Union

a sequel to Love Letter

and

a Trials of Light and Darkness story

xxx

Chapter One

City Center,

Arendelle

April 3rd, 1843

Elsa Siguror stepped into a little flower shop under the eaves of new tenements, followed by a pair of plainclothes guards. She was getting used the familiar specter of their presence, but she didn't enjoy them any more than she did last October. They were stifling, constantly breathing down her neck and making her feel like an animal trapped in a cage. Besides, after how she'd handled herself during the violence in Corona and the revolution afterwards, one would think that her advisors would realize that she was fully capable of protecting herself. Besides, they made her even more conspicuous than she already was. She couldn't go anywhere in the city without setting herself loudly apart anymore.

Sure enough, the store's few patrons looked up with surprise, and continued to stare as Elsa did her best to try to casually approach the counter. Elsa normally didn't mind being the center of attention, but with the guards, she always felt self-conscious. They made her seem weak, or even worse, distant. If there was one thing about Agnarr's rule that Elsa didn't want to mimic, it was the way he seemed to revel in being better than his fellow men. The 'Divine Right of Kings,' he'd called it.

The woman behind the store's little counter visibly gulped as Elsa approached.

"Her majesty! It is an honor!" She quickly bowed her head.

"That is very kind of you," Elsa said, smiling and inclining her own head slightly. She'd learned long ago that it was futile to do anything but accept the deference of her subjects. It seemed to make them more uncomfortable if she insisted that they treat her normally, for some reason.

"What does her majesty require?" The woman said, still stubbornly refusing to meet Elsa's gaze.

Elsa smiled tightly. "I saw a bouquet of roses in the window –"

"If her majesty would like them, then it would be my honor to give them to her!" The woman said excitedly.

"Oh, that won't be necessary," Elsa said. "I'd like to purchase them, however."

The flower woman flushed. "That is very kind of her majesty!"

Elsa fought the urge to sigh. "Nonsense. It is my great pleasure."

She glanced towards one of her guards. "McMaster?"

The tall man stepped over and produced several notes from a pocketbook, probably overpaying by a fair amount. Elsa thanked the woman, and they were on their way.

xxx

It's no wonder why they're all afraid of me, Elsa thought to herself as her carriage rolled along the cobblestones towards the late Namar Sadden's manor. Even in the long months that had passed since the palace had been sacked, Elsa still couldn't bring herself to think of this place as home. She wondered if she ever would.

I don't even carry my own money around. She drummed her fingers along the sill of the carriage window, gazing out into the scarred streets. The city was rising from the ashes, but it was taking time. She wondered idly if it would be ready for Anna and Kristoff's wedding in a month.

They'd sort of be right, she thought. After all, Elsa earned no salary. She did work, but it was different work than common people would do, and even then, if she decided to give up and delegate all of her tasks, she wouldn't exactly start missing meals. There was also the whole business with the ancient sword of prophecy that had been entrusted to her and the Words of the Protector that she was supposedly destined to learn. But that was beside the point.

She looked down at the bouquet of roses held in a vase at her lap and suddenly wondered if it had been a stupid idea to get them. It felt like a rather childish thing to do, like a teenager's clumsy attempt at romance. Did Odette even like flowers? Elsa didn't know. Even if she did, what if she hated roses? Elsa flushed.

Dammit. She was so new to this. She always felt clumsy, and awkward. Self-conscious, in a way that she never did anywhere else. She and Odette weren't even serious, yet, for whatever that meant. They'd kissed, a few times, and spent a lot of time together, and Elsa thought that they were probably implicitly 'together,' but Elsa didn't really dare approach the subject with Odette due to an irrational fear of rejection.

She took a deep breath and looked out the window again, surprised to see that they were already approaching the manor. Stop acting like a child, she thought to herself, annoyed by how weak her thoughts seemed. You are a queen, and a powerful wizard, and it's about time you started taking control of your own destiny.

xxx

Elsa knew that Odette would probably be in the library. Namar Sadden had owned an unsurprisingly extensive collection of books, one that easily exceeded that which Agnarr had possessed. Agnarr hadn't been much of a reader, and most of the leather-bound volumes that had burned during the palace's sacking had been dusty, stuffy things. But Namar Sadden had been an academic man, and his books were frequently loved. They were interesting, too: rare biographies, of ancient rulers that Elsa had never heard of, historical tales of great wars and mighty kingdoms, and a fair number of novels, too, some of them among the oldest ever written.

Elsa stopped at the threshold of the room, gazing fondly in at Odette Marie Novare. She sat facing slightly away from the door, at a small table almost comically covered with piles of books and sheets of paper scribbled with the loose shorthand that Odette took notes in. She was looking for something in them, though Elsa doubted that she would ever find it. Namar Sadden had fallen to the service of a great and supernatural evil towards the end of his life, and Odette suspected that she might be able to find information that would help them in their fight against that evil, somewhere in this library.

Elsa figured that it was just a bunch of old books. Interesting ones, perhaps, but books nonetheless.

God, she's pretty, Elsa thought to herself, leaning against the doorframe and idly reaching up to play with the end of her braid as she watched Odette. The girl's large, wire glasses had slid down her nose, as she pored over a page, and she unconsciously pushed them back up and tucked a loose strand of her deep brown hair behind her ear. Odette had a lot of hair, and it was very thick; the bun that she often wore at the back of her head was large, and sloppily made today. Odette had beautiful hair, but a combination of her frenetic work ethic and her own stylistic preferences rarely led her to do anything with it.

Elsa liked that. It was endearing, the way that Odette didn't seem to realize that she was … entrancing.

Her eyebrows suddenly shot up, and she absently reached over for a scrap of paper as she placed her index finger against the lines that she was interested in. She twisted the paper around to herself, and then dipped a pen and quickly began to scrawl on to the page.

Elsa smiled, and sighed. Then she realized that she was acting like an obsessed schoolgirl. She blinked, and shook her head.

Well, no matter, I'm the queen. I can act however the hell I want.

"Hi," Elsa said, knocking twice softly on the open door.

Odette glanced up, surprised, and then smiled radiantly. "Hey! I haven't seen you all day. How was it downtown?"

Elsa stepped inside. She'd had a servant deliver the roses to Odette's bedroom already, so it was empty-handed that she walked over and sat down across from Odette.

"Well, you know how it is," Elsa said, shrugging. "I'm still not too pleased about having two extra shadows all of the time."

Odette smiled sympathetically. "I hear you. But hey; things have really calmed down here since January. You might be able to convince 'the mystical powers that be' that you don't need them anymore soon."

Elsa smiled, but both of them knew that Odette was really just offering a platitude. The reason that she'd first been given an increased security detail in the first place – an assassination attempt on her life last October – wasn't an incident in isolation. Her problems weren't just going to disappear now that Namar Sadden's ambitions for the throne had been stamped out. There was still an even greater enemy lurking beyond Arendelle's borders, seemingly content to bide its time for now. They were all doing their best to prepare for the storm to come.

After all, Odette wasn't chasing after phantom threads in Namar Sadden's library for academic pleasure alone.

But for now, life still went on much as it had before all this began.

"But yeah, the ribbon cut just fine," Elsa said.

She hadn't been downtown simply to shop for flowers, of course. Given the many buildings that had been partially or severely damaged during the revolution, Arendelle in recovery was a flourishing market for construction. Elsa had been performing her duties as a dignitary this morning, christening a new shipyard that had just months before been a footprint of ash, razed by the invading forces who'd wanted to limit seafaring travel into and out of the little nation.

"In all seriousness," Elsa said, "I'm pretty proud of how well this city has been recovering. In a month, you won't even be able to tell what happened."

"We're Mending it," Odette said absently, shuffling some papers around. Then she looked up. "Well, I'm glad to hear it. At least you've managed to get something done today."

"What do you mean?" Elsa asked, straightening one of the piles of notes that lay before her. "It looks like you've been doing plenty!"

Odette reached back and undid her bun, letting her hair tumble down around her shoulders. Then she raked her hands through her hair for a few moments and began to re-twist it. She abruptly laughed.

"My head was itchy. Um, I don't know, I just don't think that any of this stuff is actually that useful," she said. Then she glanced over at the clock on the wall and fit a bookmark into the hefty tome that she had open before her. "Anyway. I was about done here."

Now's your chance, a voice inside Elsa seemed to say. Go for it!

"Perfect!" Elsa said, forcing some confidence into her voice. "Let me take you to dinner."

Odette blushed slightly and grinned. "Okay! Yeah, let's do it."

xxx

Thirty minutes later, Elsa and Odette sat at a private table in a fancy French restaurant just a few blocks away from the makeshift palace. The room around them was surprisingly full, another anecdotal piece of evidence that Arendelle's economy was recovering well from the late turbulence. Some of Elsa's economic advisors had been worried that people wouldn't be spending as much money once the city re-stabilized out of fear that more hardship would come. These advisors told her that, paradoxically, people expecting economic hardship in the future might bring it on themselves if they weren't spending money.

A stiff waiter approached the table and deposited their orders before bowing and departing.

"Anyway," Odette was saying, "that's more or less it, I think. It's not that the university here has a political science school that's particularly renown – don't get me wrong, it's good, but just that wasn't it – it's just that my tutor and Jean-Baptiste Clement knew each other, and Father Clement is in admissions, so he was able to get me in off of my tutor's recommendation."

Odette wasn't fromArendelle – she was from a little French village near Marseilles, in southern France. She'd only moved to the little island comparatively recently, four years ago, when she'd been recommended to Lannister University in Arendelle for study in political science. How she'd ended up going from a fresh-faced young graduate, to one of the closest people to Arendelle's queen, was often a subject of gossip among those in Arendelle's 'in crowd.' Who was this young lady, and what was she after? How did she manage to break down Queen Elsa's icy façade? There were even scandalous rumors beginning to bloom that perhaps they were romantically entwined.

"Well, I'm glad that you ended up here," Elsa said, taking a bite of gougère. "My father always told me that one day I'd end up going to the university for a formal education, but, well, I became queen quite a bit younger than anyone anticipated."

Odette smiled sadly. "I'm sorry that you lost the opportunity. I lost my parents when I was eleven, so I can relate to the pain."

Odette hadn't spoken about her parents before.

"What happened to them? If you don't mind me asking?" Elsa said curiously.

Odette frowned, and didn't speak for a few long moments. "There was… violence, in the south of France, stuff that would eventually build up into the French Revolution of 1832. A bad man killed my parents. I don't like to talk about it much."

Elsa got the sense that Odette wasn't saying something, but she was too shocked by the girl's response to probe any deeper. "Oh. I'm so sorry to hear that."

Odette smiled again, sipping at her onion soup and shaking her head. "Don't be. I… I'll tell you some day, probably. There's happier things to talk about now."

Elsa nodded, and then tried to think about something happier to change the subject too. Everything was so stressful these days. Even the things that should be joyful, like the new public works sector that Elsa had created to do great things like build schools for children, brought with them unpleasant things like bureaucracy, or the depleted Arendane treasury. Big problems, for big discussions. Not for an idle conversation, between two friends.

"Anna finally picked a designer," Elsa said, recalling a conversation she'd had with er sister that very morning.

"Oh?" Odette said, eyebrows shooting up, breaking into a broad grin. "Who'd she settle on?"

Elsa tapped her chin. "Let's see, what was his name… he was a German guy, actually, I figured she'd pick somebody local, but I've seen his designs, and I suppose that they just appeal to her – they're really simple dresses. Frienberg. I think."

"That's fantastic!" Odette said. "Wow, I can't believe their wedding is coming so fast! Anna must be so excited."

"Tell me about it," Elsa said, laughing and rolling her eyes. "She's getting to be insufferable. But in a good way. You know? I suppose this is what having siblings is always supposed to be like. That's what I'm told."

"I'd have no idea," Odette said, smiling. Odette was an only child.

We're so alike, in some ways, Elsa thought.

"But yes, she talks about the wedding a lot," Elsa said, smiling. "And she showed me some sketches from this designer, and they're all very beautiful. I think he's going to have a field day with her."

Odette smiled dreamily. "I've never been to a wedding before," she said. "I'm excited. It all sounds so beautiful."

"Oh!" Elsa said, abruptly recalling something that she'd been meaning to bring up with Odette for a few days now but hadn't gotten the chance to do. "By Siguror tradition, the bridesmaids are young ladies from the royal family. There's um, only two of us left, however, and Anna's getting married, so…"

Elsa realized the magnanimity of what she was going to say to Odette. She was practically asking Odette to become part of the family. This is a goddamn marriage proposal, isn't it?

She trailed off, eyes widening.

"Elsa?" Odette said, brow wrinkling.

Elsa shook her head and plowed onwards. "So I was going to ask you to be a bridesmaid, as well. The Coronan royal family will be coming to the wedding, of course, so with Rapunzel added, that will make three of us. I think that's a fine enough number."

Odette's eyes widened. "Be a bridesmaid? Oh, gosh, I mean… I mean, I'd love to, but I just – I'm nobody. I don't have noble blood."

"You're not nobody," Elsa immediately said. "You're a friend of the crown. My closest advisor, my personal friend. Kings of old were always giving titles and privilege to their personal friends. Well, maybe it's about time we give you an acre of land out in the foothills and name you Lady of Something-or-Other."

Odette laughed, and then Elsa laughed. Odette raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure we could come up with a title far more ridiculous than that. And thanks, Elsa, but I don't mind being just ordinary Odette. But I'll take you up on being a bridesmaid, if you think that it wouldn't cause any political trouble. I'd be honored."

Elsa grinned. "Awesome."

xxx

Later that evening, they were back in the palace. They'd slowly wandered their way back to Odette's chamber, and by now Elsa had completely forgotten about the roses from earlier. The conversation was dying down now, despite the fact that neither of them really seemed to want it to; there simply didn't seem to be anything else to talk about. Which was ridiculous, of course; Elsa could think of a dozen different things that she would have liked to say to Odette, but she just couldn't bring herself to say them.

"Well, I had a really good time tonight, Elsa," Odette said, looking up slightly to meet Elsa's gaze. "I mean, I always do."

No! Elsa thought to herself. This can't be where the night ends! Say something smooth to her!

"Um, me too," Elsa said.

No, you dumb fuck!

Odette shifted from one foot to the other. "Well, I suppose I'll see you tomorrow, then?"

Elsa's mind seemed sluggish. Unresponsive. "I hope so," she said.

Odette stepped up onto her tiptoes and kissed Elsa, lightly, before turning to open her door and head back into her room. She stepped behind her door and looked around it at Elsa, smiling.

"Good night, Elsa."

"'night, Odette," Elsa said, hating herself as she turned and started to walk away, embarrassed by her own ineptitude. She'd gone no more than three steps, however, before Odette shouted.

"Wait!"

Elsa whipped around, startled. Her fingertips were cold, magic dancing between them. But Odette rushed back into the hall, grabbing Elsa's arm and dragging her over the threshold and into the room. Elsa turned and she saw the vase upon Odette's vanity table.

Oh, wow, funny how I forgot about those.

"Are these from you?" Odette asked.

"Oh, uh, yeah, about that," Elsa began, but Odette threw her arms around Elsa again and kissed her.

"They're beautiful," Odette said, pulling back and gazing up at Elsa with her large, liquid eyes. "Thank you. Whatever the occasion is, thank you."

Elsa glanced back at the open door. The hallway beyond was deserted. Elsa didn't have any work appointments later this the night (which was unfortunately becoming more and more common these days, with all of the extra committees and initiatives that Elsa was working on), and there wasn't anyone expecting her. Odette's reaction to her gift emboldened her, and Elsa extricated herself from Odette's arms and walked over to close the door.

She turned back. "There's no occasion," she said. "I just saw them in the window of the shop when we were driving by, and I decided that I wanted to give them to you. I… uh, I know that you probably know this by now, Odette, but I like you."

Even if Elsa's words sounded stupid to her own ears, Odette didn't seem to consider them as much. She blushed deeply. Elsa felt a strange out-of-body feeling, the sort that came from unpremeditated instinct guiding what she said. She wasn't thinking anymore, just speaking.

"Do you remember the victory celebrations that we held, back in February?"

"Of course," Odette said. Elsa had stepped very close to her now, close enough to feel something electric between them.

"Couples were dancing in the great hall," Elsa said, softly, looking down at Odette's hands. "I wanted to ask you to dance. I wanted to move with you, feel the closeness of your heartbeat."

She reached down and took Odette's hands, slowly raising them up and sliding one around her shoulder. She slid her hand down to Odette's waist.

"But I didn't ask you, because I was worried about stupid things. Politics. I was worried what it might look like. What people might say."

Before Elsa could even start to move herself, Odette began to sway, and they fell into rhythm with each other.

"That was a horrible mistake," Elsa said softly as Odette turned and put her head against Elsa's breast and shoulder. "I should have asked you to dance."

They swayed and stepped in turn, drawing each other closer here and there, for some time. It might have been a minute, or it might have been thirty. It was wonderful.

Finally, Odette drew back, and rubbed her lips against Elsa's neck, and then stepped back to look into her eyes. Elsa wondered if the night was over. If they were done.

"I want you to take me," Odette said, voice barely more than a whisper.

Elsa's hearbeat fluttered.

"I want you to make love to me," Odette continued. "I want to give myself to you, completely. I want to be entwined with you."

She was practically gasping by the end. Elsa leaned down to kiss her, and they clumsily stumbled towards the bed. Odette landed on her back, and her eyes gleamed with excitement as Elsa climbed on top of her and kept kissing her.

"I… I don't know what to do," Elsa said, nervously. "I've never done this before."

"Don't worry," Odette whispered. "I'll tell you where to touch me."

Elsa had never felt anything so wonderful in her life.