All or Nothing

Chapter 22

A quick author's note: to anyone who has asked, please don't worry, I have not forgotten this fic and it will be finished. Since the start of the year things have been very busy for me, but I have a lot more free time over the summer so I'm hoping to update more regularly.

On that note, I'd ask you that if you enjoy the story to please review, even a short one. They really help to keep me motivated and to find time to work on my writing, each and every one means a lot to me. Thank you for sticking with me so far.

…..

"Awk-ross," Elsa tried, knowing it was wrong even before the word left her mouth.

"No," Merida mumbled, distractedly. "Softer in the throat. Ocras."

She sounded half-asleep, and indeed it was past midnight. Elsa's idea of having a nice relaxing bath together in her marble tub was working a little too well. The bath wasn't big enough for them both, but with Merida's back against the slope and Elsa lying back on her chest with her legs dangling out over the other end it was quite cosy.

"Osh-russ," she tried again.

"That's too soft."

"I quite think your people made up this language to confuse outsiders," Elsa teased, winding a lock of Merida's hair around her finger and letting it unfurl itself.

"Fear Foghlamtha managed well enough," Merida yawned.

"Yes, well, Myohenese is even more difficult," Elsa muttered. "Their alphabet has over 600 characters."

Abruptly, Merida's body seemed to wake up beneath Elsa, and with a sinking stomach she realized her mistake.

"Did I say he was from Myohen?" Merida asked. "We don't know where he was from..."

Panicking a little but trying to keep calm, Elsa filtered the rising cold in her fingertips away from the bathwater towards the floor, disguising it as a stretch.

"I guessed," she said with a feigned casual laugh. "Most scholars are from Myohen, they travel all over the world so often. I imagine one must have gotten into trouble and ended up on some mysterious shore."

Thankfully, Merida seemed to accept this. Elsa felt weak with relief.

"If you think that's bad," she started, trying to change the subject without looking too suspicious, "Corona once had a language that was a hybrid of three others. It was awfully confusing before they switched over to Dellian."

"Why did they do that?" Merida asked, the sleep creeping back into her voice.

"The last full Coronese king died with no heirs in the Southern Crusades," Elsa answered. "The distant cousin they tossed onto the throne was raised in Sangonelle, and the princess he married was from Nullarty. Converting to Dellian was just easier for everyone."

"Your cousin is from Corona, isn't she?" Merida asked.

"Yes, she's the crown princess."

"The one who went missing?"

Anna had probably told her the story.

"Yes," she said. "Thank goodness they finally found her when they did. She was their only heir."

"Why didn't they have any other children?" Merida asked.

Elsa had asked that same question when she was younger, and her nursemaid at the time mumbled something about the queen being too sad to have any more babies. She didn't realize until she was older that infertility was a plague amongst the royal families, the Corona line in particular. Carrying Rapunzel had nearly killed Corona's queen, and even after the magic flower had been given to her she was no longer able to bear a living child. And of course Elsa's mother had her own issues with the daughters she had borne...

"Our royal bloodlines make for rather delicate women," she explained away, not wanting to go into all the details. "We don't tend to have big families."

Merida whispered something under her breath in Gaelic, as she often did when something Dellian seemed silly or confusing or just off to her. Elsa turned in the bath to press her face to Merida's breasts, kissing the tip of the left one fondly.

"You don't have such problems in Dunbroch, clearly," she sighed.

"No heirs is no problem," Merida told her. "They just find someone else to be king."

"It's that simple?" Elsa laughed.

"Yes. The throne passes to the eldest child. If eldest child is no good, someone has to challenge him or her, and whoever wins keeps the throne."

That was a novel way of dealing with the succession issue.

"Why would anyone want the throne if they could be killed for it at any time?" Elsa puzzled. She knew Merida's people were fond of battle, but it seemed chaotic in theory...

"Nobody dies in challenge," Merida told her. "Not on purpose anyway. Dad won seventeen challenges, three of them were against MacGuffin."

Put that way, it seemed a lot more simple.

"He certainly earned his throne," Elsa said weakly.

Merida nodded, but her jaw was tight and Elsa could practically hear what she was thinking.

Warrick cheated. He should have fought for the throne like a real king. Coward.

Elsa wanted to distract her, coax her into sex for solace, but she fought it back. Instead she wrapped her arms around her waist and pulled her as close as she could, feathering chaste kisses along her her breastbone.

…..

Winter was closing in fast, and it was a particularly bad one even by Elsa's standards. If she interfered, it would disrupt the balance of the climate for the rest of the year, but every day seemed to bring a new request from farmers, mayors, factories, merchants and lay people of every description. Finally she issued an ordinance that Arendelle go into lockdown until the worst of the snows had passed. Production would cease, food from the granaries would be distributed on a weekly basis and any and all travel had to be kept to a minimum.

Secretly, Elsa was thrilled. Lockdown meant more time spent in her study and bedroom, as it was more efficient to keep the large drafty ballrooms and conference rooms locked and unheated. It meant more time for slipping back and forth through the sally port, at any hour of the day or night.

Their lovemaking, which had up to this point been quiet and a touch frenzied, became a lot more indolent, more tactile. There were days when the only movement Merida made from the bed was to duck behind it when someone knocked with Elsa's meals. There were also days when Elsa didn't see her at all, and the absence was a bone-deep ache, like something had been carved out of her.

Anna joined her for dinner in her study every now and then, making a point of not talking about Elsa and Merida's relationship. Even something relatively innocent, like noticing that the wool on Anna's skirt was thinner than that of Merida's was shut down.

"I don't want to hear it," Anna muttered, stirring her stew with sharp irritated movements.

"I just want to know if the dressmaker's..."

"I said, I don't want to hear it!"

"Anna, don't be childish," Elsa chided.

"Sorry, not wanting to know all the details of your sex life...your illegal sex life...is childish now, is it?"

"For God's sake, Anna, it's just a bloody question about skirt material," Elsa snapped.

"And how close you had to get to notice a difference," Anna retorted.

"Are you really going to do this with everything I ask you about? Merida is part of my life, I can't just not talk about her..."

"I don't care," Anna growled low. "It doesn't matter what you say to me, but you're getting careless. It's just me now, but how long do you think you can keep this a secret? Someone's going to notice sooner or later!"

A shiver ran down Elsa's spine. Anna was right. They had been careless, especially since the lockdown. There were many times they came close to being caught, and just laughed it off like it was a joke.

Merida scoffed when Elsa told her they would have to be more careful, but she did as she was told. She came through the sally port only at night, as she had done before, and kept her voice down. But having that little bit of freedom to act as she wanted and having it snatched away again made Elsa sullenly angry. It made her realize how fragile their whole arrangement was.

She wanted nothing more at this time than to be challenged for the throne, as Dunbroch's rulers were. She could fight with her ice and lose. A stronger, smarter, more suitable ruler could take Arendelle's throne. She could leave Arendelle and be with Merida, wherever Merida wanted to be.

Even fantasizing about it, an idle thought, it was depressingly clear that would never happen. Arendelle's throne was hers, more than Merida ever would be.

…..

That sullen anger had been building as the winter winds raged on, and she took to wandering the mostly-empty castle to soothe her nerves. Occasionally she caught sight of Kristoff jogging to the kitchen from his quarters in the base of the castle, or Anna cycling through the empty ballrooms in her winter cloak. Maids and household staff hurried around their tasks, trying to get back to the warm kitchen hearth before nightfall.

Increasingly, she noticed higher-level staffers talking to Merida, the steward in particular, and the captain of the guard. They were both young men, mid-twenties, and although Elsa was sure Merida was interested in nothing more than polite conversation during the boring seclusion she was less sure of the men's intentions. They would not dare be so familiar with a member of the royal family, but in their eyes Merida was a refugee, albeit a noble one.

She watched them from the upper balustrade, the captain saying something that made Merida snort with laughter, the man visibly glowing from her attention. That spike of anger grew as she watched him escort her away somewhere, down the hall.

He has no reason to talk to her. No reason to even look at her.

When she lifted her hands from the balustrade, it was covered with ice. The structure underneath was full of gradually spreading cracks.

…..

She found Merida in the library, wrapped in half a dozen blankets on the window box, a couple of books open around her. But she wasn't looking at the books. She was staring out the window, frowning.

"Merida?" Elsa called, and Merida jumped.

"In ainm Dé!" she shouted in Gaelic. "You gave me a fright..."

"I'm sorry," Elsa apologized, closing the distance and kissing her head lightly. "I didn't mean to sneak up on you."

"It's fine," she mumbled, stretching under the blankets. "I was distracted..."

"What were you looking at?"

Elsa peered out the window herself, but it was an endless expanse of inky black and swirling white. The same thing they'd seen every day for close to two months.

"I thought I saw something," Merida said. "Must have imagined it."

She was reluctant to say what she thought she had seen, so Elsa didn't press her. She sat across from her in the window box, picked up a book and poked her own feet under the blanket nest to rub gently against Merida's.

But when she looked up from her book again, Merida was still staring out of the window.