CERSEI
The mourning was over, and Cersei Lannister could be herself again.
She stood before the looking glass while her maids dressed her for the last day of the tourney, and for the first time in what felt like years she was clad as a Lannister of Casterly Rock ought to be clad. In crimson silk slashed with cloth-of-gold, the lions of her house worked across her bodice in gold thread and small rubies, her golden hair dressed high and bound with a fillet of gold.
No more black. No more grey. No more drab widow's weeds and the wearisome work of arranging her lovely face into grief she did not feel. She had buried Robert Baratheon and she had not wept a single honest tear, and now she need not even pretend to.
The realm thought her a grieving widow. The realm was a fool, as it always was, and saw only what she chose to show it.
Strong as a bull, they said of him. She studied her reflection, pleased. And I unmanned the bull with a few drops in his wine, morning after morning, and not one soul the wiser. Let them mourn their roaring drunken oaf. I am free of him at last.
The tourney had run a full week, as grand as any the realm had seen, knights come from every corner of the Seven Kingdoms to break their lances in honour of the new king. Cersei had watched it all from the royal box, as a Queen should.
She had watched the Knight of Flowers unhorse three men in a single morning and lay a rose in the little queen's lap. She had watched men die and be maimed for the king and crowds entertainment. She had watched the joust and the melee and the archery, the feasts that ran past midnight, the singers and the mummers and the bear that danced. A week of the realm at play, all of it for Joffrey, all of its love poured out at her beautiful son's golden feet.
And through every hour of it, the wolf girl had been at his side.
That was the splinter that would not work itself out of Cersei's flesh, no matter how she picked at it.
Sansa Stark.
Always there, always at the king's right hand in the royal box, her little hand in his, the two of them with their heads bent together, laughing.
Laughing.
All week Cersei had sat a seat away and watched her son laugh with that insipid northern child, watched him lean close to murmur in her ear and watched the girl flush and giggle behind her hand, watched the pair of them bask together in the adoration of the people as though they had been made for it, as though they were the sun and all the realm only flowers turning to follow. The crowds had screamed for them both.
King Joffrey and his beautiful queen.
They had thrown flowers not only at the king now but at the girl beside him, and Sansa had caught them and pressed them to her breast and beamed, radiant, beloved, a queen out of a song.
It should have been a mother's pride to see. Instead it sat in Cersei like a swallowed stone. It made her sick.
I never had that, she thought, and the old bitterness rose in her throat like bile. Not once. Not for a single day. She remembered her own wedding to Robert — the drunken oaf swaying at the altar reeking of wine, calling her Lyanna in the bedchamber that very first night, the name of his dead wolf-bitch groaned into Cersei's golden hair while he took his pleasure and gave her none.
There had been no week of tourneys for love of her. No fifty thousand smallfolk weeping with joy at the sight of her. No husband who leaned close to make her laugh, who tasted the wine before her lips touched it, who looked at her across a crowded hall as though there were no one else alive in the world.
She had been a brood mare for a drunkard, wed to a man who loved a corpse, and she had made herself a queen out of nothing but her own will and her own cunning, with no one's hand in hers and no one's love to lean on.
And now here was this northern hussy, this stupid child of four-and-ten with her sewing and her courtesies, handed all of it at once — the crown, the king, the love of the realm, the doting golden husband — handed it as one might hand sweetmeats to a kitchen girl, without ever having earned a drop of it.
Sansa Stark had what Cersei had bled for her whole life and never once been given. She had Joffrey.
She has my son.
Cersei watched her own green eyes narrow in the glass, and made herself smooth her face again, because a lady did not scowl, her mother had taught her that before the imp took her away, a lady's face was a mask and a weapon both. But the thought would not leave her.
The girl had her son. The girl sat where Cersei should sit, laughed where Cersei should laugh, lay each night in the arms that—
She did not finish the thought. It lived just beneath the surface of her, a dark warm shape she did not look at directly, the same way one avoided looking at the sun. The memory of holding him as a babe, the golden weight of him at her breast; the way he had grown into the very image of Jaime, of Jaime young and perfect before the world had spoiled him; the small fierce flame that licked up in her, unbidden and unnamed, whenever she watched the wolf girl take his arm. Cersei told herself it was a mother's love.
He was mine first, was all she let herself think. Before any of them. Before the wolf girl, before Robert, before the whole world. He was mine first and he is mine still, whatever crown they put on that simpering child's head.
A knock at the door.
"Your Grace." A Kingsguard, through the wood — Ser Balon Swann, by the voice. It was easier to remember them, now that there were only five. Two had been slain in the tourney. It was no great loss, if they were so easily felled, she did not want them protecting her son. "The king bids you attend him. Before the day's jousting. At once, if it please you."
Cersei's heart leapt, and she was careful not to let the maids see it.
Summoned. By her son. On the last morning of his own wedding tourney, when by rights the boy should be abed with his northern bride. Cersei felt a slow warm satisfaction unfold in her breast.
So. A whole week wed and already he sends for his mother. One week of the insipid little wolf and he remembers who he wants beside him. I knew it. I always knew it. What could that pale dull child give him that compared to his own mother?
"Lead on, ser," she said. "I would not keep my son waiting."
She had been angry, at the first. She could admit that to herself now, walking the corridors of the Red Keep with the white knight at her shoulder. When the betrothal to the Stark girl was made, she had felt the old fear rise — the fear that had ridden her since she was a girl of ten in a smoky tent, the crone's voice croaking out of the dark.
Another, younger and more beautiful, to cast you down and take all that you hold dear. She had looked at Sansa Stark and felt the shadow of those words.
But she had mastered it. A queen mastered her fears. She had looked again, properly, with clear eyes, and she had seen the truth.
The Stark girl was not more beautiful.
Pretty, perhaps, in the simple way girls were. But not beautiful. Not as Cersei was beautiful. Maggy the Frog had been a lying savage, a smelly old fraud, and her prophecies were smoke; Cersei had told herself so a thousand times.
If the girl were truly the one foretold, she would be lovelier than me, and she is not. So the prophecy is false, and I am safe, and there is nothing to fear.
And in any case it did not matter, because no girl, however young or fair, could take from Cersei the one thing she truly held dear. A wife was a wife. A bride was a thing a king took to get heirs upon, a brood mare in a pretty gown. But a mother…
A mother was forever.
The bond between a mother and the first son she had carried and borne and bled for could not be cut by any wedding, any crown, any northern child with her courtesies and her needlework. Joffrey might bed the wolf girl. He might even grow fond of her, in time, as men grew fond of comfortable chairs.
It changed nothing.
He was Cersei's. He had always been Cersei's, since the agony of his birthing, since she first held that perfect golden child to her breast.
The most beautiful baby in all the world, she remembered, and the memory was warm as wine. Such a labour he was, my Joff. A day and a night and half another day, and the maesters wringing their hands, and I would not scream, I would not give them the satisfaction of my screams. And then he came, and he was perfect, golden and perfect, and I looked at him and I saw — I saw Jaime. I saw my brother's face in miniature, my own face, the beautiful Lannister gold, and I knew I had made something wholly mine, a thing that was Lannister to its marrow with not one drop of Baratheon in it that mattered. My sweet boy. My golden lion. My Joff.
She had loved him more than she had ever loved anything, save Jaime. Perhaps more than Jaime, now — and was that so strange?
Joffrey was Jaime as he had been, Jaime as a young man, golden and perfect and unspoiled, before the years and the white cloak and all the long grinding business of being a Lannister had worn the first bright shine off of him. When she looked at her son she saw her brother as he was at seventeen, when they had been everything to each other and the world had not yet got its hooks in. And the love she bore the boy had a fierceness in it that frightened even her, sometimes, in the dark — a heat that did not feel entirely like the love she bore for Tommen or Myrcella. She did not look at that too closely.
She thought of the coronation. Her three golden children upon the steps of the Iron Throne, gold circlets on their heads — and the thought, unbidden, brought the crone's voice with it.
Gold shall be their crowns and gold their shrouds.Cersei's step faltered, just slightly. Three for you, the frog had said, and gold their shrouds, and there they had stood, her three, all crowned in gold—
No. She thrust it down. Lies. Old lies from an old fraud. My children are crowned in gold because they are a queen's children, not because some warty hag saw shrouds. Tommen lives. Myrcella lives. Joffrey reigns. The prophecy is broken already, for I am not cast down, and I never shall be.
She had reached the door. She put the crone from her mind, and arranged her face into a mother's tender warmth, and went in to her son.
He was alone, which pleased her, standing at the window with the morning light gilding him and a glass of wine in hand. His hair was hers, his skin was hers, he was hers—perfect as always. He had grown so tall. Cersei noticed. When had he grown so tall? It seemed only yesterday he had been small enough to hold.
"My darling." Cersei crossed to him with her arms open and gathered him in, and pulled his golden head down against her, against the warmth of her breast, the way she had held him when he was small and frightened and the world was too much for him.
Mine. My beautiful boy. Mine again, now that the brute is dead. "I knew you would send for me. I knew it. A boy needs his mother, whatever else—"
Joffrey allowed it for the space of three heartbeats. Then he stepped back, out of her arms, firmly, and the loss of him was a small cold thing in her chest.
"Mother."
"You pulled away." She heard the petulance in her own voice and could not stop it. "You never used to pull away. There was a time you could not be pried from my skirts." She made herself smile, made it arch and knowing. "Or have you had your fill of mothering, now that you have a wife to warm your bed? Tell me true. Have you grown bored of bedding your little wolf already? You may tell your mother. I shall not judge you for it. I always said she would bore you inside, though I confess I did not think it would take only a sennight—"
"You forget, Sansa is the queen and my wife besides. Speak of her with some respect." Joffrey said.
Cersei scoffed. "And I am your mother. Which of us do you imagine matters more?"
"I know what you are, mother." her son sighed and said. "Believe me, I do."
Something in the way he said it gave her pause, but she let it go. "What is it you want of me, sweetling? You did not call me here at dawn to discuss your bride's many shortcomings, I think. Though we might, if you wished. I could make you a list."
"No, I did not." Joffrey turned the glass by its stem, "I had another topic in mind, but…What is it about Sansa that you hate so much? Truly. I've wondered."
The question caught her off guard, and so she answered it honestly, which she rarely did with anyone.
"She is insipid," Cersei said. "A pretty empty vessel full of songs and curtsies and not one thought of her own. She is a child playing at being a woman. She is northern, and dull, and beneath you, my love, so far beneath you that it shames me to see her on your arm. You are the most splendid king this realm has seen in three hundred years, everyone says so, and you have shackled yourself to a witless little wolf bitch who can do nothing but sew and simper. She is not good enough for you. No one—"
"—is good enough for me," Joffrey finished. "Yes. That's the trouble, isn't it, Mother. According to you, no one is ever good enough for me." He ticked them off on his fingers, his voice gone amused but weary. "Margaery Tyrell — too ambitious, too cunning, a schemer who'd rule me through my own bed, you said. Desmera Redwyne, a nobody, you said, a wine-merchant's daughter dressed as a lady. The Dornish we agreed on. The Sealord's daughter—too proud, and you'd rather die. Every match anyone ever proposed for me, you found the rot in it inside a breath." He spread his hands. "So tell me, since you've considered and rejected every maiden in the Seven Kingdoms and beyond. Who would be good enough? Who, Mother? Name her."
And Cersei, who had asked herself that question many times and always arrived at the same answer, stepped close to her beautiful son, and took his face in her two hands, and kissed him on the mouth.
For a moment he was too startled to move, and she pressed it, deepened it, this thing she had wanted for longer than she would ever have confessed to a living soul.
He was so like Jaime. He was Jaime made young again, Jaime made perfect, Jaime as he had been at seventeen before the long years had worn him down— the same gold, the same beauty, the same green-eyed Lannister fire, but new, unspoiled, hers in a way grown Jaime with his white cloak and his secrets had not been hers in years.
When Joffrey tried to pull back she caught his lip between her teeth and held him, gently, lovingly, and the taste of him was wine and youth and gold, and it was better than Jaime had ever been, better than anything, and she thought, yes, this, this is the answer, this was always the answer, who else could ever be good enough for my golden boy but the woman who made him—
Joffrey wrenched away.
He stumbled back two steps, his hand flying to his mouth, and when he took it away there was blood on his fingers where her teeth had broken his lip. The sight of his blood and his bruised lip, the copper taste of him on her tongue, almost undid her entirely. She had to bite back a sound that would have shamed her.
"You're mad," Joffrey breathed, staring at her.
"I am not mad." Cersei's breath was quick, her cheeks flushed, and she felt more alive than she had felt in years. "I have given you your answer, my love. You asked who is good enough, and I have shown you. There is only one woman you will ever need, who will ever truly love you, who has loved you since before you drew breath. The same who carried you and bore you and would burn the whole world down before she let it harm you. Me, Joffrey. Only me. I am the only one. Let the wolf girl keep her crown and her empty title. I am the woman in your life. I always have been. I always will be."
Joffrey looked at her for a long moment, his bleeding lip, his cold gold eyes, and something in his face she had never seen before and could not name.
"We are not Targaryens, Mother," he said quietly. "And I am not Jaime."
Cersei flinched as though he had struck her.
The name hung in the air between them. He knows.The thought went through her like ice water. He knows about Jaime. How — how could he—
"You and my uncle," Joffrey went on, watching her, "are not nearly so subtle as the pair of you believe. You never were. I know." His mouth twisted. "I have eyes, Mother."
"It doesn't matter." Cersei reached for him again, desperate now, the ground shifting beneath her. "Whatever you think you know — it doesn't matter, it changes nothing, I am still your mother, I am still the only one who—"
"The fact that you are my mother," Joffrey pinched the bridge of his nose, "and the mother of my siblings, is the only reason I have not had you hanged. For treason. And for regicide"
Cersei went still.
The warmth drained out of her. She looked at her son's face and saw that he was not japing, for the first time in her life Cersei Lannister was afraid of her own child.
"What makes you think," she said carefully, "that I had any hand in your father's death."
"You're not denying it."
"What makes you—" She stopped. He was right. She had not denied it. The accusation had been so sudden and so true that her tongue had failed her, and that failure was itself a confession, and they both knew it.
She tried another road. "Was it Pycelle? Did that sniveling old coward whisper in your ear? Because if he did—"
Joffrey sighed. "You're still not denying it, Mother."
She drew herself up. If denial would not serve, then let her stand in the truth, where she had always been strongest. "Everything I have ever done," Cersei said, "I have done for you. Everything. Do you understand that? For you, and for this family, and for nothing else. For you, my love. All of it for you."
And it was true. She believed it with her whole heart.
She remembered the day Robert had first come to her bed with the cuts on him. Small angry wounds the cursed throne had dealt him, going red at the edges, beginning to fester.
She remembered Pycelle's mealy reassurances, the old fool's poultices, and her own cold certainty that Robert would heal as that oaf always healed, that the gods who had cursed her with him would let him live to torment her another twenty years.
She had not been able to bear it.
Not when she had finally seen a road out. So she had taken matters into her own hands, as a lioness must, and slipped a few drops into the king's morning wine — only a little, only enough — every morning for three weeks, patient, careful, until the rot had its deep hold and even Pycelle could not pretend the king would mend.
And she had done it for him. For Joffrey. Because Robert had been a poison in her son's life, a great loud corrupting brute who was making the boy into something coarse, dragging him to hunts and feasts and teaching him to be the same kind of careless drunken fool.
She had saved her son from that. She had cut the corruption out of his life as maesters cut rot from wounds, and now Robert was gone and Joffrey was king and she would guide him, she would rule beside him as Queen Regent until he was old enough to rule alone, and the two of them would be as they had been before the accident, before that brute ever came between them—
"All of it for me," her sweet boy murmured, "Who were you going to poison next, I wonder?"
Cersei blinked.
"For my benefit, of course." her son continued. "Since everything you do is for me. Who was next on your list, Mother? Sansa?" His eyes bored into her. "Were you going to do it at the wedding? A few drops in the bride's cup, in front of all the guests, the new queen dead on her wedding day? Or were you cleverer than that — were you going to wait, let her get me an heir first, and then see her sicken quietly of some wasting illness once she'd served her purpose?"
Cersei said nothing, because the answer was yes — yes, she had thought exactly that, the heir first and then the girl gone — and because some cold instinct warned her that her son already knew it and speaking the words would be of no help to her.
That is why, she realized slowly. That is why he tasted all her food at the wedding. Every dish, every cup, before she touched it. The little fools all thought it so romantic. He was guarding her. From me. He was guarding the wolf girl from her own husband's mother.
The understanding lit a slow fury in her. The little bitch.The girl had got her claws so deep into Cersei's son that he would taste poison for her, would sit there at his own wedding feast playing food-taster to a northern child against his own mother.
I was going to be patient with you, little dove. I was going to let you live until you'd whelped. But perhaps I cannot afford to wait. Perhaps you must have your accident sooner than I—
"Joffrey." She made her voice gentle again, made it warm, reached for him with a mother's tenderness. "My sweet boy. You are overwrought. You have buried your father and taken a wife and a crown all in a single week, it is too much for anyone, of course you are saying wild things. Come. Come to me. Let me—"
She tried to hold him, to pull him close, to comfort him, maybe kiss him again if he'd let her, but Joffrey caught her wrists and held her off, and there was barely any gentleness in his grip at all.
"I cannot trust you, mother." His voice was sad. It broke her heart to hear him so. "Tomorrow, you must leave."
"...What?"
"It will be given out that the Queen Mother, overcome with grief for her beloved husband, wishes to withdraw from the world for a time, to take her ease in the halls of her childhood. You are going home to Casterly Rock, Mother." He took her hand in his and squeezed, as if to give her comfort whilst he pronounced her banishment. "You may take Uncle Jaime with you, if you like, for escort. I'm sure the two of you will find ways to pass the journey. But you are going, and you are not coming back. Not for a long while."
Cersei stared at him, and for a moment she could not speak for the outrage of it. "You cannot," she got out at last. "You cannot send me away. I am your mother. I am the Queen Regent of the Seven—"
Joffrey frowned, looking honestly confused. "What in the world, gave you the notion that you were Queen Regent?"
"I—"
"I am a knight, Mother." Her boy reminded her softly. "Anointed and sworn. By the laws and customs of the realm, a knight is a man grown, and a man grown needs no regent. There will be no regency, I rule in my own right."
"I won't go," Cersei ground out. Her voice was steady, growing cold. "I will not. You cannot make me. I am your mother, I made you, I am yours and you are mine, We need no one else—"
A section of the chamber wall swung open.
Cersei whirled. There was a door there — one of the old hidden ways, the eunuch's passages, she had not known of this one — and out of the dark of it stepped her father.
Tywin Lannister came into the morning light, and behind him came Jaime, white-cloaked, his face bruised and a frown on his lips.
"You will go," Lord Tywin Lannister announced.
He had heard. That was Cersei's first thought, looking at her father's face — that cold disgusted face she had spent her whole life trying to please and never once succeeding. He heard all of it. He was behind that wall the whole time. He heard, and he saw.
"We heard everything, sweet sister," Jaime said quietly. "And saw it. All of it."
She looked at her twin, the other half of her, the only person who had ever truly known her, and she saw something moving behind his green eyes — her eyes, the eyes they shared — and it was not as it should have been. It was something she had never seen him turn on her before.
He had watched her kiss their son, press herself against the boy, name Joffrey the only man she would ever need. He had watched her try to set their child in his place. And Jaime Lannister, who had loved her his whole life with a single-minded devotion, was looking at her now as though she were a stranger.
No, she thought. No, Jaime, you don't understand, he is only you, he is you made young again, it was always only ever you—
"You shame yourself," Lord Tywin said. His voice was quiet and each word fell like a stone. "You shame this family. I have spent forty years building House Lannister into the greatest power in this realm, and I have watched my children spend that legacy like drunkards spending coin. But this…" He looked between her and her brother with utter contempt. "You will go to Casterly Rock. You will be wed to a lord of my choosing, a man who will keep you far from court and far from mischief, and you will spend the rest of your days being a proper lady of a great house, which is the one thing you have never managed to be. That is the end of the matter."
"And if I refuse?" Cersei's fear made her reckless. She lifted her chin. "I know things, Father. I could tear everything down with a word. Jaime and I — what we are to each other, what we have always been. The truth of Joffrey's birth. The fact that I put Robert in his grave. One word in the wrong ear and your precious legacy is ash, your golden king a bastard born of incest, the whole edifice—"
"Are you threatening me?" Tywin asked.
His voice did not rise. It went, if anything, softer. And it was the softness that frightened her, the absolute cold of it, the way his pale eyes settled on her and did not blink. She had seen her father destroy men with that voice. She knew of the Reynes of Castamere. She felt the threat in her own mouth turn to ash, and she flinched, she who had sworn she would never again flinch before any man.
"You will go to Casterly Rock," the Warden of the West said, "And you will stay there."
"You can't treat me like this." It came out small, almost a child's voice, and she hated herself for it. "I am the queen. I am your daughter—"
"You are no daughter of mine."
The words landed in the center of her like a blade.
"A daughter of mine," Father went on, relentless, "would have died before she shamed her house as you have shamed it this morning and these last twenty years. You are something that wears my daughter's face." His lip curled. "Hear me, Cersei, for I will say it once. If you ever breathe one word — one word — of the lies and the treasons you have just threatened me with, anything that could touch the king's reign or this family's name, you will not be killed. That would be a mercy, and you have not earned one. You will wish you could die. Do you understand me? You will pray for it." He turned away from her, dismissing her, as he had dismissed her ten thousand times. "Now get out of my sight, and make yourself ready to travel."
And Cersei, who had been a queen, who had brought down a king, who had borne three children and buried a husband and held the whole of the Red Keep in her beautiful clever hands, bowed her golden head and accepted it, because there was nothing else to do, not now, not with all of the men she loved in one room arrayed against her and her father's cold eyes upon her.
But in her heart, already, she was scheming.
This is not the end. They think they have beaten me. They have only sent me away. I will go to the Rock, and I will be patient, and I will wait, and I will find the way back. There is always a way back. Joffrey is young yet, he doesn't know what he's doing—he'll come to see the error of his ways. Patience. Only patience. The lioness is not beaten. The lioness is only crouching.
She glanced at Jaime — once, quickly, looking for the old ally, the one who had always in the end taken her side against the world. And then she looked away, fast, because in that single glance she had seen that he had read her. He had always been able to read her, her twin, her other self. He had seen the scheming behind her bowed head as plainly as if she had spoken it aloud — and his face, when she met it, had been a stranger's. She had never seen him look at her so. Not in all their years.
It is Joffrey, she told herself. He saw me kiss him. He is jealous, that is all, jealous as he has always been of anyone who touched me — even our own son. He will forgive it. He always forgives it. We are the same, Jaime and I, one soul in two bodies, and a man cannot stay angry at his own soul forever.
She believed it, mostly. But the look he had given her stayed with her, and she could not quite explain it away, and some small cold part of her, the part that had heard a crone's voice in a tent long ago and never truly stopped hearing it, was afraid.
They came to take her the next morning— her father's men, quiet and efficient, with a closed wheelhouse and an escort of Lannister red. She had tossed and turned, hoping her boy would come to see her off and that he would soften and tell her it was all a mistake.
The king came in the morning with his siblings but he made no apology. She hugged them all, and kissed them on the cheek goodbye. If her kiss for Joffrey was a little closer to his lips than the others, it was only a coincidence.
Cersei did not weep as she left. She was proud of that. She held her head high and let them see the Queen Mother depart with all her dignity, grieving for her husband, withdrawing to the halls of her childhood to mourn. That was the story they had given the realm, and she wore it the way she had worn black, a costume over the truth, and the smallfolk who lined the streets wept for her supposed grief and called blessings on her, the fools, and never knew they were watching a queen carried into exile by her own blood.
Jaime rode beside the wheelhouse for a time, mounted, his white cloak bright in the morning sun. She watched him through the gap in the curtains. Her twin. Her other self. He did not look at her. After they passed through the Lion Gate and out onto the kingsroad he reined up, Cersei thought he would say something, anything, he seemed about to, but then something flashed across his face and Jaime let the wheelhouse roll on without him.
She understood then that he was not coming after all, that he meant to stay at court, with the king. That he had chosen Father over her, that father had turned him against her as he must have done with Joff.
Even you, she thought, watching her brother dwindle behind her on the road. Even you, in the end. You looked at me last night as though I were something dead. But you'll come back to me. You always come back to me. We are the same, you and I, one soul in two bodies, and a man cannot abandon his own soul. You'll come to the Rock, in time. I know you will.
The kingsroad unspooled behind her, and King's Landing fell away, the red walls and the Great Sept's dome and the squat ugly menace of the Red Keep where her son sat his father's bloody throne without her.
As she left she focused on one truth.
When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. They had failed. Cersei lived still. It wasn't over.
Joffrey is young and he will come to his senses, she thought, But if not, if my sweet son does not see sense… Accidents happen. Plagues come. Wars are lost. And if anything should befall my eldest — gods forbid it, gods forbid, but if it should — then it is Tommen who takes the throne, my soft biddable Tommen, who loves his mother dearly, who has never in his life pulled away from my arms. A child king needs a regent. A child king needs his mother's hand to guide him. They will not be able to deny me then. I will come back to King's Landing in triumph, and I will rule through my sweet second son as I was always meant to rule, and the wolf girl and the Imp and Father and all the rest who schemed against me will learn what a lion's patience purchases in the end.
But still, even as Joff was being led astray, she loved him still. Hers was a love unconditional, eternal. Everything she did, she did for him. She would continue to do so, and one day he would come to his senses. He must. He would call her back or he would come to her. She would accept him back with open arms and give him all the love he could need, in whatever way that entailed. As a mother, a confidant or a lover.
The wheelhouse continue to roll west, toward the Rock, toward the sea, toward the great golden halls where she had been born a lion's daughter and dreamed of being a queen.
The crone's voice did not trouble her any longer. She had put Maggy from her mind, the lying frog, the smelly old fraud, with her queens and her shrouds and her valonqar. None of it had come true. She was Queen still — no one could strip her of that, whatever they pretended — and she was not cast down, only traveling.
JON
The dream came again, ice and fire and blood, as it had come for nights now.
He stood in a hall of stone dragons. A castle grown rather than built, black towers carved into wings and claws and gaping mouths, the whole of it crouched as if to take flight and burn the world.
Then he was elsewhere, by the weirwood, white and weeping. Blood, dark and thick, running down the pale bark to pool black among the roots. Beyond the tree stood walls of ice, and as he watched the ice began to melt and run, and the red leaves caught fire, every leaf a flame, the tree a torch against a white sky.
My prince.
A woman stood in the snow. Slight and still, a mask of dark red lacquer where her face should be, only her eyes showing. They were the colour of the burning leaves. She did not seem to feel the cold. Jon was not certain she was there at all.
Remember, she said. Jon did not understand.
Remember what?
What you are. The wolf knows it. The dragon knows it. The leaf-fire eyes did not blink. Two are ash now. You must sing.
Her words made no sense to Jon. They never did. He reached for her. His hand closed on smoke.
A crow settled on the weeping tree. Three eyes, two black and one red, all three fixed upon him. When it spoke its voice was dry, like branches grinding in a wind.
I have done what I could, it said. The rest he must do. Guard the king. It ruffled its wings. Tell him. They will march on the Wall soon. The cold comes down, and the dead come with it. He must be ready.
The dream shifted. Jon was somewhere else. In black armour chased with red and littered with rubies that shone like blood, a horse beneath him, a lake and a burned castle and a roaring crowd.
Harrenhal, some part of him knew. A knight lay in the dust before him, old, white-haired, unhorsed. Ser Barristan. In his hand was a crown of pale blue roses. He turned his horse and rode past the cheering thousands, past his wife, and laid the roses in a grey-eyed girl's lap, and the girl threw back her head and howled, a long wolf's howl, and the whole castle went still.
The dream shifted again, and the howl became the wind off the bay, and Jon stood in a yard he knew, the Red Keep's. Joffrey stood before him, looking slightly older, and Sansa beside him with a babe in her arms, black haired and blue-eyed.
I wonder if this is how Rhaegar felt, the king said, looking out past the walls.
Your Grace? Jon felt his mouth move and heard his own voice ask, frowning.
Leaving the Red Keep. To stamp out a rebellion.
My love. The queen's voice was sweet and soft even in her chiding. You are not Rhaegar. And Jon saw something else in her blue eyes that her mouth did not say—and we are not facing Robert Baratheon.
Joffrey smiled. You're right, of course. He raised a hand and stroked the cheek of the babe their love had made. I plan to come home.
He gave Sansa a married man's kiss, and they rode out shortly after. The king, armoured in gold. His Kingsguard all in enamelled white scale. The host gathered beneath the golden stag, banners snapping. They rode to war again, and the dust took them, and the dream let them go.
The masked woman stood at the dream's edge. Her voice had gone soft now, soft and wrong, a sweet note held a hair flat.
Where the dragons were born, prince. Where they died. A word came with her voice, though her lacquered lips never seemed to move. He almost did not catch it. Dragonstone. When the sky bleeds, that is where you must be.
Jon woke.
He came up gasping, the grey dawn at the window, his heart going like a smith's hammer. Ghost's red eyes looked down at him, red like ravens and burning like the leaves.
For a moment the dream was still all around him, the burning leaves and the weeping tree and the howling girl. Then it began to go, sliding through his fingers like smoke however hard he clutched.
Some pieces stayed, lodged like splinters.
At the end, giving the roses to the howling wolf-girl, he had been Rhaegar. He had worn his father's skin and felt it from the inside—the silver prince crowning a Stark girl queen of love and beauty at Harrenhal, the act that had begun a war and ended a dynasty and put a hammer through a man's chest on the Trident and led, by its long bloody road, to Jon. To his own getting.
Joffrey grown, a child in Sansa's arms, the king riding out beneath the golden stag. I wonder if this is how Rhaegar felt. Jon could not make sense of the words and their meaning, only that they left him feeling cold. You are not Rhaegar, the queen had said. I plan to come home, the king had answered. Jon hoped that was a promise his friend could keep.
It was a dream, Jon told himself. Old stories chewed up in the night, nothing more. He had heard the tale of Harrenhal numerous times. It was no wonder his sleeping mind should dress him in it. That was all it was.
He did not believe it.
But Jon Snow had long practice setting aside the things he could not afford to look at; he had been setting aside the truth of his own birth for the whole of his life, even before he had the truth to set aside.
So he set this aside too, and rose, and washed in the cold basin water, and dressed, and did his best to forget the burning tree and the three-eyed crow and the word that would not leave him.
Dragonstone, the dream whispered after him. When he opened the blinds and glanced out, a comet cut through a bruised pink and purple morning sky, creating a gaping bleeding wound in the heavens.
The throne room was full when he came to it.
Jon took his place along the wall with the other household men and lesser lords and watched the court assemble. Seven years at court, and he had not learned to like it. Too many people, too much scent laid over too much sweat, every face wearing a smile it did not mean.
I'd rather be out on the yard, he thought. The yard was simpler and the blades less deceptive.
Jon marked the beards, or the want of them, as he looked around. Half the lords had shaved themselves clean. The king wore no beard, so the beards came off, because where the king led, the realm followed. Many wore a knot of silk at the wrist as well, a wife's favour, because in the three weeks since the wedding's conclusion the king had not be seen without his queen's favour about his wrist.
They ape him down to their chins, Jon thought, it almost made him chuckle. A man who could shave a thousand lords by shaving his own face held a kind of power Jon had no name for. It was a dangerous amount of power to have, but Jon felt it was well deserved.
King Joffrey sat the Iron Throne, his small council seated below. And in a carved chair beside her father, sat the Queen.
That was new. Jon found he did not mind it.
The queen sat the court now, crowned in silver and sapphires, grave and quiet while king and council heard the realm's petitions. She said little. But let a matter touch a woman or a girl—a widow's dower, a broken betrothal, a charge against some serving maid, or whore—Joffrey would turn to her and ask, What would my queen counsel?
And he would weigh her answer as he weighed Lord Tywin's, and more than once Jon watched a ruling bend the way Sansa pointed it. The lords had thought it strange, the first time. No doubt many still did. They'll grow used to it in time, Jon thought.
The petitions were winding to their end when the doors at the foot of the hall swung open, and the herald's staff struck the stone.
"Aurane Waters! The Bastard of Driftmark!"
A silver-haired man came up the long hall, sea-browned, Valyrian to the eye, and went to one knee before the throne with a courtier's ease. Jon disliked him on sight, and could not have said why.
A bastard knows a bastard, perhaps. And this one wears it better than I ever have.
"Your Grace. My lords. My queen. Forgive me for coming unannounced. I bring word from my brother, the Lord of the Tides, that will not keep. Word that touches the crown dearly."
"You're forgiven." Joffrey sounded easy and looked somewhat relieved for the reprieve. "Driftmark is a good friend to the crown. What word?"
Waters glanced about the crowded hall. "It might be better read in private, Sire. For you and the council alone."
"I'd read it now." The king lifted a hand. "Ser Barristan. Bring it here."
The old white knight took the sealed letter and climbed the steep iron steps to put it in the king's hand. Jon watched Joff break the seal and read, unhurried, gold eyes moving down the page. Then something pulled at the corner of the king's mouth, and he began, softly, to laugh.
The council stirred. They looked one to another. Whatever they had braced for, it was not laughter.
"Your Grace?" Lord Stark inquired carefully. "What does it say?"
"A great deal. The whole court should hear it, I think. It concerns you all." Joffrey lifted the parchment and read, and his voice carried clear to the rafters, flat and grave, so that the words of the absent Lord of the Tides filled the hall as if the man himself had spoken them.
"To His Grace, Joffrey of the House Baratheon, the First of His Name, true and rightful Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, from his loyal servant Monford of the House Velaryon, Lord of the Tides and Master of Driftmark.
Your Grace will forgive the manner of this letter, sent in secret by my brother's hand, for I dared trust it to no raven nor any open road.
Your uncle, Lord Stannis, summoned us to Dragonstone, all the lords of the narrow sea, that we might hear him out. We came thinking to find a grieving man and a loyal one.
We found neither.
We found him in the company of a red priestess out of Asshai, a sorceress, who has so worked upon him that he has cast down the Seven and given himself wholly to her foreign fire-god. With our own eyes we watched him burn the good septon of Dragonstone alive in the castle yard, and burn every image of the Seven in the sept besides, the Father and the Mother and the Crone and all, while this red woman sang to her god over the flames. He has emptied his treasury to hire sellswords, free companies out of the Disputed Lands, and means to make war."
The murmur had begun to rise. The king read on through it, unhurried, and now his mouth curved.
"And he stood before us all and made this declaration, which it shames me to set down, but Your Grace must know what is said against you. He named you no trueborn son of King Robert, but a bastard got in incest between the Queen Cersei and her brother Ser Jaime, the Kingslayer, and your royal brother and sister the same, abominations all. He charged you further with the murder of your own father, that you might steal a throne not yours by right. And upon these slanders he laid claim to the Iron Throne, and called on every lord present to declare for him. His red woman claims that soon he shall have the power needed to seize Kingslanding.
When asked how he came to know this information, he and his red priestess spoke of visions in the flames and the truth of the Lord of Light.
Your Grace, the man is mad. The lords of the narrow sea have declared nothing. We made our courtesies and remain on Dragonstone, but we are yours, Your Grace, every one of us that signed beneath my name. Written in haste, under the sign and seal of Monford Velaryon, Lord of the Tides."
Joffrey lowered the parchment. The hall had gone from murmur to open noise. For the rest of those gathered, it was the thought of war that had them buzzing. For Jon, it was the place named.
Dragonstone.
The dream and the masked woman's words had been following him all day since he glimpsed the bleed in the sky, no matter how much he tried to put it from his thoughts.
Jon had felt like he was going mad.
"Silence!" The herald's staff cracked the stone. "Silence for the king!"
The hall stilled. Joffrey looked down at Aurane Waters, kneeling still at the foot of the steps.
"Your brother writes that you came by this in secret. By stealth."
"I did, Your Grace." Waters lifted his head. "Your uncle does not suffer his guests to leave Dragonstone freely, not since the burning. He fears the word will run ahead of him, as it has. I went over the seaward wall by night and swam to a fishing skiff, and I have not slept dry nor easy since. The letter never left my skin until this moment." A pause. "I would have swum the whole narrow sea to put it in your hand, Sire. The things I saw in that yard—" He stopped, and Jon saw that the man's jaw had tightened, and judged that part, at least, was no performance. "The king's justice is wanted on that rock. Badly."
"A red woman, a burned septon, and hired swords." Joffrey's voice was dry as autumn leaves. "My uncle has been very busy it seems. Tell me then, you and your brother and these lords. What do you make of it? Do you hold me a bastard and a kinslayer?"
Waters looked up at him. "Your Grace, every lord of the narrow sea worth the name knows the truth. There is one true king in the Seven Kingdoms, and his name is Joffrey Baratheon, trueborn son of King Robert, anointed before gods and men. We know no other. We'll have no other."
"Well said." Joffrey rose. "Well said."
He came down off the throne—down the cruel iron steps to stand level with his council—and put the question to them, one by one. To Lord Tywin. To Lord Redwyne. To Renly. To Lord Stark. To the lords Tyrell. To the Grand Maester. To the Lord Commander.
"And you, my Lord, what do you make of my uncles claim? These truths he has uncovered in his priestesses flames? That I am a bastard, that I murdered my own father?"
Each gave him back the same answer. That they knew him for Robert's trueborn son and their lawful king.
He turned to Sansa and she looked at him incredulously. "Wife, what say you?"
"You jape, my king. You are your father's son. All know it. You are the One True King."
Then he turned and put it to the hall, and the hall answered him in a rolling tide, men dropping to their knees, crying his name and his right.
Jon, like most of the hall, felt insulted on the king's behalf. The realm had Robert's own word for fifteen years, his love before all the court. Stannis might as well swear the sea ran uphill or that the sun was green. He had ruined himself and got nothing for it.
The man must truly be mad.
The dreams flashed behind his eyelids again as he thought on Stannis' actions. He saw the weirwood burning and the stone dragons turning to face him.
Joffrey let the noise crest, climbed back to his throne, and waited for the quiet.
"I did not know my uncle hated my father so well," he said, and there was a weariness in it now, near to grief. "I gave Stannis the benefit of the doubt. When he would not answer my father's ravens to take up his seat on the council, when he made no appearance at my father's funeral, at my coronation, at my wedding, I told myself he grieved in his own sour way. I was wrong. He always did feel passed over, my uncle. Robert had the throne, Renly had Storm's End, and Stannis had a rock and a grudge and an ugly hairy lipped wife." He shook his head as the hall tittered. "I should not have given him the doubt. That was my error. I own it."
He turned to Redwyne. "How near is the fleet?" He listened, and nodded once. "Good."
Then the king looked out over his lords, and his face went grave.
"It grieves me to break the king's peace so newly made. But in truth my lords, I see no other course. " He laid his hands on the arms of the throne, on the black blades that killed his father. "Hear me. I am Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and I am Defender of the Faith, and those are not two crowns, but one. I might have forgiven my uncle the insults to my person—the lies about my birth, even the talk of murder, in time, if he came to his senses, if he fell at my feet and begged my forgiveness. A man may swallow much. But he has burned a septon alive. He has put the Seven to the torch in their own holy house. That is not just rebellion, my lords. That is sacrilege, and a king sworn to defend the Faith cannot suffer it. I cannot suffer it." He paused, and waved the letter. "He means to make war. He means to take King's Landing and the seven kingdoms from Lord Monfords words. He means to take my head and that of my brother and sister. He means to destroy your faith and set your holy men to the torch for his mad pleasure and for his red witch. As your king, I shall not allow it. I cannot allow it. I mean to stop him. I mean to take Dragonstone. I mean to take his head and destroy all he holds dear. I mean to make war. Who comes with me?"
The hall roared.
Jon felt the sound rattle through his bones, the great wave, lords surging up with their swords pledged before the asking was done. Joffrey let it break. When it ebbed the council closed about the foot of the throne, and Jon, near enough, caught the low urgent voices.
"Your Grace, you cannot mean to go yourself—" Redwyne.
"Nephew, a king does not stake his own neck to root out one rebel lord, let me—" said Renly.
"Husband, please—" Sansa.
"You are newly crowned and newly wed, with no son of your body." Lord Tywin, cold as well water. "You will not set foot upon a battlefield. It is folly, and I will not hear otherwise."
Joffrey frowned down at them, and the stubborn look came into his face. "How am I to ask these men to bleed for me—to sail to my uncle's rock and storm his walls in my name—while I sit home soft and warm with a wife to keep my bed? What manner of king sends men to die and will not stand the risk? What kind of king does not fight his own battles?"
He had not lowered his voice for that part, and Jon watched the hall hear it, and watched it move them, the way Joffrey always moved them. But they cried against it all the same.
Because you are the king. Because the realm has need of you. Send one of us in your stead.
The council pressed; the king argued. In the end, plainly unhappy but giving way, Joffrey raised a hand.
"Very well. You've worn me down, my lords." A sigh and a rueful twist of the mouth. "Lord Renly and Lord Redwyne shall command in my name. Some of the fleet, once it arrives, will stay, to ward the bay and the city. The rest sails for Dragonstone, to bring my uncle to the king's justice, and the gods'."
"Your Grace." Waters again, from below. "When your ships engage your uncle's, my brother and the lords of the narrow sea will turn their cloaks, and fall on the rebel fleet from within. Stannis believes their loyalty his. He has only the seeming of it."
"Then House Velaryon does the crown good service this day," Joffrey said, "and the crown does not forget its friends. When this is done, ser, you'll find me most grateful."
The bastard bowed. "The Velaryons have always been true friends to the throne, Your Grace. We ask no more than to serve."
Jon did not believe that to be exactly true but it was not his place to say so, and like as not the king had thought it already. Joffrey thought most things already.
That evening the king took his supper in his solar, and Jon with him. The two of them alone, the wine and the candles, as they had taken a hundred suppers since they were boys.
For a while they talked of the war, of tides and numbers and days of sail. Then Joffrey set down his cup, and his manner changed. He turned his cup slowly by its stem. "You still have not given me an answer, my friend. There is one place left. I'd give it to you, Jon. If you'll have it. I'd sooner have you at my back than any sword in the realm, and you know it." He smiled. "Or if I've convinced you of the perks of not swearing to celibacy and you'd rather not, I can give it to Redwyne or hold some trial for it. Meryn Trant, like Boros Blount is easily replaced. Say the word."
Jon looked at the table and did not answer at once. He wanted it. That was the trouble. He wanted it more than he had let himself know—to stand at Joffrey's shoulder, sworn and cloaked, to guard this strange golden friend who had been the best part of his life since they were boys. And the dream came back, the three-eyed bird grinding out its words in the dark. Guard the king. As though something past the edge of the world were ordering him to the very thing his heart already wanted.
But there was the other thing. The thing he was.
How do I swear to guard his life, Jon thought, when my own blood is a knife at his throat? A sworn shield with a claim to the throne he was to guard. It was a lie at the root of the vow, and Jon Snow had been raised by a man who did not abide lies.
"Jon." Joffrey was watching him. He had always been too quick, his friend. "You've gone somewhere. Is there a thing you want to tell me?"
"Yes," Jon said, before he could stop the word. Then, helpless, "No. There's a thing. But I can't. I swore a vow, Joff. To my father. Never to speak of it, to any man. I'll not break it. Not even for you, my king. Please don't ask me."
"Ah." Joffrey nodded, slow, and did not press. Jon was grateful for it. Then the king tilted his head, and asked, in a voice as idle as if he were asking after the weather, "Is it that Rhaegar Targaryen was your father?"
The cup near fell from Jon's hand. The floor seemed to tilt under him. He was on his feet without knowing he had risen, and then he remembered himself and got down on one knee with his head bowed, his heart slamming.
Joffrey laughed. Not cruel. Warm, near to delighted.
"Oh, get up. Get up, you great fool, before Sansa walks in and we've both got a deal of explaining to do." He grinned. "Sit. Sit, Jon."
Jon got back into the chair. His mouth had gone dry as old bone. "How," he managed. "How could you know that?"
"I have known for some time." Joffrey shrugged and took a sip of his wine, easy as you please. "It was not so hard to put together. Lord Eddard Stark returned to Winterfell with two things. His sister's bones. And a newborn babe. And in sixteen years he never named the mother. Not even to you. Why is that do you think? She could not have been so shameful." His graces gold eyes glinted. "What secret could be so dangerous that the honourable Ned stark would rather shame himself than admit? It was quite easy to put together from my position."
"That's guessing," Jon said. "You said you knew."
"I knew for certain when we spoke about Daenerys Targaryen and her marriage to that horselord. The guilt and rage on your face was clear to see for someone who knows you as well as I."
Jon let out a long breath. There seemed no use lying now. So he told him—all of it, which was little enough. The tower of joy in the red mountains. Ned finding Lyanna there dying in a bed of blood. The promise she had wrung from him with her last strength. And the three Kingsguard who had died at the tower's foot. Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. Ser Oswell Whent. Ser Gerold Hightower, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard.
When he was done he slumped back. "So. Now you have all of it. What happens now?"
Joff had started eating again. "Not much, I'd think. Not a lot has changed."
"Not much." Jon stared at him. "Joff. A great deal happens now. I'm—"
"—Still my friend." The king smiled, " I suppose we're no longer good brothers anymore, seeing as you're in truth Sansa's cousin. And you're not a bastard anymore. So I guess a lot has changed."
Jon blinked. "What?"
"Come now, Jon. Think. Three Kingsguard." The king set his food aside and leaned back. "Three. The Sword of the Morning, the Lord Commander, and Oswell Whent. While Rhaegar's other knights rode to die on the Trident, while the Mad King sat his own throne with the realm burning round him—three of the seven finest blades in the realm were a thousand leagues off in the mountains of Dorne, guarding a tower. Now. Why would three white cloaks stand and die for a dying woman and a bastard babe? Why would they stay when their prince was dead and the war was lost? Why did they not seek their new king, Viserys, third of his name?" He let it hang. "Because there was no need to. A son comes before an uncle. Kingsguard guard one thing, Jon, and one thing only. The blood royal. The king, or the king's heir. They do not die in the sand for bastards. They were where their vows set them. Guarding their king. It is likely your mother and father were wed, I couldn't tell you the manner of it or its validity. Whatever the manner it must have been convincing enough, three Kingsguard do not die for a bastard when their true king is elsewhere. Well, I suppose they could have all been mad… but so many mad people working together seems unlikely."
Jon could not speak.
The room had gone very still, and very far away. Not a bastard. He turned the words over and could not make them sit.
He had been Jon Snow for sixteen years. He had been a bastard for sixteen years. Even now, knowing his father's name, knowing his own — Aemon — he thought himself a bastard still.
And Joffrey had drawn it off him with a handful of cold clean sentences. Three Kingsguard do not die for a bastard. As though it were arithmetic. As though it were nothing.
It was not nothing. He remembered the voice. My prince. Jon could make no sense of it.
Joffrey drank, and gave him the moment. Then, lightly, "So, back to what I was saying, do you still want a place in my Kingsguard?"
"How can you even ask it." Jon's voice came rough. "How can you trust me, Joff, after what I've just told you? By your own reckoning I'm a trueborn dragon. And you'd give me a sword and stand me at your back?"
Joffrey set down his cup, looked at him for a long tense moment before he rose, and came round the table to stand over him.
"Get up," the king said quietly.
Jon rose as commanded, wary.
Joffrey drew his dagger, the Valyrian steel the late king had gifted him. Jon tensed—but the king reversed it, pressed the hilt into Jon's hand, folded Jon's fingers round it.
Then he took Jon's hand with the blade in it and drew the point forward until it rested against his own breast, over the heart, over the wolves and stags of the doublet Sansa had sewn him.
"There," Joffrey said. He smiled, clasped the back of Jon's head with his other hand and held Jon's eyes. "Now hear me, cousin."
Cousin. The word and acknowledgment sent shivers down his spine.
"Everything Stannis wants, everything he reaches for—you could have it. Truly have it, by blood, in a way my poor uncle never could." The king's voice was calm, the blade steady at his own heart between them. "Push, and it's done. Lord Stark is Hand of the King; half the court answers to him. You're loved here, the king's own shadow, rider in a dozen tourneys. There are old dragon men still breathing who'd weep to learn a son of Rhaegar lived. Tell them you found evidence that Stannis was correct, forge it if you must, my father is dead and my mother cannot gain say you from Casterly Rock. You could wed a Great House to your claim with a word. You are a trueborn dragon, Jon, and I am but a stag. What is a stag to a dragon? One push, here, now, and everything that was ever kept from you is yours."
Jon did not move the blade. He let the words pass over him, not entirely believing the position he had found himself in or the words he was hearing.
Joffrey frowned at his lack action. The king forced the blade more firmly into his chest. Jon did his best to resist him. "Where is your rage, cousin? Think of Rhaenys. Your sister. They said she was a sweet little girl. Think of Aegon, with his head dashed against this very keeps walls. Do they mean nothing to you?"
Joffrey's words were the spark. The guilt and rage and frustration that he had been doing his best to set aside came roaring back. Joffrey must have seen it, as he had seen it on the ride back south, for he smiled—soft, knowing, understanding.
Jon looked at the dagger in his own fist, at the point dimpling the cloth above his friend's heart, at eyes that did not so much as flicker.
"You can kill me," the king was saying, "I won't resist. Death is not so bad. Make your decision now. What will it be, cousin?"
Jon had made his decision long ago. He turned the blade, reversed it, and held it out hilt-first.
"Maybe I could," Jon said at last. "Maybe it's all true. But I stood in the hall this morning with the rest of them, and I meant what I said. There is one true king in the Seven Kingdoms." He met Joffrey's eyes. "Don't try and force your burden on me."
Joffrey looked at him a moment longer and laughed. Then he took the dagger, sheathed it, and pulled Jon into a rough hard embrace, thumping his back.
"I'm glad," the king said, fierce and pleased, against his shoulder. "There are so few trustworthy men in the kingdoms, but I knew I could trust you. Whether you were the dragon's son or just the bastard of Winterfell, I'd have staked my life on it." He pulled back, grinning. "Well. I suppose I just did."
Jon huffed a breath that was almost a laugh, the danger going out of him. "You're mad. What if you'd read me wrong?"
"I suppose I'd be dead then, and you'd have some explaining to do." Joffrey dropped back into his chair, looking very much pleased with himself. "Besides. Sansa would never have forgiven you. She'd have been ever so sad. Break my wife's heart, and where would you be."
"Hmm." Jon sat, and took the opening, for he had been hunting one all evening. "Speaking of your wife..."
Joffrey let his head fall back. "Oh, gods. Not you as well. Will she set the whole castle on me? First Pycelle, then grandfather. Am I to be lectured on my own marriage bed by you as well?"
"It gives me no joy to say it." And it did not. Jon's face had gone serious. "You know how my mother died. A Stark maid, like Sansa, dead in a bed of blood." And still I am pushing her toward it. The thought sat sour in him, but he went on, because it was true and wanted saying. "But hear me out. There are threats in the realm. Stannis today, and gods know what tomorrow—this Aurane's brother and his turncloaks, and—" Jon remembered the dream, something about the wall "—the wildlings at the wall. More will come. They always come. A child of your body doesn't only secure your line. It guards Sansa. A queen who's given the king an heir is harder to set aside, harder to harm. A barren queen is a thing some men reckon wants solving. A mother of the king's sons is the realm's own treasure." He held the gold eyes. "You'd be shielding her, Joff. Same as you shielded her at the wedding feast."
Joffrey grimaced, "Caught that did you?"
He had. He did not know why Joff thought Sansa needed shielding but he'd also learned not to question certain things.
The king was quiet a moment. "I'd have thought," he said at last, low, "that you of all men—knowing how Lyanna died—would stand on my side of this."
"I understand your fear better than any man living. And so does Lord Stark. That's why he's not said a word to press you. We both understand it. But, Joff—even kings don't get all they want. You saw it yourself this very morning, when the council talked you down. You wanted to go, and they would not have it, and you gave way, because you had to do the thing the realm needed. This is the same. It is not about what you want. It's about what the realm needs."
Joffrey let out a long breath. "That," he said, "is all I ever think on. The realm. What it needs." He turned his cup, round and round and round. "And you may have the right of it. You usually do, curse you." A sigh. The king drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.
For some time he said nothing, and then eventually, "If it is as you say, then for the line, for the succession, perhaps for the peace of the realm—it would be best if you took that white cloak. A trueborn dragon sworn to celibacy and to my own life, where I can see him, where no man can ever raise him up as a banner. That's the thing a king ought to want."
That did not seem so bad to Jon, it was better than a bastard deserved. He did not say that however, instead he said "But?", for he had heard it coming.
"But… you're my friend." Joffrey said plainly. "And I'd see you happy. A name of your own, a wife who loves you, children to raise. All things I know you want but will never admit." His mouth quirked. "It's a poor reward, to thank the man who would not take my throne by locking him in white for life. Is it that much better than the Nights Watch I talked you out of so long ago? Loras chose his with eyes open. That's a different thing. I see it in your eyes, you feel as if you haven't got a choice."
"Joff—"
"I'd legitimise you gladly," the king pressed on, as if Jon was not present. "Not as a Targaryen. We keep that dragon in its box, I think, for your sake and mine and the realm's. But as a Stark, or as something new. A great lord, Jon, with lands and a seat." He paused. "Dragonstone, perhaps, once we've prised my uncle out of it. There'd be a fitting jest in that, I think."
Jon shook his head, slow. "Your father kept trying, will I suffer you to do the same?" he said, "I feel undeserving."
That was the truth of it. Guilt at the life he'd been allowed to live that other bastards could not, and guilt for the family he had never known, those dead and those who had been made to live as beggars whilst he feasted at a king and prince's pleasure. For some reason Lady Stark came to mind as well. "And I'll not be a rival to Robb, nor a shadow on the other Starks, by being made a Stark. Winterfell is Robb's. I'll not set even the ghost of a claim beside him. He's my brother. He was a brother to me when he'd no cause to be."
"Then found your own house," Joffrey said simply. "New men raise new houses every age. Half the great houses started with one man a king lifted up. You'd take nothing from Robb. You'd build a thing that was yours."
"I'd want it earned." Jon's jaw set. "Not given. Not handed me across a supper table because the king is fond of me. If I'm to be a lord, I'll have earned it with my own hands, so no man can name it charity. So I can't name it that."
Joffrey studied him, and something like respect moved behind the gold. "You've earned it ten times over already. But—" he shrugged "—if that's how you feel, then do something about it."
And Jon remembered the dream. The masked woman in her red lacquer, her voice soft and wrong. The three eyed crow. The stone dragons.
His skin prickled cold. They had been speaking around it all this time. He knew where he had to go.
"Then let me go," Jon said. "With the fleet. To Dragonstone. Let me earn it there."
Joffrey looked at him a long moment. "If that's your wish," the king said slowly, "then go. Sail with Renly and Redwyne. Come back to me with glory enough on you that not even you can call it charity." He raised his cup. "And when you do, I'll legitimise you, and make you a lord, and find you a wife worth the having. One of the Sealord of Braavos's daughters, perhaps. That would knot us to Braavos. Wed you cleverly enough, and we might see that debt struck clean out. You'd serve the realm by marrying. Imagine that."
"You think of coin even while you're matchmaking."
"I think of everything. It's exhausting. You've no idea." Joffrey speared a piece of meat and weighed Jon across the candleflame, his lips twitched. "If I did make you a Targaryen, what would your epithet be? The Dragonwolf?" He tried it on his tongue, pleased with it. "Aemon the Dragonwolf. Dragon for the father, wolf for the mother. It has a ring no?"
Jon snorted into his wine. "What have I ever done to offend you so?" He turned it over, and his own mouth twitched in spite of him. "And by that reckoning, what's Sansa, then? What's Robb? Troutwolves? Wolf for Stark, trout for Tully?"
Joffrey choked on his wine, laughing. "Troutwolves. Gods be good. Don't you dare say it where Lady Catelyn can hear, she'll have both our heads on the Traitor's Walk—"
"A whole litter of little troutwolves," Jon said, grave as a septon, "flopping about the North and Riverlands—"
And the two of them broke, helpless, young men with too much wine in them, laughing across a table as it had always been.
But later, abed, Jon did not laugh.
He lay staring up into the dark, and the dream came back to him in pieces. The weeping tree. The burning leaves. The three-eyed crow. Guard the king. They will march on the Wall soon. And the masked woman in her red lacquer, calling him prince, telling him to sing.
He was to go to Dragonstone. Jon Snow lay awake a long while, and wondered what waited there for