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If my voice is not reaching you
Add it to the echo-
Echo of ancient epics
(AFZAL AHMED SYED)
Elia need not have been harmed at all, that was sheer folly. By herself she was nothing.
(A STORM OF SWORDS, GEORGE R.R. MARTIN)
I. THE PRELUDE
She is always a sickly child.
Her younger brother flings himself from cliffs, returns to the Sandship wearing a grin and bruises he can’t explain, makes friends with travelling merchants and desert-dwelling salamanders and all the while, Elia is confined to a bed and a room with only one window to let in the light. Oberyn tells her all his stories, of course, but Elia does not care for stories. She is hungry, so hungry, and for life, for baked sand beneath her feet, for adventures of her own.
“Can I go out with Oberyn one day?” she asks her mother when they are seated in the shade of orange trees in the Water Gardens and the air is sticky with a citric heat.
“Perhaps,” her mother replies, stroking the wealth of dark hair, “One day.”
In her mind, she is already there: veil at a jaunty angle, hands on skinny hips, brandishing a sickle spear, conqueror not conquered. Weak, the maesters call her but she knows, somewhere deep in her heart, that they cannot be speaking of her, no, must mean some other girl. She is strong and vital and pulsing with life and the only sound that she can hear is the thud-thud of her own heart.
-
If there is one thing she hates, it is being the middle child. She loves her brothers: Doran who is already a man grown and never forgets to bring her presents from the market bazaar and speaks to her as though they are of an age and Oberyn, who is wild as a colt, and puts a rattlesnake in her bed when she is nine years old and has never ventured far enough to see one before. They are two ends of the same spectrum: her brothers, the leader and the rogue, but Elia is caught in between them, tugged by two extremes, and feels as though there is not enough air for her to consume, living in their shadows.
When she feels like this, she sneaks into her mother’s study and hides beneath the heartwood table, counting the scrolls that await her mother’s attention. The reigning princess of Dorne will ignore her at the start, kicking Elia accidently with her feet until she gives up sulking and starts to giggle, then raise her up into her lap and Elia will bury her face in her mother’s silks and inhale the scent of saffron mixed with jasmine.
Her mother lets her look at all the papers, consult all the maps and Elia likes to trace their shapes with her finger: the jagged mountain peaks, the meandering rivers, the bending lines that unfold like freedom.
When she is thirteen years old, she bleeds for the first time. The feeling is awful: as though her body is purging itself of some dark, secret tumour and Elia retreats to her bed for the first two days, dizzy with pain.
They start tossing around the word beautiful where once they used the word weak.
“Beautiful,” her mother says thoughtfully, one night, as she brushes out the tangles and coils of her only daughter’s hair, “One of these days, you shall make a lovely bride.”
Elia says nothing, squints at the mirror. She thinks wistfully of her friend Ashara Dayne with her hair like ivory-coloured silk and glowing violet eyes. She is not beautiful with her unfashionable Dornish colouring, the raven hair and swarthy skin and eyes like chestnuts on the brazier. She says as much to the princess of Sunspear who laughs, cupping her face with one hand and tilting it towards the light.
“I see the strength, the inner pride,” her mother murmurs and smiles, “It makes you glow.”
-
The suitors start arriving from her fifteenth birthday, Yronwood and Fowler, Dayne and even Lannister, but they all fall like cards beneath her brother’s mocking glare.
Elia doesn’t care, one way or another, she has no wish to be married, particularly not to some Westerner and have to go live in the cold, grey waste that she imagines is Casterly Rock. She wants to stay forever in the sun-drenched plains of her homeland and it is her deepest and most sincere regret, one that dwells at the bottom of her heart, that she cannot confide, even to Oberyn, that she was not born first, her mother’s heir.
Then she is eighteen and the King comes to visit Dorne.
The visit throws Sunspear into a frenzy; suddenly hundred-year old antique furniture is not good enough and has to be chopped up and replaced with blood-coloured marble and hand-stitched cushions from Lorath, endless dishes are prepared (quails’ eggs spiced with cumin, orange slices stuffed with duck, rice with lemon and garlic) and dismissed and everyone is outfitted in extravagant, new clothes.
Elia does not fully grasp the purpose of the visit – imagines that trade is the pretext or perhaps a renewal of the Martell-Targaryen military alliance – but she notices Oberyn watching her with dark hooded eyes and an intense gaze she is at a loss to interpret.
When Aerys Targaryen enters the room, his eyes sweep over them all before settling on Elia. They go up and down, like inspecting a prize cow.
The scrutiny makes Elia tremble.
His son is with him, the dragon Prince, with the griffin lord Jon Connington. He is a sober youth, the soft gold-white hair swept neatly away from the chiselled face but his eyes are warm as molten amber where his fathers’ are cold as shards of ice.
After dinner, Rhaegar acquiesces to her mother’s requests to demonstrate his musical talents and Elia has to force herself not to slump. In truth, northern music bores her and she cannot imagine Rhaegar’s pear shaped instrument will live up to the energy and wild beat of Dornish drums and lute but she makes an effort to appear interested.
At first, Rhaegar bends his head over the harp and his fingers fly over its strings, coaxing notes from it as clear and sharp as a spring morning. He raises his head and for a moment, his eyes lock with hers. Suddenly, all she can think of are those same fingers, long and tapering, over her own body.
For the second time that night, she trembles.
-
Over the next days, she and the Prince are increasingly left alone together and she no longer believes the visit has anything to do with trade. Elia takes Rhaegar around Dorne, shows him her favourite view from the Spear Tower, the dazzling throne room in the Tower of the Sun and plucks a blood orange for him from the trees in the Water Gardens and is shocked by the thought that comes to her unbidden as he eats it, the desire to lick away the juice that comes streaming from his mouth.
He observes all with an interest that is unfeigned and Elia likes him for that.
“I wish I knew my kingdom better,” he admits to her unexpectedly one evening, hands resting on the balcony of the Sandship solar, “I wish I could go amongst the common folk and live with them, just know what life is really like for them. Gods…I so want to be a good King, one who really under stands the lives of his subjects.”
Her first thought is to offer a teasing retort but the wistfulness in his voice is as raw as pain and her mouth grows dry to hear it. She knows what it is like to want something as hard as that.
“You will be a good King,” she soothes and in that moment, seeing the fire flash in his eyes, she believes it too, “and they will love you even more than they do now.”
He looks at her, surprised both at the depth of what he revealed and at her response. After a while, he takes her hand in his and squeezes the fingers gently.
We are kindred spirits Elia thinks and the realization makes her bite her lip hard.
-
They are married within a moon’s turn. The day of their wedding dawns dark and damp (an ill omen Oberyn mutters but she ignores him) and Elia is concerned by the flimsiness of her gown. With great ceremony, she enters Baelor’s Sept, trying to deny the cough rising in her throat. All she wants is this day to be perfect but she can feel a heaviness settling in her temples and chest at the miserable weather.
She manages to croak out her vows but interrupts Rhaegar’s vows with the much-dreaded cough, clapping a lace handkerchief to her mouth with hasty embarrassment. She imagines she can feel a hundred watching eyes narrow.
By the time, the feast is over and the bedding revelries have ended, Elia stands before the silken bed and wants nothing more than to clamber onto her mare and not stop riding until she is back in Sunspear.
It is then that Rhaegar enters.
The look in his eyes as he crosses the threshold makes all her anxiety melt away like a hand wiping clean a misted window. She swallows painfully.
“How are you feeling?” he murmurs, his voice deep and pleasing as summer wine.
“Well enough,” she replies softly.
He steps towards her and the pounding of her heart fills her ears, so loud she is sure he will hear, and he takes her by the elbows and turns her around. Elia has never believed she is beautiful, not really, despite her mother’s and Oberyn’s assurances to the contrary but here, right now, held in her husband’s arms as his breathing comes out, ragged with desire, she feels her own beauty, can feel the glow radiating from within and lighting up every corner of her form.
When he finally bends his head to kiss her, it is like being consumed by a fire.
II. THE CHASM
It takes a while to adjust to married life.
She begins to understand that a Dornish princess and a Targaryen princess are two different things. In Sunspear, she had almost unlimited freedom, curbed only by recurring bouts of illness from childhood: freedom to ride over sand dunes, to taste the cool waters of local wells, to graze her knee and bloody her gown and not worry what people thought of her. In King’s Landing, it is different. In King’s Landing, there are always eyes always watching and though their words are kind (how lovely you are, how lucky our prince is), they remind Elia of a pack of wolves, circling their prey, ready to pounce at the first scent of blood.
King’s Landing itself is different. Elia always imagined it would be large and cosmopolitan, like one of the Free Cities, full of jostling merchants and friendly patrons. Instead, it is loud and the acrid smell of fish and smoke lingers in the air and the sky above seems to hang a leaden grey, blocking out the sun.
She starts to spend more time indoors, trapped again like in her girlhood, but this time there is no heartwood table, no comforting scent of saffron and jasmine to perfume the air. She cannot sit on her husband’s council, consult him about matters of policy, instead has to retire to her chambers with her twittering handmaids and sew frozen images of deer roaming in gardens of flowers.
She is surprised therefore, one evening, when Rhaegar enters her room, holding a map of the Reach that depicts a complex transport route from Highgarden to the Arbor.
“What do you think?” he asks, perching her on his lap and there is a strange quality to his voice, like a breath being suppressed.
Elia follows the route with a delicate finger. “It will be expensive to construct.”
“Yes.”
“But I think the gain might outweigh that in the long-run…I think you’ll make your money back, give or take a few years.”
“I think so too,” her husband replies and even with her back cradled to his chest, she can sense him smiling, his breath warm against her hair.
It is these moments, illicit and stolen from predatory eyes, and those spent lying in their bed, tracing the uniform fall and rise of his breaths, that remind Elia that she is not alone after all.
-
In the second year of their marriage as his father begins to increasingly favour him with greater responsibilities, Rhaegar plans an alliance with Norvos to enhance trade between borders. Elia is emphatic in her approval of the idea, her new sister-in-law is after all Norvoshi, and she thinks proudly that Dorne has always been ahead of the other Kingdoms in trading with lands beyond the sea.
One day, when she is sitting in her bedroom and Rhaegar is bent over the desk in the corner, he tur ns to her halfway through a letter to his councillors.
“Would you like to accompany me to Norvos, Elia?”
She is sewing, as ever, and instantly drops her work into her lap, making her husband laugh. “Do not look so shocked. I would not have married you if I did not enjoy your company.”
She nods, not trusting herself to speak. Her mind is racing forward to the trip, so vividly she can almost feel the gently swaying ship beneath her heels, the first step onto Norvoshi soil, the sights and sounds and smells of a new place.
An adventure, Elia thinks, an adventure of my own.
-
“Is it true you plan on taking Elia to Norvos with you?”
They are in his father’s solar, the curtains flung open to admit the last of the afternoon sunshine, Rhaegar reclining beneath the sturdy desk and Jon pacing the floor before him.
“Yes, I think it will be good for her.” Jon nods, continues pacing.
Rhaegar laughs, “You are still easy to read as a schoolboy’s study book, Jon. Out with it and quickly.”
“I do not know…rather, I do not think that it is a good idea to take your lady wife on such an…expedition, considering the fragile state of her health.”
“Perhaps it will do her good. The Norvoshi climate is more temperate than here in King’s Landing.”
“Perhaps…but the princess, may be, how shall I say, foolhardy with her health? Her brother after all is as reckless as any man I have ever met-“
“Are you saying my wife would purposefully put her health in danger, Jon, that she does not know her limits? They may be siblings but Elia is not the Red Viper.”
Rhaegar is frowning now, his earlier good humour dissipated and Jon clears his throat, resolves to say nothing more on the issue but cannot stop himself from muttering,
“All snakes share the same scales.”
-
Then just as suddenly as Elia’s presence on the trip is declared, it is cancelled.
She sits in Maester Pycelle’s lodgings as the old man shuffles about amongst herb jars and yellowing papers, tugging fretfully at his beard, and her husband sits on the other side, chin resting in his hands.
“The fact is,” Pycelle admits after a time, “that in your condition, madam, that is to say, now that you are with child…and considering your history with illness, I would not advise travel, particularly not sea travel.”
Elia’s eyes narrow and she wishes she had the power to freeze the old man with a look. A spark of resentment ignites in her heart at Pycelle for taking this away from her and she thinks, with a guilty lurch, for the unborn child as well.
Rhaegar turns to her, a groove worn between his eyebrows and takes her hand in his, ignoring her stiff posture, “I have to agree, my love. If anything happened to you or the child…I would never forgive myself.”
“I understand,” Elia replies, withdrawing the hand, she is still too disappointed to bear being touched. She swallows painfully and summons up a smile, berating herself for her selfishness, “It is probably…for the best, as you say. I shall be better rested here.”
The two men smile at her, as though grateful she has not resorted to temper and she swallows again, this time to force down the bile rising in her throat.
-
It is dawn when Rhaegar leaves and Elia stands in the harbour, shivering in a woollen cloak; until he draws near to wish her farewell.
“And just think,” her husband murmurs, such obvious happiness lighting up his features that it pierces Elia to her core, “when I return, there will be a bouncing baby to play with.”
She smiles her agreement, leans up on tiptoe to wrap her arms around him and kiss him until they are both breathless. He laughs, promising the brand of her lips will warm him through the long journey east, before turning to board the ship.
A child to play with, Elia thinks and prays, and please Gods let it be a son.
-
Her daughter is born under a blood-red crescent moon, during the hour of the wolf.
Two moons previously, the reigning princess of Sunspear died and Elia is still numb with the shock of losing of a beloved parent. When they place the little girl in her arms, wrapped in swaddling clothes, and sleeping peacefully, Elia is hard-pressed to feel anything through the fatigue, except a sense of disappointment as pervasive as a bed smell in the air. Disappointment that her mother is not here to witness the birth of her first grandchild, that Rhaegar is still in Norvos, that the girl already has a thatch of black hair and nut-brown skin, marking her as Martell first, Targaryen second.
“I’d like to name her…for my mother,” she murmurs to Maester Pycelle in a cracked voice, who nods understandingly and returns a few hours later to tell her Aerys and Rhaella have had her daughter christened Rhaenys.
Exhausted, Elia slumps back into the pillows and blinks away tears.
Her distress, she tells herself, is that she was unable to give Rhaegar an heir, when really it goes deeper and wider than that. It is rooted in knowing that she will have to raise her daughter to never have the luxury of refusal, that Rhaenys will never be able to board a ship or buy a house or lie with a man out of the pleasure of whim, that her voice shall ever be as substantial as the wind, as loud as the water’s gurgling echoes.
-
After Rhaenys’ birth, Elia miscarries twice, each time putting her in mind of her first moon blood, the inexplicable feeling of loss as her body bled itself into oblivion.
Rhaegar would have liked to hold her as she shook in the aftermath but his wife shied from touch, in times of duress, like a skittish mare. The tears would cling to her lashes but they would not fall and eventually she would rise from their marriage bed, a brave smile on her face and kiss the creases of concern away from his face.
The children fade from her body into nothingness but the scar tissue remains, etched into both their hearts, a wound to never heal.
(And all the while, the wolves circle closer, sensing weakness, sensing the end).
-
Then one perfect summer morning, when the sky is the same blue as the sea and King’s Landing is still rousing itself from sleep, her son is born.
Elia loves him instantly, ferociously, loves him for the delight he brings to Rhaegar’s eyes, loves him for the throne he will one day grace, loves him above all else for proving once more that she is not weak, that she can survive, despite the odds, just as her son did.
She wants to keep him with her, always, wants to feed him herself and gives him up irritably to the wet-nurse for suckling. She feels the old prickle of resentment underneath her skin, at how easily they take her son away from her, just like everything else.
When she feels fit enough to leave her chambers, she goes to the nursery to visit her daughter. She is dimly aware that she has failed her daughter in some way (and vows she will never do the same for her son) and the contrast between her relationship with her mother and her relationship with Rhaenys never fails to disquiet her.
Rhaenys is sitting in the far corner with the black kitten her father gave her a week ago. The kitten, restless and bored, rubs its head against Rhaenys’ hand and then escapes from her lap until the girl grabs it and places it back against her stomach.
“No,” she says firmly, “Stay.” Elia smiles and steps forward.
“Mother,” Rhaenys instantly shoots up and a little awkwardly, curtsies, “Lady mother, I am glad to see you looking well.”
Elia winces at the formality and raises a hand as though to dismiss the stiffness of royal protocol from their relationship then kneels down to enfold her daughter’s body within her arms. Rhaenys is plump for her age and smells reassuringly of milk and honey as she adjusts to the unfamiliar embrace.
“Rhaenys,” Elia begins, “You know you have a brother now, don’t you?”
Rhaenys nods, “Papa says his name is going to be Aegon.”
“Hmm, Aegon,” Elia pretends to mull it over, “Do you think that’s a nice name?”
Rhaenys thinks for a while before nodding, the slightest of smiles creeping over her lips. But a moment later, her face plunges back into darkness.
“What’s wrong, my love?”
“Ma-Mother,” she whispers, “Will…will papa love me less now that he has a son?”
Elia feels tears prick her eyes. A daughter of Dorne should not ask such a question, she thinks, there should be no need for such questions. Gods forgive me.
“Of course not,” she says, tightening the embrace and rocking Rhaenys a little, “You…you are his firstborn and precious besides. He-We both love you now as much as we did yesterday.”
Rhaenys nods but looks uncertain and Elia adjusts the coil of her plait. She takes a deep breath and promises herself that they shall grow closer, that they shall be as close as she was with her own mother. She has given Rhaegar a son, performed her last wifely duty, their claim to the throne is unrivalled and surely happiness is no longer just out of reach, but waiting for them, waiting to be realized, waiting just around the corner. The rest of her days, she thinks, will be of peace, of peace and happiness and warmth.
(But oh my sweet summer child.
Winter is coming).
III. THE FALL
Rhaegar shares all his secrets with her until one day he does not.
His father, ever erratic in his moods, ever wrathful in his angers, grows darker with the passing years and as though in response, Rhaegar, as she remembers him, laughing and earnest and romantic, disappears a little, every day, into the harsh and rigid contours of his princely role.
The third time she miscarries (for she never gives up on hope, no matter what the maesters say, no matter what that fool Pycelle believes), her husband does not come to her. In his absence, she allows herself the balm of rarely shed tears but as his absence stretches out into the night, the catharsis disappears, replaced by a genuine anxiety.
Finally, in the early hours of the morning, he stumbles into her room, smelling of wine. For a while, Elia just stares at him, uncomprehendingly, and for the first time in all their years of marriage, a worm of fear coils in her heart.
Eventually he comes forward and puts his arms around her, tentatively, as though it is a breach of conduct he expects to be chastised for.
For some reason, this starts her crying again and this time, Rhaegar cries with her, soaking the shoulder of her gown.
My love is too thick, she is dimly aware, the love that begins at conception not birth, loves each child whilst they are still in the womb as though life is a guarantee, a foolish luxury to indulge in the world they live in, it needs to be more thin she thinks as she clings desperately to someone who is already slipping away.
-
At the turn of the moon is scheduled the elaborate tourney at Harrenhal. Rhaegar begs her to not to go and to her chagrin, brings Pycelle in for consultation and they both decide it is too precarious for her to travel so soon after the loss of a child.
Elia is furious. Her physical health, after all, is recovered. It is her mental condition, that concerns them, that she is too fragile for such a taxing public event. But she is not, she knows that, carries that secret deep within her soul let others believe she is weak; she knows how strong she truly is.
(Later, of course, she will wonder if she read the situation all wrong, later when her husband slides past her without a backward glance and places the laurel wreath of inky blue flowers into the lap of a godsdamned child, she will wonder if it had anything to do with her at all).
-
The next day, Elia goes to the sept to pray. Normally, she dresses in the northern fashion, hair lumped on top of her head, and sleeves huge and swinging but today she is Dornish, a temptress in virginal white, her thoughts effectively screened by a veil.
She hears soft footsteps padding behind her and notices Lyanna Stark kneel down and clasp her hands before her chin, the perfect tableau of piety.
Beside her, Ashara stirs.
“Lyanna,” she murmurs and the girl looks up, first startled and then afraid to be spoken to by the closest companion of the future queen of the Westeros.
“Yes?” she replies, trying her best to be brave, to jut out her chin, to stop her lower lip from wobbling.
“The next time Elia or I catch you flashing those pretty eyes at the Prince,” Ashara says with her sweetest smile, “we will gouge them out ourselves.”
-
(Truth be told, she does not hate Lyanna Stark. She should, perhaps, hate the girl who stole her husband from her, turned Rhaegar into a cold and distant stranger but Elia has never once believed that Rhaegar could be seduced into doing something he did not plan on doing in the first instance himself. It would be easier of course to hate her, hate her the same way Ashara and Oberyn do as if born of some perverse loyalty, that bitch, that whore but willful self-delusion is the one vice Elia has never allowed herself.)
-
When she hears about the Tower of Joy, the mysterious kidnapping of a Northern maid, the fair, innocent girl-woman who will bring seven kingdoms to their knees, Elia has to cling to every shred of self-control she has, sensing if she starts screaming now, she will never stop.
You cannot take him from me she wants to howl he is mine, given to me. You cannot have him.
(After all, they have taken everything else, everything she has ever truly wanted: Dorne, her mother’s legacy, the son born of her flesh and blood. At the very least, they could leave her her husband).
-
“War,” the messenger says, his features grimed with soil and exhaustion, “Jon Arryn calls his banners. The falcon declares war.”
She is standing in the throne room, listening to the message but in some far-reaching corner of her mind, she senses that this is not real, it cannot be, a few hours ago she was teaching Rhaenys sums in her room, that was real, but not this.
War, those are things fought in other lands, between horse lords and slave traders, but not here (even with Rickard Stark’s burnt corpse and his son’s blanched one), not between subject and liege lord, between husband and wife.
“My lord?” the messenger asks wearily, the King is silent as though fallen into the same stupor as his daughter-in-law, “Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” Aerys says finally, his face reflecting a tumult of sudden emotions in contrast to the impassive faces of the Kingsguard who flank his throne, “I hear you.”
His words send a tremor of fear through the room, people begin to clutch one another and chant prayers to the Gods. Elia, on the other hand, is mobilised into action.
My children, she thinks frantically, I have to get my children out of here. We are most vulnerable in the capital.
As though sensing her escape, Aerys Targaryen rises from his throne and roots her to the spot with his iciest glare. For a moment, time seems to stand still and then whoosh backwards, filling her ears with static.
“No,” Aerys raises a finger at her, chapped skin and broken nail, “You stay here.”
-
“You should not worry,” her uncle Lewyn tells her as his squire assists him with the light weight of his Dornish armour, “We shall see you safe from here by the moon’s turn.”
“Aye,” she says quietly, and with enough desperation audible for the knight to turn around and cup her face with his hand as her mother might once have done.
“Take heart, lass, and remember it’s not personal, it’s about Dornish allegiance,” he assures her, “It has naught to do with you.”
By her sides, her fists clench until the knuckles are white and she draws blood from the soft flesh of her palms.
“No,” she replies bitterly, “It never does.”
-
Chaos descends upon King’s Landing like the dark of the night.
An endless sea of humanity pushes past Elia as she runs down the stairs, seeking her father-in-law: courtiers, soldiers, and septons alike, all wearing the same expression of pinched fear.
“What’s happening?” she pants as she stumbles into the throne room, “What’s going on?”
Her father-in-law is sitting on his throne as though it is any other day, as though the streets are not deserted and the Sept not stuffed with people, as though men are not locking their wives and daughters in attics and buying rat poison from themselves.
She drags her tongue across her lips, forces herself to ask the question again. “What is happening here, my lord? Why is everyone so afraid?”
“Happening, my dear?” Aerys lips pull at the sides like a puppet master pulling up the curtain at the end of the act (Surprise! He lives!), “The lions are marching to our rescue or have you not heard?”
“Rescue?” she echoes.
Standing at Aerys’ feet, Jaime Lannister ducks his head, refuses to meet her eyes. Elia feels her mouth turn to cardboard.
“Ha!” Aerys explodes, jarring her out of her frozen reverie, “I can see it, your horror at the idea of my rescue, your traitorous family of Rhoynian bastards have ever plotted my downfall.”
(In other circumstances, she might have protested, sworn her families’ unending loyalty to the Iron Throne and the dragons who graced it but now, it seems of little use).
Aerys leers, looking like a skeleton at a banquet of the already dead, “Vanquished, are you, dear daughter-in-law? Vanquished?”
Her mind is whirring like the gears of a clock, thoughts assembling and reassembling like quickfire, and for a while, she can only echo Aerys’ question in her head:
Vanquished, am I?
-
(The night is dark and full of terrors).
Elia Martell, crown princess of Dorne, future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, gropes around in the shadows, clutching her son to her breast, trying to discern the streets of King’s Landing in the black of night. She trips at one point, comes up with blood gushing from her shin but mercifully, the baby is still asleep, curled up at her shoulder like a cherubim.
The eunuch’s directions, she can barely recall them. Something about the last pot shop in Pisswater Bend.
A light flickers and she gasps when the figure of a stocky woman fills the doorway. She raises a hand, as though in greeting.
Elia staggers towards her, notices with a great pounding of relief, that this woman too is holding a child in her arms.
“’Ere,” the woman says, thrusting the swaddled baby at Elia, “Take ‘im.”
Elia gulps.
“Is there another with you? A girl?”
“Nah, nah, no girl, just ‘im.”
Her heart sinks.
(She tries to reassure herself: Rhaenys would be saved by her irrelevance. She was just a girl, could inherit no crowns, posed no threat to either the storm lords or the bloodthirsty wolves, just a girl, and her mother’s daughter at that. She would ignite no love affairs, start no wars, bring no stories screeching to their ends).
“Alright,” she says shakily, “My thanks.”
To receive the other, she has to give up the one she holds. She has to give up her son.
Unbowed, unbent, unbroken, she commands herself; those are the words of my house. I am strong, I am strong, I am strong.
She steels herself and in one quick motion, Aegon is in the woman’s arms. She wants to say be kind to him, he has only slept a few hours, he will not drink milk, make sure to water it down before you give it to him, please tell him how much I love him but the baby awakes and starts crying and some dam bursts within her and brings the same tears pouring down her own cheeks.
“Off with you,” the woman says, gruff but not unkindly, “Go on, back to wherever you came from.”
Elia nods, rubs tears from her eyes, tries to ignore the sounds her son is making as he wails. She turns away, holding the weight of a stranger’s child in her arms and returns to her prison in King’s Landing.
(The streets are noiseless, even rats hold their breath when the lion roars.)
The only sound she can hear is the thud-thud of her own heart.
IV. MY SON, THE KEEPER OF MY HONOUR
Jon Connington stares out of the window and he can see the frost that decorates the bare bones of once verdant trees, can see the squawking crows flapping in the sky, carrying messages no one is alive anymore to hear.
(And the world grows a little colder every day.)
He forces himself to turn back to the matter at hand: Aegon is seated at the large table, surrounded by councillors, including his Dornish cousin, strategising their next move. Jon, of course, thinks they should go on to King’s Landing, crush the Tyrells beneath their feet and gain access to the bounty of Highgarden and the Reach but Aegon has other plans.
“The Wall,” he says calmly, “We ride for North for the Wall and the bastard who calls himself my father’s son.”
“Your aunt has already joined him,” Jon points out, knowing his concerns will fall on deaf ears, knowing this is a vengeance seventeen years in the making, that can only be repaid blood for blood, ashes for ashes, “We do not have the manpower -“
“He will not hold the North, Jon,” Aegon snarls, “I will not let him. And when I am done with him, I shall ride west and deal the same fate to the Lannisters and they shall remember the words of my mother’s house.”
Jon’s lips purse into a frown, he knows there is no pointing arguing with this princeling, who he knows less well than he once thought, who is surprisingly as much his mother’s son as he is his father’s.
(Jon suddenly recalls something he said to Rhaegar many years ago: that all snakes share the same scales.)
-
Vanquished, am I?
I am not vanquished.