Chapter Text
Learn, good soul,
To think our former state a happy dream,
From which awaked, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim necessity, and he and I
Will keep a league till death.
- Richard II (Act V, Scene I)
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“Look, uncle — a raven!”
Gwayne lifts his eyes from the road to crane his neck toward the sky, slowing his horse to a trot.
Ravens are no special thing, especially along the river road, where open fields stretching away on either side of the Honeywine provide ideal grounds for the birds’ hunting and scavenging. But there is a note of curiosity in Daeron’s voice that makes his nephew’s interest become Gwayne’s own: so he looks up.
The raven is not wheeling overhead in the loose, circling patterns of the hunt, but flying apace, tracing a straight path to the northwest. A messenger bird, then.
“It must be bound for Highgarden, judging by its course.”
“I wonder what message it’s carrying,” muses Daeron. “Perhaps notice of the tourney. That’s only a fortnight hence, now.”
He sounds eager. Gwayne can hardly blame him: to celebrate the prince’s name day, Ormund had decreed that Oldtown would host a grand tournament to rival the one held by King Viserys twenty years gone. Ten-and-six already, thinks Gwayne, shaking his head. How can that be?
Naturally, the thing has been a subject of great fancy for Daeron since the planning of it began. Gwayne remembers the excitement of his first tournament well. It had been a nearly all-consuming thing — though he’d been riding in the lists, not sitting atop the dais as a guest of honor. But his nephew has a great love of all things chivalrous, and a romantic imagination besides. And this tournament is to be held in his own name. Gwayne has no doubt that he would be equally enthused to participate as a lowly farrier as he would a combatant.
Watching the raven’s progress, an ink-dark blot against the bright blue sky and billowing clouds, Gwayne hazards his own guess as to its message.
“Perhaps a declaration of undying love, from some hapless besotted maiden under thrall of the charms of Ser Leyland Tyrell.”
A frown furrows Daeron’s brow. “Why should that make her hapless? Ser Leyland is an honorable man, and handsome as well.”
Gwayne squints up at the sky. The raven has vanished from sight, dropped down below a crest of trees on the horizon. Gone to carry an unknown set of hopes, or fears, or aspirations to an unknown set of hands, to meet with an unknowable reception.
“Because Ser Leyland,” he says, still studying the horizon, “is not the type to entertain the affections of any maiden. His interests lie elsewhere, I fear.”
Daeron makes a startled sound, barely audible above the wind that whips down into the valley and blows their hair across their faces. It is as if he’s never heard such a thing suggested, although Gwayne knows he must have. The depravity of lust between man and man is one of Ormund’s favorite topics on which to sermonize, when something puts him in the mood.
Turning to his nephew with a wry look, Gwayne adds,
“And because we are all piteous creatures, in the talons of love.”
The boy looks for a moment like he wants to ask his uncle something more, but he does not. They ride on a little way in silence, with Daeron digesting Gwayne's words and Gwayne taking the lay of the land ahead.
Of late they have spent much time riding together in the woodlands along the river road, stopping occasionally to swim or to fish or simply to lie in the sun, their horses grazing a nearby patch of clover, and watch the ever-changing skies that pass over the Whispering Sound. These activities are, for the most part, tacitly forbidden to Daeron; swimming because it is dangerous, and fishing because it is messy, and tends to end in tracking home unpleasant odors. So they have become a clandestine indulgence, and the pleasure of thwarting Ormund’s authority in this small way is as sweet for Gwayne as it was for Daeron.
In his own childhood, acerbic and retiring by nature, and unwilling to use the power of his father’s position as Hand to entice or compel friendship from his peers, Gwayne had been unpopular with the other boys, noticed only by the girls and ladies of the court, with whom he’d had little interest in making common cause. Thus he had lacked co-conspirators with whom to enjoy such a rebellion, and any appeal there was in it vanished like a lost appetite.
Now, in Daeron, he finds a sense of making up for lost time.
This area is well-known to Gwayne, and he and Daeron have ridden this way often enough on the rare (and lately rarer) opportunities they’ve had to escape the press and bustle of the city together. It is not a dangerous stretch of road by any means, or else he would not have brought Daeron here. Yet even relaxed, Gwayne’s mind remains alert. He finds himself scanning both path and tree line for anything out of the ordinary, a habit that has followed him into civilian life from his position as captain of the City Watch.
Daeron, on the other hand, tends to be easily absorbed in his thoughts, as he seems to be presently. Gwayne finds himself glancing over now and again to study his nephew’s profile. The boy is the very picture of contemplation, eyes fixed but distant and mouth pursed in contemplation.
Good, Gwayne thinks, that he can forget to guard himself so completely in Gwayne’s presence — although less good if a highwayman were lurking in the bushes ahead. Perhaps Daeron trusts his knight uncle to be the equal of any threat they might encounter. Or perhaps he simple doesn’t consider such matters at all.
As a prince, Daeron is guarded at all times, by men far more decorated and experienced in battle than Gwayne, who is himself no knight bachelor. Daeron’s safety, like any of his other concerns, is managed for him by Ormund and does not require the boy to lift a finger or spare it a thought.
A bower as much as a stronghold, Gwayne thinks: one that in the long run will make him complacent and dependent. Though perhaps that is not entirely by accident.
It sits uneasy with Gwayne, the idea that Daeron should have no experience in combat, in real swordsmanship. For his own part, Gwayne would feel exposed without the knowledge that, armed, he can hold his own against most men, should it come to that. He wonders idly whether he should risk speaking to Ormund about finding a place for Daeron under him, with the Watch.
Up ahead lies a different decision to be made. The river winds away westward, and the road forks with it. One path, well-trodden, follows the water; the other leads toward the hilly eastern edge of the valley and a deep woodland.
“Which way?” asks Daeron, gently drawing back on the reins to bring his horse to a jog, looking to his uncle. Gwayne scans the landscape, considering.
“We’ve not yet hunted in this forest. Perhaps today is the day.”
They had not planned on a hunt, and were not equipped for stag or boar, or anything that would require cleaning on the spot. But each had brought his bow and a modest complement of arrows, which would do the job suitably for smaller quarry.
At the prospect of a hunt, Daeron nods eagerly, and his serious grey eyes light up with boyish excitement. As grand a playground as Oldtown must make for a young prince, it is still only one city out of a whole wide world. Gwayne knows that Daeron feels confined sometimes within its walls.
They have not made as broad a survey of the lands surrounding the city as Gwayne would have liked — as he would have done by now if Daeron were his own ward, or his son, and the decision were wholly in his hands. It would be good to change that.
Ormund would not like it, Gwayne well knows. The Lord of Oldtown is fussy, as he is with most things, about where Daeron is permitted to travel and with whom. He would perhaps be displeased to know that Gwayne had suggested they stray off the open and well-frequented road and into a deep dark wood, however acquainted with it Gwayne might be. Ormund perceives dangers to the young prince, real and imagined, everywhere. Everywhere, except within himself.
But Ormund is not here, and need not know.
“The forest then,” Daeron agrees, and with the small and secret smile of a child who has succeeded in stealing a sweet without detection, he turns his mount toward the woods, taking up the lead.
✶ ✶ ✶
As the open road gives way to trees, the canopy closes about them like a cloak of green. The weather, fine and clear when they started out that morning, has begun to cloud over, leaving the forest floor in twilight even at midday.
The forest is a pretty one. It is quiet and deep, with many silvery birch trees and hidden waterfalls, better suited for leisurely walking than for hunting in Gwayne’s opinion. The game is of middling quality, although he did have the luck to take a fat pheasant here once. But Daeron loves to hunt, and Ormund will not indulge him, except of course when called for by an appropriate social occasion.
So they hunt, because it is a thing Gwayne can give to Daeron to bring him joy.
That is something of a rare pleasure for Gwayne these days. As the boy has grown, from a bright and cheerful child who smiled easily at his uncles and at strangers alike into a serious, quieter and quieter young man, Gwayne finds that making his nephew happy is something which falls less within his power each year.
He would not call Daeron melancholy, nor morose. There is nothing sulking or self-pitying about his manner or, when Gwayne manages to learn it, his mind. But parts of him are closed to Gwayne that never used to be, and he is sometimes secretive and withdrawn.
Of course, a little of that is to be expected. Gwayne remembers all too well his own experience of adolescence. The apprehension and uncertainty he’d felt as his body, his emotions, his grasp on the truth of the world around him all became changeful seemingly overnight, unrecognizable even to himself. It had been an alienating time, one that in some ways had not improved even when manhood finally settled upon him.
But with Daeron there is also something else.
Gwayne understands that other part as well. Better, he thinks, than almost anyone might.
Yet he cannot offer Daeron protection from it, only respite. The second son of a second son, Gwayne cannot hope to change what happens within the halls of power, when the Hightower’s heavy doors are shut to the outside world, their quatrefoil panels proudly displaying a tableau of the Seven for all to see — mercy, justice, protection — holy icons turned a countenance for the brutality within.
Gwayne, too, lives behind those doors. In some ways he thinks himself as much a prisoner as Daeron. The only difference is that Gwayne can come and go as he likes, so long as he always returns in the end.
“Uncle? Are you alright?”
Daeron’s voice cuts through these darkling thoughts like a beacon, and Gwayne comes back to himself with a start, finding his throat feels rough. He clears it. Then he schools his face into a gentle smile.
“Yes, fine — I was only thinking how lovely it is to be spending this time with you, outside of the city walls for once.”
Daeron nods, seeming relieved, if still a little uncertain.
“It has been some time,” he agrees. He sounds wistful. “But I know you are busy, with the Watch and with your duties to my sire. I do not wish to be another burden on you.”
“You are no burden,” Gwayne says, astonished.
Chewing the inside of his cheek, Daeron hesitates a moment before making his response.
“This is a rare day of leisure for you. Yet here we are spending it to tour me around this forest, which you already know quite well. Is there truly nothing else that would please you more to do with your time?”
Ah. So that is what this is about.
“When you are a man grown, and have children of your own someday, you’ll understand.” His smile is real now, and warm. “To share the things I love with you — this forest, what mastery I have of the sword, the thrill of a challenging hunt — is a pleasure of its own. If I had spent this day lounging abed, listening to fine music and being fêted by a comely serving girl on grapes and honeycakes and wine, I would not have enjoyed it more.”
“Abed? All day?” Daeron laughs, a sound of delighted disbelief, as if this were an absurdity and not something Gwayne had truly done, often enough, in his salad days. “Sire says you are a libertine. Now I fear it may actually be true.”
Mirth tugs at the corners of Gwayne’s mouth now in earnest.
“Well, here I am at a very early hour, keeping my promise to take you riding when I could be awash in debauchery back in the city, if I so wished. Not a very good libertine, if I am to be one.”
“The Seven proscribe only a few specific indulgences as sin,” Daeron responds. He sounds as though he were reading directly from one of Ormund’s catechisms, dry and priggish. “Rather it is the pursuit of pleasure in a thing that makes that thing sinful, not the thing itself. Even riding could well be sin, if it is also a pleasure.”
Gwayne snorts.
“I think the Seven have in mind rather different pleasures than the pleasure of the hunt.”
The boy’s eyebrows creep upward. “Are you a septon now, to know what the Seven intend?”
Coming from Ormund, this might have been a barb with real teeth, an accusation. But in Daeron’s tone Gwayne hears only his own dry sarcasm reflected back.
“I nearly was, you know.”
“What?”
“A septon. My father wanted me to take vows, when I was younger. Did Ormund never tell you that?”
Daeron is quiet for a moment. “Never.”
Somehow this does not come as much of a surprise. Ormund is always quick to point out Gwayne’s faults to Daeron in the moment, but there is too much Hightower history needing to be covered for him to spend much time instructing the boy in Gwayne’s personal failings as well. In any case, his failure to become a septon hardly even ranked among Gwayne’s ten worst faults where his cousin was concerned. It had probably not been worth slipping in between his myriad other sins.
“Well, it didn’t last long.” He shrugs dismissively. “I wasn’t suited for it, and I was too useful with a sword to be wasted on prayer and contemplation, so in the end I made my escape. But I came out knowing a little more about the Faith than your average libertine, I’d wager that much.”
“Do you ever regret it? Not completing your ordination.”
Gwayne considers this.
It is a difficult question to answer. In some ways he feels to take the crystal might have been a relief, freed him from some parts of himself it would be easier not to struggle with.
But he knows that ultimately he could never have lived a septon's life of uncritical obedience, taking orders from an authority he can neither hear nor see. The gods exist, of that Gwayne is sure. What they want from him, and how much of scripture is their own word and not the word of ambitious and controlling men, less so.
“Sometimes,” he says finally, glancing over at his nephew with a smile. “But if I were a septon, you and I would see even less of each other than we do now. And that would be a terrible pity.”
At this, Daeron flushes pink with pleasure. They ride on for a while in silence, and then Daeron looks over at him again, a closed and unreadable look on his young face.
“Uncle?”
“Hm?”
“My sire’s judgments are often over-harsh. I do not think you a libertine.”
Gwayne laughs, and reaches over to tousle the boy’s hair.
✶ ✶ ✶
Hunting fowl is a difficult prospect on horseback, in a wood.
The horses’ hooves break twigs and crunch dried leaves underfoot, and besides that there is the noise made by the riding tack as they move through the forest making their slow progress. They flush more than a few coveys of quail from the bushes, alarmed by the sound of hoofs and jangling metal. But they cannot leave the horses, so it is an annoyance which must be borne.
If Gwayne had thought of it, they might have brought a groom along. In the end, though, he’s glad they didn’t. The frankness of their earlier conversation would not have been possible around a third set of ears who might carry any part of it back to Ormund.
One part in particular played back in his mind: My sire’s judgments are often over-harsh.
Daeron rarely voiced such open criticisms of the Hightower patriarch even in private, though Gwayne suspected there was much more than what he said aloud simmering just beneath the surface. But it warms him to think that on this occasion Daeron had mustered his boldness to speak in Gwayne’s defense.
Just as his mind turns to wonder what other of Ormund’s judgments Daeron may have been speaking of, a bouquet of pheasants bursts from the brush just in front of them in an explosion of noise and feathers.
Daeron’s bow flies up, tracing the birds’ path through the air briefly before dropping the weapon down to his side again with a huff of frustration. The boy is quick with his draw, incredibly so. But no one could be quick enough given so little warning. Gwayne, for his part, had only just about gotten an arrow nocked and begun to search for the target.
They glance at one another — Gwayne looking caught out with his half-raised bow, Daeron pouting thunderously like a boy of ten — then burst out laughing.
“We’ll not catch much, at this rate,” laments Daeron, when they’ve composed themselves.
“It doesn’t look likely, does it?”
“Perhaps if one of us walked ahead, and the other led the horses...”
It’s a good suggestion. Gwayne weighs it. These woods are safer than many, and familiar enough to him, but some danger still remains of a brigand happening upon them unawares. He would prefer to have Daeron close by his side if that were to happen.
It occurs to him that the thought sounds suspiciously like Ormund. Oh, for gods’ sake, he thinks. He’ll be ten-and-six in a fortnight, practically a man grown. You’ll have to let him out from under your wing sooner or later. At the same age, Gwayne had already fought men half again his size and won.
“I could lead the horses,” he says reluctantly. Daeron’s eyes brighten. “But you must promise to stay in sight. At all times, do you understand?”
The boy nods eagerly.
“You have my word, uncle. The horses don’t startle them until we’re quite close. I only need to be perhaps forty feet away to have a chance of making my shot, I think; if you can stay twenty or thirty feet behind, it might give us a chance. Though farther would be better.”
“Hand me your reins then,” Gwayne says, holding out a hand. When Daeron does so and dismounts, he can’t help himself from repeating, “And Daeron — in sight, please.”
Rolling his eyes, Daeron performs a stilted impression of a courtly little bow that makes Gwayne chuckle, then pads ahead into the underbrush, bow poised half-drawn at his side and pointed down toward the earth. Gwayne watches the shape of him retreat, a smudge of pine-green dark among the paler limeleaf green of the trees. When the boy is at a distance of perhaps twenty yards and begins to blend into the wooded surrounds, he calls out,
“That’s far enough! Go on, but slowly. I’ll keep pace.”
Daeron turns back for a moment, nods. Then he continues onward, creeping through the underbrush, low and light like Gwayne had taught him.
There is a sense of pride in watching him move as he does, capable and confident, that overcomes the apprehension Gwayne feels at being separated by so great a distance. Or rather, a distance which feels great, for Gwayne knows that sixty feet is not so far. He could easily close the gap in moments if he turned the second horse loose.
It is a strange feeling, this boy — who has been a boy to him for as long as he has been in Gwayne’s life — now being on the cusp of manhood. Gwayne knows that Daeron still needs his protection, but he no longer knows how much. He knows his instinct to stay close is the right one, but not how close. And increasingly he feels that he is running out of time to strike the right balance, between staying near enough to stretch out a hand when Daeron is in danger of stumbling off his feet, yet far enough back that he may learn how to find them on his own.
Gwayne can sense that there will be consequences, perhaps terrible ones, if he fails. But he does not know yet what those consequences might be, and it frightens him.
Up ahead, Daeron makes an abrupt stop. Gwayne’s horse senses it a minute before he does, jittering under him. Immediately Gwayne scans the edges of the forest path on either side for movement, sound, danger. But there is nothing. He pats the mare’s neck, soothing her. Then he realizes that Daeron is looking back at him, signaling silently with one beckoning hand: Come here, but come slowly, and be quiet.
Flicking the reins, Gwayne rides up until he draws even with his nephew, mouthing soundlessly: What?
Daeron stows his bow and points high into the branches above.
“Uncle,” he whispers, “there’s a cat in that tree.”
Gwayne turns to follow the line of Daeron’s finger with a quickness in his pulse. He half-expects to see a catamount perched there, coiled to pounce. But it is no catamount. The creature peering down at them has the face of a house-cat, but it is much bigger, perhaps the size of one of the runty stray dogs that beg for scraps down by the wharf. Its dull green-gold eyes, half-lidded, are fixed watchfully on the two men below.
Gwayne stares at it for a moment in wonderment, mouth softly agape.
“It is a lynx,” he whispers back.
“A lynx? I’ve read about them, I think. But I’ve never seen one.”
“They do not like to be seen.” Gwayne follows the lynx’s movement as, still looking at them with those hooded golden eyes, rises from its perch and begins to slink slowly from branch to branch in an unhurried retreat. “We are lucky to have spotted this one. Well done.”
The boy huffs softly, pleased with himself, or pleased to have pleased Gwayne, which is often the same thing.
They watch the lynx a little longer until it disappears from view, blending into the late summer foliage like a ghost. Neither speaks for a long moment. The animal has cast a sort of spell that each of them is reluctant to break. Daeron is the one to find his voice first.
“Will there be others nearby, do you think? Perhaps it has gone to find its pack. I would like to get another look at it, if we can.”
Gwayne shakes his head. Daeron says it so hopefully, he is sorry to disappoint him.
“No, I think not; they are solitary creatures. They hunt alone, make their dens alone, and live alone, except to mate and rear their cubs.”
“Then perhaps it may have cubs, and we can take one back with us to the Hightower to keep for a pet. Please, uncle, I know you could track it! There is no better tracker in all the Reach than you.”
This praise warms in Gwayne’s chest like a tot of rum. He finds himself smiling, never mind whether there’s any truth in it. But then Daeron seems to double back on himself with a frown, biting his lip uncertainly.
“But then, perhaps it would not like to live in a castle. I should hate for it to feel confined. It seemed a clever creature.”
To be empathetic even to the desires of a wild beast is very like his nephew, Gwayne thinks. Ten years a ward of Oldtown, where soft feelings are made to harden into the unyielding principles of the Faith, yet still Daeron remains stubborn in his kindness. Ormund was tasked with forging the boy into a man, and at almost ten-and-six, a man he may nearly be. But not Ormund’s kind of man.
“You have a good heart,” he tells him. “You’re like your mother in that. In any case, I’m sure our friend in the trees will be grateful not to be taken a prisoner.”
Daeron’s eyes are fixed on the canopy, staring hard into the spot where the lynx had disappeared, as if he could call it back with his thoughts.
“I did not want it for a prisoner. Only for a friend.”
Gwayne hands him the reins to the second horse. “A pet is always both.”
Another long moment passes before Daeron pulls his gaze from the treetops. He turns toward the horse, one hand braced on its flank, but does not make a move to climb up. Finally, with a queer look on his face, he says,
“Do they truly live all their lives alone?”
“That is what the bestiaries say.”
“How terrible.” Daeron shudders slightly. “I think it must be a horribly lonely thing, to be that lynx.”
“It is in their nature,” Gwayne replies, hoping the fact will be some comfort. Their conversation has touched something in Daeron, in a place that is not open to him, and he knows he must tread delicately or risk doing some fatal harm he cannot yet see. “I do not think they suffer for it. Solitude is an indifferent thing to them, most like. It is all they have ever known.”
Mouth contorting bitterly, Daeron says with sudden venom:
“Well, I am sorry that we saw it.”
To this Gwayne does not know what to say.
He suspects that Daeron does not mean it, that it is merely an adolescent whim which has made him say the words. But he knows too that a truer feeling lurks underneath, and for that, has no consolation to offer.
Daeron mounts his horse in silence, still scowling blackly to himself. He says nothing to Gwayne during the ride back to the edge of the forest, and Gwayne, for his part, does not ply him to speak.
✶ ✶ ✶
They are still a quarter hour’s ride from the city gates when the sky opens above them, pouring forth a torrent of rain that seems to slice sideways with the force of a storm at sea.
Within a matter of moments their riding cloaks, chosen for the morning’s fair weather and not this squall, are soaked through. The wind whips back Daeron’s hood and plasters his pale hair to his skull, until he’s sure he resembles nothing so much as a ghostly seal. Spitting sodden clumps of hair out of his mouth, he loses his patience and snaps,
“The Others fuck me!”
It is a very un-princely oath, and a burst of hot shame oozes over him as soon as the words leave his mouth.
Not only for the obscenity, but the realization that this is the first thing that he has spoken aloud in nearly an hour. What must Gwayne think?
With Ormund, silence is often punishment. Daeron knows this intimately well. And he knows his uncle has suffered this punishment of Ormund’s, too. He can only hope that Gwayne knows he means no such thing by it, that he is only wounded by his own obscure disappointment which Daeron does not fully understand himself.
Why it should upset him so much, he wonders, to learn that the lynx — for all it seemed beautiful, powerful and clever — spends all its life in isolation? Yet it does. It snags at him like a broken tooth. And he cannot help turning inward, folding up inside his thoughts so that he will not speak. If he does, he is half-afraid of what might come tumbling out of his own mouth. What Gwayne might come to know about him. What he might come to know about himself.
Now that the seal on his silence has been broken, a bit of the poison blackening his temperament begins to ease out through the cracks left behind, and Daeron at last feels that he can breathe again.
Gwayne turns to him, one hand shielding his eyes and shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the downpour. He looks more than half-drowned, nearly as bedraggled as Daeron imagines his own appearance. Yet despite this he is, unfairly, quite handsome still. Daeron thinks he himself must be a ghastly thing to behold, more pale river rat than boy.
“Can you see well enough to ride?”
Daeron nods emphatically, even if it is not entirely true. He badly wants to be out of the rain.
Gwayne claps him on the shoulder, still shouting. “Good! I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like trotting home at my leisure while all the heavens rain down on us.”
“Nor I!” Daeron shouts back.
“Do you care to race me, then?”
Daeron’s pulse quickens at the challenge. “Only if you care to be beaten, uncle!”
Despite his still-lingering sour mood, he feels himself smile, and there is some tooth in it.
The prospect of a contest cheers him. Daeron’s wont, more often than not when he gets inside his own head like this, is to require something tangible to grasp onto before he can begin to pull himself out of the quicksand of his own thoughts. Gwayne has thrown him such a lifeline.
His uncle returns the smile, blue-green eyes glinting with some mischief. Daeron thinks they look more intense this way, without the soft fall of his fringe, slicked to his brow as it is, to soften them.
“Say that once you’ve beaten me. Come on! Hah!”
And he snaps the reins without giving a count, driving his mare forward into the lancing rain.
Daeron follows, spurring his own horse firmly with a cry of outrage at such foul play, but the sound is lost behind him on the wind.
To beat his uncle in a chase a-mount will require all of Daeron’s focus, leaving no room for self-absorption or introspection. Ser Gwayne Hightower’s horsemanship is spoken of in tones of great respect at the Hightower court, even among knights who might otherwise hold him in disregard. And although Daeron is often told he shows similar promise, Gwayne’s remains a twenty-year head start.
They’ve run this race many a time before on the same stretch of road. Always in better weather, though, and always ending with Gwayne as the winner.
Today the road is a river of mud beneath them, and each hoof strike throws up a spray of muck that darkens the horses’ white bellies and leaves flecks across Daeron’s chin. When he sticks his tongue out, he can taste it: the grit of the road, dry and mineral, soured by the lingering must of all the animals that have passed along it since the last rain. It is a familiar, nauseating taste. Daeron flicks his tongue over his bottom lip a second time to chase the remnants of it.
As a child, he’d had a perverse habit of eating the mud from the stable-yard. He had been caught, he’s told, taking great fistfuls of the stuff in his tiny hands and shoveling it into his mouth until the front of his doublet was caked with the evidence.
In truth, Daeron mostly remembers this from having it related to him by others — Ormund, who wields the story with a tone of disgust to chastise him, and Gwayne, whose eyes it fills with a terrible sorrow and a pity that sets Daeron’s teeth on edge. No one else would dare to bring such a thing up, he supposes, as it is shameful, and he is a prince, supposed to be above shame and above reproach, though he knows he is neither.
What he does remember is this: he’d understood that the mud was disgusting. That the Lord of the Hightower was repulsed, as with many things, by its smell. Daeron had hoped that by eating it, by taking the muck into his body, he might make himself disgusting too. So disgusting that no one could stand to touch him.
In any case, it hadn’t lasted long. Lord Ormund had purged him of the impulse quickly enough. Made him clean again, and suitable for clean hands to touch.
Back in the present, the muck is rinsed away almost as fast as it can gather: on his face, on his clothes, on his expensive riding boots that were a present from his sire. Ormund will be furious, he thinks. A cold trickle of dread runs down Daeron’s spine, leaving his fingers cold and numb on the horse’s reins.
Then, with a surge of recklessness another thought comes: Let him. Let him rage and rage and tear the whole tower down; but he is not here now and I won’t give this moment with my uncle over to him.
Up ahead, Gwayne is beginning to pull away, the gap growing wider. Daeron grits his teeth, leaning forward and squeezes with his legs, pressing his horse to put on speed. The stallion responds beautifully. It is a magnificent beast, chosen for him by Gwayne for swiftness and surety of foot. The gap begins to close, and Daeron does not let up, driving harder. The rain is still lashing down in heavy sheets but he barely feels it, only shakes his head now and again like a dog to sling water and wet hair out of his face.
By the time the city walls loom into sight, Daeron is nearly as lathered as his mount. His entire being has narrowed into a pinpoint of focus, a single spot on his uncle’s back twenty feet ahead ahead. The lynx, the feelings it conjured, is forgotten. Ormund, even, is mostly forgotten.
And Gwayne is just within reach.
Giving his mount a final urging, Daeron shouts, “Come on! Aderī sōvēs, aderī!”
The High Valerian forms on his tongue unconsciously, unbidden, and as the stallion gains speed for a blissful moment he is with Tessarion, truly flying, coursing low over the Whispering Sound to skim the water, and the torrenting rain is only a mist of sea-spray in his hair. Daeron closes his eyes, leaning into the image, aching for it to be real.
When he opens them, he has drawn even with Gwayne. The moss green of his uncle’s cloak is so close he could reach out and take a fistful of it in his hand.
Gwayne glances over. He looks almost surprised to see Daeron there at his side, as if he’d been meaning to look back, expecting to see his nephew far off in the distance. It is almost the look of a prey animal, the rabbit that thinks it has escaped the hawk only to pause for breath and be snatched up in a flash of talons.
Daeron grins, feeling suddenly fierce and wild. His blood is hot with the sensation of being utterly, totally alive. Any other time, he might fear this feeling, push it down. It is the Targaryen aspect in himself, he knows; the desire to conquer, to subjugate, to overcome by force. A fearful need to dominate.
Were Gwayne his other uncle, now is when Daeron must pull back. The trick is to perform just well enough to let Ormund see the brief flicker of his excellence in order to approve of it, then smother the flame before its light becomes a threat. But Gwayne — Gwayne has always been delighted whenever Daeron manages to outstrip him in anything. His disapproval comes only at seeing that Daeron has held back, diminished himself, not given all.
So Daeron gives another sharp tap of his heels against his horse’s flanks, and overtakes.
They thunder past the spreading oak tree that marks their customary finishing line with Daeron a hand’s length ahead, sodden cloaks flapping behind them like banners, both of them whooping with exhilaration like boys of ten or twelve. Gwayne flags first, dropping his horse into a canter, then a trot. He sags in the saddle like a sack of grain, and Daeron feels much the same.
When they arrive at the city gates, still riotous with laughter, the guards recognize their prince and commander, and let them pass directly. The rain is beginning to ease, finally, and by the time the two reach the stables the skies are all but clear again.
They dismount their horses and hand them off to a groom, who bows repeatedly and obsequiously. Gwayne staggers over to the stable wall and falls with a heavy thump against it, panting. He looks more than a little haggard.
“Gods, you’ve gotten — quick,” he gasps, when he can find the breath.
Daeron, bent double with his hands braced on his knees, shakes his head.
“You let me win!”
The words are heated, but without venom. Gwayne laughs. “I did no such thing. You simply outpaced me. Perhaps I am getting old.”
His uncle’s chest heaves, and Daeron watches it rise and fall like a billows. They are both overheated, sweating from the exertion, and Gwayne has tugged open the collar of his tunic to cool himself. A droplet snakes its way downward from his hair. Daeron’s eyes trace its progress: along the line of Gwayne’s jaw, curving, then down the thick white column of his throat where it disappears beneath the damp linen of his undershirt.
He glances quickly away.
Biting his cheek, he says: “It was only by a hand’s breadth, anyway.”
✶ ✶ ✶
Once Gwayne is satisfied that the horses have been seen to, they receive a fresh pair and begin to wend their way back through the streets of Oldtown, toward the Hightower.
Summer is in its last late bloom across the city, harvest-time, and the fresh smell of cut hay suffuses the streets and waterways like a perfume. It is Daeron’s favorite season, which Gwayne always half-jokingly says is because his name day falls then. But there may be some truth in it, Daeron thinks. To be reminded of having been born reminds him of his mother, of the fact that he indeed must have a mother, even though she exists to him mostly in letters and the occasional small portrait or present sent down from King’s Landing.
And then there is the Alicent who exists in Gwayne’s stories of their childhood: vibrant, alive, and so much like Daeron himself that it sends a shock of longing to the heart of him that he never had the chance to know her. She is funny and diligent and mischievous; sometimes sad, too, but determined to make the better of it.
This Alicent feels more real somehow than the one he has known mostly through letters. But she is not his mother, he thinks.
The Alicent Gwayne describes would never have written off her youngest son, sent him far from home to be at the mercy of a strange place and strange hands. And she must have been through much, since then, to make her do such a thing. To his shame, Daeron sometimes thinks of Gwayne’s Alicent as his real mother. He thinks that she must have died when the first of his brothers was born, and the woman he writes to, with less and less frequency these days, is someone else who only kept her name and titles.
As they travel down the Tower Road toward the harbor and toward home, they pass by a market. A colorful jumble of stalls spills out into the main thoroughfare, catching Daeron’s eye. One of the stalls is festooned with ribbons, bright things of silk and velvet that the merchant selling them touts as fine quality, very fine indeed!
Daeron has the thought to buy one for his mother, for he loves to please her, even if she is far away and scarcely real.
“I’ll only be a moment,” he tells his uncle, dismounting and leading his horse over to the stall. Gwayne dismounts too, and graciously pretends to be interested in the wares while the man selling them chatters on about the latest fashions, the sumptuous quality, the good bargain he can give them.
Fingering a length of lace-edged ribbon in deep artichoke, Daeron wonders idly if there is a maiden somewhere whom Gwayne fancies, who he might make a present of such a ribbon to.
He has never seen Gwayne in the company of a woman, except among their family or when obliged by good manners at a social event. And his uncle does not seem the type to get bastards upon a serving girl in secret. But surely all men must desire such things. Even maesters, sworn to celibacy, foreswear acting on attraction, but cannot stop the feeling itself. And Ormund too, who at nearly forty has never married despite his bounden duty to produce an heir. Daeron knows he must be pricked by the same need that drives other men to take a wife, for he still seeks a wife’s comforts elsewhere.
If Gwayne were secretly courting someone, thinks Daeron, she must be the fairest and most enchanting creature in all of the Reach. Perhaps even all of Westeros.
Daeron knows his uncle’s standing and expectations in life are modest, even as son to the Hand of the King. A second son, and due no great inheritance to hear Ormund tell it. But maidens, Daeron is told, prefer a man who is gentle, chivalrous, and fair of face, though all the wealth and power in the world were offered them in exchange for wedding a brute. They have the right of it, in his estimation.
Chewing the side of his tongue, Daeron tries to picture Gwayne married to the peerless maiden he has dreamed up for him.
They might live in the country estate Gwayne sometimes mentions, which Daeron has never visited because it is too far from the safety of Oldtown for Ormund to ever permit it. There would be children, of course — a lot of them, Daeron imagines. He knows how children are got and is certain his uncle would do that part of a man’s duty credibly. He can picture it easily: children of all ages, some tall and willowy girls with Gwayne’s fine features and their mother’s silken tresses, some babes in arms, some ginger-haired boys knee high, running around playing at sword fighting. Perhaps even a boy his own age.
The thought sends a stab of jealousy through him, and he lets the image go, dropping it together with the ribbon in his hand. If Gwayne did have children, Daeron would see even less of him than he already does. It is not something to be wished.
“What do you think of this one?” he asks his uncle, holding up another strip of velvet in a blue so pale it is almost silver. His mother might like it, he thinks, though he is not sure of her tastes. Really he is mostly sparing his uncle from the overbearing solicitations of the stall-keeper.
“Lovely,” agrees Gwayne. He strokes it with the pad of his thumb to test its softness, and Daeron can feel the heat of his hand through the silk, as though it were Daeron’s palm he were stroking and not the fabric. It is a curious sensation. “It would look well in her hair. But this one, I think, for you.” The ribbon he holds up is deep blue and studded with knots of silver thread, like a night sky speckled with stars. He places it at Daeron’s temple, tilting his head to one side thoughtfully.
But there is a glitter of waggery in his eyes, and Daeron, feeling unaccountably wounded, feels his cheeks begin to burn. He sniffs primly, turning away.
“My sire says that it is unseemly for boys to wear ribbons in their hair, once they are in breeches. It is a degenerate Targaryen fashion.”
“Is that so,” says Gwayne, and no more.
Daeron makes a purchase of the silver ribbon, feeling awkwardly as though there has been some rupture with his uncle, although they have not openly quarreled. He doesn’t know why he became cross, and itches to apologize. Yet he cannot bring himself to meet Gwayne’s eyes as they prepare to re-mount their horses, knowing he has behaved like a petulant child. He is certain Gwayne must think less of him for it.
An apology is still struggling to form itself on his tongue when a tall, black-bearded man, in armor and wearing a dark green cloak, parts the crowd to approach them.
“Hail, Ser Gwayne!” He gives an abbreviated nod to Gwayne. Then to Daeron, bowing more deeply: “My prince.”
“Ser Randall,” says Gwayne. He sounds troubled. “Well met. What is the order of things?”
Ser Randall cuts a look sidelong at Daeron, as if uncertain how frankly he may speak in front of Ormund’s ward. “The fire in the warehouse district has been put out. We think the danger is mostly past.”
Fire? Daeron thinks, frowning. He had not known that anything was amiss in the city, although Gwayne seems unsurprised to hear of it. Perhaps there is much his uncle keeps from him of his affairs with the City Watch. While he contemplates this, Ser Randall continues giving his report.
“But there is —” Again the knight glances at Daeron. “— Still some unrest. One of my men was struck across the helm by a woman who did not like the fact we’d closed the road. He knocked her to the ground in front of her children. Broke her jaw, most like.”
Gwayne’s lips press into a grim line. “The man has been taken off duty?”
“Aye, we’re holding him in the wet-cells, for now. Until you can speak with him.”
“I’ll see to it. Thank you, Ser Randall.”
The knight nods curtly, makes another bow to Daeron, and then slips away, dissolving back into the stream of market-goers remarkably quickly for such a tall figure. Gwayne turns to Daeron. From the regret etched in the lines around his mouth, Daeron knows that their day of leisure has come to an end.
“Come, Daeron. I’ll take you home, but then I must attend to this matter. It is a busy time for the Watch, I’m afraid, especially with this tournament of your uncle’s concoction coming up.”
Daeron swallows past the bitterness of his disappointment. He knows he should be grateful that Gwayne has made time for him at all, with how many demands are placed on him, how onerous the responsibility of leading the force that keeps their city in good order. But instead the he feels only shortchanged and stung.
“Uncle will not be pleased if you miss supper,” he says quickly. It is a shamefully transparent attempt to use Ormund as countenance for his own feelings.
Gwayne gives him a rueful smile, and chucks him under the chin with one gloved hand. Like a child, Daeron thinks. So be it. Then I may as well scowl like one too.
“Your uncle is the one who appointed me captain of the Watch. If I miss supper now and then as a result, he’ll just have to make his peace with the prospect of entertaining himself by tormenting another relative, or perhaps the serving staff.”
After they’ve mounted their horses and begun the twenty minutes’ journey to the end of the Tower Road and the Hightower itself, Daeron asks hesitantly:
“What will be done with him? The man that assaulted that woman.”
“If he were any man — nothing, as much as it shames me to say it. What he did is wrong, and it is a knight’s duty to prevent such a thing if he sees it happening. But it is not a crime, unless the lady were highborn.” Gwayne bites these words out with a great deal of contempt, as if the taste of them revolts him. “But,” he adds, “as he is a member of the Watch, I am his commanding officer. So I may stand him down for a month, to sit in irons and contemplate his wrongs, and dock his pay. Could I do more, I would.”
Daeron rides in silence a moment, pondering this. He touches his fingertips lightly to the line of his own jawbone, where stubble is beginning to fill in since last he shaved. Tries to imagine not being able to speak, or to eat, without pain.
“How can it not be a crime? To break someone’s jaw!”
“The law protects some, and shelters others. A knight has power, some little power though it is, and a washer-woman does not.”
The rest of that litany hangs unspoken between them: A lord has power, and a title-less second son does not. A knight has power, and his squire does not.
A man has power, and a boy does not.
“If I am ever king,” Daeron muses, gripping tightly at the reins in his hands. He hopes he won’t be, for it would mean the deaths of both his brothers, and a great deal of suffering for the realm. “The gods guard against it, but if I were king, I would change the law. Those without power are those most in need of its protection.”
“Then you would be a just king,” replies Gwayne. There is a touch of warm approval in his voice that flows into Daeron like wine.
All Daeron’s sting of resentment toward his uncle earlier, whatever trace of it remained — for the mockery with the ribbon, for his imagined abandonment to an imagined family — vanishes under the warm glow of this praise. Watching Gwayne’s back as the man trots ahead, Daeron wonders how Ormund would have dealt with the man from the City Watch. Retribution, he thinks, but not necessarily justice. Perhaps he would have been executed, or subjected to some terrible torture. But only if he were not essential to the Watch; if he were, Daeron suspects the suffering of the woman and her children would have little sway on his sire.
But my uncle Gwayne…he is a true knight, Daeron thinks. He cares for the suffering of those who cannot defend themselves. He sees my suffering, and he cares for me.