on the vine are yours and mine
“They’ll never accept it.”
Isolde hears the words as they leave her mouth; feels the vibrations of her vocal cords in her skull, rattling against her teeth. She sees his face, knows the hard crease of his frown, as she has kissed it from his lips for many nights now.
“Who would not accept it?”
The sweetness of the mead bitters in her mouth. She takes another drink; lets the edge of the silver goblet press against her lip, against her tongue. Still, the mead is sour. She swallows it anyway. It does nothing to warm her, though the cloak around her shoulders and the velvet of her robes staves most of the chill.
Ulfric has let his drink gone untouched. He sits across from her at the table, a heavy thing of polished oak. Here, with her, in his bedroom, with its rich furnishings and the cold stones of Windhelm, he has shed the mantle of High King. She has none to shed; could not. His is a crown he chooses to wear. Hers is in her blood. In the iron of her bones.
Isolde takes a breath; lets it fill her lungs. Her words strike as the hammer on the anvil.
“Your people. The Nords who follow you. They would never let a Redguard sit the throne.”
His brow dips; she counts the new wrinkles upon it, as she has laid her hand there when the nightmares kept him awake. She has new lines on her face, too, ones he has praised in this secret place, beneath the heavy furs of his bed, with his lips tracing each one. He has praised the curls of her hair and the callouses on her fingers, devoted each mole and mark to the press of his lips.
“Isolde,” he begins, winter-weary, “You say this each time I ask it of you. A Kingdom needs a Queen. The people of Skyrim -”
“Your people,” she bares her teeth. “Your people are not mine, Ulfric. ‘Tis true that Skyrim is my home; her blood is mine also. But the Nords who call you King, they would never look at me and see a Queen. They have always seen a Redguard.”
He opens his mouth to speak - closes it, clenches his jaw. She softens; she leans her body across the table to lay her hand atop his knuckles, thick and scarred as they are. The heavy fall of her hair shadows her face.
“Even after I brought Alduin down, and they called the name Dragonborn in the streets as I passed, I knew they could only see a Redguard. A crown will not change that.”
Ulfric sighs. “And when I ask you again - a week, a month, a decade from now? Will your answer always be thus?”
She throws her head back and laughs.
“I am Dovahkiin; I can slay a Dragon-God, but I cannot see time. Let us make it to the next decade. Perhaps our world will have changed enough by then.”