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The dress fit wrong. You were not surprised, it was borrowed after all, from the lady of Ashford who had clearly not seen good fashions for many years. It had long sleeves that cuffed at your wrists, flaring over your hands, a high neckline that was a simple circle around your neck, and a bare skirt, no embroidery, no pomp. You had not packed any black dresses for yourself, you had not expected to enter mourning on a simple trip away to the backwoods that were Ashford. It was stupid, you now thought, not to pack anything just in case. You held too high hopes for your life, too much joy it seemed, for the situation you were in. You were married to a Targaryen prince, nothing would ever be simple. High hopes would only leave you naive and unprepared.
You twisted your rings around your fingers, staring at the tabletop in the aftermath of what you had just witnessed, in the heavy silence that remained with the departure of the hedge kni- of Dunk. Ser Duncan the Tall. He deserved the respect of his name at least, after all that he had gone through, the same as the rest of you.
Maekar sat there too, behind the desk that had once been occupied by the golden light of his older brother, now just dim and grey and shrouded with loneliness and silence. He sat straighter than you had ever seen him, as if the loss had pulled his spine taut, as if he was forced to hold everything upright and properly now that the brother that once did it all was gone.
He looked so tired, your husband, more tired than you had ever seen him before. Your marriage was still relatively recent in the grand scheme of things, but you felt you had come to know him in that time, and the change was palpable. He had already been a frowny grump, had already been rigid and almost always on the cusp of aggressiveness but now… now he was weighed down by the grief and guilt, his shoulders taut but rounded, his eyes haunted, his mouth always grim but in a different way to before.
He had not let you touch him since the trial, not properly anyway. He flinched at the brush of your hand, at the possibility of comfort. He did not even look at you long enough to warrant attention. You realised quickly that he did not want to feel better, that he did not want to allow himself to forget his pain, even for a moment. You felt blind in the face of this, unsure of how to proceed, whether you should push or step back. It left you doing nothing.
The cuts on his face were scabbed over now, but it still hurt you to look at them. They only made his grief that much more obvious, as if each slash was replaced by the word “kinslayer”, by the words “grief” and “horror”. And Ser Duncan too had looked so battered and bruised, like he had been squished by a giant’s hands, haphazardly put back together, then left unto the world. Your heart had clenched for him too, but again you were left to do nothing. You had become a pathetic, helpless thing, made up only of all the things you did not do.
You had not said anything in the aftermath of the puppet show, despite your many misgivings about not only Aerion but Maekar’s role in indulging him. You had not said anything about the precarious nature of Daeron’s words, how they fueled a fire that should not have been lit in the first place. You had not said anything at Baelor’s funeral, had barely said anything since. You were made only of the mistakes of your silence.
You could still hear Maekar’s voice as he spoke to Ser Duncan, “he is my last son”, and tears bit at the backs of your eyes. You sucked a breath in, twisted the ring harshly around your finger, and clenched your eyes shut.
“I think you should let him go,” you finally pushed out, and it sounded too high-pitched in your ears. You clenched your hands together, a frown marring your brow, but you did not hurry to take the words back, only let them steep in the air.
You heard Maekar shift, heard him put down his book and turn to face you.
“What?” It was simple, not shouted, only just about spoken into the air, restrained only through exhaustion.
“I think you should let Egg go with him,” you finally opened your eyes, finally glanced at Maekar as the words breezed out of you.
He was so pale, especially in this sickly grey light. His lips looked impossibly red, the cuts too, and his eyes were like blue crystal ,shiny like ice from the wall, straight from the North. There was so much there in his face, in the downward slope of his brow and the look in his eyes, but he said none of it.
“Why would you even suggest that?” He breathed out, and you had never heard him sound so gentle and pained, as if the act of hearing your words was enough to crush his heart.
“You heard Ser Duncan,” you returned, shifting forward in your seat, your own eyes scrunching up with pain, lining with tears desperate to spill. “You heard all he had to say, and you know the truth of it too.”
Maekar clenched his eyes shut and shook his head. His throat moved with a harsh swallow and you were desperate to go to him, to clasp his face in your hands as you had done so many times, to kiss him and look him right in the eye from only inches away. You stayed rooted to your seat.
“Enough of this,” he whispered, “I have made my decision.” He kept his eyes shut, his head bowing, but you could not let it go.
“Maekar,” you whispered his name, and it felt strange in your mouth. How long had it been since you had said his name truly? “He deserves better. He deserves a chance to grow better, away from the poison and the rotted apple,” you argued, fighting past the lump in your throat, leaning even farther forward.
“You do not know what he deserves,” he gritted out, and you felt yourself go still. Your hands trembled a little as your eyes widened. “You are not his mother.”
You stared at him through your tears. You felt your heart in your chest in a way you had never felt it before. It was the first time you were so aware of it, as if you could feel all its lines and the lump of flesh in the middle, could feel it peel back at the edges and shrink and shrivel, throb with pain.
“You did not carry him, you did not birth him. You are not Dyanna, you do not know what the boy deserves.” He said it with such finality, each word firm and clipped, said with such conviction that it could be nothing but the truth.
Your hands shook violently now, and even clenching them did not quell the tremor. You breathed slowly in and out, but each inhale shook, rattled in your chest like windows in a gale, each exhale threatened a sob or a wail. But you were frozen too, incapable of all the reactions your body wished from you. You could do nothing except sit there and feel the pain, could do nothing but become that person of inaction once more.
Your eyes dropped from Maekar to the tabletop, tracing the different grooves and patterns in the wood. How wonderful that a tree, all marked and gnarled, could still be so beautiful. You could not even twist the rings on your fingers, it was far too much movement.
Slowly, after a long moment, you nodded, the only thing you could do, and leaned back in your chair. You continued to stare. You worried that if you closed your eyes the tears would spill, and that was too much right now.
A part of you wanted to glance back up at him, to see if he felt any remorse for what he said, to see if the pain consumed him the way you wished it to now. But you could not handle it if you looked up and nothing had changed on his face.
The two of you sat in the silence of it now. The air remained heavy with everything said, as if it had caught the words and now held them there safely, cradled and perfect and unforgettable. You did not move, and neither did he, sitting there like two statues who could never look at one another, could never speak to one another, forever placed facing away but in the same space, existing alone together. You wondered if anything might ever break this silence between you.