For a long time there was only the fog.
It wasn't the grey fog of any morning Alan had ever known. It wasn't the wet-wool fog that used to sit on the motorway on his drive in, turning brake lights into smeared rubies. This fog was softer and more complete, and it had soaked into him the way water soaks into bread. He lived inside it. Most of the time he was it. Things reached him through it the way sounds reach a man at the bottom of a swimming pool: warped, gorgeous, and meaningless.
There was warmth, and there was the absence of warmth, and the absence was a catastrophe that made his whole body scream. When he screamed long enough, a sweetness arrived. There were colours, great slow smears of them, mostly crimson and gold. They hung above him like the undersides of sunset clouds. Faces swam up and sank away again like pale fish. There was a voice, low and honeyed. He would later learn to wait for it the way a dog learns the sound of one particular car on the drive.
And there were the dreams, if they were dreams. A kitchen with a humming fridge. A phone screen lighting a dark bedroom blue. Rain on a windscreen, the wipers losing the argument. Then came a sound like the biggest door in the world being slammed, then nothing, then this.
In those months he did not know he was Alan. Knowing takes a mind with shelves in it, and his shelves had not yet been built. He knew hungry and not-hungry, held and not-held.
Then came the fever.
He would later reckon it came in his third month. It turned the crimson-and-gold world into a furnace. He remembered a great deal of noise around him, dimly, the way you remember being very small. A woman's voice had gone raw and terrible, nothing like honey: no, no, you will not, you will not. An old man's voice, thin as a reed, was full of words like humours and the gods' will. There was a cold wet cloth, and a smell of burning herbs so bitter it seemed to have a colour. Someone was praying to the Mother. Someone else, with a voice like a barrel rolling down stairs, was shouting at them to pray louder.
Then the fever broke the way a wave breaks: all at once, and everything behind it was changed.
After the fever, the fog began to thin.
It thinned slowly, and then quickly, the way a winter dawn does. Of all the moments it might have chosen, it finished lifting while he was feeding.
Warmth came first, as it always did. He was held in the crook of an arm that smelled of rosewater and, underneath, of lemon and the iron tang of expensive thread. A heartbeat thudded under his ear, slow and steady as a temple drum. There was sweetness in his mouth and the small animal contentment of a belly filling.
Then the world came into focus, like a lens being turned.
Above him was a face.
It was the first clear thought he had had in months, and the thought was that this was the most beautiful face he had ever seen. He had seen a great many faces on screens. This one looked as though its sculptor had studied lions. It had high cheekbones and a mouth that seemed made for disdain, though just now it was soft. Her hair, loosed from its pins, fell like poured bullion in a heavy curtain, and the candlelight inside it made a small private golden room. Her eyes were green. It was the green of deep water over pale sand, or of emeralds in a jeweller's window after closing. He suspected those eyes had never looked at anyone else the way they were looking at him.
"There you are," she murmured. "There's my prince. There's my brave boy."
Prince, said a small, newly woken voice at the back of his skull. Huh.
The room behind her came up in pieces. A canopy of heavy crimson velvet was stitched with black thread. A window sat so deep in the wall that it looked like the mouth of a cave. Through it he could see evening sky over tiled roofs running down to a bay the colour of hammered copper. There was a brazier. A tapestry on the far wall showed men in green and gold driving a great stag into the teeth of hounds. On a chest by the bed stood a silver pitcher embossed with a roaring beast.
It was a lion.
He kept feeding, because the body wanted to and the body was, for now, in charge. But his mind had begun to take inventory, slowly and with mounting dread.
The door opened. A woman in grey and white slipped in and dipped low. A septa, said the part of his brain that had read far too many fantasy novels and would not stop cataloguing.
"Your Grace. The Grand Maester asks whether the prince has fed well this evening, and whether you will allow the wet nurse to take the night feeding..."
"The wet nurse," said the golden woman, without looking up, "may take herself back to whichever fishmonger's wife in Flea Bottom Pycelle found her. While I have breath, my son will not feed from some common slattern. I told the Grand Maester so when the fever took him. I will not tell him again."
The septa wilted and withdrew.
Pycelle.
Flea Bottom.
Your Grace.
Something in Alan's new mind went very quiet and very still, the way a room goes still after a glass is dropped.
No, he thought. No, that's... no.
"Pay her no mind," the woman told him. Her voice changed again, going low and sweet and conspiratorial, meant only for him. "They think a queen ought to hand you off like a parcel. Let them think it. The Mother gave you to me, and I am not giving you to anyone." She brushed his cheek with one finger. "Not to the maesters, not to the septas, and not even to your father."
The finger drifted up from his cheek and caught something at his brow. He felt a faint tug and realised it was a lock of his hair. She twisted it around her fingertip. At the blurry edge of his infant vision he could see it now, a curl as dark as a crow's wing against her white skin.
Her face did something complicated. It wasn't quite a frown. It was more like a cloud passing over a field.
"His hair," she said softly, to no one. "Robert crows about it to every lord who will listen. Black as the stag's hide." Her thumb stroked the curl. "But you have my eyes. The maesters say every babe's eyes are blue at first and change later. Yours have changed, and they're mine." She said it the way a general might report that the eastern wall was holding. "That's the Lannister in you. Remember it. Whatever else they tell you, you are a lion too."
Cersei, said the voice in Alan's head, and this time it did not ask permission.
Cersei Lannister.
Robert's hair and Cersei's eyes.
I'm Robert Baratheon's son.
He stopped feeding, and the world tipped.
It hit him the way the lorry must have hit him in the rain, as a series of blows, each one landing before he had recovered from the last.
This was the Red Keep, and that was King's Landing out the window, above Blackwater Bay. He had watched this world on a laptop balanced on his knees: reruns and rereads, forum arguments at two in the morning. In this world men died with their heads on spikes, and women died in childbed, and children died in their cots...
...of fever.
He remembered a scene, suddenly and horribly. Years from now, Cersei Lannister would sit beside a sickbed and tell another grieving mother about her firstborn, a little black-haired boy taken by a fever. He was a son of Robert's who died before he could matter, a footnote, a sad story a villain told to earn a moment's pity.
The fever had come, and the fever had broken, and the black-haired boy had not died.
Or he did, whispered something cold at the bottom of him, and you're what crawled in after he left.
He pushed that thought down, very hard, into a place he did not intend to visit again soon.
He found he was crying. It wasn't only a baby's cry. Something wet and silent was leaking from the corners of his eyes while his small chest hitched. Cersei made a sound of distress and lifted him to her shoulder. She walked the length of the chamber, patting his back with a queen's firm, impatient rhythm.
"Hush. Hush now. What is it, your belly? Hush, my love, my little lion."
From his new place on her shoulder, Alan could see the door. Beside it, where there had been only shadow a moment before, stood a knight in white.
He wore a white cloak and white enamelled scale, and one white-gloved hand rested easily on his sword hilt. He was tall and golden and so like the woman holding Alan that for a dizzy second Alan thought he was seeing her reflected in polished steel. The knight's face was handsome in a lazy, careless way. He looked like a man who had been told all his life that he was beautiful and had long ago stopped finding it interesting.
He did not look careless now. He was looking at the baby on his sister's shoulder, and Alan had no name for the look on his face. It wasn't hatred. It was worse than that, because it held hunger, and grief, and a sort of baffled tenderness that seemed to shame him.
"He's loud tonight," said Ser Jaime Lannister.
"He's a prince. Princes are meant to be heard." Cersei did not turn around. "You should be at the door, not inside it."
"The door is dull. The door has no opinions." He paused. "He looks like Robert."
Cersei's hand went still on Alan's back, just for a moment. Then the patting started again, as precise as a metronome.
"He looks like me," she said. "Look at his eyes."
Jaime looked. Alan was pinned by that gaze, the same impossible, poisonous, jewel-deep green as his mother's, and he felt a chill climb a spine that could not yet hold up his own head.
He's wondering, Alan thought. He's standing there wondering what a son of his would look like.
That thought opened onto a dark stair, and the next one waited at the bottom of it: What happens when she gives him one?
They left him in the cradle, and he lay awake long afterwards. The cradle was carved, gilded oak, with a stag at its head and a lion at its foot, as if the carpenters had been told to make peace between the two houses in wood because nobody had managed it in flesh. A nursemaid dozed in the corner. The brazier ticked as it cooled. Beyond the thick window, a sept's bells rang the hour and gulls cried over the black water.
Alan thought.
For three months he had had nothing to do but exist. Now that he had a mind again, it would not stop turning, like a millwheel in a flood.
Right, he thought. Let's be methodical. Let's not panic. We are a four-month-old infant who cannot lift his own head, and we are going to be methodical.
First fact: he was the trueborn son of King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, and Queen Cersei of House Lannister. He was no bastard in a prince's clothes and no secret wrapped in a crown. He was an heir with both the stag's blood and the lion's, black-haired and green-eyed, as legitimate as the Iron Throne itself. Admittedly that wasn't saying much, given how Robert had come by it.
Second fact: in the world he remembered, the lack of a true heir had been the crack in the foundation, and everything else had grown out of that crack like black roots. Cersei's three golden children had none of them been Robert's. Jon Arryn had read an old book of lineages by candlelight and noticed that every marriage of stag and lion, going back for centuries, had produced black-haired babies. Jon Arryn had died of a poison called the Tears of Lys. Eddard Stark had come south to take his place and found the same book and the same truth. Then came a boar hunt, a king gored and dying, a cruel boy on the throne, and a good man's head on a spike. After that the whole realm had torn itself to bloody pieces while winter came down from the north like a slow white tide.
At its root, the whole war had been a question of whose children were whose.
Now there was a child whose parentage no one could question.
So does it still happen? Alan made himself consider it. Does Robert still die?
In the story he knew, Robert had died because Cersei wanted him dead. Ned Stark had found out the truth and, being Ned Stark, had warned her first. She had sons to protect, and they would lose everything the moment their father learned what they were.
But Alan's existence didn't make Cersei love Robert. One evening had been enough to show him that. He had heard the frost in her voice when she said your father. He had felt her hand go still when Jaime spoke. She had been married a year, perhaps a year and a half, to a man who got drunk and wept for a dead Stark girl. Having a son hadn't changed that. It had only given her something of her own to hold on to.
And Jaime was still standing at the door.
Suppose that in a year or two or three a second child arrived, a little yellow-haired princess or prince, while Robert's black hair sat on the head of his eldest. Nobody would need Jon Arryn and a dusty book to see what that meant. Anyone with eyes would see it. Alan himself would be the evidence, and his own face would be proof of the crime.
I'm the control group, he thought, with a kind of hysterical clarity. I'm the baseline. Any blond sibling of mine is a confession.
Would Cersei see that? She was many things, but in his memory she had never been stupid about danger standing right in front of her. It was the danger that came slowly, from the side, that she missed. Surely she would see this.
He thought about the look on Jaime's face and the hunger in it.
Surely.
And if she doesn't, he thought, if she's careless, or doesn't care, or thinks she can talk her way out of it, then I haven't delayed the war. I've dragged it forward. Robert would find out in two or three years instead of fifteen, with no Ned Stark beside him to hold him back, while he was still young and strong and furious about everything. He would kill her. He would kill the baby. He would kill Jaime, or try to. And Tywin Lannister would not sit on Casterly Rock and watch his daughter's head roll.
That meant the Lannisters in rebellion against the crown, with a Baratheon-Lannister prince caught in the middle, the one thing both sides would want to hold. It meant him.
He lay very still in his gilded cradle and felt the true weight of what he was for the first time. He wasn't a person. He was a piece on a board, the most valuable piece of all, and he could not yet hold up his own head.
He made himself think wider, because thinking narrow was going to drive him mad.
Outside the walls of the Red Keep, the rest of the world he remembered was being born too.
Far to the north, at Winterfell, a grey-eyed lord was learning to be a father to two boys. One was a baby with his mother's Tully-red hair. The other was a dark, quiet child who wasn't his, with a secret for a birthright. Robb Stark and Jon Snow were a year or two older than Alan, maybe less. Across the narrow sea, in a house with a red door and a lemon tree, a silver-haired baby girl who had been born in a storm was sleeping, while her brother nursed his grievances. There might even be a second silver-haired child somewhere, a boy smuggled out of the city, a possible prince, if that particular theory had ever been true.
And beyond the Wall, in the endless white, something that never slept was waiting for the long night it had been promised.
None of it would care whose son he was.
The war isn't the point, Alan realised, and the thought was so large and so cold that he shivered in his swaddling. The war is a distraction. It's the whole realm fighting over a chair while the house burns down around them. If I'm the heir, truly and undeniably, then maybe there doesn't have to be a war at all. Maybe there's time. Fifteen years, seventeen, however many I've got.
Maybe this time, when winter comes, the Seven Kingdoms will be standing together instead of lying in pieces.
It was a good thought and worth holding on to. He managed to hold it for almost a full minute before the next one came.
Of course, first I have to survive my mother.
The door crashed open.
This was nothing like a septa's careful entrance or a Kingsguard's silent step. It was the entrance of a man who had never opened a door any other way. The nursemaid jerked awake and fell off her stool into a curtsey so low it was nearly a collapse.
"Leave it, leave it, woman, gods' sake..." The voice was like thunder rolling round a valley, slurred at the edges with wine. "Where is he? Where's my boy?"
All at once Alan's world was filled with man.
He was enormous. He was not fat, not yet, not the swollen barrel of a king Alan remembered from the screen. He was broad the way a bull is broad, all chest and shoulder and thick, hardened arms. He smelled of red wine and woodsmoke, horse and sweat and outdoors. His beard was black, thick and spade-shaped, his hair was a wild black mane, and his eyes were a vivid, stormy blue, bright with drink and with something else.
He scooped Alan out of the cradle one-handed, as easily as picking up an apple, and held him high overhead so that the whole chamber wheeled.
"There he is!" roared King Robert Baratheon. "There's my son! Look at that hair, Baratheon to the root, eh? The seed is strong!" He laughed, a huge delighted laugh that shook the rafters and shook Alan's small body to the bone. "Pycelle says you've beaten the fever. Beat it like a Targaryen! Ha! A fighter. I knew you'd be a fighter."
He brought the baby down against his chest and held him there, surprisingly gently for all his roughness, one great calloused hand covering Alan's entire back. His heart was going like a war drum. Up close, his eyes were wet.
"I lost everything in the war," the King said, and suddenly he was speaking so quietly that the nursemaid on the floor could not possibly have heard. "Everything worth having. I thought the gods had nothing left to give me but a crown I never wanted and a wife who..." He stopped and let out a breath of wine. "But they gave me you, didn't they? Didn't they, little Alyn?"
Alyn.
It landed on him like a tolling bell. Somehow, in all that fog, he had missed it, or heard it without understanding. They had named him Alyn. Alyn Baratheon, after some famous old admiral his father admired, a sea-lord with a fist in his name.
It was close enough to Alan, he thought, that whichever gods were running this madhouse must be laughing themselves sick.
"You'll be a warrior," Robert told him. "Not like me. Better than me. You'll have the hammer and the gold both. You'll never have to lose anyone." He pressed his bearded face to the top of Alan's head, and his breath caught. "I swear it on my father's bones. You'll never lose anything."
Cersei had appeared in the doorway behind him, drawn by the noise. She clutched a robe of green silk at her throat, and her golden hair hung loose down her back. She stood very still and watched her husband weep into their son's black curls.
Her face was a mask, as perfect, beautiful and blank as a marble statue in a sept.
But her eyes, the green eyes Alan had inherited and now looked out of, were fixed on Robert's back. For an instant, before she smoothed them over, Alan saw something in them that made the milk in his belly turn to ice.
It wasn't love, and it wasn't even hatred.
It was patience.
He did the only thing a baby could do. He twisted in his father's arms, stretched one fat, clumsy, useless fist towards the doorway, and wailed for his mother.
Robert laughed. "Wants his mother, does he? Go on, then, take him. He's got your temper already."
Cersei crossed the room and took him, and when she did, the mask slipped. What lay underneath was soft again. It was soft, and fierce, and entirely his.
Good, Alan thought, pressing his face into the rosewater-and-lemon warmth of her. Look at me. Keep looking at me. Not at him, and not at the door where your brother stands. At me.
It was the first move he had ever made in the great game that had killed so many of the people he used to watch from the safety of his sofa.
He was four months old, and he intended to win.