The cake was not really a cake.
It was bread, sweetened with honey and studded with dried currants, shaped into something roughly round by Mira the innkeeper’s wife.
Seven tallow candles had been pressed into the top because Father had asked nicely, and probably because Father had slipped her a few extra coppers as well.
It sat between two cups of watered ale on the worn table and it smelled wonderful, and Alex studied it for a long moment before he looked up at Mikal’s face.
His father was grinning.
Mikal was a big man.
Six feet of him, broad through the shoulder, with black hair and a dark beard going slightly to grey at the edges and eyes that were warm and brown and at this moment completely unguarded, the way they only got when it was just the two of them and he had nothing to perform for anyone.
He had a broken nose that had healed crooked and a scar along his jaw from a melee outside Oldtown when Alex had been three.
He wasn’t a handsome man by any conventional measure.
But when he smiled it reached his eyes without reservation, and Alex had learned over seven years that a man whose smile reached his eyes was a man who wasn’t hiding anything.
That mattered.
In this world, that mattered more than most people seemed to realize.
“Seven,” Mikal said, as though the number itself was a personal achievement.
In Westeros perhaps it was.
Child mortality being what it was, perhaps every year earned its own quiet celebration.
“Seven years.
You were barely bigger than my boot when you came into the world and your mother….
” He stopped.
Cleared his throat.
“Well.” He lifted his cup.
“Seven years.
The gods have been good.” Alex lifted his own cup.
“Thank you, Father.” He watched the small flicker cross Mikal’s face, that brief, almost invisible thing that happened whenever Alex was too measured.
Too composed.
Too much like a man being courteous rather than a boy being genuinely delighted.
He saw it, noted it, and deliberately let his expression soften into something warmer.
Something more appropriate for a seven year old sitting in front of honey bread and tallow candles.
It was harder than it should have been.
It was getting easier than it used to be.
They were outside Ivy Hall, a village too small to appear on any maester’s map, two days’ ride from the road that ran between Highgarden and the wider Reach.
The kind of place that existed mostly to serve travellers who needed one night’s roof and one hot meal before pressing on to somewhere that actually mattered.
Mikal had ridden two tourneys this season.
A minor lord’s nameday celebration and a harvest festival that had attracted four knights and one very optimistic squire.
He’d won the first and placed second at the second, and come away with enough coin to carry them comfortably through the coming months.
By the standards of their life it was a good year.
Alex understood their life with a clarity that still occasionally unsettled him.
They were not poor, not truly.
Mikal had his horse, his arms, his skill, a reputation solid enough among the minor tourney circuits of the Reach to keep steady work coming.
They ate.
They slept under roofs more often than under canvas.
There were hedge knights in Westeros who had considerably less.
But there was no keep.
No lands.
No lord who would send ravens on their behalf if something went badly wrong.
Their stability was exactly as wide as Mikal’s lance arm and exactly as fragile as one bad fall from a horse at the wrong moment.
Alex had been thinking about that for two years.
Longer, probably, if he counted the part of him that had been thinking about it before he fully understood what he was.
Across the table Mikal was cutting the bread into rough slices, still smiling, humming something tuneless under his breath, a habit he had when he was content.
Alex watched him and let himself simply be present for a moment.
Whatever else was happening inside him, whatever weight sat behind his eyes, this was real.
This table.
This man.
The smell of honey and tallow smoke in a warm inn on a cold autumn evening.
Some things did not require analysis.
“Your mother would have liked this place,” Mikal said, without looking up.
Quiet.
Not raw, he’d had seven years to sand the worst edges off it, but not nothing either.
“She liked small places.
Said big cities were too loud and not honest enough about what they were.” Alex said nothing.
He had learned that this was what Mikal needed, not a response, just space and a listener.
“Freya.” He said her name the way some men said prayers.
Brief and complete.
“She’d have had opinions about that cake.
Said it wasn’t shaped right.” A short genuine laugh.
“She had very specific opinions about shapes.” Alex looked at his slice of bread and thought about a woman with black eyes the colour of midnight, eyes he had inherited entirely, that he had never seen looking back at him from a living face.
He knew her only through Mikal’s stories and his own reflection in still water.
First Men blood, Mikal had mentioned once.
Old blood, from the north of the Reach where the First Men had held on longer than elsewhere, where some families still kept the old ways quietly alongside the Seven.
People of the forest and the stone, older than the Andals and their gods and their written laws.
He thought about that sometimes.
Her blood and Mikal’s both, running through the same veins, Andal and First Men wound together in one unremarkable boy sitting in an unremarkable inn on his seventh nameday.
He didn’t let himself linger on it long.
There was no use in it.
“She sounds like she was difficult to argue with,” Alex said.
Mikal laughed again, louder this time, surprised by it.
“Gods, yes.
Brilliant woman.
Absolutely impossible.” He shook his head, fond and rueful at once.
“You have her eyes, you know.
Same colour.
Same look in them sometimes, like you’re seeing something the rest of us aren’t.” Alex held his father’s gaze and said nothing to that.
After a moment Mikal reached across and tapped his cup against Alex’s.
“To seven more.
And seven after that.” “And seven after that,” Alex said, and meant it considerably more than his father knew.
He blew out the candles, all seven, one breath, and ate his honey bread in the warmth of the common room while outside the autumn wind moved through Ivy Hall and the night settled in around them, and Mikal talked about Freya a little longer in the easy way of a man who had made peace with his grief without ever fully setting it down.
Alex listened to every word.
He kept them carefully, the way you kept things that could not be replaced.