You're the only one who makes me
A Wellven Royalty Winter Romance, written as a gift for @andthelightbulbclicks for the @troped-fanfic-challenge Holiday Gift Exchange! [Rated T] [7.6k]
Princess Raven of Sky Mountain has been searching for a match for a long time. She had rebelled, of course, but she was ready now, to try to find the right heir to marry. A promise to her father, one that she intends to keep, no matter how difficult it had proven to be. How was it possible that every suitor was someone less interesting than the last?
Maybe getting lost in a blizzard was just what she needed to solve all of her troubles.
Moodboard by @thelittlefanpire
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Her corset pinched at the skin on her back. Her ribs itched. The lace on her sleeve kept catching, leaving unappealing strings dangling from her wrists. The room was sticky and hot. Her shoes were pinching her toes. The pins in her hair were beginning to give her a headache. Really, she was uncomfortable in every way, and her thoughts were a rotating wheel of complaints.
She didn’t utter a single one aloud.
Raven Reyes was the ever reluctant Princess of Sky Mountain. She was used to standing up straight and keeping her irritation to herself, or at least, not verbalizing it. She could ask the right questions and curtsy just so and she knew every step to at least 15 dances. She spoke three languages and knew poems in five. But that didn’t mean she enjoyed it.
Her fingers itched for the coal burning engine she was building in her bedroom upstairs. She could think of at least three different ways she could be making it work more efficiently as she sat and pretended to be listening to the Duke of the Flower Valley droning on about his country’s glass production.
She wondered if she could find a way to make Sky Mountain a more efficient means of glass production. That would show him.
This party, like every single party she had ever attended, was a waste of her time.
She peered down the table at her father, the King Jacapo of Sky Mountain. He had been watching her, a bemused expression on his face. She shot him a glare and he just shook his head, and glanced over at the Duke. Be Polite, he seemed to say. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him.
Raven was the only daughter of King Jacapo, and she was his heir. The marriage between the future Queen of Skuy Mountain and any son of any monarch was the most sought after alliance in all of Prymfya, and so she sat, and she was polite, and she waited for the day someone sent her an heir worth listening to.
So far, that day had not come.
When Raven was a little girl, her father had made her a promise. So long as she chose someone who was an heir to their own throne, she could marry whomever she pleased. Her marriage, as long as it was proper, was her choice. She had rebelled, of course. As a teenager she had fallen for a stable boy, and had sworn to her father she would run away with him. She had flirted incessantly with a third son of a Duke during the spring courting season of her 22nd year, but he had merely been to irritate her father after he refused to allow her to ride the motorized bicycle she had built. (He caved, and she got a broken clavicle for all her trouble… It had been worth it.) But eventually, she had seen the error of her ways. She had watched as the other young princesses in her circle were married off to the highest bidder, old men and gross men, men with dozens of illegitimate children and mistresses they kept in their homes, and suddenly the immense gift her father had given her became apparent.
She was 27 this year, and was finally ready to seriously consider a suitor. Of course, that meant there hadn’t been a single man worth considering. A parade of princes and duchesses and even a queen from some far off land had made their way to her fathers court, and each one of them had been duller than the last. So far, this evening was shaping up to be much the same.
When the night finally closed, and the last stragglers who had long overstayed their welcome were heaved into their carriages, she straddled over her window, letting one leg hang out into the cold night air, and leaned back against the frame. Nights like this made her wonder if her father should have simply chosen for her, picked a respectable man with a worthy family and good character and sent her off. It would certainly be easier than this, than spending her nights wondering if this might be the most interesting suitor she would ever meet, if this might be it and if she should just agree to marry him because what if the next was worse? She looked out over the foggy moors of her father’s palace, a night sky filled with the swirls of galaxies far away, a heavy cloud cover rolling in from the east, and wondered if her father would have been better off.
The sun cut through the heavy cloud cover as the morning broke and Raven was itching to be anywhere but in her room, stewing. She dressed quickly, grabbing a slice of warm bread and an apple from the kitchen on her way out to the stables, speaking to almost no one aside from the cook, who always kissed her on the cheek and tucked her hair behind her ears and told her she should eat a little more.
The brisk cold bit at her skin leaving pink on her cheeks, invigorating her in the early morning. She made her way out into the stables and saddled her favourite horse, at the protestation of the stable hand. As she led her white mare out into the cold, she felt the world start to quiet. A long ride on her own, nothing to distract her, no one to talk about unimportant nothing in her ears. It sounded like exactly what she needed.
The ride out was perfect, the brisk winter wind became stinging and skin numbing, her hair tangling in the wind. About an hour and a half out, though, the winter clouds took over the skies and the snow began to fall, first in soft flurries but quickly turning into heavy icy snow. Sooner than she expected she could barely see in front of her horse’s nose. She turned around, trying her best to fully about face to go back the way she came, but her horse reared back, seeing the tree in front of them only seconds before she did. She held tight to the reins, barely avoiding getting thrown from her saddle, and the edges of her senses started to notice the panic she was feeling. She took a deep breath, and then another, but it did nothing to stop her racing heart.
She had heard stories, stable hands and other servants getting lost in the blizzards that ravaged her kingdom. Sometimes they made it back, fingers and noses blackened with frostbite. Other times they were found frozen out in the packed snow, or worse, found in the spring when the last of the snow had melted away. She pushed the image of her frozen corpse emerging from the frostbitten woods, and took another deep breath.
She stepped down off her horse, and tied her to the tree. A stable, sturdy post in the swirl of white around her. Next, she unraveled the blanket from the side of the saddle, finding the cold weather leg wrappings she had stuffed inside and wrapping them up. She slung the blanket over her mare’s neck, covering her ears, and then stepped under her neck, using her as a shield from the snow. She closed her eyes, and tried to think.
She remembered seeing a shack a little while back, but there was no way she could find her way back if she couldn’t see 2 inches in front of her face. She certainly wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to the palace. She swore, but the sound of her voice was lost in the wind before it reached her ears. She sunk into the snow on the ground, packing it around her feet and pulling her knees up to her chest trying her best to keep her body warm.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, her ears numb and her fingers tingling, before a light pierced the swirling white of the storm. A rider on a black horse emerged, and Raven did something arguably very stupid. She ran out in front of him, waving her arms frantically. Thankfully, his horse saw her much the same way her mare had seen the tree and came to a rearing stop. His rider was less than pleased.
“You could have thrown me off my horse!” he yelled, barely piercing through the roaring wind.
“I’m so sorry, I’ve been lost out here, I’m not even sure how long. I need help finding- I need help.” Best not to tell a strange man in the middle of the woods who she was, no matter how nice his cloak was, or how well groomed his snow covered horse. “Please, I don’t mean to slow you down on your travels, but there is no telling how long this storm will go on and I-”
He raised a hand to cut her off and she watched as his shoulders sagged in acceptance.
“Get on your horse,” He yelled, and led his horse close to her and tying their bridles together, “I saw a big barn not far off the road, back the way I came. I think if we keep out of the trees and on the raised path we should be able to find it.”
