Arthur stood at the head of the long table in the great hall of Camelot with a goblet of dark wine in his hand and the noise of a hundred conversations washing over him.
Torches burned along the walls and the long tables that had been specially made were arranged in rows across the floor and were laden with more food than Brightwater had ever seen gathered in one place. The roasted pigs from the harbour sat in the centre of the largest table with their skins crackling and glistening with juicy fat, surrounded by platters of grilled fish and bowls of root vegetable stew and baskets of Dalla's bread and wheels of cheese and crocks of butter and dishes of pickled onions and roasted turnips and every other thing that the combined kitchens of five villages had been able to produce in a single day.
The smell alone was enough to make a man weep.
Arthur raised his goblet.
The hall did not quiet immediately. It took several seconds of him standing there with his arm up before the nearest tables noticed and began shushing their neighbours.
"When I first came to this island," Arthur began, "I thought that perhaps I would not be welcome here. I thought I would build my keep up on the mountain and live behind my walls with my family, separated from the rest of you by stone and station and the simple fact that none of you had asked for a lord and I had arrived as one anyway. I thought I would have to earn your tolerance and settle for your indifference and count myself lucky if I managed either."
He paused and let his eyes move across the hall, finding familiar faces in the crowd. Orwin near the front, his white beard freshly trimmed, both hands wrapped around his cup. Brin at the end of a table with her shaggy dog lying beneath her bench. Torren with his arm around his wife and Pol sitting beside them looking as though he had already had more wine than was advisable for a boy of his age. Harmon and Sable and Dalla and Godric and Lorra and Wynna and a hundred other faces that had become as familiar to him over the past two months as the faces of his own family.
"That is not what happened."
"What happened is that you opened your doors to me. You shared your knowledge and your labour and your time, and you did not treat me like an invader or a burden or a nuisance sent down from King's Landing to make your lives more complicated. You helped me build roads and clear fields and cut timber and haul stone, and you did it not because I paid you, though I did pay you, Torren, do not look at me like that, I pay you very well."
Laughter rolled through the hall and Torren raised his jug in acknowledgement.
"You did it because you chose to. Because you decided, on your own terms and in your own time, that what I was building here was worth being a part of. And it is because of your efforts, your sweat and your skill and your trust, that I was able to bring my family here today."
He looked down the table to where Mira sat with Mordred and Morgana settled in a cushioned basket beside her chair, and Cassie sat next to her with Percival dozing against her shoulder.
"They are here because of you. All of you. My children will grow up on this island because you made it possible, and I will never forget that. So when I say that you are my family, I do not mean it as a pretty word to put in a speech. You are ours and we are yours, and whatever comes next, we face it together."
He lifted his goblet higher.
"To family."
The hall erupted.
"TO FAMILY."
A hundred cups went up.
A hundred voices roared the words back at him.
Someone at the back of the room banged the table hard enough that a platter of fish jumped and Brin's dog barked in surprise. Arthur drank deep and sat back down in his chair while the noise crashed over him, Mira's hand found his beneath the table and squeezed, and Cassie reached across Mira's lap and laid her fingers on top of both of theirs.
The feast rolled on around them.
Arthur leaned back in his chair and watched Mira tear a piece of bread in half and dip it in the stew while she talked, her cheeks flushed from the wine and the warmth of the hall. She kept shaking her head slowly as she spoke, as though the words she was saying could not quite keep up with what she was feeling.
"I cannot believe it, Arthur. I truly cannot. When we came up through the forest and saw the waterfall and the walls above the trees I thought I was dreaming. I thought you were going to tell me it belonged to someone else and that our home was a cottage somewhere behind it. And then we rode through the gates and I saw the courtyard and the hall and the towers and I just... I could not speak."
"The bathing chambers," Cassie added, leaning forward past Mira with her green eyes wide. "The bathing chambers alone are worth more than every building in Flea Bottom combined. I do not think you understand how extraordinary this place is."
"I wanted to build a home," Arthur said simply. "Not just for us. For our children and their children after them. Somewhere that will stand when we are gone. Somewhere that when Mordred and Morgana and Percival are old enough they will look up at these walls and know that they are safe."
He took a sip of wine and then leaned forward slightly. "The keep itself is almost impossible to take by force. The shelf is approachable from only one direction on foot, which is the western road, and that road narrows between two rock formations where I plan to build a secondary gatehouse. The cliffs on the other three sides are sheer enough that no army could scale them under fire, and the curtain wall adds another thirty feet on top of that. Once I have trained a garrison, even a small one, a hundred men could hold this castle against a thousand. Maybe more, depending on whether the attackers bring siege equipment up through that forest, which I do not envy anyone trying to do."
He gestured toward the ceiling above them, where the stone arches of the great hall met the natural rock of the cliff face behind.
"The spring at the back of the keep feeds directly into the cisterns beneath the castle. Fresh water, always running, from the mountain itself. It cannot be poisoned without poisoning the entire aquifer, and it cannot be diverted because it comes up through solid rock. We also have the garden beds in the inner courtyard and the paddock in the outer courtyard, so in a prolonged siege we could grow food and keep livestock inside the walls. Between the stored grain and the fresh water and the gardens and the animals we could hold out for years without resupply."
He paused and then the corner of his mouth curved.
"But none of that is what you really want to hear about."
"No," Mira agreed immediately.
"Tell us about the bathing chambers again," Cassie said.
Arthur laughed. "Stone basins, large enough for three people comfortably, maybe four. The water is fed from the mountain spring through channels that run past the kitchen hearths on the lower level, so it arrives hot. and it stays hot because the stone holds the heat. There is a whole bathing complex down by the servants' district that I built for everyone on the island to use freely, anyone can walk in at any time and bathe in clean warm water. But every room in the family wing has its own private basin as well."
"Every room," Mira repeated.
"Every room."
"Arthur Pendragon, you wonderful, ridiculous man."
Cassie was grinning at him with the particular expression she wore when she was about to say something that would make him blush in front of a hundred people.
"And the bed in our chambers. Tell me about the bed."
"It is... large."
"How large."
"Large enough for five people, comfortably."
Cassie's eyebrows climbed. "Five people. Planning to expand the collection of wives, are we, my lord."
Arthur nearly choked on his wine. "No. Gods, no. Two of you is more than sufficient. Two of you is more than any sane man could handle. I built a large bed because I wanted room for all three of us and the children without anyone falling off the edge in the middle of the night."
Cassie and Mira both laughed at that and Arthur shook his head and grinned into his cup.
"Speaking of things I have for you." He turned in his chair and caught the eye of one of the serving men he had hired from the harbour village, a quiet youth named Edwyn who had been hovering near the wall behind him all evening. "Edwyn. The cases, please."
The young man nodded and disappeared through a side door, returning a moment later carrying two small wooden cases of dark polished oak, each one about the size of a man's hand, with simple iron clasps and no ornamentation. He set them on the table in front of Arthur and retreated.
"I had these made for you," Arthur said as he turned to face both women. "One for each of you."
He unclasped the first case and opened the lid.
Mira's hand went to her mouth.
The necklace lay against a bed of dark velvet, and the first thing that struck the eye was the colour, the deep impossible blue of the sapphires that ran along the chain in a line from small to large, each one set in a cage of pale platinum. There were dozens of them, the smallest no bigger than a pinhead and the largest perhaps the size of a fingernail, and they were arranged in a way that made the chain look as though it had been strung with pieces of fallen sky. At the centre of the necklace, where the chain met its lowest point, a single ruby sat in a platinum setting, deep red and enormous, easily the size of a palm, cut in a faceted oval that seemed to hold its own light within the stone.
Arthur opened the second case.
An identical necklace lay inside.
Cassie made a sound that was not quite a gasp and not quite a word and her hand found Mira's arm and gripped it.
"Arthur," Mira whispered. "Where... how did you... these are..."
"I had them made," he said again. "For both of you. Because you deserve something beautiful, and because I have spent two months on this island thinking about you and I wanted you to have something that told you that."
"They are the most beautiful things I have ever seen," Cassie breathed, her green eyes reflecting the ruby. "Arthur, these must have cost a fortune, where on earth did you find a jeweller who could—"
"I have my ways."
"Arthur."
"Kiss me and stop asking questions."
Cassie leaned in and kissed him entirely unconcerned with the fact that a hundred islanders were watching. Arthur felt her smile against his lips. Mira did not wait for her turn, she simply caught the side of his jaw with her hand and turned his head toward her the moment Cassie pulled back and kissed him herself, and the cheer that went up from the nearest tables was loud enough to rattle the goblets.
Arthur lifted the first necklace from its case and fastened it around Mira's neck, his fingers working the small clasp while she held her hair up off her shoulders. He then did the same for Cassie, fastening the second necklace, and when the ruby settled against her skin the colour matched the flush that had spread across her cheeks and down her neck.
The hall erupted into applause.
The feast continued long after the formal part of the evening ended. The bards that Arthur had hired from the mainland had been playing politely in the background for most of the meal, but as the wine flowed and the tables were pushed back to clear space in the centre of the hall they shifted into something considerably livelier.
Not the stately dances of the Red Keep, no this was country music, fast and loud and full of the stomping rhythms that Arthur and Mira remembered from the harvest festivals in Harrowfield, where the dancing was done in lines and circles and nobody cared whether your feet landed in the right place as long as you were moving and laughing.
Mira grabbed Arthur's hand and pulled him out of his chair before he could protest, and within minutes the two of them were spinning through the centre of the hall with the island folk clapping in time around them. Cassie joined a circle dance with Dalla and Sable and Wynna and several of the other women, Percival held on her hip and bouncing gently in time with the music while his small silver head turned to follow the movement trying very hard to understand what all the noise was about.
Orwin sat in his chair near the fire drinking and smiled at everything. Torren got very drunk and attempted to lift Pol over his head, which did not go well for either of them. Harmon danced with his wife for the first time in what she loudly announced was eleven years, and she wept halfway through it, which made Harmon look so alarmed that Arthur had to assure him from across the room that those were happy tears.
Even Horus joined the festivities, though Arthur suspected the falcon's motivation was purely culinary. The bird had stationed himself on one of the high window ledges above the hall and was working his way through a pile of fish scraps that someone had left on a platter beneath the sill, pausing occasionally to fix the revellers below with his standard expression of contempt before returning to his meal.
The hours wore on.
During which Arthur did not notice Cassie leave.
He had been talking with Orwin and Godric about the planting schedule for the next season, his mind comfortably blurred by wine and it was only when he turned to say something to her and found her chair empty that he registered her absence.
"Where did Cassie go."
Mira, who was sitting beside him looked up and shook her head gently.
"Do not worry, my love. She went to check on the children, that is all. Percival was fussing and the twins needed settling. She will be back."
Arthur nodded and turned back to the conversation, though a small part of his attention remained fixed on the empty chair.
The feast wound down around them. Guests began to drift toward the doors in twos and threes, calling their thanks and their goodnights across the hall. Arthur stood and clasped hands and exchanged farewells until the hall was less than half full, and then less than a quarter, and then it was mostly empty except for the serving staff who were beginning the long process of clearing the tables and sweeping the floor.
Cassie appeared at the entrance to the hall.
She crossed the floor quickly and came to Mira's side, and the two women exchanged a look that Arthur, in his pleasantly wine-fogged state, did not quite manage to read before Mira nodded and reached over to take his arm.
"Come on, my love. Time for bed."
Arthur grinned.
He was more than a little tipsy, which was a state that happened to him rarely and which he found he quite enjoyed, the combination of the wine and the warmth of the two beautiful women on either side of him and the knowledge that he was finally, after two months of sleeping alone in a cabin by a lake, going to spend the night with both of them, filled him with a joy he could barely suppress.
He rose from his chair and turned to face the remaining handful of people in the hall, most of them serving staff and a few lingering guests, and he raised his goblet one final time.
"My friends. I am going to retire for the evening. With both of my wives. At the same time and I do not plan to sleep very much."
Mira closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her forehead. Cassie bit down on her lower lip so hard it went white. A flush climbed both of their necks at roughly the same speed.
The hall exploded into cheers and wolf whistles and at least one piece of bread thrown in the air for reasons that were unclear.
"THAT IS OUR LORD."
"PENDRAGON. PENDRAGON."
"GIVE THEM HELL, MY LORD."
Arthur bowed deeply and theatrically to the crowd, caught both of his wives by the hand, and pulled them toward the corridor that led to the family wing while the cheering followed them through the doors and echoed off the stone walls.
He kissed Mira first, catching her against the wall of the corridor with one hand at the small of her back and the other tangled in her hair, and she made a soft sound against his mouth and kissed him back with two months of longing behind it. Then he turned and kissed Cassie and Cassie's hands came up to grip the front of his tunic as she pulled him closer.
"Arthur," Mira said against his jaw as he broke the kiss with Cassie and leaned back toward her. "Arthur, we need to talk to you about something."
"Later."
"Arthur."
"Mira, I have been on this island for two months without you, and tonight I am going to show both of you exactly how much I missed you, and I am not interested in talking about anything* before that happens."
Both women exchanged another one of those looks.
Cassie's hand found his wrist and she held it firmly enough that he paused. "My love, listen to me, please. I know tonight is not the time for this, and I am sorry, I truly am, but there is something we need to tell you before we go any further. Something we did before we left King's Landing."
The pleasant blur of the wine receded slightly.
Arthur looked at Cassie then looked at Mira. The expressions on their faces were not the expressions of women who wanted to discuss household matters or relay a piece of gossip from the capital. They were the kind of expressions that people wore when they were about to deliver terrible news.
"What did you do?"
Mira reached out and laid both hands against his chest, "Before we tell you, I need you to promise me that you are not going to overreact."
The wine fog was fully gone now.
"Mira. What did you do."
"Promise me first."
"I am not going to promise anything until you tell me what—"
"We did something, Arthur... Something that we should have told you about before we did it. Something that we did because we believed it was the right thing to do, even though we knew you might not agree with how we went about it."
"Cassie." His voice had dropped. "Tell me. Right now. What did you do."
Neither of them answered.
Instead Mira stepped back from him and turned to face the oak door of the lord's chambers at the end of the corridor. Cassie moved to the other side of the door and put her hand on the iron handle. The two women looked at one another across the doorway for a moment, something passing between them that Arthur could not read, and then Cassie pressed down on the handle and pushed the door open.
The lord's chambers were lit by candles burning on the side tables and the glow of the hearth fire. The great bed, the one Arthur had built large enough for five, sat against the far wall beneath the windows. Everything looked exactly the way it should have looked.
Except for the woman sitting in the chair beside the hearth.
She was wearing a plain travelling cloak with the hood pulled up, the kind of cloak that a servant might wear, drab and rough and entirely unremarkable.
She reached up and pulled the hood back from her face.
Silver-gold hair spilled down over her shoulders, catching the firelight, and violet eyes met Arthur's across the length of the chamber.
"Surprise," Rhaella said. The smile on her face was small and fragile and absolutely terrified.
Arthur stood in the doorway.
He did not move.
He did not speak.
He did not even blink.
He stood there with one hand still resting on the doorframe and the other hanging loose at his side, all the while his face went through six different expressions in the space of three seconds before it settled on one that was not quite any of them.
Then he moved.
He took Mira by the arm and Cassie by the shoulder and guided both of them into the room and then he stepped inside after them and closed the door behind him and locked it.
He turned to face all three women.
"Are you out of your minds," he said in a quiet voice. It was the voice he used when he was genuinely angry and was putting a great deal of effort into not shouting.
"Arthur—" Mira started.
"Have you gone completely, irrevocably, catastrophically mad. Do you have any idea what you have done. Any idea at all. Do you understand what this means."
"Arthur, please, if you would just—"
"You have spirited away a princess of the realm. Not just any princess. Not some distant cousin or minor relation that nobody pays attention to. You have taken Rhaella Targaryen, the granddaughter of the King, the sister of the future heir to the Iron Throne, the woman who is betrothed to the future king of the Seven Kingdoms. You have taken her out of the Red Keep and brought her to my island, and you did all of this without telling me."
He had begun to pace.
The lord's chambers were large enough that his pacing carried him a good twenty feet in each direction, which was useful because his legs seemed to need every inch of it. His hands went to the top of his head and locked there, his fingers gripping his hair, as he walked back and forth across the stone floor.
"When they discover she is gone, and they probably already have, the first thing they will do is search the keep. When they do not find her in the keep they will search the city. When they do not find her in the city they will send ravens to every lord in the realm. And when they learn that Mira and Cassie Pendragon, the wives of Lord Arthur Pendragon, left King's Landing on the same day that the princess disappeared, do you know what they will conclude. They will conclude exactly what happened and they will declare us enemies of the crown."
"Arthur—"
"I will be executed." He stopped pacing and turned to face them. "Or sent to the Wall if they are feeling merciful, which they will not be, because this is not a theft of jewellery or a matter of unpaid taxes. This is the abduction of a member of the royal family. This is treason, Mira. This is the kind of treason that ends bloodlines. And the two of you. The two of you will be made silent sisters if you are lucky, and if you are not lucky then I do not even want to think about what—"
"Arthur." Rhaella's voice cut through his. She had risen from the chair and was standing beside the hearth with her hands clasped in front of her.
He stopped.
She met his eyes.
"I am sorry," she said. "I am truly sorry, Arthur. I know what I have done to you by coming here. I know the danger I have put you in, and Mira, and Cassie, and your children. I know that you did not ask for this and that you did not consent to it, and I know that every word you have just said is true. They will come looking for me. They will find out where I have gone. And when they do, the consequences will fall on you and your family because of a choice that I made."
She paused and her hands tightened against one another.
"But I could not stay. Arthur. I could not. Marrying Aerys is not, it is not something I can simply endure the way my mother endures thingsnn. Aerys does not see me. He has never seen me. He looks at me the way a man looks at a chair that has been placed in his room for his convenience, something to be used when it suits him and ignored when it does not, and I know, I know what he will become, Arthur, I have seen the cruelty in him, the way his eyes change when he is frustrated, the way his voice drops when a servant displeases him, the way he—"
Her voice cracked.
"I would rather die. I mean that. I would rather have thrown myself from the balcony of my chambers than stand in a sept and swear my life to that man. And I did not have anyone else, Arthur. I did not have anyone else who could help me, anyone else who would even try. My father agreed to the match. My grandfather agreed to the match. The Kingsguard would not defy a royal command. There was no one. No one except Mira and Cassie, who I took advantage of, who I asked to risk everything they have because I was desperate and alone and afraid."
She drew a shaking breath.
"If you want me to go back, I will go back. I will walk down to the harbour and I will get on a ship and I will return to King's Landing and I will marry Aerys and I will spend the rest of my life behind whatever walls they put me behind, and I will do it because I will not be the reason that your family is destroyed. Just say the word, Arthur. Tell me to go, and I will go."
The room was very quiet.
Arthur stood in the centre of the floor with his hands still locked on top of his head, his chest rising and falling mllll. He looked at Rhaella. He looked at the tears that were beginning to slide down her cheeks in thin silent lines. He looked at the way her hands were shaking where they gripped each other in front of her gown, and the way she was holding herself up straight despite all of it, the spine of a princess who was falling apart and refusing to fall down.
He looked at Mira and Cassie.
Mira was watching him with the unwavering gaze she had given him on every night he had ever come home from something terrible, the gaze that said she had already weighed the risks and made her choice and was waiting to see if he would trust her the way he always trusted her. Cassie stood beside her with Rhaella's hand in hers, and her green eyes were fierce and frightened in equal measure.
A notification chimed softly inside his head.
────────────────────
[QUEST REACTIVATED]
────────────────────
A PRINCESS IN CHAINS
────────────────────
Description:
Princess Rhaella Targaryen has fled her betrothal to Prince Aerys and taken refuge in your home. The choice you deferred once is now upon you. She cannot be hidden forever, and the Crown will come looking.
────────────────────
Path A — Intervene
Objectives:
• Prevent the marriage by any means
Rewards:
• +5,000 XP
• Rhaella's eternal loyalty
• Legendary Trait
• ???
Consequences:
• Potential conflict with the Crown
• Increased political danger for your family
• Unknown ripple effects on the future
────────────────────
Path B — Leave it be
Objectives:
• Do not interfere with the betrothal
Rewards:
• +2,000 XP
• Political safety for your family
• Continued good standing with the Crown
Consequences:
• Rhaella marries Aerys
• Unknown consequences begin to unfold
────────────────────
The notification hung in his vision for a long time.
Path A.
Path B.
The same choice he had been given before, the same choice he had deferred on a balcony in the Red Keep when he had told Rhaella to speak with her grandfather instead. The system was not going to let him defer again. The princess was standing in his bedchamber.
The choice was here.
It was now.
Arthur's hands dropped from the top of his head.
He stood there for a long moment breathing hard through his nose his eyes fixed on a point on the far wall that none of the three women could see.
Then he drew in a single sharp breath through his teeth.
"DAMN IT," he roared.
All three women flinched.
Arthur pressed both palms against his face and dragged them down slowly, pulling at the skin beneath his eyes, and when his hands dropped away the fury in his expression had not gone but it had been pushed down beneath.
He looked at Rhaella.
"You do not leave these chambers. Not for any reason. Not to walk the corridor, not to take the air on the balcony, not to visit the kitchens, not for anything. You stay in this room with the door locked and the curtains drawn and you do not show your face to anyone who is not me or Mira or Cassie. Do you understand me."
Rhaella nodded quickly.
He turned to Mira and Cassie.
"No one comes inside this room. No servants, no visitors, no craftsmen, no one. If anyone asks where the set of meals is going, you tell them the lord of the castle is ill and eating in his chambers. If anyone asks why the door is locked, you tell them it is because I said so and I do not owe anyone an explanation. If anyone so much as looks at this door you come and find me immediately."
Both women nodded.
Arthur turned and walked to the door. He unlocked the bolt, pulled the door open, and stepped out into the corridor. He stood there for a moment with one hand braced against the doorframe and the other hanging at his side, staring down the passage toward the rest of the castle.
He had to think.
He had to find a way to salvage this, to turn an act of desperate love into something that did not end with his head on a spike above the gates of King's Landing. There had to be a path through this that kept his family alive and kept Rhaella safe and did not set the entire realm on fire in the process.
There had to be.
He just could not see it yet.
Arthur pulled the door shut behind him and walked down the corridor alone while somewhere far across the black water of the bay the torches of King's Landing burned against the night sky and a kingdom began to search for its missing princess.
(AN: Shall Arthur save rhaella or should he turn her over to the king or maybe try and find another path. What do you guys think. Anyway hope you enjoyed the chapter.)
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