The king had given the girl her grandmother’s name.
Queen Alyssa Velaryon had been dead years, and one woman had still managed to knot Targaryen, Velaryon, and Baratheon into the same rope.
Boremund’s mother.
Jaehaerys’s.
Rhaena’s.
The child in the yard wore the name like a borrowed coat and swung as if it were a sword.
Rhaegar had become a post for her to hit.
The king was watching.
So were seven white cloaks, the officers of Dragonstone’s garrison, and a clot of stormlords who had come for a betrothal and stayed for blood they could clap for.
If he was going to give her the bout, he would not do it on his knees.
“Watch the shield, Alyssa.
A man who holds one can still hit back.”
He beat her blade off the rim and gave ground, eyes past her shoulder on the wooden dummy at the edge of the sand.
He set his feet, drove up, and left the dirt.
The body went long and turned once in the air.
The twist put the round shield off his arm.
It left his hand with a hard hum and cut past her ear for the post.
Alyssa stopped.
The stroke she had been building died in her wrists.
A thrown shield was not in the work she knew.
She stood with the practice sword and watched it go.
Wood has no spring.
He knew that when he let it fly.
He was already running.
The shield kissed the dummy, kicked up spinning, and he took it out of the air before it found the mud.
He slammed the rim into the ground on one knee and put a shout with it, the whole cheap hero’s landing, and told himself the sequence had been clean.
The yard made a noise.
He took it for the throw.
Boremund’s laugh carried over the rest.
“Look at that.
He’s stealing my work!”
“Yours is a bull with a hammer.
Mine looks like something.”
He was still grinning when he left the ground again.
Same turn.
The shield came off the arm in a full circle and went for her.
Alyssa saw it and screamed.
The watchers screamed with her.
He had not counted on her putting her face in the way.
The light training shield took her square.
Blood jumped from her nose.
She went over backward, stiff as a felled post.
The shield dropped in the mud.
The yard was soft.
Her head did not find stone.
She was out.
The ring closed.
Rhaegar got there first, hauled her up, and stripped the shirt off his back to mop at the blood.
“Maester!”
The girl was built for falls.
He had her skull in his hands and no patience left.
“You dodge.
You don’t stand there.”
She was not crying.
The nose had wrung the tears out of her anyway.
She roared it into his face, sure of herself.
“I shouted!”
“You shouted at a shield.”
He shut his mouth after that.
The bridge of it was broken.
The whole nose went up in a blot, and her mouth was a smear of what had run down.
Men in a yard collected marks.
Most of the ones watching had taken worse before they were her age, and called it teaching.
Alyssa was a girl, and she had not started pretty.
A smashed nose would finish the work.
The maester came at a run.
Queen Alysanne took the child with him and they carried her into the keep.
That left the yard looking at Rhaegar and at the king.
Jaehaerys had told him to give her all of it.
Every man there had heard the order.
The question sitting in the quiet was whether following a king counted when the thing that fell down was a princess.
“Good.
Hardbar through and through.”
Jaehaerys clapped his shoulder, already turning for the door and the girl.
The smile had an edge.
Rhaegar read the rest of it without help: the king was pleased to watch him hit a child in skirts and name it obedience.
Hands came together.
The lords liked a king who praised the stroke and went to his daughter in the same breath.
They called him just.
Then they put the praise down and started on the throw.
One of them picked the shield out of the mud and turned it in his hands as if the wood had a secret in it.
Baelon came up rubbing his brow.
“You heard Father and tried to kill her.”
“I didn’t mean the face.
He won’t want me in that room.
Tell her I’m sorry.”
Boremund got there next.
The arm went around Rhaegar’s neck and locked, the same trick he had used in the dust an hour ago.
He was still larger.
He meant to spend that while he had it.
“Show me the throw,” he said.
“Before you grow and I can’t make you.”
The hall at Dragonstone was already at table when they came in from the wash.
Aemon and Jocelyn’s betrothal had been done in the old Valyrian way.
Jaehaerys had brought one septon to stand witness and no more of the Faith than that.
The guests were the houses that would not spit at the rite.
The wedding the singers would care about would wait until both of them were sixteen, and it would be held in the Red Keep.
Celtigar of Claw Isle.
Velaryon of Driftmark.
Baratheon of Storm’s End. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Valyrian blood, all three, thin or not.
The Seven did not own their grandfathers.
Dragonglass took the candlelight and threw it back.
Musicians worked along the wall.
More than ten long tables had been laid with meat, bread, fruit, and wine that had not come cheap.
The high table ran across the dais.
Jaehaerys sat the center.
Queen Alysanne had his one side and Princess Rhaena the other.
Three Targaryens in black kept cups moving and took the congratulations as they came.
The betrothed pair sat with them.
So did Baelon, Alyssa, and the three younger ones: Maegelle, Vaegon, Daella.
Alyssa had a veil over the ruin of her nose.
She caught Rhaegar looking and drew a finger across the air like a man cutting sausage.
His knees came together.
Of all the children in that keep, it had to be this one.
He had asked Baelon after the yard.
She rode.
She climbed.
She fought.
She swore like a dockside girl and liked it.
Crude was the word that fit.
Whether she kept a grudge he had not needed Baelon to answer.
The sausage had done that.
Rank at a feast was a measured thing.
The nearer the king, the higher the blood.
Boremund took the head of the long table closest to the dais, and the stormlords he had brought filled it out.
A Lord of Storm’s End did not travel with four cousins.
Knights and officers with names of their own had come in his wake.
A hundred of them sat in the hall.
Down in the harbor, under the castle, the men who had no place at a table kept the ships: soldiers, squires, sailors, the rest of the noise.
The crowned stag hung where the room could see it.
Beside it, red crabs on white: Celtigar of Claw Isle.
The boy at the head of that table was Lord Bartimos Celtigar.
A second son who had taken the seat because the Shivers had emptied the rest.
His father, Lord Edwell, had been the first lord in the Seven Kingdoms with a name men knew to die of the sickness Rhaegar had carried through Oldtown.
The party that had come with the boy was small.
Every head at that board was brown.
They were an old Valyrian house and they had crossed with the Targaryens before the Doom, but the blood in them had been watered down to ordinary.
The close matches with the royal line had gone to houses that still looked the part.
Rhaegar’s place was by the doors, as far from the dais as a man could sit and still be in the room.
The men around him were knights with no house behind the name.
Westeros kept its bastards out of a formal hall.
A king’s acknowledged bastard was a different animal, and only just.
At a family table Rhaena could put him where she liked.
Tonight he was in the room because she was, and that was the whole of the courtesy.
He was not a fool about food.
He was not a fool about where they had put him either.
The world ran on seats.
He could not move his.
He took it out on the plate.