The rest of the tourney passed without princes noticing us, which I considered a great mercy and Damon called the natural order of the world.
He fought in the melee on the second day and came out of it with a dented pauldron, a bruised thigh, and someone else's blood on his gauntlet, which seemed to put him in an excellent mood. I spent most of the morning trying not to be trampled while carrying spare weapons, shouting at a groom twice my age for losing sight of Damon's horse, and learning that melees were less noble contest and more organized riot performed by rich men in armor.
There were rules, certainly. Standards. Honor, if you squinted and were willing to forgive a great many things.
There was also a lot of mud, swearing, and men hitting one another in groups until one side fell down.
"It's uglier than jousting," I told Damon afterward while I helped unbuckle his vambrace.
He sat on a stool outside House Vypren's pavilion, stripped down to his sweat-soaked gambeson with his hair damp against his temples and a fresh bruise darkening the line of his jaw. "Most fighting is uglier than jousting."
"That seems unfair. Jousting has all the spectacle. If I'm to be beaten half to death one day, I'd at least like it to happen with banners flying."
Damon held out his arm so I could tug the leather free. "You'll be beaten half to death with or without banners if you keep talking while someone is trying to hit you."
"That sounds like advice."
"It is advice."
"Then I dislike it."
"That's because you dislike most useful things."
"I like food."
"That hardly proves your point."
It was difficult to argue with a man while wrestling him out of armor, particularly when that man was Damon and had perfected the art of sounding bored while insulting me. I settled for muttering darkly under my breath while I stacked his plate in order and checked the buckles for wear.
Around us the tournament field churned on in all its noisy glory. Knights staggered back toward their tents, servants ran messages, squires carried helms and shields and occasionally their masters' dignity. The air smelled of churned earth, horse sweat, trampled grass, and too many men who had decided washing was an offense to the Warrior.
It was magnificent.
It was exhausting.
And, now that the first shock had worn off, I found I loved it in the same way I loved storms from inside a house: with full appreciation for the spectacle and no desire to be directly struck by lightning.
Damon did not win the melee, which I thought was rude of the gods after all the effort I had put into keeping him fed and properly armored. He did, however, acquit himself well enough that Lady Lythene's brother—who had come down to King's Landing on separate business and found us for supper—declared Damon had "looked almost respectable until someone hit him in the head."
Damon accepted this with the weary dignity of a man who had known his family too long to expect kindness from them.
I, on the other hand, laughed hard enough to nearly choke on roast capon.
The days that followed passed in a blur of tournament events, city noise, and more work than I had thought could be fit into one boy's life.
There were archery contests, feasts we did not attend but had to prepare clothing for, private suppers among nobles where Damon was required to appear, and I was required to wait outside looking decorative and available in case he needed anything. There were endless errands through the city: collecting cleaned linens, fetching tack repairs, carrying messages from one lordling's man to another lordling's man, which was somehow considered an honorable use of a squire's time.
King's Landing never grew less ugly, but it did become easier to read.
After a few days, I knew which streets near our inn to avoid after dark, which food sellers cheated least, and which alleys smelled merely bad rather than murderous. I learned that gold cloaks were useful only when someone richer than you was watching, that fish bought near the river was better than fish bought near Flea Bottom, and that if a silk-clad woman smiled at you on the Street of Silk, it was best to keep walking unless you wished to discover how quickly twelve-year-old boys could be robbed.
I learned, too, that Damon in King's Landing was not quite the Damon I knew in Fairmarket.
He was still himself—still quiet, still dry, still infuriatingly capable of looking composed in any circumstance—but in the capital there was another layer to him. He moved more carefully among nobles. Listened more. Spoke less, and when he did speak, it was with a measured precision I recognized from the times Lord Lucias had him sit in on household matters back at the castle.
He belonged here more easily than I did.
Not because he loved it. Damon did not love much outside horses, duty, and occasionally proving me wrong. But he understood it. The courtesies, the silences, the careful balancing of pride and obedience. He knew how to stand in a room full of people richer and more powerful than he was without either groveling or inviting insult.
Watching him, I realized something that sat uneasily in my chest.
Damon was not simply a knight in training anymore, not simply the boy who had dragged me out of a river and then spent years regretting it.
He was becoming the sort of man other people would follow.
That was a dangerous thing in Westeros.
It was also, I suspected, inevitable.
By the end of our stay I had seen enough of the city to last me a lifetime and yet nowhere near enough to satisfy me.
We did not set foot in the Red Keep. House Vypren was respectable, not grand, and the nameday celebrations belonged to greater houses than ours. But once, from the crest of Visenya's Hill, I saw the castle shining red in the afternoon sun while banners snapped over its towers and thought of all the lives moving behind those walls.
Kings and councillors. Princes and ladies. Schemes laid over supper. Marriages arranged over wine. Men deciding the fate of the realm while boys like me mucked horses in their shadow.
I remember staring at it until Damon nudged my shoulder with his own.
"Come on," he said.
"You ever think about it?"
"About what?"
"That." I jerked my chin toward the Red Keep. "Being close to all that."
Damon looked up at the castle for a moment, expression unreadable. "No."
I snorted. "Liar."
He glanced at me. "Not every man wants court."
"I didn't say court. I said all that." I waved a hand vaguely at the Keep, the city, the bay, the whole ugly magnificent heart of the realm. "Power. Importance. A chance to matter where everyone can see it."
Damon was quiet for a beat too long.
Then he said, "The closer you stand to power, the easier it is for it to crush you."
I looked at him sidelong. "That sounded almost wise."
"I hate when you say things like that."
"It's because you're secretly ancient."
"I'm 22."
"Yes. Ancient."
He shoved my head lightly with one hand and kept walking.
We left King's Landing three days later.
I was glad.
I was also miserable about it.
The city had exhausted me, disgusted me, and offended my nose in ways I would never fully forgive, but riding away from it still felt like leaving a story halfway through. The walls shrank behind us, then the towers, then the Red Keep itself, until all that remained was a smear of pale stone against the sky and the stink of the city fading at last from the air.
"Well," I said from the saddle, looking back one last time. "If I never see King's Landing again, I'll count myself fortunate."
Damon rode ahead of me, as always. "You said yesterday you wanted to come back."
"That was before I slept in an inn bed with fleas the size of hunting dogs."
"You're impossible."
"I'm adaptable."
"You're dramatic."
"I contain multitudes."
One of the men-at-arms behind us groaned aloud. Damon did not even turn around.
The road north felt longer than the road south, though perhaps that was only because the excitement was gone and all that remained was sore muscles, dust, and the knowledge that no matter how grand King's Landing had been, Fairmarket would still expect us to wake early and work hard the moment we returned.
Which, as it turned out, was exactly what happened.
Lady Lythene listened to Damon's account of the tourney with cool attention, asked three questions sharp enough to skin a man, and pronounced herself satisfied that he had not disgraced the house. Then she looked at me and asked whether I had embarrassed them in the capital.
"Only once or twice," I said honestly.
Damon made a strangled sound.
Lady Lythene smiled in that dangerous, elegant way of hers. "How merciful of you to show restraint."
Lord Lucias wanted a proper accounting of the lists, the melee, the knights who had distinguished themselves, and which houses had seemed most interested in strengthening ties with the Riverlands. Damon gave it to him with his usual calm competence while I stood at the back of the solar trying to look invisible and failing.
Afterward Damon found me in the yard and said, "If you ever tell Lady Lythene about the silk merchant incident, I'll bury you under the stables."
I stared at him in delight. "You mean when that woman on the Street of Silk grabbed your hand and called you pretty?"
"She was drunk."
"She was accurate."
"She was eighty."
"Love knows no age."
Damon lunged for me.
I ran.
Fairmarket swallowed us again after that, and life resumed its old shape as if we had never left.
At first I resented it.
After King's Landing, Fairmarket felt small. Too quiet. Too familiar. The same yard, the same stables, the same river roads, the same merchants grumbling in the square and the same boys at practice trying to cave one another's skulls in with blunted swords. I had seen the capital now. Seen tourney fields crowded with banners from every corner of the realm. Seen a city so vast and ugly and alive that it felt like the center of the world.
Coming back to Fairmarket was like waking from a fever dream and finding your old boots waiting by the bed.
But boots, I discovered, had their uses.
Routine settled over me again with ruthless efficiency. Training in the yard. Lessons with the maester. Stable work, messenger work, armor work, all the endless tasks that made up the life of a squire. Damon was given more responsibilities as a knight of the household, more patrols, more oversight of the men-at-arms, more invitations to sit with Lord Lucias when matters of land or levy were discussed.
And me?
I grew.
That was the worst of it.
No glorious revelation. No dramatic transformation. I simply grew, as boys do, with all the grace of a colt and twice the appetite. My limbs lengthened before the rest of me caught up. My voice cracked at humiliating intervals, usually when I was trying to sound clever in front of someone who deserved better. I became faster with a blade, stronger in the shoulders, better on horseback, and considerably more dangerous with a spear than anyone had intended when they first put one in my hands.
Damon called it improvement.
Lady Lythene called it "finally becoming useful."
I called it a conspiracy.
The years passed in work and bruises and the strange, relentless business of becoming someone.
There were summers of dust and winter mornings so cold the practice swords burned in my hands. There were harvest feasts in Fairmarket where I danced badly with miller's daughters and was informed by one of them that if I ever stepped on her feet again she'd throw me in the river. There were patrols through Vypren lands with Damon and the men-at-arms, sleeping under trees and waking with dew in my hair and a sword within reach.
There were letters, too.
Not many. Damon was not a man made for letters and I less so, but once Elyane wrote from House Wylde to ask whether I had yet learned not to speak before thinking. Damon read that line aloud in the hall and half the household laughed while I vowed vengeance upon the entire nobility.
Another time news came from Riverrun of Lord Hoster's failing health, and afterward I noticed Lord Lucias spending longer in his solar with visiting riders and sealed messages. Men spoke more quietly when politics came up. The realm was at peace, as peace went in Westeros, but even I could tell there were cracks beneath it.
Robert Baratheon sat the Iron Throne.
Jon Arryn ruled much of the realm in all but name.
The Lannisters grew richer.
The Greyjoys brooded on their rocks.
And in every hall from Dorne to the Wall, men were making plans they would call prudence when they worked and loyalty when they did not.
I understood little of it at twelve.
At thirteen I began to listen.
At fourteen I learned that listening was often more useful than speaking, though I did not always manage to act accordingly.
And by fifteen—
By fifteen, I had finally become dangerous.
Not because I was a great warrior. I wasn't. Not yet.
Damon could still knock me flat in the yard whenever he stopped being charitable. Ser Harlan, master-at-arms of Fairmarket, still said my greatest weakness was impatience and my second greatest was my mouth. But I had grown tall enough that men no longer smiled indulgently before sparring with me. I had shoulders now, and strength in them. Calluses. Reach. Quickness. I knew how to ride hard, fight dirty when necessary, and keep my footing in mud, snow, or blood.
More importantly, I had learned when not to look like I was thinking.
That, in a castle, was a skill worth more than swordplay.
At fifteen I was no longer the inn boy Damon had hauled into House Vypren out of pity, annoyance, or temporary insanity.
I was still his squire.
Still his shadow half the time, his burden the other half, and his problem always.
But I had grown into Fairmarket the way a blade grows into its sheath. Not comfortably. Not gently. But with purpose.
And Damon—
Damon was 25, a knight in full truth now, broad-shouldered and battle-tested, with a reputation in the Riverlands for steadiness under pressure and a seat in Lord Lucias's confidence that he had not possessed at 22. He wore command more naturally than ever, though he still hated being praised for it. Men listened when he spoke. Stableboys scattered when he frowned. Girls in Fairmarket smiled when he rode through the market square, and he noticed none of it because the gods had cursed him with beauty and no practical understanding of the damage it caused.
I noticed enough for both of us.
It was in the autumn of my fifteenth year, with the air turning sharp and the river reeds going gold along the banks, that the next change came.
I remember the day clearly because it began in the yard with Damon knocking me flat on my back and informing me that if I telegraphed my left shoulder any more obviously he might hang a bell from it.
"I hate you," I told him from the dirt.
"You'll live."
"Unfortunately."
"Get up."
I got up, because of course I did.