Royal Rumble A Kingdom Divided by a Crown, a Love Forbidden by Blood The winter the Princess vanished, London had not yet finished celebrating. Coronation bunting still clung, sodden and forgotten, to lampposts along the Mall, and the last of the golden confetti lay trodden into the frost like scattered coin. It was the coldest December in a decade, the kind where breath hung in the air of the Palace corridors despite the coal fires kept burning in every hearth, and where the ladies-in-waiting wore their furs even indoors, murmuring that something in the house had changed, though none could say quite what. Princess Aurora had been seen at supper on the Tuesday, seated at her sister's right hand in a gown of ice-blue satin, her hair pinned with her mother's sapphires. She had laughed at something said down the table. She had asked, so the footmen would later recall, for the windows to be opened a crack, despite the cold, as though she wished to hear something beyond the glass. By Wednesday morning, her rooms stood empty. The bed had not been slept in. Her jewel case sat untouched upon the dressing table, though a single drawer, the one that had held her mother's old travelling cloak, had been left hanging open. Group Captain Edward Jacques, equerry to the household, decorated flyer, and a man whose name had lately been spoken only in careful, lowered voices on account of his divorce, did not report for duty that day, nor any day after. The Palace called it nothing at first. Then, when the silence stretched past a fortnight, it called it abduction, and set the police and the Home Office and half the newspapers of England searching the ports and the aerodromes for a stolen princess and the disgraced flyer who must have taken her. They searched the wrong places. She had not been taken. She had gone, deliberately, into the teeth of a winter that swallowed footprints within the hour, toward a village so small it did not appear on any map the Home Office consulted, where a woman with a stranger's name would spend years learning to light her own fires and darn her own stockings, and where a war-worn man who had once flown for a king would learn, far more slowly, how to forgive himself for loving her. It would be years before Queen Elena found the lane that led there. Longer still before she asked the question she had carried every winter since. Was it worth it?