Work Text:
Her brothers had been arguing, Myriah suspected. No words, heated or otherwise, passed between them after she made her entrance, but the strained quality of the mutual silence between Maron and Mors betrayed them nonetheless.
After making a few perfunctory remarks about the journey from Sunspear to King’s Landing, remarks that were pointedly directed at his sister and only his sister, Mors made a move to leave. “Are my nephews out and about?” he asked Myriah. “I may need them to show me the way, if I am not to be hopelessly lost in this dragon’s lair.”
Do you think of my sons as those dragons too, brother? Myriah took hold of his hand. “Stay. Let us speak together, all three of us, as we used to do.”
Mors deflected by saying, “Perhaps your Baelor could help me find a flagon of Dornish red, to warm my bones in this chilly court. Is there any Dornish wine to be found here?”
“We always serve Dornish wine here, as well as the Arbor variety,” replied Myriah, sharply.
“Our sister is the mistress of the Red Keep after all,” Maron muttered, the first words he had spoken since Myriah entered the room.
Mors said nothing in reply. He leaned over to kiss Myriah’s cheek, while slowly but surely disengaging his hand from her grasp. His gaze lingered on his sister’s face, for a heartbeat, then another, before he turned his own face away. “Pray do not worry, sweet sister,” he said, his eyes already fixed on the door. “I will do my duty, on the day of the wedding. I will stand beside our brother, holding the bride’s cloak embroidered with our sun-and-spear, and I will hand him that cloak with a smile on my face, as he weds his Targaryen bride. But do not ask me to smile when he bends his knee to the dragon king.”
That dragon king was Myriah’s husband. Mors liked him well enough as a man, and as a good-brother too, but those, of course, were matters of a separate realm.
His older siblings held their collective breaths as Mors bounded out of the room, his steps swift and determined. The door closed firmly behind his back, with a loud thud. Myriah raised her eyebrows. That was all the inducement Maron needed to begin unburdening himself. “Our brother still believes I am making a grave mistake,” he confided.
“The peace treaty was agreed upon last year. It has been settled since then,” Myriah pointed out.
“He believes that as long as I have not wed this Targaryen princess, then there is still a chance.”
“A chance?”
“Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken, he keeps repeating in my ear, as if I had forgotten the words of our House. When we were boys together, five and six, he could never remember those words correctly. Unbroke, Unbent, Unbroken, Mors would say, time and again, no matter how many times our maester corrected him. Do you remember?”
Myriah smiled, her smile a bittersweet one. “I remember.” She was still residing in Sunspear at the time, though already betrothed to Prince Daeron, already stripped of her position as the heir to Dorne.
Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken, Maron had kept repeating in his younger brother’s ear, until the little boy finally remembered the correct words in the correct order.
Her two brothers, born only fifteen moons apart. They had been inseparable as children, “as good as twins,” their nursemaid was fond of saying. Myriah was a number of years older, and her inseparable companions had been her cousins and the daughters of her father’s councillors. Had she ever wished for a sister, a sister by blood rather than by inclination? Not truly, not until the day her betrothal to Prince Daeron was announced, which was also the day her birthright was declared lost to her.
If I had a younger sister, then she could have been the one betrothed to this dragon prince, and I would still be the heir to Dorne, that thought had taken hold in her mind.
And yet, there was also this, clamoring for space inside her head: but how could I wish such a cruel fate on my own sister?
Back then, she had imagined it to be a fate worse than death, to be wed to this Targaryen prince who bore the same name as the accursed king who had brought fire and blood to Dornish soil.
It had not been easy, by any means, but it was not, after all, a fate worse than death, she had discovered later.
Maron sighed, transporting Myriah back to the present. “Have I chosen the right path, sister?” he asked, looking solemn and troubled.
Myriah examined his countenance. “Do you have doubts, brother?”
“I do not doubt my own views. But I wonder about the views of others. What would our father think? Would he approve of my decision, do you suppose?”
“Our father was not a stranger to peace treaties. He signed one himself, with King Baelor, another dragon king, as Mors would put it.”
And he sent his daughter, his eldest child and former heir, to the dragon’s court, to seal that treaty. And I have done my best since then to ensure that the peace sealed with my wedding and my lost birthright would last, in my lifetime, and my children’s lifetime, and my children’s children’s lifetime.
“Our father did not bend his knee to King Baelor, when he signed that peace treaty,” said Maron.
“He bended his knee three years before,” Myriah reminded him.
“When our father bended his knee during what the Targaryens insisted on calling the Submission of Sunspear, he had the sword of King Daeron the First forcing his hand. This time there is no sword forcing my hand. Is that worse, or better?”
“Dragon kings are not all made alike,” Myriah said. “This King Daeron is not the same as the other one, whose name will forever be accursed in Dornish history.”
“I know it, sister. I would not have agreed to the treaty otherwise. Would that Mors know it too … and his lady wife’s kinsmen as well.”
“The Wyls would never have accepted any peace treaty with the Targaryens quietly and easily, whatever the circumstances. They will make their objections known to all, loudly and vociferously; that is to be expected. Let us hope that they will do no more than that. Our lady mother chose a Wyl as Mors’s bride with that in mind. The bond of marriage – and now of blood, with the births of Mors’s daughters – would bind them to us more closely, she had hoped.”
“And yet I fear that our brother could be the one brought over to their side, to their way of thinking about the matter.”
“Have faith in him. Mors speaks his mind freely to your ears, and to mine as well, but his doubts have never been shared with other ears in Dorne, as far as I know.”
Maron nodded. “That is true enough. He showed naught but support for my decision in public. It is only when we are alone that –”
Myriah interjected, softly, “Then all is well, brother. Or as well as could be expected, under the circumstances.” A short while later, she added, more firmly this time, “Remember who you are. You are the Prince of Dorne, Maron. Not our brother. Not our father, not anymore. Remember what Father told us, about the lesson passed down from Princess Meria to her son and heir Prince Nymor. Princess Meria said, ‘When I am dead, you will do as you see fit, as the Prince of Dorne, and when you are dead, your daughter will do as she sees fit, as the Princess of Dorne. That is how it should be. That is how it must be.’”
Maron frowned. “It has never struck me as a very helpful lesson. She was only stating the very obvious, was she not?”
“Oh, but it is helpful! Only the ruling Prince or the ruling Princess at the time will best understand the conditions on the ground. Not his or her predecessors. Only you, Maron, at this moment in time. Not Father. Not Grandmother Aliandra. Not any of our ancestors who have sat on that throne beneath the sun and the spear. Only you can decide. Distressing yourself about what Father would have done, or what Grandmother Aliandra would have done, will do you and Dorne not much good at all.”
“And what about you, sister? After all, this could have been your place. It would have been your place, had our father not agreed to that earlier peace treaty and marriage alliance. Would you have bended the knee, as the Princess of Dorne?”
“I do not know,” Myriah answered truthfully. “I might not have been the woman that I am now, had I stayed in Sunspear and become the Princess of Dorne. That woman … I do not know how she would see the matter. I do not know how she would decide.”
We mourn not just the ghosts of the dead and the departed, but also the ghosts of the selves we could have been but never were, her good-mother had once said. Queen Naerys had mourned for the life she could have had as a septa, unwed and unbound to her brother Aegon.
But if I mourn for the Princess of Dorne that I could have been, would I not be regretting the existence of my sons at the same time? My sons who carry their father’s blood as well as my own?
Mourning that woman made her feel guilty towards her sons, but not mourning that woman would have made her feel guilty towards herself.
“Has it changed you so much, sister, living in this court?”
“How not? I lived among strangers for most of those years, hostile strangers many of them. Even my husband was a stranger for a long while – though not a hostile one, thank the gods – before we grew closer, before we both came to the realization that a life must be built, not offered to you on a silver platter.”
Maron took his sister’s hand and kissed it. He seemed lost for words. “Sister, I –“
“This treaty will be good for Dorne, and for the Seven Kingdoms. We do not know what kind of king will sit on the Iron Throne in future generations. There may not be another opportunity.”
“But your son Baelor … surely –“
“Baelor is only one generation. What comes after him … we do not know for certain. It could be a king who resembles my good-father, who believes perpetual war with Dorne is the natural state of the world. This peace will prevent endless bloodshed. For Dorne’s sake. For the realm’s sake.”
“Is this the counsel of a sister, or a queen? Or the counsel of the Princess of Dorne who could have been?”
“I am all that, and more,” replied Myriah.
Still, she knew, deep down, that there was a part of her that would be recoiling, witnessing the Prince of Dorne kneeling on one knee to a dragon king. Even though that king was her own husband. The blood of Princess Meria flowed inside her too. Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.
Dorne was bending its knee, yes, but Dorne would not be broken by it.
She had learned to live with ambivalence, her own, as well as others, and with the feeling that she was being pulled towards ten different directions. She was this, that and the other, and each role came with its own set of demands and exacted its own price on her. Daughter of the sun. Mother of dragons. Queen of the realm. Princess of –
“I have done my best,” Maron insisted. “This is not a submission, but the fruit of an extended negotiation, with concessions given and received by both sides. A negotiation that took two years. Two long years. I did not bow down at the first opportunity, did not concede everything so easily just because the king is my good-brother.”
“And neither did Daeron. But there will be voices accusing both of you of just that, to be sure. Voices in Dorne accusing you of selling out to the Iron Throne for the price of a few measly privileges. Voices in the Seven Kingdoms accusing him of giving special treatments to Dorne because he is married to a Dornishwoman. You must be prepared for that. And so must my husband.”
Maron nodded.
“Be good to her. That is my counsel as a sister.” As your sister, and as your future wife’s good-sister, soon to be her good-sister twice over.
We are as good as sisters, Daenerys had said.
Be like a mother to her, Queen Naerys had implored, on her deathbed. My poor motherless daughter. Fatherless too, though her father is still living.
“To her?”
“To Daenerys. She will be going to a distant land, as I did, beginning a new life in a –“
“Not in a hostile court, surely. Not like you did.”
“There are those who are still opposed to this marriage and to this peace treaty in your court, you know that well enough, brother.”
“They will be wroth with me, with their prince, not with my lady wife.”
“But she will make an easier target for some, like I was, when I came to this court.”
“At least Daenerys will not have the kind of good-father you had.”
“That is one blessing indeed,” Myriah agreed.