NO ONE
Time moved differently in the dark. This was not a complaint. A man had learned to find the truth of things wherever it lived, in light or in darkness, in cold or in heat, in life or in the long moment of its ending. The dark was honest. It stripped away the performances that living things conducted for one another's benefit and left only what remained when performance was no longer possible. In the dark a man knew exactly what he was.
He was a servant of Him of Many Faces. He was a man who had no name worth giving. He had been a blind man, a deaf man, a lame man, in service to his god, and he had found that each privation taught him something the possession of the faculty had concealed.
Blindness had taught him to hear. Deafness had taught him to watch. The lameness had been the most instructive. It taught him to move through the world at the mercy of its surfaces, to feel the contempt and the pity and the occasional rough kindness of strangers, was to understand something about the gift that no amount of theology could provide.
The cold of the black cells was nothing to him. The hunger was nothing. The darkness was, in its own way, a gift.
He is patient, he who waits for all things. A man's teacher had said this, or something like it, many years ago in a voice and face that had since been discarded. The House of Black and White prepared its servants for many things. For prisons. For waiting. For a man to live a life that was not, necessarily, his alone.
He had not expected to be here as long as he had been.
The assignment had been simple in its concept, if not in its execution. There were records lost to the House of Black and White — not stolen, not destroyed, but forgotten, as many things are when people are given the gift and the knowledge passes with them.
They were ancient records. The first servant's records. The account of what had been done to the slaves of Valyria, who had suffered for a millennium without the mercy of death — bound to glass candles in ways that made them undying, the perfect immortal property of their masters. They had not eaten, had not slept, had not required the ordinary maintenance of living creatures. They had not been able to die.
The slaves had begged for the gift. They had been begging for a thousand years, and no one had come, and then the first servant had come, and had given it, and the begging had ended. He gave it to slavers too, eventually.
But the method had been lost.
The house wished to recover it, for reasons that were the house's and not a man's to question. He had volunteered for the search, because the younger servants lacked the patience and experience for it.
He had come to Westeros to find a glass candle, the last known relics from old Valyria, the objects around which the binding had been performed. There were records that the Targaryens had brought such things from the Freehold's ruins when they came to Dragonstone.
He had come to the Red Keep to look, and had been found before he could begin looking properly, and now he was here, in the dark, with the cold, and the patience, and the slow passing of time.
He was, in the estimation of his god, failing.
He examined this truth without distress. One failed, sometimes. The gift was not always given cleanly. Even the most careful servant of Him of Many Faces found himself in cells, occasionally. What mattered was what happened next.
What happened next was light.
Not much of it. A single torch, carried at a distance, approaching through the passage beyond his cell. He heard the footsteps first — one set, light and unhurried, the footstep of a young person who moved well and had been trained to do so.
The light arrived.
A boy. No — not a boy exactly. A young man, fourteen or fifteen mayhaps, at the age where the difference between the two is real but not yet settled. He was tall for his age, with golden hair that peaked out from underneath his cloak and golden eyes that caught the torchlight in a way that most eyes did not, and he was dressed without ornament, in dark clothes with the aim of coming and going relatively unnoticed.
He carried the torch in his left hand and in his right he carried a tray. On the tray there lay black bread, a wedge of hard cheese, dried meat, a cup, a small wineskin, a skin of water. The boy set the tray down and pushed it through the gap at the cell's base without speaking.
A man looked at the food. A man looked at the young man on the other side of the bars. A man let the silence sit.
"Is it poisoned?" The man who was no one asked, in the language of Westeros, which he had been speaking fluently for eleven years and which still sounded to him like a blunt instrument and was grating to an man's own ears.
"No," said the young man.
A man listened to the word. He heard it the way he had been taught to hear — not the surface meaning only, but the grain beneath, the quality of the breath that carried it, the small muscular adjustments that accompanied truth and were absent in its opposite. In the House of Black and White, they called this art by many names. In the words of Westeros, there was no name for it.
The boy was telling the truth.
A man ate. The bread was hard and the cheese harder and the dried meat had been salted to the edge of palatability, but a man, in truth, was hungry. So he ate methodically, without hurry, and drank the water first and the wine after, and when a man was done he set the empty cup on the tray and pushed it back through the gap and sat with his back against the cell's wall and waited.
The young man had been waiting too. He had not shifted or fidgeted or spoken while the food was eaten. This too was interesting. Most people who brought things to prisoners wanted to be acknowledged immediately. The young man was patient.
"You work for Him of Many Faces," the young man said. It was not a question.
A man did not show the thing that moved through him at those words. He had given up showing things a very long time ago, and giving up the performance of stillness was one of the first lessons. Stillness performed is still a kind of noise, its own signal, just as loud as startlement to anyone who knew what to listen for. Instead he achieved the real thing, which required nothing. He was still because he had become no one and there was nothing to be gained by motion.
"And you are here for a glass candle," the young man continued softly, his voice low. "Or were, before this."
A man looked at him for a moment. "A man would know how you came to know that."
"I can't explain it in a way you'd understand." The young man said it simply, without apology or elaboration. "The walls have ears as well sometimes. And you'd know if I were lying."
A man considered this. The young man was right on all counts. Whatever explanation he might offer, its truth or falseness would be easily legible.
A man examined the words I can't explain it in a way you'd understand and found them honest, which was stranger than finding them dishonest would have been. Most people who could not explain things did not know they could not explain them.
"A man accepts this," A man decided.
The young man crouched, which brought his golden eyes down to level with a man's eyes. The torchlight moved in them in, causing them to shine in the darkness.
"Dragonstone," the young man said simply. "The Targaryens held it for a hundred years before they came to King's Landing. It was a Valyrian outpost before that, for longer still. If there are candles to be found, they would be there."
A man was still.
"There is also the Citadel," the young man, continued, his voice never higher than a whisper. "In Oldtown. The archmaesters have one. They know what it is and they are afraid of it. I suspect they know what it can do."
The young man made these revelations easily, seemingly almost without thought. He spoke it as if it were common knowledge. A man thought about the years of careful work that had led him to the Red Keep and the error that had brought him here and considered that mayhaps he had been looking in the wrong place entirely.
A man was, he admitted, grateful. Even gratitude was a clean thing, in the dark, without performance.
"You are the prince," a man had concluded. It was not difficult to reason. The golden eyes, the quiet authority, the access to the black cells at this hour.
"Joffrey Baratheon," the young man announced. He did not seem to think the confirmation required any ceremony. "I have been visiting the cells. There are men here who are neither criminals nor threats, and I have decided to send them north. By ship to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. The Night's Watch has use for willing men." The young man, now named Joffrey, looked past the bars between them into a man's eyes."You have two choices. You board the ship, which sails in days time, or I have you executed at dawn."
A man was understanding where this was going.
"The ship is Braavosi," the prince of Westeros said. He produced a key from somewhere on his person. A man heard it before he saw it, that small sound of iron on iron. The prince unlocked the cell door and opened it and stepped inside without a hint of hesitation, which was either very brave or informed by something that made bravery unnecessary. A man was not sure which was better.
Baratheon crouched down again, at eye level, close enough that even in chains a man could have killed him seven different ways before he could have called for help. He did not call for help.
He leaned forward, and spoke quietly, with the correct pronunciation and enunciation. "Valar morghulis."
A man answered without hesitation. "Valar dohaeris."
The prince nodded once. He sat back on his heels and looked at the man who was not anyone with those gold eyes that caught light strangely. "I would have something from you." he said. "Before you board the ship. An oath, sworn on all the gods, yours and mine and the ones neither of us serve. That you will give the gift to whoever I name, before you continue your own work."
A man looked at him. A man thought. About the glass candles, and the lost records and the first servant's work and the long patience of the house. A man thought about his possible execution. A man thought about Dragonstone. A man thought about Oldtown.
"A man swears. For all you have done, the life of this servant you have saved and the life you will now allow a man to take, a man will allow you two names." The prince named Joffrey seemed honestly surprised. A man now understood that the young man had only assumed all this work would give him one name.
It would seem that the golden prince did not understand as much as he had thought. For he had just saved a man's life and would allow a man to accomplish his mission, a mission that would help the servants of the many faced god give the gift to many.
The boy could have asked for more names and a man would not have denied him. The prince came to this realisation as well, as seen by his frown. Joffrey sighed, shook his head and looked back at no one in the cell.
A man gave his pledge. "On Him of Many Faces, and by all the gods of sea and air, and even him of fire, I swear it. By the seven new gods and the old gods beyond count, I swear it. One gift will go to whoever you name, before a man continues his work, and the second after."
The prince was quiet for a moment. The torch burned. The darkness pressed at its edges. "Agreeable. The first name, is Daenerys Targaryen."
A man noted the name.
He turned it over once, twice, set it in the place where names were kept. A man did not ask why. The why of a name was the client's business.
"It shall be done," a man said. "And the second?"
"Find me when you have collected what you wanted." A man understood and smiled. The prince needed time to decide who to grant the gift to.
Joffrey Baratheon rose. He looked at the man with those strange gold eyes, unlocked his chains and then he walked out of the cell and left the door open behind him, taking his torch back down the passage.
The darkness returned.
A man sat in it for a while. A man thought about Dragonstone. A man thought about Oldtown. A man thought about a girl with silver hair and violet eyes who was, at this moment, somewhere in the world that the darkness did not show him, and who would not be in the world much longer when a man kept his oath.
A man thought about the name. Daenerys Targaryen. How fitting. A name from old Valyria, the language that had shaped the candles he was looking for, the civilisation that had built the thing that had enslaved multitudes of people for a thousand years, the civilisation that had burned.
The last of its children, scattered, diminished, and this prince had given him one of them to find.
A man wondered, briefly, whether the god had arranged it. A man decided it did not matter. The god arranged everything, in the end. That was the point of the god. A man did not need to wonder.
Valar morghulis, the prince had said, with the perfect pronunciation. Valar dohaeris, a man thought as he stood up. A man smiled and left the cell to wait for the ship.
Last edited: Jun 10, 2026
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DDragonman
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#8
JON
I should not be here.
This thought had come to Jon before, in various forms, over the seven years he had spent at court. The awareness that he was bastard in rooms he had not been born to, the sense of occupying a space on uncertain terms.
Jon had grown accustomed to it though, or thought he had. It was different now.
He should not be here. He should not have existed at all. It wasn't self pity. It was the truth, a simple painful truth.
A prince had taken a lady. A war had begun. A prince had died on the Trident with a hammer through his chest — his father in truth, though he would never call him that, for he had never known him. The man had died not knowing that he had left a son in the red sands of Dorne.
But Rhaegar wasn't special.
Thousands of men had died in that war. Thousands more had lost fathers and sons and brothers. His uncle — his father, the man he called father — had spent fifteen years carrying the secret of it like a boulder in his chest.
All of that. All of that, so that he could exist.
Jon rode at Joffrey's shoulder and said nothing, and watched Robert Baratheon's broad back ahead of them, and thought, that man killed my father. And then, that man laughed at the death of my siblings. Rhaenys. Aegon. My brother and sister.
Robert Baratheon laughed and yet here Jon was, riding south with his son, in service to a kingdom built on the bones of children.
Jon pushed the thought away and kept pace.
The summons had come before dawn.
Jon had still been dressing when the shadow fell across the entrance of the tent he shared with Loras, Lancel and Tyrek.
He had emerged into the grey pre-morning to find Ser Boros Blount's unlovely face regarding him with look that fell between weary, annoyed and confused.
"The king sent me to fetch you," Ser Boros had said.
"Just me?" Jon asked. "Shall I bring his squires?"
"My cousins can sleep," said Joffrey, from behind Ser Boros. The prince had been dressed and horsed already, and did not look the least bit tired. Joffrey smiled at him over Ser Boros's shoulder. "Good morrow, my friend."
"Your grace, good morrrow," Jon greeted. "What is happening?"
"Ride with us and find out."
Lord Stark's tent was a short walk away. Jon arrived in time to see his father emerge into the pre-dawn grey still pulling his cloak around his shoulders, his face was pinched with annoyance at his sleep being interrupted though he was trying not to show it.
The king was already mounted, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak like a bear that had learned to sit a horse. Ser Barristan was waiting beside him and Ser Boros came up to join them.
"Up, Stark!" Robert called out, loudly, which was the only register he seemed to possess before midday. "We have matters of state to discuss."
"Come inside, your grace," his father said.
"No. The camp is too full of ears." The king gestured expansively at the dark. "Besides, I want to ride out and taste this country of yours. Your boy shall come as well."
Lord Stark's eyes found Jon briefly. Jon gave him nothing, because there was nothing useful to give.
He shouldn't be here either, Jon thought, looking at his father. He should be at home with his lady wife. He should be with Robb, who must now be Lord of winterfell. He should be with Arya, the little devil. He should be with Rickon, who is three years old and will not remember his father's face if he spends too many years in the south.
But he wasn't at home in Winterfell. He was here because a promise extracted from him by a dying girl in a tower still holds him here, fifteen years later, in the dark before dawn, getting back onto a horse for a king he did not truly know.
Jon put his boot in the stirrup and mounted.
Robert set a pace that suggested he was trying to outrun something. They drove hard off the kingsroad and across the open plain, the pre-dawn dark giving way to a grey and watery light that turned the world the colour of old pewter. Jon rode at Joffrey's shoulder and kept his eyes forward and let his mind do what it had been doing since the godswood.
Aemon, his father had said, in the godswood, afterward. She named you Aemon. For the Dragonknight, I believe. And Jon had laughed, which was perhaps not the appropriate response, but he had laughed because he could not help it, because when he and Robb had been eight years old in the yard at Winterfell they had fought with sticks over who got to be Aemon the Dragonknight and who got to be the Lord of Winterfell. Jon was a bastard. So he could not be Lord of Winterfell and so he and Robb decided that Jon must needs be Aemon the Dragonknight. And all the while the name had been his and he had not known it.
He did not know what to do with the name. He had turned it over for days and still did not know. He was Jon Snow. He had been Jon Snow for sixteen years, had built a life under that name, had earned a place under that name. Aemon Snow/Sand/Targaryen was a stranger — a dead boy, the son of two people he had never met, the last ember of a dynasty that had burned itself out before he was old enough to hold a sword. He was not that boy. He could not be that boy.
And yet.
He remembered standing in the crypts of Winterfell as a child, when the stone kings sat in their darkness and the silence was absolute. Jon would go by himself, but his father would sometimes bring him there. Not often — not as a regular thing — but occasionally, in a way that felt like the paying of a debt. Jon had always known whose statue his father stopped longest in front of.
Lyanna Stark. His sister. My mother.
The face in the stone was young—too young. She had been sixteen when she died, his father had said, his voice careful and emptied of everything except the words themselves. Sixteen years old, in a tower in Dorne, with blue winter roses scattered around her and the smell of blood.
She named you Aemon, his father had said. She was holding the roses still. She loved him, and she loved you.
Jon had been thinking and still did not understand.
The king reined in at last on a low rise as the dawn broke through, flushed and laughing with the exhilaration of the ride, his enormous chest heaving.
Jon pulled up alongside Joffrey and looked back down the slope. The Kingsguard had fallen far back, as directed. The plain stretched south and west, brown and misted, the kingsroad a thin dark line cutting through it. From here the column and its noise and its three hundred complications were invisible.
Just four riders on a ridge. Two fathers. Two sons.
"Gods," Robert said, laughing. "That is how a man ought to ride." He looked at Jon, and at Joffrey, and some of the exhilaration became something softer for a moment. The king had moods that moved through him like weather, swift and total. "You two kept up well."
"Ser Barristan's doing," Joffrey settled on his charger and said. "He feels that a man who cannot ride hard in the dark is a man who will die in a battle."
"He'd know." Robert's laugh was quieter now. "Gods, that wheelhouse. It creaks and groans as if it's alive and suffering. Do you know, it broke two axles between Casterly Rock and King's Landing last progress? Two. Cersei insists on bringing half the furnishings of the Red Keep every time she travels." He looked at Ned with a grin that had something genuine in it still, under all the years and all the weight. "I swear, if it breaks another axle I'll burn it, and she can walk."
"I'll light the torch," Ned said, and for a moment Jon could see in his father's face the young man he must have been, the one who had been fostered at the Eyrie with this enormous loud laughing man he called a friend.
"I still say we should have taken a ship from white harbour." Joffrey complained, vexed.
"Your mother," Robert sighed out, in a tone of long suffering.
"You married her." said Joffrey, mirroring his father's tone.
"Why must you remind me?" The king grumbled, his breath was steaming with each word. "I have half a mind to leave all this behind and just let you rule, Joff. Gods know you'd do it better than me."
"Mayhaps, but I hear the crown is heavy and the throne is mighty uncomfortable." Said Joffrey. "Anyhow, your annoyance amuses me father."
"You are an insolent child." The king declared, though he could not keep the grin from his lips and he slapped Joffrey on the shoulder hard enough to rock him sideways in the saddle.
"If you want to smack something," Joffrey said, recovering, "You can have a go at that wheelhouse, mayhaps if it's damaged enough, mother will see sense and leave it behind."
Robert laughed, the sound came from his belly and rolled out over the plain.
Jon and his father watched this exchange in silence. Robert loved his son, it was clear for all in the realm to see. Robert's love was loud and physical and slightly overwhelming and entirely genuine. He showered Joffrey in gifts and spoke as if he were his only son. Robert spoke often and at length at how good his son was at everything, how proud he was, how Joffrey would be the best king the realms had seen. It was a belief shared by many.
He would make a better king, Jon agreed, not for the first time. He already is one, in all the ways that matter. All he needs is the chair.
"I hope you boys at least get to enjoy yourselves," Robert said, still cooling down from the rush his pace had given. "Going into the city every day, the taverns and whatnot. You're only young once." His eyes settled on Joffrey with intense focus. "Have you bedded a girl yet?"
Jon kept his face entirely still and fought not to laugh.
"I have some experience, Father," Joffrey said, with the same ease he brought to everything. "Though I find whores are not quite to my taste."
Robert's face opened into pure delight. He reached out and gripped the back of Joffrey's neck with one massive hand. "'Some experience' he says. That is my boy!" He looked, in that moment, entirely happy.
Then his gaze swung to Jon, and the expression became something slightly more complicated, as if he already knew the answer and was expecting to be disappointed. "And what about you, Snow? Don't tell me you're still as pious as your father."
"I wish not to father a bastard, your grace," Jon said.
Robert made a sound of profound dismissal. "I've offered to legitimise you. How many times now?"
Ned said nothing. The question was being left to Jon, as it always was, as his father always left these things to him out of some respect he had for Jon's right to his own name.
"The king is generous," Jon said. "As always. But there is no need."
"No need," Robert repeated, his frustration clear. "No need. Gods, you Starks." He looked at Ned. "Is it something in the water up here? Something in the cold? You raise them all like monks." He shook his enormous head. "You're just like your father. I hope you know it's not a compliment."
Jon flinched. It was small. A single involuntary contraction, barely a breath's worth of movement. He felt it happen and could not stop it.
His father did not notice. Robert did not notice. But Jon looked across at Joffrey and found Joffrey looking at him, quietly, with those gold eyes, and then Joffrey looked away and said something to the king about the barrows visible below them, and Robert was diverted, and the moment passed.
Just like your father, Robert had said. Meaning Ned. Meaning the man who had raised him. Not meaning Rhaegar Targaryen, who had died on the Trident with Robert's hammer in his chest. Not meaning a dead man. A dead prince. The last dragon. Jon breathed and said nothing and waited for the feeling to pass.
"There was a rider in the night." Robert said at last. His tone had changed, the morning-ride warmth retreating before something heavier. He reached into his cloak and produced a folded letter. "From Varys."
He passed it to Ned. Ned read it. Joffrey held a hand out when it was done and Robert made no objection. Joffrey read the letter. His mouth curved.
"What are you laughing at?" Robert demanded.
"Viserys must be very desperate," Prince Joffrey chuckled. "To sell his sister to a Dothraki khal."
"Sold himself a hundred thousand swords is what he did," the king said, the warmth entirely gone now.
"What is this about Robert? Shall we send her a wedding gift?" The king's hand asked, and Jon could hear in his father's voice the careful flatness of a man preparing to resist something.
"A knife," Robert Baratheon frowned at his hands dismissal. "A sharp one, and a bold man to wield it."
Lord Stark's jaw tightened. "She is little more than a child."
"She is older than me," the prince said, "and I am practically a man grown."
"She is innocent in all of this," Father said, ignoring this. "She did not choose her brother or her name."
"And how long will she remain innocent?" King Robert's voice had acquired an edge. "She will breed. It is what women do, and Dothraki children would still have Targaryen blood and grow of an age to plague me."
"There is no need to worry about that," His heir said. He had set the letter down on his saddle. "The childbed is dangerous. Women die. Babes die. Or the babe may be a girl. The Dothraki are a brutal people in any case — she may not survive being among them at all, let alone survive a pregnancy. It is an unpleasant possibility, but not one we need to arrange. Time is likely to arrange it for us."
"And if it doesn't?" Robert said. "You are to reign after me Joffrey. This is a threat on you as well."
"If it doesn't, then we have time to address it." Joffrey's voice was patient, trying to talk his father back from the edge. "There is no urgency that requires a knife today."
"Your Grace," Father began, speaking to the king, "the murder of children… it would be vile… unspeakable… "
"Unspeakable?" the king roared. The words came pouring out like a wound reopening."What Aerys did to your brother Brandon was unspeakable. The way your lord father died, that was unspeakable. And Rhaegar…how many times do you think he raped your sister? How many hundreds of times?"
Jon looked at the plain. He looked at the flat brown ground below the ridge and the mist hanging over the barrows of the First Men and he kept his face and his body completely still and breathed, slowly, through the roaring in his ears.
Joffrey said nothing, watching his father's outburst. The kings voice had grown so loud that his horse whinnied nervously beneath him. The king jerked the reins hard, quieting the animal, and pointed an angry finger at Ned. "I will kill every Targaryen I can get my hands on, until they are as dead as their Gods forsaken dragons, and then I will piss on their graves."
Lord Stark was saying something but Jon did not hear. He was looking at Robert Baratheon. He looked at this large man on a horse, flushed with old rage, with his fighting body gone to fat and his hands shaking slightly with the feeling, and he tried to find in this creature the man who had won at the Trident. The warrior who had cut through Rhaegar's bodyguards to reach him, who was said to have clashed with Rhaegar in the stream half a hundred times. The man who had killed his father.
Jon could not find him.
What was there instead was something diminished by time and wine and ease. A king who was frightened of shadows, who spoke of murdering girls across the sea as though it were statecraft, who had taken the grief of a dead woman and used it to justify near two decades of fury against people who had not been there.
Jon thought of Rhaegar's rubies scattered in the Trident, flowing down the river like little droplets of blood. He thought of a girl in a tower holding blue roses. He thought of an infant boy, with his head dashed against the red keeps walls. He thought of a young girl littered with a hundred stab wounds. He thought of the red keep, the graveyard of his siblings, and how he had lived there for near on a decade, feasting and being hosted by this man for whose pleasure they were murdered.
Jon felt rage and hate like he had never felt before. It was a bitter coiling thing in his chest with countless teeth that burned hotter than wildfire and hurt more than any wound he had taken in the yard.
Jon could not say anything. Jon could not do anything. Jon was holding the reins so tight in his hands that his horse could not keep still. Joffrey was looking at him with eyes that shined like the sun.
He knows. Something within him said. Jon felt a traitorous lance of fear shoot through his heart, but he mastered him self and pushed the thought away.
Jon breathed the cold northern air and looked at the plain and said nothing.
They were cousins, something said in him, quietly. Robert and Rhaegar. And yet he took pleasure in his children's death.
Jon glanced at Joffrey. The prince was looking at his father. We are cousins aren't we? If I ever had children, would he take pleasure in their death?
Jon knew the answer was no with a clearance that surprised him. It helped, slightly. It cooled his blood. He was not sure why.
"You're overreacting, Father." His cousin said firmly. Joffrey was looking up at the sky, he seemed to sigh.
The king blinked. The flush of anger peaked and slowly began to recede.
"A hundred thousand Dothraki," Robert stressed again, but the roar had gone out of it, and the anger was bleeding out like Jon's mother and little sister.
"Who will not cross the Narrow Sea," Joffrey explained. "The Dothraki fear open water. Viserys may be desperate enough to find ships—I doubt he will have enough—but even so, the khalasar will not follow him onto them. He would have a Targaryen invasion of perhaps himself and his sister and whatever hired swords are desperate enough to follow the Begger King and Queen to their deaths." He counted on his fingers. "And they could only land in so many places if they wish to be successful. Dragonstone, which Nuncle Stannis holds with the royal fleet. Or Dorne."
"Dorne," Lord Stark decided after a moment.
"Dorne will rightly never forgive us for Elia and her children," Joffrey said. Robert's expression went somewhere uncomfortable. "That is the truth of it, Father, and pretending otherwise helps nothing."
Jon thought to speak. "Mayhaps if you gave them the Mountain and Amory Lorch's heads." His voice came out colder than he expected. 'King' Robert glanced at him curiously, as if just remembering he was here.
The prince did not blink. "If Sansa and the babes she bore were murdered in such a way, would a few heads some sixteen years later suffice?"
Joffrey was looking between Jon and Lord Stark. Jon's father's face was cold. Jon's blood was boiling at the thought. The planes grew uncomfortable, with the king the most uncomfortable of all. They each knew it could not.
"I would hope not. They may offer the Targaryens shelter out of spite if nothing else." The Prince of the realm paused. "But it makes no difference. The Dothraki will not cross. Viserys and his sister will most likely die in the Dothraki Sea. This is a letter to be read and then set aside."
Robert chewed on this. He looked unconvinced, but the fury had ebbed. "People still call me Usurper, boy. Give them half a chance—"
"Then let us not give them half a chance," The crown prince cut through. "The realm needs to be strong enough that no Targaryen pretender can find purchase in it. That is the work. We must needs tie every corner of the realms together."
A silence settled. The wind moved through the brown grass.
"The Vale," Father said, after a moment. "With Jon Arryn gone, the east needs—"
"Not the Arryn boy," Robert said immediately. "We spoke of this already, Ned. He is too sickly."
"I agree. Though I love Robin like a little brother, it can't be him. Not now. Not yet."Joffrey said. "Bronze Yohn. For the wardenship. And Robin should foster with him. Royce is a good man, steady, and the boy needs someone stronger than what he has." He did not name Lysa Arryn directly. He did not need to.
Jon remembered before they left Winterfell. Lord stark spoke to him about a letter that had come. That the lady Lysa believed the Lannisters to have murdered Jon Arryn. But the woman was wrong.
Jon Arryn was old, he had been sickening for moons. And whilst he had deteriorated quickly in that last week, it was nothing strange for one so old according to the maesters. And whilst the Lannisters no doubt had the means to do away with the old hand if they wished, Jon could think of no reason to. He told his father as much and they had come to the conclusion that the lady Lysa was likely blinded by grief.
"The blackfish holds the Gates of the Moon, and that is fine… but he is his nieces man." Prince Joffrey was saying. "She left hysterical if you remember father. Mayhaps Bronze Yohn's brother could hold the gate instead. He is well respected and knows the Vale lords. They would accept him."
The hand of the king frowned, but thought it through carefully. "It has merit."
Robert looked from one to the other, not sure if he should be annoyed or pleased that this was the direction the conversation had taken. He settled, as he usually settled with Joffrey, on something like pride.
"Fine," Robert agreed. "We'll speak of it more when we have Ned properly ensconced as Hand." He gathered his reins. "Right now, I want to ride."
He spurred forward without waiting, as he always did, down off the ridge toward the barrows of the First Men.
Jon looked at Joffrey. Joffrey looked at him, those gold eyes steady, asking nothing.
He saw me flinch. And Joffrey had said nothing, and had redirected the king, and the moment had been allowed to pass.
Jon did not know whether to call that loyalty or friendship or tact. Perhaps it did not matter what he called it.
He was still Jon Snow. He was still a bastard — just, as it had turned out, a different kind of bastard than he had been told. He still did not belong at Winterfell. He had never belonged at Winterfell, not fully, and what his father had told him in the godswood had not changed that. It had only explained it.
He belonged here.
He looked at Joffrey, who was already moving, falling in behind the king, sitting his horse with that careless ease that made the yard knights furious and the court ladies sigh, wearing a blue silk favour at his wrist, mind already elsewhere.
His cousin.
The thought settled somewhere in him deep without drama. His cousin. His king, in the fullness of time. The man his sister was to marry. His task, his purpose, the thing he had decided on a borrowed garron seven years ago when Winterfell disappeared behind him and the south opened up.
The more things changed, Jon thought, and put his boots to his horse and rode after them. It did not matter. Joffrey would still be king. Jon would still be at his side. That would have to do for now.