All or Nothing
Chapter Three
…..
Got a wee bit caught up with other fics, trying to write an original work that's going to be a sort of twin of this work and real life stuff. But I'm having a lot of fun playing around in the fandom and it looks likely to stay that way, so I'll try to update more often.
…..
Merida recovered her faculties well enough to be up and walking, Elsa was told, and she had to wrestle with the decision as to what should be done with her. Sending her to the refugee compound was out of the question, no matter what she said she was still a princess. At the same time, she hadn't a penny to her name and not even the clothes on her back, the ones she'd arrived in having been burned long and ever ago. She couldn't be allowed to wander freely around the kingdom, they still had to confirm that her story was true, and Elsa hadn't been able to bring herself to use the hair strands she'd been given. She was afraid of what she'd see.
Eventually, she gave a decree that Merida be allowed to remain in the castle as a guest of the crown. They opened some unused guest chambers near the central towers and moved her there, and while she was free to explore the castle itself and the grounds, she was forbidden to leave without an escort. She explained this to Merida in person, as nobody in the castle besides Anna spoke any Angolsi, and she nodded along solemnly.
There wasn't really any need to put restrictions on Merida, however; she seemed wholly uninterested in leaving the castle, or indeed her own chambers. She spent some time in the towers, Elsa knew, because she could see the towers from her office and she saw her sitting on the ledge sometimes staring out at the ocean. She rarely spoke to anyone, rarely smiled, never laughed. She seemed lost in despair.
The castle staff were lit up with gossip. They called Merida 'the little red ghost' and swapped shifts to try and get a glimpse of her, they traded information greedily. Elsa caught two chambermaids giggling outside of her bedroom, not even trying to be quiet. Her advisor would have told her to hold her tongue, so as not to be fuelling more salacious gossip, but she couldn't contain her anger.
"That girl is a guest of the crown. You will treat her with the same respect you would treat me or Princess Anna, " she told them, deliberately pulling the temperature around them down a few degrees.
"Yes, your highness," one of the maids stammered, white as milk.
"Please accept our apologies, your highness," the other said, bowing so low she nearly fell over.
"I want you to inform the rest of the staff that I don't want to hear anyone talking about a 'little red ghost' or they'll be forced to find a new place of work. I trust you can spread that information for me."
When she mentioned the nickname, both maids went from white to scarlet. They murmured their acquiescence and hurried away, probably to work harder than they'd ever worked before.
Elsa knew it wouldn't stop the gossip, but they'd be more discreet about it.
…..
She kept her distance from Merida, except when it was necessary. She couldn't understand why, but being around her was uncomfortable, and Merida seemed to feel similarly. She wore her pain so clearly it could be felt in waves. Elsa's only experience with pain was her own, and she couldn't have offered any comfort even if she knew how. For all that Elsa found the nickname offensive, Merida truly was like a little ghost, haunting the castle and tiptoeing on the peripheries of her vision.
It was Anna who stepped in to change all that, though. Initially she'd been hyper-aware of her own awkwardness when meeting new people and avoided Merida out of shyness, but perhaps memories of her own loneliness growing up in the castle drove her to act. One afternoon, clutching an Angolsi phrasebook and a basket of pastries she'd lifted from the kitchen, she approached Merida where she was sitting in the tower and chattered away at her about nothing for almost four hours. Elsa saw all this from her office, Anna babbling away and rifling through the book while Merida just nodded along, baffled.
But they became fast friends after that. Merida was probably just glad of some distraction, and Anna was delighted to have a girl to talk to who wasn't her sister (Elsa, try as she might, was still quite stiff and formal even in Anna's presence). Their chats were farcical to watch, more like a long confused game of charades than anything else. Anna's grammar was awful, and she kept mixing up basic words. Elsa once came across Anna and Kristoff trying furiously to explain something to Merida with a lot of flapping and hand-wringing.
"Elsa! You need to help us!" Anna called to her as she passed by. "I just introduced her to Kristoff and it's all gone wrong!"
Sure enough, Merida was frowning at Kristoff and slowly backing towards the door.
"What did you say to her?" Elsa asked.
Anna rifled through the book and spoke dreadful, garbled Angolsi. Merida's frown deepened. Elsa sighed heavily.
"Anna, you just told her Kristoff is a horse that sells children."
Elsa smoothly detailed the error to Merida, and introduced him properly while Anna cringed in the corner. Once she understood what had happened, Merida laughed with relief. It was a small laugh, barely a chuckle really, but enough to show she wasn't completely lost.
As the weeks passed and summer became autumn, Merida was often found in Anna's company, being dragged around the castle to whatever Anna thought she needed to see or leafing through picture books in the library. Grateful as she was to Anna for taking their refugee under her wing, Elsa couldn't help but feel a little stab of jealousy for their camaraderie. Even having lost everything, Merida had the full attention of another girl while Elsa was so often alone.
…..
August brought a heatwave that Elsa was loathe to interfere with, except to add extra ice to the stores in the kitchens. All the windows were thrown open and people wore as few clothes as they dared, almost everyone was short-tempered and sulky. Anna's condition was put down to being irritable with the heat. She complained about her head hurting, and took more naps than usual.
(Merida, at this time, spent almost all of her time in the towers where it was cooler. Anna had declared it boring and left her to it.)
The rash wasn't noticeable until it had been there almost two weeks, at which point it had spread to her face and made a butterfly-like pattern across her cheeks and nose. She fainted at breakfast, burning hot with fever, and upon stripping her to give her a cool bath they discovered the purple-red rash all over her back, stomach and chest. She was put to bed, and the doctor called, but he hadn't seen anything like it before.
Just a day later, a maid who had been serving breakfast collapsed and was discovered to have the same spreading rash. Within three days, five of the kitchen staff had it. The doctor ordered them quarantined in the south wing and all the linens in the castle boiled and the surfaces scrubbed.
Anna was steadily getting worse. She was delirious, calling out for her mother and father, Kristoff, Elsa, even Olaf at times. She couldn't sleep, her muscles spasmed with pain and any food she was given came back up within minutes of eating it.
To anyone that encountered her during that time, Elsa was the epitome of a cool, controlled leader. The threat of this strange new plague was terrifying, but she handled the quarantine measures with grace and efficiency. She sealed off the castle and everyone in it, herself included, to prevent the spread of the plague. She brought in surgical protective wear for the staff at great expense and kept the household calm and reassured.
In private, she was a mess. She barely slept with worry. She couldn't bring herself to visit Anna's sick bed, so afraid she was of what she'd see. After so many years of isolating herself away from her beloved sister, to have her so cruelly snatched away when they'd just begun to reconnect was something she wouldn't survive willingly. She spent the nights locked in her office, slumped across her desk, weeping.
…..
After one particularly bad night, Elsa found Merida leaving Anna's bedchamber with a small harp she'd found somewhere. Needing something besides the plague to talk about, she asked her where she'd found it.
"I found it at the back of the library," Merida answered. "It helps her sleep."
"That's very sweet of you," Elsa told her, because it was. "But you should be wearing protective clothing in there, or you'll get sick too. Please remember that next time."
Elsa turned to go, until Merida said something that stopped her in her tracks.
"Oh, I already had it when I was little."
Elsa spun around and grabbed Merida's shoulders so hard she winced.
"You had it? You've seen this before?" Elsa gasped.
Merida was in severe danger of having that look of confusion etched permanently on her face.
"Yes? We all had it. Everyone gets it when they're children," she said, shrugging off Elsa's grip. "Is this really the first time you've seen it?"
"We've never seen anything like this before," Elsa told her. A slow warmth was blooming in her chest; here was a way to possibly save Anna, and the rest of the country with her.
"Huh, no wonder she's so sick…" Merida mumbled.
"Is there a cure?"
To her horror, Merida shook her head.
"No, you just have to wait for it to leave on its own. And give them honey in hot water to help the throat swelling. Although…."
"Although what?"
"There's a herb we use, it cleans the blood or something. But I don't know if it grows here…."
Elsa let go of her shoulders, only to grab her hand and drag her down the hall to her office.
"You're going to find out," she told her.
…..
Elsa wrote up a document to allow Merida to leave the castle with Kristoff to look for the herb, but before she left they called in the doctor to describe everything she knew about the plague. Elsa translated to the best of her ability, both Merida's statements and the doctor's questions, and it took all night. Three of her advisors insisted on being present, occasionally huffing and whispering amongst themselves.
Merida's people called the plague sruthan loiscneach, roughly translated as river burn. It was caused by the bite of a type of larva that lived in stagnant water and passed from person to person by bodily fluids. The symptoms presented more severely in some people than others, but it was all round agreed that it was best to get it in childhood. In adulthood, it could cause blindness, limbs lost to amputation and eventually death (Elsa's stomach clenched as she translated this part.) The Ceilts treated it with hot water and wild honey, boiled mead and the mystery herb Merida was unable to describe properly in Angolsi.
Kristoff had been pacing impatiently at the door, and when they were finally done he whisked Merida away without even a passing word to anyone. Elsa couldn't fault him; he was probably the only person in the kingdom as worried as she was herself. When she saw them leave through the castle gates, she slumped in her chair and let out a long sigh.
"Your highness?"
She bit back another sigh. The doctor was leaving, but the advisors were staying.
"We have been talking…." Chancellor Makkenon began.
"I had noticed," Elsa said, sourly.
"We believe it is unwise to put so much trust in what this 'princess' says. We still haven't verified her story. And we don't believe it is prudent to trust her with the lives of our people. This herb she's looking for could be anything."
Elsa threw her hands up.
"Do you have any other solutions? I don't know if you've noticed, but my sister is on death's door and nobody else has any idea what this thing is!"
"That in itself is suspicious, your highness," Chancellor Heino said. "If this disease is as common as she says, why has it not been encountered here before? And why did it appear only after our mysterious visitor arrived here?"
Elsa fixed him with a stare that, with less control, would have frozen him on the spot. As it was, the temperature in the room plummeted.
"I don't like what you're implying, Chancellor," she bit out. "But judging purely by efficiency standards, I'm sure there are faster ways of murdering the crown princess than infecting her with a disease she may still recover from."
The advisors huffed some more and left, but what they said lingered in her mind long after they left, and long after Merida and Kristoff returned with the herb they'd been looking for, soaked to the skin and obviously exhausted.
The herb was tested, and distributed to the infected staff once they were sure it was safe, and finally mixed into an elixir for Anna. The staff recovered within two days, but Anna remained bedridden and delirious for a further two weeks.
One night, so plagued with doubt she couldn't sleep easy, Elsa followed the distant plucking of the little harp to Anna's room. She didn't go in, not wanting to disturb Anna's rest, but peeked through the half open door.
Anna was sprawled sideways across the bed, cold compresses draped across her forehead and arms. Merida was sitting on top of the covers, strumming away gently, clearly bored out of her skull. She'd been there since lunchtime.
"Can you sing that song again?" Anna mumbled in Arendellian, grabbing at Merida's arm.
"I don't know what that means," Merida told her in Angolsi.
Anna groaned, the fever having driven all of the Angolsi out of her head. She starting humming a tune off key, discordantly.
"Oh. Okay."
Merida changed the tune she'd been plucking to something higher and sweeter. She began to sing softly in Gaelic, a simple melody that lilted beautifully. Her voice was clear as a summer bird's, and Elsa was transfixed.
Anna groaned happily and threw her aching head on Merida's lap, which didn't phase her in the slightest aside from a single missed string pluck. The song was a lullaby, and it had the intended effect. Anna was soon sleeping soundly. Merida didn't even try to move her, just put the harp down and crossed her arms to wait for her to wake up.
Elsa tiptoed away then, her heart conflicted. She could understand the reservations her advisors had, she'd be a fool not to see that they made sense. But every instinct screamed that this girl was not a threat.
And that left only one way to know for sure.
The book. The hair.
The truth.
…
The lullaby Merida sings is 'Seoithion Seo Ho' a song that doubles as a warning against fairies stealing your children.
