The column was two miles long, and Alyn could not see the end of it.
He stood on the step of the great royal wheelhouse with one hand on the doorframe and looked back down the Kingsroad, past the city gates, past the last straggling hovels of the suburbs, and the column simply went on. Knights in bright surcoats on tall destriers. Men-at-arms in the black and gold of the king's household, marching four abreast with their spears on their shoulders. Gold cloaks of the City Watch, who would ride with them as far as the Trident. Lannister guardsmen in crimson. Tyrell guardsmen in green. Wagons piled high with tents and trunks and casks of wine, wagons full of salt pork and flour and cheese, wagons full of the king's armour and the queen's gowns and the prince's books. Grooms leading strings of spare horses. Cooks and scullions and laundresses and farriers, a cart of hunting dogs baying in their cages, a septon on a mule, a maester on a slightly better mule. Banners everywhere, stag and lion and rose, snapping in the morning wind.
At the head of it all, a quarter mile ahead, his father sat his great black warhorse in a doublet of gold-trimmed black, with no armour and no helm, laughing at something Ser Barristan had said. The king had insisted on riding at the front. He had insisted on riding the whole way. He had insisted on bringing the hounds, and the hawks, and eleven casks of Dornish red, and anyone who suggested he might like to travel in comfort in the wheelhouse with his queen had been told, at length and at volume, exactly where they could put their comfort.
The wheelhouse, for its part, was enormous. It was a palace on wheels, two decks high, drawn by forty heavy horses, with oak walls carved and painted and gilded and hung inside with silk and velvet and cloth-of-gold. His mother had commissioned it for the journey. It had cost more than a small castle. It moved, on a good road, at roughly the pace of a determined snail.
Behind it, in the next carriage, Lyonel and Argella were having a fight.
"There are giants!"
"No."
"There are! Ser Boros said! Past the Wall! Giants as tall as trees, and they ride mammoths, and they eat people—"
"Ser Boros is stupid," said Argella with withering finality. "And so are you."
"You're stupid! I'm going to find a giant and bring it home and it's going to eat you—"
"Then I'll bite it."
"You can't bite a giant—"
"I can bite anything."
And between them, perched very upright on the cushioned bench with her hands folded in her lap and a book unopened on her knees, sat Cassana, turning her head from one to the other with the calm, attentive interest of someone watching a game of cyvasse played by two people who did not know the rules.
She caught Alyn's eye through the open window. She did not say anything. She only raised her eyebrows, very slightly—a look so exactly like their mother's that he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
He had wanted this. He had wanted it badly, lying awake in the dark the night of his name day, thinking of a grey-eyed boy in the far cold north.
He had not expected all of it.
It had begun a month ago, in his father's solar, over a jug of wine that Alyn had brought himself for the purpose.
He had chosen his moment carefully. Late in the evening, after a good day's hunting, when the king had eaten well and drunk well and was in the expansive, sentimental, back-slapping humour that came over him at the bottom of the third cup. And he had said, as casually as he could manage:
"Father. You keep saying you want to join our house to the Starks."
That had been all it took. Robert had been off before Alyn could finish the sentence.
"Want to? Boy, I've wanted it since before you were born! Ned Stark's my brother. Not by blood—by something better. We were boys together at the Eyrie, did you know that? Jon fostered us both. I taught Ned to drink and he taught me to—well, he tried to teach me to keep my mouth shut, never took. We fought side by side at the Bells. At the Trident. He came to Pyke for me with half the North at his back and never once asked what was in it for him." He drank, and his eyes went soft and far away. "There's no man alive I'd trust more. Not Jon. Not my own brothers. Ned. And I swore, after—" He stopped. Something passed across his face, old and dark and quick. "I swore I'd bind our houses together. The way it should have been. The way it would have been, if—"
"Father," said Alyn.
"—if the gods had been kind, and they never are, gods damn them, but by the Seven I'll see it done one way or another, I'll see a Stark and a Baratheon wed if I have to drag them to the sept myself—"
"Father."
Robert stopped.
"Who?" said Alyn.
His father blinked at him.
"Who is it going to be?" Alyn asked patiently. "You've been saying it for years. Stag and wolf. But you've never said who. I'm spoken for. That leaves Lyonel and Argella and Cassana. And Lord Stark has five children. So—who?"
"Well," said Robert. "Well. That's simple enough." He set down his cup, and sat back, and frowned at the ceiling. "There's Ned's eldest. Robb. Good lad. Fine lad. Fought well in the melee last year, that tourney. Takes after his mother in the looks, more's the pity, but he's got Ned's spine. He'd do for Argella. Or Cassana."
"He's sixteen, Father. They're seven."
"So? Betrothals are made in the cradle all the time!" Robert paused. His frown deepened. He seemed, for some reason, to be thinking about his daughters' faces. "Well. Maybe not Robb. He'd have to wait a long while. Lad'll want a wife before then. Ned'll want him to have one." He scratched at his beard. "There's the girl, then. The eldest girl. Sansa. Pretty little thing, I'd thought of her for you, before the roses. She'd do for Lyonel."
"She's older than him."
"By a few years! What's a few years?" Robert waved a hand. Then his brow furrowed again. "Though she's a quiet, mannerly sort, isn't she. Sings. Sews. Lyonel would—" He visibly pictured it. "Lyonel would put a frog in her soup at the betrothal feast. Poor girl. No. Not Sansa. The other one, then. The wild one. Arya."
"Lyonel and Arya Stark?"
"They'd either kill each other or be thick as thieves. Either way it'd be worth watching." Robert grinned, then shook his head. "No, Cat would never forgive me. That leaves—who does that leave? The boys. Ned's younger boys. There's the one who climbs things. Always up a tower or a tree or a wall. Ned says he's half squirrel. What's his name—"
"Bran."
"Bran! Aye. Bran. He'd do for one of my girls. Argella, maybe. She'd keep him off the towers." Robert drank. Frowned. "Or Cassana. Or—no. Hm." He scratched his beard again, harder. "And the little one, the youngest. Rickon. Gods, he's barely out of swaddling, last I heard. Bites people, Ned says. Well, Argella bites people. Maybe that's a match." He laughed, then stopped laughing, and stared at the cup in his hand as though it had personally offended him. "Seven hells. Robb's too old, Sansa's too gentle, Arya's too wild, Bran's too—I don't know what Bran is. And Rickon's a babe." He scowled. "How does Ned do it? Five of them, and I can't make one match."
Alyn waited until his father had finished glaring at his wine. Then he said, mildly:
"How do you know they'd even like each other?"
Robert looked up.
"They met once," said Alyn. "For a week. At the tourney last year. Lyonel spent the whole time trying to climb onto the Smalljon's shoulders, and Argella spent it throwing cherries at Lord Tarly, and Cassana spent it with me. I don't think any of them said ten words to any of the Starks. And the Stark children were there with their mother, and their lady mother didn't let them out of her sight." He shrugged. "You'd be marrying people who've never met. You can't expect them to get along just because you and Lord Stark do."
His father opened his mouth. Closed it again.
"And their mothers will want a say," Alyn added. "Lady Catelyn will. And Mother will. Mother especially."
That, he saw, was the one that landed.
Robert had gone quite still. Alyn watched the thought travel across his face, slow and heavy as a cart on a muddy road. His eyes went distant. He was thinking—Alyn could see it—of his wife's face, every time he had mentioned the Starks and the triplets in the same breath at supper. The thin, tight, displeased line of her mouth. The particular way she set down her cup. The temperature in the room dropping several degrees all at once.
And then, slowly, something else came into his father's face. Something Alyn had not entirely expected.
He was thinking about his daughters.
About Argella, scowling and fierce and seven years old, glaring at him over her porridge. About Cassana, small and quiet and green-eyed, climbing into his lap with a book and saying nothing at all for an hour. About some northern boy he had never properly looked at, whose name he could not remember, standing beside one of them in a sept.
The King of the Seven Kingdoms set down his cup with great deliberation.
"I'll want to look at them," he said.
"Father?"
"Ned's boys. I'll want to have a proper look at them. All of them." His brow had lowered, and his jaw had set, and he had the expression of a man about to inspect a string of horses he suspected of being lame. "I'll want to see if they can ride. If they can fight. If they've got any sense in their heads. I'll want to know what they eat. I'm not giving one of my girls to some boy I've seen once across a tourney ground, Ned's son or no. That squirrel boy could be a halfwit, for all I know." He thumped the table. "Seven hells, he might be a Tully."
"He's a Stark, Father."
"Half Tully! You've met Cat's brother. Edmure. Lad can't hit a boat with a fire arrow." Robert brooded. "No. I'll need to see them."
"And Lyonel?"
His father snorted. "Lyonel? Lyonel can look after himself. Whoever gets him, it's Ned who ought to be worried. Some poor wolf girl, stuck with that for the rest of her life." He considered. "I should send Ned a letter of apology now. Get ahead of it."
Alyn laughed.
And Robert laughed with him—big and sudden, the way he always did—and then slapped the arm of his chair and roared, "That settles it! I'll write to Ned. Tonight. No—" He was on his feet now, eyes alight. "No, better than that! Why write? Why not go? We'll go to Winterfell! The whole lot of us! I haven't seen Ned in years, not properly, not since Pyke. I've never once been north of the Neck since the war. I'll see his boys and he'll see my girls and we'll hunt and drink and sort it out like men, face to face!" He grinned hugely. "Your mother will hate it."
"She will," Alyn agreed.
"She'll complain the whole way."
"She will."
"Ha! Good!" Robert seized the jug and poured them both another cup, sloshing it over the table. "To the North!"
Alyn raised his cup and drank, and kept his face perfectly straight.
To the North, he thought. And a boy at Winterfell with grey eyes.
He had not had to suggest it at all.
His mother had, in fact, hated it.
She had hated it loudly and at length and in several registers, beginning with icy disbelief and proceeding through cold fury and on into a long, simmering, eloquent silence that lasted three days. She had pointed out that the North was cold, and far, and full of savages and bad roads and worse food. She had pointed out that the king had a realm to rule. She had pointed out that the triplets were seven years old and had never been further from the Red Keep than the kingswood.
And then she had looked at her husband, and at her son, and at her three children—Lyonel already planning to find a giant, Argella already planning to bite one—and she had said, coldly, that if her children were going to the far end of the world, then she was certainly not letting them go without her.
And then she had commissioned the wheelhouse.
The first week was the best week of Alyn's life.
He thought that on the third evening, sitting on a log by a campfire somewhere south of Duskendale, with a haunch of venison in one hand and a cup of his father's terrible Dornish red in the other, and the stars coming out overhead. It surprised him. But it was true.
It was the ground, mostly. That was the first thing. The ground did not move. He could stand on it, and walk on it, and lie down on it, and it simply stayed where it was, flat and solid and perfectly, gloriously still. After the King's Hammer, it felt like a miracle. He had woken on the first morning in his tent and lain there for a full quarter hour, simply feeling the earth not rock beneath him, and grinning at the canvas like a fool.
And the tent itself was a palace. A royal pavilion of black silk, big enough to hold a feast in, with a carpet of Myrish wool over the grass and braziers in the corners and a bed—an actual bed, a camp bed of oak and leather, piled with furs and hides and woollen blankets until it was softer than the one in the Red Keep. He fell into it every night and slept like a stone.
The food was better than the Red Keep's too, or seemed so. His father hunted every day. Every single day, without fail, the king would ride off into the woods at first light with his hounds and his hawks and a dozen knights, and come back at dusk with a stag over his saddle, or a boar, or a brace of pheasants, roaring with laughter and covered in mud. And then they would roast it over the open fire, in the middle of the camp, with the whole column gathered round. Fresh meat, charred on the outside and red in the middle, with salt and pepper and bread baked in the ashes. It was nothing like the delicate dishes of the royal kitchens. It was better.
And his family was with him.
That was the thing he had not expected. He had spent so long in the Red Keep, with his father in his solar and his mother in hers and his siblings in the nursery and himself in the yard or the library or the small council chamber, that he had forgotten what it was to simply be together. Here there was nowhere else to go. Every evening, they sat around the same fire. His father told stories—the Trident, the Bells, Pyke, every one of them taller than the last. His mother sat wrapped in a fur cloak, complaining about the smoke and the dust and the insects and the cold, and pretending not to laugh at the stories. Lyonel roasted things on sticks until they caught fire. Argella ate whatever Lyonel roasted and told him it was terrible. Cassana sat beside Alyn and leaned on his arm and watched the flames.
Ser Barristan stood watch at the edge of the firelight, grave and silent. Ser Jaime lounged on a log nearby in his white cloak, eating an apple and making dry remarks that made his sister's mouth twitch. And on the second night, a small figure had come stumping out of the darkness with a wineskin in one hand and a book in the other, and sat down on the far side of the fire as though he had been invited.
"Uncle Tyrion," said Alyn, startled. "I didn't know you were coming."
"Neither did anyone else," said Tyrion Lannister cheerfully. "I find that's the best way. Fewer arguments." He uncorked the wineskin. "I've always wanted to see the Wall, Your Grace. The greatest structure ever built by the hand of man. Seven hundred feet of ice. I thought I'd stand on top of it and piss off the edge of the world." He drank. "And besides—no one tells me anything. I had to learn of your betrothal from a cupbearer. I decided if I wanted to know what this family was up to, I'd simply have to follow it about."
His mother looked as though she had bitten a lemon. His father roared with laughter and threw Tyrion a pheasant leg.
Alyn smiled, and said nothing, and thought about the stranger's story, in which another Tyrion Lannister had gone north with another royal progress for exactly the same reason—and what had come of it.
Not this time, he thought. Not like that.
And then there was Margaery.
She was riding beside the wheelhouse that afternoon, on a pretty grey palfrey, in a riding habit of green wool with a hood trimmed in fox fur, chatting with his mother's ladies. And every so often, when she thought he was not looking, she glanced back along the column to where Alyn rode beside his father, and smiled to herself.
She had not been invited. Not at first.
She had found out about the progress the same afternoon the king announced it, as the whole court had. And that evening she had come to find Alyn in the library, sweeping in without knocking in the manner of her grandmother, and closed the door behind her, and folded her arms.
"Winterfell," she said.
"Yes."
"For a month."
"About that. More or less."
"And two months there. And two months back." Margaery tilted her head. "Five months, Your Grace. Five months."
"I know. It's a long way."
"It is," Margaery agreed. "A very long way. Five months is a very long time for a young man to be away from his betrothed." She looked at him, and her brown eyes were wide and innocent and sweet, and not innocent at all. "Among all those northern ladies. With their pale skin and their furs and their great grey eyes."
Alyn stared at her.
"I've heard the northern girls are very beautiful," Margaery went on, thoughtfully. "And very bold. And you are, after all, Robert Baratheon's son."
"Margaery—"
"I'm only saying. Your lord father is a great man. A great king. Everyone knows how generous he is. With his affections." She smiled sweetly. "I'm sure it doesn't run in the family."
For a moment, Alyn could not speak. Then he started to laugh, and could not stop. "You want to come."
"I want to see the North," said Margaery Tyrell with great dignity. "I've never been. I'm told it's very educational. And it would be a great shame for the future queen to know nothing of a full third of her realm." She paused. "And someone ought to keep an eye on you."
"Your grandmother will never allow it."
"Grandmother," said Margaery, "has already said yes."
She had, too. Alyn had gone to see Lady Olenna the next morning, to be certain, and found the old woman on her terrace with her tea and her lemon cakes, looking deeply amused.
"Of course she's going," the Queen of Thorns had said, before he had finished his first sentence. "Five months? With you riding about the North among the Starks and the Umbers and gods know what other wild northern families, all of them with daughters and none of them with any sense? I should say she's going." She sipped her tea. "I'd have sent her anyway, Your Grace, if she'd been fool enough not to ask. Let it never be said that a Tyrell left a perfectly good prince lying about unattended."
And so here she was.
Her tent stood beside his in the camp each night—a pavilion of green silk, a little smaller than his own, embroidered with golden roses, guarded by two Tyrell men-at-arms and crowded with her handmaidens and her cousins. Three of them, at least; Alyn had not managed to learn all their names. They giggled whenever he walked past. Every evening, Margaery sat with his family at the fire, between his mother and Cassana, and charmed his father and charmed his uncles and helped Cassana with her book and somehow, through some sorcery Alyn could not fathom, persuaded Argella to let her braid her hair.
And every evening, when the fire burned low and the camp went to bed, she would rise, and curtsey to the king and queen, and say goodnight to the children, and then turn to Alyn, and say, very sweetly, "Goodnight, Your Grace. Do sleep well." And then she would walk past him to her tent, and as she passed, she would murmur, so low that only he could hear it, "Alone."
And her handmaidens would giggle, and she would disappear into her green silk pavilion, and Alyn would stand there by the fire with his face burning, while his father roared with laughter and his mother pretended very hard not to have heard anything at all.
Five months, he thought, shaking his head as he walked back to his own tent. She's going to do this for five months.
He was not entirely sure he minded.
But it struck him—walking through the camp in the dark, past the guttering fires and the sleeping soldiers and the soft snorting of horses—that it was very funny, really. He had spent his whole life watching his father's reputation shape the realm. The bastards in the stews. The serving girls. The whispers at court. The cold silences at supper. The way his mother's face went still whenever a pretty girl laughed too loudly at one of Robert's jokes.
He had never once imagined that it would come back around, one day, to him.
Even my betrothal, he thought, starting to laugh. Even this. Thank you, Father. Thank you so very much.
He was still laughing when he pushed open the flap of his tent, and stopped.
His bed was full.
Lyonel was in it, sprawled across the middle with his arms and legs flung out in four directions, already snoring. Argella was curled up at one side, scowling in her sleep with her fists clenched as though she were fighting someone in a dream. And Cassana was sitting up at the end, wrapped in a fur, wide awake, watching the tent flap as though she had been waiting for him.
"There are wolves," she said quietly. "We heard them. Lyonel said they'd come into the tents and eat us. Argella said she'd bite them. But then she got scared too." She paused. "We thought you'd be bigger than the wolves."
Alyn looked at his three siblings in his bed, and thought of all the things he could say. That there were three hundred armed men camped around them. That there was a Kingsguard knight standing outside this very tent. That the wolves were miles off, and wanted nothing to do with a camp full of fires and dogs and men.
He did not say any of them.
He took off his boots, and his belt, and climbed into the bed, and it was immediately clear that there was not nearly enough room. Lyonel rolled over in his sleep and flung an arm across Alyn's chest. Argella, without waking, burrowed in under his other arm and clamped onto it like a limpet. And Cassana crawled up from the end of the bed and curled against his side with her head on his shoulder and her cold feet tucked against his leg, and sighed, and was asleep almost at once.
He lay there, pinned. He could not move his arms. He could not move his legs. There was a knee in his ribs and an elbow in his neck and a great deal of black hair in his face, and somewhere far off in the dark, very faintly, a wolf howled, long and lonely, and one of the triplets whimpered in her sleep and burrowed closer.
Like monkeys, Alyn thought. Three little monkeys, all wrapped round a tree.
He thought of the long road ahead. Two months of it, up through the Riverlands and over the Neck and across the wide cold emptiness of the North. He thought of Winterfell, and the grey-eyed boy he had never met. He thought of the snow that was coming, and the things that would come with it.
And then he stopped thinking about any of it, because it was warm, and the ground was still, and his family was here, and he was very tired.
Outside, the wolf howled again. Inside, Lyonel snored.
Alyn Baratheon smiled in the dark, and slept.