Chapter Text
He was born in a city and castle that had only just begun their slow, painful restoration; the smell of mortar was as natural to him as the scent from flowers from the gardens in the Old Palace and the constant thumping of axes, the creaking of woods and the piercing rhythmic sound of stone-cutter instruments were a lullaby as soothing as the songs of the desert that his wetnurse hummed over his cradle and the rhythms of his mother Lysene homeland.
Sunspear grew along him, with him after its near destruction in what the books north of the Red Mountain proudly called the Conquest of Dorne.
“The short-lived Conquest of Dorne,” his sister never failed to remind everyone.
Their lady mother would just sigh. “You won’t be winning any friends in your new home if you keep saying it, Mariah. Everyone knows how short-lived it was. Your new family doesn’t need any reminders. You must be diplomatic.”
Maron Martell did not yet know what diplomatic meant but he could say that his sister was clearly not it.
Sunspear kept growing and he did as well – kept growing with the smells, sights, and sounds of rebuilding… and the sudden commotion when someone would rush to his father to announce that a new one had been found.
A new secret mass grave.
Maron could not say when he came to knew what these were. He had likely heard it first before he could even talk and sometimes, he could swear that he had known it at the time as well – that those dried up wells, lonely fields, huge trees with earth around them too recently disturbed in sharp contrast with the parched up soil of the forests around them, dilapidated houses were the places where the good, the true, the brave had found their graves. The ones who had dared oppose Daeron Targaryen and his stewards… He had seen the recognition of one such corpse from one such grave. When he became older, he could reason out that it must have been one of the latest graves and that the very location of it – one of the almost ruined buildings in the thickest shadows of the north-oriented oldest parts of the Old Palace used to storage ice for as long as it would hold, the bodies had been almost… recognizable not just by their clothes. But he would never forget his early horror at the sight of the half-melted faces, the teeth bared because of the lack of lips, and the sobs of a mother who had been brought over to identify her son…
“I’m doing my best to bandage the wounds,” his father would often say, “but I won’t be able to do it in a lifetime. It’ll be up to you to bring my efforts to conclusion, my son.”
No, Maron would think. It would be up to my sister. Because he knew that in Dorne, almost all of Dorne, and this part of Dorne in particular, first children inherited, always, at any rate. All first children – except for the daughter of the Prince himself. And she did not even have the redress every other disinherited child of Dorne had – they could at least address their lords. Whom could Mariah appeal to? Only her father, which would be waste of time! Instead, she stood to lose her birthright and be the sacrifice they would send to the Targaryen court and the Targaryen of the hated name.
Even when it became increasingly clear that Mariah would be queen, it was not enough to make Maron feel less of a thief.
As a child of six, he would sit quietly as maester after maester taught Mariah the wisdom of the Citadel and the highest minds of Dorne’s diplomacy taught her how to parry the blows in the city that she would be calling her home. The blows!
“You should never talk about the war, unless it is to say how grateful you are that misunderstandings are over.”
“And if they aren’t over?” Mariah challenged and her face turned that peculiar shade of golden brown it took when she blushed.
“Especially then!”
She would then barely refrain from rolling her eyes and Maron would look down without knowing, without even suspecting just how useful these lessons would be to him one day. The profound impression they left upon his soul would do him much good in his own marriage… but that would not come to be for some twenty years. At the time, Daenerys Targaryen was not even born.
All this time, Sunspear kept growing.
“I won’t go any further,” Mariah said stubbornly and their mother sighed. Even the eight-year-old Maron knew that she would. What else could she do – turn a heel and go back to Sunspear? Where their father would grab her and deliver her to King’s Landing single-handedly? But these grown-up reasons could not change his eight-year-old feelings, clearly, because Princess Siella shot him a hard look before turning to her daughter to pour some reason into her.
At this time, Maron was old enough to perceive the obvious lack of joy for Mariah’s wedding in these parts. In Sunspear, people had become more used to it because the ravens and preparations had been part of their lives for years, but in the Red Mountains where lords and ladies were farther from the control of the Martells, resentment was clear, in both high and lowborn. Maron had already heard the whispers about the massacres that the Young Dragon himself had caused here, about a village left without men in a single day because fathers, sons, and uncles had all fallen defending their homeland, about the rebellions suppressed with blood all over the mountain and how the Torrentine had gone almost blocked with bodies thrown there from all the length of her stream. Few could pretend joy. Lady Dayne of Starfall had not even come to greet their party and by the look in his mother’s eye, Maron could see that she did not believe in the alleged illness that had prevented her from making the journey.
It’s been just as many years as I have lived and yet hatred is just as bright and hot as it was then, Maron thought. And I’ll have to make it stop one day? How?
The Targaryens did not help his love for peace, though. It was always understood that Daeron Targaryen would come to fetch his bride from the border, as the Dornish custom was; now, it had turned out that he was impeded from coming and Mariah was beyond enraged – enraged enough to speak unguardedly.
“If they think I’ll be running to them like a puppy, they’re very much mistaken,” she claimed, whereupon their mother required a conversation without anyone near – Maron could not make out anything despire his keen, trained hearing. But on the next day, Mariah mounted her mare obediently and he comforted himself by looking at the new wooden buildings in Castle Skyreach. They had rebuilt there, too. His eyes went up the highest tower, shining silver in the sunlight.
“I always try to see if it can truly reach the sky as well,” someone said next to him. He quickly looked down, ashamed to be caught at so blatantly obviously trying to check if something impossible was actually possible. Then, his eyes fell on the person who had spoken.
It was a girl his own age, dark-haired and dark-eyed. He hoped she would grow up because this far, the only thing that told her apart from a child of five were her keen eyes and the somewhat mature facial lines. But his discomfort went away immediately. It was only a child.
“And have you seen this?” he asked.
Elana Jordayne shook her head. “When I look up high enough, the sun always blinds me,” she confessed. “But I like to think it does reach it.”
For some reason, Maron liked her as soon as she said this. And for the rest of his life, he would be careful not to dwell on what this some reason was. Now, he only looked around to make sure that everyone was focused on the bride and said, “Perhaps you’ll be able to show me the old haunts here when we get back?”
Without answering, she simply smiled back.