Chapter Text
The turbulence Irulan had created in his prescience must have clouded his abilities so much that even in his wildest vision-dreams Paul couldn’t have anticipated this moment, couldn’t have foreseen this. Going to a brothel to question some scoundrels with street kids.
Shrouded in her robes and cape, the hood covering her distinctive beauty and golden hair, Irulan was walking by his side in the darkened streets in the gutters of the city, yet there was no light shimmer of a shield around her. Paul had insisted that she would turn it on while they left the old Atreides compound, but Irulan had declined, pointing out that the telltale shimmer of the protective energy field would have drawn attention. Seeing the solid logic in her reasoning, Paul had to accept. These parts of the city weren’t any place people usually toured with the body shield.
The gutters of the city had spread out from the fringes of the city’s perimeters too, had made its way toward the city center like cancer spreading over a body. It was another proof that his home planet wasn’t the same as it used to be, despite his best efforts to leave it untouched by his holy war. Another reality—another failure on his part. His lips flattened as they rounded a dark corner, dipping his face to hide his soured expression. His face was hidden behind his hood, too, covering his distinctive devil-eyes as these kids called Eyes of Ibad.
Irulan’s head shifted toward him as they walked as if she sensed his unease while they somberly walked in silence, glancing at him under her hood. The unrest gnawed at his chest further, seeing her doubtful look as if she still had qualms about doing this with him. As if he would have let her do it alone. He had even shocked himself by letting her do this at all.
He would have stopped her, wouldn’t have allowed her to leave despite her certain statements that Paul didn’t have a say in it. He did have a say in it. She was his wife, and he was her husband, whether they liked it or not. It made them responsible for each other. Paul wouldn’t have let go and endanger herself like this, but he had also quickly realized stopping her would have created more tension between them. He did not want that. He wanted to find a common ground with her. He needed it. Irulan must be in a…haze, feeling…repercussions of the last twelve years. Stopping her would have worsened her condition. Paul would not allow that, either.
Stopping a process, hindering a flow never worked.
So, here he was, following her to some brothel to question some scoundrels.
He tried to relax, counseling himself this wasn’t the first time he had done something familiar. He had fought with Chani side by side for long years, shoulder to shoulder like comrades. She had been always beside him during their warfare against the Harkonnen reign on Arrakis and later in the Battle of Arrakis against the Imperium, and his following Jihad. She had always accompanied him in the battleground, to the frontlines, charging with him behind and beyond. She still accompanied him whenever Paul visited his battalions. It was as easy as breathing for them to fight together, it had always been. What was unfamiliar was Irulan’s presence, not the situation.
It felt like Irulan took another place—a place that Paul had always reserved for Chani, as well, despite they had never even talked about it. It made him feel guilty once more as if he was breaking his promise another way, finding another loop as Chani had accused him of. The remnants of their fight echoed in the recesses of his mind, asking Paul if he was going to break his oath.
I will not break my promise.
So you say now.
Paul quickly shoved away the memory from his awareness, refusing to let it root further in his consciousness, yet anger also flamed in the bottom of his heart for the doubt and suspicion, despite Paul had kept his oath for twelve years after the first time she had spoken to him those words, despite how much hardship and tension it had caused in their personal life. Paul quenched the anger, too, remembering the cause of that doubt, his sorrow and grief entwining, the unrest in him growing.
Irulan glanced at him again as they approached the tall concrete building in the corner in the shadows, two men standing at guard by the entrance. There was no sign on the building, nothing to specify what kind of an establishment was inside past these walls. The concrete was grey and old, left to neglect, and his unrest flared to anger once more for different reasons. His wife in such a place without him!
She did not even hesitate as she stepped past the guards by the door to walk inside the building and lowered her hood. The interiors had a different aura than outside, it was no longer grey and old in neglect, but the halls were cast in the soft light of the globeglows, warm and amber, casting shifting shadows on the clean walls. Along the corridor, there were small chambers and lodges with only thick curtains of beads that offered privacy from the throes of passion and lust instead of doors.
Some of the rooms were already occupied, twisted naked bodies in the silk sheets behind the curtain of beads. Paul glimpsed at the bodies, his anger flaring like a volcano but Irulan didn’t even cast a glance. She was walking with her chin up, staring directly ahead. In front of the unoccupied chambers, there were girls too—barely clothed, inviting and enticing, offering themselves and waiting to…host their customers.
Paul did not look at them nor the sight of carnal desires that should have only been reserved for the lovers who were bound by their mingled spirits and love. The hand of a woman tried to touch him for a call, and Paul quickly twisted away, not letting the touch stain his self-ruh.
He pitied the women and even some men who offered the temple of their bodies in this demeaning way in exchange for credits and debts, but the safety of them still carried on his shoulders. They too were his subjects.
A raven-headed woman whose chest was covered with beads of a large necklace that circled her bosom and cleavage, her round breasts all open and nipples only covered with glinting stone cut off their way, but her eyes were trained solely on Irulan, no one else. Her shimmering skirts that showed off her legs shifted as she neared his wife closer and Paul quickly touched his slip-tip, wishing she had activated her shield. Though, his prescient sensed no danger, no alarm tingling in him.
The woman’s hands raised and caught Irulan’s in a sudden whirl, and she was raising them to her face, squeezing them tightly. “Find him, find him, my lady,” she whispered in a dark prayer. “He cut my friend open, gutted her like a pig. She was seventeen.”
They all froze, Irulan the most, and then her face became resolute, decisive. She nodded at the woman. “I will.” Her slim strong fingers caught hers and she squeezed back. “He won’t hurt any of you again. I won’t let it. I promise.”
Paul watched her silently, the moment engraved into his gaze and his memory, the woman Paul had never seen before this close. A vision came at him unbidden, a path had never taken—Irulan Corrino sitting on the Golden Lion Throne, all clad in gold, shining under the Kaitain’s sun. The Empress of the Known Universe. A path he had taken away from her.
I’m a highborn with her family fallen from grace, her father imprisoned by the Emperor himself, trying to make out in this world on her own.
Paul had stayed silent in somber acceptance when she had declared herself a disgraced highborn surviving on her own with aloof but placid detachment, knowing the statement’s stark truthiness although it had hurt him. The Bene Gesserit had bred and groomed her to mate and serve an Emperor they had designed, but another way would have been possible if Paul hadn’t chosen the paths he had. His destiny had sealed their paths.
The gone-vision disappeared from his mind-eye as Irulan’s earlier accusing words replaced them…
You keep whining about your destiny, about the parts we’re playing, the roles that were supposedly assigned to us, but do you also want to know what I think about them? Pretty lies to make you feel better with the decisions you made.
Paul silenced them as they walked down the corridor until it opened up into a spacious airy hall filled with glinted, sensual furniture and warm, amber air that completed the sensuality of the environment. The ruler of the House quickly stood up from her plush seat as soon as they appeared in the doorway, flanking Irulan in their middle.
Madame Mary was a tall, middle-aged woman with white in her copper hair like his mother, standing proud but relieved upon seeing them. Her, most likely.
“My lady—” she called with respect and reverence, although Irulan didn’t use her highborn status with the children of the Pit, these women showed her the respect her status demanded.
The vast difference between them and the children she had befriended spoke in volumes again, the way they treated his wife, and his wife toward them. Never once Paul would have thought Irulan Corrino would have been that—unguarded and mellow, almost homey.
He remembered his surprise upon seeing the small girl, their bond deep in affection. The motherly affections Paul had always sensed in her was in the open unfiltered, and it was what had surprised Paul the most despite his institution and senses. Her agency as a Bene Gesserit and the heir of House Corrino had been always resolute to bear the heir for the imperial dynasty, a task, and duty she had wanted to play, but Paul had never let her until now. Now, for the first time, Paul had also seen how she would be a mother.
The mother of his child.
“Do you want an heir or a child, Princess?” Paul had asked her before she had broken and confessed her crimes the last time he had seen her before tonight, and Irulan had refused to answer him, telling him he would have given her neither.
Now, Paul had another wonder, another possibility that he had not thought of before. Even if Irulan hadn’t wanted to bear the heir for him as she claimed, she would want to carry a child for herself. Toward Paul, she was mostly the same, a spitfire shrew that challenged him whenever she got upset, proud and arrogant with a razor-sharp tongue, but something had changed in her. Paul had seen it clearly, without any shadows or doubt.
And that relieved and worried him at the same.
“My lady, thank you for accepting to come again,” the matron of the brothel spoke to her with the same respect. “My girls are getting more afraid. We all are.” She paused and cocked her head backward. “Come, this way. Let me show you what I caught.”
Two of her guards opened and pushed the library on the wall behind her, revealing a secret passage behind. Irulan wasn’t surprised, neither were the children, so they all started to head toward the secret passage that the woman was leading them.
The basement was dark and damp, moist of his home planet’s terrain becoming more evident. “Activate your shield,” Paul ordered in a whisper as the corridor they followed became darker and the air became heavier with humidity. It was also stale without fresh air and windows, and something alerted his senses. Beyond them, the air smelled sour and wicked.
Two men were sitting in a lump in a dark corner, chained to the wall.
His fingers touched his knife underneath the sash beneath his robes. Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw Rogue and Tim’s backs grow tenser as well, standing beside him. Irulan’s eyes turned sharper in emerald glint, gazing at the men.
“How did you catch them?” she questioned, twisting aside toward the matron.
“One we spied circling the house,” she answered.
Rogue scoffed. “A creep?” she asked in a low voice, glancing at Paul. “Tonight made a hell of lots of stalkers.”
Paul grimaced but did not react to the words. The teenage girl had a feisty streak, but she was protective. It was even a bit of fresh air after those who always scampered away from his sight.
“The Brothers questioned him but he denied,” the matron replied. “He claims he was just looking around, but we saw him checking out Leia many times since last month. Usually, we don’t react to…fans. Everyone now and then, a girl has an admirer, but we wonder if he’s more.”
Irulan nodded. “The other?”
“Well, that’s another story,” she said. “A…friend of us from the night watch found him checking the murder scenes. He brought it to us before taking him to their headquarters. We have until midnight. If we cannot prove something or can’t have a confession, I’ll give him back to our friend.”
Paul’s head whirled at her, surprised. “An Imperial guard gave him to you?”
The woman looked unaffected by his surprise as Irulan also glanced at him. “The Qizarate don’t like what we do,” she spoke placidly. “Our services offend them. To their eyes, we’re worse than heretics. Even with the proof, the Qizarate would set him free.”
“The murder is a violation and crime by the forms and Muad’Dib law.”
“Muad’Dib law is subjective and partial, and these days, Lady Justice’s eyes are wide open, her sight is skewed and biased,” she replied, clipped and dismissive before turning to Irulan. “My Lady.”
Paul grimaced but there was a part of him that knew he couldn’t decline. His law was not objective, and Qizarate was not fair while they enacted the law in his name. They even found Muad’Dib too soft and compassionate. Paul did not entertain himself with any foolish belief that they would feel any compassion for the people they perceived as worse than heretics. The old forms and the imperial institution had been constantly chipped away by the Brotherhood and his new religion in the last decade and his attempts to keep the monster he had created under leash had been as effective as trying to keep a sandworm under a leash.
In the end, Kobra had even conspired against him with the Guild and the Bene Gesserit. Paul had taken the man’s head after Irulan’s banishment although he had allowed the Tleilaxu gift, but the one he had replaced him was no different than Kobra. Only the names had been changed, not the purpose of the Brotherhood.
Irulan stepped ahead, and there was a shimmering light around her in the dark that eased off his heart. There was even a part of him that wanted to step in and question the men instead of her, something he had never felt this starkly with Chani again whenever she put herself in danger. Irulan was capable, but her abilities lay everywhere else. Such dangers still didn’t fit well with Paul when directed at the Princess Consort. Paul had also felt scared for Chani whenever she endangered herself, but the unease in his chest still felt different, unfamiliar.
Paul tried his best to stay unaffected, steeling his confounded emotions.
The first whimpered quickly under her scrutiny and close inspection, coming undone as he faced the intrusive sharp green eyes that bore through him. In a few moments, he confessed his love for Leia and his desire to make the young prostitute the mistress of his home.
“Leia wants him?” Irulan asked, shifting her attention to the patronage of the house, but the woman shook her shoulders in uncertainty. Irulan looked at the guards that accompanied Tim and Rogue. “Take him upstairs, and find Leia. If she wants it, he can take her. We can help them start anew somewhere else.”
She looked at Madame who nodded her approval after a moment of hesitation but wisely decided not to cross her with her decision. Paul did not cut in, either, let her lead the investigation and the verdict. If the girl agreed, they could help them start anew like she had assured. Paul didn’t mind. In fact, he liked it.
After Tim and Rogue carried the man out with the guards, Irulan returned her attention to the other man in chains. The unease pinged in his chest once more as she drew closer, squinting at the man who did not look at her back.
“Look at me,” she commanded in a certain, clear way, but her voice teetering on the edge of the Voice. “How do you feel about people selling their bodies?”
He stayed silent, and Irulan pressed, her vocal reaching through his defense and forcing. “Tell me.”
“They’re whores,” the man spat out with spitting at her feet. Paul almost reacted and stabbed him for the insult. For Fremen, giving body water was the ultimate respect, but in Caladan there was nothing more offensive.
“You hate them,” she stated, voice certain and unaffected, not even casting a look down at the spit. “Why? They demean themselves. Why would you bother yourself with it?”
“Lord abhors fornication, lechery, and debauchery.”
“Lord also abhors violence,” she encountered the zealot. “Murder.”
“It’s decadence. They’re a disease, an infected wound, filth.”
“And thou shalt kill them where they stand?” she asked, her vocals getting more instructive and picking up his defenses and forcing him to admit. She was standing still, placid although Paul sensed the simmering anger beneath her cool façade as she restrained it. “Did you cleanse the filth?”
“I did not touch them.”
His Truthsense tingled all over his skin and Irulan’s fingers twitched. “You are lying.” Her vocals developed an edge with malice, something darker and oppressive. The Bene Gesserit training was sharp and focused, knowing where to attack. The man screamed, fire on the edge of his nerves. Her Voice took her captive and did not let him go.
Paul almost winced, not wanting to know how she had learned to do that. The man continued to scream and started to shake in his bounds.
Her words lashed at him like welts. “You shalt not lie!” she carved the words on his nerves, making him holler now.
“STOP!” he screamed. “I didn’t touch them!”
“YOU SHALT NOT LIE!”
His screams filled the basement, words inflicting the phantom pain but the body reacted the same. His nose started to bleed, and his eyes followed. Irulan still did not stop.
“TELL ME!” her Voice boomed over his screams. “And I’ll finish your pain.”
The confession came through between sobs, tears, spittle, and screams, begging for mercy. Irulan stared down at the pitiful heap of the bleeding and slobbering man, sacked in his bounds, almost kissing her feet now.
His screams stopped, her fingers relaxed, and then there were only sobs and whimpers.
“I just wanted to cleanse the filth…” he whimpered.
Many times Paul had seen disgust and contempt on her expression, but he had seen her true despise like this as she looked down at the low men. Somehow it also eased off his chest.
“Those women you killed were more human than you’ve ever been,” she said, truest contempt thinning her voice and crumpling her expression as she grabbed his hair and yanked his head back, revealing his neck.
“You killed them not because you wanted to cleanse, but because you wanted to feel powerful again. You desired them and you hated that. You’re a little pathetic envious man who desired something he could’ve never had, and you hated yourself for that. So you killed them because they reminded you of that,” she said for the last before her blade cut off his throat.
Paul watched her as the dark blood ran over her glimmering shield and pooled beneath her feet.
*
He found her in the Pit’s public bathroom, kneeling in front of a wooden washbasin as she slowly scrubbed the blood off her hands. Her head was crestfallen and inclined aside, but she was not still, only her hands moving, slow and dragged. He could sense her gaze was distant, far away as he stood in the doorway.
“Are you okay?” he asked, still watching her from the doorway. Her hands stopped when he called out to her then she nodded without looking at him before resuming cleaning the blood off her hands. He watched for another moment, then slowly returned to leave.
Her voice stopped her before he disappeared. “Paul—” He twisted aside and looked at her over his shoulder and saw she was doing the same as she still knelt in front of the washbasin.
“I-it gets easier, does it?”
He paused for a second, then nodded his assurance, understanding what she was asking. “It does.”
She swallowed and nodded back. “We should return before Gurney sends a SAR team after us,” Paul told her softly.
Paul returned to go after her another nod, then her voice stopped him once more. Paul turned toward her over his shoulder.
“Would you not let the Qizarate free him?”
He shook his head quickly but in certainty. “I will not.”
A paused followed, a hesitancy, but she asked after a second, her voice small and soft, “Can you make sure Leia and Tom would find a place safe?”
Although she hadn’t spoken plainly, Paul still understood her wish. She wanted to give the couple a safe place where they would start anew. Paul stared at her for a fraction, something…nameless transpiring between them, a secret wish that they also both felt but did not speak of. He remembered himself wishing to escape to Tupile taking Chani before learning the truth of that wish. From the very woman who stood kneeling in front of him now, washing off the murder of blood from her hands. Irulan had wished to escape from him with her confession, burning the bridges, and wishing who she had become with him.
I’m a high born with her family fallen from grace, her father imprisoned by the Emperor himself, trying to make out in this world on her own.
The naked, stark truth of her status panged his chest with guilt and everything stood between them in the past and what awaited them in the future, and the reason she had hidden the truth of herself from these orphans she had found on the streets. The pang in his chest grew heavier, the succubus that had latched itself onto their fate and had taken them captive.
All your powers, all your intelligence, all your beauty, and yet you still do nothing!
Paul nodded solemnly, silencing her words, and promised again, “I will.”
She nodded silently, no words leaving her, but Paul knew she had accepted his promise.
*
She tucked Amy into the bed before they left, pulling the blanket over her and sweeping her hair over her pillow. The little girl stared at her with love and affection, smiling and Irulan smiled back, leaning down to place a kiss on the crown of her head.
Paul stood by the doorway, watching them again, the path their fate had brought them forfeited. He had escaped from this choice for years, had refused it even though he knew by intuition, even ignored her because of it, but what he had ignored for years was laid in front of him even clearer. There was no running away anymore. He had thought himself he had accepted it but witnessing the truth that was in front of him was something else.
Irulan Corrino was going to carry his heir.
And she was going to be a good mother. As he looked at her with the small child, Paul also confirmed to himself internally what he had always known by intuition, that Irulan Corrino would be a good mother who would love her children dearly and fiercely, a lioness who would do anything to protect her curbs.
The nameless doubts in his chest withered into nothingness at the sight of her with the small girl, a fate perhaps Paul would also give her after she bore him a son.
A small spitfire like Amy...and her mother, with her claws and teeth she wasn’t shy from showing, owning her moniker as the shrew, challenging him constantly.
The vision came at him unbidden, Irulan and a baby girl in her arms in her sunlit chambers at Arrakeen’s Keep, smiling at her baby as she looked down with love and affection, Amy sitting together with them, smiling at Irulan as wide as when Irulan had just tucked her into the bed. She was wearing a flourish pink dress with lace and small pearls, and there was a small tiara on top of her long hair in braids.
The golden-lit vision faded from his sight as Paul kept staring at them in the darkened old cabin.
# # #
Paul kept everyone and their curiosity away from her when they returned from the Pit in the dark hours of the night and ordered she was not to be disturbed. It was a last mercy for her, giving her some solitude and privacy she needed more than air after what had happened today, and Irulan appreciated silently like everything else he had done tonight.
His presence had shocked her, scared her, angered her, and wearied her, but right now, Irulan felt nothing but a stillness with his presence. An acceptance. She had always believed she had expected his presence in her life like she had accepted her duty as the Princess Heir to wed him and save the last dignity of her House and her father like she had accepted to serve the Bene Gesserit’s purpose and Her House by bearing him his heir. She had never questioned it until that faithful day when she burned down the bridges, but what she felt now—despite knowing what he sought from her now, it still felt different.
This acceptance—felt different. Briefly, she even wondered that was what Chani felt toward him for his every decision that made him unhappy and discontent, like Irulan’s unwanted presence in their life, this serene acceptance, sand absorbing water.
Would love cause this?
The question popped into her mind as they walked in the dark somber corridors toward her chambers, both not uttering a word. Irulan quickly dispelled the wonder from her thoughts although her eyes glanced at his solemn figure, looking like a ghost that haunted the castles, head crestfallen, face haggard, shoulders hunched.
No. Loving him would still be the worst thing that ever happened to her. This ghostly figure would only make her life more miserable than he'd already done. And she did not love, she despised him.
Yet, he was still escorting her to her chambers like a true gentleman, and his shield was still around her wrist. The protection he had forsaken her for her benefit. The notion was small perhaps, Paul was almost invisible even without his body shield, yet, it still felt different. For the first time in twelve years, Paul had acknowledged her as his wife in some context beyond being a title.
I’m your husband and you’re my wife. Whether we like it or not.
It was a strange acceptance, too, reluctance mixed with admission and recognition, but it also felt different. Like he had also yielded to it despite his own feelings, water absorbing sand.
Another question arose in her, but Irulan did not even let herself speculate on it.
No.
He had no love for her. He had proven it to her many, many times. He just desired to use her for another purpose now. Nothing else. His priority was still to keep his beloved and her child safe and alive. Hard to do that if she was dead. He would take one of her sisters as his wife if Irulan died, but Josifa and Rugi were barely at the coming of age. They would wed, but Paul wouldn’t want to father a child with them, despite the artificial ways.
And for another Sister… He didn’t trust the Sisterhood. He had never.
Do you see it? You’re the only Bene Gesserit he still trusts.
Reverend Mother’s statement swirled in her mind and Irulan felt irritated by letting her guards now. She was letting herself be enticed, falling into the same trap. She would not think of it like that. Irulan had sensed the tension between him and Lady Jessica during the small moment when they had returned, and it didn’t surprise her. She had been aware of their estranged relationship, and in a way, Irulan could even say Paul’s station regarding it. After her departure, the woman had not returned to Arrakis even for a short visit, hadn’t even come to see her own daughter. But that was between her and her children, nothing about Irulan. Beyond this tension, Paul’s sudden…closeness toward her meant nothing.
He was just playing nice because he wanted something from her. He had even forbidden her from seeing the Professor again even if she didn’t accept his offer. He had told her to call it whatever she wanted to call it when she had challenged him it was blackmail, dismissing her refusal with ease and without any consideration.
Despite what she had refused to that envious violent animal for killing those poor women who had to sell their bodies and her curiousness for…bodily pleasures that intrigued her, she would not do it if Paul did not allow it. She would not demean herself like that even when she had all the rights to seek comfort and affection. Fornication was beneath her, and it would only bring her a contemporary relief, and the price would be too high.
Even though she would risk Paul’s fury for herself, she would never risk the Professor with it. Paul would not be merciful. All in honesty, she hadn't even believed the Professor would want to see her again after realizing she had been a virgin. Professor Jackson wasn’t a fool or a romantic. And he also knew when to push and when to retreat. Perhaps it was a line that Irulan also needed to learn. More than ever now.
Yet, her anger still returned, the way he was entrapping her into a cage once more, forcing her toward a path she did not wish for herself. Once Irulan could have accepted it, yes, if not as Chani out of love, but as the Bene Gesserit on the throne, doing her duty, but she was not that woman anymore.
Paul was going to understand it, too.
Irulan was going to make sure of it.
“You don’t need to walk me to my chambers, Paul,” she told him snappish as they continued down the corridor. Momentarily, he paused, sensing her abrupt change in demeanor, glancing at her. “I can find my own way. I’ve been here for two months.”
“I know,” his reply came short, calm and even, not triggered by her sudden ire, ignoring it once more. “But I haven’t seen my childhood home for years. I’m…just touring.”
His easy yet placid acceptance halted her steps for a fraction. Despite everything between she wasn’t expecting that, either. “You could’ve visited your mother,” she muttered lowly.
For years, while Lady Jessica had kept himself away from Arrakis, Paul had also kept himself away from Caladan. From his birth planet. Irulan had never thought about it in length, had always thought Paul Muad’Dib Atreides might have come to the world on Caladan, but his home was truly Arrakis. Now seeing Caladan and Paul beside her, she felt deep in her heart that it had been a conscious choice, not a coincidence.
Like how he had always tried to keep his birthplace away from his war, tried to keep it…unchanged.
“I could have,” he muttered back and did not add anything else, but Irulan didn’t let it go this time.
She glanced at him and asked openly as they arrived at her doors. “Were you afraid that Muad’Dib would’ve changed it or were you afraid it would have changed Muad’Dib?”
Paul stared back at her, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “Is this a rhetorical question or an inquiry for your Muad’Dib chronicles?”
Irulan stayed silent then shrugged, and took off his shield from her wrist. “Are you going to let me go to the Pit again?” she asked, handing it back to him without any thank you or anything else.
“That depends,” Paul replied, his blue-on-blue eyes still fixated on hers as he took his shield.
“On what?” Irulan asked back, a challenge entering her voice. “On how much I’ll be compliant and obedient?”
“Let us not entertain ourselves of thinking you ever obedient, Princess-wife,” he told her, that twitch at the corner of his lips reappearing. If Irulan didn’t know better, she would have even called it…fond, but she still didn’t buy this new…amicability from him.
“Even the years of strict Bene Gesserit’s indoctrination couldn’t have tamed you.”
Her eyebrows knitted into a deep frown with the word of taming, although once she would have denied his remark and stated she had always been loyal to the Sisterhood.
“Do you want to tame me?” she flared, tilting her chin. “You’re done with Chani now, and have you set your eyes on me?”
His small smirk disappeared after that and his lips grimaced. “Chani, too, has never been tamed, nor have I ever wished it. Nor do I wish to tame you.”
Irulan let out a scoff, giving him another searching look, her head inclining aside. Paul held her gaze. “Do you know what I thought first when I heard your offer, my lord husband?” she asked.
“Is it a rhetorical question again?” Paul asked back, thin mocking evident in his voice now without any fondness, and for a split second, it felt like nothing had truly changed. As if they were still the same people who could barely tolerate each other. There was a familiar quality in it, something safe.
“I thought perhaps you were missing me being of your link,” she mocked him back, ignoring his jab. “Perhaps I wasn’t being so off-the-chart, was I? After all, killing two birds with one stone has always been Muad’Dib’s finest skill. The mastermind of the battles and warfare.”
She snickered again, looking at him with contempt. “All’s fair in love and war, eh?”
His grimace tightened his lips further as he gazed back at her, blue-spirited eyes darkened in his restrained anger. “And have you missed it, Princess-wife?” he asked in a low voice, a dangerous low edge sharpening it. “Have you missed pushing my buttons?”
She laughed low and throatily, letting the mocking contempt give her voice a lilt, knowing he would hate it. Perhaps she did indeed miss it. Everything was so much easier when she despised him.
“Noah once told me he would’ve thought he did something wrong if he didn’t make an Emperor not upset with him from time to time,” she shot back, the cheeky retort rolling off her tongue with ease and amusement, she couldn’t help it.
Knowing that her utterance of his first name would get him even more upset also augmented her amusement, and Irulan had even done it specifically for that purpose. Paul would have known she was far too trained by the Bene Gesserit to slip something like this, but she didn’t mind it. In fact, his recognition only added to her content when his grimace tightened further and his jaw throbbed with his contained anger.
“He then must like to live dangerously in his old age,” he clipped.
Irulan laughed again, and the Bene Gesserit in her also didn’t miss how Paul had pointed out the age difference between them. In a way, it amused her even further.
“He wouldn’t admit it, but again, he bedded the Princess Consort of the Atreides Empire. So yes, I reckon he does like it. He’s…adventurous.”
“I’m glad your little privileged indulgence and my leniency haven’t disappointed you,” came the sharp reply through clenched lips, and his mouth twisted into a sardonic smirk. “It can be a fond memory for you now.”
Irulan glowered at him with his veiled reminder that she would never see her lover again nor have his tolerant leniency. “Rest assured, my lord, fondness won’t be the first thing I remember when I think of your kind leniency.”
She made sure to pause for a split second so he would perfectly understand her meaning and then made a quick, small curtsy, dipping her head before she spun on her heel and walked inside her chambers.
The door closed on his face with a loud thud in her anger, and it felt good.