fic: "Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court" by Tielan - Chapter 3
TITLE: Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court - Part 3: No Solutions
SUMMARY: As long as the Hydra attacked the land, they'd never have peace.
CHARACTERS: Clint, Phil, Natasha.
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 3: No Solutions
graphic by hiddencait
Clint's instructions had been to get the Lady out of the residence so the household staff could move her into the Queen's rooms, determine her skill at hunting and hiding out on the land, and see if he couldn't persuade her to be a little more forthcoming about her past
As Fury put it, "She's been here nearly four months. Get her to open up about her time in the forest - and before that, if you can."
So far, Maria had been close-mouthed about how she came to be in the forest, only mentioning that she'd been there for a number of years.
It burned Clint's blood to think of people - Blood - leaving an adolescent girl to fend for herself, out on the edges of the Blood society.
They left at daybreak, and returned at sunset.
The new rooms were received with quiet delight - her own workroom, her own library, her own door to the garden. She even smiled as she trailed her fingers across the spines of the books they'd brought in from the library to fill her bookcase - a slow, peeping curve of pleasure that sparked something warm in Clint's belly.
She didn't hug them, or do more than say thank you; but her pleasure was palpable, and that was enough for the moment.
"Nick's gone out to the town," Phil said when they left Maria to clean up for dinner. "He said he'll be late - a meeting in town with more complaints about the warriors."
"They haven't been badly-behaved, have they?"
"No. But the daughters of the townspeople take great interest in the well-built young males who occasionally come into town to spend a little of their money. And the merchants and aristos object to this." The sardonic smile of the older male said a great deal about the townspeople who had their fletching in a flutter.
"And what, exactly, do they expect Fury to do about it since it's not a discipline problem?"
"They're townspeople," Phil said with sardonic understatement. "It's hard to tell."
"They're idiots."
Clint still remembered the last meeting they'd had with the merchants a year ago, when they'd gone back to request the traditional tithe from the town to the Queen and her court - for the nurturing and protection of the land.
The head of the Brewer's Guild - a lean whipcord of a man who'd looked almost the match for Nick - had told the Residence representatives that the warriors could sit in the Queen's residence and say they had the right to collect tithes, but there was no Queen in the residence, feeding the land. The Hydra hadn't attacked here in twenty years, and without a Queen they weren't likely to, neither. The town of Aer Gerulus would hold its independence from the residence.
He hadn't quite called the warriors 'brainless, muscle-bound dicks', but Clint thought it'd been close.
After that, the warriors who moved in and out of the residence on rotation from the camps went into the town to spend their wages, but the personnel permanently stationed in the residence opted not to spend what they had on anything more than the basics.
"Fury figured he'd go and make an appearance anyway." Phil gave him a sideways glance as they headed towards Clint's rooms. "You look like you've had a long day."
"Something like that." Clint shook his head. "She pretty much ran me ragged."
"Not surprising, considering she'd been living in that cottage for several years. Did you find out why?"
"No. She keeps her secrets like a miser."
"Protecting people who didn't even look after her." Phil muttered. "She lets us in, but she doesn't trust us."
"Tasha says she's warming to the idea of having a court."
"She's a Queen. Having a court should come as naturally as breathing." Phil held up a hand with a rueful smile. "I'm repeating myself. I know. Go get cleaned up and I'll see you at dinner."
Clint grinned, and went to get cleaned up.
He'd just gotten out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his hips, and was contemplating skipping dinner when there was a knock on the door.
A quick psychic probe showed only one of the maids, and he dropped the shields and opened the door.
Natasha balanced a tray in one hand while the other held a small crossbow pointed at his balls. "You're not using the spells I gave you against coercion and illusion, Clint."
"I wasn't expecting to be ambushed in my rooms." Clint stepped back, holding the door open as she walked in, vanishing the crossbow, and putting the tray down on the table in the sitting room. "And couldn't you have waited until I was dressed?"
The look she gave him was plain enough and the heated kiss she gave him even plainer. But when he leaned in and she leaned back, it seemed seduction wasn't on her mind.
"I figured you wouldn't want to be in court dinner after keeping up with Maria the whole day."
"Good call. Someone taught her to hunt. Not just game - people." Clint blew a long breath out. That had been a shock - to have her come up behind him and poke him in the back with a stick. "She got the jump on me the first time. After that, I kept an eye out. But she was taught how to track people with darker Jewels - and probably how to bring them down, too."
"She was given good training." Natasha lifted the covers on the food. "Court protocol, survival, hunting, the Hourglass arts..."
In middle of putting on a dressing gown, Clint paused. "The Hourglass? She's a Black Widow Queen?"
He knew Natasha had been working with Maria in the area of Craft and spells, but he didn't think they'd been going through the Black Widow training just yet.
"The arts of the Hourglass can be learned by any of the Blood, Clint, not just Black Widows. We have a natural advantage because of our caste; but it's not unknown for witches from other castes to also get training in the Hourglass. Or it wasn't. Here." She passed him a plate of stew - meaty bones and thick broth.
The meal wasn't fancy, but their first shared meal had been rabbit spitted over a forest fire, each wary and watchful of the unknown other. Clint had known perfectly well that the beautiful woman sitting across from him was death, but he'd been young and brash and immortal in his own head. And although she hadn't smiled when he'd told her it was cold and they should share bedrolls, she hadn't gutted him for insolence either.
When you're older, maybe.
He'd been pragmatic enough to think of it as sop, not a promise. A witch like that would find a male - or a dozen - willing to warm her bed long before Clint became old enough to be more than an over-eager puppy between her thighs.
To say she'd surprised him was an understatement.
"When did you realise she'd been trained in the Hourglass?"
Natasha ran her finger along the bone, neatly stripping it of meat. "After her first moontime in the library." She sucked on a fingertip for a moment. "The tangled webs surrounding that library that should have torn her mind out, Clint. I had to take them down so you and Phil and Nick could come in, but she was already there when I walked in. And the protections were untouched so far as I could see."
"Keyed to her?"
"How? The residence was abandoned back when the then-court fell, and that was before she was born."
Clint spooned up his food and asked a question he'd had in the back of his mind for some time now. "Did the Black Widows see what would happen to SHIELD Territory?"
"I don't know," she said. "I've never asked any of them."
"But?"
"I think they saw it." Natasha dipped a hunk of meat in the sauce on her plate. Tucked it into her mouth. Chewed thoughtfully. "Someone groomed her to rule - and not just a village or a town, but a Province or a Territory. Her training's too thorough, her knowledge too complete for a sixteen year-old Queen who's been living in the forest for a couple of years..."
"Whoever mentored her was teaching these things to a witch who was barely out of childhood."
"Yes."
"And just left her out there to survive?"
"It's not unknown."
He watched the wary stillness of the pale jaw behind the corkscrew curls that slid across her cheekbone like a veil. Her own training had started in childhood: moving stealthily, learning to kill - with weapons and with jewels. And, like Maria, she'd been abandoned at a relatively young age.
"Is it possible the people who trained you also trained her?"
"No. My trainers and mentors are dead."
"Some of the dead can still teach and train," Clint reminded her. The Blood were more than merely flesh; the power that resided in them could last on beyond the death of the body. Called the demon-dead, most were simply the people they'd been in life, only their bodies no longer healed naturally. The regular drinking of blood - mostly animal although a little human - prevented them from rotting, and they could fight and think, work and play, learn and teach, before their power faded and they became no more than a whisper in the Darkness.
"These ones can't," Natasha murmured. "The executioners would have finished the kill, ensured they couldn't become demon-dead. And they didn't know anything about ruling and management of a court. Only how to kill."
"Well, someone taught her how to hunt males. Someone who thought she'd someday need that skill."
"I'd have thought you'd be glad someone had taught her how to protect herself."
"Oh, I'm glad of it. Just...disturbed, too."
"What did she do today?"
Clint shrugged and put the plate down on the side table, leaning forward so his elbows rested on his knees. "We started out trapping - snares and such. Moved onto hunting when we found a herd of fallow deer. Then I suggested we try tracking instead. I'd get a five minute head start, and she'd try to track me."
"And she surprised you."
"To say the least." He'd nearly put a psychic bolt through her shields, he was that startled. After that, he paid attention and she didn't get past him again. But Clint had been assuming she was a novice, and the realisation that she wasn't changed the playing field.
"How would you judge her style?"
"Direct. She prefers blunt force to cunning, but I have the feeling she could use cunning if she thought it was needed. She knows the subterfuges, but she doesn't use them to their full potential - like your psychic tripwires? The ones that send a specific message? She had those down pat, but they gave off this psychic resonance that jangled..."
Natasha grinned as she settled back with a cup of wine. "Unnerving?"
"It was like getting squeezed through a psychic sieve."
"Poetic."
"Painful." But he'd got the drop on Maria, too, as he crumpled and she ran in to help. Never assume your target is helpless.
"She'll be a good Queen when she gets there," Natasha murmured when he told her how Maria had thought he was in pain and run to him.
"She's a good Queen now."
"Then she'll be a very good Queen when she gets past the fear of failing her court."
"And if she doesn't?"
"She'll still be a very good Queen." She tilted her head with a faint smile. "Lucky for you."
"Lucky for all of us," Clint murmured.
The Scarlet Purges had been brutal on the Blood back in the earliest days of the war. The Hydra had targeted the Queens and Black Widows and all dark-Jewelled females, spending dozens of warriors in the effort to cut the heart out of the Blood.
They'd succeeded.
The Territory Queen of the time had escaped with her First Circle, but the slaughter had been unexpected and horrific. Province Queens, District Queens, village Queens overcome by the Hydra, killed, broken, and twisted by the spells the Hydra had wielded against them.
Without the Queens, the social structure of the Blood collapsed. Without strong Queens and dark-Jewelled witches to anchor the darker-Jewelled males, the Warlord Princes turned savage. The Princes and Warlords had struggled but held together, and here and there a Queen had risen high enough for long enough to gather a court and anchor the males and the land.
Clint didn't remember those years - he'd been born a few years after the Scarlet Purges began, orphaned by the time he was five and living off the streets with the other children. But he'd heard of the Phoenix Court - it had been on everyone's lips at the time: a Province Queen, red-haired, green-eyed, dark-Jewelled and strong-willed, with a powerful triangle of males around her.
Lady Jean Grey had risen to power ten years after the Scarlet Purges, and her court had held onto power for twelve before being betrayed from the inside. Nobody knew the truth of what had happened - at least, nobody who was willing to say - but there were rumours about her walking the Twisted Kingdom, about a betrayal so deep that it had rent the court apart.
There were still some Queens in the villages, but none with the strength of Jewel or character to form courts capable of holding the Territory against the Hydra.
Not until Phil had found Maria.
But as long as the Hydra attacked the land, they'd never have peace.
"The problem isn't the lack of Queens," he said, more to himself than to Natasha. "The problem is the Hydra. And we don't have a solution for them."
"Not yet," she said, and her voice trembled with something more.
"What is it?" She was a Black Widow by nature and training; born to look between the mists and veils of the realms and into the Twisted Kingdom, the edges of madness. "Have you seen something?"
Her eyes went distant, her voice resonant. "A Blood male begging for death." Natasha shivered. "A Prince who isn't a Prince, and a Red Jewel carved into a skull. A Warlord Prince without a home and a hole in the realm...and a hand around her throat, squeezing- NO!"
Clint caught her as she erupted out of the chair, fighting a vision that hadn't happened yet. "Tasha!"
Her nails dug into his wrists as he held onto her shoulders, his grip hard to reassure her of where she was. He felt the press of her snake tooth - a Black Widow's sting beneath the nail of her little finger - and knew fear before she retracted it. The veil across her pupils dropped and she looked at him, saw him, knew him.
"Hey." After a moment, she relaxed into his grip. "What did you see?"
Natasha shivered as she looked into his eyes, her chest rising and falling with short breaths. "I'm not sure. The future, I think."
"Maria's future?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I'd have to weave-"
"Not tonight." Clint caught her shoulders, turning her back to him, anchoring her. "Not like this."
His motives were innocent enough. Tangled webs took on the mindset of the weaver, and in the state Natasha was in, she'd see the worst of possible futures. But as she looked down at him, he remembered he was one dressing gown away from naked.
Blue eyes kindled and her mouth curved, and Clint felt himself respond to her desire.
"No," Natasha agreed with a faint purr in her voice. "Another time."
--
Chapter 4: Stomping On Sleeping Dragons
SUMMARY: As long as the Hydra attacked the land, they'd never have peace.
CHARACTERS: Clint, Phil, Natasha.
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter 3: No Solutions
graphic by hiddencait
Clint's instructions had been to get the Lady out of the residence so the household staff could move her into the Queen's rooms, determine her skill at hunting and hiding out on the land, and see if he couldn't persuade her to be a little more forthcoming about her past
As Fury put it, "She's been here nearly four months. Get her to open up about her time in the forest - and before that, if you can."
So far, Maria had been close-mouthed about how she came to be in the forest, only mentioning that she'd been there for a number of years.
It burned Clint's blood to think of people - Blood - leaving an adolescent girl to fend for herself, out on the edges of the Blood society.
They left at daybreak, and returned at sunset.
The new rooms were received with quiet delight - her own workroom, her own library, her own door to the garden. She even smiled as she trailed her fingers across the spines of the books they'd brought in from the library to fill her bookcase - a slow, peeping curve of pleasure that sparked something warm in Clint's belly.
She didn't hug them, or do more than say thank you; but her pleasure was palpable, and that was enough for the moment.
"Nick's gone out to the town," Phil said when they left Maria to clean up for dinner. "He said he'll be late - a meeting in town with more complaints about the warriors."
"They haven't been badly-behaved, have they?"
"No. But the daughters of the townspeople take great interest in the well-built young males who occasionally come into town to spend a little of their money. And the merchants and aristos object to this." The sardonic smile of the older male said a great deal about the townspeople who had their fletching in a flutter.
"And what, exactly, do they expect Fury to do about it since it's not a discipline problem?"
"They're townspeople," Phil said with sardonic understatement. "It's hard to tell."
"They're idiots."
Clint still remembered the last meeting they'd had with the merchants a year ago, when they'd gone back to request the traditional tithe from the town to the Queen and her court - for the nurturing and protection of the land.
The head of the Brewer's Guild - a lean whipcord of a man who'd looked almost the match for Nick - had told the Residence representatives that the warriors could sit in the Queen's residence and say they had the right to collect tithes, but there was no Queen in the residence, feeding the land. The Hydra hadn't attacked here in twenty years, and without a Queen they weren't likely to, neither. The town of Aer Gerulus would hold its independence from the residence.
He hadn't quite called the warriors 'brainless, muscle-bound dicks', but Clint thought it'd been close.
After that, the warriors who moved in and out of the residence on rotation from the camps went into the town to spend their wages, but the personnel permanently stationed in the residence opted not to spend what they had on anything more than the basics.
"Fury figured he'd go and make an appearance anyway." Phil gave him a sideways glance as they headed towards Clint's rooms. "You look like you've had a long day."
"Something like that." Clint shook his head. "She pretty much ran me ragged."
"Not surprising, considering she'd been living in that cottage for several years. Did you find out why?"
"No. She keeps her secrets like a miser."
"Protecting people who didn't even look after her." Phil muttered. "She lets us in, but she doesn't trust us."
"Tasha says she's warming to the idea of having a court."
"She's a Queen. Having a court should come as naturally as breathing." Phil held up a hand with a rueful smile. "I'm repeating myself. I know. Go get cleaned up and I'll see you at dinner."
Clint grinned, and went to get cleaned up.
He'd just gotten out of the shower, wrapped a towel around his hips, and was contemplating skipping dinner when there was a knock on the door.
A quick psychic probe showed only one of the maids, and he dropped the shields and opened the door.
Natasha balanced a tray in one hand while the other held a small crossbow pointed at his balls. "You're not using the spells I gave you against coercion and illusion, Clint."
"I wasn't expecting to be ambushed in my rooms." Clint stepped back, holding the door open as she walked in, vanishing the crossbow, and putting the tray down on the table in the sitting room. "And couldn't you have waited until I was dressed?"
The look she gave him was plain enough and the heated kiss she gave him even plainer. But when he leaned in and she leaned back, it seemed seduction wasn't on her mind.
"I figured you wouldn't want to be in court dinner after keeping up with Maria the whole day."
"Good call. Someone taught her to hunt. Not just game - people." Clint blew a long breath out. That had been a shock - to have her come up behind him and poke him in the back with a stick. "She got the jump on me the first time. After that, I kept an eye out. But she was taught how to track people with darker Jewels - and probably how to bring them down, too."
"She was given good training." Natasha lifted the covers on the food. "Court protocol, survival, hunting, the Hourglass arts..."
In middle of putting on a dressing gown, Clint paused. "The Hourglass? She's a Black Widow Queen?"
He knew Natasha had been working with Maria in the area of Craft and spells, but he didn't think they'd been going through the Black Widow training just yet.
"The arts of the Hourglass can be learned by any of the Blood, Clint, not just Black Widows. We have a natural advantage because of our caste; but it's not unknown for witches from other castes to also get training in the Hourglass. Or it wasn't. Here." She passed him a plate of stew - meaty bones and thick broth.
The meal wasn't fancy, but their first shared meal had been rabbit spitted over a forest fire, each wary and watchful of the unknown other. Clint had known perfectly well that the beautiful woman sitting across from him was death, but he'd been young and brash and immortal in his own head. And although she hadn't smiled when he'd told her it was cold and they should share bedrolls, she hadn't gutted him for insolence either.
When you're older, maybe.
He'd been pragmatic enough to think of it as sop, not a promise. A witch like that would find a male - or a dozen - willing to warm her bed long before Clint became old enough to be more than an over-eager puppy between her thighs.
To say she'd surprised him was an understatement.
"When did you realise she'd been trained in the Hourglass?"
Natasha ran her finger along the bone, neatly stripping it of meat. "After her first moontime in the library." She sucked on a fingertip for a moment. "The tangled webs surrounding that library that should have torn her mind out, Clint. I had to take them down so you and Phil and Nick could come in, but she was already there when I walked in. And the protections were untouched so far as I could see."
"Keyed to her?"
"How? The residence was abandoned back when the then-court fell, and that was before she was born."
Clint spooned up his food and asked a question he'd had in the back of his mind for some time now. "Did the Black Widows see what would happen to SHIELD Territory?"
"I don't know," she said. "I've never asked any of them."
"But?"
"I think they saw it." Natasha dipped a hunk of meat in the sauce on her plate. Tucked it into her mouth. Chewed thoughtfully. "Someone groomed her to rule - and not just a village or a town, but a Province or a Territory. Her training's too thorough, her knowledge too complete for a sixteen year-old Queen who's been living in the forest for a couple of years..."
"Whoever mentored her was teaching these things to a witch who was barely out of childhood."
"Yes."
"And just left her out there to survive?"
"It's not unknown."
He watched the wary stillness of the pale jaw behind the corkscrew curls that slid across her cheekbone like a veil. Her own training had started in childhood: moving stealthily, learning to kill - with weapons and with jewels. And, like Maria, she'd been abandoned at a relatively young age.
"Is it possible the people who trained you also trained her?"
"No. My trainers and mentors are dead."
"Some of the dead can still teach and train," Clint reminded her. The Blood were more than merely flesh; the power that resided in them could last on beyond the death of the body. Called the demon-dead, most were simply the people they'd been in life, only their bodies no longer healed naturally. The regular drinking of blood - mostly animal although a little human - prevented them from rotting, and they could fight and think, work and play, learn and teach, before their power faded and they became no more than a whisper in the Darkness.
"These ones can't," Natasha murmured. "The executioners would have finished the kill, ensured they couldn't become demon-dead. And they didn't know anything about ruling and management of a court. Only how to kill."
"Well, someone taught her how to hunt males. Someone who thought she'd someday need that skill."
"I'd have thought you'd be glad someone had taught her how to protect herself."
"Oh, I'm glad of it. Just...disturbed, too."
"What did she do today?"
Clint shrugged and put the plate down on the side table, leaning forward so his elbows rested on his knees. "We started out trapping - snares and such. Moved onto hunting when we found a herd of fallow deer. Then I suggested we try tracking instead. I'd get a five minute head start, and she'd try to track me."
"And she surprised you."
"To say the least." He'd nearly put a psychic bolt through her shields, he was that startled. After that, he paid attention and she didn't get past him again. But Clint had been assuming she was a novice, and the realisation that she wasn't changed the playing field.
"How would you judge her style?"
"Direct. She prefers blunt force to cunning, but I have the feeling she could use cunning if she thought it was needed. She knows the subterfuges, but she doesn't use them to their full potential - like your psychic tripwires? The ones that send a specific message? She had those down pat, but they gave off this psychic resonance that jangled..."
Natasha grinned as she settled back with a cup of wine. "Unnerving?"
"It was like getting squeezed through a psychic sieve."
"Poetic."
"Painful." But he'd got the drop on Maria, too, as he crumpled and she ran in to help. Never assume your target is helpless.
"She'll be a good Queen when she gets there," Natasha murmured when he told her how Maria had thought he was in pain and run to him.
"She's a good Queen now."
"Then she'll be a very good Queen when she gets past the fear of failing her court."
"And if she doesn't?"
"She'll still be a very good Queen." She tilted her head with a faint smile. "Lucky for you."
"Lucky for all of us," Clint murmured.
The Scarlet Purges had been brutal on the Blood back in the earliest days of the war. The Hydra had targeted the Queens and Black Widows and all dark-Jewelled females, spending dozens of warriors in the effort to cut the heart out of the Blood.
They'd succeeded.
The Territory Queen of the time had escaped with her First Circle, but the slaughter had been unexpected and horrific. Province Queens, District Queens, village Queens overcome by the Hydra, killed, broken, and twisted by the spells the Hydra had wielded against them.
Without the Queens, the social structure of the Blood collapsed. Without strong Queens and dark-Jewelled witches to anchor the darker-Jewelled males, the Warlord Princes turned savage. The Princes and Warlords had struggled but held together, and here and there a Queen had risen high enough for long enough to gather a court and anchor the males and the land.
Clint didn't remember those years - he'd been born a few years after the Scarlet Purges began, orphaned by the time he was five and living off the streets with the other children. But he'd heard of the Phoenix Court - it had been on everyone's lips at the time: a Province Queen, red-haired, green-eyed, dark-Jewelled and strong-willed, with a powerful triangle of males around her.
Lady Jean Grey had risen to power ten years after the Scarlet Purges, and her court had held onto power for twelve before being betrayed from the inside. Nobody knew the truth of what had happened - at least, nobody who was willing to say - but there were rumours about her walking the Twisted Kingdom, about a betrayal so deep that it had rent the court apart.
There were still some Queens in the villages, but none with the strength of Jewel or character to form courts capable of holding the Territory against the Hydra.
Not until Phil had found Maria.
But as long as the Hydra attacked the land, they'd never have peace.
"The problem isn't the lack of Queens," he said, more to himself than to Natasha. "The problem is the Hydra. And we don't have a solution for them."
"Not yet," she said, and her voice trembled with something more.
"What is it?" She was a Black Widow by nature and training; born to look between the mists and veils of the realms and into the Twisted Kingdom, the edges of madness. "Have you seen something?"
Her eyes went distant, her voice resonant. "A Blood male begging for death." Natasha shivered. "A Prince who isn't a Prince, and a Red Jewel carved into a skull. A Warlord Prince without a home and a hole in the realm...and a hand around her throat, squeezing- NO!"
Clint caught her as she erupted out of the chair, fighting a vision that hadn't happened yet. "Tasha!"
Her nails dug into his wrists as he held onto her shoulders, his grip hard to reassure her of where she was. He felt the press of her snake tooth - a Black Widow's sting beneath the nail of her little finger - and knew fear before she retracted it. The veil across her pupils dropped and she looked at him, saw him, knew him.
"Hey." After a moment, she relaxed into his grip. "What did you see?"
Natasha shivered as she looked into his eyes, her chest rising and falling with short breaths. "I'm not sure. The future, I think."
"Maria's future?"
"Maybe. I don't know. I'd have to weave-"
"Not tonight." Clint caught her shoulders, turning her back to him, anchoring her. "Not like this."
His motives were innocent enough. Tangled webs took on the mindset of the weaver, and in the state Natasha was in, she'd see the worst of possible futures. But as she looked down at him, he remembered he was one dressing gown away from naked.
Blue eyes kindled and her mouth curved, and Clint felt himself respond to her desire.
"No," Natasha agreed with a faint purr in her voice. "Another time."
--
Chapter 4: Stomping On Sleeping Dragons