fic: "Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court" by Tielan - Chapter 6
TITLE: Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court - Part 6: Trust And Service
SUMMARY: Rhodey wouldn't let himself think about that. Wouldn't let himself remember failure.
CHARACTERS: Rhodey, Tony, Maria, Clint, Phil, Logan
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 6: Trust And Service
Rhodey didn't shield from the wind as he stood up on the hilltop outpost that watched over the training camp below. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and let the chill air bite into his flesh and bones, deep into his soul.
There was snow on the breeze - not yet here but close, fluttering through the air in big white flakes that would settle thick on the ground in the camp and turn everything white. It would make the air cold and the paths slushy until someone put a binding spell on the major thoroughfares, and would cloak the weary desperation that had invaded the training camp these last six months leading up to Winsol.
No end to the war against the Hydra.
Thirteen days - the major celebration of the Blood, when they danced for the glory of all the Blood was meant to be - a time of hope and family and promise and laughter.
At least, a time that was supposed to be full of such things.
The last time he'd celebrated Winsol as it was intended to be, Rhodey hadn't yet made the Offering to the Darkness. He'd been youth enough to still play with his young cousins and little sister, but adult enough to be allowed to drink the small cup of hot-blooded rum that was to the glory of Witch, dreams made flesh.
Off to the side, damp gravel crunched. The sharp, edged scent of a Warlord Prince filled the air, a psychic scent as familiar to Rhodey as his own.
"Ugh. Snow. Just what we needed this Winsol."
"Pepper will love it."
"Yeah, well, she doesn't have to shovel it off the paths."
"Isn't that why she has you?"
Tony shrugged. "So she keeps telling me. I thought it was because I was good in bed."
"More than I needed to know."
"She also said you should come by if you're not being all leader-y and broody out here for Winsol."
"Pepper did not say that."
"Well, maybe not the part about asking you around. But 'leader-y and broody' were her exact words."
Rhodey thought but didn't say that 'broody' was something a man wasn't allowed to be around Pepper Potts - unless the male in question was Tony Stark, in which case he brooded nevertheless.
"Which day?"
"I think she said the third. She was quite insistent."
"I'll think about it." Rhodey had stayed at Stark Manor many times. He was welcome any time he cared to turn up on the doorstep - not just by Tony, but by the witch who ran Tony's household and life, and held his heart in her capable hands.
But he preferred not to celebrate Winsol. Too many bitter reminders of what had been and would never be again. It was hard to celebrate all that the Blood were meant to be when all Rhodey could see was the endless now of the war against the Hydra and death.
"Sir." The stockier of the young warriors manning the outpost was standing a few feet away, hovering with a message on his lips. "A contact from Prince Fury - there's a coach approaching with the last squad of warriors from the residence."
"Wonderful," Tony muttered. "We get the kids home in time for Winsol."
Rhodey shot him a look before looking at the messenger. The boy was nearly vibrating with excitement. "And?"
"They're bringing the Queen with them, sir!"
For a second, Rhodey thought he'd misheard. The sudden hot spike of Tony's temper and the pulsing flare of Red Jewelled power that came with it suggested otherwise. Still, he had to check. "The Queen? Fury's Queen? Out here?"
"That's what Prince Coulson said."
"Oh, Coulson's come to visit? Even better." Tony turned to Rhodey. "I'm going out to the Western border to see if there are any small furry creatures hiding under rocks. Kick over a few trees, that sort of thing."
"While you're out there, let Murdock know his squad will be replaced before Winsol." Accustomed to both Tony's whims and his sense of humour, and familiar with his history, Rhodey didn't question his friend's decision. It helped that Tony outranked him, both as a Warlord Prince, and as a male who wore a Red Jewel.
Even if that Jewel was no longer actually coloured Red.
"Wants to spend Winsol with his assassin?"
"You want to spend it with your hearth-witch." Rhodey had never questioned Tony's attachment to Pepper, although others had wondered why a Dark-Jewelled Warlord Prince would be interested in a Rose-Jewelled hearth-witch of no family and no money. "Hey, Tony? Be careful."
Tony smiled - a faint, bitter smile quite unlike the cocky, devil-may-care grins he'd given once upon a time. "You, too."
Rhodey didn't wait to watch Tony leap for the Winds, but dismissed the messenger, and began picking his way down the steep incline towards the camp below, thinking furiously.
What had possessed Fury to send the Queen along? An adolescent witch - an adolescent Queen - in a warrior's camp, walking among males who hadn't seen a Queen in years, if not decades. And right before the Winsol dispersi-
He suddenly saw Fury's plan. The cunning old fox!
Outrage warred with amusement, but both were fruitless when dealing with a Warlord Prince of Fury's age and authority. He let it go.
By the time he reached the camp, the carriage was just rumbling along the access road, and Rhodey's aides came running up, full of reports and news. He cut them off. "Get the men into inspection formation. And have the Warlords report to me."
He met the coachman's eye and nodded. "Good trip?"
"Good enough. The weather's turning."
"If you've got time, take a meal in the mess tent and a rest before you have to go. My aides will show you the way." Rhodey strode over to the door of the carriage. It opened as he reached it, and he put out a hand to help her down.
She was taller than he'd thought.
He was used to thinking of Fury's little Queen as actually 'little' since that was how the warriors rotated in from the residence tended to refer to her. As a result, the tall, slim witch with the speaking eyes was a surprise. So was the fact that, beneath the blue woollen coat she wore, she was dressed in warrior's garb - leather trousers, vest, boots and gloves - and turned to face him with the light-footed, battle-ready stance of a warrior.
Then there was the fact that she was Rhodey's Queen.
He felt the tug of recognition like a punch in the gut, rendering his courtesies mute.
"Lord Rhodes," said her escort - Prince Coulson. Behind him, Barton was surveying the camp with the eyes of a man who would be dangerous no matter his caste or what Jewels he wore, while the returning squadron disembarked and headed off to their quarters.
No Fury, thank the Darkness. Rhodey didn't need Nick Fury looming over his shoulder while he came to grips with the Queen - his Queen.
Mother Night and may the Darkness be merciful.
"Prince Coulson." Rhodey resorted to the formalities - something to ground him, keep him from babbling. He was a mature Warlord in his prime, not some adolescent idiot. "Lady Hill? Welcome to the training camps."
Lady Hill looked around her with bright, interested eyes - meeting gazes, surveying the camp with a judicious eye before turning back to Rhodey. "Lord Rhodes. We apologise for the unexpected visit, but Prince Fury thought I should be informed about the war against the Hydra."
Rhodey considered what he knew of Fury, of the Warlord Prince's temper and protectiveness, considered what he'd have done if his Queen had needed informing about the war. And wondered if the old man was out of his mind.
"He suggested you come out here?"
"No." Her smile glittered, suddenly nothing more than a young and mischievous witch tweaking an older male's nose. "But it's a practical place to start."
*And Fury didn't object?* Rhodey asked Barton on a Purple-Dusk spear thread. *I'm surprised.*
*Probably not as surprised as Fury when he went up against Maria and lost,* Barton replied, amused. *She marshals arguments like warriors and engages them like it's a battlefield.*
He could imagine.
"Did you have anything you wanted to start with?"
"Just give me the induction that you give to the new warriors when they come into camp."
She made it sound so simple. Which it might have been, Rhodey concluded, if not for the fact that she was not only a Queen but his Queen, and his first instinct was to bundle her back into the carriage she and her escort had arrived in and send her back to Aer Gerulus for safekeeping.
Not that he was likely to manage that anymore - not without a fight. The news of her arrival had spread through the camp, and the Warlords he'd gathered to report to him were already watching her with hungry eyes.
How long since most of them - any of them - had seen a Queen? And who was Rhodey to deny them this much connection with her?
"All right. Let's walk." It would give the men a chance to see her, and since they were walking and talking there'd be less interruptions. Theoretically. "How much have you been told of the war?"
"It started when the Hydra attacked the Territory Queen's court twenty five years ago and has been going on since then. They're not Blood, but they're not landen either - they have some form of Craft but it's not anything we've seen before. Their Jewels are clear rather than coloured. They attack the Queens wherever they can find them, and they just keep coming." She glanced over at him. "And we only just discovered that their leader is a male who terms himself 'the Red Skull'."
Her information was good - their knowledge of the Red Skull was fairly recent, and while Rhodey had told Nick, he hadn't expected the Warlord Prince to pass it on to the Queen.
Then again, he hadn't expected this kind of a Queen either.
"Here, in this camp, we're running what's essentially Territory-wide guard duty," Rhodey said. "From here, males are trained and kept informed, assigned guard detail and border watch. We've got several hundred warriors out on rotation at any given time, with a couple hundred stationed here at base before they're shipped out. About a hundred are given leave at any one time to spend with their families if they have them."
"Must be hard on their families."
"It is." Which was one of the chief reasons why Rhodey had never married. "We mitigate it by sending them out in squads - twenty men, trained to guard each other's backs and work as a unit." Friends, comrades, and brothers-in-arms - those you could trust to defend and protect.
"How bad has it been lately?"
Rhodey thought about lying as he followed her gaze around the camp. Then she turned back to him and fixed him with a clear stare. He gave her the truth. "It's gotten worse in the last year. They attack more often and in greater numbers than we've seen."
"The people? The land?"
"We can't protect them all." And it stung. They could fight and fight and fight, but in the end, the helpless still died - Blood and landen communities wiped out, villages and towns left full of corpses, the land left empty, crying out for care.
"And this 'Red Skull' - we've got nothing more on him?"
"Only a little - a glimpse and some rumours. A small group of males with specialised training are following up-"
Rhodey broke off. A dark psychic presence was moving through the camp - familiar and daunting. The psychic wave that rippled around him was usual; the concern that tinged the psychic threads was new.
A moment later the men who'd formed a subtle crowd around Rhodey, Lady Hill, and her entourage stepped back so the Warlord Prince could stride through them, the blades of his metal gloves still dripping with blood. No-one was going to stand in the way of a Grey-Jewelled Warlord Prince who'd just stepped off a killing field, and especially not this one.
Once, he'd been Master at Arms in the Phoenix Court, one of the three most powerful men in the Province - in the Territory, since the Phoenix Court had been the only court standing at the time - a trusted confidante of a dark-Jewelled Queen. He'd trained and taught dozens of males in those years - keeping an eye out for the ones who would be leaders, showing them how to fight, how to organise, how to manage men. Since the fall of the Phoenix Court, he'd mostly roamed solo between the various camps, fighting Hydra, encouraging the warriors, advising the leaders he'd once taught and trained when they asked for help.
He was tall and tanned, with rough-hewn planes to his face that the witches sighed over, and he moved like a predator unchallenged.
He was a predator unchallenged.
"Rhodes," he began, then paused as he saw Maria. His brow furrowed as he stared at her. "What in the Darkness are you doing here?"
The growl that rose in many male throats - Rhodey's among them - was cut off as Maria's eyes narrowed. "It's good to see you, too, Logan."
Logan?
Ripples passed through the crowd, comprehension flowing slowly. Rhodey looked at her escort in confusion, only to find them staring at their Queen with the same expressions of shock. So this was new to them, too?
"You grew up."
"And you got old."
He grinned then, baring his teeth. "Brat. I may be old, but I can still thrash you for insolence."
"I have my own males for that these days."
"But not to keep you from doing stupid things like turning up in a war camp that's about to be attacked by the Hydra? Yeah," he said, the amusement gone as he looked at Rhodey. "You've got company. Several thousand of them at last count. I stopped to cut their numbers by a couple of dozen, but I figured it was more important to warn you than put a dent in them."
Mother Night.
"How far away?" Rhodey asked as he began issuing orders to the sector leaders and his aides on psychic threads. They'd need to mobilise the camp. Get the sentries in. Warn the nearby towns and villages...
"Under an hour." Logan looked at Maria, whose escorts had a hold of her arms and were trying to persuade her to leave. "You won't get away in time. And even if you did; better to stay here - we've got close to five hundred men here and established shields - there'll be nowhere safer."
"Other than a long way away," Phil retorted.
"And how are you going to get her that long way away before the Hydra come?" Logan demanded.
"You want us to risk our Queen-?"
"Listen to me, Barton," Logan interrupted. "I didn't teach Maria her survival skills to see her die cornered by Hydra; so when I say it's a risk, believe me, it's a risk."
Barton gaped for a moment. Coulson seemed equally floored.
"All right, gentlemen." Maria interrupted, her voice clear and authoritative. "We've established that I'm not going anywhere while the Hydra are attacking. Maybe now we should establish how we can help with Lord Rhodey's defence plans for the camp?"
The deference was unexpected - and weighty. Rhodey saw in her eyes the expectation that he would keep not only her, but all of them safe, and felt the press of lives in his hands.
Not again. Mother Night, not again.
But Rhodey wouldn't let himself think about that. Wouldn't let himself remember failure. Not when his Queen was watching him with steady eyes, trusting her life and the lives of these men to his hands and leadership.
He drew on his Purple Dusk Jewel and all the training of years and kept his expression calm as he began issuing orders.
His Queen trusted him to keep her safe. He could do this.
He would do this.
--
Chapter 7: Branded By Her Hand
SUMMARY: Rhodey wouldn't let himself think about that. Wouldn't let himself remember failure.
CHARACTERS: Rhodey, Tony, Maria, Clint, Phil, Logan
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 6: Trust And Service
Rhodey didn't shield from the wind as he stood up on the hilltop outpost that watched over the training camp below. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and let the chill air bite into his flesh and bones, deep into his soul.
There was snow on the breeze - not yet here but close, fluttering through the air in big white flakes that would settle thick on the ground in the camp and turn everything white. It would make the air cold and the paths slushy until someone put a binding spell on the major thoroughfares, and would cloak the weary desperation that had invaded the training camp these last six months leading up to Winsol.
No end to the war against the Hydra.
Thirteen days - the major celebration of the Blood, when they danced for the glory of all the Blood was meant to be - a time of hope and family and promise and laughter.
At least, a time that was supposed to be full of such things.
The last time he'd celebrated Winsol as it was intended to be, Rhodey hadn't yet made the Offering to the Darkness. He'd been youth enough to still play with his young cousins and little sister, but adult enough to be allowed to drink the small cup of hot-blooded rum that was to the glory of Witch, dreams made flesh.
Off to the side, damp gravel crunched. The sharp, edged scent of a Warlord Prince filled the air, a psychic scent as familiar to Rhodey as his own.
"Ugh. Snow. Just what we needed this Winsol."
"Pepper will love it."
"Yeah, well, she doesn't have to shovel it off the paths."
"Isn't that why she has you?"
Tony shrugged. "So she keeps telling me. I thought it was because I was good in bed."
"More than I needed to know."
"She also said you should come by if you're not being all leader-y and broody out here for Winsol."
"Pepper did not say that."
"Well, maybe not the part about asking you around. But 'leader-y and broody' were her exact words."
Rhodey thought but didn't say that 'broody' was something a man wasn't allowed to be around Pepper Potts - unless the male in question was Tony Stark, in which case he brooded nevertheless.
"Which day?"
"I think she said the third. She was quite insistent."
"I'll think about it." Rhodey had stayed at Stark Manor many times. He was welcome any time he cared to turn up on the doorstep - not just by Tony, but by the witch who ran Tony's household and life, and held his heart in her capable hands.
But he preferred not to celebrate Winsol. Too many bitter reminders of what had been and would never be again. It was hard to celebrate all that the Blood were meant to be when all Rhodey could see was the endless now of the war against the Hydra and death.
"Sir." The stockier of the young warriors manning the outpost was standing a few feet away, hovering with a message on his lips. "A contact from Prince Fury - there's a coach approaching with the last squad of warriors from the residence."
"Wonderful," Tony muttered. "We get the kids home in time for Winsol."
Rhodey shot him a look before looking at the messenger. The boy was nearly vibrating with excitement. "And?"
"They're bringing the Queen with them, sir!"
For a second, Rhodey thought he'd misheard. The sudden hot spike of Tony's temper and the pulsing flare of Red Jewelled power that came with it suggested otherwise. Still, he had to check. "The Queen? Fury's Queen? Out here?"
"That's what Prince Coulson said."
"Oh, Coulson's come to visit? Even better." Tony turned to Rhodey. "I'm going out to the Western border to see if there are any small furry creatures hiding under rocks. Kick over a few trees, that sort of thing."
"While you're out there, let Murdock know his squad will be replaced before Winsol." Accustomed to both Tony's whims and his sense of humour, and familiar with his history, Rhodey didn't question his friend's decision. It helped that Tony outranked him, both as a Warlord Prince, and as a male who wore a Red Jewel.
Even if that Jewel was no longer actually coloured Red.
"Wants to spend Winsol with his assassin?"
"You want to spend it with your hearth-witch." Rhodey had never questioned Tony's attachment to Pepper, although others had wondered why a Dark-Jewelled Warlord Prince would be interested in a Rose-Jewelled hearth-witch of no family and no money. "Hey, Tony? Be careful."
Tony smiled - a faint, bitter smile quite unlike the cocky, devil-may-care grins he'd given once upon a time. "You, too."
Rhodey didn't wait to watch Tony leap for the Winds, but dismissed the messenger, and began picking his way down the steep incline towards the camp below, thinking furiously.
What had possessed Fury to send the Queen along? An adolescent witch - an adolescent Queen - in a warrior's camp, walking among males who hadn't seen a Queen in years, if not decades. And right before the Winsol dispersi-
He suddenly saw Fury's plan. The cunning old fox!
Outrage warred with amusement, but both were fruitless when dealing with a Warlord Prince of Fury's age and authority. He let it go.
By the time he reached the camp, the carriage was just rumbling along the access road, and Rhodey's aides came running up, full of reports and news. He cut them off. "Get the men into inspection formation. And have the Warlords report to me."
He met the coachman's eye and nodded. "Good trip?"
"Good enough. The weather's turning."
"If you've got time, take a meal in the mess tent and a rest before you have to go. My aides will show you the way." Rhodey strode over to the door of the carriage. It opened as he reached it, and he put out a hand to help her down.
She was taller than he'd thought.
He was used to thinking of Fury's little Queen as actually 'little' since that was how the warriors rotated in from the residence tended to refer to her. As a result, the tall, slim witch with the speaking eyes was a surprise. So was the fact that, beneath the blue woollen coat she wore, she was dressed in warrior's garb - leather trousers, vest, boots and gloves - and turned to face him with the light-footed, battle-ready stance of a warrior.
Then there was the fact that she was Rhodey's Queen.
He felt the tug of recognition like a punch in the gut, rendering his courtesies mute.
"Lord Rhodes," said her escort - Prince Coulson. Behind him, Barton was surveying the camp with the eyes of a man who would be dangerous no matter his caste or what Jewels he wore, while the returning squadron disembarked and headed off to their quarters.
No Fury, thank the Darkness. Rhodey didn't need Nick Fury looming over his shoulder while he came to grips with the Queen - his Queen.
Mother Night and may the Darkness be merciful.
"Prince Coulson." Rhodey resorted to the formalities - something to ground him, keep him from babbling. He was a mature Warlord in his prime, not some adolescent idiot. "Lady Hill? Welcome to the training camps."
Lady Hill looked around her with bright, interested eyes - meeting gazes, surveying the camp with a judicious eye before turning back to Rhodey. "Lord Rhodes. We apologise for the unexpected visit, but Prince Fury thought I should be informed about the war against the Hydra."
Rhodey considered what he knew of Fury, of the Warlord Prince's temper and protectiveness, considered what he'd have done if his Queen had needed informing about the war. And wondered if the old man was out of his mind.
"He suggested you come out here?"
"No." Her smile glittered, suddenly nothing more than a young and mischievous witch tweaking an older male's nose. "But it's a practical place to start."
*And Fury didn't object?* Rhodey asked Barton on a Purple-Dusk spear thread. *I'm surprised.*
*Probably not as surprised as Fury when he went up against Maria and lost,* Barton replied, amused. *She marshals arguments like warriors and engages them like it's a battlefield.*
He could imagine.
"Did you have anything you wanted to start with?"
"Just give me the induction that you give to the new warriors when they come into camp."
She made it sound so simple. Which it might have been, Rhodey concluded, if not for the fact that she was not only a Queen but his Queen, and his first instinct was to bundle her back into the carriage she and her escort had arrived in and send her back to Aer Gerulus for safekeeping.
Not that he was likely to manage that anymore - not without a fight. The news of her arrival had spread through the camp, and the Warlords he'd gathered to report to him were already watching her with hungry eyes.
How long since most of them - any of them - had seen a Queen? And who was Rhodey to deny them this much connection with her?
"All right. Let's walk." It would give the men a chance to see her, and since they were walking and talking there'd be less interruptions. Theoretically. "How much have you been told of the war?"
"It started when the Hydra attacked the Territory Queen's court twenty five years ago and has been going on since then. They're not Blood, but they're not landen either - they have some form of Craft but it's not anything we've seen before. Their Jewels are clear rather than coloured. They attack the Queens wherever they can find them, and they just keep coming." She glanced over at him. "And we only just discovered that their leader is a male who terms himself 'the Red Skull'."
Her information was good - their knowledge of the Red Skull was fairly recent, and while Rhodey had told Nick, he hadn't expected the Warlord Prince to pass it on to the Queen.
Then again, he hadn't expected this kind of a Queen either.
"Here, in this camp, we're running what's essentially Territory-wide guard duty," Rhodey said. "From here, males are trained and kept informed, assigned guard detail and border watch. We've got several hundred warriors out on rotation at any given time, with a couple hundred stationed here at base before they're shipped out. About a hundred are given leave at any one time to spend with their families if they have them."
"Must be hard on their families."
"It is." Which was one of the chief reasons why Rhodey had never married. "We mitigate it by sending them out in squads - twenty men, trained to guard each other's backs and work as a unit." Friends, comrades, and brothers-in-arms - those you could trust to defend and protect.
"How bad has it been lately?"
Rhodey thought about lying as he followed her gaze around the camp. Then she turned back to him and fixed him with a clear stare. He gave her the truth. "It's gotten worse in the last year. They attack more often and in greater numbers than we've seen."
"The people? The land?"
"We can't protect them all." And it stung. They could fight and fight and fight, but in the end, the helpless still died - Blood and landen communities wiped out, villages and towns left full of corpses, the land left empty, crying out for care.
"And this 'Red Skull' - we've got nothing more on him?"
"Only a little - a glimpse and some rumours. A small group of males with specialised training are following up-"
Rhodey broke off. A dark psychic presence was moving through the camp - familiar and daunting. The psychic wave that rippled around him was usual; the concern that tinged the psychic threads was new.
A moment later the men who'd formed a subtle crowd around Rhodey, Lady Hill, and her entourage stepped back so the Warlord Prince could stride through them, the blades of his metal gloves still dripping with blood. No-one was going to stand in the way of a Grey-Jewelled Warlord Prince who'd just stepped off a killing field, and especially not this one.
Once, he'd been Master at Arms in the Phoenix Court, one of the three most powerful men in the Province - in the Territory, since the Phoenix Court had been the only court standing at the time - a trusted confidante of a dark-Jewelled Queen. He'd trained and taught dozens of males in those years - keeping an eye out for the ones who would be leaders, showing them how to fight, how to organise, how to manage men. Since the fall of the Phoenix Court, he'd mostly roamed solo between the various camps, fighting Hydra, encouraging the warriors, advising the leaders he'd once taught and trained when they asked for help.
He was tall and tanned, with rough-hewn planes to his face that the witches sighed over, and he moved like a predator unchallenged.
He was a predator unchallenged.
"Rhodes," he began, then paused as he saw Maria. His brow furrowed as he stared at her. "What in the Darkness are you doing here?"
The growl that rose in many male throats - Rhodey's among them - was cut off as Maria's eyes narrowed. "It's good to see you, too, Logan."
Logan?
Ripples passed through the crowd, comprehension flowing slowly. Rhodey looked at her escort in confusion, only to find them staring at their Queen with the same expressions of shock. So this was new to them, too?
"You grew up."
"And you got old."
He grinned then, baring his teeth. "Brat. I may be old, but I can still thrash you for insolence."
"I have my own males for that these days."
"But not to keep you from doing stupid things like turning up in a war camp that's about to be attacked by the Hydra? Yeah," he said, the amusement gone as he looked at Rhodey. "You've got company. Several thousand of them at last count. I stopped to cut their numbers by a couple of dozen, but I figured it was more important to warn you than put a dent in them."
Mother Night.
"How far away?" Rhodey asked as he began issuing orders to the sector leaders and his aides on psychic threads. They'd need to mobilise the camp. Get the sentries in. Warn the nearby towns and villages...
"Under an hour." Logan looked at Maria, whose escorts had a hold of her arms and were trying to persuade her to leave. "You won't get away in time. And even if you did; better to stay here - we've got close to five hundred men here and established shields - there'll be nowhere safer."
"Other than a long way away," Phil retorted.
"And how are you going to get her that long way away before the Hydra come?" Logan demanded.
"You want us to risk our Queen-?"
"Listen to me, Barton," Logan interrupted. "I didn't teach Maria her survival skills to see her die cornered by Hydra; so when I say it's a risk, believe me, it's a risk."
Barton gaped for a moment. Coulson seemed equally floored.
"All right, gentlemen." Maria interrupted, her voice clear and authoritative. "We've established that I'm not going anywhere while the Hydra are attacking. Maybe now we should establish how we can help with Lord Rhodey's defence plans for the camp?"
The deference was unexpected - and weighty. Rhodey saw in her eyes the expectation that he would keep not only her, but all of them safe, and felt the press of lives in his hands.
Not again. Mother Night, not again.
But Rhodey wouldn't let himself think about that. Wouldn't let himself remember failure. Not when his Queen was watching him with steady eyes, trusting her life and the lives of these men to his hands and leadership.
He drew on his Purple Dusk Jewel and all the training of years and kept his expression calm as he began issuing orders.
His Queen trusted him to keep her safe. He could do this.
He would do this.
--
Chapter 7: Branded By Her Hand