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How to Train Your Raven

Pairing: Brynden Rivers x f!reader

Summary: A noble lady from a disgraced house that supported Blackfyres is married off to Lord Bloodraven as a reward for his loyalty and prowess in battle. But he prefers to occupy his time with duties as the Hand of the King. Comfortable but lonely, she befriends one of his ravens. Warnings: arranged marriage, yearning, angst, fluff, Westeros politics, Shiera.

The raven was a greedy, ungrateful beast, and you loved it dearly.

You had named him Pebble, for no greater reason than the smooth grey of his breast feathers, which reminded you of the stones along the Mander where you had played as a child. He came to your windowsill each morning, croaking his hoarse demands, and you obliged him with crumbs of bread and shreds of cold meat saved from your supper. In return, he permitted you to stroke the ruff of his neck and mutter your foolish secrets into the space between his blinking black eyes. It was a small, pitiful comfort.

The Tower of the Hand was a cold place, despite the braziers that burned in every chamber. You had been given rooms near the top, close enough to the Hand’s own solar that you might, in theory, encounter your husband on the winding stair. In practice, you saw his servants more often: the silent men in their grey wool cloaks, the Raven’s Teeth who guarded his door with bows strung across their backs. They nodded to you when you passed, respectful but distant, as though you were a ghost they had been instructed not to disturb.

You were a ghost, in a way. A shade drifting through the Red Keep in your pale gowns, your House’s green and gold folded away in chests because wearing them felt like a provocation. Oakheart. The name sat heavy on your tongue these days, a fruit gone bitter on the branch. Your father had played his double game during the rebellion and lost, and you were the price of his redemption, a trueborn daughter gifted to a legitimized bastard, a man who had not wanted you, who had asked for another woman’s hand a thousand times and been refused, and who had accepted you as a lord might accept a parcel of land he had no intention of farming.

You tried not to think of Shiera Seastar. It was impossible.

Her name was everywhere in the Red Keep, whispered by serving girls and sung by minstrels, painted in miniature on ivory pendants that his paramours wore at their throats. The most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms, they called her, and when they said it in your hearing, their eyes would dart to you with something between pity and amusement. See the Oakheart girl, their glances said. See how plain she looks beside the memory of Seastar’s shimmer.

Back in the Reach, you had been called beautiful. You had believed it. Here, you were a candle held up against the sun. Back in the Reach, you were praised as a proper lady, and Shiera was called a shameless whore with nothing more than derision. But King's Landing valued influence, the ability to captivate and draw interest, which Shiera had in abundance.

You did not hate her. Hatred required energy you did not possess. But you feared her. You feared the day she would return to court, trailing silk and scandal behind her, and you would have to stand beside your husband and watch his single eye follow her across the hall. You feared the quiet, courteous dismissal that would surely follow. You had married a man who loved another woman. It was a common enough fate for highborn ladies, you knew, but knowing it did not make your marriage bed any warmer.

You spent your days wandering. The gardens, with their rose trellises and marble fountains, their sharp-scented herbs and imported lemon trees shivering in the sea wind. The library, where you read histories of the Seven Kingdoms until the words blurred before your eyes. The sept, where you knelt before the Maiden and asked for guidance that never came. And the stairway that spiraled up to the Hand’s solar, where you would sometimes sit on the cold stone steps with a book open on your lap, close enough to hear the murmur of voices beyond the iron-banded door, the scratch of a quill, the rustle of parchment. You never knocked. You were too afraid of being turned away.

It was on one of those steps, three moons into your marriage, that Brynden Rivers finally spoke to you about the raven.

You had Pebble on your knee, feeding him strips of roasted capon you had wrapped in a napkin and smuggled from the kitchens. The bird was growing stout, you could see it in the way his breast swelled over his claws, the way he waddled rather than hopped when he moved along the windowsill. You had noticed but you had not cared. You had to keep feeding him so he wouldn't leave you as well.

“What am I doing, Pebble?” you whispered. “What am I doing here? My husband does not want me. The court does not see me. My family’s name is a jest and a warning both. I am a wife in name only, and I do not know how to become anything more. I was not taught how to be a wife to a man like him. I was taught how to be a wife to a lord who wanted a gentle lady to manage his household and bear his children. But Lord Bloodraven has a household that manages itself and no desire for children of his body, or so they say.” You paused, your fingers stilling on the raven’s feathers. “Perhaps he would want children if they were Shiera’s.”

The raven croaked.

You stroked the raven’s feathers again, and your voice cracked. “I am even afraid that you will leave me, Pebble. You are the only friend I have in this place. Please do not fly away.”

The door to the solar opened. You scrambled to your feet, the napkin falling from your lap, capon scattering across the stone. Pebble let out an indignant caw and flapped onto the windowsill, his wings laboring under his weight.

Lord Bloodraven stood in the doorway.

His hair, silver-white, fell straight to his shoulders, and his skin was so pale it seemed to drink the light. The red birthmark that crept up his neck and cheek, the source of his name, was vivid as a splash of wine against snow. He wore black, and the eye that fixed on you now was the deep, unsettling red of dying embers.

The other eye was gone. A pale, smooth scar ran from brow to cheekbone, and beneath it, a dark hollow that seemed to see more than any living eye could.

“My lady wife,” he said. His voice was quiet, precise, each word placed as carefully as a stone on a cyvasse board.

“My lord.” You dropped into a curtsy, your heart hammering. You had not expected him to emerge. He rarely did before the hour of the bat. “Forgive me, I did not mean to disturb you. I was only...”

His gaze had moved past you to the raven. Pebble was worrying at a shred of capon, his beak tearing at the meat with smug contentment. Bloodraven’s expression did not change, but the air shifted, a faint tightening like the pause before a thunderclap.

“That is my raven,” he said.

“Yes, my lord. I hope you do not mind. He comes to my window, and I...”

“He is fat.”

The words fell like a stone into still water. You felt heat rise to your cheeks, the familiar burn of mortification. Your fingers twisted in the folds of your skirt, a pale lavender silk, pretty and demure. Here in the grey light of the tower it seemed washed-out and childish. You were a woman grown, a wife, and yet you felt like a girl being scolded by her septa for some minor transgression.

“I have been feeding him,” you admitted in a small voice.

Bloodraven stepped forward. His movements were unsettlingly smooth. He lifted one long-fingered hand, and the raven, your Pebble, your greedy, ungrateful Pebble, fluttered up to perch on his wrist without the slightest hesitation, as though you had never existed.

“A raven of the Tower must be lean,” Bloodraven said, stroking the bird’s breast with one pale thumb. Pebble closed his eyes in bliss. “He must fly swiftly over distances that would exhaust a lesser bird. He must carry messages through weather that would kill a hawk. He must be quick, clever, and sharp as a blade.”

He turned that burning red eye back to you.

“You have made him useless.”

The words struck harder than they should have. You had not thought yourself capable of tears, you had not wept once since leaving the Reach, not at your wedding, not on your wedding night when your husband failed to come to your bed, not in all the lonely days that followed, but now your throat tightened and your vision swam. You blinked rapidly, fighting it down, but a single tear escaped and traced a burning path down your cheek.

You ducked your head, hoping he had not seen. The silence stretched, unbearable.

“I am sorry,” you whispered. “I did not know. He came to me. He seemed friendly. I only offered him kindness.”

“Friendly.” He said the word as if it were a foreign concept. His blood-eye seemed to gleam in the half-light, and for a moment you could have sworn you saw the raven’s reflection in it, a dark bird within a darker pool. “Ravens are tools, my lady. They are not pets. This one has been made useless by your kindness.”

The word useless stung again. You dropped your gaze to the floor again, studying the worn flagstones beneath your slippers. “I apologise. I will not feed it anymore.”

You did not wait for a response. You gathered your skirts and fled down the winding stair, your slippers slapping against the stone, your breath coming in short, hitching gasps. You did not stop until you reached your chambers, where you threw yourself onto the great empty bed and buried your face in the pillows and wept until there was nothing left inside you.

You did not go to the Tower the next day, nor the day after that. You kept to your rooms, claiming a headache when your maids inquired. You took your meals alone, the food tasteless on your tongue. You did not open your shutters, though you heard the scratch of claws on the sill more than once. You could not bear to see Pebble, to see the raven who had abandoned you as easily as breathing, who had flown to his master’s hand without a backward glance.

It was on the third day that a servant knocked at your door and informed you that the Hand of the King required your presence in his solar.

You dressed carefully, your hands trembling on the laces of your gown. You chose a dress of pale green, the color of new leaves, the closest you dared come to the Oakheart colors. You pinned your hair up in a simple coil. You looked, you thought, like a woman preparing for an execution.

The solar was warm, lit by a fire in the great hearth and by candles in iron holders. Books lined the walls, more books than you had ever seen in a private chamber, their spines cracked and worn from use. Maps and charts covered a long table, and in the corner, a perch held three ravens, their heads tucked under their wings.

Bloodraven sat behind a desk of dark oak, a quill in his hand. He did not rise when you entered, but he set the quill down and gestured to a chair across from him.

“Sit,” he said.

You sat. Your hands folded in your lap, the picture of a well-bred lady. You had been trained for this, after all: to be still, to be silent, to be pleasing. It was the only weapon you had ever been given.

Bloodraven regarded you for a long moment. In the firelight, the port-wine stain on his cheek seemed to shift and writhe like something alive. His eye, that terrible red eye, seemed to see straight through you, past the careful composure and the pretty dress and into the hollow ache at your center.

“You have not been to the Tower,” he said.

“I did not wish to disturb you, my lord.”

“You have not been to the gardens, either. Nor the library. Nor the sept.” He leaned back in his chair, steepling his long fingers. “My birds tell me things.”

Your heart lurched. The ravens. Of course. You had forgotten, in your misery, the whispers that surrounded your husband like a cloak of shadows. He could see through the eyes of his birds, they said. He could watch the whole of the Seven Kingdoms from his Tower, and nothing escaped his notice. You had thought it a fanciful tale, a legend spun to explain the unerring accuracy of his spy network. But the way he looked at you now made you wonder.

“I have been tired,” you said, which was not entirely a lie.

“You have been crying.”

The words were blunt, without softening. You flinched, your gaze dropping to your hands.

“My lady,” Bloodraven said, his tone had shifted. It was not kind, you did not think kindness was in his nature, but it was less cold than before. “Look at me.”

You raised your eyes.

“The raven,” he said. “You named him.”

It was not a question. You nodded anyway.

“Pebble,” you said, your voice barely above a whisper. “Because of his breast feathers. They reminded me of home.”

Bloodraven was silent for a moment. Then he rose from his chair and crossed to the window, his back to you, his silver hair catching the firelight.

“I have had many ravens,” he said. “Hundreds, over the years. I breed them in the Tower, train them, dispatch them across the realm. They are tools, nothing more. I have never given one a name.”

He turned, his single eye finding you again.

“No one has ever named one of my ravens before.”

You did not know what to say. You sat frozen, your heart beating a nervous rhythm against your ribs.

“He is not useless,” Bloodraven said, and there was something akin to curiosity in his voice. “I examined him this morning. He is plump, yes, but he is healthy. His plumage is glossy. His eyes are bright. He is more docile than the others, more accustomed to human touch. There are uses for such a raven.”

He took a step toward you, then another, until he stood before your chair, looking down at you with an expression you could not read.

“I have been a poor husband,” he said.

Your mouth opened but no sound came out.

“I did not ask for this marriage,” he continued, “and neither did you. We were both bound by the king’s will, and I have not made the binding easier for you. I have been…absent. Preoccupied.” He paused. “Unkind.”

“My lord, you have been...”

“Do not,” he said, lifting a hand to stop your protest, “be polite. I am surrounded by polite people. I find it exhausting.”

You closed your mouth.

Bloodraven lowered his hand. “I loved Shiera,” he said, and the name was a blade between your ribs. “For many years. I asked for her hand more times than I can count. She always refused. Perhaps she was wise.” His jaw tightened, a flicker of old pain crossing his pale features. “But she is not my wife. You are.”

He reached down, and before you could react, his fingers closed around your hand. His skin was cool, dry. But his grip was steady.

“I cannot promise you love,” he said. “I am not a man given to tender feeling. The whispers about me are not all false. I am a sorcerer, of a kind. I do see through the eyes of my ravens. I have done things that would make you flinch to hear, and I will likely do more before I am through. I have little patience for the courtly games that fill the days of most highborn ladies.”

He paused, and his thumb brushed once across your knuckles.

“But I am not cruel without cause. I do not take pleasure in suffering. And I have watched you these three moons, my lady. Through the eyes of my ravens, yes. I have seen you in the gardens, sitting alone on the stone benches. I have seen you in the library, reading the same page over and over because your mind is elsewhere. I have seen you feeding my raven, speaking to him as though he were a friend, because you had no one else to speak to.”

Your face was burning. You wanted to look away, to hide, but his eye held you as surely as a pin holds a butterfly.

“I did not intend to spy,” he said, and there was a note in his voice that might have been regret. “At first, I was merely curious. Then I was...concerned. You are withering, my lady. Like a flower deprived of light. And I am the one who has kept you in the dark.”

He released your hand and stepped back.

“I would like to propose a truce,” he said. “A beginning. I will not pretend to be something I am not. I will always be busy with the affairs of the realm, always be strange, secretive and perhaps a little frightening for your liking. But I will make an effort to be present. To speak with you. To…know you.” He tilted his head, a gesture eerily reminiscent of his ravens. “If you will permit it.”

You stared at him, your heart pounding so loudly you were certain he could hear it. This was not what you had expected. This was not the cold dismissal, the polite abandonment, the quiet return to separate lives. This was an opening, a crack in the armor.

“I would like that,” your voice came out steadier than you had hoped. “My lord.”

“Brynden,” he corrected. “If we are to attempt this, you may as well use my name.”

You swallowed. “Brynden.”

The corners of his mouth twitched, the barest suggestion of a smile. “See? Not so difficult.”

He returned to his desk and picked up his quill, but he did not dismiss you. Instead, he gestured toward a smaller table near the fire, where a tray of fruit and cheese and a pitcher of wine had been laid out.

“Stay,” he said. “Eat. You have been hiding in your rooms for three days, and I suspect you have not been eating properly.”

You rose from your chair, your legs unsteady beneath you. As you crossed to the table, you saw a perch near the window, separate from the others. On it sat Pebble, his head cocked, his black eyes fixed on you with reproach.

“He has been sulking,” Brynden said, not looking up from his parchment. “He does not understand why you stopped coming.”

You reached out a trembling hand and stroked the raven’s breast. Pebble made a soft sound and pressed his head against your fingers.

“I am sorry,” you murmured to him. “I am here now.”

Behind you, you heard the scratch of the quill pause for just a moment, and then resume.

From that day, you took your evening meals in the solar with Brynden, sitting at the small table by the fire while he worked at his desk. He did not speak much, but he answered when you asked questions, and sometimes he would pause in his writing to ask one of his own. Small things at first: how you found the Red Keep, whether the sea air agreed with you, what books you had been reading. You answered honestly, and he listened with a focus that was almost unnerving, his eye fixed on you as though every word you spoke were a piece of intelligence to be filed away.

Then he started inquiring about your life, so you told him. Your father had pledged fealty to both King Daeron and Daemon Blackfyre, sending one gold and the other men. King Daeron had kept his crown, and House Oakheart's reputation had suffered. Instead of emerging unscathed either way, as Lord Oakheart had intended, the King inflicted punishments on him. His eldest son, your older brother, was assigned to become a Kingsguard. He had to refute his title, land and future of marriage and instead serve as a guard to the same King he had fought against. You, the eldest daughter, were given to Hand of the King as a reward he didn't ask for. A legitimate lady to solidify his standing. Your mother had acted as if everything was fine, which you suspected was for your sake, although you didn't want such strained treatment. And you scarcely saw your brother since arriving in King's Landing, even though you both lived at the Red Keep.

You learned things about him in return. He had been born with the birthmark, with hair already white, and his mother had wept when she first saw him. He had been a poor swordsman as a boy, too thin and frail, so he had turned to the bow out of desperation. He loved his Blackwood sisters. He did not sleep well. He never had.

One evening, a fortnight after your conversation in the solar, you gathered your courage and asked the question that had been burning in your throat since the day you arrived.

“Do you wish I were her?”

The quill stopped. The fire crackled in the silence. Pebble, perched on the back of your chair, shifted his weight from one claw to the other.

Brynden set the quill down slowly. “That is a foolish question.”

“I am not afraid of the answer.” You were, of course. You were terrified. But you had spent months living in the shadow of a ghost and you could not do it any longer.

He rose from his desk and came to stand before the fire. The flames cast his face in red and gold, the birthmark nearly invisible against the glow. His back was to you.

“I wished for many things,” he said at last. “I wished for her to love me. I wished for her to choose me, just once, over all the others. I wished for a great many foolish things that a wiser man would have let go long ago.” He turned to look at you. “But I do not wish you were her. You are not her. You are nothing like her, and that is…not a bad thing.”

“I have heard she is the most beautiful woman in the Seven Kingdoms,” you said, and you hated the smallness of your voice, the jealousy that crept in despite your best efforts.

“She is,” Brynden said, and your heart sank. “But beauty is a strange thing. Shiera’s beauty is like wildfire: brilliant, consuming, and utterly indifferent to what it destroys. I spent years burning in it, and I have the scars to show. You are different. Your beauty is like…” He paused, searching for the word. “Like the first green shoots after winter. Blooming. Steady. Something that grows rather than blazes.”

You did not know what to say. Your face felt hot.

“I am not good at this,” Brynden said with a flicker of frustration in his voice. “I am no poet. I do not know how to court my own wife.”

A laugh bubbled up in your throat, unexpected and slightly hysterical. You pressed your hand to your mouth, trying to stifle it, but it escaped anyway, a small, surprised sound that made Brynden’s eye widen a fraction.

“I do not know how to be courted,” you admitted. “I was taught to be a lady, not a wife. No one ever told me what to do with a husband who did not want a wife.”

“I never said I did not want a wife.” He took a step toward you. “I said I did not ask for this marriage. There is a difference.”

“Is there?”

Another step. He was close enough that you could smell the faint scent of ink and old parchment that clung to his clothes. Close enough that you could see the tiredness around his eye.

“I am learning,” he murmured, “that I may have wanted something I did not know I did.”

His hand rose, and this time, he did not stop at your fingers. His cool palm cupped your cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of your mouth with a gentleness that contradicted everything you had heard about him: the cold sorcerer, the ruthless spymaster, the man who had killed Daemon Blackfyre and his sons with arrows guided by dark magic. In this moment, he was only a man, touching his wife’s face for the first time.

“You are trembling,” he said.

“I am afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of this ending.” Your voice cracked. “Of Shiera returning. Of waking up tomorrow and finding that you have remembered you do not want me after all.”

His eye searched your face. You had the unsettling sensation that he was seeing more than your skin and bone, more than the fear in your eyes. Seeing into you, the way he saw through the eyes of his ravens.

“Shiera is in Lys,” he said. “She left months ago, before our wedding. She may return someday, she always does, but she is not here now, and she has no claim on me. Whatever I felt for her, it is done. I have been a fool for her long enough.”

He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching yours.

“As for waking up tomorrow,” he murmured, “that is simple. You shall wake up in my bed.”

Your breath caught.

“The bedding ceremony was waived,” he continued, “because I requested it. I did not think it fair to subject you to the court’s crude jests when we were strangers. But we are not strangers now. Not entirely. And I find that I am tired of sleeping alone in my cold solar while my wife sleeps alone in her cold tower.”

His thumb traced the line of your jaw.

“If you are willing,” he added, and the hesitation in his voice, the faint uncertainty, undid you completely.

“I am willing,” you whispered.

He kissed you. His lips were cool, like his hands. The kiss was cautious, almost experimental, as though he were tasting a new wine and trying to decide if he liked the vintage. But it deepened, slowly, his hand slid from your cheek to the back of your neck. You felt a knot of tension loosen in your chest.

When he pulled back, his breathing was slightly unsteady.

“You will not be alone.” He took your hand again, this time, he laced his fingers through yours. “I have a thousand eyes. Some of them will always be watching over you.”

It was perhaps the strangest declaration of affection any woman had ever received. But you found yourself smiling anyway, a real smile, the first you had worn since leaving the Reach.

That night, you did not return to your lonely tower rooms. You slept in the Hand’s bed, in the Hand’s arms, and though he did not sleep, he had told you he rarely did, he held you in the darkness, his fingers tracing idle patterns on your shoulder.

In the morning, you woke to find him already dressed, standing at the window with the pale dawn light on his hair. He turned when he heard you stir.

“Good morning, my lady.”

“Good morning, Brynden.”

He crossed to the bed and sat on its edge. From behind his back, he produced a single winter rose, its petals white as fresh snow, its center a deep, vivid blue.

“There are no winter roses in King’s Landing,” you said, taking it with trembling fingers. “How did you...?”

“I have my ways,” he said, the faint smile on his lips was no longer tentative. It was the smile of a man who had unraveled a mystery and found the answer rather pleasing.

You lifted the rose to your nose and breathed in its sweet, cold scent. Through the window, you saw a raven circling against the pale sky, not Pebble but another, its black wings cutting the air with swift precision. It was returning home, carrying something in its beak.

“What is he bringing?” you asked.

“A letter,” Brynden said. “From the Arbor. Lord Redwyne is plotting something tedious involving wine tariffs.” He paused. “Would you like to watch me unravel it?”

“Yes,” you said. “I would like that very much.”

He offered you his hand, you took it.

Pebble, watching from his perch, let out a satisfied croak and followed you and your husband up the winding stair to the solar.

Part 2: see here

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