“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, whenshe’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.
