Arthur woke with a smile on his face as the sunlight illuminated his chambers. For the first time in as long as he could remember he did not wake with the grinding ache of a healing wound or the tight knot of some unsolved problem sitting behind his eyes or even just the exhausting work of a squire.
He awoke naturally at the time his body wished to and what made it better was the moment he did, he was greeted with the knowledge of what today was.
Their arrival.
He lay there for a moment and let himself feel it properly, the anticipation that had been building in his chest for the past week swelling up now into something that was very nearly giddiness. Then he threw the covers off and swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up and stretched his arms above his head until his shoulders popped, and the sheer scale of the room he was standing in still made him shake his head slightly even after sleeping in it for a three days.
The lord's chambers of Camelot were, by any measure he could think of, absurd.
The bedroom alone was at least three times the size of Rhaella's chambers back at the Red Keep, which had been the grandest room he had ever spent any significant time in, and the bedroom was only one part of the suite.
Through the archway on the left was a personal library which contained shelves running floor to ceiling along three walls with enough space for more books than Arthur currently owned or had ever seen in one place.
Through the archway on the right was a bathing room fed by the same mountain spring that ran through the keep's interior, the water channelled into a deep stone basin that was large enough for three people and warm enough that steam drifted off the surface. Beyond the bathing room was a private dining chamber with a long table of polished oak and chairs for eight and a hearth of its own.
And beyond all of that was the balcony.
The balcony was not really a balcony. It was a terrace, a broad stone platform that jutted out from the eastern face of the keep and hung over the cliff edge with the waterfall thundering past below. It was large enough that Arthur had already marked out a section for a garden and another section where a man could train and practice sword forms.
From its edge you could see the entire eastern half of Brightwater spread out beneath you like a painting, the forest and the lake and the farmland and the coastline and the blue-grey ocean of the Blackwater Bay stretching to the horizon beyond.
Camelot truly was a beautiful castle.
Arthur crossed the bathing room and lowered himself into the warm water of the basin, letting it close over his shoulders while the heat worked into the last of the stiffness that the morning always left in his back. He scrubbed himself clean with a rough cloth, washed his hair, climbed out and dried himself before pulling on a clean tunic and breeches and good, buckling Sunset at his hip more out of habit than any expectation of needing it.
He stepped out of his chambers and into the corridor beyond.
The corridor was empty, in fact, it was spectacularly empty. Arthur walked the full length of it without seeing a single soul. He turned a corner and walked down another corridor. Also empty. He descended a flight of stairs, crossed through what would eventually be the great hall when it had furniture in it beyond the high table and a few benches, and emerged into a secondary passage that connected the keep to the kitchens.
Still empty.
He had been living in the castle for three days now and the sheer scale of the castle still caught him off guard. He had walked past the same tapestry hook three times yesterday before realising he had been going in a circle, and the night before that he had spent a quarter of an hour trying to find the kitchen only to discover it was directly below the room he had just come from, connected by a stairway he had walked past without noticing.
He eventually found people in the kitchens.
Three women from the southern village were working around the long preparation table in the centre of the room, their sleeves rolled up and their faces flushed with heat from the enormous hearth that dominated the far wall. Dalla was among them, the young baker from the harbour village, her wheat-coloured hair tied back with a strip of cloth while she kneaded a vast quantity of dough.
Beside her a stout older woman named Wynna was plucking a row of chickens, and at the far end of the table a quiet girl named Lorra was slicing vegetables into a pot.
"Good morning, my lord," Dalla said without looking up from the dough. "If you are looking for breakfast it is on the sideboard behind you, Clara was meant to bring it up to you but she forgot to lead the lambs up to the slaughter house for night."
Arthur glanced at the sideboard,m and picked up a piece of bread and cheese instead. "It's no issue, like I said before getting the castle in working order takes priority for the moment. How are the preparations coming."
Wynna looked up from her chickens. "Well enough, my lord. We have four pigs on the spit down at the harbour already, and Brin's husband caught a dozen good-sized fish at dawn that will go into the stew. Dalla's been baking since before the sun came up."
"I suspect we shall have more than enough for the feast then," Arthur said with a smile before he took his bread and cheese and retreated.
The inner keep opened onto the great courtyard of the outer walls, and the moment Arthur stepped through the iron-banded doors into the morning air the scale of the castle hit him again in a way that it had not quite done from the inside. The courtyard was enormous. Not merely large in the way that the Red Keep's courtyard was large, but genuinely vast, the space within the outer curtain wall stretching out in every direction until the far walls looked small against the sky.
Buildings lined the interior of the curtain wall on all sides. The barracks ran along the northern stretch, a stone structure with bunks for five hundred men and an armoury at one end. The stables occupied the southwestern corner, wide and airy with stalls for a hundred horses and a hayloft above.
A servants' quarter had been built into the eastern wall, a cluster of houses with their own kitchen and common area. The training yard sat in the open space between the barracks and the keep, paved in smooth flat stone with weapon racks and a quintain post and a long wall for archers.
Beyond the training yard, in the wide open space that filled the southern half of the courtyard, someone had already begun to lay out garden beds and a large paddock where a few of the island's sheep had been brought up to graze on the grass.
Arthur crossed the courtyard, greeting the handful of workers he passed as he went. Two of Torren's quarrymen were fitting a new stone into additional buildings that Arthur had ordered made. A young boy from Orwin's village was sweeping the steps of the great hall with a broom nearly twice his height. A pair of women from the new harbour village were stringing a line of coloured cloth between two pillars near the gatehouse.
"What is this," Arthur asked, pausing beside them.
The taller of the two women, a dark-haired woman named Sable who had come over from Duskendale with her mason husband, looked up with a grin. "Decorations, my lord. For the feast tonight. I know it is not much, but we thought the place could use a bit of colour. It is all very grey, if you do not mind my saying."
"It is very grey... isn't it? Thank you, Sable."
"Your wives are going to love it here, my lord, I am sure of it. My Edric has been talking all week about how he wants to meet them, though I suspect that is mostly because he heard Lady Cassandra is a Targaryen and he wants to see if her hair is really silver."
"It is not silver. But our son's is."
Sable's eyes went wide. "A silver-haired baby. Oh, my lord. The women of the island are going to fight over who gets to hold him first."
Arthur laughed and kept walking.
He reached the stables and found Quiet standing in her stall with the same unblinking stare she always wore, her eyes tracking him the moment he appeared at the entrance. He saddled her quickly and he led her out into the courtyard and swung up onto her back.
"Let us go bring them home, girl."
He rode out through the gatehouse, Quiet's hooves clattering across the stone of the archway, and turned down the winding road that led from the fortress shelf through the forest and down toward the coast.
Two months.
It had been two months since he had held them.
Two months since he had pressed his face into Mira's hair and felt her hands on his back. Two months since Cassie had called him an idiot and kissed his cheek at the same time. Two months since he had held his children and felt the small warm weight of them against his chest and breathed them in.
The road wound down through the trees and the harbour came into view below.
___________________________________
On a ship heading out of Kings Landing Mira stood at the port rail with Mordred and Morgana bundled against her chest while the salt breeze caught her loose hair and threw it back across her shoulders.
Cassie stood beside her with Percival on her hip, the silver-haired boy staring out at the water with his green eyes wide open and his tiny mouth forming a small O of fascination every time a wave broke against the hull and sent a spray of white foam up past the rail. Cassie held him with one arm while the other hand gripped the wooden railing, her dark hair tied back in the practical braid she had taken to wearing.
"Gods, but it is good to breathe again," Mira said as she closed her eyes and turned her face directly into the wind. "I had forgotten what clean air smelled like."
"I could definitely get used to the smell," Cassie said with a smile.
"I can scarcely believe the day has come." Mira opened her eyes and looked out toward the horizon. "Just us and Arthur and a place we can finally make into our home."
"It all seems like a fairy tail doesn't it?" Cassie said while looking at Mira.
"It does... but if anyone could make a fairy tail real it's Arthur." Mira laughed, and for a moment the two women stood together at the rail in comfortable silence.
Cassie shifted Percival to her other hip and glanced back over her shoulder at the cabin behind them, and when she looked at Mira again the easy warmth in her expression had been replaced by something more serious.
"Mira."
Mira's jaw tightened slightly wnd she did not turn from the rail. "Yes."
"Are we putting everything we have at risk."
The words sat between them for a moment while the waves slapped against the hull and the wind hummed through the rigging.
"Cassie... I thought we—"
"I am serious, Mira. I have been thinking about it every hour since we left. What we did. What it could mean if anyone finds out. What it could cost Arthur, and the children, and everything he has built on that island. We did not even ask him. We did not even tell him. We just... did it."
Mira's hands tightened on the rail and she was quiet for several long breaths, the wind pulling at her hair, before she spoke. "No one saw. We were careful, Cassie. There is nothing to connect us. As far as anyone in that keep knows we left on a ship this morning with our children and our belongings and nothing else. They should not be able to trace it back."
"Should not?"
"Will not."
Cassie looked at her. "And when Arthur finds out what we have done. He is going to be furious."
Mira let out a slow breath through her nose. "He might be. For a little while. But I know Arthur and I know that if he had been there he would have done exactly the same thing."
"I hope so," Cassie said quietly.
"I know so."
Cassie looked back toward the cabin one more time, and Mira reached over and squeezed her hand once, brief and firm.
"It will be all right, Cass. It will all be all right."
Cassie nodded. She did not look entirely convinced, but she held Mira's hand for a moment longer before releasing it and turning Percival back toward the open water.
The island was getting closer.
_____________________________________
Arthur was sitting on the stone bollard at the end of the pier with his legs hanging over the edge when Orwin found him.
The old man settled onto the bollard beside him and folded his hands in his lap and looked out at the water with the same expression he had been wearing since the day Arthur first stepped off a gangplank and into his life.
"You are fidgeting, my lord."
"I am not fidgeting."
"You have picked up a pebble and thrown it into the water six times in the last quarter of an hour. That is fidgeting."
Arthur looked down at his hand and discovered that he was, in fact, holding a pebble. He threw it into the water.
"Seven," Orwin said.
Brin arrived next, striding down the dock from the harbour road with her perpetual scowl firmly in place and her enormous shaggy dog trotting at her heels. She did not sit. She simply planted herself a few feet away with her arms crossed over her leather apron and stood there.
"Is the ship here yet."
"Not yet," Arthur said.
"Good. I brought nails."
Arthur stared at her. "You brought nails. To my wife's arrival."
"A welcome gift. Three hundred of them. Best I have ever made. Any woman who is married to you is going to need a great many nails for all the things she will have to fix."
"Thank you, Brin.... I think."
Torren came down the hill next with Pol in tow, the one-eyed quarryman carrying a clay jug of something that smelled strong enough to strip paint. Behind them came Harmon the lumber boss, freshly scrubbed and wearing what appeared to be an actual clean shirt, and Godric the farmer, who had brought a basket of early vegetables from the new fields as a gift for the lord's wives. Dalla arrived last, slightly out of breath and dusted with flour, carrying a wrapped loaf of bread that was still warm from the oven.
They gathered around Arthur on the dock in a cluster, and for a while they simply talked.
"So," Torren said while he uncorked the jug and took a sip that made his one remaining eye water. "Two wives.... at the same time."
"At the same time," Arthur confirmed.
"And three babies."
"Three babies."
Torren shook his head slowly. "How?"
"I can barely manage the one woman I have. She has opinions about everything, my lord. Everything. The way I cut stone. The way I eat my supper. The way I breathe too loud when I sleep. Two of them would kill me inside a fortnight."
"My wife is worse," Harmon said. He crossed his arms and nodded. "Twenty-three years and that woman has not let me win a single argument. Not one. Two wives, my lord. You are either the bravest man I have ever met or the most foolish."
"Can he not be both," Orwin offered.
"Aye."
Pol, who was perhaps nineteen and had never been married leaned forward. "Is it true they are both beautiful, my lord."
"They are the most beautiful women in the world, Pol."
"And one of them is a Targaryen."
"She is."
"With silver hair."
"Not her but our son does."
Pol's eyes went very wide and he opened his mouth to ask another question but Torren reached over and cuffed him on the back of the head without looking. "Close your mouth, boy, before something flies into it."
"SHIP," a boy's voice rang out from the top of the harbour wall. "SHIP COMING IN, I CAN SEE THE SAIL."
Arthur was on his feet before the boy had finished the second word.
He walked to the end of the pier and shaded his eyes with one hand and looked out toward the mouth of the harbour, and there it was a single-masted trading cog cutting a m white line through the water as it angled toward the inlet.
His heart was beating faster than it had in months.
Mira.
Cassie.
His throat tightened.
After an hour or so the cog entered the harbour and the crew furled the sail as the vessel coasted the last hundred yards toward the pier on its own momentum. A deckhand threw a mooring line and one of the harbour men caught it and hauled the ship in, the hull bumping gently against the dock, then the gangplank was lowered with a thud onto the wood of the pier.
Arthur did not wait for it to settle.
He was up the gangplank his boots ringing on the planks, and when Mira saw him coming her whole face broke open into something that was half laugh and half sob, and she had just enough time to shift the twins to one arm before Arthur reached her and pulled her against him with the other.
She was here.
She was finally here.
Arthur buried his face in her hair and breathed her in while his arms tightened around her and the twins squirmed and made small protesting noises between their bodies.
"Mira," he said against her temple. "Gods Mira you're finally home."
"I am here, my love,"'she said, her free hand gripping the back of his tunic hard enough to bunch the fabric into her fist. "Oh, Arthur. I missed you. I missed you every single day."
He pulled back just far enough to kiss her, properly and thoroughly, one hand cradling the back of her head while the other steadied the twins against her chest. She kissed him back with two months of missing him behind it, and somewhere on the dock below one of the island men let out a low appreciative whistle that was immediately followed by the sound of Brin's elbow connecting with someone's ribs.
Arthur broke the kiss only because Cassie made am impatient sound behind him that clearly communicated she had been waiting long enough.
He turned and she was there, Percival balanced on her hip with his silver hair catching the light, and her green eyes were already spilling over and her lower lip was trembling.
"Come here," Arthur said.
She came.
He wrapped his arms around both of them, Cassie and Percival together, and Cassie pressed her face into the curve of his neck the way she always did when she was trying not to cry in front of people, and Percival grabbed a fistful of Arthur's hair and pulled with the determined strength of a baby who was very glad to see his father and had chosen an unusual way to express it.
"Ow," Arthur said.
"Oh, shush," Cassie whispered against his throat, laughing through her tears. "You survived a wyvern. You can survive a baby pulling your hair."
"I am not so sure about that."
He kissed the top of her head and then Percival's silver crown and then Cassie's lips. She gripped the front of his tunic with her free hand and held on as though she were afraid the ship might suddenly pull away from the dock and take her back to King's Landing.
"I love you," she whispered.
"I love you too, Cass. Both of you. All of you. Every single one of you."
He guided them both down the gangplank, one arm around Mira's waist and the other steadying Cassie's elbow, and the moment their feet touched the dock the small crowd of islanders surged forward to meet them.
Orwin was first, bowing neatly at the waist with his white beard freshly trimmed. "My ladies. Welcome to Brightwater Isle. We have heard so much about you from your husband that I feel as though we are already old friends."
Mira gave him a smile that was still wet at the edges and took his offered hand. "You must be Orwin. Arthur has spoken of you in every letter. He says you are the wisest man on the island."
"The wisest and the oldest, my lady, which are often the same thing and occasionally the opposite."
Dalla pressed forward and offered the wrapped loaf of bread with both hands. "My lady. Welcome. This bread was baked this morning and it is the best I have ever made, and if your husband tries to tell you about the rosemary recipe please know that it was my idea and he merely suggested the honey."
Brin was next, presenting her bundle of nails with the grim ceremony of a general surrendering a fortress. "Three hundred nails, my lady. Best iron on the island. You will find uses for them I'm sure."
Cassie looked at the nails and then at Arthur and then back at the nails. "Thank you," she said, with a smile.
Torren offered his jug. Godric offered his basket of vegetables. Pol stood at the back of the group and turned approximately the colour of a ripe tomato when Cassie looked at him and said hello. Harmon shook both women's hands and his wife, who had come down from the new village to see the arrivals, immediately took charge of admiring the babies.
"Oh, look at them. My lord, you did not tell us they were this beautiful. And the silver hair, oh, oh, come here, little one, come and let me see those eyes, oh my days, oh my goodness..."
The introductions went on for some time.
Arthur stood in the middle of all of it and watched his wives being absorbed into the community he had spent two months building, watched Mira's and cassies natural warmth draw people to her the way it always did. Neither of them looked down on the small folk. Neither of them spoke with the condescension that highborn ladies sometimes used when addressing smallfolk. They spoke the way they had always spoken, like people talking to other people, and the islanders responded to it immediately.
Eventually Arthur raised his voice above the chatter.
"All right. Everyone. The feast begins at sundown, and I want all of you at Camelot for it. Every man, woman, and child on this island is welcome, so spread the word to the other villages. Tonight we eat and we drink and we celebrate, because my family is finally home."
A cheer went up from the small crowd on the dock.
Arthur turned and helped Mira up into the carriage he had arranged, a simple but sturdy cart with a cushioned bench and a canvas awning. Cassie climbed up beside her with Percival on her lap, and the twins were settled between them in a nest of folded blankets. Arthur closed the gate at the back of the cart and walked around to speak to the driver.
"Take the main road up through the forest. Go slowly, I want them to see the island on the way."
"Aye, my lord."
Arthur swung up onto Quiet and fell in beside the carriage as it rolled away from the harbour, and behind them the crowd began to disperse in every direction to spread the word.
____________________________________
Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen walked down the centre of the corridor leading to his daughter's chambers with an ill look on his face and a quick step in his feet.
He was not in a pleasant mood.
The small council meeting that morning had gone badly, the reports from Dragonstone were getting worse instead of better, and his father had spent the better part of an hour lecturing him about the importance of presenting a united family front to the lords of the realm, which Jaehaerys had interpreted as a thinly veiled instruction to go and make certain he had made up with his daughter.
She should simply just do as she's told.
He shouldn't beggar himself to her like this.
He reached her door.
A Kingsguard stood beside it his eyes fixed on the middle distance not reacting to the Princes presence.
Jaehaerys knocked twice on the door.
"Rhaella. It is your father. Open up, I need to speak with you about the preparations for the betrothal ceremony. Your mother wants to know which seamstress she has chosen for the dress and wants the guest list finalised by tomorrow morning."
Silence.
He knocked again, harder.
"Rhaella. I know you are not happy about any of this but ignoring me is not going to make it go away. Open the door."
Silence.
Jaehaerys pressed his lips together and looked at the Kingsguard beside the door. "Has she been in there all day."
"Yes, my prince. The princess has not left her chambers since last evening."
Jaehaerys considered this for a moment. Rhaella had been difficult for weeks now, sulking and weeping and refusing to participate in any of the wedding preparations with a stubbornness that his wife had described as theatrical and their father had described as understandable, and Jaehaerys had privately described as exhausting.
"Rhaella. I am coming in."
He pushed the door open.
The room was empty.
Jaehaerys stood in the doorway for a long moment. Then he walked into the chamber and looked behind the curtains and behind the screen and into the bathing room and out onto the balcony.
Empty.
No Rhaella.
A cold feeling settled into the bottom of his stomach.
He turned back to the corridor and seized the Kingsguard by the front of his armour and dragged the man two paces sideways until they were both standing in the open doorway, and Jaehaerys thrust his free hand toward the empty chamber behind them.
"You told me she has not left her chambers."
"She has not, my prince. I have been at this post since—"
"LOOK!!!" Jaehaerys shook the man once, hard enough that the armour rattled. "Look at that room. Does that look like a room with a princess in it to you. Does it. She is gone. She has not been here for hours at the very least."
The Kingsguard's face went white beneath his helm.
Jaehaerys released him with a shove that sent the man stumbling backward against the wall, and the prince turned and strode to the end of the corridor where a pair of household guards stood at their post.
"Lock down the keep. Every gate, every door, every postern, every servants' passage. No one enters or leaves without my personal authorisation. Send word to the Lord Commander that Princess Rhaella is missing from her chambers and order a full search of the castle, top to bottom, every room, every corridor, every cellar, every tower. I want every Kingsguard, every Gold Cloak, and every household guard looking for her. And send a runner to my father. Tell him..."
Jaehaerys paused.
His jaw worked silently for a moment.
"Tell him his granddaughter is gone."
(AN: So the family has reunited and Rhaella is missing, I wonder where she could possibly be... anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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