A/N: Originally written seperately for the tortall100 community on livejournal.
Disclaimer:The characters and situations here belong to Tamora Pierce. I don't own them; I just use them.

It was a very bitter winter, the first year of the famine. Bitter was the taste of snow, which Thayet had always thought enchanting in her brief encounters with it, like southern tangerines with the sugar pulled out of them. Jonathan tried teaching her to skate to cheer her up but the Court had lost its gaiety. Some nobles retreated to their estates, fearing a Royal couple cursed by death. Some nobles were hanged by their peasants, who were desperate for bread which a barren land could not provide them. Their names had come the week before. A bitter letter from a peasant, the son of a cleric. The dead, the dying, Thayet knew, did not exist solely in Sarain. The sick, the aged, the children with arms reaching out to her, hands so thin and empty, the despair, these were not merely Saren ills. Death existed in Tortall, too.

But she had not dreamed of this, on moving, and for Thayet jian Wilima, it was a bitter winter.

Rage simmered through Jonathan's veins as he pulled on his gambeson. The anger quaked through his hands so much that he had to let Veldan tie it. The squire's hands were quaking with a different kind of fear; the King of Tortall in a white fury was an imposing sight.

"Majesty."

Alanna, armoured, at the door. She herself looked feral, one hand settled on her hilt. Jonathan was curt. "Lioness?"

"There is no way you're fighting him. I won't let you, Jon."

"Stay out of it, Alanna. He called the Queen a whore."

Alanna made an impatient gesture and Veldan scurried away immediately, leaving the gambeson unbuckled. "You're the King, Jonathan. You can't."

He began to buckle the gambeson himself, but Alanna grabbed his wrist with bruising force. He hissed in fury. "My father did."

Alanna spoke bluntly. "He had an heir and you don't."

Something he'd been trying to ignore, beneath the rage. "I'm a Knight of the Realm. I can't let an insult pass unchallenged."

There was sympathy in her face, but he didn't want sympathy from Alanna; didn't want sympathy at all. A King didn't need it.

"Then don't. I'm your Champion, Jon. That's what I'm here for. I'll make him pay for you."

Rage and impotence. A kind of despair; a vague wish for freedom, so deeply buried. Alanna, in the armour of the King's Champion. Jonathan of Conte made the only choice appropriate for a King.

"Thrash him, Lioness."