Chapter Text
“Are you afraid?” Dalton asks, then grins, strong crooked teeth and dark hair dripping with seawater. He already knows the answer. You are sitting on the rocks together as a storm rolls in, skies like a whirlpool and waves ravenous, currents aching to swallow you whole.
“What’s there to be afraid of?” You smile, prying open an oyster with your knife. “It’s triumph or a glorious death.”
“Or both.”
“Or both,” you agree. You slurp down the oyster—cold brine, bloodless flesh—then shuck another with your short, dull blade. Nestled inside the gelatinous viscera is a pearl the size of a marble, dark green like pine trees. “Look!” you say excitedly, showing Dalton.
“That’s a good one,” he admires.
“Isn’t it?”
“Massive! And a rare color, too.”
“It’s an omen,” you say, beaming, warmth in your cheeks. You quarry the pearl from the oyster and rinse it off in the turbulent surf that roils around your ankles. “The Drowned God sent it to me.”
“A wedding present.”
“A promise.”
“A token of approval.”
“I’m going to give it to him,” you say, tucking the pearl away in the pocket of your trousers that are rolled up to your knees. Dalton knows who you mean: the man waiting to marry you in King’s Landing. Letters flew back and forth clutched in the beaks of ravens, propositions from Rhaenyra relayed by her son Jacaerys and the Sea Snake Corlys Velaryon, counteroffers from Aegon scrawled by the hand of his grandsire Otto Hightower. In the end, Dalton chose the Greens. It was a decision you agreed with wholeheartedly, not that he asked. But still, he knew. He always knows.
“The Usurper should receive it gladly.” Dalton slouches against the rocks and smirks at you, his ghost-grey eyes cunning and rakish. “He seized the throne from Rhaenyra, the dead king’s wishes be damned. He rides into battle on the back of a monster. He reads little. He rages much. He lives without shame. He does not concern himself with his hair or his clothes. He drinks and he whores and he’s not afraid to get bloody. He takes what he wants, he does not wait for permission. He is an honorary Ironborn.”
You gaze into the south, where now the tides are murderous and tomorrow you will set sail into your new life: first following the jagged coastline of the Westerlands, then passing the Reach, then circumnavigating Dorne and the Stormlands and Massey’s Hook until at last you dock in Blackwater Bay. You’ll be married the same night you land; there’s no time for delay. You wish it could be even sooner. You murmur, imagining the Usurper—a man neither you nor Dalton have ever met, a vanquisher, a warrior, a myth, a paragon—undressing you in the candlelight: “He is perfect.”
“He will know what to do,” Dalton says cavalierly, popping open an oyster and gulping it. “You need not worry about that. He has plenty of experience, and he has the temperament for it. He will tame you as a man should.”
“I know he will.”
“And once you’ve given him an heir or two, you can sample other goods if you like. Surplus children will just be shipped off to the Citadel or the Faith or an irrelevant marriage anyway. They needn’t be true Targaryens.” He chuckles. “No one will know the difference. We are descended from the First Men, just like House Strong. Your children will look like you no matter who fathers them, they won’t be strange, silver-haired foreigners.”
This is a common sentiment on the Iron Islands. It’s true that the priests implore women to remain steadfast and incorruptible, but when men are permitted to have any number of salt wives and can be gone away sailing for long, long months, well...in practice, eyes do wander, and allowances are made. Any good rock wife should remain a maiden until marriage and faithful to her husband until the continuation of his lineage is assured, and beyond that, the details are less important. Mother has sought companionship from a castle mason for years, even before Father died. But your body—and it is a deeply corporeal conviction, famished muscles and cavernous bones, visions that keep you awake at night—craves only one man. “I don’t want anyone else.”
“Someday you might.”
“Perhaps,” you say, still thinking of the husband who waits for you in King’s Landing, the dragonrider, the king, not because the Conqueror’s crown was given to him but because he took it by force. He paid the iron price.
In the morning, Mother tells you goodbye in front of the great hearth, the fire crackling as cold grey rain falls outside; carved into the stone of the overmantel is a kraken, the sigil of your house. Dalton waits impatiently with one hand on the moonstone pommel of his sword, Nightfall. He’s not trying to be disrespectful. He’s always impatient.
Mother is not beautiful, but even if she was that’s not what the Ironborn would say about her. Beauty has little value here. Beauty does not keep ships afloat or bellies from starving in the winter. The best things a woman can be are hardworking, proud, fierce, fertile, and Mother is all of them, and so the people love her. She buried three children; you and Dalton are all that’s left. But still, she does not worry for you. Or if she does, she hides it well. She touches your cheek with her rough weather-beaten hands and she says, smiling softly: “If you are worthy, the Drowned God will see you safely to King’s Landing.”
“I love you.”
“I love you,” Mother echoes, drawing you into her, holding you there for a very long time.
~~~~~~~~~~
You are up in the rigging when you hear the lookout shout from the crow’s nest: ships on the horizon, two of them. You climb down the ropes to where Dalton is standing at the bow, squinting through his spyglass. You wear trousers, boots, a loose white linen tunic held closed at the bust with gold buttons, each embossed with a kraken. It’s warm here; you are just off the west coast of the Reach, Old Oak and Highgarden and the Shield Islands. When you venture close enough to glimpse the terrain, the hills and cliffsides are greener than you thought it was possible for land to be. You feel the smooth round weight of the pearl in your pocket. I’m almost home.
You ask Dalton, shading your eyes from the glaring sun: “Whose banner is it?” For Aegon or for Rhaenyra? Friend or foe?
A long moment passes before he answers, gulls squawking and waves breaking against the hull. The ship rocks on glittering, foaming surf that is choppy with wind. You adjust your balance instinctively; you never get seasick. Sometimes you think you belong here more than anywhere, a creature of riptides and undertows. The earth is so still. “House Grimm of Greyshield.” Dalton grins, all the way up to his eyes, a shark that breathes air. “And they chose the wrong side.”
“Soldiers?”
“No, cargo.” He collapses his spyglass. “Too easy.”
He shouts for the men to prepare to board and you sprint below deck to the captain’s quarters, where you and Dalton sleep at night and where you’ve stowed your personal effects. You yank on your leather gloves, grab your bow with your left hand, throw your quiver of arrows over your right shoulder. Up on deck, you see that the farthermost ship is escaping, banking sharply towards the coast; but you’re swiftly gaining on the other. You’ll catch it, there’s no doubt. Ironborn vessels are smaller, shallower, more agile than any ships in the realm...even with the scorpion mounted on the forecastle. Its bolts—if providentially aimed—could kill any dragon currently living, except perhaps Vhagar, a leviathan of the sky. But you have no need to fear her. She is your ally now.
“Starboard,” Dalton tells his men as they rush by him with rope and grappling hooks. He knows you shoot best from that side. On the ship you are rapidly flanking, you hear sailors screaming, praying, scrambling to take their chances in the lifeboats. But it’s too late for that. Up in their crow’s nest, a man is raising a crossbow and aiming at Dalton. Your brother sees this but does not move; he’s waiting for you. You nock an arrow and feel the fletching whisper between your fingers. The man in the crow’s nest is struck through the heart and goes plummeting to the deck.
Ironborn men cast grappling hooks over the starboard side of your ship, catch the rigging and bulwarks of the Grimm vessel, and haul it close enough that they can pour onto the decks like a rogue wave. Dalton goes over first. He is the captain, and every captain is a king aboard the country of his ship, and none among the Ironborn will follow a king who cannot kill. He raises Nightfall, and when the blade falls, gore splatters across the wood and paints his own skin crimson. That’s why he’s called the Red Kraken; he emerged from his first battle bathed in blood, sixteen years old, a force like a hurricane. The only parts of him that remained clean were the glinting grey pools of his eyes and the flash of his teeth when he smiled.
You board last, leaping over the bulwark of your ship to land hard on the captured vessel’s portside quarterdeck. You shoot down two men—one swinging at you with a cutlass, the other sprinting for the lifeboats, an arrow through the throat, an arrow to the spine—then creep down the steps to the door of the captain’s cabin. All around you, Ironborn are roaring as they wield axes and swords. None assist you. None watch out for you. If you are worthy, and you are meant to survive and wed the Usurper, the Drowned God will protect you. If not, you will die in battle—a glorious death, unquestionably—and sink through the depths to feast in His halls for eternity.
You kick open the cabin door, and sure enough cowards have hidden there, three of them. One charges you with a dagger and you put an arrow through his eye socket. His corpse thumps to the floor. The other two remain crouched and trembling, showing you their empty palms. You rip the dagger out of the dead man’s grip and admire it—sharp blade, gold hilt—then tuck it into your belt.
“Come with me,” you tell the sailors, and you keep a nocked arrow at their backs as you lead them down to the main deck, where Dalton and his men have dragged the survivors and pushed them down to their knees. Dalton is laughing, Nightfall dripping blood in his grasp, inspecting the trove of goods onboard: crates of apples and melons and peaches and fireplums, barrels of mead and wine, Arbor gold and Arbor red.
“I believe the contents of this ship were meant to go north and feed Cregan Stark’s wolves, would you agree, sister?”
“Looks that way.”
“But not anymore.” Dalton scrutinizes the prisoners and then stops when his finds the captain, perhaps thirty years old, a short beard and drooling red, several teeth freshly evicted from his skull. “What do they call you, land dweller?”
“Gabriel of House Grimm,” he answers, gruff and bold.
“Gabriel?” Dalton thinks on this, twirling Nightfall. The moonstone pommel gleams. “I’ve never heard of you. You must not be important.”
“My father has many sons, and I am far from the eldest.”
“Ah! Then you won’t be missed,” Dalton says, cleaning the blood from his sword with a rag that one of his men tosses him. “Lord Gabriel Grimm, I’ll be taking your ship, and I’ll be taking your life. Any final requests in the meantime? You have until I’ve counted to ten in my head.”
Lord Grimm spits blood at Dalton’s boots. “You’re a beast from the lowest, hottest hell!”
“That wasn’t a request. Try again.”
You study the condemned crew—some old enough to be grandfathers, some so young they have not yet married, never loved a woman, never had children, never left lasting footprints in the sand of the world—and feel yourself, with shame burning in your face, becoming kind. To kill in battle is one thing, the Drowned God praises it, even requires it. But to execute the pitiful and yielding is something else. So many have been lost already: soldiers and sailors on both sides, dragons meant to live for centuries, Viserys, Father, Mother’s dead babies, Lucerys and Jaehaerys and Helaena. Surely the earth is not meant to be bled dry like a man with a slit throat. “You could take them as thralls,” you suggest. “As the Ironborn sail off to war, we will need men in the dockyards and the fields and the mines.”
“Oh, they wouldn’t be interested in that.” Dalton is joking, but you don’t think anybody else knows it. The captives’ wide, desperate gazes flit between the two of you.
“They might be.”
“Men of the Reach are soft. They yearn gluttonously for sweet wine and late mornings. They’d rather be dead than useful.”
“But they could be of use to us.”
Dalton smirks, mischievous, amused, and sheaths Nightfall. He gestures to the captives. “Go ahead. Make your proposal.”
You stand in front of them; they peer up at you from where they kneel on the deck, their eyes sodden with hatred and horror. “We have kept thralls since before the Conquest. You will be taken back to the Iron Islands and put to work for a term of seven years. You will receive food and lodging. You will not be paid for your day labor, but you may endeavor to earn wages in your allotted leisure time if you have a craft or cultivate produce. If you serve faithfully and diligently, and you survive the first three years, you will earn the rights to marry, own property, write letters, and father heirs, who will be born free. If you complete your term, you will become Ironborn and enjoy all the same liberties as a man native to the Islands.”
Some of the captives are glaring at you, barbarous, bloodthirsty; but others have the silvery sheen of hope in their eyes.
“But if we sail you home and you betray us,” you say, your voice turning dark. Dalton grins, toothy and reptilian. “If you spill the blood of an Ironborn or attempt to flee your covenant, we will send you to the Drowned God. And He will not invite you to spend eternity in His halls of golden light and feasts and wine and mermaids to attend to your every desire. He will damn you, and you will be alone in the black and the cold, and the last touch you’ll ever feel...” You pull off one of your leather gloves and skate your fingers over the face of the Grimm lord, slowly, tauntingly; the men watch you, stunned and transfixed. “Will be the tentacles of the Drowned God dragging you down, down, down.”
You allow time for them to ruminate on it, the only sounds the low immortal rumbling of the ocean, the screeches of circling gulls restless to rip flesh from bones and jelly-filled eyes from sockets, the warm western wind in the sails.
You ask Lord Gabriel Grimm: “Would you like to build our ships, or would you like to meet the Drowned God?”
“Ships,” he rasps immediately.
“Very well,” Dalton says, surveying the captured men. They are dripping with maroon gore and sea spray, silent, shivering. “Who else would like to build ships?”
Five hands shoot up immediately.
Dalton turns to his first mate Rollo Pyke, a bastard from the Lonely Light. “Slay everyone who hesitated.”
Blades are ripped from scabbards and find their way to jugulars, windpipes, the vulnerable spaces between the ladder rungs of ribs. Red floods across the deck; bodies buckle and convulse. The six survivors cover their faces and flinch, moaning as hot blood soaks through the knees of their trousers. You watch them, thinking: I hope I’ve done the right thing, and their lives are worth living.
Dalton says: “Rollo, you and a skeleton crew will sail this ship back to the fleet. When you get there, deliver our plunder, and tell the men to eat and drink until it’s gone. Task someone with transporting Lord Gabriel Grimm and the other thralls back to the Iron Islands. You and I will reconvene in King’s Landing.”
“Yes, captain.”
Then Dalton strolls away from the slaughter and beckons you to follow him. Your two pairs of leather boots clop against the deck in tandem. You pass him the dagger you found and he marvels at it as the blade glimmers under the sun. He plucks an apple out of a crate, wipes off the blood that speckles it with his sleeve, and takes a wet ravening bite. He nods back to where Rollo and the others are gutting the captured crew and tossing their corpses overboard. There are splashes and screams. “You would make friends of them?”
You smile reticently; you don’t want him to think you’re weak. There’s no greater sin in your world. “Friends don’t come back to kill you someday.”
“Too much mercy. Too much discretion.” He beams and breezes his lips across your cheek, a gale of coppery blood and crisp apple. “This is why women make good wives and mothers, but poor reavers.”
“If you think so highly of wives, you should acquire one.”
He cackles. He has many salt wives already, but no rock wife, and therefore no true heir nor regent to act in a boy’s place until he comes of age. If Dalton dies young, there will be chaos. Distant Greyjoy cousins will crawl out of their stony hovels to assert their claims. Dalton’s concubines will murder each other’s children to try to nudge their own sons closer to the Seastone Chair. “I have plenty of time to do that. I will please the Drowned God so immensely He’ll let me live for a hundred years.”
But I have offended Him with my compassion. That’s what Dalton believes, anyway. You cast your eyes down to the deck, ashamed. “I’ve disappointed you.”
Dalton stops, the dagger still nestled in his right hand, and lays the point of the blade against your throat. “Do not speak these words again,” he says with mock severity, then grins and spins the dagger in his palm, offering you the hilt. “You are the pearl in the oyster of my life.”
You stare at the dagger, perplexed. “I gave it to you. You’re the captain.”
“You paid the iron price for it. It’s yours.”
You smile and take the dagger. Dalton takes your face roughly in his calloused fingers and kisses you full on the mouth.
~~~~~~~~~~
Otto Hightower is waiting for you at the harbor, the Greyjoy banners sighted long before the ship docked. As Ironborn men rush ashore for a night of drinking and whoring—tomorrow the rest of the Iron Fleet will arrive in Blackwater Bay, and their work properly will begin—you and Dalton meet the Hand of the King under hot late-afternoon skies the color of glowing embers. There are two people with him: one a woman, the other a man who at first you think is the king—he has the right bearing for it, lethal and arrogant and dauntless—until you are close enough to see his eyepatch.
Not Aegon, then. Aemond. The second son. The son who killed Lucerys Velaryon and started this war.
You smile at Aemond; you’re family now. He glowers back. Your smile dies.
“Lord Dalton Greyjoy of the Iron Islands!” Otto says, too enthusiastically, his delight strained in a crevice-lined face and his eyes darting. “The Master of Ships. Our beloved friend. You are very welcome here. And my gracious, you are much younger than I’d imagined!”
Dalton is in his mid-twenties but doesn’t look it yet. He smirks, his posture ungainly. He is always slinking and listing when he’s on land, searching for a current to roll beneath his feet. “You are much older.”
Otto chuckles uncertainly and then bows to you, a deep and desperate bow. “Lady Greyjoy, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Prince Aemond and his wife, Princess Floris of House Baratheon.”
“Hello,” you greet them both cheerfully. Aemond glares, saying nothing. Floris—tall and statuesque, dark-haired, beautiful but bored—sweeps a dull curtsey. You kneel down on the dock and reach into the sparkling sea below, gliding your hands through waves that are startlingly calm and warm. “Dalton, it’s like bathwater!”
Otto says to your brother: “I was surprised that you wrote your letters in your own hand, my lord. I’d heard that most Ironborn can’t read or write at all, that some even view it as witchcraft.”
“I would never allow a maester or scribe the power to deceive me.”
“Your esteemed father was not literate, was he? I think I recall that about him.”
“He wasn’t. But no king should be bound to the will of the one who came before, and the same is true for the Lord of the Iron Islands.” Dalton smiles wickedly. “My father would never have entered into a war on behalf of the Targaryens, nor any other house of the mainland. But fortunately for you, I have greater ambitions.”
“Indeed,” Otto Hightower says, and in his Andal-blue eyes you think you can see doubt, apprehension, distrust. He looks around and becomes alarmed. “You brought no maids with you?”
“No, my lord,” you reply, standing and drying your hands on your gown.
Dalton grins, glancing at you proudly. “It’s bad luck to have women aboard unless they are one of the very few inclined towards sailing and war.”
Otto looks at you, puzzled. “But who attended to you on the journey?”
Dalton says: “Ironborn noblewomen, even Greyjoys, brush their own hair and draw their own baths and scrub their own floors. They do not idle.”
Otto considers you, troubled. “She will have to acclimate to our ways.”
Dalton abruptly lurches forward; Aemond grips the hilt of his own sword Blackfyre and strides to meet him, but Otto Hightower holds up a palm to dissuade his grandson. Dalton seethes to the Hand of the King: “You chose us because of who we are, land dweller. Do not disdain us for the same reason.”
Otto and Aemond exchange a glance. Aemond’s smug, scarred face seems to say: I told you.
Dalton embraces you, a kiss for each cheek, lingering so long that Otto, Aemond, and Floris all blink at him uneasily, their mouths twisting into grimaces. “Write me afterwards. Tell me how it was.”
“I will,” you promise, and Dalton leaves to join his men in the most shadowed, unsavory corners of the city.
“He will not give you away at the wedding?” Floris says as she watches him go, baffled.
“It’s my responsibility, not his.” You were not there when Dalton killed his first enemy or sailed his ship as the captain for the first time; he will not be there when you and Aegon exchange vows and uncover each other’s skin in the candlelight. “Where is the king?” And you expect a heroic answer: he is beating men bloody in the castle courtyard, he is burning traitors alive with his dragon.
“I’ll go wake him,” Aemond tells Otto, very loudly, as if he wants you to hear it. Then he casts you one last glare before he leaves.
Otto Hightower attempts to distract you. “My lady, your belongings will be brought up to your chambers straight away. I’ve arranged for Princess Floris to give you a tour of the Red Keep so you can start to become accustomed to your new home. Your kingdom, in fact. You will be its queen in a few short hours.” He sounds like he can’t quite believe it, even now, even though he was the architect of this design. “I will send for you when the septon is ready to begin.”
When my husband is dragged from his bed and sufficiently roused, you mean. “Thank you, my lord.”
Without any further words of invitation, Floris begins to walk away. You trail after her, moving swiftly in your gown. You cannot wear trousers and tunics to court, you know that much. You will marry the king in a dress of black lace that Mother sewed for you, working through the night more than once. Over the bodice is a metal corset: gold, gleaming, sharp points of tridents and a large kraken in the center.
Floris leads you first to the gardens of the Red Keep, so you can see them while there is still enough daylight. She languidly points out fountains, and fishponds, and arbors, and innumerable species of flowers in colors you didn’t know existed; you have the sense that she is purposefully stalling. There are cats everywhere, dozing on stone benches, pawing at shimmering fish when they swim up to the surface to swallow insects and bits of plants that have been carried there by the warm southern breeze.
“Because there are no more rat catchers,” Floris says when she notices you pondering the cats. And that’s right, now you remember. Aegon had them all hanged after one helped murder his wife and son.
As the sun sets, Floris shows you the way to the Great Hall where the Iron Throne looms like a shadow, and then the castle courtyard alight with torches, and then Maegor’s Holdfast where you ascend the staircase to the royal apartments. There are courtiers everywhere, wearing vivid colors and smooth fragile skin, gawking and whispering, and although you smile at them very few manage to conjure up polite greetings in return. You catch disjointed phrases of their gossip: A Greyjoy? Unthinkable...when Jaehaerys the Conciliator needed a new Hand of the King, all the realm agreed that choosing a squid would be disastrous, and now we are to be ruled by one...she will not please him...her children will be savages...why is she dressed like that...how did it come to this...and none of it would have happened if Aemond hadn’t killed little Luke Strong.
And then there are a handful of young women fluttering around in revealing gossamer gowns, their faces and fingernails painted, their wrists jangling with bracelets, their hair arranged ornately and yet tumbling out of combs and pins, simpering curiously at you as they prop their elbows on bannisters and windowsills and rest their chins in their palms. You’ve seen women like this before. But could they really be...?
Whores. And you have no illusions that men enjoy them, and men like your future husband most of all, but to have them here so openly, and on his wedding day...it evinces a lack of care that stuns and stings. “Are those...?”
“He was more discrete while the queen was alive,” Floris says, like she regrets having to tell you. “He kept them away from the Red Keep. But I suppose he’s been in need of distractions.”
Since his wife and firstborn son were butchered. “Were you here when it happened?”
Floris nods, then shudders. “Helaena’s screams woke the whole castle. The poor lamb. She was a gentle woman, no one in all the Seven Kingdoms deserved such a grisly fate less than she did. Aegon wasn’t so happy even when she was here, but now...well, it couldn’t have been easy to see something like that.”
“He saw it?”
“The aftermath, anyway.”
You follow her into the queen’s chambers, which clearly have not been touched since Helaena’s death. Hightower-green tapestries hang on the walls, embroidered with dragons of gold. Another woman’s jewelry is still here, and her hairbrushes, and her perfumes and powders and paints. And when you lift up a rug that seems oddly placed, you find a vast crimson stain on the stone floor beneath. Here the blood flowed. Here all of your lives were irrevocably changed. Floris turns away, embarrassed. It is becoming unmistakable how haphazardly your arrival was treated.
But the Usurper is fierce and fearless and insatiable. He’s an Ironborn in all but name and blood. He wants me. He will tame me.
There are wooden figurines in a row on the vanity: butterflies and moths, praying mantises, beetles, caterpillars, arachnids. “He must be exhausted from battle,” you say, picking up a spider to examine the skillfully carved legs. “That’s why he did not greet me at the harbor.”
“The king has never been in battle.” And then, when you stare at Floris with bewilderment: “Aemond goes, Criston goes, young Daeron is fighting in the Reach. But the king does not.”
“But we’d heard that he’s a great warrior who flies to war on dragonback.”
“Well, that sounds better than the truth, doesn’t it?”
You gaze helplessly at Floris, disbelief settling until it begins to feel real. You wish Dalton had not left you; you suddenly miss him direly, unbearably.
At last, she smiles. “I’m glad you’re here, even if no one else is. I’ll finally have somebody to talk to.”
“You don’t talk to Prince Aemond?”
“He doesn’t believe I have anything of interest to say. Not that I expected he would, mind you. Cassandra is my father’s favorite, Ellyn is my mother’s, Maris has always been the most beautiful. I am well-versed in my unremarkable nature. That’s why Father gave me to Aemond, even though everyone knows he’s a monster.”
You had assumed this was slander, in the same way people hate Dalton. “Is he really?”
“After what he did to little Luke Strong? How could he not be?”
You are becoming overwhelmed with disorientation and dread; you are dizzy with it. “What about the king’s mother Alicent? Can’t you talk to her?”
“Oh, she is hopeless,” Floris sighs, and you wonder what she means. “I’ve been instructed to accompany you tonight. I’ll escort you to the sept, and then to the king’s bedchamber following the ceremony.”
This is strange; you’ve always known men to go to their wives’ beds, not the other way around. “He won’t visit me here?”
“He will not set foot in this room,” Floris says, looking at you. “Not tonight, not ever. He refuses.”
A woman appears in the doorway, a shock of coppery hair, large dark eyes swimming with misery, a green velvet gown that hangs from her bones. She is surrounded by a flock of somber, listless maids. She’s been crying; her voice is thick and her cheeks flushed. “We are ready for you, sweetheart,” she tells you numbly, and vanishes again before you can reply.
“That was Alicent,” Floris explains.
You think: These people are so heartbroken and so afraid that there’s no room for them to feel anything else.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” Floris says, scrutinizing your gown and corset.
You don’t know what she means. “Of course it is.”
“Let’s go then,” she says, and you walk with her out of your chambers that aren’t really yours, across the hall, down the staircase, through the tumultuous sea of courtiers thrashing with crosscurrents, shaggy cats hissing at you when you step too close.
“Where are the king’s children, Jaehaera and Maelor?” you ask Floris. “I was looking forward to meeting them.” You’ve never had younger siblings who lived; you thought they might be something like that to you.
“Gone,” Floris says, not breaking her stride, not glancing back at you. “Sent far away for their own protection. Children aren’t safe here.” A pause. “I’m not sure we are either.”
Outside the night is warm, humid, hums of insects in the air, illuminated by torches. You try to gaze up to see the stars but find only smoke and a canopy of trees instead, no knobby limbs of pine but lush branches and fat leaves clattering. You cannot hear the ocean, or breathe in the salt of the sea, or fathom the Drowned God having any dominion here. This is home? you think doubtfully. Then you are in the sept, candles burning and stone pillars in the shape of the Seven: Father, Mother, Warrior, Smith, Maiden, Crone, Stranger. You don’t believe in them. A condition of your marriage had been your conversion to the Faith, and you and Dalton had laughed as he scrawled his agreement, black ink dripping from a white quill made from a gull feather.
Hardly anyone else is here. The light is dim and shadowy, as if this is a secret. The other attendees wear dark green clothes and tense frowns: Otto, Aemond, an aged septon, a maester, Alicent, a knight who must be Lord Commander Criston Cole. The king’s mother keeps whispering fretfully to him, something about how there is supposed to be a cloak to cover you with, but no one remembered to procure one. Sir Criston soothes her, a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter,” Criston is telling Alicent. “It won’t take long.”
Otto mutters to Aemond: “Where the fuck is he?”
Then a door creaks open and the king appears, to the others’ palpable relief. He is attended by three of his Kingsguard. Floris murmurs the names of the men to you—Reyne, Estermont, Waters—but you pay no attention to them. You are looking at your husband instead.
He takes his place with you before the septon, silver hair unkempt and wine sweating out of him, sweet fruit, bitter poison. He wears a cape over his tunic, muddy green accented with gold-thread dragons, a heavy gold chain draped across his shoulders, the Conqueror’s crown on his head. He’s smaller than you imagined, but that’s no disappointment. Dalton isn’t so strapping himself, nor was Father when he was still the Lord of the Iron Islands; it’s not height or muscle that makes a man. But Aegon is small everywhere: in his presence, in his spirit. He drowns in the voices that echo off the towering walls and domed ceiling of the sept. He could be easily lost in a crowded room. He stands in front of you slumped and swaying, not speaking, not even studying you, not bothering to see if you are to his liking. He has already decided, it seems. You keep trying to catch his gaze so you can give him a smile, soft and shy, I’m glad to finally meet you. But he avoids your eyes, and for the first time since your ship ventured south of the Westerlands, you feel cold.
Eventually, Aegon notices your black lace gown and furrows etch into his brow. When he speaks, his voice is deep and dazed, very solemn, very slow. “Are you in mourning for your future here?”
“For the late queen,” you say, mystified that he has not realized this already. Surely it is the proper way to proceed. Respects must be paid. And it was a glorious death: fighting off armed men with her bare hands to try to stop them from killing her children, screaming so loudly all the castle jolted awake, saving Jaehaera and Maelor from the same fate as their brother, who was erased from existence before he could become anything, brave or cruel or weak or legendary. Did they burn what was left of him? you wonder. As a true Targaryen?
“Oh.” Aegon does not look like he approves. He looks away instead, his eyes a weak watery blue, more like rain than the ocean, more like a puddle than a sea.
Who is he? you think with dawning horror. Who was I sent here to marry?
The septon begins the ceremony. You have heard Ironborn mock the frivolities of mainland weddings—songs, pageantry, seven vows and seven blessings—but none of this happens tonight. The words are rushed and hollow. The witnesses watch with wide, restless stares. When Aegon kisses you to seal the union, he reels and mostly lands on your cheek instead, barely touching your lips.
~~~~~~~~~~
Floris guides you to the king’s bedchamber—presently unoccupied—where servants bring you a bowl of beef-and-barley stew, bread, and wine, a careless meal you only eat a few bites of. You aren’t used to the meat of land animals; it tastes heavy and like iron, like blood. You abandon the tray and it is removed. A maid arrives and delivers fresh linens, lights candles, begins filling basins with water.
“Good luck,” Floris says, and then goes to leave.
You can’t stop yourself; you call after her: “What will happen now?”
She halts in the doorway and smiles bleakly. “It won’t be too bad. He’s no beast.”
Then she’s gone and you stand forlornly in the center of the room wringing your hands, gazing at the bed, the silence turning loud. The maid continues to bustle around the bedchamber. In the fireplace, logs crack and flames flicker.
You know he must enter you, but not in which position or for how long or at what sort of rhythm or what it will feel like, or what he will do with his mouth and his hands, or what he will say to you during, when you are no longer strangers but the closest you’ve ever been to another person. You reach into a clandestine pocket sewn into the skirt of your gown and touch the small, smooth weight of the green pearl you found during your last full day on the Iron Islands. You had planned to give it to your husband on your wedding night. Now you leave it hidden, not knowing what to do with it, not knowing anything.
He comes in quickly, heavy determined footsteps, and for a moment you have hope: Now he will at last become the man I believed him to be. The king, the Usurper. He will tear off my gown and push me onto the bed and cover me, conquer me, show me what it means to be tamed—
Aegon grabs at you with drunken, artless hands. He finds where to unhook your metal corset easily enough, and it falls to the floor with a bang. You hope he hasn’t broken it; Dalton forged that for you. But then he fumbles with the lacing at your spine, unable to open your bodice. He tugs futilely at it, then sighs and surrenders, staggering off towards the bed.
“Girl,” he orders the maid. “Remove her gown.”
The maid hurries over to you and begins deftly unfastening the lacing. You watch as Aegon goes to the bed, braces his open palms against the soft feather mattress, lowers his head and squeezes his eyes shut as if he’s trying to summon the will to touch you. His lips are dark and bloody with wine.
You think of all the nights you’ve been sleepless as you starved for him, ached and pulsed for him, consummated this marriage over and over again in candlelit mirages until your chest was a sheen of sweat and your thighs were slick. It’s not going to be like that. He doesn’t want me at all. It splits out of you like lightning from a dark sky: “No, you must do it!”
The maid lifts her hands away and recedes into the shadows. Aegon stands up straight and gapes at you as if he can’t believe you’ve spoken. His eyes are glistening and confounded and lost. “What?”
“You are older, you are the husband, you have taken women before. You must lead me through this. You cannot leave it to servants.”
He closes the distance between you, his boots pounding on the stone floor, his golden chain rattling. “You would tell your king how to conduct himself?”
“You’re supposed to be forceful and fearless. You’re supposed to overpower me. Why else would a woman follow a man?”
“I’m not good enough for you?”
“You are a grave disappointment.”
On the Iron Islands people tell the truth, even when it’s harsh, even when it’s painful. That’s how you show respect. But you can tell this hits him somewhere deep; stunned, childlike woundedness shines in his eyes and is soon eclipsed by wrath, the reflections of flames burning there like dragonfire. “Then you are free to go.”
“You know I can’t.” Already, you regret it. He’s not just your husband now, he’s your family. When Mother’s babies died, you consoled her. When Father got sick and Dalton wept, you held him.
Aegon snaps at the maid: “Fetch Lotus and Serenity.” She bows dutifully, shoots you a skittish and pitying glance, glides out of the room.
Your heartbeat hammers in your ears. Cold dread seeps across your belly like blood from a wound. “What are you doing?”
“You don’t wish to be my wife?” Aegon pitches at you as he sits down on the edge of the bed and yanks off his boots, flings away his chain. “Then I’ll proceed as if you’re not.”
“Aegon, what are you doing?”
The door opens again, and this time two interlopers appear, some of the same young women you observed earlier: beautiful, giggling, sheer gauzy gowns and clanging with earrings and bracelets. One of the whores drops to her hands and knees and crawls like a shadowcat towards the bed. The other lingers by the writing desk, smirking at you, pouring herself a goblet of wine and drinking it in long, slow gulps.
From where he sits on the bed, your husband opens his trousers and grins at you, vacant and drunk and cruel. “Watch and receive your education.”
The whore on her knees takes him in her mouth, and there are wet slopping sounds as you yelp in shock and despair and hide your face in your hands, as Aegon rolls down—one vertebrae at a time—until he is flat on the bed, moaning with his fingers in some other woman’s hair, then reaching for the second whore when she climbs nimbly onto the mattress to join them, smiling, laughing, kissing his wine-stained mouth and then leading his hand between her legs. You can’t watch, but you can’t leave either; if you flee from your wedding night, all the realm will know. You will dishonor your husband, but you will dishonor yourself more.
Through glimpses between your fingers, you see things that were supposed to be yours: another woman’s panting ecstasy, the lust unfurling across Aegon’s face, his hunger, his relief.
You curl up on the frigid stone floor, sobbing into your palms, and wait for it to be over.
~~~~~~~~~~
The archer, only twenty years old, enters the tent and joins the procession of men of the Reach waiting to enlist. The stakes are real now, because the war is too: dead royal children on both sides, dragons taking flight, marriages arranged, armies massing, the Sea Snake and the Red Kraken commanding hundreds of ships between them.
When he gets to the front of the line, he finds a man at a table making lists. The recordkeeper asks without looking up: “Where do you come from, my lord?”
“House Grimm of Greyshield,” the archer answers. “My brother Gabriel and the rest of his crew were butchered by the Red Kraken when he sailed south to deliver his sister to the Usurper.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” the man says disinterestedly, as if half the soldiers he’s seen have come with such a tale: a dragon burned my home, a man destroyed my life. Only through bloodshed can I resurrect it.
“The other ship got away, but they saw my brother’s overtaken by a vessel with Greyjoy banners. Through their spyglasses, they watched the Red Kraken cutting down men with his Valyrian steel blade, Nightfall. And do you know what else they saw?”
The man sighs, his quill scratching against the parchment. At last, he gives the recruit his full attention. “What?”
“His sister participated in the slaughter,” the archer says, glassy revulsion in his eyes. “Boarding my brother’s ship. Shooting down men with arrows. What sort of woman has no mercy in her heart? How could she violate the laws of the Seven, how could she reject the Mother who made her?”
“The Ironborn are heathens, and the Greens are monsters. Alicent Hightower poisoned the old king, Aegon stole the throne, Aemond murdered Prince Lucerys. Like attracts like.” The man shrugs. “What can you do? Load scorpions? Set broken bones?”
“I’m an archer.”
“Oh, the gods are good. We need more of those.”
He adds as it occurs to him, soft and meditative, almost a prayer, almost a prophesy: “I’d like to kill that Greyjoy bitch someday.”
The man smiles. “Wouldn’t we all?” Then he slides the parchment across the table so the archer can make his mark.