Work Text:
The book has been handed down through their family for generations, or at least that's what Winter's father says.
It's not your family, she doesn't say, because she knows enough to hold her tongue. She won't question why he's the one who gave it to her, even though her mother is the one who wrote the chapter before hers, because her mother is drunk in the kitchen downstairs and Weiss is training late into the night and neither of them are out of his reach.
The tale isn't new, even though Winter has never heard it before. There are patches of it she thinks she heard in her mother's bedtime stories, parts that seem as torn from Remnant's myths as from the imagination of Schnees of years gone by.
Winter closes her eyes, sees the people inside the story, the grand fantastic journey their last hope set off on long ago. Each person lives within it, and she can feel where some chapters focus on the average individuals rather than the astonishing quest.
She's allowed to write in it with an ordinary pen, or so her father claims, so Winter chooses the one the military academy gave her when she went to the recruiter's office. The ink glides across the paper, each elegant letter spelling out the next chapter.
Winter has never been a writer, never been someone who made art for its own sake, but this comes easy to her. She focuses on the last hope, the nameless, faceless knight, and the grand journey. Her mother had left the knight at the peak of a grand mountain, teetering on the edge. Winter brings the knight down, traversing thin winding trails across grass and snow.
There's a person by the side of the road, a woman. The knight has had lovers before, men and women both, but this one is different. Winter imagines her face — heart-shaped and kind even though she tries to hide it, framed by short dark hair, eyes a bright shade of gold — and realizes exactly as she finishes the description that this is someone she knows.
The Marigolds' heir, who had whispered Call me May like she was sharing a secret and then pressed Winter into the wall while they both hid from the clamor of yet another pointless gala. They'd seen each other since then, brief glimpses at high society get-togethers, and Winter had realized how valuable the secret May told her was. How much power she'd been given.
Winter's first reflex is to write her out. The second is guilt, a pang so painful she has to dig her nails into her skin to get away.
Would May be happy in this story? Winter doesn't know. All she knows is how easily the words come to her pen.
The woman travels with the knight for a short time. They come to know each other well, sharing meals and stories and quiet moments, although the knight's armor is never shed and the woman's past never told.
They arrive at a city, a bustling port, full of people and sights and smells alien to them both. The woman bids the knight a cordial goodbye, and between one blink and the next she has vanished into the crowd, once again a stranger.
The knight's quest will continue, not by Winter's hand but by another's, or maybe it will draw to an end here, not completed but put aside, the last hope choosing a peaceful life.
Winter will not write the woman's story, neither the beginning nor the end. It's not a Schnee's to tell.
The ink dries. Winter closes the book and leaves her pen with it. Her things are in her bedroom, packed and ready to go. She doesn't see her father when she leaves.