The stands were louder on Day 4.
Alex had thought he understood the noise by now, three days of it had recalibrated his sense of what a crowd sounded like.
He’d been wrong.
The joust brought something different out of people.
The melee had been chaotic and exciting but it was hard to follow, hard to fix your attention on any one thing.
The joust was simple.
Two men.
Two horses.
One lance each.
The simplicity of it focused everything, the crowd’s attention, their noise, their collective held breath, into a single point.
He felt it in his chest when the first horses ran.
“First time you’ve felt that?” Edwyn said beside him, watching his face instead of the field.
“Yes,” Alex said.
“You get used to it.” A pause.
“Actually you don’t.
That’s the thing about the joust.
You never quite get used to it.” They were in the competitor’s viewing area, ground level, close to the lists, Mikal beside them with his arms folded watching everything with the focused attention of a man doing professional research.
He wasn’t competing today.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t working.
The herald’s voice rolled across the full lists.
“The joust!
Day the first!
By the grace of Lord Tywin Lannister and in honour of Prince Viserys Targaryen —” The crowd settled.
“Ser Jonothor Darry of the Kingsguard — Ser Gareth Rowan of House Rowan!” Genuine cheer for Darry.
Solid appreciation for Rowan.
The horses came to their marks and the crowd went quiet in the specific way it went quiet before a lance hit, not silence exactly, more like ten thousand people breathing at the same time.
The impact was physical from this close.
Not just sound, a concussive thud that Alex felt in his back teeth.
Rowan went sideways and the crowd came up out of their seats.
“Gods,” Alex said, before he could stop himself.
Mikal glanced at him.
Something in his expression that might have been amusement if it had been allowed to develop further.
“Different from the stands.” “Yes.” “Remember that feeling.
That’s what I’m riding into tomorrow.” Alex looked at the field where Rowan’s squire was helping him up.
Looked back at his father.
He didn’t say anything.
But his hand found the small whetstone in his pocket and he turned it over once without thinking about it.
— The morning session moved through its bracket with the particular rhythm of professional competition, herald announcing, crowd responding, horses running, the results landing with varying degrees of drama.
Most bouts were decided in two tilts.
A few in one.
One went to five before the crowd was on its feet screaming.
Alex watched everything.
Not just the jousting, the people around it.
The way lords in the noble stands leaned to each other when certain names were announced.
The way the Kingsguard knights who weren’t competing watched the ones who were, with the professional attention of men assessing colleagues.
“Ser Lewyn Martell of the Kingsguard — Ser Baldric Oakheart of House Oakheart!” The Martell section of the noble stands responded warmly.
The rest of the crowd gave the polite appreciation of people watching someone they respected but hadn’t chosen as a favourite.
Lewyn Martell rode well.
Clean, efficient, unhurried.
Oakheart went down in two tilts.
“He’s good,” Alex said.
“Kingsguard,” Mikal said simply, as though that was complete explanation.
Which, Alex supposed, it was.
“Ser Arthur Dayne, Sword of the Morning, of the Kingsguard —” The crowd went quiet.
Not the anticipatory quiet before a tilt, something different.
The quiet of people who understood they were about to see something that existed in a different category from what had come before.
Alex had noticed this quality in the stands during the melee when Selmy was fighting.
He hadn’t expected to feel it more strongly for someone else.
“— Ser Denys Mallister of House Mallister!” Alex had his own image of Arthur Dayne.
Assembled from fragments, references in fanfiction, implications in show dialogue, the accumulated weight of every story that treated this name as shorthand for the absolute pinnacle of what a knight could be.
In the reels in his head Dayne was almost mythological.
A symbol more than a person.
The man who rode out was twenty-one at most.
That was the first thing that hit him, how young he was.
White cloak moving in the harbour wind, Dawn at his hip, sitting his horse with the ease of someone for whom a horse was simply a extension of his own body.
He acknowledged the crowd with a nod that was neither performing modesty nor performing greatness.
Just a man acknowledging that people were there.
And then he ran his first tilt and Alex understood.
It wasn’t that he was faster than everyone else, though he was.
It wasn’t that his seat was better, though it was.
It was something harder to name, a quality of absolute precision, like watching someone do something physical at the exact limit of what a human body could do, with no wasted motion anywhere in it.
Mallister went down in one tilt.
The crowd’s sound was different from what it gave Rhaegar.
Warmer in a specific way — the sound of people recognising mastery rather than status.
“There’s our money,” Edwyn said quietly.
“You already said that,” Alex said.
“Worth saying twice.” Mikal said nothing.
He was watching Dayne ride back to the far end with the expression of a man storing information he would need tomorrow.
— The afternoon session brought Rhaegar.
Alex had been waiting for this with a specific quality of anticipation he couldn’t entirely account for.
The reel version of Rhaegar in his head was assembled from a hundred different sources, fanfiction that made him a tragic romantic, show moments that loaded him with the weight of prophecy, the general accumulated mythology of a character who died before the main story started and therefore existed in everyone’s imagination as whatever they needed him to be.
Melancholic.
Silver-tongued.
Obsessed with destiny.
Beautiful in the way of things that were ending.
“Prince Rhaegar Targaryen of House Targaryen!” The crowd’s reaction was immediate and enormous, bigger than anything that had come before, louder than Dayne, louder than Selmy, the sound of ten thousand people releasing something they’d been holding.
Alex looked at the prince riding out and felt something strange happen in his chest.
He was seventeen.
That was the thing.
Just seventeen, silver-gold hair, purple eyes visible even from this distance, riding with genuine skill and the particular ease of someone who had been training seriously for years.
He was everything the descriptions had suggested and he was also just a young man on a horse, and the gap between those two things sat in Alex’s chest like a splinter he couldn’t locate precisely.
He laughed at something a companion said before he reached his mark.
Genuinely laughed, head back, unguarded, the laugh of someone who found something actually funny rather than performing amusement for an audience.
*That’s* what the uncanny valley felt like.
Not the silver hair or the purple eyes.
Just the laugh.
Just a seventeen year old finding something funny on a Tuesday afternoon in Lannisport while ten thousand people watched him with the specific reverence usually reserved for things that didn’t laugh.
‘You’re going to make such a mess of everything,’ Alex thought, without heat.
Almost sadly.
Then the tilt ran and Rhaegar put Ser Addam Marbrand down in one pass and the crowd came apart and Alex came back to the present.
“He’s good,” Edwyn said, with the tone of a man being professionally fair about a competitor.
“Yes,” Mikal said.
“He is.” A pause.
“Not as good as Dayne,” Mikal said.
Neither of them said anything to that.
— Between sessions Alex went to check on Bucket.
The competitor’s stables were busy at midday, squires and grooms moving between stalls, horses being watered and checked, the smell of hay and manure and leather oil that Alex had stopped noticing after the first day.
He worked through the checklist, Bucket’s feet, his water, the saddle that would go on him tomorrow.
Bucket watched him with the flat suspicious expression he gave everyone who wasn’t Mikal and didn’t bite him, which Alex had learned to count as a form of acceptance.
“He doesn’t like you much,” said a voice behind him.
Alex turned.
Gold hair.
Green eyes.
A guard two steps back at alert posture, hand not on his sword but close enough to suggest the option was available.
Jaime Lannister was looking at Bucket with the assessing expression of someone who knew horses.
“You can tell by the ears.
They go flat when —” Bucket’s ears went flat.
He bared his teeth at the guard.
“Like that,” Jaime said.
“He does that to everyone,” Alex said.
“Except?” “My father.” Jaime nodded, satisfied, as though this confirmed something.
He looked around the stall with the easy confidence of someone for whom other people’s spaces were simply spaces.
His eyes found Alex’s practice blade at his hip.
“You rewrapped the grip,” he said.
Alex looked at his hand.
He had, two nights ago, following the advice from the stables.
“You were right.
Better purchase.” Something crossed Jaime’s face, not quite surprise, more like the specific satisfaction of someone whose advice had been taken and proved correct, which was apparently a rarer experience than it should have been.
“Your knight competes tomorrow?” Jaime asked.
“Yes.
Second day entrants.” Jaime was quiet for a moment.
He looked at Bucket, properly looked, the way he’d looked at the practice blade, the assessing look of someone who actually saw things.
“Good horse.
Old, but good bone structure.
He’ll hold up.” “He bites,” Alex said.
“Good horses often do.” He said it with a slight tone that suggested he found this personally relatable.
The guard behind him made a small sound that might have been a suppressed laugh.
Jaime glanced back at the guard.
Then at Alex.
“Is your father nervous?” The question landed differently than Alex expected.
Not casual, genuine.
The curiosity of someone who hadn’t yet learned to perform disinterest in things that actually interested him.
“He doesn’t show it,” Alex said carefully.
“But yes?” Alex looked at Bucket.
“Probably yes.” Jaime nodded slowly.
“My father never shows it either.” He said it without obvious emotion, just as a fact he’d observed about a person he lived with.
“But you can tell.
They get very — ” He paused, looking for the word.
“Still.” Alex thought about Mikal the previous evening.
Checking equipment by torchlight.
Moving carefully.
Very still.
“Yes,” he said.
“Like that.” They stood there for a moment in the comfortable silence of two children who had arrived at an unexpected point of understanding and didn’t quite know what to do with it.
The guard cleared his throat.
Jaime straightened.
“Good luck to your knight tomorrow,” he said, and walked away with the easy stride of someone who had somewhere to be and wasn’t hurrying to get there.
Alex watched him go.
Then he went back to checking Bucket’s feet.
— Evening.
The feast was warm and loud but Alex was quiet through most of it, sitting with Mikal and Edwyn while the room moved around them.
Mikal was eating steadily and saying nothing.
He had the stillness Jaime had described, the particular quality of contained focus that was different from his normal quiet.
His hands were still, which was unusual.
Normally they were doing something, oiling a strap, sharpening something, the constant maintenance habit.
Still hands meant his mind was somewhere specific and he didn’t want to disturb it.
Alex watched him for a moment.
Then he reached into his pocket and took out his whetstone and set it on the table between them.
Mikal looked at it.
Looked at Alex.
Picked it up and started working the edge of his belt knife.
Slow, rhythmic, the sound of it low under the noise of the feast.
His shoulders dropped slightly.
Edwyn looked at Alex across the table with an expression that was briefly, genuinely, without his usual performance of cheerfulness.
He nodded once.
Small.
And went back to his food.