Note: First, I'd like to warn that there's implied sexual abuse (including of minors) in that story, so it may not be for you if those things make you uncomfortable. This is the same AU as the "True Ruler" one-shot in my prompt fic collection, but written so it can work as a mostly self-contained first chapter. Otherwise, these two chapters are technically a longer chapter split in two. The initial ~6000-word draft ended having a small cliffhanger followed by an infodump mid-way through, so I just went ahead and made it two ~3000-word chapters.

The tea and dye seller – Part 1

-So… what kind of person was your first fiancé?
Helena had drunk a little too much to have any respect for the saying according to which one shouldn't speak ill of the dead.
-I think Sune and his siblings liked him much better than I did. And all three of them were only about ten when he died. Just about everyone older than that agreed that he was basically an older, fatter and dumber version of Sune and his brother. I know he was the worst thing I could imagine having in my bed at the time. How wrong I was about that…
Helena's drinking partner knew better than to prod her about that particular subject when she briefly vented about it. Even though she doubted the existence of his husband who was allegedly a crowd-hating night owl, Stig got credit for believing the real story. Half the people in her new home country, and probably this very tavern, believed "How wrong she had been" and his actions to be a complete fabrication on her part intended to escape the consequences of her own wrongdoings. The half that did believe she was telling the truth to an extent tended to be all too aware of the potential consequences of defending an alleged outlaw in public or not understand that actual situation meant that nobody was touching a single hair of Sune's on her watch. Stig himself asked after Sune quite often, but almost exclusively on the matter of his recovery from the situation that had made Helena leave Scandi Kingdom with Sune in tow. Helena really, really hoped Stig wasn't going to turn out to be in the middle of gaining her trust for the purpose of betraying her in some way at a later time. The fact that nobody in the island-district had known Stig for more than three years unfortunately made that possibility very real. Stig also refused to sell any kind of hair dye without testing it on himself first; this resulted in his hair, beard and even eyebrows getting a new color every few weeks, and Helena having no idea what they looked like undyed after close to half a year of knowing him. Even more unfortunately, she was just that desperate for a friend outside of her cousin's household; the whole nightmare that had ruined her reputation back in Scandi had also stacked so many layers of complexity onto her relationship with Sune that a lot of their recovery involved making their lives as separate as they could reasonably be. Stig stared at the bottom of his mug, returning to their actual conversation subject:
-Sigrun and Mikkel claimed that he wasn't all bad also. I was hoping you would be among the people who had experienced some little-known good side of him first-hand.
Helena sighed:
-Well, to give him a little credit, I was unaware of many of the ways it was possible to hurt someone at the time. By the standards I have today, he gets points for not having ever deliberately hurt people to anyone's knowledge. But the guy was still getting the whole spoiled Prince treatment, so he has quite a history of inadvertently hurting people. And who knows how he would have ended up treating his "birthday gift" if there hadn't been that damn fire.
The heirs to the throne of Scandi Kingdom traditionally got a new servant with a very specific duty on their sixteenth birthday. Since their marriage tended to be a strictly political alliance that required a pair theoretically able to produce a child, that new servant was frequently a way of officially integrating an already existing lover into the household or giving those who preferred their own sex a socially acceptable partner. The latter, but not the former, had applied to Emil. Due to the nature of the "present", heirs turning sixteen tended to be among those leaving their own birthday party as soon as it was no longer rude to do so that year. That had made Helena much less eager to be on the guest list than previous years. Her schedule had conveniently managed to change in such a way that she had actually had something more important going on, a couple of days of travel away from the Scandi royal palace, when a fire had started in the archives while the "guests-only" party had been just getting started. That had been, without her being aware of it at the time, Helena's first brush with the extent to which Scandi's True Rulers, better known as the Kingdom's Royal Council, could manipulate events to serve their interests. That had been three years ago. She could still hear "How wrong she had been" boasting about how he had earned his position in the "Council" by being the one behind the fire.

The tavern's door, which was near Helena and Stig's table, was slammed open. Sigrun stepped in, dropped a few coins on the table, and literally dragged Helena out of the tavern, onto the street leading to her cousin's estate:
-Sorry, but I hope you're not too drunk to take a patient. One of the guests was dumb enough to try "testing" on Sune and Alva. Sune recognized the "love pill", but Alva swallowed it whole before he could stop her.
Helena's body's reaction to Sigrun's words was almost enough to compensate for the effect of a couple drinks on her thought process:
-No…
Both giving "love pills" to someone under sixteen and tricking someone into having one were illegal, for a very good reason. Some speculated that many couples that had married for other reasons than love would be childless if it weren't for them. Children weren't supposed to have even seen one of those pills, unless they had extremely careless parents who didn't hide them properly. They could also have seen them for the same reason Sune had, which was far from enviable. While Helena understood how someone could be curious of the effects of those pills on children, she really wondered what went through the mind of those who got to the level of curiosity-satisfying that required actually having at least one child on hand; the mere fact that "testing" had emerged as a euphemism for doing such a thing sickened Helena.
-Who…
-Hulda, the sweet seller. She tried to pass the pills off as a hard to find kind of candy.
The very jobs that had made Adam and Ylva able to take Helena and Sune in meant that there was almost always at least one guest less permanent than themselves in the house on a given day. Adam and Ylva had at least been honest when they had told Helena that they could only really vouch for the other members of the family living in the house and their most long-term employees. The fact that their ten-year-old youngest daughter had been too young to be told anything more than "someone was very mean to Sune, please be nice to him" had turned out to be a lot of help in terms of giving Sune someone with whom he could more or less just be a kid again. As soon as they got inside the house, Sigrun made a beeline for Alva's bedroom, in front of which Adam, Ylva, Tyra and Johan were waiting. Both Adam and Ylva nodded when they saw Helena arrive, signaling that they trusted her to help Alva.

There was no widely known product or spell that countered the effects of "love pills". If someone forced or tricked into ingesting one was lucky enough to be able to escape the situation before its effects truly kicked in, all that could be done was find them a room with a bed in which they could be alone for a few hours. Nobody else could be the room with them, as those under the pill's influence made extremely drunk people look selective with those to whom they showed affection in all meanings of the term. But that was what to do if they were an adult. When it came to children, the fact that the pills were meant for fully grown people alone could be a threat to their life, which required someone with medical expertise to watch over them until the effects wore off. This was the reason Helena wasn't surprised to find Mikkel at Alva's bedside. There was otherwise no agreed-upon way to deal with the young girl's current state, thanks to the reluctance of some of those with the power to make such decisions to even discuss the subject. Mikkel had apparently gone with giving Alva something to hug and making her help her own body eliminate the drug via moving it a little, judging by the large pillow in which her face was buried and the fact that she was lying on her side, back to the door, frantically kicking the air. Helena took her medical check-up talisman out of her pocket and put it on the top of Alva's back, which was exposed due to her having been stripped down to her underwear to handle her own increased body temperature a little better. Aside from the differences that came from Alva being a girl, Helena recognized everything from the very first time one of those pills had been forced onto Sune, including the fact that her body's fight against the pill's less desirable effects was a desperate one. Treating her wasn't going to be as hard as Helena had feared, but she was going to need to concentrate while she was drawing the spell on one of the blank talismans she always carried. She finished, let the ink dry, and tied it around Alva's neck. Alva promptly settled down and released her grip on the pillow. Helena helped her roll over to her other side and delicately took the pillow out of her arms so they could see each other's faces:
-Helena?
Exhaustion had already set into Alva's face, but she didn't make any move towards Helena. The spell had worked.
-Please keep this necklace on until tomorrow morning. It's okay to go to sleep if you feel like doing it now.
Helena looked in Mikkel's direction, and could tell he was astonished despite how little he showed it. As a non-magical healer born and raised in Scandi's Southern Region, the idea that magic-based healing was unreliable was buried too deep into his skull to be easily eliminated. He wasn't that bad a person, other than that. Helena let her thoughts drift into the circumstances in which she had elaborated the spell she had just used. "How wrong she had been" had wanted to elaborate a talisman-compatible spell that shared some of the properties of the "love pill". In his tunnel vision, he had forgotten how easy it was to figure out a counter once the spell itself was created. Unfortunately, the price of Helena and Sune's escape had been high. The entire Kingdom of Scandi now genuinely believed that the "love spell" was all her doing, rather than a project on which she had been forced to cooperate under three different means of pressure. According to a rumor that had somehow taken hold faster than she and Sune had been able to leave Scandi, Helena went around pretending to know a spell that could counter the effects of the "love pill", hoping that some shelter or clinic would take the bait and obliviously become her own, personal brothel. Depending on who one asked, Sune could be anything from her willing accomplice to being in the very situation in which both of them had been in regards to Scandi's newest True Ruler.

Helena left the room and promptly told Tyra she could check her work. Alva's older sister was one of the very people who had been fooled by the false information concerning Helena, yet could greatly benefit from believing her. If an island-district of Saimaa was big enough to have a "Scandi neighborhood", it was usually big enough to have some kind of abused spouse shelter; Tyra helped out in the local one. She knew a little medical magic, but it was focused entirely on fixing things from which Alva had been fortunately spared this evening. As Tyra rushed into the room, Johan, Alva's older brother and the family's middle child, disdainfully told Helena that if she was looking for Sune, he was in their shared room and not allowed to leave it without supervision. From what Helena could tell, the reason Johan's baseline of mild hostility towards both her and Sune was split between getting part of his big brother role taken away from him and getting some of his expectations about "love pills" crushed less than a year before becoming old enough to use them. Helena and Sune earned the existence of some of their meager savings to the latter fact; Adam and Ylva considered that they would have probably had to spend much more money in the future if Johan had reached the age of sixteen without understanding some of the things Helena and Sune's presence had taught him.

Helena found Sune curled up in the bed's blankets, having not gone beyond kicking his boots off and leaving his knife belt on the floor in terms of undressing. She sat on the bed, and he promptly crawled over to rest his head on her lap, leaving his right ear exposed to surrounding sounds. That meant he was alright talking. His version of the story was much more detailed than Sigrun's, and included the fact that Hulda had been sent to spend the night somewhere outside the house. Sune quickly admitted to wishing the two of them had somewhere else they could sleep as well. The first adult he had found after dragging Alva out of Hulda's room had been a new servant who had no idea Sune actually knew what "love pills" looked like, and had not seen it worth "bothering Mikkel over a piece of candy". When Alva had started cuddling Sune and giving him kisses on the cheek, the servant had simply found it adorable and admitted to suspecting the young girl had a child's crush on Sune. Fortunately, the whole incident had also made Sune late for his swordplay lessons and Sigrun had not only gone looking for him, but enlisted Mikkel's help in doing so. Unsurprisingly, Sune was angry at that servant for her obliviousness, but didn't think that was enough to ask Adam and Ylva to terminate her over. She remained someone Sune didn't want to run into anytime soon, along with Alva. Another reason for which the two of them spending the following night outside the house would be preferable was that while the "impulse to show affection" phase of the pill' s effects was going to end by the next morning, the "wanting to be around the other person, regardless of how they treat you" phase was going to last a good three days. Helena's counter-spell didn't work on that phase, but it could be shortened by making sure the people involved didn't see each other at all for the entire first day and first night. Unfortunately, Alva knew exactly where to look for Sune the second he was in house at all, and was at an age at which quite a lot of things forbidden by adults and older children looked extremely arbitrary. Strictly speaking, Helena and Sune's liberty of movement within the Scandi neighborhood could let them sleep in the nearby Inn, but neither she nor Sune liked the idea of sleeping in the same building as a bunch of complete strangers. Not to mention that the innkeeper would want to know the reason of their stay, and Helena didn't want to be responsible for too many people finding out what had happened in Adam and Ylva's household too soon. The reason many of the neighborhood's residents didn't want her anywhere near their children was to consider on top of everything else. She suggested that the two of them take a walk around the neighborhood and see how Sune felt after it. Sune agreed it was worth a try.

The neighborhood's single, but meandrous street was starting to empty itself, as those who lived outside it, or on the nearby smaller islands, were starting to leave. As they were walking by the harbor, Helena saw a familiar head of currently-red hair waiting for the crowd to thin before he could get to his boat:
-Stig! You're still here?
Five minutes later, Helena was very grateful for the magic heating plate Stig had acquired at some point, the cups and water he used to let people sample the tea he sold alongside the hair dye, and whoever had been dumb enough to not buy that delicious blueberry blend.
-Your tea usually tastes like you are trying to repurpose a failed hair dye. Since when do you carry something so good?
Stig took on his usual look of being slightly more offended than the situation warranted, even when he knew he was being teased:
-People around here actually like the "failed hair dyes" for some reason, and I kind of need the money. That one is a blend my cousin-in-law's wife came up with, and I think I'm the only one besides her who likes it. I mostly keep it in stock on the off-chance a third person who likes it comes along.
Helena took another sip:
-I think I may be interested in a pot, next time. This tastes strangely like the kind of tea I grew up with.
Sune seemed to like it as well, considering the sound of appreciation he had after drinking it was the first he had emitted since they had left the house. The improvised tea party unfortunately had to be cut short, as Stig needed to get back to his island. He slapped he forehead little after getting up from his seat:
-Hey, I just realized I know of a place the two of you can stay tonight. How willing would Lady Ylva be to let the two of you leave the island for the night?