Although the Queen did recover, her health was never the same. The doctors told the King that his beloved queen had tuberculosis, and that she would physically be fragile for the rest of her life. The disease quickly robbed the Queen of her strength, but she insisted on spending as much time in the garden as possible, resting many hours on the bench where she and the King had fallen in love.
Unfortunately, as Summer breathed its last, so did the fragile Queen. A servant found her laying in a bed of wildflowers next to the wooden bench, the life gone from her eyes and her heart long still.
Aside from the King and their children, no one was hit by the Queen's untimely death more than her former Lady-in-Waiting Elizaveta, now the head of the Royal Household. The Queen had been her dearest friend, and in fact it was she who found the lifeless Queen when she failed to come to dinner.
A month of kingdom-wide mourning followed the death of their beloved Queen.
The King, stripped of the true love he once enjoyed, began in earnest to find suitable matches for his two children, so that they might also know true love before it was too late. In particular he kept up correspondence with King Edward of Soluna. King Edward ruled another very large and prosperous kingdom, and was also graced with a beautiful daughter, his pride and joy and only heir after his queen died in childbirth. Princess Katherine was charming, well read, eloquent, gracious, a true princess. She had also served as acting queen ever since she was old enough to help her father. She was an ideal match to marry James and become the kingdom's next queen when King Hubert gave the crown to his son in one year's time.
