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got fic: at the bottom of everything
Title: at the bottom of everything
Pairing: Rhaegar/Lyanna
Rating: R
Words: ~3,800
Summary: The roses sit lightly on Lyanna's head, the petals cool and feather-soft where they brush against her brow, the same icy blue as her gown, heavy silk and brocade that has her flushed and sweating in the beating southron sun.
Notes: Written for Day Two of the Valentine's Event at![[personal profile]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=88)
gameofships.
at the bottom of everything
Lyanna watches Prince Rhaegar as he sings, squinting through the heavy smoke from the torches spitting on the walls, intrigued by his strange Targaryen features, his pale hair and lilac eyes, but also the careful tilt of his head and the generous curl of his mouth, the way his fingers move across the strings, light and deft and sure. Few men bother with music in the North, believing it weak, a womanish waste of hands meant to hold axes and swords, but there is a certain strength to the way Rhaegar holds his harp, in the set of his shoulders and the curve of his arm.
His song is a familiar one, a tune Lyanna has heard countless times at weddings and feasts, but he has slowed it into something near a dirge, his voice rich and dark in Harrenhal's cavernous main hall. When he reaches her favorite part, the stanzas about a young girl whose father locks her in a tower to keep her safe from some unnamed danger, she feels a slow ache in her chest, burning just beneath her ribs, and she buries her face in her wine to hide the tears stinging the corners of her eyes.
+
She had meant it as a jape, a way to teach three unruly squires respect and better manners, but the king had been wroth when she trotted off the field without revealing her face, shouting as she darted between two men of the Kingsguard, and the crowd had erupted in taunts and jeers, to placate his fury if nothing else.
He is no true king, to show his childish rages so publicly, she thinks, remembering how Aerys had looked on the dais, anger flushing his craggy face, his hair unkempt and his crown crooked and red weals festering on the backs of his hands.
She hides her helm and breastplate under a thick and flowering shrub, and tucks her greaves into the mossy crater of a rotten log. Her shield is too large and heavy for such things, so she leaves it propped against one of the ancient, arching trees, grateful that she'd dropped her jousting lance before she fled the field. She finds her dress where she left it, folded into the shade from a cluster of rocks; her hands shake as she fusses with the laces at her bodice, and she is still smoothing her skirts down over her riding breeches when she hears footsteps rustling the humus.
"I would not have expected you, my lady."
It is the prince, standing suddenly at her elbow, studying her with narrowed eyes and a curious twist to his mouth. His hair is pulled back from his face, gathered into a loose tail that sharpens the lines of his cheekbones and jaw, and he is still dressed in his tourney clothes, a fancy red and black surcoat that drains what little color there is to his skin. She looks away from him, watching the shadows stretch and curl beyond his shoulder as the sun burns through the sagging canopy of trees.
"Do all the Northern houses train their women at arms?" Rhaegar asks.
"Some," she replies, thinking of Bear Island and the clans living along the Bay of Ice, places the Ironborn often seek to raid when the waters are too choppy to cross the Sunset Sea. "My own house has not done such in a thousand years."
He makes a soft noise in his throat, neither agreement nor argument, then catches her hand, running his thumb over the telling rough patches on her palm. "Yet, you ride like a warrior and bear the marks of a swordsman."
"My brothers were given the swords." Lyanna pulls her hand away, troubled by both his closeness and his eyes. She has never seen eyes that color, and she finds them as unsettling as his casual familiarity. "I was given books and needles and stories about the gods."
"Have I interrupted your prayers?" he asks, tilting his head toward the tree beside them, where her jousting shield waits like an accusation. She had been proud of her artistry when she painted it, but it looks poorly done now, as the failing sunlight flares over each uneven stroke and wandering line.
"No." Harrenhal's godswood is dark and quiet enough for the godswoods in the North, but there is an uneasiness here that digs at something under Lyanna's skin, an ill feeling hidden in the brackish, murky stillness of the stream, in the fallen corpses of dead trees left to decay for three hundred years, still blackened with a reminder of Aegon and his dragons. "My gods rarely trouble themselves with the lands south of the Neck."
He nods at this, falling silent for a long moment, then glances down the path that leads to the keep. "You should leave here, before you are found."
"You will not give me away?"
"You meant no harm, and my father will forget, once he finds suspicion in a new shadow." He brushes a strand of hair from her face, his fingers lingering too long on her cheek. "I will keep your secret."
"At what price?" she asks sharply, her voice cracking through the stillness like a whip. It occurs to her now, as the corners of his mouth pull with a smile, that she has given him no titles nor shown him any deference, but if anything, he seems pleased rather than offended.
"We shall call it a trade," he says, turning toward the path. "Perhaps one day I shall give you a secret of my own."
+
They feast again that night, though Rhaegar does not play his harp; a troupe of Oldtown singers comes in as the honeycakes and sweetbreads are cleared away, and the servants ready the main hall for dancing, pushing the lower tables against the wall and sweeping fresh sawdust onto the floor.
Lyanna takes her first turns with Robert, his hand warm and solid at her waist and her head barely reaching the middle of his chest, but he leaves her with her brothers at the end of the fourth song, excusing himself to visit with a group of knights from the Stormlands he hasn't seen since the last tourney. She passes the next few songs between Brandon and Ned, then the next few with Benjen, smiling despite the awkwardness of his gait, the way his fingers twist uncertainly in the folds of her skirts, how often he stumbles and steps on her toes.
"I don't like dancing," he confesses, a frown slanting the line of his mouth. He is three full moons from twelve, all arms and legs and a solemn Stark face he has not yet grown into, and his hair is an unruly mop, curling where it brushes his shoulders but not quite long enough to be tied at his neck.
Lyanna laughs. "You'd best learn to like it, if you mean to have a happy wife."
"I don't want a wife." His frown deepens, and he wrinkles his nose the way he does when Winterfell's kitchen serves pease. "I want to have adventures. I want to go south and be a knight."
"And you'll make a fine one, I wager. The best," Robert says, ruffling Benjen's hair as he wraps his arm around Lyanna's waist. "You'll be the next Dragonknight."
Benjen flushes pink to his ears and gives Robert half a bow, then runs off toward a milling group of children his own age, freckled boys with the sharp-nosed, mousy-haired look of Freys.
"He's a good lad," Robert murmurs, leading her into a new step as the music shifts into a light and lilting reel. He has wine on his breath, and a damp patch is spreading near the neck of his doublet, a reddish tinge seeping into the careful thread-of-gold stitching. "I can only hope Renly turns out half as well."
"Is he troublesome?" she asks.
"He's a spoilt terror," Robert replies, a mirthless laugh rumbling in his chest. "Storm's End is full of old men too craven to refuse him treats or strap his bottom. I'll never understand why Stannis allows it. I've a mind to bring him back to the Eyrie, but I doubt Jon Arryn would thank me for the grief and noise."
"If Lord Arryn was a man vexed by grief and noise, he wouldn't have fostered you and Ned."
"Oh? Is this how you speak to me, your own betrothed?" Robert asks, startled into a fond smile. He cups her cheek, his hand clumsy with wine, his thumb rough and calloused at the corner of her mouth. "Would that you were even a year older. We could wed tonight, and we could return together to Storm's End. Renly needs a mother, not cosseting greybeards who bow just because he eats his turnips."
Her stomach lurches at the very thought of it, of becoming a woman wed before her fifteenth nameday, of leaving her brothers and the familiar comfort of Winterfell for a strange, windswept keep in the stifling heat of the south, where she would bear Robert's children and tend little Renly and wear her fingers to nubs sewing new cloaks for Robert to tear or soak with wine. She glances at Brandon, who is dancing closely with Ashara Dayne, and then at Ned, who is sharing a drink with Howland Reed, and then at Benjen, who is laughing with the Freys. She doubts he would go south to be a knight, because he is a Stark, and the North is a living thing in a Stark's blood, but she envies the fact that he could.
"I would be honored," she says, forcing herself to smile.
+
The roses sit lightly on Lyanna's head, the petals cool and feather-soft where they brush against her brow, the same icy blue as her gown, heavy silk and brocade that has her flushed and sweating in the beating southron sun.
A shocked murmur runs through the crowd; Lyanna hears Princess Elia gasp and Robert bellow in anger, and Ned freezes beside her, his elbow a sharp point as it nudges into her arm.
"My lady," Rhaegar says, nodding his head.
He checks his horse into a turn and spurs it toward the stables, his hair flashing silver in the sunlight, snapping like a banner fighting against the wind.
+
"This was ill done," her father says, his voice quiet in the close heat of their tent, calm where Brandon's had been angry and harsh. Brandon had raged at her for nearly an hour before storming off after Ned or Robert or both, threatening Rhaegar with one breath and calling Lyanna cruel names with the next.
"Would you have had me refuse him?" she asks, her eyes raw and swollen from crying.
Rickard studies her for a moment, then shakes his head, his mouth a grim and tired line. "No, Lya. You've done no wrong. The fault is Rhaegar's. Had you refused him, Aerys might've taken insult."
"If I've done no wrong, then why are we leaving?"
"Because if we stay, we risk giving Elia insult," Rickard says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Dorne has long been an unhappy part of this realm, and for Rhaegar to snub is wife so publicly -- the Starks have not had trouble with the Targaryens since Torrhen knelt. I'll not have trouble now, just because it pleased some princeling to give you a handful of flowers."
"Father, I -- "
Rickard waves her off, then stands from his chair with a sigh. "We ride as soon as Brandon and Ned find Benjen." He pauses at the tent flap, his fingers curled in the dusty fabric. "Shall I call for your maid, or can you manage your things on your own?"
"No, I'll do it," she says, her cheeks hot and fresh tears burning her eyes. Her hands shake as she changes into a riding dress of plain, grey wool, as she throws her blue gown and the rest of her things into her traveling trunk.
+
Lyanna runs into the godswood as soon as she is finished packing, pushing deeper than she had the afternoon before, crossing the brackish stream and cresting the sloping rise just beyond it, until she finds herself inside a loose thicket of sentinels, a dozen or so ancient and greyish trees ringing a proper weirwood. She is surprised by it, since most the heart trees in the south were lost when the Andals brought the Seven across the Narrow Sea; its an old and gruesome thing, the face more bloodied and sneering than the watcher at Winterfell.
She sits beneath it, smoothing her skirts over her lap as she leans back against the hulking trunk, digging her hands into the red leaves piled around her, grateful for the familiar touchstone. Her head aches from crying, a dull pain that throbs across her temples with each breath, and her stomach is sour, empty and churning at once.
"You told me your gods do not venture this far south."
It's Rhaegar, his voice sad as he steps out of the shadows cast by the sentinels. His hair is unbound, pale and smooth where it spills over his shoulders, and he is dressed in fine but simple hunting woolens, soft greens and browns that do not bleed the warmth from his face like the dark colors of his house.
"I'm not praying. I'm hiding from my father. If he doesn't find me while it's light enough to ride, he might not take me home."
Rhaegar crouches in front of her, his arms folded neatly on his bent knees. "I'm sorry if I've caused you trouble. It was not my wish."
"It's done with." She tosses a handful of weirwood leaves into the air between them, watching as they flutter down like snow in summer, frowning over his shoulder when she hears angry voices on the other side of the rise. "My brothers -- I should go."
"Come away with me," Rhaegar says as he stands.
"What?"
"Come away with me." He catches her hand and guides her to her feet, his thumb brushing the back of her wrist. "We can go anywhere you please. North or south, or across the water."
"I can't," she says, stepping away from him as the voices draw closer. "You are a man already married, and I am betrothed."
"Do you love him?"
Lyanna frowns at him for a moment, unsure of how to answer. Robert is kind to her in his own rough and blustering way, and he claims to love her with all his heart, but he is a southron lord with southron habits, unused to being defied or refused. He will put her aside eventually, once she has given him sons and daughters and her favors are no longer new, leaving her to drink with his men and father bastards across the Stormlands while she dwells in Storm's End alone.
"Does it truly matter?" she asks finally, batting at her hair as it falls into her face. Her father had been pleased when Robert proposed the match, and Ned and Robert are closer than brothers. "The papers are signed and sealed."
"It should matter. A septon once told me the gods fashioned us for love."
"And you believe that?"
"No," he admits, turning back toward the sentinels. "I believe they fashioned us for failure."
+
The letters come infrequently, spaced over enough weeks that she is always surprised when she finds a new one, tucked beneath her pillow or folded inside her jewelry box or rolled into one of the knots on the frame of her bed. He never signs his name to them, and they're sealed with a flame in silver rather than a dragon in Targaryen red or black, but the thin, spidery hand speaks of the same man who so carefully held his harp at Harrenhal, and the offer is the same as the one he made in the godswood.
Come away with me. We can go anywhere you please. North or south, or across the water.
She often wonders how he manages it, since Winterfell ravens are first opened by Maester Walys or her father, if he sends a rider north with each new note, or if he's found a Northern man willing to risk the Wall for a few extra coins.
The next letter comes a fortnight past her nameday, falling from the collar of her bed gown as she's pulling it around her shoulders. She smiles as she breaks the seal with her thumbnail, and the message twists at something warm and dangerous inside her chest.
I'm coming for you the night the moon turns. Meet me a league south of the winter town. You will not need a horse.
+
She tells herself she's not going.
Her breath catches at the very thought of it, of running away from Robert and Storm's End, of traveling to all the far-off places she's never been, of Rhaegar's silver hair and his slow, sad smile, but then she remembers Ned and her father and her duty to her family, and a cold weight settles in the pit of her stomach.
She tells herself she's not going, up until the moment she climbs through her window.
+
They ride south and east, south and east, one of the Kingsguard knights half a league ahead and the other two half a league behind.
She had suggested Pentos or Lys when they first set out, so she is surprised when they cross the White Knife rather than follow it down to White Harbor, and again when they stay on the Kingsroad past Harrenhal, bypassing Saltpans and Maidenpool and Duskendale. At night they camp well off the road, rolled into horse blankets and shivering without a fire, and in the mornings they continue south and east, until the flint hills of the Crownlands give way to the rolling plains bordering the Reach.
"Do you mean for us to sail from Storm's End?" she asks, their second night past Blackwater Rush, shocked that he would think to bring her so close to Robert's lands.
"I thought perhaps Dorne," he says, tucking her into the curve of his arm and pressing a soft kiss against her temple. "We'll be safer if we leave from somewhere we won't be recognized."
+
Dorne is dusty and hot, flat save for the sudden, jagged peaks of the Red Mountains, reaching up toward the sunbleached sky like broken and bloody teeth, and Lyanna hates everything about it, the dry air and the constant heat and the fine sand that blows into her nose and mouth with every shift of the wind, gritty and rasping against her skin when it sifts underneath her clothes.
"A few more days," Rhaegar tells her, when she asks how much longer they must stay here, in a stifling tower built from rough bricks the same burnt orange-red as the mountains outside her windows. "It's not safe yet," he says as well, offering her one of the slow, sad smiles that makes her stomach twist and her heart flutter, though he does not tell her why, and he only kisses her if she asks.
He had not touched her on the road, perhaps to spare her from the prying eyes of the Kingsguard, but he seeks her constantly now, pushing her back against walls and dragging her down onto his bed, pulling her into his lap as he sits on the low couch in his solar, one of the few rooms in the tower with a window overlooking the mouth of Prince's Pass. He is careful with her, often teasing her with his hands and mouth before settling between her legs, and he narrows his lilac eyes as he spends inside her, his fingers brushing over the hollow of her throat or curling into her hair.
"A few more days," he says, until her moon blood stops and her belly starts to swell, and then he no longer speaks of leaving at all.
+
Lyanna is four moons gone when she learns about Brandon and her father, not from Rhaegar or the Kingsguard knights, but from two of the maids as they whisper about the news in the halls.
She cries until her eyes burn and her throat feels hoarse and raw, until searing pains tear through the low of her belly and blood starts to bloom between her legs, bright and warm against the skin of her thighs. Rhaegar sends for the midwife, a wizened Dornish woman with leathery hands and a kind, toothless smile, and she leads Lyanna into bed with soft words, then doses her with a foul-tasting potion and a cup of dreamwine.
"The babe will be well, if she keeps to her bed," the midwife says, just as Lyanna's eyes are sliding closed.
The mattress dips as Rhaegar sits beside her, his hand splayed over the swell of their child.
+
"You never wanted me at all," Lyanna says, a fortnight later, just as she's well enough to walk again, the truth hitting her all at once, like the heat lightning that strikes the Dornish desert in the dead of night. "You wanted another child."
"Needed," Rhaegar admits, pulling his hair over one shoulder as he looks up from his book. "I needed another child, and I needed a Stark to bear it. Fire and ice, the scroll said. Could Elia give me another child, it would not be the one prophesied."
Lyanna steadies herself against the lintel, her knees weak and sharp ache hollowing into her chest. "You never loved me. You've told me naught but lies from the start."
"No." He frowns out the window for a moment, then closes his book with a sigh. "I spoke the truth when I said the gods fashioned us for failure. The child you carry is fated to save the realm from darkness and death, but by leaving Elia and bringing you here I've already ripped it in half."
+
Lyanna watches Rhaegar ride north through Prince's Pass from the window of the solar, digging her fingernails into the scorched red bricks lining the sill as he shrinks into the horizon, his black armor glinting darkly in the Dornish sunlight.
She thinks of Ned and Robert, battling their way south because of her own folly and something Rhaegar once read in a dusty scroll, and of the babe growing in her belly, a Targaryen bastard who will always live with this war his shadow. Her shoulders begin to shake, her stomach knotting and her breath burning in the back of her throat, but the tears to not come. Perhaps I spent them all on Brandon and Father.
"Are you well, milady?" her maid asks, frowning as she sets the breakfast tray on the table.
Lyanna sighs and moves away from the window. Rhaegar was wrong, she thinks bitterly, as the maid lays out the fruit and bread and cheese. The gods fashioned us for disappointment and lies.
"I'm well enough," she says, forcing herself to smile.
Pairing: Rhaegar/Lyanna
Rating: R
Words: ~3,800
Summary: The roses sit lightly on Lyanna's head, the petals cool and feather-soft where they brush against her brow, the same icy blue as her gown, heavy silk and brocade that has her flushed and sweating in the beating southron sun.
Notes: Written for Day Two of the Valentine's Event at
gameofships.Lyanna watches Prince Rhaegar as he sings, squinting through the heavy smoke from the torches spitting on the walls, intrigued by his strange Targaryen features, his pale hair and lilac eyes, but also the careful tilt of his head and the generous curl of his mouth, the way his fingers move across the strings, light and deft and sure. Few men bother with music in the North, believing it weak, a womanish waste of hands meant to hold axes and swords, but there is a certain strength to the way Rhaegar holds his harp, in the set of his shoulders and the curve of his arm.
His song is a familiar one, a tune Lyanna has heard countless times at weddings and feasts, but he has slowed it into something near a dirge, his voice rich and dark in Harrenhal's cavernous main hall. When he reaches her favorite part, the stanzas about a young girl whose father locks her in a tower to keep her safe from some unnamed danger, she feels a slow ache in her chest, burning just beneath her ribs, and she buries her face in her wine to hide the tears stinging the corners of her eyes.
+
She had meant it as a jape, a way to teach three unruly squires respect and better manners, but the king had been wroth when she trotted off the field without revealing her face, shouting as she darted between two men of the Kingsguard, and the crowd had erupted in taunts and jeers, to placate his fury if nothing else.
He is no true king, to show his childish rages so publicly, she thinks, remembering how Aerys had looked on the dais, anger flushing his craggy face, his hair unkempt and his crown crooked and red weals festering on the backs of his hands.
She hides her helm and breastplate under a thick and flowering shrub, and tucks her greaves into the mossy crater of a rotten log. Her shield is too large and heavy for such things, so she leaves it propped against one of the ancient, arching trees, grateful that she'd dropped her jousting lance before she fled the field. She finds her dress where she left it, folded into the shade from a cluster of rocks; her hands shake as she fusses with the laces at her bodice, and she is still smoothing her skirts down over her riding breeches when she hears footsteps rustling the humus.
"I would not have expected you, my lady."
It is the prince, standing suddenly at her elbow, studying her with narrowed eyes and a curious twist to his mouth. His hair is pulled back from his face, gathered into a loose tail that sharpens the lines of his cheekbones and jaw, and he is still dressed in his tourney clothes, a fancy red and black surcoat that drains what little color there is to his skin. She looks away from him, watching the shadows stretch and curl beyond his shoulder as the sun burns through the sagging canopy of trees.
"Do all the Northern houses train their women at arms?" Rhaegar asks.
"Some," she replies, thinking of Bear Island and the clans living along the Bay of Ice, places the Ironborn often seek to raid when the waters are too choppy to cross the Sunset Sea. "My own house has not done such in a thousand years."
He makes a soft noise in his throat, neither agreement nor argument, then catches her hand, running his thumb over the telling rough patches on her palm. "Yet, you ride like a warrior and bear the marks of a swordsman."
"My brothers were given the swords." Lyanna pulls her hand away, troubled by both his closeness and his eyes. She has never seen eyes that color, and she finds them as unsettling as his casual familiarity. "I was given books and needles and stories about the gods."
"Have I interrupted your prayers?" he asks, tilting his head toward the tree beside them, where her jousting shield waits like an accusation. She had been proud of her artistry when she painted it, but it looks poorly done now, as the failing sunlight flares over each uneven stroke and wandering line.
"No." Harrenhal's godswood is dark and quiet enough for the godswoods in the North, but there is an uneasiness here that digs at something under Lyanna's skin, an ill feeling hidden in the brackish, murky stillness of the stream, in the fallen corpses of dead trees left to decay for three hundred years, still blackened with a reminder of Aegon and his dragons. "My gods rarely trouble themselves with the lands south of the Neck."
He nods at this, falling silent for a long moment, then glances down the path that leads to the keep. "You should leave here, before you are found."
"You will not give me away?"
"You meant no harm, and my father will forget, once he finds suspicion in a new shadow." He brushes a strand of hair from her face, his fingers lingering too long on her cheek. "I will keep your secret."
"At what price?" she asks sharply, her voice cracking through the stillness like a whip. It occurs to her now, as the corners of his mouth pull with a smile, that she has given him no titles nor shown him any deference, but if anything, he seems pleased rather than offended.
"We shall call it a trade," he says, turning toward the path. "Perhaps one day I shall give you a secret of my own."
+
They feast again that night, though Rhaegar does not play his harp; a troupe of Oldtown singers comes in as the honeycakes and sweetbreads are cleared away, and the servants ready the main hall for dancing, pushing the lower tables against the wall and sweeping fresh sawdust onto the floor.
Lyanna takes her first turns with Robert, his hand warm and solid at her waist and her head barely reaching the middle of his chest, but he leaves her with her brothers at the end of the fourth song, excusing himself to visit with a group of knights from the Stormlands he hasn't seen since the last tourney. She passes the next few songs between Brandon and Ned, then the next few with Benjen, smiling despite the awkwardness of his gait, the way his fingers twist uncertainly in the folds of her skirts, how often he stumbles and steps on her toes.
"I don't like dancing," he confesses, a frown slanting the line of his mouth. He is three full moons from twelve, all arms and legs and a solemn Stark face he has not yet grown into, and his hair is an unruly mop, curling where it brushes his shoulders but not quite long enough to be tied at his neck.
Lyanna laughs. "You'd best learn to like it, if you mean to have a happy wife."
"I don't want a wife." His frown deepens, and he wrinkles his nose the way he does when Winterfell's kitchen serves pease. "I want to have adventures. I want to go south and be a knight."
"And you'll make a fine one, I wager. The best," Robert says, ruffling Benjen's hair as he wraps his arm around Lyanna's waist. "You'll be the next Dragonknight."
Benjen flushes pink to his ears and gives Robert half a bow, then runs off toward a milling group of children his own age, freckled boys with the sharp-nosed, mousy-haired look of Freys.
"He's a good lad," Robert murmurs, leading her into a new step as the music shifts into a light and lilting reel. He has wine on his breath, and a damp patch is spreading near the neck of his doublet, a reddish tinge seeping into the careful thread-of-gold stitching. "I can only hope Renly turns out half as well."
"Is he troublesome?" she asks.
"He's a spoilt terror," Robert replies, a mirthless laugh rumbling in his chest. "Storm's End is full of old men too craven to refuse him treats or strap his bottom. I'll never understand why Stannis allows it. I've a mind to bring him back to the Eyrie, but I doubt Jon Arryn would thank me for the grief and noise."
"If Lord Arryn was a man vexed by grief and noise, he wouldn't have fostered you and Ned."
"Oh? Is this how you speak to me, your own betrothed?" Robert asks, startled into a fond smile. He cups her cheek, his hand clumsy with wine, his thumb rough and calloused at the corner of her mouth. "Would that you were even a year older. We could wed tonight, and we could return together to Storm's End. Renly needs a mother, not cosseting greybeards who bow just because he eats his turnips."
Her stomach lurches at the very thought of it, of becoming a woman wed before her fifteenth nameday, of leaving her brothers and the familiar comfort of Winterfell for a strange, windswept keep in the stifling heat of the south, where she would bear Robert's children and tend little Renly and wear her fingers to nubs sewing new cloaks for Robert to tear or soak with wine. She glances at Brandon, who is dancing closely with Ashara Dayne, and then at Ned, who is sharing a drink with Howland Reed, and then at Benjen, who is laughing with the Freys. She doubts he would go south to be a knight, because he is a Stark, and the North is a living thing in a Stark's blood, but she envies the fact that he could.
"I would be honored," she says, forcing herself to smile.
+
The roses sit lightly on Lyanna's head, the petals cool and feather-soft where they brush against her brow, the same icy blue as her gown, heavy silk and brocade that has her flushed and sweating in the beating southron sun.
A shocked murmur runs through the crowd; Lyanna hears Princess Elia gasp and Robert bellow in anger, and Ned freezes beside her, his elbow a sharp point as it nudges into her arm.
"My lady," Rhaegar says, nodding his head.
He checks his horse into a turn and spurs it toward the stables, his hair flashing silver in the sunlight, snapping like a banner fighting against the wind.
+
"This was ill done," her father says, his voice quiet in the close heat of their tent, calm where Brandon's had been angry and harsh. Brandon had raged at her for nearly an hour before storming off after Ned or Robert or both, threatening Rhaegar with one breath and calling Lyanna cruel names with the next.
"Would you have had me refuse him?" she asks, her eyes raw and swollen from crying.
Rickard studies her for a moment, then shakes his head, his mouth a grim and tired line. "No, Lya. You've done no wrong. The fault is Rhaegar's. Had you refused him, Aerys might've taken insult."
"If I've done no wrong, then why are we leaving?"
"Because if we stay, we risk giving Elia insult," Rickard says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Dorne has long been an unhappy part of this realm, and for Rhaegar to snub is wife so publicly -- the Starks have not had trouble with the Targaryens since Torrhen knelt. I'll not have trouble now, just because it pleased some princeling to give you a handful of flowers."
"Father, I -- "
Rickard waves her off, then stands from his chair with a sigh. "We ride as soon as Brandon and Ned find Benjen." He pauses at the tent flap, his fingers curled in the dusty fabric. "Shall I call for your maid, or can you manage your things on your own?"
"No, I'll do it," she says, her cheeks hot and fresh tears burning her eyes. Her hands shake as she changes into a riding dress of plain, grey wool, as she throws her blue gown and the rest of her things into her traveling trunk.
+
Lyanna runs into the godswood as soon as she is finished packing, pushing deeper than she had the afternoon before, crossing the brackish stream and cresting the sloping rise just beyond it, until she finds herself inside a loose thicket of sentinels, a dozen or so ancient and greyish trees ringing a proper weirwood. She is surprised by it, since most the heart trees in the south were lost when the Andals brought the Seven across the Narrow Sea; its an old and gruesome thing, the face more bloodied and sneering than the watcher at Winterfell.
She sits beneath it, smoothing her skirts over her lap as she leans back against the hulking trunk, digging her hands into the red leaves piled around her, grateful for the familiar touchstone. Her head aches from crying, a dull pain that throbs across her temples with each breath, and her stomach is sour, empty and churning at once.
"You told me your gods do not venture this far south."
It's Rhaegar, his voice sad as he steps out of the shadows cast by the sentinels. His hair is unbound, pale and smooth where it spills over his shoulders, and he is dressed in fine but simple hunting woolens, soft greens and browns that do not bleed the warmth from his face like the dark colors of his house.
"I'm not praying. I'm hiding from my father. If he doesn't find me while it's light enough to ride, he might not take me home."
Rhaegar crouches in front of her, his arms folded neatly on his bent knees. "I'm sorry if I've caused you trouble. It was not my wish."
"It's done with." She tosses a handful of weirwood leaves into the air between them, watching as they flutter down like snow in summer, frowning over his shoulder when she hears angry voices on the other side of the rise. "My brothers -- I should go."
"Come away with me," Rhaegar says as he stands.
"What?"
"Come away with me." He catches her hand and guides her to her feet, his thumb brushing the back of her wrist. "We can go anywhere you please. North or south, or across the water."
"I can't," she says, stepping away from him as the voices draw closer. "You are a man already married, and I am betrothed."
"Do you love him?"
Lyanna frowns at him for a moment, unsure of how to answer. Robert is kind to her in his own rough and blustering way, and he claims to love her with all his heart, but he is a southron lord with southron habits, unused to being defied or refused. He will put her aside eventually, once she has given him sons and daughters and her favors are no longer new, leaving her to drink with his men and father bastards across the Stormlands while she dwells in Storm's End alone.
"Does it truly matter?" she asks finally, batting at her hair as it falls into her face. Her father had been pleased when Robert proposed the match, and Ned and Robert are closer than brothers. "The papers are signed and sealed."
"It should matter. A septon once told me the gods fashioned us for love."
"And you believe that?"
"No," he admits, turning back toward the sentinels. "I believe they fashioned us for failure."
+
The letters come infrequently, spaced over enough weeks that she is always surprised when she finds a new one, tucked beneath her pillow or folded inside her jewelry box or rolled into one of the knots on the frame of her bed. He never signs his name to them, and they're sealed with a flame in silver rather than a dragon in Targaryen red or black, but the thin, spidery hand speaks of the same man who so carefully held his harp at Harrenhal, and the offer is the same as the one he made in the godswood.
Come away with me. We can go anywhere you please. North or south, or across the water.
She often wonders how he manages it, since Winterfell ravens are first opened by Maester Walys or her father, if he sends a rider north with each new note, or if he's found a Northern man willing to risk the Wall for a few extra coins.
The next letter comes a fortnight past her nameday, falling from the collar of her bed gown as she's pulling it around her shoulders. She smiles as she breaks the seal with her thumbnail, and the message twists at something warm and dangerous inside her chest.
I'm coming for you the night the moon turns. Meet me a league south of the winter town. You will not need a horse.
+
She tells herself she's not going.
Her breath catches at the very thought of it, of running away from Robert and Storm's End, of traveling to all the far-off places she's never been, of Rhaegar's silver hair and his slow, sad smile, but then she remembers Ned and her father and her duty to her family, and a cold weight settles in the pit of her stomach.
She tells herself she's not going, up until the moment she climbs through her window.
+
They ride south and east, south and east, one of the Kingsguard knights half a league ahead and the other two half a league behind.
She had suggested Pentos or Lys when they first set out, so she is surprised when they cross the White Knife rather than follow it down to White Harbor, and again when they stay on the Kingsroad past Harrenhal, bypassing Saltpans and Maidenpool and Duskendale. At night they camp well off the road, rolled into horse blankets and shivering without a fire, and in the mornings they continue south and east, until the flint hills of the Crownlands give way to the rolling plains bordering the Reach.
"Do you mean for us to sail from Storm's End?" she asks, their second night past Blackwater Rush, shocked that he would think to bring her so close to Robert's lands.
"I thought perhaps Dorne," he says, tucking her into the curve of his arm and pressing a soft kiss against her temple. "We'll be safer if we leave from somewhere we won't be recognized."
+
Dorne is dusty and hot, flat save for the sudden, jagged peaks of the Red Mountains, reaching up toward the sunbleached sky like broken and bloody teeth, and Lyanna hates everything about it, the dry air and the constant heat and the fine sand that blows into her nose and mouth with every shift of the wind, gritty and rasping against her skin when it sifts underneath her clothes.
"A few more days," Rhaegar tells her, when she asks how much longer they must stay here, in a stifling tower built from rough bricks the same burnt orange-red as the mountains outside her windows. "It's not safe yet," he says as well, offering her one of the slow, sad smiles that makes her stomach twist and her heart flutter, though he does not tell her why, and he only kisses her if she asks.
He had not touched her on the road, perhaps to spare her from the prying eyes of the Kingsguard, but he seeks her constantly now, pushing her back against walls and dragging her down onto his bed, pulling her into his lap as he sits on the low couch in his solar, one of the few rooms in the tower with a window overlooking the mouth of Prince's Pass. He is careful with her, often teasing her with his hands and mouth before settling between her legs, and he narrows his lilac eyes as he spends inside her, his fingers brushing over the hollow of her throat or curling into her hair.
"A few more days," he says, until her moon blood stops and her belly starts to swell, and then he no longer speaks of leaving at all.
+
Lyanna is four moons gone when she learns about Brandon and her father, not from Rhaegar or the Kingsguard knights, but from two of the maids as they whisper about the news in the halls.
She cries until her eyes burn and her throat feels hoarse and raw, until searing pains tear through the low of her belly and blood starts to bloom between her legs, bright and warm against the skin of her thighs. Rhaegar sends for the midwife, a wizened Dornish woman with leathery hands and a kind, toothless smile, and she leads Lyanna into bed with soft words, then doses her with a foul-tasting potion and a cup of dreamwine.
"The babe will be well, if she keeps to her bed," the midwife says, just as Lyanna's eyes are sliding closed.
The mattress dips as Rhaegar sits beside her, his hand splayed over the swell of their child.
+
"You never wanted me at all," Lyanna says, a fortnight later, just as she's well enough to walk again, the truth hitting her all at once, like the heat lightning that strikes the Dornish desert in the dead of night. "You wanted another child."
"Needed," Rhaegar admits, pulling his hair over one shoulder as he looks up from his book. "I needed another child, and I needed a Stark to bear it. Fire and ice, the scroll said. Could Elia give me another child, it would not be the one prophesied."
Lyanna steadies herself against the lintel, her knees weak and sharp ache hollowing into her chest. "You never loved me. You've told me naught but lies from the start."
"No." He frowns out the window for a moment, then closes his book with a sigh. "I spoke the truth when I said the gods fashioned us for failure. The child you carry is fated to save the realm from darkness and death, but by leaving Elia and bringing you here I've already ripped it in half."
+
Lyanna watches Rhaegar ride north through Prince's Pass from the window of the solar, digging her fingernails into the scorched red bricks lining the sill as he shrinks into the horizon, his black armor glinting darkly in the Dornish sunlight.
She thinks of Ned and Robert, battling their way south because of her own folly and something Rhaegar once read in a dusty scroll, and of the babe growing in her belly, a Targaryen bastard who will always live with this war his shadow. Her shoulders begin to shake, her stomach knotting and her breath burning in the back of her throat, but the tears to not come. Perhaps I spent them all on Brandon and Father.
"Are you well, milady?" her maid asks, frowning as she sets the breakfast tray on the table.
Lyanna sighs and moves away from the window. Rhaegar was wrong, she thinks bitterly, as the maid lays out the fruit and bread and cheese. The gods fashioned us for disappointment and lies.
"I'm well enough," she says, forcing herself to smile.