Chapter Text
Once they were in Tyrion’s room, the first thing Nyssa Dayne said was, “We should set expectations.”
“Expectations.” Jon Connington had done his best to break Tyrion of drinking, and unfortunately it seemed to have mostly worked. Tyrion wasn’t nearly drunk enough to hear how the beautiful daughter of a minor offshoot of House Dayne didn’t want to fuck him. He already knew that, and it seemed excessive for her to say it out loud.
“Yes, expectations.” She settled herself in a chair. “I’ve been told you’re fond of whores, so that should eventually take care of succession.”
“So my bed won’t be seeing use tonight.”
“Not with me, no. If you must, you can find a woman and I will make myself scarce, but straying on the first night could hardly bode well for our marriage. Mayhaps save your celebrations for the morrow. But yes, eventually I expect some woman will give you a bastard, which our queen will legitimise. After that, you or I can raise it as your heir.”
“You would really volunteer to raise a dwarf’s bastard son, just so you don’t have to fuck me?”
“You never know, it might be a daughter.” Judging from the way Daenerys ruled, things were going to get a lot more Dornish in terms of succession, which Tyrion supposed his new wife must appreciate.
“And aside from that?”
“Aside from that, what? I’m not going to slip the Tears of Lys into your wine, if that’s what you’re worried about. There are worse husbands my father could have picked for me.”
“Taller ones, too.” The least she could do was come out and say why she didn’t like him. They had been alone barely five minutes and the woman was already too bloody enigmatic, all dark hair and dark eyes and narrowness.
“Stupider ones,” Nyssa countered. “Crueller ones. Shooting your father was rather impressive. Somebody should have done that decades ago.” She stood. “Oh, I almost forgot.”
She walked to the bed, pulled back the sheets, pulled a hairpin from her hair, jabbed it unceremoniously into the heel of her hand and dripped a little blood on the sheets, before smearing it slightly into the fabric. “There we are. Consider my maidenhead broken.”
*
Tyrion Lannister had no idea what to do with his wife. She did not seem to hate him, but it was impossible to tell if she liked him, either. At least she seemed to tolerate the marriage. She held her head high while courtiers whispered behind her back. The closest he saw to her showing that she was bothered at all was when she ‘accidentally’ spilled red wine on the dress of a woman who had been loudly and obnoxiously proclaiming her preference for tall men.
His inability to make her out led him to avoid her as much as possible, but he could not avoid her on the ride from Kings Landing to Casterly Rock. They had to ride side by side, and – fuck – they were sharing a tent.
Strangely, things grew easier between them on the ride. Nyssa had read widely, he discovered. So long as the conversation stayed upon the topic of academic interests, they had much to talk about. Just so long as they did not talk about the fact that they were man and wife.
Tyrion could feel the troubles coming. She was beautiful and she was intelligent, and the last thing he needed was to desire a woman who would not have him. Not when their journey brought them to something like functional coexistence.
Riding was hell on his legs and backside, and after several uncomfortable days in a row he finally admitted that he was hobbling so much as to be pathetic, and retrieved a cane from among his things.
Nyssa took one look at him and said, “You had a cane all this time? You’ve been limping like a dying horse for days.”
“I didn’t realise your preference was for your husband to lean on a walking stick like an old man.” Probably he was being overly harsh. The cramp in his legs was making him snappish.
“I didn’t realise your preference was to be in pain for no good reason.” She paused. “All those stairs in Casterly Rock can’t be pleasant for you either.”
“I’m sure you’d love to see your lord husband carried up all those stairs by a manservant like a sack of potatoes.”
“I’ll pretend not to see, if you like.” And she returned to the book she had been reading. The strange thing was that he believed her.
*
Once they settled in Casterly Rock, Tyrion had other problems.
Namely the fact that nobody had ever really expected the lordship to fall to him, in spite of Jaime’s time in the Kingsguard, and they were all trying to seem unsurprised that their new lord was half the height of their new lady. It was going to take a lot of work to make them used to his new rank.
Nyssa, by contrast, seemed to take to it like a duck to water. In less than six days, she had the household moving so bloody smoothly that Tyrion had brief flashbacks to the time when his father had given him command of Casterly Rock’s drains. It was that same sense of bloody-minded desire for efficiency. Seven hells, the woman had different colours of ink for different parts of her household planning.
She ran the rest of her life just as efficiently. Her whims were rare, which made them all the more unexpected, and the rest of the time was completely lacking in whim. Nyssa had a time for meals and a time for running the household. A time for needlework and a time for taking her exercise. A time for riding and a time for hawking and gods forbid anyone try to cajole her in to hawking for a moment longer than she had planned for the day.
The only problem so far had been when a knight had tried his luck with her, assuming that since Tyrion was not sharing her bed that she must want some man, and had got a scratched face for his trouble. Not to mention how Nyssa’s three lady companions had laughed at him.
“Who do you think I am?” Nyssa had exclaimed, “Cersei Lannister? That lady was blonde, ser. I trust you can tell the difference.”
The lady companions were baffling, too. Nyssa had brought them with her from Dorne. All three were unmarried, and all were devoted to each other. Tyrion had wondered if Nyssa made a fourth, so he asked her about it and she told him no, she simply found it more convenient to have ladies-in-waiting who weren’t going to leave her service for a husband and babies.
The castle had just about settled into having Tyrion as master and Nyssa as mistress when it was thrown into disarray again. The Kingslayer was visiting with his new wife.
This prompted Nyssa to make a whole host of new lists and schedules, along with some kind of symbol-based code system for meal planning which even Tyrion had trouble in understanding.
But he was more than glad to see Jaime again, and he liked Brienne, though they’d had little enough time to speak to each other. Now that they were brother and sister-in-law, they could properly get acquainted. Brienne had arrived dressed in men’s clothing, and had visibly baulked at Nyssa and her three ladies all elegantly attired, but Nyssa had greeted Brienne with friendliness and Brienne seemed to relax, if only a little.
Brienne ended up being part of Nyssa’s retinue when she went out to ride, and joined Nyssa’s circle of ladies sewing, even if Brienne did not sew anything.
But a few days later, Brienne found Tyrion alone and asked, nervously, “What is Nyssa like?”
“What’s she like?” Tyrion echoed, “You’ve been spending as much of the day with her as I have.” Tyrion took his meals with Nyssa, and with guests in attendance that meant the four of them – Nyssa, Tyrion, Jaime and Brienne, along with Nyssa’s three ladies from time to time – talking late into the night.
“Yes, but – she said she would have new clothes made for me, and I – I don’t want to…”
“You’re worried she will make you look ridiculous.” Tyrion didn’t think Nyssa would do anything like that, but Brienne must have had so much mockery in her life that he understood her worry. “I think we might be able to find that out.”
“I don’t want to ask her.”
“There’s another way.”
During the hour Nyssa spent walking with her ladies in the garden, she would be away from her study. Her study where she kept nearly everything written down. She would have made a terribly spy but an excellent spymaster.
Tyrion let himself and Brienne in. There were lots of neat stacks of paper on Nyssa’s desk, and once Tyrion found the stacks which related to Jaime and Brienne’s visit, Brienne was able to find a piece of paper entitled ‘Brienne clothes’, with the notes:
‘Should be blue and subtle decoration only.
Only has one dress – padded at chest. But would that not make her feel worse when she doesn’t wear padding? Did she choose the padding or someone else?
Men’s clothes – doublets tolerable but could be better tailored for her. Short doublets do no favours. Tell seamstresses to provide a longer style?
Emphasise height and strength? Or does she want femininity? Mix of styles?’
Reading over Brienne’s arm, Tyrion said, “I think she wants you to look nice,” but Brienne was already looking in dismay at the piece of paper a few pages below that one.
“She pities me.”
Brienne pointed out the schedule. An hour blocked out for a few days previously, marked out in Nyssa’s handwriting as ‘Be nice to Brienne’.
“She said she wanted to see me fight, so I sparred against a few of the men in the courtyard. Her and her ladies all crowded around giving me compliments and asking me questions about swordplay – real questions, as if they had actually been paying attention to my answers.”
Tyrion wouldn’t have put it past Nyssa to be genuinely curious about swordplay. She seemed curious enough about everything else. He leafed through more of the pages until he found something relating to welcoming Jaime and Brienne to the castle.
‘Jaime – leave to Tyrion, wants to talk to his brother.
Brienne –
If unpleasant, avoid
If dull, entertain but avoid as much as practicable
If pleasant, socialise’
There was a tick next to ‘If pleasant’.
“I… think she likes you,” said Tyrion.
“You think? She’s your wife. You talk to her all the time.”
“Yes, but we don’t talk about ourselves very much at all. We talk about history and politics and the running of the castle. We haven’t talked about how she ended up like – this.” Tyrion gestured at the stacks of lists and schedules.
He caught his own name among them and drew out the page:
‘Tyrion – no mistress yet
Keeping her hidden? Possible but unlikely
Nobody to his taste? Unlikely
Deciding to be celibate for a while - trying something new???
Depressed and therefore uninterested?’
After that was a – seven hells, she’d put together a list of possible Lannisport whores to suggest to him. Where had she even found this information?
Tyrion had to admit it: while there were many things he knew about Nyssa – the books she liked to read, who around the castle she liked and who she didn’t – many parts of her were mysteries to him.
In the sept, she only ever prayed to the Stranger. It was as if she had taken that god as some kind of watchword.
*
When the clothes came, they were comfortable trousers of good blue cloth, and over them a tunic of blue with gold embroidery, which flared out at the waist to give the impression of the feminine figure Brienne lacked. It looked like a knight’s surcoat, and it looked like a dress that had been cut short at the thigh, and it looked like a tunic, and it looked like a doublet, and the strange thing was that when Brienne sat with Nyssa and her ladies in their dresses, she did not look out of place at all.
Maybe it was simply that she looked comfortable, and happy, and for an ugly woman she looked really quite pretty in it.
Tyrion felt some share of Brienne’s relief, but had little time to enjoy it before Jaime was not-so-subtly sidling up to him in a corridor to say, “So. Nyssa.”
“What about her?”
Jamie actually sighed. “I know it’s not what you wanted.”
What Tyrion wanted was Tysha, but he never had found out where whores go. “I knew I needed to marry. The Rock must have an heir, and her father offered her, and I hadn’t heard anything awful about her, even if I did have my doubts as to why a man would offer his eldest daughter to the Imp.”
Tyrion had done his research before accepting the offer of Nyssa’s hand. Her father had two stepdaughters, neither of them as pretty nor as accomplished. For the daughter of a minor son of House Dayne, wedding the Lord of Casterly Rock would have been a success. But not when that lord was Tyrion.
“Not that she’s always easy to understand herself, either,” Tyrion went on. He gestured with his cane. “She has me carrying this thing almost all the bloody time, now. Passes it to me if I’m not using it.”
“She’s… odd, sometimes,” Jaime admitted. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if Nyssa was joking or serious. But he didn’t think she was unkind. “Still, you could do worse.”
“I probably couldn’t do any better, that’s for certain.”