The Accidental Empress by Allison Pataki

for you to marry. No one for you to even talk to, except for me. And Mamma. Weren’t you ready for something larger? More adventure?” Sisi urged her sister with what she hoped would be contagious enthusiasm.
    “No,” Helene answered, her voice remaining flat.
    “So you were content, then? When all our days looked the same: lessons and walks to the lake and meals with our parents? Days in which the only young man we ever saw was our brother Karl?”
    “Yes, I was satisfied with that.” Helene nodded.
    For her part, Sisi could not understand how her sister was not enthralled by this new life for which she was intended. She had always known that her restless spirit would likely carry her somewhere far, far away. The highlights of her days in Possenhofen had been when Mamma had allowed her to saddle up Bummerl and run free through the woods and fields. She wanted adventure. She wanted love; love like the love she read about in the books she stowed away and carried up to the tops of the mountains. Love that devoured, like what Isolde experienced in her tragic tale. Or love like what Shakespeare’s young women felt; women who braved shipwrecks and battlefields and villains and the damning hand of fate.
    As if reading her sister’s mind, Helene said, bluntly: “Sisi, I’m not like you. I never have been. I’ve always admired you for the ways in which you are different from me, but I’ve never wanted the same things as you. I don’t want a life like this—” Helene waved her thin arm toward the large windows, outside of which the hive of activity buzzed as madly as before.
    “A life with all sorts of strangers to meet, and dinners to attend, and a groom to impress.” Helene shook her head. “No, I want a quiet life. A life of solitude does not scare me. In fact, it seems quite nice.”
    Sisi had known this about Helene: that her sister possessed reserved—almost hermitic—tendencies. That the boundaries of Possi would be enough to contain her for life, and happily, too. But as a young woman, Helene did not have that luxury; Helene could not forgo marriage to remain in her father’s isolated Bavarian duchy. Helene had to marry the man who chose her. Or rather, the man who was chosen for her.
    The fact that that man was kind and good and handsome—and happened to be the emperor of Austria—seemed, to Sisi, to be uncommonly good fortune.
    “I had hoped that Mamma would allow me to enter a nunnery,” Helene confessed after several moments, her shoulders wilting as she said it. “And I was planning to ask them. But this all happened so quickly.”
    Sisi cut her sister off. “My sweet Néné, we know how impossible such a fate is. You heard Mamma explain.”
    “Yes, I did.” Helene slowly slipped into the gray dress.
    “Well, my sweet Néné.” Sisi stepped into her petticoat now, and she walked toward the window, gazing out once more at the household that her elder sister would have to manage. “This is your new life, and I know that you will make the best of it. You will be such a sweet wife that Franz will adore you, as I adore you.”

    “You look lovely, Miss Elisabeth.” Agata admired Sisi, whose long hair she had just fashioned into her favorite style: two plaits woven into a thick bun. “Miss Helene, are you certain that I cannot fashion your hair for dinner?”
    “I’m certain. Thank you, Agata.” Helene, following her aunt’s orders, was applying a meager amount of rouge to her cheeks, but her black hair she insisted on wearing in her customary style—parted down the middle and pulled back into a sensibly tight bun.
    “We must give her credit, Agata.” Sisi looked at her sister in the mirror’s reflection. “My sister will never be the type of monarch who changes to suit the fancy of the times.”
    Though her sister was adamant about wearing a muted gray gown, Sisi had selected a dress of soft blue with white lace and pearl trim for herself. She felt a rush as she gazed in the mirror,