“I hope you are not too disappointed, my lord husband,” Selyse had written him after Shireen’s birth. “It will be a boy next time, I am convinced of that.”
There had not been a boy, or another girl either. Selyse was determined to keep trying, Stannis mostly indifferent to the act itself. I did my duty, he insisted.
Selyse’s determination for a son did not deter her from showing affection to the daughter they had. He watched their easy ways with each other, mother and daughter, and found it perplexing. The shy, melancholic child and her proud, haughty mother. And yet in each other’s company, both seemed almost … content, if such a thing was possible in a place as doomed and ill-fated as Dragonstone.
He did not find his daughter a disappointment, more a baffling puzzle. Holding her in his arms for the first time, months after her birth, and only after she almost died, he wondered how something so tiny and so fragile could make so much noise. Her first word, her first step; he had missed them all, receiving news of them only from Selyse’s letters, letters he did not always reply to.
He was shocked to realize that she had learned to read and write, when he received the first letter from Shireen. The words were big and painstakingly formed. He had stared at them for a long time, trying to imagine Shireen at her desk, hard at work, concentrating, writing each word carefully. But he could not imagine it, for her face was lost to him. He had seen his daughter last six, no, seven moons ago.
She came to see him after Blackwater, shy and afraid and nervous. Of her own father. “I’m sorry you lost a battle, Father,” she had said, looking at her feet instead of her father’s face.
He said nothing at first. “Are you disappointed, Shireen?” He asked, finally.
She frowned, uncertain what he was asking. “Disappointed that you lost a battle?”
“That I didn’t win,” he said instead.
She smiled. “Of course not. Mother said you are going to win the war,” she said, with an earnest conviction that would have broken his heart, if he had one.
vaporwave
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
blakekathryn
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
