Chapter 4 #2
They drifted lazily at first, fat and slow, catching the light in the beams. Julia flicked the wipers once, then again a minute later when the pattern repeated.
Alone, if she hadn’t known the forecast, she might have called it charming. Picturesque. Exactly the sort of thing people imagined when they thought of Balmoral at Christmas—just enough snow to make the postcards happy.
Then the flakes thickened.
Within ten minutes, the air ahead was crowded with white.
“Okay,” Julia murmured. “Now you are showing off.”
Beside her, Vic had gone very still. “It’s fine,” she said, too quickly. “The roads are clear. They grit them. Scotland is prepared. They laugh in the face of weather events.”
“Yes,” Julia said. “And we’re in a Volvo with winter tyres. We’re not going to slide into a ditch and be eaten by deer.”
“That’s not how deer work,” Hyz pointed out. “They’re vegetarians.”
“They’re opportunists,” Vic muttered.
Julia inhaled slowly through her nose and let it out again. She kept her gaze fixed on the road, adjusting their speed down a notch. The tarmac was still mostly visible, dark between the slush, but the edges had begun to blur.
She had driven in worse. She’d driven Alex through protesters and torrential rain and once, memorably, through a flock of extremely stubborn geese.
Snow was… snow. You respected it. You went slow.
You stayed off the brakes as much as possible.
You accepted the possibility that schedules might change.
Beside her, Vic was not accepting anything.
“What if the caterers get stuck?” she burst out suddenly. “What if the turkeys never make it? What if Mrs. MacLeod has to improvise and ends up serving beans on toast to the Queen on Christmas Day? What if the staff can’t get in? What if—”
“Vic,” Julia said quietly. “Breathe.”
“I am breathing,” Vic said. “I’m inhaling panic and exhaling catastrophe.”
In the rear-view mirror, Julia saw Hyz’s eyes widen. Trouble. Mum was tipping out of “fun anxious” into “oversaturated anxious.” It was a fine line. One Julia had learned to watch carefully.
She eased off the accelerator another fraction, giving herself just a little more time, a little more room.
“New rule,” she said, keeping her tone light. “Anyone who says the word ‘what if’ more than three times in a row has to take a sip of water.”
Vic blinked. “I don’t have any water.”
“I do,” Hyz said, producing a slightly bedraggled bottle from somewhere in the depths of her booster seat. “It’s got glitter in it.”
“Why does it have glitter in it?” Julia asked.
“Art project,” Hyz said. “We were making snow globes in a jar.”
“It’s very festive,” Vic said faintly. “Also, I don’t trust any water I can’t see through.”
“It’s only a few bits,” Hyz said. “They go to the bottom.”
“See?” Julia said. “Even chaos settles eventually.”
“That’s not how physics works,” Vic said, but some of the frantic edge had left her voice.
Julia risked a quick glance from the road to her.
She loved Vic in all her modes. The goofy, loud, affectionate one. The soft, exhausted one who fell asleep halfway through a film, head on Julia’s shoulder. The fierce one who would go toe-to-toe with ministers twice her age when she thought something was unjust.
She loved this one too, the one who cared so deeply she tried to micro-manage the universe into compliance.
But she also knew where that drive came from.
Knew the shape of the time it was born in: the unexpected pregnancy, the fear of becoming a mum, the contemplation of her options and finally a baby whose future had seemed suddenly precarious.
Knew the way that experience had burrowed into Vic, convincing her that if she didn’t anticipate every variable, something terrible would happen.
“Hey,” she said softly. “Look at me for a second.”
Vic tore her gaze away from the whiteness outside and met her eyes.
“You’re doing brilliantly,” Julia said. “You’ve thought of everything you could reasonably think of. The rest… we will handle as it comes. Together.”
“That’s what you said when we decided to be together,” Vic said. “And when Alex found out. And when we had that meeting about formalising my role.”
“And were any of those disasters?” Julia asked.
Vic hesitated. “No,” she admitted. “But that’s because you were involved, and you are a professional competence machine.”
Julia huffed out a laugh. “Flattery will not distract me from my point.”
“What is your point, again?” Vic asked. “Because from where I’m sitting, the point is that we’re driving into an actual snowpocalypse with nothing but optimism and a forty-three-page schedule standing between us and an undercatered royal Christmas.”
“The point,” Julia said, “is that Christmas will not collapse if we have to substitute parsnips for carrots or if the reindeer are half an hour late.”
“Don’t you dare speak lateness into existence,” Vic said.
“Besides,” Julia continued calmly, “we’re not in charge of the weather.”
“That’s debatable,” Hyz murmured from the back. “Sometimes I think Mum might be.”
“I am not,” Vic said. “If I were, I would have ordered light, fluffy flakes on a gentle breeze, not whatever this is.”
“This,” Julia said, nodding at the thickening wall of white ahead, “is Scotland being Scotland.”
They passed a sign flashing an amber message: SEVERE WEATHER WARNING – DRIVE WITH CARE.
Julia’s hands tightened instinctively. There. That was the little external confirmation her gut had been waiting for.
“Oh no,” she said softly, almost under her breath.
Vic caught it. “What?” she demanded.
“Just… they’ve upped the warning level,” Julia said. She kept her voice calm, but didn’t lie. “We need to take it slowly. That’s all.”
“Can we still get there?” Hyz asked, more curious than frightened.
“Yes,” Julia said immediately. “It just might take us longer. Which is fine. We’ve got nowhere else we need to be until tomorrow.”
“We need to be at the turkey delivery point,” Vic muttered.
Julia inhaled again, letting the air fill her lungs, holding it for a count of four, letting it out for six. The therapist she’d quietly started seeing a few months after the coronation had called it “regulation.” She’d called it “not yelling at minor royals,” which had seemed to amuse the woman.
Now she used it for herself. For Vic. For the car.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s review our assets.”
“We’re not in a briefing,” Vic protested weakly.
“We are always in a briefing,” Julia said. “Asset one: capable driver who has not killed anyone with a car yet.”
“Reassuring,” Vic murmured.
“Asset two: reliable vehicle with snow tyres and a full tank,” Julia continued. “Asset three: food. Asset four: warm clothing. Asset five: a child who appears to have some sort of direct line to the whims of the weather gods.”
“I told you,” Hyz said. “It’s going sideways.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The snow had gone from fat, lazy flakes to the horizontal sting of a real storm. The wind picked up, shoving at the car in gusts. The world beyond their beams narrowed to a tunnel of grey and white.
Julia slowed further, hazard lights blinking patiently. A car passed them going the other way, nose cautiously aligned with the curve of the road. Somewhere ahead, she could just make out the orange flash of a gritter, doing its steady, unsung job.
She felt Vic’s hand slide across the centre console, fingers seeking. Julia didn’t let go of the wheel, but she tilted her wrist, letting their little fingers hook together.
“You know we could have come up by train,” she said lightly. “Or waited and flown in with Alex.”
Vic shuddered. “Helicopter with four 5 year olds,” she said. “Absolutely not. We’d be bailing them out of the rotor blades.”
“Fair point,” Julia said. “And we wanted the extra time.”
“I wanted the extra time,” Vic corrected. “You very graciously agreed to indulge my festive mania.”
“I like your festive mania,” Julia said. “Usually.”
Vic let out a breath that sounded suspiciously close to a laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being… a lot.”
“You’re being you,” Julia said simply. “We like you. That’s why we keep you.”
“I thought it was my excellent taste in women,” Vic said.
“That too,” Julia said.
The sign they passed next didn’t flash; it was static and black and white. But it caught Julia’s eye all the same: SNOW GATES – BE PREPARED TO STOP.
She’d seen them before. Closed once, years ago, when she’d been up here for a miserably formal New Year’s gathering. They were open now, standing sentinel, an empty threat.
Still, the sight nudged something in her, a quiet acknowledgement that this was… significant. Not a flurry. Not a brief flirtation with winter.
“Okay,” she murmured again.
Vic noticed. “Okay what?” she demanded. “Julia. Do not okay me in that tone. That’s your ‘we’re about to call an emergency meeting and you’re not going to like it’ voice.”
Julia smiled despite the tension buzzing under her skin. “My voice has many nuances,” she said. “You’re very perceptive.”
“She’s worried,” Hyz translated.
Children, Julia thought, not for the first time, were a menace to plausible deniability.
“I’m… cautious,” she said. “We’ll probably be fine. We might just need to… accept that some things aren’t going to happen exactly when you planned.”
“You say that like the concept of ‘exactly when I planned’ isn’t the load-bearing beam of my personality,” Vic said.
Julia’s lips twitched. “I’m aware,” she said. “Which is why I’m telling you now, while we’re in a car and you can’t start reprinting the entire schedule.”
Vic huffed. “Rude. Accurate, but rude.”
It was almost a relief when they finally turned off the main road and onto the long drive that led up to Balmoral.
The tyres crunched over more compacted snow, but the trees on either side gave some shelter from the wind.
Lights glowed ahead—warm, steady pools of yellow against the twilight.
The castle rose slowly into view, a darker bulk against the dim sky, familiar and imposing.
“We made it,” Vic breathed. It sounded less like triumph and more like a prayer.
“We did,” Julia said.
“And the snow’s going to keep going,” Hyz said quietly. “It’s going to make everything weird and different.”
Julia eased the car to a gentle stop near the entrance, where staff were already hurrying out with umbrellas and warm greetings. For a second, she let herself sit there, hands still on the wheel, the engine ticking softly, the snow pattering against the windscreen.
She glanced at the sky. The flakes were larger now, swirling in unexpected eddies. No sign of stopping.
“Oh no,” she whispered, so softly that only she heard it this time.
Not because they were in danger. Not because she regretted coming. But because she could see, suddenly and clearly, the way this could ripple.
Deliveries delayed. Staff stranded. Timetables shuffled. A thousand tiny adjustments, each one a potential stress fracture in Vic’s carefully built vision.
And beyond Vic’s spreadsheets, more serious things: locals cut off, emergency services stretched, people out there without the resources Balmoral had.
“Hey,” Vic said softly, laying a hand on her arm. “You okay?”
Julia drew in a deep breath, felt it touch the bottom of her lungs, and let it out again.
“Yes,” she said. “Just… recalibrating.”
“We’ll make it work,” Vic said. “We always do, right?”
Julia looked at her partner—hair mussed from the drive, eyes tired but bright, mouth determined—and felt a fierce rush of affection.
“Yes,” she said. “We always do.”
She squeezed Vic’s hand once, then turned off the engine and stepped out into the cold, into the swirl of snow and the murmur of staff and the looming stone of Balmoral.
Later, standing at a window inside, watching the flakes thicken, she’d remember that drive with a clarity that surprised her. The first snowflake on the windscreen. The flashing warning sign. Hyzenthlay’s calm, unnerving certainty.
The snow oracle had spoken.
The storm was coming.
Julia only hoped she could keep Vic from taking it personally.