Alicent could scarcely remember Oldtown the way Gwayne could, but she was served the occasional reminder inside the Red Keep that stirred a most ancestral, ancient longing. It was the occasional wisp of salt or imported incense that invoked the olfactory memory of a girl racing across the shore; or the meticulous documentation of the harbour’s patrons, watching the sails billow from the highest windows and men calling orders to their shipmates; or the sound of a comb, unravelling windswept hair that curled in the seawater. A mother’s touch, slowly slipping from her memory like cupped water. Alicent realised now more than ever that her thoughts were occupied by an unchanging past, finds herself drifting further and further back every peaceful moment she could source. Now, she considered the furthest point of reach. A time before King’s Landing, before marriage and motherhood and the mess of royalty she and her progeny had together made. She remembers a time where she could still talk to Gwayne like siblings could; without secret or refinement, the way brothers teased a sister for reading too much or the chimerical betrothals to a particularly nasty-looking Hightower knight. Times when she felt she could confide in Gwayne, without thought for pleasantry and an invisible boundary drawn between them by the Kingsguard. When there weren’t ears attached to the walls instead of seashells, the waves of honesty and laps of sincerity making wet the sand of a faraway shore. Her chin presses against her hand, plumping her cheek as she peers out of the Red Keep; at men readying their horses for battle. For her. When did duty start to complicate love and friendship? When did expectation triumph integrity? She finds herself forlorn, thoughtful, retracing her steps; reimagining the earth moulding to the shape of her foot, freedom’s breeze tangling locks of red hair.
“The gardens below the Hightower, they had pink roses, didn’t they?” She recalls fondly, though the fragments of childhood are becoming harder to piece together. Her eyes scour the scene, of families bidding goodbyes to their brothers. A duty she would soon have to complete, when Gwayne would ready his own horse. “I think I’d like some. Here.” A trivial thought, perhaps. But every day, she feels more absent from home; this place had never felt like home to her, and more than ever does Alicent feel as though she had much overstayed her welcome. “I remember how the smell would drift up to the tallest window, when you could almost no longer see.” Do you remember it too?
