“I got one! I got one!”
The little perch he heroically struggles to drag out of the stream isn’t much of a catch, and Kristoff doesn’t bother whacking its head on a rock and tossing it in the creel. Now that his son has finally caught a fish, they can stop for the day. He carries the big basket himself, lugging it into the kitchen where he’ll clean his catch.
I’ve never taken much to a life of servants and pomp and circumstance, but when it comes to gutting and cleaning fish, I turn up my nose and inform my husband, very curtly, that I am, after all, a princess, and such things are beneath me.
Elsa gloms on to her sister Emma, who at eight years old is still running around in short pants along with her sister. I shout at them not to go too far as they run into the woods, and John of course volunteers to take his friend with him into the woods to make sure the girls don’t run afoul of a bear or break a leg.
I give him a look of warning, my stomach churning up as I spot him grabbing her hand when he thinks I’m not looking anymore.
With a deep sigh I turn back to my work. I push my computer aside and read over the latest letter from Melissa. After her parents came to Kosztyla (and attended the wedding, of course, though it was too much for Melissa to handle) they took her home to Wisconsin, where she originally hailed from.
Enclosed in her letter is a picture of her with her husband, a tall, grinning man who bears a strong resemblance to their two children. He’s a minister and they run a mission together, though it’s to feed their local hungry; Melissa no longer travels outside the country. I tuck the picture into one of my books, meaning to show it to John soon. He keeps asking me how it came to be that I married his father, and there are some details I haven’t shared with him yet. Some I won’t.
Melissa herself is the head of a rape crisis center and moonlights as a volunteer coordinator for a battered women’s shelter.
Danielle survived her gunshot wounds, barely. She suffered damage to her spine, a collapsed lung, and several broken bones, but the bullets miraculously missed her heart, and she lives to this day with her boyfriend, a fellow former journalist. She can walk on crutches and they have an active life together, most recently forming a foundation to raise awareness of the danger faced by reporters in hostile countries.
My mother and father both eventually remarried (to other people) and he moved to Ohio with his company while my mom went back to school and eventually became an artist-in-residence, traveling to various kindergarten classes to play the guitar and teach music.
After Cassandra’s death, the resistance, which was never much of one at all, collapsed. Kristoff never participated in any more military operations and after the reforms I championed, he doesn’t need to.
One year to the day after our wedding, while I was still carrying baby John in my arms, my prince demolished the assembly line under the mountain and destroyed the remaining armor suits, along with the schematics and all his father’s and grandfather’s and great grandfather’s research and notes. No one will ever build one of those things again.
He saved the battery technology, however. Last year, with international investment and partnership, Kosztyla opened a factory building all-electric cars using the battery technology that powered the suits, and a team of scientists is working with my husband to find peaceful medical, environmental, and commercial uses for the dozens of technological advances that made the armor suits possible in the first place.
I should say he destroyed all of them but one. The very last of the advanced prototypes is locked away, just in case he ever needs it. It was my idea to save it, even though he argued with me for days that not even one of them could be permitted to exist, that if it fell into the wrong hands it would start all over again.
Lastly, the government of Kosztyla entered into an economic development partnership with Solkovia, and the two states have approached the other countries in the immediate region to discuss forming a regional defense and economic agreement, kind of a miniature European Union. One day my son—presiding over a democratically elected parliament and impartial court system—will lead this union to even greater heights. My prince is content knowing that he has stopped the cycle of madness and oppression that made his land known throughout the world as a hell on earth.