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Cregan would have to be deaf and blind to not know of Baela Targaryen’s exploits in the capital.
He had left her there in the care of her brother’s council, a bloodless sword in her hand and the men who had saved her life, who she had saved by her own hand, at her back. His hands were clean of it, the vermin swept out, the traitorous brought to the wall or the headsman’s block, his blood welcoming the chill of the northern winds and the warmth of his own bed, and yet the ravens came.
Found in the company of whores, beggars, goldcloaks, and gods know what other kinds of rabble-
And came.
Should you be so kind as to send a letter recommending a course of action-
And came.
I do not wish to speak ill of the dead but even when he was living, Prince Daemon allowed her too much freedom-
Cregan grew weary of it, a new one presented to him nearly once a week, a lingering reminder that beneath the Neck was a land that required nearly as much attention as the wastes beyond the Wall.
Lady Baela has recently returned alive and well after disappearing for three days-
Lady Baela was caught wagering money and articles of clothing in a rat pit-
Lady Baela has offended Septa Amarys to the point that she has made the decision to return to Oldtown rather than continue in her work to break the lady of her scandalous endeavors-
Lady Baela-
Lady Baela-
Lady Baela-
It was as if these men, some twice his age, had never dealt with a rebellious child before. Or a woman with a will stronger than their own. He’d thought at least a Lannister would know how to work with the latter, their women were known for sharp tongues and unyielding dispositions no matter how much they tried to stamp it out at a young age. Why must they call for him? He who had practically caved to her will for a moment’s humor watching a girl barely into womanhood lift a sword against him and two dozen of his men in defense of her gutter rats? What consumed them to think that a thousand miles away he could do anything about the daily rebellions of a widowed girl who never even was permitted by gods and men to be a wife?
Permit the Lady Baela to take to Dragonstone and have her household there. In time, she may grow to accept responsibilty, is all he had eventually written back after the third, or maybe the fourth, panicked raven detailing long nights of drinking with her father’s goldcloaks and dangerous swims across the Blackwater Rush.
As the ravens continued to arrive weekly, still seeking his advice, despite him sending back the same advice every time, Cregan was starting to feel more than a bit weary of it. He’d started giving them to Sara to read, sitting in his solar as Rickon played with one of his little cousins, Jeyne, in the corner, knowing that his half-sister would pass on any relevant information.
“Missing?”
Surely, he had been mistaken. Surely, Sara had misspoken or he had misheard her. Baela Targaryen had disappeared before, but even news of that had not reached him for at least a week following her return. This raven was dated two days past, written in a rushed hand, ink smearing, the paper crinkled as he took it in his own hand.
The Lady Baela has absconded from King’s Landing and according to her legitimized uncle has fled to Pentos. She has refused to marry the choice of the crown in order to preserve the succession and has deeply offended Lord Rowan-
Again, he could not help but wonder if all the other liege lords of Westeros were imprisoned in this never-ending cycle of news involving the King’s sister. As for the offense of men, well, if they were able to be offended by the daughter of Daemon Targaryen then maybe they should have known better than to draw close to a spitting dragon.
Cregan had thought that would be the end of it.
He had been wrong.
. . .
Cregan recognized the men at his gates instantly, the rabble saved by their beloved lady who lifted a sword in their defense as blood slicked the stones around them, and he knew in his heart what he was about to find when he finally looked to the last of them.
Baela Targaryen looked half a Northerner and half a pirate. Her hair was cut to her jaw, the curls on top woven back into a pair of braids decorated with silver cuffs. Men’s trousers cut to fit shorter legs, fraying at the bottoms, a sword at her hip on her finely-made belt. A fine, though badly fitting, doublet in grey that was stained from travel with a thick cloak of black fur and wool atop it. The cloak was familiar, he’d seen it before on Prince Jacaerys’ shoulders when he’d brought him to stand atop the Wall and look out at a world few ever saw.
Her dressing as a man was not what concerned him, no, it was the fact that the letters had not truly conveyed how unwell she looked. Even after a month of captivity during the occupation of Dragonstone, she had seemed relatively healthy. A bit thin and tired, but nothing close to this gaunt-cheeked wraith of a girl that stood in his courtyard now. Her smile was nothing more than a cracked-lip gash of blood and bone, an unpleasant, ill-fitting thing on her face.
“My Lady,” Cregan said, bowing slightly, “I must admit I wasn’t expecting you. I had thought you would be enjoying the warmth of Pentos this winter.”
The flash of teeth turned bloodthirsty and sharp.
“It’s strange how such rumors spread, is it not? Despite what they say, my destination was always sure and set. Jacaerys spoke of this place with such fondness.”
She said his name like she had practiced it in front of a mirror, repeating it over and over until it no longer stung to form it, till the movements of it no longer broke open and bled. She said the Prince’s name like he said Arra’s.
“Winterfell welcomes you, my Lady.” He turned to the steward, “Bring out the bread and salt.”
And so his troubles began.
. . .
She came to dinner in a dress, a thick woolen piece in Targaryen black.
Polished dragonglass buttons glittered in the lights of the sconces, the edges of them wrapped in silver and gleaming, like a pretty handle on a rusty knife. They were barely a handful of bites into dinner when she spoke.
“He told me about the pact, about you, about this place. Jacaerys may have been dedicated to his mother’s cause but I know that he would have had only promised a daughter to a man he knew would protect her as his own child. You kept your oaths despite knowing that at the time, House Targaryen could hold up no such bargain.”
Cregan did not answer, watching her, waiting her out.
“Aegon is not even ten and he is frail, my Lord, as much as it pains me to say such things of my brother. What he witnessed in his captivity has left his distrusting and restless and is content to pretend his queenly wife does not exist up in her tower. We are the last of the Targaryens.” Lady Baela’s voice cracked on that, a hint of emotion slipping through, “Only four dragons remain to us.”
There had not been so few since the Targaryens had made Dragonstone their home. It was a humbling, harrowing thing to know. Cregan found himself wondering if the council even know how truly precarious the Targaryen hold on excellence had become. Without dragons, there was no guarentee that the Faith would uphold the Doctrine of Exceptionalism.
Without dragons, they would simply be men.
“A hatchling, one who nearly killed me when I attempted to claim it, one with a bastard girl atop it somewhere in the depths of the mountains, and a mourning queen who has not laid a single egg since she was claimed by Ulf the White.” She spat the traitor’s name like a curse, “When my sister marries, her children will have her husband’s name and unless a miracle should happen, not a single egg to lay in their cradles. We are a dying breed, my Lord Stark, and we still owe the North a great debt for the honoring of your oaths.”
Lady Baela drew in a steadying breath.
“Marry me, let me give you a sister for Rickon, a Targaryen for him to take to wife one day, in the traditions of mine and Jacaerys’ house.”
There it was. The solution to her husband problem wrapped up in a pretty bow of diplomancy and debt. He supposed he should feel flattered that every living southern man seemed to be unworthy of marriage in her eyes, drawing her sights north to him, but he wasn’t.
There was a wound there, in her soul. A wound that only she could heal, married or not, and it could fester. It was festering, really, for even the daughter of Daemon Targaryen had not been known for her recklessness before the Battle of the Gullet. If anything, Prince Jacaerys had spoken of her diplomacy and careful words honed in her grandmother’s house that concealed a fiery Targaryen temper.
“My son is no Targaryen, my lady, any wife of his will share no kinship.”
She waved a hand, almost casually, but it wasn’t. Her shoulders were tense beneath the black wool, the tall collar sharp against her pale hair.
“A sister, then, and only a sister. Should Aegon ever have a son of his own, you could strengthen your ties to the throne twofold.”
“No.”
She seemed to freeze in place, to stop breathing for a moment before she recomposed herself.
“No?”
“Marriage is not a means of escape, my Lady. Do not think me unknowing of the throne’s plans for you. What will the small council do to my people if I assist you in this scheme? Raise tarrifs on goods arriving from White Harbor? On goods making their way up through the Neck once winter has passed?”
“I will not marry Lord Rowan, my Lord. I would rather throw myself from the Wall.” She stood as she spoke, slamming her hands down on the dining table, dishware rattling with the force of her.
“Nor should you marry him if you do not wish to.” Cregan scoffed, “You are the daughter of Daemon Targaryen, thinking you would go quietly into a marriage of their choosing was their first mistake.”
“And their second?”
“Putting you in your chambers instead of a cell when you disagreed. Though I doubt that would have stopped you either, with the loyalty you’ve inspired in your household.”
He watched as Lady Baela almost laughed, mirthless humor in her eyes before they faded back into a desperate, almost dead look. Like a wounded animal struck by an arrow but not bleeding quick enough to die peacefully.
“The snows are heavy enough that the roads even to White Harbor will soon be impassable by outsiders and my lords here have very little reason to converse with the south.” Cregan finally stood, matching her with his hands on the table, “I am happy to shelter you here until winter is over and even after that, but I will not wed you.”
Rage as hot and volatile as dragonfire burned in her eyes then, the sharpest sign that she still lived, and there was even a sheen of tears there before she turned on her heel and stormed from the room.
. . .
She did not return to the castle until morning, though the guards were quick to tell him where she’d come from, the stench of her thick with brothel perfumes and spilled wine.
He’d sent a man to bring up whoever she may have paid, and the boy they brought to his solar was barely older than Lady Baela, maybe a year at most, but Cregan saw the reason she’d chosen him immediately. Dark hair that curled around his jaw, dark eyes, freckles. Not an exact resemblance to the late Prince but close enough, just enough to make do.
“I didn’t lie with her, milord,” the boy said, voice almost fearful, “At least not in that way. I took care of her, of course, as she wished, and then she wanted me to lay my head on her thigh so she could touch my hair and talk.”
“What did she say?”
The boy shrugged, “Not sure, milord. She wasn’t speaking Common.”
. . .
The Lady Baela is reportedly no longer in Pentos and has not been found on Dragonstone and Driftmark. The council would be grateful for any assistance or advisement you could give on this situation-
Cregan sighed. She’d never been in Pentos in the first place. It was almost concerning that this was the council that held the realm together, incompetent as they seemed to be of late.
You recieved my counsel and did not heed it. It would be good of you to remember that when winter ends, you may find me at your doorstep, seeking to ensure that the council works for the good of the Royal Family and of the Realm, not their own personal ambitions.
. . .
She rarely stayed out in town for more than a night, returning to her own bed in the safety and warmth of the castle walls by dawn. On the occasions she did stay out longer, the news was always brought to him and a further report given once she had finally returned.
This was different. She’d been out for three days and nights, simply sending one of her gutter rats to deliver the news that she still lived, which he supposed was more than she’d bothered to do for the council when she’d disappeared into the depths of the city for days without a single word.
And then came not one of her gutter rats, no, but instead the boy whore she favored, on the evening of the fourth day. His teeth were bloody, lip split, his gait limping from a swollen ankle, and Cregan had made the decision that whatever was going on would end that night.
“Tell me, now.” Cregan slowed his walk only slightly to not outrun the limping boy.
“The madam’s sent her over to a different tavern now, milord. She was picking fights with the men today, and the girls, anyone who’d give her a fight really. I stepped in when a drunk tried to kick her when she was down until her guards could get to us.”
“Good lad.” He made a mental note to have the boy provided for, for there were not many young men in his position would take such a hit. It never failed to amaze him how she so easily gained the loyalty of those around her, particularly of the smallfolk. He was sure that if he had tried to question the boy now as to her habits as he had in the beginning of her visits to him, he might not have been quite as successful.
“Is she well?”
The boy hesitated and Cregan’s heart sank.
“It was the Prince’s nameday this week, I believe.” Another hesitiation, “so no, milord, I don’t believe she is very well at all.”
His voice held not even a trace of mockery. Only worry. Loyalty, again, the loyalty. Any King would sacrifice much for the loyalty that the lowest of them gave this woman who should have been Queen. The Queen That Never Was, just like her grandmother before her, her throne and her children’s throne stolen out from under them by cowardly men.
Someone brought them horses then, the ones that had just come back from the patrol, their tack still on and readied, and they rode them down into the town towards the tavern the boy had come from.
. . .
She’d been sprawled across the lap of one of her bluecloaks when he’d found her, bloodied and doublet torn at the shoulder, and had kicked at him like some angry kitten as he dragged her out into the cold night.
Her bluecloaks had stood in her defense the second his fingertips had touched her, swords ringing, and it was only a command in her family’s tongue that settled them, allowing him to bring her outside uncontested. The smell of sweat and perfume and wine was sharp in the chill, blood shiny against her skin in the light from a nearby lantern.
“Look at this.” Cregan pressed his thumb into the cut on her lip, blood welling up and oozing around the digit, “Look at you. He would not want this.”
Baela slapped his hand away, snarling, but he was not cowed. He caught her flailing wrists in his hands, moving her bodily until her back hit the wall of the building. She spat blood at him, breath thick with the stink of wine, and he grit his teeth at the wet feeling on his neck, dripping hot past his collar. She smiled, sharp and cruel and ugly.
“Do you still ache for your wife?” She asked, red dripping down her chin, “Do you wake wanting for the warmth of her? Tell me, my lord, how different can one cunt feel from another?”
Anger flared in his chest, his hands tightening around her, pushing her back with more of his weight even as he shook her slightly, “Stop this. Do you not think? I have given you these days of drinking and revelry and nights with your whores without judgement. I have given you a place to hide without asking anything in return, and this is how you speak to me?”
It was unfair to say such things, he knew that, for in her drunken wounded state or in her more sober, wraithlike state, she owed him nothing for his hospitality. Nor would she ever. The Pact may go unfufilled but his own blood had sealed his oaths of fealty, oaths of friendship, of brotherhood. She would have been a sister to him through that oath, should things have gone the way they were meant to, should she have been the mother of his son’s wife, the grandmother of his grandchildren.
Perhaps that was why she’d chosen him over all the others, some kind of Targaryen queerness, some need for a brother of some kind to take to husband, even if they were only connected by oath and word and the ritual sharing of blood. That was how Targaryen’s married, wasn’t it? On their little island of rock and glass and stinking of sulphur, bleeding wounds and sips of red from ceremonial cups? Some strange similiarty between different gods, different oaths sworn by the blood of ritual, oaths that could not be undone by a crown or king.
“He’s such a pretty whore, don’t you think? Not as comely as Jace, of course, but pretty enough to please my eyes. He has a sister too, you know, hair dark as night, with the prettiest little ringlets.”
She strained against his hold, her words slurring from the wine and the ache from her bruised, swelling jaw, hair scraping against the rough wooden slats behind here, “She looks a bit like what Rickon’s wife should have been, I think. We can still have her, you know? I won’t even mind if you close your eyes and pretend I’m Arra. If you do it, it makes me feel less guilty about doing that myself.”
What could he say that he hadn’t already said before? He felt like every conversation with her was a circle, neverending and never resolved, spotted and speckled with insults intended to get a rise out of him. If he hadn’t known who she was before, maybe they would have worked. She wanted a reaction from him, wanted power over him, as a woman, as a wife, as the mother of his child, and every day he fought the urge to allow it. To grant it to her and give in to what she wanted.
But it wasn’t what she really wanted, was it? He was simply the lesser evil, the gentler hand even as he refused to ease along her own rotting, festering existence.
She wanted a dozen things at once, all conflicting and cruel and ugly and he understood it because after Arra had bled out upon their bed he had wanted them too. Had wanted to escape his pain, to climb out of his own body and flee from it as if it wouldn’t cling to his very soul. He’d been kinder before Arra died. In the wake of her, there was nothing but not enough feeling and too much feeling all at once, misery and craving for sleep, for something that would make his belly feel full, for the pinprick of cold on his bare skin. The warmth was too much like her, too much like memory, even the heat of Rickon in his arms, the last trace of her form, was too much to bear at times. His father had been married before Cregan’s mother, married to her elder sister who he was fond of, and her death had carved into him like a knife. He’d been like Baela, in a way, seeking the warmth where he could find it after, and it was no coincidence that his half-sister Sara had been born not even a year after his first wife’s death.
Rickon Stark had never treated Cregan’s mother cruelly. He had never raised a hand to her or even his voice, but he never loved her. Not as a good man should. The wound from his first wife lingered and wept infection and misery no matter how well he seemed to hide it. Cregan would not let history repeat itself, not in this place, not in his family, not even with her.
He dropped her hands and she slumped back against the wall, flinching away slightly as he took her chin in his hands again, tilting her face to get a better look at the bruising on her jaw, the places their skin met tacky with blood and sweat.
“You can fool them, Baela,” her breath hitched beneath his hand, “but you don’t fool me. You dream of death, you think of it constantly in the quietest ways. His, yours, it lives within you and you feed it. You give it pieces of yourself to fill its belly and then it asks for more, doesn’t it?”
Her eyes burned with fury and when she went to speak, he held her chin tighter, pushing her head further back into the wall, “He’s gone, my Lady, and he doesn’t want you following him. Not like this, not young.”
There was a moment of frozen silence before Baela’s hand clamped around his wrist, wrenching it away even as she cried out in pain from the pull on her injured jaw, and he let her move him away. Her wrist was so frail next to his that he feared that stopping her movement might snap it in two.
“You’re not my father,” She said, “and you’re not my husband. You have no authority over me, not here, not anywhere.”
She stepped further into his space, nearly chest to chest.
“And you don’t know what he would have wanted for me. You didn’t know him. I know him. I’m the only one left that knows him and no sharing of blood beneath a heart tree will ever give you the right to speak for him.”
“If he loved you, which he did, he would want you to live as any man who loves would.”
Baela’s eyes were shiny with tears, with rage, with hatred.
“If he loved me, he would have married me when I asked.” She stepped back, “but he didn’t. And now he never will.”
He didn’t stop her when she walked away, watching as the whore she was so fond of met her at the door of the tavern, his dark eyes full of concern.
She ignored his touches, brushing past him without a word, and Cregan watched the young man’s face fall.
. . .
She did not visit the whore again.
. . .
The report came of another fight the next night, of one of her bluecloaks losing a finger in a brawl in her defense. He saw her at the other end of the hall late one night as he walked, unable to sleep, her hair pale in the dark like a ghost.
They did not speak.
They went their separate ways.
. . .
Three more nights passed before she returned to the castle.
He did not see her at dinner, not that he’d been expecting to, and had retired to his solar to tend to his correspondance once Rickon had been put to bed. It was late, far later than normal, when he finally went to his own bed.
Cregan had not expected her at dinner, he had expected her even less to be waiting for him in his quarters. Especially not in his bed, the skin of her bare shoulders dark against his linens where she lay on her belly beneath the blankets and furs, blinking sleepily at him.
“These aren’t your chambers.”
She huffed out a laugh at him, as if she wasn’t a bed thief, as if she wasn’t, presumably, naked in it as well.
“I was cold, my Lord.” There was a hint of teeth there, a flash of an almost-smile, a glare of the hearth reflecting off the sheen of spit around her mouth and the half-empty bottle on the bedside table, “I thought maybe I could find warmth.”
“Warmth? Or that your standing will be compromised enough that I will be drawn to pity and duty and marry you then?”
A shrug, the shift of blankets and furs upon her skin as she rolled to her side, facing him. The hollows of her collarbones were sharp, dark with shadows, the skin just above it shiny and pink with burn scars.
“There’s not much left to compromise. As for pity and duty?” Her voice sounded wrong, somewhere between half-dead and slurred from the ale, “As long as I’m warm you can make whatever choices you wish.”
He sighed loudly, bolting the door and rubbing a hand roughly over his face. The fire in the hearth was still warm when he approached it, but growing low, and after tossing his cloak over the back of one of the armchairs he knelt to put wood in the fire. The position put his back to her, guarding his face from her sight, and he shook his head at her words.
“Gods, woman. You truly are his daughter.”
She laughed, it was almost happy. Almost.
“They said that too. Too much trouble to be Queen without Jace at my side. Too much kissing with too many boys, making too many friends of whores and beggers.”
Cregan tosssed another log onto the fire, watching the sparks fly upwards and burn out upon the hearth, “Not to mention the gambling, the horse racing, and the disappearing.”
He glanced back at her, watched her shrug at that, at the way the blanket fell around her chest, her hair pale against the pillows. She looked horribly young, then. It made him ill.
“I’m sorry,” she said, almost sweet, “For talking about your wife’s cunt.”
It was such an absurd statement that he almost laughed. If she’d had been a man and spoken of Arra the way she had those days prior, he would have been unable to control his anger. It was his weakness, he knew it, that thread of rage in his chest that when pulled could nearly unravel him. They were alike in that, he couldn’t help but notice, and her thread was much more easily pulled.
The fire crackled loudly as he rose to his feet again. He barely heard her over it when she finally whispered her answer.
“You should not have,” He said, feeling almost as though he was speaking with Rickon after he’d done something he wasn’t meant to, “You meant to make me angry but I am not some southern man who you can sway so easily, my Lady.”
“Should I go?” Her voice was terribly small, it made his chest hurt just to hear it.
He should let her go. He should have her taken back to her rooms, should call her maids to dress her and ensure the guards forgot they saw her enter. But to let her stay…
Maybe letting her stay could lance the wound, drain at least part of the infection. A safe place to be filled with rage, with grief, with suffering. A safe place to bleed.
“No, my Lady. You can stay if you wish.”
She sniffled in the bed. He wished for wine or a sword, anything to busy his hands. Too restless to sit, too trapped to leave.
“Do you miss her?” Baela paused, “your wife?”
Gods, he hated how even the very question brought the thick feeling of tears to his throat, the burning behind his eyes.
“I do,” And it wasn’t enough to just say that, but he had never been a man for flowery words, for poems and songs and the arts of expressing one’s love for another.
She was the sun in winter, he wanted to say, but didn’t, she was the moon in summer, and she was everything lovely in the world in between.
“I miss him,” Baela said again in that little voice, something almost frail, “All of them, all the time. But especially him; and then I feel guilty because when I miss him, I get angry at him.”
There was a line, jagged and low, on the trunk of the weirwood tree, where in his worst moments of anger after Arra, he had taken Ice from his back and struck it as if it would allow him to strike the gods that failed to protect her.
“He wouldn’t marry me either, even though we were betrothed, even though I begged and pleaded. At war’s end, he’d say, as if there was any chance we would both make it there alive. When he died I hated him for that and at war’s end I drank and raged and wept and found a man at the brothel with pretty dark curls and pretended he was Jace. I thought it’d save me, that they wouldn’t want to marry me then. If they thought me ruined, maybe I could be permitted to live as I pleased.”
It hadn’t been enough.
“I should have died with him, it would have been better that way. Kinder. Anything is better than this, stuck running for the rest of my life to keep from being trapped in a marriage that I don’t want, the two men I’m willing to marry suddenly and strangely unwilling to take me to wife. ”
Part of him couldn’t blame her for her fury. The road north was a long one by sea and land alike, reaching the end of it only to be rejected would have been quite the blow.
“You would grow to resent it, once the feeling of victory over the council faded,” Cregan said, “You have known love once, it is the root of your suffering, and you’ll never be happy so long as you are in a marriage without it.”
She scoffed loud enough that part of him worried the guards outside might hear it. But what would it matter? It wasn’t as though she’d been subtle in her activities in the north or the south. Everyone in this keep knew why she was here. Everyone knew what she was running from.
Everyone knew the only true way to save her from it.
“I never want to love again.”
Neither do I. He wanted to say, but didn’t. Let her have a little hope, even if she didn’t want it, didn’t accept it, even if she hated the very thought of it.
So he said nothing, let the silence stretch out like a lonely road ahead of them, long enough that he wondered if she’d finally succumbed to the warmth of the furs and the wine and had fallen asleep.
“I miss my father.”
She was crying now, he could tell, could hear in her voice and in her breathing. Cregan knew the reports from the Riverlands, from Maidenpool. How Daemon Targaryen had made the Riverlands his hunting grounds for his kinslaying nephew with the bastard dragonrider Nettles at his side. They were close, Cregan knew that for fact, the Lord of Maidenpool told him of a doting prince and adjoining bedrooms. Days on dragonback and shared tubs. The girl was no older than his own daughters, daughters who needed him.
Daughters who now went without his protection in a world of greedy, calculating men.
While he had been sharing a bathtub with his paramour, his daughter had been holding the seat at Dragonstone and grieving the life she should have had there. Grieving more and more, one by one, until all were dead but three. Suffering alone as a prisoner and then once freed, bold enough to lift a sword against a dozen men in defense of her own, with no one to stand behind her but those she defended. A Queen in her own right.
“I hated him. I still do, I can’t help it. I hate all of them for leaving like they did.”
Cregan could not help but turn then to face her, to see the tears on her cheeks bright and shining in the light from the fire, to see the pale of her hair against the furs, against her own skin.
“He’d never let them do this, let us be married off like cattle and hunted like common thieves. He’d kill them, all of them.”
Prince Daemon, even with all his flaws, would have slaughtered and burned every soul in the Riverlands and King's Landing for his children. Cregan knew that in his heart, in his soul.
He moved towards the bed, his shadow casting on the wall, the light barely reaching her around him. She watched him with weary eyes.
“You’ll be safe here, I swear it to you.”
She scoffed, softer this time, “Don’t make such promises. You may yet find them hard to keep.”
“An oath then?”
There was a knife in his bedside drawer, one with a handle made from the same piece of weirwood that the beads for Arra’s wedding cloak had been carved from. The very same blade that had bound the oaths he and Prince Jacaerys had made at the beginning of the war, their blood shed against its edge. It shone in the light as he brought it out and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Targaryens haven’t managed to keep an oath for you quite yet,” Baela said, almost lighthearted despite her tears, “Despite my efforts.”
She sat up, drawing the furs up to cover her chest. The scarring from her burns stretched beneath the blankets, down her breasts, towards her armpits, shiny as dragon scales.
“And yet, there has never been a Stark that has forgotten one, and I have no intention of being the first.” He met her eyes, turning the knife over in his hand and letting the blade rest cold against his palm, “Prince Jacaerys’ death was no insult, it was a tragedy and I have never regretted keeping my oaths I made to him.”
She watched him for a long moment, stunned, before she wiped her face with her hands and reached out for the knife.
“And tell me, my Lord Stark, what oath must House Targaryen make to you now, that I may be the first of us to finally keep it?”
There was only one thing he could think to ask for, for if she had not mentioned it, he would have asked for nothing at all.
“That you live.” She looked as though he had struck her, “That you fight to live to be an old woman so that you will not go to him young. That you live long enough that when you go to him, he will have a glimpse of what it might have been like to grow old together.”
Her hand trembled where it still stretched expectantly in the space between them, falling to the furs. Cregan did not hesitate then, pressing the blade into his palm and feeling the sting as the blood welled up around the steel. She sobbed as she took the offered blade, dripping red, opening her palm to match, and he clasped their hands together. Blood ran down their arms, dripping into the furs.
“I will do whatever it takes, should that day come that the council or any other man comes to take you away against your will, to protect you. While I draw breath, you will never be compelled or ordered to marry against your will. While I draw breath, there will always be a place for you here in Winterfell. I will defend you and yours with my body and blade, this I swear to you before the old gods, on the memory of my wife.”
He squeezed her hand, the wound flaring with pain, but he did not falter.
“I will strive to live,” Baela whispered, “I will strive to go home to my mother and my father and my heart an old woman, as you’ve asked of me. I swear this to you before the old gods and my father’s gods too, on Jace’s memory.”
The winter winds howled in the trees.
The weirwood wept tears of blood.
Later, the blood will clot on their bodies, will dry tacky and red against their arms.
He’ll ask where her nightgown went.
Wouldn’t you like to know? She’ll taunt, but her smile won’t be cruel, and there will be a little laugh in her lungs when he rolls his eyes, when he brings a shirt out of the drawer and draws it over her head.
He’ll do everything in his power to ignore the feelings that the sight of her in his clothes makes him feel.
The maids will talk, She’ll say with a raised brow.
It’s winter, he’ll say, lying on the other side of the bed, not touching, but there, unwilling to send her away when he’s already told her she can stay, they’ll be bored by a fortnight’s end, searching for something new to gossip about.
We could keep them truly entertained if you gave me a babe.
He’ll give her a look, she’ll laugh into a pillowcase stained with blood. Her split lip from the tavern fight will break open, smearing on her mouth.
It was worth a try, she’ll whisper, if only to see your reaction.
You’re a pest, he’ll reply, but there will be no heat behind it.
She’ll giggle, she’ll laugh more than he ever thought he’d hear from her, and when the giggles turn to tears, he’ll run his uninjured hand over her moonbeam hair like he would Rickon’s in his crib, like he would Arra’s in their marriage bed, like his mother would do to his before she sent him to bed.