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Even when Galladon was very young, he knew he had been born Galladon Storm, but he also knew he wasn’t a bastard anymore. He’d only stayed a Storm for a week, and then his lord uncle had flown on a white-and-gold dragon all the way from King’s Landing to Tarth, with a letter from the queen herself that said Galladon was mother’s trueborn son. That had made mother happy, which made him happy too.
***
She was shy, the first time they lay together, but so was he, which at least gave the situation a little balance.
“You’ve seen me naked before,” he reminded them both as they sat by a spitting campfire under the eaves of an abandoned riverland farmhouse. “And I don’t mean when I didn’t have any clothes on.” She saw the pain in his eyes and touched the stump of his right arm and told him he was perfect as he was: when he didn’t seem to believe her, she tried to kiss away his hurt and uncertainty. By the time he tumbled her into his bedroll, she didn’t feel at all ungainly.
***
“Why is father dead?” Galladon asked mother one day when he was four.
“Because he was in the Kingsguard,” she answered. It was the seventh day, so she was busy polishing her sword; she did it every seventh day of every week of every month of every year, and let no one else touch it. “The Kingsguard are supposed to die defending kings or queens. He died defending the queen.”
“She’s a good queen,” he said after a few minutes’ thought. Mother didn’t answer; she just smiled a little and packed away her chamois leather and sheathed the glistening red-black blade in its scabbard for another week.
Galladon knew all of mother’s smiles, mainly because there weren’t very many of them so it was easy to keep track. When grandfather or the men-at-arms laughed at a jest, mother would barely smile at all, just a little curve of her mouth to show she’d liked it well enough. Her smiles came more freely when they rode or sailed in the skiff and looked at Tarth, their island, and found little beaches where nobody ever landed and saw its mountains in new and exciting ways.
But the real smiles came for him and most often of all when she talked about father. Galladon would sneak into her bedchamber late at night and ask her things, often things he’d asked time and time before, and he would know she was smiling in the dark and would touch her lips to feel it. Or sometimes they would be out in the yard or sitting at table or at business, and somebody would say something that didn’t seem important but mother’s eyes would glitter like her necklace and she would smile like all the Seven were in the room and Galladon would know she’d remembered father.
***
Snow and freezing rain licked bedraggled horses and riders alike as they pushed on through leafless winter trees: three of them, ostensibly riding to capture Sansa Stark and her Vale outriders before their rendezvous with Brynden Blackfish, actually to make sure that nobody, including themselves, did anything of the sort. There was a great deal to be said for treachery, but in this weather it became harder to bear. She might have found the ride sufferable had she not scouted too far west and needed to ford the Greenapple to rejoin the other two. Clothing and armour-pads were turning to ice on her body.
He’d ridden ahead of the others and had found a conifer thicket tough enough to protect them. By the time they caught up with him, he’d already fumbled a fire together. She entered the clearing and almost fell from her horse instead of dismounting properly. His hand on her back steadied her.
“You’re freezing,” he muttered.
“We all are that.”
“Glory and I didn’t go swimming. Here.” He pulled off his thick white cloak and bundled her in it.
She balked. “It’s a Kingsguard cloak. I’m not entitled –”
“You’re cold. Keep the damned thing on and come to the fire. Shut up, Loras.”
***
Galladon started learning the sword when he was five. Other boys waited till they were six, but at five Galladon was already as tall as them and mother and the master-at-arms said he was ready. He worked harder than any of them. He imagined father working just as hard at sword practice, but with a steel sword instead of a wooden one.
Mother trained with a sword as well; she was the only woman who did. She fought as well as any of the men, which made Galladon very proud. The knights whispered that her real sword, not her tourney sword, was magic. He wasn’t sure; it had a pommel and an edge like all of the others, but if it had magic in it, it came from father.
A necklace, a sword and a little boy were an odd three things for father to have left her. The sword stayed on the wall, except when mother cleaned it, and once that year during spring rains when reavers came and she took it down and fought at the head of all the knights. Ser Parsifer told the whole of Evenfall Hall afterwards that the Warrior had guided the blade. Mother had glared at him and walked away.
She didn’t wear the necklace often, just at feasts and once when a man came to see her and she didn’t want to marry him. It was all sapphires, as blue as her eyes, hung in gold. The maids whispered it was as fine as any of the queen’s necklaces, and still more quietly told each other that it would be stolen one day because mother never locked it away in her jewel-case. Galladon knew that it wouldn’t. Only mother had the key to the heavy strongbox under her bed, and only Galladon had ever borrowed the key to look. The necklace lived in there, wrapped in an old white cloak. It didn’t seem lonely for the other jewels, so he left it there.
***
They often rode together in the kingswood, choosing times when Loras Tyrell would be the only one to notice them leave, because he’d guessed already and had enough of his own bedroom secrets to practise absolute discretion. But Loras didn’t quite appreciate that there was more than one excellent reason to get lost in among winter trees. Day after day their blades would sing together, and she feared the time when he would deem himself worthy of returning to the yard and training openly.
“It was your name day last week,” he observed one afternoon as they packed the tourney swords back onto their horses and retrieved their real steel.
She stopped with Oathkeeper’s belt loose in her hand. “How did you –”
“Find out? Well, not for sake of you telling me, though I’d have thought you might.”
She felt awkward and twelve again. “I’m sorry.”
Maybe he heard something wrong in her voice, for he went to her and held her for a long moment. “Don’t apologise,” he murmured in her ear. “I got you a present. I hope you like it.”
“You didn’t need –”
“I didn’t need to get you anything, I wanted to.” He kissed her broken nose. “Here.” He dangled a black velvet bag in front of her. She took it in one trembling hand, broke the lead seal and peeped inside.
Blue brilliance glittered out at her and she gasped as she drew out the rope of sapphires. “Jaime, you – you shouldn’t have –”
He kissed the corner of her mouth. “They match your eyes.” She embraced him, as fierce as her love for him, and after one thing had led inexorably to another they decided that making love against a tree while wearing chainmail was an experiment they should not repeat.
***
Later that year, grandfather was ill, so ill that Maester Alek thought he might die. One day when he was well enough to sit in his solar he called mother to him and sent all the servants away. Galladon listened at the door, though he knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, and heard grandfather and mother arguing. He told her she needed to get married. She told him she already had a son and heir, and didn’t need another. Galladon decided that listening to this definitely wasn’t right, so he sneaked away.
Afterwards, mother went to her bedchamber alone, and Galladon went to hug her because she always hugged him when he was upset so it was fair. Then she dressed in a pretty pale blue gown and attended dinner wearing father’s necklace, and grandfather scowled at her when the men carried him to table but never said anything again about being married.
***
Other men might wake with smiles and soft words and embraces for their women. She’d never cared to investigate the truth of that particular pretty fantasy. All she knew was that her man, when they deemed it safe to stay in the same bed all night, woke with muffled curses on his lips and shuttered pain in his eyes.
One particular morning began well before dawn. King’s Landing slept, outside the Red Keep. Even the servants were still abed. But he woke with a violent tremble and sat up gasping in the dark.
Still more than half asleep, she groggily watched him swing his legs over the side of the bed and wondered where he was going: but he went nowhere, just sat there staring at the window. The sea was audible outside, beating on the shore. The sea never slept.
“Jaime, what are you doing?” she whispered.
He stiffened. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
She sat up. His white tower was chilly; she clutched the fur-lined bedspread to her chest. “Did you dream?” He didn’t answer. She laid a hand on his right shoulder. “You’re trembling. You’re cold.”
“No, I’m not. I’m bloody angry.”
She wriggled closer to him. “Whatever it is, I –” and she saw his left hand in a shaft of moonglow, opening and closing on a handful of sheets and blankets over and over again, and she knew.
“When I sleep, it’s still there,” he said in a conversational voice. “I can lace my doublet without my squires’ help, I can climb up and down the cliff stair like it’s a flat corridor, I can write better than a seven-year-old; I can do every tiny thing I used to take for granted. I can use a sword. I put my arms around you and I hold you instead of groping at you.”
She refrained from mentioning that he’d never seemed clumsy in bed, or that his prowess in the yard with a sword in his left hand was causing all the men-at-arms and a high proportion of the knights to whisper that he surely had to be the Warrior born as a man. She waited.
“And then I wake up.” He clenched his left fist, his only fist. “To this.” His handless right arm shook. “May the Seven bugger each other – what kind of cruel trick –”
She heard the ragged break in his voice and pulled him round into her arms and let him weep against her shoulder. Though he tried to pull away, she insisted; when he started repeatedly punching the side of the bed she captured his left arm too and pinioned it till he collapsed against her.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered after a few minutes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry...”
“It’s all right.” She lay back down and towed him with her, somehow tweaking the bedding over him too. “Just let me help and it’ll be fine.”
“It won’t,” he said in a deadened voice after a few silent minutes. “It’ll be morning soon and we’ll have to put on the masks again. I’ll still be a crippled Kingsguard – Kingsguard, Brienne – and you’ll still be a lord’s only heir.”
Anger flared inside her. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Except that it does. I joined the Kingsguard sooner than marry Lysa Tully and keep the Rock. Do you want to keep Tarth? If so, you need a man who can marry you.”
“An uncommonly generous man, too, who would let you father his heirs.”
He sat up. “Are you –”
“Of course I’m not pregnant. But I won’t bed anyone else.”
“Highborn ladies seldom have the choice.”
She tugged him back against her. “I was never much good at being a highborn lady.” He smiled weakly against her neck, but didn’t answer. She ran her fingers through his golden hair – three or four inches long, now – until he fell asleep again, draped across her. She closed her eyes to wait for morning, and as she drifted off she told herself her moon-blood was late due to war stress and her breasts were tender because Loras had clipped her too hard in the training yard. Such beauty lay in lies.
***
When Galladon was six and started studying harder with Maester Alek he learnt how different mother’s stories about father were from anyone else’s. The maester had history books, accounts of Robert’s Rebellion, of the Eight False Kings and the restoration under Queen Daenerys. There had always been minstrels’ songs and rhymes, too, but mother just had words and smiles.
Maester Alek told Galladon about the battles father had won, and lost, and about the treasons he’d done and been forgiven. The minstrels, although they would always wait till mother had left the hall, would sing of some of the same battles, with father in the vanguard, leading and winning. His sword was always golden and the sun always shone through his hair, though Galladon was fairly sure it had rained for most of the time. It was a singer who whispered to him once that father had loved his queen sister more than a man should, and that Galladon’s cousin the lioness who wrote him polite letters from Casterly Rock wasn’t really his cousin. That singer left Tarth soon afterwards.
Mother’s tales were simpler. Words and laughter, anger and tears; “He was the best,” she told Galladon one day when he came back from the yard rubbing his calluses. “Nobody in the Seven Kingdoms could have beaten him.” She studied her own sword-reddened hands. “We fought in anger only once. His hands were chained together and still he nearly won.”
Mother fought with a sword better than anyone he’d ever known. He thought about father, how he’d been best, and his heart felt big and joyful. “Everyone must have been frightened of him.”
“A lot of people were.” She scrunched up her right hand. “Some outlaws were so frightened of him that they cut his sword hand off.”
Galladon was entranced. “But he still fought.”
“He did. He trained with a sword in his left hand, harder than you train now, till he was almost as good with the left hand as he ever was with the right.”
“Almost?” he asked, oddly disappointed.
This smile was sad. “He did die, sweetling. He never did that while he had his right hand.”
***
Serving in the queens’ personal guard train had taught her to clench her teeth and close her eyes when faced with Cersei’s harsher words and more violent outbursts. The only time she ever heard him retaliate, dragons were searing the sky over King’s Landing and the Red Keep was full of screams and terror outside the barricaded Maidenvault.
“You idiotic woman! Have you the sense of a newborn?”
“You dare raise your voice to me?”
“Do you actually know what you’ve done?”
She laughed, harsh and hysterical. “Saved us, you cretin. Saved us with what saved me the last time you failed me. It will fight off all the invaders and leave us free; you believe any man can vanquish it?”
“In seven hells and seven heavens, why –”
“Oh, now I understand. You’ve proved so stunningly ineffective in protecting me – are you jealous, brother?”
The slap was audible through the closed solar door. Queen Margaery’s eyes widened, but she didn’t pause in her string of calm orders and soothing words.
“I could have your hand off for that.” Cersei’s voice was low and fierce. “Where would that leave you?”
“I could lose a hand for striking the queen. At this rate, you won’t stay queen long enough to pass sentence.”
“Come back here.” In the other room, a different door opened and closed. “Come back here!”
She shivered beneath her chainmail. Suddenly Loras was at her elbow. “What’s Jaime doing?”
“I think,” she said with difficulty, “something stupid.”
The young knight’s face was expressionless. Outside, a dragon roared. Flame crackled on Rhaenys’s Hill. Faint battle-sounds drifted through the high window.
“Go after him.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I guard the king and the queens. Go.”
She stumbled into the corridor. Behind her, she heard Cersei flounce into the main room. “I’ll have him off the Kingsguard after this battle. I’ll –” and the door closed.
He’d already vanished and she had no idea where he’d gone. She ran through the Red Keep, Oathkeeper in hand. She heard far-off fighting like audible shadows. Upstairs and downstairs; towers and side chambers – and at last she entered the throne room’s spectator gallery.
The Iron Throne stood thirty feet below her. Blood pooled on the floor around it from three dismembered corpses; a tall Dothraki, a fat foot soldier, an ironborn pirate. The three dead faced three still standing.
The dragon-queen, Daenerys Targaryen, the Stormborn, stood with her back to the rear wall with a sword bare in her hand, though by the way she held it she’d had next to no training in how to use it. Any woman should have been terrified, but no fear showed on her face or in her stance.
A monster from children’s nightmares hulked ten feet in front of her. Eight feet high, with just as much reach, it held a greatsword light in its hand the way a normal man would hold a longsword. Its massive plate armour was stained with the blood of the queen’s dead. It loomed, black-helmed like the Stranger come to Westeros.
But between them was him.
Torchlight glinted off his gold sword and silver armour. White shield, cloak and surcoat rippled clear in the gloom like benevolent ghosts. The golem-monster lunged over him at Daenerys; he parried and thrust it back.
“Can it understand us?” she heard Daenerys ask in a calm voice.
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Is it flameproof?”
She heard him take a deep breath. “Stay behind me as I move.” Ever so slowly, he started to steer the three of them in a leftwards circle, edging himself and Daenerys towards the main door.
Her mind kicked her legs into gear and she ran, off the gallery, towards the stairs.
***
Afterwards, Galladon took his first ever wooden sword out of his chest and held it in his left hand and stood in front of his mirror. It felt all wrong, like the world was sideways. But father had trained to do it. Father had learnt, and fought, and won.
***
Afterwards, to hear all the boasting, one would have thought all the court old and new had been there in the throne room, either useless on the gallery or frozen in the doorway. Just enough of them really were. Just enough to bear witness.
“Kingslayer?” she heard a stupefied white-haired knight exclaim as she pushed through soldiers both Lannister and Targaryen in the corridor.
“Selmy. You one of hers?”
“Yes –”
“Good. Clear us a way out.”
“Who you think you are, to speak thus to me –”
“The Lord Commander of the bloody Kingsguard. Or, I should say, Queensguard. Clear us a way out!”
Armed men in crimson and sable poured into the room from all directions. The pair beneath the sword continued to inch round the room, slowly, too slowly. Another Dothraki and a neat-armoured eunuch guard pushed to the front of the crowd by the door, drew their swords and rushed the monstrous golem. It hissed. Without even looking at them it lashed its greatsword down and backwards, eviscerating the one, beheading the other.
But as it moved, the golden sword before it leapt. The thing started to turn. A quick thrust dipped beneath its questing arm, and black blood ran from its abdomen, but it did not fall. Roaring in wordless fury, it raised the greatsword.
Grey-black steel met gold in a shower of sparks. The blades swept apart and together again, fast as lightning and with thunderstorms’ energy. The bladesong whistled backwards and forwards across the screaming, chanting room, as if all the magic and might of the gods were in there too.
She heard Tyrion Lannister swearing and Selmy calling for Daenerys to run to him. Tyrion’s crossbow twanged, and a bolt speared the monster’s back, but it paid the hit no more mind than it had the earlier belly-wound. She frantically elbowed past men tall and short, but not enough of them. She couldn’t get to the front, to intervene.
Kingsguard and demon, the two in the centre circled and struck in their deadly dance, at a speed that seemed barely possible for man or monster. It should have been over already – but the one a foot and a half shorter than the other and with far less reach still held it at bay. He moved like a wave on the seashore, his sword catching every blow with casual fluid mastery. His shadow rose tall behind him on the wall, as mighty and majestic as the Warrior come to Westeros to fight for the dragons.
He lunged again. Three quick strikes forced it backwards. It spun faster than arrows’ flight and parried a blow that might have taken off its right arm – but its back was suddenly to the Iron Throne and there lay nothing between Daenerys and the door.
“Run!” he shouted. The queen took off as fast as a hawk – but her foot caught in a puddle of blood and she slipped onto her backside. The monster swung its arm up above its head and aimed a massive overarm strike straight at her.
He dodged between them again and his upraised white shield met the blow.
The sword-strike clove the shield in two and shattered the arm that held it. The great grey blade hacked into his shoulder and ribs and caught there for a bare half-second. The golden blade, suddenly unconstrained, flashed up one last time and met the golem’s helm-joint.
The head parted from the massive shoulders and black blood spurted into the red lake. The monster collapsed in a pile of steel and bone. Warriors shouted and dragons roared – and Jaime fell before the throne.
***
Galladon was seven when he started noticing the spaces in the world. He and mother didn’t leave Tarth very often, but as he grew, grandfather started taking him with him to meet other lords. He soon learnt that people on Tarth didn’t discuss some things. Bastards, for instance. At Griffin’s Roost, while grandfather was closeted with Lord Jon, he heard household knights and men-at-arms whispering about all the things that were wrong with bastards: dishonour and lying and all manner of evil. When he was back at Evenfall Hall he went to grandfather’s solar and peeked at the paper in the desk that said the queen knew he wasn’t a real bastard.
He found mother in her own solar, sitting on the window seat to sew up a tear in her leather practice armour. “Are there other bastards who aren’t bastards anymore?” he asked her.
“Yes, plenty. The queen’s own nephew and consort, Jon Blackfyre, was born a bastard, but she legitimised him too.”
“And that means he’s not really a bad person.”
Mother paused and laid her needles aside. “You aren’t a bad person. You never were.”
“Even if I was still Galladon Storm?”
“When Jon Blackfyre was still Jon Snow, he was a good person. He commanded the Night’s Watch and served with honour and valour. The queen set him as Warden of the North while he was still Jon Snow, and she wouldn’t have done that if he’d been a bad person.”
That was true; the queen was never wrong, though she must be lonely when her consort was away from King’s Landing. “In the histories, the lord of Winterfell was always Warden of the North. The queen must have known he was special to set him over Lord Stark.”
“Lord Stark is Jon Blackfyre’s cousin, and he can’t be Warden of the North because he broke his back and can’t walk. He’s the cleverest lord in the Seven Kingdoms, and rides all over his lands, but the Warden of the North needs to be able to walk.”
“It must be bad for him,” he considered. “Not walking. Why did he break his back?”
“Because your father pushed him out of a window,” mother answered calmly.
Galladon stared. “No. He didn’t.”
“He did, when Lord Stark was the same age as you are now.”
Father wasn’t like that. “He didn’t!” Galladon shouted. Mother stood up and moved towards him, but he ran out of her solar and all the way down the stairs and out of the hall to the harbour in the basement, and she didn’t follow him. He sat on the wall and threw pebbles into the sea and scowled fit to make his face stick that way. She shouldn’t have said it, because it didn’t happen.
He didn’t talk to mother or even look at her all the way through dinner, but after he’d gone up to bed, she came into his room and shooed out the elderly nurserymaid and sat by him. “It happened,” she told him, in a voice that meant he finally couldn’t argue with her. “It wasn’t honourable or good of him at all, but he did it anyway.”
“He didn’t,” Galladon insisted, feeling like he might cry.
She smiled sadly and brushed his curly hair off his face. “It wasn’t his best move ever. Try to remember the things he did that were more honourable.”
“He died.” He rolled over and hid his face in mother’s lap like he was a baby. “I didn’t want him to do that.”
“Neither did I. But there’s honour in dying, sometimes.”
***
She didn’t scream. She couldn’t. Cersei cried out once, from the gallery, and Tyrion ran to his brother’s side swearing blue murder and cursing him for a chivalrous whore-son. Daenerys shouted a quick order to fetch someone called Marwyn. Barristan Selmy walked to his queen’s side whispering imprecations of disbelief. But all she could do was sheathe Oathkeeper and stumble forwards. Her voice had fled. It felt like the whole world had been squeezed in a vice.
Daenerys dropped her useless sword and knelt to take his head in her lap. She drew off his helm. His golden hair was sweat-plastered to his head and his face was pale. “Is it dead?” he croaked.
Another of Daenerys’s soldiers bent over the monster and nodded to Selmy. “Yes,” the older knight told him in a stupefied voice. “But – Kingslayer –”
“It’s Jaime. To you, Lord Jaime.”
Tyrion yanked his cloak off and held it to the spurting half-severed right arm with tears running down his face. “I didn’t kill Joff,” he said in a shaking voice. “I only said that to hurt you.”
“I know.” He half-smiled. “It was Margaery.”
She staggered into the clear circle around the little group and knelt by him and took his hand. His fingers threaded into hers, so familiar, so weak. “Tell her,” he whispered, jerking his head at Daenerys. “Aerys.”
Words had never come easily to her, but she took a deep breath and looked straight at the beautiful dragon-queen. “King Aerys was going to burn down King’s Landing. He –”
“Lies,” called a courtier in the crowd.
Daenerys’s purple eyes snapped to the man. “Silence.” The mutters in the throne room stopped at once and there seemed no sound but laboured breathing. The queen raised her silver eyebrows. “As you were saying?”
“He – there was wildfire all over the city. If it had caught, everything would have burned. All the people, dead. So – Jaime killed him before he could set it off.”
“It’s true,” Tyrion supplied when Selmy seemed set to argue. “I found the wildfire. It’s true – you arrogant golden bastard: why didn’t you tell anyone?”
He smiled. “Kingsguard – keep king’s secrets. Not from his heirs.” His eyes were barely focused anymore, but he looked up at her with the same dreamy tenderness she’d seen a dozen times by firelight. Odd surprise lay there, but no pain.
His gaze seemed to catch on her chest, on the way her chainmail hung far tighter there than it should, now that her body had finally decided it needed teats bigger than saucers. “Are you –?” he breathed.
She stared down at him, all words frozen in her throat. “I –”
His smile grew. “That’s a complication,” he enunciated carefully.
“Complication?” she hissed. “You – you’re dying.”
“Feels easy to me.” He squeezed her hand again, feather-light. “Don’t forget.”
She could have demanded to know how he could ever think she would forget, or beat the floor and beg him not to die, but instead she nodded. “I swear it on my sword and the Seven.”
“Good.” Maybe he could no longer see her. “That’s good.”
He didn’t speak again. A minute or two later, as a maester built like a blacksmith pulled Tyrion’s cloak aside and cursed at the sight of the wounds, his hand went limp in hers, and Daenerys closed his eyes and drew his Kingsguard cloak over his face.
***
Galladon’s lord uncle worked for the queen and was the second most important person in the Seven Kingdoms, so he didn’t come to visit often, and usually only for a few days. He spent a whole week on Tarth once when Galladon was eight. It was a wonderful week, though both of them were surprised when Galladon found he was the taller. Mother welcomed uncle warmly, but was less impressed when uncle took Galladon for a ride on his dragon.
“I won’t drop him.”
“Do, and you’ll find yourself even shorter.”
It was colder in the sky than on the ground or in the sea. Tarth glistened under Viserion’s white wings like an emerald and an agate dropped in the middle of a pile of sapphires. Galladon clung to the warm dragon-neck underneath him and after a while realised he’d spent so long pretending not to be frightened that he really wasn’t frightened at all.
“Did you take father flying?” he asked uncle, when they stopped so Viserion could eat a sheep.
“No; he died before we got the chance. He only saw dragons the once.”
“At least he had once.” Galladon sat down on a big rock and hugged his knees, while uncle sat beside him swinging his short legs an inch off the ground. “Mother misses father sometimes,” he confided. “I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Nothing you can do,” uncle snorted. “Just keep on growing up looking like him.”
“Do I?” Galladon peeked sideways at uncle. He’d always thought that brothers would look sort of the same, except that uncle was a dwarf, and it was hard to imagine what his face would have looked like before he lost his nose in a fight.
Uncle laughed. “Oh, he was nothing like me. He was tall and beautiful. I’m short, ugly and devious. Her Grace finds me useful this way.”
***
“You crazy bitch!”
“Don’t speak like that to me –”
“Then tell me this wasn’t your doing! Your juggernaut killed our brother!”
The shouting behind her was meaningless. The whole world lay dead before the Iron Throne.
“I loved –”
“I loved him too. Seven buggering hells! I loved him. I didn’t fuck him for twenty years or let him father my husband’s children, but I loved him, no less than you!”
Shocked gasps echoed from the rafters. “You mad embittered dwarf, you –”
The voice cut off in a heavy twang and a choked scream. “By the Seven,” Tyrion said in a near-normal voice. “That was an accident.”
“She’s gut-shot.” That was the maester, the maester who’d come too late. “There’s nothing anyone can do. Milk of the poppy – the gift of mercy –”
“Mercy?” Tyrion half-shouted, half-sobbed. “You think she deserves mercy? Come here. I’ll give her that.”
“Lannister –”
“I killed our father already. You think the gods can hate me any more?”
***
Dragons were beautiful and terrible all at once. So was Tarth, in the middle of a storm with ships bobbing in the harbour and others foundering offshore and waves crashing at the cliffs with enough force to bring down rock-faces. So what was the difference between that and all the tales about father? They called him a lion; maybe he was more of a dragon inside.
***
Somehow she made it to her room. She couldn’t breathe properly. It was as if an invisible wolf was biting her repeatedly in the gut. But if it – the child –
As the door closed something inside her gave way and she dropped to her knees again, weeping senseless, endless tears. Her heart hurt as if the greatsword had cleaved it into pieces too.
Someone came in a while later, how much later she couldn’t say, and she was aware later of the maester and of Tyrion. She realised she was in bed and she tasted the milk of the poppy and she slept, praying never to wake.
But wake she did, many hours later, with sunlight creeping up the wall and one of the queen’s foreign maids in the room to wait on her. She waved away food but let the girl bathe and dress her. The day should not be sunny. Storm-rain should rake the towers and King’s Landing should be darkened forever. She wanted to strike the maidservant’s hands from her hair. She’d dispensed with maids at fourteen: the only hands that had brushed her hair since were her own, and his.
Daenerys received her in the solar that had been Cersei’s just a day earlier, attended only by a pair of eunuch guards. She too wore a gown instead of yesterday’s chainmail. Hers was deep red-black, low-cut across her perfect breasts. She was graceful, and beautiful, and alive. Every bit of her hurt to look upon.
“I’ll give you a decree of legitimacy, when the child is born,” she said without preamble. “It won’t lessen the scandal, but it should make your lives easier.”
Raw truth burnt her mind like dragonfire. She was bearing a fatherless child. She ought to be ashamed of her conduct or afraid of the future or at least to be feeling some emotion, anything other than a dull-hot longing. “I – your Grace is – kind.”
“Kind?” Daenerys’s lips quirked into a soft sad smile. “Very rarely. Kindness has no place in the affairs of princes.” She gestured out of the window to the gibbets already erected lower down Aegon’s Hill. At the fore dangled one of the queen’s own men, a richly-jacketed Tyroshi sellsword with blue-dyed hair.
“What did he do?”
“Killed the boy Tommen. I ordered him taken alive.”
If Tommen was dead there wasn’t any point even asking about Loras Tyrell. She laid a hand on her belly. My child’s brother, just a boy, dead. “Tommen had a sister.”
“Still has, to my knowledge.”
Finding words was harder than ever. “Myrcella – has barely twelve years. Robert Baratheon acknowledged her.”
The queen’s smile peeped again. “I admit I enjoy the thought of the Usurper with horns. Restoring Tyrion to Casterly Rock after he admitted patricide in front of the entire court would be extremely difficult to justify, and I need him here, as my Hand, more than I need him in the westerlands.”
Part of the world seemed to right itself and she nodded weary thanks on Myrcella’s behalf. She suddenly couldn’t seem to raise her eyes from Daenerys’s elegant, tiny, silver-shoed toes. “Your Grace – if kindness should cross your mind – I beg you, tell the Seven Kingdoms what happened. That he...”
“Saved me? Gave his life for mine?” Daenerys gestured to the black-cushioned window seat, and they both sat as the rebuilding of a dynasty began outside. “I only knew the legend. I didn’t know the man.”
“Not many people did.” It was an understatement. Maybe she was the only one who had. “A legend isn’t always a comfortable thing to be.”
“I can agree with that.” Daenerys sniffed. “As it happens, I already have a skilled balladeer working on the subject. Legends can always bear a little revision.”
She watched the dragon-queen and her open, friendly smile, and realised this goddess-beautiful woman hadn’t betrayed disdain of her ugliness by so much as a raised eyelash, and felt shaken and humble and proud and afraid all at once. “Thank you. I – I hope you prosper.”
“And fear I won’t.”
“Westerosi politics are vicious.”
“So are dragons.”
She hadn’t seen Daenerys since, for which she was oddly glad. The dragon-woman had fertility problems: reminders of fecund families often caused her pain. In all the years, she’d miscarried four girl-babes and borne just one living son, a sickly child with a staggeringly high intellect whom she’d named Rhaegar.
***
Grandfather’s five-and-sixtieth name day came a few moons after Galladon’s ninth. There was a feast to celebrate: some of the other lords came, and the great storm lady with her husband the rainlord. Galladon had never seen her before. She was his cousin’s cousin, so in some respect his cousin too, unless his cousin was his sister which he didn’t think about. She wasn’t at all pretty, with the greyscale marks on her cheek, but she almost seemed it when her husband said something to make her smile. It reminded Galladon of mother.
When the feasting was done and all the tables in the great hall were pulled to the walls, the harpist stopped his ballads and two fiddlers and a drummer began a gigue. Mother didn’t dance. She’d shone all evening in sapphires and a blue-gold gown and spoken quiet polite words to the lords around her, but at the first signs of merriment she slipped aside. Grandfather didn’t notice, or maybe didn’t think it right to argue.
Galladon had been very daring and drunk a small goblet of wine with his dinner. He was nearly a man grown, after all, and was already as tall as squires of twelve years. He danced with the storm lady, and then a Morrigen girl and then the steward’s maiden daughter, but the hall was hot and stuffy so he went outside into the high courtyard to get some air.
The sea hissed on the shore below Evenfall Hall’s high plain walls. It licked at the cliffs along the coast. Galladon leant over the balustrade and stared at the ships in the enclosed harbour below and breathed salt spray till he felt better. He nearly went straight back inside, but on a whim he wandered up the dim stone staircase that wound round the outside of the keep instead, and entered Evenfall on the upper floor.
A corridor three feet long led him onto the great hall’s gallery. Galladon leant over the rail. He could see everything from up here: which lady was dancing with which lord or ser, which couple were whispering in the corner, which serving woman was lingering by which guardsman. It felt like he knew everything there was to know in the world. He felt a little dizzy: he sat down on the wooden floor. His eyes crept up the opposite wall to the proud swords and banners that hung there, with mother’s in the middle of them all, and then further still, to the other side of the gallery.
Mother was standing there in the near-dark, leaning on the rail to watch the dancing, just as Galladon had a few moments earlier. He couldn’t see her very well. The torch behind her, on the wall of the corridor that led to the bedchambers, just outlined her; another one on her left shone weakly on her face. She was smiling in the way that meant she was remembering father. Had she and father danced together, once?
A man was standing beside her.
Galladon scrambled upright and looked. The man stood on mother’s right, deeper in the shadows than she was: torchlight fell around him instead of on him. He had to be a stranger, someone who’d come in one of the lords’ trains, for there was no one on Tarth both as tall as mother and leaner than her.
But the man had slid his left arm round mother’s waist like he’d known her for years. She wasn’t acting like anything was wrong; she should have pushed him off, even in the middle of a feast! He leant to her ear to whisper something, and she only smiled like Galladon had just taken six rings at once on a quintain.
The man bent his head and kissed the sapphire necklace’s clasp on mother’s bare neck, and Galladon’s legs shook in hot anger. That was father’s necklace!
He pressed his back against the wall and started skirting round the gallery, as quiet as a breeze. I’ll fight you for her, he promised silently. I’m smaller than you but I won’t lose!
The man looked up, straight at Galladon lurking in the shadows. “We already fought over her,” he thought he heard a voice say. “You already won.”
And suddenly Galladon noticed that the man’s right hand, gripping the rail, wasn’t hand-like at all, but seemed a shaft of golden flame that danced in the half-light, and he realised he couldn’t see him but saw right through him. One moment the velvet doublet was pure white; the next it was richest crimson slashed and piped with gold as pure as the sword on his right hip, his wrong hip. Curly hair just as golden framed his face – a handsome man’s face, close-bearded, with laughing green eyes that speared Galladon to the wall, unable to move.
Names and labels flew around his head. The Lion of Lannister. Jaime One-hand, Jaime Goldenhand. Kingslayer and Queen’s Saviour. Oathbreaker. Murderer. Hero. Avatar.
“Father?” he whispered. He hardly heard his own voice over the music down below. The man’s grin broadened, and he winked.
Galladon bolted.
He fled off the gallery and down the stair the way he’d come, and ran right across the darkened courtyard away from the hall and into the sept atop the pier. Candles burnt, slow and gentle, on the altars. He pushed the heavy door shut and staggered to the nearest bench, shaking like a thrift leaf in the wind.
“Galladon?” He looked up. Septon Lucerne was standing in the little doorway at the back that led to his cell: he feasted as happily as any man, but did not dance. “Are you all right?”
He stared at the Stranger’s altar, near-black in the left transept. “Where – where are the dead?” he asked in a quavering voice. He kicked his own left ankle with his right foot: he was almost grown, and his voice shouldn’t shake like that.
The septon’s cowl slid off his tonsured grey head as he came to sit beside Galladon. “The dead... their bodies remain with the living, but their souls go to heaven, if they did good deeds, or to hell if they were evil.”
He wriggled. “What about the people who were both? Like the Dragonknight. He was a good man, except he dishonoured Queen Naerys. Would he get stuck here?” Would anyone else?
Lucerne laughed. “No, no. All men are a mixture of good and evil. The Seven judge them all on their merits, and send them all to one end or another.”
“So, ghosts...”
“There are no ghosts.”
“Oh.” The candlelight danced. Galladon pulled the ends of his mind back together. “I think,” he said very carefully, trying to remember Ser Howard’s exact words after the last seven-feast, “I drank a little too much wine.”
“How much?” Galladon mimed a depth as big as one thumb-joint, and the septon laughed again. “You’ll be fine.”
“I will. I know it.”
When Septon Lucerne had gone, Galladon lit a candle and placed it on the Father’s altar, then sat in front of it and tried to find his own father’s golden shadow in the flame. In the end he fell asleep leaning on the altar-stone.
***
At first it had seemed like her imagination was playing the cruellest of tricks possible on her. She’d accepted that she would inevitably see him in her dreams, and ride and fight and dance and make love with him there, but she hadn’t banked on waking to feel his hand in her hair, or hearing his voice in the background when she was wide awake, or fancying he stood at her shoulder in a crowd.
Mornings were the worst. They made her want to hide under her blankets all day or sleep forever with no dreaming and no waking. But she remembered how he’d forced himself to live after losing his hand, and with that example locked in her mind, she could do nothing but rise and start each day anew with the greatest part of herself missing and the smallest part of him nascent in her womb, a part that rapidly became its own reason to wake in a morning.
As the years passed she grew to like the memories. If she couldn’t have him, at least she had his echo in her mind, though it said a number of unattractive things for her sanity. Then there was Galladon too, their beautiful boy, who seemed to grow more like his father every day.
“Do you remember,” she silently asked her imagination, “the Maidenvault?” She leant over the gallery rail and watched the dancers down below. “Two days before the dragons came. Everyone knew they were coming, but Margaery ordered music.”
“Of course I remember,” memory-Jaime answered with a laugh. “Cersei wouldn’t dance with me – she never did while I only had one hand to tow her around with.”
“The Keep and the whole city seemed like to burn, but we couldn’t flee.”
The breeze kissed her neck. “And if the sight of Loras dancing openly with Lew Piper didn’t count as shocking, we could safely say nobody cared about anything anymore. So I pulled you into the dancing circle like nothing mattered.”
“I remember dancing well; that was what surprised me most.”
“You weren’t being self-conscious. You’re a very graceful woman when you’re not thinking about it.” Nonexistent fingers tickled her waist and she fought to keep still. “And you are raising us a thoroughly decent boy.”
“I’m glad you approve. I try not to let him idolise you, but I don’t think it’s worked.”
“The appropriate word is lionise, and no, it hasn’t.” The wind kissed her again. “Just keep my failings clear in his eyes and it may all end well.”
“Such of them as I care to remember, I shall.”
“And don’t let him join the Queensguard.”
“That goes without saying.”
Teasing laughter sprang from torches and firelight. “And for yourself? Is this enough? Or should some handsome man like me walk into Evenfall and sweep you off your feet –”
“There are no men like you. There’s only you.”
“That’s my wench.” Odd air currents played on her back, and she felt enveloped in a warm embrace she’d last felt ten years ago to the day.