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The road back to King's Landing smelled like rain, river mud, and the particular sour grief of a house in mourning. It had soaked into your traveling cloak, into the wool of your dress, into your hair, into the creases behind your knees where you had been sitting in a jolting carriage for three days and two nights. You were not sure you would ever be rid of it entirely - the smell of Casswell's sorrow, your sister's swollen eyes, the small embroidered blanket still folded at the foot of the cradle as though someone had simply forgotten to put it away.

You had held her for a long time, the morning you left. Your sister had stopped crying by then, wrung out as an old cloth, and she'd only leaned her head against your shoulder and been still while you stroked her hair the way your mother used to, when you were very small and the world had seemed large and unkind.

She had been married not yet two years - a good match, a lord's second son with a steady income and a gentle disposition, and she had been so pleased with herself at the wedding, your younger sister, with her new ring, her new name, and her whole life arranged before her like something bright. You had danced at her wedding and toasted her happiness, and you had meant it, every word of it. You had meant it so thoroughly that when the raven had come, four weeks ago while you were already deep in your own grief, you had packed your bag without hesitating and told Daeron you were going.

He had nodded. He had been drinking already, at midday - not heavily, just the beginning of it, the first glass that was still social and almost respectable - and he had nodded and said go, and his eyes had been soft and genuinely sorry, and so you had gone.

And you had held your sister for nearly two weeks.

Now you were in a carriage, and the road was long, and your back ached, and the grief of your younger sister sat in the bottom of your chest beside your own grief, the two of them making company for each other, which was the only comfort available.

You had not told Daeron about the boy. The little carved rattle, the embroidered linens, the small hopeful accumulation of a twenty-week pregnancy — you had not told him it was a boy, the maester had mentioned it quietly and you had absorbed the word and kept it. You were not sure why. Perhaps because the naming of it would have made a specific grief out of something that was already unbearably specific. Perhaps because Daeron, in those four drunk days afterward, had been unreachable in his own way, and adding another stone to what he was already carrying had seemed cruel.

Perhaps simply because you had wanted something to keep. Something that was only yours.

Grief was a territory you had learned, these past years, against your will. You knew its topography now - the first sharp drop of it, the way it leveled out into a kind of grey flatness, the unexpected places where it suddenly deepened again, the step you didn't see coming. You had thought, going to your sister, that you understood it well enough to be useful. That whatever you had learned in your own losses could be offered to your sister in hers. And you had been, perhaps, of some small help - your presence if nothing else, your hands, your willingness to simply be there without trying to fix what could not be fixed. But what you had not accounted for was how much of your sister's grief would find the places in you that were not yet fully healed, that were still raw in the dark. You had held her, and you had meant it, and somewhere inside yourself you had been holding your own things too, pressed together, and the weight of all of it had been considerable.

The carriage lurched over the stones of the city gate and you pressed your palm flat against the cool glass of the window, and you watched the city take shape around you - the stalls and the towers, the press of evening life, the distant grey mass of the Red Keep rising up above everything like a thing that had always been there and would always be. The lamps were already lit along the walls. You had hoped to arrive before supper, before the court gathered itself into its careful formations and you would be required to smile and enquire after people's children, but the road had been slow and it was what it was.

You arrived a full day before you were expected, which had seemed, that morning, like a small mercy. You had allowed yourself to imagine stepping quietly through the apartments, washing the road from you, sleeping for twelve hours without dreaming of anything at all. The week at Casswell had been exhausting in the particular way grief exhausted - not the body so much as whatever it was that lived behind your eyes and had to manage all of the feelings on everyone's behalf. You had managed a great deal of feeling over the past week. You were ready, now, to stop managing for a while.

The carriage slowed. A servant appeared at the door and you stepped out without waiting for assistance, your legs stiff, your back aching. The courtyard was almost empty at that hour - most of the household was at supper, or preparing for it. Good. You thanked the driver, instructed one of the lingering servants to see to your bags, and made your way inside through a side entrance, up a back stair, along the corridor you knew better than any other in that place.

You and Daeron shared an apartment in the usual fashion - a solar, a shared anteroom, your respective sleeping chambers on opposite sides. It was a good arrangement. It afforded privacy in the way that court life so rarely did. When he had had too much to drink and could not bring himself to be still, you did not have to lie awake listening to the particular restlessness of him, the pacing, the way he would sometimes sit up through the deep hours and you would hear him from the other side of the wall, moving, resettling, unable to hold still. And when you had cried yourself into a kind of numbness in the middle of the night and could not face the thought of anyone witnessing it, even him - especially him - you did not have to.

It had been a very useful arrangement, these past months.

You paused at the door to your own chamber first, pushed it open, stood for a moment in the threshold. Your maid had kept it tidy in your absence - the fire banked but not lit, the bed made with its familiar coverlet, the little blue vase on the windowsill holding the dried stems of something that had once been flowers. Lavender, you thought. Long past its keeping. Daeron had put them there; you had come home from a walk in the godswood one afternoon, weeks ago now, to find them still fresh and purple and papery in the blue vase you had always liked, with no note, because he would never leave a note about a thing like that, it would embarrass him. He had been sitting in the solar pretending to read when you'd come back in, and when you'd said something about the flowers he had turned a page he had clearly not been reading and made a sound that might charitably be interpreted as acknowledgment. And yet they had been there.

You looked at the dried stems for a moment. Then you looked away.

You ought to wash. You ought to eat something. Instead, you found yourself crossing the room toward the door that connected to the shared anteroom, intending only to knock on Daeron's door and say I'm home, a day early, how are you - something simple and unremarkable that would establish the fact of your return without ceremony, that would let you go to bed without the strangeness of having said nothing. You were very tired of things being strange. You were tired of managing the gap between what was and what you would prefer, of navigating the particular silence that had descended over your marriage after the third miscarriage, the way you had both been exquisitely careful with each other in a manner that was not tenderness but something more like the caution of two people moving around a cracked thing that could not be allowed to fully break.

You were tired of careful. You were tired of managing. You knocked once, lightly, pushing the door open as you did, the way you always had in three years of marriage, because that had never been a room that required much formality between you.

The smell reached you first.

Wine, overripe and stale. Candles burnt low, the bitter end of their wicks. And beneath those, warmth, close human warmth, the thick animal smell of a room that had had too many people in it and not enough windows opened.

You stood in the doorway and your mind did something it sometimes did in moments of shock - it became very methodical, cataloguing details in the order it could bear them. A wine bottle on the table beside the bed, tipped at an angle, a dark stain spreading in a slow patient arc across the wood beneath it. Two cups. Not one. Two cups. Daeron's cloak on the floor in a heap near the door, as though it had simply been shed and forgotten. His boots, kicked off near the hearth. The hearth itself cold now, ash pale and settled. The candles on the far table guttered down to their bases.

And Daeron, on the bed.

He was sprawled on his back in the way of a man who had not so much fallen asleep as been felled by it - one arm thrown over his eyes, the other dropped open at his side, fingers curled loosely upward. His sandy hair was loose. He was completely, thoroughly, unambiguously unclothed.

And beside him.

The girl was young. Younger than you, perhaps. Her dark hair was spread loose across the pillow - not your pillow, not the one from your chamber, but close enough, the same set, the same fabric - and she was sleeping with the deep, uncomplicated ease of someone who had drunk well and had no complicated feelings about where she had ended up. The sheet was pulled to her waist. The sheet that the chambermaid had last folded back with neat precise corners.

You stood there.

You could not say how long. Long enough for the candle nearest the door to gutter in the draft you'd brought in with you. Long enough for the cold from the corridor to creep up through the soles of your travel boots. Long enough for your mind to stop cataloguing and simply see - to take in the full and complete and undeniable picture and understand it without any further work of interpretation. You had thought yourself prepared for something like this. You had thought, in the loose unexamined way you had trained yourself in, that you knew what you were married to, and what that meant, and what it would cost you. You had thought you had taken the measure of the worst of it.

Something happened in your chest. Not the sharp crack you had felt before - the breaking of the first pregnancy, the second, the devastating specific weight of the third - this was something slower, something more internal. A door, somewhere very deep. A latch dropping into its socket. A sound so quiet you almost didn't hear it.

You took one breath.

Then another.

Then you closed the door.

---

You were very calm in the anteroom. You noted this about yourself with some detachment, the way you noted the weather - coldly, at a remove. Your hands, when you looked at them, were steady. Your pulse was even enough. You sat down in the chair nearest the cold hearth and you folded your hands in your lap and you looked at the middle distance and you thought, with extraordinary clarity. So that is it, then.

You had known, of course. In the loose, unexamined way that one knew the things one did not wish to examine. He had always been out late. He had always come back smelling of drink and smoke and something else, on the worst nights - something that was not wine, not woodsmoke, not the particular damp of the Keep.

You had told yourself you did not know what it was. You had been very committed to not knowing, because not-knowing was a thing you could live inside, and knowing was not. The brothels had been mentioned to you once, by a woman at court, with a smile that was not quite a smile, and you had held your expression and changed the subject and gone back to your rooms and sat at the window until you could breathe properly again. But there had always been - you had always believed there was - a difference. Between out there, somewhere in the dark city in the places you could not see and therefore could not fully believe, and here. In the apartment. In the bed. On the pillow.

Really, Daeron. The thought was level and cold and entirely clear. The whores were one thing. But here. Here.

You thought about your sister's face in the doorway when you had arrived at Casswell - the pale, stripped look of someone who had cried past the point of crying, who had gone somewhere beyond it and was sitting quietly in that beyond, waiting to come back. You had crossed the room, and your sister had folded against you, and you had held her. You had held her for a week. You had offered her the full weight of your presence because it was the only thing you had to give, and you had given it without reservation, because she was your sister and you loved her and that was what love meant, in the end - you showed up, you stayed, you gave what you had.

You thought about the box in the back of the wardrobe. The carved rattle. The embroidered linens. The small soft things you had packed away because looking at them was not something you could manage and throwing them away was not something you could manage either, and so they sat in the dark.

You thought about sitting in this same apartment four weeks ago, after the maester had said what he had to say in the quietest and most careful of voices, sitting in the chair by the window while the afternoon simply moved around you without asking your permission. You thought about Daeron knocking on your door at some point, and the long silence on the other side of it while he waited, and how you had not answered because you simply could not, could not open the door and arrange your face or be present for anything beyond your own stillness. About how his footsteps had eventually moved away. About how the next morning he had sat across from you at breakfast and been quiet, careful, and had not drunk anything until after midday and had left a glass of warmed cider near your plate without a word, and how you had picked it up and how the warmth of it had moved through your hands and into your chest and how that had been, in some terrible way, enough. The full extent of what either of you could do, and you had received it like bread given at a lean table, grateful and aching all at once.

One week after, you had left.

And he had done this.

You were on your feet before you had decided to stand. Your body had done this before - moved while your mind was still sorting itself, made the decision before you were ready - and you followed it because there was nothing else to do. You went to your chamber. You changed out of the travel dress into the plainest gown you owned, dove grey, worn soft at the elbows, the one you'd never wear to supper. You reached up and began pulling pins from your hair one by one, setting them on the vanity table in a neat row because your hands needed something to do, and then your hair came loose around your shoulders and you looked at yourself in the mirror for a long moment - hair loose, grey dress, travel-pale face with shadows beneath your eyes - and then you looked away because looking at yourself right then was not useful.

You pulled on your cloak. The plain one. You took the small coin purse from your traveling bag, tucked it inside the cloak, and went out through a servant's passage that let out near the lower courtyard, and from there through a gate that was rarely watched in the evening hour. Then, you were outside the Keep's walls and the city was below you and the cold came up from the river and you walked into it because there was nowhere else to be.

---

You had never moved through King's Landing truly alone. There had always been guards, or a maid, or another lady, the small knot of respectability that marked you as someone belonging to someone. Without it you were simply a woman in a plain cloak with loose hair, and the city, to its immense credit, ignored you entirely. A fishwife shouldered past you on the hill steps without apology. A man leading a cart horse did not look up. Children ran in the gutter and cut across your path and did not pause. It was, in its way, a relief - to be nobody, to be nameless, to move through other lives with no one examining yours for signs.

You were feeling a great deal, and it came in waves as you walked. Not the cold clarity of the anteroom anymore, but something wilder and less organised - working its way up through your chest in surges that you breathed down, carefully, because you would not cry in the street. You were a lady married to a prince, and you were furious, and you were heartbroken, and underneath all of it you were tired, so profoundly tired, in a way that reached down past your bones into something even deeper, and you could not tell which of those things was largest, only that all of them were present and none of them had anywhere to go.

The tavern appeared before you without any particular intention on your part. It was a decent establishment - not fine, nothing the court would frequent, but clean, with solid chairs and an actual burning fire and a smell of bread and tallow rather than anything worse. A woman behind the bar looked at you with the incurious assessment of someone who had seen everything. You took a table near the fire, not too near the door, not too near anyone else, and when the woman came you asked for an ale.

"Just the ale?"

"Just the ale."

You sat with the cup in front of you and the fire making the room warm and orange, and you thought. You thought about the way the girl's hair had fanned across the pillow. You thought about two cups, not one.

You thought about the lavender in the blue vase, dried to nothing now, and the poem Daeron had read by the fire five Sundays past, his voice slow with wine but warm with it, something from a Lyseni poet, lilting and sad, and you had been pretending to embroider and not pretending at all, really, only listening. You thought about the way he had caught your hand once, walking back from the sept in the morning, simply caught it and held it without preamble or comment, and you had walked that way for the length of the corridor until you'd reached the door of the solar, and then he had let go as though it hadn't happened.

You thought about three miscarriages, and you counted them, one by one, the way you always did when you needed to understand the full scale of something. The first, so early the maester had said some women never even knew - as if ignorance would have made it painless. The second at twelve weeks, far enough along for hope, not far enough for official mourning, not far enough for anyone to grieve with you in any recognised way, and so you had grieved alone, in the chair by the window, very quietly. And the third.

Twenty weeks. Far enough for the flutter of movement, far enough for the court to know, far enough for the little gifts to arrive - the embroidered linens, the carved rattle, the small soft accumulations of other people's hope on your behalf. Far enough that the maester had been able to tell you it was a boy, once you had miscarried, and you had folded that knowledge up and kept it.

You picked up the ale and drank.

It tasted terrible. Bitter, flat, yeasty, and nothing like anything you would choose. You drank it anyway because Daeron drank to make unbearable things bearable, and you had always quietly judged him for it. Now, here you were, and you drank it, and you couldn't help but ask yourself if it was your fault. Was it because of the miscarriages? Because I couldn't give him -

You did not finish the thought. You didn't need to. It had always been there, patient and ugly, waiting underneath the surface of every kind moment, every poem read by firelight, every dried flower in a blue vase. Was it because you couldn't hold a pregnancy past twenty weeks? Was it because every time the loss came it had taken something else with it, some warmth or reaching-toward, some willingness to be close, until the space between your chambers had become the space between your lives? Was it your fault, in some essential way, that he had gone looking elsewhere? Was there some deficiency in you, some fundamental unworthiness, that had -

The ale cup was empty.

You ordered another, which you did not finish.

You rented the room above the stairs.

It was a narrow room with a single window, a washbasin, a hook for clothes, and a bed that was perfectly serviceable if not particularly comfortable. The innkeep's wife showed it to you without asking questions, which was the second kindness the city had done you that night. You paid three days in advance because you were not sure, yet, how long you would stay - only that you could not go back that night and you could not go back the next day, and beyond that you had not thought, because thinking too far ahead had always been how you came to conclusions you were not ready for. You would think as far as three days. Three days was enough.

The wife handed you the key and went back downstairs, and you stood alone in the room with the night sounds of the city coming through the thin walls and the one window's glass - distant bells, a dog, the particular rumble of a cart, someone laughing at a great distance.

What am I going to do?

It was the most honest thought you had had in quite some time. It sat in you with a strange, uncomfortable weight, because you were not, as a rule, a person who didn't know what you were going to do. You had spent three years managing what could not be managed, arranging what could not be arranged, and moving through the court with the specific composed confidence of a woman who had decided, at some very early age, that competence was its own form of protection. You knew what to do. You had always known what to do. The knowing was the thing you were most sure of about yourself.

And now you didn't know.

You changed into your shift. You washed your face and hands in the basin, the water cold from the pitcher. You left your cloak on the hook and sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the dark for a long time before you finally lay down, and you looked at the ceiling - low, whitewashed, with a crack running from the window toward the corner - and you let the sounds of the city come in and move around you, and eventually, because your body made its own decisions when your mind became too full, you slept.

---

The first day passed in a state of deliberate and slightly desperate purpose. You could not think clearly yet, but you could move, and moving was better than sitting still, so you went to the market and bought a comb, a change of linen, and a small pot of soap, and you found a washerwoman who did not ask questions. You ate bread from a street stall, and drank water from a public fountain, and you walked through the city for hours, through the neighbourhoods you had only ever seen from the window of a litter or a curtained carriage. The city received you without judgment because it did not know your name and did not care to learn it.

The anger on the first day was clean and clarifying. It had a shape, a clean precise outline: the girl's hair spread across the pillow, the two cups not one, the wine stain on the wood. You could hold the shape of it up and examine it without the edges going soft, and the clarity was, in its terrible way, almost a comfort. You were angry. You were very angry. The anger belonged to you, and you were entitled to every piece of it, and you were keeping it, you were not going to let anyone talk you out of it, not even the part of your brain that was already, traitorous and quiet, beginning to construct extenuating circumstances.

You were not ready for extenuating circumstances. Not yet.

The second day was harder.

You woke before dawn and lay in the dark listening to the city beginning its morning, the sounds layering themselves in the way they did - the very first birds, then carts, then voices, then the bells - and you stared at the ceiling crack and you felt, underneath the clean shape of the anger, the other things. The ones that were less clean. The ones that were older, heavier, and did not resolve into any particular shape but simply sat there, present and patient, the way a wound sits before you have looked at it properly.

You thought about three years of marriage, and what it had contained.

You thought about the first year, which had been tentative and strange in the way first years always were - two people in proximity, learning the rhythms of each other, the specific tolerances and irritants and small habits that accumulate into a life. Daeron had been, from the start, different from what you'd expected. You had expected, perhaps, something more like his father - severity, military precision, the compressed impatience of a man who wanted things done correctly and immediately. What you'd gotten was someone who sat in the solar for hours reading everything except the correspondence he was supposed to be reading, who fed crusts of bread to the birds from the window ledge with the concentration of a man performing a significant task, who fell asleep in odd places and woke from them badly, gasping and disoriented, and who drank - from the first, always drank - with the consistent, practiced dedication of someone performing medicine on himself.

He had been kind to you. Awkwardly, sometimes, in the way of a man who knows the forms of kindness better than the impulse, who has learned the shapes of consideration without always knowing what to do with the content. But kind.

The second year, after the first miscarriage, had been quieter. A door had closed somewhere. Not between you - or not only between you - but in him, something that had already been fragile going a little further toward fragile, the drinking getting a little heavier, the absences a little longer. You had managed around it. That was what you were good at, after all - managing around things, adapting to the shape of the available space, making yourself fit. You had not asked for things he could not give. You had not pressed on the tender places. You had been, in your way, very considerate of him.

You wondered, lying in the narrow bed on the second morning, whether that had been the right thing. Whether the management, the accommodation, the patient architecture of not-asking - whether all of that had simply made it easier for him to be absent. Whether care can become, over time, a kind of permission.

That thought was not comfortable. You did not particularly want it. You pressed it down, got up, and washed your face before you went back out into the city, because the city did not ask uncomfortable questions and the movement was still better than stillness.

The third morning, you went to the market because the innkeep's wife had mentioned the fruit near the harbour, and because choosing a pear was exactly the size of task you were currently capable of - something that required thought without requiring feeling. The morning was cold and very clear, the sky thin blue above the rooftops, the harbour visible in glimpses between the buildings, grey water flat as hammered iron.

You were standing at a fruit seller's table with a pear in your hand, testing the give of it between your thumb and forefinger - firm, cold, just right - when a hand closed around your wrist.

Not hard. Gentle, even. But sudden, very sudden, and you had been alone and unguarded for three days in a city that did not know your name, and the fear response was faster than thought - a sound escaped you, sharp and startled, before you could stop it, and you were already pulling back, already twisting, when the second hand came up and covered your mouth.

"It's me. I'm going to let go now - please don't cause a scene." The voice was warm and very steady, low and urgent and unmistakable, directly against your ear.

He let go.

You turned.

Daeron looked like something that had survived a great deal and was not sure what to do with the having-survived.

Three days of beard growth had taken the neat sandy scruff he usually wore and turned it into something ragged and unhappy at the jaw. The shadows beneath his violet eyes had deepened past tired into something structural, the look of a man whose sleep, when it came, had not helped. His hair was bundled up under a pulled-forward hood that was doing almost nothing to conceal him - it was very evidently a hasty arrangement, the hood of a man who had put it up in a hurry and had been hoping for the best. He was wearing ordinary clothes, not court clothes, things that fit him badly, that were probably borrowed. He smelled of nothing in particular, which meant he had been, remarkably, sober. He looked like a man who had been walking for three days and had not thought much about anything except walking.

You looked at him.

You raised your hand and slapped him across the face.

It was not a cautious slap.

The sound of it cracked across the market noise and your palm stung and your wrist ached from the force of it, and the fruit seller went very still, the woman at the next stall stepped back, and a boy two tables down stopped what he was doing and stared.

Daeron's head turned with the force of the blow, slowly, and he brought one hand up to cup his jaw and worked it carefully. Then he looked back at you, his eyes very wide, and there was something in them - not hurt, exactly, or not only hurt, but something that might be, absurdly, the beginning of a kind of relief. As though being slapped by you was better than the alternative of not being slapped by you, of not having found you at all.

"I deserved that, I suppose," he groaned.

"You suppose," you retorted, voice sharp with malice.

"I think - yes, I think unambiguously yes, on reflection."

"Don't do that." Your voice was level and cold, and you were proud of it for being both of those things. "Don't be witty about it. Don't - just don't."

"I'm not trying to -" he stopped. His voice was rough around the edges. "I'm not trying to deflect. I'm just not very good at this kind of conversation without something to do with my hands."

The fruit seller had resumed a very studied interest in his oranges. The woman at the next stall was doing her best impression of someone who was not listening.

"How did you find me?" you asked.

"I've made quite a few drinking buddies in Flea Bottom." He said it without any evident embarrassment. "Apparently I'm known in certain quarters. I described you to a few people. It cost me a good deal of coin." He paused. "Don't tell my father."

"Your father is the least of your concerns."

"No, he's actually quite a significant concern, but - yes, you're right, in the context of the present conversation he can wait." Daeron lowered the hand from his jaw. The red mark of your palm was already blooming across his cheek. He was looking at you very carefully, in the way he sometimes looked at things he was afraid of - with a kind of open, measured steadiness, as though bracing himself. "I've been looking for three days."

"I know."

"I went everywhere. I checked the whole Keep first, every room, I woke half the servants asking after you, I - I went to every place in the city I could think of where -" he stopped. Something moved through his expression and settled. "I couldn't not look. I want you to understand that. Whatever else there is to say about any of this, I could not - I cannot -"

"What do you want, Daeron?" Your voice was still level. You were holding it there by considerable effort. "You've found me. What is it that you want?"

He was quiet for a moment. A cart went past behind him, loud over the stones, and he didn't flinch from it, kept his eyes on you.

"I want you to come back," he said. "Not for any - not for the court's sake, not for my father's sake, not even for any particular sake of mine. I want you to come back because that room above the tavern has no hearth, and one window, and you've been sleeping in your clothes for three days, and that is not—" he stopped himself. Tried again. "I know I have no right to ask anything of you right now. I know that. I'm not asking you to forgive me or to act as though this hasn't happened. I'm only asking you to come back to somewhere warm. You can have your old apartments if you want. The ones before - the ones you had before we shared the solar. I won't be in them. I won't trouble you. I'll move to the other side of the Keep if you need it. I'll arrange everything. I only want to know that you're -"

"I won't be going back with you," you interrupted.

He looked at you. He did not argue. This, too, was something you noted about him - he did not argue with things he knew to be true. He could talk around them, deflect from them, cover them in enough wine and wit that they became temporarily obscured, but when you named something clearly, he did not pretend you hadn't. He simply stood there and absorbed it.

You both knew what this was. It was not a negotiation. It was not a position you were taking that would yield under sufficient pressure. You were standing in a market in King's Landing in plain clothes with loose hair and you were telling him a fact, and the fact was simply I will not be going back with you, and it was true in a way that went deeper than preference, went down into whatever part of you had been holding the weight of this marriage and had reached, at last, the full extent of its holding.

You felt, saying it, something that was not quite relief and not quite grief, but was in the territory between them. The territory where a very long-held breath is released.

"I want to have the marriage annulled," you said.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked away briefly, off toward the harbour, and when he looked back his expression was complicated - pained, and guilty, and also something else that he was trying, not quite successfully, to contain.

A short, involuntary breath of something that was almost a laugh escaped him, and he got his hand up to his mouth immediately after, pressing it there.

"I'm not laughing at -"

"You are absolutely laughing at me."

"Not at you -" he took his hand away from his mouth. His expression was sober again, fully sober, the bare face of a man who had had three days of sobriety to work through and had clearly not found it comfortable. "I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at - at the situation. At the whole shape of it. I know that doesn't help." He exhaled. "Who would annul it? That's all I'm asking. Who in the Seven Kingdoms is going to put aside a consummated marriage between a lord's daughter and a prince? The High Septon? My father?" He shook his head, and there was no mockery in it, only the flat acknowledgment of a thing they both already knew. "I wish that weren't true. I want you to know that I genuinely wish it weren't. If there was a door I could open for you, I would open it."

"Then open it."

"I can't." His voice was quiet. "There is no door. There has never been one, for us - for any of us in our position, and I know that, and you know that, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of it. I'm sorry that I'm the one you're trapped with." He paused, and something shifted in his expression, something that walked the dangerous edge between deflection and sincerity. "Though I would note - and I say this fully aware that it may get me slapped again, which I suppose I've earned the quota for today -"

"You have not even approached your quota today," you said flatly.

"- that there are worse men to be trapped with. In this city alone. I have walked through this city for three days and I have seen what it contains, and I am - I am a disaster, I know that, I have always known that, but I would never -" he stopped. Something darkened in his face. "I would never raise a hand to you. I would never be cruel. You would never want for anything that it is in my power to give you. And I know that is a very low bar to be commending myself over, I do know that, but… Look around," he said, and he made a small, sweeping gesture at the market, the street, the city beyond, the same gesture that encompassed all of it, all of the world that was available to you and the walls that surrounded it. "Look at what's available. Look at what the options are, for women in your position, in anyone's position. You are warm. You have food. You have fine clothes, and a good fire, and no one lifting a fist to you. There are women in this street right now who cannot say the same."

Something cold and furious moved through you.

"You are comparing yourself to men who beat their wives," you said, "as a reason I should be grateful."

He looked as though he immediately regretted the entirety of the past thirty seconds. "No. No, I -"

"That is what you just did. You just told me that because you don't beat me and because the fire is always lit, I should overlook the fact that you brought a woman into our home." Your voice had gone quiet in the way that was sometimes more frightening than shouting.

The woman at the next stall had given up pretending not to listen. The fruit seller had stepped back a pace. Two men nearby had found somewhere else to be.

"You told me I lead a pampered life and should accordingly be satisfied with whatever you do and don't do, and that my unhappiness is - is a kind of ingratitude -"

"I didn't say -"

"You did," you said, and your voice was steady and it was cold and it carried in the cold morning air of the market and you did not care, you genuinely did not care who heard. "You are telling me, right now, that my feelings about what you have done are disproportionate. That I should look at the available options and be grateful for the ones I have. That a decent fire and a full table make up for whatever liberties you choose to take, because at least you are not the worst thing available." You paused. "And that is - that is perhaps the most honest thing you have said to me about your own thinking in three years of marriage. Thank you for it."

He had gone very still.

"That was not -" he started, and stopped, and his jaw tightened in the way it did when he was genuinely ashamed rather than performing shame, and then he looked at you. "You're right. I didn't mean it that way. I meant - I was trying to -" he stopped again. "I was saying it badly. I don't mean that you should be satisfied. I know you should not be satisfied. I am not asking you to be satisfied. I am asking you to -" he exhaled. "I am asking you for something I don't deserve. That's what I'm doing. I know it's what I'm doing. And the argument I was trying to make was a very poor one, and I retract it."

You looked at him.

He looked back. His face was a ruin of itself, and it was not - you knew him well enough to know this - it was not performed. The particular humility of a man who had just listened to himself say something inexcusable and had the minimal self-awareness to understand that he said it.

"Is it because of the miscarriages?" you asked, bluntly.

He blinked.

"Is that why? Because I couldn't -" your voice did the thing again, the thin slipping thing, and you pressed on through it. "Is it because I wasn't able to give you a child, and so you -"

"No," he said, shaking his head.

The word was immediate. No qualification, no careful cushioning, just no, flat and certain, the most certain thing he had said in the whole conversation.

"Look at me," he said, and you realised you had looked away, toward the harbour, toward the grey water and the small ships. "Please look at me."

You looked at him.

His eyes were very tired, very direct, and they held yours without flinching. "I don't care very much for an heir. I never have. My father cares. The court cares. I - genuinely, honestly, in the truest sense I am capable of - do not. I'm not performing indifference for your benefit. I've never wanted the throne or what comes with it, and the only part of an heir that ever meant anything to me was -" he stopped himself again, as if he were pondering if his next words were the wrong thing to say. The muscle in his jaw worked. "Was the possibility of a child that you wanted. That we might have wanted. Not an heir. Not a succession. A child. And when that possibility -" another stop. "I was drunk for four days, after the last time. I am aware that was not helpful. I am aware that I chose a thing that was available and easy over the much harder and more important thing of being present for you. That is what I do, consistently. That is my - that is the particular failure I have been making since I was old enough to make failures. I choose the easy thing." He reached down for your hand, though you moved it away. "The girl was the easy thing. She was nothing to me. She was easier than you, and I chose easier, and that was unforgivable, and I am asking you to forgive it anyway because I don't know what else to do."

You had not looked away from him. You could not, now.

"You called me harder," you said.

"You're the hardest thing in my life," he said, and his voice was rough and even and honest, and something in your chest did the slow, breaking, terrible movement of a thing that had been very tightly held for a very long time. "Everything about you is harder than wine, and easier rooms, and company that wants nothing and expects nothing. You want things. You expect things. You expect me to be something other than what I am, and most of the time I fail at it, but at least you expect it, at least there is - at least with you there is the expectation of something better, and that is -" he stopped once more. He was running out of words. You could see it, the way the speech became simpler, more stripped. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know how else to say it."

"I would rather have no marriage at all than the one we have had. I would rather be nothing - no one's wife, no title, nothing - than to stay in something that has cost this much and given back so little." You said it. The thing you had been carrying since the anteroom, since the narrow bed, since three cold mornings in the borrowed room. You started again, "You say I lead a pampered life. And perhaps I do. But I have lost three children in this pampered life. I have managed your absences. I have arranged myself around your drinking, and your nightmares, and your going out, and your coming home in the dark hours, and I have done it quietly, and competently, and without complaint, because that was what there was to do. I deserved better than to come home to that room."

He was very still.

"Yes," he said, at last. Quiet. Just that one word. "You deserved better. You have deserved better for a long time."

He didn't say anything else. This was also something you knew about him - the particular silence that fell when he had gotten past everything else, past the wit and the deflection and the careful management of his own image, down to whatever was actually underneath. What was underneath, apparently, was this: very quiet, and very certain, and very sorry.

You looked out at the harbour again, the grey water, the distant line of the far shore. You thought about the narrow bed and the one window and the cold mornings with the city sound coming up through the walls. You thought about the old apartments, the ones you'd had before the shared solar - the east-facing rooms, the wide hearth, the view of the godswood - and you thought about what it would mean to go back, what it would cost and what it might, in some smaller way, restore. You thought about the box in the wardrobe and the dried lavender in the blue vase. You thought about the very particular quality of his voice reading poetry badly by a winter fire.

"I told you," you said, at last. "I won't be going back today."

He nodded. One small, careful nod.

"You'll leave me alone," you said. "You'll not send anyone after me, you'll not have me followed."

"I'll leave you alone," he agreed.

"And if I decide not to come back -"

"Then you won't come back," he said, very quietly. "And I'll - I'll find some way to manage that."

You looked at him. He looked wrecked, honest, and sorry, and somewhere underneath all of that there was the man who had left flowers in the blue vase, and the man who had told you his nightmares because you were the only person he could tell them to, and both of those men were this man standing in front of you in borrowed clothes in a market in King's Landing, and you could not sort out what to do with any of it.

"Go back," you said.

He looked at you.

"Go back to the Keep," you repeated. "I'll - I'll think."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he nodded again, and that time the nod had something in it, the slight, careful shape of something that was not quite hope but was not not-hope either. He looked at you for one moment longer - violet eyes and the bruised-looking shadows beneath them and the particular, wrecked openness of a man who had run out of deflections - and then he turned and he went, pulling the hood back up as he went, stepping out of the flow of the market and away, until the crowd took him and he was gone.

You stood at the fruit seller's table.

The pear was still there, waiting patiently on the pile. You reached out and picked it up again. Tested it. Firm, cold, the give of it just right beneath your thumb.

You paid for it.

You put it in your pocket and you walked back through the market and up the street toward the tavern, and you did not look back. You could not look back.

You did not know if he watched you go. You had enough to think about without knowing.

---

The room above the tavern had one window, which let in the grey morning light at a low angle, laying a pale rectangle on the floor. You sat on the narrow bed with the pear in your hands and you looked at the rectangle of light and you ate the pear slowly, bite by bite, cold and sweet and slightly tart, and you thought about everything and you thought about nothing and you did not yet know what you were going to do.

You thought about what he had said about the child. About a child that you wanted. That we might have wanted. The deliberate distinction between heir and child. The way his jaw had worked when he said it, the particular tightness there that meant he was trying not to feel something too visibly in public, and he had said it anyway, in a market, because you had asked.

You thought about the four drunk days after the third loss, about how you had named them cowardice in the privacy of your own head, and how he had named them the same thing aloud just now, unprompted, in the open air, and how those two assessments - yours in private, his in public - were the same assessment, arrived at from different positions but meeting in the same place.

You thought about his hands. How they shook, some mornings, before the first cup. How he used to hold them out and look at them the way a person looks at something they do not fully recognise as their own. He had told you once, in that late dark-hour honesty that the wine sometimes opened in him, that the shaking was not only the drink - that it was the dreams, that the dreams left a physical mark, that his body carried the weight of things his mind had seen. You had listened and not said anything, because what was there to say, and he had seemed, in the listening, relieved.

You thought about what he had said, that you were the hardest thing in his life, and how it had landed in you, that sentence, somewhere below the anger, somewhere deeper than the cold clarity you had been keeping yourself in. It had not landed as a comfort. It had not landed as an accusation. It had landed as a statement of fact from a man who was telling you the truth, and the truth was that you cost him something - that being with you, being present with you, being the kind of husband you deserved, was the most difficult thing in his life, more difficult than the wine, and the dreams, and the expectations of a father who wanted a soldier and got a prophetic drunk. You were harder than all of it.

You didn't know whether to find that devastating or, in some small and entirely unreasonable way, something that mattered.

What you knew was only that there was no door. He had told you, and he was right, and you already knew. There was no door out of this marriage, no door that any power in the Seven Kingdoms would open for you, and you could not go home because home was a complicated word, and the house where you had grown up had new inhabitants, and your father was gone, and your mother had remarried somewhere far north, and the sister closest to you was at Casswell in her own grief, and you were a princess of a Targaryen household, and the walls of that title were smooth and high and the going over them was impossible.

You were trapped.

You had always been trapped. You had known it at six-and-ten in your father's hall, standing in your best gown with your hands folded, watching a sandy-haired young man look across the room at you with violet eyes that seemed to be seeing something entirely else. You had known it at the sept, taking the vows. You had known it at every quiet turn since, every time the nature of the thing became a little clearer. Being trapped was the condition. It was the water you swam in. It had never been something that could be changed, and you had known that, and you had made your accommodations to it the way you made all your accommodations: competently, quietly, without a great deal of fuss.

What was new was that you were sitting in it, clearly, stripped of the architecture of not-knowing. The architecture was gone. There was nothing left to soften the edges.

You finished the pear. You set the core on the windowsill, where the pale light caught it. You sat for a moment with your empty hands in your lap and the taste of it still on your tongue - cold, and sweet, and faintly tart, one very ordinary good thing in a morning that had contained a great deal of the other kind. You pressed the backs of your hands against your eyes briefly, not crying, not quite, only pressing the feeling down to somewhere more manageable, and then you lowered your hands and you looked at the city.

You folded your hands in your lap and you looked out at the rooftops, at the grey sky above them, at the city that did not know your name and did not need to. It was a comfort, still. The city's indifference. The particular freedom of being nobody in a room with one window.

You would not go back today.

That was the most you could say with any confidence. Beyond today was a distance you were not ready to measure, a road whose length you could not see from where you were standing. Perhaps tomorrow you would have enough of yourself reassembled to look at it more clearly. Perhaps not tomorrow. Perhaps it would take longer than that - longer than the three days already spent, longer than the cold mornings and the solitary meals and the simple animal relief of having no one watching your face to see what you were feeling. You were used to being watched. You had spent three years managing the watching, composing yourself for it, and it had cost something, all that composing, something you only noticed now in its absence; how much quieter it was when no one was looking.

Or perhaps not.

The taste of the pear lingered on your tongue, and somewhere across the city there was a man with violet eyes and sand-coloured hair walking back toward a place you shared a name with, and he had looked for you for three days, and he had told you you are the hardest thing in my life, and had said it not as complaint but as confession.

The light on the floor shifted as the clouds moved. The city made its sounds. The morning went on around you, indifferent and alive and very large, and you sat in the middle of it and you breathed, and you thought, and you did not yet go back.

But you did not, quite, close the door.