Summary: You were tasked with looking after four members of the King's Guard who stumbled into your Lord's keep in the middle of a stormy night. One of them was the Crown Prince in disguise and badly injured. You helped him escape without being seen, and now he searches for you...
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The Captain stops just for a moment to splash some water on his face from a horse trough in the courtyard. It's dusk, and he's grateful that he, Tarly and Godwin had been able to make it to the Red Keep before full nightfall. They had been on the road for more than two turns of the moon, and had nothing much to show for it.
Godwin and Tarly both offer to go up with him, but the Captain waves them off and sends them to find bunks and get some sleep. Poor Tarly tries to put up a fight with him over it, but Godwin just slings an arm around his brother's shoulders and neck and hauls him off with a weary salute to the Captain.
"Find us in the morning, Captain, we'll put our heads together and try to come up with some new ideas."
The Captain thinks Godwin is being incredibly optimistic, but to be fair that is just how the man is. And the Captain isn't going to take that away from him. Not when it was kept them going these many weeks. That hope that maybe, just maybe, they'd find a lead somewhere.
The Captain stuffs his gloves under his belt, splashes one more cold handful of water over his face and pushes his hair back. His palms come away streaked with road dust, brown, gray and red. His cloak is definitely not white anymore, so he strips it off, and uses the least dirty looking corner to wipe his face the best he can. He probably looks no where near presentable but he knows that Prince Baelor isn't going to care about that.
As prepared as he is going to get, the Captain tosses his cloak over one arm and goes striding through the Keep to the Tower of the Hand. He passes a few other members of the Kings Guard on his way, to be expected, it is shift change. They nod, or throw casual waves his way, call out questions about where he's been, but the Captain maintains his pace, and tries to keep a somewhat neutral look on his face as best he can. He doesn't want any sort of whispers or gossip to circulate as a result of him, his mission, and his failure at it. Not for his own sake, but for the Prince's.
The Captain has been with the Kings Guard long enough to know, that the court can and will use anything, anything, as a weapon, as a step up, or a thing to be bartered. The story of Prince Baelor's participation in the Trial of Seven at the Ashford Tourney is already shaping up to be a story like few others. Brother against brother. Uncle against nephew. A terrible wound. A missing day.
He finds the Prince hunched over his books at his desk, plenty of candles burning brightly to make it easier to read by. He looks drawn, tired and in pain, things the Captain got good at picking out from the Prince's face in the past few weeks. Even when he's trying to hide it.
"Captain," the Prince greets, after being bid to enter the solar. The Captain shuts the door firmly behind him, and crosses over the carpeted floor to take a knee before the Prince's desk.
"Your Grace," the Captain says, more to the carpets than to the man he has failed.
"Captain," the Prince says, his voice tired and a little exasperated. "Please get up."
"I didn't find her, your Grace. I am so sorry."
"I know you didn't, you sent word from Oldtown, and then again from Bitterbridge after you and Tarly and Godwin tracked down the guards that escorted her. I know you did your best."
The Prince is speaking reasonably, but it does nothing to soothe the Captain. He was supposed to find her. The Prince made the lady a promise, and trusted the Captain and his men to help him keep his word.
"We should have been faster. I should have left the second we got to Summerhall. Maybe we would have been able to catch up to her." The Captain continues to tell the floor.
"We couldn't have known that the Lady Havarn was going to send her away so quickly. I thought we would have time to handle it delicately, so as not to endanger her. That was my mistake, not yours."
The Captain finally looks up and sees that the Prince has slumped back in his chair a little. He gives the Captain a somewhat wan smile. The Captain finds he doesn't care for that look on the Prince's face. It looks a little to much like defeat.
"Please get up off the floor, Captain."
The Captain slowly does so, feeling each one of the hundreds of miles that he has ridden over from Summerhall, to House Havarn, to Oldtown, to Kings Landing. He can hardly believe it has only been a few months since he was last here. It feels as though years have passed by somehow. Maybe that's just how long distances in short periods of time can make people feel.
"I visited the motherhouse every day for a week, your Grace. They insisted that no one matching her description had taken any orders."
"I believe them," the Prince says simply. "Given her faith, I doubt she took orders in the faith of The Seven."
"But the Lady Havarn's guards, the one's that escorted her, swear that she did."
"I'm sure they did swear they saw as much. And I'm sure they probably saw enough to assure them they had done their jobs. But what they did not realize is that when a woman actually swears orders to the Silent Sisters - that is a rite that men are not allowed to witness."
The Captain reels just a little, surprised, "Oh." he says nonsensically. "Why didn't the women at the Sept tell me -"
"Because it's not common knowledge on purpose." The Prince interrupts gently. Something deeply sad in his voice. "Motherhouses are often the last bastion of shelter for many women, Captain. They aren't going to let it be well known that the women that go into motherhouses might not actually stay there."
The Captain pauses for a moment, to let that knowledge settle fully. That is…wonderful, horrible, and somehow something that makes the Captain feel relieved, but at the same time full of sorrow. He understands better now, why the Prince sounds so mournful. That such a thing exists, that such a thing needs to exist. What does it say about the world men have built, the Captain wonders to himself, that women have to protect themselves in such a way.
He puts this secret of the motherhouses down deep in his heart, and makes a silent promise to The Mother herself that he will take it to his grave.
Turning his attention back to the Prince and his theories, he asks, "You think she escaped that way?"
"If she was taken to Oldtown, I think it's very likely. She let the Lady Havarn think whatever she wanted, I think she let the guards take her to Oldtown. I think she went quietly to the motherhouse there, and just as quietly left as soon as she was able."
The Captain feels a burst of hope, "Then she may find a way to send you a message. She will make herself known and myself and Tarly and Godwin will go and fetch her from where ever she is. Your Grace, I swear, even if she turns up at The Wall itself, we will go and bring her back to you."
The Prince slowly rises from his chair. He clearly is not back to his full health, the Captain realizes abruptly. He's so much better than he was of course, and it is a comfort to see. But he has picked back up too much, too early. His Grace comes over to clap his hands on the Captain's shoulders.
"I know you would, Captain. I never doubted it."
There's something in the way the Prince smiles, quiet, and still so sad that has the Captain worried.
"You don't think she will contact you?"
Prince Baelor looks away briefly, his eyes sliding off to the side towards the fireplace.
"I don't know what she will do, Captain. It's been weeks already."
Suddenly, something that the Prince said earlier finally registers for the Captain.
"You said 'if'," the Captain says slowly. The Prince looks back at him, that drawn look of pain plain in the corners of his eyes and mouth. The way he holds himself stiffly. "You said, 'if she was taken to Oldtown'," the Captain finishes.
Prince Baelor takes a couple of steps back, clasping his hands behind his back and turning to look out the windows at the growing tapestry of stars in the night sky.
"You think the Havarns were lying?" the Captain presses, stunned. The Prince shrugs.
"It is a possibility I have to consider."
"But…why would they?" the Captain asks, desperately confused.
"She said it herself, she is…'politically inconvenient'. If they discovered after we left that I had been there, and that she protected me. Or if they decided not to risk having her still be there in case the Kings Guard came back asking questions about a woman that claimed she was being kept as a hostage of the losing side in a war thirteen years done."
"We did go back asking questions," the Captain points out, devastated.
"And now you understand why I ordered you not to mention her by name. Only to request an audience with the lady that had helped you, so you could pass on the Kings Guard's thanks and appreciation. To only resort to taking her physically from that place if you could lay eyes on her. I did not want to risk upsetting her delicate position by even hinting that we knew who she was."
The Captain has to swallow past a lump in his throat as the full implications of what the Prince is outlining sinks in. The politics of many things slip by him, and he's never felt bothered by that. But it is swiftly dawning on him just how much the Lady Havarn had stupidly risked, by having her lady in waiting and hostage against the crown serve servants of that same crown.
"What was Lady Havarn thinking," the Captain whispers, horrified. The Prince gives the Captain another wan smile.
"I don't know for sure. She was very drunk, after all. But I imagine she thought we wouldn't care."
"Why wouldn't we care?" the Captain asks incredulously.
"People think many things of the Targaryens, Captain. And although the Kings Guard are not of our house, you are an extension of it since we are the family in power. And you can imagine that people who fancy themselves our enemies think themselves better, more cunning, more suited for that power. Lady Havarn assumed we would not care about the penniless eldest daughter of an extinct house, because she didn't care about the penniless eldest daughter of an extinct house. And in her mind, she is always right."
The Captain struggles with that for a moment, before dismissing it as a bad job all together. He doesn't feel like understanding the thinking of a woman like that is all that important a skill for him to have. And honestly pities the Prince a little that he must retain and hone that skill.
"Then what did she do? If she didn't send your lady to the Silent Sisters in Oldtown."
Prince Baelor closes his eyes as if the question causes him incredible pain.
"I don't know." He admits quietly.
The Captain's mind spins, like dust stirred up in the whirling storms he witnessed once in the deserts of Dorne while following the same man in front of him on a long trek to Redgrass Field.
"I could go back," the Captain offers. "I could take a regiment with me, turn the house upside down. Interrogate everyone from the Lord down to that blind guard that waved us by."
The Prince shakes his head sadly.
"We can't. Havarn is clearly participating in the planning stages of some kind of insurrection. If we go and kick over their keep like that, it will only give more fuel to that fire. And I don't know how deep or how far the tinder for it has been laid."
The Captain gives into a frustrated huff. "So there's nothing we can do?"
"For now," the Prince says heavily, his tone sliding into something hard. "But once the danger of whatever the Havarns are helping plan has passed. Once we have dug up that plot, exposed it, and extracted our punishments…"
Prince Baelor doesn't change his stance, doesn't move over much at all, but the Captain sees the man he followed as a young squire into war. The one they called Breakspear. The warrior they called The Hammer. The air around him turns sharp, and the Captain swears he can almost smell the scent of brimstone filling the room.
"…I will know the names of every house that she was passed around to like a trump card they thought would save them. And I will make sure they understand how deeply flawed that plan was from the start."
The surety of the Prince's words are like a shot of fire directly into the Captain's veins. All exhaustion from the road is washed away in an instant. He straightens up, pushes his shoulders back, and itches for his sword in his hands.
"Aye, your Grace," the Captain says firmly. "And I will help you."
The Prince turns to consider the Captain, his eyes still bright with fury. He nods once in recognition.
"I know you will, Captain. But for now, you need rest. Please take the next few days off. Tarly and Godwin, too. I will speak with the Commander to make sure it is official."
The energy still suffusing him, the Captain performs a picture perfect bow. "As you say, your Grace. But if you have need of us earlier. If a message does find you - please, let us know. It doesn't matter if it arrives an hour from now, we three would be back in the saddle in a heartbeat."
"I understand, Captain. I will keep you informed, I promise."
"Thank you, your Grace." The Captain says formally and straightens. The Prince walks him to the door, and opens it for him.
Standing in the door way, hand raised to knock however, is the Lord Bloodraven. The Captain startles, while the Prince merely raises an eyebrow in question.
"Baelor, we must speak." The Bloodraven hisses, the most animated the Captain thinks he has ever seen the other man. The Master of Whispers is somewhat infamous in the Red Keep for being nearly unflappable and cold. He is missing his usual cowl and hood to protect him from the light, but his empty eye socket appears more sinister in the low light of the torches than it normally did half hidden by his protective clothing.
"Yes, I've been expecting you all day, actually. I thought you'd turn up once you read my report." The Prince says, and the Captain can tell he's just as eager to talk to the Lord as the Lord is to speak with him.
"Privately, Baelor. We need to speak privately." Lord Bloodraven insists, his red eye flickering over the Captain.
"Of course, come in please," the Prince says, stepping slightly out of the way, so Lord Bloodraven can arrow between him and the Captain. He then gestures for the Captain to continue on this way out. The Captain reluctantly does so. He's not sure of course, but he suspects that whatever conversation the two will be having will be about House Havarn and what happened there. But Prince Baelor just gives him a reassuring smile, that bright fury from earlier banked, for now.
"Thank you again, Captain. Please go find some rest."
"Yes, your Grace. But please remember what I said. We'd be ready within the hour if you need us."
The Prince glances over his shoulder at Lord Bloodraven, who has stalked over to the sideboard by the windows and is in the process of pouring himself a cup of wine. When his Grace looks back to the Captain, he's pleased to see a little spark of hope back in the Prince's eyes.
"I will, Captain, thank you" Prince Baelor says sincerely, and then gently shuts the door. The Captain offers nods to his two brothers on duty, who do not react, as is proper. He then makes his way slowly down the hall towards the stairs.
If the Master of Whispers has insights into the insurrection plot, perhaps the time when they can go knock some heads together for more information will be coming sooner than expected.
With that somewhat more encouraging thought, the Captain goes in search of his bed.
