Chapter Text
299 ac.
The Gold Road, The Crownlands.
Kevan Lannister.
The red walls of the tent moved in and out with each breath of the night’s wind, bellowing like blood soaked sails. The cries and clatter of the army around them drowned out the silence Kevan knew his brother wanted, but it was inescapable. This was their war. Tywin’s last war.
We should have stayed at Harenhal, he thought.
Brynden Tully held Harenhal now though, and the mountain might as well have drowned in the God’s eye.
Tywin Lannister, the Lord of Casterly Rock was craggy and stone faced as Kevan set the report down, eyes sharp as he awaited his brother’s reaction, as he always did. It had been their game as children he remembered. They would wait in the shadows of the Rock’s halls and chambers, marking men and their faces and their minds, judging each curve of a lip, each flickering gaze, trying to determine their thoughts.
Kevan’s thoughts were all heavy under his brother’s eye. There was lead in his stomach and stone in his veins and the very breath in his lungs seemed to have become water sodden, weighted with the storm-charged air of the southern Riverlands, pulling him into the floor.
The ink had bled in its writers haste, but the message had been clear.
The wolf rose up through red stone and claimed a Lion’s pelt and its lair. The cubs and mother live for now, but the wolf may still be hungry yet.
Kevan wished for wine. Kevan wished for summer. Kevan wished for his wife in flashes that Tywin no doubt caught. It would rain on the morrow, the men said, and he wished for that too.
“He won’t kill them,” Tywin said, looking down from where he stood at the map before them, “even though it’s the smarter move. Stark doesn’t have the heart.”
He wanted to believe his brother. Wanted to believe that Tommen and Myrcella and – gods be good – even Cersei would survive. So he made himself believe, told himself the lie, forced his tongue to remain motionless as Tywin laid the silver wolf upon King’s landing, and fixed his eyes upon the tent’s fabric. In and out it went. They had been in. Now they were out.
The bodies of the Targaryen children jumped into his mind, and he pushed the memory away with purpose.
“So we march for King Tommen then?” he asked. His brother looked at him and Kevan was quiet. He had always been good at that, making people quiet.
“If he were in hand I’d let Stannis Baratheon and Stark rip each other apart over the capital,” he said, voice clear and cold. “But he isn’t in hand, so we will go, and watch them rip each other apart regardless.”
“And if they ally?”
Tywin braced himself on the table, and Kevan wondered how many times they had stood in these positions. Tywin at the table, and Kevan in his shadow. He had never given it much thought before, his brother had always been bigger than him so the shadow had never seemed a burden. What man would not live inside of it? He considered this as his brother sat, mouth tight.
“Stannis will not tolerate anything less than the Seven Kingdoms, and Robb Stark had nailed his crown too tight to his head to let go now.” He looked at him. “You will go to Loras Tyrell and offer Tommen to Margery.”
Of course I will, he thought grimly, that would be their play. He wondered how Loras Tyrell and his sweet faced sister would react to him offering them a boy of maybe seven. Eight? Even the height of Iron throne would not disguise his youth.
“And if they refuse?”
“Do you see Mace Tyrell on his knees begging Stannis Baratheon for mercy?”
Kevan thought of the image, then decided it was absurd.
“They won’t refuse,” Tywin said, and bowing Kevan turned to leave, to find the knight of flowers before he stopped at the tents entrance, the cloth dancing beneath his fingertips. There was a burning in his gut. He looked back at his brother.
“Any word on Lancel or Tyrion?”
Tywin’s eyes were not soft. Try as he might Kevan would never reach that within him. There was understanding in them though, and he took it gladly anyway. For not the first time, he wished Joanna was alive.
“I’ve heard nothing of your son,” Tywin said, and a mixture of relief-dread washed over him because his foolish son, the boy who postured and preened and had hung about his heels as a babe might live, might breathe, might not be sleeping with steel in his throat.
He did not miss that nothing was said about Tyrion.
“My Lord.”
He bowed and left, walking into the sea of Knights and men at arms and sell swords and camp followers, a cloth city made of Westermen and Reachmen, singing and fucking and whispering. He could almost hear it weave through the camp. Watch the unease set in. Touch at the pulse of the men as they looked at him, the brother of Tywin, emerge as they learned of the death, of the blood, of the wolf whose maw they now marched into.
“Long live King Tommen!” he thought he heard someone yell.
For how long, he could not help but think, for how long.
Still the eyes burned into him, still the tents looked a sea of blackened blood on the road under the silver sliver of the moon, still his bones felt heavy with unease, and still the tents bellowed like sails, like lungs.
In and out.
In and out.
299 ac.
Harrenhal, the Riverlands.
Gendry Waters.
How Arya had got to Harrenhal, Gendry didn’t want to think about. Whenever he tried the guilt would leave him feeling faintly sick, his shoulders would hunch, and Ser Brynden would scold him for making-himself-an-easier-target in his gruff voice. He remembered her accusations of leaving her behind in a Godswood that had smelled thick with rain sodden earth and the anger on her face, the grim determination.
He should have said something to the Blackfish. To anyone.
But the riders had only reached them the night he was to enter the great castle, and Arya had been dragged kicking and screaming from amongst the squires, dressed as a boy, again, too late to send her back, and too late to alter course. So Gendry had passed through the gates of Harrenhal with the knowledge that if he failed, Arya would have days to reach the safety of Riverrun. Days.
Because of it, all his memories of the battle were wrought with dread and determination and the metallic taste of blood in his mouth. Fear as well. Bone shattering fear he barely kept standing though as he pried open the great steel cages where the prisoners were held, brought them blinking into the torchlight and pressed steel into their hands as the Blackfish sounded his horn.
What he remembered clearly though were the wolves. It wasn’t like he could forget it. He and a hostage knight had managed to open the great Ironwood gates expecting soldiers, only for an army of wolves, led by a great she wolf, to rip into the mountain’s men instead. The creature had been brutal and vicious and a rallying point as the men cried out “King in the North!” and “King of the Trident!” in equal measure. A living omen. A sign from the gods.
Arya, when it had all been over, had thrown herself at the wolf whilst crying, pressing kisses to her still bloodied fur, and introduced Gendry to the creature, somehow oblivious to the terrified eyes upon them.
This is Nymeria, she had said.
The direwolf had been at her side when her brother and King had arrived with his army, when she had been berated her in the Lord’s chambers he knew, because he had been summoned to them after, and seen the direwolves curled up together by the fire. Arya had left with a letter in her mother’s hand he could only guess the contents of, and the King had told him the next service he would ask of the smith.
It was not an order, nothing Robb Stark had ever asked him to do had been that, but he had understood the intention. Even Bastard’s knew the importance of a show.
So when the Raven came that Arya’s brother had taken the Red Keep, the castle he had grown up in the endless and rotting shadow of, Gendry had knelt before the Blackfish in the dirt, the sun high and cruel overhead, and sworn vows that felt hollow in his mouth. To be brave and Just, to defend the young and innocent, to protect all women.
“Arise Ser Gendry Waters.” The bastard Baratheon.
When evenfall came he slipped away from the men, away from the storm in his mind to the only place that felt steady, that he knew. It was where Arya found him now, at the back of the forge, where things made sense and the heat could bake his bones clean.
He didn’t even hear her enter as he worked, the steel a song in his ears making him deaf to the word beyond it. The hammer felt a part of his arm, and for a moment, he thought he was swinging it at a man’s skull before the anvil returned to him, and Arya’s words jolted him into reality.
“What are you making? A sword?” She pulled and sat herself up on a pile of crates without asking, and before Gendry could tell her the soot would soil her clothing. She didn’t seem to care though. She never did. “You’re a knight now,” she said, “you should have one.”
“It’s a war hammer actually,” he told her, the bitterness creeping in despite his best efforts. “It’ll help them tell their story.”
“It’s not all fake you know. You really did earn it. Uncle Brynden said –”
“The Blackfish has been kind to me,” he ground out because it was true. Ser Brynden had been as good a master as any Gendry had ever known, gruff and attentive in a way Master Mott never had the inclination to be. Still the whole thing tasted like bile in his throat, welded with dim memories of a man on a black charger near running him down by the Mud gate and the gold that had glinted on his head. He might have imagined that actually. He didn’t think Robert Baratheon – his father –would bother with crowns on a hunt. Maybe he did though. It’s not as if he would ever know.
“But they just want me to look the part,” he said, pulling the glowing steel off the anvil and plunging it to cool in water, the steam hissing as comforting and familiar as a mother’s lullaby. “I’m no better than a mummer m’lady.”
“Not a lady.”
“Sorry, princess.”
She kicked him. Or tried too rather as her legs weren’t long enough to reach and Gendry let himself laugh at the frustration on her face, the way her eyes narrowed up. She looked annoyed at him he thought.
“I saw you,” she said, and Gendry’s own eyes narrowed in confusion. “I saw you kill the man who killed Lommy. I saw you lead the men in. I saw you,” her voice was a whisper now. “I saw you.”
Gendry could barely think beneath her eyes, digging into him like she could pry up the bones from his skeleton. Lommy’s killer had been pockmarked and knife-thin and he had died with a scream stuck half-way in his throat, ribs shattered, lungs punctured. He had lain there for a while, Gendry above him, begging for death and Gendry… he hadn’t moved. All he could think about were the tortures, the rats, the corpses hanging from the walls, the rapes that had made him cover Arya’s ears so she wouldn’t have to hear. It hadn’t been a Knightly thing to do. It hadn’t been honourable. He had watched the man die slowly though, and raised his eyes to see the Nymeria staring at him like Arya was now, like she could see everything.
“How could you have seen me –”
“Well it wasn’t through my eyes was it!”
He knew the tales about her brother, the whispers men traded by firelight, out of their Lords hearing. He knew Robb Stark was said to turn into a wolf, have the claws of a wolf, the fangs of a wolf. A northern man had told him the King could see through his Wolf’s eyes, and named him a word that had slipped from Gendry’s mind. What could he say? What could he ask? She had seen him. She had seen him.
His mind whirled but Arya just tucked her knees up to her chest, oblivious to it. “My mother’s already mad at me, I don’t want you to be as well.”
She looked almost girlish, Gendry thought. The lights of the forge made her look smaller than she usually seemed all of a sudden. He felt a deep wash of shame creeping up his neck then, and turning from her pulled an object from one of the shelves, and held it out to her.
“Here,” he said.
Arya jumped down, peering at the jet black stone in Gendry’s hands. “What is it?”
“Knights have favours don’t they?”
Arya huffed. “It’s the other way around, Knights receive favours from Ladies.”
“It’s a gift then,” he said, and handed it over to Arya, deciding that since he wasn’t a real knight, it didn’t really matter. It was meant to be something like absolution for his guilt, though he would never tell Arya that.
Tobho Mott had taught him to embed emeralds in chest plates and sapphires in helms, earning infamy on the street of steel because of it. Gendry had hated the work, the wealth of the world that would likely be knocked into the mud come the next tourney.
It was for Arya however, and for Arya he would stomach it.
He didn’t have garnets or amethysts for the girl, but he had found a fragment of the half-melted towers lying in the sun, and slipped it into his pocket before anyone could question him. He had cut and polished it to be smooth, and in the faint orange glow of the forge’s embers the black stone looked like it still had dragon fire trapped inside of it. Whichever way Arya turned it in her hand bands of deepest red and burnished amber flickered in and out of existence, and even set in plain steel, Gendry could swear it still burned.
“You always talk about that Targaryen Queen right? Well that stone’s from the top of the Kingspyre tower. Blasted by dragon fire. It’s not a hammer but –
“I like it.” Arya looked up at him as she said it, and Gendry thought there was something wrong with her face, because it looked red. It was probably the heat he reasoned, forges were always sweltering even this late into the night.
“Good,” he said with a smile, “because settings are bloody fiddly and I don’t have the time to make anything –”
He stopped, because Arya had suddenly looked very angry, and then run off with the stone still clutched in her hand. Gendry watched her form slip out of sight without moving, bewildered at her reaction, heat beating onto his back.
He didn’t feel like a Knight then, he just felt warm and heavy and hollow. For a moment, he wished Arya would come back, then pushed it aside, and went back to his work.
299 ac.
South-eastern Barrowlands, the North.
Theon.
A summer storm had hit Winterfell his first night within its walls. The snow had lashed against the stone like whips and made the night scream as it never had on the Islands, high and haunting.
Theon had hated how scared it had made him.
He was a Greyjoy, and a prince of the Isles. Still, he had thought the dark gods of the green lands had come to kill him like the stupid stories Yara would tell to scare him, had come so that his blood would water the roots of the sad faced tree Lord Stark had bid him kneel before that day, and had him swear dull oaths as ward.
The world had been so white, he remembered.
And then Robb had come.
The heir to Winterfell had clambered into his bed and beneath his covers despite Theon’s protests. He had been younger than him, but determined, and no amount of sharp kicks to his ribs had made him move. Robb had kept him up the whole night harassing him in breathless tones about the Iron Islands. If they really reaved and raped and could he sail and had he killed a man and what was the drowned god like and what colour was his sister’s hair and had he ever seen a Kraken and how many bridges where there at Pyke and on and on and on.
He didn’t remember the answers he’d given him, but he did remember the warmth, the hand tucked about his neck he’d found in the quiet of the morning.
He wasn’t warm now.
His horse had collapsed a league back, and the earth beneath his feet was snow sodden and cracked with frost. So he walked. One foot and then another, over and over again. His breath curled up in wisps of lost heat upon the air, dissolving into the night as he forced his body to move, forced his legs to not give out to the burning within them, made himself focus only on the muddied path that wove through the barrows, the tombs of ancient Kings.
It felt like they were judging him somehow, and Theon pulled his cloak closer about his shoulders. He was a Prince, he told himself, and his father’s –
Was he his father’s heir? He had to be. What else was he? He was a Prince of the Islands, the prince of the Islands and even Yara and her smug smiles couldn’t take that from him. He had taken the greatest stronghold in the north with nothing but a ship’s worth of men, he had been its prince.
Had been, he thought with a rising anger that nearly let him ignore the cold creeping into his bones. Winterfell, his prison had been his for one beautiful moment before the Wildling cunt had stolen Bran and Rickon from him and the Hornwood’s widow had poisoned his men with promises of mercy. Sweet mercy. They were Ironborn, he had told his men and they needed no mercy, and Theon had gone to far to go back now.
He wondered what Yara would tell him when he reached her at Moat Calin. If she would be impressed with his daring escape or pleased at his men’s cravenness. His men. The men who should have served him without question instead of trying to give him up to the fucking Northmen.
The winds picked up, and Theon fancied he could hear Robb’s laugh upon it. If he appeared then – somehow, because Robb was south and killing lions – Theon would have punched him, would have torn into his face with his nails in rage and grief for the warmth of his skin, for the hand about his neck on the night of the summer storm.
The anger was a burning pit in his stomach, weaving up into his bones and bearing him onwards. One step and then another. He couldn’t stop moving, not now and not ever. If he did he might not get back up again, might not reach Yara, might not fix the immense pile of shit he had found himself in.
The snow was falling far thicker now, gentle and incessant and soaking him through. How long had he been walking? The path ahead was only lit by whatever starlight filtered through the he clouds, thin and watery and what he wouldn’t give for a fire. What he wouldn’t give for summer. What he wouldn’t give to feel his fingers and his face and the frozen flesh of his back and –
His legs gave out beneath him, sending him into the ground’s hard embrace. Theon looked up at the grey sky above him, dimly aware that he couldn’t feel his arms as his eyes drooped lower and lower. He should stay awake. He should fight. Theon was tired though, and the snow felt like soft kisses upon his lips, and he was tired enough to take them.
Blindly, he wished for Robb. For the warm heat of the body of the King he had betrayed.
And then he didn’t think anything at all.
-
A tongue lapped at the frost over his eyes, teeth close enough to rend in the pale light of dawn. A hound, Theon recognised dimly, and awoke to the sight of men above him, snow pillowed upon him, pinning him to the ground.
Yara’s men, he thought.
The hound, hounds still crowded around him, sniffing at his frozen flesh and waiting for their master’s word. Their smell was rank enough to make his eyes water and throat burn, and the world was white and cold and everything hurt. His legs ached and his hands lay useless where they had fallen and, with rising terror, he realised his right refused to move. Groaning, Theon managed to heave the limb towards himself only to find the skin black and breaking, blood frozen and the hounds still sniffing about his neck.
He tried lifting the hand up only for a man to grasp it, clutching tight and cruel enough to hurt. Theon didn’t feel anything though. He thought he might cry.
“Now who might you be?”
There was something curious in his tone, and all Theon could see of the man were his milk pale eyes and curling mouth. He had to be one of Yara’s, one of the sailors gone salt mad with war.
“The… Theon Grey… Greyjoy,” he answered hoarsely, voice broken by the frost he imagined coating his throat.
The man smiled wider. Knife-like. “Are you now?” He sounded pleased.
He’ll take me to Yara, Theon thought dimly before the white swam up to greet him once again, and the heir to Pyke slipped back into dreams of summer storms. The man above him only dug his nails deeper into the frost bitten flesh though, mind swimming with the possibilities.
And oh what possibilities there were.
To Stannis Baratheon, Heir to the Iron Throne.
Joffrey Waters, my Father’s killer, is dead at the foot of the throne he claimed. I have his castle, his mother the Queen, his court and his brother and sister in my power. The Lannisters rage down the Gold Road to crown young Tommen, a boy of seven, and mount my head on a spike. You rage around Massey’s Hook if my intelligence is sound, to crown yourself instead. I do not claim the Iron Throne, your grace, only the Kingdoms mine by my mother’s and father’s blood. No more and no less. I expect to argue about this when we meet with our tongues, and not our swords.
My father oft said that the enemy of my enemy may be an ally come war, and I await to see if he was right.
Come to King’s Landing, find justice for your brother and I for my father, find a lion’s pelt too if it please you. But come. Come and see.
Robb Stark, King of North and Trident.