Chapter 14 - cressen loras red viper

CRESSEN​

The letter had come on black wings, as the worst tidings always did, and now it lay open on the table in Lord Stannis's solar, and Cressen read it through a second time because he could not believe he had read it true the first.

Be it known to all the lords and people of the Seven Kingdoms that His Grace King Robert of the House Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhyonar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, has departed this life.

The king died in his bed upon the third day of the third week of the twelfth moon of this year, two hundred and ninety-eight after Aegon's Conquest, witnessed in his passing by Grand Maester Pycelle and by His High Holiness the Septon of the Faith.

He is to be succeeded by his beloved son and heir, following the funeral rites owed a good and gentle king. All lords of the realm are hereby summoned to King's Landing, to pay their respects to the dead, to attend the coronation of the new King, Joffrey of House Baratheon, First of His Name, and to witness the royal wedding that shall follow within the same sennight, joining the houses Stark and Baratheon as was the late king's dearest wish.

Robert Baratheon was dead.

Cressen had known the king as a boy. The loud one, the laughing one, the great roaring promise of a boy that all the world had loved and that no one had loved well enough to save from himself.

Dead in his bed.

Robert, who had seemed too large for death, brought down at last by something quiet. The old man's eyes stung, and he blinked, and told himself it was the cold off the sea coming through the window.

"In his bed." Lord Stannis stood at the window with his back to the room, and his voice was flat and hard as the black stone the castle was shaped from. "My brother. Who took an axe-wound across the brow at Pyke and more than a dozen from Rhaegar at the Trident and lived to laugh about both. Dead in his bed. With the Grand Maester and the High Septon to swear to it." His jaw was working. He always ground his teeth when the anger was in him. Cressen had known it since the man was a boy, the small grim child who never wept and never forgave. "How convenient, the witnesses. A Lannister maester and a holy man who'll say whatever the gold tells him to say."

"My lord—" Cressen began.

"They killed him." This was the Lady Selyse, thin and sour in her chair, her ears jutting beneath her hood. "The Lannisters killed him, and now they mean to set that incest-born bastard on your throne and call him king. Joffrey." She spat the name as if it fouled her mouth. "A bastard born of a brother and sister's filth, gilded and paraded about as though he were a true son of the Baratheons—"

"Lady Selyse." Cressen kept his voice gentle. He was growing tired of keeping his voice gentle in this grim castle. "Forgive me. But the evidence of this — I have seen it, my lord, from our copy of the great book of lineages, and I tell you it is thin. Thinner than thin. A maester's notes on the colouring of children, generations of Baratheons running dark over their brides, and from that we are asked to leap to — to incest, to cuckoldry, to bastardy, to the murder of a king." He spread his trembling hands. "It is a thread, my lord. A single grey thread. I say again, you cannot hang a war upon it."

"The boy has gold eyes." Stannis turned from the window. "Not Baratheon blue. Gold. Explain that to me, maester, with your books and your colourings. Explain the gold."

"Lord Tywin Lannister's eyes are flecked with them. His mother is a Lannister. And children's eyes change, my lord. The maesters of the Citadel—"

"Spare me the Citadel."

"My lord, you loved that boy." It came out of Cressen before he could stop it. "I remember. I have watched you together when the Prince visited Dragonstone. You showed him the charts of the Narrow Sea currents when he asked about your work as master of ships. Lady Shireen loves him still, he was like an older brother to her." The old man's voice shook. "Whatever else he is, you loved him as a son once. And now you would make war on him, on the word of a book of colourings and—"

He stopped himself. But not soon enough.

"And what?" said Lady Selyse, her voice having gone very cold. "Finish it, maester. And what?"

He did not finish it. But they all knew the word he had swallowed, and the word was her.

She had been sitting apart, by the brazier, in her red silk, and now she rose, and the room seemed to lean toward her as men leaned to a hearth in winter.

Melisandre.

The red woman, the priestess out of Asshai by the Shadow, with her ruby at her white throat and her eyes the colour of blood.

"The maester is afraid," she explained. Her voice was low and warm and accented and it filled the solar like smoke. "It is no sin to be afraid, old man. Fear is the gift the Lord of Light gives us to keep us moving in the dark. But you would let your fear counsel your king toward a death greater than any battle." She turned to Stannis, and her ruby caught the brazier-light and glowed. "This is the moment all your life has bent toward, Your Grace. Azor Ahai reborn, the warrior of fire, the prince that was promised. The night is gathering and only you can hold it back. The usurper will fall before you, the false king with the gold in his eyes will burn, and you will draw Lightbringer flaming from the fire and the Seven Kingdoms will be yours. R'hllor wills it. I have seen it in the flames. It will come to pass."

Cressen felt the hatred rise in him, hot and shameful in an old man's chest. He had served the Faith of the Seven and the wisdom of the Citadel for near eighty years, and he had never in all that time wanted to strike a living soul as he wanted to strike this woman from across the world.

You did this, Cressen thought, looking at her, at the smile that knew everything. You. He was a hard man and a bitter one and a wronged one, my poor cold lord, but he was a sane one, a just one. He took the pages and he frowned at them and he set them aside, because he is not a fool and he knew them for the thin thing they were. And then you came.

The lady had come with her fires and her prophecies. She had found every wound the world had left in his boy. Every slight, every honour instead given to lesser men, every time Robert forgot him or the realm looked past him. The viper from Asshai had dug her fangs into him, pouring boiling oil into every one of Stannis' wounds and setting them alight. She had fed him with prophecies, supped him with lies and now she sought to take a sane man's grievances and make them a holy war.

"gods make poor allies," Cressen said aloud, and his voice cracked. "And that one has no power here, whatever she promises. My lord, hear me, I have served your house since before you could walk—"

"Hold your tongue!" Lady Selyse was on her feet. "You will not speak so to a priestess of the Lord of Light, nor counsel cowardice to the one true king. My husband is the trueborn heir of Robert Baratheon and the rightful lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and you will not—"

"It is as Melisandre says." Stannis spoke over his wife without seeming to hear her. His shadowed eyes were fixed on something past the walls. "They have killed my brother. I knew it the moment the raven came. Robert did not die in his bed. Robert was put in his bed and held there, and now they will crown the gold-eyed bastard and drape him in cloth-of-gold and the whole realm will cheer, because the whole realm is a child that loves a pretty thing and asks no questions of it." His jaw ground. "I will not have it. I am the rightful king and I will not stand on my rock and watch them seat an—an abomination on my brother's throne."

Cressen had to make him see sense. "My lord—"

"I saw it, Cressen." And now Stannis looked at him, and there was something in the man's face that frightened the old maester more than all of Selyse's malice and all of the red woman's fire. It was a kind of certainty that had no bottom to it. His blue eyes shone bright with mania. "In the flames. She showed me. I did not want to look but I did and I saw. I saw the world turned to ash. All of it, the green fields and all I loved and held dear, made grey ash blowing on a dead wind. All because of him. A golden boy. A boy with golden hair and golden eyes, smiling, as the ash fell around me like snow" His voice dropped. "The boy will be the end of us all. I have seen it. Everything I do now, I do to stop that. Whatever it costs."

Cressen's blood had gone cold. Madness, he thought. This is madness, dressed in fire and called prophecy. She has him seeing the end of the world in a brazier. "Visions in a fire are smoke and wishes, my lord, they are not—"

"I can give him more than visions," Melisandre said.

Something in her voice made the whole room still.

"There is power in king's blood, Your Grace. The oldest power, the truest. With it, I can do what has not been done in a hundred years and more. The comet is near. Soon it shall burn in the sky to show the times of miracles and wonders are upon us again. Give me the boy, and the blood that runs in him, and I will wake a dragon from the stones of this very island. And with that power at your back, your grace, no man may withstand you. No army may oppose you. Not the Lannisters, not the wolves, not the abomination and all his host. You will not merely take the Seven Kingdoms. You will scour them clean."

The boy.

Cressen knew at once which boy she meant, and the horror of it closed around his old heart like a fist. Edric. Edric Storm. Robert's bastard, sweet-natured, trusting, a child, here under this roof, under Stannis' protection. King's blood. She means to burn a child. She means to put Robert's own baseborn son to the fire to wake her dragons, and call it holy.

"Yes," Lady Selyse breathed, leaning toward her husband, her sour face alight and her eyes shining. "Yes, husband, give her the boy. What is one bastard against the throne, against the Lord of Light's own purpose? Give her the boy and I may finally give you the sons we have been denied. Give her the boy and let her wake the dragons and burn them all—"

And Stannis — Stannis, who had been a hard man and a cold man but never, in all the years Cressen had known him, a cruel one — Stannis stood silent with his jaw working, and Cressen saw him considering it.

No, the old man thought, despairing. No. Not this. I have failed you in many things, my lord, my poor lonely son, but I will not fail you in this. I will not let her make a child-killer of you. It is the one thing left in the world that I can still do for you.

He wished Davos were here. The onion knight was the only other soul in this castle with the sense the gods gave a turnip, the only one Stannis still half-listened to. Between them, the lowborn smuggler and the old maester, they might yet have talked the king back from the cliff's edge. But Davos was away across the water, recruiting pirates and sellsail captains to Stannis's banner, gathering the swords for this godsforsaken war, and there was no one here to stand with Cressen at all.

So it fell to him. As it had fallen to him to raise the boy when his mother and father died, and to chain himself to this grim rock for love of a child no one else had loved as they should. It fell to the old man, as the last things always did.

Cressen knew what he had to do. He had known, since the red woman began whispering her poison in Stannis' ear. He had been hesitating. He would hesitate no longer.

There was wine on the sideboard, sweet and dark, the dornish red that the lady favoured. Cressen rose, slow and trembling, leaning on his stick, and shuffled toward it.

"My lord," Cressen called softly, and made his old voice humble. "Lady Melisandre. I am an old man, and I have spoken too freely, and too harshly, and I am ashamed of it. Fear makes fools of the old. Let me make amends. Let us share a cup together, you and I, priestess — a cup of peace, to your Lord of Light and his purpose. An old man's apology."

He poured two cups with hands that shook. And as he poured, turning his body so that the wide grey sleeve of his robe hid the motion, the way he had hidden so many small things across a lifetime of small mercies and small kindnesses, he worked the hard crystal from where he had secreted it in his cuff, and crushed it between thumb and finger over the second cup, and watched the strangler dissolve into the dornish red and vanish.

Smooth, now, he prayed. Please. Deft. Do not fumble. Not now. And the gods, who had given him little enough of late, gave him this. His hands, that had trembled for years, went still and sure for the space of a single breath.

He carried the cups across the room. The old maester felt his lord and lady's eyes on him but his were only on Melisandre. Her red lips, her red eyes, the red silk that hugged her form and the ruby at her neck that shimmered and danced in the torch light.

He gave the poisoned one to the red woman, and kept the clean one for himself. Melisandre looked down at the cup, and then up at him, and she was smiling, and the smile told Cressen that she knew. She knew everything. Her eyes seemed to burn like one of her fires and they held no fear at all, only a terrible serene amusement, the look of someone watching a child reach for a blade too big for his hand.

"Shall we drink, then, maester?" she said softly. "To peace. And to the Lord of Light."

"To peace," Cressen croaked. He would not drink to her false god.

They drank together, beneath the eyes of the Lord and lady of Dragonstone. The old man drained his cup, as the red woman drained hers — long, and deep, and unafraid — the strangler and all, and set it down, and stood there glowing with the brazier-light caught in her ruby, entirely unharmed.

It was Cressen who felt it. His cup had been clean without a bit of the strangler to speak of, but it was Cressen who felt it whilst the red witch looked on. A tightening in his old throat, a closing, the air going thin and then gone. He staggered. The cup fell from his fingers and rang upon the stone.

"Maester?" Stannis frowned, took a step. "Cressen, what—"

"It came to pass just as I told you it would, Your Grace." Melisandre's voice was warm and dripped into the ears like honey. "The Lord of Light protects his own. There is nothing in any poison of theirs that can touch one who serves the fire. You were wrong old man, my God has power. More than you can imagine." She looked down at Cressen as he sank to his knees, his hands at his throat, the world narrowing and darkening at its edges. "The old man sought to murder me, to keep you from your destiny. You see now what manner of counsel he gave you."

No, Cressen tried to say, and could not. No. I loved him. Everything I did, I did for love of him. Do not let her—

He was on the floor now. The cold stone against his cheek. The room going far away and small. And through the roaring dark he heard the last thing he would ever hear, the voice of the boy he had raised, the lonely grim child he had loved like a son, saying the words that broke what was left of an old man's heart.

"Take him," Stannis said. His voice was thick, his voice laced with certainty. "Edric. The boy. Take him and do what must be done. If it will wake a dragon— if it will stop him and the ash — then take him, and the gods forgive me, for there was no other way."

"You will not regret it, Your Grace." Melisandre's voice, fading now, fading. "When the comet is come and is at its height, I will give you fire made flesh. Dragons. A power no man living can stand against. The night will fall, and you will be the dawn, and all will know that there is only one true King in the realm."

Stannis, Cressen thought to speak again, with the last of him. He made to reach out for his boy. Oh, my lord. My poor cold lonely son. I am sorry. I am so sorry. I tried—

His throat was closed and the words would not come. The last thing he saw when he looked up was her, with her red eyes and her red red smile.

LORAS​

The king had been three days at his vigil, and Loras thought that if they did not get him down off that cold marble soon, they would be holding a second funeral the same week as the first.

"You've stood your watch, Joff." Jon Snow said it low, in the same tone Wilas would use to gentle a horse that had run itself near to foundering. "Three days and three nights. No man could ask more. No father could ask more. But the funeral's this morning, and you have to lead it, and you can't lead it dead on your feet, Your Grace."

They stood together in the great dim vault beneath the Great Sept of Baelor, where Robert lay in state upon his bier with candles burning at his head and feet and the seven faces of god looking down on him.

Joffrey knelt at the bier's foot in his blacks, where he had knelt, near enough, since they had carried his father in. Ser Balon Swann and Ser Mandon Moore stood the watch today in their white cloaks. Loras and Jon had taken it in turns to kneel beside the king through the long nights, because neither of them would leave him to grieve alone, whatever the custom said about a vigil being a solitary thing.

"A little longer," Joffrey said, his voice screaming weariness.

"No," said Loras. "Forgive me, Your Grace, but no. The whole realm is gathering above us to bury your father, and they'll want their king washed and fed and standing tall when they do it, not grey-faced and swaying. Your father would be the first to tell you so. He'd tell you to get up, eat a side of beef, and stop being a bloody fool about it." He paused. "Probably in language I'd not repeat in a sept, or am allowed to use on a king."

That won the ghost of a smile, which was what Loras had been after.

"He would, at that." Joffrey bowed his head to his father a moment longer. Then he rose, stiff, swaying just slightly, and Jon's hand was at his elbow at once and Loras's at his other side, and the king let them steady him, which told Loras better than anything how spent he was.

Joffrey never let anyone steady him.

"All right," the king said. "All right. Take me home. Let's bury my father properly."

The crowd hit them like a wave the moment the sept doors opened.

Loras had known there would be a crowd. There had been a crowd for days, thickening, the smallfolk of King's Landing massing in the great plaza below the sept and all up the slope of Visenya's Hill, drawn by grief and by hope and by the simple human hunger to see. But knowing it and standing in it were different things. The roar went up the instant Joffrey appeared at the top of the broad marble steps.

It was a vast wordless sound, thousands of throats at once, and then the name breaking out of it, Joffrey, Joffrey, the King, the King, gods bless him, the young king — and surging forward, hands reaching, faces wet, as if the mere sight of the boy in his blacks could ease something in them.

"Close up," Ser Balon snapped, and the white cloaks and the gold and the red closed around the king tight like a fist. Loras and Jon pressed in tight at his back, and together they brought him down the steps and through the screaming press toward the waiting litter.

Hands stretched past the guards to brush the king's sleeve, his cloak, anything. A woman was weeping and holding up a baby. An old man had gone to his knees in the dirt. Loras kept one hand on his sword and one on the king's shoulder and thought, not for the first time, that there was something almost frightening in being loved by so many at once.

They got him into the carriage. Loras and Jon climbed in after, and the curtains fell, and the roar dulled to a great muffled sound beyond the cloth. The carriage rumbled underfoot as they pulled off back to the redkeep.

In the dimness of the litter, with the crowd shut out, Loras got his first good look at his friend's face, and did not like what he saw. Joffrey looked hollowed. His gold eyes were sunk in shadow, the skin around them drawn tight and grey. Grief and three days' fasting and no sleep had worn him down to something thin.

"You should eat the moment we're back," Loras urged. They should have pulled him way sooner. "And sleep an hour. There's time before—"

"Do you think I'll be a good king?"

The question came quiet, out of nowhere, the king's eyes on the swaying curtains and not on either of them.

Jon answered first, his words certain. "I know you will."

"You're a good man, Joff," Loras said. "I've known you since you were eight years old. Good men make good kings — not always, true, but more often than not, and you're better than any man I know. You'll be a good king. The best the realm's had in a long while. Everyone says so." He smiled. "I'd not waste my white cloak on you otherwise."

Joffrey was quiet a moment. "Sometimes I wonder," he murmured. "That's all. Sometimes… I lie awake and I wonder."

"Every good man wonders, I think." Jon said. "It's the bad ones who never do."

The king looked at him, and something eased a little in the worn face, and he said no more about it. But Loras turned the words over the rest of the way down the hill, and could not quite say why they troubled him.

It was a strange thing, to hear doubt in a voice that never doubted.

Joffrey was the most certain person Loras had ever known. He had always seemed to move through the world as though he could see a little further down the road than anyone else, as though he knew how things would fall before they fell. To hear him wonder was like watching a wall show a crack.

He's grieving and exhausted, Loras told himself. That's all it is. A man's allowed to doubt himself the morning he buries his father.

He let it go. But it stayed with him, a small wrong note in an otherwise perfect song.

The Red Keep, when they reached it, was a hive kicked open. The whole castle thrummed. Servants ran in every direction. Carts of black cloth and white flowers and funeral candles choked the yards, stewards were shouting and urging, the kitchens poured smoke like a miniature besieged town.

There was a funeral to hold this morning, a coronation to mount in three days, and a royal wedding to follow hard upon it, and the household had to ready all three at once, and the strain of it showed on every face that hurried past.

Joffrey went up to his chambers in Maegor's Holdfast to wash and rest the little he could, and Loras took the guard at his door, and found Ser Jaime Lannister already there.

They stood the watch together, the Knight of Flowers and the Kingslayer, in companionable enough silence.

Loras had no great love for Jaime Lannister and no great hate either. The man was vain and quick-tongued and had killed a king, and was also, Loras had slowly come to understand, a better and sadder man than his reputation allowed if one were inclined to look deep enough. They were both of them sworn to the same boy. The same king. That made a kind of bond, whether either of them sought it.

It was a while before Sansa came.

She came up the holdfast stair with the Tarth woman a pace behind her and a small wrapped parcel in her hands, and Loras marked, watching her come, how much the girl had changed since she first arrived at court.

She had been a pretty but somewhat clueless child then, all courtesies and rehearsed sayings. The moons had worn some of that away.

There was a sense of belonging in the way she moved through the red keep. She strode to them with her chin up, the auburn hair caught in a net of silver, a woman where a girl had been.

It was partly the aging, Loras supposed. A maid of three-and-ten became a maid of four-and-ten and found her feet. But it was partly the love, too. She had bloomed here because the thing she had come south hoping for had turned out to be real.

She had turned fourteen the day before the old king died. Loras remembered it with a pang. There had been a gift in the making for that name day. Jon and Joffrey had been at some scheme for it, the two of them thick as thieves over it for a moon when the king was not busy with his gold cloaks. And then Pycelle said Robert was dying, and Joff had gone to his father's side and stayed there the whole last week, and the name day had come and gone in the shadow of a deathbed.

Joffrey had been wretched about it, Loras recalled — apologising to her for having no gift, no feast, nothing, with his father rotting in the next wing. And Sansa had taken his hands and told him, with that grave sweetness she had, that the only gift she required was not so far away and coming closer.

A week away still. The wedding. Even buried in funerals, the girl had not lost sight of it.

"My lady," Loras said, bowing. "He's resting. Or meant to be."

"I won't keep him." She lifted the parcel a little. "I only wanted to bring him this. It will help him through today, I think." Sansa smiled, warm and certain. "May I?"

Loras looked at Jaime, who gave careless shrug, and the two of them stood aside and let her pass through into the king's chambers. She likely wouldn't kill him, she would have to get past the old man.

When the door had closed behind her, Jaime spoke, idly, examining the back of his sword hand.

"Tell me something, Ser Loras. Do you still think it ought to have been your sister marrying him?"

It was a sharp question to ask so lightly, and Loras took a moment with it.

There had been a time the answer would have come quick and bitter. When the betrothal to the Stark girl was first struck, Loras had grieved it in his quiet way. Not because he wanted the throne for Highgarden, though his grandmother dearly did, but because Margaery had been, to his mind, the next best thing.

If Loras himself could never have the one he loved, and he never could, that road was closed and barred, then at least his sister might.

Margaery as queen, Joffrey as king, and Loras in a white cloak standing guard over the both of them and over their children, the two people in the world he loved best, kept safe behind his sword all his days. It had been a good dream. A whole life could be built on it.

But then he had watched Sansa Stark look at Joffrey across a supper table. He had seen the way her whole face changed when the king laughed. He had seen love there — real love, pure as snowmelt in the north, the kind the singers strained for and rarely caught — and Loras Tyrell, who carried his own hopeless love folded small and quiet in his chest, knew something genuine when he saw it.

He would not wish a lesser thing on Joffrey. He could not. Whatever made the king happy made Loras happy. That was simply the shape his love had taken, and he had made his peace with the shape of it sometime ago.

"I don't mind it so much anymore," Loras said, deciding there was no harm to being truthful. "Truly. I don't think my lord father or lady mother mind it much either, whatever my grandmother grumbles into her soup." He smiled. "Margaery would have loved being queen, I'll not pretend otherwise. She'd have worn the crown beautifully and given him a litter of golden children and been glad of every moment. But Tommens not so bad. He's a sweet boy. Six years, or maybe seven, she'll wed him at one-and-twenty, still young enough for a nursery full, and she gets to be a girl a while longer in the meanwhile. There are worse bargains, I think." He paused, and let the old jest come, because the moment wanted lightening. "Mind you, I'd not have minded if my sister sat the throne. A brother of the queen does well for himself."

"Mm." Jaime's mouth twitched into something that was not quite a smile. "It's not as merry as the songs make it, being kin to a queen. Believe me on that." And there was a strange look on his face for a moment, gone as quick as it came, something Loras did not understand and knew better than to ask after.

They let it lie. They were good at letting things lie, the two of them, standing their watches.

The royal family gathered in the yard to ride to the sept, and Loras, watching them assemble, marked again the growing chill between the King and the Queen Mother.

Loras didn't think they had been particularly close before, but it was different now. There was a coolness coming from Joffrey that was not there before.

He wasn't cruel. Never cruel. The king was never cruel to anyone, least of all in public, least of all on the morning of his father's funeral.

But there was a coolness there, a distance, a courtesy with no warmth behind it. He greeted the queen with a bow and a few soft words and then turned from her to see to his brother and sister, and Cersei Lannister stood with her son's coolness settling over her like northern frost.

Joffrey had always seemed to hold his mother at arm's length. He had spent his boyhood at his father's side, hunting with Robert, sitting in on Robert's councils, trailing the big loud laughing king everywhere he went, and never, that Loras had seen, sought out the queen's solar the way a boy might.

It had grieved Cersei. One could see it grieve her still. She loved her golden son with a fierceness that bordered on the frightening, but where there might have been some semblance of warmth from her son before, now there was nothing. Where one might expect him to go to her for comfort, he found it in duty or his friends and a northern girl soon to be his wife.

Little Myrcella stood near her mother with her lip trembling, lost in all the black and the grief, and Loras's heart went out to the child.

He stepped close, and drew a white rose from inside his cloak, he was never without one, the Knight of Flowers, it was half his name, and bent and offered it to her with a courtly flourish, as though she were a great lady and not a frightened girl of ten.

"For the bravest princess in the Seven Kingdoms," he declared.

Myrcella took it, and a small smile broke through the gloom on her face, and Loras counted that a victory worth more than most he'd won in the lists.

Cersei did not smile. The queen looked at him with those cold green eyes, and Loras, who had never much feared anyone, met them and gave her a slow and entirely insolent wink.

He had the considerable satisfaction of watching it land — watching the flicker of annoyance cross that beautiful cold face before the funeral-mask came down again.

Petty of you, Loras, he told himself, and did not repent of it in the slightest.

The funeral was as grand and solemn a thing as Loras had ever stood through. The Great Sept of Baelor was filled to its marble walls, the lords and ladies of all the Seven Kingdoms come in their black finery to bid the king farewell. Loras stood among the throng of knights and marked the great houses as he found them. There were the Tyrells, his own people, his grandmother small and sharp-eyed and entirely unbowed. The Hightowers deigning to come down from said Hightower to grace them all with their presence. The Redwyne's most of whom had already been at court. Lord Randyll Tarly with his family and Heartsbane at his back.

There were other too of course, great lords from all around the realm, but most did not catch his eyes. Loras was a kings man first and a reach man second, the rest of the kingdoms sort of blended together.

The Starks drew his eyes however.

Lady Catelyn stood with Sansa, tall and grave, her Tully colouring strong in the candlelight. He watched her eyes flicker to the vale contingent, they seemed to land on the Royce's and Harold Hardyng—soon to be Arryn— with unspoken accusation.

Loras had heard, as most had, conflicting tales from the vale of Arryn. What most could agree upon was that Sweet Robin was dead. Nasty business, Loras thought. Whilst he found the boy and lady Lysa strange, the boy was only six. He had barely even lived.

Lady Stark had brought her younger children south for the wedding — there was the wild one, the little sister, Arya, fidgeting and scowling in a gown she plainly loathed; and the youngest boy, Rickon, scarcely more than a babe, clutching his mother's skirts. But Loras's eye went searching and did not find the one it looked for.

"Where's your brother?" he murmured to Jon, beside him. "The heir. Robb. A man comes south for his sister's royal wedding, surely."

"He doesn't come," Jon murmured back. "There must always be a Stark in Winterfell. With my father here and the rest of the family south, the duty falls to Robb. He holds the north while they're away."

"That's a sad sort of duty, to miss your own sister's wedding to a king for it." Loras shook his head. "Nothing in the world would keep me from my sister's wedding. Surely the north can mind itself a few weeks."

"It's been that way since Winterfell was raised," Jon said, and there was something in his quiet northern voice that did not invite argument. "There must always be a Stark in Winterfell. There always has been. So there will be. He will likely come to visit once lady Stark returns, or perhaps Joff and Sansa will go to Winterfell. I know father would like them wed in front of a heart tree."

Loras let it go, though it still seemed a melancholy and needlessly tedious custom to him, to keep a brother from a wedding for the sake of an empty castle.

One by one the great folk went up to the bier to pay their respects. The royal family went last, with Joffrey at the head. He went alone, for he was king, walking the long aisle to stand a last time over his father, and the whole sept held its breath to watch him.

When the queen went up with the younger children, little Tommen, eight years old and overwhelmed, looking down at the painted stones laid over his father's eyes, began to cry.

It was not a quiet crying. It was the helpless open weeping of a small boy who understood, all at once and all too completely, that his father was gone and was not coming back.

Cersei's face was tightening, and she hissed something low and urgent — hush, Tommen, not here, not now, people are watching — most likely, in her attempt still him, to compose him, to make him fit the dignity of the moment.

And Joffrey crossed to them.

The king came back to the bier, and crouched, and gathered his weeping little brother up into his arms, and lifted him, and held him. Tommen buried his face in the king's black-clad shoulder and sobbed, and Joffrey held him through it, one hand cradling the boy's head, murmuring to him too low for any to hear, his own grief-worn face bent over his brother's, and made no move at all to quiet him or hurry him or be ashamed of him.

Loras heard the sound move through the sept. A soft intake of a thousand breaths, the small noises of the moved and the weeping. It reached many a heart.

The young king, who had buried his own grief for three days to do his duty, setting the duty aside for a moment to hold a frightened child. It was song worthy, as all things Joffrey did. But loras knew him. He knew his king. He had not done it for that, he had done it simply because his brother was crying.

Why would you ever wonder? Loras thought, watching him. He remembered the question in the litter, the doubt in his kings ever certain voice. Do you think I'll be a good king?

Looking at the king holding his weeping brother before all the realm, Loras could not for the life of him understand where such a doubt could come from. You great fool. You're the best man any of us knows. Look at you. How could you ever wonder?

They came out of the sept into the grey light and the waiting roar of the crowd, and Sansa came to stand at the king's side as they made ready to descend, slipping her hand into the crook of his arm, and Loras could not help himself.

"You know, Your Grace," he started, "I've always held that I complement you better than any lady at court. But I confess this one may have the better of me. She sets you off almost as well as I do."

Sansa giggled. A real girlish giggle, quickly smothered into something more befitting a funeral, and Joffrey gave a small smile, the first true one Loras had seen on him all that long grey morning.

There, Loras thought, glad of it. There he is. He hoped to see more of it, once the worst of the grief had worn away. Once the father was buried and the crown was on and the wedding done, and the king could be, for a little while at least, a new husband instead of a realm's whole weight made flesh.

The smile suited him far better than the sorrow. Loras meant to coax as many of them out of him as he could, in the days to come. It was, he had long ago decided, as good a use as any for a life.

He happened to glance, as they started down the steps, at the queen.

Cersei was watching her son and the Stark girl. And the look on her face, in the unguarded half-second before she felt herself observed, was not grief at all.

It was something Loras had no comfortable name for. A hatred so pure and so cold that it raised the hair on his arms, fixed on the auburn-haired girl who had her arm through the king's, who was soon to replace Cersei as queen.

Then the mask came down, and Cersei was a grieving mother again, and the moment was gone.

But Loras had seen it, and it stayed with him as they went down into the sea of screaming, grasping, adoring smallfolk, the name of the king going up around them like a tide — Joffrey, Joffrey, gods bless the young king — thousands of faces lifted and wet and shining with a love that asked nothing and gave everything.

He is so very easy to love, the Knight of Flowers thought, watching the crowd reach for his king, watching a whole city pour out its heart at the sight of a tired young man in black.

He had thought it a thousand times and never tired of the thinking. But now, with the queen's cold hatred fresh in his mind's eye, another thought came on its heels, unbidden and unwelcome, and would not be shaken off.

Perhaps there is such a thing as too much love. Perhaps love and hate are not so far apart as the singers pretend, and a man loved by everyone is a man with a great many ways to be lost.

Loras Tyrell thought of his own love, the quiet hopeless folded thing he carried, that asked only to stand near and serve and be a rose the sun shone on. He had made his peace with being only that. He was content. He wanted nothing more than to guard the man he loved and see him happy and ask no return.

But he wondered, going down into the roar, what he might have become, what he might have done, had he not made that peace. Had he wanted more than the sun's golden light on a rose. Had his love curdled instead of settling, the way he could see, even now, some other love beginning to curdle behind a beautiful cold face above him on the steps.

Loras did not like the thought. He put it from him, and smiled, and drew his white rose-fancies back around him, and went down the steps at his king's shoulder into the love of the multitude.

But he had thought it. And like the king's strange doubt in the carriage, it stayed.

OBERYN​

In Dorne, when they crowned a prince, they did it quickly, under the open sky, and then they got out of the sun to drink and fuck.

The Andals of the green lands seemed to do everything slowly, with as much gold and incense as could be crammed into a day, and Oberyn Martell, standing in the marble vastness of the Great Sept of Baelor with the seven looking down their carved noses at him, thought it a wonder any of them ever found time to rule at all, so much of their lives did they spend kneeling.

The boy knelt now.

He knelt before the High Septon in the heart of the sept, beneath the great dome where the seven shafts of coloured light came slanting down through the crystal, and the old man in his cloth-of-gold anointed him with the seven oils.

A drop on the brow, for the Father, that he might judge with justice. A drop on the eyes — the Maiden — that he might defend the innocent. The Crone, for wisdom. The Smith, for strength. The Mother, the Warrior, the Stranger. Seven oils for the seven faces of god, smeared one by one onto the bowed golden head, while ten thousand candles burned and the most powerful people in the Seven Kingdoms held their breath.

And still the boy wore no crown.

That was the cleverness in his decision, Oberyn conceded, watching with his arms folded and his face arranged into the pleasant attentiveness he had worn since he arrived in the stinking cesspool they called a city.

The crown had sat the seat of the Iron Throne, and the boy had sat below it, and the whole of King's Landing had wept itself sick over the humility of their golden king who would not presume.

A pretty trick. Oberyn had seen pretty tricks before. He had performed a few. The trick was always prettiest to those who did not know it was so.

He let his dark eyes move across the gathered lords. There, the Lannisters in their crimson — and at the heart of them, Tywin Lannister.

The Red Viper's smile did not waver. It was a near thing.

There you are, he thought. Old lion. There you sit, in your fine red, watching your grandson anointed with holy oil, looking as pleased as a cat in cream. And do you ever think of her? …In all your reckonings and your sums, old man, in all the long ledger of your life, is there a single line for my sister?

Sixteen years, and the wound was as raw as the hour they brought him word of it. His gentle sister, who had never been strong, whose chest had always troubled her, who had given the dragon prince two children and her whole soft heart. Married to beloved Rhaegar Targaryen and then set aside for a northern girl. And then, when the city fell—

Oberyn did not let himself see it, here, in the sept, with the candles and the singing. He had trained himself not to see it in public, because when he saw it his face did things that frightened people, and Doran had been very clear.

But the wound was as raw now as it had been sixteen years ago. The Mountain. Gregor Clegane, Tywin Lannister's mad dog, sent into the Red Keep when it fell. Rhaenys, his sister's little girl, dragged screaming from beneath her father's bed and stabbed half a hundred times. The baby, Aegon, his head dashed against a wall. And Elia… raped upon the floor beside her murdered son, and then killed, by a man whose hands were so large he might have done it without thinking.

And the man who gave the order sat there in his crimson, breathing, looking pleased.

Lord Tywin had wrapped the little broken bodies in crimson cloaks and laid them before the Usurper's throne as a gift, a proof of loyalty, the corpses of a princess and her babes offered up like game from a hunt.

Robert Baratheon had looked at them and seen dragonspawn. Oberyn had heard he smiled.

The man was a corpse himself now, below this very sept, and Oberyn found he could not even take pleasure in it. The man had been a brute and a fool, but he had not held Elia down. He had not killed the children. The ones who had done that still lived, and prospered, and one of them watched as his grandson was anointed into kingship while all the realm cheered.

Patience, he heard his brother say, in that mild infuriating voice of his. Patience, brother.

The anointing was done. The boy rose, and the long walk began.

This too, as with the crown, was a strange new addition proposed by the Lannister boy. The new king was to go on foot from the Great Sept of Baelor across the whole of the city to the Red Keep, while his lords rode or were carried in litters behind him. Oberyn had a fine sand steed beneath him and was glad of it. He had no intention of walking anywhere for a Lannister's grandson.

He fell in among the mounted lords and let his horse carry him, and watched the boy walk ahead, small and golden in the press, and watched what the walk was for.

It was a slow accretion. A coronation done in stages, like a sauce reduced. At intervals along the route the procession halted, and at each halting some new richness was added to the king.

At the foot of Visenya's Hill, a steward knelt and offered up a sceptre and orb of gold, and the boy took them. Further on, before a great press of weeping smallfolk, a lavish cloak was laid across his shoulders — blood red, trimmed in white fur, hung with golden medallions that caught the sunlight. Then rings, slid onto his fingers at another station. Then a heavy chain of office, gold and rubies, laid about his neck.

By slow degrees, as the procession wound through the streets, the plain anointed boy in his simple whites was transformed, layer by layer, into something gilded and magnificent, until by the time they neared the Red Keep he blazed like a king out of the songs, red and gold and white from crown to heel.

And all the while no crown, Oberyn noted. Cloaked and ringed and chained like an idol, and still bareheaded. They do love to make you wait, these Andals. They make even the gods wait.

The smallfolk did not wait. The smallfolk drowned their king in love.

Oberyn had never heard the like, and he had heard crowds from Oldtown to Meeren. The streets were a solid wall of bodies, every window and rooftop crammed, and the sound that came off them as the golden boy passed was not cheering so much as a kind of collective weeping joy, more worship than anything.

They threw flowers. They held up their children to see. They wept and reached and called his name as though the mere passage of him through their wretched streets were a blessing on their miserable lives.

My King. Joffrey. Joffrey, we love you. Gods bless the young king.

It unsettled the Dornishman, that sound, though he could not at first have said why. He had seen kings cheered. He had never seen a king adored, not like this, not by the lowest and poorest of a city famously hard to please. The smallfolk were not known to love easily, and they did not love a lie for long.

And yet, Oberyn remembered, they loved Rhaegar too. Oh they loved him most of all. They sang for Rhaegar in these same streets. And what good was that love for Elia and her children?

The throne room of the Red Keep, when at last they came to it, was a wonder even to a Dornish prince who had seen most of what this world had to offer.

The hall was vast and packed, every lord and lady of consequence in the Seven Kingdoms gathered beneath the high windows, and at the far end, atop its steps, brooded the Iron Throne — that great ugly tangle of a thousand swords beaten and fused together, sharp and black and graceless, the ugliest seat of power Oberyn had ever seen, and somehow the most fitting.

The High Septon had gone ahead of the procession through the city and so was already to its summit, where Robert Baratheon's antlered crown rested still upon the seat.

The king came up the hall through the parting crowd, blazing in his gilt, and began his climb.

King Joffrey climbed slowly, with the care those barbed steps demanded. Oberyn had heard the tale by now, everyone had, of how the throne had cut the old king to death and left him near delirious in the end.

At the top, the king knelt for the final time, upon the highest step, below the seat, below the crown. The High Septon lifted it up from the throne and held it a moment above the kneeling boy, and then lowered it onto his golden brow — the dead father's crown, the heavy gold with its stag's-antler points — so that for one breath the son wore the father's crown. Then the old man lifted it away again, and gave it to a waiting acolyte, and took up another.

The new king's own crown. Oberyn leaned forward despite himself to see it.

It was, to his surprise, a restrained thing, after all the gilt and fur of the walk. A simple band of gold, no antlers, no ostentation — but set all around with rubies that burned red as Elia's blood, the blood roaring in his veins, and between the rubies, black diamonds, dark and deep and shimmering with their own cold fire when the light caught them.

Red and black. Oberyn's eyes narrowed a fraction. Red and black. A handsome choice, boy. Targaryen colours, almost, though I doubt one man in this hall will say so aloud, with the dragons sixteen years dead.

It was a beautiful crown, and Oberyn distrusted clever beautiful things on principle, having made a study of being one.

The High Septon set it upon the boy's brow and named him — Joffrey of the House Baratheon, the First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm.

And the boy rose, crowned at last, and turned, and sat the Iron Throne.

He sat it well. Oberyn would give him that, sourly. Many men would have looked small in that monstrous chair. The boy looked as though it had been waiting for him. He arranged himself among the blades with an ease that said he had thought about how to sit it, which of course he had, this one had a look that said he thought about everything.

The hall erupted into a roar of acclamation that shook the coloured glass in the high windows, lords and ladies crying out the new king's name. Beyond the walls, the bells began to toll, and the small folk took up the roar as well, so that the whole of King's Landing bellowed its love at once.

Oberyn cheered with them, because a man who did not cheer would be noticed, and a Dornishman least of all could afford to be noticed not cheering.

He cheered, and he smiled, and inside the smile he was somewhere else entirely.

It should be Aegon sitting there. The thought came cold and clear through all the noise. My sister's son. The Dragon's son, the little prince with his father's silver hair.

He would be a man now, near enough — older than this gilded Lannister child. He would be sitting that ugly chair by right, by blood, the dragon come again, and Elia would be standing at the foot of those steps a dowager queen, alive, grey-haired perhaps, but alive.

That was the world that should have been. If only Rhaegar had done his duty and won—

Instead his sister was sixteen years in the ground with her babes, and a Lannister's grandson wore the crown, and the old lion smiled.

Oberyn's dark eyes went to the woman who stood at the thrones foot. The Queen Mother, gowned in mourning black that somehow contrived to be the most magnificent garment in the hall, gold and crimson worked through the black, her golden hair caught up in a net of rubies, beautiful and cold and triumphant.

Cersei Lannister. The mother of the king. The first lady of the realm.

And that should be Elia, Oberyn thought, and the smile on his face did not so much as flicker, sixteen years of practice holding it in place. That place, that honour, that black-and-gold magnificence at the foot of the throne — that is a mother of kings, and my sister was a mother of a king, the true one, and she got a Mountain on top of her for it and a crimson cloak for a shroud. Look at her stand there. Look at the Lannister woman have everything my sister should have had—

He made himself breathe. He made himself remember Doran.

His brother had summoned him before he left for King's Landing, to the water gardens where Doran sat with his gout-swollen legs and his maddening patience, and had taken Oberyn's hand in his soft ruined ones and said, Brother. You will go, and you will smile, and you will give them no cause. Whatever you see. Whatever you feel. We are not ready, and a war begun in grief is a war lost before it starts. Watch. Listen. Smile. And come home to me with everything you have seen, and nothing broken. Promise me.

Oberyn had promised. He kept his promises to Doran, mostly, which was more than he could say for any other promise in his life.

So he watched, and listened, and smiled, and turned over in his mind the things he had brought south with him.

The marriage. Not this golden King's, but the one meant to avenge his dead sister.

Viserys Targaryen, the beggar prince across the water, the last living son of the old dynasty, and Arianne, Doran's daughter, Oberyn's fierce clever niece, promised to him in secret these years past.

A dragon for Dorne. A path back to fire and blood, to the old alliance of dragon and sun, to a day when the Martells might set a Targaryen on the Iron Throne and stand at his side as they had meant to stand at Rhaegar's.

It was a slow plan. It was, of course, Doran's plan. All of Doran's plans were slow. But it was a plan, and it had been a comfort, knowing it was there, a blade kept oiled in the dark against the day.

Except…

Except the men they had sent east to watch the boy and his sister had gone quiet. That was the worm in the fruit, the thing that had gnawed at Oberyn the whole long road to King's Landing.

Doran's eyes in the Free Cities, the careful watchers set to keep the thread of the marriage alive — they had not sent word in too long. Their reports had simply stopped.

If something has happened… if the dragon is dead, Oberyn thought, if Viserys is dead, or the girl, or both — then Doran's patient marriage is so much ash, and we are back where we began. No dragon to set against the lions. No fire and blood waiting in the wings. Only us. Only Dorne, alone, with our grievance and our patience and our sixteen years of swallowed rage.

He looked up at the boy on the throne, crowned and golden, the whole realm roaring his name.

And if it comes to that — if there is no dragon, and the vengeance must be ours alone, taken with our own hands — then it will have to be taken from you, boy. Whatever you are. However much they might love you.

He studied the king, then, with the cold attention he gave to things he meant to understand before he killed, and he confessed himself uncertain, which was rare and unwelcome.

For the boy was not what Oberyn had come prepared to hate.

Everywhere Oberyn had gone these past days, in the wine-sinks and the markets and the halls, he had heard the same thing. That the boy was good. Dutiful. Pious past his years. That he fed the poor with his own coin and food, walked Flea Bottom to know the sorrows of his people and prayed at dawn in the sept.

There was a song, even — Oberyn had heard it twice now, in two different taverns, a mournful pretty thing.

Succeeding You, Father.

Made of the boy's last words to his dying king, and grown men and women had wept into their cups to hear it.

A good king, they said. Genuinely good, perhaps, which was more dangerous than cruel, because a cruel king made plenty of his own enemies and a good king's enemies had to make themselves.

Perhaps, Oberyn allowed, watching the boy accept the realm's love with a grave and weary grace, perhaps you would even give me what I want, boy, if I came to you and asked. Perhaps you are just enough for that. Gregor Clegane still lives, still serves, still rides under the Lannister banner — perhaps I could kneel before that ugly chair and say, give me the Mountain who killed my sister, give me Amory Lorch who killed her daughter, and perhaps you would say yes, because you are that good, and it would cost you nothing but two monsters you have no use for.

Oberyn turned the thought over and over and over before he set it down.

But you would never give me the real one. You would give me the dog, but never the man who loosed the dog. You would never give me Tywin Lannister, who sits there at the foot of your throne looking oh so pleased — because Tywin is your grandsire. The Mountain only obeyed. The old lion commanded. And no good king, however just, hands over his own grandfather and the foundation of his own power for a Dornish prince's grudge.

That was what it came down to. Family always came first. No matter how monstrous the crime.

So it does not matter, in the end, whether you are good. You may be the best king the realm has had in three hundred years. The singers may weep over you for a thousand. It changes nothing. You are a lion under the gold, boy. Lannister blood, Lannister gold, Lannister power, the old lion's own grandson crowned and anointed while the man who murdered my sister stands smiling at your side. And Elia's blood cries out. Rhaenys cries out. The babe Aegon cries out from his little broken grave. They will have their fire and blood, mine own sweet dead, one way or another, from across the water or from Dorne alone — and if it must be taken from a good king, well…

The smile stayed on his face, pleasant, charming, the smile that had undone lords and ladies both across half the world.

Good men bleed the same as bad ones. I have made something of a study of it.

A horn sounded, silencing the hall, and the new king lifted his hand.

"Bring my brother," Tywin's grandson called, his voice carrying clear over the throng. "And my sister."

A stir at the back, and then the little prince and princess came up the long hall. Tommen, round and solemn, still saddened even with the funeral two days past. Myrcella, slight and golden, holding her brother's hand. They came to the foot of the Iron Throne and looked up at it, and at the brother who sat it crowned. At his urging, they began, uncertainly, to climb.

They climbed only partway, for the king rose from his terrible chair and came down the steps to meet them, so that they should not have to climb to him, and the hall murmured at it, that softness, that grace.

An acolyte brought a pair of slender gold circlets. Joffrey set one upon his brother's head, and one upon his sister's, gently, and turned the children to face the court.

"Hear me," the king said, and the hall went silent to hear. "Until the gods grant me a child of my own body, my brother Tommen stands first in the line of succession, and after him my sister Myrcella. They are my heirs. Honour them as you would honour me." He laid a hand on each small golden head. "Whatever befalls me, the line is secure. The realm will always have a Baratheon to follow."

The hall roared its approval, lords and ladies crying out for the new king and his heirs both, and the little prince looked up at his crowned brother with such naked love and relief that even Oberyn felt the edge of it.

A good king, Oberyn thought again, watching the golden family arrayed upon the steps of the Iron Throne, crowned and beloved and secure, while his sister and her children lay sixteen years in the cold. Truly. What a pity.

The red viper clapped with the rest, and smiled with the rest, and behind the dark warm Dornish eyes he began, patiently, the way his brother had taught him, to count the ways into a guarded king.

SANSA​

She had dreamed of her wedding a thousand times, and not one of the thousand had been half so fine as the morning that came.

They woke her before the dawn, and the day became at once a glad confusion of women. Her mother and Arya and all her ladies, and Margaery Tyrell with her clever knowing smile and three of her cousins, crowding the chamber, talking over one another, laughing, fussing.

They bathed her in water scented with the oils of the Reach that Margaery had brought as a gift. They dried her auburn hair before the fire and brushed it until it shone like burnished copper and worked it through with a net of fine silver and tiny river pearls. They laced her into the gown, and the gown was a marvel — ivory silk and silver Myrish lace, the bodice sewn with seed pearls and frost-pale crystals that caught the light like morning on snow, and across the long sweep of the skirts, worked in thread of silver and grey and palest blue, the direwolf of her house ran among pale roses.

"Oh, my lady," breathed Jeyne, who had been her friend since they were small girls together at Winterfell. "Oh, you look—"

"Like a queen," said Margaery, and there was no edge in it, none at all, only a warm and generous pleasure that made Sansa love her for it. "You look like a queen out of a song, Sansa. He'll forget how to speak when he sees you. I should know, men forget how to speak around me often enough, and I have never looked half so well as you do this morning."

Even Arya looked, and scowled, and looked again. Her little sister stood by the window in the grey-and-white gown she had been wrestled into under loud protest, her face set in the fierce frown she wore whenever she was made to do anything ladylike, and she studied Sansa for a long moment with her Stark-grey eyes.

"You look stupid," Arya said at last. Then, grudgingly, as though the words were being dragged out of her with hooks: "...Pretty. You look pretty. It's a stupid pretty dress and you look stupid and pretty in it." And she scowled harder, furious at herself, and Sansa laughed and crossed the room and kissed her sister's scowling cheek before Arya could squirm away, and thought that she had never in her life been so happy.

Her mother rode with her in the wheelhouse to the wedding, and for a while they did not speak, and Sansa watched the morning sun come golden through the curtains and could scarcely sit still for the joy of it.

"You are a woman grown today," Catelyn said at last, and took her daughter's hand. "And a queen. I can hardly believe it. It seems no time at all since you were a babe at my breast, and now—" Her eyes shone. "You'll forgive a mother for being foolish. The day comes for every mother and it always comes too soon."

"Mother." Sansa squeezed her hand. "Tell me about your wedding. To Father. You never have, not really."

So Catelyn told her of Riverrun, and the war, and how she had been meant to marry Brandon, Ned's elder brother, the wild one, and how Brandon had died with their father in King's Landing, burned and strangled by the Mad King, and how it had been quiet grave Ned she wed instead, almost a stranger, the two of them married in the sept at Riverrun in a double wedding with Lysa, on a day when half the realm was at war.

"I did not love him, that day," her mother admitted. "How could I? I scarce knew him. He had your brother Robb on me and rode off to fight before the babe was born, and I thought, this cold northern stranger is my husband and I do not know him at all." She smiled, and the smile was soft and far away. "The love came after. It came slowly, and it came surely, and it has never once left me. That is the truth of it, Sansa, that the songs never tell you. Sometimes the love comes first, and sometimes it comes after, but in a good marriage, it comes. And yours—" her voice caught "—yours has come already, before the vows are even spoken. You are luckier than ever I was, sweetling. You go to a man you already love. And who will treat you well. There is no greater fortune in all the world."

She was happy saying it. Sansa could see that she was happy. And yet there was a sadness in her mother too, a shadow behind the joy, and Sansa knew its name without having to ask.

"You're thinking of Aunt Lysa," she said softly.

Catelyn's hand tightened. For a moment something crossed her face — grief, and anger, and a sister's old complicated love, all tangled together. "It is your wedding day," she said. "I'll not darken it. There will be time enough for the dead when the living have had their joy." She touched Sansa's cheek. "Your aunt would have wanted you happy. She was a great one for weddings and songs, my sister, when we were girls. Let us leave her there, in the songs, and speak no more of it today."

Sansa did not press. But she held her mother's hand the rest of the way, and was glad of her, and grieved a little, quietly, for an aunt she had never truly known, and a cousin she had never met who had gone into the dark somewhere far away in the mountains of the Vale.

The wheelhouse came to a halt, and the door was opened, and the sound hit her like a wave.

She had not understood, until that moment, what Joffrey had meant. When she had asked him, why they were not to be wed in the Great Sept of Baelor as kings and queens were wed, he had taken her hands and spoke very softly and very seriously.

Because the smallfolk will want to see, Sansa. They are the realm too, as much as any lord in his castle, and they have had little enough joy in their lives and little enough from those who rule them. Let them have this. Let them have a wedding to remember, and a queen to love, and a day they can tell their grandchildren of. I mean to do better by them than kings have done. We shall start here.

She had not fully understood. But she had seen the love they poured out for him at the late kings funeral and for her kings coronation. And now, stepping down into the vast open bowl of the Dragonpit on her father's arm, she understood it all entirely.

There were more people than she had ever seen gathered in one place in all her life. The great ruined dome of the Dragonpit had been raised over and cleared and hung with banners — the crowned stag of Baratheon and the grey direwolf of Stark, side by side, everywhere, gold and grey — and beneath the open sky it was packed with people, fifty thousand of them, the histories would later say, the smallfolk of King's Landing crammed shoulder to shoulder upon the tiered stone, and more outside, choking the slopes of Rhaenys's Hill, hanging from every vantage.

And when Sansa appeared at the top of the long aisle in her ivory and silver, the sound that went up from all those throats at once was a thing she felt in her chest and her teeth and the soles of her feet, a vast roaring tide of love.

The Queen! The Queen! Look at her, look, isn't she lovely. The Queen for our King! The Queen!

"They love you already," Ned said quietly, at her side. He had come to walk her down, grave and handsome in Stark grey, the long face she loved so well gone soft with feeling. "Look at them. They've not even truly met you and they love you, for his sake and for your own. You'll be a good queen to them, Sansa. I have never been more certain of anything."

"Father." She could hardly speak for the swelling in her throat. "I'm so happy. Is it wrong to be so happy?"

"No, sweetling." His eyes were bright. "No. It is the most right thing in the world." He looked at her a long moment, and she saw him seeing her truly. "You've grown into someone fine, Sansa. I am prouder of you than I have ever been of anything." His voice roughened. "Now. Shall I give you to your king?"

"Yes," Sansa whispered. "Oh, yes. Please."

And he led her down the long aisle, through the roaring love of fifty thousand people, toward the man who waited at the bottom of it.

She had not been allowed to see him until that moment, and when she saw him she forgot, for a breath, how to breathe.

Joffrey stood at the heart of the great space with the High Septon beside him in his cloth-of-gold, and he was everything. He wore black and gold, the crowned stag worked across his breast, and on his arm — she saw it and her heart turned over — he still wore the favour, the same favour, the blue silk she had given him as a girl, the one he wore when he rode as the mystery knight and crowned her his queen of love and beauty.

He wore it still, on his wedding day, where all the realm could see. And on his golden head sat the crown, the gold, red and black, the rubies and the dark diamonds, and his golden eyes found her the instant she appeared, and did not leave her, all the long walk down, as though there were no fifty thousand others in all the world, as though there were only Sansa.

Her father placed her hand in the king's. She felt the warmth of it close around hers.

"You came," Joffrey said, low, only for her, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. "I half feared you'd see sense and run."

"Never," she breathed. "Not in a thousand years. Not ever."

The High Septon spoke the words, old and holy, calling on the Father and the Mother to bless their union, the Crone to light their way and the Smith to make it strong, the Maiden and the Warrior and the Stranger. Sansa said her prayers in a voice that shook only a little, and Joffrey said his clear and steady, and the candles burned and the crystal threw its rainbow light, and it passed for Sansa in a kind of golden dream, the way she had always known it would, the only way it could have been with her golden prince—now king.

Then her father came, and unfastened the maiden's cloak from her shoulders — the grey cloak with the white wolf, the cloak of her childhood, of House Stark, of the girl she had been. He lifted it away gently, and folded it over his arm, and kissed her brow.

And Joffrey took up the bride's cloak.

It was beautiful past the telling — black and gold, the Baratheon colours, but worked all along its border, she saw, with the direwolf of her house running beside the stag of his, the two of them together, again and again, the way she had sewn them on the doublet, the way they ran in all her dreams now. He had remembered. He had had it made just so.

And he stood behind her, tall and straight, and swept the cloak of his protection over her shoulders, and fastened the clasp at her throat with gentle hands, and leaned forward, and kissed her cheek, soft and tender, exactly the way she had pictured it a thousand times as a girl.

Sansa did not weep. She was proud of that, after. She wanted to, but she did not, because a queen did not weep before fifty thousand of her people, and she was a queen now, and so she held the tears in, shining, behind her eyes.

"With this kiss I pledge my love," the king said, turning her to face him, "and take you for my lady and my wife, and my queen, all my days."

"With this kiss I pledge my love," Sansa said, "and take you for my lord and my husband, and my king, all my days."

And he kissed her.

It was not a long kiss, nor a deep one, for all the world was watching — but Sansa felt it go through her like sunlight through water, and when their lips parted the Dragonpit erupted, fifty thousand voices crashing up into the open sky, and she stood in the circle of her husband's arms in the thunder of it and felt, truly, as though her feet had left the ground. As though she were floating. As though she might drift up off the stone and into the blue morning and never come down.

Then Joffrey did one thing more, one thing she had not looked for.

A page came forward bearing a cushion, and on the cushion lay a crown. Her crown. Sansa had not known there would be a crown for her now. She had thought to be crowned later, with more ceremony — but Joffrey lifted it from the cushion and held it up so the people could see, and the roar redoubled.

It was a slender silver band, finer than gossamer, and worked all around it, engraved in the silver with exquisite care, were blue winter roses, and snarling wolves, and leaping stags, twined together; and set among them were diamonds like frost and sapphires like the deep blue of the roses themselves, so that the whole of it glittered cold and blue and silver, a northern crown, a crown made of her, made of everything she was and everything she loved.

"For you, my queen," Joffrey said softly, and set it on her brow.

And that nearly undid her. She felt the tears come stinging and fought them, fought them with everything she had, blinking up at the blue morning sky.

I will not weep, I will not! I am the Queen, and somehow she held them, and smiled instead, radiant, while her husband crowned her before all the realm and the people screamed their love until the old stones of the Dragonpit seemed to tremble with it.

This is real, Sansa thought, dazed with joy. This is real. It is happening. It is all of it real.

The feast was held in the Red Keep, and it was the grandest thing Sansa had ever seen or dreamed of seeing.

The lords and ladies of all the Seven Kingdoms filled the great hall, and envoys had come from across the narrow sea, from the Free Cities, grave dark men from Braavos and perfumed magisters from Pentos and Myr, bringing gifts.

Bolts of silk and Myrish lace, a singing bird in a golden cage, a jewelled dagger, casks of rare sweet wine, a tapestry that the Lysene weavers said took ten years to make. The gifts were piled high, and Sansa thanked each giver prettily, and her cheeks ached from smiling, but she did not mind in the least.

Joffrey had changed his clothes for the feast, and Sansa's heart leapt when she saw that he was wearing the doublet. Her doublet, the one she had laboured over for moons, the deep blue and gold with the wolves and stags running across it.

He had worn his wedding finery to be married in, and now, for the feast, for the dancing, for the long warm evening of their wedding, he wore the thing she had made with her own hands. He caught her looking and grinned and spread his arms a little, See, I'm wearing it, and she laughed and could have run up to hug and kiss him again right there before all the court.

There were forty-nine courses. Sansa lost count, but the singers later made it forty-nine, and she had no cause to doubt them. There were dancers from the Summer Isles in feathers of every colour, and a troupe of mummers who played The Dragon's Daughter, and a fire-juggler, and a bear that danced, and singers — so many singers, and one of them sang a new song that Sansa had not heard, a sweet sad lovely thing called Succeeding You, Father, and she saw Joffrey's face go still for a moment when it began, and reached under the table to take his hand, and he squeezed hers and the moment passed.

All the food was tasted before it reached the high table, of course; she knew that much of how royal feasts were kept. But Joffrey did more than that. Each dish that was set before her, he took from her plate first and ate of it; each cup poured for her, he drank from before he passed it to her lips.

The first time he did it, Sansa thought it the most romantic thing in the world, her husband taking the first taste of everything, like a knight in a song proving his devotion.

"My lord husband," she said, teasing, leaning close, "surely it should be the other way about. You are the king. If anyone in this hall is like to be poisoned, it is you, not poor unimportant me. I should be tasting your cup." She smiled up at him. "Let me protect my king."

Something moved behind Joffrey's gold eyes, quick, there and gone.

"You would think that, wouldn't you, wife." he said. Sansa did not understand him.

"...My lord?"

But he only smiled, and the strange flat thing in his eyes was gone as if it had never been, and he kissed her on the cheek, light and warm. "Never mind it, sweet. It doesn't matter. Drink your wine." And she flushed, and let him do as he pleased, because he was her husband now and his pleasure was hers, and she thought no more of it.

He was so charming all that long evening. He charmed the dour Braavosi, and spoke to the prickly Dornish and the northern lords who had come to see Ned's little girl wed. He had a word for everyone, the right word, the word that made each guest feel seen and valued. And Sansa watched him and tried to do as he did, to mirror him, to be the queen beside the king — and found it came easier than she had feared, with him there to steady her.

Whenever the press of it grew too much, whenever some lord went on too long or some lady's questions grew too sharp and Sansa felt the panic flutter at her throat, Joffrey was simply there, appearing at her side as if he had felt it from across the hall, sweeping her away. Come, my queen, you owe me a dance, and then they would be turning across the floor together and the world would right itself.

She danced with everyone, in the end. She danced with Joffrey most of all, but she danced with Jon, who was stiff and careful and apologised twice for his feet though he never once trod on hers; and with little Bran, solemn and proud in his finery, flushed scarlet to be dancing with a queen; and with her father, who held her the way he had held her as a little girl standing on his boots in the solar at Winterfell; and with Loras, who was the finest dancer in the hall and made her laugh the whole time; and with Renly, all easy charm.

It seemed every lord in the realm wished a turn with the new queen, and they were all so kind, all of them, and the music never stopped, and Sansa thought that her heart might simply burst with the fullness of it.

Every time she looked at Joffrey across the hall she felt herself fall a little further, as if in a dream, endlessly and without fear.

The night wound down at last, the candles guttering low, the music going soft and sweet. They had been feasting all week, what with the funeral and the coronation, and they still had a week to go, of feasting and jousting, just to celebrate the wedding.

There had been talk, earlier, of a second wedding. A northern one, before a heart tree, in the old way, to honour her blood and her father's gods. But the Red Keep's godswood had no true weirwood, only an old oak the southrons had taken to calling a heart tree, and her father and Joffrey had agreed, in the end, that it would be no true marriage in the eyes of the old gods to swear it there.

When we go north, Joffrey had promised her. When I take you home to Winterfell, we'll say the words again before your father's heart tree, the real one, with the red leaves and the carved face, and your gods can witness us same as the Seven Who Are One did today. I'd not cheat you of either set of gods, Sansa. You'll be twice my wife when it is all done.

The thought of it warmed her — of going home, of standing in the snow before the weirwood with Joffrey at her side, of her two worlds made one.

"Sansa." Joffrey leaned close, his breath warm at her ear, and his voice had gone low and serious beneath the music. "Listen to me. The bedding. If you don't want it — the custom, the hands, all of it — you've only to say. I'll pick you up this instant and carry you out myself and cut through the whole rabble of them and damn the tradition. You needn't suffer it if it would shame you. Only tell me."

And Sansa, who as a girl had found the bedding wonderfully wicked and exciting, and who had grown old enough since to find it frightening, discovered that tonight, this night, with this man, she found it only funny.

"It's all right," she said, giggling. "Tradition must be observed, my lord. What sort of queen would I be if I robbed all these good people of their fun? Let them have their bedding. I'm not afraid."

Joffrey grumbled something under his breath about traditions invented by drunkards and gropers, and Sansa laughed again — she had been laughing all day, he had kept her laughing all day, it was one of the thousand things she loved in him — and then a voice rang out across the hall, calling for the bedding, a wonderfully dry clever voice that sounded suspiciously like the king's small uncle, Lord Tyrion. And the hall took it up with a roar, and they were seized.

They were pulled apart, laughing, and the women fell upon Joffrey and the men came for Sansa, and Sansa heard her husband give an outraged squawk from somewhere in the press of ladies.

"Unhand your king— that is the queen's— ladies, ladies—" and she caught a glimpse of him being borne away helpless on a tide of laughing women, and saw, to her delight, that Margaery and Desmera Redwyne were at the very heart of it and enjoying themselves enormously, Margaery saying something that made the king squawk again.

The men were far gentler with Sansa, and she knew whom to thank for it. Jon and her father and Loras had placed themselves close about her, and where another bride might have been stripped and jostled and pawed up the stairs, Sansa was escorted — that was the only word — her cloak and gown removed with a careful courtesy that owed everything to the three grave armed men at her shoulders, who let no hand stray and no jape grow too coarse.

She felt a great rush of love for them, her quiet half-brother and her father and her husband's sworn friend, who had made even the bedding a thing of gentleness for her sake.

They brought her to the bedchamber in her shift, and there was Joffrey, already delivered, stripped to his trousers and nothing else, his golden hair tousled and his face flushed and laughing, shooing the last of the gigglers out the door.

And then the door closed, and the noise of them faded down the corridor, and Sansa stood in her shift in the warm candlelit room, alone with her husband, and the thought rang loud and clear.

This is really happening. I am married. I am his wife. We are alone, and I am his, and this is really, truly, happening to me.

There was wine on the table, dark and sweet.

"Husband," Sansa said — she had been calling him that all day, husband, husband, husband, and the word was a small private delight every time, like a sweet held under the tongue — "would my lord husband like some wine?"

"He would," said Joffrey, smiling, "if his lady wife will pour it."

So she poured, two cups, and her hands trembled only a little, and she gave him one and kept one and they drank, and she did not know what to do next.

She was nervous. She could not help being nervous. Her septa had told her things about the marriage bed, in a low grave voice, things that had frightened her. That it hurt, the first time and after, that there was blood, that a man took what he wanted of his wife whether she willed it or not, and that a good wife learned to bear it and be glad to give her lord sons.

Sansa did not believe Joffrey would be like that. She could not imagine those gentle hands being cruel. But even if he were — even if it hurt, even if it was nothing like the songs — she found she did not mind, because he was hers and she was his and she had wanted this for so long that a little pain seemed a small price to pay for it.

"How—" She flushed, and made herself go on, because someone had to. "How are we to start? Should I— should I take off my shift?"

Joffrey set down his cup. He came to her, and took her face in both his hands, gently, as if she were something very precious, and he kissed her.

This was not the kiss from the Dragonpit.

This was longer, and deeper, and slower, and it made the warmth bloom all through her, down her throat and her breast and her belly and lower, a warmth she had not known her body could make, and she swayed into him and kissed him back with everything she had, clumsy and eager and not at all caring that she was clumsy.

She had not believed a kiss could be better than the one before fifty thousand people. She had been wrong. When at last he drew back she was breathless and her heart was hammering and she did not want to stop, she wanted to go on, she wanted everything, all of it, now.

Joffrey looked down at her, and there was a great tenderness in his face, and also, she saw, a deep and dancing amusement.

"We're not going to consummate the marriage tonight, Sansa," the king said gently.

The words made no sense to her at first. Then they did, and a cold lance of fear went through all her lovely warmth. "I—" Her eyes filled, mortified, horrified. "Did I do something wrong? Was the kiss— am I not— " The worst thought of all. "Am I not pretty enough? I can be better, I can learn, I—"

"Sansa." He caught her hands. His voice was fierce and certain. "Stop. Listen to me. You are perfect. You must never, ever doubt that, not for a heartbeat. It is nothing you have done. It is nothing about you at all." He smiled. "It's that you're too young, that's all."

Relief and indignation crashed together in her. "Too young!" She pulled back to stare at him. "We're the same age! You can't call me too young, we—"

"I am four and ten for one more month," Joffrey said, his eyes were laughing at her. "So I suppose you are right, for now. But I am a knight and king besides, and I say you are still too young, wife."

"That's not—" She was flustered, and embarrassed, and somehow furious, and before she had decided to do it she had struck him on the arm, a real swat, the way she might have hit Arya. And then froze in absolute horror at what she had done.

She had struck the king.

She had struck the king. She had struck her husband, the king, on their wedding night.

But Joffrey only threw back his head and laughed, delighted. "Exercising your queenly privileges already, I see. Barely even a day, the singers will surely love it."

"I'm so sorry," Sansa gasped. "I didn't— I would never— "

"Sansa." He was still laughing, but he caught her hand and kissed the knuckles of it. "It's all right. Truly. You're the queen. You may strike my arm whenever you please, it's one of the great privileges of your position." His eyes warmed. "Now. Will you let me explain, or will you assault me further?"

She subsided, scarlet, and let him explain.

"The marriage bed is dangerous enough for a woman as it is," Joffrey said, and his voice had gone quiet and serious now. "Childbed kills. It kills more women than war kills men, and no one sings about it, and it kills the young ones worst of all, the ones whose bodies aren't ready. I won't add to that danger. I won't."

"But surely—" Sansa frowned. "Surely I shan't get with child the very first time. That's not— it doesn't happen so quickly as that, surely."

Joffrey's lips twitched. "Your mother," he said, "got your brother Robb on her wedding night, or near enough. Before your father rode off to war. Ask her."

Sansa opened her mouth, and closed it, because she could not argue with that, her mother had said so just this morning. So she frowned and let her disappointment show plain on her face instead.

He reached out and stroked her cheek with the palm of his hand, and she caught the hand and held it against her face, against her skin, not willing to let it go.

"It's only until you're a little older," he said softly. "Until the maesters say it's safe — that there's no extra danger in it, that your body's ready. A year, two—" Two!? "—perhaps less. And then I am yours and you are mine and we'll fill this castle up with golden and black-haired wolf-pups until your father runs out of names for them. I only want you alive to enjoy them. Is that so terrible a thing, for a husband to want?"

"And if I ask Pycelle?" Sansa said, feeling a little mutinous. "If I ask the Grand Maester, and he says there's no danger, that I'm ready right now—"

"Then I'll take Pycelle's head," Joffrey said, "for telling my wife such a lie to please her." He said it lightly, but Sansa caught the thing underneath it, and he murmured, almost to himself, "I should have taken it already, gods know."

She giggled, sure he was japing — and then was not sure, for there was something half in earnest in the gold eyes, something cold and old that did not belong on her laughing husband's face.

She did not like to see it there.

Sansa reached up and touched his jaw and said, gently, "It wasn't his fault, you know. The Grand Maester. Your father's death. There was nothing anyone could have done, my king."

"I know," Joffrey said. But she did not think he believed it, quite, and she did not understand why, and she let it go, because it was her wedding night and she did not want shadows in it. She saw the grief in him still, that he was putting aside for her sake. Sansa accepted that he would speak of it when he was ready or not at all. That was his decision. She would not force him to dwell on what he did not wish to.

"Are you sure?" she asked instead, returning to it, she had wanted this for so long. "About — about tonight. I meant what I said. I'll bed you even if it hurts. Every time, if I must. I don't care about the pain, truly I don't, I only want—"

"It hurts the first time," Joffrey said. "For a maiden. After that it shouldn't hurt at all — it should be the opposite of hurting, if it's done right, and I mean to do it right." Which only made her want it more, immediately and fiercely, and she must have shown it, because he laughed again. "No, Sansa. You are the queen, and there is almost nothing in this world you could ask of me that I would refuse you. I'll give you castles and crowns and the heads of your enemies on spikes if you like. But this one thing I will refuse, for love of you, and you'll not move me, so you may as well stop trying."

She saw that he meant it. He was immovable, the way her father could be, and so she knew there was no use in pushing further tonight. But she would wear him down eventually, she could be as stubborn as Arya if she wanted to. A year, gods forbid two, was much too long in any case.

"Then what shall we do?" she asked, a little forlorn, a little sulky still.

"Whatever you like," Joffrey said. "We can talk. We can sleep. We've the whole night and no one to please but ourselves." He smiled. "It's our wedding night, Sansa. There are no rules in it but the ones we make. What do you want?"

Sansa thought about it, before she hesitated. She did not want to seem wanton. What if her Lord husband, her King, thought her a fallen woman? Oh Sansa thought she'd surely die. But he had said anything, so surely…

"Can we kiss again?" she asked. "Just kiss. Like before."

Joffrey laughed, soft and warm and glad.

"Of course we can," he said. "As much as you like. That, I'll never refuse you."

So they kissed. And after a while Sansa, growing bold, drew her shift off over her head, and unlaced his trousers and helped him out of them, so that there was nothing between them at all, no silk and no shame, only the warm dark and the candlelight, and she asked him in a small voice to hold her, just hold her, and he gathered her in against the warmth of him and held her close, and it was better than the songs, better than the dreams, better than anything she had ever imagined in all her foolish romantic girlhood.

And they spent the night so.

Not as her septa had warned her, not with pain and blood and a man taking his due — but talking, the two of them, in the dark, of everything and nothing, of their childhoods and their hopes and the realm they would build, of the children they would have one day and the names they would give them, kissing between the words, laughing, falling silent, kissing again. Sansa told him things she had never told a living soul. Joffrey listened to all of it as though there were nothing in the world he would rather hear.

And somewhere in the small hours, wrapped in his arms with her head on his chest and his heart beating slow and steady beneath her ear, she fell asleep happier than she had ever been or known it was possible to be.

She woke to grey morning light and an empty place beside her, and for one terrible plummeting moment she thought it had all been a dream — that she would open her eyes to her old chamber and her old life and find that none of it had happened, that there was no king and no crown and no wedding, that she had dreamed the whole golden day.

Then she saw him.

Joffrey sat at the foot of the bed, his back to her, the grey dawn silvering his bare shoulders, and he had something in his hands.

Sansa's heart filled at the sight of him — real, he's real, it's all real — and she crept up the bed, still giddy, still half in the warm country of sleep, and wrapped her arms around him from behind and pressed her cheek to his back.

"What are you doing, Lord husband?" she murmured into his skin, smiling.

He had a torn strip of bedsheet across his knee, she saw, and a dagger in his hand.

"I've asked the maids to bring us food," Joffrey said, turning his golden head to smile at her. "So we can break our fast together, you and I. Just us."

"That's lovely," Sansa said, and meant it, and then, "but I meant the dagger, husband."

"Ah." Joffrey looked down at it. "There has to be blood on the sheets, Sansa. In the morning. The custom — they'll want to see the blood, to know the marriage was consummated. It pleases the realm to know it. A married king, a bedded queen, the line secured. They'll hang the sheet from the window and cheer at it." He turned the dagger in his hand. "Since there's no blood of yours to show, there'll have to be blood of mine."

"There's still time, you know," Sansa said, teasing, walking her fingers up his arm. "If you wanted real blood on the sheets. I'm right here. I'm very willing. I did say."

Joffrey chuckled, low and soft. "I recall you promising," he said, "to bear me as many children as I could want. A whole pack of them, I think you said." He caught her teasing hand and held it. "If you still mean to do that, then you're going to bleed for me a great many times in the years to come, Sansa. Childbed after childbed. More than your share of blood and pain, all of it for my sake and the realm's." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "We are not at war as of now, so let me bleed for you here. Before your battles begin, let it be my blood on the sheet this morning, and not yours. Let me give you that, at least, Wife."

And Sansa, who had woken giddy and teasing, found her eyes gone suddenly hot and full, overwhelmed all at once by the sheer enormity of how much she loved him and how much, impossibly, he seemed to love her back.

"All right," she whispered. "All right. If you want to."

So Joffrey drew the dagger across the meat of his own forearm — a quick clean shallow cut, no more than enough — and let the blood run down and pressed the torn sheet to it until the white was stained a bright and convincing red, the proof the realm would want, the maiden's blood that was not a maiden's blood at all, but instead a husband's gift.

And then he bound the little cut with the other half of the strip, and turned, and gathered his wife into his arms, and kissed her brow, and outside the door Sansa could hear the maids arriving with the breakfast things, and the morning was grey and gentle and full of the smell of fresh bread.

I am awake, the new queen thought, with absolute certainty, holding her husband in the grey dawn light. She knew it past all doubting now.

Sansa had spent her girlhood half living in dreams, in songs, in the bright imagined country where everything came right and the handsome prince loved you and the wedding was perfect and the marriage was happy ever after. She knew the difference, now, between the dream and the waking.

She knew this was waking, because no dream she had ever dreamed, in all her foolish hopeful years, had ever once been half so good as this.