A/N: Chapter 2? And is that a whiff of a plot? My God, I might actually finish this. Now there's a thought.
Many apologies, TheNinjaOfCOUGH, Hans Christian Andersen. DA.
Enjoy.
King Arthur The Beloved
Part II - Winter
A young maiden would draw back her curtains in her gable with a sloping roof one morning and find the first shy, delicate buds of apple-blossoms nudging up from between the tender green shoots of the slender-limbed apple-tree by her window, and Spring would greet her on gauzy wings and a soft petal-slip. She would smile when gentle breezes blew lacy willows into Summer, until Autumn swept the brown leaves into his embrace, and took them far, far away.
Many years passed, and still no-one noticed how often General Winter would visit, in an overcoat of beige and summoning icy winds that chilled the land and turned it a glittering white, like icing on a cake. Autumn flew away with his leaves, away and away, away with Summer and all the rest of the faeries, yet no-one wept for their passing, not even the gray skies, wherefrom fat, white goose-feathers swirled down and down into the laughing arms and tongues of rosy-cheeked children. The snow fell, and adults and children alike tumbled down slopes in sleds made out of orange-crates, clapping and giggling and eating hot apple-turnovers, and they forgot that it was cold.
The land glistened, as if it were covered in thousands and thousands of tiny diamonds that melted at the slightest touch of warm fingertips. But fortunately there was no more warmth, only mesmerized eyes that gazed skywards at the white, white flakes that whirled around them, and the endless gray beyond. And so the snow continued to fall, and the diamonds continued to brush across the land.
They were so enchanted by the falling drifts that they didn't miss Arthur, even when he no longer rode out on his snow-coated mare with the icicle on her forehead, even when the sugar they always kept by for her piled in neglected sugar-bowls by the window-sills, and they did not care when they were knocked over and spilt all over the floor like scattered handfuls of ice-crystals on the tiles that were no longer swept, for they were too busy watching and watching the snow.
Yet it was not the snow King Arthur watched, although he would kneel by the window of his tallest tower day and night, looking out upon his frost-bedecked lands, the specks of children skating on the frozen river, the workshops and markets that lay quiet and empty under a blanket of snow, the Maypole in the village square, its bright ribbons trailing still and silent onto the ground, all the colours of the rainbow painted over in white, while around it the children danced with the snow instead.
However, none of this was what he so yearned to see.
Only his faithful servants of the Castle were worried for him, as he ate little and laughed less, not even for his Nurse, Elizaveta, for whom he always had a special smile and a kind or playful word, and indeed now, though he possessed neither, she was the only one who could coax him away, telling him that it was too dark to see, to go to bed as if he were a little boy again, to better wait the next day for waking early, though every morning she wrung her hands and tugged at his sleeve and still he did not stop, hearing her pleas less and less until it seemed to him that she didn't speak at all.
The moonlight washes flagstones cold, as he rocks back and forth because no-one speaks to him and none of the orphans come to play with him anymore, and he is so cold, and so lonely, and he does not think that it is he who does not talk, that it is he who no longer plays with the orphans he once saved, so long ago in a Kingdom where the sun shone and the nightingales sung and the barley danced with the yellow daffodils. He does not want them, all those flowers and all that sunshine, only…
…Only the beautiful daughter of General Winter, who visits him only at night when he is asleep, and never when he stays awake waiting and waiting to catch a glimpse of anything more than the single strand of pale hair she sometimes leaves behind, and other times not even that. Now that he has seen her once, in pure white and a diadem of ice-diamonds, he cannot see anything else, not his hills or his brooks or his people that he once held so dear, only that they were cold and gray, because she isn't there.
Sometimes he creeps past the grand ball-room he never dances in, past the dining-rooms he never eats in, past the guest-room where General Winter sleeps, to kneel by the window in the tallest tower, and whisper to the cold, gray night that if only she would come, he would make her his Snow Queen.