Work Text:
Roslin wonders if anyone in the Seven Kingdoms has prayed as hard for a girl babe as she has. She knows well of the women who kneel before the Mother and petition for a boy, an heir for their lord husbands, whilst girls are just what comes between – useful for alliances at best, another mouth to feed and another face lost in the crowd at worst.
Roslin has known the worst, has risen to the best due to the fortune of a fair face, and yet she prays with all of her heart for a girl. Sometimes she prays, impossibly, that the babe will not come at all, that she will carry her child until the war has ended and the world is a safer place. She knows such a thing is impossible, and so she shifts her prayers to asking for strength to protect her child from her family’s boundless ambitions, to protest when before she had merely wept her sorrow. She has always been called sweet and delicate and so she prays for courage and for fortitude; but mostly she asks for the one thing that will keep her lord husband alive – a girl babe.
She cannot bear the thought of more blood on her hands should they execute Edmure.
When the time comes for the birth, she labors alone save the midwives who peer with hawkish eyes between her thighs. She wishes for a mother, for a sister, for even one of her brothers to come and hold her hand as she feels ripped down the middle from her pains. A part of her wishes that her husband could be beside her, even as a larger part of her wonders if he will love the babe at all, if he could ever come to love either of them, mother and child both, knowing what they had cost him.
The first cries of her child are met with soft sighs and murmurs of disappointment from her attendants, and Roslin weeps from relief, from exhaustion, as they place the tiny creature in her arms. All at once she cannot imagine Edmure not loving her, their girl, and she cries more at the thought that he will have the chance to. A girl child is not enough to render the once lord of Riverrun worthless, and though Roslin’s tears fall as they did that terrible night less than a year past (and yet how time had stretched, the months dragging by), she holds her daughter with steady arms, with newfound steel in her bones.
Her daughter is a sweet thing with more of her Tully father than her Frey mother, with a tuft of red-brown hair adorning the top of her head and, when she opens them sleepily, the bluest eyes Roslin has ever seen. Her father sends word telling her she might as well name her Walda like all the rest, but she refuses, her voice wavering but unrelenting. “No,” she tells her brother, and his eyes are inscrutable as he tilts her head, looks at her as though she is some new and strange creature. “I shall give her a name from the Riverlands.”
But what name she is thinking she holds tight to herself – her newfound bravery does not give away to foolhardiness.
When she is able to rise from her bed, she goes to the sept to light candles in thanks for the answering of her prayers, and though her heart beats against her chest like a wild bird at the thought of what comes next, she breathes deep and fills her lungs and reminds herself that she is a mother now and she must be strong. It becomes her mantra, the words of her own house, and how appropriate, she thinks – she no longer wishes to be known as a Frey, and House Tully is decimated. There is a need for something new.
She cradles her daughter in her arms all the way to Casterly Rock – a defensive mechanism, for girl or no, she has a fear that if she releases the baby in the arms of her kin, something terrible will befall her. She is only a girl, after all, Roslin reflects, worthless in the game her father is playing. The better to be rid of her so that Roslin’s milk will dry and she will take with child again, hopefully a boy this time – this one is just another Frey girl in a world with too many already. She holds even tighter at the thought as a shiver works down her spine.
No, she reminds herself – she is not a Frey girl, she is a Tully girl, and as sorrowful as it is they seem to be rarer by far.
She languishes as half-guest and half-prisoner in her chambers, not ill-treated but confined to the castle walls and grounds, the jagged cliffs acting as a natural border to the edge of her new world. And yet it feels less of a prison than the one she escaped, less dangerous, and it gives her pause to think that she feels safer in the hands of her enemies than amongst her own kin.
When Edmure joins her after a moon’s turn, she scarcely recognizes him. She still remembers the man she had been given to wed, with open, honest eyes, broad shoulders and an easy smile. He had not rebuked her as she had wept through the wedding and the bedding, and the thought that she was wedding a good man made the ordeal all the more painful. But now his face is drawn and thinned, his eyes tired and his shoulders slumped, and she bites back the lump in her throat at the sight, at the remembrance of what it was to see this man not killed but still destroyed the night after he had treated her so tenderly.
Seeing him again, her greatest fear is not that he will never forgive her, never love her. Such a thing she could bear, she could wear it as her penance for keeping silent in the face of inhumane atrocities. But the babe she cradles in her arms is an innocent, perhaps the only innocent of them all, and she wishes for nothing more than Edmure to love her, the sort of love that Roslin, lost in the crowd, never received from her own father. He must love her, she tells herself – Roslin does so much that she can scarcely fathom anything different.
Her fears melt away when he reaches out to take the baby in his arms, looking down to study her intently. He runs a finger along the short slope of her nose, and Roslin feels her heart give way, and thinks that the fondness and sorrow she feels could easily become love, if there is room for such a thing for them.
“She is beautiful, my lady,” Edmure tells her, and Roslin tries to forget how he had told her that she was beautiful, the night of their wedding. He rests a palm on the babe’s red hair, cupping the child’s small head in his big hand. “What have you called her?”
“I thought to name her Catelyn.” The words tumble out and she winces; she had meant to broach the subject delicately, perhaps after his rest, but then of course he would want to know the name of his daughter.
She bites her lip at the spasm of pain that crosses Edmure’s face at that, and he draws the baby closer to his chest. He looks down still, but his eyes are far-away, in a different time and place. She remembers how the sack of the wedding had gone from cruel to unbearable in her mind when the groom’s party had arrived at the Twins. Before it had all been theory and plan, and her brothers and father had spoken of honor and broken pledges. It had sat ill with her but she had forced herself to not think upon it.
But they had arrived, then, and they had just been people, not vicious liars as she had been taught. The King in the North, the oath-breaker who had disgraced and dishonored her family, had been no dangerous warg but a boy younger even than she, his mother a great lady even under the weight of grief, the sort of lady Roslin had wanted – and had never imagined – to be. And her groom, the Lord of Riverrun, had been earnest and sweet, a worthy replacement for his nephew in her eyes, and she had wanted so desperately to call off the entire affair. Instead, she had wept, and they had comforted her.
They had all been so achingly human.
She thinks she will never forget the horror in Edmure’s kind eyes when they had burst in and taken him captive, when they had showed him - showed them - what they had done to his nephew, to his sister. The King in the North had been hacked to pieces alongside his direwolf, the Lady of Winterfell thrown in the river with her throat slashed from ear to ear, is that not as you trouts prefer? her father had wheezed. The Stark bannermen had been chained or slain, and her father had crooned the Northern cause at an end.
And she had wept until she could not catch her breath, had clung to Edmure’s arm as though begging for repentance. Forgive me, she remembers pleading, I could not say, they forced me, and I never thought…not this, I did not think this… And she had not, she had never dreamed such horrors, such gladness at desecration.
She wonders if that is what he thinks upon, when he looks at their baby, and if he has decided whether or not he could someday forgive her.
“Please, my lady,” he says softly. “No. I think not.”
“I meant it as no offense,” she pleads, suddenly worried that he would take it as a jape, a cruelness to add to the pile of the rest. “I…I know you loved her well, and…”
She releases her held breath as Edmure rests a hand upon her cheek, and she sighs at the soft touch, at the sadness in his eyes. “Peace, Roslin,” he says gently. “I know you meant it sweetly.” He pulls his hand back, shifts the baby in his arms, studying the child’s undeniably Tully features. “Our mother died when I was young. My sister…Cat was as a second mother to me. I shall miss her every day.” His voice catches, and Roslin instinctively reaches out to lay a palm upon his forearm, suddenly uncaring if he will pull back or not, seeing only someone in pain in need of companionship. “But I do not want the shadow of that night hanging over us forevermore,” he adds, his voice stronger as he composes himself. “I do not want to look upon our daughter and be always reminded of what happened. And the gods save our little one from her aunt’s fate. I should not ill-wish her so.”
“Yes, my lord,” she says softly, with only a little bit of regret – she has already begun to refer to her baby as Catelyn in her head, had thought it suited well, but giving up the name is one of the only things that she can offer to a man who has lost so much. “You must choose another name for her, then.”
Edmure smiles – it does not reach his eyes as it once did when they danced, just after he draped a cloak of red and blue around her. “Another name of home, perhaps.”
“Yes,” Roslin replies, feeling a flutter of hope in her stomach – for them both, for their child, for the idea that one day they may indeed have a home of their own, far from the oppressing shadow cast by the Twins and from the grasping claws of Casterly Rock. “Something of home.”