May Chooses December

Lady Melisande Cresse is twenty and engaged to the heir of House Blackthorne, until he tells her he loves someone else and offers to keep her as his mistress instead. His uncle has a better offer. Duke Alistair Blackthorne is thirty-eight, a Marshal of Stormwind, and he proposes marriage as a practical matter of honor and succession. Melisande accepts on the same terms and neither of them says what else is in it. The morning after the wedding, the army calls him away.

This isn't a story about age not mattering. It's about a choice that has to be made again and again, every year, by a young wife who is still rising and a husband who will not stay young.

Set in Stormwind among the Alliance nobility, from the years before the war in Northrend onward. A story from The Hearth-Rooms collection.

This story is non-commercial fan fiction. World of Warcraft and Azeroth belong to Blizzard Entertainment.

Contents

Chapter 1: Ivory

Chapter 2: Practicality

Chapter 3: Becoming

Chapter 4: Regulation

Chapter 5: Dawn

Chapter 6: The Weather Has Been Fine

Chapter 7: The East Nursery

Chapter 8: Practicality, Retracted

Chapter 9: Every Day

Chapter 10: The King's Courier

Chapter 11: The Dower House

Chapter 12: Benedict

Chapter 13: May Chooses December

Epilogue: Ten Years On

Epilogue: Twenty Years On

Coda: The Gloves