The Storm That Stayed Inside

The day went wrong before breakfast. The hall was still dark at the far end, and the kitchen noises had not come up the stairs yet.

Her crayon snapped. Not just any crayon. The orange one, the planning one, worn short and serious from every map that mattered. The two halves did not fit back together, and she tried.

Her braid came out crooked. Then crooked again. Then it fell out altogether. Her boot took the wrong foot. And her paper tore right through the middle of a drawing she had been keeping.

Princess Allison sat on the bottom stair and folded her arms. Outside the window, the sky was rinsed blue, corner to corner, without one cloud. The light came through and lay on the step beside her, and she did not want it.

The storm was not outside today.

She tried to outrun it. She stomped down the long hall, past one tall window and then the next, and the stomping followed her the whole way. She growled at a chair that had done nothing.

By the middle of the morning the storm had settled in her chest, planning to stay the afternoon. She opened her mouth to ask for something and found she did not know what.

The King, her father, heard the stomping from the next room and came into the long hall. He listened to skies like music. He listened to daughters the same way.

He nodded once, the way you nod at real weather.

"There is weather today," he said.

"The sky is empty," Allison said, in a voice like a slammed drawer.

"Not that sky," said the King.

And he went and got his boots, and two cups, and came back down the long hall to her.

"A sky storm is for waiting out," he said, and they sat down together on the bottom stair, close enough to reach. "This kind is the same. I have nowhere to be. I have coffee. Storms hate that."

He let the small cup of milk with honey cool until the steam had all gone. Then he handed it to her. She held it and did not drink it, on principle. He looked out the window at nothing, like a man prepared to watch nothing for hours.

They sat. That was the whole plan, and the King committed to it like royal work. Somewhere off the hall a door opened and shut, and it had nothing to do with them.

After a while, Allison listed the wrongs. She started with the crayon and went in order.

The King took each one seriously. A snapped planning crayon, he agreed, was a genuine loss to the kingdom. The drawing was worse. "You were keeping it," he said.

The list got all the way said. Allison let her shoulders down and drank some of the milk. It was cool the way she liked it.

"Do you get them?" Allison asked, into her cup. "Inside storms?"

"I had one last Tuesday," said the King.

"You did not stomp."

"I stomp on the inside," he said. "Loudly. Ask my socks."

That surprised a laugh out of her. Some of the milk went over the rim, and her heels knocked the stair twice.

Her hands felt like doing something at last. So they mended.

They smoothed the torn drawing flat on the stair. She held the two edges together while he glued a strip of coral paper across the tear. Her little boat had a coral patch on its sail. Now her drawing had one too.

"Not a scar," said Allison, looking at the bright new patch.

"A story," said the King.

And somewhere in the mending, the storm thinned. She pressed her thumb along the coral strip, once and then again. A little grumble was still there, but there was room around it now.

Allison looked up. The afternoon had gotten bright without asking her permission. She leaned against the King's arm, the mended drawing on her knees, and noticed she was hungry. The only grumble left was in her tummy.

"It stopped," she said.

"They do," said the King. "Every single one, so far."

They walked the courtyard in the leftover afternoon, his boots and hers, to check the kingdom. The stones were warm all the way through. The long road went out past the wall with nothing on it but light.

The chair she had growled at was formally pardoned, with a hand on its back. The boot went on the right foot on the first try. Her hair blew loose in the courtyard breeze, and she let it.

"Tomorrow I will draw a new map," she said. "With the other orange crayon. The backup one."

"The backup one," said the King, the way he confirmed supplies for the kingdom. "I will sharpen it tonight."

That night the King came to say goodnight, and stopped at the window a moment, listening to the clear dark out of habit.

"Fair skies," he reported. "Inside and out." He stayed at the window a while longer. "There is no storm I would not cross to sit beside you."

"Even the stomping ones," said Allison.

"The stomping ones," said the King, "are my specialty."

Outside, the lanterns held their gold rings steady down the long road, and the mended drawing hung over her bed, patch first.