The yard below the inner ward of Dragonstone was still bright with the last of afternoon when Baela and Rhaena came back. Joffrey saw them first, shouting their names as he bounded down the steps. Luke looked up from the flagstones, where he had been scratching lines in the dirt with a stick. Beneath the gallery, Jace closed the book he had long ago stopped reading.
Baela was radiant—plainly so. Her hair had worked loose from its pins, wind-whipped and wild, and her face held a brightness that didn't belong to the quiet obsidian corridors of the keep. She was speaking before she had reached them.
"—and she climbed so sharply at first I thought Rhaena would lose her grip."
"I did not," said Rhaena, smiling.
Joffrey sprang down the last step, his eyes wide. "Who climbed?"
Baela stopped. For a heartbeat, she simply looked at him, her breath still unsteady from the flight, as if she had forgotten they hadn't been there to see it.
Then she said, "Meleys."
The name broke the moment open. Joffrey's mouth fell open. "You rode Meleys?"
"With whom?" Jace asked from the shadows of the gallery.
Baela blinked, her gaze shifting to Rhaena.
"Our grandmother," Rhaena answered for her.
The yard went unnaturally still. The distant cry of a gull over the cliffs suddenly seemed very loud.
"Grandmother was here?" Joffrey asked, his voice climbing. "At Dragonstone?"
Baela's smile didn't disappear, but it seemed burdened now. "Yes."
"And she took only you?"
Rhaena shifted, her fingers catching in the fabric of her skirts. "It was not meant—"
"She came all this way," Luke interrupted. He had stood up, the stick dangling forgotten in his hand. "And she only asked for you?"
"She wanted to see us." Rhaena answered, coming to her sister's aid.
"But she's our grandmother too."
Baela drew herself up, her chin lifting in the exact line of her grandmother's. "She is. No one said she wasn't."
"Then why didn't she come see all of us?" Joffrey demanded.
Rhaena took a step toward him. "It wasn't like that."
Jace watched them, the book heavy against his thumb. The ease of the afternoon had evaporated, replaced by a sudden, sharp clarity. Luke wasn't explosive like Baela; his anger was a quiet thing, visible only in the stillness by which he meant to keep it contained.
"How could she be here," Luke asked the flagstones, "and not even send for us?"
"You make it sound cruel." Baela frowned, her own defensiveness rising.
"What else is it?"
Rhaena winced. She looked as though she wanted to reach out, to smooth over the jagged edges of the conversation, but there was no bridge to be built—only one to be broken.
Baela threw an answer out too fast, a reflex to end the questioning. "She came because we are Laena's daughters."
The words landed with a crash.
The silence that followed was different. It was the silence of a door being locked.
Baela felt it at once. Her shoulders lost their certainty.
She had meant it as a simple fact—a familial truth to explain a visit—but in it, the sentence carried a lethal charge.
Joffrey seized at the part that hurt him. "So she likes you best."
"That is not what I said."
"It is."
Luke said nothing. He simply looked at Baela, then at his own hands—pale hands like his mothers, with the faintest shadow of dark hair.
Jace felt a cold tightening in his chest.
He had spent his life watching adults—watching how they measured their smiles, how they stood a little closer to one child while looking past another, blaming circumstance, need, or propriety.
He knew love was rarely a level sea.
But the simplicity of Baela's answer left a mark.
Because we are Laena's daughters.
It was a truth so pure it was cruel. So simple that it could not be denied.
And yet, for a moment, it seemed to cast the rest of them into a dimmer place.
Rhaena moved first, because she always did when feeling turned brittle in a room.
"She brought ribbons," she said quietly. "And a comb. Perhaps she felt bad because she did not find gifts for boys."
Baela looked at her sharply, but Rhaena went on.
"She only wanted to see us since we had been away from home the longest. That was all. It was not meant against anyone."
It changed the feeling, though the wound remained open. Joffrey folded his arms. "I still should have gone. I wanted to ride the dragon."
"You are too small," Jace said, his voice flat.
"I am not."
"You would have cried halfway up."
"I would not have."
Luke almost smiled, but it didn't hold. Jace set the book aside. "Did Grandmother ask after us? When she was leaving?"
Rhaena hesitated.
That was answer enough.
"She knew we were all in good health."
"That is not what I asked," Jace said.
Baela opened her mouth, then shut it. Rhaena lowered her eyes.
Joffrey let out a small, wounded noise and turned away a pace, kicking at the ground.
Luke said, very quietly, "Grandfather would have asked."
Nobody answered. Because that was true as well.
Corlys always seemed to have room enough for all of them. Different room, perhaps, for different purposes, but room all the same. A hand at the shoulder, a question remembered, a carved shell brought back from a voyage that he knew a child would treasure where an old merchant would not.
Luke had received the largest share of that attention for years, everyone knew it, yet Jace had never thought it made the rest of them smaller in his eyes. Even when Baela and Rhaena returned, he only seemed to grow to accommodate them.
This was not the same.
"She had no time," Baela said.
"She had time to pack you gifts," Luke said. There was heat in him at last—the heat of injury. "It isn't fair."
"No," Jace said, standing before it could sharpen further. "It isn't."
He had not spoken loudly, but the yard went quiet. Jace picked up his book and closed it properly. Baela was still looking at him, half-defiant, half-uncertain. Luke flushed and dropped his gaze, shame tightening his jaw; Joffrey simply looked left out.
Jace drew a breath through his nose.
And held it.
"It happened as it happened," he said. "Quarreling over it will not make her come back and ask differently."
Baela's chin lifted. "I did not ask her not to ask you."
"I know," Jace said.
That took some of the fight out of her.
Rhaena watched him closely. Perhaps she had expected anger from him more than from any of the others. If so, he did not give it to her.
Luke kicked lightly at the fallen stick. "It still feels rotten."
Jace looked at him then, and his expression eased, though only a little.
"Yes," he said. "It does."
That was enough to make Luke's face go tight again, the quick assent taking the wind from his sails. Luke looked away.
Joffrey came back at once to the single point that mattered most to him. "I only wanted to ride the dragon."
This time even Baela laughed, though softly.
"I know," she said.
"I would not have cried."
"You would have screamed the whole way."
"I would have shouted like a warrior."
Baela snorted. "That is worse."
"You can ride Vermax when he's big enough."
With that, the yard loosened by a degree. Rhaena moved nearer her stepsiblings then, as though by standing among them rather than beside Baela they might no longer appear to be on opposite sides, and Joffrey went to her at once with questions. Baela began answering before Rhaena could, talking again of the flight, the wind, the height, the sea below. Joffrey listened greedily.
Jace let their voices run on. He glanced up toward the darkening sky over the ridge where Meleys had gone, thinking of one thing.
Not the dragon.
Not even that Rhaenys had come.
That she had chosen.
He could not have said why that stung as it did. Only that it did.
There was some understanding that seemed always to hover just beyond his reach whenever Driftmark, or inheritance, or blood, or family came too near the center of a thing.
He felt it like the edge of a word half-heard through a door—too faint to grasp, too clear to ignore.
He did not trust the feeling.
Baela's voice rose again, spinning the tale of the flight for a wide-eyed Joffrey, who listened in hungry misery. Luke listened too, though trying not to show how much he minded it. Rhaena added small corrections now and then, gentling the story where Baela made it too triumphant.
Jace only half-listened.
A thought had begun to form, not all at once, but with the slow certainty of something settling into place.
He had spent too much of his life letting others decide where bonds should rest—what closeness meant, what place belonged to whom, what could be assumed, what must be earned, and what was safer left untouched.
As though such things were given, and not taken.
If Driftmark was to be Luke's one day, and if Corlys mattered as he plainly did, then it was no use waiting for such ties to settle themselves.
The idea sat strangely in him at first—then less so with every passing moment.
He looked toward Luke, who was pretending not to care as Baela described Meleys' wings over the sea, and at Joffrey, whose outrage had already become imagination, and at Rhaena, trying quietly to hold everyone together, and even at Baela, who spoke with only delight, never intending hurt, though it had come all the same.
The thought settled.
Then, very suddenly, he said, "I think I shall write to Grandfather."
The others stopped.
Luke blinked. "About what?"
Jace considered that.
"About Driftmark," he said. "And the sea. And whatever he thinks worth teaching."
Baela stared at him a moment, then gave a quick little shrug, as if this made perfect sense and she had no intention of admitting otherwise. "He will like that."
Luke's face shifted. Not quite relief...not quite envy.
"You think he'll answer?"
"Yes," Jace said.
He did not know it with certainty. But as soon as he said it, he believed it.
Rhaena looked at him with gratitude she had no occasion to feel. Perhaps only because he had found a way out of the hurt that was not blame.
Joffrey said, "Tell him I should come too."
Baela laughed. "You only want ships now because you did not get dragons."
"I want both."
"That," said Jace, "is plain greed."
Even Luke smiled at that.
The sky above the ward had deepened to evening by then. A bell was ringing somewhere below for supper. One by one the servants crossing the yard began to light the wall torches, and the first flames rose small and gold against the stone.
Jace picked up his book, though he no longer intended to read it.
He was thinking instead of ships with black hulls and salt-stiffened sails. He imagined the spray of a narrow channel hitting his face and the pull of a changing tide against a rudder. He thought of the old man who had crossed half the known world and returned still hungry for motion. Of letters, and what they might begin.
Jacaerys Velaryon began to choose his grandsire for himself. He would not wait to be given a place.