Chapter Text
The dress was the colour of old parchment, cream shot through with gold, the pattern worked into the fabric itself so that it caught the light differently depending on how Lady Gwin Ashford moved. Lucilla had aired it, pressed it, and hung it the night before, and now she stood at the far end of the room smoothing the last of the wrinkles from the bedclothes while the lady's maid worked the laces at Lady Gwin's back.
"Too tight?" the maid asked.
"No. A little looser, perhaps." Lady Gwin exhaled. "There. That is, is it straight? In the back, is it straight?"
"It is perfectly straight, my lady," the maid said. "You look very well."
Lady Gwin turned to the looking glass. She was a slight girl, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a face that was still finding what it would become, pretty now and likely to be striking later, if she grew into her own particulars. The amber necklace at her throat caught the morning light and threw small warm points of it across her collarbone. Her hair had been pinned up and dressed with a cluster of small cloth flowers, pale orange and gold, that matched the dress almost exactly.
She studied her reflection as though it might still contradict what she was told.
"The blue would have been safer," she said.
"The blue would have been a mistake," the maid said firmly. "This one suits your colouring. The blue would have swallowed it."
"Do you truly think so?"
"My lady, I have dressed you for three years. I think so."
Lucilla tucked the corner of the coverlet and said nothing. It was not her place to have opinions about Lady Gwin's dress, and she did not offer one. She moved to the window instead and looked out at the meadow, where the servants below were still driving stakes and stringing pennants in the early light. The tourney ground was not yet finished. It did not look like it, anyway.
"They say Prince Valarr is very handsome," the young lady said to the mirror with a playful smile on her face, as one does when speaking of someone she very much admired. "Handsomer even than his father was at his age."
"I could not say," the maid replied, "not having seen him. Though I imagine he did not get his looks from his great-grandfather the Unworthy."
Lady Gwin laughed at that, a quick bright sound that she tried to muffle with her hand. "That is wicked of you."
"Only honest, my lady."
"What of the others? Prince Maekar's sons, what do they say of them?"
The maid paused her pinning for a moment. "Prince Aerion is the one everyone talks about. Brightflame, they call him, and not without reason, by all accounts. The Targaryen looks at their very best, silver hair and all. The sort of young man who knows exactly what he looks like and has decided it is the most interesting thing about him."
"And the other one? Prince Daeron?"
The maid resumed pinning. "Handsome enough as well, in his own way. They are Targaryens, it is more or less guaranteed." A small pause. "Though they do say he is rather... always in his cups. Very fond of wine."
Lady Gwin's brow creased faintly in the mirror. "In his cups? But he is young, is he not?"
"He is," the maid said, with the tone of someone who has said as much as they intend to on the subject. “There. That strand is done.” The maid stepped back and surveyed her work with satisfaction. “You will make them all stop and stare, my lady. The queen of love and beauty on your own name day! There is no one else it could be.”
Lady Gwin looked at herself in the glass, for a moment, as though trying to see what other people saw. It was her name day. The tournament was in her honour. The thought still possessed an air of unreality, a heavy anticipation that made the actual day feel like a dream.
“I hope I do not disappoint them,” she said, quietly, and did not entirely sound as though she was joking.
“You will not,” the maid said, already finished with the matter.
Lucilla folded a discarded shawl over her arm, stopped for a second to look at Lady Gwin, young and beautiful and dressed for the day that was hers, and made for the door. She had one more room to tidy.
She was nearly out when the door opened from the other side and one of the younger chambermaids nearly walked into her, quick and breathless, who had evidently been running.
"Oh, pardon. I beg, my lady," the younger maid dropped a hasty curtsy to Gwin, then turned to Lucilla with wide eyes, then back again to Gwin, the way she always did when she had news she could barely contain. "Have you heard? About the Targaryen princes?"
"Which of them?" Gwin’s lady’s maid asked, before Lady Gwin could.
"Two of Prince Maekar's sons, the oldest and the youngest," the maid responded in a lowered voice, though there was no one else in the corridor. "They are missing. The rider that came ahead said the princes set out from Summerhall together bound for Ashford, and now they cannot be accounted for. They fear, well, no one said it plainly, but the looks on the men's faces-"
The room went quiet.
"Missing? Both of them?" Lady Gwin turned from the mirror.
"That is what the rider said. They do not know where they are. Whether they fell behind, or took another road, or-" she stopped, and swallowed. "No one knows."
Lucilla stood in the doorway with the shawl still folded over her arm.
She thought, without meaning to, of her son Wat. Two years ago, the knock at the door before dawn, the guardsman’s voice, the word “stolen” dropped into the dark of the doorway like a stone into still water. She had spent three days not knowing. Three days of going through the motions of work while something else entirely was happening, something she had no good name for and no way to put down. He had come home in the end. He had come home shaken and she had not asked him anything that first night, only held him, and she had told him it was all right, and mostly she had believed it. She had never quite got the dread of those three days out of her body.
Lucilla shook her head to rid herself of thoughts of the past and focus on the present. She did not know Prince Maekar’s wife. Did not know her name, her face, or anything of her at all. But she found herself imagining the princess anyway, somewhere in that column, face turned to the window of the wheelhouse, eyes moving over every rider that passed, scanning the treeline, watching the road behind.
Lucilla knew what that kind of waiting felt like. She knew it in her hands and her chest and the way her breath always caught when a door opened and it was not the right person coming through it. It was like an old wound that had been forgotten most of the time, until something brushed against it and the pain returned, clear and certain.
“Poor woman,” she said, quietly, and meant every word of it.
No one responded. Perhaps they had not heard her. The lady’s maid was adjusting the last pin and Lady Gwin was still looking at herself in the mirror with that expression, young and solemn and privately a little afraid, the way a girl looks when something she has wished for has finally arrived and turned out to be real.
Lucilla went out and pulled the door softly closed behind her.