Chapter Text
Myriah Martell had borne four sons to the king. A good and fitting Dornishwoman to give him strong heirs.
They had each arrived after a different turn. Baelor came first, dark and fierce; Aerys, second, with his nose long and already condescending; Rhaegel came during a cold fever, and the boy retained a nervous tremor and slow speech in his wake. Maekar emerged small yet coiled and watchful, after twenty hours of struggle. He gave her more cuts than he’d given satisfaction when it was all through. A bitter bargain struck between gods and the new-born.
Yet though she watched them emerge into the light through tears and pain, they had all somehow managed to carve from her heart their own chamber. Four distinct kingdoms. She would hold them close, and in return hold the memory of their infant fingers, the first steps, their breath on her cheek.
But no mother keeps a lock and key upon such things forever.
By now, they'd all grown out of childhood, leaving for their own squireships, tourneys, marriage prospects; and there came a day she saw all of them together again under this red-stone canopy that now served more a prison. A day she finally accepted one truth her son’s silences had been building a fortress against, so long.
Something had curdled between Baelor and Maekar. And only the gods themselves could untwist it.
“Brothers must bicker,” she whispered to herself later as she took in all their vacant chambers, “but this?”
The way the younger would follow the elder with a gaze like a held dagger; a muscle working in his jaw. The way the elder sometimes paused, head turned, hearing steps which were never near, hands white upon a practice blade, until they fell still.
They'd been as close as two saplings once. Maekar followed at Baelor's heel as soon as he could toddle, babbling nonsense words only Baelor ever seemed to truly comprehend.
“Ba-el-lo!” He'd called him then, with more passion than syllables. That was when she could tell him what to wear. Now Maekar chose the color, texture, and cut of every garment himself. Now he’d rather face a dragon alone than let another, least of all her, pick up what he put down.
Baelor had taught him to ride, taught him to grip a tourney sword, told him tales of old heroes from history books they shared in the dead of night. Then a shift. Something had twisted sour. Baelor was gone often—further north, in training, on his own path. Upon returns he had grown quiet, serious. While other courtiers spoke to each other of their triumphs, he made no mention.
And Maekar grew more bitter for the lack. He’d pick pointless fights over trifles at dinner that left Aerys sneering and Rhaegel with another nervous fit. Every lunge and parry he practiced against a straw dummy became fiercer; she knew, she’d been drawn to watch the yard more than a queen should. Sometimes she fancied the wicker-and-sack creature bore Baelor’s likeness. She told herself this could not be so.
No amount of reasoning with either son had changed a thing. Maekar would not meet her gaze, but would nod stiffly, mutter a clipped word, “yes mother,” and quit the room. With Baelor, the mask was kinder but just as impassable. He’d let the conversation wash past and over him like spring rain. “All is well, mother,” with the warmth and sincerity of stone.
The hurt did not show so plainly on Baelor; his smile was a familiar weapon when dealing with the court. Yet she, who had taught it to him for good, saw when he turned the pommel inward. Watched the way he would sometimes stand in a corridor until the echo of Maekar’s boots had long since faded, then trace a finger over a carved sun on the stone—a sun that Baelor had pointed out to him as boys, explaining its Dornish origins. “Look here, this is mother’s kin. This is your kin.”
One memory, sharp as glass, came back to her then. A scorching day five years past, when Baelor, a newly-knighted youth all pride and honor, returned from his squireship. Maekar—only thirteen—was practically vibrating from anticipation, standing with her in the throne room to greet him. Baelor embraced them all in perfunctory turns, a stranger still. His armor was bright, but she remembered his face better. As the knight caught sight of Maekar, it seemed, for just a heartbeat, to split wide with pure, radiant joy.
“Here’s my little hawk,” he said, and opened his arms.
But Maekar, already half-lowered in an attempt at respect before remembering himself, stood rooted. “My prince,” he said, as if reading it from some dusty book. Not ‘brother,’ not even ‘Baelor.’ The smile on her eldest son’s face had been slow to die; the king, standing beside her, had failed to see the flash of disappointment before it was extinguished completely, replaced with courtly poise. The rest of that evening’s feast, and all the ones after, Baelor spoke to everyone else about him, and never with him. A pattern was born that day that not even her mother's pleading could dissolve. They had ceased being brothers, and started being their proper titles, their distance a formality and a wound both.
“Is he always this angry now?” Baelor had asked once that very week. It was late, after the king had retired to their bedchambers. Aerys was still reading, his head on her knee, and Baelor lingered in the room with a half-finished cup of wine. He wasn't speaking of Rhaegel or Aerys. He watched a sliver of moonlight play on a floor, then back at her.
“You were gone a long while, son,” she’d replied quietly. She remembered wanting nothing more than to press a kiss into his fine, dark hair; her heart a sudden, soft mess.
“I came back. And now…” Baelor’s fingers whitened around the goblet. “Now when I look at him, he looks at the wall.”
Aerys had lifted his head then, blinking. But Myriah had kept her gaze steady. “He feels you abandoned him, my love.”
“By becoming a knight? By serving Father? By—”
“By growing up before he did.”
Baelor drank the rest of his wine and set it aside. When he’d straightened, he wore that prince’s face again. Smooth, empty, unreadable. “Yes. Well. He has always known the shape of things better than I.” He left her, and she thought she understood it as the end. That was the lie she allowed herself.
Now, in the oppressive heat, she traced her own path around a silent tourney ground. No banners flew, no heralds shouted. Only wind. She remembered two figures wrestling in the dust here, two small princes rolling and grunting until a king had clapped and proclaimed Baelor stronger for his six years’ advantage. But after their scramble from the dirt, it had been her youngest's arm draped triumphantly over the elder’s shoulders. Now she looked for those footprints and found nothing.
When Baelor’s twenty-three name day arrived, a tourney to mark the occasion was inevitable. Daeron, ever one to keep his sons sharp by setting them against each other in controlled violence, decreed a small matter. “Something for court. A spectacle.”
For three days preceding, knights came from the Trident, the Reach, the Westerlands. Red Keep was bustling, an overturned anthill of armor and silks. Every hall smelled of oiled leather, hot iron, and the sharp bite of polish. Through it all she tracked them. Baelor was all gracious ease, a prince moving through clouds of silk-spun fawning lords and sycophants as if he owned every ray of light that touched them. A king's heir, a shining tourney knight at ease with his stature, practicing in the courtyard every morning with lazy, perfect strikes against the royal master-at-arms.
Maekar, on the other hand, made his fortress in silence, surrounded by his own sworn men. Knights who, like him, looked grimly content with a world that had only them to please, a world of dented shields and grim-faced dedication. He would be in the list with them.
“Let them fight each other,” Aerys had suggested to their mother one evening at dinner, breaking off a piece of black bread. “Let us have an end of this, mother. Let them draw blood as men are meant to and be done. The squabbling grows tedious.”
Rhaegel, for whom any noise above a whisper might cause palpitations, flinched. “Blood,” he mumbled, pushing at a carrot slice on his trencher.
Their father only looked on, as he always did. Calm. All-seeing, but without an interest in intervening. It fell, as it always did, upon Myriah.
But she would speak to Maekar tonight. As he came in, heading towards his chambers in the winding corridors off of Maegor's holdfast.
“Maekar.” Her own voice, a murmur in the hall. He stopped short, then turned, his whole posture a rigid question. “The tourney starts on the morrow.”
He had removed his leather gambeson but the shirt beneath was damp. He ran a hand through his light hair. “I know.”
“Are you... prepared?”
A muscle twitched near his jaw, “I’ve been training.”
“So I have seen,” she admitted softly.
For an instant, he looked less a knight, more her small, hot-headed son searching for ways not to cry. The thought was gone as quick as a snuffed candle flame. “Let him have his celebration,” and in those simple words, she heard something else, buried like bone splinter. Something a part of him still longed for. “It’s Baelor’s day,” he added, more formally, correcting himself.
That night Myriah lay abed with Daeron, listening to his even breathing, thinking about blood as something other than wine or war; that day of tourney came not a day too soon. A wound needed to open before you can get a clean look at the infection. She could not keep stitching over what would only keep tearing back through the fabric of her house.
Day One. Heat that lay on the Red Keep like a woolen blanket baked fresh from the tanner’s ovens. Myriah sat beside her king upon the dais, the canopy of silk offering negligible relief. Every gust of wind was like a hot breath. Ladies dabbed at their brows, lords sipped weak wine, but attention on the sand was unwavering. Rhaegel winced at the jarring ring of a shattering lance. Aerys, she noticed, held a small, bored smile as if personally insulted to be here.
“My books,” he leaned in to whisper. “The maester was going to show me maps from before the Conquest. The maps, mother. Not this. Why not hold a symposium? No blood, only brilliance.” She gave a small, weary smile in return.
It was only upon a late match in the afternoon, a brutal contest in the melee, that her true interest surfaced.
In that one there are six pairs fighting. It ends only two at a time when a squire steps forth to pull away bested men from the main fight. The suns glinting in their helmets blinded.
Two of them, however, became one vortex of dust and rage and noise. Their fight quickly left the others. No one wanted in, they knew the violence that had a target beyond simple sport.
Myriah didn't need to see heraldic colours; the styles were too distinct. The taller one with broad shoulders—he moves with a punishing economy, a storm contained. Baelor, always fluid and strong. And the other—the smaller figure but somehow more relentless, like a wasp—darting and feinting, trying every avenue to draw blood. Maekar.
They were meant to be in different parts of this melee. Yet they moved toward one another with the certainty of steel to lodestone, leaving the scrum of other fighters to their own lesser disputes. The field of their argument shrunk to the space between their shields. A crash of shields. The ringing sound rang in the ears; everyone stopped for a beat, just long enough to notice the change in noise.
At first, it was beautiful—knights as poets with their swords. Every thrust had rhythm. Every parry a careful counter-tune. Yet there were no grunts or gasps, and Myriah, even so far away in the heat and the din, felt the hollowness where the sound ought to be, that this battle, as all theirs now were, fought without breath. Each move a line cut from a long-forgotten argument spoken and unspoken.
Then came the true moment of their undoing, and of hers.
Maekar ducked a wide swing. He came up from the ground inside Baelor’s guard with a fast, violent upward slash with his sword. Not at the helm or the shoulder.
But at his elder brother's leg.
A dangerous shot, illegal for its dishonour; meant to maim, not to gain a point.
There was a collective intake of breath from the entire lists, the sound of twenty hundred men sucking air through teeth.
It struck true. Through steel and into the leather beneath.
Aerys had gone from bored to smug, a slight, hungry light in his eyes. Their father, the king, shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. The leather of the chair creaked. A line formed between the skin above his nose. Rhaegel, however, shrank into himself.
But Baelor… Baelor did not cry out. The crowd surged to see better. And she could no longer breathe with it.
He simply buckled. She saw him stumble. He locked his knee. Then his other leg buckled. He was on one knee. He took off his helm with shaking hands, throwing it into the dust. He looked right at Maekar then. She could not see the exact shape of it, the sweat and grime of it; but in her mind it burned like a torch.
Maekar lowered his sword a fraction, but didn't drop it. Just looked down. There was no triumph in his posture, only that fierce, desperate thing. “Yield,” he demanded, and this was new, too—a public act, one that dared anyone else, even their king, with it. His face red and shiny with sweat; yet in that defiance a boy again stood with tears in the corners of his eyes, unable to name what ailed him.
“Fucking yield, Baelor.”
Baelor, one arm across a thigh that bled steadily onto the sand of the list, pushed himself up. He stood tall, though she thought he would surely fall again.
“To what?” The question was carried to them by a godsent lull in the murmuring and whispers. Baelor’s voice was rough as a file. “You? What victory do you take here? That you managed it?”
And then, even across the heat-warmed space, her mother’s heart knew her children were speaking not in words, and it knew also what they said was a ruin to the other.
“You’re embarrassing Father. Mother.”
“Ah,” said Baelor, taking a step on the good leg, the sword hanging limply from one hand, useless as a crutch, “now we speak of decorum.” And he turned then and limped back towards the tents, head held high, to the shock of every person in the viewing stands.
No master-at-arms or king’s herald cried a halt to a fight, yet all recognized it was ended, that something greater had broken than bone or oath of tourney conduct.
Daeron's voice beside her was a quiet rasp of irritation, not a king's pronouncement but a father's sigh, full of weariness and profound disappointment. “Folly.”
He did not look at her. He was watching the youngest son still standing in the middle of the tourney ground amidst a silent sea of people.
Maekar stood alone with a blade he would not sheathe and a victory he would not claim, a statue erected to commemorate a fratricide he had only dreamt of. The other combatants slowly backed away, giving him a wide berth, until it was only him, the discarded helm of the prince, and the spreading stain of royal blood on the sand.
She had to intervene, as a queen and as a mother.
With a small inclination of her head to her king, she rose. The silk of her gown rustled like dry leaves. It was not so difficult to cross the sand in the end; not with all her attention narrowing to the slumped shoulders of the boy she had held in the hours of his first-born fury. He did not hear her approach.
“Maekar.” Her Dornish accent was thicker when her composure was threatened.
He flinched, turning. His face, from this close, was worse. It wasn't fury she saw, not triumph. It was the stark, raw shock of a man who has thrown a punch at a shadow and felt it connect with a living face. She reached for him. For a heartbeat she thought he’d let her; he’d been hers once, in an era so distant it might have belonged to another woman. But he recoiled from her touch as though it were the lash itself, a flinch as deep and instinctive as breath.
“The physician,” she forced her voice even. It took more strength than birthing him. “He must see to Baelor’s leg.” Her words did nothing.
He stared beyond her to a distant point at the Red Keep's towers. He was a prisoner of whatever demon drove him and she had no weapon to break its walls.
“He never said goodbye,” he whispered, and the words were so faint, they could have been an illusion.
But the queen heard. She felt the truth behind it all then—of five past years—land a sharp kick between her own ribs.
Her son had thought he'd meant to draw real blood not to win, but to make Baelor feel something for him, a scar they would share.
It was no secret that Baelor did as all noblemen did and found comfort between the thighs of any who offered a welcoming sigh. But one in particular had remained constant since Baelor's sixteenth name day. A girl, dark-haired and quiet from the Stormlands named Jynifer Swann, whose family owned a castle on the eastern coast, overlooking Shipbreaker Bay.
Maekar did not like Lady Swann.
His aversion was obvious only to a mother. A way he wouldn't stay in the same solar with them; the bitter bite to his comments later on “the usefulness of such a pale shadow following the Prince about.”
He saw her in the way he might a sickness that clung to a healthy limb; a sign that the whole had been taken somewhere dark. Baelor liked her gentleness; he enjoyed her conversation—always meek—and it was for her that Baelor learned that silence, for which court would have no other use, might also be used in intimacy and kindness. He spent nights listening to her play the harp while staring into flames.
“Has he bedded her?” Maekar had asked once. They had a moment of accidental solitude. He stood sharpening a dagger as they spoke, his gaze elsewhere. He was not, as others often said to him, a simple man. Just brutally direct.
“Baelor is discreet,” was her simple, gentle-avoidant reply.
“Not so discreet as all that.” And then he met her gaze. “If this girl will not be a wife for Baelor, she serves only as practice.”
His bluntness stole the wind from her chest.
A thought took root then. Perhaps he hated Lady Swann for the reason that all lesser boys might hate some superior opponent for some battle long decided. Jealousy was such a messy stain; it soiled its wearer and all whom he touched. But a strange jealousy, more specific; as if it were not about the object affection for themselves; but of what that object afforded. She thought this: Maekar did not hate Lady Swann because Baelor loved her; he hated Lady Swann because Baelor had anyone else. And it was her kindness, and the quiet intimacy it permitted, he hated in her. He had seen a language Baelor spoke to this girl—of simple gestures, quiet smiles, small looks of understanding—that he hadn't used for him since they were boys wrestling in the dust.
For Baelor never spoke a word against Lady Swann, but would find every excuse for it not to go further between them than whispers. There was a clear and public block preventing the marriage, a wall put in place by those with higher ambitions.
“Lady Swann is lovely,” she’d once tried, “but of insufficient house for a Prince’s bride.” It seemed the safest way.
“She is sufficient for him, apparently,” Maekar countered, and then bit his tongue to say more. His hand went to the grip of his dagger and he twisted it there.
After the tourney disaster, this simmering resentment began to heat its own kettle.
That night she found her second son in the map room, tracing a route across Westeros with a long, pale finger. Not looking at her. A goblet sat on the oak table, untouched. This was the one she shared in the hours long after a royal dinner—of ink, old vellum, secrets between king and queen that had nothing to do with the realm's matters and all with the ones of their own house. She closed the door. The silence here had a different texture. Ancient and respectful.
She saw him looking at Dorne. She moved and poured her own goblet.
“Baelor will be walking with no aid soon,” she began, careful.
Maekar did not stop looking. “The surgeon said it would leave a limp in damp weather.”
“Are you… proud of that?” she asked into a glass of Arbor red.
This brought him around. He took his wine at last. He looked, at that minute, as broken as he made the day he entered the world. His anger, so useful and potent a shield against all who might wish him harm, was of no use now that all harm had been delivered. In her heart, this thought came unbidden: That is a man learning he cannot use anger to staunch a grief he never had words to name.
“Did it make you feel better?” she prodded as kindly as she could, “The feel of your steel hitting the mark?” She wanted to take the knife from her thoughts and place it into a careful wound.
His jaw clenched again, a rhythm he carried so often beneath the skin of the cheek. “You ask me if hurting him… made me feel better?” he parried, all the bitterness in him rising at last in his tone, the only child to show so much Dornish fire in so cold a North-ward king.
“It is my question, Maekar.” Her own Martell resolve tempered her words.
“He does not see me.” His sudden, frustrated roar echoed off leather-spined books. The admission struck the silent stone chamber with the force of a trebuchet stone. His goblet landed splintering in the hearth. He did not apologize. He stared into the embers. She realized he was fighting off not a feeling but a whole storm; one where lightning struck at the very same branch again and again until the limb split and dropped in ruin. She waited. A mother knows how to wait.
“All my life,” he said into the glow, each word forced through his teeth, “to him I have been either his little hawk… or this.” He gestured to himself, to his armoured hands and restless spirit, an act she’d seen him do when looking at nothing in particular, “The little brother. Some sort of hindrance or shadow. He goes to tourneys and is a hero. I train. He learns statescraft with Father, I train. He talks for hours with some simpering girl about poetry and storms and he finds her beautiful. Beautiful for being nothing.” He paused to drag in a ragged breath.
“Maekar, Baelor is—” her attempt at bridging.
“Let me finish,” he cut in, then winced, an afterthought of deference. Apologized, not for the interruption, she saw, but for his inability to govern his own spirit. “The one thing I learned to be better than him at… was fighting. In this yard, where a shield and sword are the only truths. It was the only place where Baelor was not Baelor, the perfect prince. He was only… a man. A man who could bleed. Today I wanted… I needed him to feel me when the blade met him.” A pause stretched in the chamber so tight it vibrated. A child’s truth, an old wound he thought he was burying in the blood on the sand. “Perhaps I even hoped...”
He broke off to shake it all out, like a dog throwing water from its coat.
And what he left unsaid was worse than any shout.
A single tear traced a path through the dust on Maekar’s cheek and he quickly, savagely, wiped it away with the back of a mailed fist, cursing under his breath, some crude term. He would sooner bleed than be wept, this one. Her small boy who would not be comforted.
What could she offer? She understood then that her failure had been greater than not acting to save them. She had never, in all those years of watching the quiet war between them, truly considered that it was a battle for one soul's acknowledgment. That the fortress one brother built was not to keep the other out, but a terrible edifice he believed he must live within.
“You mistake your brother,” she heard herself say, as a Dornish sun baked their home kingdom. “His love for you is greater than your pride will permit you to see.”
At that he turned. She saw that same, fierce, almost mad glare that she'd seen just earlier in the sands of the tourney grounds. He stalked toward her, not like the wasp she'd imagined on the field but like a bull that meant to gore.
“He left me.” He pointed a finger past her to the door Baelor had been carried through earlier. The king’s words and tourney results long forgotten. “And now when he limps,” he took another step, “when he thinks of that leg... when he walks and feels a ghost of a tug... all those words I haven't been able to speak, he will hear. Every single one of them.”
Myriah stood rooted, a strange coldness rising through her despite the room’s warmth. For in that awful, hateful promise she finally saw the full measure of their shared curse.
She had to do something. Even a queen understood there were limitations to what crowns and counsel could do. So Myriah did the only thing she thought possible, pulling rank as their mother, and summoned both her princes.
The chosen place, for this most delicate and possibly disastrous talk, was her own chambers. She dismissed all of her women and stood waiting, arranging a pot of soothing tea with trembling hands she refused to let her sons see. The incense of amber and lemon oils did not mask her dread.
Baelor came first. His gait was steady, almost imperceptibly altered. Only a slight stiffening to the right leg, which a watching eye might mistake for courtly restraint. As a good eldest son, always mindful of propriety and rank, he took this summons, from no authority but hers, gravely.
“You wished to see me, mother?” No questions about the urgency. His presence was perfect; handsome face smooth and still under the golden light filtering through the leaded glass. He wore no royal finery now but simple linen breeches and a black velvet doublet with his cuffs unbuttoned; all edges softened. His gaze, usually so easy and captivating, was just carefully neutral. He sat opposite the embroidered chair she occupied as though called for a small tax matter. A performance.
“My boy. How fares your leg?” she started, with small talk for a subject that threatened great ruinous divides.
“Impeding, but the physician believes I will dance a minuet in half a year without trouble,” he smiled a little and touched it as he sat. The wound she understood already began to fester into legend among the knights; and soon it would become part of her house, part of history.
“Let us pray for it,” her prayer had no space for gods. Then, “Your brother joins us.”
Baelor inclined his head, the elegant gesture at once acknowledging and resigning. There, it is there; even from the very suggestion, a small shutter descended in the expression of his eyes, like drawing heavy drapes on a sunny morning.
Maekar entered. He didn't ask. He stopped at the door and his glance went immediately toward Baelor. As he stepped across the plush rug he carried in with him all the rage of their encounter, smelling still of horse, practice-yard sweat, and that hot iron odor a sword leaves behind it. His clothes held dust of it along the cuffs, as well.
He did not greet the heir to the throne with a title, or anything, but took a chair on the other end of her. His posture tense, back away from the support of its soft carved wood.
Her heart felt like a piece of soft lead, pulsing painfully within her, as she saw him and Baelor positioned at their opposite ends. Two sons flanking their lonely mother; what was the meaning of that? She could not command the truth; perhaps not even persuade it. But she had power here to hold its raw surface, however unseemly.
She poured two cups of the lemon-berried tea. They watched her movements and then accepted.
This small offering consumed itself in three minutes of thickened silence.
“I will not pretend I understand what rift you have driven between you,” said Queen Myriah with more quiet venom in her tone than the queen ought possess, let alone its queen, “I have watched you. Watched for many months now.”
Their cups froze at the twin of their mouths, their eyes looked to hear. Baelor’s held sorrow. Maekar's held defiance so pure he trembled.
“You are men. Not boys, fighting over wooden swords or privileges,” she told them. She could almost hear her own mother talking, in her mind, from Sunspear’s long and stone-scorched halls. Myriah, you have to be firm. “Whatever slight between you needs to heal, or it will poison all those around it. Rhaegel is sick with fear, you’ll notice. Aerys is preening on your hatred. Your father pretends this doesn’t sicken him, because it suits Targaryen mythic sagas that brothers tear at each other’s hearts over ambition or crowns. But this… is not that. I will not have it. Not under my roof.”
She looked from one to the other, watching her words land like stones.
“Tell me,” she demanded, looking at Baelor, “why your brother thinks you abandoned him. And you,” her gaze now on Maekar, “why you think the only way to be seen is to maim. The truth, if you please. Not for me. But for yourselves.”
Baelor set down his cup, a soft clink that sounded like a closing door. He looked at Maekar, then at her, and the smooth mask he wore cracked just enough for the pain to show through. He looked tired. Truly, deeply tired.
“He was not meant to be left behind, mother,” Baelor began, and his voice was low and rough with a weight she had not heard before. “When I went north to serve Lord Whent, to squire… it was an honor. A duty. He was still a boy. I wrote to him.” He paused, as if the simple act of recalling the letters was an effort. “Every month, I sent a raven. About the snows, about the training, about the knights I met. I told him of the things I thought he would find exciting. Of tourneys won, of lords who could tell a story that would make the stones weep.”
He looked at Maekar then, a direct, unshielded gaze. “I wrote them all for you, brother.”
Maekar’s face was a fortress wall. His hands were fists on the armrests of the chair. “I got the letters,” he bit out, the words clipped and sharp. “I read them. They were like reading about the life of a stranger. A prince who was happy. A prince who was making friends and winning glory. While I was here, in the shadow of the Red Keep, training with the master-at-arms until my shoulders screamed. You told me of your life, Baelor. You did not ask me of mine.”
The accusation made the room feel colder. Myriah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air. She had read those letters. They were charming, full of the spirit of a noble son making his way in the world. She had never seen them as a report from a happy stranger.
Baelor flinched. A real, undeniable flinch. “I… I didn’t think. I was a boy myself, Maekar. I thought you would be proud. I thought you would be waiting for me, as I was counting the days to come home to you.”
To come home to you. The silence that followed was absolute, quartz heavy. Light from the single bulb fractured on the dust motes between them.
Myriah watched her second son. The rigid defiance in his shoulders seemed to shudder, then slump, as if a great weight had settled there. He would not meet Baelor’s eyes, but he stared at a spot on the intricate pattern of the rug, a coiled serpent devouring its own tail.
“Son, you did not write back,” she said, her voice gentle but firm. She was not asking, she was stating a fact they all knew.
Maekar’s head snapped up. “What was there to say? That I had bested the squire from House Crakehall in the yard? That father had praised my posture with a lance? That Aerys had mocked me for some imagined slight in front of the court?” His voice rose, cracking with a fury that had been dammed for years. “It would have sounded like the boasting of a child to the hero of Harrenhal! I would not have you pity me.”
A mother’s heart is a map of every wound her children have ever suffered. She saw it now, laid bare in the lamplight. One son trying to bridge a growing chasm with stories of success, never realizing he was boasting from a cliff face to a boy at the bottom. The other, crippled by a pride as vast and empty as the sky, choosing silence over the vulnerability of asking to be lifted up.
“There is more,” Myriah pressed, the queen's certainty taking root where her mother’s grief had been. Something had sparked this blaze. Letters and absences were tinder, but not the flint. “I know that night when you returned, Baelor. From Whent. You held your arms to him. And he would not come.”
Now Baelor shifted. Maekar went utterly still, a statue suddenly imbued with terror. His eyes found a portrait of a long-dead king on the far wall and clung to it.
“I called him my little hawk,” Baelor said, the nickname tasting like ash on his tongue. “He always laughed at it.”
“‘He will grow claws to rival a dragon’s,’” the younger suddenly breathed out, looking at the floorboards now. He was quoting their father’s drunken boasting after Maekar’s first victory at a squires’ tourney. He remembered. Her chest tightened.
“But he did not come to me,” Baelor finished, a raw sound entering the polished timber of his voice. “He called me ‘My prince.’ As if he did not know my name. Why?”
Maekar seemed to shrink into the brocade of the chair. He looked, for the first time, not angry or defiant, but small. “Lady Swann was in your escort,” he mumbled to the serpent on the rug.
A knot of dread formed in Myriah’s throat.
It was Baelor who scoffed, a soft, mirthless sound of true astonishment. “Jynifer? Her father escorted her north to see family. It was a convenience.
“Maekar, that was years ago. You…” He trailed off, the thought arriving even as he spoke it. The smooth, courtly prince’s face dissolved into sheer bewilderment. “You cannot still think…? For five years you have thought this… grudge began over some lands-knight’s daughter? Gods be good.”
“You still lay with her,” Maekar whispered. The words were like stones, heavy and final.
Myriah closed her eyes. Here it was. The shallow well they had both been digging for so long, so furiously, believing they might reach the core of their pain. All this strife, for a girl Baelor kept close only for what little softness she might lend him when the court left him ragged. For the shadow of a love he could not allow himself. Her own hands curled on the arms of her chair.
“It isn’t love,” Baelor snapped, a flash of that rare anger she had only ever seen directed at himself “She knows that what we have is brief. That is all it is, a brief warmth against a great cold. We have not… what she and I do is a balm. That’s all. I have never given her anything I am not prepared to take back.”
Baelor was such a mature person for his age. Even at five and ten he'd held onto such maturity and that maturity continued with him, for which all who observed saw as admirable. He spoke with all the calm of a diplomat. He was never given over to such passion, or so others thought. Myriah saw more. The prince who is calmest has to have something to hold on to.
Maekar was breathing through his mouth now, though no sound came out. His entire body leaned away from his brother, like a plant scorched by flame.
All her strength was failing. This conversation could only break things, not mend them. To push further would be to press on their wounds until the marrow showed. And yet, if she let them be… this chasm, already so deep, would become their grave. “Your jealousy, my son,” she heard her own thin voice say, cutting across Baelor’s explanations, “is an easy bed for this sickness to rest in, Maekar. It’s soft there. I understand it. But it feels to me there is an older ache under it.” The quiet words were a gamble.
She was looking right at Maekar.
Baelor fell silent, as confused as a guest who has arrived mid-play. He followed her gaze.
There was no flash of defiance this time, no clench of a mailed fist. Something broke across Maekar’s face like a tremor that was nothing to do with temper. His eyes finally found Baelor’s, and held. In them, she saw a world her eldest had never bothered, or never dared, to look at.
“My heart can’t hold anything else that doesn’t have your shape, brother.” Maekar's whispered confession made the air solid as stone, unmoving as a tomb. Baelor leaned back in shock. She held her own breath and she saw, for a single wild heartbeat in Baelor's sudden widened eyes—the shape of a recognition that nearly broke him.
It lasted no longer than a shudder.
Before Baelor could form a word, whether of horror or of anything else at all, her younger son stood up. It was a convulsive, graceless movement.
Without another look to either of them, without the formality of a bow, or a word, Maekar fled. He didn't stride, or even run like a boy, but simply moved for the door with such desperation to quit the room that it was the fastest motion there. He had said it and now he would not endure it to live past its echo.
The heavy oak door shut. Baelor had not moved from his chair, yet she could have sworn he’d been dealt a mortal blow. The color had vanished from his face, leaving it ashen under the lamplight. A muscle worked in his throat as he swallowed. Then, a careful slowness returned to his limbs; with a quiet breath he placed the teacup back upon the table, with the neat precision she herself had taught him.
A different silence settled over the chamber: not a tension waiting to be snapped, but the hollow quiet that follows a cry of unbearable pain.
“Mother,” he said, and the word was foreign in that room, stripped of all its history. “What… What was that? Did he mean… Could he possibly mean what that sounded like?”
And Myriah, her own heart a tattered flag after the storm, finally let the mask she wore for the court drop. She reached across the small table and laid her hand over his. His fingers were cold.
“Listen to me, Baelor,” she said, her Dornish accent thick with an urgency that left no room for royal distance. “Any mother knows the shape of her children’s souls, even when they try to hide them. You have spent five years thinking Maekar was angry with you. He is not. He is lost. He has been lost since the day you came back a grown man and did not see that the boy you left behind had built a world with you at its center.”
She squeezed his hand. “He is confused. He is ashamed. And what he feels for you, my love, is so tangled up in brotherhood and worship and a boy’s desperate longing that he has no name for it himself. Until tonight. And in naming it, he believes he has damned himself.”
Baelor’s gaze was fixed on the door, as if he could will it to open, to undo what had been done. “And I… I never saw. I thought his anger was pride. I thought… gods, I thought he was jealous of a girl because he wanted her for himself.” The self-recrimination in his voice was a whip.
Gods, what a tangle. To see your eldest son, the heir, the perfect prince, realize he had been fighting a shadow.
“Go to him,” she urged, her grip tightening. “Not tonight. The wound is too raw. But you cannot let him fester in this confession, alone. You cannot let him believe what he said was a curse on our house. Whatever you feel… whatever this is… it must be faced. Or it will unmake you both.”
Baelor finally looked at her, and in his mismatched eyes she saw a glimmer of the boy he’d been, the one who had taught Maekar to name the stars. “What if… what if what I do makes it worse?”
Myriah withdrew her hand and sat back, a queen once more. “It cannot be worse than this.”