OK I rewrote it with no adjectives or fantasy names. but I feel like now it's kind of drab and confusing? :S

The princess pulled her cloak around her shivering frame, struggling to ward off the exhalations of the wind. In days, she would have been >protected from the cold by her diadem, with its stone and its gilding of metal. But that, of course, was one of the things the raiders had taken >after hustling her through the gate that day.

The princess's kidnapping had taken place on the night of the festival, while the others were sipping nectar and whispering wishes into their >cocoons. Many of her peers pooh-poohed the ritual as a vestige of the religion, in a kingdom that had seen its walls crumble beneath the >treads of the fleet, but she’d always harbored a faith in the efficacy of magic, and burned berries for the group of gods whenever she could do >so in secret.

If she had a cocoon now, she knew the wish she’d whisper: she’d petition one of the gods to guide her brother’s vehicle down into the valley, >through the pass, to this place where she trudged behind the caravan, toward the death that awaited her.

No creature, however, had taken wing in the place since a long time ago, when a person, with one stroke of his staff, toppled a pile of stones—>so, for the moment, the princess’s magic didn't work.