Author Note: Just a heads up, I will have a heavy nod to points in the Dune mini-series in a few of the meditation lines in this chapter. No plagiarizing intended.
Other than that... Happy reading :)
With the attempted peace council drawing swiftly to closing, Chani found it far harder to keep up her active aloofness to the ruling duke, who was also roaming the halls of the palace she was now wandering in. As she was attempting now in fact with Otheym as always, her silent shadow walking a few steps behind her. His hand resting with cool awareness against the hilt of his crysknife. His eyes scanned untrusting to every face they passed, even a few among their own tribe.
Her dreams of him had come more frequently so that almost every night now she half wakes to the feel of his arms around her. The touch was growing too solid to be pure memory but given how bitter the final round of talks had gone and how restless her growing child was at the loudness of the shouting voices, Chani was finding the quiet of her and Otheym's room a welcomed haven.
More so of late, given with every rest, she gains just a little more time with him.
More solid now than she was used to out among the sands, her phantom fedaykin, if that was what she could truthfully call him, was always gone from her side when the rising sun would fully wake her if it wasn't Otheym gently shaking her awake for the nightly meal.
The hazy musk of his scent is always so strong that for some seconds before she fully opens her eyes, Chani fools herself into believing the Paul she loved- Paul Atreides- would steal back to her side. Shaking off the bloodied trappings of the war-thirsty emperor that had taken his place, if only for a little while, as she'd nuzzle in against the so real feeling of remembrance of him, she'd conger up in her dreams.
A fresh scent of the flavor she'd always associated with her lost young duke that clung to her clothes after just such a dream meeting filled her nose now in a fresh breeze from a passed open window.
"Are you sure you're alright, Chani?" Otheym asks when she pauses with a low groan at a sudden pull in her side. A lucky scrapping one of her training partners landed in the mock fight she'd been allowed to attend before that day's earlier meal and prayers.
For once, the looming headache of negotiation set aside to give each side a time for cool reflection as ordered by the Emperor Maud'Dib himself.
Chani takes a deep breath at the question fighting down the returned twisting of revolution and mild regret at the water wasted in her pitiful retching at the sight of the horrors when the exploring pair had come across the harsher patches of the place they'd been called to.
It was one thing to hear the whispers of how Lisan Al Gaib had taken the lives and a few of the heads of several key members of his enemies it was another entirely to see them on crude display along one of the back battle standings.
Even Otheym had blanched at the sight, but his own repulsion soon gave way to worry as he moved to helpfully pull back the looser waves of Chani's hair when he noticed the gagged set of her jaw before she'd finally lost the quiet battle with her turning stomach in loosing what was left of her earlier meal onto the ground.
"I just can't…." Chani whispers, pushing aside her sickened feelings for the much less water-wasting confusion as no matter how hard she tried, she was unable to wrap her mind around how the barbaric show of power blended with the ways and tactics she knew from her 'drunken lizard' of an off-world duke's son that she'd come to love so fiercely as she'd shown him the way in being one with the harsh sands of the open desert.
"He'd cried openly when he'd needed to take Jamis's water," Chani remembered seeing again in her mind's eye how broken Paul had been as he'd walked away from the quickly shrouded body. His head lowered in such heavy guilt when he'd caught her watching him.
"Now he takes the heads and skins of those who defy him." Otheym spits his tone, cool yet bitter at the same time.
Chani quickly closed her eyes and fought down the want to retch at the reminder of that too.
How a few of their more trophy-hungry tribe members had gone hunting in the halls for the whispered battle drum made from the taken flash of the slain Feyd-Rautha. If such a thing had been found Chani hadn't bothered to find out.
"Forgive me, Sihaya." Otheym begs, catching the twist of disgust on Chani's turned-away face, then stumbles yet again over the name. "Chani." He corrects, bowing his head in quiet respect before peeking up to catch her eye. "Forgive me."
"It's alright." Chani sighs at the slip. Nearly everyone here called her by her hated desert name.
It still pained her deeply at the shift in it all. That it was those of Otheym's sietch that were quickly proving to be her true family than those that still remained from her lost Sietch Tabr, Stilgar among them who honored her wish about her naming choice since she'd arrived.
Even those in Sietch Gara Kulon who whisper and conspire against her still call her by her proper name of "Chani" when they refer to her.
The familiar tread of boots has Chani pausing in thought. Two sets, one of them easy for her to place.
The off-world tread of Gurney Halleck.
But the other….
"Water soft royals," Otheym grumbled under his breath when Irulan, with Gurney acting as escort, turned into the passage ahead of them.
"Otheym." Chani scolds them no matter how deeply she agrees with the insult-intended remark.
The hard bite of the sound of his name or maybe the following deep desert-changed scolding Chani gives her bowed-headed companion seemed to draw the pair's attention to them, much to Chani's displeasure as those off-world-colored eyes of Paul's taken bride quickly begin to appraise her.
If there was one soul out of all those wandering the hall of this maze of a palace the desert woman had hoped against hope to avoid at all possible cost in catching alone, it was Irulan Corrino-Atreides.
She's heard, of course, in the whispers reaching them of the goings on of the water waste of a war in how the only comforts this princess royal can hope to find are in the books she writes and reads since trading her now exiled father's prison planet Salusa Secundus for the sand hardened landscape of Dune.
"What? I only speak truths," Otheym counters, still talking in the language only used by those of the deepest of northern deserts but theirs a smile in his voice now that softens her immediately as Chani turns away from the questioning burning of her rival's gaze. "or do you think one of her books finally realized how dull she was and left her too that she needs to wonder so in search of it?"
At this, Chani laughs aloud, the outburst earning a much narrower seeming look from the still-watching royal.
"Apologies, your grace." Chani finally managed once her laughter had run out, changing back to a more known dialect for those not native to her sand-covered home world as her head bowed reluctantly in a show of respect she didn't have for the blonde-haired woman. "Otheym here was just wondering about the whereabouts of your husband and why it's not he but his battle strategist that guards you."
Irulan obviously noticed how Chani's tone soured on the usage of Paul's marriage title.
Chani's hand immediately drops to curl around her abdomen at the smile now curling Irulan's mouth before she speaks. "I'd not disturb Paul's meditations for something so trivial as taking a breath of air."
Chani finds herself nodding along in quiet agreement with the information.
No. and in the other woman's place, neither would she. If anything, she'd only wish to sit in one corner of Paul's meditation room just for the closeness she'd gain with him as he probed the possible futures ahead of them. And she had done so more than a handful of times during their times on the sand before that dreaded sand crossing into the South.
"What?" she asks, noticing the much more interesting way her replacement as Paul's companion was watching her now. How even the best of her witch's training couldn't erase all of the envy Irulan held whenever her gaze would sweep over the swelling of the child Chani carried.
"Well, as you must know, as an off-worlder, I'm always curious about your ways here on Arrakis." Irulan starts off, and Chani feels more than sees the way both Otheym and Gurney tense at the dropped change in the princess royal's voice. "and there has been one thing I've always wanted to find out….."
"As my mother was never titled as a true wife, you will never be my husband…. But in time, we may find the kind of love she found with my father." His daughter's voice says
"I am the voice from the wilderness." This voice was newer than he was used to, rougher, wilder. It sounded like his own, but it also frightened him to hear it grinding against his ears like the roaring call of a deep desert maker against an unprotected ear. "...and I've come to warn, to atone, to give aid to those strong and willing enough to listen to the words of an old, blind man."
"I should spill your water for what you've done." Chani's growled voice cuts in just as deadly as the crysknife blade she holds pressed against the bared throat of his taken bride with Irulan looking so calm in the face of the angery fremen woman.
"You're truly so surprised?" the princess royal asks, still without flinching at the harder press of the knife edge against her throat as she tilted her head enough to catch Chani's eye. "It is my natural right to carry those of the royal succession. I am Empress of the known galaxy."
"You have a title, Irulan. I am the one he calls his wife." Chani snarls back, her hands tugging even harder against the fist full of Irulan's hair in her knife-free hand. "the only woman to truly love." Chani reminds herself with a pleased gleaming in her blue spiced eyes of the twisting of pain clouding Irulan's eyes and the reminder of truth in her words.
"So that means you can be the only woman who could possibly love him even if he doesn't love me back?" his bride questions before the scene dissolves into another as the threads of time twist around his seeking mind.
"…the water…. The blood spilled so carelessly on the sands that were once pure and good….. all in the name of an animal masquerading as a prophet and a savior when he was truly neither….." that worm roar of a voice cuts in making Paul tremble with the return of it.
"I've meddled in the future…. In every possible pathway of it, and I've become trapped because of it." He hears his now matured voice lamenting as he probes again into the vast void of possibilities.
The afternoon sun was warming the exposed skin of his chest as he sat clothed only in his training pants with his head lowered in practiced meditation. Pushing his mind, he reaches further into the darkness of possibilities.
"but that's just it, isn't it, Father?" his son chuckles lowly against Paul's ears, his voice so like Paul's for its command yet the playful undertone matching that of Chani in the few times his dear beloved allowed for teasing. "knowing of a trap is the first step in avoiding it isn't it?" "the first step along the…."
But Paul would always steer his mind away from that joking playfulness, pushing further into the stretching, changing futures ahead.
"You cannot control the future." That scratchy voice from the wilds of the sands would hiss like a young maker trapped on the surface, unable to escape.
"a man called Maud 'Dib should have heeded that advice, shouldn't you? Father." This younger man's voice sighs, his tone so sad now compared to the happier times Paul had snatched it out from the haze of a time not yet lived.
"Oh, hush now, my Usul. You may have eternity, but me?" Chani's soft sigh of breath tickles so warm but strained against his ears. Her voice so close to him he deluded himself into thinking he could feel the tickling brush of her loose flowing hair against his shoulders with a whispered "I only have now." as she leaned in to press her lips against his cheek.
Paul turned his head in a foolish attempt to chase her kiss when the sounds of many hurried footsteps abruptly ended his strained prodding into the void of fragmented futures.
"Stilgar?" Paul asks, his shirt left abandoned in his hast, to open the door to his chosen room wider, then spots a more familiar face among the hurrying bodies jostling along the hallway. "What is it? A battle?" he asks worried "Is someone guarding Chani? Is she alright?" he prods before the fremen leader could think to draw breath in his answer.
"She will be. Once this unworthy challenge your off-world bride has given is seen, though." Stilgar answers with a smile.
"What?" Paul asks, preying on the eldest of desert makers that he'd heard wrong.
"Just as I've said, Usul." Stilgar grins slapping a hand against Paul's unclothed shoulder so the stinging sounds of striking flesh makes a few of the passing fremen warry in the shifting looks of the palace guards before Paul was waving them away. His attention now focused only on Stilgar.
Nothing in any of his earliest of prodding into the waters of the future had he ever seen anything like this. In a year or two, possibly three or four but never now. Never when the two were still so young and the war not yet raging as wild and uncontainable as he'd seen it become.
"Seems your women wish to cross blades with the other. A test of skill to see who draws first blood between them." The old man of the desert says to easily, "No office intended to your taken bride, Paul Maud'Dib, but I don't think Irulan will be much of a match for Chani, even with the babe in her belly. That girl has the true fire of the sun and the sand in her veins. And you know as well as I how wild fedaykin blood can boil under the right conditions."
"I gave strict orders, Stilgar. Irulan knew them. She was there when they were given." Paul snaps, "No harm was to come to Chani or her taken mate. I made that perfectly clear. Not one shadow of harm was to come to…."
"There will be safeguards, Maud'Dib." Stilgar tries to calm. "both of them will be completely safe."
Not that Paul believed him as another flash of the vision of Chani's knife at Irulan's throat plays once more behind his eyes. Only this time with the heart-stopping addition of Irulan springing her own counterattack a blurring Chani seemed unable to counter in time.
"If I lose Irulan, I lose my key to holding the Imperium." Paul points out "and if I lose Chani…." He hesitates, unable to even consider dwelling on that possibility.
He can't, no he won't lose his desert woman again.
He can survive the test of the Bene Gesserit's tricks within tricks and their black box of pain. He can survive taking just a drop of the water of life and take the pain and bloodshed of losing his humanity to a war just starting to spread over the stars and the sand. All of that he would gladly carry without complaint, but being without Chani by his side.
That he can't hope to withstand. Not again. Not when she was so close within his reach again.
"You won't lose either of them, Usul." Stilgar calms. "the fight is only for first blooding, not to death." A hand now resting strong and firm against Paul's unclothed shoulder. "They will have shields and heavy restrictions on where they will be able to land a strike."
"Little comfort," Paul answers, pushing hard through the mingled robes of the gathered tribes until he reaches the door to the very room where, not that long ago, he'd drawn the fetal lifeblood of his cousin and taken his place as Emperor of the known galaxy.
Now, Paul Atreides was only a young man in a panic as he slipped in among the gathers all eager for a seat at this eagerly awaited matching on the fighting floor.