"Arms up," said Ser Barristan.
Alyn lifted his arms, and the old knight settled the breastplate over his head and began working the straps with quick, sure fingers. Outside the pavilion, the tourney grounds roared like the sea—trumpets, drums, hawkers, the thunder of hooves in the lists where the knights were warming their horses, and beneath it all the vast, restless murmur of fifty thousand people who had come to see blood spilled for sport.
"Too tight?"
"No, ser."
"It will be. You've grown again since we fitted it." Barristan tugged at a buckle and frowned. "The armourer swore he'd left you room for a year. That was three moons ago."
It was true. Alyn was fourteen years old, and a few moons more, and he stood six feet and one inch tall in his boots. He had to duck to come through most doors in the Red Keep. He was taller than Ser Barristan, taller than Ser Jaime, taller than most of the knights who would ride in the lists this afternoon, and still growing—he could feel it in the ache of his bones at night, in the way his sleeves crept up his wrists a little further every fortnight. His shoulders had broadened until his old doublets would not close across them. His arms had thickened with five years of swordwork and his chest with five years of hauling armour and mucking stables and swinging a practice hammer against his father in the yard. That morning, washing in the basin, he had noticed a dark shadow along his jaw that had not been there a moon ago, and had stared at it in the polished steel of his mirror for a long time.
The stranger had never been this big. Not even close. Sometimes Alyn caught sight of himself in a window, or in the gleam of a shield, and did not recognise what he saw.
You're the son of the Demon of the Trident, he reminded himself. And the grandson of Tywin Lannister. You were always going to be something.
"There," Barristan said, stepping back. "It will hold. Try not to be struck too hard in the ribs."
"I'll try not to be struck at all, ser."
"Everyone is struck," said the Lord Commander. "The trick is to be struck less." He looked Alyn up and down with that calm, measuring gaze. "You know what they will do."
"They'll come for me."
"All of them. Every squire on that field wants to be the one who knocked the prince on his backside. They will make alliances. They will gang up on you. They will come at you from behind." A pause. "Do not be too eager."
Alyn smiled. "Never, ser."
The pavilion flap opened, and a small figure slipped through it, ducked under the guard's arm, and marched straight up to Alyn.
Cassana was six now. She had grown, a little, but she was still the smallest of the three, slight and quiet as a shadow, with her black hair in two long braids and their mother's green eyes watching everything. She had something clutched in her fist.
"Here," she said, and held it up.
It was a ribbon. Black silk, with a thread of gold running through it. Alyn recognised it: it had been on her gown at breakfast.
"It's a favour," Cassana said seriously. "Knights wear them. So you'll win."
Alyn knelt—even kneeling, he was taller than her—and held out his arm, and let her tie the ribbon round his vambrace with great concentration and a very lopsided knot.
"There," she said. "Now you have to win."
"I'll do my best."
"No," said Cassana, with a flicker of their mother in it. "You have to."
Robert Baratheon had spent more on this tourney than he'd spent on the war with the Greyjoys, and he did not regret a single copper of it.
Kevan Lannister regretted it. Kevan had made that very plain. The queen's uncle had been master of coin for three moons now, since the whole business with Baelish, and in that time he had developed a pained, pinched look that Robert found vastly entertaining. He had come to the king's solar a fortnight ago with a stack of ledgers under his arm and a face like a man attending his own funeral and said, Your Grace, the crown cannot afford this.
The crown can't afford anything, Kevan, Robert had said. Never could. Your brother's gold will pay for it. He's paid for everything else.
And so here it was. Pavilions of silk in every colour, stretching along the river like a field of flowers. Stands of fresh-cut timber, hung with cloth-of-gold, big enough for twenty thousand. Casks of Arbor gold and Dornish red stacked like cordwood. Whole oxen turning on spits. A purse of forty thousand dragons for the champion of the lists, and ten thousand for the winner of the melee, and a thousand, and a warhorse, and a suit of plate, for the best of the squires.
And his son was going to win that last one. Robert had no doubts at all.
"You're grinning like a fool," said Ned Stark beside him.
"I'm the king. I'll grin however I like." Robert slapped his friend on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince, and grinned harder. "Look at this, Ned! Look at it! When was the last time you saw a tourney like this?"
"Harrenhal," said Ned quietly.
Robert's grin faltered for just a moment. Then he laughed and waved his cup. "Aye, well. This one'll end better. Now hush, it's starting."
The royal stand was a riot of noise and colour. Cersei sat to his left in green silk and gold, with a jewelled lion at her throat, perfectly composed and faintly bored, the way she always was at tourneys until something happened that interested her. Behind her, the three youngest were making a noise fit to wake the Seven. Lyonel had climbed onto a bench and was hollering at a pair of Dornish squires down in the lists. Argella had got hold of a bag of candied cherries from gods knew where and was throwing them at the back of Lord Tarly's head, one by one, with deadly aim, while her septa pretended not to notice. Cassana had come back from wherever she'd vanished to and sat very still between her mother's feet, her chin on her knees.
Further along the stand sat Ned's family, brought south at Robert's insistence for the tourney. Cat, stiff and proper. Their eldest boy, Robb, a good-looking lad with his mother's colouring, trying very hard to look as though he were not dying to be down in the lists. And the eldest girl, Sansa—a sweet little thing, all auburn braids and big blue eyes, gazing at the knights and the banners as though she had walked into one of her songs.
Robert looked at her fondly and thought about it again. He'd been thinking about it for a moon now. Ned's girl and Robert's boy. Stark and Baratheon, bound by blood, the way it should have been, the way it would have been if—
He put that thought away, as he always did.
"She's a lovely girl, Ned," he said instead. "Your Sansa."
"She is."
"Pretty as a picture. And that boy of mine's going to need a wife one day. What would you say to that, eh? Stark and Baratheon. Brothers in fact as well as name."
Ned was silent for a moment. "She is very young yet, Robert."
"So's he! They'll grow. Think on it, that's all I'm asking. Think on it." The trumpets blared, and Robert turned back to the lists with a roar. "There he is!"
Forty squires took the field for the melee. They came from every corner of the realm—stormlanders and westermen, northmen and Reachmen, Dornishmen and lads from the Vale—in every colour and sigil under the sun. They were big lads, most of them, sixteen and seventeen and eighteen, on the very edge of knighthood. Robert had been a squire once. He knew what it was to be a squire at a great tourney, with the whole realm watching and your lord in the stands, desperate to show what you were worth.
And every one of them, he saw at once, was looking at his son.
Alyn walked out into the lists in plain grey steel, with his helm under his arm and a blunted longsword on his hip and a ridiculous little black ribbon tied round one arm. He was a full head taller than most of the squires around him. Some of them looked at him with open hostility. Some with wary respect. And some, the younger ones, with something close to dread.
The marshal lowered his staff. The squires' melee began.
Robert had seen melees go a hundred ways. Sometimes it was every man for himself, a great chaotic scrum. Sometimes the lads formed into little knots, twos and threes, allies of the moment, to pick off the others one by one. He had seen Barristan's warning in his son's face that morning, and he knew what was coming. The lads would gang up on the prince.
He was right. At least a dozen of them went straight for Alyn—from the front, the sides, behind. They came at him in a pack, like hounds on a stag, and for a moment Robert lost sight of his son altogether in a flurry of steel and shields and bright tabards, and his heart lurched and he half rose from his seat—
And then the pack burst apart.
Squires went flying. There was no other word for it. One came reeling out of the scrum backwards, clutching at his helm, and fell flat. Another went sideways, clean off his feet, his shield split down the middle. A third dropped his sword and staggered away cradling his wrist. And in the middle of it all, Robert's son stood like a rock in a river, with the tide of squires breaking against him and falling away.
He did not charge. That was the first thing Robert noticed. He did not rush in swinging, the way Robert himself would have done at his age. He stood his ground and let them come to him, and when they came, he broke them. Short, heavy, economical blows, every one of them landing where it was meant to. A shield-rim into a face. A blade into a gap under an arm. A shoulder, when one lad got too close, that sent the boy sprawling five feet away into the mud.
"Gods," said someone behind Robert, very quietly.
Robert did not answer. His mouth had gone dry.
He had watched Alyn in the yard since the boy could walk. He had fought him himself a hundred times, a thousand, taught him every trick he knew. He knew his son was good. He had known it since the lad was twelve and put the Tyrell boy on his heels. But the yard was the yard. Robert had always held back there, a little, even when he didn't mean to. So had Barristan. So had all of them.
No one was holding back now.
And it did not matter.
The squires kept coming, and the squires kept falling. Some of them, the cleverer ones, gave up on the prince and turned on each other instead, hunting easier prey. Some of them regrouped and came at Alyn again, and were broken again. Within the space of a quarter hour, the field of forty had been cut to fifteen, and half of the twenty-five who had yielded or been carried off had been put there by one boy.
Beside him, Robert heard Cersei laugh. A small, soft, delighted sound. He glanced at her. She was leaning forward in her seat, her lips parted, her green eyes blazing.
"Look at him," she said, not to Robert, not to anyone. "Just look at him."
Robert looked. And for the first time in his life, watching someone he loved fight, he found he had nothing at all to shout.
The Umber boy was the first to give Alyn real trouble.
He was a squire from the far north, seventeen, the son of Lord Umber of the Last Hearth, and he was enormous—nearly as tall as Alyn and broader, with a wild shock of reddish hair and a voice like a bull aurochs and a greatsword he swung as if it were a willow switch. The northmen called him the Smalljon, which Alyn gathered was a joke, since his father was even bigger. He had cut his way through the field with a sort of cheerful, bellowing ferocity, laughing every time he knocked a squire down, and when at last he and Alyn found each other in the middle of the lists, he grinned through his beard and raised his blade in salute.
"Prince," he said. "I've heard a lot about you."
"All good, I hope."
"None of it good." The Smalljon's grin widened. "Your father thinks you're the Warrior come down from the heavens. I think you're a southron boy who's never met a northman." He swung.
It was like being hit by a falling tree. Alyn caught the blow on his shield and felt it jar every bone from his wrist to his skull, and slid back a foot in the mud. The Smalljon laughed and swung again, and again, great two-handed blows that came down like an axe on a woodpile. Alyn gave ground, one step, two, three, and heard the crowd's roar change pitch—
Don't be too eager, he thought. Don't. Wait.
He waited. He took the next blow, and the next, and on the third, as the Smalljon's greatsword came down in its great overhand arc, he stepped into it instead of away from it. Inside the reach of the longer blade, close enough to smell the northman's sweat. He caught the Umber's wrists on his crossguard and heaved, and for one long moment they strained against each other, face to face, steel to steel—
And the Smalljon, for the first time in his life, Alyn suspected, felt himself being moved.
His eyes widened. Alyn saw him understand, and saw him grin anyway—the wild, joyous grin of a northman who has finally found a fight worth having. And then Alyn put his whole weight behind it and shoved, and the Umber went back a step, and another, and his heel caught in a rut, and he went down on his back in the mud with a crash like a collapsing wall.
Alyn put the point of his blade to his throat.
The Smalljon lay there, laughing, mud to his ears. "Yield," he wheezed. "Gods be good, I yield. You're not a southron boy. You're a bloody giant."
"So are you."
"Aye, but I'm meant to be." He held out a hand, and Alyn hauled him up. The Smalljon slapped him on the shoulder so hard it rang his armour like a bell. "Next time, Prince. Next time, I'll have you."
"I'll look forward to it."
That left the Baratheon.
Ormund Baratheon was a cousin of some sort—his father had never been able to remember precisely how, and called him cousin in the vague, cheerful way he called most people cousin. He came from a cadet branch of the house that held a small, shabby holdfast somewhere on the Wendwater and had been more or less forgotten for three generations. He was sixteen, lean and quick and tireless, with the Baratheon black hair and blue eyes, and he fought like a man with something to prove. Alyn suspected he did. Ormund had been squiring for a hedge knight in the Stormlands until a moon ago, when his father had written to the king to remind him that his house existed, and Robert had laughed and invited the boy to court.
He was not as strong as the Smalljon. Not close. But he was faster, and he was cleverer, and he did not make the same mistakes twice. He did not try to overpower Alyn. He danced. In and out, in and out, striking at the gaps—the back of the knee, the inside of the elbow, the joint of the gorget. He kept away from Alyn's shield and away from his reach and simply kept going, while the other squires fell away around them and the crowd's roar rose and rose.
Alyn took three solid blows in the space of a dozen heartbeats and felt the last one land squarely on his ribs, just where Barristan had told him not to be struck.
Loras, he thought. It's Loras again. Same trick. Same speed.
But he was not twelve anymore.
He let Ormund come in again. He let the cousin see what looked like an opening—his shield dropping an inch, his guard drifting wide—and when Ormund darted for it, quick as a swallow, Alyn was already moving. He did not swing wide. He did not overreach. He had spent two years since that day in the yard making sure he would never swing wide again. He brought his shield up hard and caught Ormund's blade on the rim and turned it, and in the same motion, short and tight and brutal, brought his own sword round flat into his cousin's side.
Ormund Baratheon folded over like a man kicked by a horse and went to his knees.
He knelt there a moment, gasping. Then he looked up at Alyn through the slit in his helm, and Alyn saw the blue Baratheon eyes behind it widen, and then crinkle.
"Cousin," he wheezed. "That was a dirty trick."
"You fell for it."
"I did, didn't I?" Ormund laughed, and winced, and laughed again. "Yield. I yield."
The marshal looked around the lists. There was no one left standing but the prince.
For a moment, there was silence. Then the stands exploded.
Alyn stood in the middle of the lists with the mud and the churned grass and the scattered bodies of forty squires around him, and let the roar wash over him like the sea.
It was a strange sound. It was not like the cheering at a feast, or the roaring in the yard when he had put a squire on his back. It came from everywhere at once, from fifty thousand throats, and it shook the ground under his feet. In the royal stand, his father was on his feet with both fists raised, bellowing something Alyn could not hear. Beside him, his mother had risen too, and she was not bored anymore. Lyonel had climbed onto the rail and was screaming and waving his arms. Argella was pelting the marshal with candied cherries. Somewhere in the midst of them, a very small figure in green was standing on her seat, perfectly still, with her hands clasped in front of her.
Alyn raised his arm with the black ribbon on it, and Cassana waved back.
Then he turned his head and looked along the stands, to where the Tyrells sat.
He had been thinking about it for a long time. Longer than a moon. Longer than his father knew.
He had always known he would not choose his own wife. No prince did. Marriage was a treaty, not a love match, and the heir to the Iron Throne was the most valuable treaty in the realm. His father would decide, in the end, with his mother whispering in one ear and Jon Arryn in the other and every great house in Westeros jostling for a place.
But deciding was not the same as choosing. A man could not always choose the path. He could sometimes choose where he stood on it.
The Tyrells had been circling for years. There had always been interest—the Reach was the richest and most populous of the Seven Kingdoms, with more swords than any other and more grain than all the rest combined, and Mace Tyrell had wanted his daughter on the Iron Throne since the girl was in swaddling. But after Alyn had put Loras Tyrell on his heels at twelve, the interest had quickened. And after the business with Littlefinger, when his father had roared to the whole court whose son had found the traitor out, it had become something else entirely. Lady Olenna—the Queen of Thorns, they called her, Mace's mother and the real power in Highgarden—had been at court for a full moon now, taking tea with the queen and gossiping with the ladies and asking a great many quiet, clever questions about the prince.
His mother had told him so, with a little curl of her lip. Cersei did not like Olenna Tyrell. But she had not said no.
And then the Starks had come south, and his father had begun, over his cups, to talk about Sansa.
Alyn liked Lord Stark very much, and he understood why his father wanted it. Stark and Baratheon, bound in blood, as they would have been if a girl called Lyanna had lived. It was a good dream. A kind one. But Sansa Stark was a child. A sweet, dreamy child who still thought knights were like the ones in her songs, and who looked at Alyn across the feasting hall the way she looked at the painted knights on a tapestry. Whatever else he had become, there was enough of the stranger still in him that the thought of standing before a septon with her made his stomach turn.
And there were other ways to bind the stag and the wolf. He had two sisters, and a brother. Lord Stark had sons, and another daughter. There would be time.
The Tyrells were something else. The Reach's grain would feed armies. Its gold and swords would fill the gaps the Greyjoys and Littlefinger had left in the crown. And when the long winter came—and Alyn knew, in his bones, that it was coming—it would be the fields of the Reach, and their granaries, that decided how many of the realm's people saw spring.
And Lady Olenna was the cleverest woman in the Seven Kingdoms, which was a far better thing to have on your side than against you.
So. He had thought about it for a long time. And he had decided that if a choice was to be made, it would be better to make it himself, before the whole realm, where it could not be quietly unmade in a solar.
He walked to the edge of the lists, where the smallfolk crowded against the barrier, and found a flower-seller—a bent old woman with a basket of blooms balanced on one hip, calling her wares to anyone who would listen. He took a silver stag from his purse and gave it to her, and she stared at it, and at him, and at the coin again. And he took from her basket a bunch of roses. Golden roses. The colour of the Tyrell sigil.
Then he walked, in full view of fifty thousand people, to the stand where the Tyrells sat.
He saw them see him coming. Mace Tyrell, fat and florid in his green and gold, going red with astonished pleasure. Loras, leaning against the rail, raising one eyebrow and grinning. And in the centre of it all, a small, sharp old woman in black and green with a face like a wizened apple and eyes like two chips of flint, who had gone very still.
And beside her, Margaery.
She was fifteen, a year older than he was, slim and composed in a gown of green silk, with brown curls pinned beneath a circlet of little golden roses. She was said to be clever, and kind, and quick, and her grandmother's favourite. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched him come with a look of polite, pleasant interest, like a player watching an opponent make an unexpected move and waiting, with great patience, to see what it was.
Alyn stopped before the rail. He looked up at her. And he held out the roses.
"My lady," he said. "For your house."
He had kept it simple. It was not a declaration. It was not a proposal. Princes did not propose—kings and councils did that, in solars, over wine and ledgers. It was only a gift, from the champion of the squires' melee to the daughter of the Lord of Highgarden, before the eyes of the whole realm.
But every lord in those stands understood exactly what it meant. And none of them would forget it. A prince's public favour, given in front of fifty thousand witnesses, was not a thing that could be easily taken back. Not without insulting the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms. And his father, whatever else he was, did not like to insult his friends.
It was a small move. A single piece on a very large board. But it was his.
For a moment, Margaery Tyrell did not move. Then, slowly, colour rose in her cheeks—the flush of someone genuinely caught off guard, perhaps for the first time in a very long while—and she reached down and took the roses from his hand.
"Your Grace," she said. Her voice was very steady, despite the pink in her cheeks. "You're very kind."
"I'm very muddy," said Alyn. "I apologise for that."
Something flickered at the corner of her mouth. Not quite a smile. The beginning of one.
And beside her, Lady Olenna Tyrell—who had spent a full moon probing and circling and asking her clever questions, who had come to King's Landing to play the long, slow, careful game of marriage and alliance at which she had no equal in the Seven Kingdoms—was staring at him with her mouth slightly open, as though a sheep had just walked up to her and recited the lineages of House Gardener.
Alyn could not help it. He laughed.
He laughed out loud, there in the mud before the stands, with fifty thousand people watching. And after a moment—a long, stunned, silent moment—the Queen of Thorns closed her mouth, and narrowed her eyes, and looked at him the way a very old, very skilled player looks at a new opponent who has just done something she did not expect.
Then, very slightly, she inclined her head.
Behind him, in the royal stand, Alyn heard his father's voice rise over the tumult in something between a roar and a bellow of laughter. He did not look back to see what his mother's face was doing. Or Lord Stark's.
He would find out soon enough.