Land of the King

Chapter 77: Defender of the Vale

4803 E.L

"And there is nothing more that can be done for her?" Arassuil asked, desperate yet also resigned.

"I am sorry, Your Highness. Our healing arts are among the finest in the world, but we have never been able to cure old age. Her time has come. For one not of the Line of Elendil, she has lived very long indeed already," the healer said.

Arassuil sat back down into his seat, his head in his hands. The healer was right of course. For someone not of the royal line, two hundred and ninety-seven years was no unexpected age to die. Still though, the suddenness was stunning. In the span of two years, his mother's health had begun to decline markedly and where once she was strong and hale, for few ailments plagued the descendants of Númenor in their youth, now she had become sickly and frail. It was as if she was aging decades in months.

One of the other healers came out from the room. "She wants to see you, Your Highness," he said.

Arassuil got to his feet and entered the room. Death lingered in the air and his mother laid upon the bed, cuddled in blankets. Nothing like the strong and stern queen he remembered. She was thin, though not yet dangerously so, and her blonde hair had begun to pale into whiteness. Yet even in old age, her beauty remained, with nary a wrinkle or imperfection on her skin.

Her eyes lightened up with delight when she saw him, and Arassuil had to resist the urge to cry. So rarely had his mother so openly showed him affection, and now at the end she did it so easily.

"My son," Queen Alyssa said as she caressed his face as he took a seat at the left of her bed.

"Mother…" he tried to say but his mother shushed him gently.

"I know, I wasn't always the best mother to you and your siblings. Forgive me. For so long, my mind was consumed with thoughts of vengeance. I became so obsessed with vengeance for the family I had lost, I didn't properly appreciate the family that I had been given in return. It drove your father and your siblings away from me. Yet you stayed, even with your responsibilities in Arnor, you stayed here with me. Thank you."

"They're coming to see you. Father, Beleg, Jeyne, they all are."

"Yes, and I am grateful for that. Yet it is you who will inherit the Vale, or rather the broken pieces of it I leave to you. Rule better than me."

"I… I don't understand," he said confused. How was he to rule better than her?

"You will one day," the Queen answered, her eyes sad and regretful.


What had his mother meant? His mother's death had come already, and he still did not know what it was he was supposed to do.

"Arassuil…"

He looked up to see his father. Arahad, Second of His Name. The High King of Arnor had come to see his estranged wife on her deathbed and when she had died, he had remained to see Arassuil crowned.

"Father…"

They remained like that for a while, in an awkward silence, until finally one of them broke it.

"All these years, you rarely ever came to Gulltown. Why?" Arassuil asked.

His father sighed before answering something else altogether, "Your mother and I were strangers when we wed. It was an arranged marriage intended to tie the Vale and Arnor ever closer together. Yet even then, I thought that we could be happy together. Then the war came…" he said with a heavy pause.

"Your mother was never again the girl I wed. Her smile became a rare treasure, her laughter dead and gone. It seemed like all the joy had left her, replaced only with a hardness. Vengeance consumed her.

Yet the same ruthlessness that had empowered her to fight for the war's end, doomed her to never see its end. The heavy-handedness that she allowed saw the radicalization of an entire half of the Vale and though Rodrick was dead, his sons lived on."

He felt the need to protest, to defend his mother, but his father cut him off.

"When the throne of Arnor finally fell to me, your mother asked me once again to rally Arnor to her cause, and this time with the power I had, I certainly could have and we might have won at last, but I told her I would not send Arnorian soldiers to die in her war. Whatever relationship we had broke down then and we became estranged."

"Why didn't you do as she asked?"

"An old lesson passed down in our family. Tell my son, do you know how the Dragon Wars began? It was because my namesake threw away the lives of millions for his ego, ignoring the advice and visions of his predecessor. My grandfather was forced to commit atrocity after atrocity to end the Dragon Wars, and my own father spent his entire reign repairing the damage to our family's reputation. For all our power and prestige, we rule with the consent of the Arnorian people. It is our duty and our responsibility to rule with wisdom, and wisdom is not dragging Arnor into more unnecessary wars.

Yes. I could have done as your mother asked. I could have marched a hundred thousand Arnorian soldiers into the Mountains of the Moon at her behest. The rebels would have been squashed and forced to finally bend the knee. Yet once we withdrew, they would have rebelled, turned back to their old guerilla means of waging war. The cost, in men, money, and materials… it would never have been worth it.

A lesson to you my son. Arnor may be one of the most powerful empires in the world, but we are not invincible. Even now, many centuries from the Dragon Wars, the wounds run deep and we have not truly recovered. To wage an endless and ultimately useless war for nothing but pride would have been foolish and irresponsible… and dangerous."

Arassuil's interest was piqued further with the last word.

Noticing that he had garnered his son's attention further, Arahad continued, "The memories of the Dúnedain are very long. Though the living memory of the Dragon Wars is passing away with each passing year, I think we are still walking through its long shadow. We will never forget it, just as we have never forgotten deep down that our true homeland sank below the waves.

But the memories of lesser men are short. The Valyrians are now as strong as they were then, if not stronger and Arnor? As pained as I am to admit it, Arnor is weaker than it once was. The giants are gone, and our people's will for another Dragon War burned in dragonfire alongside an entire generation. How much longer before Valyria forgets entirely the lessons of the wars and moves against us again?

As a condition of my aid, I asked that we negotiate with the rebels first, to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Your mother, unable to swallow her pride, incapable of moving past her need for vengeance, refused it outright. And I knew then that Arnor could not help her. I could not help her.

I do not hold it against your mother that she could not give up her need for vengeance. Nor that she would fight to have the rule of her whole kingdom. Eru knows if the same thing had happened to me, I would have been much the same as her.

But I wasn't, I was put in the place of the man who had to turn down his wife for the sake of his people. With Valyria growing more antagonistic by the decade, who knew what interfering in the Vale could have caused? I refused to have that on my conscience, even if it cost me my relationship with your mother. Duty came before my personal feelings."

"Did you love her?" Arassuil asked, he needed to know this at least.

"What?" there was confusion in his father's face, and a hint of anger.

"Love is the death of duty, the bane of honor," he quoted the famous saying by Araphant, the King whose actions caused the greatest civil war in Arnor's history.

His father relaxed, "I see why you ask. And to tell it truly, I think that we never could have had the relationship you do with your wife Jessamyn. That died with her family. I like to think that we had something though, whether it was love or not… Only Eru knows.

"Yet my son, we cannot allow emotion to rule us. If we cannot rule our emotions, we cannot rule Arnor. Araphant's actions had dire consequences. Consequences that we cannot afford, not anymore."

"How do you suggest I resolve this issue then? How can I call myself King of the Vale when half my kingdom does not acknowledge me?"

"I do not know. I could tell you how I would resolve this, however, I cannot answer for you. You are the King of the Vale, not I and one day you will have this power over Arnor as well. It is your choice."

Arassuil looked into his father's eyes and saw the loneliness there and he knew. Heavy was the head that bore the crown. His father was testing him he knew, for if he could not resolve the Vale's problems, how could he hope to resolve the crisis that faced the far larger realm of Arnor?

"I'm postponing my coronation."

Arahad raised an eyebrow, "Might I ask why?"

"I cannot claim to be the King and Defender of the Vale, until I have all the Vale to obey me and defend," he answered simply.


It was a neutral meeting ground in contested territory. Arassuil had taken guards with him, but he did not truly fear an ambush. Not only did he trust that the Arryns held to their own words, he trusted that they believed in their own self-preservation. The consequences would be… dire, to say the least, if the Crown Prince of Arnor died under a banner of truce.

"Prince Arassuil," he was greeted by the leader of the rebel delegation.

"Prince Artys I presume?" he asked.

Despite being of his mother's generation, Prince Artys still lived, though he would likely follow her in death soon to old age, perhaps in another decade when he reached a similar age. For now, at least, old age had not yet fully set in, and he remained hale and strong. It did leave Arassuil a bit concerned that his negotiations might be undone though.

"My men call me King, Prince Arassuil," Artys answered.

"Funny, mine do the same. Yet only one of us can claim to be the grandson of the last man both your men and mine recognize as a King of the Vale. My grandfather, Roland Arryn. I wonder if you still remember how he died?" Arassuil asked, a slight challenge in his voice.

Artys winced, "My father never had his brother or his family killed. There was a fight in the palace and they died in the chaos. It was my father's greatest regret."

Arassuil was not exactly sure what to make of that.

"Whether that is true or not, your line has no right to the throne of the Vale, or the Falcon Crown," he countered.

"Why not? You are not even an Arryn. Your descent is from the female line. In the male line you descend from Elendil and the Kings of Arnor. Everything that my people fought against will come true if you remain King. They will never bend to you."

"I am as Arryn as any of you. I have just as much a right to the name. It is the Falcon that is my personal banner, not the White Tree. Furthermore, the traditions of our people, of Andal Law, dictate that a man's lands are inherited by his daughters before his brothers. Will you turn your back on the customs you claim to uphold?

"Yes, I will be King of Arnor one day, the Vale will be united to Arnor through that. That is inevitable already, and it was made so by your father when he rebelled, and accidentally or not, caused the death of all ahead of my mother in the line of succession."

"Your mother," Artys said with a dry mirthless chuckle. "A tyrant, even the old Mountain Clans she promised lands and clemency for fealty, she turned on and eradicated when their use to her came to an end."

"The Mountain Clans broke the terms of their agreement with my mother, they turned back to their old raiding ways and began stealing goods and women from their neighbors. I am not blind to the faults of my mother and that was not one of them. I offer my own terms to you now, and am willing to negotiate and concede on a great many things if it will bring peace to the Vale once and for all."

"And why would I hear these terms? We've been holding for centuries now, what's to stop that continuing for centuries more?"

He's testing me.

"I am the Crown Prince of Arnor. Tell me can you hold against Arnor if it truly warred against you? If we brought our full force to bear? These mountains are yours, and no doubt you would extract a very heavy price for them. But what chance do you have against the full might of Arnor?"

"You're bluffing. Your father was the Crown Prince as well. Even when he became King, Arnor did not rise."

"My father supports me in this. If I offer reasonable terms and you still reject me, what other way to end the war is there?" he asked. He was unsure how much of that was true, but it was now or never he knew.

Artys hesitated at that and Arassuil struck while the iron was hot, "My mother radicalized the northern Vale with her heavy-handedness, ruthless tactics, and unwillingness to compromise. If the people you rule learn of my terms and willingness to negotiate, will they support you like they did against Bloody Alyssa? Think about that, you know my reputation."

Arassuil's own reputation was much better than his mother in both halves of the Vale and unlike her, he commanded the full loyalty of the southern Vale and the full support of Arnor. The north still didn't have any love lost for him, but he was not the tyrannical queen to them his mother had been. Artys gritted his teeth before saying, "Very well, what are your terms?"

Arassuil smirked. Now the negotiations could really begin.


Months later, a grand ceremony and feast was held in Gulltown for the coronation of Arassuil of the House of Elendil and the House of Arryn as King of the Vale. For the first time in over two and a half centuries, representatives from the northern houses of the Vale would attend and swear fealty to Arassuil, a symbol of the reunification of the Vale.

It had not been in truth that much of a difficult negotiation. Reduced taxes, a high level of local autonomy, promises for support during harsh winters, religious freedom and autonomy, and the title of Prince for Artys and his line and a confirmation of their Lordship of Strongsong, which would have overlordship over the rest of the northern Vale.

His mother would never have accepted such an arrangement. The northern houses were less his subjects, and more his tributaries, like how the kings of Dorne had been to Arnor before the Kin-Strife. But when he would otherwise have had nothing at all from the northern Vale?

Arassuil would take what he could get. All that mattered was that the civil war, the division, had finally ended. His own lords had grumbled, but they were war weary enough that they accepted the peace without much struggle.

His father walked up to him, a smile on his face, "I'm proud of you son, and I think your mother would be as well. You will make a fine King of Arnor one day."

"Thank you father, that means a lot coming from you."

"There is a long road ahead for the Vale to fully recover, but I think it will do just fine under your guidance. For now, you wear the Falcon Crown only, it is my hope that when the time comes that you bear the Sceptre of Annúminas and the Winged Crown with it as well, you will be ready to rule Arnor as well."

"I won't disappoint you father," Arassuil said, determined.

"No, I don't think you will."


Author's Note: So ends the Vale arc. It has been a long road getting here, but we have finally reached the final arc(s) of this story. I'm thankful to everyone who has followed me since I typed up and posted that first chapter. I hope that you will continue to follow me as we enter the story's finale.