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 when leaving the Reach, not at your wedding, not on your wedding night when your husband failed to come to your bed, 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
a/n: Please don't let this flop guys, I have an entire series planned out.
a/n: Voluntary donations are accepted on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3
a/n: Comment if you'd like to be added to the series taglist. Rn I'm tagging those who went along with my freaky birdman propaganda.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ summary: In which a dragon burns and a wolf freezes.
⊹ ࣪ ˖ pairing: baelor "breakspear" targaryen x f!stark!reader
⊹ ࣪ ˖ wc: 12.8k
⊹ ࣪ ˖ notes/content: angst (so much angst), they're both sick with desire, injury mention, yearning and pining; just feels all around. Not much to say about this one other than I have gone on 20 side quests and discovered about ten other ships I love for LS but coming back to writing canon HW reminds me why I'm 🧎♀️ for this man every time. Thank you so much for support as always, we're really getting into the deep end of this fic now.
read on ao3. ⊹ series masterlist.
You don’t remember falling asleep, but you remember waking.
After that, the days blur together.
At first, they tell you it’s been three; then five; then a week since the Kingswood. Long enough that the edges of things stop swimming whenever you sit up. Long enough that you can make it from bed to chair to window without your knees buckling beneath you.
The arrow wound still pulls when you move incorrectly. Aerys, with his grave mouth and intense eyes, anoints it a good pain. The type of hurt means the poison hasn’t eaten anything vital, like nerves. Your shoulder is now little more than a patchwork of tight skin and bruises under the linen; it feels like someone else’s flesh, in truth, clumsy and traitorous, stiff when you want it soft and weak when you want it strong.
Baelor’s absence hurts more than the wound itself. He has not requested to see you, not even once, and you hate a small part of you that’s wounded deeper by that knowledge than the arrow you took in his stead.
Your father visits as often as the maesters permit instead. Each time, his hand finds yours in the blankets with a grip that could crack bone if he forgot himself. And each time, his jaw works like he is swallowing down something sour.
Every visit brings the same tired reminder that you’re leaving as soon as possible. You don’t ask him why King Daeron still insists on meetings if that is the case. You don’t need to. He’s doing what every good king must: make the best out of the terrible.
But when your father leaves, and the door clicks shut behind him, you lay staring at the carved canopy—a riot of dragons and vines—and feel something in your chest claw at the walls of its cage. As if some part of you had grown used to the board, even knowing it means that you’re a piece on it.
—
The Red Keep’s godswood is smaller than you expected.
Back at Winterfell, it’s a world unto itself—deep and ancient, a tangle of roots and shadows and the thick, breathing silence of snow whenever the weather cools enough. This is more so a tucked-away secret in the corner of the world that few eyes ever glimpse, and even fewer appreciate.
The weirwood grows crooked in the centre of the cramped yard. Its trunk twists up from a bed of dark earth, white bark stained pink where the sap seeps down. The leaves rustle in the slight breeze; a dense, uneasy red, as if the tree has bled into itself and never stopped.
The face itself is softer than the ones at home. Less harsh in the lines. The eyes still know you, though.
They always do.
You had to argue with the maester to be allowed here at all. With your father, a little. With the white cloak who insisted on trailing three paces behind you from your chamber to the godswood gate.
“Wait here,” you told him, before he could step onto the moss. “The old gods have no love for your steel.”
He hesitated at your order—torn between duty and superstition, between his oath and the stories he’d likely heard about strange trees that like to keep watch—and then stationed himself outside the low stone arch, within shouting distance but out of sight. You’re not foolish enough to dismiss protection entirely after such an attack, even if you crave privacy for your thoughts.
Now, for the first time since the Kingswood, you are truly alone.
Your shoulder complains as you sink down at the base of the weirwood, back to the trunk, boots braced in the damp earth. A low, pulsing ache flares and then settles. You let your head fall against the bark, eyes slipping shut for a single breath. It’s cool, faintly damp to the touch and smells faintly of sap and rain. You close your eyes properly this time and breathe, slow and indulgent, until your pulse stops hammering in your ears.
The dream clings to you.
Fire on stone. Blood in your hair. The feel of Baelor’s mouth almost on yours, the word wife warming the shell of your ear before it all went red. Fog and horses. Crypts and ravens and the roar of something huge and distant. A boy’s thin, fierce face above dark water, eyes like a dragon’s, saying—
You don’t remember what he said. That might be the worst of it. The words feel important, the way the moment before a fall is important.
“I don’t know what you want of me,” you confess the weirwood quietly. “I’m trying.”
The wind shifts ever so slightly.
“You are,” another voice responds, from somewhere behind the curtain of leaves. “In your way.”
You go very still.
The knife at your hip is not there; they have not let you have steel since the maesters cut the arrow out. But your hand goes for it anyway, finds nothing but wool and your own useless fingers there, grasping at nothing. You push off the trunk, biting down on a gasp as your shoulder spikes white-hot.
He steps out of the shadow of the tree like the shadow given a body of a man.
Brynden Rivers is unmistakable without the red drip across one side of his face. Here, under the leaves, with his bone-pale hair loose around his shoulders and his birthmark livid against skin gone almost translucent in the stilted light, he looks more like a creature from some old northern tales than a man. There’s a stillness to him that doesn’t feel like ease so much as coiled intent.
“My lord Rivers,” you say, because you were not raised in a barn. Your voice is steadier than you feel. “Do your king’s spies make a habit of lurking in other men’s godswoods?”
He inclines his head, the gesture precise as a knife drawn from its sheath. “Only when invited.”
You look pointedly at the empty grass between you. “I don’t recall inviting you.”
“No,” he agrees. “But you came here. Alone. Which suggests you might be thinking along paths not unlike mine.”
Above him, the ravens announce themselves in an eerie little chorus—three of them, hunched in the branches, feathers a blacker shadow against red leaves. One gives a harsh, rattling croak, as if amused by your palpable unease. You dislike how closely he’s watching you, him and his birds. Not leering, not hungry. Just… picking you apart with ruthless abandon. The way a man might note the shape of a lock he means to pick.
“If you’ve come to offer sympathy, Lord Rivers,” you say, folding your hands in front of you in some attempt at composure, “I warn you I’ve had my fill of men telling me how close it was that I died.”
His mouth twitches, not quite a smile but a shade of some private amusement. On his ruined face, even that much looks a little like mockery.
“I don’t waste condolences on the living,” he tells you. “They’re usually busy wasting them on themselves.”
You huff, despite yourself. The movement tugs at your stitches and heat spikes promptly under your bandages in an unspoken reminder.
“Then why are you here?” you wonder. “Aside from the pleasure of unnerving a convalescent.”
“Because,” Brynden says, “it occurs to me that you are angry.”
He says it mildly, like he’s commenting on the weather.
You bristle instinctively, mouth flattening into something less open for him. “If you’ve come to scold me for that, you’re late. The maesters have already tutted about my humours, and my father has already told me anger is no use to a woman who can’t draw a bow with her bad arm.”
“The maesters,” he says dryly, glancing boredly around the small yard, “collect leeches, not enemies. And your father is wrong about anger. It’s plenty useful. It just needs a direction, lest it chew holes in its owner instead of its target.”
He takes a few steps closer, unhurried and relaxed, until he’s at the opposite side of the trunk’s roots. Not looming. Just… there. A presence you feel pressing into you as if he had his mouth by your ear and breathing directly into it. His odd red eye flicks from your shoulder to your face, to the faint tremor in your fingers that you hadn’t noticed until he looked. You have the uncomfortable feeling that if he wished, he could list everything you are feeling in order of strength.
“You were shot,” he goes on, tone still maddeningly even. “Poisoned. Hauled back from the Stranger’s door at some cost. And the man who loosed that arrow did not do so on a whim. He knew you would be on that road. He knew when you would pass. He knew enough to tip his shaft, because simply killing you would not have sent a message quite sharp enough.”
A muscle in your jaw jumps. “I am aware.”
His head tilts, bird-like. “Are you?”
You stare at him, unblinking despite the ache already forming behind your eyes. Something whispers, deep inside you, that to lower your eyes now would be a mistake.
“You’ve been lying in bed, dreaming fever-dreams, being told by men with ink on their fingers that it was all a terrible misfortune. An outrage, yes, but not what they meant to happen. That you were merely an unfortunate piece of scenery between Blackfyre and the crown.” His mouth curves, thin and sharp. “Tell me you don’t believe as much.”
You think of blood in your mouth, of how those men charged into battle with intent to kill, all in the name of a man, a symbol, that is no longer breathing. You remember the shape of Baelor’s fear as he clutched you to him, hauling you closer and screaming for his brother.
“I think,” you reply slowly, measuring each word, “that if I had not been there, they’d have killed someone else. A prince, if they were lucky. They were not careful men.”
“Mm.” Brynden glances up into the leaves, as if the ravens are a more interesting audience. “Careless enough with their own lives, certainly. Less so with their planning.”
His gaze drops back to you, sharp enough to pin, and you almost bristle beneath the scrutiny of it, the weight..
“You were not scenery, my lady. You were bait. A wolf’s pelt hung where everyone could see it, to drag the dragons out of their walls so they may be slayed.”
The idea is not new. You have brushed its edges in the small hours while in bed, when the pain was at its worst and the corridor outside your door too quiet. Hearing it said aloud makes your throat tighten, as if his words have hands that have found purchase there.
“If that’s all you came to tell me, you can save your breath. I already know my worth to ambitious fools.”
“Do you?” he asks, immediate and almost gentle with amusement. “Then perhaps you might be inclined to make it more expensive.”
There’s a glint there now. Not kindness, but something needling, almost flaying.
You stare at him for a breath. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Brynden replies, “that the prince came to me. To ask for my help in finding the traitor who sold that information.”
The tree is cool at your back; you press into it until you can feel the faint give of living wood.
“Baelor went to you,” you repeat.
Brynden’s mouth crooks, acknowledging the crack in your voice without comment. “He did. It cost him, I think, far more than he enjoyed. He does not like me much, you see. I cannot fault him for that. But I am the crown’s servant, and I do what I must to preserve it.”
He takes another step closer, enough that you can see where the scar bites down into the empty socket on one side of his face, the way the puckered skin drags his expression when he moves his mouth. It looks like two different men sharing one skull, neither of whom is wholly your friend.
“Still,” he goes on, “his concern was… instructive.”
Heat crawls up the back of your neck. You look away, toward the carved eyes of the weirwood.
“This is not about the prince,” you state stiffly.
“Isn’t it?”
His voice is soft, almost amused. Again. And a small part of you wishes to snap your teeth at his throat.
“You are heir to Winterfell. He is heir to the Iron Throne. An arrow meant for him goes into you instead. The North saves the dragon with its own blood, and the realm looks on.” His fingers tap once against the hilt of the sword at his hip—a soft, thoughtful little patter that somehow sounds like he’s counting something in his head you cannot see. “There are a great many ways to spend that story, if one is… imaginative enough.”
You think of Daeron in his solar, talking of alliances and symbols. Of Baelor in the woods, voice raw as he begged you to breathe. There are a thousand ways to spin what you did, which pains you even more, because in that moment, you simply wanted to save Baelor. Instinct, old and roaring, had moved your body before any sense could hold it still. No calculation, no real intent other than to see a man unharmed.
“You mean the match his Grace suggested.” The word match tastes sour on your tongue. “To Maekar.”
“I mean, all the matches he didn’t suggest,” Brynden answers instead. “And the ones he may be thinking of now that he’s had to pacify half his court with assurances the North isn’t about to snatch up its wolf and sulk back home forever.”
Something sharp blazes through you. Hope. Anger. Want. You’re not sure which has the stronger teeth.
“You think he would match me to Baelor,” you say, your tone terse. “After telling my father otherwise.”
Brynden snorts, a short, inelegant sound. It sits strangely on him, as if the noise belongs to someone more human than what he is.
“I think Daeron likes to believe he can have both: the stability of the match he’s chosen, and the comfort of knowing his eldest son will swallow it like every other bitter draught he has handed him.” His good eye gleams, red and unreadable when it finds you again. “I also think he has misjudged how deeply that draught cuts. On both sides.”
You glare at him. “What do you want of me, Lord Rivers?”
“Two things,” he answers promptly, as if he’s been waiting for that specific question and is glad you finally arrived there, too. “First: your help in finding the rat who thought tipping an arrow into your blood would be a clever move. Second: for you to stop lying to yourself about the nature of the game you’re in.”
You laugh once, but it comes out harsher than you hoped; you can practically hear the snarl in the words when you speak. “Is that all, my lord?”
“For the first,” he continues, as if you haven’t spoken, “I need only that you allow yourself to be a stone in the pond. Word has already gone out that Stark means to quit the city as soon as you can sit a saddle. When that day is fixed, we will watch who takes a sudden interest in gates and departure times. Who sends letters at odd hours. Who asks after your health with more than polite curiosity.”
He shrugs his lean, bony shoulders. On him, the gesture looks almost skeletal, something else trying to play at being a man. “My little birds are very good at knowing who listens at doors. It will narrow the field.”
“And if whoever it is decides to try again?” you ask. “While my father thinks he’s simply taking his half-healed pup home?”
“Then we catch them,” Brynden says, so matter-of-fact it almost startles you. “Preferably before they loose another shaft. Failing that—” his mouth curls into something almost wolfish, almost pleased, “—we make sure it’s their hand the arrow falls out of when I bring it back to the king.”
He is too casual about this, too sure of the eventuality of it. It should unsettle you more than it does. Or perhaps it does, and you are simply too tired to feel it properly right now. Perhaps the South has taught you enough to recognise that the biggest danger between these walls is the very man standing in front of you.
“Why ask me?” you question after a fraught pause. “You could do this without warning me at all.”
“I could,” he agrees. His eye never leaves your face, tracking every minute twitch and change. “But I find bait struggles less when it understands the hook. And I am not entirely without… fellow-feeling.”
You blink at the word. “Fellow-feeling.”
He skims his attention over your face like you’re being slow on purpose.
“I have loved unwisely myself, Lady Stark,” he reveals, and it surprises you to hear him speak it so candidly. “It does strange things to a man’s judgement. Makes him send his enemies to the Wall when they should have gone to the grave. Makes him bleed for a crown that will never sit on his own head. Makes him, occasionally, walk up a great many stairs to a godswood he does not worship in, to offer a northern lady a choice.”
Your mouth goes dry. “What choice?”
It closes around you, like a viper coiling around your ankle, the awareness of something else. The thing you’ve felt coiling in his words since he stepped out of the shadow.
“To move yourself,” he says simply. “Instead of letting other men do it for you.”
You hear your father’s voice layered over his: And if I move myself? Then I’ll be very proud. And worried sick, no doubt.
“How,” you demand, biting out each word, “exactly.”
Brynden glances up at the carved face, as if asking for permission to speak. The leaves whisper overhead. One raven ruffles its feathers and peers down, head cocked as it monitors you both with its beady, black eyes.
“You are heir to Winterfell,” he says again, as if it bears repeating. “Because your father had only one pup. You. But he has brothers still. An uncle for you. Cousins. A whole second line that could, with a word from your mouth and his, step into the place you currently occupy.”
Your stomach drops. “You’re suggesting I… give up my birthright.”
“I am suggesting,” Brynden corrects, hearing the jagged fury in your words, “that the realm could learn to love a northern queen very easily, if there were a man in Winterfell to soothe the North’s nerves. Your uncle. The Old Wolf’s own grandson. A Stark with winters behind him already.”
The words land like a blow straight to your chest, mangling your insides from the inside out.
Because you know there’s truth to his words.
Winterfell is yours by birthright. By law, by blood, by every story the North tells itself about wolves and succession. You are well enough liked by your father’s bannermen. Some have called you our girl since you were small; some have drunk with you at your father’s board and watched you ride and smiled as if they could already see a direwolf cloak on your shoulders and imagine you as their lady. The North is loyal to its own, even when uncertain; you knew these gruff men would rally around you.
And yet.
You can see their faces, clear as the sky on a sunlit day, as they hear this suggestion. The guarded relief they would not dare name. The way men would shift in their seats and tell themselves that of course, of course this is sensible. A man in the high seat, a true Stark, a known quantity. A lord with years and victories to his name. A man whose body is not a battlefield the way yours will be the moment you take a husband.
A girl can always be replaced in their minds. By a husband. By a son. By a boy they can pin their hopes on. You know that. You’ve watched the way their eyes move to the cradle whenever some lord’s lady produces an heir, as if she has already become background to the main event.
The knowledge stings. It feels like being skinned because it’s so unfair yet true.
“My father would never ask that of me,” you choke out, and your voice is thin around the edges.
“No,” Brynden says. “Which is why it would have to come from you.”
The godswood seems to press in closer. Bark at your back, stone at your sides, sky narrowed above to a strip of grey between red leaves where the world feels too hot and too far from home.
“Your father wants you alive,” Brynden goes on. “He wants Winterfell safe. In that order, I suspect, though he would pretend otherwise if you forced him to choose. He brought you south to be seen, not sold. If Daeron tells him the only way to have peace is to chain you to one brother or another, he will snarl and swallow it for his people’s sake. Unless you give him another path.”
“And what path is that?” you demand, and this time you do show him your teeth; a brief, terrible flash. “I denounce my claim, hand Winterfell to my uncle, and become what? The South’s pet wolf? A queen whose people whisper that she abandoned them for dragons and southern comforts?”
“You become,” Brynden retorts, still infuriatingly calm, like you’ve already had this conversation a thousand times already, and he knows every word you’ll utter, “a woman whose life is her own in more ways than one. Who can look at a dragon and decide whether she wants to burn with him or not, without an entire kingdom’s weight hung on the scale.”
There is something almost gentle in the way he says it. Almost. It sits uneasily in his mouth, like a language he doesn’t speak often. Heat prickles behind your eyes. You look away, out over the low encircling wall, where the city sprawls in sun and smoke and distant noise. Here, it is muted, as if you and Brynden and the tree exist in another world entirely.
“You speak as if it were simple.”
“Nothing about this is simple,” he answers with careful bluntness. “It will hurt, whatever you choose. You will owe debts either way. To your father, to your house, to the prince whose life you dragged back from the Stranger’s teeth with your own flesh.”
Wind rises around you, a rustling gust that tugs at the silky, pale strands of his hair, catching red light.
“But pain you choose,” he adds softly, “sits differently under the skin than pain chosen for you.”
The wind moves through the leaves again. One crimson leaflet spins down in a lazy arc and lands near your boot. It looks like a drop of fresh blood on the moss. Not quite a sign, but not quite nothing, either.
“If I listen to you,” you whisper, working over your own thudding heart, “and do as you suggest, who does it serve? The North, or the crown?” You search his face. “Or you?”
He considers that, head cocked.
“All three,” he says at last. “Or neither. I am not in the business of kindness, Lady Stark. I am in the business of keeping my king and his heirs alive long enough to drag this realm, kicking and screaming if it must, into something better than it was when I was a boy. You are… a nexus. A point where too many lines cross. Remove you from some of those lines, and the tangle lessens.”
There is truth in that, as strange as it sounds in his mouth. There is also something else, too, coiled and private, entirely unspoken. You can’t see its full shape, you realise, but you feel it. The way his eye gleams when he speaks of fewer knots. The way his mouth almost curves when he talks of dragging the realm. You can’t tell if he wants it tidier for Daeron’s sake—or for his own.
“And Baelor?” The name escapes before you can stop it.
Brynden’s mouth twitches again, that almost-smile, wrong on half his face and too sharp on the other.
“And Baelor,” he says, “gets a chance to decide whether he wants you as his queen enough to fight for it, or whether he prefers the comfort of the chain already around his neck.” His eye glints, a glimmering ruby in the light. “Love, as I said, does strange things to men. I am curious what it will do to him.”
You want to be angry. At him, for prodding. At yourself, for the way your heart stutters traitorously at the idea of Baelor choosing you on purpose. Of simply cutting ties and freeing yourself from obligation, even when something old and stubborn in you balks at the mere thought of leaving your people or your position. But would it not serve the North even more if you were here, if you stood in some position of power rather than being constantly doubted and overlooked in your own halls? A Queen. The thought is dizzying because it’s never something you’ve imagined for yourself.
Instead, you find your fingers have curled in the moss until your nails bite dirt.
“And the traitor?” You hear yourself ask because that is safer ground than the shape of your own wanting. “You truly think they will try again.”
“I think,” Brynden says idly, “that men who fail rarely sit quietly with their failure. They tell themselves it was bad luck, not bad judgment. They tell themselves next time will be cleaner.”
He looks up into the branches once more. The ravens shift there as if hearing something in his tone you can’t.
“Let them,” he murmurs. “I will be waiting.”
There is a chill in the way he says it that has nothing to do with Godswood shade. You believe him. You suspect, dimly, that being the man Brynden Rivers is waiting for is a very short road to a very long fall.
He steps back from the tree, giving you space you hadn’t realised you needed. At the edge of the clearing, he pauses.
“Think on what I’ve said,” he tells you over his shoulder, pale hair slipping over the lean length of him. “Speak to your father, if you dare. Or don’t. This is your move, my lady of the North. For once, no one can make it for you.”
You flinch at the title; it sits on you heavier than any southern courtesy, and he speaks as if it is something you could lay down like a cloak.
“Why are you helping me?” you ask, before you can stop yourself.
He pauses in the act of turning. In the mottled light, with his pale hair and his ruined face, he looks almost like one of the carved kings in the Winterfell crypts, you think, dragged south and given a pulse again and unfit to prowl these halls.
“Because,” Brynden answers, “I serve the crown, not Daeron’s plans nor yours. And because if my prince burns himself hollow for a woman, I would rather it be for one who knows exactly what she’s doing.”
His gaze snaps to the bandage peeking at the edge of your collar. “And because,” he adds, so quiet the keep almost drowns him out, “women who stand between dragons and arrows deserve more than to be spent like coins.”
You cannot tell, for the life of you, whether that last part is for you, or for his own sense that good pieces are hard to come by.
Then he is gone. Back into the trees, into the stones, into whatever hidden stair he used to reach this place without your guard hearing. The godswood swallows him as if he were never there to begin with. Only the ravens mark his passing, shifting once, then settling again.
You lean your head back against the bark and close your eyes in despair.
—
“You’re on your feet.”
Your father’s voice hits you before the rest of him does. It’s flat, roughened by a morning spent swallowing his temper, no doubt.
He stands in the doorway a heartbeat later, broad shoulders filling the frame.
You’d heard him coming because he made it impossible not to. His bootsteps thudded down the corridor with more force than the Red Keep’s delicate tiles deserve, sending a faint shiver through the stone under your bare feet. The guard outside your chamber had murmured a soft, deferential, “My lord Stark,” and then gone abruptly silent.
You understand why when you glimpse his expression.
Now Barthogan Stark takes in the sight of you at the window intently, one hand braced on the sill, your injured arm held close.
“Mostly,” you answer. “The maesters will be terribly offended if I start sprinting, but standing seems to offend them only a little.”
He looks like a man who’s been chewing iron since dawn. His jaw is set hard enough to crack teeth. The grizzle in his beard bristles like frost-rimed shrub. Someone convinced him back into his proper lord’s garb—a dark doublet, clean shirt, grey and white stitched at the collar with Stark sirewolf on his breast—but it sits on him more like armour today.
His gaze rakes over you, a soldier’s quick inventory: the steadiness of your stance, the way you’re favouring your wounded shoulder, the slight pinch at the corner of your mouth when you shift your weight. Something in him loosens ever so slightly.
“Sit,” he orders.
You arch a brow. “If I do, can I trust you not to pace a hole through the floor?”
“Probably not,” he mutters.
You obey anyway, easing back into the cushioned chair by the window. The motion tugs on the healing flesh in your shoulder; a flare of hot ache follows and ebbs in rolling waves you try your best to hide from your expression. Your father waits until you’re settled before he starts to move, crossing to the middle of the room and turning on his heel in a tight, irritated circle like a wolf testing the size of his cage.
You watch him.
Bloodraven’s words crawl back into your mind as you watch him prowl.
A northern queen, if a man took Winterfell instead…
Your uncle. The Old Wolf’s own grandson. A Stark with winters behind him.
Pain you choose sits differently than pain chosen for you.
You hadn’t slept well after that. Every time you closed your eyes, you saw your uncle’s face in the high seat at Winterfell, snow drifting past the windows, your father at the board with a weight lifted you hadn’t known he carried.
You want to be furious at Bloodraven for saying it. The problem is that part of you knows it’s true.
“Let me guess,” you say now, because if you don’t speak, you will start thinking again about uncles and birthrights and what it would mean to lay Winterfell down. “Breakfast with the king did not go as planned.”
He snorts. “He does not eat this early. He summons.”
“Of course he does.” You fold your good hand in your lap, fingers restless. “What did his Grace want of you?”
“To thank me,” Barthogan says, with such savage irony you almost wince. “To tell me again how very sorry he is that his city allowed my pup to be shot. To assure me he’s doing everything in his power to find the snake in his walls.” He stops, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, though on your father, the gesture looks less tired and more homicidal. “And to remind me, very gently, of what insult it would be if the North walked away now.”
You grimace.
You can see it perfectly. Daeron in some smaller audience chamber, thin and composed, those tired eyes fixed on your father. Your father standing there unmoved and stubborn, breathing hard through his nose.
“And the marriage?” you prod.
His mouth flattens into a line you know too well. “Still dangling it. Neatly. Like meat over a pit. Talk of unity. Of how the realm watches what we do next. How refusing would give Blackfyre fools a story they’d dine on for years—‘see how the wolf spurns the dragon; see how the king cannot keep his own allies in line.’”
You can hear Daeron in the phrasing even without the king’s careful tone. Bloodraven had said there were many ways to spend this story. Daeron clearly means to spend it profitably.
“And what did you say?” you ask.
“I said,” Barthogan growls, “that I had not brought my only child south to be bartered like salt cod, arrow or no arrow.”
His hands open and close at his sides, fists forming and loosening as if he can feel Daeron’s words on his knuckles.
“I said the North will not be bullied into a marriage by men who cannot keep their own roads safe. I said if he pushes too hard, he’ll find his union talk snowbound until his grandchildren’s time.”
You almost smile at that, despite the painful knot in your stomach. Your father turning the full weight of cold Stark fury on the king of the Seven Kingdoms, and Daeron bearing it like a man weathering a storm he knew was coming, measuring exactly how much he can afford to push before something breaks.
“And he reminded me,” your father finishes, voice rough, “that if I snarl loudly enough, there are a dozen other houses who’d happily give him a bride to shore up his broken realm. Houses that don’t have our grain, but who have ships, and gold, and ambitions sharp enough to cut themselves on.”
He scrubs a hand down his face, muttering something in a sharp Northern tongue you haven’t heard since you were small enough to get lost in the woods.
You try to swallow over your dry throat, words rising up. You could say it right now. There is another way. Give Winterfell to my uncle. Let him be the Stark the North looks to, while I become the Stark the realm looks to.
The words sit on your tongue, as heavy as lead. You picture your father’s face if you spoke them. The hurt. The pride. The fear. The way he would see it as cutting out his own heart to hand to someone else.
You let the silence stretch instead. Because you cannot say them until you know where Baelor stands. You will not give up your home for someone who might not wish you beside him.
“Why did he send you back here?” you ask at last, when the air feels a little less likely to crackle.
Barthogan makes a face like he’s bitten something sour. “To tell you that his gracious family would be honoured to dine with us at noon, now that you are well enough not to fall into your soup. Southern habit of eating every time the sun moves an inch.”
Your stomach, traitorous, chooses that moment to complain that it has seen nothing but broth and boiled grain for days. You ignore it with all the dignity you can muster.
“So the king wishes to lay his gratitude at our feet with an audience,” you say. “And perhaps see if the wolf’s pup will growl less than her sire.”
His eyes flash. He doesn’t deny it.
“Can you manage it?” he asks abruptly. “Sitting at their table.”
You think of Bloodraven under the weirwood, all pale hair and scars, suggesting you step aside and let an uncle take your seat so the realm might love you. You think of his red eye watching you, weighing how much of this you will endure before you crack the board yourself.
You think of Baelor’s hand over yours and the word wife hanging unspoken over both of you like a blade.
“Yes,” you say. “If I don’t move too quickly. And if you don’t start a blood feud before the roast.”
One corner of his mouth twitches. “I’ll do my best.”
—
Afternoon light slants through the high windows of the royal solar. The ceiling beams are low enough to feel almost intimate, carved with twisting vines and tiny dragons that watch over the table with blank golden eyes. Copper plates and silver knives gleam on linen. Steam curls from dishes of river fish and stewed greens, from loaves of bread torn open to cool, from little boats of honey and butter waiting to be plundered.
They are already there when you and your father are shown in.
Daeron rises first, because he is king and because he is polite. Myriah, beside him, is already half-standing, shawl sliding from one shoulder, dark eyes raking over you like a mother hen inspecting you for damage.
The princes stand as well, chairs scraping on stone.
Baelor.
You see him and, for a moment, everything else ceases to exist.
He’s in dark red and black today, simple but well cut; the pin of the Hand rests heavy above his heart, an invisible weight that seems to bow his body. His hair has been newly combed, but one rebellious strand escapes to fall over his brow. There’s a faint bruise along his jaw you don’t remember from before, yellowing at the edges like old lightning. His eyes find yours at once, like they’ve been starved of the sight.
The space between you tightens, crackling.
You remember the dream of him barefoot on warm stone, calling you wife in a voice that was all heat and aching promise. You remember the reality of him in the Kingswood, arms around you at the gallop, breath burning in your ear as he whispered you back from the dark. Now he inclines his head like a man greeting an honoured guest. His face is composed, every line schooled to courtesy. His fingers on the back of his chair are white to the knuckles.
“Lady Stark.” His voice is rougher than you’re used to, like a blade that’s seen hard use and not yet been fully honed. “It is very good to see you awake.”
“Your Highness,” you reply, and if your mouth feels dry, you blame the wound and the maesters’ poppy. “I am glad to oblige you by not dying.”
Something flickers in his eyes—pain, humour, something sharp and fragile—and is gone almost before you can decide which it was.
Maekar stands at his brother’s shoulder, broader and more obviously ill at ease. He looks you over with an unvarnished frankness, taking in the sling, the stiffness in your movements, the tightness in your jaw when you shift. Relief loosens his posture, his shoulders dropping a fraction.
“Lady Stark,” he grunts. “You look less like death. That’s… good.”
You nod to him, a small smile blooming despite yourself. “And you look as if you’ve survived another rebellion, Your Grace,” you answer. “I’m glad of that, too.”
There’s a faint cut along his cheek, fading now; a new split scar along the ridge of one knuckle where a sword hilt must have bitten. He snorts, an almost approving sound from him you’ve come to realise.
At the far end, Aerys—fine-boned, ink-stained fingers already worrying at the stem of his cup—offers you a reticent, earnest smile. Rhaegel sits half in his own head, as always, looking at you and somewhere beyond you at once, as if seeing layers you’re not privy to.
Myriah breaks the moment.
“My sweet wolf,” she calls out, and you don’t know when that became your name in her mouth, but it has. She comes forward, takes your face gently between her hands, thumbs brushing your temples, then kisses your brow as if you are one of her boys, and the unadorned affection nearly steals your breath, making you miss your own mother so fiercely you bite back a whimper. “Sit, before you fall.”
“I won’t fall, Your Grace,” you protest, but you let her shepherd you toward the empty chair to Daeron’s right, opposite Baelor.
Your father takes the seat beside you, near the end, within reach. His hand brushes your arm as he sits, a wordless promise you’ve known since childhood: I’m here.
Once everyone’s settled, food begins to move. You take bread because it’s safe, fish because refusing would be remarked on. The smell of herbs and roasting fat makes your stomach cramp with sudden, embarrassing hunger.
Conversation trickles around the edges of the table at first. Rhaegel murmurs something to Aerys about an odd turn of phrase in a Valyrian scroll, and Aerys nearly spills his wine in his eagerness to answer. Maekar and your father exchange a few stiff, practical words about horseflesh and armour repairs, men who know how to measure one another without needing courtly flourishes.
Baelor does not speak to you again, but you feel him like a heat source in a cold room. When you reach for your cup and your fingers tremble, his gaze snaps to the movement. When you suppress a wince at a careless jolt to your shoulder, you catch the way his jaw clenches from the corner of your eye.
It is like sitting across from a banked forge. The danger is not in the flame you see, but in how hot the iron already is.
Daeron waits until plates are half-emptied, wine poured again, the worst of the initial awkwardness worn down by chewing and swallowing.
Then he sets his cup aside and rises.
“My lord Stark,” he says. His voice is mild, made to carry without effort. “Lady Stark.”
Conversation dies at once, the room tightening around his words. You lay your fork down, careful not to clatter it. Your father’s hand curls into a fist under the table.
“I have already spoken my apologies to your lord father,” Daeron continues, inclining his head toward Barthogan. “And my thanks, though neither seems equal to what has passed. But it would be poor courtesy, and poorer truth, not to speak them to you as well, my lady.”
His eyes settle on you. They are tired, those eyes. Tired and sharp and weighing.
“You came south at my invitation,” he says. “You rode in my sons’ company under the protection of my walls. You bled for my heir under my trees. The North has shown this house a loyalty that cannot be bought or commanded. It can only be answered.”
The phrasing is lovely and neat. You can almost hear Bloodraven in your head, amused: There are a great many ways to spend such a story, if one is imaginative.
“I would answer it,” Daeron says decisively, “with more than speeches.”
Your heart stutters inside your chest. Across the table, Baelor’s fingers go utterly still on the stem of his cup.
“It is my wish,” the king goes on, “and that of my council, to bind our houses not only in ink but in blood. To take this hurt done to you and turn it into proof. To show all who watch that when the North stands for the dragons, the dragons stand with the North.”
He breathes once, shallow but controlled. “If you are willing, Lady Stark, I would see you wed to my son Maekar. As thanks. As honour. And as a promise to the realm that such courage as yours is not forgotten.”
Utter silence falls over the solar. You’re not sure anyone is breathing.
For a heartbeat, no one moves or speaks at all.
Maekar is the first to break the stalemate.
His head jerks up, eyes wide, stripped for once of his usual scowl. “What?” he blurts.
The sound is so blunt, so unvarnished, that even Myriah startles. Aerys makes a strangled noise halfway between a cough and a laugh; Rhaegel blinks, dragged back from whatever distant landscape he’d been wandering.
Maekar seems to realise, a heartbeat too late, what he’s done.
“Forgive me,” he says quickly, colour climbing the back of his neck. He looks from you to his father and back again, as if searching for something solid to hold. “I only meant— I wasn’t told—”
His gaze snags on Baelor, as if pulled there.
You follow it.
Baelor sits utterly still, more stone than flesh. His cup is untouched in his hand, but you can see the faint quiver in his fingers where they grip the stem. The muscles in his jaw work once, twice, as if he’s grinding something between his teeth. His eyes are dark, fixed not on his father, not on Maekar, or you, but on some point along the grain of the table as if looking anywhere else would make him break.
For a foolish moment, you think—hope, fear, both—that he will speak. That he will rise and cut his father off, declare you as unavailable for both your sakes and make you foolish enough to consider givingup your birthright and duty for him.
He doesn’t.
He swallows once, throat moving with tension that looks like it borders on painful. His gaze flickers to yours, quick and bare. What you see there is a storm. Want and worry and something else, more ancient and dark. Fury held so tight it’s almost trembling behind the restraint. And under all of it, a plea you can’t quite name.
Move yourself, Bloodraven had told you, and your mind can conjure up the rest. Or watch them move you and call it duty.
Baelor drops his eyes.
“The king speaks wisely.” His voice is even, only the tightness at the corners of his mouth betrays him. “As Maekar’s elder brother, I can say he would not find a braver bride.”
Maekar’s hand clenches on the table hard enough that the tendons stand out like cords. He looks away, jaw bunched. Your father is stone beside you. You can feel the rage rolling off him like heat from a forge, contained only because there is nowhere in this room to let it out without cracking the world. Myriah’s hands are folded carefully in her lap. Her gaze moves between you and Baelor with a quiet, dawning sorrow, as if watching something she has seen coming and hoped, against sense, to avoid.
This is the shape of your future, laid out bare: Maekar’s wife, Winterfell’s lady, a symbol on a board men much older than you have been playing at for decades. Your life yoked to a purpose you did not choose.
Unless you make the choice yourself.
Your shoulder throbs in time with your heartbeat. The dream of the burning keep flickers at the edges of your mind, that boy’s dragon-bright eyes saying words you still can’t remember. Bloodraven’s voice threads through it all.
Your fork is still in your hand. You set it down very carefully, as if it weighs a great deal.
“My lord.”
Your voice is steady. You feel absurdly proud of yourself for managing as much.
Daeron inclines his head. “Lady Stark.”
“My father and I are… honoured by your words,” you begin. It’s the right opening, you know as much, the instincts of courtesy run deep enough to find the path even now. “What you offer would bind our houses in a way no one could mistake. I do not take that lightly.”
You can feel all of them watching you. Baelor’s gaze is a physical thing on your skin.
“However,” you say, and the word feels like stepping out onto river ice, “I am only just risen from my bed. The maesters tell me the poison is not wholly done with me yet. I fear I am not fit, at this moment, to give your Grace an answer of the weight such an offer deserves.”
Daeron’s eyes narrow by a hair. Myriah’s fingers tighten around her napkin.
“I would beg,” you continue, “that you allow me a little more time to regain my strength—and to speak further with my father—before we discuss the future of both our houses over a meal.”
You manage a faint, apologetic curve of your mouth. “At present, I confess, I can barely think past the ache in my shoulder.”
There’s enough truth in it to stand, but also enough lie in it to count as a move of your own.
A beat of silence follows your words.
Then Myriah speaks, soft but firm. “The girl is still fever-touched, Daeron. Let her breathe.”
The king’s jaw twitches. He’s not a man accustomed to being stayed in his own solar. He looks from you to your father.
Barthogan doesn’t move, shoulders hunched, his expression carved from stone and northern ice. “If my daughter says she needs time,” he rumbles. “Then she needs time.”
For a moment, you think Daeron will push anyway, demand because he can, because he’s king and he’s of conqueror’s blood. Then you watch him remember the weight of the northern loyalty, your father’s temper, and the realm watching for any excuse to call him a tyrant.
He inclines his head, a barely there dip of his head.
“Very well,” he says after a moment. “We will speak of it again when you are stronger.”
“Thank you, your Grace,” you say, with all the Stark dignity you possess.
You bought yourself a few breaths, a voice at the back of your head whispers. Use them.
You set your napkin aside and push your chair back, more slowly than you’d like. The room tilts for a moment, but you steady yourself on the armrest, refusing to grip hard enough for anyone to see your knuckles strain.
“If you’ll forgive me,” you add, barely keeping onto your voice, “I fear I must beg another courtesy and retire. The maesters warned me I might tire quickly.”
You feel Baelor’s attention leap like a struck thing.
He’s on his feet before Daeron can answer, chair scraping back.
“I’ll see Lady Stark returned to her chambers.” There’s a bit more haste in it than he probably meant to show. “The corridors are crowded at this hour, and we still have a traitor in our midst. I’d rather not have Lady Stark elbowed by every courtier in the city.”
“Baelor,” Daeron says.
Just his son’s name., but there’s an unmistakable edge in it; a warning. Not merely a father chiding a son for overstepping into gallantry, but a king reminding his heir that his heart has an audience.
You freeze.
You hear and feel it land on Baelor like a hand to the shoulder. Or his throat. You feel the way he goes still beside you.
Out of the corner of your eye, you catch Maekar’s expression shutter. His gaze drops to his plate. Something like guilt flashes across his face; then he clamps down on it, looking instead at the far wall like it holds an answer to his unspoken questions.
Baelor swallows thickly.
“With your leave,” he says again, more measured this time, “I will escort our guest.”
Daeron’s mouth presses into something that is not quite a frown. Myriah reaches under the table and, very deliberately, touches her husband’s wrist. She doesn’t speak. You suspect she doesn’t need to. The king’s shoulders ease by a fraction.
“Very well,” he intones. “Do not keep her standing.”
Baelor’s gaze finds yours. He comes around the table in controlled steps and offers you his arm.
It is a simple thing, a courtly gesture. Men offer arms to ladies a hundred times a day in this castle. You’ve given your hand to half a dozen since you arrived, let them take a fraction of your weight without thinking.
This feels nothing like that.
His sleeve brushes your fingers first, the fine wool whispering over your skin. Then your hand settles in the crook of his elbow, palm against the warm, solid line of his forearm. Heat jumps between you like static; his muscles tense under your touch, and you feel your own body answer, a matching clench up your arm.
You look up at him.
His face is arranged in perfect princely composure. Up close, you can see the crack in it—the way his throat works once before he speaks, the faint tremor at the corner of his mouth, the shadows that haven’t yet left his eyes since the Kingswood. Those mismatched eyes search yours, quick and hungry, as if trying to read the shape of your choice in the set of your jaw, the tightness around your eyes, the way your hand is holding his arm just a little too tightly.
You don’t know what he sees. You’re not entirely sure what’s there.
“Lady Stark,” he says formally, giving the smallest of bows he can manage without jostling you.
“Prince Baelor,” you reply, matching his tone.
Between you, your fingers curl a fraction tighter on his arm.
Behind you, you can sense Daeron’s gaze like a weight on your back. Myriah’s, softer but no less keen. Your father’s, hard and sharp and fiercely protective. Maekar’s, turned deliberately away, jaw clenched as if he’s bracing for some blow only he can see.
Baelor turns you toward the door.
The white cloaks fall behind you at a respectful distance. The door opens before you reach it, and the solar—with its careful words and shining plates and its king who would bind you where he needs you most—falls away as you step into the corridor’s cooler air.
—
The walk back to your chambers feels longer than the whole road to the Kingswood.
The corridor is wide enough for six men abreast, tapestries softening the stone, sunlight spilling in pale bars through high-arched windows. You and Baelor take up no more space than any well-bred lady and prince ought. Your hand rests just so on his arm, your steps remain measured, your pace neither hurried nor slow enough to draw remark.
It doesn’t matter.
The air between you vibrates.
You feel him in every line—the set of his shoulder under your palm, the contained force in his stride, the way his jaw jumps whenever you pass another servant or guard and the man’s gaze lingers a fraction too long on the sling holding your arm. Up close, you can see other things now that the formal light of the solar washed out: the fine grooves of exhaustion at the corners of his eyes, the telltale stiffness in his left knee when he turns, the way the pin of the Hand sits wrong on his chest, like it’s heavier today than it was yesterday.
For a while, you let the silence stand. There is too much in it for easy words. Only once the murmur of the royal solar has faded behind you into ordinary castle noise do you speak.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” you ask.
Your voice is quiet, but it still cuts.
Baelor doesn’t pretend not to understand. His other hand tightens where it braces behind his back. You feel the flex of muscle beneath your fingers; the tendons in his forearm stand out for a heartbeat, then ease.
“I am the king’s heir,” he replies, after a moment. “In public, before my own blood, I do not contradict my father like a sulking boy.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t.”
You pass through a slant of light; it spills across his face, catching on the faint yellowing bruise along his jaw, the tired shadows under his eyes. The pale eye looks almost colourless, the dark one near-black.
You stop pretending to be strong and let more of your weight lean onto his arm. Your shoulder aches in that deep, hot way that makes you want to bare your teeth at the world. He doesn’t comment, but his body adjusts without thinking—angling just so, stride shortening a fraction, taking more of you into him so you can breathe easier around the pain.
“He offered me to your brother,” you remind him, hearing the hurt in your own words. “As a reward. As a lesson. As a promise.” Your mouth twists. “You sat there and praised the match.”
His breath leaves him in something too thin to be a laugh.
“What would you have had me do?” he asks, low. “Knock the goblets off the table? Tell my father, in front of you and my mother and my brothers, that if he gives you to anyone but me I’ll tear this fragile peace to pieces just to prove I can?”
You consider it. “It would have been… clarifying.”
His mouth does a strange little contortion—half pained, half unwillingly amused. Behind you, the white cloak coughs, soft but pointed; Baelor’s shoulders stiffen at the reminder of someone else’s presence.
“Here,” Baelor murmurs.
Your door is suddenly there to your right, your quarters behind the closed door. The guard straightens as if a spear has gone up his spine at the sight of you both.
“My lady.”
His gaze slides to Baelor, then skitters away, fixing on a safe point somewhere over your head. Baelor eases your hand from his arm only long enough to push the door open himself.
“I’ll take her in,” he says to the guards, not looking back.
“My prince, our orders were—”
“—to see the lady safely to her chamber,” Baelor cuts in. “You’ve done so. If I intend to murder our guest in her own rooms, I promise I’ll call you to watch.”
The words are dry enough to lash and you blink at the cutting edge that’s so unlike Baelor’s usual imperturbable nature. The guards flush, step back in an uneven, near comical stumble. The white cloak behind you goes quiet and still by the wall.
You step through the doorway, Baelor a shadow at your back.
The room smells of you and maesters’ herbs and beeswax polish. The bed is neatly made. The brazier glows low and steady. Someone has set a bowl of fruit on the table by the window. Bright oranges and figs like small captured suns, as if colour might coax your appetite back to you.
Baelor shuts the door with his own hand.
“Out,” you tell the maid perched on her stool by the hearth.
She jumps. “My lady, the maester said—”
“I know what the maester said.” You don’t raise your voice; you don’t need to. “I say I wish to speak with the prince in private. Go.”
Torn between dragon and wolf, she hesitates only a breath before bobbing a curtsey and scurrying out. The door opens and closes again, the murmur of the guards outside a brief rustle, then nothing.
Silence.
Baelor stands just inside the threshold, as if he’s not sure how far he’s permitted to come. For all the straightness of his shoulders and the silent power his very presence seems to carry, there’s something raw about him in this moment, fragile and uneven like hot metal bent wrong.
“Why didn’t you come?” you ask. “To my room. After the Kingswood.”
His head snaps up as if you’ve struck him.
“I couldn’t,” he says eventually, the admission rough, and he looks away. “Every time I thought of opening that door, I felt—” He huffs out a breath, angry with himself. “There’s something in me I don’t entirely trust, when it comes to you. Some… violence. Some wanting. I have to strangle it every time I see you. In that bed, half dead—” His throat closes for a moment. “I was afraid if I came back, I’d break. Or I’d frighten you. So I did the only thing I know how to do.”
“And what is that?” you ask, your voice quieter now.
Baelor meets your eyes, the shame in his face plainly offered.
“I worked,” he replies simply. “I sat with my father. I hunted the man who hurt you. I turned every hour I should have been at your bedside into a blade I could put in someone else’s hand. It was cowardice, not coming. But it was the only way I could be sure I was doing you more good than harm.”
You hold his gaze a moment longer, feeling that settle alongside all the other sharp truths between you. You cross to the table—slow, because your body insists on it, not because you want to—and brace your good hand on the back of the nearest chair. You do not sit.
“If you feel nothing,” you say instead, turning to face him again, “tell me now.”
His shoulders lock.
The words taste like rotten fruit in your mouth, but you keep your expression even, your words matter-of-fact.
“If you feel nothing,” you repeat, because you were raised with Winterfell’s cold in your lungs and it taught you early not to flinch from painful truths, “say it plainly. I’ll do the respectable thing. The northern thing. I’ll wed your brother and make peace with it. I will not be the woman who clings where she’s not wanted.”
All colour seems to drain from his sun-kissed face.
“I—” The word breaks in his throat. Baelor takes a step toward you, then stops himself like a horse checked at the last instant, fingers curling uselessly at his sides. “Don’t say that,” he manages, voice rough. “Don’t put that in my mouth.”
“Why not?” you ask, sharper than you mean to be. “Your father seems very sure of the match. Maekar could be worse. He has a kind heart under all that iron. He’ll make a decent lord of Winterfell if your father lets him stay long enough to learn it. He’ll be loyal, I think. To me. To my people.”
Something flickers across Baelor’s face—pain, and a sort of bleak humour, and the ghost of a thought you recognise because you’ve had it yourself: He’d fit. North would become him, given enough time.
He closes his eyes briefly, and when Baelor opens them again, both irises are too bright.
“Do you know what it does to me,” he says slowly, as if each word has to be hauled up from somewhere so deep he’s too afraid to give the thought shape, “to picture it?”
Your heart trips.
“Picture what?” you ask.
Your tone is flat. You don’t trust it to be anything else. Baelor laughs, once. It’s not a sound you’ve heard from him before. Short and ugly, with no amusement in it.
“Everything,” he says. “Your hand on his arm at feasts. Your chair beside his in Winterfell’s hall. Your direwolf carved next to his dragon on banners over your walls. You at his side in council, speaking of snows and grain while he speaks of steel, and you looking at him the way you look at me.”
His throat works.
“And further,” you prod, because if you are going to hurt yourself with this, you might as well cut all the way to bone. “Go on. Don’t stop halfway.”
Baelor’s jaw locks. You eye the way his teeth grind, how his nostrils flare, his hands two balled fists of bone and strength.
“Does it drive you mad,” you ask quietly, ruthlessly, “to imagine Maekar wedding me? Maekar bedding me? Me bearing his children?”
The questions slice through him with such precision you briefly think he’s knees will fold. They don’t. But Baelor does flinch. There’s no other word for it.
“Yes,” he spits out, barely controlled, and now there’s nothing careful left in him. The word scrapes out, low and ragged. “Yes. It makes something in me… ugly. A thing I don’t like. I am not proud of the thoughts I have when I let myself follow that line too far.”
Your fingers bite into the chair-back until your knuckles ache.
“Then claim me.”
You feel the world tilt around those three simple words. They hang there, bright and dangerous, between wolf and dragon.
“If you feel what I feel,” you go on, voice steadier than the pulse hammering in your throat, “say it. Claim me. Claim this. Go to your father and tell him the only way he gets his pretty story of wolf and dragon is if you stand beside me, not your brother. Tell him you won’t spend my life like coin to pay for his peace. Give me something better than ghost promises and almosts, Baelor, or let me go.”
His composure breaks like thin ice.
“I did,” he says.
You blink. “You what?”
He huffs out a breath that is almost a laugh except far too hateful to be anything but bitterness.
“When he told me,” Baelor says, “when he first spoke of binding you to Maekar—before this luncheon, before he had the room as witness—I went to him.” His gaze goes distant for a heartbeat, seeing another room, another door closing. “To his solar. I shut us in. I told him he couldn’t use this.”
You stare at him, waiting for more, waiting for anything that might give you some shred of hope.
“I told him that you are not a piece he can move,” he continues, and now his voice has that same hard, flat undertone. “I told him if there must be a match, it should be me.”
He paces, a short, restrained half-circle like a tethered thing.
“I told him,” Baelor continues, “that I love Maekar with everything in me, but he is not the one you bled for. I am. That you laugh with me. That you listen. That when I speak, you see me, not the crown. That some days the only time I remember I am a man and not just a function of his peace is when you look at me.”
The words make something in your chest yaw open.
“I told him,” he finishes, quieter, his back to you, “that if he sends you to anyone but me, he will kill something in me I don’t think will grow back.”
That last sentence hangs there, heavy and suspended.
Your eyes squeeze shut. “What did he say?”
Baelor shifts, just barely for you to hear the rustle of cloth.
“He said the crown is a hungry god,” he recalls, and you can almost hear his father’s voice overlaid with his. “That it eats us all. That we do not marry for ourselves. That if his heir is seen taking joy instead of making a sacrifice, every man waiting for an excuse to pull this realm apart will take it.” His hands flex at his sides. “He told me our fire might save the realm… or burn it down. And that he cannot risk another war for my heart, when he has spent his whole life trying to keep the last one from flaring up again.”
You listen to him speak as if in a daze, your thoughts fuzzy at the edges.
“He put the choice in my hands,” Baelor says, and now the bitterness curls in like smoke. “He is clever that way. He did not command. He told me the truth plainly, and then he looked at me, and waited to see whether I would strike the match.”
“And you?” you ask. “What did you choose?”
You’re not sure why you ask, because deep down you know. The choice was answered in his silence. Baelor finally turns to glance at you, his pale eye focused, even though there’s something pained burning behind it.
“I chose not to burn you alive with me.”
The words land like a blow to the sternum.
“I chose,” he goes on, halting, “to keep standing between him and a war, instead of standing between him and what he thinks that war would take. I chose to put the realm first because that is what he taught me to be. Because that is what I know how to do.” His head lowers marginally. “Because I am a coward when it comes to you in ways that have nothing to do with fear.”
You frown. “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” he explains softly, stepping closer despite himself, “that I can face an enemy army without blinking, but the thought of dragging you into the centre of the realm’s wars… that is the one thing I cannot stand while still calling myself a decent man. If I drag you into this fire, I need to know we’ll build something out of the ashes that’s worth every curse, every hungry mouth, every dead boy that might follow such an upset. I cannot promise that. Not yet. Not with the kingdom this cracked, this ready to split.”
He’s near enough now that you can feel the heat coming off him, the tension singing through him like a string wound too tight. The words wash over you like a wave, threatening to pull you under.
“I feel so much for you,” he admits, barely above a whisper, “that it is dangerous.”
His hand lifts again, like it did in the Kingswood. This time, he doesn’t stop it. Baelor’s palm finds your jaw, warm and rough; his other hand braces at the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair. The touch is not careful. It’s frantic, searching, clutching onto a future you can feel slipping from you.
“Every time you walk into a room,” he breathes, “it feels like someone opens a door in my chest. I watched you bleed for me, I watched you laugh with me and accept me, and now they ask me to give you up.”
His forehead comes to rest against yours, breath hot, the words brushing your mouth.
“I burn for you, do you understand?” he whispers, something broken and wretched in the gentle, sad admission. “And I cannot put it out. I have tried.”
Your good hand finds his wrist, fingers curling around the frantic beat there. That’s all there is for a heartbeat. The heat of him, the smell of horse and smoke and you on his skin, the thrum of his pulse under your thumb.
This is the moment, you think.
This is where you close that last inch between you and let the future fall where it may. Where wolf and dragon both stop pretending there isn’t already a fire, and simply decide whether to tend it or step back and let it gutter.
You lean closer, your breath rasping against his mouth.
Baelor flinches.
It’s small—a catch in his breath, the barest pull back of his head—but you feel the restraint slam back into place in his hands, the prince and the Hand grabbing the dragon by the throat. A shudder rolls through him, and he squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them again, the fire is still there, but you can see the mortar of duty being slapped over it in fast, desperate handfuls.
“The realm needs more from us than this,” he says hoarsely.
You go very still.
He isn’t wrong. That’s the worst part.
You search his face. You see the war written there. The part of him that would give anything to throw Daeron’s hungry god to the wolves and keep you, and the larger part that has been built, brick by careful brick, on the certainty that his wants are the least important thing about him.
Slowly, you feel yourself nod, edging back until there’s more space between you. “Then that is your answer.”
The pain on his face is so raw you almost fold in on yourself.
“I don’t want it to be,” he says.
“I know.” Your voice does not crack. You are quietly furious with your own body for wanting to. “But it is.”
Baelor looks at you like a man looking for an opening in a wall he built himself. You let him see everything inside your heart: anger, hurt, the small grim shard of why am I never worth the ruin—and over all of it, the same clear-eyed understanding that has kept Starks alive through worse storms than dragonfire.
“I won’t go against your wishes,” you tell him, words flat. “Not on this. I won’t destroy my life for a man who isn’t ready to stand up, in daylight, and choose it. Choose me.”
You ease his hand from your face. His fingers slip away as if the air has turned to ice between you.
“When the king asks again,” you add, straightening despite the pull in your shoulder, “I’ll give him a Stark’s answer. My father will do the same. We’ll find a way through that doesn’t tear your realm apart. We are very good at surviving other people’s bad ideas.”
“Don’t—” he starts, then breaks off, hands balling into fists. “Don’t make this sound easy,” he says, almost angry. “It isn’t.”
“No,” you agree softly. “But it’s done.”
You see the moment Baelor understands that anything further will just be picking at an open wound. You think he’ll ignore all of it—close the space again, damn the realm and his father and every hungry eye, and kiss you anyway. The thought flashes across his face bright and wild and his.
His body jerks towards you, and then you witness him strangle the impulse with his bare hands before he can take another step. He doesn’t move again.
Instead, Baelor bows.
It’s a prince’s bow. Perfect, precise, the right depth for the heir of Winterfell. It feels like you’re two strangers standing on opposite sides of a battlefield, two survivors but neither of you victors.
“Rest well, my lady,” he rasps.
You incline your head, because you don’t quite trust your voice. Baelor turns to the door. His hand pauses on the latch before he can open it. His shoulders go tight; you see his spine straighten, as if something inside him has just shifted into its new, painful place.
He half-turns back, enough that you can see the line of his profile, the hollow at the base of his throat.
“You should know,” Baelor says quietly, “that whatever else I am—Hand, heir, dutiful son—you are the shape my heart has taken, and always will.”
The words land like an arrow, clean through your heart.
Before you can answer—before you can decide what answer there even is—he opens the door and steps out.
It closes behind him with a soft, firm click.
You stand in the middle of your borrowed southern room, shoulder throbbing, palm still tingling where it touched his skin, and let that sound echo.
—
“Pup?”
You scrub the back of your hand across your cheeks, once, hard, and turn from the fire.
You hadn’t meant to cry. You’d meant to stand where Baelor left you and start turning hurt into something sharp and useful. You’d made it as far as the chair by the hearth before your knees went soft and the tears came—silent, hot, and humiliating. Now your eyes sting, your throat feels scraped raw, but the tears have stopped. The fire blurs only a little.
Barthogan Stark steps in and shuts the door carefully behind him, like he’s afraid it might slam of its own accord. His shoulders are knotted up around his ears; his beard is roughened where he’s dragged his hand through it too many times. His gaze flicks around the room, taking in the empty maid’s stool, the untouched fruit, the smooth bedcovers—
Then he sees your face.
“What happened?” he demands, all softness burned away in an instant.
He takes two strides in, stopping only because he clearly makes himself stop. His hands open and close at his sides, itching for someone’s throat.
“Look at me, girl.”
You do. Slowly.
Whatever he was about to say strangles itself in his mouth. For a moment, he just stares—at your reddened eyes, the way you’re sitting too straight, like posture is all that’s holding you together.
“I’ll go back to him now,” he snarls. “Tell that thin bastard he can keep his son and his stories. We’re done. We ride north at dawn, and if he doesn’t like it, he can—”
“Father.”
It comes out sharper than you mean. It stills him like a hand on a hound’s ruff. You push yourself up from the chair. Your legs protest, your shoulder throbs, but you force yourself to stand anyway. This isn’t something you say sitting down.
He moves as if to catch you when you sway; you lift your good hand, stopping him with a small, precise gesture.
“I’m not going to fall,” you reassure him. “Not for this.”
You hold his gaze. You think of Bloodraven under the weirwood, of Daeron in his solar, of Baelor by your fire saying I burn for you and still stepping back. Of all the roads that end in other people’s hands on your life.
Something inside you—something old and winter-hard—clicks into place. So many Starks have come before you, have fulfilled their duty without thought to their own happiness. Winter is coming, you remind yourself, drawing strength from your house words. Your place is not here, in this southern finery. You are a wolf of Winterfell, and it’s time you put foolish, childish fancies to bed. It’s time you bury your heart and grow up.
“Tell King Daeron,” you tell your father, and your voice is steady, Stark-clear, “that I accept his proposal.”
an: Aerion was onto something, we should all drink some wildfire!!! I'm sorry but also... walk with me 👀 Next chapter you'll be finding out why the fic is titled Holy Waters, so that's something to look forward to at least!
