SANSA
Two days, and he had not woken.
Sansa sat where she had sat since they carried him in from the hunt, on a hard stool drawn close to the great bed, her husband's hand in both of hers. She had not let it go save when they made her, when Qyburn and the Grand Maester needed the room to do their work, and even then she had stood in the corner with her arms wrapped round herself and watched every breath he took, terrified that if she looked away it might be the last.
Lady lay on the cold floor at the foot of the bed, her grey head on her paws, and had scarcely moved either—the direwolf had not left the chamber since they brought the king in, and would not, and growled low at any who came too near the bed but Sansa herself. It was a comfort, that great silent grey presence. It was the only one. The wolf seemed to understand better than any of the lords and maesters that something precious lay in that bed and might be slipping away, and she kept her vigil as fiercely as Sansa kept hers.
"Come back to me," she whispered, and pressed her lips to his knuckles, and then to the back of his hand, and then to the palm. His hand was warm. That was the one mercy.
A dead man's hand went cold, she knew that, everyone knew that, and Joffrey's was warm, so he was not dead, so he could still come back. He must come back. "You promised. You promised me you'd not leave. Do you remember? I plan to come home, you said. You have to keep it. Kings keep their promises, you told me so. So keep this one. Come home. Come back and keep it."
Joffrey Baratheon did not stir.
The maesters had bled him and dosed him and pored over him and, in the end, admitted between themselves that they did not know what ailed him.
His skull was swelling within, Pycelle said; that first day the blood had come from his nose and, worse, from the corners of his eyes, thin red tears tracking down that beloved face, and Qyburn had watched it with his careful bloodless interest and said it was as though the king's whole body had gone into a shock, the way a man's did who had lost a limb or taken terrible wounds—only there was no wound. No cause they could find.
Between the two of them, the maester and the not-maester, they had stopped the bleeding at last and quieted his heart's mad racing and brought him to this: not dying, not waking.
For a moment it seemed like he would wake, on that first night. When they had carried him in, before the bleeding was stopped—he had murmured, low and urgent, his brow furrowed as though he labored at some great weight.
Sansa had bent her ear to his lips, her heart leaping, thinking he was waking, thinking he spoke to her. She had caught only pieces of it.
Be brave, he had breathed. Do not falter. And her eyes had filled, because she knew—she was sure—that he was speaking to her, telling her to be brave, to hold, not to break while he was gone. And then, clearest of all, the last of it before he sank back into his silence: I love you. Just that. I love you.
She had wept over those words a hundred times in the two days since. He knew, she told herself. Even lost in whatever dark he's in, he knew I was here, and he told me to be brave, and he told me he loved me.
Sansa did not know how he knew she was there, She only knew that her husband had said be brave and I love you and then gone silent, and that she meant to be worthy of both for he had not made a sound since.
Sansa smoothed the hair back from his brow and did not weep now, because she had wept herself dry the first night, and there was nothing left in her but the waiting.
She had made them bring her a chair to the window, so she might sit where she could see both him and out, and she looked out now while she held his hand.
The crowds had not gone. It had only grown.
They filled the square below the Red Keep and spilled down every street she could see, and more came every hour. Somehow the word had got out—a scullion's loose tongue, a guardsman's, it did not matter now— word that the king had fallen and might not rise, and the city had gone half-mad with the fear.
Some had come to the gates simply to stand, as though nearness might help; they asked the guards for news a hundred times a day, and wept when there was none, and would not go home.
Others had made their way to the Great Sept of Baelor and knelt on the marble steps and prayed, morning and night, in such numbers that the septons could not have cleared them had they wished to. Sansa thought she could hear them, faintly, when the wind was right. Countless frightened voices, praying for her husband.
It was the signs that had done it. If Joffrey had only fallen sick, the city would have grieved and prayed and let it be. But he had not only fallen sick. He had fallen at the very hour the sky broke.
Sansa had not been in the kingswood—she'd had the telling of it after, again and again, from men who could not stop telling it. Joffrey stumbled and bled, and then collapsed, senseless. And in the following moments they all swore it, in that very breath others would say, a sound had come rolling across the water from the east.
A boom, deep and vast and far away, felt in the chest more than heard, that rattled the shutters clear across the city and set every dog in King's Landing to howling.
The king fell, and the world thundered, at once. No man who was there would ever be talked out of it. It was clear that the two things were one thing.
And the sky had been wrong ever since.
That first evening the sunset had come up the colour of a fresh wound, red and bruised purple and a sick smeared orange, far redder than any sunset ought to be, and the next dawn the same, and every dawn and dusk since—the sun rising and setting in blood, dimmed at noon to a sullen coppery coin a man could look at without squinting, the whole sky gone hazy and close and strange. And above it all the comet, that the smallfolk had called King Joffrey's Comet in gladder days, bleeding on, so that the heavens were red by day and red by night and never clean.
Then, yesterday, the ash had begun to fall.
Sansa put out her hand to the open window and it came away grey. Fine grey dust, soft as flour, sifting down out of that wrong red sky, settling on the rooftops and the cobbles and the still waters of the bay, greying the shoulders and the hair of every soul who knelt praying on Baelor's steps until the whole vast crowd looked like an army of old men. It got into everything—the water, the food, a man's eyes and throat. It came from the east, on the wind, off the burning island, and Sansa did not need a maester to tell her that.
Everyone knew where it came from.
And a grey dust falling from a bleeding sky, onto a city praying for a king who lay dying and no soul able to say why—no septon alive could have kept the smallfolk from reading doom in that.
Out past the mouth of the bay, always, the smoke. A smudge of grey-black low in the east, and some evenings a red glow beneath it, like a coal that would not die.
Dragonstone, Sansa thought.
Dragonstone was burning, and the not-knowing why bred worse things than any knowledge would have.
It was a curse, the whispers ran—the red woman's curse, Stannis' curse, reaching across the water to strike their king down and choke his city with ash. The fire in the east and the king in his deathly sleep and the grey fall from the red sky, they were all one thing, surely, all the same black sorcery, and the city trembled under it and did not know whether to weep or riot.
And there was the priest.
Thoros of Myr had been in the city when it started, and Thoros of Myr was a red priest, a servant of the same fire-god the smallfolk had now learned to hate, and it had not taken long for the whispers to find him.
A red priest did this. There is one among us. He serves the flame, like the witch. He calls the fire and the ash down on us. The gold cloaks had seized him—for his own safety, they said, and it was even half true, for a mob had gathered at the inn where he lodged, torches lit, howling for him.
But Sansa knew, because she sat at the king's council's, and had been at court long enough to know that there were those among the lords and even among the small council who thought the simplest thing would be to give the crowd the priest's head, and let them have their scapegoat, and quiet the city with blood before the fear boiled over into something worse.
She thought of Joffrey, who had never in his reign given the mob a head to keep it quiet. Who found a better way, always. She held his warm hand and looked at the grey dust on her fingers and the blood-red sky beyond the glass, and did not know yet what she thought, only that a head struck off in fear was not a thing her husband would have wanted, and that a frightened city was a dry field waiting on a spark.
The door opened softly behind her. She knew the step.
"Sansa." Her mother crossed the room and stood beside her, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "Sweetling. You must eat something. You've had nothing since yesterday's morning, and precious little then. This does the king no good—you making yourself ill at his side."
"I'm not hungry, Mother." Her words fell on deaf ears.
"Hungry has nothing to do with it. You will eat because your body needs feeding whether you wish it or no, and because he will want you strong when he wakes, not fainting." Lady Catelyn's voice was gentle and it was iron, both at once, the voice of a woman who had nursed her share of the sick. "I have sat up more nights than I could count over a feverish child, sweetling, waiting out a fever that might break or might not. Five children I raised through every chill and flux the North could throw at them. I know how it hollows a body out, this watching. But starving at his bedside will not wake him one hour sooner, and it may lay you low beside him, and then what use are you to him? Come now, sweetling. Only a little. Some broth, some bread."
"I can't." Sansa did not look away from Joffrey's face. "How can I sit and eat, Mother, as though it were any ordinary day, while he—while he's—" Her voice cracked and she mastered it. "I won't leave him. If he wakes, mine is the face he'll see. I've decided it. So don't ask me again to go and eat in some other room, because I won't, and don't tell me it's for my own good, because I don't care about my own good just now. I care about his."
Her mother was quiet a moment. Then she bent and kissed the top of Sansa's head, the way she had when Sansa was small.
"Then I'll have the broth brought here," Catelyn said, "and you'll take it here, at his side, where you can watch him the whole while. That much you'll grant me. At least a little." And Sansa, who had no strength left to fight a battle she would only lose, nodded, and her mother went to see to it, and Sansa thought that she had never in her life understood her mother so well as she did in this grey room.
She was not the only one who came to sit with him.
Tommen came, and Myrcella, his brother and sister, and it was the children who undid her worst of all.
Myrcella tried so hard to be brave, being the elder—she would stand very straight by the bed and hold her little brother's hand and say that Joff would be well soon, he was only sleeping, everyone knew he was the strongest and cleverest of them—but her chin would tremble even as she said it.
And Tommen, who was only eight, would climb up onto the bed against all the maesters' fussing and curl against his big brother's side and cry into his shoulder, quietly, and beg Joffrey to wake up, please, please wake up.
Sansa had tried to comfort them. She had held Myrcella and stroked Tommen's golden hair and said all the things one said—he's strong, he'll wake, the maesters are doing all they can, be brave for him. But the words became like the falling ash in her own mouth, because she did not believe them any more than the children did, and they knew it, and she knew they knew it, and there was no comfort in a comfort that the comforter could not feel.
She had never felt so useless. She was the queen, she was meant to be their strength, and she had none to give, because all of hers was spent on the man in the bed, and the children saw her hollow eyes and her wet face and understood that their good-sister was as frightened as they were.
In the end all they could do was the three of them together, huddled at Joffrey's bedside, holding whatever part of him they could reach, waiting.
She loved them for coming. She loved them, and she failed them, and she could not forgive herself either one.
The council when they came, filed in quietly, out of respect for the sickbed. Her father first, grave and grey, and behind him Lord Tywin like something carved from winter, and Mace Tyrell, Garth Tyrell, and Qyburn, and Grand Maester Pycelle shuffling last with his chains clinking. They gathered at the foot of the bed and Sansa did not rise, and did not let go of Joffrey's hand.
"Grand Maester," her father said. "Is there any change?"
"None, my lord Hand. I am sorry. He is stable. He is no worse." Pycelle spread his soft old hands. "But he does not wake, and I will not lie to the queen and tell her I know when he shall, or if. The swelling in the skull is a mystery to me. In fifty years of service I have not seen its like."
"There has been a raven," Ned said, and Sansa looked up at that. Her father had a parchment in his hand. "From Driftmark. Lord Velaryon's brother, the bastard Aurane Waters, sends word of—of what befell the fleet at Dragonstone." He hesitated, and Sansa saw him choose his words with care, as if not sure he should share it."You should all hear it. It is not easily believed."
He read it.
Sansa listened, stroking her husband's face, and the room grew very still. The eruption of the mountain. The fog, and the dark that swallowed the day. The stone men, and the gargoyles come alive off the castle walls, and the great stone dragons that were the towers. The grey plague that ran like fire and turned men to stone. And then the thing that stopped even her hand upon Joffrey's cheek: that the men who had gone marked with the king's blood had been spared the grey—that the plague slid off them, that they alone could stand where other men fell. The death of Aurane's brother to greyscale, Lord Renly bidding the bastard to lead the unmarked to Driftmark, and the fact he and the few marked with him had heard their king's own voice in their skulls.
"Preposterous," Mace Tyrell said, when it was done, but he said it uncertainly, glancing round to see whether anyone would agree. "A king's blood turning a plague? Voices in the air? This Waters has been at sea too long, or in his cups. Men see all manner of things in a battle."
"Men do," said Qyburn mildly. "But I don't believe this is that. Some unexplainable things have occurred these last few days, that scar for one." He looked at the king in the bed with that cool clinical fondness that made Sansa's skin crawl even now, and the small scar that had appeared on her beloveds face that same day he had collapsed. "I would not be so quick, my lord, to pass judgment. King's blood is not as other blood. The oldest tales are full of it—that it holds power, that great workings ask for it. And the High Septon blessed this fleet before all the city. Blessed it, and marked the men with the king's own blood, and named it holy. If ever a working were to hold, it would be that one." He inclined his head toward the sleeping king. "And consider the hour of it. The king falls senseless, bleeding from the eyes, at the very moment—so the letter tells us—that his marked men are set upon by horrors on that island, and cry out that they feel him with them. His body here, his strength there. You may call it coincidence, my lord Tyrell. I am a man of reason, and I do not."
"You are a man of reason," Lord Tywin said coldly, "who has just told this council that my grandson's soul is at Dragonstone while his body rots in this bed." He turned his pale gold-flecked eyes on Qyburn. "If you knew there was such danger in this working—if you knew the blood might do this to him—why in the name of all seven hells did you let him bleed himself for a fortnight and send it to sea?"
"Because I did not know, my lord, and neither did he." Qyburn was unruffled. "The king did not know what waited on Dragonstone. No man could. He gave his blood to hearten his men—to let them carry a piece of their king into battle and not be afraid. That was all he intended, I would stake my life on it. That it should prove to be more than a gesture—that the gods, or the blood, or whatever power runs under this world, should take the thing he meant as comfort and make it a shield in truth—" the not-maester spread his hands "—that, no man could have foreseen."
And then they were all talking at once.
It rose around her like water. Mace disbelieving, Pycelle fretting, her father grave and trying to hold the thread, Lord Tywin's cold voice cutting under all of it, and the question going round and round—what do we do, what do we tell the city, what of the priest, what if the king dies, what if, what if, what if—and it climbed and climbed until Sansa's head was pounding with it, a hot spike behind her eyes, and her husband lay still and silent in the middle of it all, that furrow between his brows, as though even in his deep dark their noise reached him and pressed him further down.
"Be quiet."
She had not meant to say it so loud. It came out of her sharp as a slap, and the room fell silent, every lord of them turning to look at her, the queen on her stool with the king's hand in hers, and for a heartbeat Sansa was half-frightened at her own boldness.
She was fourteen. These were the great men of the realm. She had spoken to them as a mother speaks to squabbling children in a sickroom, and—
—and they had gone quiet. They were waiting. They were waiting for her.
And into that sudden silence came his words. Not from his lips—he lay as still as ever—but from her memory, from the first day, the only thing he had said before the dark took him whole. Be brave. Do not falter.
She had thought them a comfort, a husband's love murmured to his frightened wife. Now, with the great lords of the realm turned toward her and waiting and the city praying in terror beyond the glass, the words came back to her and turned in her hands and became something else.
Not comfort. Instruction. As though he had known, even falling, even lost, that a moment like this one would come, and had left her the only order that mattered. Be brave. Do not falter.
I won't, she told him, silently, her hand tight around his. I won't falter. Watch me, Husband.
Sansa looked down at the dear sleeping face, and then round at the waiting men, and she thought: what would you do? If you were awake and I were sleeping, and it fell to you—what would you do?
She knew at once. She knew as though he had told her. She had lain beside him at nights and listened to him think aloud, and she knew the shape of his mind now, the way she knew the shape of his hand in hers.
He would not give them a head. He would give them a story—a true one—and turn their fear into love.
Her husband's words had turned her skin to porcelain, to ivory, to steel. The queen stood.
"Thoros of Myr is to be released," she said looking between the men of the small council, "and brought to me. I will speak with him myself."
"Your Grace—" Mace Tyrell began.
"That was not a request, my lord." She said it quietly, and it stopped him, and some cold clear part of her noted with faint wonder that it had stopped him. "Qyburn. Look at me and answer me true, before all these men. Do you believe—truly believe, not to comfort me, not to flatter the crown—that what ails my husband is the working of his blood? That he suffers because his blood shields those men?"
Qyburn met her eyes. "I do, Your Grace. On my honor, such as men reckon it. I believe it."
Sansa's hand rose to her throat, to the pendant that hung there—the dark polished stone of Dragonstone that Joffrey had given her, cool against her skin. She held it a moment. Then she let it fall and looked round at the council.
"Then this is what the city will be told. All of it. Everything in that letter." Ned started to speak and she went on over him, gently, as Joffrey had gone on over his lords. "The people are afraid because they do not understand, and men who do not understand a thing will make up a worse thing to fear. They see the sky bleed and the grey ash fall and their king struck down, and with no true story to hold to, they have built themselves a curse. So we will give them the truth, which is better than anything they could invent. King Joffrey lies as he does because his blood is protecting his people. Because far across the water his men face horrors loosed by foul Stannis Baratheon and his red woman—fire, and stone, and a grey death—and the king's own blood, freely given, holy, blessed by the Faith, is the shield between those horrors and the realm. The fire in the east is the enemy's. The king is the wall against it. That ash on their shoulders is the breath of the very evil he suffers to hold back—and hold it back he does, for them, with his own blood, even now as he sleeps." Her voice did not shake. "He bleeds so that they need not. He suffers, even now, for love of the men who fight in his name, and for love of every soul in this city. Let them hear that. Let every fishwife and beggar in King's Landing hear it. Send word to the High Septon as well. He is to proclaim it from the steps of Baelor, and call the whole city to vigil—to fasting, and prayer, day and night, until the king wakes. Let the ash fall on them while they pray for the king who bleeds against the grey. Let them make it holy."
"And if he does not wake?" Lord Tywin asked. Not cruelly, she saw. She remembered he had carried Joffrey to the keep and remembered how unsettled her husband's grandfather had been.
Sansa looked at him steadily. "He will wake."
"We cannot know—"
"He will wake, my lord." She did not raise her voice, and did not look away, and after a moment, to her own surprise, it was Tywin Lannister who inclined his head, a bare fraction, and let it go. "We shall soon find out, all of you are no doubt thinking. Then we shall. But I'll not stand in this room and speak of my husband's death over his own sleeping body, and I'll thank you all not to do it either."
She turned to her father. "One thing more, and it may be the most urgent of all. Send to Ser Jacelyn Bywater. Remind him—though I think he needs no reminding—that the gold cloaks are the king's men, and that the king's peace is to be kept in the king's city, most of all now, when the city is frightened half out of its wits and a mob has already gone to one man's door with torches. A frightened city is a hair from a burning one. There will be no mob's justice while my husband sleeps. No heads given away to quiet a crowd. No inns fired, no red priests dragged into the street, no man's house pulled down because a neighbor named him a sorcerer. If the people are afraid, we will answer their fear with the truth and with prayer, not with blood—and the gold cloaks will see to it that fear stays prayer and does not curdle to riot. That is his way. That is the king's way. That is my husband's way. It will be mine while he cannot make it himself."
For a moment no one spoke. Then her father bowed his head. "It shall be done, Your Grace," Ned Stark said, and there was something in his grave voice that she had not heard him use with her before—not the fondness of a father for his girl, but the respect of the King's Hand for his queen.
"Then leave us." She sat back down, and took her husband's hand again, and turned her face to him, and did not watch them leave. "I wish to be alone with my Lord husband."
They went. As they filed out, she noticed her father's lingering gaze and felt the weight of his pride settle on her, warm and quiet. She was too tired to hold it. She bent over Joffrey's hand and pressed it to her cheek and let the room empty, and when they were gone she whispered, only to him.
"I did what you'd have done. I think I did. Wake up and tell me if I did it right."
It was some hours later that Loras came.
He knocked, and put his head in—the Knight of Flowers in his new white cloak, that he wore now with a gravity Sansa had never seen in him before Joffrey pinned it on him. His eyes were bruised, and his face weary and drained. No doubt she looked worse. "Your Grace. The red priest, as you asked."
Beyond him in the corridor Sansa glimpsed another face, and despite everything it warmed her.
Bran, her brother, standing guard at her door in a squire's leathers, all of ten years old and fierce with the importance of it. He had wanted so badly to sail with Ser Barristan—the other squires had gone, and Bran had begged and sulked for a week—but their mother had forbidden it flatly, and their father had not gainsaid her, and so Bran was here, alive and whole and safe, pestering the Kingsguard with questions and guarding his sister's door as though the fate of the realm hung on it.
Sansa had never been so glad of a mother's stubbornness in her life. If he had gone, she thought, and could not finish it, thinking of the letter, the stone men, the grey. She gave her little brother a small tired smile through the door, and he stood straighter, and she loved him so much it ached. The thought of what Jon was facing, that she might lose both a brother and a husband nearly undid her.
But she remembered Joffrey's words. Do not falter. Be brave. I love you. And they gave her strength.
"Send the priest in, Loras. Thank you."
Thoros of Myr came in, and Sansa was relieved to see he had not been badly used—a red robe gone shabby, a night or two of poor sleep in his face, but no bruises she could see, no marks of the cells. He bowed to her, deep.
"Your Grace. I am sorry for the king. I have prayed for him—to my own god, I confess it, since it is the only one I have, but a prayer is a prayer, and I meant it kindly."
"I don't doubt you did." Sansa studied him. He had been to court often over the years, a fat drunk merry priest who told good stories and had never, that she had heard, done any harm to anyone. "Thoros. I must ask you plainly, and I must ask you to answer me plainly, because much may hang on it. Did you have any hand in this? In whatever was worked on Dragonstone—or in what has befallen my husband? You are a red priest. The woman who we believe did these things was a red priestess. I have to ask."
"I know you do. And I swear it to you, Your Grace, on the fire and on my own poor soul. I had no part in any of it. I never met the woman. I want no part of thrones or kings or the great red workings—I am a bad priest and a worse man, I drink too much and I believe too little, and the largest thing I have ever set fire to is my own sword to frighten green boys in a melee." He spread his hands, rueful. "I liked your husband, Your Grace. He and his father were kind to me. I would not harm a hair of him."
Sansa believed him. But she had been at Kings landing long enough to know that believing was not the same as being sure.
"I take you at your word," she said. "But I cannot yet be certain, and while there is doubt, I cannot set you loose in the city—for your own sake as much as the crown's. So you will be confined. But not to the cells. You'll have a chamber here in the Keep, with a fire and a bed and wine, and you'll be treated as a guest and not a prisoner, until we know the truth of all this and can let you go with honor."
Thoros bowed again, and there was real gratitude in it. "That is more mercy than I looked for, Your Grace. Far more than I got these last two nights. Thank you."
"You're welcome." She let him get to the door, let him think it done, and then, quietly, to his back, "And Thoros?"
He turned, questioning.
"If I learn that you lied to me," Sansa said and Lady lifted her head and growled by the foot of the bed. Her voice was soft and even and did not waver at all, "if I find you had any part in my husband's suffering—I will not give you to the mob, or to the headsman. I'll take your head myself. Do you understand me?"
The fat priest looked at the fourteen-year-old girl holding the sleeping king's hand, the wolf that seemed ready to rip into him, and something moved in his face—surprise, and then a slow respect, the look of a man who had just seen more steel than he expected in a soft place.
"I understand you, Your Grace," he said. "And I'd expect no less of a queen who loves her king."
He bowed a last time, and Loras took him away, and the door closed, and Sansa was alone with Joffrey again.
She kissed his hand. "You'd have liked that," she told him. "I sounded like you. A little. Wake up and I'll do the voice for you."
The city fasted for three days.
Three days the septons rang the bells and the smallfolk knelt on the marble and went hungry for love of their king, and out past the bay the smoke thinned, though Sansa did not know what that meant. Three days she scarcely left the stool by the bed, and slept in snatches with her head on the coverlet by his hand, and woke each time with her heart in her throat to check that he still breathed.
On the third night she was murmuring to him—she was always murmuring to him now, the small nothings of their marriage, the way she'd tell him of her day if it were an ordinary evening—when his hand tightened around hers.
Sansa went utterly still.
"Joffrey?"
His eyes opened. Gold eyes, clouded and slow, swimming up out of somewhere very deep and very far, and they found her face, and knew her.
"...Sansa," he said, in a voice like a rusted hinge.
She burst into tears. She could not help it; five days of held terror broke out of her all at once, and she was laughing and sobbing and kissing his face, his brow, his cheeks, his mouth, the corners of his eyes where the blood had run, saying his name over and over, and he blinked up at her, bewildered, and lifted one weak hand to touch her wet cheek.
"Don't cry," he rasped. "Don't— why are you crying. What happened?" His brow creased. "How long? How long have I— I was somewhere. It did not feel like last time, I—" He stopped and something crossed his face, some memory of a place she could not follow him to. "How long have I been gone?"
"Five days," she wept. "Five days you slept—and I thought— I thought—" She pressed his hand to her mouth. "You kept your promise. You came back. You came home."
And there, under his right eye—she saw it clear now, in the candlelight, as she kissed the place— that small new scar, pale and clean, healed as though it were years old, in the very spot where he had marked ten thousand men with his blood.
He would not rest, of course. He never could.
Within the hour, weak as he was, propped up on pillows and barely able to lift his head, he had called the council to him—and the first words out of him, before they could ask him a single thing, were an order.
"Ships," he said. "To Dragonstone. At once. The men— my men are still out there, we have to bring them home, send every ship that will float—"
"Your Grace, you must rest—"
"Ships, Grandfather. Send the ships. I'll rest when they're on the water." And such was the force still in him, sick and grey and flat on his back as he was, that Lord Tywin inclined his head and went to see it done.
They need not have hurried, as it happened.
That same day, before the rescue ships could be more than provisioned, a raven came—and then another, and another, from Driftmark and from the fleet itself.
Dragonstone had fallen. The mountain was quiet. Stannis Baratheon was dead, and his red witch with him, and the horrors were ended, and the marked men were coming home.
The sky over King's Landing began to clear. It happened over that day and the next, so gently that Sansa did not mark the moment it turned—only looked up once from Joffrey's bedside to see that the ash had stopped falling, and looked up again the next morning to find the sun risen clean and gold and ordinary over the bay, the haze burned off, the blood gone out of the heavens.
The smudge on the eastern horizon thinned and paled and was gone.
Someone had swept the grey dust from the windowsills. The city woke to a blue sky it had not seen in near a week, on the very morning the word ran through the streets that the king was awake and Dragonstone had fallen, and the smallfolk wept and cheered and said to one another that of course, of course—the darkness had lifted from the sky the very hour it lifted from the king, because they were one thing, they had always been one thing, and now the proof was overhead for any man to see.
The king had wakened and the sun had come back. What more could anyone ask?
And when they came—when the battered ships crept back into the bay and the survivors came down the gangplanks into the arms of a weeping, cheering, disbelieving city—every last man of them who had stood on that black beach and lived bore the same mark.
A small pale scar, healed clean, high on the right cheek beneath the eye. The very place their king had marked them with his blood. The very place the new scar had bloomed on Joffrey's own face while he lay dreaming.
Whilst some still doubt the nature and truth of all that occurred on Dragonstone, they were mostly silenced by the men and the king's shared scar. For that showed something had indeed occurred on that island. One thing most agreed on however was that Joffrey Baratheon was beloved of the gods themselves. The proof was in the returning men and the now clear skies.
Sansa couldn't care less of the truth of what had happened, only that her husband was returned to her, her brother was returned to her and once again all seemed right with the world.
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Thread starterDDragonman Start dateJun 3, 2026 Tags asoiaf game of thrones drama medieval fantasy self insert joffrey baratheon jon snow sansa stark kingdom building major character death
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#802
SHIREEN
King's Landing came up out of the morning haze, and Shireen watched it from the rail with her hood pulled low, and could not keep her fear at bay.
She had drawn the hood up the moment the lookout cried land, and she kept it up now, close about her face, though the wind off the water kept trying to tug it back.
Under it her head was bald as an egg, smooth and bare, every hair burned away in the fire and she could not bear for anyone to see. A lady was meant to have hair. Her mother had always said so—that Shireen's hair was the one pretty thing the gods had left her, after the grey stone took her cheek, and that she must brush it a hundred strokes a night and be grateful for it.
It was gone now, like her mother, like everything she had ever known.
The men gave her a wide berth on the crowded deck. They had been doing so since Ser Jon had cloaked her. There had been some trouble at first, shoving and shouting, a marked man spitting at her feet and calling her witch, another laying a hand on his knife before Lord Redwyne ordered calm. Still, Ser Jon had let it be known that any man who touched her would answer to him, with Ser Jaime and Ser Barristan by his side. No one had dared try, but they watched her all the same.
She felt it always, the watching. She had grown up watched—the little grey-faced girl, the one children were warned not to catch the sickness from—and she knew every kind of look there was.
Some of the men looked at her and were only angry, a low simmering anger at everything, the dead and the fire and the long horror, and she just happened to be near it.
Some looked at her and felt nothing at all, which was almost restful.
But some—and these were the ones that frightened her—some looked at her with a hate so plain and cold that her stomach dropped, as though she were the thing that had done it all, the fire and the stone men and the grey death, as though it had come out of her.
I didn't mean to, she wanted to tell them. I only wanted to help Edric. I only wanted it to stop.
But in the fire she had seen things—glimpses, torn and flickering, gone before she could hold them—stone men lurching through smoke, and gargoyles falling out of a red sky, and men she did not know screaming and dying on a black beach in the dark.
Every time she closed her eyes, she was brought back to the fire and screaming and the horror of that night. The spread of the plague, the gargoyles and the death that followed.
I didn't mean to, the thought came again. It sounded weak to her own ears. Her eyes had grown wet.
The padding of paws on the deck made her turn and she blinked away the tears before any could see.
Ghost came to her, the great white wolf with the red eyes that some of the men feared worse than they feared her. The direwolf always seemed to know when she had need of him.
He pushed his cold nose against her hand, and Shireen dropped to her knees on the wet planks and wrapped both arms around his neck and pressed her face into the thick white fur, and for a moment the watching men, the sadness and the cold fear all went away.
"Good boy," she whispered into his fur. "Good Ghost."
He had taken to sleeping outside her cabin door. "Best not to let anyone get any ideas, my lady."
And sometimes he would follow her around. She thought perhaps the wolf understood that she was frightened and alone, better than anyone.
She looked up. Ser Jon stood over her. Lightbringer, the other knights called him, half jesting, for the sword and the dawn he had brought, though she did not think he liked the name much.
He was not a big man, lean and dark and grave, with a long face that rarely smiled, but it was gentle when it looked at her, and that was worth more to Shireen than size or splendor.
Jon crouched beside her and scratched the wolf behind the ears, and for a while said nothing, which she had learned these past days since the battle's end was his way. He was not a man who filled up silences with talk.
"He's grown fond of you," Jon said at last. "Ghost doesn't take to many. You should be flattered. He's better judgment than most men I know."
"I have grown fond of him as well. He makes me feel safe," Shireen said, small.
"That's what he's for." A ghost of a smile. Then it faded, and he looked at her with those dark grave eyes, and said, as he had said more than once now on the long voyage, "You needn't be so afraid, my lady. You're under my protection, and the king's, and no harm will come to you. All will be well."
Shireen said nothing. She did not believe him—not because she thought he lied, but because adults were always promising children that all would be well, right up until it wasn't.
Her father had told her all would be well. Her mother, Maester Cressen, Ser Davos; all had said the same. Now they were all gone and only Shireen was left and nothing was well at all.
She looked at the approaching city, all those thousands of roofs and manses packed on their hills, a whole city of strangers who would look at her the way the men looked at her, and she thought about the king, her cousin, who had every reason to hate her, would decide what became of her. And Ser Jon's all will be well did less than nothing to settle the fear beating in place of her heart in her chest.
Shireen did not tell him any of that though, because Ser Jon had been kind, and he had kept her from harm on Dragonstone and on the way to the king's city. And perhaps there still remained a tiny part of her that wanted his words to be true here as well.
The fleet came into the harbor to the sound of bells.
Shireen had never heard the like—every bell in the city ringing at once, it seemed, and beneath the bells a roar that she took at first for the sea and then understood was people, a crowd, thousands upon thousands of them packed along the waterfront and the walls and every rooftop, come to welcome the marked men home.
The ships that limped in were battered and burned and far fewer than had sailed, and the crowd wept even as it cheered, because everyone in that city had sent someone, and many of the someones were not coming back.
The royal family had come down to the port to meet them. Shireen saw them from the deck as the ship warped in—a cluster of fine cloaks and bright colors on a dais above the crowd, and in the midst of them, unmistakable, her cousin.
King Joffrey.
Who had been kind to her when no one was kind to her, who had not looked away from her grey cheek, who had carried her about on his shoulders and told her she was clever.
She had loved him and missed him so much it ached. So Shireen had begged and pleaded so much so, that Edric had been sent to stay with them on Dragonstone. And now Edric was dead.
He was dead, and he wasn't coming back and it was all her fault.
Her cousin stood on the dais in cloth-of-gold with a crown on his golden head, the king who had beaten her father, the king who would decide whether she lived, and even at this distance Shireen thought he looked pale—paler than a king should look, thin and worn, as though he too had come through the fire.
Lord Renly came to them before they disembarked.
He moved stiffly, one arm held close to his side, and there was grey in his handsome face that Shireen did not think had been there before the black island. Even though he was in pain he smiled at her, a warm easy smile, and crouched a little to be nearer her height.
"There's my brave niece." His voice was warm, the same easy warmth he'd shown her all the long voyage home, when he'd sit with her of an evening and tell her foolish stories to make her smile. Uncle Renly had always been the merry brother, so unlike her father that Shireen had sometimes wondered how they could be brothers at all.
He touched her cheek, gently, the side where the grey had been—it did not seem to trouble him the way it troubled the others, that the stone was gone and the skin beneath it smooth. "Nearly home now, sweetling. You've been braver than any of us. Just a little further, and then we'll see you warm and safe and fed, I promise you."
He straightened, wincing—the wound in his side pained him still—and turned to Jon. "I'll be needing the dagger back, my friend. The ceremony must be adhered to."
Jon nodded and drew it—the dark rippled blade Shireen had seen him carry since the fire—and as he touched it, the steel lit. Cold and white, there and gone, dying the moment it left Jon's hand.
Uncle Renly held the dagger and it did not burn; but Shireen, close as she was, saw him shift his grip, and knew the steel was warm. It was always warm now, she had heard. Warm to the touch, always, since the night it burned in Ser Jon's fist.
Others had tried to wake the flame. In the days since the island fell, she had watched them try, in idle moments, half in jest and half not—men taking up the famous dagger and willing it to light, and it never did.
She remembered the handsome golden knight, Ser Jaime, the kingslayer, the one who laughed at everything, holding the blade up and scowling at it and commanding it to burn, and roaring with laughter when it stayed dark and cold in his hand.
"It knows quality," he'd said to Jon. "You are the better kingslayer, it won't sing for the likes of me."
It sang for no one. Only for Ser Jon, who the men said had ended the long night with it. Lightbringer, in the Lightbringer's hand.
Lord Renly and Lord Redwyne went first to the king.
Shireen watched from among the disembarking men, Jon at one shoulder and old Ser Barristan at the other, as the two lords crossed to the dais and knelt before Joffrey. She could not hear all of it over the crowd, but she picked up bits and pieces—Dragonstone is yours, Your Grace... the island is retaken... Stannis Baratheon is dead—
Her father's name, spoken like that, flat and final, went through her like cold water and she flinched.
A hand settled on her shoulder. Jon's. He did not look down at her or make a fuss of it; he only left his hand there, steady and warm, and somehow that was better than any words, and she found she could stand and breathe again.
Renly held out the dagger, and the king took it. And Shireen, watching, saw the blade flicker in Joffrey's hand—the smallest ghost of a flame, a single pale flicker that guttered out almost before it caught, so faint that she thought perhaps she'd imagined it.
The king looked down at the dark steel a moment, his pale face unreadable. Then he sheathed it, and lifted his head, and asked—she saw his lips shape it, and heard it passed back through the crowd—
"And my cousin? Bring her to me."
Ser Barristan offered her his arm, grave and courteous, as though she were a great lady and not a frightened bald child in a borrowed cloak. He was one of the few who had been truly kind to her, the old white knight, kind without a shadow of fear or pity in it, only a plain grandfatherly gentleness, and Shireen took his arm and let him and Jon walk her toward the dais through the parting crowd.
The whispers followed her the whole way.
Not about her, for once. About the scars. She heard it rustling through the crowd on every side—look, the mark, they all have it, see there on his cheek—and the king, the king has it too, the very same, look, beneath his eye—and Shireen understood that the men who had come home from the black island all bore the same small scar, high on the right cheek, and that the king bore it too, though the king had never left the city.
She thought of the beach in her stolen fire-glimpse, the men with the red blood painted on their faces, and she remembered—or thought she remembered, it was all so torn and strange—the blood washing away in the end, and a scar left behind where it had been.
The same scar. On all of them. On the king. She did not understand it.
Then she was at the foot of the dais, and the king was coming down the steps to her, and Shireen's heart pounded.
He reached out and drew back her hood.
She wanted to snatch it up again—her bare bald head, before all these thousands—but she made herself stand still, because cousin Joffrey was the king and she was the demon's daughter and he could do as he pleased.
When the hood came down, he did not flinch, or stare, or look away. He only looked at her—at her bald head, and at the cheek where the grey stone had been all her life and was not anymore, the skin there smooth and new and unblemished as a babe's, which frightened people worse than the greyscale ever had—and at her frightened face, and he looked at all of it the way he had looked at her when she was small, as though there were nothing there to look away from at all.
Shireen curtsied. Her knees shook and she nearly stumbled and caught herself.
"Your Grace," she managed. And then, because it was the largest thing in her and it would not stay down, her eyes filled and spilled and she blurted: "Edric's dead. They burned him. I—I couldn't— I tried to— I couldn't stop it—"
"I know." The king's voice was low, and soft and only for her. "I know, sweetling. I'm so sorry. It wasn't your fault. None of it was your fault."
And Shireen, who had held herself together across a whole sea of watching hateful eyes, came apart all at once. She flung herself at the king and buried her face in his cloth-of-gold and wept, great ugly heaving sobs, her arms locked around him as though he were the last solid thing in a drowning world—and the king of the Seven Kingdoms, before all his court and all his city, knelt down on the boards of the pier and gathered the dead usurper's daughter into his arms and held her while she cried.
"There now," he murmured into her bare head. "There. It's over, Shireen. You're safe now. I have you. I'm here. It's going to be all right now."
And Shireen sobbed, and clung to him, and tried with her whole broken heart to believe it.
They gave her a chamber in a high tower, with a soft bed and a window that looked over the bay, and serving women who did not spit or sign the seven stars against her but only dressed her and fed her and left her alone, and it was more kindness than she had met in a long while and she did not trust one bit of it. Kindness had a way of turning. She kept her hood by the bed and waited for the other thing to come.
It was some days later that they summoned her to the king.
A guard in a gold and black cloak walked her through the great echoing halls of the Red Keep to a door, and knocked, and a voice within said to enter, and Shireen went in with her heart in her throat.
It was a solar, warm and bright, with a fire in the hearth and the afternoon sun slanting through the windows. The king sat in a tall carved chair, one leg crossed over the other, at his ease—pale still, thinner than she remembered, the illness not yet gone out of his face, but a king in his own seat for all that.
And standing close at his shoulder, one slender hand resting in his where it lay on the chair's arm, was the queen. They made a picture together, the two of them, gold and copper in the firelight, and Shireen felt very small and very plain coming in out of the dark hall.
Shireen had heard the talk and had glimpsed it briefly but she knew it for true now. The Queen was beautiful.
Sansa of House Stark, tall and slender and auburn-haired, with a kind grave face and a fall of hair like burnished copper down her back, thick and shining and lovely.
Shireen looked at that hair and her hand crept up, before she could stop it, to the smooth bareness under her own hood, and something twisted in her chest.
She had wanted, her whole life, to be pretty. Just once. And the strange cruel jest of it was that now, for the first time, her face was—the grey stone gone from her cheek, the skin smooth and clear, the thing she'd prayed for since she was small—only no one saw it as pretty.
They all saw it as wrong. A girl whose greyscale simply vanished in a fire was not a girl who'd been made lovely; she was a girl who'd been touched by something, and men looked at her healed cheek and went pale and made signs against her. And her hair was gone besides, the one pretty thing her mother swore the gods had left her, burned to nothing—so that she had at last got the smooth face she always wanted, and it had only made everything worse.
She made herself stop. Thinking of her hair made her think of the fire, and thinking of the fire made her sad, and she had promised herself she would not cry and embarrass herself in front of the king again.
"Shireen." The king smiled at her, warm, and it reached his tired eyes. "Come in, cousin, sit. How do you find the castle? They're treating you well, yes? The rooms are to your liking?"
"They're very nice, Your Grace." Her voice came out small. "Thank you."
He tilted his head, his gold eyes seemed to lay her bare. "Are you hungry? You look thin. Tell me what you like best to eat and I'll have them bring it—anything at all, the kitchens here can make wonders. Lemon cakes? I'm told every girl in the realm loves lemon cakes."
The queen tsked and pinched his cheek at the comment. Joffrey laughed and brought her fingers to his lips.
Shireen felt like she was interrupting something.
"I'm not hungry, Your Grace. But thank you."
The king studied her a moment, and the queen looked at her with such soft sympathy that Shireen had to look at the fire instead.
"Cousin," the king said at last, gently. "I have to ask you about Dragonstone. About what happened there, before the mountain broke. I know it's a hard thing. I wouldn't ask if I didn't need to understand it. Can you tell me? From the start. Everything you saw."
And so Shireen told him.
It came out of her in pieces, halting and stuttering, out of order—the strange holy day her mother would not explain, and Ser Davos gone without a goodbye, and Edric not at breakfast, a touch of chill her mother said, and Patchface singing about fire and the little birds burning, and the pyre going up in the yard all day, and being brought out into the red evening, and the red woman's calm sweet voice, and then—Edric on the pyre, bound and weeping, and her mother's arms like iron around her, and her father grinding his teeth and turning his face away, and the flames, and the screaming, and running, running into the fire—
She was crying before she was halfway through, and the queen crossed the room and knelt and gathered her in, and held her, and murmured to her, and Shireen finished the telling with her face pressed into the queen's shoulder and the queen's lovely hair against her wet cheek and the queen's arms warm around her, and it was the first time since the fire that a woman had held her, and it broke something loose in her that had been clenched tight for a long time.
The king had gone very still and quiet through all of it. When she finished he leaned back in his chair, and looked at the fire, and thought, and did not speak for a long while.
Shireen could almost see him thinking. There was something behind his gold eyes that was very old for a boy's face.
"Thank you," he said at last, softly. "I know what that cost you, to tell."
"You're being very brave, my lady." The queen said to her, rubbing her shoulder.
Shireen wiped her eyes and said nothing, waiting for Joffrey to continue.
"Let me ask you something else," the king said. "Something easier, I hope. Ser Jon. What do you make of him?"
The question surprised her. She thought about it, and answered truly, because she did not know how to do otherwise. "He was kind to me, Your Grace. On the boat. And on the island, after—after the fire, when the men wanted to— he put his cloak on me. He wouldn't let anyone hurt me. And Ghost sleeps by my door." She swallowed. "He's one of the only ones who was kind."
"Do you hate him?"
She blinked. Shireen had felt a lot of things, sadness and anger and guilt, but hate? "No, Your Grace."
"He killed your father, Shireen." The king said it plainly, as if she needed a reminder. "You could hate him for that. It would be only natural."
"No." She shook her head, and found, tasting the word as she spoke it, that it was true. "My father was going to— he burned Edric. I don't— I don't think I hate Ser Jon. He was kind to me." She looked down at her hands.
The king was quiet again. Then, softer: "And me? Do you hate me, Shireen?"
She looked up, startled.
"You could," he said. "I'd understand it. I made war on your father. I sent the ships and the men that took your home and ended your house. Everyone you knew is dead, and I had a hand in a great deal of it, whatever the rights of it were. No one in the world would blame you for hating me for that. So I'm asking you plainly, cousin, and you may answer me plainly, and nothing bad will happen to you whatever you say. Do you hate me?"
She looked to the Queen at her side to see if this was some sort of trick, but Queen Sansa only smiled and squeezed her shoulder.
"No," Shireen whispered, and this was truest of all. "I don't hate you, Your Grace. I don't hate anyone. I don't— I just want it to stop hurting."
Something moved in the king's pale face, something that might have been pain of his own. The queen's hand tightened on Shireen's shoulder.
"Cousin," the king said. "I must tell you some things now, and they're hard things, and I'll not lie to you or dress them up. Will you continue to be a brave girl and hear them?"
Shireen's stomach went cold, but she made herself sit up straight, the way a lady should, the way her mother had drilled into her. "Yes, Your Grace."
"There are men—good men, my men, frightened men—who have come to me and said that you must die." He said it gently but he said it, the whole terrible thing, and Shireen's breath stopped. "That you walked out of a fire that should have killed you, and came out changed, and that such a thing is unnatural, and that your father's blood and your father's madness are in you, and that the safest thing, the surest thing, would be to be rid of you. And there are others, softer ones, who say no, don't kill the child, only send her away—give her to the Silent Sisters, to serve the dead the rest of her days, or shut her up in some motherhouse in the far corner of the realm to live and die a septa, forgotten. So that she can never be a banner for anyone. So that House Baratheon of Dragonstone ends quietly and troubles no one."
Shireen's eyes had filled again, but she did not look away, and she did not run, though every part of her wanted to. She thought of her father, and the silent grey sisters who tended corpses, and the far cold motherhouse, and worst of all the other thing, the men who wanted her dead, and she was so frightened she could hardly breathe. But she lifted her chin and she said, in a small shaking voice that she fought to keep steady.
"If— if the king commands it. I'll accept whatever punishment you think is right, Your Grace. I won't make trouble. I promise."
For a moment the king only looked at her. Then he smiled with a tenderness so sudden and so fierce that she did not know what to do with it.
"Shireen," He leaned forward and took both her small hands in his. "You are my family. My blood. I have no plans to give you up or let harm befall you. Not ever." His gold eyes held hers, fierce and warm. "I love you, Shireen. No one is going to hurt you while I am king. I promise you that."
Shireen's heart soared so high it hurt. She could not speak. No one had said such a thing to her in her whole life—I love you, no one is going to hurt you—not her father, not her mother, no one, and to hear it now, when she had braced herself for the worst, to have her fears proven true, she could only press his hands and blink back tears.
"But still, I must do something," the king went on, gentler. "That much is true. Too many of the men fear you, and fear does ugly things if you leave it be. If I do nothing, the whispering won't stop, and one day some frightened fool might decide to end his fear himself. I'll not have you living the rest of your life waiting on that." He paused. "So I mean to give you a place they cannot touch. A name, a home, a future—a good one. Not the sisters. Not the grave. A better door than any of theirs. I mean to kill quite few birds with one stone, but I shall not force a thing on you." He was quiet for a moment, watching her.
"So I ask you again, cousin." the king said softly. "What do you think of Ser Jon Snow?"
Shireen looked at him, and at the queen, and back at the king, and did not understand at all.