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It had taken a few days for Lady Alicent Hightower to be able to weep after her mother's death. The first night she did so, she wept until she lost her voice, face on the pillow, almost suffocating herself, at times, with her congested nose against wet fabric. As she managed to stop crying at last, she tore a thick piece of skin from her thumb with teeth in an attempt to stop the tears from returning.
She began to feel restless about the eventual silence of the room, and therefore wished to cry further, to fill in the quiet, but she was far too spent. What took hold of her now was pure exhaustion. She realized, unnerved, that her crying had not taken away the pain of loss from her chest; it only reminded her that she would have to live more countless nights of the same melancholy and hopelessness.
Alicent thought of knocking on her father's door, but decided that facing her current loneliness would be less frightening than facing the sad and tired look on Otto Hightower’s face.
She then thought of praying: it was what her mother would have done. How many times had she peered into her mother's chambers and found her murmuring prayers, with a seven-pointed star rosary in hand and tears wetting her eyes? Thus she left her own chambers, looking left and right before moving on, careful not to run into any guards. It was far past the hour of ghosts: Red Keep was as silent as her room, and, had Alicent not known that its residents were now asleep, it might as well have been completely empty; she did not encounter a soul as she followed an inconspicuous path to the castle's small sept.
She was not allowed to be in the sept so late at night, and Alicent's mother would not have approved of this small transgression. It mattered little what she would or would not have approved of, as she was now dead, albeit Alicent could not help but feel as if she was somehow troubling her, even in death.
In life, her mother always seemed troubled, even in moments most close of happiness; to be loved by her mother meant to know that some strange and unknown anguish would always accompany the love. Alicent oftentimes suspected that she was the reason of the troubling, other times she suspected that the reason was her father, or her brothers, or even something else entirely, and could never come to any conclusion: she did not know what could have put on her mother such a suffering-filled countenance. Perhaps it was a thing she did not yet understand. Alicent hated not understanding things.
Her mother would never be troubled again, of course, as she was now dead.
The castle’s sept did not in any way compare to the central sept of King's Landing, although it had a small altar for each divine face, and a small statue on each, which was already more than most private septs possessed. However, it was not frequently used, nor very well cared for: most of the candles on the altars were extinguished, and those that were lit produced only a few erratic shadows on the dusty walls in the midst of almost complete darkness.
That night, Alicent was not led by her feet and faith to the altar of the Maiden, as it usually happened. Not even to the altar of the Mother, where she had prayed days ago, following her own mother’s funeral. No; instead, she found herself kneeling before the altar of the Stranger; the statue almost her height, with its face covered, unknowable.
She struck a match and lit a single candle for the Stranger: it did not diminish the gloom of the sept, but crackled timidly in front of Alicent's face.
The young lady prayed without much practice, for she seldom spoke to this face of the gods, knew no hymn or common words, so her whispered prayers sounded to her ears like feverish reverie — had this been how her mother heard her own prayers before illness took her? —; yet Alicent went on until she did not know what more to say, obeying the demands of her heavy heart.
In the end, she felt nothing else; no relief nor grief. The silhouette of the statue, vaguely human, stood before her impassively: absent of the grace of the Maiden, or the care of the Mother, or the strength of the Father. Nothing.
She considered praying at another altar, but for the first time she felt what she would later come to know was incredulity: her prayers would never be the same without her mother's presence. Alicent’s faith but a cheap imitation of hers; she could only wish to be as dedicated a mother, wife, and devotee as her mother had been. A quiet hung over her, motionless.
Finally standing, she turned to leave and face once again the emptiness of her room, when a wind crept through the crack of a half-open stained glass window and whistled amongst the architecture of the sept, thus extinguishing the candle that Alicent had lit for the Stranger.
A shiver ran through Alicent's whole body, raising the hairs on her arms under her nightgown, in a frightening contrast of sensations: before, when she prayed, she felt all alone in the world, but now felt in the presence of something.
Holding back the impulse to ask aloud: who is there?, Alicent left the sept and was no longer carried by her own feet or faith, but by the whistle of the wind, which called: come, come, come. The voice of the wind ran through the corridors and disappeared ahead, as a child running away, begging Alicent to follow it. It took her to the godswood.
The silence of the place was less apprehensive than the silence of her apartments and the sept: there, it was not absolute, for owls were singing, and crickets, and the rustling of leaves was constant upon the evening breeze.
It was strange to be there at that hour, in solitude, without Rhaenyra's company. It was as if she was seeing something that no longer belonged to her eyes — that did not belong to anyone’s eyes, in truth.
The face carved in the weirwood stared at Alicent, as it had done countless times; little Alicent used to be quite nervous under that gaze, for she had never seen a heart tree before she came to the Red Keep. Now, she felt as if she was eight years of age again.
She noticed something wet running down her cheeks; as she put her hand to her own face, Alicent saw that she had begun to cry silently, at some point, without noticing. Her eyes leaking tears without permission as a tree trunk leaks sap or a fountain leaks water or a wound leaks blood.
The leaves fell in slow motion from the heart tree. Alicent then heard the voice of the wind, which was not in fact a voice, and did not speak words.
Child, bare your teeth.
She felt she should not speak. Instead, she thought her answer inside her mind: Who are you?
I have no name nor face. I am everything that you are not, and what you will become.
Alicent did not understand.
What do you want?, she asked, still in thought.
The wind said something too low to hear.
She knelt on the grass as she felt she should. She thought she must be talking to the Stranger himself. But do the Seven take shape of the wind? Do they take shape of the night, or of a weirwood?
Please, what do you want?, she insisted.
She still could hardly hear. Perhaps she was asking the wrong question.
Do you want?, she asked.
I do not want, I do not have desires; I have only what things are. But you want.
Alicent's hair flies untamed with the force of the wind.
You have secrets, as everyone does, and everything. But you know nothing of them.
I do, she replies.
Not yet.
She feels cold. She feels the urge to immerse her entire body underwater.
You do not know, but somewhere in the early days of your blood, in the crossing of the farthest vein, the First Men still in their youth inhabited these lands, and in that distant time a woman gave birth to a child at the bank of a stream, and with her own teeth cut the cord that bound her to her firstborn; she considered drowning the child in the water, but with our power heavy over her, she decided instead to leave him there in the grass, bloodied, to be taken over by the forest; a small piece of cord’s meat was stuck forever between her teeth.
The child, at the bank abandoned, received no protection from us, but was put to sleep soundly by our ancient song, until he was found by a family of wanderers who traversed there; they raised him as their own, and the cord on his navel was not torn off until the day he could, with his new teeth, bite it and swallow; not knowing that his mother had done same, and not knowing that he had been conceived by the violence of a man forcing his seed deep inside the woman's womb.
The meat of the cord, which was in the woman's teeth, was also in the teeth of the child, whose children, after, were also born with meat on teeth, and their children also, and again and again, long after, for thousands and thousands of moons; the children becoming kings and queens and lords and other things unimportant; at the end of this long path of blood, infinitely dissolved but still alive, you walk, child, with meat between your teeth, without knowing.
Alicent could not stop weeping, although it was not a pained cry, as it had been before in her bed, but a flowing and uninterrupted cry, such as the stream of a river. She thought of nothing.
I have no reign in this inhospitable place, but I come to meet you with my secrets, calling upon you with help of the solid truth of death, and remind you: child, it is the end of the path, but all else will go on as it always has; the soil, the beasts, the roots.
Be wild and not tamed, listen with care to the sound that comes out of you and reverberates in the world. Be as impure as your mother could not be, she whom now lies under the earth, awaiting. Throw yourself to the waters. You can be free only like this, or surrendering to the fire, and that is all. Know the meat between your teeth. Know this once, now, or nevermore. I come with this warning: my child, you must not remain.
I don't understand, Alicent said. And sobbed once, remembering she had a throat to speak. Do you want me to leave?, she asked. This time, she spoke aloud, not in thought, and frightened herself with the sound of her own voice. The wind simply blew.
Where must I go?, she pleaded.
Thus, everything fell silent. Even the owls. Even the crickets and the leaves.