fic: "Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court" by Tielan - Chapter 2
TITLE: Assembly, Care, & Feeding of a Queen's Court - Part 2: The Widow's Question
SUMMARY: She wasn't sure whether to offer - the girl hardly knew her, would be well within her rights to refuse.
CHARACTERS: Natasha, Maria.
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter Two: The Widow's Question
There was a cleaning crew in the corridor leading towards the library, shifting debris out of the way.
Natasha was not exactly pleased by the signs of industriousness, but she kept the irritation off her face as she passed them in the corridor, nodding to the Warlords who were working with the group. More and more of these work crews had turned up at Aer Gerulus in the last few weeks. Mostly comprised of local townspeople, they'd been slowly working through the collective debris of twenty-plus years of abandonment.
In the last few weeks, since Fury and Phil had come home with an adolescent Queen in their wake, that work had sped up considerably.
Most of the community considered that a good thing.
Natasha wasn't so sure.
As she stalked down the corridor between the piles of old leaves and branches blown in by the wind, Natasha called to mind the first time she had seen this - not when Nick Fury had set up his base of operations in the abandoned estate, but back when Aer Gerulus had been the home of the Territory Queen and her court, some seventy years previous.
She'd been young and reckless, dared by one of the other kids to get into the Queen's Residence without being caught.
She'd planned it - oh so carefully - crossing this road here, untangling that security web there, falling in with a group of young aristos coming in from the gardens as though she belonged among them instead of the gutters from which her mentors had pulled her, or the shadows to where they'd consigned her. And when the aristos went into a room, she'd flung a sight-shield around herself and gone wandering.
The trick, as her instructors had taught her, was to look as though one belonged there - as though one had a right to be in any given place. Hide in plain sight; don't stand out.
Easier said than done when even the back corridors of Aer Gerulus gleamed with more artistry and care than the most elaborate of the receiving rooms of the dump in which Natasha was schooled.
Walking down those corridors now, her boots smearing the accumulated dust of years, Natasha shook her head at the temerity of the girl she'd been. Within moments of getting into the residence she'd been hopelessly lost. Footsteps and conversation had threatened at the next corner, and she'd pushed at the nearest door, seeking a room - anywhere - she could hide.
She pushed open the carved doors now, feeling the webs of spells shift at her touch to allow her passage. Although the room was illuminated along the far wall by floor-to-ceiling windows, she lit a ball of witchlight to guide her into the room, its radiance spilling across the dusty rugs and the aged wood of the bookshelves.
So far as Natasha could tell, when the court at Aer Gerulus dissolved, a Black Widow had sealed off the library and cast preservation spells to keep the books from rotting. The protection spells had been on the verge of dissolving when the community had settled here, but they'd had enough punch to claw at Natasha's shields before she used her skills in the Hourglass arts to key them to herself.
Since then, she'd come here at least once a week when she was at the residence, to read, to study, to browse, to relax.
Natasha let the door slip shut behind her, and inhaled the scent of book-dust with something like a sigh.
So, too, had she rested against the door as a young woman, awed by the sight of so many books all in one place. Her instructors had laughed at her thirsty mind, and done what they could to encourage it. Your brain is the best weapon you will ever have. But their resources were limited, and they didn't know what they didn't know.
Standing here all those years ago, though, Natasha had looked into the face of possibility and thrilled to the challenge.
She hadn't even noticed the librarian, sitting over on the couch by the window, her hair white as blanketing snow, her eyes as blue as the sky outside the windows in the now and not in the past in her mind.
As blue as the sky silhouetting the slim figure who'd frozen in the act of turning the page, the morning light casting blue shadows on her dark hair.
Natasha called in the stiletto without thinking. Then she silently cursed and vanished it again.
They stared at each other for a moment, Black Widow to Queen. Then Maria winced. "Lady Romanoff."
"Lady Hill." Natasha eyed the adolescent witch and kept her voice even and civil. "Aren't you usually at morning training at this time?"
"I'm taking a day off," Maria said, her eyes never wavering from Natasha's face. "Or a few. That's allowed." Then, quickly, "I thought I'd find something to read."
Something was nagging at Natasha's thoughts, but she couldn't formulate it under the steady study of those eyes. To give the girl her due, she had presence. Natasha had been trained to think, to formulate, to plan in all situations and circumstances. But she'd never faced anyone so young with so much composure - not anyone her instructors hadn't trained.
She managed a response.
"There's plenty of that here. Assuming your taste runs to books written thirty to a hundred years ago, that is."
The young witch shrugged and looked down at the book she'd been reading, lying on top of an old, ragged quilt that had surely seen better days. It might have been seen as a submissive gesture. Only the girl was a Queen, and Natasha had the feeling the girl wasn't avoiding her gaze so much as considering how much she could say to a stranger.
For the last few weeks, the girl had drifted in and out of the community, turning up for mealtimes and morning training, rebuffing most attempts at conversation, and watching everything with large, wary eyes. Nick might have brought the young witch back to be Queen, but the girl certainly wasn't acting as though she wanted anything to do with the males who made up the rough community of fighters.
Had Nick even given the girl the choice of coming? Nick was a Warlord Prince, and they were intimidating at the best of times. It was possible the girl had been coerced into coming to Aer Gerulus. She was young, she'd been living alone with no-one for company but landens; it was possible she'd thought that a Blood community would be better than nothing and was now regretting it.
Natasha crouched down beside the couch, intending to ask the girl if she wanted someone to talk to, to determine if the child really wanted to be here or just had nowhere else to go.
And paused.
This close, the psychic scent wound around her, unmistakeable: Moon's blood.
Maria twitched, and her expression grew subtly defiant as Natasha looked up at her.
Three days out of every month, during her moontime, a Jewelled witch had to drain her power into her Jewels. During that time she could do nothing more than the most basic of Craft without extreme agony, leaving her vulnerable to attack from enemies. In most Blood communities, a witch made sure she spent those days among people she trusted - family or close friends.
Here, in Aer Gerulus, Natasha kept to her rooms and let Clint and Phil fuss, while Nick 'kept an eye on the situation'. But it had taken her nearly six months before she'd trusted them enough to stay in camp during her moontimes.
No wonder Maria was here in the library instead of her rooms.
"Are you going to tell Clint?"
"That depends," Natasha said, both amused and irritated that the girl had picked up on her relationship with Clint, and the assumption that Clint would claim the right to fuss - which he would. "Were you planning to stay here for the next three days?"
"They'd come looking for me anyway."
"And what do you think would happen when they found you?" Natasha let that question hang in the air. Maria winced. "You're better off facing them now, before they get worried."
"Maybe."
The reserve was still there and Natasha felt almost compelled to reassure her. "You can trust them, you know."
"I know."
It wasn't just a response; Natasha felt the assurance in the young woman's voice. She tilted her head, puzzled. If it wasn't about trust, why was she so reluctant to integrate into the community?
"After the Scarlet Purges, you travelled all over the realms," the young Queen ventured.
"Yes."
"How many Queens did you meet along the way?"
Natasha stared, taken aback. Of all the questions she'd expected, that wasn't one she'd expected the girl to ask. "A few. Not many." Not as many as she'd seen before the Purges, back when the Territory had been rich in Queens and thriving under their care.
Maria tugged the quilt more closely around her. "Were they good Queens?"
"I suppose." Natasha had never thought about it. "I didn't stay very long in any one place. Why?"
The wide mouth tilted at the corner, a little sadly? Wistfully? Natasha wasn't sure and didn't yet know Maria well enough to tell.
"A good Queen doesn't just collect a court of males around her; she looks after them, too. She has a responsibility to her males as much as they do to her."
Ah. Not a lack of trust or a fear for her safety, then; something else instead. A fear of not being good enough.
Natasha might have laughed, except for the seriousness of the old mind hiding behind the youthful features. In the present state of the Territory, after years without a Queen strong enough to anchor them, many males would have accepted any Queen - even a bad one. Maybe a few would have held out for a Queen who held their honour as high they did hers, but it would have been precious few.
A Queen who fretted about being good enough? Who held off from the males because she wasn't sure she could give them what they needed? Who protected a landen village instead of running to save her own skin, and recognised and handled a Warlord Prince's protectiveness?
Phil had told Natasha and Clint of the attack against the village, sparing nothing in the telling - not even Maria's reluctance to leave with them.
In the end, she left because staying would have put the landens at risk of another attack. It had nothing to do with us. Well, almost nothing.
Natasha considered the girl sitting in front of her, her hands suddenly clenched tight on the patchwork quilt. In pain, then, but unwilling to let it show. "Have you seen a good Queen's court?"
"Yes." After a moment, Maria shrugged. "I grew up in a court."
When it became clear she wasn't going to say which court, Natasha didn't question further. Instead, she fell back on protocol. "Then you know that it's the males' right to fuss when a Queen has her moontime."
Maria looked sour. "Only the First Circle."
"So who do you think gets First Circle rights here?" Natasha the young woman flush.
"I'm not-"
"If you didn't want to be a Queen, you shouldn't have come back with Fury and Phil."
Silence. Silence for a long time, during which Maria stared fixedly at her hands. Then, finally, "I don't want to fail them. I don't want to see them die."
"Maybe you won't."
"Have you looked out there? There's a war on!"
Tempted to snap that she'd seen much more of the war than this child ever had, Natasha held her tongue. She remembered being that young and scared when her certainties were gone. When she spoke, her voice was carefully even with the control of many years' experience.
"Why did you come here, then?"
"I couldn't stay where I was."
"But you won't be the Queen the males need?" Natasha let the question hang in the air between them. Then she softened a little. "You're allowed to be scared."
"I dreamed of a hole in the realms," Maria said at last. "An army of death and walking in the Twisted Kingdom. It wasn't a tangled web, just a dream. But it felt true."
"If those were my dreams, I'd be scared, too," Natasha admitted, wondering how much the child knew about tangled webs and visions. Something prodded at her thoughts again. "But you can't let your fear freeze you. You have to keep moving."
"Being scared shouldn't be an excuse."
"No."
"Can we limit it to Phil and Clint?"
Natasha eyed the younger witch. "You're not intimidated by Nick."
"No." Maria grimaced as she drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. "But he'll fuss the worst. And because he's the leader, everyone else will take his cue."
Natasha turned her laugh into a cough at the astute observation. "One of the disadvantages of having a dark-Jewelled Warlord Prince in your court."
"I guess I can't give him back?"
"I don't think that's how it works."
Maria opened her mouth to say something - before the colour drained from her face. She made a noise like a squeak and curled up over her knees in obvious pain. Natasha caught her breath and took a step forward before she stopped herself. The Queen had no reason to trust her - and she'd shown herself wary to everyone else in the residence, so why should she allow herself to be touched by a witch whose natural inclinations were to mind-webs and poisons? *Clint!*
*Tasha?*
*I'm with Maria in the library.* She sent him the route in her head, silently acknowledging that her refuge was about to become public space. *It's her moontime.* His temper sharpened.
*And she didn't-? Never mind. I'm on my way.*
*Tell Phil.*
*And let him tell Nick?* Amusement coloured the psychic thread between them. *Bad girl, Tasha.*
Maria was taking long, measured breaths, like someone forcing herself through the pain. Natasha hoped she wasn't overstepping and gripped the girl's shoulder, giving her something else to focus on. "Are they usually this bad?"
"The last few."
"I..." She wasn't sure whether to offer - the girl hardly knew her, would be well within her rights to refuse. "I know how to make a soothing brew for moontimes if you like."
The dark head lifted. "Please."
"And you'll let the males fuss?"
"About as much as you will when your moontime comes."
Natasha smiled, acknowledging the hit. "You get to remind me in a week's time, then."
One corner of the wide mouth tilted up. "You have a deal."
--
Chapter 3: No Solutions
SUMMARY: She wasn't sure whether to offer - the girl hardly knew her, would be well within her rights to refuse.
CHARACTERS: Natasha, Maria.
DETAILS: Master Post
Chapter Two: The Widow's Question
There was a cleaning crew in the corridor leading towards the library, shifting debris out of the way.
Natasha was not exactly pleased by the signs of industriousness, but she kept the irritation off her face as she passed them in the corridor, nodding to the Warlords who were working with the group. More and more of these work crews had turned up at Aer Gerulus in the last few weeks. Mostly comprised of local townspeople, they'd been slowly working through the collective debris of twenty-plus years of abandonment.
In the last few weeks, since Fury and Phil had come home with an adolescent Queen in their wake, that work had sped up considerably.
Most of the community considered that a good thing.
Natasha wasn't so sure.
As she stalked down the corridor between the piles of old leaves and branches blown in by the wind, Natasha called to mind the first time she had seen this - not when Nick Fury had set up his base of operations in the abandoned estate, but back when Aer Gerulus had been the home of the Territory Queen and her court, some seventy years previous.
She'd been young and reckless, dared by one of the other kids to get into the Queen's Residence without being caught.
She'd planned it - oh so carefully - crossing this road here, untangling that security web there, falling in with a group of young aristos coming in from the gardens as though she belonged among them instead of the gutters from which her mentors had pulled her, or the shadows to where they'd consigned her. And when the aristos went into a room, she'd flung a sight-shield around herself and gone wandering.
The trick, as her instructors had taught her, was to look as though one belonged there - as though one had a right to be in any given place. Hide in plain sight; don't stand out.
Easier said than done when even the back corridors of Aer Gerulus gleamed with more artistry and care than the most elaborate of the receiving rooms of the dump in which Natasha was schooled.
Walking down those corridors now, her boots smearing the accumulated dust of years, Natasha shook her head at the temerity of the girl she'd been. Within moments of getting into the residence she'd been hopelessly lost. Footsteps and conversation had threatened at the next corner, and she'd pushed at the nearest door, seeking a room - anywhere - she could hide.
She pushed open the carved doors now, feeling the webs of spells shift at her touch to allow her passage. Although the room was illuminated along the far wall by floor-to-ceiling windows, she lit a ball of witchlight to guide her into the room, its radiance spilling across the dusty rugs and the aged wood of the bookshelves.
So far as Natasha could tell, when the court at Aer Gerulus dissolved, a Black Widow had sealed off the library and cast preservation spells to keep the books from rotting. The protection spells had been on the verge of dissolving when the community had settled here, but they'd had enough punch to claw at Natasha's shields before she used her skills in the Hourglass arts to key them to herself.
Since then, she'd come here at least once a week when she was at the residence, to read, to study, to browse, to relax.
Natasha let the door slip shut behind her, and inhaled the scent of book-dust with something like a sigh.
So, too, had she rested against the door as a young woman, awed by the sight of so many books all in one place. Her instructors had laughed at her thirsty mind, and done what they could to encourage it. Your brain is the best weapon you will ever have. But their resources were limited, and they didn't know what they didn't know.
Standing here all those years ago, though, Natasha had looked into the face of possibility and thrilled to the challenge.
She hadn't even noticed the librarian, sitting over on the couch by the window, her hair white as blanketing snow, her eyes as blue as the sky outside the windows in the now and not in the past in her mind.
As blue as the sky silhouetting the slim figure who'd frozen in the act of turning the page, the morning light casting blue shadows on her dark hair.
Natasha called in the stiletto without thinking. Then she silently cursed and vanished it again.
They stared at each other for a moment, Black Widow to Queen. Then Maria winced. "Lady Romanoff."
"Lady Hill." Natasha eyed the adolescent witch and kept her voice even and civil. "Aren't you usually at morning training at this time?"
"I'm taking a day off," Maria said, her eyes never wavering from Natasha's face. "Or a few. That's allowed." Then, quickly, "I thought I'd find something to read."
Something was nagging at Natasha's thoughts, but she couldn't formulate it under the steady study of those eyes. To give the girl her due, she had presence. Natasha had been trained to think, to formulate, to plan in all situations and circumstances. But she'd never faced anyone so young with so much composure - not anyone her instructors hadn't trained.
She managed a response.
"There's plenty of that here. Assuming your taste runs to books written thirty to a hundred years ago, that is."
The young witch shrugged and looked down at the book she'd been reading, lying on top of an old, ragged quilt that had surely seen better days. It might have been seen as a submissive gesture. Only the girl was a Queen, and Natasha had the feeling the girl wasn't avoiding her gaze so much as considering how much she could say to a stranger.
For the last few weeks, the girl had drifted in and out of the community, turning up for mealtimes and morning training, rebuffing most attempts at conversation, and watching everything with large, wary eyes. Nick might have brought the young witch back to be Queen, but the girl certainly wasn't acting as though she wanted anything to do with the males who made up the rough community of fighters.
Had Nick even given the girl the choice of coming? Nick was a Warlord Prince, and they were intimidating at the best of times. It was possible the girl had been coerced into coming to Aer Gerulus. She was young, she'd been living alone with no-one for company but landens; it was possible she'd thought that a Blood community would be better than nothing and was now regretting it.
Natasha crouched down beside the couch, intending to ask the girl if she wanted someone to talk to, to determine if the child really wanted to be here or just had nowhere else to go.
And paused.
This close, the psychic scent wound around her, unmistakeable: Moon's blood.
Maria twitched, and her expression grew subtly defiant as Natasha looked up at her.
Three days out of every month, during her moontime, a Jewelled witch had to drain her power into her Jewels. During that time she could do nothing more than the most basic of Craft without extreme agony, leaving her vulnerable to attack from enemies. In most Blood communities, a witch made sure she spent those days among people she trusted - family or close friends.
Here, in Aer Gerulus, Natasha kept to her rooms and let Clint and Phil fuss, while Nick 'kept an eye on the situation'. But it had taken her nearly six months before she'd trusted them enough to stay in camp during her moontimes.
No wonder Maria was here in the library instead of her rooms.
"Are you going to tell Clint?"
"That depends," Natasha said, both amused and irritated that the girl had picked up on her relationship with Clint, and the assumption that Clint would claim the right to fuss - which he would. "Were you planning to stay here for the next three days?"
"They'd come looking for me anyway."
"And what do you think would happen when they found you?" Natasha let that question hang in the air. Maria winced. "You're better off facing them now, before they get worried."
"Maybe."
The reserve was still there and Natasha felt almost compelled to reassure her. "You can trust them, you know."
"I know."
It wasn't just a response; Natasha felt the assurance in the young woman's voice. She tilted her head, puzzled. If it wasn't about trust, why was she so reluctant to integrate into the community?
"After the Scarlet Purges, you travelled all over the realms," the young Queen ventured.
"Yes."
"How many Queens did you meet along the way?"
Natasha stared, taken aback. Of all the questions she'd expected, that wasn't one she'd expected the girl to ask. "A few. Not many." Not as many as she'd seen before the Purges, back when the Territory had been rich in Queens and thriving under their care.
Maria tugged the quilt more closely around her. "Were they good Queens?"
"I suppose." Natasha had never thought about it. "I didn't stay very long in any one place. Why?"
The wide mouth tilted at the corner, a little sadly? Wistfully? Natasha wasn't sure and didn't yet know Maria well enough to tell.
"A good Queen doesn't just collect a court of males around her; she looks after them, too. She has a responsibility to her males as much as they do to her."
Ah. Not a lack of trust or a fear for her safety, then; something else instead. A fear of not being good enough.
Natasha might have laughed, except for the seriousness of the old mind hiding behind the youthful features. In the present state of the Territory, after years without a Queen strong enough to anchor them, many males would have accepted any Queen - even a bad one. Maybe a few would have held out for a Queen who held their honour as high they did hers, but it would have been precious few.
A Queen who fretted about being good enough? Who held off from the males because she wasn't sure she could give them what they needed? Who protected a landen village instead of running to save her own skin, and recognised and handled a Warlord Prince's protectiveness?
Phil had told Natasha and Clint of the attack against the village, sparing nothing in the telling - not even Maria's reluctance to leave with them.
In the end, she left because staying would have put the landens at risk of another attack. It had nothing to do with us. Well, almost nothing.
Natasha considered the girl sitting in front of her, her hands suddenly clenched tight on the patchwork quilt. In pain, then, but unwilling to let it show. "Have you seen a good Queen's court?"
"Yes." After a moment, Maria shrugged. "I grew up in a court."
When it became clear she wasn't going to say which court, Natasha didn't question further. Instead, she fell back on protocol. "Then you know that it's the males' right to fuss when a Queen has her moontime."
Maria looked sour. "Only the First Circle."
"So who do you think gets First Circle rights here?" Natasha the young woman flush.
"I'm not-"
"If you didn't want to be a Queen, you shouldn't have come back with Fury and Phil."
Silence. Silence for a long time, during which Maria stared fixedly at her hands. Then, finally, "I don't want to fail them. I don't want to see them die."
"Maybe you won't."
"Have you looked out there? There's a war on!"
Tempted to snap that she'd seen much more of the war than this child ever had, Natasha held her tongue. She remembered being that young and scared when her certainties were gone. When she spoke, her voice was carefully even with the control of many years' experience.
"Why did you come here, then?"
"I couldn't stay where I was."
"But you won't be the Queen the males need?" Natasha let the question hang in the air between them. Then she softened a little. "You're allowed to be scared."
"I dreamed of a hole in the realms," Maria said at last. "An army of death and walking in the Twisted Kingdom. It wasn't a tangled web, just a dream. But it felt true."
"If those were my dreams, I'd be scared, too," Natasha admitted, wondering how much the child knew about tangled webs and visions. Something prodded at her thoughts again. "But you can't let your fear freeze you. You have to keep moving."
"Being scared shouldn't be an excuse."
"No."
"Can we limit it to Phil and Clint?"
Natasha eyed the younger witch. "You're not intimidated by Nick."
"No." Maria grimaced as she drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees. "But he'll fuss the worst. And because he's the leader, everyone else will take his cue."
Natasha turned her laugh into a cough at the astute observation. "One of the disadvantages of having a dark-Jewelled Warlord Prince in your court."
"I guess I can't give him back?"
"I don't think that's how it works."
Maria opened her mouth to say something - before the colour drained from her face. She made a noise like a squeak and curled up over her knees in obvious pain. Natasha caught her breath and took a step forward before she stopped herself. The Queen had no reason to trust her - and she'd shown herself wary to everyone else in the residence, so why should she allow herself to be touched by a witch whose natural inclinations were to mind-webs and poisons? *Clint!*
*Tasha?*
*I'm with Maria in the library.* She sent him the route in her head, silently acknowledging that her refuge was about to become public space. *It's her moontime.* His temper sharpened.
*And she didn't-? Never mind. I'm on my way.*
*Tell Phil.*
*And let him tell Nick?* Amusement coloured the psychic thread between them. *Bad girl, Tasha.*
Maria was taking long, measured breaths, like someone forcing herself through the pain. Natasha hoped she wasn't overstepping and gripped the girl's shoulder, giving her something else to focus on. "Are they usually this bad?"
"The last few."
"I..." She wasn't sure whether to offer - the girl hardly knew her, would be well within her rights to refuse. "I know how to make a soothing brew for moontimes if you like."
The dark head lifted. "Please."
"And you'll let the males fuss?"
"About as much as you will when your moontime comes."
Natasha smiled, acknowledging the hit. "You get to remind me in a week's time, then."
One corner of the wide mouth tilted up. "You have a deal."
--
Chapter 3: No Solutions