Donkeyskin - ON HOLD

Of Origins

*Of Origins*

        The first story Elodie could remember hearing was the story of how her parents fell in love. She couldn't remember the first time she heard it, she just knew that, in the string of nannies and nursemaids and governesses that had come and gone from the time she was one or two, the only constant had been their love for the royal couple and the story of their love.

        Elodie had at once loved and hated the story, and she'd heard it so many times she coule go recite it in her sleep, and sometimes she did. The only person who had never once told the story, seeing how every one else around the little princess would look at her and see only the legacy of her parents, was her wet-nurse.

        The woman, a lesser lordling's daughter, widowed, had nursed her after her birth, and after the death of one of her newborn twins, her son. Elodie had grown up alongside her surviving daughter, Adrienne. From infancy, Adrienne and her mother had been the only members of the court to remember Elodie's existence as something other than just a shadow of her mother.

        Even the princess herself sometimes felt eclipsed by the auras of her royal parents. The number of times she'd heard the story, and from so many different people, had ingrained in her mind a deep sense of inferiority and a quiet, pensive disposition, as well as an unshakable shyness.

        The story went something like this:

        In the smallest of the northern kingdoms, not particularly renowned for anything, the king, who already had three sons, remarried the love of his life, and made her his queen. Nine months later, she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.

        The girl grew, and as she did, she became more and more beautiful, and word of her beauty spread, far beyond the borders of her kingdom. The whispered rumors said she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

        As soon as she was old enough, suitors came from all over the world. All of them hoped for one thing: to secure her hand in marriage. Lords sold their fortunes for the most precious gifts money could purchase, merchants brought back treasures from the edge of the world, kings poisoned their queens, all for a chance at her hand.

        She refused them all, unwilling to marry a man inferior to her in any way.

        Around the same time all this was happening, in the richest of the northern kingdoms, the queen died of the flux, leaving behind her king and her son. The young prince was a brilliant intellectual, as well as a peerless warrior, and blessed in the looks department, nearing his thirtieth name-day, and still unmarried. The king was old and grief-stricken, and only months after his wife's death, he, too, perished in what appeared to be a hunting accident.

        Borderlords, seeing that their new king was not exactly a young man, but a bachelor nearing his thirties, and still heirless, launched a rebellion, seized most everything but the capital, leaving the young king trapped inside his stronghold, with no control over his kingdom.

        But the young king was relentless; he refused to yield as his advisors suggested. Instead, he wrote to the king of the smaller kingdom, King Francis, requesting aid and an army. He was refused, King Francis unwilling to risk his men on what he believed to be a lost cause.

        The young king kept at it, though, searching for ways to regain his power, and he learned that that the king had a daughter, unmarried, about half his age, but whose dowry included more than enough money to hire and pay for sell-swords.

        So, in the dead of night, leaving control of the capital in the hands of his most trustworthy general, he ordered the man to yield up the city to rebels, and seemed, to all appearances, to have fled for his life.