Arthur stood on the high balcony of the lord's chambers and looked down at what the harbour had become.
The southern harbour of Brightwater Isle, which had held a dozen fishing boats when he first arrived and which had been expanded twice in the two years since to accommodate the growing trade that now flowed through the island's docks was gone.
Where there had been a large working waterfront with timber berths and a warehouse and dozens of fishing vessels drying their nets, there was now an armada.
The ships filled the harbour and spilled out past it into the open water of the bay in every direction, packed so tightly that a man could have walked from one end of the fleet to the other by stepping from deck to deck without ever touching water. The Velaryon fleet was absent as they stationed around Dragonstone itself where it had been maintaining the blockade for the better part of eighteen months, but everything else that the realm could float was here, gathered in the waters around his island in preparation for the assault that would begin within the fortnight.
Arthur counted the masts from his vantage point but stopped counting when he reached three hundred.
"Two years," he said to the empty air. "Went by far too bloody quickly."
He leaned his forearms on the stone railing and let out a long sigh. He hoped the war would be short. He hoped they would take Dragonstone in a single assault and scatter whatever remained of the enemy fleet and be home before the storms made the bay impassable. He hoped that the men on those ships would all come back to whatever village or city they had left behind, that the wives and the mothers and the children who had watched them march to the harbours would see them walk home again.
He knew it was wishful thinking.
Wars were never short.
The door behind him opened.
"You're brooding again."
Arthur did not turn. "I'm not brooding."
"You are staring at the harbour with a face that could turn wine to vinegar and sighing every thirty seconds. That is brooding by any honest reckoning." Prince Duncan stepped up beside him and set a cup of wine on the railing in front of Arthur before lifting his own.
The prince had arrived on Brightwater three days earlier with the king's household aboard the flagship, and had spent most of those three days in meetings with the fleet commanders and admirals that Arthur had been mercifully excluded from. "Why are you not inside with the family? Your wives are beginning to wonder whether you have thrown yourself off the balcony."
"I needed air, that is all."
Duncan leaned on the railing beside him and followed his gaze out over the harbour. "That is a sight I shall not soon forget," Duncan said quietly. "I don't think there has been a fleet this size assembled in these waters since the days of the triarchy war."
Arthur picked up the wine and took a sip. "Impressive is not the word that comes to my mind."
"What word does."
"A grim one." Arthur set the cup back down. "Some of those men on those ships have left their homes for the last time yet they do not know it. When this war ends there will be families across the realms who will never see their husbands or their fathers or their brothers again."
Duncan was quiet for a while, he simply kept looking out over the blackwater. "You speak the truth of it," Duncan said at last. "I will not pretend otherwise. But we have been left with precious little choice in the matter. Dragonstone sits in enemy hands and has sat there for two years now. The blockade has held them in place but it has not dislodged them, and so long as they hold that island they command the eastern approaches to the bay. Every merchant vessel that tries to reach King's Landing from the Narrow Sea must run a gauntlet to get there. The losses to trade alone have been ruinous. Another year of this and the capital will begin to feel its effects."
"I know...." Arthur picked up his wine again. "But knowing doesn't make it any less grim."
He looked out at the fleet for a while longer before he sighed again. "All I want is to stay here," Arthur said eventually. "I want to sit by the lake and watch my sons and daughters learn to walk I want to grow old here and never raise a sword against another living soul for the rest of my days."
He paused.
"But I gave the King my word."
Duncan lifted his cup. "Then let us drink to a short war."
Arthur touched the rim of his own cup against Duncan's. "To a short war."
They drank.
Duncan set his cup down on the railing and put his hand on Arthur's shoulder. "Come inside, my friend. Be with your family. Make the most of the days that remain to you before we sail. There will be time enough for staring at ships and feeling the heaviness of the war. Tonight you have a castle full of people who love you and wish to see you, and that includes my father, who has been on the floor wrestling with your children for the better part of an hour."
Arthur managed a small smile at that. "He is still on the floor?"
"He is still on the floor. Mordred has pinned him against the leg of a chair and Percival has made off with his crown. I have not seen my father this happy in years, if I'm honest with you."
Arthur laughed despite himself and pushed himself off the railing and followed Duncan back through the balcony doors and into the keep.
The great hall of Camelot was not being used for anything formal tonight.
The long tables that normally ran the length of the room had been pushed to the sides, and in the wide open space King Aegon the Fifth of his name, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, was sitting on the floor.
He had his back against the leg of an oak chair with his legs stretched out in front of him. His crown was gone because Percival, aged two and a half, had taken it off his great-grandfather's head and was now wearing it on his own considerably smaller head.
Percival was enormously pleased with himself and was tottering around the floor in circles, one hand holding the crown in place and the other waving at everyone he passed.
Mordred had also positioned himself in front of Aegon with both small hands braced against the old man's kneecap and was pushing with all the considerable force that his two-and-a-half-year-old body could produce, which given the [Demon Back] trait he had inherited from his father was actually enough to make the king rock slightly in place.
"Your Grace," Arthur said from the doorway.
Aegon looked up from behind Mordred's assault and gave Arthur a grin that took twenty years off his face. "Arthur. Your son has been trying to topple me from my seat for the past quarter of an hour and is very nearly succeeding."
"He does that, Your Grace, I can barely stop him from dragging chairs around with him."
"So I have learned at some cost to my dignity." Aegon reached forward and scooped Mordred off his knees with both hands, lifting the boy into the air, and Mordred shrieked with delight and kicked his legs as the king held him aloft. "This one will be a force to reckon with when he grows into that strength."
Queen Betha sat in a proper chair nearby with Morgana on her lap, the queen's silver-streaked hair somewhat disrupted by the fact that Morgana had been attempting to chew on it for the past quarter of an hour.
"Your daughter seems to love the taste of my hair," Betha observed as Arthur crossed the hall toward them.
"She has been doing that of late, though I think it may be the berry scent of your hair."
"Or perhaps she's got her father's massive appetite."Cassie called from across the hall where she sat on a cushioned bench nursing Sheira. Cassie's second child, a daughter of four months, who had her mother's dark hair and her father's purple eyes.
"That is for sure," Mira said from the other end of the bench where she was nursing Lancelot. Lancelot was was six months old and built with the solid proportions of a small battering ram. He grabbed for Mordred's foot as his older brother was carried past by the king and his grip was strong enough to make Mordred yelp.
Arthur had chosen to give Lancelot [Sword Prodigy] through the inheritance system at birth. The trait combined with the Pendragon bloodline's [Royal Swordsmanship] and the [Uchiha Bloodline] that had passed to all his children through the bloodline would, Arthur hoped, produce a warrior unlike any the Seven Kingdoms had seen in generations. He did not know yet whether the boy would take to the sword. That was years away. But if he did, the foundation was there.
Sheira had received [Arcane Script]. Arthur had chosen it because the books that filled his study, the Dragon Dictionary and the alchemical texts and the fragments of Old Valyrian he had been collecting and studying for two years, would need a reader who could decipher them long after Arthur himself was gone. Someday the books would pass to his children, and when they did, Sheira would be the one who could open them and understand what was written inside.
And then there was Rhaegar.
Rhaella sat in the window seat on the eastern side of the hall with the afternoon light falling across her silver-gold hair and her son cradled in her arms. Rhaegar was six months old, and he was the most Valyrian-looking child Arthur had produced. The boy's hair was a pure silver-white that caught the light and returned it doubled, his eyes when they opened were a vivid violet that matched his mother's shade for shade, and his features even at this early age had the sharp lines that marked the blood of Old Valyria as clearly as any banner marked a house.
Arthur had given Rhaegar [Blood of the Dragon].
He had done it because he wanted the boy to carry every advantage that Targaryen blood could confer. Rhaegar already had Targaryen blood through his mother, but [Blood of the Dragon] was the system's recognition of that heritage taken to its fullest expression, the unlocking of the Magic stat and dragon affinity and everything that came with it. If Aegon legitimised the boy, and the king had all but promised as much, then Rhaegar would enter the world as a Targaryen with the blood of both houses running through him.
Duncans wife Jenny of Oldstones sat cross-legged on a rug near the hearth with Percival in her lap, the crown of the Seven Kingdoms still perched on the toddler's head at its absurd angle. "He is going to insist on keeping that crown," Jenny said as Arthur entered the hall.
"He may keep it with my compliments," Aegon said mildly from the floor. "I have been searching for an excuse to be rid of the thing for thirty years."
Arthur crossed the hall and helped the king to his feet, which required more effort than either of them cared to acknowledge, and then he went to each of his wives in turn. He kissed Mira on the temple and ran his thumb along Lancelot's cheek while the boy attempted to eat his own fist. He kissed Cassie on the mouth and adjusted the blanket around Sheira's sleeping form. He then crossed to the window seat where Rhaella sat and bent and kissed her softly, and she smiled up at him with Rhaegar's silver head tucked against her collarbone.
"You were gone a long while," Rhaella said quietly.
"I was thinking."
"You think too much, my love."
"So I am told."
Eventually Servants brought the food for them. Not the elaborate multi-course service of a formal feast, but something simpler.
Roasted chicken, thick slices of ham and wedges of yellow cheese, bowls of fresh bread still warm from the kitchen, a pot of fish stew, a platter of late summer apples from Godric's orchards, and a jug of the island's own cider that Orwin had been fermenting in his cellar for the past year.
They gathered around a single long table in the centre of the hall and they all began to eat. "I must say to you plainly, Arthur," Aegon began as he poured cider for himself and the queen, "this island of yours has surpassed every expectation I held when I granted you the lordship. I have been attempting to take the full measure of your improvements since I arrived three days past and I keep losing count."
"The people did the work, Your Grace. I pointed them where to go and paid them fairly for the doing of it. They deserve the credit more than I."
"And that is precisely what makes a good lord, Arthur. You would be surprised, or perhaps you would not, how many men of your station have yet to learn that simple truth." Aegon tore a piece of bread and dipped it into the fish stew. "And this castle. When Duncan wrote to me of it I confess I thought my son had taken leave of his senses. I have stood inside Harrenhal and Storm's End and the Red Keep itself, and I say to you without a grain of flattery that Camelot stands among them. The waterfall alone would be worth a journey of a thousand leagues."
"The mountain provided the bones of it, Your Grace. I merely built around what was already here."
"He does this," Duncan said from across the table without looking up from his plate. "Every time someone pays him a compliment he finds a way to give the credit to something else."
"It is a fine home," Betha said warmly. She reached across the table and laid her hand briefly over Mira's. "But more than that, you have made it feel as a home should. Sadly the Red Keep has never possessed this warmth no matter how many generations of Targaryen have spent there."
Mira covered the queen's hand with her own and squeezed gently. "You are too kind, Your Grace. That means more to us than I can rightly say."
"I think it is the children that make the difference," Jenny added. She had managed to ease the crown from the sleeping Percival's head without waking him and was holding it in one hand while the toddler drooled against her shoulder. "A castle without children in it is nothing but cold stone. Fill it with little ones and there is always a shriek or a laugh or a crash coming from somewhere round the corner."
"Speaking of crashes," Arthur said, "Mordred put his head clean through a shelf in the nursery yesterday. He was running the corridor at full tilt and did not trouble himself to slow for the turn and went straight into it."
"Seven save us," Betha said, her hand going to her chest. "Was the child hurt."
"No, Your Grace. He seemed more annoyed than anything, though after looking at the shelf it seemed he actually cracked it."
Laughter moved around the table, and Mordred, who was sitting in Mira's lap working through a piece of bread looked up at the sound of his name before returning to his bread.
"He will be a great brute of a man," Aegon observed, watching the boy. "Look at the width of his shoulders even now. He has your build, Arthur, and he is not yet three years of age. By the time he is grown he will stand as tall as you or Ser Duncan."
"The gods preserve us all," Cassie murmured.
"And the little lady here," Betha said, leaning sideways to peer at Morgana who had crawled beneath the table and was working to remove Arthur's boot with both hands. "She has your determination, it seems once she's decided something she won't let it stop her."
"She has decided a great many things in her two and a half years upon this earth," Mira said with a giggle. "Most recently she has decided that baths are a punishment devised by cruel and unfeeling parents, and that her brother Mordred exists upon this earth for the sole purpose of vexing her."
"A perfectly ordinary girl, then," Jenny said with a grin.
Aegon's eyes moved to the window seat where Rhaella had returned with Rhaegar after the food was laid out, the princess preferring to eat apart from the main table so she could nurse the baby without an audience.
"How does she fare, Arthur," he asked quietly, pitching his voice beneath the general noise of the table so that the words reached Arthur and no one else. "
Arthur followed the king's gaze. Rhaella was looking down at Rhaegar's face while the boy nursed, one finger tracing the curve of his silver brow.
"She is the happiest I have ever known her to be, Your Grace."
"Does she smile."
"Every day."
"Does she laugh."
"Often and loudly. Cassie tells the worst jests you have ever heard in your life and Rhaella laughs at every one of them, which sadly only encourages Cassie to tell more."
The corner of Aegon's mouth lifted. "That is well. That is very well indeed." He was quiet for a moment, turning his cup slowly between his fingers. "And the boy."
Arthur looked at Rhaegar.
The son of a Targaryen princess and a Pendragon lord, born on an island in the Blackwater Bay, carrying [Blood of the Dragon] in his veins.
"He is healthy, Your Grace. Strong and growing fast. He favours his mother more and more with each passing week."
"He does have the look of a Targaryen."
"He does."
Aegon took a slow sip of cider and set the cup down upon the table. "We shall speak of the boy's future when this war is behind us, Arthur. Properly and at length. There are matters I wish to raise with you that are not fit for the table. But know this much." He fixed Arthur with that steady dark gaze that carried in it every year of a long and difficult reign. "That boy will not bear the name Waters. Not whilst I live and breathe. You have my word on it."
Arthur felt something ease inside his chest that he had not realised was knotted. "I am grateful, Your Grace. Truly."
"Do not thank me yet, my boy. The conversation I mean to have with you will involve a good deal of talking and at least one matter you are not going to care for. But the end of it will be the right end." Aegon picked up his cup again and gestured at the stew with it. "Now leave off looking so grave and eat your supper. I am told that Dalla woman will be most displeased with all of us if we let it go cold, and I have learned in my years that it is unwise to anger anyone who controls the kitchen."
The meal stretched on through the afternoon and into the early evening. The children were fed and cleaned and permitted to play on the floor while the adults lingered at the table with their cups and their talk.
Aegon told stories of the Fourth Blackfyre Rebellion that he had never shared beyond his closest circle, tales that made Duncan laugh and Betha shake her head. Mira spoke of the island's farms and the new orchards and the fishing fleet that had grown large enough to supply half the Crownlands if the trade routes were ever properly reopened.
Duncan talked of the plans for the assault, framing the strategy in broad terms that excluded the details he had been told to keep among the commanders, but sharing enough that Arthur could follow the operation.
Jenny asked whether there was truly no way to negotiate, and Duncan explained why the men who held Dragonstone had made it clear through two years of silence that negotiation was not something they intended to engage in.
Aegon listened to all of it with his chin resting on his clasped hands and his eyes moving from speaker to speaker, and said very little, which Arthur had learned was what the king did when he was thinking hardest.
Rhaella eventually joined them at the table, Rhaegar settled and sleeping in a basket beside her chair, and the conversation turned lighter.
Arthur ate and drank and held Sheira when Cassie's arms needed rest and listened to the people he loved fill the great hall of Camelot with warmth.
He would miss this... he really would.
The war was coming.
But tonight, in this hall, among his family, the war could wait.
_____________________________________
The morning came too quickly.
Arthur had lain awake for most of the night with Mira's head on his shoulder and Cassie's arm across his waist and Rhaella's fingers laced through his own on the pillow beside him, he had listened to the three of them breathing in their sleep trying to keep this moment in his memories.
He hoped this moment would last forever, but as his last dinner with his family ended so did this moment.
Morning came and they all headed to the docks to say their final goodbyes.
The last of the supply boats were being loaded for the flagship, barrels and crates and bundles of arrows and coils of heavy rope being hauled up gangplanks. Arthur's own contingent, two hundred of his best household guards in their grey Pendragon surcoats with their shields on their backs and their spears bundled, was already assembled on the dock in a formation that Torren's son was calling into order.
Quiet stood at the edge of the dock beside the gangplank that led to the transport vessel being taken onto the ship with the other horses. And standing between the horse and the gangplank, in a small cluster that made Arthur's throat close the moment he saw them, were his wives.
Mira was holding Mordred on one hip and Morgana on the other. Her wheat-gold hair was around her shoulders and her eyes were already red.
Cassie had Percival by the hand and Lancelot in the crook of her arm and Sheira in a sling against her chest. Her dark hair was braided back and her green eyes were wet and she was biting the inside of her cheek hard enough that Arthur could see the muscles in her jaw.
Rhaella stood slightly apart from the other two with Rhaegar held close against her shoulder, the boy's silver head turned inward against the curve of her neck. Her violet eyes were fixed on Arthur as he walked toward them across the dock with an expression that contained every word she had been unable to say the night before when they had all lain together.
Arthur stopped in front of them.
For a long moment none of them spoke
But eventually Mira broke first.
She set Mordred down on the planks and Morgana beside him and she walked the three steps between them and pressed herself against Arthur's armoured chest and her arms went around his neck and she held on with a ferocity that made the steel plates of his gorget dig into his collarbone.
"You come back to me, Arthur Pendragon." Her voice was muffled against his chest and broke twice on the way through the sentence. "You come back to me alive and in one piece, do you hear me. I have not carried three of your children and built a life on this island with you just to lose you to some gods-forsaken rock in the middle of the sea."
"I will come back, Mira."
"Promise me."
"I promise you."
"Swear it."
"I swear it. On everything I am and everything we have and every child we have made together, I swear to you I will come back."
She pulled away just enough to look at his face and her hands came up to grip both sides of his jaw, her fingers wet with tears, then she kissed him and he kissed her back with everything he had.
Cassie was next.
She had transferred all three of her children to Rhaella and the handmaidens in the time it took Mira to release him, and the moment Mira stepped back Cassie stepped forward and caught the front of his breastplate in both fists and pulled his face down to hers.
"If you die out there I will never forgive you." She was crying too, though she was trying harder to hide it than Mira had. "I will march into whatever afterlife the gods have put you in and make your eternity a misery."
"I would not dare."
"You had better not." She kissed him with the same desperation that Mira had, her hands tangled in the front of his armour, and when she pulled back she pressed her forehead against his and closed her eyes. "Come home to us. Please. Just come home."
"I will, Cassie. I swear it."
"Good. Because your daughter has your stubbornness and I cannot handle her alone."
He laughed despite himself and held her for a long moment before she let go.
Rhaella came to him last.
She had handed Rhaegar to one of the handmaidens and crossed the short distance between them. When she stopped in front of him her lips trembled. "I am not going to cry," she said.
"All right."
"I am going to be brave and dignified and will say my farewell with grace and composure."
"All right, Rhaella."
Her lower lip trembled.
"I am not crying."
"You are not crying."
A single tear slid down her cheek.
Arthur reached out and wiped it away with his thumb and she made a small choked sound and threw her arms around his neck and buried her face against his shoulder, and whatever remained of her composure dissolved entirely into the padding of his gambeson.
"I love you," she said into his shoulder. "I want you to know that if anything happens to you I will burn this world to the ground."
"That is not necessary."
"I mean it, Arthur."
"I know you do." He pulled back and tilted her chin up with one finger. "I will come back to you. To all of you." He then kissed her.
Arthur turned to his children.
"Be good for your mothers," he said to all of them.
He looked at the three women standing on the dock with his six children between them, and committed the image to memory before he turned toward the gangplank.
Lunk stood at the rail of the transport vessel with his pack on his back and his massive hands resting on the wood. Arthur had tried to convince him to stay on Brightwater with the women and the children, had tried three separate times over the past week, and each time Lunk had simply looked at him and said "Lunk goes with Arthur" and that had been the end of the discussion.
Jory was beside him, the boy's face pale beneath his tan but his face determined and his hand resting on the hilt of the real sword that Ser Duncan had given him two years ago. He was fifteen now, taller than he had been and broader through the shoulders. He was scared. Arthur could see it in the way the boy's fingers drummed against the pommel and in the slight too-rapid pace of his breathing. But he refused to be left behind.
Arthur walked up the gangplank and stepped onto the deck.
"Jory."
"Ser."
"How are you."
"I am terrified, Ser."
"Good, scared men pay attention. Brave men get killed because they forget to look where they are stepping." He put his hand on the boy's shoulder and squeezed once. "Stay close to me. Do what I say. Keep your shield up and your head down and we will get through this."
Jory nodded hard. "Yes, Ser."
A longboat carried them across the short stretch of water between the transport vessel and the flagship.
The royal flagship was the largest ship Arthur had ever set foot on, a great war galley with a gilded dragon prow and three banks of oars and a deck wide enough to stage a melee on. The Targaryen banner flew from the mainmast, and the rails were lined with Kingsguard.
Arthur climbed the rope ladder to the deck with Jory scrambling up behind him.
King Aegon stood near the stern castle with Prince Duncan at his side, both of them in travelling armour. Prince Aerys leaned against the port rail further down the deck with his arms folded and Wildfyre belted at his hip.
The young prince had not set foot on Brightwater Isle.
In the three days that the royal household had been ashore, Aerys had remained aboard the flagship without explanation or apology, taking his meals in his cabin and declining every invitation that had been extended.
Arthur had not pressed the matter.
Whatever Aerys felt about the man who had taken his betrothed sister away from him and built a life with her on an island that Aerys could see from the deck of his own ship was something that Arthur did not wish to examine more closely than was strictly necessary.
The young prince's violet eyes tracked him now across the deck with the same intensity they had carried in the small council chamber the day Arthur had presented the swords. Arthur met them briefly and inclined his head in a greeting that was neither warm nor cold and received nothing in return.
Aegon clasped Arthur's forearm as he reached the stern castle.
"I am glad you are here, Arthur. I know what it costs you to leave them behind. I have not been gone ten minutes and I already miss Betha so fiercely that my chest aches with it." The king released his arm and looked back toward the island. "Forty years I have been married to that woman. You would think it would get easier with time."
"No, Your Grace. I do not imagine it does."
"She will be well looked after on your island. Your people have been nothing but gracious, and Jenny has been talking about the lake house as though she means to move into it permanently. I suspect I shall have to prise her out of there with a royal command when the time comes to return to the capital."
Aegon paused and his expression sobered. "I thank you for letting the Queen and Jenny remain on Brightwater until it is safe to make the crossing back to King's Landing."
"Think nothing of it, Your Grace."
Aegon studied him for a moment. "You are worried."
"I would be a fool not to be, Your Grace."
"Yes. You would." The king turned and looked out toward the eastern horizon. "We all would."
The signal horn sounded from the flagship's bow.
Arthur then watched the oars emerge from the rowing ports along the flagship's flanks, two hundred oars on each side sliding out in perfect unison and dipping their blades into the water.
Arthur stood at the stern rail and watched Brightwater Isle grow smaller behind them.
Then he turned to face the east, where Dragonstone waited.
(AN: So the battle of dragonstone will happen next though I imagine they won't put up much of a fight. I mean they've run out of food right? Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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