Chapter 2: The Road North
The royal carriage of Eldoria rolled out of the palace gates to the sound of trumpets and cheering crowds. Princess Lena leaned back against the velvet squabs, arms folded, watching the familiar spires of home recede through the window until they were swallowed by the curve of the road. The six grays moved at a steady trot, hooves ringing on the cobblestones that soon gave way to packed earth. For the first few miles she kept the curtains half-drawn, letting the winter sunlight stripe her lap in gold and shadow.
She was not sentimental. She had said her goodbyes the night before—quiet ones, to the mare, to Cook Mara, to the tower parapet where she had watched so many sunrises. Yet as the city fell behind, a strange tightness settled in her chest. Not regret. Not fear. Something closer to anticipation laced with irritation. Two years. Two years in a frozen northern backwater to learn "decorum." She would treat it like a game: charm the duchess, master the lessons faster than anyone expected, return home with perfect curtsies and sharper wits, and prove her father wrong.
The first three days passed easily enough. The southern roads were broad and well-maintained; inns waited at regular intervals with hot mulled wine, feather beds, and stables for the escort's mounts. Lena played cards with her two ladies-in-waiting—Lady Mirren, a quiet brunette who embroidered endlessly, and Lady Seline, sharp-eyed and gossip-loving—until the candles guttered low. She read treatises on trade routes she had already memorized, debated tariffs with Captain Thorne of the escort until he laughed despite himself, and teased the younger knights until their ears turned red.
On the fourth morning the hills began to rise. The air grew thinner, sharper; the trees changed from broad-leaved oaks to dark, needle-clad pines. Snow dusted the verges like spilled sugar. Lena wrapped her cloak tighter and kept the window open despite the chill, watching the landscape harden. By evening the inns grew smaller, the food plainer—stew instead of roast, rye bread instead of white. The knights' songs around the fire turned quieter, more mournful.
The fifth day brought the first real flurries. Fat flakes drifted past the window like lazy moths. The carriage slowed on steeper inclines; the driver cracked his whip more often. Lena felt the change in her bones: the cold seeped through the floorboards, through the furs piled on her lap. She no longer played cards after supper. Instead she sat with her knees drawn up, staring into the dark beyond the glass, listening to the creak of leather traces and the muffled thud of hooves.
On the sixth day they crossed the first of the high passes. The road narrowed to a single track flanked by sheer rock on one side and a plunging drop on the other. Snow lay deeper here, banked against stone walls. The escort rode closer, hands never far from sword hilts. Lena pressed her forehead to the cold pane and watched the world narrow to white and gray.
By the seventh day the border was near. The knights spoke less; even Seline's gossip dried up. The air tasted of iron and frost. Lena wrapped a woolen scarf around her neck and chin, leaving only her eyes exposed. She no longer pretended nonchalance. The journey had become real—endless, cold, inevitable.
On the eighth morning the border stone appeared without warning: a weathered granite pillar half-buried in drift, carved with the silver wolf of Veylmar. No guards. No ceremony. Just the wind sighing through the pines. The driver called a brief halt so the horses could rest; Lena stepped down into ankle-deep snow, boots crunching, breath clouding white. She walked to the stone, traced the wolf's outline with a gloved finger. It felt colder than the air around it.
She climbed back inside without a word. The carriage rolled on.
The valley beyond the pass opened slowly. Silver mines glittered on distant hillsides like frost caught in sunlight. Villages appeared—timber houses with steeply pitched roofs to shed snow, smoke rising straight in the still air. The people they passed wore thick woolens dyed in somber greens and browns; children stared wide-eyed at the black-and-gold carriage until their mothers pulled them away.
By mid-morning the road curved around a low rise. The driver slowed without being told. Ahead lay a small village green at the edge of a hamlet—perhaps the last settlement before Rosenheim Palace, still a mile or two distant. A crowd had gathered in the open square: villagers in heavy coats, a handful of academy girls in navy cloaks edged with silver braid, several older women who looked like matrons or minor officials.
In the center stood a simple wooden frame—four stout posts driven into the frozen ground, a single crossbeam at waist height. Two girls, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, were bent forward over it. Their wrists were secured to the uprights with soft leather thongs. Skirts and petticoats had been lifted and tucked securely out of the way; drawers pulled down to their ankles. Bare skin gleamed pale against the gray afternoon light. Already a fierce lattice of red welts striped their bottoms and the backs of their thighs.
A tall woman in a black wool gown—hair pinned in a severe knot—stood behind them, birch rod in hand. The twigs were fresh, glistening with sap, bound tightly at the handle with twine. She lifted it without preamble and brought it down in a clean, practiced arc.
Crack.
The darker-haired girl flinched hard, a sharp hiss escaping her teeth, but she held position. Fresh lines appeared, overlapping the earlier ones in neat, deliberate layers.
Crack.
The second girl—a redhead—cried out openly, body jerking against the frame. Tears streaked her face, freezing in tiny crystals on her cheeks.
Lena's breath caught. She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass, unable to look away. The scene unfolded with eerie calm. No shouting. No spectacle for spectacle's sake. Just the steady rise and fall of the birch, the soft creak of the frame, the girls' ragged breathing clouding in the chill air. The watching crowd stood in quiet order; a few murmured to one another, but no one laughed, no one jeered. A small boy—no more than eight—stood beside his mother, eyes wide but silent, as though this were simply another part of an ordinary morning.
The prefect raised the birch again. Three more measured strokes, each drawing a stifled sound from one girl or the other. Then she stepped back.
The darker girl straightened as far as her bonds allowed, voice hoarse but steady. "I thank you, Mistress Elspeth, for my correction."
The redhead followed a moment later, words broken by sobs. "I… thank you… Mistress Elspeth… for my correction."
The prefect untied them without hurry. The girls straightened their clothing with trembling hands, curtsied first to her, then to the small crowd, and walked stiffly away toward a row of cottages at the green's edge. The onlookers began to disperse as though nothing remarkable had occurred.
Lena let the curtain fall back into place. Her heart hammered against her ribs; heat flooded her face, then drained away, leaving her strangely chilled. Yet beneath the shock and the instinctive royal outrage, something else stirred—something unwelcome, insistent, and mortifying.
Arousal.
It came unbidden, a slow, liquid warmth pooling low in her belly, tightening her thighs beneath the heavy traveling skirts. She shifted on the seat, pressed her knees together as though that could smother it. Her breath came shallow; her cheeks burned hotter now, not from embarrassment alone but from the shameful knowledge of what her body was doing.
How dare it? How dare her own flesh respond to such a spectacle—the exposed vulnerability, the rhythmic crack of the birch, the girls' trembling submission, the calm inevitability of it all? She was Princess Lena of Eldoria, not some tavern girl gawking at a public whipping. She should feel only disgust, only fury.
Instead her pulse thrummed between her legs, traitorous and insistent. She clenched her fists in the folds of her cloak, nails biting into palms, willing the sensation away. It only sharpened.
She forced her mind back to the details: the cold air on bare skin, the welts rising like latticework, the quiet thanks given through tears. Clinical. Intellectual. Anything to drown the heat.
It didn't work.
The carriage lurched forward again, picking up speed as the road straightened toward the distant silhouette of Rosenheim Palace. Its towers rose against the darkening sky—gray stone, silver-capped, austere and beautiful in the way of northern fortresses.
Lena swallowed hard. She considered calling out to the driver, demanding they turn back—but pride, and now this new, confusing shame, clamped her mouth shut. Whatever that village ritual had been, it was outside the palace walls. A local peculiarity. A barbarism her father surely hadn't known about when he sent her here.
She would say nothing to Duchess Elara when they arrived. She would smile, curtsy, play the gracious guest. She would watch. She would listen. And she would bury this unwanted stirring so deep that even she forgot it existed.
But as the palace grew closer, the warmth lingered, a secret she carried with her into Veylmar—still blissfully, dangerously unaware that the Doctrine made no distinctions, offered no exemptions, and would soon discover every hidden corner of her defiance… and her desire.
The carriage rolled on through the gathering dusk, carrying its royal passenger deeper into the snow-bound north.