art form,” Timid whispers, a shy smile curving her lips. “I like to crochet. Sometimes I go off the pattern and make things up as I go along.”
“Wild woman,” I tease with a wink.
Thankfully, the joke makes her laugh and seems to put the entire company at ease, which is a relief. The group of ten college botany teachers is my first All-American booking, and I’d love for them to take positive stories about their experience back across the ocean.
“Seriously, you have talent,” Braids insists, pointing a stern finger at my screen. “Don’t waste it. Like I tell my students—no one will ever see the world exactly the way you do. That’s why we need new scientists and artists and all the rest. Each new pair of eyes can change the world.”
Touched, I nod. “That’s so true. And thank you again.” I tuck my phone into the back pocket of my jeans. “If you need anything before the hike this evening, please feel free to text me. In the meantime, get settled and take as many pictures as you want. Of anything you want!”
I lift a hand and back away down the path, a twinge of regret tightening my ribs.
I’d love to learn more about photography and see plants all over the world, but I can’t imagine when I’d find the time to take a class or venture more than a hundred miles from home. Someone has to hold this madhouse together.
Especially now that Lizzy is leaving.
Lizzy.
Leaving…
The thought of my older-by-four-minutes sister moving six hours away to a country accessible only by air or treacherous, winding Alpine roads is bad enough. Knowing she’s being sold into marriage to an idiot to secure our family’s legacy is flat-out heartbreaking.
No matter how much I love this mountain, if it were up to me, I’d sell our ancestral land, put my parents up in a condo, and free us all from the royal ties that bind and gag. But clinging to history and tradition is the only thing that gets my aging father out of bed in the morning, and my mother would die of a broken heart if she knew she’d never get to see one of her girls become a “real” princess.
Since the vote that relegated our family to ceremonial status, without taxpayer support or any power over our country’s governing process, my sister’s betrothal to Prince Andrew of Gallantia has been the hope my mother’s clung to like a sugar addict guarding the last chocolate croissant in the bakery. She’s raised Lizzy to believe that marrying Andrew is her duty and destiny, and no amount of common-sense talk from my younger sister or me has been able to change Lizzy’s mind.
But we’ve both tried. Hard.
Especially Zan.
My younger-by-ten-minutes sister, Alexandra, is a fiercely independent businesswoman presently living in Zurich who considers arranged marriage so horrifically medieval that she plans to wear black to the wedding in protest.
Maybe it’s the fact that we’re triplets that’s made Lizzy’s fate so hard to stomach. Zan and I know that if the stars had aligned a little differently on that cold December day, it would have been one of us led to the slaughter instead of sweet, shy Lizzy.
But as Lizzy’s identical twin—Zan shared a womb with us, but she doesn’t share our matching DNA—I can’t help but feel it’s worse for me. I can sense Lizzy’s emotions, even when miles separate us. I know she’s miserable to be leaving home.
As I head down the trail, leaving my campers to get settled in their yurts before the guided hike this evening, I catch waves of Lizzy-flavored melancholy wafting up the mountain toward me.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I will lose my sister forever.
Every time I think about it, tears prick my eyes. I’ve always been a look-on-the-bright-side kind of person, but lately, the sunny side has been hard to find.
I can’t bear the thought of my sister married to Andrew the Atrocious.
I only spent one summer with Andrew and his brothers, but that month by Lake Lucerne was enough to make me loathe the Royal Turd. Even under the supervision of the nannies hired to watch over the six of us while our parents and the boys’ grandfather drank too much German wine and debated the terms of Andrew and Lizzy’s betrothal, Andrew managed to make Lizzy cry no less than ten times.
He thought his pranks—everything from the relatively benign “crickets in the oatmeal” trick to the more brutal stashing of snakes in Lizzy’s bed—were hysterical. Zan and I were not amused, of course, but poor Lizzy was traumatized.
She still checks her sheets at least twice before she turns out the light, just to make sure nothing slithery is hiding under the covers.
And no, it doesn’t matter that the snakes weren’t venomous, or that Andrew was only nine years old. My sisters and I had only been five at the time, and all three of us knew better than to torment other children, and our parents were far more checked out of the parenting process than the Gallantian elders.