The three headed dragon༄ | ch. 7
Chapter Summary: The princes arrive at Winterfell. First meetings are made. Some graceful, some graceless, none of them what anyone expected. And by the time the day is done, something has quietly shifted that cannot be undone
pairing: young!Baelor Targaryen x LS!(fem)reader x young!Maekar Targaryenn
content: 18+, minors don't interact!
It had been a few months since your father rode east to the coast.
Winterfell had gone still in the way that places went still when most of their men were gone. Quieter. Heavier. The absence of men at table and in the yard was a presence of its own, and you had learned to stop noticing it because there was no use in feeling it every hour.
Winter had announced itself fully now.
Not the warning cold of early season, not the bite that retreated by midday, the real thing, the kind that settled into your bones and stayed there, that turned your face to something resembling glacial stone if you stood in the yard too long.
The godswood held it differently than the rest of Winterfell. Here the cold was quieter. Less a punishment, more indifferent, the same cold that had pressed against this heart tree for ten thousand years and would press against it for ten thousand more.
Your mother had told you once that the gods could be cruel. You had been young when she said it and had not entirely understood her. You thought you understood her better now.
And yet it was not cruelty you kept returning to as you sat with your back against the heart tree and the cold pressed in around you. It was the question beneath the cruelty. The one that had no answer and kept arriving anyway, in the quiet moments, in the spaces between;
Why you.
Why this Stark. Why this woman, in this particular turn of the world's long story. Why not a generation sooner, when the arrangement might not have been possible. Why not a generation later, when you would not have had to be the one to build it from nothing.
The heart tree watched you and offered nothing to comfort your thoughts.
Your thoughts returned to the coast.
The war had fully unravelled by now, not the contained, manageable thing that early ravens had once tried to suggest, but something vast and grinding and without clear edges. Most of the North had ridden with your father.
Five thousand men marshalled along that coastline, and still the island bled violence in a way no campaign had yet found an answer to. The Skagosi did not fight like men who expected to lose. They never had.
Your father wrote every few weeks.
Short letters, plain-handed, stripped of anything that was not necessary. He and Benjen were alive. The situation was thus. The coastline held or did not hold. He did not write of fear and he did not write of loss, which meant there was fear and there was loss, and he had decided you did not need to carry it alongside him.
You carried it anyway.
The strange thing was how distant it all felt, despite the distance not being very great. Not south-of-the-Neck far, not King's Landing far and yet it lingered at the edges of everything like something half-remembered. A myth rather than a reality.
You knew this was the mercy of ordinary life insisting on continuing even when terrible things were happening just beyond its edges. You were grateful for it and ashamed of the gratitude in equal measure.
Last moon, Rickon had received a letter of a different kind. The Crown had moved. King Daeron had announced to the southern courts the involvement of House Targaryen in the northern war. The biggest reason for which, of course, was your betrothal. Your name, spoken in halls you had never entered, attached to a political calculation you had not made and could not unmake.
One mercy of living this far north was not knowing how the rest of the realm had received the news. You imagined there were opinions, and whispers, and women in southern courts with very clear ideas about what a northern girl had done to deserve two princes and whether she deserved them at all. You would learn soon enough, when you rode south with your betrothed, what that particular reality felt like from inside it.
And yet what should have been the most enormous change of your life felt almost secondary. A future thing. A distant country. It was the war, immediate and present and hungry, that filled every room of Winterfell and every waking hour and every letter that arrived with frost still on the seal.
You did not know when the day would come.
The day you meet them, your betrothed, two southern princes who existed so far only as descriptions in your father's careful letters and the imaginations of everyone in Winterfell who had formed strong opinions about them. You only knew that it felt closer than it once had. That the distance between now and that day had been quietly shrinking while you were busy looking elsewhere.
The red leaves moved above you, slow and restless in the cold air, catching what little light the winter sky had left to give. Sȳndor looped back through the trees near you and settled a few feet away, his amber eyes finding yours across the frost.
The red sap had pooled thicker at the corners of its carved eyes, trailing down the pale bark in long, dark lines, as though the tree had been weeping quietly while you were not watching.
You watched it for a long moment.
It did not answer.
It never did.
"Sister!"
You heard him before you saw him. The crunch of boots on frozen ground, the ragged heaving of breath, and then Wendel burst through the tree line at a run, his thick fur coat, far too long for him, dragging along the frozen ground behind him. He nearly tripped on it twice before he reached you and stopped, hands on his knees, fighting to catch his breath.
"Are you alright?" you asked.
"Mother—" He gasped. "Mother asked for you." He straightened, his cheeks red from the cold and the running both. "Some lord has come. To propose to you."
You stared at him.
"What?"
He had arrived that morning with a dozen of his men.
Lord Liddle of House Liddle , called "The Liddle" by his own clan, though no one in Winterfell had used the title, rode through the gates without sending word ahead, without requesting an audience, without any of the courtesies that a visit to the seat of the Warden of the North required as a matter of basic sense.
Your brother had made his feelings about this known, quietly and precisely, in the corridor outside the great hall. You had caught only fragments of it. Hushed, terse, Rickon trying very hard to be contained before your mother had placed her hand on his arm and said something low that made him press his mouth shut and breathe through his nose for a moment.
The mountain clans were not bannermen in the traditional sense, they owed no formal fealty, no men, no grain but they were essential in their own stubborn way. They kept the passes. They knew the wildling trails better than anyone. They maintained an uneasy, unspoken arrangement with the Night's Watch that kept the Wall's western approaches quieter than they had any right to be. Insulting Lord Liddle in his own hearing, in front of his own men, was not a thing your mother was willing to do.
And so he had been welcomed. Bread and meat and a seat at the great table, because that was what Winterfell did with difficult men and your mother had been doing it longer than Lord Liddle had been difficult.
You had been ushered in shortly after. Wendel, who had absolutely been told to stay in his chambers, had found a dark alcove near the far wall and made himself as small and invisible as a boy of thirteen a fur coat two sizes too big could manage. You had seen him immediately and chosen not to acknowledge it.
Now you sat beside Rickon at the great table, your hands folded in your lap, your face arranged into a careful neutral expression. Lord Liddle sat across from you, broad and self-satisfied.
Every so often his gaze slid toward you. The particular look of a man appraising something he had already decided belonged to him.
You held his eye each time until he looked away.
Rickon sat at the head of the table in a fitted coat that made him look larger than life, his jaw set, his bearing immovable, every inch the lord he was being asked to be and was managing it, barely, by a thread of Stark stubbornness that had been tested considerably since Lord Liddle had opened his mouth.
"Lord Liddle." He ground his teeth. "It is a generous proposition you have made for my sister. But as I have said, several times now, she is betrothed to the Crown."
"Bah, the Crown." Lord Liddle waved his hand as though swatting at something small. "I offer her much more than the Crown could."
"And that would be?"
"A place among her own kind. A say in the running of the mountain men."
He said it with so much false confidence it was almost extraordinary, the sheer weight this man placed upon himself, as though the mountain clans and the Iron Throne were things that could be measured on the same scale and he had simply decided they came out even.
The announcement of your betrothal to the Crown had reached most of the North by now. It had not, it seemed, reached all of it. Or it had reached Lord Liddle and he had simply decided it did not apply to him, which was somehow worse.
"Lord Stark, I assure you and I believe your sister knows it to, that south is not a particular place for a woman of her standing."
"And yours is?" you asked.
The hall went quiet.
Lord Liddle's men chuckled
The lord's face twitched. Something shifted behind his eyes, the smug ease of him cracking slightly at its edges, his ego absorbing a blow it had not anticipated from that particular direction.
"You may be a Stark," he said, his voice losing its ease now, the false warmth of it dropping away to reveal something harder and less pleasant beneath, "but even Starks understand the standing my house holds in these mountains. I wrote to your father countless times. If this senseless war had not started, he would have seen reason. He would have betrothed you to me. Not to the Crown."
The silence that followed was of a different quality entirely.
"That is a grave insult you are throwing at my sister, a daughter of House Stark, Lord Liddle." Rickon's voice was very low as he spoke to him, "And a graver one at her betrothed. House Targaryen is not as gracious as we are being." His grey eyes did not waver. "I would consider your next words very carefully."
Beneath the table, you found Rickon's hand and pressed yours over it, gently. His fingers were rigid as iron beneath yours. He did not move otherwise.
Lord Liddle's chair scraped back.
He rose, and crossed toward the great table. Two steps. Three. His chin lifted, his mouth already opening around whatever he had decided to say next.
"My lord, I only meant—"
The growl stopped him.
It came from beneath the table, low, deep, a sound that did not belong to the throat so much as to the chest, to the ribs, to something less patient than either. Sȳndor had been lying at your feet since this hearing began, still as stone and twice as silent, and now his lips had pulled back from his teeth and the sound that left him was loud.
Lord Liddle stopped mid-stride.
His hand, which had been rising in some conciliatory gesture, froze where it was.
His men had stopped laughing.
"Good boy," you murmured, and your hand found the rough warmth of Sȳndor's head beneath the table. He settled, slowly, his eyes still fixed on Lord Liddle, and laid his jaw back across your foot. But the growl did not fully leave him. It sat in his chest like a banked fire, patient and entirely prepared to become something worse.
Lord Liddle swallowed.
He looked at the table. At you. At the general area beneath the table where Sȳndor had returned to stillness but had made his feelings on the matter permanently clear.
"He will not harm you," Rickon said, from the head of the table, in the tone of a man offering reassurance he did not feel. "Provided the situation does not require it." A beat, perfectly timed. "He is very well trained. He responds to tone, mostly. And intention."
Liddle's men exchanged a glance.
Lord Liddle himself had the look of a man rapidly reconsidering the architecture of his visit, how it had begun, how it had proceeded, and how many of his current options involved leaving with his dignity reasonably intact.
"All due respect, I—"
The horn cut through his words.
It came from the walls, deep, long, rolling through Winterfell's stone corridors and courtyards like something shaken loose from the sky. A single blast that swelled and held and filled every room in the castle before it faded.
Then the doors to the great hall opened and your mother stood in the entrance, three servant girls behind her, all of them flushed and breathless from running.
"The Crown princes have arrived."
Your heart hammered once, hard, against your ribs.
The hall erupted. Chairs scraped against stone. Men stood. Voices rose and tangled and Lord Liddle was saying something but no one was listening to him anymore.
Rickon gathered himself immediately, straightening his cloak, squaring his shoulders and moved for the doors without looking back. Lord Liddle and his men followed, swept along in the current of it, suddenly small and irrelevant, a minor irritation overtaken by the scale of what was arriving.
The hall emptied.
Only you and Sȳndor remained.
He was already looking at you, his amber eyes searching your face. You crouched beside him and placed both hands on either side of his great head and he pressed into you, warm and solid and certain in the way that only he had ever been certain.
You looked at him for a moment.
"Not this time," you said quietly. "Stay close. But not with me."
He held your gaze for a long beat, then he exhaled slowly through his nose and you pressed your forehead briefly to his before you stood.
You smoothed the front of your dress.
Let's see what my future looks like.
And you walked out to meet it.
The courtyard was rigid with attention. Every man and woman in Winterfell had found a place to stand. Guards along the walls, servants in the doorways, stable boys craning from behind posts. The cold morning light lay flat across the stones, pale and sharp, and breath rose from every mouth in thin white clouds.
Your mother stood at the foot of the great stairs. You had never seen her back so straight. She did not turn when you appeared beside Rickon, but her hand found yours for a moment, brief, fierce, gone before anyone could see it.
Sȳndor had followed you out, as you had known he would, and now sat at the edge of the yard at a careful distance, watching. You caught his eye once. He looked back at you steadily, dark fur still against the grey stone, and did not move from his place.
Good
You did not know how your future husbands will truly feel about him.
Future husbands. The words still sat strangely in your mind, like a garment cut for someone else's body.
The gates opened.
The column came through in a long, dark line, and the first thing that struck you was the sound of it.
The noise, proud and unashamed. The rhythmic strike of hooves on frozen stone, the low bark of orders passed down the line, the clink and shift of plate and mail on men who wore it like a second skin. Winterfell's yard, which had been holding its breath, suddenly had something to push against.
The horses were nothing like northern horses. Long slender legs, the short-cropped coats that caught the light like polished coin, the deep chests and the restless, coiled energy of animals bred for warmer climates and even ground. They moved through Winterfell's yard with an almost liquid grace that made Frost and her kind look built for a different world entirely. Which, you supposed, they were.
At the center of the column, two riders.
They were easy to find. Not because they rode ahead or carried themselves with any flourish, but because the men around them rode for them, arranged in the unconscious geometry of protection, the way soldiers arranged themselves around the thing they could not afford to lose. And because even at a distance, even in dark riding clothes against a grey winter sky, they looked like what they were. Princes. Sons of a king. Men whose blood had built and burned and ruled this continent for nearly three hundred years.
Their horses were black. Both of them, black as a starless night, with long curling manes and eyes like dark water, and they moved through the yard with the same unhurried authority as the men on their backs.
Your household herald stepped forward, staff striking stone, his voice carrying across the courtyard with the clarity of a man who had been rehearsing this moment since the raven arrived.
"Winterfell and its Lord humbly welcome the honorable Prince Baelor Targaryen, firstborn son of His Grace King Daeron, Second of His Name, Hand of the King and heir to the Iron Throne."
A pause. The wind moved through the yard.
"And his brother, Prince Maekar Targaryen."
They rode to the center of the courtyard and the column parted behind them like water around stone. Both wore sleek padded coats of black leather, cut close to the body, the three-headed dragon stitched in red thread across the chest, the necklines thick with dark fur that rose to cover their throats against the cold. Road-worn. Real. These were not court clothes.
The one with the dark hair dismounted first. He was tall, very much so, nearly as tall as Rickon, taller than most men in the yard.
His hair was dark and slightly curling, cut short, pushed back from his face. His nose was slightly crooked, fine-boned, and his eyes...his eyes were mismatched. One dark, nearly black. The other pale, violet or lilac, you could not tell from this distance, only that they were not the same, and that the effect of it was strange and pulling, like looking at a face that held two different seasons at once.
A gold earring caught the light in his right ear. Small. A single hoop, warm and bright against his dark hair. You thought of the southern sun you had never seen, of blood that ran warmer than northern blood and showed it even here, even in the flat grey light of a Winterfell winter.
It became painfully clear to you, standing there in the cold yard with nowhere reasonable to look, that he was extraordinarily handsome.
Not in the way northern men were handsome. You knew that kind, the rugged, weathered, broad-shouldered kind that came from hard winters and harder work, the kind that looked like it could bring down a bear with its bare hands and considered that a perfectly adequate courtship. You had grown up around that kind. You understood it.
This was different.
You had seen merchants from Braavos and Pentos pass through Winterfell over the years, men from across the Narrow Sea with their fine clothes and their stranger faces, and you had thought them exotic in the distant. But He was not exotic in that way. He was not foreign. He was Westerosi, southern, the blood of dragons made flesh, and the handsomeness of him was something else entirely. Fine-boned where northern men were hewn, composed where they were blunt, the kind of face that seemed to have been arranged with a carefullness that nature rarely bothered with.
Rickon had always said southerners looked soft.
Rickon, you thought, had never met this southerner.
Because soft was not the word. Not even close.
You felt his authority before you had consciously registered it, the way it moved through him like heat through stone, quiet and total and entirely certain of itself. He had not raised his voice once since entering the yard and he had not needed to.
He already unsettled you in a way no man ever had.
You resented that considerably.
He stood with his back straight as a blade, saying something low to his brother, entirely unhurried, as though Winterfell's courtyard were simply the latest room he had walked into and found sufficient.
Then your eyes moved to the other prince.
And found him already looking at everything with the expression of a man who had decided, somewhere around the Neck, that the North owed him a personal apology.
His jaw was strong and set with the stubbornness of a man who had decided on an sour expression and intended to keep it. His hair was silver, true silver, not the pale blond that sometimes passed for it in the stories, but the real thing, the colour of moonlight finding still water, cut shorter than you had expected, cropped close at the sides with two loose strands that had escaped and moved now freely in the wind, entirely indifferent to the dignity of the prince they belonged to.
His eyes, still difficult to read at this distance, were deep violet.
His skin bore the faint, pitted marks of the pox, roughening what might otherwise have been a finer face and doing nothing at all to soften the expression it currently sat beneath, which required no softening to make its feelings known.
He was handsome. You registered it, not his brothers kind of handsome, not that composed, southern fineness that made you feel observed and off-balance all at once.
This was something closer to home. Broader in the shoulder, harder in the jaw, the kind of face that looked like it had been tested by something and had not enjoyed the experience but had come through it unchanged. Northern men had looked like that. Men who had stood in bad weather and decided the weather was wrong, not them.
It surprised you. You had not expected to recognize anything in him.
You were still looking at him, not entirely meaning to, when his eyes moved.
And found yours.
You looked away immediately. Faster than was graceful. You fixed your gaze on his brother with the focused attention of someone who had absolutely not been looking at the silver haired prince this time and could prove it beyond all reasonable doubt.
Baelor, as though sensing the shift, turned.
His mismatched eyes found yours across the yard and held them and for a moment the noise of the courtyard, the horses, the men, the cold wind moving through the banners, all of it receded to somewhere distant and unimportant.
Your breath stopped.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to notice it had.
Then he smiled, small and private and not for anyone else in the yard and looked away.
He pulled off his riding gloves one finger at a time, unhurried, as though the cold and the journey meant nothing to him and you were breathing again. The cold air tasted sharper than it had a few seconds ago, and you were profoundly, deeply grateful that no one appeared to have been watching your face just then.
He walked toward your brother first.
He stopped before Rickon and inclined his head.
"Lord Stark." His voice carried across the yard, warm and low. "Your father spoke of Winterfell often during our time together in King's Landing. He did not exaggerate. The landscape alone is worth the ride."
Rickon clasped the prince's forearm in the northern fashion, firm, direct, no flourish.
"Prince Baelor. The North welcomes you. I trust the Kingsroad treated you well."
"It treated us cold and long, my lord, but we are Targaryens. We have survived worse than weather." A beat. "Your father has written often of you. He said you held Winterfell as well as any man twice your age. I see now he was not being generous."
Rickon nodded at that compliment, ever the proud man he was.
"I hold it until he returns," Rickon said. "That is all."
"That is not a small thing," Baelor said, simply and something in the way he said it made it clear he meant it.
Then he turned to your mother.
He took her hand and bowed over it, holding her fingers delicately for a short second.
"Lady Stark. I owe you thanks for the welcome you have extended us. I know what it costs to house and feed a column of soldiers in winter, and I know you have had to do it while managing a castle and a war from the same seat. My father asked me to convey his personal gratitude, but I suspect mine is the more honest of the two."
Your mother looked at him for a moment.
Then she smiled at him.
"The King's gratitude is welcome, Prince Baelor. But you are right, yours is the one that arrived on horseback after three hundred miles of cold, so I will value it more." She inclined her head. "You and your brother will have warm rooms, hot food, and whatever else Winterfell can offer. It is not King's Landing, but it stands."
"My lady, if King's Landing had walls like these, my father would sleep better at night."
Your mother almost laughed. Almost. You saw it in the corners of her mouth, quickly governed, before she composed herself and inclined her head once more.
Then he moved to Wendel.
Your youngest brother had been standing very still and very straight since the column had entered the yard, his chin raised, his small hands clasped behind his back in a precise imitation of the way Rickon stood. He was trying so hard to be formal that it made your chest ache.
Baelor stopped in front of him. Then, without ceremony, he crouched, lowering himself so that his eyes were level with Wendel's, one knee on the cold stone, his dark coat pooling around him. The gesture was easy and unself-conscious and entirely without condescension.
"And you must be Wendel," he said.
Wendel nodded once. His eyes were enormous.
"Your father told me about you as well. He said you were the fiercest Stark of all, but that you were keeping it secret until the right moment."
Wendel stared at him. Then, in the small, serious voice of a boy who had been given something precious and was not entirely sure what to do with it:
"I am training with a sword."
"Are you? What kind?"
"A short sword. Ser Rodrik says I am not ready for a real one yet."
"Ser Rodrik is wise. But I will tell you something." Baelor leaned slightly closer, as though sharing a confidence. "I was not allowed a real sword until I was twelve. And I was terrible with it for a full year after that. So you have time."
Wendel looked at him with the particular intensity of a child deciding whether an adult could be believed.
"Were you really terrible?" he asked.
"Truly terrible. Ask my brother. He will tell you. Our knights tried very hard to teach me the ways of fighting."
Wendel glanced past Baelor toward the second prince, still mounted, and then back.
"He does not look like you," Wendel said.
Baelor's mouth twitched.
"No," he said. "He does not."
He rose, placed a hand briefly on Wendel's shoulder. Light, warm, gone almost before it landed and turned.
Then he was in front of you.
Up close he was more than the sum of what you had observed from across the yard, which should not have surprised you and did anyway.
You had to look up to meet his eyes, and found them already on you, those impossible mismatched eyes and they were warmer than you had expected. Warmer than you had prepared yourself for. The kind of warm that did not announce itself but arrived the way winter sun arrived, slowly, at first light, before you had thought to look for it or decided what to do with it.
You looked at each other.
The moment was neither short nor long. It simply was.
To your considerable surprise, he went to one knee.
Not a courtier's bow, nothing so performed as that. A deliberate lowering and entirely certain of itself,
He took your right hand in both of his and pressed it gently to his forehead, held it there for a breath, and turned it just slightly and kissed it. A brief, warm pressure against your skin that sent something entirely unexpected moving through you before you had the presence of mind to stop it.
"My lady."
By the old gods...
His voice low and warm, it pressed against you like hot coal.
It settled somewhere beneath your sternum and stayed there, the way heat stayed in stone long after the fire had moved on.
You had never noticed the way a voice could do that, had never had cause to. You noticed it now, standing very still with your hand still in his, with the cold pressing in from all directions and somehow feeling it considerably less than you had a moment ago.
He rose.
His hand did not immediately release yours.
You noticed, that despite the cold and three hundred leagues of winter road, his hand was warm, as though his blood ran hotter than other men's, as though winter had tried its best and simply failed to reach him.
You also noticed, against your will, how large his hand was. How his fingers were long and fine-boned and how yours looked very small inside them.
The blush arrived before you could stop it.
You felt it in your cheeks, immediate and traitorous, and had the profound wish to be somewhere very far away and very cold, which was almost funny given where you were currently standing.
His mouth curved, not quite a smile, but the shape of one, as though he had noticed and had decided to be kind about it.
"It seems your father is a far more modest man than he lets on."
You looked away. Collected yourself. Looked back.
"My father," you said, with as much composure as you could locate on short notice, "is the most honest man I know. Whatever he told you, I imagine it was entirely accurate and you simply chose to hear it generously."
"A diplomatic answer." He said to you, as though the two of you were the only people in the yard and he saw no reason to rush.
"Though I think you know as well as I do that diplomatic answers are what we reach for when the honest one would give too much away."
His mismatched eyes held yours.
"'The winter flower,'" he said, his voice dropping just slightly, warm and deliberate. "They spoke of you in King's Landing as though you were something to be admired from a distance." A pause, "I begin to see why."
You had no immediate answer for that. You searched for one and found nothing that would not make the situation considerably worse, so you lifted your chin instead and held his gaze with the particular stubbornness that had always served you better than words.
His smile returned. Fuller this time, directed entirely at you.
Movement caught your eye over his shoulder.
Maekar had dismounted.
He swung down from his horse in one fluid motion and handed the reins off to a waiting stable boy without looking at him. He stood with his arms crossed and his cloak pulled against the cold, watching the exchange between you and his brother with the particular expression of a man who had already formed his conclusions and found them unsurprising.
His violet eyes moved to you.
What you found there was an assessment so flat and so brief it was almost worse than open hostility, as though he had looked, and measured, and filed the result away somewhere unimportant.
Then he looked away.
As though you were not worth the continued attention.
You felt the sting of it more than you expected to and resented that immediately.
You did not see Wendel move.
You only heard the determined crunch of boots on frozen stone, and by the time you found him with your eyes he had already covered half the distance between your mother's side and the silver haired prince, his fur coat dragging behind him, his jaw set with the expression of a boy who had made a decision and was too far into it to reverse course.
Your mother's hand flew to her mouth.
Rickon went rigid.
Wendel planted his feet before Maekar, puffed out his chest, and spoke.
"You will treat my sister with honor, ser." He swallowed, his gaze darting to you for a fraction of a second before locking back on the prince. "If-if you do not... then you will answer to me."
The courtyard held its breath. Rickon went rigid, a muscle jumping in his jaw. You felt a wave of horrified, fierce love for your little brother so strong it almost buckled your knees.
Maekar did not laugh. He looked down at Wendel, his gaze sweeping over him once, assessing. Then, to the astonishment of everyone present, a short, rough chuckle escaped him.
"A knight's heart in a boy's body," he said, his voice a low rumble. "You have courage, little soldier." He took a step closer and lowered his voice slightly. "But stand with your shoulders back. A man who looks ready for a fight is less likely to be given one."
The advice was so unexpected and devoid of mockery, that Wendel simply stared, his bravado forgotten. Maekar gave him a short, sharp nod of something that looked unnervingly like respect, then turned from him, his duty to the boy concluded.
He moved to Rickon first. His stride was heavy, deliberate, eating the ground between them. He stopped and offered the northern clasp, his forearm meeting your brother's. His grip, you could tell, was iron.
"Lord Stark," Maekar said, his voice flat and hard as the frozen ground. "Your father is a man of substance. I trust his sons are the same."
It was not a pleasantry; it was a challenge and a statement of fact rolled into one. Rickon, to his credit, met the prince’s intense violet gaze without flinching. "The North breeds no other kind, Your Highness."
Maekar released him and turned to your mother. He executed a bow that was perfectly correct, yet stiff, as though the motion was a concession his body resented making.
"Lady Stark," he said, and the words were clipped, a duty performed and dispensed with.
Then, at last, he was before you.
He offered a bow. It was brief, correct, and entirely without warmth. The barest minimum that duty required after greeting the lord and lady of the house.
"My lady," he said. His voice was deeper than Baelor's, rougher at the edges, a voice accustomed to giving commands in the open air, not pleasantries in a courtyard.
You curtsied, your movements practiced and smooth, "Prince Maekar."
His gaze passed over you and moved on, already dismissing you, already looking for the next thing. Baelor, you noticed, watched his brother with an expression of faint, weary annoyance. It was clearly a familiar dynamic.
Just as the tension seemed ready to break, it was shattered by another voice.
"My princes!"
Lord Liddle, who had been fuming near the gate, now bustled forward, a broad, false smile stretched across his face. He pushed past a startled guardsman and positioned himself directly in front of the royal party, radiating an air of self-importance.
"It is an honor to stand before the Crown," he boomed, inclining his head with a flourish. "A true honor. I am Lord Liddle, of the mountain clans. A steadfast ally to House Stark."
Maekar looked at him with an expression of such pure, undiluted contempt that Lord Liddle’s smile faltered for a second. Baelor, however, stepped forward smoothly, placing himself between Liddle and your family. The warmth had vanished from his face, replaced by the cool, polished steel of the Hand of the King.
"Lord Liddle," Baelor said, and his voice was quiet, yet it cut through the courtyard air like a shard of ice. "We were concluding our greetings with our hosts."
It was a dismissal, delivered with such elegant finality it left no room for argument. But before the humiliation could fully land, Wendel, empowered by the prince's defense and his own fierce loyalty, took a half-step forward.
"He is no guest, my prince," Wendel declared, his voice high and trembling but utterly clear. "He came to ask for my sister's hand. He tried to get Rickon to break her betrothal to you."
The yard did not just go quiet. The air itself seemed to freeze. Every servant, every guard, every man of Lord Liddle's own retinue went utterly still. The accusation, spoken by a child with absolute sincerity, had stripped away all pretense.
You could not see Baelor's face. Only the rigid line of his back, the stillness that had come over him, the stillness of a man choosing very carefully what he did next. A low sound resonated from his chest.
Then, a movement. Swift. Deliberate. Entirely without hesitation.
Maekar stepped in front of you.
He did not look at you. He did not speak to you. He simply moved himself between you and Lord Liddle. A solid, immovable wall of black leather and silver hair. But it was not merely the placement of his body that struck you. It was everything that came with it, the set of his shoulders, broad and unyielding, the way his chin lifted slightly, the way his hands dropped to his sides. The posture of a man who had just drawn a line in the frozen ground and was waiting, with something that bordered on anticipation, for someone to be foolish enough to cross it.
This was a claim.
Wordless, graceless, and absolute, the kind that did not ask permission and did not need to. You were behind him and therefore you were his and Lord Liddle was in front of him and therefore Lord Liddle had a problem.
You stared at the back of his head.
A moment ago those same violet eyes had looked at you and found nothing worth lingering on. He had assessed you, looked away, and you had felt the dismissal of it settle under your skin like a splinter.
And now he was standing in front of you as though the idea of anyone else laying claim to you was something he found personally offensive.
You did not know what to do with that.
"You insolent little lord," Maekar snarled, his voice a low, dangerous growl. He took a step toward Liddle, whose face had gone pale.
"While men of the North bleed on that coast, while your own people give their sons to a war you hide from in your mountain passes, you ride to their seat and sniff around their women." Each word was placed with a precision that made it land harder than the one before it. "You stand in their hall, at their table, and think your name, your pride, your mountain caves carry enough weight to challenge a betrothal sealed by the Iron Throne itself."
He took another step.
Lord Liddle did not step back. He was, to his small credit, too proud for that. But something in him had gone very still.
"She is not yours to want," Maekar said. The quietness of it was absolute now, stripped of everything but the bare and implacable fact of it.
"She was never yours to want. And the next time you look at her, I will carve your eyes out myself. And I will make sure you are still breathing when I feed them to you."
Baelor let the words hang in the frozen air, letting their venom do its work. Only when Maekar took another menacing step forward did Baelor place a firm, steadying hand on his brother’s arm.
"Brother. It's enough."
The command was quiet, but absolute. Maekar stopped, his chest heaving, his violet eyes burning with a fury that was far from extinguished.
Baelor turned his cool, mismatched gaze upon the terrified Lord Liddle.
"What my brother," he began, his voice deceptively mild, "is attempting to convey, Lord Liddle, is that a betrothal to the Crown is not a proposition. It is a matter of state. One does not haggle for it in a courtyard as if it were a side of beef."
He let the silence stretch, his eyes never leaving Liddle's.
"You have come to Winterfell seeking an alliance, while the North is at war. A war the Crown has now joined. You have insulted our betrothed, and in doing so, you have insulted the King who made the match." He tilted his head. "This has been a deeply unwise visit for you, my lord."
Baelor let his hand drop from his brother's arm and gestured dismissively toward the gate. "Go back to your mountains. And when you pray to your old gods, pray they grant you the wisdom not to come down again until you have learned your place."
He turned his back on Liddle completely, the dismissal so absolute it was like a physical blow. He looked to your mother, and the polished warmth returned to his face as if summoned by will alone.
"Lady Stark, you were offering us shelter from this bracing northern air? After that, I find I am very much in need of it."
Your mother, who had watched the entire exchange with a hawk's intensity, inclined her head, a flicker of profound respect in her eyes.
"Of course, Your Highness. Winterfell's halls are warm."
As your family and the princes turned toward the great hall, Lord Liddle left utterly diminished in the courtyard behind you, Maekar stepped away from you without a word.
No acknowledgment.
No glance back.
He moved ahead with his arms at his sides and his gaze straight forward, the picture of a man who had done what needed doing and had already stopped thinking about it, as though the last few minutes had been a minor inconvenience now filed away and forgotten.
You stared at his back for a moment.
Then a warmth found your arm.
Baelor appeared at your side, his hand settling at your elbow. He said nothing immediately. He did not need to. He simply guided you forward.
"I apologise for my brother," he said quietly, low enough that only you could hear. "He has a way of expressing himself that tends to leave very little room for interpretation."
"I heard that," came a flat voice ahead of you.
Baelor did not miss a step.
"I know," he said pleasantly.
A short silence. Then, undeterred, he continued at the same low register. "My lord father and mother devoted considerable effort to teaching him the finer points of diplomacy. It was not, I'm afraid, his most natural subject."
"My prince." You kept your voice even. "I am quite used to men like your brother. You need not apologise for him."
Baelor glanced down at you.
He said nothing.
But his hand remained at your elbow, and the corner of his mouth moved, and he simply inclined his head.
Stepping inside, the familiar scent of woodsmoke and roasting meat and fresh bread wrapped around you like something you had not known you needed until it arrived. The great hall had been laid with care, the long table heavy with venison stew, bowls of root vegetables glistening with butter, dark loaves still steaming from the kitchens.
Your mother guided everyone toward the high table with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had been seating difficult guests for decades. You settled across from the princes, Wendel dropping into the chair beside you with a small, guilty look that he aimed at you sideways, his shoulders drawn up around his ears. You pressed his hand once beneath the table and felt him exhale.
Rickon took his place at the head, waited until everyone had settled, and stood.
"Let us eat," he said, with the economy of a man who had not yet decided whether he was hosting guests or tolerating them. "You will need the strength for the road ahead."
Everyone inclined their heads.
You stabbed a roasted potato.
The venison smelled extraordinary, yet your stomach was doing something complicated and you did not intend to draw attention to it.
Then you felt it.
Two sets of eyes. Simultaneously, from across the table.
You looked up and met both pairs at once.
Baelor's mismatched gaze was warm and quietly attentive, the look of a man who was paying considerably more attention than his relaxed posture suggested and was not particularly troubled by you knowing it.
Maekar looked like the weather before a storm. His expression had settled back into its natural state, dark, flat, radiating the particular energy of a man who was annoyed by everything. His violet eyes met yours and did not move.
I wonder who pisses in his porridge every morning, you thought, with a flash of northern bluntness you were grateful no one could hear.
Then Maekar looked down at his plate.
He prodded a piece of roasted turnip with the tip of his knife, slowly.
"What," he said, "is this."
"A root vegetable, my prince," you said. Your voice came out even and cool, which you were quietly proud of. "They grow in the ground. I understand the South has them as well, if one is willing to dig."
The corner of Baelor's mouth moved.
Maekar's violet eyes lifted to yours. Something crossed them, before the familiar flatness returned.
"In the South," he said, "we have the decency to do something with them first."
"Pay him no mind," Baelor said smoothly, his mismatched eyes bright with an amusement he was making very little effort to conceal. "My brother considers any food that does not bleed when cut to be a philosophical failing."
You looked at Baelor.
"Then I shall have the kitchens send his venison up still kicking next time," you said. "I would not want the prince to feel slighted by our hospitality."
Baelor laughed.
Not a polite laugh, not the careful social sound of a prince maintaining atmosphere, a genuine one, short and unguarded, warm enough that several people along the table looked up from their plates. It transformed his face entirely, briefly, and you found yourself looking at it a beat longer than was strictly necessary before you looked away.
Maekar stared at you.
His expression was caught somewhere between irritation and something else entirely. He did not speak.
Instead he picked up the turnip, held your gaze, and bit into it.
You looked back down at your potato and said nothing.
But the corner of your mouth, entirely against your wishes, moved.
"How long do you mean to rest at Winterfell, Your Highness?" Rickon's voice cut through the momentary warmth like a blade through cloth. He did not dress it up. "My father and brother await your support on the coast."
Baelor turned to him, the humor settling into the composed focus of the Hand, the shift was seamless, practised, the face of a man who wore two expressions and moved between them without effort.
"Two days," he said. "Enough to recover the men and horses. Then we ride east."
"Good." Rickon's hand tightened around his goblet. "The sooner the better. I want to see the head of every last one of those savages on a spike before winter deepens."
"That is a sentiment we share entirely, my lord," Baelor said quietly. His eyes moved over Rickon's face with a diplomat's attention.
Your mother's hand fluttered.
"My son." Her voice was gentle but precise, the tone she used when she was steering something away from a cliff edge without making the steering obvious. "The battlefield will keep. Let us not bring it to the table tonight."
She turned to Baelor, "I have been meaning to ask, my prince, I have corresponded at length with King's Landing regarding the arrangements, the guests, the northern families who will attend but no one has thought to tell me what a Valyrian wedding actually looks like. I confess I am quite curious."
The effect on Maekar was instantaneous.
He had just taken a long pull of ale. At the word wedding he choked with a violent, full-bodied convulsion, ale going entirely the wrong direction, his fist slamming against the table as he fought for air.
Baelor closed his eyes briefly.
Your mother looked as though she was trying to decide whether to call for a maester.
Wendel, beside you, pressed his lips together with visible effort.
You looked very carefully at your plate.
"A Valyrian wedding," Baelor said, setting down his cup, "is not what you would be accustomed to. I want to be honest about that."
Your mother folded her hands on the table. Listening.
You said nothing. You were aware of your own stillness.
"The ceremony is old," he continued, his voice measured, "Older than the Conquest. Older than the dragons, some say, though I suspect that is an exaggeration." A brief pause. "It begins with fire. Torches, candles, as many as can be lit. The Valyrians believed that fire bore witness in the way that gods bore witness elsewhere. That it saw, and remembered."
Your mother's expression was carefully composed. You recognized the effort.
"The bride and groom are dressed in the old fashion, robes in the colors of the house, for you that would mean black and red." His mismatched eyes found yours briefly, acknowledging something without naming it.
"There is a blade of dragonglass. The groom draws it across his palm. The bride—" He stopped. Chose his next words with particular care. "Across her lip. Just enough. Just a small cut."
The table was very quiet.
"The blood is mixed," he said. "And marked here." He touched two fingers briefly to his own forehead. "It signifies the continuation of the bloodline. The joining of two into something that cannot be separated."
He let that sit for a moment.
"And then the vow." Something shifted in his voice as though the words themselves required a different kind of handling. "Spoken in High Valyrian. Hen syt ñuha ōghar, hen syt ñuha perzys, hen syt ñuha jelmāzma. Kesrio syt ñuha." A pause.
"One flesh, one heart, one soul. Now and forever."
Silence.
Your mother opened her mouth, closed it, and reached for her wine.
"And what of the two of you in this arrangement?"
"Rickon." Your mother's voice.
Maekar, who had only just recovered from his coughing, his face still carrying the faint flush of a man who had recently lost a fight with his own ale, set his goblet down and looked at Rickon with a flat gaze:
"If you are asking whether my brother and I intend to kiss," he said, his voice still slightly roughened from the coughing, "you are going to be very disappointed."
You inhaled a piece of potato. The coughing that followed was not brief and it was not quiet, and Wendel helpfully slapped you on the back twice with considerably more force than was necessary while you attempted to recover what remained of your dignity.
Baelor, with the composure of a man entirely accustomed to mealtimes that went like this, set down his fork and folded his hands on the table.
"The old Valyrian custom," he began, "speaks only of the union between a man and a woman. A union of three has only one precedent in recorded history. Aegon the Conqueror and his sister-wives and even then the ceremony was not followed in its entirety so much as adapted to accommodate what was being asked of it." He paused. "My lord father is aware of how this sounds, which is precisely why he asked Aerys to research it thoroughly before any arrangements were confirmed."
"Aerys," Maekar said, into his goblet, "spent three weeks in the archives and emerged looking like he had not slept once and had never been happier in his life."
"That is accurate," Baelor agreed, without missing a beat. "What he found was an old custom. Ancient, in fact, predating the Doom, predating most of what we know of Valyria as it existed at its height. It is called trēsy jentorion." He said the words carefully, "The brothers' bond. Historically it was performed between men of the same blood, brothers, sworn companions, men who wished to bind their loyalty to one another in a way that went beyond words alone." A pause. "It has never, to our knowledge, been incorporated into a wedding ceremony. But then—" the faintest trace of something moved through his expression, "very little about this arrangement has clear precedent."
"Reassuring," Rickon said flatly.
"Deeply," Maekar agreed, with equal flatness, and drank.
Baelor continued as though neither of them had spoken.
"We will each cut our palms and the blood will be marked here." He put his hand of the back his neck. "And we will speak the vow of trēsy jentorion alongside each other. The ceremony will acknowledge the three of us as bound within the same rite." He looked at you briefly, and his voice dropped just slightly, as though the next part was meant more for you than for the table.
"It will not be traditional. It will not look like anything that has been done before. But it will be real, and it will be witnessed, and it will mean something."
A silence settled over the table.
Wendel had gone very still.
Your mother's hands were folded in her lap with a precision that suggested she was managing several feelings at once and had decided the table was not the place for them.
Rickon looked at the wall.
"And the dragonglass blade," Maekar said, with the air of a man raising a point he had been sitting on for some time. "I want it noted that I objected to that part."
"You objected to every part," Baelor said mildly.
"I objected to the dragonglass blade specifically and on principle."
"And yet here we are."
Maekar looked at him. Then at his plate. Then picked up his fork with the energy of a man who had made his position known and had nothing further to add.
The table had found a tentative peace.
It lasted approximately four seconds.
"Will the bedding be different as well?"
Wendel's voice rang out with the clear, carrying confidence of a boy who had absolutely no idea what he had just done to the atmosphere of the room.
He leaned forward, elbows on the table, face open and entirely earnest.
"Did Aegon the Conqueror share his wives simultaneously or separately? Because the histories are not specific on that point and I have always wondered—"
The silence that followed was of a very particular quality.
Rickon looked as though he had briefly left his body.
Your mother's eyes had gone very wide.
Your face, entirely without your permission, became the approximate color of a winter peach.
Baelor and Maekar, by contrast, received this with a composure that suggested the subject had, in fact, been discussed between them at some point, possibly at length, possibly with considerable difficulty.
Baelor's expression did not change. Maekar reached for his ale with the unhurried movements of a man who had already made his peace with the universe and its many inconveniences.
Though you did notice, with some satisfaction, that the tips of his ears had gone very red.
Whether that was the ale, you could not say.
"There is no record," Baelor said, with the measured calm of a man defusing something, "of a specific Valyrian bedding custom. The old texts are not particularly detailed on the subject."
Wendel opened his mouth.
"Which means," Baelor continued, with gentle firmness, "that we have very little to go on and the matter has not yet been decided."
"But will you follow the court tradition?" Wendel pressed, undeterred, with the relentless curiosity of a boy who had never once in his life recognized a closed door.
"Because in Archmaester Gyldayn's histories there is a passage about the bedding of—"
"No," Maekar said.
The word landed on the table like a dropped sword.
"We will not." He set his goblet down.
"Our mother spoke on the matter at considerable length and made her position very clear. The bedding tradition ends with us." A pause. He glanced at you very briefly, the look there and gone before it could be named. "It is a barbaric custom and we have no intention of continuing it."
Your mother exhaled, quiet and careful.
Wendel looked briefly disappointed, then seemed to think better of it, and reached for his bread instead.
Rickon, who had spent the last thirty seconds looking at the ceiling, slowly returned his gaze to the table and reached for his wine with the movements of a man who had aged several years in a very short time.
You stood up.
The table shook slightly as your hip caught the edge of it, and every head turned toward you at once. Your mother, Rickon, Wendel, and two Targaryen princes, all of them looking at you with varying degrees of concern and curiosity.
"I need air." You inclined your head, quick and precise, the closest thing to a bow your current composure could manage. "If you will excuse me."
You did not wait to find out whether you were excused.
Your feet made the decision before the rest of you had fully committed to it and you were already moving, past the chairs, past the servants along the walls, toward the door and the cold and the blessed, indifferent dark beyond it.
"But my darling, your venison—" your mother called.
The door closed behind you
You did not know where you were going.
You only knew that the hall was behind you and the cold was ahead and your feet had made a decision your mind was still catching up to. You moved through familiar passages, past the tapestries, past the torches burning low in their brackets, through the corridors that knew the sound of your footsteps better than you knew them yourself.
You found yourself in the glass gardens.
Your mother's particular miracle. Your father had built it for her years ago, expanded it, really, added to what had been a modest thing and made it something that had no business existing this far north.
The gesture had said everything that a Stark man could not put into plain words , I know what I asked you to leave behind. I cannot give it back. But I can give you this.
The air inside was warm and close, thick with damp earth and the faint sweetness of things that should not have been blooming in winter.
Winter roses in pale blue and white. Fireplums. The hardy Dornish moss your mother had been coaxing along the base of the far wall for three years with the patient determination of a woman who had learned that some things simply required more time than felt reasonable.
You walked between the rows without purpose, your fingers trailing along the petals of things that were soft and alive.
You breathed.
The garden helped.
It always had.
You did not hear the footsteps until they stopped.
You turned, expecting a servant or your mother but-
It was Maekar.
He stood near the entrance with his arms crossed and his expression set in its default configuration. Closed, flat, faintly displeased with the general situation.
He looked profoundly out of place among the roses. Like a sword left in a solar.
"This is a foolish place to be alone," he said.
"I am not alone now, am I," you said, and turned back to the winter roses.
He made a sound that communicated his feelings about that response with considerable economy and moved further into the garden, his boots quiet on the damp stone path.
"The castle is full of men," he said. "Ours and yours. Ears everywhere. You walk out of a hall in the middle of a supper and every servant between here and the kitchens has an opinion about why."
"I am aware," you said. "I live here."
"Then you should know better than to give them something to whisper about."
You turned to face him.
"And you, my prince?" Your voice came out even, which you were grateful for. "Does following me into my mother's garden not give them something to whisper about as well?"
He looked at you.
For a moment the room held its breath, the humid air between you going very still, and you thought he would say something sharp and final and leave, the way he seemed to prefer doing things.
Instead, he looked away.
His gaze moved to the Dornish moss along the base of the wall, and something shifted in his face.
"My mother has a garden like this," he said. Quietly. The anger entirely absent from his voice, leaving something underneath it that sounded considerably more human.
"In King's Landing. Smaller. She tends it herself." A pause. "She says it is the only thing that keeps her from forgetting what home is like."
You said nothing.
He glanced back at you, and the defensiveness returned to his eyes almost immediately, as though he had heard himself and was already regretting the openness of it.
"You Starks are not the only ones who are attached to their lands," he said. Gruff. Preemptive.
"I know," you said.
He looked at you.
"My brother is good at this," he said, after a moment. His jaw tightened slightly. "The words. The warmth. He knows how to be in a room with people and make them feel, whatever it is they need to feel." Something moved briefly behind his violet eyes.
"I do not know how to do that. I have never known how."
"No," you agreed. "You do not."
He made a short, rough sound, "At least you are honest."
"I was raised to be."
He looked at you for a long moment.
"I will not pretend this is what I wanted," he said. The words came out without decoration, without apology. Plain as stone.
"This arrangement. Any of it." A pause. "But it has been decided, and I do not go back on things that have been decided." His eyes held yours steadily.
"I will give you my name. I will defend it. I will give you sons and stand with you and honor what my father signed."
The humid air between you was very still.
"But I will not love you." He said it the way he said everything, directly, without flinching from it, as though softening it would be a greater unkindness than the words themselves.
"My brother can give you that. I will give you what I have. It will have to be enough."
You looked at him.
And then you stepped forward.
Closing the distance between you with a deliberateness that made something shift almost imperceptibly in his expression, the absolute certainty of him faltering for just a fraction of a second, there and gone so fast you might have imagined it.
You did not imagine it.
You were close enough now to feel the warmth radiating from him, that unreasonable, elemental heat that had no business existing in a northern winter. Close enough that you had to tilt your head up to hold his gaze.
Your eyes moved over his face slowly. Taking their time. His jaw, sharp and set. The pitted marks the pox had left against his skin. The violet eyes that had gone very, very still.
Then your gaze dropped.
To his mouth, that hard, uncompromising line that had done nothing but frown and snarl and say blunt, graceless things since the moment he had ridden through the gates.
You looked at it anyway.
Slowly.
And then you looked back up.
Something had changed in his eyes. The recalculation happening behind them was visible now, no longer subtle, the confidence of him not broken but genuinely, unexpectedly interrupted.
His breath had slowed.
You were close enough to feel it against your lips.
You spoke at barely a whisper, your voice low, only for him, only for the warm close air between you.
"My mother hated this place when she first came here. And my father, they could not be in the same room without the air going sharp between them. She promised herself she would never love a man like him. His nature too hard, too cold, too entirely unlike anything she had ever wanted."
You did not step back.
"Now see where they landed, my prince." Your eyes held his, steady and entirely unafraid. "Four children. And a love so complete and so consuming that not one other woman has ever occupied a single corner of my father's gaze. What began as indifference became something neither of them planned for and neither of them has ever recovered from."
You let that sit between you, in the warm air of the garden, in the space that was almost nothing and felt like considerably more.
Then, you stepped back.
"So your words mean very little to me." You turned back to the winter roses, your fingers finding a pale blue petal with perfect calm.
"I imagine your brother will do just fine."
Behind you, Maekar said nothing.
But you heard his breath.
And it was not entirely steady.
Then he abruptly left and you smirked to yourself, undenaibly the wolf brought the great dragon down.
The sharp cold of the afternoon had settled over Winterfell by the time you found yourself moving again.
After the garden, the princes had been shown to their chambers. Whether the princes had sought out Rickon afterward you did not know. You had not asked. You had gone to the kitchens instead, retrieved the venison you had abandoned at supper, wrapped it in cloth, and carried it to the godswood because the godswood was the only place in Winterfell that had never once asked anything of you.
The trees were very still.
A lone raven watched you from the branches of the heart tree.
"Sȳndor."
Nothing.
You remembered the way he had melted back into the shadows during the princes' arrival. Further and further until the darkness had simply swallowed him whole. You did not blame him. You envied him, if anything. The ability to simply disappear when the world became too much, to press yourself into the dark wait until it was over.
You sat down against the heart tree with your venison and your thoughts and the raven watching you from above.
Then you felt it. Another presence. Behind you.
You turned.
Baelor stood at the edge of the godswood, his hands loose at his sides, his bearing straight and easy all at once in the way that seemed entirely natural to him, as though his body had never learned the difference between effort and rest.
He had changed his coat, longer now, heavier, dark wool with the three-headed dragon worked along the sleeves in red thread so fine and clean it could only have come from one source.
Your mother's stitching. Unmistakably.
You made a note to have words with her about that.
"May I?" He gestured to the space beside you, his eyes moving briefly to the venison in your hands without a flicker of comment.
You hesitated for only a moment, thinking of Sȳndor somewhere in the trees, thinking of amber eyes watching from the dark and then moved over.
He settled beside you. Not too close. Close enough. He looked at the heart tree the way people looked at things they were trying to understand rather than simply observe, with patience and genuine attention.
The silence between you was not uncomfortable.
You were aware of your own nervousness in a way you could not entirely account for, your hands too deliberate around the cloth in your lap, your eyes fixed on the carved face of the heart tree.
"The Children of the Forest," Baelor said, after a while, his voice quiet and unhurried, shaped for the particular stillness of the place. "They must have known something we did not. These trees are a testament to that. To something that has outlasted everything that tried to replace it."
"They are," you said. You looked at the red sap trailing down the pale bark, slow and dark and endless. "I will miss them. When we marry in spring and I ride south. I will miss them more than almost anything else."
The melancholy of it surprised you with its weight.
You felt his gaze move to your face.
You did not look up.
"It is a shame," he said, carefully, "that so many of them were cut. They are remarkable things. I find them beautiful, in a way I did not expect to."
A short sound left you before you could stop it. Not quite a laugh. Not quite not one either.
"As if," you said, under your breath.
A pause.
"I beg your pardon?" There was something in his voice. The faint, warm shape of amusement carefully contained.
You looked up at him then, finally, with the directness of a woman who had decided she had nothing left to lose by it.
"You are being kind," you said. "You do not have to be kind, my prince. Not here."
He looked at you.
"I am not being kind," he said. "I am being honest." A beat. "There is a difference. I would have thought a Stark would know it."
The raven shifted on its branch above you.
Baelor's head snapped up.
The movement was so sudden, so entirely unlike the composed prince who had sat down beside you, that you looked up too and found the raven looking at Baelor back.
Baelor stared back at it with an intensity you had not seen on him before.
"My prince." You touched his arm without thinking. "Are you alright?"
He blinked.
The raven lifted from the branch in one smooth, silent motion and was gone between the trees, black against the pale sky, there and then not there.
Baelor watched the place where it had been for a moment. Then his composure returned.
"Forgive me," he said. "Yes. I am fine."
You looked at him a moment longer than you should have, at the way the strange intensity had passed off him as quickly as it had come, at the composure folding neatly back into place, like a man closing a door on a room he had not meant for you to see.
You did not ask. Some doors were not yours to open yet.
And then a shadow fell over both of you
Large. Sudden. Entirely without warning.
You looked up.
Sȳndor stood at the edge of the clearing, his amber eyes moving between you and Baelor with the slow, deliberate attention of an animal conducting a very thorough assessment.
His dark fur was damp from the trees. He was enormous in the grey afternoon light, which you had always known and which apparently landed differently when viewed from the perspective of a southern prince encountering him for the first time at close range.
To his considerable credit, he had not moved. He sat very still, his eyes on Sȳndor with an attention that was neither fear nor performance.
Then he slowly rose to his feet.
He offered you his hand as he did, without looking away from Sȳndor, and you took it and let him pull you up beside him.
"Sȳndor, I presume," he said. Not a question. Almost warm.
"Yes, my lord, please, he does not know you, he—"
He was already moving.
Slowly, with the calmness of someone who had decided that stillness was the right language for this conversation and had committed to it entirely.
You pressed your hand to your mouth and did not breathe.
Baelor stopped before Sȳndor, who had not moved, who was watching the approaching prince with those amber eyes and then, without hesitation, went to one knee.
"Ñuha geptot jēdari ao, zȳhys perzys se ñuha dōre, yne ōdrikagon, kostōba lōtinti hen hēdrȳ."
I bow before you, your fire and my respect. Let me approach, great wolf of the North.
The godswood was very still.
Sȳndor looked at him.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The two of them simply regarded each other in the grey afternoon light, the prince on one knee and the direwolf sitting like something carved and then Sȳndor leaned forward and pressed his great head slowly, into Baelor's outstretched hand.
You stared.
Baelor's fingers moved through the dark fur with the ease of a man who had been granted something and understood the weight of it.
You had never seen Sȳndor do that. Not with anyone he had not known for years. Not without being asked. Not like that, that particular quality of willingness and entirely chosen.
"How," you said.
Baelor looked up at you, his mismatched eyes bright in the pale winter light, and for the first time since he had ridden through Winterfell's gates the composure was entirely gone, replaced by something unguarded and genuine and startlingly young.
He was smiling.
"I did not know if it would," he said, his hand still moving slowly through Sȳndor's fur. "But I thought it was worth attempting, if I ever had the chance."
You stared at him. "You thought about it?"
"At some length, yes." He glanced up at you. "My brother and I discussed it, actually. What one does upon meeting a direwolf. Whether to stand or kneel. Whether to reach out or wait. Whether speaking would help or simply alarm him." A pause. "We had rather different opinions on the approach."
You could only imagine.
They talked about him. Both of them, somewhere on the long road north, debating the correct protocol for meeting your wolf. The image of it, Maekar scowling into the wind, Baelor thoughtful, the two of them arguing about Sȳndor while three hundred miles of winter road passed beneath their horses, sat somewhere in your chest in a way you did not entirely know what to do with.
Baelor looked at Sȳndor for one last moment, something quiet and genuine in his expression, and then rose to his feet.
"I will leave you two." He inclined his head to you, and then, just slightly, to Sȳndor. "You are in excellent company."
And then he turned and walked back through the godswood, his dark coat moving through the pale birches until the trees swallowed him and the sound of his footsteps faded into the quiet.
You stood in the stillness he left behind.
Sȳndor watched the place where Baelor had disappeared for a long moment, his amber eyes tracking the last trace of him with that slow, attention he gave to things he had not yet finished deciding about.
Then he turned to you.
You looked at him.
He looked at you.
"Don't," you said.
He blinked slowly.
You scratched behind his ears with both hands, and he pressed into it.
"Good boy," you muttered.
Next Chapter: I have to say, this is probably my favorite chapter so far. I had so much fun writing it. I hope you enjoy it! ❤︎
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