porcelain, ivory, steel

Valarr frowned, dark brows furrowed. His hands came up to brush down the front of his doublet: black velvet with red piping along the seams and bright golden dragon clasps across the front.

“What’s wrong with it?” His voice cracked high in the middle of his question, and his cheeks burned at the indignity of not even being able to crack for emphasis. Matarys was leaning against their mother’s chair, flipping through the book he had, but Valarr knew that his brother wasn’t even paying attention to the words. He just wanted to be around the spectacle of it all.

“It’s just…” His mother huffed and waved a hand to encompass all of him. “Stiff? You’re not serving your grandfather, Valarr, you’re going to meet your wife.”

“But these are some of my best—shut up, Mat!” but Matarys’ snickering grew louder still as Valarr’s cheeks burned hotter. Mother clucked her tongue as she turned him by the shoulders and shoved him, gently, towards the door. Light streaked through the tall windows of the family solar in his parents’ apartments, and a glance out the diamond glass windows revealed the glimmering expanse of Blackwater Bay, the Great Sept’s newly completed spire winking in the morning sun.

“The red silk, nire mutil maitea,” she ordered as he was herded out the door. “The red silk with the black wool.”

The red silk with the black wool itched.

Valarr could not stop scratching at his wrist, and Ser Roland was doing his best not to notice.

The Tyroshi vessel was one of three; the majestic Blood Bride moored closest, the golden figure on the bow gleaming bright as the sun. The Archon did not accompany his daughter, and why would he, Valarr thought resentfully. Bittersteel, Rohanne, and her brood of bastard dragons had fled to her father’s court. Even after having given his granddaughter to Valarr and the Iron Throne, the Archon was still playing his games.

“The Archon wants his blood on the throne, and we’re going to give it to him while he harbors rebels?” He’d sneered at his father when the raven had come three moons ago. “The nobles already whisper about us! About muñāzma, a-and you, and—” His father had raised a hand for silence, long face carefully blank, but Valarr could see in the slant of his heavy brow that he was troubled.

“This family will become one again, mis ojos,” his father said in the very patient voice he took when he and Matarys were brought in front of him for playing pranks on the servants when they were small.“Of course, there will be disagreements about sons and daughters and inheritance, but we have some time to hammer out those details.”

His father was good with hammers.

Valarr, on the other hand, had rolled back the cuff of his sleeve and was frowning at his dagger in his hand. “Mat, do something about this.”

“Why’s Daeron here?” his brother said instead, looking over his shoulder at their cousin, who was slouched against the low wall. The air stank of fish and made Valarr’s nose wrinkle with it. Fish and salt and something sweet-rotten that only the bay could smell like. It was certainly worse in the city, where the fishmongers pulled their wares in, and trash filled the water lapping against the piers, along with corpses from misadventure.

“Because he just is. Cut this off, it’s rubbing me raw.”

Matarys sighed and took the blade to examine the best way to cut the messy side of the embroidery; the blade pointed at Valarr’s wrist. Valarr kept hissing at his brother to be careful. Matarys hissed back.

“A very welcome greeting, your graces.” Kiera of Tyrosh’s accent was strong, the vowels rounded, her common broken enough to draw attention. She stood in the skiff that had brought her from the galleon, too large to come any closer, her hand braced on the shoulder of one of the women accompanying her.

Kiera was very… pink. Valarr wondered how easy it had been for her to climb down into the skiff in such finery, or if she had dressed while crossing the harbor. Her gown bared her shoulders; a touch of sun had reddened her bronze skin. Decorative golden chains held up her gown, while dusky pink silk hung loose across her breasts. Her sleeves were little more than fluttering fabric, clasped at her arms and wrists. Kiera’s warm skin shimmered like the water beneath the sun, dusted with powder. Even her hair—half braided back, the rest in tight twists—was colored a twilight pink, edging on the Tyroshi purple his mother loved.

Her eyes, however, were such a vibrant, vivid jade that they drew all attention.

Those jade eyes flicked down, and Valarr looked at where Matarys held the dagger poised at his wrist.

Daeron’s laughter filled the pier, which was better than his incessant vomiting into the water earlier.

But then, Daeron expelled half a barrel of the Tyroshi wine all over the Archon’s representative halfway through the dancing at the wedding feast, and likely got the man’s daughter, one of Kiera’s maids, as well. Valarr and his new bride watched from their place on the dance floor amidst the horrified whispers surrounding them.

Grandfather, his golden crown glowing in the firelight that filled the great hall, looked apoplectic. Uncle Maekar, sullen and sour and grim since Aunt Dyanna had died at the start of winter, was livid.

His parents and grandmother were bustling around to diffuse the situation, though whatever they were doing, Valarr couldn’t see.

Kiera’s nose was wrinkled; the fiery carnelians that hung from her elegant hairpiece tinkled with the shaking of her head. “He is a fool,” she said in her halting Common. The Tyroshi she spoke was too different for Valarr to even attempt to understand with his own shaky grasp on High Valyrian. Instead of pink, Kiera was draped in red for her Lord of Light, another thing that separated her from the realm she would be queen of.

All for the sake of whatever bastards that black dragon spawned.

She was his now, and Valarr had willingly cloaked her in his protection. The septons said they were to love their wives, just as they must love their brothers, and when Kiera kissed him, he thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

And as he watched her waddle about the new rugs brought into their new apartments in the Red Keep, Valarr, uncertain and nervous and oddly hopeful now than he’d been a year ago, thought that maybe he would just kill the Blackfyres.

None of his children would tie themselves to those usurpers. Grandfather was Just and Good, and so was his father, but Valarr could see what they could not. There could be no question of his legitimacy, and more importantly, the legitimacy of his children who would follow him on the throne. As Kiera’s maids herded her to the lounge by the window, the braziers blazing in the chamber to keep away the chill that had come across the city in the last week, Valarr knew what he must do.

Men spoke ill of his blood. They called his father weak. They called them halfbreeds, and the king and his father could ignore it all they wanted, smile in the faces of those who spat at their feet and promised fealty, but it wouldn’t change. Not when there were other options.

Brynden Rivers had the right of it, and Bittersteel was amassing an army.

Let them try to take Valarr’s birthright and his children’s legitimacy away from him.

But it wasn’t bitter black fire that stole the future from Valarr. It wasn’t a blade in the dark, nor poison cups at the table.

It was the pitable look on the face of a maester, and the weeping midwife and two swaddled bodies on a pier wreathed in flame. Victarion and Viserys never drew breath; their bodies were blue and mouths still. Valarr remembered what baby Rhae had looked like, with dusty blonde hair on her head, mouth pursed like a rosebud, and cheeks fat and pink. The twins were cold and skinny, too early, the maester had said. So lucky, he continued, that they had not gone to rot and taken his lady wife with them.

“Maybe if you’d had better breeding stock,” Aerion had said in some sort of conciliatory tone. “Than whatever castoffs Daemon didn’t want.”

Only his father had been able to pull Valarr away while the hapless Kingsguard dragged Aerion to the maester.

It wasn’t a Hightower or Lannister bride that Valarr thought of as he sat at Kiera’s bedside, his hand warmly wrapped around her cold one. He thought of how she liked the bird’s nest soup his grandmother made herself, and the lullabies that Queen would softly sing when she sat with them, her Dornish tongue musical and lilting, and Valarr missed Sunspear and the Water Gardens they stayed in during the rebellion, Aunt Dany pregnant and smuggling them boxes of sweets even though Mother had said no.

He thought of the swaddling clothes that Kiera had embroidered, showing him the little dragons she had embroidered on them. “Your eyes,” she told him with a nod. “Our sons should have your eyes, they are so beautiful.”

Valarr hadn’t known what to do with it. He hadn’t known what to do with this new wife, from this foreign place he didn’t understand, who rolled her eyes at him, who turned to him when she was homesick. Valarr could have walked away, left her to her ladies. This arrangement was a fool’s errand he didn’t need to take part in, but when she cried, he held her and asked her about the things she missed, which was how the sitar player had come to court, and the bakers made boxes and boxes of honeyfingers until Valarr was certain that they’d drown in them.

“I think I’d rather they have yours,” he’d told her, ears red, haltingly trying to wrap his mouth around the Tyroshi he’d been trying to learn. The way Kiera’s face lit up and the high-pitched sound she squealed made Valarr want to vanish beneath his shirt, but instead, he welcomed her into his arms and let her pepper kisses over his face.

As winter ebbed and spring swelled the rivers, with it came this strange sort of blossoming that Valarr wasn’t sure to make of. He couldn’t ask his father. Baelor Targaryen and Jena Dondarrion had been a love match, first planted with a favor at a tourney, and then wedded after the brave Baelor Breakspear lay at Blackhaven with a wound from a rebel. His grandfather might have, for his marriage was meant to bring peace and prosperity, but Valarr couldn’t fathom a world where his grandparents did not love one another; decades now of companionship surely wiping away memories of distrust.

It was his mother who came in, opening the windows, bringing in a steaming bath with Kiera’s expansive suite of oils, who bundled him up into his father’s arms and sent them out to the training yard.

“I lost Valarr’s sister,” she told them after the servants laid the table with the roasted fish and potatoes Valarr liked, and Kiera’s adored honeyfingers and pork with fig and plum sauce. “He’s too young to remember, but with her loss, I lost any other children. We had wanted a large family.” Lady Jena’s hands smoothed across the tablecloth. Kiera was listless in her chair until Valarr draped an arm over her shoulders, relaxing as she snuggled into his side.

They’d never spoken about how many children they wanted. They had only wanted those two boys with his eyes, with her eyes, maybe with her curls, he imagined.

Maybe maybe maybe.

“You grieve, and then you get up and keep going,” his mother said, wistful and melancholy, brown eyes shining with tears. “And then? You try again.”

Valarr picked up his lance, and Kiera asked for a loom and a spinning wheel. Instead of honeyfingers, it was balls of freshly dyed yarn that stained his hands when he found them in their apartments. Boxes of dyes in jade and mint, in purple and blue, came up the high hill, and he laughed at the streak of mottled blue and pink that had streaked across her nose.

He kissed her then. He kissed her until she sighed his name, and they were the only things to be found in their bed.

“There’s a tourney in Ashford,” Daeron sighed, sniffing and shaking his wineskin. Kiera held Rhae’s hand while Daella led them along the gravel paths of the garden. As they turned, Kiera waved at him with a smile on her face.

Valarr waved back at her, wondering if maybe he could ask his father about giving her some of the gardens for her own back in King’s Landing.

A sharp smack hit his knee, and Valarr jolted.” Oi! What was that for?”

Daeron sniffed and slouched further into the plush couch. “I was saying there was a tourney in Ashford that my father is making me take Egg to. He is to be my squire.”

Valarr raised an eyebrow and looked up at the boy who was perched in the tree, tow-headed and wide-eyed as they locked gazes.

“I’m sure he’s quite excited about that,” Valarr said evenly, while Aegon furiously shook his head. “He wanted to squire for my father.”

“My father wants to keep him close,” Daeron extended a wine-languid arm towards nothing in particular. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere. All my favorite whores are here.”

A tourney sounded nice. A small thing, in the backwaters of the Reach.

“Mayhaps I’ll join you then.”

Cousin Manfred was almost as intolerable as Aerion. It would be nice to send him sprawling on his ass in the mud.

Instead of a grandson, Valarr placed the urn in his mother’s arms, and she cradled it like a babe. Her face was remote, her hair a shroud of red around her.

So red.

Father had been shrouded in red. Fire and Blood, like they’d all been born into. Was that what those words had meant?

Was it a sign of Kiera’s Lord of Light?

Her screams echoed through the Red Keep. She raged. She wept. She was loud. She was quiet.

Mother went so quiet, retreating to Dragonstone, where the crashing waves against the wet, black rock might scream her grief for her.

“A pyre is needed,” Uncle Aerys said as Valarr watched his mother’s ship grow smaller on the horizon. “But it wasn’t the right one.”

Lord Brynden’s boot barely made a sound against the stone, but perhaps Valarr didn’t care to hear it, looking dully at the fall of white hair and white face, and why did he look so dead and yet still speak?

“I’ll let the king know of her ladyship’s departure. You take as long as you need.”

Kiera’s hand was cool when she slipped it into his, and Valarr squeezed it. As his mother’s screams died, so did Valarr’s voice.

He was the only one with eyes like his now.

Alone on the pier, Valarr licked his lips. His throat ached, itchy and uncomfortable as it had the past week since coming home.

We’ll grieve, and we’ll get up and keep going, he tried to say.