"Time is the longest distance between two places."
Tennessee Williams
—•—•—•—
The thing about Summerhall was that it breathed.
It nestled among the green hills of the Stormlands, far from the stench and noise. Summerhall has crafted wooden windows that let light pour in once you open them, and corridors that smelled of old books and sunbaked stone and nothing sinister at all. It had gardens where the only politics were between the roses and the weeds, and even those battles were slow and patient and decided by rain. The servants moved without the careful, watchful economy of Red Keep servants. They walked. They laughed. Doors were left open. A cat had taken up residence in the library and nobody had evicted it.
Valaena had pressed her cheek against the stone of the window seat in her chamber on their first morning back and exhaled so deeply it felt like putting down something she hadn't known she was still carrying.
A year had passed, more or less.
She was six now. Almost seven in the way that children said almost as though they could hasten time by naming it early.
The ravens came and went between Summerhall and the Red Keep. Small dark shapes in the sky, always carrying news. Mostly small news. Supply counts. A septon's petition. A trade dispute in the Reach. Once, a message about a ship that had sunk somewhere off the coast of the Stepstones, carrying cargo nobody wanted to put a name to directly.
Valaena read every letter her father would permit her near, and her father, perhaps because he had not yet learned that this was a mistake, permitted her near rather more than he should have. She felt smug about that.
The seasons came too, properly, in the way seasons did only in this world. It was not the polite quarterly rotations of the world before, where four months of cold reliably followed four months of sun, but in long, unpredictable stretches that could last years or sometimes a decade. Westeros did not so much have seasons as it had geological moods. She had thought Westeros was one of those summer-all-year-long destinations like Brazil or Thailand. It boggled her mind to know she was entirely wrong on her theory.
The white raven had arrived on a cloudy morning, carried by the Citadel from Oldtown, which meant it had travelled a very long way to tell everyone something they had already half-suspected: autumn had come. Or was coming. Or intended to come. White ravens did not hedge.
Valaena had stood in her father's solar when the maester read it aloud and felt a strange thing happen in her chest—a sort of expansion, as her remaining doubt and skepticism washed away. She had known, intellectually, that seasons here lasted years. She had read it. But reading was different from the actual white bird arriving with its actual declaration, and something about the formality of it made it real in a new way.
She thought of Susan, briefly. Of autumn term at Hogwarts, which arrived like clockwork every September first with its crowded platform and pumpkin pasties and the satisfying ritual of new quills and untouched parchment. That autumn had been predictable. Contained. Safe in its predictability.
This autumn would last perhaps three years. Perhaps four. Nobody could say with certainty.
She was not entirely sure whether to find that terrifying or wonderful, so she had settled, in her usual fashion, for both.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They had gone back to King's Landing only once that year.
She would not think about it for long, even now. The memory had edges that cut if you held it incorrectly.
Jena Dondarrion—Valarr's mother, her uncle Baelor's Lady wife—had died in childbirth near the end of 199 AC, bringing Matarys Targaryen into the world with her final breath.
The journey to King's Landing for the funeral had taken a week, the usual week, seven days of road and changing horses and nights at small keeps that all blurred together into one long grey passage. Valaena had sat beside her mother in the carriage and stared out the window and thought about Lady Jena's round belly and the way she'd laughed that night in the Red Keep courtyard when Valaena had been carried by her brothers to the kitchens.
She had not known Jena well. She had only known her in scattered moments—a warm greeting here, a kind word there. But she had been real. She had laughed. She had been kind to Aelinor Penrose when many weren't, and she had looked at Valarr like he was the cleverest, most wonderful thing she had ever created, which was, Valaena supposed, entirely accurate from a mother's perspective.
Valaena remembered the solemn procession, the black banners, the way the castle had seemed to hold its breath for a full sennight, and the particular silence of people who were being watched and thus could not grieve properly.
Prince Baelor had stood very still through all of it. That was what she remembered most. Not his expression, which had been the controlled, composed expression of a man who had decided that falling apart was something he could not afford to do in public. Just his absolute stillness. The way he stood the way mountains stood, as though movement was something he had temporarily suspended along with everything else.
The heir to the Iron Throne could not afford to show weakness, not even in grief.
Valaena did not know the extent of their love as a product of an arranged marriage, but she'd like to believe that they did. That they grew to love one another.
Saying goodbye to a loved one is never easy. She took it upon herself to hold her uncle Baelor's hand in a silent comfort on their way back to the castle.
On the other hand, Valarr had been pale. The lines around his eyes were red from crying. But he stood steadfast like his father.
Valaena had sat beside him through the dinner after and the long, hollow evening that followed, and she had not said very much because there wasn't very much to say. She had simply been there.
Occasionally she pressed her arm against his in the way that meant I am here without requiring words, and eventually he had leaned his head sideways against her shoulder for a moment, brief and seeking, before straightening again with the dignity of someone who had decided he was nearly grown.
She had let him pretend.
It seemed the kindest thing she could offer.
Before they returned to Summerhall ten days later—they were introduced to Matarys, their new cousin, tiny and bewildered by existence, who had been placed briefly in Valaena's arms by a nervous nursemaid and had stared up at her with eyes that hadn't yet settled on a colour.
"Hello," she had said to him, seriously. "I'm sorry about your mother. She laughed well."
He had grabbed her finger with remarkable strength and she had decided, quietly, that this one would be all right.
>~>~>~>~>~>
Magic, was her private project and her private frustration in roughly equal measure.
She had made real progress, and she knew it, and knowing it made her simultaneously proud and impatient.
Lumos worked easily now. She was still wandless, still coaxing magic through flesh that had not been trained to conduct it—but steadily. She could hold the light for several minutes before it guttered.
Alohomora was fairly reliable on light locks.
Accio worked for lightweight objects when she concentrated, though asking a book to fly across a room when servants might observe required careful timing and a plausible excuse at the ready.
Though her specialty, which she had known even in her previous life, was charms and enchantments. The structural ones. The kind that required sustained focus rather than a single explosive effort. It was the reason Susan Bones had been studying towards a specific career in the ministry. Bureau Chief of Charms Enforcement and Counter-Enchantments. A title that sounded bureaucratic and was, in fact, precisely the sort of thing a Hufflepuff who took rules seriously and also understood why rules existed would spend her working life doing.
The job itself included: Developing policy to deter dangerous enchantments. Leading investigations into illegal charm use. And collaborating on protective wards. You had to love charms the way some people loved architecture. Not just the effect, but the how of it as well. The layered intent. The way an enchantment had to be convinced to hold its shape without cracking at the seams.
She had spent three weeks on her small leather pouch. Three weeks of sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor after everyone was asleep, pressing her palms against the worn brown leather, whispering the extension charm in pieces and stages, coaxing the interior to become more without the exterior becoming larger. The physical laws of this world did not want to cooperate. They were stubborn laws. They had never had reason to negotiate before.
But on the twenty-second night, she had put her hand inside the pouch and felt it go in past her wrist, and then her elbow, and she had held very still and not screamed, which she counted as a significant personal victory.
The pouch currently contained: three dragon eggs, two texts she had borrowed indefinitely from the library, a stock of dried lavender she used to help Daeron sleep, a small knife for plant harvesting, and one extremely indignant response from the pouch's physical laws that manifested as a faint resistance every time she reached past a certain depth. She was working on the resistance.
Potions were the harder and more painful lesson that year, and the one she had wanted most urgently—because she had people she loved, and this world had no Madam Pomfrey, no hospital wing, no healing draught sitting in a cupboard. The nearest thing to medical care here was a maester with a poultice and a prayer, and she had watched it not be enough too many times already. It was nerve wracking to know that a small deep cut can possibly kill her now.
And Daeron still had his dreams. They came in the night with the quiet, relentless frequency of rain on stone, and no amount of lavender under his pillow made them stop. But a proper Dreamless Sleep draught would. She knew the recipe precisely—valerian root, powdered bicorn horn, sopophorous bean, and half a dozen other things—but even a stripped-down version, built from only the accessible ingredients, might dull the edges. Buy him nights that weren't nightmares wearing the skin of sleep. That was worth attempting. That was worth all the failed attempts and the wrong-smelling results and the moons of searching through every herbal text in the library.
And then there were the smaller, everyday violences of a world that had no concept of antiseptic. Someone burned themselves at the forge. Someone took a cut that festered. Winter brought coughs that lived for months. She had watched a stableman suffer for two weeks from an infected hand wound that, in her previous life, would have been resolved in an afternoon. It had made her feel sick with helplessness in a way she hadn't expected. She was not a person accustomed to knowing how to fix something and lacking only the materials. Not when she used to breathe and live in magic.
So she would find the materials.
With the valerian root and wormwood she was seeking, combined with the ironbloom pennyroyal already in her pouch and the grey-green siltmoss she had identified in the Summerhall library as a mild antibiotic, she could assemble something functional.
A mild sleeping preparation for Daeron—not the true draught, but close enough to help.
A fever reducer from chamomile and ironbloom combined in the right ratios.
A simple antiseptic tincture for wounds, using the siltmoss properly prepared in boiled water.
A burn-healing paste from the waxy yellow flowers that grew along Summerhall's south wall, which she had already tested carefully on her own minor burns and which worked.
A basic Pepper-Up substitute for fevers and colds using powdered ginger root and a preparation she had been cautiously refining for four months.
None of it was the real thing. But all of it was better than nothing.
She read every herbal and maester's guide in the Summerhall library. She cross-referenced. She made careful lists in small handwriting on folded parchment tucked into her pouch. She had experienced the particular frustration of identifying a plant by its properties and then discovering it only grew somewhere entirely inaccessible. Half the ingredients she needed did not exist on this continent or existed only across the Narrow Sea in regions with no reliable trade.
There was nothing to do about that except keep looking and keep substituting and keep failing until she found the combination that worked.
Valaena kept piling work upon new ones into her mental lists of survival. And it was all for a peace of mind.
It was ABSOLUTELY mental that the required tasks were too long. This is why she preferred modern society and their wonderful creations. It was filled with less anxiety and worrying and all about deciding what would you eat at lunch that afternoon or what hobby a person could enjoy to spend their extra free time on.
Oh, how she missed it so.
The dragon eggs were a different matter entirely—a political problem dressed as a personal one—and she had been turning it over for moons with the slow, careful attention she gave to things that had no clean answer.
She had six eggs in her keeping: her own, her father Maekar's, Uncle Baelor's, and the three she had accepted from her brothers and Valarr with the implicit promise of eventually doing something about them. All three of those sat cold and stone-dark in the bottom of her enchanted pouch, precisely as she had decided they would remain. At least for now.
The question of which eggs to hatch was not, at its core, a question of affection. She loved her brothers. She loved her cousin. Those facts were not under debate. The question was whether love was a sufficient qualification for a dragon rider, and the history she had spent a year reading had answered that quite firmly.
No.
She had read about Viserys the First—Viserys, who had loved his daughter Rhaenyra so completely that he had given everything she asked for, including the thing she should never have been given unchecked: validation at the expense of every other consideration.
Rhaenyra's children—illegitimate or otherwise—by Laenor Velaryon were Velaryon in name, and Viserys had permitted them to claim dragons anyway (well.. skipping the part where she was the heir at that time).
Add Rhaenys, The Queen Who Never Was, (Who Should Have Been—in her opinion) and her dragon, Meleys. Plus another one of Viserys' many bad decisions, which he had given approval for her children to also claim dragons under the Velaryon name. Vhagar and Seasmoke. Three dragons in Velaryon hands, not Targaryen ones. Three weapons pointed sideways instead of upward.
Then another branch of the problem: Laena's children. Daemon's children by Laena. The math of it, when you followed it to its logical end, led directly to the Dance of Dragons.
The Blacks and the Greens.
Kin killing kin on dragonback over a throne that could only go to one of them.
Half the dragons dead within a generation. Most of the riders dead. The last dragon dying twenty years later, small and sick and stunted in a room in the Red Keep, because there were no longer enough of them to sustain the line when the Dragonpit was also destroyed. Because weapons without control were not weapons. They were disasters waiting to find their particular shape.
She had read that particular family history in the library until her eyes blurred, and the conclusion was not complicated. It only felt complicated because the people involved had loved each other and love was an effective blindfold.
Even Jaehaerys I—the Conciliator, the greatest king in Targaryen memory—had understood this. He had nine surviving children and more grandchildren than Valaena could immediately count, and he had given dragons to only two sons and their bloodline under the Targaryen name: his heir and his heir's heirs. Aemon I and Baelon. Not a gift to everyone. A controlled inheritance. A chain of custody that kept the weapon in hands that had been examined and found trustworthy, not distributed by sentiment. And she had arrived at the same conclusion he had.
Her own egg, she was hatching regardless. She was not going to pretend she had purely strategic reasons for that—she didn't, not entirely. She wanted the dragon. She wanted the companion. She wanted something in this world that was hers in the wordless, essential way that the magic beneath her skin was hers, carried from another life into this one. A reminder of her life as Susan Bones, who had died young in a war she hadn't started, needed something that was not a title or an obligation. She wanted the dragon. That was an honest, selfish reason and she kept it.
Her father's egg: yes. Maekar was Baelor's most loyal brother. He had fought beside him at the Redgrass Field. He had bled for him. He was not a man of elegant courtly instincts—he was blunt where Baelor was graceful, brusque where his brother was warm—but he was reliable in the way that truly mattered. He would not be seduced by power. He had too much stubbornness for seduction, and too much genuine care for his family to let a dragon make him something other than what he was. She liked to think it was similar to a Baelon to an Aemon.
Uncle Baelor's egg: of course. The heir to the Iron Throne. The Hand of the King. The man who had crouched to be eye level with a five years old and told her to learn the world before she tried to change it.
There was also a symmetry to it that she could not dismiss: the three-headed dragon of their house sigil. Three riders. Three eggs. Herself, her father, her uncle. The succession and its most trustworthy protector.
She had already been thinking about what should follow, if those eggs hatched. If she hatched more eggs. Not just the celebration. The structure. The future.
A Dragon Rider Order.
Solely under the command of the Targaryen King—not a lord, not a Hand, not even a Kingsguard commander. The King. And with it, a law: that any person who claimed a dragon must either marry into the main line of succession to the Iron Throne, or could not be married to any other house at all. A dragon rider's loyalty could not be divided between their rider's bond and a lord's banner. The dragon was the throne's weapon first, the rider's second, and any house that sought to claim that weapon through marriage alliance would find themselves facing charges of treason instead.
Those who refused the law—any royal Targaryen member—who tried to claim a dragon outside those strictures, or who attempted to pass a dragon claim through their children in a marriage that placed it outside Targaryen control—would be stripped of their noble titles and tried accordingly.
It was harsh. She knew it was harsh. Harshness was sometimes the only thing that held. And it's sadly, normal in this world.
She would suggest it to her grandsire when the time came—carefully, in the particular sideways way she had learned to introduce large ideas to adults, wrapped in sufficient deference that they could believe it was partly their own thought. The timing mattered. The words mattered. A six year old princess proposing legislation was a curiosity; a six year old princess asking her grandsire a series of thoughtful questions about the history of dragon riders until he arrived at the conclusion himself was something else entirely.
She had time. She had patience. She had books.
Ugh—that made her sound like Hermione.
The part that made her chest tight, and which she had not told anyone, was the other side of that decision.
Daeron's egg, left stone for now. Aerion's, stone. Valarr's, stone.
She loved them. All three of them in entirely different ways. Daeron with the particular fierceness of someone who understood him, Aerion with the exhausting tender labor of someone who was choosing to see the good before the damage, Valarr with the clean warmth of chosen family.
She had decided, quietly and without ceremony, that they would not have dragons yet.
She hoped they would understand, eventually. Or that by the time they were old enough to fully understand, she would have managed to build the structure that made the refusal make sense and bring more dragons back to house Targaryen.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The fire problem had resolved itself through burnt fingers and subsequent invention. Ahem.
She had known theoretically that fire was involved in hatching dragon eggs. The texts were consistent on that point, even if they were vague on specifics. She had placed her egg in the solar hearth on an ordinary evening and reached in to adjust it, and the fire had done what fire did.
Three fingers, right hand. Burned. Not badly. But badly enough.
She had sat on the floor holding her hand and thinking about the Flame-Freezing Charm with the focus of someone who had just discovered they needed it and did not have it.
It was an accidental self-inflicted harm. An extreme embarrassment to the witch she was.
The charm applied to herself lasted only minutes—not long enough for sustained work. But if one enchanted the charm onto an object, like the flying enchantment threaded into every broomstick, it could hold indefinitely.
Her father had given her the necklace on her fifth nameday: Valyrian steel, a fine chain with a pendant shaped like a small stylised dragon, old and clearly meaningful in some way she had never asked him to explain. She threaded the Flame-Freezing enchantment into it over four nights, carefully, layer by layer. On the fifth morning she had held a lit candle against her wrist for a measured count of sixty and felt nothing but pleasant warmth.
The egg was a different problem entirely.
The egg was still warm. The egg still pulsed. The egg was alive beyond any reasonable doubt and had been for over a year.
So why hadn't it hatched?
This was the question that occupied the empty parts of her thoughts during meals and lessons and the in-between moments when she was supposed to be doing other things. She had tried everything she could think of.
Fire was one, obviously.
She had walked into the kitchen hearth, somewhat dramatically, and produced the screaming maid and the fainting cook situation. Valaena had emerged unsinged and somewhat embarrassed and had spent the subsequent conversation explaining that she was fine and that no, she did not know how, and that yes, she understood this was very unusual, and no, please, there was no need to tell her mother.
To their credit, they didn't tell anyone of what happened. Probably because no one would have believed in them without solid proof. Or they convinced themselves otherwise that what they saw did not happen.
She was now, as long as she wore the necklace, entirely fireproof which was a satisfying thing to be, even if it had no practical application to her daily life beyond allowing her to retrieve things from fireplaces without a poker.
But fire alone didn't hatch the egg. She'd held it in flames. Slept with it pressed against her sternum. Poured her magic into it in careful, sustained streams the way she'd pour water into a very small cup—slowly, mindful not to overflow, attentive to every response.
The Egg. Did. Not. Hatch.
Why.
She was turning this question over in the back of her thoughts on the morning Aerion yanked her hair.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They were in the solar that Aemon and Aegon shared, because it was the warmest room in the afternoon and because Aemon had a way of watching card games with such earnest intensity that it made everyone play more carefully.
Aegon V Targaryen, was her newest brother, and Dyanna's fifth child born in Summerhall.
Aegon was a moon old and did not watch anything, being primarily occupied with existing and occasionally expressing opinions about it at volume. He was in his cradle on the far side of the room. A nursemaid sat nearby. He had pale hair and dark eyes and the particular squelched-cabbage look of very new babies, which Valaena found endearing despite herself.
Aemon, two years old and seated on a thick cushion to reach the low table, was holding his dragon stuff toy—that Valaena made—and was ferociously biting it to death as he watched them play.
Daeron had his cards fanned out, looking relaxed. Aerion had his facedown on the table in front of him, which violated three rules of Crazy 8's and which she had corrected twice already.
And Valaena was—Valaena was thinking about dragons, and specifically about the membrane of dragon eggs, and whether there was a charm that could be applied to facilitate hatching, and what that charm would need to do to a living eggshell without hurting what was inside it, and whether there was any historical precedent in the Valyrian texts Uncle Aerys had translated—
"Ow."
Aerion had yanked a strand of her hair, sharply, with the precise amount of force that communicated I want your attention rather than I am genuinely trying to hurt you, but which was nonetheless the sort of thing that one did not simply let pass.
She turned to look at him.
He had the expression of someone who was already preparing a defense. "You weren't listening."
"I was thinking."
"You were staring at the wall. For a very long time. It was unnerving." He pointed at her cards. "It's your turn."
Valaena set down the hand she had picked up from the table, looked at Aerion with the particular calm of someone who was choosing their words the way you chose which path to walk on ice—slowly, testing each one before committing—and said, quite pleasantly, "Aerion. When you want someone's attention, what do you do?"
He blinked. "I—"
"You pull their hair," she said. "Now. If someone were to walk up behind you and yank your hair, what would you do?"
The question landed. She watched it land. Watched the small, instinctive recoil that crossed his face before his chin lifted and his jaw set and he began to say something that would probably have been that's different, which would have required another conversation entirely.
"Don't," she said gently, before he got there. "Just think about it."
Silence.
"…Sorry," he said.
The word came out with the texture of something he had swallowed the wrong way, but it was genuine, which was what mattered.
"Thank you," Valaena said, and picked up her cards.
Daeron, who had been watching this with the fond interest of someone who had seen it many times before, dealt Aerion a new card with great ceremony. Aerion accepted it and held it up close to his face for inspection.
"Your turn," Aerion said again, this time without yanking anything.
She played her card—a seven of cups, which in the set she had made from parchment and charcoal served as an eight and changed the suit to leaves—and the game continued its pleasant, circular path.
"Father confirmed it this morning," Daeron said, without looking up from his hand. "We leave for Storm's End in four days."
Aerion's head snapped up with the speed of a dog hearing the word walk.
"The tourney?! He allowed us to go with him?" he asked in surprise.
"Yes. The very same."
The game descended briefly into chaos as Aerion abandoned all pretense of playing to enumerate, at volume and with great personal investment, everything he intended to see and do at the tourney. Valarr's reunion featured heavily. The jousting featured more heavily. Valaena listened, arranged the remainder of her cards without playing them, and thought about Storm's End.
She had never been. They have never been. The tourney was for Lyonel Baratheon—Lord Beric Baratheon's grandson, six and ten and being knighted, which was apparently an occasion requiring jousts and feasts and a small regional gathering of lords who would otherwise not travel so far south for purely social reasons. Lord Baratheon's only male heir. Which meant it mattered, in the way these things mattered: succession, visibility, alliance. A tourney wasn't really about the tilting. It was about being seen at the tilting.
"Uncle Baelor is competing in the lists," Daeron added, still looking at his cards.
Aerion practically vibrated. "Of course he is. He'll win."
"He might."
"He will. He is the blood of the dragon."
Valaena set down her cards and looked at the far wall, which had a tapestry of a hunt scene that she found irritating and which had nothing to do with what she was currently thinking.
She was thinking about jousting lances and the particular vulnerability of a man on a horse at full charge and the things that went wrong at tournaments and how often they went wrong and whether she would have to sit in a stand and watch her uncle Baelor—her favorite uncle, the one who told her to learn the world before she tried to change it—ride into impact with a lance held by a man she did not know. It was bloody awful.
"Valaena's making a face," Aerion observed.
"I am thinking," she said, for the second time that afternoon.
"Don't hurt yourself."
"Mm."
Daeron stared at her. "You don't want to go."
"I want to go," she said, which was true, but not the whole truth. "I want to visit the library at the Red Keep after. And I want to see Valarr and Uncle Baelor. And I want to see the Stormlands. I have never been to the Stormlands."
"So you don't want to watch the joust," Aerion translated, with the accuracy of someone who had spent years learning her conversational patterns.
"I would prefer to watch it from further away than the front stands."
Aerion was quiet for a moment. Then: "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"Aerion," Daeron said.
"It's true! What is the point of a tourney if you sit at the back?"
Aerion held up his card again, apparently offering it to her as some form of truce.
She took it, dazedly.
"Father's looking for a knight for me to squire under," Daeron offered, perhaps to redirect the conversation, perhaps because he genuinely found this more interesting than the debate about joust proximity.
"He's been asking around."
Valaena looked at her eldest brother. "What do you want?"
He met her eyes briefly, then looked away. "To squire somewhere interesting."
"We'll see who Father finds," she said.
Daeron shrugged. Aerion complained that he didn't get to squire anywhere yet even though he was almost as old as Daeron and much better at sword practice and this was deeply unfair, which was true in the narrow way that narrow things were true, and the game resumed until Aemon fell asleep sitting up, and the nursemaid politely shooed them all out into the hall.
>~>~>~>~>~>
It was the morning they began packing for the journey to Storm's End. It would take about a week's ride to get there. The carriage was, in theory, large enough for four people.
In practice it contained Valaena, Daeron, Aerion, and their father, which was a different configuration entirely. Maekar sat across from all three of them with the expression of a man who had committed to this arrangement and was now silently auditing his decision-making.
They had been travelling perhaps two hours when Aerion, compressed and restless beside her, turned.
She could feel him opening his mouth.
"Don't pull my hair," she said, without looking at him.
He closed his mouth.
Then: "What are you thinking about?"
"The egg."
"You're always thinking about the egg."
"I'm usually thinking about the egg, yes."
Daeron, on her other side, had his head resting against the carriage wall and his eyes half-closed. He was not asleep. He was doing the thing where he listened to everything while appearing to do nothing.
Aerion shifted. Resettled. Shifted again.
"Do you think the tourney will have pie."
Daeron said, without opening his eyes: "It is a tournament to celebrate a young lord's knighthood. Not a pie festival."
"But will there be pie."
"There is always pie."
"How do you know?"
"There is always pie."
Aerion considered this philosophically.
Then it was apparently Darron's turn to ask random questions:
"If someone were to cut off your leg—"
She turned to look at him with the expression of: Where did this come from?
"—where would you feel the pain?"
"In my leg," she said.
"No—" He leaned forward with the urgency of someone who had been waiting to have this conversation. "No, that's the point. If someone cut it off. You no longer have the leg. So where does the pain go?"
Aerion raised his eyebrows.
Valaena looked between them. "The pain would be felt while the leg was being cut. The severance itself—"
"But after," Daeron interrupted. "After the leg is gone. You reach down and it isn't there. Where is the pain?"
"There's a phenomenon," their father explained slowly, now apparently joining against his will, "where men who have lost limbs say they still feel them. As though the body does not believe the leg is gone."
Daeron pointed at him in vindication. "See! So you feel the pain where the leg was. Which means you feel pain in a place you don't have."
"That's a different kind of sensation, it isn't quite—"
"But where is it located? You can't feel a thing in something you don't have. So either the pain is in the leg that isn't there, or it's somewhere else—"
"The mind," Valaena said. "It's in the mind. The brain generates the sensation of pain in a location the body no longer—"
"But you can't touch the mind," Aerion said, as though this settled something. "So where—"
"You cannot touch the pain in the leg either, because the leg is gone," Daeron said.
"Exactly my point!"
"That was the opposite of your point—"
"It was the same point expressed differently—"
"It was a completely different point that you are actively claiming as your original one—"
"It was the same—"
Valaena looked at her father.
Maekar was staring at his two eldest sons with an expression that could most precisely be described as a man watching a wall slowly fall on him and having accepted that this was simply what was happening now. His jaw was set. His brow had arranged itself into creases that conveyed, without any words, a profoundly complete and total exasperation. He looked like a man who had survived wars and rebellions and negotiations with kings and had not, in any of those contexts, suffered anything quite so specifically depleting as this particular argument about phantom leg pain.
His eyes moved to Valaena's, briefly.
She offered him a small, helpless smile.
His expression said, very clearly: you are the only functioning person in this carriage, and I hold you responsible for nothing because you clearly inherited your sense from your mother.
"Kepa," Valaena said pleasantly, "would you like to resolve the debate?"
"No," Maekar said.
"A wise position," she agreed.
The argument about legs continued for approximately one more hour, reached no conclusion, and transitioned seamlessly into a debate about whether a dragon's fire was hotter than a wildfire, which Valaena ended by citing three sources and refusing to engage further.
They ate travelling bread and dried fruit and sometimes hunted meat in relative peace.
Then Aerion looked at her sideways and said, in the tone of someone beginning something he already knew would provoke a reaction: "You have a lot of freckles."
"I know," she said. Susan Bones' face was covered from cheek to cheek in freckles the same exact way.
"They look like something was spilled on you."
She turned to face him slowly.
"Something was spilled on you," she said, with complete serenity. "A huge ego. By the gods. When they were assembling you. With a whole cup of arrogance but with the lack of height."
Aerion's mouth dropped open.
"They ran out of proper features halfway through," she continued pleasantly, "and had to improvise. It explains a great deal."
"Father." Aerion turned to Maekar with the wounded dignity of someone who had started a fight and was now requesting intervention against its consequences. "She is being vicious."
"You called her freckles spilled," Maekar said.
"That is an observation—"
"Kepa," Valaena said, looking at her father with all the solemn gravity she could assemble. "Am I ugly?"
Something shifted almost imperceptibly in Maekar's expression—a slight softening, suppressed with the speed of a man who had been suppressing things for thirty years. "Nonsense," he said. "You are the most beautiful girl in the realm."
Valaena turned to Aerion with precise satisfaction.
Aerion's jaw worked for a moment. Then, with renewed confidence: "Father." He squared his shoulders. "Am I ugly?"
Maekar answered his second son without hesitation.
"Very much so."
Daeron guffawed until there were tears in his eyes and turned to look urgently out the window when Aerion sent him a glare that could kill.
Then he stared back at their father—shocked and betrayed.
"You—You are meant to say—" he stuttered, offended.
"I said what I meant." Maekar agreed, entirely tranquil.
"Father."
"Aerion."
"I am not ugly—"
"Your mother thinks you handsome," Maekar said. "Your mother is biased."
"You are biased!"
"I am objective."
Valaena pressed her lips together very firmly. Trying not to laugh. She looked at the ceiling of the carriage and thought of entirely sober and serious things, none of which helped. Daeron had abandoned all pretense and was laughing into his sleeve.
Aerion crossed his arms and settled into an affronted silence that lasted until they stopped to change horses, during which he climbed out of the carriage, walked around it twice, and climbed back in looking somewhat restored.
"I am handsome," he announced, to nobody in particular.
"You are," Valaena said kindly. "Don't fish for it."
He accepted this.
>~>~>~>~>~>
Storm's End was, in a word, enormous.
Valaena stood at the base of it on the afternoon they arrived and looked up at the drum tower. It was round and massive and built like someone had been genuinely worried the world would one day try to knock it over—and felt the appropriate species of awe that very large, very old, very serious architecture produced in sensible people. The outer wall was a single seamless cylinder of stone. No joints visible. No seams. As though it had grown up from the earth already whole.
She knew, distantly, that Bran the Builder was credited with it, and that this suggested either remarkable individual industry or a name applied to an entire tradition of brilliant stonemasonry rather than a single person. She stored this thought next to the others and followed her father through the gate.
The grounds outside the castle were their own world. Tournament grounds had a specific quality she recognised from descriptions in every book she'd read: temporary and vivid, like a market that had been told to dress as a festival. Dozens of pavilions stretched across the field to the east of the main gates. House colours flying from posts, organised along invisible rules of rank. Lower down the hill, smaller camps. Merchants. Craftsmen. The smell of roasting meat and horses and old leather, threaded with honeycakes from a tent she immediately noted the location of. Aerion noticed it approximately half a second after she did.
Valarr met them in the inner yard, and Valaena was glad, in the honest and immediate way she was occasionally glad of things. He had grown since the funeral—taller, broader through the shoulders. His dark hair grew longer. His mismatched eyes found her first.
He hugged her, with the particular fierceness of children who had learned that people could go away without warning.
She hugged back.
Baelor, standing behind his son, smiled at her in the way he did when he was genuinely pleased by something simple.
"You've grown," he told her, hand briefly on her head.
"It's been a year," she said.
"So it has." He looked between her and her brothers and his expression was warm and private, the look of a man cataloguing something he intended to keep. "Let's get you inside."
>~>~>~>~>~>
The first day they spent exploring every inch of the castle that wasn't actively guarded. Storm's End had corridors that went down into the rock, and a view from the battlements that made the sea look like hammered silver, and a great hall hung with stag antlers that were each larger than Valaena was. Impressive and faintly excessive in roughly equal measure.
Their four intended guards—Ser Olwyn Flowers, steady and brown-haired, officially Daeron's guard but practically all of theirs; young Edwyn Cleer, barely twenty and visibly taking the assignment seriously; Hart, one facial expression regardless of circumstances; and Dessa, the woman guard of Maekar's household whom Valaena had been deeply pleased by and Aerion had attempted to object to until Dessa knocked one of his chosen men's practice sword out of his hand without appearing to try—followed at the required distance.
They are their escorts and babysitters for the Tourney. While the three Kingsguard members that came with Prince Baelor, stayed besides him and Maekar.
Valarr knew Storm's End marginally better than they did and played guide with the enthusiasm of someone who had arrived one day earlier and intended to make full use of the advantage. He found them the best view from the second-level walkway. He found a storage room full of rope that smelled of pine tar and declared it excellent without being able to explain why. Aerion accepted this without question, which Valaena found characteristically consistent.
They ate supper with Lord Baratheon's household and went to bed early, because tomorrow the lists opened.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The stands were very close.
That was Valaena's first thought, seated in the place of honour in the temporary wooden gallery, looking down at the tilting lane with the dismay of someone who had hoped for more distance and received considerably less. The field smelled of churned earth and horse sweat and the particular metallic note of many people wearing iron. The day was clear and cold, the kind of cold that was still polite but had intentions.
She hated tournaments. She had bad memories with them as she recalled her own housemate, Cedrick Diggory, one who she used to have a crush on, was murdered. And poor Harry Potter, who was always the centre of a life crisis each year in Hogwarts.
She had read about tournaments in this world for extra research. She had read the romances and the histories both, the ones that made them sound like glorious theatre and the ones that recorded the actual outcomes—the men who went home maimed, or didn't go home at all. The horses that did not consent and were asked anyway. The green boys who came to prove themselves and proved instead something about the angle of a fall and the human spine's tolerance for impact.
She did not understand the enjoyment of watching. She had tried to, with the fairness of someone who attempted to understand things before dismissing them. She had read the accounts of the great tournaments—Maidenpool, Kingslanding—and she had thought: yes, but someone died at this one, and someone lost their hand at that one, and the one described as glorious sent three knights home in carts. The crowd roared with appreciation when a lance broke particularly hard. The crowd rose when a man was unseated. And she could not quite reach the part of herself that would experience that as entertainment rather than as evidence of something uncomfortable about the creature that enjoyed spectacle involving other creatures' pain.
And then Baelor entered the field on his grey horse and she understood, almost against her will, the different kind of tension. The watcher's particular helpless fear. The kind that came from loving someone and being unable to do anything useful while they did something dangerous. That, at least, was legible. That had its own shape.
The opponent was Ser Arlan of Pennytree. Looks to be around forty years old, weathered, unhurried, the comfortable bearing of a man who had survived multiple tournaments by being careful rather than lucky.
The first charge was thunderous when they happened very fast in a small amount of space. The sound of impact: hardwood meeting shield, the grunt of effort, horse and armour finding the new balance landed in her chest before her mind had processed it.
Both riders held. She breathed. Breakspear or not, her uncle Baelor was only human.
Second charge. Third. On the fourth pass, Baelor struck high and clean and Ser Arlan's lance caught air.
The crowd rose.
Valaena rose with them, without exactly deciding to.
Aerion grabbed her arm, vibrating with triumph, and she let him because it seemed important to him and she was too busy watching her uncle pull up his horse with the easy grace of someone who had already moved past the victory to the next thing.
"Told you," Aerion said.
"You did," she agreed.
That evening they ate with Baelor and Valarr in the smaller dining room, and Lyonel Baratheon joined them briefly. His Baratheon jaw is already structural and definitive. He was merry as he was loud. And Valaena found out that he was a horrible singer.
It was a pleasant evening, all in all.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The third day arrived with thinner clouds and colder air and the particular smell of autumn mornings that should have been pleasant.
The morning lists were made up of lesser-known knights and newly made ones. Green boys in borrowed armour testing their worth against each other with more enthusiasm than precision. It produced the same combination of earnestness and disaster she associated with every arena where the inexperienced competed publicly.
Surprisingly, the boys agreed with her assessment.
"Let's go walk around," Aerion said, with the urgency of someone who had been sitting still for an hour and had reached his limit. "The markets are better than this."
Valaena was already standing.
Daeron looked at the field, then at the entrance to the castle, then back at the field. "First, I need to find the garderobe," he said.
Aerion figured he'd go as well before exploring. He stood, brushing dust from his knees. "We will meet you there afterwards," he told Valaena and Valarr.
"We'll stay to the grounds," Valaena nodded.
Ser Olwyn confirmed their arrangement: Dessa and Edwyn with Valaena and Valarr. Hart and a fourth guard remained with the elder boys.
The market was, as she had decided on the first day, the best part of any tournament grounds. Rows of small tents and open tables, each selling something different. Valaena moved toward the herb-sellers with immediate and specific interest.
The first stall had pennyroyal—ironbloom, they called it here, and she bought a good quantity because it was a purifying base she could use in half a dozen preparations. Dried chamomile for fevers. Something the vendor called siltmoss that she pressed between her fingers and smelled and recognised as the grey-green moss with mild antibiotic properties she had read about in the Summerhall library.
"You're doing the thing," Valarr said.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look at stalls and count things on your fingers but there's nothing in your hands."
"I'm making a mental inventory."
"Of what?"
"Plants." She paused at a table of dried roots. "I'm looking for something specific and haven't found it yet."
"What does it look like?"
She described valerian roots—the clusters of small pale flowers—and his face shifted into the expression of someone who had unexpectedly become useful.
"I've seen that," he said. "Not here. Near the edge of the trees, past the west end of the field. There's a strip of meadow grass along the tree line before the road comes through, and I saw something growing there that matches what you're—" He paused. "Well, roughly."
Valaena looked at Dessa.
Dessa looked toward the west end of the grounds, measurable distance, open terrain. "It's not far, princess. Edwyn and I would have you in sight most of the way."
"Then let's look," Valaena said.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The strip of meadow ran along the edge of a wood, just as Valarr had described: a narrow band of rough grass and low growth, sun-softened and smelling of damp earth. The treeline stood dark behind it. Between the market and here, open ground they had crossed without incident.
She found the valerian plant within minutes. It was a clustering of ferny leaves and pale dried flower-heads, the root beneath the soil carrying its distinctive earthy smell. She crouched and pulled up one small section to check the root structure.
"Is that it?" Valarr stood above her, casting a shadow.
"That's it." She sat back on her heels and looked along the meadow strip. There was more. Quite a lot more, actually. And—there, to the left, darker-leaved against the grass—wormwood. She laughed, brief and small, the sound of relief. Both of them, here, in the same stretch of unremarkable meadow outside a tournament ground.
She gathered with the methodical pleasure of someone whose problem had unexpectedly resolved. With these two alone she could make something functional for Daeron. Combined with what she had already, the antiseptic tincture and the mild fever reducer were now within reach. Small things. Beginning things. Better than nothing, and nothing had been the only option for too long.
Valarr walked beside her as she worked, offering occasionally useful commentary. Dessa stood at the meadow's edge. Edwyn was further along the tree line, following the perimeter as guards did.
When she had gathered everything she needed, she wrapped the wormwood in the linen she had secretly brought out from her pouch, then the valerian separately, then gathered the remaining lavender from its pouch to consolidate it with the rest. She looked at the bundle in her arms—the linen packages, the separate wrapped roots, and the lavender. Then she realized that she had only applied the extension enchantment to her small pouch, neglecting to cast the undetectable charm.
This meant that anyone could see what's inside and access her leather pouch, discovering that it contained a much larger space than it appeared to have.
That won't do.
"Dessa," she called.
Dessa stepped forward.
"Would you please carry these?" Valaena held out the bundles. "I've no more room in my pouch."
Dessa stepped forward to take them. Valaena held out the first bundle.
Dessa's hand was just closing around it—
"Princess—"
The voice had changed.
Not louder. Tight.
Valaena looked up.
Two men stood in the meadow thirty feet ahead.
She processed them in a fraction of a second. Strangers. Not tournament attendees. Not servants. They were positioned precisely between her party and the return path to the castle, and they were looking at her with the focused, purposeful look of men who had arrived here to do something specific and had been patient while they waited to do it.
Valarr had gone very still beside her.
Then she heard the footsteps behind her. Of grass and branches being snapped under a foot.
Not one set.
Two.
They came from the tree line, from the dark between the trees.
Dessa moved fast, her hand dropping the bundle and going straight to her sword, three quick steps placing herself between Valaena and the two men ahead—
And from somewhere in the dark of the wood, precisely from a position she could not have anticipated or seen, came a sound she would never forget once she had heard it once.
Sharp. Mechanical. Final.
The snap of a crossbow releasing. A whoosh.
A bolt that took Edwyn in the throat.
She saw it happen. The world slowed. Edwyn was mid-stride, turning back toward them with his hand already reaching for his weapon, his mouth opening to shout—and then the bolt was there, suddenly, just there, embedded deep in the column of his neck. The shout became a wet, guttural sound that was not a word and would never be a word, thick and drowning. His legs kept moving for two more steps out of some terrible mechanical momentum his body had not yet received word to abandon, and then they buckled. He went down sideways. He lay in the long grass and his heels were still moving and his hands came up to his throat and there was blood on the grass, spreading very fast in the way blood spread when something that was supposed to be sealed had been opened.
Not still. He was not still. But the sounds he made were getting quieter, and the spreading was getting wider, and Valaena's chest was doing something that had no name—
The second bolt punched through Dessa's armour between her shoulder blades.
Dessa, who had placed herself as a shield. Dessa, who had been three steps ahead and facing the threat and had done everything correctly and was being punished for it—
The sound Dessa made was involuntary and animal and deep, the sound of a body receiving catastrophic damage before the mind has processed what the body already knows. She staggered. She turned. Valaena could see her face—still composed, still trying to assess, still a guard doing her job in the seconds between the wound and the falling—
"Run!" Dessa said, raw and urgent, reaching back for the bolt with the reflex of someone trying to remove what has been put into them—
And Dessa went down.
She went down slowly, it seemed, or the world had slowed it, or Valaena's mind had slowed it for her because it understood that she needed to see this and remember it. The individual blades of grass bending under Dessa's weight as she fell. The sword half-drawn still in her hand. The bolt buried between her shoulder blades pointing straight at the sky.
She's not dead, Valaena thought with sudden sharp urgency. She went down breathing. That was a breathing sound—
"Vulnera Sanentur—"
"HELP!" Valarr's voice split the air, high and sharp and carrying. "GUARDS—HELP—"
"Vulnera Sanentur!"She screamed, her thoughts buzzing and repeating a chant of heal, heal, Heal. HEAL!
The gods must've heard her pleas when she saw, agonizingly and slowly, Dessa's blood drawing back into her—
She heard another whoosh.
Then Dessa made a sound that was not a word, a choked truncated sound, as the arrow punched itself into her head.
Her magic scattered.
Oh, she thought, with the terrible clarity of a mind that had faced violence before and recognized its shape before the rest of her had caught up, oh this is—
Valarr grabbed her.
He grabbed her with both arms and pulled her against him the way he had held her at the fountain, that night with the lemon cakes and the hard lessons—but this was not a fountain, this was open ground and four men closing from two directions and no guards standing—
The men came close.
She thought: if I scream like Valarr, will anyone hear?
She thought: Accio won't help, the herbs are useless, she needed time, a second, just a second—
She thought: Valarr is in front of me. He is between them and me. Keep him safe—
Something struck the back of her head, blunt and hard and sudden as a door slamming.
The meadow tilted—grass and grey sky and the dark edge of the trees and, impossibly, a small purple wildflower growing beside the wormwood she had gathered twenty minutes ago, something peaceful and absurd in the corner of her narrowing vision—
The sky was the flat grey of early autumn.
And then there was nothing at all.