house of mint

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THE QUIET KIND – M. TARGARYEN

summary: a political marriage binds prince maekar targaryen to elinor redwyne, a woman who has spent years waiting for a life that never came. in the quiet spaces between duty and expectation, they begin to build something neither of them expected, and neither of them quite knows how to name. (set a year before AKOTSK) READ ON AO3

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The fire crackled. Somewhere in the distance the castle made the sounds castles made at night–settling, shifting, the faint echo of voices from another wing entirely. The servant materialized to fill their cups and vanished again.

Maekar picked up his wine.

Elinor picked up hers.

They drank.

“This is very good,” she said, and what he recognized as genuine relief at having found something true to say.

“Arbor gold,” he said. “Your family’s.”

She looked at her cup with an expression he couldn't quite read, something between amusement and a more complicated feeling. “Of course it is.” A pause. “That’s either a courtesy or a coincidence.”

“A courtesy,” he said. “My brother suggested it.”

“Ah.” A flicker of warmth, directed at the absent Baelor. “He seems very thoughtful.”

“He has his moments.”

The food came, simply prepared, as he’d asked, nothing that required architectural dismantling to eat. He had specified that too, because he had no patience for meals that were more performance than sustenance, and had assumed without asking that she probably felt similarly. He wasn’t entirely certain where that assumption had come from.

They ate for a while in silence that was not comfortable, precisely, but was at least honest. She did not manufacture conversation simply to fill it, and he found himself grateful for it in a way he hadn’t anticipated. The candles between them guttered slightly in a draft and steadied.

He thought about the garden, about the way her composure had been maintained at such evident cost. About Baelor saying she isn’t fragile with that quiet certainty.

He picked up his cup.

“Your family,” he said. “You are the third daughter.”

She looked up. “Yes.”

“There are others. Older sisters?”

“Two older, one younger.” A pause. “Both older sisters are married. My younger sister is recently betrothed.” Something moved across her expression, briefly, not grief, not quite, but the awareness of time and its passage. “I am the last of the daughters to be settled.”

He absorbed this without comment, which seemed to be what she wanted, acknowledgement without the weight of sympathy she hadn’t asked for.

“Were you close,” he said in between chewing, gesturing with his fork. “With your sisters.”

“With Maris, yes. She is the closest to me in age.” A small pause. “We are different in most ways but she is,” she considered the word, “steadfast. She writes regularly.”

“That is something.”

“It is.” She turned her cup slowly in her hands, a small thoughtful gesture. “You have brothers. Prince Baelor, and–”

“Aerys and Rhaegel.” He said it without any particular feeling. “We are not close in the way you mean. Baelor is the exception.”

“He seems like someone who would be an exception to most things,” she said, and there was something in her voice that was gently, carefully observational rather than flattering, and he found it more tolerable than a compliment would have been.

“He is,” Maekar said. “Insufferably so, on occasion.”

He noticed that she almost smiled.

The meal progressed.

It did not transform, there was no single moment where the stiffness lifted and something easier took its place. It was more gradual than that, more honest. The wine helped in the way wine was designed to help, taking the sharp edges off the silence without removing it entirely. She asked him about the Red Keep, not the grand history of it but the practical matter of it, how long it took to learn, whether he had ever gotten lost himself, and he answered more directly than he expected to, including the admission that the east wing had confused him for the better part of a year when he first came to court as a boy.

She looked at him when he said that, and something in her expression shifted–the look people had when a fact no longer fit the shape they had made of someone. He didn’t know what version of him she had been constructing. He found, unexpectedly, that he was faintly curious.

“Your home, the Arbor,” he said, after a while. A topic he always seemed to return to. “What is it like? In winter.”

She looked up from her plate, and something shifted in her face–a quality of attention that was different from her careful, managed attention of the past few days. More natural, like a door opening into a room that had better light.

“Quieter,” she said. “The summer is all ships and trade and noise, and the harvest, and then suddenly it’s very still. The sea goes gray.” She paused. “I used to walk the wall above the water in the evenings in winter. There’s almost no one about. Just the wind and the water and the vines going bare on the hillside.”

He listened to her describe it with the precise economy of someone who had loved a place long enough to know exactly which details contained it. The smell of it. The particular quality of the winter light. The way the Arbor felt in those months like something that belonged only to the people who had stayed.

“You’ll miss it,” he said, sipping his wine.

She was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said, simply, without dressing it as anything other than what it was. “I expect I will.”

He respected that, the refusal to minimize it for his benefit.

“My youngest asks questions about it,” he said, which was more than he had intended to offer, and which surprised him slightly on its way out.

She looked at him. “Prince Aegon?”

“He heard the match had been proposed and wanted to know if you could see the Arbor from a ship.” He paused. “I couldn’t answer that.”

“You can,” she said, and there was something warming in her voice now. “On a clear day it looks like a long green line on the water. You see the color before you see the shape of it.” A pause. “How old is he?”

“Eight.” He considered. “He reads everything within reach regardless of whether it was meant for him. It produces questions I am not always prepared for.”

“What kind of questions?”

“Currently he is working through a history of the Valyrian dragonlords and has developed extremely specific concerns about the reproductive habits of dragons that his maester is finding difficult to adequately address.”

As he spoke, something in him moved toward a smile and did not quite arrive. She had seen it anyway. She had seen almost all of it, and she looked at the table, and the color in her cheeks was genuine and had nothing to do with the fire.

“Forgive me,” she said, composed again but with warmth still at the edges. “That was–”

“Accurate,” he said. “The questions are extremely specific.”

She laughed again, softer this time, and looked down at her plate, and when she looked back up, the carefully managed composure had been replaced by something more actual, more present, as though the laugh had taken something with it when it left.

The conversation moved after that.

Not dramatically, they were still two people finding their way around each other with care, still leaving certain doors respectfully closed. But it moved. She asked about his other children, Aemon in particular, who he described as the most quietly relentless reader he had encountered outside a maester’s order, and something in her expression suggested this pleased her. He asked about her reading–she told him history, mostly, some natural philosophy, her mother’s campaign for poetry largely unsuccessful.

The candles burned low by the time she set down her napkin. The servant had long since disappeared entirely, leaving them to the fire and the quiet and the remains of a meal that had lasted, he realized, nearly two hours.

She rose, and he rose with her, and they stood on opposite sides of the table in the low light.

“Thank you,” she said. “For arranging this, my prince.”

He nodded once. She seemed to understand that was the best he could offer, and did not wait for more.

He walked her to the corridor. They parted without ceremony, a goodnight, a slight inclination of her head, her quiet step receding down the hall. He stood in the doorway and looked at the table with its burned-down candles and two empty cups and closed the door.

He told the servant to leave the clearing until morning, and went to bed, and lay in the dark.

The courtship proceeded.

This was the most accurate description Maekar could find for it–not flourished, not developed, simply proceeded, in the way that things proceeded when they had been set in motion by someone else and you had agreed, under some duress, to let them continue.

There were two dinners. He arranged them himself because Baelor had suggested it and it had made practical sense, not for any other reason, and they were–tolerable. More than tolerable, if he was being precise, which he preferred to be. She was not difficult to sit across a table from. She did not fill silence with noise for its own sake. She had opinions about things and stated them without performance, which he found considerably easier than the alternative.

He sent no flowers. He wrote no letters. He did not promenade through the yard hoping to be seen or engineer occasions for meaningful glances or do any of the things that courtship apparently required of men who had more enthusiasm for the enterprise than he did. He was thirty-six years old. He had six children. He had done this before and knew that what followed the courtship was the actual business of a marriage, which was considerably less decorative and considerably more demanding, and the decorative portion seemed to him largely a waste of everyone’s time.

She did not appear to expect flowers. This was a point in her favor.

What she did expect, or at least what she received without complaint, was competent management of the practical aspects–the household questions she brought to him directly rather than through the steward, which he respected; the information about Summerhall she absorbed with the focused attention of someone who intended to know it properly.

At the second dinner she said something about Rhaenyra that was genuinely interesting and he had responded with more than intended and they had talked for two hours without either of them noting the time, and he had gone to bed afterward thinking that at least he was not marrying a fool, which had been one of his more persistent private concerns.

He had shown her the correct staircase because she had been standing at the junction looking lost and it had seemed inefficient not to. It had taken four minutes. He did not think about it afterward for longer than that.

The wedding was in ten days.

He went to the yard and hit things and thought about what needed doing, which was a great deal, and did not think about the wedding for the rest of the morning, and mostly succeeded.

Five weeks.

She counted them sometimes in the early mornings before the castle woke, lying in the gray light with the city noise beginning its distant accumulation outside, and tried to locate herself accurately. Five weeks in King’s Landing. Five weeks in the Red Keep. Five weeks since she had stood on the Arbor wall and tried to prepare herself for something she couldn’t yet imagine.

She was not sure she had managed to imagine it even now.

The days had their shape, which helped. She had always been someone who found comfort in shape–in the reliable repetition of morning walks and household tasks and the small domestic architecture of a day well-ordered. The Red Keep was offering her that, gradually. The housekeeper had warmed to her after the first week, which Elinor had worked at quietly and without fanfare because capable housekeepers were worth their weight in gold and she knew it. The east staircase was becoming reliable. The solar’s afternoon light had become something she looked forward to.

These were small things. She was honest with herself about that. They were the scaffolding of a life, not the life itself, and she was still waiting to see what the life itself would turn out to be.

The court was another matter.

Nothing overt–she had prepared herself for overt and found it wasn’t overt at all, which was in some ways harder. Overt gave you something to address. What she got instead was the accumulation of small moments, each individually negligible, that added up to a weight she felt at the end of certain days.

Lady Caswell, at a supper, asking with genuine-seeming warmth how Elinor was finding King’s Landing after so long at Arbor–with a slight pause before so long that Elinor had no evidence was deliberate and couldn’t stop hearing.

A cluster of ladies whose conversation shifted when she entered a room, smoothly and without interruption, like water moving around a stone.

The way certain women smile at her with that specific quality of assessment–measuring, calculating, arriving at conclusions–and then let their eyes move, just briefly, toward the upper gallery.

She knew what was in the upper gallery.

She had been told about the portrait in the first week by a chambermaid who spoke of the late princess with the careful reverence of someone who had loved her and wanted Elinor to understand that this love existed and had not gone anywhere. Elinor had listened and thanked her and said something she hoped was kind, and had gone to her rooms and sat with it.

Dyanna Dayne had been beloved. This was simply a fact, like the direction of the staircase or the angle of the solar window–something the castle knew and expected her to know too. Beloved by her husband, by her household, by her sons and daughters who had learned how to be in a family while she was still in it. Elinor was not Dyanna. She was not trying to be Dyanna. She was trying to be Elinor Redwyne, who was shortly to become Elinor Targaryen, and do that job with the care and competence it deserved.

This was sensible. She was aware it was sensible. She was also aware, in the less examined parts of herself, that sensibility didn’t always silence the quieter things.

She was the last daughter unwed. The unfortunate one. The girl who had needed a widower’s second marriage to be settled, at twenty-seven, after years of waiting that the court’s arithmetic read as a flaw rather than a faithfulness. She knew how it looked. She couldn’t entirely argue with how it looked.

She thought about Willem more than she expected to, here in this castle.

Not with longing–she knew it for what it was. There had been no love to lose, or not that kind of love. She had been fifteen when the betrothal was arranged and when the Rebellion took him. She had barely known him. What she remembered was a young man of nineteen, pleasant-faced and somewhat serious, who had bowed to her correctly and spoken to her father at length about the Arbor’s trade routes. She had thought him agreeable. She had thought, in the careful way of a fifteen year old girl being practical about her future, that she could probably be happy enough.

Then he had ridden out.

The letter had come three months later. He lives. Two words that had turned out to mean something far more complicated than their surface.

She had been sixteen when she first visited him. Her father had arranged it–a matter of proprietary, maintaining the connection, of demonstrating that the Redwynes honored their commitments. She had gone with her mother and a small retinue to their keep, and been shown to a room where Willem lay in a bed with his hands folded on the coverlet and his chest rising and falling with mechanical steadiness, and she had sat beside him for an hour and talked to him about the Arbor because it seemed like the right thing to do.

She had done it every few months for eleven years.

His mother had received her with decreasing warmth as the years passed–the initial gratitude curdling gradually into something more complicated, the presence of this girl who was neither wife nor free becoming a reproach simply by existing. Elinor had understood this and not held it against her. Grief did strange things to people. The woman had watched her son disappear into himself and stayed watching for over a decade. She was allowed complicated feelings.

Elinor had written to the family monthly regardless. Short letters, careful and consistent, asking after the household, reporting nothing significant because there was nothing significant to report, maintaining the thread of connection because someone should and she was the one who was there.

When Willem died–quietly, during a new moon in late spring, his heart simply stopped after eleven years of mechanical persistence–the letter from his family had been brief and correct. Elinor had read it and sat with it for a day and then written back with condolences that were genuine if not grief-stricken, because she was sorry, truly, that a young man of nineteen had ridden to war and never come home, even if the man in the bed had not been him for a very long time.

The legal dispute took eight months after that. She had let her father manage it and had not read the correspondence and had spent those eight months in the strange suspension of a woman who was neither one thing nor another, waiting, as she always had waited, for her life to be returned to her.

She was twenty-seven now and her life had been returned to her in the form of this castle and this man and these ten days remaining before the wedding, and she was trying–carefully, honestly, without demanding more than she could support–to find something in that worth holding onto.

The dinners helped.

She had not expected that. She had expected the dinners to be another performance, another managed occasion like the garden walk, and they had been awkward at first, genuinely and completely awkward, but then something had loosened and they had talked–about things they actually thought, without ornamentation–and she had laughed once without meaning to and he had almost smiled, and she had gone back to her rooms afterward and written to Maris: I think I could be content here.

He was not warm. She had stopped expecting warmth early and found that without the expectation she could see what was actually there–a rough honesty, a consistency, the sense of a man who said what he meant and did not say what he didn't. He had mentioned Dyanna once, simply and without performance, and she had received it as best she could, and he had not looked at her differently afterward.

She had gone to the portrait that morning.

She had stood in front of it for a long time–Dyanna Dayne, dark-haired and composed, looking out of the painting with an expression that was simply present, not performing anything for the painter–and had felt none of the things she had been afraid she would feel. No smallness. No inadequacy. Simply the recognition of a woman who had been here before her and was not here now, and the quiet acknowledgement that this was simply true, and did not need to be anything else.

She had inclined her head at the portrait. A small, private thing, not entirely explicable.

Then she had gone to find the housekeeper, because there were things to be done and the wedding was in ten days and she was the one who was going to do them.

What she felt instead was the particular weight of a woman who had spent eleven years learning the precise shape of a life that wasn’t going to happen, and was now being asked to put that knowledge down and pick up something else entirely.

Willem had not been a love match. She wanted to be honest with herself about that, here at least, where no one was watching. She was fifteen when the betrothal was arranged. He had been pleasant enough–older, a lord’s son from the Reach with a reasonable reputation and a forthcoming inheritance–and she had approached the prospect of him with the pragmatic warmth she brought to most things. She had been prepared to know him. Prepared to build something with him, in the careful, incremental way that marriages were built.

Then the Rebellion. Then the battle. Then the letter.

He lives, the letter had said, which had turned out to mean something considerably more complicated than the words implied.

She remembered her first visit. He had been in a bed in his family’s keep, breathing steadily, hands folded on the coverlet, looking for all the world like a man who had simply decided to sleep for a very long time. His mother stood in the doorway and watched Elinor with an expression that was equal parts grief and something harder–the look of a woman measuring what this girl’s continued existence in their lives was going to cost them.

Elinor sat beside him for an hour and talked to him quietly about nothing in particular, because it had seemed like the right thing to do, and had ridden home and written to his family every month after visiting for years until he died.

She wasn't sure when it had become a habit instead of an obligation. There had been comfort in it, she thought. Perhaps it was the sense that someone ought to remember he existed, that someone ought to maintain the thread of connection even when it led nowhere. Or it was something simpler and harder to name–the knowledge that he had gone to war at someone else’s direction and come back like this, and that was not his fault, and the least she could do was not pretend he hadn’t existed.

His family had disputed the betrothal contract for eight months after his death.

And now here she was. Twenty-seven years old, still on the Arbor wall, watching the same water she had watched at fifteen, and twenty, and twenty-five with entirely different prospects and entirely different feelings about them, and trying to locate something that felt like a beginning rather than a continuation of waiting.

A prince’s son. A widower. Stern, by all accounts–direct, uncomfortable with court politics, not given to warmth. Four sons of varying degrees of difficulty and two young daughters. A household that needed steadying, which was, apparently, where she came in.

Her father had said it plainly. Prince Maekar is not an easy man, Elinor, and his sons are less so. What is required is not charm. It is steadiness.

She had met him once, and carefully, she was trying to file away the small things she was collecting about him. The way he moved through rooms with a contained purposefulness, the quality of his attention when he was listening, the fact he had not looked at her the way men sometimes looked at her, with the particular weight of assessment that made her feel reduced to her surface.

He had looked at her directly and moved on, and she had found it, unexpectedly, respectful.

She didn’t know if she was frightened. She examined the feeling carefully, the way she examined most things, and found it was not fear exactly but a close relative–the awareness of standing at the edge of something large and irreversible with no clear map of what it contained.

She wanted to be content. That was the true and simple thing at the bottom of all of it. Not grand happiness, not a love story, just a life that felt like hers. A household she could attempt to steady. People she could know. Mornings that belonged to her.

Whether those things were available in King’s Landing, or at Summerhall in a household built around a man she had only just met, she couldn’t yet say.

She stayed on the wall until the cold drove her in, and went to finish packing, and did not look back at the water.

The letter from Baelor arrived a few days after the terms were finalized.

This was not unusual. Baelor wrote with the comfortable frequency of a man who enjoyed correspondence and assumed everyone else did too, which Maekar did not, but he read the letters because ignoring them produced more letters, curious ones, which was worse.

This one was brief. A pleasantry about the weather. A note about a tourney nearby in the Reach he was attending, which Maekar had no interest in. And then, near the end, in the same unhurried tone:

The Redwyne girl seemed well when I saw her in the gallery days ago. She has a quality of stillness that I find rather restful. I imagine you noticed.

Maekar read that last sentence twice.

He set the letter down and looked at it for a moment. Then he picked up his quill and wrote back: I have not given the matter further thought, which was true in the sense that he had not sat down to think about it, and inaccurate in almost every other sense, and he sealed it before he could reconsider.

He thought about the gallery. The way she had been standing at the railing with both hands resting on the stone, not performing anything, simply looking at the water with that focused stillness of hers.

He thought about the years. About what it cost a person to maintain faithfulness to something that had already ended, simply because the paperwork had not yet caught up.

He went to the training yard and hit things for an hour, which helped, and did not examine why it helped.

She arrived on a gray morning, the sky pressing low over the city, the kind of day that made King’s Landing look like a different place entirely–harder, smaller, stripped of whatever tolerant light had softened it on her first visit.

Maekar was in the yard when the gates opened.

He was not there to receive her. He had been in the yard since before dawn, working through drills with the methodical focus that had always served him better than sleep on mornings when sleep was uncooperative, and he had lost track of the hour, and the sound of hooves on stone made him look up.

She came through on a chestnut palfrey, riding with easy competence, her hair braided simply against the wind, her cloak pulled close against the cold. Behind her, a small retinue–servants, a cart of luggage, the ordinary apparatus of a life being relocated. She was looking at the yard as she rode in, at the men at practice, at the stone walls and the banners, and her expression was the one he was beginning to recognize: attentive, still, taking it in.

Then she saw him.

For a moment neither of them moved. He was aware that he was standing in the middle of the yard in his training clothes, sword in hand, which was not how he had intended to receive his betrothed, and that awareness sat in him with a particular flatness that was not quite embarrassment but was adjacent to it.

She inclined her head. Composed, as she always seemed to be, though he thought–he was not certain–that there was something careful about her composure this morning. Something that cost her slightly more than it had before.

He crossed the yard.

“My lady,” he said. “You arrived earlier than expected.”

“The wind was favorable,” she said, then paused. “I hope it isn’t inconvenient.”

He looked at her. The gray morning light did nothing to diminish her. He noted that, and little else.

“No,” he said.

And then, because it was true and he saw no reason to withhold it:

“Welcome back.”

Something in her expression shifted, very slightly. Not relief, quite. Something quieter than that, and more considered, as though she had not expected it and was deciding what to do with it.

“Thank you,” she said. “My prince.”

He walked her as far as the door, said something to the steward about her rooms, and left her in capable hands without looking back. He returned to the yard and picked up his sword.

He completed the drill four more times until he was satisfied.

The septa was named Marra, and she walked exactly four paces behind them, and she was the most present absence Maekar had ever experienced.

He was aware of her the way he was aware of a stone in his boot. Not debilitating, simply impossible to ignore. She made no sound beyond the soft rhythm of her footsteps on the garden path. She did not speak. She did not need to. Her entire purpose was to be there, four paces back, a reminder that this was a thing that required supervision, that he was a man who needed to be watched while walking through a garden with a woman, that the King’s fourth son, who had ridden into the Blackfyre Rebellion at twenty-three and come out the other side with blood on his hands and a scar along his ribs that still pulled in cold weather, could not be trusted to conduct a garden walk without a chaperone.

He had not slept well.

Beside him, Elinor Redwyne was talking.

Not nervously, or not obviously so, not at first. She was pointing at things, asking small, careful questions, making observations about the garden with the genuine interest of someone who paid attention to her surroundings and had decided that attention was the appropriate tool for this situation. Her voice was soft and even and she was, he could tell, giving this her full effort.

“The late roses are still holding,” she said. “I hadn’t expected that, this late in the season.”

He looked at the roses, they were, in fact, still holding. Only a few of them, stubborn and slightly ragged at the edges, clinging to color in the gray autumn air. He had never had opinions about roses.

“The Red Keep’s gardens are well-maintained,” he said.

“Yes.” A pause–that pause. “Do you spend much time in them?”

“No.”

“No,” she repeated, not as an echo but as an acknowledgement, and looked back at the path ahead. Her hands were folded in front of her, her posture even. She was wearing a deep green cloak that set off the auburn in her hair in a way that he noticed and did not remark upon.

They walked.

The silence lasted perhaps thirty seconds, which felt considerably longer.

He was aware, in the silence, of the complete absurdity of his own internal landscape. He had stood in a shield wall at the Redgrass Field. He had held a line while men on either side of him fell and had not moved because moving was not an option. He had, on occasion that he did not discuss, killed men with his bare hands in the dark because there had been no alternative and he had simply done what was required and moved on. He had done all of these things without particular difficulty.

He was struggling to walk through a garden.

“Are you fond of gardens generally,” she tried again, “or is it simply a matter of time?”

“Time,” he said. “I don’t object to them.”

“That’s something,” she said, and there was a faint note in her voice that might, in a more relaxed situation, have been the edge of humor. He glanced at her. She was looking at the path, a faint color in her cheeks.

She was trying. He could see it now more clearly than before, the careful selection of each question, the effort behind the composure, the way she was giving this her complete and genuine attention and finding it, as he was, considerably harder than it had any right to be. But there was something else underneath it today that he hadn’t seen in the receiving room or across the table at the terms discussion. Something that was less about the performance of composure and more about the maintenance of it–the difference between a wall that had been built and a wall that was being held up.

The reality of it, he thought, was landing on her. Here in this garden, four paces ahead of a septa, beside a man she had met three times, in a city that was not hers, the reality of what her life had become was arriving all at once, and she was absorbing it with everything she had, and the effort was beginning to show at the edges.

He found he could not look directly at it.

He was not a sentimental man. He did not, as a rule, concern himself with the interior states of people he barely knew. But he was aware, with a clarity that was not entirely comfortable, that this woman had spent eleven years faithful to a man who was already gone in every meaningful sense, and had emerged from that with her composure intact and her character apparently undamaged, and was now standing in a garden being chaperoned like a girl half her age, trying to make conversation with a widowed prince who didn’t know how to meet her halfway, and doing all of it without complaint.

This was a poor way to begin, he thought. Not a different match necessarily, simply better than this specific garden walk, this specific silence, this specific version of him who was standing here like a man enduring something rather than participating in it.

“You came from the Arbor,” he said, because it was true and because the silence had gone on long enough.

She looked at him, a flicker of something–surprise, perhaps–that he had offered something unprompted. “Yes.”

“You grew up there.”

“All my life.” A pause. “It’s very different from here.”

“In what way.”

She seemed to consider this genuinely, which he appreciated. Not oh, everything is so grand here, not the reflexive flattery of someone managing a powerful man. She actually thought about it, and watched her do it, and waited.

“The scale,” she said finally. “The Arbor is contained. You can see the edges of it. Here everything goes further than you expect.” A brief glance at him. “I keep turning corners and finding more corridors.”

“You’ll learn it.”

“I’m sure I will.” A pause, and then something shifted slightly in her voice, something quieter coming through, less managed. “It’s a strange thing, to learn a place you’re going to live in.”

He had nothing to say to that. It was simply true, and he recognized the truth of it in a way he didn’t particularly want to examine, and so he said nothing, and she did not appear to require him to.

They walked another circuit. Septa Marra followed, eternal, four paces back.

By the third circuit the effort was more visible. Still not dramatically, she didn’t falter or stumble, but the composure had acquired a quality of active maintenance, like a fire being carefully tended rather than burning on its own. She was paler than she had been at the start of the walk, he noticed, and the color that came into her face when the silence stretched was less the faint flush of cold and effort and more something pressing upward from underneath.

She asked him about the training yard, which he answered. She asked about his children, and he answered briefly, and watched something in her expression do the work of receiving that brevity and setting it aside for later.

He walked beside her and thought about the eleven years. About what it was to wait faithfully for a life that was not going to come, and to emerge from that waiting into this, a city that confused her, a household that wasn’t hers, a man who didn’t know how to make any of it easier. She was twenty-seven years old and she appeared younger than that, which had clearly done her no favors in the years of whispers and social arithmetic, and she was standing in a garden working very hard at something that should not have been this hard, and he was not making it easier.

“Are you cold?” he said.

She blinked. Something in her expression shifted, the question landing unexpectedly, cutting through whatever she had been managing.

“A little,” she admitted, in a voice that was slightly less composed than her others, as though the honesty of it had come out before she decided to allow it.

“We can go in.”

She looked at him for just a moment, a look he couldn’t entirely read, something in it that was both grateful and something else, something more complicated, and then she said, “If you like,” which was not quite agreement, but close enough.

They went in.

He deposited her with her maid at the foot of the east staircase, said something appropriate, and watched her go up the stairs with that even, unhurried step that cost her more than she showed, and did not watch her for longer than was necessary.

He went to find his brother.

Baelor was exactly where Maekar expected him to be, which was on the upper balcony overlooking the garden with a cup of wine and the expression of a man who had been there for some time.

“Don’t,” Maekar said.

“I was just enjoying the garden,” Baelor said. “The roses are still holding. Remarkable, this late in–”

“Don’t.”

Baelor smiled and was quiet for a moment, which was almost worse. Then he turned, leaning against the balcony railing with an ease that Maekar had always found mildly aggravating, and looked at him properly.

“She was trying very hard,” he said.

“I know.”

“So were you, in your way.” A pause. “It didn’t look like nothing, Maekar. In case that was your impression of how it looked.”

Maekar said nothing.

Baelor set his cup down. “You’re pitying her.”

Maekar looked at him.

“I know that face,” Baelor said, not unkindly. “You’ve decided the situation is harder for her than it is for you and you’re carrying that around like a grievance on her behalf that she hasn’t asked for.” He paused. “She’s twenty-seven years old. She has spent years being faithful to a man who couldn’t know she existed, and she came out of it standing upright with her character intact. She isn’t fragile, Maekar. She isn’t a girl who needs protecting from the difficulty of her own life.” He glanced at his brother. “She’s a person in an uncomfortable situation, the same as you. The difference is she’s actually attempting to bridge it.”

The silence that followed was the kind that meant Baelor had  said something accurate that Maekar was not going to acknowledge out loud.

“She deserves better than a garden walk with a septa trailing behind,” Maekar said, which was not what he had intended to say and was more honest than he had meant to be.

Baelor looked at him for a moment with that calm, clear gaze. “Then give her something better,” he said simply. He retrieved his wine. “A private dinner. Something small. No septa. Just a meal, like two people who are going to spend their lives together might occasionally share.” He turned back to the garden. “You know where the kitchens are.”

“I’m aware of where the kitchens are.”

“Then you have everything you need.”

He arranged the dinner that evening.

He did it himself, spoke to the steward directly, specified the time, and kept it simple. A room off the main hall. A fire. Food that didn’t require ceremony. He did not consult anyone. He did not ask for advice. He made a decision and enacted it, which was the only way he knew how to do anything.

He sent a note to her chambers. Brief, correct, to the point.

My lady – I have arranged supper for tomorrow evening. Seventh hour. I hope it suits.

He did not sign it warmly. He signed it as he signed everything: Maekar.

He went to bed.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

“Then what is it?” Maekar said.

“It is a practical matter.” His father’s voice was mild. It was always mild. Maekar had learned young that mildness, in Daeron II, was not softness. It was precision. “Your household requires stability. Your sons require–”

“My sons require discipline,” Maekar said. “Which they receive.”

A silence followed that particular statement. Maekar was aware, distantly, that it had not landed the way he intended.

“Aerion,” his father said, “who has been at court these past months, overturned a merchant’s cart in the Street of Steel last fortnight because the man’s apprentice looked at him incorrectly. The merchant is demanding restitution. The apprentice lost two fingers.” He paused. “This came to me through three separate sources before it came to you.”

Maekar said nothing.

“Daeron was found asleep in the stables at dawn last week. A groom tripped over him.” Another pause. “He had been there since the previous afternoon.”

“I was informed.”

“Yes, after the fact.”

The words were gentle, though they landed like a mace.

“They have already been returned to Summerhall,” his father added, more quietly now. A brief pause, as though he were considering how much to say, or how to say it.

“Your daughters have no mother.”

Maekar kept his eyes on his father and did not allow himself to look at the lords, who were still studying the table with great devotion. He was aware of what this was, not cruelty, not punishment, but simply his father looking at a problem and offering a solution as he always had, as he always would. Daeron II was a good king. Maekar knew this. He knew it in the same way he knew the sun rose in the east: as an established fact that required no feeling.

“You have managed admirably,” his father continued. “No one questions that. But a household of seven–six children and their father–without a woman’s hand to steady it… these things have a way of drifting. You know this.”

“I am not asking for a wife.”

“No.” His father looked at him with something that, in another man, might have been sympathy. “I am asking you to have one.”

“The matter will be concluded here,” his father said. “Quietly, and under my eye. Your betrothed will remain at court until the wedding, and afterward you may take her to Summerhall with her place in your household properly established.”

The corridor outside the council chamber was long and cool, the stones still holding the night’s cold even as the morning came on. Maekar walked it with the even stride of a man who was not, under any circumstances, retreating.

Footsteps fell beside him. He did not need to look.

“That went well.”

“Don’t.”

“I thought your point about discipline was particularly compelling. The silence afterward was very powerful.”

Maekar stopped walking. Baelor stopped a half-step later, turning to face him with an expression of perfect fraternal innocence that Maekar had been seeing since they were boys and had never once found convincing.

Of his brothers, Baelor was the one he understood least and trusted most. There was no contradiction in this. Baelor moved through the world with an ease that Maekar had never possessed and had long since stopped envying–he simply accepted it as one of the fixed differences between them, like height or the color of their eyes. Where Maekar pushed, Baelor persuaded. Where Maekar commanded, Baelor listened. It produced the same results, most of the time, and cost Baelor considerably less.

“Father has made his decision,” Maekar said.

“Father made his decision some weeks ago. Today he told you about it.” Baelor fell into step beside him again as Maekar resumed walking. “There’s a distinction.”

“A useful one.”

“I thought so.” A pause. “It isn’t a punishment, Maekar.”

“I know what it is.”

“Do you?” Baelor’s voice was genuinely curious, not unkind. “Because from where I was sitting, you received the news the way you receive a sentence.”

Maekar did not answer immediately. They had reached the end of the corridor, where a tall window opened into the yard below–the training ground, the familiar shapes of men at practice, the clean sound of steel on steel drifting up from a distance. He looked at it without seeing it.

“I am thirty-six years old,” he said finally. “I have six children. I have managed my household for three years without–” He stopped, then began again. “I do not require someone to manage it for me.”

“No one is suggesting you do.”

“A wife is not a steward.”

“No,” Baelor agreed. “She isn’t.” He was quiet for a moment, but when he spoke again, his voice had shifted. Still warm, but with something steadier underneath it. “She isn’t a replacement either. No one expects that. No one would be so foolish.” He glanced at his brother. “Father wants your sons to have steadiness. He wants your household to have a woman in it who can do what you cannot–not because you are lacking, but because you are one person. And you are also their father, which makes certain things harder.”

Maekar looked at the yard.

“Aerion does not need a stepmother,” he said. “He needs a cell.”

Baelor laughed, a quiet sound, genuine. “Perhaps. But in the meantime.” He let that sit. Then: “A Redwyne match has been proposed. Elinor Redwyne, third daughter of Lord Alester Redwyne, second son of the Arbor. She is said to be–”

“I do not need a description.”

“No, I imagine not.” Baelor studied him for a moment with that calm, clear gaze that Maekar had always found faintly unsettling–the sense that his brother saw considerably more than he said. “Will you meet her?”

A long silence.

“Father has made his decision,” Maekar said again.

It was not an answer. Baelor, who understood him better than almost anyone, accepted it as one.

It was his father’s intention that the matter be settled quietly at court and only afterward transferred to Summerhall, with nothing left ambiguous but the marriage itself.

The Redwynes arrived several weeks after the meeting.

Maekar knew this because Baelor told him, with the particular tone he used when conveying information he suspected Maekar already had and was choosing to ignore. He was not wrong. The maester had informed Maekar two days prior. Maekar filed the information away and continued with his morning.

The meeting was arranged for the following afternoon, in one of the smaller receiving rooms off the eastern gallery, his father’s doing, and one of the few things about this entire proceeding that Maekar had not objected to. He had no interest in being presented with a prospective wife in the throne room like a transaction, or in a feast hall with half the court craning their necks for a look. A small room. A short audience. Lord Redwyne, his daughter, himself, his father. That was sufficient.

He arrived before them.

This was intentional. He had no desire to enter a room already occupied by people waiting to observe his reaction to things, so he stationed himself near the window and waited, and when the door opened he was already composed and settled and entirely in command of the occasion.

Lord Alester Redwyne entered first, a broad man, prosperous in the way of Reach lords, the second son of the Arbor’s ruling line, ruddy from sea air, with the careful smile of someone who understood that this meeting represented an extraordinary opportunity and was determined not to waste it. He bowed correctly; Maekar acknowledged it.

Then his daughter followed him in.

Maekar had been given her history in full before this meeting, as a matter of course–her age, her position in the family, the previous betrothal, the years of waiting, the legal dispute that had dragged on after her intended finally died. He had read it with the same dispassion he brought to any briefing document and had formed no particular conclusions. People were shaped by circumstances. That was simply how it worked.

He had not formed a conclusion about how she would look.

She was–he took stock directly, as was his habit–striking in a way that was not immediately explicable. Auburn hair, simply dressed, falling loose over her shoulders with no elaborate arrangement to justify itself. Fair skin, gray eyes that moved across the room with a quiet attentiveness before settling, briefly, on him.

She appeared younger than her years, which he knew to be twenty-seven, and he thought briefly and without particular welcome that the court’s whispers about her prolonged unmarried state had nothing to do with her appearance and everything to do with circumstances that had not been her fault.

She did not flinch when she found his gaze. He gave her credit for that.

She curtsied with composed grace, not the exaggerated performance of someone trying too hard, just a clean, correct curtsy, and then folded her hands and waited.

His father was saying something welcoming to Lord Redwyne. Maekar tracked it at the edge of his attention.

He was assessing her practically, as he would assess anything placed before him for consideration. She was well-bred, evident. She held herself without artifice, without the brittle brightness that court girls learned young and wore like armor. She was not performing ease. She was simply still. The stillness of someone accustomed to waiting, he thought, and then set the thought aside because it was not a useful one.

His father drew him into the formalities.

He said the correct things. Elinor–her name was Elinor, he reminded himself, not the girl or the Redwyne daughter–answered his father’s questions in a voice that was soft without being insubstantial. She did not volunteer more than was asked. She did not fill the silence with nervous words. When his father said something gracious about the Arbor she smiled, and it was a real smile, briefly, before it settled back into that composed quiet.

At some point his father contrived to engage Lord Redwyne into a discussion of something requiring attention across the room. His father was a good king and a better diplomatist, and Maekar found himself standing a few feet from Elinor Redwyne with no particular barrier between them.

She looked at him. He looked at her.

“My prince.”

“My lady.”

A pause. 

He did not fill it. She seemed to consider something for a moment. He watched it happen, a brief internal weighing, the pause of someone who thought before they spoke, and then said, “You have a beautiful view from this room. I hadn’t expected to see the bay so clearly from here.”

He glanced toward the window, almost despite himself. The bay was visible, yes, gray-green in the afternoon light, ships moving slowly across it. He looked back at her.

“You can see it better from the eastern tower,” he said. “This window faces slightly south.”

She followed his glance toward the window and then back. “I’ll have to find it, then.”

It was a simple thing to say. There was nothing in it that demanded a response, no flattery, no performance, no obvious attempt to charm. She was simply making conversation in a room where conversation was required, and doing it without apparent distress.

He found he had nothing particular to object to in that.

The audience lasted another half hour. Lord Redwyne was pleasant and politically intelligent, saying the right things without overreaching. Elinor stood with her father and answered what was asked of her and did not attempt to insert herself into the discussion of terms, which was either well-coached restraint or natural temperament. Maekar suspected the latter.

When they left, his father looked at him with that careful, unrevealing expression.

“Well,” Daeron II said.

“She’s composed,” Maekar said.

“She is.”

“Unusually so.” He paused. “Given everything.”

His father looked at him with something that might have been quiet satisfaction, in another man. “Yes,” he replied simply. “Given everything.”

Maekar looked at the window. The bay. The slightly southward angle of it that missed the best of the light.

The discussion of terms took place the following morning.

It was a practical exercise, as such things were. Lord Redwyne had come prepared–Maekar had expected nothing less from a man who came from one of the most profitable trading operations in the realm–and the numbers he presented were reasonable without ostentation. A dowry befitting a third daughter of a second son of a great house. Certain trade considerations. The question of any children’s inheritance, handled with the careful delicacy of a man who understood he was negotiating with a prince and did not wish to appear to be doing so.

His own children would remain at Summerhall for the present. It was agreed without further discussion.

Maekar sat across from him and listened and said what was required of him. His father’s steward took notes. Baelor was present as a courtesy and said very little, which meant he was paying close attention.

Lord Redwyne was a competent man. Maekar found him tolerable, which was more than he had expected.

At one point, in the natural course of accounting for Elinor’s position in the marriage, Lord Redwyne raised the matter of her previous betrothal with the practiced ease of a man who had rehearsed how to do it. Maekar already knew all of it–the young lord who had ridden into the Blackfyre Rebellion and come back broken, incapacitated, neither dead nor living in any meaningful sense. The years Elinor had spent in that suspended state, technically spoken for, practically forgotten, loyal to a man who no longer knew she existed. The legal dispute that had dragged on after his eventual death, tying up the dissolution of the contract for longer than anyone had wanted.

He had read the summary without particular feeling and had not changed that assessment. It was a history of waiting and misfortune and nothing else. There was no scandal in it, no character flaw, nothing that reflected on her. Simply years that had happened to her while other things failed to.

Lord Redwyne said something about his daughter’s patience, her grace through a difficult circumstance. Maekar listened without expression.

He thought, briefly and without intending to, about what it cost to a person to wait faithfully for something that was never going to arrive.

He did not dwell on it.

The terms were agreed before midday. Lord Redwyne signed. Maekar signed. His father added the crown’s seal with the quiet finality of a man closing a door, gently, on any remaining possibility of reversal.

It was done.

He found himself in the eastern gallery an hour later without having entirely decided to go there.

He had business in that direction–correspondence to review, a meeting with his sons’ new master-at-arms that he had been postponing–and the gallery was simply the most direct route. This was the explanation he did not offer to anyone because no one had asked.

He heard her before he saw her.

Not her voice–she was not speaking. It was the sound of her: a soft footfall, a presence in the corridor ahead where it opened onto the small garden overlook. He slowed, without deciding to, and she came into view.

She was standing at the overlook railing, facing outward. She didn’t know he was there. Below the railing the garden fell away in its late-autumn colors, the hedges trimmed, the fountains still, and beyond it the city, and beyond that the bay and she had noticed from the wrong-facing window the day before.

She had found the better view.

She stood very still, both hands resting lightly on the stone railing, and looked at it. Her hair was down, a long plait over one shoulder, catching the pale morning light. There was nothing in her posture of a woman composing herself or performing for an audience. She simply didn’t know she had one, and so what he saw was whatever she actually was in an unguarded moment.

She looked as though she were measuring the place rather than admiring it. The way a person does when they are preparing to leave something behind, or to understand what they are walking into.

He was not certain which. He stood there a moment longer than was necessary, then moved to continue down the corridor, his footfall even, unhurried, and she turned at the sound and saw him and straightened slightly–not startled, just adjusting, that internal settling he thought he was beginning to recognize–and inclined her head.

“My prince.”

He slowed but did not stop.

“My lady.” A beat. “The view is better from here.”

“It is,” she said. Something in her expression suggested she might say more, and then she didn’t, and he continued on.