Chapter Text
The Day My Father Gave Me to a Lion
The news came over supper, as so many things in my life have. He told me with the smile of a man who thinks he’s won a wager, his goblet raised before he even spoke the name.
Tywin Lannister. The golden lion of the West, Lord of Casterly Rock, father to the Queen, grandfather to a future King. And now, it seems, husband to be—to me.
My father looked at me as if expecting thanks. As if I ought to leap across the table and kiss the ring he does not wear.
“Do you know what this means?” he asked, as though I might be too simple to grasp the weight of what he’d arranged.
I knew. I have always known. The first time a Brax girl is told not to run in the courtyard too loudly, not to laugh too much, not to talk of swords or books, not to frown when men look—she begins to understand. The first time she bleeds, and the maids smile with pity, she knows. I’ve known since I was nine and watched my cousin weep behind her veil the night before her wedding. I knew before he said Tywin Lannister’s name. It was only ever a matter of whom.
Father’s voice was heavy with pride, and I wondered if he could taste the iron in it. As if he’d won me a prize instead of selling me like a broodmare gilded for auction. I think he half-believes it was merit, some clever maneuver. But men do not marry girls for wit or virtue. They marry them for blood and hips. An heir. That is what he said.
“You will give him heirs.”
As though he had made them in his mind already—cubs with hair like gold and hearts like flint.
Tywin Lannister is old. Older than my father, who wheezes when he rides and winces when the wind shifts. Tywin Lannister’s daughter is two years older than me. Her child—his grandchild—is swaddled in silks by now, a prince for a warrior king.
I remember seeing Lord Tywin once when I was small. He came to talk with my father about a debt, or perhaps a marriage—always the same coin in different mouths. He looked like something carved from stone. He did not blink, nor smile, nor spare a single glance toward my mother or me. He spoke with my father for hours and left as silent as he came.
He is not the sort of man to strike a girl across the face, I think. But neither is he the sort to ask if it hurts. I do not expect kindness. I do not expect cruelty. I expect civility. That is enough.
The western wind is cruel, always. It slips through the shutters no matter how tight you seal them. You learn to sleep with your back to it. You learn to endure it. So I will endure this too.
—L.B.