His fifteenth name day began with Lyonel sitting on his chest.
"Wake up!" his brother bellowed, from a distance of approximately four inches. "Wake up wake up wake up! It's your name day! There's a feast! There's going to be a boar! Father says it's the biggest boar in the whole kingswood and he killed it himself and it nearly killed him first! Wake up!"
Alyn opened one eye. Lyonel's face filled the whole of it—round and flushed and grinning, black hair sticking up in every direction, a smear of what looked like honey on his chin. He was seven now, and big for it, and he weighed a great deal more than he had when he used to do this at three.
"Lyonel," Alyn said. "Get off."
"No!"
"I say no," said a voice from the foot of the bed. "Not you. That's my word."
Alyn lifted his head. Argella was sitting cross-legged on the end of the coverlet, arms folded, glaring at her twin with withering contempt. Beside her, perched very upright on the edge of the mattress with her hands folded in her lap, sat Cassana, holding a small parcel wrapped in green silk.
"Celia let us in," Cassana said quietly. "She said you'd want to be woken."
"Celia," said Alyn, "is a liar."
From somewhere beyond the door, he heard Celia laugh.
They gave him their gifts there and then, sitting on his bed in the grey morning light, because Lyonel could not wait and Argella would not be outdone and Cassana simply went wherever the other two went.
Lyonel's came first, thrust at him in a grubby fist. It was a stag. A small wooden stag, about the size of Alyn's palm, carved with more enthusiasm than skill out of a piece of pine. It had four legs, though not all the same length, and a great branching crown of antlers that had clearly taken most of the effort, and a face that looked slightly surprised. Lyonel had painted it black. He had painted most of his hands black too, judging by the stains.
"I made it myself," he announced. "With a knife. Ser Barristan said I wasn't allowed a knife, but Ser Boros gave me one when nobody was looking. It's you. See? It's big and it's got antlers. That's you."
"It's beautiful," said Alyn, and meant it.
"I cut myself four times," said Lyonel proudly, and showed him the scars.
Argella's gift came next. She did not thrust it at him. She held it out with great ceremony, at arm's length, her small face grave and fierce. It was a stone. A smooth, round, grey stone from the beach below the Red Keep, about the size of a hen's egg.
Alyn looked at it, and then at his sister.
"It's for throwing," Argella explained, in the patient tone of someone addressing a very slow person. "At your enemies. When you're king. I picked the best one. I looked for three whole days." She considered him. "You can throw it at the ironborn. Or the Dornish. Or anyone you don't like."
"Thank you, Argella. I'll keep it with me always."
"Good," said Argella, and nodded once, satisfied, and went back to glaring at Lyonel.
And then Cassana held out her parcel.
He unwrapped it slowly, because she was watching him so carefully. Inside the green silk was a square of linen, a handkerchief, hemmed by hand in black thread. And in the corner of it, stitched with tiny, painstaking, uneven stitches, was a picture: a black stag, standing proud, with a great crown of antlers—and twined through the antlers, in thread of gold and green, a single small rose.
Alyn looked at it for a long moment.
"Did you make this?"
Cassana nodded. "Margaery taught me. She showed me how to do the rose. She said—" She hesitated. "She said it would look nice on the stag."
"It does," said Alyn. Something in his chest had gone tight and strange. "It looks very nice on the stag."
His sister smiled—the small, shy, rare smile that she did not give to many people—and leaned against his arm, and said nothing more.
He did not think about it again until much later.
The feast was the grandest he had ever seen, and he had seen a great many.
His father had thrown it, and his grandfather had paid for it, and between the two of them—Robert's appetite and Tywin's gold—they had produced something that would be spoken of in King's Landing for years. The throne room had been hung with black and gold and crimson, stag and lion side by side on every banner. There were three hundred guests at the trestle tables and a thousand more in the yards outside, where the smallfolk had been fed at the crown's expense. There were singers from Oldtown and tumblers from Braavos and a troupe of mummers from Lys who performed the whole of the Conquest in an hour, with a dragon made of red silk and twelve men.
And there was the boar.
It was enormous. Robert had killed it himself in the kingswood a week ago, and he had told the story of it at least once an hour since, each time a little larger and a little more dangerous. It came in on a great silver platter carried by eight men, roasted whole, with an apple in its mouth and its tusks gilded, and the whole hall roared at the sight of it, and Robert roared loudest of all.
"That's a boar!" he bellowed, standing on his chair. "Look at it! Nearly had my leg off! Ser Barristan saw it, didn't you, Barristan? Tell them!"
"It was a very large boar, Your Grace," said Ser Barristan gravely, from his place behind the high table.
"Very large! Ha! You hear that? From Barristan, that's like a song!"
Alyn laughed with the rest, and ate, and drank—watered wine, mostly; his mother was watching—and let himself enjoy it. It had been a good year. A hard one, in places, and a frightening one, but a good one. Littlefinger was dead. The Iron Islands were quiet. His father was well and his siblings were well and his mother was smiling more than he had seen her smile in years.
His grandfather sat on his mother's other side, cold and correct, eating very little and watching everything. Beyond him sat his uncle Tyrion, who had come up from Casterly Rock with Tywin for the occasion and was working his way steadily through a flagon of Arbor gold. Further down the table, Uncle Jaime lounged in his white cloak, golden and bored, flicking grapes at his brother when he thought no one was looking. And across the hall, at a table near the dais, sat the Tyrells. Lord Mace, florid and beaming. Ser Loras, handsome and amused. Lady Olenna, small and sharp in her black and green, picking at her food like a bird.
And Margaery, between her grandmother and her brother, in a gown of pale green silk, with golden roses in her hair.
Alyn caught her eye across the hall, once. She smiled at him—pleasantly, politely, a lady greeting a prince—and looked away.
And then his father stood up.
Robert Baratheon did not tap a cup for silence. He did not wait for the singers to finish. He simply rose from his chair, all six and a half feet of him, and filled his great chest with air, and roared.
"SILENCE!"
The hall fell silent. Instantly. Completely. A tumbler froze halfway through a handspring and toppled over. Somewhere in the back, a dog stopped barking.
"That's better," said Robert, grinning. He lifted his cup. "My lords! My ladies! Friends and guests and whoever the rest of you are! Today is my son's name day. My Alyn. Fifteen years old today, and taller than every man in this hall, save me!" A roar of laughter and applause. "And my lady wife and I—" He turned and held out his hand. "We have an announcement to make."
Alyn's heart stopped.
His mother rose. She took his father's hand—lightly, gracefully, as she did everything—and stood beside him at the high table, in a gown of crimson and gold with a lion at her throat. She looked out over the hall. And then she looked down at her son.
There was something in her face that Alyn had never seen there before. He could not name it. Pride, yes, and love, and something softer, and beneath it all something that looked almost like grief.
"My son," said Queen Cersei, clearly, so that every person in the great hall could hear. "Prince Alyn of House Baratheon, heir to the Iron Throne, is to be betrothed to the Lady Margaery of House Tyrell."
For one long moment, the hall was completely silent.
Then every head in the room turned, all at once, toward the Tyrell table.
Lady Olenna Tyrell rose. She did not hurry. She rose slowly, leaning on her cane, and stood very straight, and looked up at the high table with her sharp old eyes.
"House Tyrell," she said, and her thin dry voice carried to every corner of the hall, "is deeply honoured by Their Graces' choice. We have long been the faithful servants of the Iron Throne. We are proud—very proud—to become its family." She paused, and something glinted in her flinty eyes. "And I am given to understand that the prince has a fondness for roses. Highgarden has a great many of them. I'm sure we can spare one."
The hall erupted with laughter. Olenna sat down, looking very pleased with herself.
And beside her, Margaery Tyrell rose to her feet. Her cheeks were pink. She looked up at the high table—not at the king or the queen, but at Alyn—and for just a moment, the courtly mask was gone, and he saw something underneath it that he could not read at all.
Then she smiled, and bowed her head, and the whole hall stood and cheered.
Alyn sat very still in his chair while the noise crashed around him like the sea, and looked at the faces.
His father was laughing. Of course he was. Robert had thrown back his head and was roaring with laughter, slapping the table so hard the cups jumped, as though this were the finest joke anyone had ever told him. He leaned down and clapped Alyn on the shoulder hard enough to bruise. "Ha! Didn't see that coming, did you? Didn't see it coming! Your mother wanted to surprise you!"
His mother had sat back down. She was smiling. It was a small smile, and a real one, but it was not quite a happy one. It was the smile of a woman who had made a decision she knew was right, and was not yet sure she could bear. She reached out under the table and found his hand and squeezed it, very hard, and did not let go.
His grandfather did not smile. Tywin Lannister did not smile at anything. But he looked at Alyn across the table, and inclined his head—a fraction of an inch, no more—and lifted his cup, very slightly, in a gesture that from anyone else would have meant nothing at all, and from Tywin Lannister meant well done.
His siblings were staring. Lyonel's mouth was hanging open, a half-eaten honeycake forgotten in his fist. Argella's face had gone through astonishment into outrage, and she was glaring at Margaery Tyrell across the hall as though she meant to go over there and bite her. And Cassana—
Cassana was looking down at the table in front of her. At the small square of linen she had made for him, which he had brought to the feast tucked into his doublet and set beside his plate. At the black stag. And the little golden rose, twined through its antlers.
Then she looked up at him, with her great green eyes wide and startled, and Alyn could not tell whether she had known.
He did not think she had. He thought perhaps Margaery had. He thought he would never be quite sure.
Further down the high table, his uncle Jaime had stopped flicking grapes. He was staring at his sister with an expression of total bewilderment, as though she had just announced that the sun would rise in the west. And beside him, his uncle Tyrion had choked on his wine. He was coughing and spluttering, wiping Arbor gold off his chin with his sleeve, and when he finally caught his breath, Alyn heard him say—quite clearly, to no one in particular—"Well. Isn't it lovely to be informed."
No one had told them. Alyn realised it with a jolt. His mother had not told her own brothers. His grandfather had not told his own sons. They had sat at this table all night, eating and drinking, and no one had said a word.
And the rest of the court—
He looked out over the hall, and saw the faces. Lord Renly, grinning and applauding, looking delighted with himself, as though he had arranged the whole thing. Stannis, at the end of the table, grinding his teeth. Jon Arryn, grey and tired, nodding slowly in grave approval. Mace Tyrell, purple with joy, pounding his son on the back. Ser Loras, laughing. A hundred lords and ladies, cheering, raising their cups, some of them sincere and some of them very much not.
And in the shadow of a pillar near the back of the hall, a plump, powdered figure in lavender silk, not cheering at all. Only watching. His soft hands tucked into his sleeves, his round face perfectly still, his eyes moving slowly from the high table to the Tyrell table and back again, the way a man watches dice tumbling across a board and adds up the sums.
Varys met Alyn's gaze across the hall. He smiled, and bowed his head.
Alyn smiled back.
He had not known. That was the strangest part. He had known it would happen—he had made it happen, he supposed, with a bunch of roses a year and a half ago. But he had not known it would be tonight. He had not known his mother had agreed.
And she had. That was the thing that amazed him most of all.
He had watched it happen, over the past months, without quite understanding what he was seeing. Margaery in the gardens with the triplets. Margaery in the sept, three rows behind the royal pew, never in front. Margaery at the queen's table, when she was invited, asking the queen's advice about her gowns and her prayers and her embroidery, and listening to the answers with every appearance of rapt attention, and never once, not once, putting herself forward.
And then the day in the spring when Lyonel had fallen out of the old oak in the Queen's Garden and broken his arm.
Margaery had been there. She had been sitting on the bench with Cassana. And Alyn had heard about it afterwards from four different people, and every one of them had told it the same way: how she had not screamed, or fainted, or called for help and waited. She had run to him, and knelt in the grass, and held him still and calm while he howled, and sent Cassana running for the maester. And then she had carried him—a boy of seven, big for his age—all the way to the maester's chambers in her own arms.
And she had stayed. Through the setting of the bone, with Lyonel screaming. Through the long night after, when the fever came. She had sat at his bedside with the queen until dawn, saying very little, holding a cup of water to Lyonel's lips when he woke, and leaving only when the fever broke.
His mother had not said anything about it. Not to anyone. But a week later, Margaery Tyrell had been invited to take tea with the queen, alone, for the first time. And then again. And then again.
And a moon after that, his mother had come to his chambers one evening and sat on the edge of his bed, as she used to when he was small. She had been quiet for a long time. And then she had said, without looking at him, She'll do. I suppose.
That was all. She'll do.
From Cersei Lannister, it was a blessing from the Seven.
Three years, Alyn thought now, sitting in the roar of the feast with his mother's hand clenched around his and his father's laughter in his ears. When I come of age at eighteen. Three years, and I'll be married.
He had known it would come. Every prince was married. But it had always been a distant thing, a piece on the board to be moved when the time came. Now it was real. It had a date. It had a name and a face, sitting across the hall in green silk with roses in her hair.
It was very strange.
And then the music started, and someone was calling for the prince to lead the first dance with his betrothed, and the whole hall was clapping and stamping and shouting for it. His father hauled him to his feet by the collar, roaring with laughter. And Alyn found himself crossing the floor of the great hall with three hundred pairs of eyes on him, to where Margaery Tyrell stood waiting at the foot of her table.
He bowed. She curtseyed. He held out his arm, and she laid her hand on it, lightly, as courtly as you please.
"Your Grace," she said.
"My lady."
"You look," said Margaery, "as though you've been hit with a warhammer."
"I feel as though I have."
Something glinted in her eyes. "Grandmother wanted to surprise you. So did your lady mother. I think it may be the first thing they've ever agreed on."
"Did you know?"
"For a week." She smiled—not the sweet, shining, breathless smile, but a smaller, drier one, very like her grandmother's. "I was sworn to secrecy. On pain of the queen's very great displeasure."
"That's a terrible fate."
"I know," said Margaery. "I've seen her displeasure. It's the main reason I said nothing."
And Alyn laughed—properly, for the first time all evening—and led her out onto the floor.
They danced the first dance, and the second, in the formal, stately manner of the court, while the whole hall watched and clapped. And then the music quickened, and others joined them, and the floor filled with lords and ladies, and it became a feast again. He danced with his mother, who held him a little too tightly. He danced with Cassana, standing on his feet, and with Argella, who kicked him in the shin, and with Lyonel, who insisted on leading. He danced with Margaery again. He drank more wine than his mother would have liked, and less than his father would have liked, and lords he had never spoken to in his life came up to clasp his hand and congratulate him and wish him joy. Ser Barristan bowed to him. Ser Loras clapped him on the back and said welcome to the family, Your Grace, gods help you. Uncle Tyrion raised a cup to him from across the hall, and mouthed something that might have been congratulations or might have been run.
It was, by any measure, the best name day of his life.
It was very late when he finally lay down in his own bed, with the noise of the feast still echoing faintly up the stair from below and the taste of wine on his tongue and his feet aching from the dancing.
He lay on his back and looked up at the canopy, the way he had on so many nights, and thought.
The Reach was his now. Or as good as. Highgarden's gold and Highgarden's grain and Highgarden's swords, bound to him by marriage, with the cleverest old woman in the Seven Kingdoms at their head. When the long winter came, it would be the Reach that fed the realm.
The West was his by blood. His grandfather had seen to that, and would go on seeing to it, and if a day came when Lyonel sat in Casterly Rock—
Well. That was a thought for another night.
The Iron Islands were divided, and would stay divided, for 3 more years at least. The Vale was loyal to Jon Arryn, and Jon Arryn was loyal to his father. The Stormlands were his father's own. Dorne—
Dorne was a question. The Dornish archer on the King's Hammer had made that very clear. Alyn did not know the answer to it yet.
And the North.
He turned on his side and looked at the window, where the stars were shining over the dark bulk of the city.
His father still wanted it. Alyn knew that. Robert had never let go of the dream of binding House Baratheon to House Stark in blood, the way it should have been bound through Lyanna. He had given up on Sansa for Alyn—grudgingly, after the roses—but he had not given up on the dream. He talked of it still, over his cups. Lyonel and one of Ned's girls. Argella and Ned's heir. Cassana and one of the younger Stark boys. Stag and wolf, at last.
It was a good dream. Alyn thought he might help his father make it come true.
But it was not the Starks of Winterfell that kept him awake tonight.
A boy who lived in Winterfell, with the Starks, but was not quite one of them. A dark-haired, grey-eyed boy, a year or two older than Alyn, who had been raised all his life as Ned Stark's bastard son and believed it, and who was nothing of the kind.
Jon Snow.
The son of Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen. The blood of the wolf and the dragon. The rightful heir to the Iron Throne, by some reckonings—more rightful than Alyn, more rightful than Viserys, more rightful than anyone. The boy who, in the stranger's story, had gone to the Wall and become Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and died, and come back, and led the living against the dead. The boy who had ridden a dragon. The boy who had stood at the end of the world and held back the long night when no one else could.
The hero of the whole story.
And he was out there, right now, in Winterfell, being raised as a bastard by a man who loved him and a woman who did not. Not knowing who he was. Not knowing what he would become. Not knowing that a prince in King's Landing lay awake in the dark, thinking about him.
Alyn did not know what Jon Snow would be, in this world. He did not know whether the boy would still go to the Wall, without the war and the shame and the chaos that had sent him there in the stranger's story. He did not know whether he would still become what he had become. He did not know whether, if he ever learned the truth of his birth, he would see Alyn Baratheon as a brother in arms, or a usurper's son sitting on a throne that was his.
But he knew this. When the dead came south, he would need Jon Snow. He would need him more than he needed the Reach's grain or the West's gold or all the swords of the Seven Kingdoms.
And he would need him as a friend.
I should go north, Alyn thought. Before the winter. I should go to Winterfell, and meet him, and see what he is.
He did not know how he would manage it. His father would want to come. His mother would want to forbid it. The journey would take moons. It was the far end of the world.
But he would find a way. He always did.
He lay in the dark with the little black stag Lyonel had carved on the table beside him, and Argella's stone, and Cassana's handkerchief with its small gold rose. And somewhere far below, the last of the feast was dying away into song and laughter and the clatter of cups. And Alyn Baratheon, fifteen years old, betrothed, heir to the Iron Throne, closed his eyes, and thought of a grey-eyed boy in the far cold north, and of the snow, and of what was coming.
He fell asleep before he could decide what he would say to him.