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You are a delight to me, my lady.
Roslin pressed her face into her hands, willing herself not to break down into sobs, but tears slipped out of her eyes and down her cheeks and palms of her hands. The words tattooed in a flowing script on her hip made her feel like she was floating on air – but also like she would be dragged down underneath at any given moment. This wasn’t a sign of freedom. This wasn’t a gift.
It was a curse – it was her curse – and she would bear its mark for the rest of her life.
Girls all over Westeros dreamed about this day, the morning they woke up on their eighteenth birthday with their soulmate’s first words to them written on their body. It felt more like a warning sign to Roslin. This was her fate. She had no way of escaping it.
After all, she was going to be married in two days’ time, but there was little to no chance that the man she was being forced to marry would be her beloved dream come true. She knew next to nothing about Edmure Tully, save for the fact that he was now Lord of Riverrun after his father’s passing. That had a nice ring to it and all, but the Lady of Riverrun had a bitter aftertaste to it when she was supposed to have been Queen in the North.
Not that Roslin cared. She didn’t care about any of that – not the fact that Robb Stark had dishonored his treaty with her lord father; not the fact that Lord Stark had taken another girl’s maidenhead and married her in turn instead of Roslin; not the fact that some random girl from the west had taken her spot as queen; not even that she was being forced to marry a man whose entire name and castle and everything was about to be taken from him, leaving her destitute alongside him.
None of that mattered in the end, not anymore. There was nothing to be done about it. Roslin had learned from a very early age that holding grudges would get her nowhere in life. She had too many spiteful and vengeful family members for that. They held enough grudges to last her many lifetimes. While they fought and bickered with one another, while they hurt and snapped at each other, she stayed back and tended to the wounded. Her father called her weak, her siblings shook their heads at her, her uncles called her pathetic, her aunts snipped at her, and her cousins sneered at her. The Freys had little room for kindness when there so much family to hold in one castle. It was either spread too thin between them or there had only been enough gentleness in their family to give to one person.
What Roslin truly cared about was the fact that she would likely meet her soulmate and never be allowed to be with them. After all that she had done for her family – after all that she would sacrifice for them, literally giving herself up like a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter, being the bait to trap and destroy their enemies and therefore ruining herself in the process – she would be alone in this world. She would be given nothing in return.
King Robb Stark and his bannermen arrived two days later. A grand feast was prepared in honor of her wedding to Lord Tully. She sat in her room, her sisters and aunts and cousins helping her prepare for the day, and said absolutely nothing. All she wanted to do was hide in her room and cry all day. She went through fits where she wanted to run away or just go to sleep and never wake up.
“You’re so lucky,” one of her little cousins Walda sighed dreamily. “I want to get married.”
“Dreaming is very different from reality,” another aunt named Walda responded. She had no tattoo, nothing to speak of written on her to suggest to someone would ever love her.
(They don’t talk about it, not even in private, how very few Freys actually have tattoos. Oh, sure, they get married, have children, live their life, but there is no black ink to soothe them into knowing that they will at least be loved even if their life didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped.)
Roslin tugged on her dress, resolutely not looking herself in the mirror. She had cried all last night and no amount of anything had been able to hide that fact. When the time came to give herself up and lose all that she had and would have, the tears fought their way out again.
“Stop crying, you silly girl,” a half-sister told her as they made their way to meet her future husband.
But Roslin couldn’t stop herself. They didn’t know. They didn’t know. It would have been folly to tell everyone in the family of their plan, especially the women. Freys were a gossipy bunch, always trying to figure out who was going to take over the Twins and who might kill who to get there. Telling everyone of their plan to betray the King in the North would have been their downfall. Roslin knew though. She knew everything and it sunk her heart.
And then they were there, before their king, before his mother, before everyone. Roslin wiped at her eyes from underneath her veil, trying her best to hide the tears, and when she finally pulled the veil from over her face, she found herself looking at a man. He had a shock of red hair and even more shock in his blue eyes. He was also not that many years older than her, not like her cousin Mara’s husband, who was more than twice her age. Roslin blinked, unsure of what to say or do. This was to be her husband? This was Lord Edmure Tully? He almost looked more of a boy than King Stark, who was younger than her.
Before Roslin knew it, the ceremony was at hand. She shook at the thought, knowing that in just a few hours’ time, all would be lost and over. Part of her never wanted to speak to him. She didn’t want to say a word. (She didn’t want to be his disappointment, just as surely as he would be hers.) The septon spoke the words of the Seven for their wedding, but neither of them said anything. They merely stared at one another, as if terrified that their first words to each other would shatter all illusions of this moment.
I have no illusions though, Roslin thought.
The wedding ceremony ended almost as abruptly as it began and Edmure kissed her. It was a sweet kiss really. She even found herself enjoying the way that he gripped her hands, his thumbs rubbing the top of her hands gently, like he was ensuring her that he would be good to her even though they were not each other’s soulmates. That was nice. But it wasn’t enough to make her forget that everything he knew and loved would be taken from him. It wasn’t enough to make her forget that she was just bait to be tossed away at the end of the night.
Holding her hand, Edmure led her to the room where the feast would be given for their party. The rest of King Robb’s bannermen were outside in tents that had been erected. Not everyone could fit in one castle after all (not everyone could fit in a single slaughterhouse). She tried smiling so desperately, but she felt broken and empty inside. She had no smiles to give, just tears.
Upon sitting down, Roslin looked down at her hands in her lap and took a deep breath. They couldn’t spend the whole night not speaking to each other. He was her lord husband now, after all – or well, he was her husband. He wouldn’t be a lord for much longer. Finally, Roslin willed herself to look up at Edmure and forced a demure smile onto her face. “I hope I am not a disappointment to you.”
The look Edmure gave her was one of both elation and relief. “You are a delight to me, my lady,” he told her earnestly.
It took everything in Roslin to not place her face in her hands and start to sob, just as she had done when she’d found those exact words written on her hip. She looked away from him just as the tears began to force themselves out and tightened her hands into fists. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be. What kind of luck was this? She did not know whether to be excited or devastated. This man, this foolish man, this unknowing man, was her soulmate. Out of all the men in Westeros, out of all the people that she could have been forced to marry, and she had been forced to marry the man whose first words to her were tattooed onto her body.
(She was supposed to have married Robb Stark. She was supposed to have been queen. She was supposed to have never married her true soulmate. And yet she had. It had taken betrayal, it had taken dishonesty, it had taken disloyalty, it had taken dishonor – but she had found him.)
“Did I say something wrong?” Edmure asked, putting a finger under her chin and carefully guiding her to look him in the face. He wore a startled look, making him look even younger. “My lady, if I said something to offend you, I did not mean–”
“No, no, you did not offend me or say anything wrong, my lord,” Roslin replied, shaking her head. “It’s just– your words.”
“My words?” Confusion swam in Edmure’s eyes and then they widened and shone brightly. “Oh.”
He pulled his hand from her face and pulled up his left sleeve. There, tattooed on his arm, were the words, I hope I am not a disappointment to you.
As he slowly allowed his sleeve to fall back, Edmure looked around the room and finally settled on her hands in her lap. “I didn’t think… I dared not even hope or dream… I put the words out of my mind completely and left them to be forgotten, especially after…”
“After you found that you were being forced to marry me?” Roslin offered. When he looked up at her, she saw something akin to shame in his eyes. He had not wanted to marry her, not before meeting her. She knew that the common perception of Frey women were that they were not beautiful, not even remotely attractive, but she was a rare breed, according to her father. “I thought much the same.”
“My lady, Roslin–” But Edmure did not seem to have anymore words. He reached out for her hands again and she gave them to him. Tears pricked at her eyes again. She would love this man, in due time, and her family was about to betray him. She would have a hand in taking everything away from him – but he would have her still. She would give him all of her, no matter how afraid she was. “I will be good to you, I swear it by the Seven. You will never have need to cry again.”
Oh, but how wrong he was. How so very wrong. But she found herself loving his sweetness, his ignorance, his blindness to everything around them except for her.