"Up, my prince. The sun's been up an hour and the gulls are already laughing at you."
The curtains came open with a rattle of brass rings. Gold, merciless morning light poured across the bedchamber, and Alyn Baratheon buried his face in the pillow and groaned.
"Five more minutes, Celia."
"Five more minutes, he says, as if the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard sits about waiting on little lords to finish their dreams." Something warm and heavy landed on the end of the bed; by the weight of it, his dressing robe. "Up. The bath's drawn, and it won't stay hot for the likes of you."
He rolled over and squinted at her.
Celia was a tall woman somewhere in her forties, and her good looks had weathered well. Her dark hair was threaded with silver and pinned under a neat linen cap. She had laughing brown eyes, and her mouth showed that it had done a great deal of smiling and a fair amount of scolding. Her hands were red from lye and hot water, and she smelled of cloves and clean linen. She moved through his chambers the way a ship's captain moves across a deck: she missed nothing, and nothing stayed out of place for long.
She had been his since his fifth name day. His mother had chosen her personally, from a list of a dozen candidates, after an interview that had apparently lasted most of an afternoon. So Celia was either the most trustworthy woman in the Red Keep, or she reported every word he said to the queen.
Alyn had decided long ago that it was probably both. He liked her anyway.
"You're very cruel," he told her, sitting up.
"I'm very punctual. Up."
The bath waited in the next room. It was a great copper tub, steaming and scented with lavender and something sharper that made his eyes water. Celia went at him with a rough cloth and a cake of Myrish soap the way a laundress goes at a scorched pot, briskly and thoroughly and with no patience for complaint.
"I can wash myself, you know."
"You may wash yourself when you can reach behind your own ears without flooding half the Blackwater onto my floor." She tipped a jug of water over his head without warning, and he came up spluttering. "Look at the state of those nails. What were you doing yesterday, digging to Dorne?"
"Ser Aron had us wrestling in the yard."
"Then Ser Aron can wash you." But she was smiling as she said it.
After that came drying, combing and dressing. Two servants stood ready with each garment as though it were a holy relic. There were smallclothes of fine linen and hose of black wool. Over them went a doublet of black velvet slashed with gold, with the crowned stag and the lion of Lannister stitched across the breast in gold and crimson thread. His boots were soft grey leather, and his belt was worked with small gilded stags. Celia tugged and smoothed and straightened until she was satisfied. Then she stepped back and looked him up and down with a critical eye.
"You've grown again," she said, almost as an accusation. "That doublet was let out a fortnight ago. At this rate the tailors will have to follow you about with their needles."
"Father says I'll be taller than him."
"Your father says a great many things." She smoothed his collar one last time. "Go on. Break your fast before it goes cold, and don't you dare get honey on that velvet."
Breakfast was laid out in his solar, on a table by the window where the morning light caught the silver.
By any sane standard it was a feast. There was porridge thick with cream and honey, and a loaf still warm from the ovens with a crock of butter beside it. There was crisp bacon, and eggs fried in butter and sprinkled with pepper from across the sea. There was smoked herring from the bay and a round of soft white cheese from the Reach. A bowl of blood oranges from Dorne glowed like embers. A small plate of lemon cakes sat beside it, because someone in the kitchens had noticed he liked them. There was a jug of apple cider cut with water, and a second jug of milk still cool from the cellars.
One servant pulled out his chair, another poured his cider, and a third stood by the wall, waiting to clear away whatever he didn't finish.
Alyn sat down and ate like a boy who had spent the day before wrestling in the yard. He ate a great deal, because his body demanded it: bread and bacon, eggs and porridge, and three of the blood oranges. The servants no longer looked surprised at how much the prince could put away.
It's strange, he thought, peeling a fourth orange with his thumbnail, how fast you stop noticing.
He had noticed at first. In his earliest years, while the fog was thinning and the world was coming into focus, the lavishness had struck him as almost obscene. There were silver plates and servants for everything. One man's only job was to taste his father's wine. Some of the rooms were so large they seemed to have their own weather.
The man whose memories he carried had eaten toast standing over a kitchen sink. He had once lived on noodles for three days because payday was late. He had never had a servant in his life, and if anyone had pulled out a chair for him, he would have assumed he was being robbed.
Over the years those memories had grown thin, like a shirt washed too many times. Alyn could still take them out and look at them: a flat with a damp patch on the ceiling, a job he'd hated, rain on a windscreen. But they felt less and less like his own. More and more they felt like a very long book he had once read about someone else. He had been Alyn for eight years. He had been Alyn for every first step and scraped knee, every lesson and bruise and name day. Somewhere along the way the stranger in his head had stopped being a separate person. Now he was more like an inheritance: a vault of odd knowledge left to Alyn by a man he'd never quite met.
He was Alyn Baratheon. That was simply the truth.
And Alyn Baratheon had grown used to silver plates rather quickly.
He wasn't sure whether that bothered him. He suspected it ought to.
His days had a shape to them now, and the shape was work.
Mornings belonged to the maesters. Grand Maester Pycelle oversaw his education himself. That was an honour. It also meant long hours in a stuffy chamber that smelled of old parchment and older man, listening to that reedy voice wander through the histories. Pycelle was a Lannister creature to the bone, and Alyn never forgot it. But the old man knew a great deal, and Alyn meant to have all of it.
He had learned his letters before he was three and his sums not long after. By six he was reading histories that made his tutors' eyebrows climb towards their hairlines. Now, at eight, he could recite the lineages of every great house and most of the lesser ones. He could argue the causes of the Dance of the Dragons, work through a ledger of crown accounts, and hold a passable conversation in High Valyrian. Pycelle had begun to call him remarkable, in the tone of a man who wanted it known who had done the remarking. His father bragged about him at feasts, in between bragging about his size.
Alyn did not hide his mind. He had considered it early on and decided against it. A prince who pretended to be stupid would only be taught to be stupid, and he needed every scrap of learning this world could give him. Besides, a clever heir was a source of pride, and pride made people generous.
But he was careful about his questions.
He never asked about the Tower of Joy. He never asked who the mother of Lord Stark's bastard was, or why no one ever seemed able to name her. He never asked about Prince Rhaegar's children, or how exactly they had died, or whether anyone had seen the bodies. He never asked about the old book of lineages gathering dust somewhere in the Red Keep's library. He never asked what lay north of the Wall, beyond the wildlings and beyond the maps. Some questions opened doors, and some doors let things out once they were open.
So he asked about harvests and tariffs and siege engines. Pycelle beamed and answered, and nobody wondered what else the prince might be thinking.
The krakens had not risen. For years he had waited, braced for it, sure that every spring would bring word of Balon Greyjoy crowning himself on Pyke. Four years had gone by, and the Iron Islands stayed sullen and quiet. He had come to accept that his memories of when were the least reliable thing he owned. The stranger had left him the shape of the story, but not the calendar.
Afternoons belonged to the yard, and the yard was where the fire lived.
Ser Aron Santagar, the Red Keep's master-at-arms, drilled him in the basics: footwork, guards, and the weight and balance of a practice blade. Ser Aron was a Dornish knight, lean and dark, with a voice like a whip. Twice a week, when his duties allowed, Ser Barristan Selmy came down to the yard as well. Alyn had quickly realised that being taught to hold a sword by the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was rather like being taught scales by the finest singer in the realm.
He was good, and there was no point pretending otherwise.
He was honest enough to admit why, though. Most of it was size. At eight, Alyn stood four feet and eight inches tall and weighed more than some boys of twelve. He towered over the other children at court, and not only the ones his own age. The squires and pages set to spar with him were often years older and still came up only to his chin. When he swung a wooden sword, his whole weight went behind it. When he shoved, boys went down. He had not yet met a boy who could stand in front of him for long, and he knew perfectly well that this was the gods' doing more than his own.
But it wasn't only size. He watched, he learned, and he remembered. His hands were quick and his eye was quicker. The last time Ser Barristan had come to the yard, the old knight had watched him fight three bouts against a squire of thirteen. Afterwards he had said, in his quiet way, "You have your father's strength, my prince, and your uncle's quickness. If you have the patience to marry the two, you'll be something to see."
Alyn had carried that sentence around with him for a week, like a coin in his pocket.
It was in the blood, he supposed. On a battlefield Robert Baratheon had been a monster out of a nursery tale, and men still spoke of the Trident in lowered voices. The Lannisters had produced fighters for as long as there had been a Casterly Rock. Tywin had broken the Reynes. Jaime had been knighted at fifteen and put in the Kingsguard the same year. Alyn had been born with the stag and the lion both running in his veins, thunder and gold. Sometimes, when he swung the practice sword and felt his whole body move behind it, he could almost feel the two of them fighting over him.
He thought about the tourney often.
He had been four years old, sitting on his mother's lap, when he watched a young knight die on a painted lance.
His father had been in a towering rage afterwards. Alyn remembered it perfectly: Robert in the royal pavilion, face purple, bellowing for Gregor Clegane's head. Jon Arryn and Ser Barristan had spent most of the evening talking him down. The tilt had been fair, they said, and the marshals had judged it clean. It was a tragedy, not a crime. Sometimes lances failed to shatter and men died, and every knight accepted that risk when he rode onto the field.
As far as anyone could prove, they were right. It had been a clean tilt, and no rule had been broken. Ser Loren Wylde of the Rain House had died in the lists at the heir's name day tourney, and that was all it was: a tragic accident.
His grandfather had then done what Tywin Lannister always did. He wrote a letter of condolence in his own hand, which Alyn's mother read aloud with a strange expression on her face, and he paid for everything. Ser Loren lay in state beneath the crystal dome of the Great Sept of Baelor while seven septons sang him to the Stranger. Afterwards his body was carried home to the Stormlands with an honour guard in crimson and gold, and a chest of Lannister gold went with it for his family. By every account it was one of the most beautiful funerals the capital had seen in years.
It hadn't started anything between the stag and the lion. There had been no feud, no breach, and no drawn swords. The Baratheons and the Lannisters went on exactly as before, bound together by a marriage, a crown, and a large black-haired boy.
But Robert never forgot. Four years later, when he was in his cups, he still called Gregor Clegane Tywin's mad dog. The Mountain had not set foot in King's Landing since, and everyone understood that he had better not. Once, a lord was foolish enough to praise Clegane's jousting in the king's hearing. Robert set down his goblet and stared at the man until he stammered an excuse and left the hall.
For Alyn, the tourney had done something else entirely.
He had spent his first four years in this world plotting. He had lain awake in the dark building schemes and moving pieces around an imaginary board, certain that knowing what was coming made him the cleverest person in any room. Then he had watched a man die in front of him in less time than it took to eat a honeycake. In that moment he had understood that his knowledge had not saved Ser Loren Wylde. His schemes had not slowed Gregor Clegane's horse by a single stride. All his cleverness had been worth exactly nothing, because he was four years old and could not lift a sword.
In this world every plan needed force behind it. A secret was only as safe as the swords that guarded it, and a claim was only as strong as the men willing to die for it. Ned Stark had known the truth about Cersei's children, and it had done him no good at all once the gold cloaks turned their spears on his men. Knowledge was a map, and a map could not walk anywhere by itself.
So that day, in the sudden cold of a blazing afternoon, something had caught light in him, and it had not gone out since.
He was too young to lead men and too young to sit on the council. He was too young to do anything that mattered. The best he could do was learn everything and grow strong, so that was what he did.
"My prince." Celia stood in the doorway with her arms folded. "Pycelle's waiting. If you're late again he'll tell your lady mother, and she'll tell me, and then I'll have to look disappointed at you. Neither of us wants that."
Alyn wiped his fingers on a napkin and stood. His chair scraped back across the stone.
"I'm going," he said.
"You've honey on your cuff."
He looked down. He did.
Celia sighed the sigh of a woman who had expected nothing else. She crossed the room, dabbed at the cuff with a damp cloth, and gave him a small push towards the door. "Go on. Learn something, then go and hit something. And for the love of the Mother, come back to me in one piece."
He went down the stair and out into the bright morning of the Red Keep. The air smelled of the sea and of smoke from the kitchen chimneys, and far below, the city was waking in all its noise and stink and glory. From the yard came the ring of steel on steel, where the grown knights were already at their practice.
He was eight years old, and he still had so much growing to do.
He intended to do all of it.