Chapter Text
The garden by the White Sword Tower was one of the Red Keep’s small mercies. No true secret, perhaps, yet it had come to feel like one to Jena. In a castle full of doors that opened too quickly and corridors where every footstep seemed to carry, this was where she could go, for a little while, to be left to herself.
High pale walls enclosed it on all sides, so that the noise of King’s Landing came only faint and broken over the stone—the low murmur of the city like the sea heard at a distance. Vines climbed the sun-warmed walls and dry leaves stirred over the path. At her bidding Ser Donnel remained back at the entrance, a white shadow beyond sight and hearing.
A stone bench sat half-hidden beside an old rose bush still clinging to its bloom. Its flowers were the deep red of fresh-spilled wine, though most had browned at the edges. There Jena sat with Matarys nursing at her breast. The maids had set a little bassinet near at hand in the shade, lined with soft blankets against the later chill.
By this hour tomorrow they would be gone from King’s Landing.
The thought had lived in her the last three days like a small hidden flame. Not joy; there was too much melancholy in it. Yet beneath that, or perhaps inside it, there was relief—sharp and almost dizzying, the relief of movement after too long held still. Her women had been at work, folding her gowns and the children’s things, wrapping cups and nursery gear in cloth, and packing their own belongings besides. They believed they were only making ready for the family’s eventual return to Dragonstone, and Jena had let them think so. It was easier.
She had said nothing of Storm’s End to them yet. Most were women of Dragonstone, but they would go with her when she told them, and do it without complaint, as they had always gone before where duty carried them. Jena suspected they would understand, in their way. Servants had keener eyes than courtiers, and more chances to use them. If half the court seemed already to know the measure of her marriage—Maekar and Dyanna with their pity, Ser Donnel with his awkward stiffness—then her women likely knew it too, or near enough. There was precious little in a household that stayed hidden long, least of all a prince and princess who could not quite manage to counterfeit ease after so many years of marriage.
Matarys slackened at her breast, milk-drowsy now, and she shifted him against her shoulder with practiced ease. The weight of him was sweet and solid. His hair smelled of milk. She bent and pressed her lips to the crown of his head before laying him gently back in the bassinet.
Behind her came the soft shuffle of steps upon the path.
Jena did not turn at once. “A few moments more, Ser Donnel,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I had thought to keep to the garden until sunset.”
“Then I would not presume to disturb your design, my lady.”
The voice struck through her like cold water.
She turned so quickly the bench scraped faintly beneath her, and there he was.
Baelor stood a few paces off upon the garden path, as startling in that quiet place as if he had stepped out of a dream. He wore riding leathers beneath a travel-stained cloak, and the dust of the road lay plain upon him—on his boots, at the hem, worked into the darker folds of wool. There were cuts and bruises about his face as well, half-healed and yellowing at the edges, the sort a man carried home from a campaign as carelessly as mud on his hem or blood on his sword. For a moment her mind, still reeling from the sight of him, fastened foolishly on his beard. Fuller than she had ever seen it, yet still neatly kept, it darkened his jaw and mouth and made him look older, harder, less the polished prince she had known and more some battle-worn captain come in from the road.
He smiled at her, and even that familiar composure looked altered on him—sadder now, and tired in some deep, bone-worn way.
Jena found her voice a beat too late. “I had not expected you so soon,” she said. “I had heard no word that the diplomatic retinue had returned.”
“It has not,” Baelor said. “They are yet some days behind the main host, and slower still for all the business that clings to such a train.” His voice was quiet, courteous as ever, though fatigue had worn it thinner. “A couple of days past, Maekar sent me a raven to say that my personal birds had never reached King’s Landing. Once I had that word, I did not care to trust another message to chance. So I left the rest to follow after and came on ahead.”
Something lay beneath the words Baelor gave her, but Jena could not quite discern its shape. Had Maekar written of her distress, to her private shame? Had he spoken hard truths to his brother, as only Maekar ever seemed willing to do, and sent him back with a sharper conscience than he’d ridden out with? Or had Baelor turned for home of his own will, with no urging but his own? She could not tell, and the uncertainty made a silence of her. There were questions buried in it that she had no wish to lay bare.
The first words she found were foolishly plain. “You made good time.”
Her gaze dropped, unbidden, to his hands—raw along the knuckles, the skin chafed where reins had rubbed too long.
A faint weariness touched the corners of his mouth. “I rode a day and a night,” he said. “There was no great difficulty in it. Though the horse may have a sterner opinion.”
The answer pricked at her in some sore place. The hard ride home had the shape of a kindness. Men always asked for such efforts to be counted tenderly, as if the gift of discomfort might stand against their first wrong that had made it necessary. Yet even as the thought rose in her, she knew it did Baelor some injustice. He was not a man who mistook his own suffering for absolution.
They stood there silent for a moment. Then Baelor’s gaze fell upon the bassinet beside her.
The change in him was slight, no more than a stilling. He looked down at the child as if the little bassinet held a flame the wind might take. In a breath, the battle-worn captain fell away, and only the father remained.
“So this is Matarys,” he said softly.
He came a step nearer then, though slowly, and with that same unfailing care he brought to all things, as if even now he would not presume too much upon her space. His eyes moved over the child’s sleeping face, the dark little head, the blanket tucked close beneath his chin, the tiny hand half-curled in sleep.
“He is well?” Baelor asked quietly.
Then at last he lifted his gaze to her.
“And you, Jena? Were you brought through it safely?”
For one strange moment the question seemed to open something in her, and close it again in the same breath. He asked it kindly. That was the cruelty of it. Kindly, softly, like a man arriving after the storm had broken the ship and gone back out to sea, wishing to know whether the wreck had frightened those left upon the shore. He had not seen her labor. He had not heard the women calling for clean cloths and hot water. He had not stood helpless whilst pain took her and took her again. The tenderness in his voice touched too late, and so turned cold in her.
She stood and lifted Matarys from the bassinet before turning away from Baelor, taking refuge in the warmth of her infant son’s body.
“As well as such things go,” she said.
The following quiet of him pressed at her more than any answer might have done. At last Jena turned back to look at him, and wished, at once, that she had not. Some part of him seemed to understand what her coolness meant, for the tired gentleness in his face altered—not vanishing, but drawing inward, as if he had put his hand, unwittingly, upon some hurt. His gaze dropped briefly to the child in her arms, then returned to her.
“I am glad it went safely,” he said at last, and though the words were simple, there was something subdued in them now, as if he knew simplicity would not serve but had nothing better to offer.
Jena sat again with Matarys in her arms, the stone bench cold beneath her even through her skirts. In the silence that followed, she knew that her plans were forever altered. Whatever quiet departure she had imagined for herself—some orderly slipping-away before his return, leaving chambers neat and children packed and nothing for him but absence—would not come to pass now. He was here.
That did not put the road wholly beyond her. There would be other ways, no doubt, some reason found, some excuse made fit to carry her and the children from the city. Baelor himself would have cause to leave again soon enough, as he always did. The thought should have settled something in her.
Instead came shame, slight but souring. Not because Baelor had said aught, nor looked at her with suspicion. He knew nothing yet. Yet his very presence made her secret intention seem to stand up between them, exposed to her own sight if not to his. In solitude it had felt like resolve. Under his eyes, it looked perilously like cowardice.
Baelor did not press her. He only stood before her in that practiced courteous silence of his, hands loosely clasped behind his back, as patient as if he had all the day to wait upon her next word.
Jena settled Matarys a little higher against her shoulder, more to give her hands something to do than from any need of the child, who slept on undisturbed. For a moment she said nothing. Then she retreated into the courtly composure expected of women in palaces and princesses in gardens: gentled voice, composed mouth, every edge she might have shown turned as cold as silk.
“I had not yet congratulated you,” she said.
Baelor’s gaze rested on her face, steady and unreadable.
“As I ought to have done. You have given the realm a great victory, by all accounts.”
He inclined his head, accepting it with the grave ease of a man who had been praised often and had long since learned how little of himself to show in receiving it. “You are kind to say so.”
“It is not kindness, my prince. Only truth.” Jena let her fingers drift once over the child’s blanket. “King’s Landing is already full of it. Your victory, I mean. The city can speak of little else.”
“Cities are always glad when danger has passed,” Baelor said.
“And gladness soon turns to song.” Her gaze rested on him. “I have heard them singing of the Hammer and the Anvil.”
Baelor’s mouth pressed thin.
“Mm.” A slight curve touched her lips, the sort that might have passed for sweetness had there not been something just a little unkind beneath it. “In the yards. Beneath the windows. One can hardly escape it." She looked down at Matarys and said in a gentle little sing-song to the babe, “Only the very special princes get turned into songs, don’t they?”
A brief tension gathered at Baelor’s jaw. “The people have need of songs,” he said, parrying her pointed compliment to the larger needs of the realm.
“Do they?”
“After years such as these, yes.” His voice remained even, taking on the pedantic cadence Jena imagined he used with his junior lieutenants. “Men endure hard things more readily when they can set them into some comprehensible shape. Songs serve that purpose. They give form to grief that might otherwise remain only chaos.”
His calm nettled her more than anger might have done. Anger, at least, would have been honest. But Baelor only took the edge of her words into himself and gave back thoughtfulness, patience, restraint, refusing even the small satisfaction of answering them in kind. Jena had not known what aims her words had, only that they had failed, and that failure irritated her more than she cared to admit.
Ceding the point before her vexation showed more plainly, Jena let the matter drop. “And the business that kept you?” she asked. Her hand moved absently over Matarys’s back. “How fares it with those who followed the pretender?”
Baelor’s face darkened almost too little to mark. Jena was surprised by it; she had thought the question a safe one, plain enough and almost formal. Yet the weariness in him seemed to deepen at once, touched for one bare instant by something pained and unguarded. Then it was gone. His posture gathered itself; the old princely composure settled back over him like steel plate over a bruise, and when he answered, it was with the measured calm of a man long used to necessary things.
“Most of the Reach lords who took Daemon’s side have sworn new oaths,” he said. His voice remained even, but some life had gone out of it. “There were more willing to bend than not, once the field was lost and the cost laid plain before them.”
Jena’s fingers stilled on the child’s blanket. Suddenly, she understood where the question had struck. Some petty thing in her—wounded, ungenerous—would not let the bruise lie. “And those who would not?”
A small muscle jumped in Baelor’s jaw. He did not answer at once. His gaze slipped from her, not far—only toward the far wall where the vines clung in thinning strands and a few dry leaves worried themselves along the path. His hands remained clasped behind his back, though the knuckles had gone white with the force of it. When he answered, his voice was low and measured.
“The realm’s justice was done.”
He said it as a prince must say such things. But his face said something else. Jena remembered the story Maekar had told her years ago: Baelor as a boy, solemn and righteous, bringing punishment down on Maekar for a burned book and then taking that same punishment on himself. If even that had marked him—some boyhood wrongdoing, some small household justice—then where did he stand now with this? With all the men he had judged. All the men he had given over to the executioner’s axe. What dark place in himself did he go to, to bear the mirror of the punishments he dealt so quietly?
And at once, against her own will, pity rose in her. It broke over her sudden as a river in flood, cold and full and stronger than the frail barriers pride had raised against it: that old wifely longing to go to him where he stood, to set Matarys down and cross the little space between them, to gather him against her as if he might rest there, to draw his head to her shoulder and kiss his brow, his temple, the worn line of his mouth, as if tenderness were a salve fit for wounds made by war and duty.
Then Ser Donnel’s face came back to her. His carefulness. His sudden stiffness. The letter. The hidden chamber of Baelor’s heart, with its door barred fast against her and opened elsewhere.
The pity turned to salt in an instant. A voice from within bade her keep still. It whispered that she did not even know whether her touch could give him any solace. Perhaps he would only suffer it as he suffered all things she offered him: gently, courteously, from a distance she had never once been able to cross. Perhaps there was no rest for him in her hands at all. The voice counseled stillness, cold and stern as a septa’s rebuke, and for a moment she let it hold her where she sat.
Yet even as it spoke, another part of her knew it for a lie, or half a lie at best. Not wisdom. Not caution. Bitterness only—bitterness putting on the look of reason, as bitterness will. For beneath it she knew lay a smaller, uglier wish: to leave him standing in his pain as he had left her to hers, and call that justice.
She could not offer him forgiveness. Not when no apology had been offered. Nor forgetfulness either, for how should she forget what was not past but present, a thing she must live beside as one lives beside a wall.
So Jena chose a middle course, if only because she had not the strength for either of the others. Something between: neither turning from him nor wholly yielding. A woman in the Marches learned such half-measures early. Storm and drought alike made a mockery of clean choices. Sometimes a woman could not choose between the high road and the low, but only set her foot where the ground seemed least like to give way beneath her.
Very gently she bent and laid Matarys back into the bassinet. The child gave a small sigh in his sleep and settled deeper into the blankets, one fist loosening beneath his chin. Baelor, perhaps taking the movement for refusal, had turned his face away again by then, his gaze gone back to the wall and their vines. The garden had fallen very still around them. For a moment Jena sat with her hands empty in her lap. Then she reached from the bench and laid her hand around his wrist.
It was no great touch. Only her fingers closing lightly over the skin and bone of him, where the pulse beat beneath. Yet he turned at once, as if the contact had spoken louder than words might have done. There was surprise in his face first—clear and almost childlike for the span of a heartbeat—as though he could not at once account for her hand upon him. He looked down at her fingers where they lay against him, and when his gaze lifted again to hers she saw it: the unmistakable sheen in his eyes, bright as light trembling on dark water.
It was a sight she never would have thought to see in Baelor Targaryen. Baelor "Breakspear," who had always seemed half-shaped from song and story, and not from the same frail flesh as other men. For one strange suspended instant they only looked at one another, and Jena had the bewildering sense that some wall she had taken for a foundation of the world itself had cracked soundlessly down the middle.
The sight of him there stirred loose an older memory, one she had not thought of in years. She had been seven when her mother died. Lady Dondarrion had been riding to Harvest Hall to visit her Selmy kin when her party was set upon in the Marches by a band of Dornish raiders camped in the red hills beyond the prince’s road—no lord’s banners above them, only hard men and camp-followers and the sort of rootless wretches who clung to such bands and lived off whatever they could take.
Her mother had died there amidst broken wagons and bloodied horses. When word reached Blackhaven, her father had taken fifty riders and gone out at once. He found the encampment and put it all to the torch. Jena had not seen it, but the castle had ears enough; she heard from soldiers, from servants, from women who thought her too young to understand, that the fire had run through tents and carts and scrub in one hungry rush, and that none had been spared. Women and children too, burned with the rest.
When her father returned, smoke-blackened and grim as a man come back from some lower hell, she had followed him on soft feet without his knowing, through the hall and down the turn of the passage and into the sept. There, in the wavering candlelight, she found him on his knees before the Mother: the great carved goddess seated in her niche, child in her lap, her stone face all pity and peace. Her father had bowed himself at her feet and laid his face against her stony lap and wept there with a sound so broken and naked that it had frightened her more than all the whispered tales of fire and death.
She had not known what to do then, standing in the sept doorway with her father’s grief before her like something too large and sacred to touch. She did not know now. The years between seemed, for a moment, to fold in on themselves, leaving her with that same child’s helplessness in the face of feeling in a man she had never imagined capable of showing it.
Matarys stirred in the bassinet. A small sound came from him—not yet a cry, only the first soft complaint of a babe waking to discomfort. Jena turned at once and bent to lift him, gathering his warm little body against her shoulder until the fretful sounds quieted into damp snuffles and little rooting murmurs.
When she straightened, she looked at Baelor for a long moment. Then, very gently, she held the child out to him.
Surprise passed over his face, plain and unguarded. He hesitated only a heartbeat before reaching for the boy. He gathered Matarys to him with a care almost awkward, as if he feared to misplace so much as a finger, or else to hold too tightly what was too precious for any mortal hand to keep. There was no courtly ease in him then, no varnish of rank or custom—only the raw, reverent tenderness of a father taking up his son.
And once the child lay against his breast, something in him seemed to ease. He swayed with Matarys in his arms without seeming to know it, slow and instinctive as a tree answering wind. Then he bent his head and pressed a kiss to the child’s brow. Jena watched as a single tear gather at the corner of his eye, then trace a fine rivulet downward before vanishing into the soft dark silk of his son’s hair.
Jena sat back down on the bench and watched him a while, Matarys cradled against his breast, and found her thoughts turning back to what Maekar had said to her in the long hours of Dyanna’s labor: that a child needed a mother and a father both. She had taken it then as a truth about children. Now, watching Baelor with their son, she wondered if it were not a truth about fathers as well. Hardness was asked too often of men, and given freely enough—but perhaps it was children who gave them leave to set it down, if only for a little while. Without that, what remained?
The thought came to her, unwelcome and sharp, that to take the children from him—however justified it might once have seemed—would not be only her own escape. It would be a taking. A theft. And the thing stolen would not be small.
By then Matarys had gone soft again in his arms, his little body surrendered once more to sleep. Baelor looked down at him a moment longer, as if reluctant to break the spell of it, then bent and laid him back in the bassinet. After, he came and sat beside her on the bench. Some strain had seeped out of him in those few moments with the babe; he looked calmer now, and a little less worn, as if the child’s brief weight against his breast had quieted something restless in him. When he turned to her, his look held warmth and a weary gratitude, as if she had given him back some small thing he had not dared ask for.
“I was sorry to hear of your father,” he said at last. “More sorry than I have yet said.” His gaze held hers, steady and earnest. “And I know it has not been easy for you, these past years, to be so far from your kin on Dragonstone.”
Jena made no reply. Baelor’s hand rested lightly on the stone bench between them, not touching hers, though not very far from it either. “My father has asked that I serve as Hand in Lord Hayford’s place,” he said. “If I accept, we would remain here in King’s Landing.” He paused, and there was something in the pause that told her he was treading carefully still. “You would be nearer to Blackhaven. Nearer to your family. I thought…”
His mouth shifted faintly, as though he knew the offering was smaller than what ought to have been said. “I thought it might please you.”
After a moment he added, more quietly, “Would it?”
Jena did not answer at once. Her gaze drifted past him, beyond the pale wall and the tired roses, and in her mind she saw again Dragonstone: black rock, salt wind, the smoking mountain forever brooding over it all, and the sea hemming one in on every side. She had endured it for years. She would not have endured it much longer. Whatever else might have happened between them, she knew now with a clarity that startled her: she would not have gone back. Not by choice, and not by submission. By Baelor’s road or by one of her own making, she would have escaped that barren place.
Only then did she turn back to him. “Yes,” she said simply, and knew that Baelor had no notion how much reckoning lay folded inside that single word.
A relieved smile touched Baelor’s mouth then, brief but real. “Good,” he said.
Some practical steadiness had returned to him now; she could hear it in his voice as he began to speak of what must be done in the days ahead—his father, the council, chambers to be readied, servants to be shifted, letters to be sent. There was much, plainly, and he spoke of it as men spoke of necessary things: one duty after another, set in order and made manageable by naming.
Jena listened to him go on. When he paused, she said gently, “You should also speak with Ser Donnel as well, now that you have returned. He has a message for you.” The words came from her almost before she had decided to speak them, as if some quieter part of her had chosen the moment for her.
Baelor looked at her then. His expression did not alter, yet neither was it empty. For a beat he said nothing, and in that small stillness she knew he understood exactly what she had placed between them.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Thank you for the reminder. I will see to it when I may.”
He said it lightly, almost as one more thread to be taken up among many others, not denied, not refused, only set quietly into its place among the lesser business of the day.
Yet Jena knew it for a moment all the same. The first of its kind between them: the first time she had brought that hidden thing into the open air of speech, and the first time he had answered.
And in the calm with which he set it aside, she understood something in return. Whatever this was—whatever shape it might take in the private chambers of his heart—it was there. But it would not be the master of other things. Not the children. Not King’s Landing. Not the many obligations upon which their lives were built. Between them, without either naming it, some quiet agreement had been reached: that this, too, would be borne, but borne in its place. It would live where so much else in them lived—in silence, in knowledge, in the narrow spaces left over after duty had taken its due.
Jena turned her face toward Baelor and listened as he went on speaking of the days ahead, his voice settling once more into the measured cadence of plans and duties and practical things. The sinking sun had found the garden by then, laying a last amber glow over the stone and the thinning vines, until even the worn leaves seemed briefly gilded.
She watched him as he spoke, this man who belonged partly to her and partly to the realm and partly to some girl long lost, and knew at last that she would not be leaving. Not now. Perhaps not ever.
It came to her then that sorrow was not always borne in the same shape. Baelor’s was a thing turned outward, given to banners and councils and the hard sacrifices of rule. Hers was smaller in the world’s eyes, and no less binding for that: the children, the household, the private sorrow of a wife who must make a home where love had not come simply. He would carry what was asked of him for the realm. She would carry what was asked of her for this family, for him. Between them, that was the bargain.
They were not lovers out of a tale. But neither were they strangers now. They were as two beams set beneath the same roof, each bearing weight the other could not wholly see, yet holding the house upright between them all the same. And as the garden darkened and the last of the sun went out upon the stone, Jena knew she would bear her share of it, so long as he bore his.