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Arianne
I was fourteen when I lost my maidenhead to the Bastard of Godgrace. I was fourteen when I read your letter to Quentyn, your letter telling him that one day he will rule all of Dorne. Your letter which made no mention of me at all, Arianne Nymeros Martell, your daughter, your rightful heir by Dornish law, your firstborn child.
Make of that what you will, Father. Coincidence? Cause and effect? Which came first, reading that letter, or losing my maidenhead?
Why did you leave that letter unattended, Father? At that hour, when you know it was my usual time to come to your solar to give you a goodnight kiss. Our usual routine, since I was old enough to walk. (Did you not wonder why I stopped coming, all the nights after that? Did you not miss our night-time ritual and conversation at all?) Was it your wish that I would find the letter and read its content, thus sparing you a difficult conversation about robbing me of my birthright? Or were you too consumed with thoughts of your beloved son Quentyn to concern yourself with what I might find by accident?
What did Quentyn make of that letter, Father? Did he write you to ask, “But what about my sister? What about Arianne? Isn’t she supposed to rule Dorne after you, Father?” Myrcella did ask, you know. The first thing out of her mouth when we were addressing her as ‘Your Grace’ and ‘my queen’ had been, “But what about Tommen? Tommen is king. Did something happen to my brother Tommen?” I doubt my brother Quentyn was as concerned about his sister’s fate as Myrcella was about her brother’s.
You did nothing when you heard about my night-time adventure with Daemon Sand. You did nothing, and you said nothing. My uncle took me aside and repeated the advice he had given his own daughters. ‘Wed, if you must, or take your pleasure where you can find it, but take care of the men you choose.’ I loved my uncle for it, but I knew even then his advice was not for me. Unlike my cousins, I must wed, and wed well, as befitting the future Princess of Dorne.
But at least my uncle cared enough to speak. At least your brother was paying attention, taking some care of my well-being. You, Father, you acted as if nothing had happened, pretended that everything was just the way it had always been.
You cannot have missed the changes it wrought on me. I was made different by it – not by the sex, not by the losing of my maidenhead, which after all, is only a rite of passage – but by the loss of my innocence. I was once a daughter who carelessly and thoughtlessly believed in her father’s love for her. I could never be that again. I do not have your talent for pretending, Father.
You have always been very, very good at pretending. “Your mother misses her friends and family in Norvos,” you told me, when I asked you why Mother was making yet another trip back to her hometown. “Soon. She will be back soon,” you told me, when her last trip, the one she would not return from, had lasted almost half a year.
I could have more easily forgiven you if I thought you had been lying. But no, I could see that you actually believed your own delusion. You should have done something, anything, to convince Mother to return to us. Write her a stern letter reminding her of her duties and her responsibilities as a wife and a mother. Write her a loving letter recalling the good old days in your courtship and during the early days of your marriage. Send someone to fetch her. Go to Norvos to fetch her yourself. (You were still healthy enough to travel, in those days). Instead, you did nothing. You sat and pined and waited, and did nothing.
What sort of a prince would do that? My uncle would have taken the first ship to Norvos. Actually, your brother would never have lost the woman he loved in the first place. And even if he had, he would not have merely sat and waited, year after year, with a supposed patience that bordered on indifference and indolence.
It was cruel and unkind of me to think that. But I did, Father, I did think that, and if I am supposed to be confessing all my sins, I might as well confess to that.
You have always been very good at doing nothing. You did nothing when your sister was raped and slaughtered. You did nothing when your brother was murdered. I suppose even if your own children were killed, you would do nothing as well. (But perhaps you would do something for Quentyn, for your chosen heir? Would you call your banners for a dead Quentyn, Father? It is futile to ask if you would for me, I know the answer to that question already.)
Caution, you call it, both in words and in deeds. “Words are like arrows, Arianne,” you told me once. “Once loosed, you cannot call them back.” Well, I did more than speak some careless words this time, and others suffered for it. You did something after all, this time. I should be glad, if I am being consistent. I have been impatient for you to do something, anything, for a very long time.
But then again, I suppose it is easy enough for you to punish me, the daughter you want to disinherit, the child you no longer love.
What did I ever do to make you hate me so, Father? Tell me, Father. Tell me the exact moment, the exact deed that turned your love into hate. You loved me once. You did. I refused to believe that the father who wiped my tears when I fell down and skinned my knees, who sat by my bed when I was ill and read me stories of monsters and maidens, never loved me at all.
If only in memory of that love, fleeting and inconstant as it may be, spare my friends the worst of your punishment. They did what they did for their love of me. The plan was mine and mine alone; they went along only for my sake, for the sake of a princess who has lost her father’s love and her mother’s company.