Chapter Text
Lady Nancy Wheeler stands at the edge of a canyon that drops a sheer hundred of feet into the earth below her. The wind whips her hair around her face as it pelts her from behind, so strong that it causes her to waver ever closer to the edge. Every second that she stands here, still as a statue, is another moment that allows him to catch up to her.
She can hear him now. He’s loud, shouting and crashing through the trees behind her. The wind and rain snatch any meaning from his words, but they sound desperate and they prickle at Nancy’s skin like tiny daggers. If she had read a scene like this in one of her storybooks as a child, she would have been hoping with all hope that the heroine would turn around and go back to him.
But this was not a storybook romance and Nancy could not turn back to face the man chasing her through the woods. There was only one choice she could make from this point, and it was the maw of the canyon, black as the night, staring up at her here and now. The wind buffets her as she takes a step forward–caressing like a hug from the mother she will never see again.
“Nancy!” A horrible, bedraggled sound rips itself out of Prince Steven’s throat as he finally, finally, breaks the treeline. When Nancy turns her head to look at him, she immediately wishes she hadn’t. He looks like a nightmare. His tunic–the deep green and gold of House Harrington–is ripped to shreds and his hair sticks flat to his forehead, soaked with rain and tangled up in sticks and leaves. The rain makes it impossible to tell, but Nancy thinks his eyes are so red because he’s crying.
The next sound she hears comes out of her own mouth, and it surprises her, the heartache of it.
“I am-” She tries to shout over the wind, but it picks her voice up and swallows it in a crack of thunder. The words she wants to say to him will be useless anyway. They will not comfort him or soothe the memory of her.
I am sorry, Steve. She thinks anyway.
He starts running toward her again and it takes every ounce of strength Nancy has remaining within her to turn away.
“No! Please! Whatever you are thinking, whatever plagues you, we will fix it! Nancy, do not take another step!” They are empty words from a man who has never understood her in the way a lover ought to. There is nothing that can fix the finality of death. Every second she hesitates, he draws ever closer. If there is one thing she has ever been good at in the short seventeen some years of her life, it is never hesitating. So why should she start now?
When she steps forward and tilts off the edge of that wide, black canyon, she is not thinking of Steve at all. All that plagues Nancy Wheeler’s final thoughts are visions of red hair and a life taken, far, far too soon.
I am sorry, Barbara
–
Prince Steven Harrington hits his knees at the edge of a canyon that drops a sheer hundred of feet into the earth below him. His hands claw in the dirt as he tries to keep himself from pitching over to follow her. Rain pelts down on his head, mingling with the salt tracks of the tears on his face. The wind howls in time with the stutter-quick beat of his broken heart.
Steve has just lost the love of his life. He bends double over himself, face pressing into the dirt where she had been standing just mere moments before, and he screams a long, cracking lament expulged from his throat. There had been a time when they were happy. A time not so long ago, freshly engaged and thrilled at the existence of each other. He had been happy that she had been the one chosen for him. He had thought she was too.
Hadn’t she been? Just this morning as they stood for a wedding portrait, had she not been smiling? How could this have happened? Why had she done this? His Nancy, his beautiful, beautiful girl. Where had she gone?
The sound of horses thundering through the forest behind him draws the prince from his fetal rocking to turn toward it. Three riders approach, all fitted in the golds and greens of his house. The lead rider dismounts the second he spots the prince on the ground and Steve feels like he may lose his guts as the rider swiftly approaches on foot.
Michael Wheeler comes to him with his face a storm, back ramrod straight and eyes–those eyes, so similar to hers, but dark where Nancy’s were blue and clear as water–wild and afraid. Steve’s stomach rolls.
“Did you find her?” Michael turns his head this way and that, wet strings of dark hair following the motion, as if she may simply appear.
“Your highness?” He puzzles when Steve does not answer, brows furrowed, “Prince Steven, where is my sister?”
“I am sorry.” The prince’s voice is hardly louder than a whisper. His eyes cannot meet Michael’s. Behind the boy, the other two riders come into his field of vision. The blacksmiths boy, Lucas Sinclair and the castle inventor’s apprentice, Dustin Henderson. The sky lets loose a thunderous roar at the same moment Michael turns his gaze to the canyon edge. Steve watches a thousand different emotions pass over the young lordling’s features–anguish, anger, fear, resolution–until it settles on a stony, unreadable thing.
“Lucas.” Michael turns to the other boy, “ride back to the castle. Gather as many men as you can, we must find a way down to look for her.” The look on Lucas’ face could be called pitiful.
“Michael, she could not have surviv‐” The glare Michael turned on poor Lucas could have melted iron. It made Steve think of Nancy again and he turned away from the others. Their voices faded into murky warbles under the raucous sound of the rain still pelting down around them.
Still below, the canyon yawned. The prince knew a river, wide and tumultuous, cut through its bottom. Even if by some gods given miracle, she had survived the plummet, the river current would have swept her down its winding path already. It was a hopeless effort, but Steve could not find it in himself to voice this. He could not find it in himself to voice anything at all.
A ribbon of blue lightning–her eyes, her eyes looking at him like he had torn the very soul from her chest–sliced through the air, connecting at the bottom of the abyss and lighting it up in a briefly brilliant flash.
Rocks. Sharp and cutting, the teeth in the jaw of a monster, jutting up out of a river current that would crush even their strongest ships against them.
Not a chance.
“My prince,” a hand came to his shoulder, soft, concerned blue eyes under a drawn brow met him. Dustin had always been drawn to him, even when he was younger and first brought to the castle under the tutelage of Scholar Clarke, tripping about the prince’s feet constantly. He found comfort in the younger man’s presence now. Steve lifted himself, somewhat shakily, to his feet and turned his gaze to face the three boys in front of him. He had told them to stay. When Nancy had taken flight from the castle atop the back of her very own steed, he had urged them to stay while he went after her. They did not often heed his commands these days, the novelty and awe of him being the prince had worn off in the years he'd known them, he supposed. He wished it had not.
"All three of you, return to the castle, the storm is getting worse." His words hitched in his throat, stuck in pitch tar that caught and slowed them, left them black and deformed when they came out of his mouth.
"I will...I will find a way down." Immediately, there was a clamor of refusal from all of the young men in front of them. Michael straightened, pulled taut as a bow string. Anger cut his face into something sharp and vindictive.
"Do not command us as though we were children, Your Highness." He sneered the honorific, "you will not forget that my sister is the one we're looking for. I'll not shelter myself while she remains out here."
"She jumped into a canyon, Michael!" Steve cracked, voice raising as the thunder. He probably looked mental in the moment, covered in mud and leaves and drenched, eyes wide enough the whites shone on all sides. It did not stop him from continuing.
"You will forgive me if I do not want you to climb down into that canyon and be faced with your sister's mangled corpse! Go home!" The only sounds around them after that were the endless torrent of rain and Steve and Michael's heavy breathing.
"Steve.." Lucas was stepping forward, eyebrows drawn hard in an expression the prince couldn't pick out. Pity or maybe admonishment. He turned away back toward the canyon. Toward where she had been standing.
Steve ran a hand through his sopping wet hair and felt like jumping himself.
"Go home."
—
The boys heeded the prince–half dragging Michael back onto his horse–and rode back to the castle. But, they would return with half the castle guard and Guard Captain James Hopper in tow. Captain Hopper was an efficient man, despite his more negative proclivities. The men were quickly organized and put to work, even in the dark and thunder.
Ropes were slung over the edge of the canyon and tied off on wide tree trunks. Men clambered down and combed the canyon bottom, boots sloshing in muddied river banks, blazing copper lamps held above their heads. Among them, the prince himself sloshed about, further ruining his fine clothing in the muck. It did not appear he cared at all.
Back up on the canyon’s edge, Michael, Lucas and Dustin stood next to Captain Hopper, watching the lanterns of the men below swarm about like many fireflies.
“You must let us join the search,” Michael pleaded for the fifth time since Hooper had denied them access to the descending ropes.
“We are just as capable as the guards. Some of them are not even two turns older than us, Captain.” Lucas added. The Captain looked just as willing to pay them heed as he had since they started asking to climb down after the guardsmen. His answer, however disappointing to them, remained the same.
“No.” The rain was slowing now, reduced to a much softer drizzle. Though a roiling wall of black clouds still sat on the horizon. Another flash of storm would overtake them soon. Hopper considered those clouds on the horizon, silent as the boys next to him continued to bemoan their lack of inclusion.
The men were not like to find anything in the dark, and they might very well drown in another torrent of rain were they to remain down there. This search would be short-lived until the morning.
“I mean no disrespect, Guard Captain Hopper, but I am a Lord of this country and you will not tell me, or those with me, what we are or are not allowed to do.” Michael, it seemed, had decided he was tired of asking for permission and was moving to climb down a rope anyway. Hopper, swifter than one might expect of a man of his stature, grabbed the young lordling by the collar of his tunic and drug him back away from the edge–like a cat might its misbehaving children.
“I mean no disrespect, Lord Michael, but I do not give a damn.” The captain deposits Michael back with the other two boys. The lordling splutters indignantly, opening his mouth to speak again when there is a shout from below.
“Captain! Captain Hopper! We’ve found something.” A bedraggled, rain-beaten guard pulls himself up over the edge of the canyon, back to solid ground. In one hand he holds a delicate, silk shoe.
“It was caught on a rock a ways down.” The guard explains as Hopper takes the shoe from him, frowning as he holds it in his hands.
“The current must have carried her away.” Captain Hopper rubs wearily at his face. They are likely to never find the body. There is simply no telling where the river could have dropped her. And with that cloud of black still steadily approaching…Hopper makes the decision swiftly. “Tell the rest of the men to come back up. There’s no use searching in the dark now, we will have to search farther down the river in the daylight.”
“What?!” Michael exclaims, “you cannot! You cannot, Hopper! My sister could still be–”
“We will start again tomorrow.” The captain does not look back as he begins the trek back toward their tied mounts in the woodline. The sky bellows angrily along with Michael Wheeler as he follows.
They would search for the body of Lady Nancy Wheeler for three days and three nights after.
Nothing would be found but one silk shoe.