All or Nothing
Chapter 2
Note on the languages used in this chapter, although they're real languages for the purpose of this fic they are proxies for non-existent countries that exist in this universe. I'm afraid I'm just not clever enough to invent a new language just for this fic.
…..
Over the next few weeks, while the injured girl recuperated in a drug-induced stupor, Elsa tried to keep her mind on affairs of state, with only cursory enquiries as to her health and what was being done to help her. Solveig was their best maid for this kind of thing, she'd nursed Anna through measles, pox, fever, fractured limbs and she'd taken care of Elsa once through a bone-shaking bout of influenza with quick but caring hands.
"She's no trouble, your highness," Solveig had told her one evening when the queen caught her running back to the bedchamber with clean linens and a steaming bowl of water. "She thrashes about at night so I have to redo her bandages, and she can't swallow too well, but she doesn't make a fuss."
Elsa nodded and sent her on her way, mentally adding a few figures to Solveig's wages.
Leafing through her papers, the words seemed to drift away from her and her thoughts refocus around the mystery occupying the spare bedchamber. The doctor was right, in a way. Arendelle was a merchant city first and foremost; its military was small and mostly dedicated to protecting their borders from bandits. They were protected by their trading allies and their considerably bigger armies. If the girl was running from someone who had a great force at their disposal, there could be trouble.
On the other hand, the kind of person who would inflict such injuries on a young girl, even if she was some sort of criminal, how could she bring herself to take that person's side? Or perhaps she wasn't a criminal at all but a refugee. Arendelle had hosted the displaced before, when clashes between two of their allies had driven peasants from their homes and into neutral territory. Many of them had arrived at their gates injured, weeping, telling tales of family murdered by soldiers high with bloodlust.
But, she reminded herself, it could be a feint. The debacle with Prince Hans had rattled her, left her second-guessing people's motives all the time. Someone could look so benign and turn out to a monster, a wounded girl could be a highly dedicated assassin. Stranger things had happened, and now that her powers were public knowledge some countries were nervous about what it meant for them. Who was to say that this girl wasn't a complicated means to a Trojan Horse plot to usurp the throne?
The trolls had gifted her an object, to ward against ill intentions. A memory book, a book filled with blank parchment, but one drop of blood or a strand of hair would provide a portrait of the donor's life and give an insight into their minds. She hadn't yet used it, afraid if she brought it up it would create bad feeling.
What clearer reason could she be given to use it now?
…..
Solveig knocked on her door mid-afternoon, 3 weeks to the day since Elsa had come across the little boat.
"Begging your pardon, your highness, but you asked me to tell you when our patient is better equipped to talk," she said, clutching at her skirts. "She's quite lucid now, though I can't understand a word she says."
Elsa's stomach lurched, but she summoned all of her formidable dignity, thanked the maid and marched to the patient's chamber.
The girl was sitting slightly up as she entered, staring at the ceiling with a blank expression. She looked much better now, with some colour and plumpness in her cheeks, but she was still too pale and listless. The vibrancy of her hair just served to make her look bloodless. She looked up as Elsa made her presence known, straightening with some difficulty. Elsa held out a hand to stop her, and she slumped back with a light sigh of relief.
Elsa placed herself delicately in the chair beside the bed, with the girl's eyes nervously scanning her every move, and addressed her in her own tongue.
"Kan du forstå hvad I siger?"
The girl just blinked. Elsa tried the languages of her neighbouring countries.
"Können Sie verstehen, was I sage?"
"Vous comprendrez ce que veux dire I?"
"Si può capire che cosa sto dicendo I?"
Nothing. The girl now knew Elsa was trying to communicate but shook her head to each language she tried, and she was rapidly running out of the ones she knew. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she tried Angolsi.
"Do you understand what I'm saying?"
The girl's head shot up almost violently, curls flying everywhere. Elsa started, despite herself.
"Yes," she replied.
"You speak Angolsi?" Elsa almost whispered, conscious that gossipy maids could be walking by.
"Yes, but not too well," the girl answered.
Elsa was relieved. From the singsong lilt of her accent it was clear Angolsi wasn't the girls' first language. Angols was a large country with a fearsome reputation for making war, and Elsa had learned the language as a precaution though Arendelle had historically had no contact with them. They were landlocked and far away enough to not be considered a threat. Still, her father had sent their royal family extravagant gifts from time to time to keep them on side, just to be safe.
"Where am I?" the girl asked in halting Angolsi. Elsa ceased her pondering and fixed her with her most formidable look.
"You are in the sovereign state of Arendelle," she answered. "I am Queen Elsa of Arendelle. And I have yet to learn your name, so let's begin with that."
For all that she was a stranded foreigner in a strange land in the presence of the queen of said land, the girl showed no signs of being intimidated by her. Elsa soon discovered why.
"Merida," she answered quietly. "Princess of Clan Dunbroch."
A princess. Elsa's mind reeled. Every moment seemed to deepen the quandary she was facing.
"But that was before," the girl continued. "I am nobody now."
…..
They spoke long into the night, as the awful story of how the former Princess Merida drifted into Arendelle in such a sorry state came out piece by piece. She related it dispassionately, as though it had happened to someone else. It was an unpleasant tale, to say the least, and though Elsa listened and only interjected to offer words her guest couldn't think of and kept her face blank, after she left the bedchamber she went straight to her office and sat there for a long time, shaking.
It began with an Angolsi Duke who had travelled to Dunbroch campaigning for the hand of their princess. Merida's people were Ceilts, a secretive race who inhabited harsh northern lands and defended their borders so ferociously that only whispers of their existence had made it to Arendellian ears. The princess had just turned down three of her fellow Ceilts for marriage, and they looked on the outsider with suspicion.
Duke Augustus Warrick was forty-nine years old, and had already married and buried two young wives and claimed their lands in his stead. Merida found him unsettling to be around, and was put off that he had travelled so far to seek her hand and yet didn't speak a word of Gaelic, her mother tongue. Her father disliked him because he'd heard his reputation as a covetous man from humble beginnings who left a trail of dead men with every rise of his station. And her mother disapproved of the way he looked at her, 'like a dog looking at a man's dinner plate.'
They declined his offer, and the Duke left amiably enough, wishing the royal family well as he took his entourage away. They thought no more about it, although Merida herself remained uneasy and nervous for seemingly no reason at all.
Half a year to the day after the Angolsi man had departed, they were invited to a feast to celebrate the birth of a son for an old ally of the Dunbroch Clan, Clan Machblair. Merida hadn't wanted to go, probably sensing from the summons that something was off about the invitation. Her father had laughed off her fears on the basis that after seven daughters 'that randy old goat Machblair' deserved to celebrate finally getting a boy to carry his name.
It was a trap, of course. The old goat had been promised high-ranking Angolsi husbands for his daughters by Duke Warrick as a reward for securing the princess, and through her the Dunbroch crown. The king was shot full of crossbow quarrels from men perched in the rafters, for no-one was brave enough to face him in true combat. The queen's head was struck from her shoulders as she ran screaming to her dying husband's side.
Merida had managed to break loose in the confusion that followed her parent's death, fighting her way through the men sent to secure her with a battle-ax and using a serving platter as a shield and scaling a tapestry to escape out of a window. She knew the surrounding forest well enough to make her way back in the blackest of night to Dunbroch, where she raised the alarm. She instructed every man, woman and child in the castle gather anything they needed to survive and flee as far north as they could.
Her own horse, the one she had left in the stables to travel by carriage to the feast, she gave to her childhood nursemaid. This woman was entrusted with the lives of Merida's younger siblings, the princes, along with her warrior husband to protect them all. They had been the hardest to convince to leave, the nursemaid dithered and fretted and panicked and the boys clung to the princess' skirt and refused to let go, until Merida spelled out exactly what Warrick would do to them when he caught up.
"He wouldn't kill me, he needed me to get the throne," Merida told Elsa as though she were commenting on the weather. "But the princes are the heirs to the throne, he'd have had their heads hanging from the doorway soon as he got through the gate."
In the end, the nursemaid's husband had scooped them all up and swept them away. Two of the boys were crying out for her as they left, one tried to escape his protector's arms to run back to her. One by one, and with most in tears begging the princess to come with them, the castle's occupants disappeared into the dark of the forest. In the distance, the light from the torches of Warrick's approaching army were rapidly blinking closer to Dunbroch.
Merida's final act before Warrick blustered into the courtyard was to cover every room in the castle with pitch and straw and set it all ablaze. He found her there, watching the flames roar out of the windows consuming all of its valuable innards, and laughing.
…..
Merida couldn't put the next occasions in an accurate timeframe, as she said the days and nights bled into each other. Warrick's first order was for her to be whipped publicly and for Dunbroch's villagers to watch, hoping that even if Merida herself didn't give up the location of the princes that the villagers would be intimidated enough to do it on her behalf. The princess didn't utter a word, and her stoicism was matched by her people.
He left her tied to the rack overnight as a warning, but that failed when an elderly farmer crept to her side to offer her water and cover her with a blanket. The man was hung from a tree in her line of sight the next day, but that night a young woman repeated the farmer's actions. She too was hung, and she too was replaced the next night by the tavern keeper. Warrick realized then that he'd run out of countrymen to rule over if he kept hanging them, so he moved Merida into the tower of the gutted castle away from the rustics.
His next plan was to starve her into submission, interspersed with occasional beatings with a club when his anger became too much for him to bear. He was at least careful not to touch her face, as a bloodied bride would reflect badly on him and he was already losing the war of public opinion both in Dunbroch and with his peers back in Angols. She continually spurned him both in his efforts to wed her and his efforts to find out where she'd hidden her brothers. Finally, he made a threat that she refused to divulge to Elsa, and she agreed to marry him.
She addressed the townspeople of Dunbroch on the day before she was due to wed, in Gaelic. To any man who could understand rudimentary Gaelic the princess was merely informing them of her engagement and her abiding love for her intended by way of a romantic poem in the old tongue. Truthfully, she was instructing them to flee northbound while the Angolsi men were distracted by the wedding by way of a code hidden in the lines of the poem. It was an old trick, seldom used but well-known in Dunbroch.
The wedding day itself passed her in a blur. The Angolsi men drank heavily and made crude insults towards her family and her land. Her new husband pawed at her as though she were a tavern wench. She took the blunt knife from the dinner table and dug it into the wood of the chair she was sitting on to keep from screaming. By the end of the meal, she'd cut a furrow so deep it nearly went straight through.
The village women had begged an audience with the princess on her wedding day and Warrick, being in a good mood, granted it. They presented her with a gift so humble it made the wedding guests laugh cruelly, but Merida's sharp eyes saw it for what it was. A wedding bouquet of pink valerian, scutellaria and St John's Wort. All powerful sedatives, especially when mixed together. There was a message written on the binding of the bouquet, hidden in the spirals of the drawn symbols, which told of a boat that had been built for her waiting in a cave at the southernmost cove to spirit her away when she made her escape.
Of course, when the feast ended and she went to her bedchamber amid ribald jeering, Warrick knew from the moment she handed him the goblet of wine that it was drugged. He threw it across the room in a fury, tore her dress away at the shoulders and bit and sucked at her body as though he was trying to tear off chunks of her flesh. This, however, was what she had counted on, for she hadn't drugged the wine at all. She'd spread the sap from the ground flowers across her chest and torso instead, and the first five minutes of their wedding night ended with Warrick collapsing into a table.
The noise alerted the guards, who began breaking down the door, otherwise she would have smothered Warrick where he lay. Instead she pulled her dress back on and climbed out of the window. By the time she reached the base of the tower the alarm had been raised, the walls were being manned by archers and she was being searched for. Even so, she scrambled up the outer wall and down the other side before she was spotted.
Merida picked up her skirts and fled as fast as she could, but a red-haired girl in a white gown on a clear moonlit night was as clear a target as one could get, and when they shot at her they found their mark. Desperate, she threw herself into the river and let it carry her for three miles until it spat her out in the shallows. Blessedly, it was only a half-mile to the cove that held the promised boat, and when she found it she used the last of her strength to push it out to sea and climb in. She stayed conscious for a single day and night, scrupulously cleaning her arrow wounds and drinking rainwater before falling into a black sleep.
And when she next awoke, her hand was being held by a woman made of ice.
…..
"That's….quite a story," Elsa said, for lack of anything else to say.
Merida said nothing, just stared at the ceiling. Elsa wanted to offer some words of comfort, some assurances to this poor creature, but her duties as a queen roared their way to the forefront of her mind.
"I must have some proof that your story is true, for the security of the realm," she said.
"I don't have any proof, I'm afraid." Merida told her. "I burned most of the proof."
"I don't require much. Just a strand of hair, if you please."
Merida turned to look at her then, eyes narrowed. Then she shrugged.
"Take what you want."
The Princess plucked three strands herself and handed them to Elsa, who wrapped them in a strip of linen and stood to leave. But before she did, Merida called out to her.
"Your majesty? If it pleases you…"
"Yes?"
She hesitated, as though the words themselves were painful.
"When I am recovered, I ask that you make me a servant in your kingdom. I am strong and willing to work hard in your employ."
Elsa felt the burning behind the words as keenly as if she'd spoken them herself. Princesses were raised to keep their pride as royals at the very core of their being, and to have to ask for help in this way was excruciating for them both.
"We shall see," Elsa said, and swept out of the room, unwilling to look at her any longer.
