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When Ned Stark returns to her, it is a blazingly hot still spring twilight. The island shimmers in the heat, only slightly abated by the river breeze. Stark is exhausted and stooped with pain, one arm in a sling and a limp to his gait. But his eyes are no more aged than that of the weary boy who came to her two moons ago, begging for answers. Who she capitulated to, and sent to what she thought was likely his death.
But it was her brother’s death she sent him to, this limpid little attendant. Oh, he was handsome once. He and his brother. Brandon. Her eyes well up with tears when he returns Dawn to her, and her throat is so clogged she can scarcely speak, though she is not sure if these are fresh tears for Arthur, or the throbbing phantom sting of grief for Brandon. And Elia. And the children. And her child. She wants to sleep.
She wishes she had never woke this morn at all. She gazes frantically at the pale lavender horizon, over the plum-colored mountain tops, wishing night on. She wants to hide in the dark like a guilty little girl. She is but nineteen, and she feels nine centuries old. Even staying upright is an effort. Every muscle aches as if she had run a race. She was in the birthing bed herself, but four moons past. But it ended in blood and tears, as much as his sister’s birth must have. The girl is dead. She can see it on his face.
But before she can force out a few words- thanks, curses, a retching sob- he waves forward a girl, a girl she knows well, Wylla, a babe in her arms.
Ashara does not know the babe.
“My lady,” says Ned Stark. “I understand this is impossible… but I cannot take the child with me, when I return. To court. To Robert.”
The infant is no more than six weeks old, with a shock of silvery hair. Perhaps it will darken with age, she thinks wildly, but then, perhaps not. Can he take that risk? With his own-
“Is it a boy?” she murmurs.
“A girl,” says Ned. “I want to take her… but I cannot, I cannot…”
Say you had a Lyseni whore, thinks Ashara. But he is right. The risk is great. To return from his quest for his sister with a child with such hair… Even the dullest of men’s suspicion would be aroused. The poor babe. Motherless and now to be denied any remaining family…
“You could take her and flee,” she says. “Across the Narrow Sea. Robert loves you well, they say. Perhaps he would let you go.”
“I have a wife,” he says, wrenchingly, grey eyes huge in his long, weathered face. “A son… I have never even met him, I cannot…” He breaks off as if disgusted with himself, that he is not willing to abandon all for his niece. Perhaps Ashara is disgusted with him. What nerve does this Stark have, to bring this to her home? She did her duty by him when she told him the truth. That is all he was owed. Not her continued friendship or loyalty. What will Adrian say, when he returns from Vaith with his bride?
“You wish me to take your blood’s bastard,” she says. “With what cause? I owe you nothing. No more. I-,” she wavers again and wipes at her eyes, quickly. Her brothers used to tease her for how easily she wept, as a child.
When Princess Loreza visited with her children, Prince Oberyn made her so flustered and self conscious she would sniffle every night after dinner. She thought she was past that. She did not even cry when she realized she was with child. With a bastard child, borne by a man who like as not saw her as no more than another conquest.
He loved me, a savage, childish little voice insists. Had he known, had we had more time, he would have loved me…
He’s dead. They’re all dead.
“No cause,” he says. “None. I have none to offer. Only… Lyanna thought Robert would kill any babe by…” He cannot even bring himself to say the name. “I cannot… Your family, some are pale blondes, there is no one else nearby… Howland has offered, but if he were found smuggling a pale haired babe north…”
Let the crannogman take her, Ashara thinks spitefully, but her heart is twisted and wrung out like a dishrag all the same. He is a cunning bastard, Ned Stark, to play on her emotions like this. He knows. He know how she has suffered. How after months of guilt and fear and anger, she had finally accepted it, had begun to rejoice in the thought of being a mother, and then….
My babe was a daughter, she thinks. A little girl. I would have named her- I had thought… for a horrifying moment, she cannot even remember what she meant to call her own babe. Then she says, “Clarisse.”
Ned Stark simply looks at her. Wylla shifts from foot to foot, the babe gurgling in her arms, her watchful almond eyes darting from Ashara to Stark and back again.
“We will call her Clarisse,” says Ashara. “Clarisse Sand. Do not believe this constitutes any- any sort of…” Sort of what? Forgiveness? Amity? “She will be my child,” she hisses. “Mine. You will have no claim, no say, never- Never come here again. When she is of age, then we will- her and I- we will discuss it. She will be a bastard of House Dayne. Not House Stark. Not yours. Do you understand? Otherwise, take her, and go where you will. Pray your new king accepts whatever halfhearted lie you come up with.”
He flinches back as though she’d screamed in his face, and a new sort of grief eases over him like a shroud. He turns to the babe, and takes her from Wylla’s arms, cradles her tiny bundle to his chest with his uninjured arm. I hope my brother hurt you, she thinks. I hope your hurts linger. But then the babe mewls again, and she has to look away. Has to angle her entire body away from this scene. She mops at her face with her sleeve, chews on her lower lip, then releases it from between her teeth. She can hear his ragged breathing.
“Wylla, come with me,” she says. “You are exhausted and your children miss you. We will allow Lord Stark to rest here for the night. He will depart come morn.”
Dawn’s weight is no more than a child’s toy in her hands. It should feel far heavier, it should, but for these fragile moments it is no heavier than a broomstick. Once she puts it down, she senses she will never be able to pick it up again. She does not know how to explain any of this to Allyria, though there is little cause to; her sister is but three years old.
Ned Stark leaves letters for the girl, before he leaves. Three, in fact. One to be read when she is six, another when she is ten, the third when she is sixteen. Several locks of dark hair are enclosed in the last. She suspects they belong to Lyanna. He does not prolong the farewells, nor change his mind, which she half feared, half hoped. He presses a final kiss to the child’s brow, squeezes her tiny fists, and takes his leave.
In his wake she does not have time to reel in shock and grief. She has to identify and interview every single person on this island who glimpsed the child. She has to assert herself as Lady Dayne for a little while longer, before Adrian returns with his new wife. Her brother trusts her implicitly, but Ashara trusts no one. The last man she trusted killed her brother.
“My daughter,” she says, letting some steel ring into her voice, forcing all tremors away, forcing a cold mask onto her agonized face. “My child. Clarisse Sand. She has always been my child. She was ill after her birth. That is why she was scarcely seen, those first few months. You remember.” We all remember. Anyone who does not remember is the enemy. “Her father is a nobleman. We will not speak of him. He brought nothing but sorrow to this house.”
Adrian returns a month after Ned Stark departs. His wife is called Lynessa, a Vaith, slender and sallow and sad. That suits Adrian fine; he despises cheerful people, the sulky boy who grew into a somber man, aged by the early deaths of their mother, then their father and stepmother, and the burden of lordship. Ashara does not even remember her mother, and was never close with her father’s second wife. Her brothers are all she has ever known.
When Adrian left, she had gone into early labor and given birth to a stillborn daughter but a few weeks prior. When he returns, she greets him with her daughter in her arms. He would not have told Lynessa of Ashara’s pregnancy to begin with; there is no lie to amend, or truth to adjust. His pale blonde wife blinks in surprise, owlish and slow, and then smiles and strokes the babe’s hair. “Beautiful,” she says, with no hint of condescension or judgment for Ashara’s lapse in virtue. “As beautiful as her mother, she will be.”
“We shall be great friends,” Ashara tells Adrian later. They are playing draughts by the fire. Clare, for that is what she calls the child now, in private, is sleeping peacefully in the nursery overlooking the orchards. “Your wife and I. And your child will grow up with mine.”
“Your child,” Adrian echoes her dubiously. His eyes are flinty and dark. He looks much like Arthur, though his hair lacks the curl Arthur’s held, and he wears it much longer, flowing down his slim back. He is thinner than Arthur, less handsome, but still striking in his saturnine way. ‘What are you playing at, you foolish girl,’ is doubtless what he wants to say.
He should hate her for backing him into a corner like this. He should be threatening to ship her and the babe off to the nearest motherhouse, and thus washing his hands of the matter entirely. Start anew with his lovely wife and focus on the future, rather than trying to stitch up the ragged wounds of the past.
“Do you love her?” he asks instead. It is almost the exact same tone with which he asked, “Do you love him?” when she confessed the whole truth, what seems like years ago.
Ashara tries for a jape. “Love her? She is your wife, Adrian, not mine.” Arthur would have chuckled; he had a dark sense of humor once you got past his stoic face and gallant heart.
Adrian does not laugh.
“I will,” Ashara promises him, as she moves another piece across the board. “I will come to love her as mine own.”
“What else could she be?” he warns, but says no more on it. He is good like that, her brother. Slow and cautious, like the grass snake, but once he decides on a matter, none could sway him, like moss on a stone. That is what Arthur would say. Her eyes fill with tears again. She pushes the board aside to embrace him. After a long moment he wraps his arms around her, stroking her hair and patting her back as if she were his baby sister all over again.
Clarisse is adored by most of the household, even the servants who accompanied Lynessa from Vaith, once they see their mistress’ indulgence of her goodsister’s bastard. Aye, this is Dorne, where it is not so uncommon to see an illegitimate child raised among kin. But this is still a noble house, and were this bastard Adrian’s, Ashara doubts Lynessa would be so tolerant. But a goodsister’s daughter is no threat, only a little doll to be petted and indulged, and Lynessa does plenty of both.
Had Clare’s hair darkened as she aged from babe to toddler, perhaps there would be room for regrets to creep in, for then surely Ned Stark could have easily passed her off as his own. She has the long face, and grey-blue eyes. Yet her hair remains as light at one, two, three, as it was in infancy. Perhaps not true silver gold, but close, not ashen blonde, not quite towheaded, but very nearly white, certainly like snow in the sunshine.
She is not a pretty little girl, exactly, she never has the chubby cheeks and limbs one would associate with a bouncing babe, but she is enthralling in her way, and a good child, scarcely raising a fuss even when hungry or in need of a wash. Ashara worries about her loneliness, and so permits her to play with the commonborn children of the keep, for sons and daughters do not come easily to her brother and his wife. Allyria is not one for babes, and is not pleased to no longer be the youngest spoilt darling of the household. She insists she will like ‘Clary’ much better when she can walk and talk.
Lynessa suffers two miscarriages and one stillbirth, which sends Ashara into a panic and a near-faint, her ears ringing, her pulse racing, so that it shames her she could not remain at her goodsister’s side, instead locking herself in the nursery with Clarisse tucked up tight against her, breathing in her sweet scent, mumbling prayers and lullabies.
When Lynessa finally does deliver a son, Clarisse is four and a half years old, old enough to have some awareness of what is going on, and old enough to hold her cousin in her lap in the days following his birth; Edric, named for their grandfather, just as she is named for their grandmother.
“Do you love him?” Ashara asks her, almost anxiously. “He will be your baby brother, almost. You have to take good care of him, Clare.”
“I don’t love him yet,” Clarisse said, always very serious, this girl, “but I am going to, Mama.”
She does. Clarisse has little interest in dolls or ‘playing’ mother the way other little girls might- though Ashara never did either- but she adores Edric, calls him Ned, which makes Ashara very uncomfortable at first- and is always darting over to his cradle to gaze at him, praising his hair, so similar in shade to her own- truly, they could be siblings, but his face is rounder, his eyes much darker- bringing him little gifts- wildflowers, acorns, pebbles worn smooth and shiny from the river.
Allyria comes around by the time she is eight and Clarisse five. Then they are either the best of friends or the worst of enemies- Ashara can never keep it straight. One day they are pretending to be Red Princesses, descendants of Nymeria, warrior queens. The next day they refuse to speak to one another because of some silly argument over whose drawing was better or who gets to wear the butterfly comb in their hair. They either whisper and giggle through their lessons with Maester Philip, or they refuse to do any work at all, because they are too busy throwing their chalk at each other.
One day when Clarisse is six, she comes into Ashara on the verge of tears, which is a rare enough sight to shock Ashara out of whatever cold response she was writing to some Cuy of Sunhouse, a bold Reacher offering his hand in marriage despite his questionable status, as a mother to a bastard child she has refused to renounce or hide away as her shame. Clarisse usually only cries when she is feeling ill. And she is so flushed; not with sunburn, which is regrettably common for her- she gets a faint spray of freckles, and then turns lobster red- but with upset.
“Lyria says I’m a bastard,” she crawls into Ashara’s lap, which she has not done in almost a year, now that she is six and in the middle of a growth spurt- she may be tall, like her father, and long of limb. “And… and that it’s my fault no one will ever marry you, Mother.”
“You are a bastard,” Ashara says, though she regrets her bluntness at the look on her daughter’s face. “But that has nothing to do with how much I love you, sweetling. How much we all love you. It’s just a word. It means nothing, here. Do you understand? Allyria scarcely knows what it means herself.”
It will mean more than ‘nothing’ when Clarisse leaves this island for the first time, but if Ashara has her way, decades will pass before that ever happens. On Starfall, Clarisse is safe. Its grassy hills and meadows, the fertile fields and burbling streams, they are her home. Its shores are shrouded in mist and the sparkle of the river’s little waves. It is the closest thing Ashara has ever know to paradise. To think of how eager she was to leave it all behind once, to go to court and serve the Princess. She never should have left.
“But you’re not married,” says Clarisse, wiping her nose with her fist, though she’s been told half a hundred times a lady uses a kerchief. “And… and I know what it means. It means you weren’t married to my father, not ever.”
“Never,” Ashara agrees, and is surprised by her own calm, that she does not fluster or grow frightened or still. “But that doesn’t matter. I wanted you and I love you. And I have no wish to marry. Everything I need is right here, in this castle.” She presses a kiss to Clarisse’s brow. She has sand grit in her hair again; doubtless she and Allyria came to blows over this. Allyria is much bigger, but Clare is quick and scrappy for her age.
She reaches to the drawer of her desk, to remove the first letter, then hesitates. Clarisse has calmed, snuggled up against her.
Ask about your father, Ashara thinks. You must want to. You must be curious. Haven’t you ever wondered? Yet Adrian is all the father she could ever need. Clarisse doesn’t want for a male presence in her life. And her daughter says nothing, doesn’t make any demands or questions. And Ashara lets her hand fall away from the drawer, from the letters inside.
We don’t need you, she thinks, cruelly, and feels horrible for it. But then Clarisse is scampering down her lap, much recovered, and asking when lunch will be served.
“When I finish this,” Ashara begins to say, then pushes her quill aside. “No, now. Let’s hurry down to the kitchens and eat all the cake before Allyria gets there. That will teach her.”
Clarisse is too polite to giggle, but she makes a little smirk that for an instant shows a glimpse of the maid she will become, with laughing grey eyes, high cheekbones, and a long Stark face hidden behind her long sheet of pale hair. And she slips her hand into Ashara’s, and mother and daughter leave the solar behind, making their way to the kitchens, through the quietly busy keep.