The Young Diplomat [Frozen II post-canon]

The Timing and the Setting

Inga securely shut the door to her room after Frederick delivered the letter and sat down by the window. She couldn't remember what she had been doing before he knocked on the door a moment before, but he was probably right that she needed to get outside. A change of scenery would help, or at least something to focus on besides her thoughts. The same thoughts had been playing over and over, and she needed to find something else to think about.

She looked at the letter. She knew the writing. Frederick seemed to understand enough to know not to open it. The date on the letter was a few days after the previous one, so not a reply to her most recent letter. She wasn't ready to read it, but she could guess what it was: he had found time to speak to his parents privately, and either they had told him the truth, or he wouldn't know the truth, and now she couldn't tell him. She wanted to tell him. It was going to eat at her until she could say something to him.

She hadn't done anything since the party except changing into her nightgown, and she had quickly fallen into a restless sleep. She had woken up with a terrible headache yesterday, which made it easy enough to tell everyone that she wasn't feeling well. She tried to forget what she now knew about her mother. She tried not to think about what she had said to her father.

Of course, telling herself not to think about something never worked.

I'm sorry, Papa!

She remembered telling him that in tears after Lars had left.

Let's get you to bed.

That was all he had said to her before taking her inside and finding Gerda to make sure she would be looked after. He had told her mother that they shouldn't tell her right then, that it wasn't the right time. She had certainly had too much to drink, she couldn't deny that. Even so, how could she have let herself jump to those conclusions about Lars and her father? It was her father. She rarely saw him talk with anyone outside of their family, and he certainly didn't have a reputation of any sort among anyone she had ever heard mention him. And she had often overheard people gossiping about her family when they thought she was too young to understand, but no one had ever mentioned her father, except perhaps to say he had been unsociable.

Of course, when a prince or a king had a secret like her mother's, it was never very much of a secret, was it? Half the time they gave the bastard a noble title, and even if they never acknowledged them, nobody cared unless they tried to take the throne. But a queen? Even when they had secure power and position, the most obvious cases were still hushed up, records destroyed, people paid off. What would people have thought about her mother if this had been widely known? Inga had heard whisperings about the Southern Isles from visiting diplomats. Would they have made a claim to the throne? She had once overheard some visiting diplomats who hadn't closed a door entirely. "I don't know why the Queen is so afraid of the Southern Isles. That supposed marriage he claimed was never valid to begin with, and even if it had been, it was never consummated." For some reason, she had remembered those words, even though they didn't make sense to her at the time. During her lessons that same afternoon, she had asked her governess what "consummated" meant, and her governess had told her she must mean "consumed" and explained that word, instead.

Everyone had been lying in little ways for years. Her mother had kept the truth from them, of course, but could she blame her? Even if she hadn't been queen, she could have been ruined, forced to spend life in a convent or begging in the streets. Perhaps some actresses could get away with such a thing. That's why "respectable girls" couldn't go into such careers, wasn't it?

Her aunt, it seemed, had been involved in all of this, too, but somehow, that bothered Inga less. Her aunt was a mysterious person, really. Of course she would have secrets.