Chapter Text
Caladan, 10190 A.G.
The connecting doors between her chambers and Paul’s old ones stood open. A small army of servants and tailors was rushing in and out of the rooms. Watching herself in the mirror she was sitting in front of, Arafa took a sip of her drink. Usually, the sharp burn of the strong alcohol in her throat and nose would help her concentrate and force her mind back into a shape she could work with. She had no such luck today.
Bodil was draping a string of sea-green jewels across her forehead, guiding the delicate chain around her head. A younger woman stood at her other side, ready to begin working on her curls. Arafa could not remember her name. Less than half an hour was left. Heralds could be heard calling the guests into the Duke’s Kirk, a domed half-rotunda sat against the mighty walls of the castle. It would be bursting at the seams.
The ceremony would be heavily steeped in local custom and religious symbolism, all for the benefit of the people. Neither her nor Feyd-Rautha were adherents of religion to any extent. On Giedi Prime, faith was generally discouraged in favour of the quasi-religious veneration of its rulers. It was seen as a threat to the absolute power of Giedi Prime’s barons, and treated accordingly. Brutal, yet far more honest than the Atreides way: Caladan was a mosaic of sects and denominations, and her House had a long tradition of using religion to exert their power, alternately sowing tensions or postulating ecumenism in periodic waves, according to the demands of the time.
To avoid any sense of hierarchy, they would enter the Kirk at the same time from opposite sides, walk at the same pace, and meet in the middle, right beneath the high dome of the rotunda. The Kirk’s resident all-male consort would accompany the ceremony with hymns. She had grown up to love the brilliance and power of the chorister’s voices, from worker’s songs passed on from generation to generation to their repertoire of the sacred, and had always found solace in them.
In her head, Imad’s words had not stopped meandering. Each sentence, each thought she had already picked apart and twisted to look at it from all sides, trying to figure out whether she had fallen prey to sentimentalism, or he had, in his pain, crossed the thin line from pragmatism to cynicism.
People said it was easier to deal with catastrophic loss if there was a culprit, something or someone to hold accountable. It was why humans were so eager to point fingers even in cases of disaster or disease, why it was so important to either point fingers at innocents or find causes and explanations and something that could be improved to prevent future tragedies. One would always be powerless to fight coincidence or misfortune, and for some, this was the most painful aspect of loss.
Arafa knew that her own need for control probably exceeded that of most, with the exception of Imad. Knowing that there was evidence of a crime, knowing who had committed this devastating atrocity against people he loved, but forbidden from acting upon it – that had to be akin to torture for him. He would not have spoken to her the way he had, and she would not have accepted his brisk tone otherwise.
Yet if she dismissed his arguments simply because he was emotionally compromised, she would have to cast the same verdict upon her own thoughts.
If only he had not sounded so much like Feyd-Rautha the day before yesterday, when he had found her at the coast.
Doubt, her father used to say, was a friend of intellectual effort. While uncomfortable, its counsel should always be welcome; any person without doubt was bound to become an extremist.
Perhaps too much doubt also birthed extremism, she mused. There had not been a day in the past two years when she had not been full of doubt, and since the invasion of Arrakis, not a minute without. Her capacity for discomfort had been melting away under doubt’s persistent nagging like late spring snow under the sun.
A hand on her arm made her look to the woman at her side. For Bodil to touch her, the older woman must have already tried to make herself heard before, without success.
“My lady, let us dress you now.” Their eyes met in the mirror. A dozen pounds of fabrics was waiting for her. With a groan that could have been that of an elderly woman, Arafa drained her glass and pushed herself out of the chair. Thurve would have scolded her for this lapse in poise in front of so many people. More so than at any other point since Arrakis, Arafa felt her absence.
What a hypocrite I am, she thought as three pairs of hands manoeuvred the heavy dress over her head. Thurve had been taking care of her in one role or another since the day Arafa was born, and she was missing her for her service, not for who she had been.
Getting drunk enough to render herself unconscious for the remainder of the day seemed like a good enough idea.
There had already been so many fittings for the dress that it took barely a minute for the tailors to close all its clever fastenings and right every drape. This minute stretched, though, like old glue. Every tug and pinch, every pull at her arms, no matter how respectful, and the growing tightness around her torso were making it more and more difficult not to snap at the people surrounding her.
Bodil and another woman were lifting an embroidered mantle out of a wooden case. It had been used for hundreds of years in these transfers of power, and was so heavy that the tailors had to strengthen her dress and add stays to keep the weight of the mantle from pulling it out of shape.
While the women were closing the decorative fibulas on her shoulders around the ancient, rich fabric, Arafa slipped into a pair of comfortable shoes. They would not be visible anyways, and she had seethed at the suggestion that she choose shoes that would make her appear taller. She would rather not be in pain than add another layer of deception.
A rush of activity on the other side of the connecting made her raise her head. Servants came with armfuls of materials or to gather tools, signalling that they had wrapped up their work, and then Feyd-Rautha stepped through.
“It’s all done, Lady Atreides,” Bodil said softly and bowed to her. People were suddenly in a hurry to leave, to get out of his way. Arafa nearly rolled her eyes, but she could not fault them. Envious is what she was as they were spilling into the hallway.
For a moment, they stood facing each other in the empty room, less than a yard between them: she, unwilling to meet his eyes, clinging to every second as though she could make them last longer; he, stopped briefly in his tracks by a surge of prideful triumph at the sight of her.
Vividly, he remembered instances of similar hesitation in her - the time it had taken her to brave his disregard for the rules protecting her, when he had first wrapped his hand around her throat eight years ago; the flash of terror followed by a first spark of captivation in her eyes in the underbelly of his arena, four years ago. From that day on, he had known that he would do anything to have her, had never doubted that she would be his, in the end.
He took another step closer. From her elbows, he trailed his knuckles up, following the masterful lace of stylised, silvery fern to her shoulders, where unfurling leaves seemed to be reaching for her heart. The design mirrored that of embroidery running along his high collar, down his front and along the hem of his coat. Ferns, he had learned, were a symbol of the indestructible on Caladan, and especially popular these days in weddings.
Oh, he had had his reservations about marrying her here. Today, though, he knew without a doubt that he had made the right choice not to drag her to Giedi Prime and diminish her for all to see. No. She stood before him now in all her strength and nobility, and he had not captured a victim, but a crown for his head.
So powerful to the observer; in truth, held so securely in his hands.
---
Rooted to the stone floor, her eyes were fixed on the ornate double doors in front of her. The doors at the main entrances to the Duke’s Kirk were the only ones made entirely from wood. To her left and right, two Harkonnen soldiers in ceremonial uniforms stood still like statues.
Across the half-rotunda, she knew he was waiting behind doors just like these, flanked by members of the Duke’s Guard. This swap had been the only way to make sure she would be surrounded during the ceremony by men at arms he could trust.
She closed her eyes when the last deep notes of a doxology faded. Only a few seconds left.
The voice of a cantor whose kind eyes and beautiful baritone had drawn her to him even as a child rose again. Over her lifetime, his voice had matured and deepened, and his range and sublime clarity had earned him the right and the duty to lead the Kirk’s consort. Words half-sung and half-spoken announced the commencement of the ceremony. The crowd had been quiet before, but she thought she could feel the weight of thousands of eyes now through the massive doors.
From the inside, two guardsmen pulled the doors open and stood aside.
No way out but through.
Forcing her eyes open again, Arafa fixed her stare at some point straight ahead. There had never been as many people filling the stepped rows of seats and the two porticoed tiers along the building’s curve. She did not dare to let her eyes wander.
Steps measured to align with the tempo of the chorister’s hymn, shoulders locked to counter the dragging weight of the mantle she would soon fasten to his shoulders, walking the distance of little more than fifty yards took almost two minutes. They were by far not the longest of her life – waiting for him on Arrakis had definitely set an uncatchable record.
---
A sip of wine each, from the same chalice. Then the touch of his thumb, covered in cool, viscous paint, blue like the sky just before dawn, painting a stripe from the bow of her mouth over her lips and chin. Her own thumb hovered a bit too long, and she had to steady her hand with her fingers to his jaw. There was concern in his eyes fed by her reluctance, and his lips moved under the pad of her thumb as he whispered her name to her.
Then, warm wax gave to the pressure of the Atreides seal, filling the hollows between its raised lines. From more than four yards away, she swore that she could hear the incessant whirring of the shigawire recorder, balanced on the knees of the Herald of the Change. The oily smell of the wax was clinging to the inside of her nose.
She pulled her hand back to reveal the perfect imprint of the bird of prey that had been her family’s heraldic figure for centuries. On the opposite side of the table covered in ornate cloth, her master of ceremonies poured another small pool of wax onto the document for Feyd-Rautha to push his own seal into. The ram’s head joined her bird of prey, and if he had been the duke and not she the duchess, that would have been it.
But by law, her husband could not be less than her, and only in the absence of a duke could she reign as duchess.
Next to her, Feyd-Rautha made the half-turn back to face her, and with a second’s delay, she mirrored his movement. Two guardsmen stepped onto the two-tiered platform from behind her. They reached for the fibulas on her shoulders. Throat closing with biting, impotent anger that surprised her with its sudden rise and made her eyes water, she was brutally conscious of the many witnesses lining the half-circle of the Kirk, watching as she was being stripped of her House’s regalia.
Since it had become clear that Shaddam would not simply let her succeed her father, she had worked tirelessly to pass this mantle to her cousin, to transfer the duchy to another line of her family, equally deserving. Irrelevance had been the solution to her problem, something she had been hoping for. Longing for, even – for the freedom of it, for the promise of a different life.
She allowed her eyes to fall shut – just for a moment, she told herself – and let the harmonies of the choral fill her mind until she could feel the deep, close to inaudible notes of the bass voices in her bones. Yet they could not drown out the tugs of the guardsmen’s fingers on the fabric, or the jarring sensation of loss when they took the weight of the mantle off of her.
And you, you have no want for power, no will to hold it. You bear it, he had said to her two years ago, when he had cornered her at the salt pools.
It had been true at that time. Now, the ground beneath her feet seemed to sway as she failed to imagine how, if at all, she could endure irrelevance that brought bondage instead of freedom.
Without her realising it, the Kirk had fallen silent around them. She had missed her cue, this time. Arafa knew that she needed to move, needed to remember the motions and the words, that this day still had the potential to end in a massacre if she could not regain her composure. A sound of metal scraping over metal made the hairs on her arms rise. The Herald of the Change was still taking notes, perfectly aware of the origin of her struggle, eager to record every detail for his master to absorb.
Like a voyeur. Obscene. Shameless. The mere idea that she would have to face Shaddam in the future, look at him, bow to him, answer him, made her nauseous. And yet, even though she knew now that he had been the architect of this catastrophe from the very beginning, even though his depravity had been laid out for her to view in full, she was shying away from the one path that would lead to justice.
This path might as well be her only way out. As long as the Corrino dynasty occupied the Golden Lion Throne, she would always be outnumbered. A new emperor might see things differently, might not intervene or even be a friend to her.
Still.
Just loud enough for her to hear, Feyd-Rautha said her name again, both query and demand in his guarded tone. The familiar rasp of his voice pulled her attention back to him. She swallowed around the pungent taste of the mineral paint and the knot in her throat.
“Yes,” she said quietly, and his palpable tension dissipated. In unison, they moved, she to the edge of the platform, facing their audience, and he stepped off, his back to the people, eye to eye with her.
The two guardsmen holding the mantle took their positions behind him, each presenting a corner of it to her. She reached for his shoulders to open the fibulas sewn into his coat.
“Look at me,” he urged her in a low murmur. Her gaze flicked to his, then back to her fingers. It would have to be enough.
“You asked me once whether I would accept his insult, or recognise the gift.”
On a late summer morning, two years ago, they had talked in the terraced gardens. She had made him face a truth of his own: that Shaddam had chosen him for her precisely because the emperor expected him to lay waste to the world and the name and the woman. Not because he was seen as worthy. Never one bearing the Harkonnen name. They could rise to unparalleled power and still be looked down upon.
He thinks only you can destroy what he’s most afraid of. His gift to you is nothing but a prettily wrapped insult.
“I remember.” The first needle slipped open, and she bent it to the side.
“And just a few days later, my darling, you told me that you wished you could leave your enemies to me.”
Unbidden, her mind threw her own words back to her – that I could stand back and watch as they dropped at your feet like flies – and transformed them into pictures. Her fingers trembled on his shoulder. Somehow, their thoughts had brought them both back to that hot day, and she did not need to concentrate very hard to recall the warmth of the stones in her back, the soft sloshing of the waves in the pool and the unyielding strength with which he had held her to the wall.
Could she truly fault herself for defending her rights by the only means left to her, by the means she had been given by the very man who had orchestrated her ruin?
“Will you accept his insult, or recognise the gift?”
The second needle finally gave way. Clever, returning her own question to her.
If she let him, he would repay Shaddam a thousandfold.
Her eyes came back to his. For a moment, he thought that she might answer him, but then she tapped the small button beneath her ear to activate the amplification of her voice. Hands steady once more, she accepted the first corner of the mantle from the guardsman, and pulled it into the fibula on his right shoulder.
“As the people belong to you, you belong to the people.”
Not a tremor in her voice as it filled the Kirk.
With her left keeping the fabric in place, she pushed the needle back into the lock with unnecessary force. The edge of the clasp bit sharply into his shoulder. At the flash of annoyance in his eyes, the corners of her mouth twitched in short-lived satisfaction. She moved to his left shoulder and fed the second corner into the fibula.
“May you be blind and mute when they speak to you.”
Again, she trapped the fabric under the needle. The soldiers behind him stepped back, letting the mantle slip from their hands and its weight settle on his shoulders.
Another guardsman approached the low platform from her right. He was carrying a small box, already opened, in his hands. The tiny spark of mirth had already vanished from her expression as if it had never been there. She brought her hands together and began to pull the signet ring from her finger, taking it off for the last time. After the ceremony, hers would be destroyed – it was too small for him, and only one could be in existence.
Swiftly, before her nerves could get the better of her, she dropped it into the box and picked up the one that had been made for him. He offered his left hand to her, and she slipped the ring onto his finger without meeting his eyes.
“Welcome, Duke of Caladan.”
---
Feyd-Rautha stood on the colonnaded terrace connected to the duke’s chambers. His, now. From here, he had an unobstructed view over the west wing of the castle, the gardens and the estuary below. The last colourful flashes of fireworks were dying down, casting their reflections onto the troubled, night-black sea below.
Through the thick walls trickled faint music and the noise of hundreds. Soon, transports would begin ferrying the common folk back to their regions of origin. Only a few dignitaries had been assigned quarters for the night. He and Arafa had retreated some time ago, to allow the festivities to find their conclusion.
All that was left for him to do tonight was to await her answer. Throughout the day, she had not given him any indication, any sign of where her thoughts were taking her. She had not asked another question after their conversation in the morning; apart from their short exchange during the ceremony, they had not spoken on it at all.
It had not been necessary. Even if she told him No now, there were so many more days to come, so many more opportunities to convince her – she was bound to him for the rest of her life, after all.
So just for today, he would let himself be content.
Welcome, Duke of Caladan.
All his. The land. The wealth. The people. Her. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the bird of prey on his left ring finger.
Eight years. Eight years of meticulous scheming, of plans falling through, of impatience and frustration. Every effort, every single day of labour had been worth it.
Light steps of a familiar gait approached him from behind. He turned and beckoned to her, and she followed his unspoken invitation, stepping between him and the balustrade. His hands returned to the edge of the cut stone on either side of her. The lace of her sleeves and on her shoulders did little to protect her from the cold air, so she leaned into him until her shoulder blades touched his chest.
Yet another balcony, he thought as he settled his chin on her head. Quite the tradition. A gentle breeze was bringing salty air from the ocean and aromatic smoke from the fireworks to them. For a while, none of them spoke. Arafa’s fingers moved tentatively over his left hand to skim the face of the ring, as if testing herself against reality.
“I have an answer for you,” she eventually said. Acknowledging her with a low, noncommittal hum, he buried his nose in her curls.
“You’ll have the samples, Feyd-Rautha.” Her voice was ripe with conflict, with determination and regret. “I’ll fight this war with you.”
A burst of his breath betrayed the reaction he otherwise suppressed. She had indeed arrived at the limit of her forbearance. Careful to keep his pleasure below the surface, so as not to scare her off at the last moment, he wrapped his right arm around her waist. How readily she said his name these days.
“I’ve given you everything now.”
“No, my darling wife.”
She stiffened in his hold, mouth opening to protest his choice of words but recognising the futility before she had formed a retort. His fingers brushed over her side, thumb following the curve under her breast to placate her.
“You’re still withholding so much from me.”
A slight tilt of her head into his cheek, a minute increase of warmth where his hand splayed over her abdomen. True, Arafa thought, and she was almost grateful for the appreciation in his tone and the concession in his words.
“But I’ll have it all, in the end.”
Inevitable. Vladimir Harkonnen’s ghost. Maybe he had been right from the start. Maybe it had always been nothing but a question of time.
“No,” she said, as if she needed to rebuke her own sentiment as well as his. “This is – a truce. Another deal. Call it a temporary alliance, if you must. I want him dead. And then –”
And then she would throw herself against her captor once more. Caladan was an ocean world. If there was one thing she had learned from the sea, it was not to struggle when all she could hope to achieve was the exhaustion of her strength. Like the first explorers stuck in the ice, she would winter here, patiently, and wait for summer to open up leads that would take her back to open water. Summer – when they had dealt with Shaddam, and the dust had settled to reveal an entirely new distribution of power.
She felt his quiet chuckle in her back, could taste his satisfaction on his breath. There was no need to finish her sentence. He understood her just fine.
What a delight she was. From the very beginning, he had admired her bravado, her will to fight him to the end, every step of the way, and here she was, wrapping her defeat into a shroud of compromise. Still defiant, after everything, still intent on opposing him. He pressed his lips to her temple and inhaled the faint perfume of her hair. Let her bide her time, wait for her opportunity, rebel against him to her heart’s content. He would keep taking her apart until nothing of her was left untouched, until her heart knew no name but his and her resistance had become ritual.