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Lynn watched Myrcella's retreating figure until the flash of white disappeared around the corner.
He looked down at his tear-soaked collar, then at the basin of bloody water on the table.
Right. He needed props. Something to tear down the fragile defenses Cersei had spent the last hour carefully building inside that girl's head.
Wait too long and Cersei would have her completely.
No time to waste.
He crossed to the desk, spread a sheet of parchment, dipped the quill, and wrote quickly.
He was going to hit Myrcella with everything he had.
He didn't bother with Varys's network, which stretched across every shadow in King's Landing. He called for the captain of his own guard instead.
"Find me a curly-haired puppy. Pure white, not a single dark hair. The gentlest, clingiest one you can get."
"Curly-haired. Don't forget that."
"Then go to the Red Keep's kitchens. Have them bake a lemon cake with the finest ingredients. Double the white sugar on top."
"Last — go to the best musician in the city and bring me a lute. The finest one they have."
The guard captain didn't understand any of it. He obeyed without a word and left.
Lynn settled back in his chair and closed his eyes.
In his mind, a melody was already playing. That old song from the Summer Isles. "The Last Kiss." It wound through his thoughts again and again, slow and quiet.
He had no Harmonic Magic.
But he had the Green Sight.
...
The day before the wedding.
Myrcella's room felt like the sea before a storm breaks. Heavy. Airless. Wrong.
The maidservants moved on tiptoe and spoke in no voices at all.
They were terrified of disturbing her.
Myrcella had been sitting at the window since morning. She hadn't spoken. She hadn't eaten. She just sat and stared at nothing, turning the same thoughts over and over: the secret, the man, her own ridiculous, wretched fate.
She was about to marry Lynn.
A knock, soft as a held breath, came at the door.
"Your Highness." The maidservant's voice was barely a murmur. "Lord Lann... has come to see you."
Myrcella's body went very still for just a moment.
What does he want?
"Let him in."
The door opened before she'd even finished speaking.
Lynn stepped inside.
He wasn't wearing the black leather armor today. Just a simple white linen shirt. Without the armor he looked different, less like a weapon, more like a person.
He was carrying a silver tray with a velvet cloth draped over it.
"I heard you haven't eaten all day." He set the tray on the table beside her and lifted the cloth.
The scent hit first. Rich, warm, caramel-sweet, filling the whole room in an instant.
A lemon cake, fresh from the oven. The golden surface was blanketed in a thick layer of white sugar.
It looked obscenely good.
Something pricked at Myrcella's chest. Not hard. Just enough to notice.
Lemon cake.
Her favorite.
A coincidence?
"Try some?"
Lynn cut a small piece and held the silver fork out to her lips, feeding her himself.
Myrcella looked at him. Something shifted in those flat green eyes, a faint ripple moving across still water.
She didn't refuse.
She parted her lips and took the cake.
It melted on her tongue. Warm and soft. That sweetness she loved bloomed across her taste buds and spread all the way through her chest.
Sweet. Delicious.
So delicious it made her eyes sting.
"I—"
She was about to say something.
Then, from outside the door, came the frantic scrabbling of small claws against wood, and a string of high, desperate little whimpers.
"What's that?"
Lynn didn't answer. He turned and opened the door.
A snow-white furball shot inside like a loosed arrow.
It made straight for Myrcella's feet, pressing its fluffy head against her skirts, nuzzling at the fabric like it had known her forever. Its tail was spinning so fast it was nearly a blur.
A curly-haired puppy. Not one dark hair on it. A pair of wet, jet-black eyes gazed up at her, shining with pure, uncomplicated joy.
The bottom dropped out of Myrcella's world.
She stared at the little creature. Something cracked open in her chest, and memory came flooding through the gap.
Casterly Rock. A warm afternoon in the gardens. Her own laughter, high and careless, as she chased a white curly-haired puppy across the grass.
One of the only genuinely happy memories from her entire childhood.
That dog had died the day before she left for King's Landing. She had cried until she couldn't breathe.
She had never kept another pet after that.
"You, how did you —"
Her voice was shaking and she couldn't stop it.
She sank slowly to her knees and reached out, running her fingers through the puppy's soft curls. The puppy closed its eyes with great satisfaction and licked her fingertips. Warm. Wet.
Myrcella's eyes burned red.
"I guessed you'd like it."
Lynn's voice came out low and quiet, like a feather drawn across the tenderest part of her.
She looked up.
Her eyes were already glassy with tears, and she fixed them on Lynn like she was trying to see through him.
"How did you know?"
"How could you possibly know any of this?"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
The lemon cake, maybe that was coincidence.
But this dog.
This was not coincidence.
This was Lynn stepping inside the sealed room of her oldest memories and finding the one thing she had buried there, the thing she'd thought was lost forever, and laying it at her feet.
"Because I was listening."
Lynn moved to her side and crouched down until they were level.
"Listening?"
"Yes."
His eyes were so soft it almost hurt to look at them.
"I was listening to your heartbeat. Your breathing. Every murmur you made in your sleep."
"They told me what you love, what frightens you, and what you ache for."
Myrcella couldn't move.
She stared into his eyes and felt herself sinking into something warm and fathomless, something she didn't have the words for and couldn't have climbed out of even if she'd tried.
He had been listening.
All this time.
She had thought he didn't care. She had told herself he didn't care, had used that certainty like armor.
But he had been watching her, quietly, in his own way, this entire time.
That realization hit her like a wave of scalding water. It swept through her and tore down every cold, careful wall she'd spent years constructing.
Lynn knew it still wasn't enough.
He reached behind him and produced a lute, old and simply made, its wood worn smooth. He settled cross-legged on the floor, pulled it into his lap, and drew his fingers across the strings.
TING —
One clear note hung in the silence.
Then the melody began. A little unpracticed, but unmistakable. It came like something remembered: the salt-damp air of an island shore, the slow fade of a summer sunset, and underneath it all, a grief too quiet to name.
"The Last Kiss."
The song she only ever played alone. In the deep of the night, when no one could hear. On her own small harp, stumbling through the notes again and again, the old tune that felt more like a secret than a song.
No one in the world knew about it. No one.
It was exactly the kind of love she had once let herself dream of, something sweet and aching and true.
Myrcella stopped breathing.
She watched him sitting there on the floor, playing her secret back to her. She heard the careful polish in his playing, the hours he had put into learning it.
The tears came then, all at once, like a string of pearls snapping, unstoppable, rolling one after another down her face.
A lie. It was all a lie.
Her mother had told her: love is a lie, power is the only truth. Men are weak creatures. You twist them, you use them, you never let them close enough to use you.
But if this was an act,
If Lynn was performing all of this,
Then it was the most real, most devastating, most completely irresistible performance she had ever seen.
How did he know?
How did he know?
No one else in the world knew that secret. No one.
Unless he was telling the truth.
Unless he really could hear the things she never said out loud.
Unless he actually cared.
The thought took root in her like something wild and fast-growing, coiling tight around her heart before she could stop it.
She looked at his face in the candlelight. The gentle line of his profile. The steady movement of his hands across the strings.
And everything else fell away.
Her parentage. Her mother's madness. The court's conspiracies. Lynn's wandering eye.
None of it mattered. Not right now. Not anymore.
All she knew was this: the man in front of her was hers.
Only hers.
And anyone who thought otherwise, that Wildling woman from the North, or those two Stark foxes, could all go straight to hell.
...
The morning of the wedding.
Dawn light lay across King's Landing like a fine layer of hammered gold, catching on every rooftile, soft and warm and slow.
The usual voices of the city, fishmongers, bakers, the ordinary business of an ordinary morning, were drowned beneath something louder and more fevered today.
The whole city was awake.
Every soul in it had come alive for one reason.
To see a wedding that would be written into the history books.
➤ Next: The Wedding Day
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