Chapter Text
Monsters and Maidens (Edric Storm & Shireen Baratheon)
We were playing monsters and maidens,” he explained. “I was the monster. It’s a childish game but my cousin likes it.” (A Storm of Swords)
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When he thought of her - if he thought of her at all - mostly he thought of that game they used to play, in Aegon’s Garden. Monsters and maidens. (There was no ‘if’ about it, not if he was being honest with himself. He thought aboutShireen every single day; every day that he was in exile, that they were apart.)
He was the monster and she was the maiden, at first, but they soon grew tired of that, and then they were both the monsters, chasing imaginary maidens only they could see.
Patchface was recruited to play the maiden once. It was a spectacular failure. The fool refused to run or hide, trailing Shireen as if she were his savior instead of the monster preying on him. Devan was a more willing and eager participant - his terrified shriek when monster!Shireen and monster!Edric were approaching was quite an accomplished piece of acting, Edric thought - but Devan was often too busy with his squiring duties to join them in their play.
Just before Edric left Dragonstone, he and Shireen had been playing at being maidens, chased by awakened stone dragons bent on devouring them whole, feasting on their flesh. The dreams had terrified Shireen, but the act of reenacting those dreams seemed to bring her some strange comfort.
Edric had balked at playing the maiden, to begin with. “Why can’t I be the brave knight rescuing you from the dragon? Why do we both have to be the maidens?”
“Even a brave knight can’t kill a dragon with just his sword,” Shireen had pointed out. “And this way, we can both run, together.”
They held hand and ran, together. Ran from an imaginary threat that turned out to be not so imaginary after all.
It did not take Edric long to realize that he and cousin Andrew were on the run. An adventure, Lord Davos had called it. The start of your life’s great adventure. No, you may not bid farewell to Princess Shireen, but you can write her a letter. Later.
Later never came. Later was when he was told that his uncle Stannis would not look too kindly on a letter from Edric to his daughter. Later was when he was reminded of how he was conceived, and the shame it had brought toStannis Baratheon and his lady wife.
Much later was when he understood that they were not going home any time soon. Not to Storm’s End, not even to Dragonstone.
And certainly not to Shireen.
Much, much later was when he finally understood why he had been sent away. Smuggled away under the cover of darkness by men willing to risk their own lives to save his.
Why do you think I was the one chosen, Shireen ? If your father truly is the rightful king, then you have king’s blood in you as well. If sacrifice truly must be hard, or it is no sacrifice at all, then which is harder, to kill a daughter - your heir, your one and only child - or to kill a despised bastard nephew?
But what kind of a monster would he have to be to ask those questions of his cousin? Or to wish that she had been the one chosen? No, he did not wish that at all. He could not wish that, ever. He was not a monster.
It was not Shireen who owed him the answers. It was her father. He was the monster.