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They say the Dornish are of the sands. It’s not a wrong assumption – Darne is hot and parched, with rolling sand dunes and fierce sandstorms. Those who live out in the Sands have the skin and faces to show for it, dark and rough, resilient to the heat and the lack of water; those who live in more merciful areas of the region still know sand and sun from birth, are taught their dangers and their virtues. Their princes and princesses are born to a castle named Sunspear – the sun being the sands’ close companion. Even their bastards are named Sand.
Elia knows of sand as well as any Dornish man or woman, noble or common. But somehow her life has been just as marked by the sea.
Sunspear is surrounded on three sides by the sea. As a girl, Elia, with her brother Oberyn, climbs to the ramparts and watches the waves gently lap and froth against the coastline, the tides bringing the water up to soak the stone walls. Oberyn likes to throw stones into the water, see how far he can fling them, delighted in the small splashes they make when they land. He has always had that streak of mischief in him. Sometimes, Elia will throw stones as well, less for mischief as for wishing. Her nurse had told her an old story once, that stones turned thrice over and wished upon, then cast into the sea, would bring the wish to the mermen and merwoman that live beneath the waves. The merpeople store these wishstones in large, jeweled trunks and draw them out one at a time to perform magical rituals to grant the wishes. Of course, the stones are always many, and the merpeople idle by nature, so not all the wishes get granted, and many not very fast.
The tale fascinates Elia as a girl. Oberyn, despite being younger, scoffs and laughs at it in disbelief, or japes that he ought to make all sorts of nonsensical wishes just to confuse the lazy merpeople. Elia tells him once that this is unkind, and he relents, though she still sees the spark of laughter in his eyes sometimes when she throws a stone of her own into the sea. Despite what her brother might say, Elia likes to think that the story is true. She enjoys imagining an underwater palace, that in her mind resembles the Water Gardens, and beautiful merpeople who live there, their trunks decorated with pearls and seashells, emeralds and rubies, engravings and coral vines. She throws stones into the sea, choosing the smoothest and nicest ones in hopes they would be attractive to the merpeople and wished for sweet, childish things.
For all their sweet dreams, children grow up and they stop believing in fairy tales and pretty, magical stories. By the time Elia’s mother takes her and Oberyn on a tour for suitors, she is a woman grown and flowered, and no longer believes in the merpeople, though she will still sometimes wish on stones out of habit and the feeling of home it gives her.
She mentions once to Oberyn on their way to Lannisport that she fancies she could find a stone on the ship to wish on. “Do you want a lord husband so badly?” her brother asks, his expression unreadable in the dark of their cabin where they lie side-by-side, crammed together onto Elia’s narrow bed.
Elia gives it some thought and replies with a smile she hopes he could hear without seeing her face, “I suppose I must have one, but if you keep scaring them all away, there will be none left.”
Oberyn only laughs at that. “I’ll try not to. But none of them are good enough for you. Just look what happened with Hightower.”
He is trying to joke, but something about his words makes Elia uneasy. She is a princess of Dorne. She would need to make an advantageous and brilliant match but mostly she wants a man she could love who would love her. There is also the issue of her health to consider – the maesters had always whispered to her parents that childbirth would be difficult for her. Do the high lords know that? Would her future husband resent her for it? What man would be good enough for her as both a political match and a true husband?
“There must be someone good enough,” she whispers, more to herself than in response to Oberyn. If her brother replies to that, she never can recall later what he says.
Casterly Rock is also surrounded by the sea. In that it resembles Sunspear. The sun there is not as scolding as in Dorne, but still warm and bright, playing across the water of the tide that laps against the cliff on which the great castle stands. Elia thinks she wouldn’t mind being a lady of a place like this, and she has heard that Jaime Lannister is both comely and already showing great talent with a sword. And yet, he is only a boy now, some nine years her junior. How could she make any judgement of what sort of man he would be and how long would she need to wait to be wed?
“I don’t think we need to worry about this child,” Oberyn tells her smugly.
“No, but you might,” Elia points out. “Not him but his sister. Mother likely has much more of a mind to wed you to Cersei Lannister. You are closer in age, and it is of no novelty for the maid to be younger.”
Oberyn scowls at her but sees the truth of her words.
In truth, neither of them were to wed a Lannister. Both Jaime and Cersei Lannister pay them little mind beyond the merest of formalities. If anything, Jaime is more interested in getting Oberyn to spar with him than in speaking with Elia. He’s only a boy, she reminds herself. And a boy who has recently lost his mother. Unlikely he is thinking of marriage.
The third morning they are at Casterly Rock, Elia goes to the ramparts that face over the sea as she had done in Sunspear as a girl and throws a smooth, beige stone into the still rippling waters. Her wishes have changed now, from girlish fancies to more adult concerns. I wish to marry a man, not a boy. I wish…that Oberyn not marry Cersei Lannister. Elia has not quite found the girl likeable, but then, grief does things to people, and she ought to be kinder to a child mourning a parent. If anything, Elia realizes that she simply is not ready to let her younger brother go. It’s him she’s closest to after all.
Silly, she tells herself. Cersei would have to come to Dorne and she and Oberyn could not be wed for some years to live as a separate household. The girl has not even flowered yet.
But the distance is less the issue. It’s more the concept, she thinks, of the way siblings get pushed apart when a spouse for one of the other is begotten.
Perhaps there is some magic in wishing stones, as neither she nor her brother are to be married to Casterly Rock. Tywin Lannister has greater plans for his children. Their mother is quite offended, Elia can tell, although he does not show it and barely speaks to them of it. Elia is relieved, Oberyn – smug, thinking himself vindicated.
“I don’t think I’ll marry at all,” he tells her as they sail away, trading the azure blue waters of the Westerlands for the aquamarines of the Dornish coast.
“You will,” Elia promises him, ruffling his hair. But perhaps not, she muses silently to herself. He has more choice as a man, even in Dorne, and more freedom as a second son, just as everywhere else.
King’s Landing, where Elia is married, is also on the sea. It is both different and the same to what she has known her whole life. The Red Keep does not face out onto the water, and she would need to wander out into the city itself and its outer walls to look over it. The water too has a different sort of color – a deeper blue, a more seaweed greed. But like all Southron seas it is calm and nearly still, aside from a spot of occasional bad weather. Yet something about it makes her heart ache, makes her feel like she is being slowly pulled into those seaweed depths, as much as into the bustling, cloying city, smelling of too many people living in too-squalid conditions and in too-close proximity to each other.
“it’s a new life for you,” Mother tells her. She will be queen one day. It is odd how so many little girls wish for that, but Elia does not think she had ever wished for that on one of her stones.
Rhaegar is beautiful and gallant, and distant all at once. In the sept he is serious, in their bed he is tender, but more like he is caressing a valued possession than a woman. Perhaps I only think of these things oddly, Elia tells herself.
She learns him quickly – the way his fingers look when they move across the harp, and the way they feel across her body, the way his eyes match the King’s Landing sea in twilight, his habit to read in the evening and train every morning. She learns that he does not talk easily, but he is usually earnest. Elia does not know if she loves him, but she wants to.
She finds a way to go to the beach outside the city gates with only a couple of knights to guard her the day before they leave for Dragonstone. Surely, no one would be pleased if they knew, but she has always made her wishes in private.
It has been so long since her last wish was tossed into the sea. She forgot to do one before leaving Dorne for good.
The stone is rough and her hands are dry. She closes her eyes as she wishes and opens them in time to watch the stone sink into the surf. I wish for love.
When she comes back to the keep, Rhaegar asks her where she had gone. When she tells him, he looks at her evenly and say, “You ought not go out alone like this, my love.”
I was not alone, she wants to protest, but instead says, “I promise.”
Elia had wished for love, but she had not specified where it ought to come from.
She gets love.
On Dragonstone, where the sea is grey as led, with only specks of dark blue when the sun deigns to shine through the thick mists, her two great loves are with her there always. She has her beautiful daughter, with chestnut curls and dark eyes, and her long-labored for babe, her precious son. The azures and aquamarines, the sun bunnies on the water, have all abandoned her, much like Rhaegar does before long, leaving her storms and brewing tempests that smash against the rocks and the cliffs, howling in the night. But her children are with her, and they are her greatest joys and sweetest loves.
Elia makes no wishes on Dragonstone.
She doubts these seas would listen to them, would be home to any creature who might be merciful and generous enough to grant a plea. Sometimes she thinks about it – when she feels lonely or afraid. She picks up jagged stones and runs them between her fingers. They scratch at her soft skin and leave angry marks against her palms. But there is nothing of home in them, nothing of the magic from her childhood.
That is behind her, just as the Southron seas she has known. These seas and these stones are for dragons. Dragons like her children. She is theirs now and her wishes must change, as must the wishing.
The night before they go to King’s Landing on the King’s command, Rhaenys picks up a stone and tosses it into the brewing sea beneath the cliffs, a childish giggle bubbling up from her lips as red blood bubbles up from the palm of her hand where the jagged stone had cut her. “Did you wish for anything, sweetling?” Elia asks as the wind whips at her hair and she cradles Aegon closer to her chest. Have I ever told her about wishing stones?
Rhaenys sucks on the bit of blood on her palm and smiles sheepishly. “To be with Father again.”