Working on a new project very passionately this week so please forgive me if my editing for this chapter's not great. Please enjoy!


Chapter 14: Growing Pains

In the morning Yugi took her breakfast tray in the Queen's quarters and did not stand upon Atemu's arrival. Not that he expected it given he discerned the Queen without courtiers or ladies or dressers. Everyone had been banished from visiting.

"Yes Majesty?" Yugi shot blandly, cradling her drink with one leg cocked elegantly over the other. Her chin was high, angry and proud. The eyes sat however a little empty, half the lustre Atemu remembered during the reign of his Father.

Apparently Atemu's legacy was to be a trail of arguments and insults.

"I wanted to speak with you about last night," he found his voice lacked the usual strength of conviction.

"Remember something else to blame me for Husband?" The white witch snorted coyly. "Crops not growing? A plague or blight across the lands?"

"I came to apologize," Atemu cut, his temper tugging his sleeves childishly.

He was embarrassed.

Yugi glanced, paled uncomfortably and straight as a board didn't at all seemed pleased. She was cold yet with those predator's eyes. Her face sat somewhere in between a waiting, hungry, beast and a rabbit ready to duck for new cover unconvinced by the sentimentalities of a farmer. Atemu rolled his insides, displeased, but what had he expected? The white witch was not as meek as Anzu, would not jump to make peace, would not trust him for an inch or a tiny gasp.

"I…" Atemu couldn't make eye contact, groaning off towards the glass of the high windows and mandalas of the ceiling as if he was in pain. "I have accused you of a great many things that are not your fault. I have blamed you for things you have done only on my orders. I should not have done so."

Yugi's eyes did not waver but neither did her expression.

"I…" Atemu tried again. "I have made very cruel assumptions about you since we first met. Many appear unfounded. I have been…" no he couldn't manage that much he surrendered to the best he could do; "I am sorry for offending you."

Yugi sighed, eyes rolling, and still sickly pale, still angry, put the drink down to rest her face into one palm as the elbow rested on the rest of the chair.

"What?" Atemu hissed, hands spreading. What more did the creature want?

"Oh go away," Yugi agonized impatiently as if the King were some screeching, incessant, child.

"What do you wish me to say?" He snapped, fingers shaking, unable to contain himself.

"Nothing," the tiny downy thing hissed with her eyes amongst her fingers, "I don't want you to say anything. I want you to leave me alone."

"Do you think it is easy for me to come here and confess that I have been an ass? That I am wrong?"

"With your pride?" Yugi scoffed. "No I don't but I don't care. Go away."

"You can't speak to me like this," Atemu retorted hotly. "Not when I am trying to make some peace between us."

"I can or you can slaughter me," Yugi grasped both rests of her seat in wiry fingers, turning to him like a striking snake. "If it's the first leave and if it's the second call the guards as you go. You have made my life wretched at every chance for the past eight years. I am permitted to be angry at you."

Atemu stalled, caught, and lips parting without anything to say felt his hands lose their tension as they idled by his sides. Silenced, stupefied, he…

He blinked, he turned, he left. He knew not what else to do.


"Atemu," Sesset entreated tightly, going further past their usual boundary of impersonal tradition than she would typically under any circumstances. "What is the matter?"

Sesset was, Atemu appreciated, one of the proudest and most capable women at court since the time of his mother. Sesset was, further, the only wife who would handle simultaneously services at the royal court, a marriage to Zarzak, motherhood and the gritty running of some of the continent's largest swathes of farmland. To have Sesset on her knees, hands grasping tenderly for Atemu's forearm over the rest of the seat, pleading did nothing to assuage the agonizingly tight knot in his stomach.

"The Sultana's not come out for two days and you look like you've seen a ghost, you're all gaunt, what in the gods' name is wrong?"

"I don't know," Atemu sighed, hiding his face in one hand before he found even that gesture hurt when the image of Yugi split up through his skull again. His hand thumped into his lap. "Her Majesty is ill from me."

"From what?" Sesset stressed acutely, "are you well? Is she attended?"

"From my stupidity or else from some infectious strain of my pride," he snorted bitterly, "but I should think she's as well on the mend as she can be while I might never be."

"Oh don't be ludicrous," she grunted, "you're young and strong, what can't you recover from?"

"Well it seems my entire way of feeling, of seeing, is flawed." He laughed, head slumping back.

"You're spinning in riddles," Sesset was becoming increasingly frustrated now, "don't tell me this is all over some damn lover's spat?"

"I wouldn't call it that," Atemu tarried dryly because frankly he didn't think Yugi would ever consent to calling them something so heinously misplaced as 'lovers'.


The Gem Faher returned to breakfast on the fifth day. Atemu was so jolted by it he couldn't so much as look at his meal without feeling wretched. Yugi was stiff all over, glassy, almost inanimate, in the straightness of her posture but branding iron hot in her eyes still. The burning, vaguely supernatural, pulse was enough for Atemu to wire up his lips and repulse from it briskly.

It was so much easier to cushion one's self from Yugi's wrath with their own Atemu realized because, oh God, the sensation of it without armour was…

Anzu had no point of comparison, she did not hate or was not capable of it with as much sheer skill as Yugi possessed. She had a biblical intensity that Atemu did not remember across the span of his life from any other source. In the whole action of consenting that he was destructive force, a bastard, Atemu had torn himself open for Yugi to put his innards to blaze with every tiny gesture or inactivity.

Atemu repelled, found his fingers shook chronically at meals when he pushed his fingertips into his temples and couldn't speak.

He turned to work, business, nobility and kingship. He prayed, he missed Anzu, he missed the little boy who would've been weaning and off to breeching soon if he'd lived. He… No. He couldn't go back there. He cauterized the portion of his memory devoted to various aspects of his adulthood; his temper, his father, his succession to the throne and a whole agonizing slew of subsequent decisions.

He found himself in a useless torrent, vicious at himself but in such a way that he agonized to obscure it, hide it, by being as far from the Gem Faher as humanly possible.

Some part of him felt that the appearance of pain on his part, weakness, would be construed as only a further insult. The wi- oh he cringed over the word- the… the Sultana, he fathomed, would loathe to see Atemu make himself a victim if only of his own personhood.


Apparently, Yugi realized, she'd been quarantined if the wide berth Atemu enforced round her was anything to go by. The snivelling, cowering, of the man Yugi had always known as so incredibly antagonistic was at once unnerving and frustrating. She was still at a deep emotional loss for how to digest the motions of the last two weeks. It left her unsure what to do, more so than she already was, more vulnerable and worried and unsure than she'd been since she was a child.

She predicted people, she read social conditions, she was a summoner of conversations and decisions but…

"So you fought then?" Kuli supposed brushing Yugi's hair.

"That is the Sultan," Mana'jet sighed, "he gets it from his mother. He recoils at the boundary of real conflict with those he values. He's so emotional, so romantic… none of my other brothers are so. It's father's passion, yes, but he gets so damn tender about it all I still can't believe his impulsiveness sometimes…"

Yugi pursed her lips, didn't bother with an answer, she was too exhausted for it. Atemu's mind, to her anyway, had forever been an infamous web of ungrateful, contradicting, actions and preferred to play seer over the ocean.

She felt as if she was blind.

She hated the vulnerability of this.


As much as they could not dare, not manage, to face each other apparently it was just was caustic for them to avoid each other. Not upon Yugi- Oh, damn it, yes upon Yugi because every second the damn tyrant was out of sight she had a slew of instincts trying to predict the king and unsettled that they could not. It sent her paranoia into a spiral. It was easier to snap and shout and rave with him because then at least Yugi could see the shape of the monster lusting for her ruin. When Atemu was gone yet still upon Eastern shores it was neigh impossible for her to unwind.

Yugi found herself dizzy, she lost track of the urge for festivities and forced the whole planning of the next solstice onto Lurek.

She swore, gasping, as her needle stabbed into her thumb.

Sh dropped the embroidery, a habitual distraction of hers; part nervous habit part meditation, to clatter on the floor and sucked the tip of her finger between her lips. She was graceful, she was cunning, and now damn nerves, damn jitters, were scratching at her making her elbows shiver.

She couldn't stand this.

She'd cried, viciously, after Atemu's apparent manhandling of that stupid blonde wench but for nothing to do with him. Yugi had cried about her whole state of existing, about the death that circled her, about her blood and her witchery and her unlucky condition. Sge seemed fated to burn or live in fear of it. It was her native state.

She cried too, over two days, that she hadn't married Mahado or even Qazzadara. She would not consider Timaeus but for at least two men she had felt something of love however un-sexualized. She had, for the first and last time, brief imaginings of kissing Mahado and what that life might've been if Atemu had been allowed back to Britton to have babes with a still living, still beautiful, Anzu. It all hurt.

She'd cried and now she felt she could again which seemed impossible. Yugi could so hardly ever cry it felt overwhelming that she might, at any moment, tumble into hysterics now. Where was the dignified confidence with which she'd out schemed Atemu's first damn witch hunt immediately after Anzu's death? The death which was, by some not unreasonable stretch, actually her fault like Atemu screamed it was.

She couldn't face the building intensity of another attempt to consummate his wedding bed. She couldn't take another moment lying with her eyes closed waiting to see if her house was still ablaze under raiders.

Her shaking elbow was still in the air, the tip of her thumb still in her mouth, when she forced open the door of the adoring bedroom to Atemu's private sitting rooms.

Atemu paled visibly upon spotting her from the fireside seat, book left open in his lap exposed and still fingered.

Yugi hand fell out of her mouth and she was speaking before she was completely aware of what she was saying.

"I can't take it," she announced rushing out wonderments, "I can't bear it."

Atemu blinked dumbly at her. His lips parted marginally, heavy, but would only dare, it seemed, attempt that much of a reply.

"Damn it all you useless man say something!" Yugi shrieked. "The hell are you going to do?"

"About what?" Atemu wheezed, fingers of one hand spreading.

"Heirs!" The Gem Faher bent in the expulsion of the word, fingers clawing into fists by her side.

"I…" the man groaned, head slumping back, "what in the name of God does it matter?"

"Because I don't know where you are!" Yugi cawed in a kind of tense, frantic, bubble of raw wrung anxiety that made her hand shake by her side as its twin cut open over the air. "I deserve to know if that onslaught is coming again!

"I don't know," Atemu appealed hissing weakly with both his palms open, empty, in his lap. "If that is what you want to hear me say then have it. I don't know."

Yugi's arms fell languidly, her breath came in like the tide and her shoulders bunched up and down through her exhale but lips tying up she didn't feel any better.

"I…" She sagged. "For gods' sake man yell at me! I don't for the life of me know where you're going to snap from next and it damn destroys me!"

Yugi didn't really know what she was saying, wishing, but she could hardly imagine what Atemu was or would out of sight or without that well of unending determinism Yugi recognized as the other. Without the passions and the wild rages she so readily knew as Atemu's comprising traits she was… God she was scared. She hated being scared. A whole battalion of horses had started walking upright to her.

Atemu moaned slumping forward, swearing into his hands as his knees spread and his elbows rested upon them.

"Stop, for the love of the light in heaven, stop," he pleaded. "It's bad enough the very thought of my own voice makes me queasy now let alone the fantasy of screeching at you."

That was worse, made even less sense, pandered to her fears even more thoroughly…

"I… I don't…." Yugi swallowed, threw up her hands, felt her eyes burn and cupping one elbow pressed the hand enclosed therein to his face to shake and turn away.

She traipsed, heels tittering, and disappeared away again.


Atemu turned…

Slumping back with the click of the door he found the ceiling till, a long moment later, where he found his toes.

Damn it all, Anzu was easy, so easy. He knew, almost wordlessly, what she wanted or how, in the air, she would respond. He could picture, time, the exact twitch of her lips or scan of her eyes. Predictability, tradition, everything he thrived on. He was such a useless strategist when the game had seemingly no rules of engagement.

Though… this game had rules, Atemu had just only ever bothered to learn half of them as, apparently, had the Sultana given how the tiny thing had evidently worked herself up.

Atemu sighed, dragged the sound, and hesitantly pulling himself up left the book on the seat. What to do? What to say? Where were the toes and the fingers he'd step on in this darkness?


Atemu took his seat in the grand hall in the morning only to find himself unreasonably ruffled by the surreal nature of Yugi's seat beside him. The witch had been there a year now, comfortably, but as always something in the pores of her tight milky skin was distracting and stirring. It displaced Atemu's comfortable thoughts sometimes to see Yugi, such a typical European beauty, dressed as such a staunch Eastern traditionalist with all the bold, unapologetic, grandeur of a Sultana's ornaments.

Yugi's pronunciation was perfect now as she laughed to Sesset at his side in Atemu's birth tongue. The fluttering hint of a different coloured accent nowhere near as pronounced as it had always been inside Anzu as if her sea colours were flowing out onto her tongue. To Yugi, in Yugi, those sounds were a ghost of some history outside the relevant. Yugi belonged here. She'd been some transplanted flower, some foreign festering bloom, which had utterly consumed the entire garden till it seemed in its rightful place amongst the chamomiles.

Sighing Atemu…

The sight of Yugi howling herself hoarse was branded on the inside of his forehead, aching, till he felt a right cad down to the withered bud of his heart but he hardly knew what to do with that.

He steadied himself, preparing for impact, and as delicately as a man such as himself could managed tapped Yugi in passing. His knuckles rapped absently at the partially exposed upper arm and, jolting, Yugi startled violently.

"Hmm?" She cocked herself, hair studded today with pins.

"And how are you this morning?"

Yugi seemed to think that Atemu had just asked him the colour of God's beard. If Atemu had been watching across the room he would've been inclined to think he had asked as much himself. Frowning the Gem Faher appeared to search for an alternative motive, some cunning ruse or joke.

"I don't know. How should I be?" She tempted dryly.

"Oh I just meant…" Atemu broke of his snap shaking his head into his hand, "never mind."

The witch frowned, brows pinching together, eyes very old. She had such a keen kind of appraising glance at times like peddler over suspect stock. If Atemu hadn't so often felt like broken merchandise and more like a man in her gaze- Though Atemu would confess he'd hardly done much to…endear himself and… The thoughts started to sting between pride and guilt till he couldn't bear them.

He gathered himself up, shifting stiffly in the throne and remembering himself tried reluctantly once more to get to business. Apparently he could not ease himself into kindnesses with the witch. Yugi evidently accepted all pleasantries as Trojan horses.

"I have a letter," Atemu rumbled drawing his attention before it wavered, "from the King of France."

"Oh," Yugi pursed suspiciously, "and what do they want?"

"A more formalized alliance, official merchant agreements, permanent ambassadors."

Yugi huffed despondently through her nostrils; "I hate the French." She declared unapologetically, reaching for her cup.

"I recall vividly." Atemu drawled trying desperately not to allow his thoughts to dip towards the pregnancy, the son, the grave, and the incompetent Frenchmen. It was a disgusting, almost comedic, fable of hubris to his shame. "They wish to visit us."

"Who? The Dauphin?"

"Hmm, yes."

"God," Yugi groaned, cocking one leg over the other eyes narrowing towards the windows. Atemu hated that or was beginning to. The witch's constant fascination with looking away, looking out, aside and apart from his face was incessant but unconscious. "Don't let them," she mumbled at the rim of her drink.

"I can't say no," Atemu murmured more reasonably, "they're a powerful ally. They'll provide a stronger foothold in the continent."

"A continent of scoundrels," Yugi popped her lips together in rumbling, brewing.

"Don't you have any nostalgia for your homeland?" He moaned quietly.

"Sometimes you don't seem to," the Sultana snorted, catching fast at his hypocrisy as she was always so vicious to snipe upon it. "I have beautiful memories. I don't approve of the culture."

"Then we have something in common." Atemu sounded tart even inside his own mouth.

Yugi laughed in a deep coquettish drawl obliterating the snark and the bitterness building inside the roof of Atemu's mouth for a far more uncomfortable kind of desire. Not that this was, admittedly, the first time he'd felt that stalactite built up of arousal dripping down his back. Men do so love what they don't understand after all.

"Touché." Yugi allowed raising her cup, plucking carelessly from her plate with her free hand and taking a sip a second later turning to her meal.

Atemu forced himself to laugh, however weakly, air dry in his chest rattled still to his core. If witches, if any witch at all, could cast spells with tears it would've been Yugi he realized suddenly entrapped with a creature perhaps too cunning for his resolve.


They had very little excuse to speak, little reason too, either seated together in the temple or at dinner or in bedrooms one thin splay of wood apart and it seemed for the best. Atemu's wounds were still bleeding, metaphysically rupturing on regular occasions to puss up horrible memories and inklings of self loathing.

In the pass of the month Yugi seemed to recover well enough, social health revitalising, to throw unnecessary festivities.

She arrived one morning, weaving in as Atemu's council men left in a thickened stream, hefting her wraps up and nodding, chuckling, to whole wave of men who bowed for her. At the head of his table, engrossed in something, Atemu noticed her voice but chose not to acknowledge it. He glanced briefly up through his eyelashes but wasn't stirred to movement until waltzing straight past him Yugi unlatched the windows over his shoulder and threw them open to the blossoming trees of the courtyard wafting up strings of jasmine.

"What's this then?" He grunted.

"I'm throwing a party, the weather's improving though I'm sure it'll be rancid again within the month," was the Sultana's abrupt answer coming cross armed to stand alongside his seat with her hip jutting. "Before my court is invested with bilge rats I want a traditional celebration. Lions, the arena, gladiatorial displays…"

"I suspect I don't get a say in the matter," Atemu sagged back languidly.

"Not really, but you've been warned I intend to steal all your men from business and I invite you to attend and gamble away our fortunes."

"While you gossip up whole new constitutions I'm sure," he countered, "well, then, if you're resolved I have a condolence to ask."

Yugi gazed down her nose at him, one shoulder inclining slightly to her mouth in a grimace.

"We need to entertain the French, they'll be here shortly," Atem was sure Yugi knew, he was sure that was the whole point. "As that is your field of expertise and my hands are thoroughly banned from the fool-hearty act of telling the wives what to do I trust I can forward that into the Queen's capable hands?"

"Capable but unwilling," Yugi warned.

"As always," he rasped darkly under his breath, a doomed man's whisper given how the witch intensified about the corners of her eyes like she might strike the Sultan down abruptly. "Have you been fitted yet? I haven't asked."

"For those clothes?" Yugi condescended, noticeably fouler now. "Yes. They're to be sent to me tomorrow. I don't like them."

"I should be so lucky for you to like anything," Atemu snorted lightly, and then, wheezing thickly though his nostrils, heaved is shoulders through an exhale; "but I…"

Yugi watched, waiting to strike and needing only a hair of space to make her mark.

"I am sorry, I fear my tongue's escaped with me again," the words were congealed in Atemu's mouth, "I have to curb the darkness of my humour."

Yugi…

Yugi paled, impossibly, she couldn't quite at all seem to decide what to do with herself. Her lips parted almost unperceptively, hands unlacing to ease along her sides as if Atemu had just confessed something unnatural.

Atemu waited, biding, shutting up with all the sage like wisdom Abraxas has so often tried to impart to him as a child.

"I…" Yugi fluttered, lost. There was a flex of her wrist against her thigh, an unconscious motion, a confused flick.

Atemu gathering his wits and inclinations took the little hand in his and attempting valiantly to ignore the hawkish stare of his wife cupped it briefly to his lips. It passed, hot under them, before he released it and twisting he flexed back to align with his charters.

Yugi did not move at first, appeared to collect herself.

"Good day Sir," she mumbled, rasping as she swished awkwardly back.

"Good day to you," Atemu answered distantly trying not to mark the exact, unsteady, lurch of his heart in his chest.


"Oh!" Yugi winced, cringing with the rest of the enamoured audience watching the spectacles from under the tents backed onto the river.

The gladiator, the challenger, was tossed back by the presently riled lion but still armed and still standing charged back with a bloodied scream. The crowd cheered, the gentler sex clapped, the men hooted and round them the breeze brought cool air off the river as they faced into the plain where the arena had been set.

It was, Atemu would permit, only as savage as the wildness they allowed in Europe. The spectacles of the joust were nonetheless dangerous but the nobility of the mounted cavalryman gave them a more genteel air of properness compared to this outright savagery. Barbarism was not the intent of the event here in the East rather events like this were geared to demonstrate the same qualities a knight strived to show: bravery, determination, strength, cunning… they simply bothered with different symbolism.

Atem leant into his hand, knees apart, lulled into a contented trance as the grand, near religious, violence washed over him. Anzu had so often politely declined these cultural events that Atemu had no power to completely strip from the royal calendar. She had feigned sickness to the court to the best of her abilities. Yugi however struck Atemu as, and it pained him to say, very similar to his own mother. Atemu's mother had seen the advantages of these events to gossip, unfold social schemes, work out trade agreements and dowry prices under a more unifying atmosphere of comradelier. The men screaming, betting, proving themselves provided a kind of rife breeding ground for all manner of cultural norms to act themselves out.

Yugi enfolded into the culture, was an active congealing part of keeping it alive, and as such had become poignant and necessary. She was, Atemu knew a mile away these days, the exact string of woman that his father so loved. It only concerned Atemu how he would present his entirely savage sultana to the more delicate Europeans expecting some stolen white angel trapped among heathens. Either Yugi would be seen as a product of primal conversion or a demonstration of the refinery of the East.

Atemu didn't like either option.

The lion had gotten down on the man. Yugi was on her feet, two fingers in her mouth, against the railing of the raised podium to whistle sharply for the attendants. When the standing by handlers were to act and intervene depended entirely in these situations upon the judgement of the Sultana or Sultan. Historically some men had died from a distracted queen or a vengeful lord making an example. Yugi at least was valiantly merciful about when to send up alarm for help and wasted no time in it.

The guards rushed the man, Yugi tumbled back into her seat sighing back into inertia after the abrupt flourish and head back splayed her hands over the rests of the seat.

"Poor thing almost had her," Yugi appraised clapping, "a shame."

"Hmm," Atemu moaned absently.

"Imagining ladies giving out colours and silver armour are we?"

"No, not yet," he snorted.

"You'll get them," Yugi informed, clap dying off as she raised her hand in acknowledgement to the brokenly saluting gladiator thanking her for her mercy. "I've had entertainment for the savages sorted."

"Now there's a funny word for them," Atemu raised his brow turning coyly.

"Doesn't everyone call their neighbours savages?" The Sultana glanced lacing a thicker double-meaning under the original appearance of the comment. It sat between them pointedly.

"I think we do."

Yugi snorted apparently disappointed by the placation cheek slumping into her knuckles.


Next time: the French arrive with their King, the world shifts a little to the left, and Atemu gets a little luckier than before