Ever After

Chapter One: The Consequences of Marrying a Mermaid

Author’s Note: This is a side story from my Frozen fanfiction “The Queen’s Admiral” written from the point of view of King Eric.   While I was developing the plotline for it, this was one of the back stories that came to my mind.  It explores the doomed romance between Elsa and Eric and what happened to Eric’s and Ariel’s marriage.

This could be a stand-alone story but I recommend that you have at least read until Chapter 5 of the Queen’s Admiral to fully understand the context of this story.

 

I breathed in the air and let the spray wash over my face.  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself on the deck of my old galleon with the smell of fish surrounding me while the wind whipped at my hair and turned it hard with salt.  My hands missed the feel of wooden railings made smooth by the constant sea water and the ropes that burned my skin when I wasn’t careful in making knots to secure the sails to the masts.

I opened my eyes and the dream was gone.  In front of me was the wall that enclosed my kingdom’s shore and I can only take in the sounds of the surf from beyond it.

It was another day.  There was a bridge that needed to be built over the marshlands to get the farm produce to the markets faster.  A pipeline for the water system for the fields collapsed last week and needed repairs.  And there were the ice imports that needed to be sourced from somewhere else after Arendelle went to war against Weselton.   Normally we could do without ice but it was the height of summer and the demand was high.  More so in our own household where Ariel in particular couldn’t go without her ice treats. 

All this meant I would be stuck behind a desk all day studying the plans for the bridge and the pipeline, computing figures on the cost for building and repairs, meeting with those stuffy engineers, and haggling with some Condorian ambassador over ice that I could have gotten from Arendelle for a third of the price.  But worst of all, I had to draw in from the royal funds.  Again.

It was the most excruciating thing I had to do and I decided to put it off until the end of the day.  Carlotta said it was bad luck to draw money at the start of the morning and especially on Mondays.  It meant your cash flow will continuously pour out for the rest of the week.  I don’t really believe her.  It didn’t matter when I drew money out of the royal funds.  They just kept coming out and they barely get replenished at all.  It’s been like that for twelve years.  My financial advisers and I try so hard to keep things afloat but by the end of each year, the public treasury barely breaks even and almost always ends up with a deficit.  

It’s not that we overspend.  In fact, we’ve cut back on a lot of luxuries over the years.  I just about employed every single savings scheme I can think of.  But bad circumstances happen.  Plagues, drought, occasional outbreaks of infighting from the farmers, and even a simple breakdown of that blasted pipeline can have dire consequences.  And that’s what really hits me hard.  Because when we come to a point of desperation my wife’s Daddy almost always ends up bailing us out of debt.

King Triton, ruler of the merpeople, sovereign of Atlantica, and benevolent banker of the bankrupt kingdom of Tastris.  I never had to ask him.  Somehow he knows when we are at a dire strait at the end of each year and valuable caskets of seaweed, pearls and other sea treasures just magically appear overnight on my shores.  Ariel calls them gifts and claims we never need to pay her Daddy back for them—not that we have anything of value to him that we can use to pay him back.  What could you possibly pay someone that already owns the sea?

I kept tallies of it though I never told Ariel.  Each debt I owed to King Triton was a bruise on my ego that I kept well hidden from my wife, from my daughter, from my people.

It wasn’t always this way.  I remember when Tastris was a self-sustaining kingdom, a prosperous kingdom.  Our fishports were the hub of commerce and we distributed our produce from Arendelle to as far as Corona and even beyond.  I journeyed the seas with some of the finest fishermen through winter storms and summer heat.  Our haul could fill the royal coffers that lasted two years and leave more to spare. 

But that was not possible now.  When I married Ariel, I couldn’t continue to make a living out of killing her friends so I had to ban fishing.  Pearl gathering and seaweed farming could have sustained us.  But then two years later when that witch attacked our baby Melody, Ariel insisted on building that wall around our shores for our daughter’s safety.   And that was when our money troubles started. 

It was a long struggle to shift my entire kingdom’s industry to farming.  My people had been fishermen for generations and very few had solid knowledge of tilling the soil.  I myself didn’t know a plow from a rake when I first stepped on a field.  It wasn’t something a king needed to do, but in my case it was.  People didn’t like the change and they needed an example to follow.  So I made that example. I still do.  Twice a week I went out and helped the common peasants in the fields.  But I always hated it.  Every. Single. Time.  The feel of the mushy earth on my fingers and the hours of pulling my muscles on the plow under the hot sun was a chore I endured for twelve years.   My wife and daughter helped.  They would deliver meals and feed the peasants after a long tiring day and they always helped during harvest time.  Thought of their monarchs working alongside them eased things with the peasants.  At least they were content enough not to revolt against me after I took away their livelihoods so that was a small blessing in itself.

“Good morning Daddy!” my eleven-year-old daughter Melody piped in and brought with her a cup of tea.  “Working hard?”  She placed the tea on my desk and I inhaled the calming scent.

“Morning sweetheart.  You always know when to make my day.  Where’s my kiss?”

She came up behind me and kissed me on the cheek.  “I’m heading off to lessons now.  Don’t work too hard.”

“I won’t, I’ll see you and your Mommy tonight, okay?”

She gave me one last hug and skipped away.  It was like she shone a brief light on my dark mood.

It’s all for her.  I just need to keep telling myself that.  It’s all for her.