Author's Notes: This happened because I reread the trilogy while avoiding finals. And I have always wondered how Sabriel and Touchstone went about restoring the Kingdom, and how the people reacted. Not that this fic actually answers the question. Ye Valar, this thing's tiny.
It will not be easy for them to rebuild the world.
He is King by blood alone, a half-mad bastard that is the best anyone can hope for; two hundred years of regency and twenty of anarchy are sufficient to persuade the people that his blood, watered down and tainted though it is, outweighs his lack of birthright and training. His affected name does not reassure anyone-- can he still not remember his real name?-- but when the Abhorsen reclaims the palace and library, the persistent presence of the Dead has reduced the old records of the Guard to mould and dust, taking the King's name with them. The people once again sigh, and look the other way, and remember that even a fool as a king is better than none.
She is no better. Abhorsen she may be, but one of them she is not. The Kingdom hasn't been without an Abhorsen so long that they would welcome anyone to the position, and she is more familiar with death itself than the living kingdom she proposes to rule. The towns and people she liberates from the threat of the Dead are grateful, but they can never forget that she probably had to be told that they even existed to be saved from anything. She has learned to be more discreet in checking her atlas whenever a new report of a village besieged arrives; she has also grown her hair long in an attempt to hide her Ancelstierran sensibilities. The people, however, are not so foolish as to actually wish her gone; they may sigh, and they may mutter, but the dead are on the retreat.
Together, they are worse than they could ever be apart. As the binding loosens and tongues are let free, the streets of Belisaere hum with criticism. Who could be so foolish as to combine the first and second Great Charters into one bloodline? The King may be a fool and the Abhorsen a foreigner, but to the people who had believed they had lost both, their reappearance was the reappearance of hope, coming so swiftly it was like a blow to the chest. Both Chartered families were so small, where they had once been great, and to put the hope and protection of two fifths of the Kingdom's power in one child was fool-hardy, absurd, and dangerous. The King and Queen sigh and turn a deaf ear, and think that they could have two children.
It will not be easy for them to rebuild the world. But they had already begun when they first doubted; and neither of them, fool or foreigner, was inclined to give up.