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Still more labyrinthine buds the rose. - Robert Browning
Though some in her position would, Margaery had never regretted being born a girl.
Highgarden had enough sons, and if her grandmother had taught her anything, it was that more could be won with petals than thorns. But she was young yet, so when Garlan looked at her askance one day and said, "sister, you could have been the deadliest of us all," she just laughed.
Hers was an easy, summer life. She embroidered with her cousins and wandered through the orchards and snuck peaches off the trees, told stories with Willas and entertained the occasional flirtation with the noble sons her father had taken to foster.
She cried when Loras was sent to Storm's End, her favorite brother stolen away from her as they had always known he would be. She later looked back on her tears with mild embarrassment, a child's disappointment, but would still run off to her chambers with his letters when they arrived to pore over them in secret, delighting in his news of one minor triumph in the practice yards or another and amused by his thinly-veiled disdain for many of his peers. Small alliances had never been Loras's particular strength; he tended to lack the necessary sensitivities. She would have to remedy that.
Just before her fifteenth nameday they rode to Storm's End for Loras's knighting. Lord Renly had greeted them gallantly and Margaery had felt herself start to blush when he had turned his charm toward her, sure to cause gossip among her cousins later as they giggled about her future marriage prospects. For once, she would not have been entirely opposed to their imaginary match.
Would not have been, at least, until the ceremony itself. She saw Renly and Loras's eyes meet as Loras rose to his feet, Renly's hand lingering seconds too long on her brother's arm, and knew then that neither of them would be hers.
She did not know that the next time she would be at Storm's End would be for her wedding.
Loras had returned to Highgarden in a too-brief visit as they waited and watched King's Landing tumbling on itself after the king's death, and they walked in the gardens together as they had as children, the morning sun still shy of its apex. She did not ask about Renly, content to humor her brother's menial updates about Storm's End for as long as he needed.
As they reached a far point in the gardens he stopped suddenly and turned to her with no trace of his earlier smile.
"Margaery," he said, sounding young. "Renly wants to be king."
"He hasn't said as much," he continued. "But he's not the sort to be content to wait around." There was a sort of fierce pride and attachment in Loras's voice, but beneath it, she thought, her brother was worried. Perhaps those were her own fears, though, and the fear that Loras had not thought about this enough to know he should be worried at all.
She looked at him then, thinking of her own future. "He will have to wed," she said. "A king without alliances is hardly a king at all."
He returned her gaze, his jaw set. "Yes," he said, "and what better allies in Westeros than Highgarden?"
There were worse things to be in Westeros, she had thought, than a maiden queen.
She had thought that then, at least. Before everything had fallen down around them, and though Renly was a kind and charming husband he rarely shared her bed, sneaking back to it on the rare occasions he did long after he thought she was sleeping, with bruises on his hips and faint scratches on his skin. And yet she had lost him, too, and was married off to children when she should have been bearing her own.
They tell her that her brother is dead. She doesn't believe them, doesn't really believe anything she has heard from the Lannisters since the day she met them, power-mad fools that they all are. The closest she has seen to honesty was the flicker of envy she thinks she saw in Jaime's eyes when he looked at her and Loras, once. But if there is to be some seed of reason at King's Landing, she will make it hers to plant.
There were other things in Westeros she could have chosen to be, but Margaery will not renounce who she is.