Chapter Text
“The gods will protect him,” Ormund said.
“Like they protected my brother Daeron?”
Rhaelle had no use for prayers, not since the day she was used as coins to pay for her brother Duncan’s folly. But Ormund believed still in the Father’s justice and the Mother’s mercy. Please, I beg you, he implored. Save him! He is our son, our one and only.
Steffon’s fever raged and raged. Maester Cressen bled him, purged him, poured various concoctions down his throat, but nothing seemed to work.
“Oh they are cruel! The gods have always been cruel,” Rhaelle cried out.
“Do not say that. Do not give them cause to cast us out of their mercy.”
“Mercy? What mercy? What mercy have they ever shown me?”
“They gave us Steffon. They gave us our son.” The gods gave them the sacred bond holding their marriage together; the flesh and blood holding up the frail skeleton of their union.
“I gave you a son. Labored for three days and three nights to bring him into this world. And now the gods seek to rob us of him. Our son. Our only child. The only one we could ever have together.”
The long, arduous birth had done its damage, Cressen and the midwife both concurred at the time. There would be no other babe for Rhaelle, no other children for them.
I will trade you, Ormund promised the Stranger. My life for his. His life for his son, the boy who had been begging to climb onto his father’s back so he could pretend that he was riding a dragon, to play the game they had played countless times before.
“You are too old for this game now,” Ormund had scolded his son, not a fortnight before the fever started consuming Steffon.
“Just one more time. Please, Father?”
“I said no!” How would it look, Ormund thought at the time, for the future Lord of Storm’s End, a boy of seven, not five, not three, to be horse-playing and roughhousing with his father like he was a regular boy with no care in the world?
You are not like other boys. You are born to duty and inheritance. Never forget that, he had told Steffon, on the boy’s seventh nameday.
How foolish it all seemed now. How futile. He would play a hundred games with his son, pretend to be a dragon a thousand times over, if only Steffon would rise from his sickbed, if only he would live.
“We are being punished by the gods. No … I am being punished. It is my doing, it is my fault our son could die,” Rhaelle said, near tears.
Alarmed, Ormund closed the distance between them. Hesitantly, slowly, he placed his hand on her shoulder, half-expecting her to recoil from his touch. Instead, she raised her own hand to grasp his.
Their fingers intertwined, he said, “You have not done anything wrong, Rhaelle. Why should you be punished by the gods?”
He was the one being punished. Punished for being a father who cared more about duty and inheritance than about his son. It was his doing, his fault that their son might not live, he was convinced of that.