"A man who serves for love will starve beside the man he loves. Coin, at least, keeps its promises."
a saying common among the hedge knights of the Reach, origin disputed, truth disputed by no one who has tried both.
—•—•—•—
Gold. Why in the seven hells didn't you say so earlier.
He'd meant it as a jape, mostly. He said it to cut the strangeness of the moment down because strange was exactly what this was. A muddy child in a torn robe standing in the middle of the road at first light claiming to be royalty, and strange things made Garret Snow nervous. But even as the words left his mouth he felt the shape of the morning rearrange itself around them. It always did the instant coin entered a conversation for Garret. Everything before gold had been a girl's wild story.
He was already doing the sums before his boots had finished settling into the mud. A royal member returned safe — gods, two of them, if the boy behind the rocks was telling true — was not reward money. That was house money. That was the kind of purse that bought a man land, or close enough to land that the difference stopped mattering, or at the very least bought him out from under every lord in the Seven Kingdoms who'd ever looked at his face, noted the absence of a surname worth repeating, and decided his sword arm wasn't worth the bread it'd cost to keep him fed through a long winter.
He'd had that look from enough lords to recognize it instantly now, like the dogs who learn the particular angle of a boot before it swings.
He had prayed to the old gods once, same as his father and his father's father before him. Carved faces in red weirwood, silent and watching, no septons and no seven sided star to speak of anywhere in the village he'd left behind. That had ended the day he rode south, or near enough to it. A boy learns fast that a heart tree opens no doors in the Reach, and knighthood is a southern rite through and through. A night's vigil kept in a sept, seven oils rubbed into a man's skin by a septon who'd never once in his life set boot north of the Neck. Most northern lords didn't bother with any of it. The old gods made no knights, only lords and riders, and that suited them well enough; a man didn't need a title blessed by gods he'd never worshipped to be worth his salt on a horse. Only White Harbor's Manderlys, transplanted out of the Reach generations back and devoted to the Seven as fiercely as any southern house, bred up northern knights in any numbers worth the counting. Garret was no Manderly, and no devout man either. He'd simply wanted the title badly enough to kneel through a vigil he didn't half believe in, and let the oil dry on skin that still, on colder nights, itched to be standing in front of a weirwood instead of a sept full of painted wooden gods that had never once answered him back.
"Right, then," he said aloud, mostly to himself, mostly to give his own hands something to do while the rest of him caught up to the morning. And what a morning it was turning out to be. His beloved eggs would have to wait.
He led the horse; a solid, uninspired brown gelding he'd named Turnip in a fit of poor humor two winters back and had never found cause to rename — off the muddy track and toward the boulders the girl kept glancing at.
"Well, go on then, girl," he said impatiently. "Fetch him out. I'm not minded to go crawlin' behind rocks after a prince on my hands and knees like some crofter's dog. A man's got his dignity, even one so far south of home as me."
The look she gave him suggested she doubted this claim considerably, which, fair enough. He doubted it himself most days.
She went, quick and small and still trembling faintly with whatever had put that much exhaustion into a child's face, and came back a moment later half dragging, half supporting a boy who could only be the cousin, dark haired where she was pale, one eye dark and one the particular deep indigo. Mismatched eyes. He'd heard men argue in taverns over whether that was a blessing or a warning sign, usually after their fourth cup, usually without ever having met a Targaryen close enough to ask.
This one looked, up close, considerably less like a blessing and considerably more like a boy who'd had a very shitty week.
"You're the knight," the boy said, in the flat, assessing tone of someone determined to sound unimpressed despite being visibly unable to stand without leaning most of his weight onto his cousin's shoulder.
"Aye."
"You don't look like much of one."
Garret let that sit a moment, turning it over, deciding how much offense to actually take and settling, as he usually did, on very little.
"Funny," he said. "Nor do you look much like a prince, lad. Thought you lot came with crowns stitched into your smallclothes down here. Save a man the trouble of askin'."
The boy's mouth opened, closed, opened again — clearly unused to being spoken to like that by anyone who wasn't also a Targaryen, and entirely unsure what to do with the sensation now that it had happened.
"He is a prince," the girl said, with weary patience.
"He is simply a prince who has been punched in the face, had his leg opened by a crossing man's knife, and carried through a tunnel like a sack of turnips for three days, which does tend to take the shine off a person."
"Turnips," Garret repeated, and found, despite himself, the corner of his mouth twitching. "My horse there is named Turnip."
The boy, Valarr, he supposed, if the stories going round the village these past days had any truth to them at all, which apparently they had rather more of than he'd credited — stared at him with an expression caught somewhere between affront and genuine, helpless curiosity.
"Why would you name a horse after a vegetable."
"Why wouldn't I. Horse don't care what a man calls him, lad, not up north and not down here neither. Eats the same oats whatever name you give him."
Garret crouched, giving the boy's leg a quick, unceremonious once over that was rather more professional than it looked. He'd patched enough wounds on enough men who couldn't afford a maester to know, what a dressing that was actually holding looked like, as opposed to one that was merely decorative. This one, to his mild surprise, looked like the former. Clean edges. No weeping. Someone had known what they were doing, or gotten remarkably lucky, and from the brief, pointed glance the girl shot the wound when he touched it. It was not fear, not surprise, mayhaps closer to proprietary concern. He had the distinct, useless suspicion that luck had very little to do with it.
He filed that thought away in the part of his mind reserved for things that weren't his business, which was a crowded part of his mind these days, and stood.
"Can you sit a horse?"
"I can," Valarr said, with more dignity than the situation strictly warranted, "ride perfectly well, when I am not—"
"When you're not currently lookin' like a boy three days dead and twice as sorry for it, aye, I follow you well enough." Garret turned to the girl. "And you?"
"I'll manage."
"Didn't ask if you'd manage, girl. We'd say a dog manages too, right up until he don't. Asked if you could ride."
Recalibration flickered across her face, as if she'd expected him to accept the first answer and was mildly thrown that he hadn't.
"Yes," she said, after a beat. "I can ride."
"Good. Up you go, then, Prince Turnip, you're first, seein' as you're the one leakin'." He lifted the boy and settled him on the front without waiting for argument, and after a moment of visible internal debate, the boy accepted the boost with awkward, humiliated gratitude.
Gods, but that was a familiar look. Garret had worn it himself, once, in a different life, standing in a Reach lord's hall with blood still drying under his nails and a knighthood freshly bestowed and absolutely nowhere to sleep that night because nobody had thought to mention where a newly made knight with no family and no household was actually meant to go once the ceremony was done. He'd slept in the stables. Nobody had apologized or cared. He had, eventually, stopped expecting anyone to.
He didn't say any of that. It wasn't the boy's fault that having people fall over themselves to catch him before he hit the ground was the only life he'd ever known. That wasn't a sin. It was just a different kind of luck than the kind Garret had been issued, and resenting a child for the particular accident of his birth seemed, even to Garret's own flinty estimation of himself, a bit much before breakfast.
Still. He noticed the resentment was there. He always noticed. He'd learned a long time ago that pretending not to notice a thing didn't make it go anywhere; it just meant it sat quieter.
~>~>~>~>~>~>
They had gone perhaps half a mile, Turnip picking his way along the muddy verge at a pace slow enough not to jostle the boy's leg, Garret walking alongside with one hand loose on the bridle and the other resting, out of long habit, near his sword hilt — when he asked the girl to account for herself, and she did: the meadow, the crossbow, the two dead guards, the cave beneath the castle, three days held while her father tore the coast apart looking in the wrong place, the boat, the village, and this morning's dock, and the word slavers had dropped into the air between them like a stone down a well. And then, by her telling, she'd simply gotten lucky, a hand worked loose from careless rope, a fistful of thrown sand, a kick in the balls, a shove, and two children running.
Garret turned it over as she talked and didn't much care for the shape of it. Two grown men who made their coin off not losing hold of frightened children didn't go down from sand, kick in the sack and a shove from a girl not yet seven, however quick her hands or legs were. There was also a careful, deliberate pause in her voice he'd caught back on the road, the sound of someone building a story rather than simply remembering one. He was working up to saying as much, had the first blunt edge of the question half out of his mouth, when she made a small, strangled sound beside him that cut it off clean.
It wasn't a large sound. A short, sharp inhale, barely more than that, the kind of noise a person made when they'd just remembered something they very much did not want to have forgotten. Garret was already half turned toward her, already saying "what" in the flat, clipped tone, before she'd finished drawing the next breath.
"My pouch," she said.
"Your what."
"My pouch." Her voice had gone thin in a way it hadn't been even when she'd been standing in the road bargaining her father's gold against a stranger's indifference.
"I don't have it. It was in one of their packs — I saw it, I knew where it was, I was going to — " She stopped herself, visibly.
"It doesn't matter why. It matters that it wasn't on either of them when I — when they went down. The other men would have taken their packs aboard the ship already."
"And that's a problem because."
"Because it's mine," she said, and there was something in the flatness of it, the sheer, total refusal to elaborate.
He'd met liars before. Good ones, mostly, in his line of work. He didn't survive ten years of hedge knighting without learning to read a man's face. This girl wasn't a good liar. She was, if anything, a rather poor one, saved only by the fact that most of the people she'd likely practiced on were too fond of her, or too highborn, or too distracted by her shiny hair and her golden eyes and the general weight of being royalty, to bother looking closely enough to catch it.
Garret looked closely. It was, annoyingly, half the reason anyone ever hired him.
"It's valuables, then?" He raised one of his eyebrows.
She bit her torn lip in a way that told him he'd landed the mark.
"It doesn't matter what it is."
"It matters plenty, seeing as you've got that look on your face like you're about to do something stupid."
"I'm not—"
"You are. I know the look well enough." He stopped walking, which stopped Turnip, which made the boy on Turnip's back wince and grip the pommel harder, and Garret spared him half a glance of apology before returning his full, flat attention to the girl.
"You're about to tell me you're going back for it."
"Yes."
No hesitation at all. Gods, old and new both, help him. He's starting to regret taking in this burdensome task.
"No," he said, "you're not."
"It isn't your decision."
"It's mine plain enough, seein' as I'm the one with the sword and the horse and some notion of how badly this mornin's already gone for everyone standin' in this road, and you're a girl of seven proposin' to walk back into a dockside full of men who were, last I heard, fixin' to turn you and the prince into cargo."
He heard his own voice climbing, which was unusual enough with a kind of distant professional irritation. He didn't raise his voice at highborn children as a rule, mostly because it rarely accomplished anything beyond making them cry, and crying children were loud. He brought it back down with effort. "Whatever's in that bag. Is it worth your life, truly?"
"It's worth more than my life," she nodded solemnly.
Garret resisted the need to crack his neck in frustration. "You're a bloody Princess of the realm. And it's as you say, your father is giving a big reward to anyone who brings you back well and safe. Does that pouch of yours have something more valuable than that? Your answer is not what a sensible person would give."
"I didn't say I was sensible. I said it was worth it."
She was already stepping back from Turnip's flank, already putting distance between herself and the two of them, and Garret had the sudden, sinking understanding that this conversation had been a formality on her end, a courtesy extended rather than a genuine negotiation, and that she had never once, through the whole of it, actually intended to be talked out of anything.
"Valaena." The boy's voice cracked across her name, high and alarmed, twisting in the saddle hard enough that he nearly overbalanced and had to grab the pommel again with both hands. "Valaena, no — you can't, not alone, let the knight go, let him—I can—"
"He has to stay with you," she said with finality, a flicker of genuine fear breaking through the careful composure, there and gone so fast Garret nearly missed it. "You can't ride on your own yet, not far, not fast, and I won't leave you with no one at all, and he won't leave you either because he's already decided he wants the gold more than he wants an argument with me, isn't that right, Ser Knight?"
Garret opened his mouth to object to being quite so neatly summarized by a child a fraction his age and found, to his own considerable annoyance, that he didn't actually have an objection ready. She wasn't wrong. That was the maddening part of it. She'd read him in under an hour more accurately than most lords managed after a year of feeding him.
"That's not the same as agreeing to let you run off alone into a den of slavers," he said instead, which was true, if somewhat beside the point now that she was already a full ten paces back and retreating further with every word.
"I'm not asking you to agree," she said. "I'm telling you so you don't waste time wondering where I've gone. Keep Valarr hidden. Keep him warm. If anyone comes down that road who isn't wearing a dragon or a stag, get him off it and into the trees, and if it comes to it — " She hesitated, just for a breath, just long enough that Garret caught the full weight of what she wasn't quite saying. "If I don't make it back before nightfall, leave me and bring him to my uncle. Ask for reinforcements and lead them to that dock. I mean that."
"That's a cold sort of thing to say to the man you've just hired."
"It's the only thing that matters," she said, and then, before he could get another word in, before he could so much as take the first step toward grabbing her by the back of her ruined robe and simply refusing to let this happen, she turned and ran.
~>~>~>~>~>~>
She was fast. He'd give her that, grudgingly, watching her small shape blur into the hedgerow and stride. Within a dozen heartbeats she was little more than a flicker of grey robe between the trees. Within two dozen, she was gone entirely, and Garret Snow was left standing in a muddy Stormlands road with a gelding named after a root vegetable, a prince of the realm swaying dangerously in the saddle, and a decision he had approximately no time at all to make.
"Go after her," Valarr commanded. His voice had lost its earlier stiffness entirely; what was left was simply a boy, frightened, too proud to say so plainly, saying it anyway because the alternative was worse. "Please. You have to — she can't—"
"Can't what. Look after herself? She's done a fair enough job of it so far, by my reckonin'. Put two grown men flat on their backs. Walked the pair of you out of a slaver's grip without so much as a fresh scratch on either of you." Garret kept his voice level, more for the boy's benefit than his own, though he noted with some irritation that he was also, in some small private corner of himself, trying to convince himself of it. "Whatever she's gone back for, she clearly judged it worth more than staying put. That's her call to make."
"You don't understand. She's — she's only small. She's not — " Valarr's jaw worked, visibly hunting for the words to explain something he himself plainly didn't have the full shape of, and Garret felt an unwelcome flicker of sympathy for a boy caught in a helpless position of knowing someone he cared for was about to do something dangerous and having absolutely no power to stop it. He remembered that position. He'd stood in it more than once, usually watching men make choices on battlefields that got them killed for reasons that seemed, from the outside, entirely avoidable.
"She told me to keep you safe," Garret said. "That's the job. That's the coin I'm owed for, and unless you're proposin' I leave an injured prince alone in open country to go chasin' after a girl who very deliberately ran before either of us could stop her, I mean to earn it."
There was silence for a moment.
Then the little prince broke it, stubbornly; "Are you not a knight?"
It was asked so plainly, with such round eyed and honest bewilderment, that Garret nearly answered before he understood he was being accused of something, funnily enough. "…I am," he said slowly.
"Then you swore the vows." Valarr said it the way a boy recites a lesson he has loved since the cradle.
"To defend the innocent. Women and children, and the weak, and to obey your lord and keep your honour clean. My father swore them, and so did my uncle, and they would never leave a girl alone to fight for herself. Father says a true knight doesn't weigh the danger first. He just goes, because the vow is the vow."
"Does he now," the Knight said doubtfully, glancing in the far off direction where the girl went.
"He's the best knight in the realm," Valarr said, with the flat certainty of a boy stating the colour of the sky. "He's never broken a vow in his life. Not one. Everybody says so."
"Then your father's a rarer creature than I've the stomach to be, lad, and I'd wager he's never once had to choose between a vow and his supper."
Garret rubbed a hand over his jaw. "Aye, I swore it. Knelt all night in a sept with a candle and a sore backside and said every word, and meant most of 'em. But I never swore to be a fool. A vow don't do much for a girl if I'm dead in a ditch halfway through keepin' it. And the vow I swore to you, just now, with my own mouth, was to see you safe. I'd call that one innocent already in hand against one runnin' off, and I can only keep the one."
"That's not how Father would count it."
"Your father has a castle, a few thousand swords, and a maester to count for him. I've a gelding named Turnip." Garret nearly smiled. "Don't tell the septons I said it. They'd sooner see me hanged than hear a knight say honour has a price on it."
"I don't care about the coin—"
"Well, I do." It came out harder than he'd meant it, damn highborns, and he watched the boy flinch slightly at the bluntness of it, and didn't particularly regret the flinch, because it was, old gods as his witness, true, and the boy was old enough — barely, mayhaps, but old enough — to hear a true thing stated plainly rather than wrapped in something softer and false. "I don't know you, boy. Don't know her either, not really, not past an hour's acquaintance and a muddy road. What I know is she made a choice, and she made it fast and clean, and whatever's sittin' in that bag of hers mattered enough she'd risk her own skin for it sooner than ask either of us to risk ours in her place. That's not nothin'. That's not a child throwin' a tantrum. You know her better than I do, lad - or was I wrong?"
Valarr was silent for a long moment, staring off into the trees where she'd vanished, his hands white knuckled on the pommel.
"No…." he admitted, finally, miserably. "You weren't wrong."
"Then we do the only sensible thing left to either of us, which is exactly what she told us to do." Garret took Turnip's bridle again and began walking, slow and steady, toward the deeper cover of the treeline that bordered the road — not the direction the girl had gone, but close enough to it that he could keep half an ear turned that way without abandoning his actual charge. "We get you hid. We get you warm as this miserable southron coast allows, which won't be much, trust me - I've known colder in the Reach in high summer than this, and that's a shameful thing for any land to manage. And we wait, and if she's not back by the time I judge the waitin's grown stupider than movin', we move, and I'll decide then whether that means goin' after her myself or gettin' you to the nearest man wearin' a stag or dragon on his chest, whichever comes first."
"And… if something happens to her?"
Garret didn't answer that one immediately. He walked another dozen paces, found a hollow beneath a shelf of rock thick enough to break the wind and shadowed enough to hide a horse and two children from a casual glance, and set about getting the boy down off Turnip's back with considerably more gentleness than his voice had carried a moment before, before he finally spoke.
"Then I'll have failed the job," he said, "and I don't fail jobs I've taken coin for. Not once yet. Don't mean to start the practice today, on account of one slip of a girl who thinks she's twice her own age and's got the stubbornness of a man three times it. My old mother used to say a thing like that about mules in the North — handsomer face, same temperament."
It wasn't comfort, exactly. It wasn't meant to be. But he saw something in the boy's face ease, fractionally.
Garret settled the boy against the rock, checked the dressing on his leg again more out of habit than necessity, and crouched beside him with his back to the stone and his eyes on the road.
~>~>~>~>~>~>
He did not, if he was honest with himself, particularly enjoy children.
It wasn't that he disliked them. It was simpler and less flattering than dislike: he had never had the luxury of spending enough time around them to develop an opinion either way. There had been no younger siblings worth the name back home, not ones he'd been permitted to claim kinship with past a certain age, not once the whispers started about which sons were which and whose mouths were too many for the stores to feed through a hard winter.
His village had prayed to carved faces in red wood, not the Seven, and the old gods were not gentle gods — they didn't forgive a man for being a mouth too many any more than a hard winter did. He'd left before anyone had to say the word aloud to him. That was supposed to be the mercy of it; going before you were sent, choosing the leaving as though choice made it kinder. He'd been ten and three. He remembered the exact weight of the pack on his back and the exact number of days' bread his mother had pressed into it without once meeting his eyes while she did it, and the way she'd said only be well, as though that cost her less than a proper goodbye.
He thought of that, now, watching Valarr Targaryen — heir's heir, blood of dragons, a boy who had never in his short life had to measure whether he was worth his own family's food stores — wince through the pain in his leg and ask, in a small voice that had nothing princely left in it at all, "Do you think she's cold? Wherever she's gone?"
"Likely," Garret said, because lying to a frightened child had never struck him as a particular kindness, whatever soft handed septons down here claimed about sparing young feelings. "Cold, and tired, and runnin' on less sense than usual — same as the rest of us this mornin', I'd wager."
"She's not usually short on sense." The boy said it with a kind of fierce, defensive loyalty that made Garret's snort despite himself. "She's the cleverest person I know. Smarter than my father, even, and my father's clever enough that the whole small council's half afraid of him."
"Didn't say she wasn't clever. Said she was short on sense, which is a different animal entirely, lad. I've known plenty clever men get themselves killed bein' too clever by half about somethin' that mattered more to their pride than their neck."
The boy pouted, his hands gripping and yanking innocent grass from the earth beneath him. "She's not being prideful. You don't understand—"
"So you've said. Twice now." Garret turned his eyes on the tree line, on the thin grey light filtering down through branches still heavy with last night's damp, listening past the boy's voice for anything that didn't belong; footsteps, shouting, the particular crashing hush of men moving fast through undergrowth. Nothing yet. "Why don't you help me understand it, then, 'stead of just tellin' me I don't. We've got nothin' but time till she's back."
Valarr was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Garret thought he might not answer at all, before he said, carefully:
"She's not like everybody else. In my family, I mean."
He scrunched up his face, thinking hard. "Everybody says she's blessed. Because of her eyes, and her egg, and she talks like she's an old lady. But she isn't just blessed. She reads. She reads big boring books all night, even when her septa says to go to sleep, and she gets in trouble for it. And she knows and creates things others don't. They just said, oh, it's her blessings, and went away. That's not fair. She tries to fix everything she can. And she's just really good at looking."
"So, you care for her a great deal, then."
"She's my best friend." Valarr said it simply, without the embarrassment Garret half expected from a boy his age caught admitting affection out loud. "She's going to be my wife one day. Everybody says so, but nobody's said it officially yet. Grown ups think we don't know." A small, private smile crossed his face, there and gone fast, the first thing resembling genuine lightness Garret had seen on him since the road.
"The older boys say being betrothed is awful, because you have to marry some girl you don't even like. But I like Valaena. She's the only one who doesn't get bored when I talk about history or dragons. And she's always on my side. So it's okay. It's actually a little bit good! That way we'll always be together."
Garret said nothing to that for a while, turning the words over, finding in them an odd, unexpected ache he hadn't anticipated feeling on a cold Stormlands morning crouched behind a rock with a stranger's children. He had never had anything handed to him that felt like that, a thing that was simply good and asked nothing of him to be so. Everything he'd ever had, he'd had to take, or earn, or beg for in the particular wordless way a man begs by simply working harder and longer and more visibly than anyone else in the hope someone important might eventually notice and feel moved to reward it. Nobody had ever handed him a thing and called it his by right of simply existing in the correct shape at the correct time.
He wondered, not for the first time and likely not for the last, what that kind of certainty did to a person's spine. Whether it made a man softer, having never had to fight for the ground he stood on, or whether it simply gave a person a different kind of strength than Garret's own, no worse for being differently earned.
Cousins, too, the pair of them, and mayhaps promised to wed. Garret had heard what it is said of dragonlords: that they wed brother to sister to keep the fire in the blood, and that the same fire sent half of them mad. He looked at the boy, pale and frightened and loyal to the bone, and thought; histories could keep their tales. A dragon was a dragon, and this was only a lad who wanted his girl back.
"She'll be back," Valarr said, into the silence Garret hadn't realized had stretched as long as it had. It wasn't quite a question either, though there was enough of one buried in it that Garret understood he was being asked, in the roundabout way frightened people asked things, to say it was true.
"Aye," Garret said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he mostly believed it. "She strikes me as the sort who finishes what she starts. Pigheaded about it, even, same as any good Northern mule. You said so yourself, near enough."
"I said clever."
"Same animal, in my experience, more often than either of you lot would care to admit."
That won him something close to a real smile, small and strained but genuine, and Garret allowed himself, for just a moment, the small and entirely unprofessional satisfaction of having put it there. Then he went back to watching the road, because satisfaction was a fine thing to feel but a poor thing to rely on.
Gold didn't feel like quite enough of a reason to be this worried, and that, more than anything else about the whole strange morning, was the thing that unsettled Garret Snow most.