Beyond the Roundels

I've been reading my way through some more of Yuletide, and while I will post a second post of recs from this, here's one that might just now trump every previous fic as the best piece of fanfiction I've ever read (for the moment).

Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high by agelast
(12,848 words. Dido Twite, Simon, Bonnie Green.)
ON A GREY, STILL MORNING in January, more than a hundred years ago, through air of that chill crispness which tests the lungs and finds them wanting, four people stood at one end of a footbridge at the end of Willoughby Park and waved to three riding away. The sky was as dim as though it were evening; one had to have gotten up in the black dawn to know that it had been steadily lightening, and would grow a little lighter still. The three riders were the King and Prince of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'but as we do not look the part,' the Archbishop had said, 'I think we shall be safe until we get to Cleydon-le-Marsh...'

( Much flailing, but hopefully no spoilers here )
If you don't know what I'm on about, I recommend the books, whatever your age, because Wolves is an romp of a story and Dido Twite who becomes the series' heroine from Black Hearts in Battersea onwards, is one of the truly great characters of 20th C children's literature. Come the end, the AU history and weirdness was getting beyond me (and if it hadn ended with Midwinter Nightingale, as I thought for a moment it was going to, my heart would have been broken), but nobody writes like Joan Aiken. (It's weird because her adult books are nothing like as wonderful as her children's ones, with distinctive characters, an original style that begs to be read aloud, and her gift for fairy tales and the improbable being taken in the story's stride).

(The Wolves Sequence starts with the premise that the Channel Tunnel was built when it was first suggested (in the 18th C), and that the Hanoverians never became kings and queens of England and mainly involves terrible Hanoverian plots to get rid of the Stuart line - including a gun that can fire on St James's Palace from Nantucket (it won't do Nantucket much good, either), a pink whale, a stolen lake, and a plot to roll St Paul's Cathedral into the Thames (foiled by elephants tugging it back...) and so much more.)