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Ormund was complaining at length, and with considerable eloquence, about the butter in which the carrots had been cooked. Quite intolerably rancid, he said.
Daeron was nodding at him with a blank, careful face, but his plate was empty, while Gwayne ignored his cousin, drinking and eating with the appetite of a man who had spent months living on roots and rotten fruit and the occasional stringy rabbit, more bone than meat.
When a servant opened the door, a gust of wind entered with him.
“My lord, a message.”
The parchment was secured with a disc of plain brown wax, cracked in its journey, and there was no seal that Gwayne could distinguish from where he sat, no sigil, no coloured ribbon, only a message passed from hand to hand until some exhausted raven had carried it to Tumbleton.
Ormund fastidiously wiped his greasy hands with a napkin, finger by finger, while the servant just stood there, with an arm extended, staring at the wall; Gwayne and Daeron shared a brief, silent look.
Had they been in Oldtown, and not in the middle of a fucking war, and Daeron had not been declared the bloody King and Gwayne had not seen what he had seen, he might have made a joke, and perhaps even Ormund might have begrudgingly smiled, and Daeron would have been free to laugh.
But those days were long gone, and Gwayne still struggled to reconcile himself to the knowledge that it had been true happiness, and they had not understood it then, and now, it would never come again. Ravens now brought word of villages destroyed by dragons, princes slain, and conspiracies uncovered; dark wings, dark words.
Ormund read in silence, and for several moments, the chamber quivered with the tension of held breath; then he placed the parchment beside his plate.
“Cole and his meagre host are dead, ambushed by Tully men and Dustin’s greybeards,” Ormund said, with the indifference of someone who knew that whatever was written there had already occurred and was to be expected, and could not be altered by courage, horses, dragons, gold or the cunning of men sitting safely at supper. “Just as you so helpfully predicted.” He cast Gwayne a faintly mocking glance as he sipped his flavoured water. “I suppose I should thank you for bringing a dozen men here instead of sitting there, waiting for that shameful slaughter,” Ormund conceded, with what he surely considered the height of kindness.
Daeron’s eyes were huge, the practised vacancy in his gaze revealing the frightened boy beneath the Prince - the King.
Gwayne might have wept, Ormund be damned, had he any tears left. He had shed them all in the Riverlands and on the forced march from Stoney Sept to Tumbleton. Tears for Cole and for their army, for men turned into arithmetic or pieces upon Ormund’s board: an army became a host, a host a remnant, and a remnant a number scratched upon parchment. Somewhere between the battlefield and the raven’s leg, names disappeared first, then faces, then all that those men had loved.
Ormund snorted, shaking his head. “A woman killed Cole, according to this, a Blackwood, with three arrows. One nasty nest of savages, if you ask me…”
Gwayne thought of Criston as he had last seen him, standing at the river with mud to his knees and fever-bright purpose in his eyes. Clear-eyed, unbent, glorious in battle, Criston had said to him, proud and broken.
Ormund resumed his complaints as soon as the lemon pie was served; the destruction of Cole’s host was inconvenient, not because of the small number of men, but mostly because the Riverlords and the Winter Wolves would now hasten their march south, which required the repositioning of their scouts and made securing their remaining alliances more pressing still.
He spoke of Criston as one might speak of a solid sword, broken at an unfortunate moment, costly to replace.
Daeron said nothing, just offering a small, sad smile to Gwayne.
Gwayne tried and failed to smile back and excused himself shortly after; as he was leaving the room, he could hear, loudly enough to carry, Ormund saying: “Never mind your uncle, he must be sad because he lost some close comrade in arms, very close - if you take my meaning…”
*
Gwayne had not meant to go to Cole’s tent that night, or at least that was the tired lie he told himself afterwards.
The air after Rook’s Rest smelled of wet ash and cooked meat, and while no rain had fallen, all the world seemed damp. Perhaps it was from all the tears of the dying, who called for their mothers, their wives, their children, the Gods, or from the living, who stared at the scorched earth as if it were the Seven Hells.
Or perhaps it was only from Gwayne’s wet face. Smoke clung low to the earth, grey tendrils rising up like ashy fingers, creeping inside mouths and nostrils and lungs and creases of clothing. Men coughed black into scraps of linen, wandering like ghosts in the camp; those who could still scream had been carried away to be tended by the maesters, and those who could not had been left behind.
Gwayne doubted that smell would ever leave him, even if the Gods allowed him to breathe fresh air again, because it had seeped in past cloth and skin, into some hidden chamber of the mind where smoke would always mean burning men and the cry of a horse would always become beasts dancing in the sky and soldiers burning like straw men.
Gwayne had thrown up twice, and his throat felt burned; the thought of speaking seemed impossible; in any case, what could there possibly be to say.
Criston sat alone in his tent, wearing a linen shirt stained grey, armour lying neglected near the entrance. Dark blood had dried across one cheek, though Gwayne did not believe it belonged to him.
“The men are asking whether we march at dawn,” Gwayne said. “My Lord,” he added, as an afterthought; titles seemed nothing in front of the Stranger pointing his black fingers at them, one by one.
Cole looked towards him slowly, but it was as if he was staring at Gwayne from afar.
Outside, a horse shrieked in pain, once, and Gwayne let the tent flap fall closed. Cole looked as Gwayne felt, as though the world had revealed its true shape to him and he despised himself for ever believing it otherwise; they were now forever separated from the rest, from men and women who did not know there was no dishonour in fear, and anyone who claimed otherwise had never stood in a cavalry charge or a shield wall, or watched helplessly as burning death burst from the sky.
“We should… eat and sleep,” Gwayne said. Eat, sleep, shit, kill and survive; war turned them into unfeeling beasts on the battlefield, or maybe simply revealed humankind’s true nature beyond the pretence of laws and courtesy.
What is a knight, if not a bloodthirsty animal dressed in steel and wrapped in velvet cloaks, Gwayne had thought as soon as the battle started, as he tasted iron in his mouth and he cut down men in the throes of fear and a strange kind of drunkenness. Now, though, bruised and bleeding and still scared, Gwayne understood that he must cling to every shard of compassion and kindness and love left in his heart, or he would be lost.
He no longer possessed the luxury of clean hands; he had killed and killed and killed until his arm was his sword and his sword was himself. But within himself, he had to retain the knowledge that blood ought to weigh something, and he refused to grow accustomed to its warm spill.
Cole did not answer. He sat very still upon the ground, bloody and filthy, handsome and remote as the marble statue of the Warrior in the Starry Sept.
But Cole was a man, not a god, and their commander, their Hand, the knight who dragged them to Rook’s Rest; for all his pride, Gwayne had few reservations about admitting he was the more seasoned soldier of the two, and the one who must lead.
So Gwayne crossed the tent and grabbed Cole’s shoulder with unsteady hands. “My Lord?” he said, the concern clear in his voice. Cole made a low, distracted sound, and Gwayne’s heart suddenly filled with pity, for him, for himself, for the King, burned and half-dead, for their dead enemies, even. In battle, they were all the same, King and smallfolk, Lords and lowborns.
His fingers moved, without Gwayne wanting it - or at least that was what he would tell himself later, in disgrace and embarrassment - from shoulder to neck, from leather to skin, from a grasp to a caress.
Criston’s head snapped up as if the touch burned him, or offended him, or both. Gwayne recoiled from his hard stare, suddenly focused and knowing, the sinking weight of shame and the horror at having been seen dropping into his stomach like a stone violently thrown by a careless hand.
“I apologise,” Gwayne started. He was always so careful, excellent at reading which knights, lords, or squires might be like him, but he could not be careful this time; perhaps watching thousands die had left him with the base desire to prove that his own body remained alive. Perhaps Criston had always been too handsome and fear had made Gwayne reckless enough to acknowledge it. “I do not know -”
“Leave me, ser Gwayne,” Cole said, his voice steady and clear, his eyes dark, unreadable pools. “Find some other soldier who is desperate enough to crave this kind of attention. You should not have trouble finding one. We leave tomorrow for King’s Landing.”
Gwayne left as if the tent was on fire, his face still wet, his heart still heavy, unsteady on his legs. Outside, he took a breath of smoky, ashy air, trying to remind himself that the pain in his shoulder, where he had taken a hard blow, the memory of the dead, lying as the crows pecked at their eyes and flies buzzed around, and even the small, abject misery of rejection meant that he was still alive, and he still felt, and he still was a man.
*
At Harrenhal, there had been a bed, a true bed, vast and ancient, with carved posts blackened by smoke and a feather mattress that smelled faintly of mildew; some long-dead Strong had commissioned scenes of the Seven carved along the headboard.
The Maiden looked down demurely while Criston pushed his linen shirt from his shoulders, and Gwayne allowed himself a long, good look at his battle-scarred body, his strong arms, the shape of his hardness beneath the breeches.
“The Gods might disapprove,” Gwayne said, tugging at his doublet.
Criston merely grunted. “The Gods do not care about us.”
He spoke the words with bleak relief: if the Gods truly did not care, then nothing was sacred, and if nothing was sacred, then nothing could be profaned, and no sin needed be carried beyond the grave.
This kind of blasphemy was unsettling to Gwayne, born and raised in Oldtown, under the shade of the Faith, but this was Harrenhal, and they had a bed. They had learned one another by then, and though Criston would have denied that there was anything to learn, they had coupled in tents, among trees and ruins, once inside a half-collapsed sept and once against the wall of an abandoned mill while rain ran through the broken roof.
Always quickly, cloaked in the shadow of secrecy and shame, although many men of their army did the same with little concealment, always dressed enough to separate at the first sound, almost never kissing, because the unspoken agreement was that this thing was appetite, and men had needs in wartime, no more meaningful than hunger or thirst, no more intimate than sharing a wineskin or dressing each other’s wounds.
War made men generous with excuses: they mistook longing for hunger, tenderness quickly became weakness, and love was degraded to the desperation of bodies that knew they might be cold by morning.
Gwayne sank into the mattress as Criston stripped him bare; the air was cold but Criston’s hands were always warm, even if not gentle. Firelight moved across Criston’s face, catching the line of his nose, the curve of his lips, the scar at his temple which Gwayne had once dared to brush.
Criston looked younger in half-darkness, less armoured by his bleak fatalism, as Gwayne reached for the ties of his breeches. Criston caught his hand.
“You often prevent me from touching you,” Gwayne said. He did not say please. He did not say I have never seen you bare. He did not say we might never lie in a bed again.
Criston released him at once. “You are touching me now. Do not begin whatever conversation you have rehearsed.”
Criston moved away, sitting on his knees, and Gwayne sat up, so that they were face to face, one frowning and one flushed, one half-dressed and the other naked and vulnerable.
There were bruises along Criston’s ribs, yellowing at the edges, and a cut crossed his left shoulder where an arrow had grazed him. Gwayne wanted to touch both but restrained himself.
“I have never asked you about women,” Gwayne said. “Or men.”
Criston looked towards the fire. “Then keep it so, ser.”
“I know of one, naturally.”
Criston’s head turned, and Gwayne found himself thrown back against the mattress, a dull pain in his chest where Criston had pushed him, just where a dark bruise spread out like a flower on his collarbone.
Criston’s chest rose and fell, and Gwayne studied him.
“Was she the only one?” Gwayne asked, but he knew the answer already. People talked a lot in King’s Landing, and gossip seemed to be a currency more liberally spent than coin.
Silence.
“I would take that as a no. How about men?” Seven hells. Perhaps it was not women at all, perhaps this handsome bastard only fucked queens.
Criston climbed over him, one knee forcing Gwayne’s thighs apart.
“Do you want to be the first?” Criston asked. “A conquest? A barely concealed secret you can parade before your friends in Oldtown?”
At that, all of Gwayne’s amusement vanished. “No. I could never make you into a jest, and if you never wished to touch me again, I would still value your friendship and counsel. I have not yet surrendered every claim to honour and principle.” Like you, went unsaid but not unheard between them.
“A valiant, vain effort.” Criston’s grip tightened around his wrists. Gwayne felt the strength in him, the anger, and something else, too, that he could not name. Felt, too, the hard press of Criston’s prick against his thigh. “And yet, you come to my bed.”
“I come because I want you,” Gwayne said. “I am not fool enough to believe you want me in quite the same way.”
Criston’s eyes were very dark, bright in the dim fireplace light, and Gwayne raised his head until their mouths were close. Criston kissed him.
A bruising, biting kiss, but Gwayne understood it by then: viciousness was the safest language Criston possessed, perhaps the only one he could speak, one that demanded nothing after the moment had ended.
Gwayne let him speak it, for a time, at least.
Then he twisted one wrist free, caught Criston by the hair, and pushed against his shoulder; for one long instant, Criston resisted.
Then he moved, allowing Gwayne to rise and reverse their positions. Criston lay beneath him, staring up in surprise.
“I want you, not merely whatever you choose to do to me - quickly and as though it were a punishment.” Gwayne lowered his hand and closed it around Criston through his breeches, and Criston’s breath caught.
“That is…” Gwayne murmured. The best feeling. The worst feeling. “Good.”
“Do not speak to me as though—”
“As though you are in my bed, hard and willing? I am tired of pretending you hate this.” Gwayne stroked him slowly through the cloth.
Criston’s head sank back into the pillows, and the sight went through Gwayne like wine, leaving him drunk on lust, pity, tenderness, and something he could not name, as he untied the breeches and freed him. Gwayne bent and pressed his mouth to him, hard and hot and wet, as Criston’s hand closed convulsively in his hair.
Gwayne had done this for other men and enjoyed it, although it had been a long time, and he had always thought that there was something ridiculous and foolish in the lovely act of fucking, in the awkward slide of skin on skin, in the exchange of spit and fluids, in the unknowable paths that pleasure took in another’s body.
There was nothing ridiculous or foolish about Criston, his thighs tense and strong beneath Gwayne’s hands, the sounds escaping his lips quiet, dragged out of him one by one, and each seemed to wreck him more than the last.
Gwayne liked those sounds and he liked Criston stripped of command, his body betraying every truth his words refused to admit.
When Criston came, it was with a grunt, and Gwayne swallowed.
When Gwayne lifted his head, wiping his mouth, Criston just stared at him, no harsh comment, no order to leave, no hasty rearranging of clothes.
Criston caught him by the shoulder and drew him upwards, their kiss tasting of sweat and seed, and Gwayne felt something within him split open, like a wound, or like hope.
Criston rolled him onto his back and clumsily kissed his way down Gwayne’s body; his hand settled on Gwayne’s hip, holding him still, and when that lovely mouth closed around him, Gwayne had to close his eyes and put his palm against his mouth, because the Maiden watched from the headboard, and the Father, the Mother, the Smith and the Warrior watched too. The Stranger never lost sight of them.
Gods be witness, perhaps just this once, it was not done in shame, or out of spite, or in despair and loneliness; for Gwayne, at least.
Gwayne came into Criston’s mouth and afterwards, they lay naked in the ancient bed.
That was new as well, because Criston usually dressed before Gwayne’s breathing had even slowed, but that night he remained upon his back, one forearm across his eyes, their shoulders touching.
Gwayne turned his head to look at him.
“Do not look at me as if-” Criston said. He did not need to finish the sentence.
Gwayne flushed beneath the cover of darkness, and his hand moved beneath the coverlet, his fingers finding Criston’s wrist and resting there lightly, barely the idea of a touch, never too much, never too tender, directly over his pulse.
As if.
*
They were still several days’ march from Harrenhal when the rapist was hanged at noon, after Cole had told Gwayne to hang him if he wished.
The words had been spoken with the brisk indifference with which one speaks of unimportant matters, his attention fixed upon maps and the absence of Vhagar in the sky. Doom surrounded them, after all, and they would all become beasts before the end, so the end had better come soon. Or so Cole said, but Gwayne had replied that men became beasts only when other men allowed it; he did not know whether he still believed it or only, desperately, wanted to believe it.
But at dawn, the sentence had been proclaimed outside Gwayne’s tent and the soldier was dragged before the assembled host. There he raged, then wept, then denied the charge, claiming that the woman had invited him, then declaring that there had been no woman at all, and finally insisting that other soldiers had committed worse and darker deeds.
Criston listened at first, but when the man began to beg, he ordered the rope drawn tight, and Gwayne watched the soldier’s boots kick above the mud; he had seen better men suffer worse deaths.
This did not repair what had been done, of course; the woman would carry it whether the man breathed or not, Gwayne knew that.
Justice was not a maester’s salve to be spread over a wound until the skin healed, but still, a line had been drawn, and for that day, at least, they were not beasts yet.
Gwayne was under no illusion that one hanging made them righteous, not any more than one act of mercy could cleanse a war, or their conscience, and yet such boundaries mattered because they could be crossed; without them, only a slow, inevitable surrender to chaos and beastliness awaited them.
Cole came to Gwayne’s tent that night, something he had never done before, and found Gwayne sitting upon his pallet, polishing a dagger that did not need polishing.
“He is dead,” Cole said, and this was unusual as well; he was not one for small talk, and he had seen Gwayne at the hanging.
“I witnessed it,” Gwayne answered. “Do you need my gratitude? For wanting the men to see that such acts could not be borne?”
Gwayne set down the dagger.
Cole remained near the entrance. “No,” he said. “It was necessary.”
Gwayne studied him. “So you have come to tell me that I was right, but cannot bring yourself to speak the words? The effort would kill you, I suppose.”
Cole looked away, and that was enough of an answer, but he crossed the tent and sat down beside Gwayne in silence, his gaze fixed upon the ground. That was more than strange; when Cole wanted to fuck he usually did not talk first, just shoved Gwayne somewhere uncomfortable, on the hard ground or against a tree, and touched him.
But now they just sat in what Gwayne imagined to be a companionable silence, until Cole raised a tentative hand and brushed Gwayne’s face, cheek to jaw, as though his hands had grown so accustomed to killing and wounding that they had forgotten how to do anything else. Or perhaps Criston had reserved all his gentleness for Alicent.
Gwayne stopped breathing as Criston nudged his jaw towards him and leaned in. They had kissed only twice before, and Gwayne had initiated it both times; the first time they fucked, Cole had tolerated a brief press of their mouths, but the second time, he had turned his face away, and Gwayne had not attempted it again.
Now Cole kissed him on the lips, once, a small, uncertain peck, and twice, slow, mouth slightly open; it would have been almost sweet, if sweetness had a place in that tent and in war.
By the third kiss, they had returned to more familiar ground.
Gwayne dropped the dagger and drew Criston between his knees, sliding his hands beneath Criston’s cloak, around his waist. Criston leaned into him, biting his lips and licking into his mouth.
Neither spoke, though Gwayne thought his heartbeat was loud enough to be heard in the whole camp; but outside, the army drank and diced and sang filthy songs. Within the tent, Criston traced the clothed outline of Gwayne’s hardness with his thumb.
Afterwards, they lay down fully clothed upon the narrow pallet, Criston curled behind him, his breath warming the back of Gwayne’s neck.
After enduring so much violence, the body could too easily mistake any touch not meant to hurt for love. Or perhaps love was simpler than Gwayne thought: an arm that held, and breath that proved someone remained alive behind him.
Gwayne stayed awake for a long while, listening to Criston’s deep, regular breathing, and understood with alarming clarity that the danger had never been the fucking, or Criston saving his life, or Criston simply being handsome and unattainable. It was their tentative companionship and the slow, begrudging growth of trust and respect between them; it was one thing to be used, or even desired, but being treated gently was another beast entirely.
*
The Blackwater Rush lay somewhere beyond the trees, its dark waters deep and impassable; their boots and bones had been wet for three days. They were creatures born from mud and rain and shaped in the form of men; soldiers had begun to desert long ago, vanishing alone or in pairs despite the danger of enemies waiting in every wood like vengeful spirits.
Criston sat outside the crumbling shack in which they had taken shelter, though Gwayne doubted that something without a roof and with only three walls still standing could properly be called shelter.
Gwayne stood over him. “Come to Tumbleton,” he said, again, not for the first time, but probably the last, the edge of urgency and despair clear in his broken voice. “This is madness.”
No answer.
“Listen to me: we cannot cross, we cannot outrun them, and we have lost half the horses and a third of the men. You will lose more because many will leave with me.”
Criston looked up at him, his dark eyes empty, his usually handsome face devoid of any expression, an unfeeling statue more than a man. “We will build rafts.”
Gwayne wanted to grab him by the shoulders and force some sense into him, but he only knelt in front of him. He registered the pain in his back and legs only distantly. What was pain when the body remembered nothing else? And if pain was proof of life, what was its absence? No. His thoughts must not follow that dark and empty road.
Criston had travelled too far down it already, and if Gwayne tried to catch him now, he might lose the way back himself. Criston had made a philosophy of death because death required only one final moment of courage, but living demanded much more: waking each morning, remembering what he had done, and choosing to keep breathing in spite of it.
“Rafts… and with what?”
Criston touched the blade lying beside him. “We have swords and axes.”
Gwayne closed his eyes and opened them again; it was dark either way. “We have exhausted men who can scarcely lift them. Come to Tumbleton, and we shall regroup there.” Gwayne forced himself onward. “My cousin Ormund would surely find some office for you. You could train Daeron’s men, for one, or even Daeron himself. And after, you could serve no one at all; the Reach is not so impoverished that we cannot support one particularly disagreeable knight.”
Criston said nothing, as if Gwayne were speaking of unheard-of matters in an unknown language.
“You would have rooms in the Hightower,” Gwayne continued, as if he was telling a dream he had and might speak it into existence with words only. “Or your own household, should you wish for it; there is good hunting near the Honeywine, and I assure you, the city is less pious than its reputation.” And I would be there, he did not add, nor we might hunt and joust and I would be content with it, even if you never so much as touch my hand by accident again.
“A fair dream, my friend,” Criston replied, voice flat and remote. “But I dream no more. I will not go to Oldtown, or Tumbleton, or anywhere beyond this war and my death.”
Gwayne’s mouth had gone dry. “You might consider it before refusing.”
“But I have considered it,” Criston said. “Even before Harrenhal.”
Gwayne leaned his aching back on the fallen trunk opposite him; soft rain ticked against the leaves, like the tears he could not - would not - shed. Criston had known Gwayne would ask and had already decided.
Criston looked towards the darkened trees. “I have served Kings, Princes and Queens.”
Gwayne stared at his own dirty hands; he did not want to hear about Criston serving Queens. He had always known that Criston loved Alicent and not him, and if she were the one begging him to come to Tumbleton, he would already be marching, but the knowledge didn’t ease the bitter pain in his wounded heart.
“I have been a shield, a sword, an excuse, even. I have killed at command and called it duty, and I have killed out of rage and pain and called it madness. I am a broken vow wrapped in a dirty cloak.”
There was a horrible vanity in self-loathing, Gwayne thought: Criston gathered every sin he had committed and painted them into destiny and fate and injustice. A monster could exist and need not be forgiven, nor should he be expected to change.
A man, however. “You are more than that,” Gwayne said, and the words were glass drawn out from his throat. To me, he could not say.
“So I could sit at your table, sleep in your bed and be grateful for whatever scraps of honour a Hightower chooses to restore to me?”
Criston lowered his eyes. For one brief and pathetic moment, Gwayne believed he might accept after all.
Then Criston said, “I do not want it.”
From inside the broken walls came the sound of a man coughing. Gwayne nodded once and then stood. “Very well, it is farewell, then; we leave at the first light of dawn.”
But Criston caught his wrist, and Gwayne looked down at the hand and then at him.
“Stay here with me tonight, then,” Criston said.
It was so selfish that Gwayne almost admired it.
“You refuse the life I could offer you, but would have another hour of - of what? My body?” Gwayne doubted they could do anything at all, in the state they were in. “My company?” The warm knowledge of being loved?
Criston released him. “Why should this surprise you? You have named me broken and dishonourable often enough.”
Gwayne ought to have walked away, but instead he sat down again; sometimes love felt like weakness, only with a prettier name.
There was no pallet, so they both spread their cloaks over the ground, the fabric now grey and brown, and lay upon it. At some point, during the night, their hands touched, and when Criston did not even pretend to be asleep as he usually did, Gwayne laced their fingers together.
Disdain or mockery would have been easier to endure than this. On the road to Tumbleton, Gwayne might have tricked himself into believing that their liaison had been all it had ever appeared to be: a sad and shameful thing born of despair and loneliness and killed at war.
Instead, Criston held his hand, and at some point, they both turned towards each other and kissed, and when Gwayne felt tears gather at the corners of his eyes and despised them and himself, Criston brushed one away with his thumb.
At first light, Gwayne rose and began fastening his cloak and his sword belt.
“You may be killed on the road,” Criston said, as he stood.
“Perhaps,” Gwayne conceded. “At least I would be fighting for my life and not for my death.”
Gwayne looked at him one last time. Perhaps he ought to have loved Criston more, enough to wish to share his death. Yet Criston needed only to love him a little, enough to wish to live with him—and he did not.
Criston remained standing against the dilapidated wall, in his stained cloak, beautiful and wretched and lost.
“Come to Tumbleton,” Gwayne pleaded, one final time. Love was such a humiliating thing, making beggars out of knights and lords.
But Criston shook his head, and Gwayne left.
*
The room assigned to Gwayne at Tumbleton had once belonged to Lord Footly’s eldest daughter; she had left behind a painted box full of lace ribbons, three devotional books, a stained mirror and a wooden comb. Maybe the lace ribbons placed on the dresser were some kind of idiotic joke from Ormund, actually, not that Gwayne cared.
The bed he was sitting on was disconcertingly soft, after months on the road, and hung with yellow curtains, and the man reflected in the mirror appeared clean and well-dressed, with no sign that he had been stabbed or shot three times in some distant field. Gwayne removed his sword belt, and placed the blade beside the bed, and a dagger under the pillow; after the attempt on Daeron and Ormund’s lives, that was how he slept, not that he slept much, probably not at all that night.
He thought he had grieved Criston already, during the travels to Tumbleton, the precautionary grief of a man who knew already what was about to pass, he had cried and called it rain or fatigue, and he had seethed with resentment at the thought that Criston would rather die than be with him, and lastly he had taken a miserable comfort in the well-worn lie that it had not been love, that it was just war, and men did and said and felt things that they would never have said, done, or felt in peacetime.
But then the morbid thought that Criston's body would still be there, without even the dignity of a burial or a funeral, came without warning. Perhaps the enemy had stripped him of his armour and leathers, his once white cloak trodden into the mud, perhaps crows had already pecked at his eyes.
War’s ultimate indignity: it did not merely kill, but turned men into things. Bodies to strip, cloaks to step on, carrion to be left beneath unfamiliar skies, boasts of someone else’s tale of victory.
Gwayne sat on the edge of the yellow bed, feather mattress soft and comfortable, head between his hands.
Gwayne had had lovers before Criston, though not as many as Ormund’s gossip would have had others believe. Brief encounters in tourney fields and inns, little affairs with men who had wives waiting elsewhere, or intended to acquire them as soon as their fathers negotiated a favourable match. When Gwayne was a boy, there had been a squire in Oldtown who trembled afterwards and begged him not to tell the septon. Then, a singer in Lannisport, and a Braavosi merchant who stole one of his rings and sent it back two years later without explanation.
Criston, the first time they touched, had taunted him, asking why a Hightower would willingly soil himself with a lowborn knight. None of them had loved him, or if they did, they had never said.
For years, Gwayne had convinced himself that he had loved each of them a little, but now it seemed disingenuous, too generous towards himself; he had desired them, liked them, enjoyed them and forgotten most of their faces.
Now he understood that it was merely one of the lies men told themselves to feel better: that every pleasure contained a sliver of affection, that every departure concealed a wound, that because one had offered something of the body, one must also have offered something of the soul.
Gwayne was not sure he even liked Criston, and what they shared could hardly be described as enjoyable. But he had desired not only the pleasure Criston’s body could offer, but Criston himself: to know him, to save him from himself, to keep him, and to take him home. He would not forget his face.
A soft knock came at Gwayne’s door, and a whisper: “Uncle?”
Gwayne wiped a hand over his face. “Yes, enter.”
Daeron opened the door and slipped inside; he had changed from the green velvet he wore at supper into a plain linen shirt and dark breeches, and held a cloth parcel in his hands.
“I went to the kitchens and got pies,” Daeron said. It had taken Gwayne two days to learn that ‘going to the kitchens’ after supper was code for ‘I sneaked in to see my dragon and brought back food from the kitchens for plausible deniability in case Ormund sees me around at night.’
“How are the kitchens?” Gwayne asked. He could go without seeing a dragon ever again, but his nephew had always been very fond of the beast.
Daeron closed the door. “Restless. Misses the sky.”
He moved to the yellow bed and sat down with a loud sigh.
“I am sorry about your friends.” Daeron said it with the kindness of a boy who had once lied and weathered Ormund’s anger to spare a servant girl the beating of her life after she forgot to clear away a dog’s shit. “But I am glad you left before they died,” he added, with the simple and devastating candour of children.
“Thank you,” Gwayne said, and he meant it.
Daeron shifted beside him. “I could order you to stay here,” he whispered.
Gwayne looked at his nephew; Daeron’s expression held the fragile, desperate resolve of a boy attempting to discover where power ended and love began.
Gwayne could have been stern, or cruel, and congratulated Daeron on how much like Ormund he would become if he did, but instead he said nothing, just smiled at him and waited. Daeron wanted him to stay because Gwayne was the parent he never had, because he loved him like a child loves his father.
“I would never, of course,” Daeron said, “but I wish you would not leave me.”
Gwayne had also asked Criston not to leave him, but could not force him either. Because Gwayne had loved him, and love never comes with chains.
He did not love all the men who had passed through his bed. He had loved his father and desperately wanted that love to be returned; he had loved and envied his sister. He had loved Criston Cole, despite the bodies Criston had left behind him, the queen he had disrespected, the girl whose suffering he had first dismissed as an inevitability of war.
“I know,” Gwayne reassured him. After a moment, Daeron rested his head against Gwayne’s shoulder, as he often did when he was a little child, and although he was now taller than Gwayne, and a king, to Gwayne he was still his sweet nephew, a boy too sensitive and kind to be a king.
Gwayne, slowly, put an arm around him, and they sat that way while dusk darkened Tumbleton’s roofs and the armies of the realm crept closer.
Gwayne thought of Criston’s rare tenderness. His hand over Gwayne’s wrist. His mouth against a tear. Their fingers laced together. Perhaps Criston had loved him, but more likely, he had not. Surely not the way Gwayne had loved him; he had never said anything, and Gwayne would not dishonour them both by inventing words for a dead man.
But tenderness should not be a rare and hard-earned prize, and love should not be alms one had to beg for. Perhaps love was nothing grander than refusing to pass one’s wounds onward.
Gwayne tightened his arm around Daeron, squeezed his shoulder and then said, “Let us eat those pies before they get cold.”