The blizzard begins on the third day after solstice and does not stop for thirty-one.
Roads vanish. Messengers freeze in the passes. The palace becomes an island of stone and fire, cut off from the world. Servants huddle around kitchen hearths. Guards stamp their feet and curse the wind.
We do not leave her apartments for four straight weeks.
The first morning the snow seals the outer gates, she looks out at the white silence, smiles like a woman who has been handed a gift, and orders the corridors to our wing cleared of all but two trusted maids. Then she locks the doors, draws the drapes, and turns to me.
"No masks," she says. "No crowns. No war. Just us."
I have never seen her look so young.
We begin in the bed (always the bed first).
She wakes me every dawn with my cock already inside her, rocking slow and sleepy until we both come without ever fully opening our eyes. Then we doze, still joined, until hunger or thirst forces us apart.
We bathe together in the copper tub, water scented with pine and orange blossom. She sits between my legs, back to my chest, and lets me wash her hair while I stay half-hard inside her from behind. Some afternoons we never leave the water; I lift her onto the rim and lick her for hours while snow lashes the windows.
We eat off each other's bodies.
Roast pheasant sliced thin and laid along her collarbones. Honey drizzled over her breasts so I can lick it clean. Figs split open and pressed to her cunt until she is sticky-sweet and laughing and begging.
We fuck on every surface the suite offers.
Across the writing desk, scattering letters from the king into the fire.
Bent over the windowsill, watching the blizzard swallow the world while I take her from behind.
On the thick Aubrassan carpet, her riding me so hard the pattern brands red diamonds into my back.
In front of the tall mirror, forcing her to watch herself come apart on my cock again and again until she is sobbing with overstimulation.
By the tenth day we stop counting orgasms.
By the fifteenth, we stop speaking in full sentences.
Words become unnecessary. A look, a touch, the arch of her brow (I know exactly what she wants). She learns the same of me.
Some nights we do not sleep at all.
She keeps me inside her for hours, motionless, just breathing together while the fire burns low. Then she tightens deliberately and we begin again, slow as tide, until dawn greys the windows.
On the twenty-second night the storm reaches its peak. Wind screams like a dying army. The palace groans in its bones.
She wakes me with her mouth, sucks me hard and aching, then climbs astride and rides me through the heart of the gale (head thrown back, hair wild, breasts bouncing with every roll of her hips). Lightning flickers through the shutters and paints her skin violet and gold.
We come together when the thunder cracks directly overhead, her scream lost in the roar, my release so intense I forget my own name.
Afterward she collapses onto my chest, trembling, and whispers against my sweat-slick skin:
"I could live like this forever. Snowed in. Only you. Only this."
I stroke her back, still buried inside her, and feel the same terrifying, exquisite truth settle in my bones.
On the thirty-first morning the sky finally clears.
Sunlight pours through the windows like molten gold, glittering on drifts higher than a man's head. The world is reborn white and silent.
We stand at the window, naked, her back to my front, my arms around her waist. My cock rests soft against the curve of her arse for the first time in weeks.
Servants will come soon. Letters will pile up. The court will demand its queen.
She turns in my arms, cups my face, and kisses me (slow, tender, almost chaste).
"Thank you," she says simply.
"For what?"
"For giving me a month when I was not a queen. When I was only yours."
I rest my forehead against hers.
"The storm is over," I answer. "But we are not."
Her smile is small, sharp, and utterly wicked.
"No, my shadow. We are only beginning."
That afternoon the palace wakes.
The queen emerges radiant, serene, untouchable.
No one notices the faint bruises on her thighs beneath the heavy skirts.
No one sees the bite mark hidden beneath the high collar of her gown.
No one hears the way her breath catches when she sits (carefully) on the hard council chair, feeling me still inside her from the final frantic coupling against the bedpost just before we dressed.
The snow may have stopped falling.
But inside her apartments, the blizzard never truly ends.
And it never will.