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The first day at the citadel, Alleras was introduced to the sphinxes. One male, people said, and one female. This was evident by one of them having bulbous round breasts and the other one not. Alleras shrugged to shift the novice robes around his body, and Alleras nodded along with the lecture.
He pondered the sphinxes sometimes, when he returned from an evening in the city. Half man and half beast, half male and half female. A fellow student caught him at it, and from then on, Alleras himself was called the sphinx. Half Dornish and half foreign, that is what it meant. Half male and half female; Alleras wondered sometimes if they knew that part.
Alleras went to all sorts of lectures. History was his favorite. It pleased him greatly to learn about all the things that had come before, and all the ways the people of his own days came to know about them. Records lost and found and reconstructed. Events that may have happened three thousand years ago, or six thousand. Or mayhaps they had never happened at all. He learned about dragons and fire-mages, who could change their shape, shifting like a flame. He wished he could do it, too. It would make things easier.
Alleras did have some dragon blood, from a princess married to a Martell lord a hundred years ago. As a child, Alleras had sometimes looked at the girl in the mirror, trying to find a hint of purple in his reflection’s dark eyes, or a gold and silver sheen in her curly hair. But he had never found a trace of it. He supposed it was for the best. It was hard enough being a bit of this and a bit of that, without carrying the weight of old Valyria on his slim shoulders as well.
The other students went to the baths, now and then, but Alleras couldn’t come with them. He would have liked to splash in the water on hot days, he would have liked to sweat out the remnants of hung-over mornings. But he couldn’t, not with the shape he hid under his robes.
This may have been why he first thought about pursuing the higher arts. He hoped to learn some glamor that would change his appearance, some spell that would allow him to stop being afraid. So far, he had not learned any such thing, just theories and exercises that amounted to nothing.
But one day, the glass candle started burning, and magic returned to the world. Now Alleras was no longer just one of Oberyn’s many daughters, playing at education in a Citadel that would have thrown him out if they knew. Now he was part of something new and greater than himself.
And that’s how he met Sam.
“The sphinx is the riddle, not the riddler,” the fat boy blurted out in greeting, and Alleras had to work hard to stop his face from moving. Had he been found out so quickly?
But as he led the novice to Marwyn’s chambers, it became clear that he had not meant anything by it. Alleras found himself relaxing in the young man’s presence. Sam had known maester Aemon, had been traveling with him when the oldest man in Westeros died. He had been sent on some mission by Aemon, to fetch Daenerys and her dragons.
The name Daenerys made Alleras’s stomach tingle. Just the same as the Daenerys who had opened her water gardens to all the girls and boys of Dorne, no matter what parentage. Alleras herself had spent many a day there, splashing in the water with his sisters. And dragons! He would like nothing more than to lay eyes upon them. Maybe he would feel a connection. No longer a sphinx, but a dragon. Changeable as flame.
His heart was still aflutter when they left Marwyn’s chambers. Sam would stay and tend the ravens, while Marwyn would travel to find this new dragon queen.
“There’s been a Sam Tarly in Oldtown before,” Alleras told him teasingly.
“The mistress of the Hightower.” Sam sighed. “She made peace with the dragon kings after the Dance, and she founded the bank of Oldtown. She accomplished more than most people of our house.”
Alleras had to smile at that. “It’s not what most people remember her for. But you’re wiser than most, Sam. Maybe you’ll surpass her one day.”
Sam glanced at him, and they grinned at each other in a sense of silent understanding. It was nice, Alleras thought, to no longer be the only sphinx inside the walls of the Citadel.