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Margaery had always thought she’d enjoy boarding school. It had seemed so adult to her when she was little, the flurry of trunks and uniforms and supplies every fall, the giddy anticipation and the goodbyes, tearful on her mother’s part and stoic on the part of her brothers. Every break, they came home full of stories, adventures, jokes and sly words that seemed to have some shared meaning for them but which were inscrutable to Margaery and her parents, though only Margaery cared enough to wonder what they meant and pester the boys for an explanation. They only smirked at her, exchanging knowing glances with each other and ruffling her hair in the way they knew she hated. Margaery watched them all leave, one by one, first Willas, then Garlan, and finally Loras, leaving Margaery alone in the house that suddenly seemed cavernous and quiet without them. She’d longed for the day that she’d be bundled into scarf and a smart new coat and loaded on to the train with a trunk full of books and a head full of ideas, for the day she’d have all her own jokes and sly words that meant nothing to anyone gathered around their family table but her.
She hadn’t quite hated it that first year, but it was close enough to make any distinction meaningless. True, she’d grown to like it, even love it, but those first days weren’t at all what she’d imagined. She didn’t feel grown-up at all. On the contrary, she felt more childish than ever, so much smaller than all the older girls, who didn’t look like girls at all and instead seemed entirely like women, with their beautifully made-up faces and artfully styled hair, their bodies that marked them as nothing like the slip of the girl Margaery was, with no hips or breasts yet to speak of.
They’d looked her up and down that first day, a formidable and intimidating pack of older girls, and let out a collective snort of derision. “Plaits?” the most scornful one said. Involuntarily, Margaery raised her hand to the skinny braids that hung down each shoulder; she’d plaited them so carefully that morning, in the most careful, sophisticated French braids she could manage. The girl noted her gesture and smirked, and for a moment Margaery wanted nothing more than to go back to the station and take the train right back home.
“How provincial,” the girl had sniffed, sailing off with the other members of her pack bobbing in her wake like ducks. The word had stung. Margaery’s family may have been rich and powerful at home, but they were still considered new money here in the capital, something Margaery’s mother had never been successful at hiding her dismay over, and that had unknowingly – or maybe knowingly – scored a direct hit. Margaery wanted spit back barbed words of her own, to make that girl’s face crumble with wounded pride. She’d stopped herself by sheer force of will. Even then she’d known those girls had the power to make her life miserable, so she’d smiled sweetly at them each time she saw them in the halls, complimented the cut of their uniforms – customized on the sly despite school regulations – and cooed over every new bauble they showed off after visits home for birthdays or holidays. But she’d hated them fiercely, and she wore her hair in twin plaits every single day until they all graduated.
When her cousins began school a few years later, they became her pack, but Margaery saw to it that they were nothing but kind and welcoming to the first years, no matter how unfashionable they might be, no matter how awkward or unfriendly.
It was her own last year at school when every girl in her hall, including her younger cousins, seemed to become obsessed with the Crown Prince. Just thirteen, he was already showing signs of the handsome man he’d eventually become. “He’s bloody fit,” Elinor enthused, pouring over the pages of one of her magazines, tracing her fingertip in a heart around Prince Jon’s face.
“He looks like he’s allergic to having his picture taken,” Margaery said, though she couldn’t say he wasn’t appealing. In fact, she rather liked the slightly pained look he always seemed to have on his face in pictures. She herself always schooled her features into the most pleasing expression possible for any photographers that might be about, seen or unseen, but she understood the impulse. Sometimes she wished she came from the most obscure family imaginable, just so she would never have to pose for anything, nor worry what people would say if she gave into temptation and pulled a horrid face for the cameras just once. She wondered if that sort of thing was easier when you were the boy who would become the King – they were hardly going to give the monarchy to some other family simply because he seemed gruff and unpolished at public events – or if it only made it a different kind of difficult. It gave her a sense of empathy with the young future King.
“Do you think he’d marry a commoner?” Megga asked once, her eyes bright and shining with the sort of hopes that Margaery knew life would crush out of her sooner or later.
“And who says we’re commoners?” Margaery demanded. Megga rolled her eyes, though she did seem a bit chastened.
“Well we’re not Princesses,” she said. “But maybe…?” Margaery had looked at her young cousin, but her thoughts lingered on the Prince. How strange, to be known to so many while knowing relatively few. How strange to be coveted by people you’d never met. Well, Margaery understood a bit of that herself; just last week her father had sent her a letter instructing her to take the train downtown to meet him for luncheon with an associate, with the unspoken assumption that Margaery was to make herself pleasant and agreeable as she always did when her father’s social interests were concerned. Maybe this one would at least be less than a decade from her in age. Hopefully he wouldn’t make her skin crawl as much as the last one had.
“Anything’s possible,” was all she said to Megga.