“Brave girl,” said Marilda, bemused. “If Baela was screaming at me like that, I don’t think I’d have the courage to go in. You can tell she’s got dragon’s blood.”

“Indeed.” Blood of the dragon and the blood of the sea; the temperamental, stormy blood of a Baratheon, too. “Thank the gods that Rhaena’s here.”

A nod. Full lips spread into a crooked smile and the captain of the Mouse laughed. “Would that I had a sister when I was in my labors.”

“I often had the same thought,” confessed Rhaenys, but she at least had her mother there. To comfort her, to grasp her hand. And then, an insistent curiosity took hold of her, a desire to learn more about this woman who had become part of their family. “Was it easy? Delivering your sons?”

Exhaling, she slid the whittling knife back into her belt, running her fingers over the ridge of the seahorse’s back. “In some ways. They were so little.” This did not surprise Rhaenys, for Baela was taller than her husband, as was Addam with his own wife. “Mostly, I was frightened. I was an unmarried woman—my father had been furious, although he came around when Addam was in his arms.”

It made Rhaenys sad to think of it. Marilda, young and frightened. Her grandsons born in a small house in Hull, without any maester. They could have all so easily died. Not for the first time, Rhaenys lamented that Marilda had not come forward sooner. Maybe then she could have been there for the boys’ childhood, but at the same time, Addam and Alyn were the men they were today because of their mother. Because they had grown up in Hull.