❝ Tell me losing everything is what saved you,
Tell me you finally tasted freedom.
Can you even imagine yourself in paradise?
Even the daughter of gods must know loneliness, must sometimes want nothing more than to be trapped in a hell of forevers...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Inside the palace, Margaret walked with her mother, Duchess Cecily.
"Jasper Tudor and Lord Strange?" The older woman asked, sounding disgusted at the revelation of the duo traveling there. "I take it that you refused them?"
"I did not reply," Margaret replied calmly. "But my spies tell me they're sailing anyway."
"The very man who led the Tudor army," Francis Lovell stated as he joined the group with an uneasy look on his face. "You must stand with Charlotte and her girls and fight them. You cannot sit back any longer, Duchess."
A slightly angered look on her face, Margaret turned to face Francis. "Cannot, Francis? So you would tell me what to do now, just as England seeks to? Just because you failed to kill the King while you were standing right beside him?"
Margaret smiled mischievously, turning her back to Francis once more while Cecily read over the letter from Henry and the one from her step-granddaughter. "My choice...is to do what my sister-in-law has done already. Remain a thorn in Henry Tudor's side. As the two of us have been doing so many happy months. Which is why I grant you safety at my court. If they come, I will refuse to see them and then they will go."
Margaret turned and smiled happily when she turned her head to see Maximilian, Greta, Phillip and Teddy walking over with Bess, Nora, Bella and Charlotte.
She smiled, hugging her nephew before she walked away with the younger children. As she did so, Maximilian, Bess and Charlotte remained, turning to face Cecily and Francis Lovell.
"Margaret has not mourned her brother Richard and her nephews," Maximilian explained to the group. "She will not even speak of Richard and Edmund. She thinks she can hide here, and the world will stay outside."
"Well, she is wrong," Cecily argued as she ripped apart the message from Tudor. "The time has come to be a York and take a stand."
"We can no longer sit back and simply allow Tudor to continue parading around as if he were the true king," Charlotte agreed.
"Who is the true king then?" Maximilian questioned. He would support York, but considering all of Edward's sons were dead, they had no one to place on the throne. Not with the attainder against George of Clarence and his children. Teddy could not sit on the throne by himself and he and Kathryn were too young to marry.
"William," Bess realized when she looked up at her aunt. "He must be on the continent."
"Exactly," Charlotte smiled. "I have faith that he, Thomas and Marie will make their way here once news spread of my flight from England. And once we have my son, we shall have the true King of England with us."
─────•~❉᯽❉~•─────
"You called?" His sister-in-law's voice was a drawl as she stood in front of him, her body casting a shadow over the documents he was reading.
