"Honestly Merida, I don't know what ye were thinkin'." Elinor chided strolling up the widow's walk toward her daughter who had been hiding from her. "Did ye expect her to return that sentiment in kind? Ye barely know her and how did ye think she was going to react?" Elinor paced. "How will she react?"

"I just - " Merida hesitated trying to find the right words. -"wanted fer her to be clear of my intentions."

"Clear of your intentions?" Elinor struggled repeating the phrase and barked out a hysterical sounding laugh. "After all this searching, we've met so many people and courted so many fine young men, Scots too... " Elinor trailed off muttering, "Of course my daughter picks an Arendellese princess"

"She's a queen now Mum."

"All that means is that she could have you drawn and quartered in an instant! Merida, did you not consider what you were asking? Marriage is a very serious affair."

"Which has traditionally been decided by sport, instead of any reasonable measure in our country. Ye weren't takin it too seriously when ye were askin' me to marry Wee Dingwall."

"Why couldn't you have just followed tradition and picked a nice Scottish lord? Instead of causing an international incident?"

"Oh and those buffoons are just great diplomatically. Macintosh; won't stop showin' off his nonexistent muscles and Dingwall drools."

"MacGuffin was alright."

"I can't understand him and he speaks in me own native tongue."

There was a break in conversation as they both had been through this argument hundreds of times before over the past years. Neither one of them needed to look to know the hurt on the other's face.

"Ye had other options." Elinor sighed exhausted.

Merida turned to face her mother head on her voice stone serious. "None that I wanted to pursue."

Elinor looked down sadly at her daughter. All their years of searching she had just wanted for her daughter to be happy, but things weren't all simple and everything had its costs. She didn't want the price of her daughter's freedom to be her life.

Merida looked away, out at the hilly landscape of Arendelle.

"It's probably just as well she said no." Merida murmured "Fricken' ice queen didn't even smile a nip during her own coronation."

Elinor laughed.

Her daughter had requested the suit of a queen and her only concern was that the queen had rejected her suit, not the political ramifications of such a request. She treated the whole situation like a man would, like her father had during their courtship. Best to offer up the truth and be rejected than to be dishonest and safe with your feelings. Elinor remembered how little she had wanted her large boisterous husband, how her own mother had pressured her to accept his courtship, with the promises that he would make a good husband.

And Elinor had grown to love him and Fergus had made a good husband. Indeed, he'd made a great father. Most men spent little time with their children but he took great pleasure in teaching them all he knew whether she approved of the sharing of knowledge or not. He'd taught his sons to make shadow puppets of bears and his daughter to shoot, the fastest ways of killing men and deer. She did not regret their early marriage.

Elinor could see him clear as day in her daughter now as she stared scared but ferocious off into the distant night sky. She wished he were here now. He would know the right words to sooth their troubled daughter.

She worried about DunBroch and the future as Merida stared down, shivering with the night air. Elinor's thoughts drifted steadily into the dark silent wind.

"Mum, there's something you need to see." Merida interrupted.

And Elinor saw something she'd never seen before.

"Ice queen indeed."

About last chapter, Percival is an OC that isn't really relevant other than to be someone that isn't immediately accepting of Rapunzel and trigger her worries about herself. He won't feature in this story. I partially based him off of Wiggins from Pocahontas.

My life is doing ok. My ex-boyfriend's mom paid me back the money he stole. I'm not filing charges.