#krei is totally galahad

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I'd like to thank you for the Legend of the Sword au you promised in the tags of that Alleirat post, I may not be good at coming up with them but I sure do love them

LISTEN MY DUDE, YOU SAID “KING ARTHUR AU” IN YOUR REPLY TO THIS POST AND I IMMEDIATELY SMASHED MY NOVEL INTO MY FAVORITE MOVIE AND NOW WE ARE HERE.  

Brenneth! Is! Arthur!  Not a discussion!  Obviously!  Come on, people!  

She’s set adrift on the river after the murder of her parents, and her boat washes up on the poorest sector of the Londinium docks, where she’s found and taken in by a profoundly broke blacksmith who rents his shop from the same building as the local brothel.  Brenneth’s story of where she came from is basically “My name’s Brenneth, my mom and dad were murdered” and like, there’s a lot of that going around, so the blacksmith gives her a pat on the head and she grows up getting into trouble with his daughter.  

Officially speaking, Brenneth takes over the smithy after the blacksmith dies of a fever when she’s sixteen, and his daughter runs her books and arranges most of their jobs.  Unofficially speaking, Brenneth, the blacksmith’s daughter, and a handful of other teens/twenty-somethings start out by shaking down the occasional arrogant merchant.  By the time Brenneth is twenty she’s running a protection game for most of their district–she’s the person to contact if the Blacklegs are giving you trouble, and honestly God save the couple of stupidly cocky SOBs who try to move in on her turf because, well, what’s a teenage girl going to do to stop them?  When the movie starts, she’s twenty-four and honestly pretty happy with her life.  Like, fuck the king, etc etc, but she takes good care of her people, no one dares to lay a malicious finger on the girls in the brothel, and the tax collectors haven’t arrested anyone in the poorest district of Londinium in three years.  Brenneth’s okay with the way things are.  She shook down a Viking this morning.  She’s happy.

Crispin is…complicated.  Crispin is the Mage, obviously, complete with golden eagle familiar, but instead of being Merlin or Guinevere or whomever the fuck, the Mage is Mordred.  Vortigern (I’m not actually using the appropriate book character because spoilers, okay) played a very clever game, slow but surely turned the king’s mage against all of Albion, and then–

It’s Brenneth that snaps him out of it.  He’s never really seen much of her, children not being commonly allowed in his tower where they might accidentally shove a fistful of nightshade in their mouths.  But he’s realizing, in a sudden flash of insight, that he’s been used, he’s been manipulated into launching an attack on Camelot so that Vortigern can kill the ruling family and take the throne.  When Crispin finds Vortigern, ready to kill him in a rage, instead he finds a king turned to stone, and a creature made of fire and armor and shadow, and a little girl with cuts on her hands unconscious in a boat.  Instead of doing a murder, Crispin throws lightning at the monster and uses the distraction of the flash to cut the rope holding the boat to the dock.  Brenneth drifts down the river without ever knowing that her life was saved by the man who destroyed her home, and Crispin, for the first time in his life, runs away.  

Brenneth is almost eleven by the time he finds her again.  Too old to be taken away and raised as a king in hiding–because Albion must have a king, and Brenneth is the last survivor, and that makes her a king–but too young to take her birthright.  Crispin wavers for a year.  Then he casts the single most dangerous spell he’s ever done, and gambles his memories and his magic against his life, and when the spell is complete Crispin is twelve years old, and he proceeds to carefully insinuate himself into Brenneth’s life while his familiar watches over them from above.

He can’t leave her alone, is the thing.  He’s so, so worried about her.  He never uses magic on her, never uses magic on anyone unless Brenneth’s life is in immediate danger, but he becomes her best friend to protect her.  Every hurt and trauma she’s ever survived is ultimately on him, and he can’t bear to leave her unprotected even if he never cared for Uther, so–

And she’s funny, and she’s sharp and clever and angry, and she swings a blacksmith’s hammer like a god of old, and she swings a sword like a hero of legend, and by the time Crispin realizes he’s gone and gotten genuinely attached to this girl, it’s way too late to do anything about it.

By the time the water recedes to reveal an old sword in a stone, and Vortigern starts dragging in women of the right age to test it, Crispin is physically twenty four, the same age as when he stopped getting older last time, and he’s gone and fallen in love with the Born King, and there’s not a goddamn thing he can do to save her from her fate.

When the Blacklegs drag Brenneth away, she doesn’t expect anything to come of it, but sure, whatever, she grabs the sword and gives it a yank and–

The group of people who stage a rescue at Brenneth’s execution is…stressed about working together, a little, and they look like this:

Crispin, ex-marauding warlord, ex-court sorcerer, Brenneth’s best friend of over a decade, extraordinarily powerful de-aged mage, and accomplished liar

Torei, ex-knight, ex-adviser to the king, ex-personal guard of the queen, mother of stubborn daughter, currently in hiding and delighted beyond belief at the prospect of murdering Vortigern’s ass

Krei, aforementioned stubborn daughter, would-be-knight, part-time street thug, full time voice of reason, who was sixteen when she bucked her mother’s orders to stay in hiding–she’s four years older than Brenneth–and went to find the lost princess and happened to show up within two months of Brenneth’s other self-appointed protector, with whom she has an occasionally tense relationship

Rada, ex-knight, current proprietor of the bathhouse in the poor sector of Londinium and local trainer-in-various-forms-of-combat for angry young blacksmiths with destinies about to bite them in the ass

Various other survivors of the old regime, mixed in with angry youngins who want to overturn the current regime

Unbeknownst to the others, Vortigern’s personal mage, a foreigner who rarely speaks, who spooked the Blacklegs’ horses and bought Brenneth thirty seconds to jump off a cliff

Brenneth spends an hour screaming herself hoarse at Crispin for lying to her while they ride back to the hideout, and then cold-shoulders him for the rest of the trip.  Krei is smart enough to take Brenneth’s recriminating glare with a guilty look and no attempt to defend herself, but Crispin–Crispin is the one Brenneth is really ready to kill, especially once he confesses the whole ugly mess to her.  

Then, of course, upon arriving at the hideout, someone tries to shoot him, and Brenneth starts her new career of shouting down attempts to denounce Crispin as a murderer.

After that, basically run canon, except that Shiko is Vortigern’s pet mage and manages to get a message to Crispin via her fox familiar begging them to free her and therefore they have a woman on the inside when they hit the citadel like the fist of God.  It ends with Brenneth crowned King, and she knights Torei, Rada, and Krei with Excalibur before announcing Shiko as her new Court Sorcerer and Crispin as her consort.  Also, she gets to terrorize some Vikings.