Princess Emma was born at the tail end of a great long time of strife, is what they say, and they would be right. Misthaven has never been a stranger to such things, but wounded by a war, stricken with sickness and famine from a horrible winter, and shaken by the Evil Queen Regina's almost-realized threats, the birth of Emma was a good fortune that the kingdom did not quite trust - and her parents, especially so. Queen Snow and King David were beloved by their subjects, but in a way that a cute pet dog is beloved: you quite like to smile and coo at them, draw pictures and give them nicknames, but you're not about to put them in charge of your entire country. Who trusts a puppy's opinions on foreign policy, anyway? And to many people of Misthaven, there was not much of a difference between a puppy and a sovereign. Such is the way things were, back then.

Nevertheless, the King and Queen were in charge of the entire country, and they were quite acutely aware of the challenge facing them, once the foreign threats to their throne were neutralized. It's all very well and good to be given a crown, but actually ruling with it is a different business altogether, and neither of them had what you would call a traditional upbringing for a position like that.

Still, they did their best, and their best was of course very good: David was compassionate and kind, with a head made for numbers and a levelheaded ear, fine tuned to the frequency of his people. His face was the one ordinary people loved and trusted - the farmers and shepherds, hunters and gatherers, merchants and sailors, mothers and fathers. The doors of his receiving room were never closed to those who would seek his advice or help, and he would go on tours to the far parts of the kingdom to visit the people who could not afford the trip to the palace. He came to be called the Shepherd King, a title that David wore with pride and respect, for he knew it was this that gave him his authority. David knew, perhaps better than any other king before him, that the power of a crown is only worth as much as the respect of the people who live under it, and it was this that made him wield it with such deft, sympathetic wisdom.

Snow, on the other hand, was not as good with things like compassion and empathy, which was quite obvious to anyone who knew her. Which isn't to say that she wasn't kind, because she certainly was, or that she was cruel, because she certainly wasn't. In fact it was not Snow's beauty or strength that people spoke and sang of (which are the normal things people speak and sing about, in regards to queens), but her heart, which everyone agreed was by far her most attractive quality.

But there was a ruthlessness to Snow that one only finds in people who were born and forged in fire and hardship, and that was what aided her more than anything else in her time as Queen. She understood the concept of honor, and of refusing to bend down to your enemy's level. One of the reasons she loved David, for instance, was because he never compromised his principles, no matter what kind of pressure he was under. She knew that a victory won through deplorable methods was not much of a victory at all, and that the means do not always justify the ends, but - she just could not particularly bring herself to care.

It was a silly little thing that first helped Snow realize this absence in herself - a legal challenge to the throne from a minor noble, a second cousin of hers through marriage to whom she had once been betrothed. It was a ridiculous claim, and he had no chance of success - Snow had only been six months old when the betrothal was legitimate, and anyway it had only lasted a few weeks before Snow's mother had died and the agreement was dissolved. But it made her angry - angry because he was a horrid little man who condescended to her in every conversation they'd ever had, and whose very obvious motive was to wrangle another title and some more land out of the crown. Angry because it was an insult to her marriage, to her daughter and her crown, to so boldly stand up in court and tell the entire kingdom that the Queen's entire life is illegitimate, because of a political decision Snow had no part of, made before she could even talk.

It was a minor problem that would have gone away quietly, had Snow given in and awarded him another stupid little word to put before his name, and another castle to take his summers in. But Snow did not want to handle it quietly, and so she went to court. For seven weeks, with her infant daughter on her hip, the Queen argued her own case before the royal magistrate and a growing crowd of her own subjects. She challenged his challenge, and made a point to challenge the betrothal laws as well, and her eloquence and vindictive passion were so impressive that the noble was stripped of all his titles, and left the kingdom's capital a poorer, humbler man.

It was this incident that earned her the name of the Bear Queen, for the people who watched her in court would often find themselves inching back in instinctive fear from the fury of Snow's speeches. There were beautiful portraits done of her standing at the pulpit, young Princess Emma tucked under one arm and a bunch of sedge reed in her free hand - the plant of memory, and a favorite snack of the great, monstrous bears that lived in Misthaven's mountainous forests. It was said that the Bear Queen would forgive but never forget, and may fate help you if you crossed her more than once, for she would snap her jaws and swallow you whole, and the kingdom would applaud her for it.

Thus the King and Queen slowly worked out a way to properly lead their people, and slowly, the people began to allow them to do it. The Shepherd's warmth fed the hearth, and the Bear's strength fortified the door, and Misthaven came back to life again. Crops were harvested, business resumed. Ships sailed, children were born, and the Princess grew up - slowly, haltingly, and surrounded by a kingdom full of people who thought of her as a prophetic symbol of their own happiness, a good luck charm upon which their entire livelihoods depended.

It is understandable, then, what came to happen later. For Emma Swan is, in every universe, nobody's goddamned token.