It was never Jaime at his mother's door anymore.
Alyn noticed it the way he noticed everything, filed it the way he filed everything. This morning it was Ser Boros Blount, thick-necked and red-faced, sweating in his white scale though the sun had barely cleared the towers. He straightened when he saw the prince coming down the passage and pulled the door open with a little bow.
"Her Grace is awake, my prince. In a temper, mind."
"She's always in a temper when she's awake," Alyn said, and Ser Boros laughed like a man who had not been sure he was allowed to.
Inside, the queen's bedchamber was dim and close and much too warm. The shutters had been half drawn against the morning glare, the braziers banked high, and the air was thick with the smell of rosewater and sweat and some bitter herb the midwives had been burning for a week. Two of Cersei's ladies hovered by the hearth. A third was kneeling at the bedside with a basin, being told, in a voice like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath, precisely how incompetent she was.
"—and if you drip that on the coverlet one more time, I will have you sent back to whatever pigsty in the Westerlands your father crawled out of, do you understand me? Out. All of you, out."
The ladies fled. Cersei let her head fall back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
Then she opened them, saw who was standing at the foot of her bed, and her whole face changed.
"There's my lion," she said.
She was enormous.
Alyn had watched the swell of her grow through the autumn and into the winter, first a gentle rounding beneath her gowns, then a curve she carried with regal defiance, and at last this: a great taut mound beneath the coverlet that seemed too large for her slender frame, as though she had swallowed a harvest moon. She lay propped against a bank of pillows, her golden hair loose and dull with sweat, dark crescents beneath her eyes. At thirty-some years she was still the most beautiful woman in the Red Keep, the most beautiful woman in the realm by the reckoning of every singer who valued his tongue. But this morning she looked tired in a way he had never seen before. Tired down to the bone.
"Come here. Let me look at you." She held out a hand, and he came and took it and sat on the edge of the bed where she patted the mattress. Her fingers were hot. "Celia's done well with you. You look almost civilised. Did you eat?"
"A great deal."
"Good. You're a growing boy." A ghost of a smile. "Gods know you're growing. Every time I look at you, you're taller. Soon you'll be looking down at me."
"I already am, when you're lying down."
She laughed, then winced, one hand flying to the side of her belly. "Don't make me laugh, you wretched boy. It sets them off."
Them.
"Is it bad?" he asked.
"It's a war." She shifted against the pillows, grimacing. "Pycelle prods at me every morning with his cold old fingers and says, Oh yes, Your Grace, oh my, Your Grace, as though he's discovered a new comet. He says he hears two hearts. He says he feels two heads." Her mouth twisted. "As if I needed a maester to tell me there's more than one creature in here, kicking me like a pair of mules."
"Twins," Alyn said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.
"Twins." Cersei looked down at the great curve of herself, and something moved across her face, some old, strange shadow that was there and gone. "Lannisters run to twins, you know. My grandmother's mother. Two of my father's cousins." A pause. "Myself."
The room seemed to grow very quiet.
"I know," Alyn said.
She looked at him then, sharply, the way she sometimes did—as though she had caught a glimpse of something behind his eyes and could not quite make out its shape. Then it passed, and she took his hand and drew it to her belly and pressed it flat there.
"Feel," she said.
For a moment there was nothing but the heat of her, taut as a drumskin. Then something moved beneath his palm—a slow, rolling push, and then, almost at once, a sharp little kick in an entirely different place, and then another, and another, a flurry of small blows like someone knocking on a door from the inside.
"They never stop," Cersei murmured. "Day and night. Fighting for room. You were never like this. You were a great lazy lump of a thing, you lay there like a stone and let me carry you about." She smiled, and there was something almost shy in it. "Your father used to put his hand here, when you were in me. He'd put his ear to me and talk to you. Such nonsense he talked."
"Does he still?"
"Sometimes." The smile flickered. "When he remembers where his wife's chambers are."
That was the heart of it, Alyn thought—the thing about his parents that he had never managed to pin to a board and study, because it would not hold still.
A month ago, the whole Red Keep had heard them. Some girl, some lady's maid or merchant's daughter or whatever she had been—Alyn never learned—and Cersei had found out, and the shouting had rolled down the halls of Maegor's Holdfast like thunder in a gorge. A goblet had been thrown. A tapestry had been torn. For a week afterwards the queen had spoken to the king only through servants, and Robert had drunk and hunted and bellowed at everyone who crossed him.
And then, eight days later, Alyn had come looking for his mother in the evening and found his father there instead, sitting on the edge of this same bed with one great hand resting on the swell of her belly. They had not been speaking. They had not needed to. Cersei had been looking up at Robert with an expression Alyn had no word for—exasperated and tired and furious and, beneath all of it, something that was very nearly fond—and Robert had been looking back at her the way a man looks at a fire that has burned him more than once and that he cannot quite bring himself to leave.
It was not love. Alyn did not think it was love. But it was not nothing, either. It was heat. Hot and cold, hot and cold, like iron in a forge, and he had begun to suspect that it was the very heat of it—the quarrels and the reconciliations, the fury and the flashes of warmth—that kept the thing alive at all. A cold marriage would have died long since. This one burned too much to die.
And Jaime—
He did not know about Jaime. That was the plain truth, and he hated it. Somewhere over the years, his mother and his uncle had drifted apart like two boats cut loose in a current. It had happened so slowly Alyn could not have said when it began. There had been no quarrel that he knew of. No scene. Only a gradual cooling, a formality creeping in where there had once been easy mockery. Jaime no longer guarded the queen's door. Jaime no longer walked beside her in the gardens. When they spoke at feasts, they spoke like cousins, courteous and brief. Sometimes Alyn caught his uncle watching her across a crowded hall with a face like a closed book. Sometimes he caught his mother not looking at Jaime with a precision that was itself a kind of looking.
Had it ever truly begun, in this world? Had it ended? When? Was it over at all, or only hidden better?
He didn't know. He couldn't know. He couldn't ask.
But he had watched the months of this pregnancy the way a man watches dice tumbling across a table with his whole fortune riding on the throw, and he had come, cautiously, to believe the babes were his father's. Robert had been in her bed often enough, in the hot seasons of their marriage. And whatever had once burned between his mother and his uncle, he had seen no spark of it in a very long time.
Believed. Hoped. Prayed, even, in the sept, to gods he was not sure were listening.
Because if he was wrong…
He had thought it through a hundred times in the dark, and it always ended the same way. The babes would come. The midwife would lift them into the light. And if their heads were crowned with gold, then every lord in the realm would only have to look from those golden babes to their black-haired, black-browed brother and do the simplest sum in the world. It would not take Jon Arryn and a book of lineages. It would not take fifteen years. It would take his father a single glance.
And Robert Baratheon, for all his warmth, was a man who had torn down a dynasty for the loss of a girl who was never his. What would he tear down for this?
His mother's head on a spike above the Red Keep's gates. Twins smothered in their cradle, or sent to the Wall, or worse. His uncle dead in his white cloak. His grandfather marching out of the west with every sword the Lannister gold could buy. The realm in flames a decade early, and Alyn—the heir of stag and lion—standing precisely in the middle of it, too young to stop any of it and too valuable for either side to let go.
And if they were black-haired…
Then Joffrey would never be born. He already hadn't been. Myrcella either, nor Tommen, nor any golden child with a secret in its blood. The crack in the foundation that had brought the whole kingdom down would simply never form. The story he had inherited—the one he had spent eight years using as a map—would be over. Torn up. Every page after this one blank.
Either way, he thought, looking at the great swollen curve of his mother under his palm, whatever came out of this bed was going to decide the rest of his life.
Beneath his hand, one of them kicked him, hard.
Cersei gasped.
It wasn't the little gasp of before. It was something else—a sharp, sucked-in breath, her whole body going rigid against the pillows, her fingers clamping down on his hand hard enough to grind the bones together. Her face went white. Then grey.
"Mother?"
"Get," she said through her teeth, "the midwives."
They threw him out, of course.
The birthing room was no place for men, and it seemed, in the eyes of the midwives, that eight-year-old princes the size of small bullocks counted as men. He found himself in the passage outside with the door slammed in his face and Ser Boros Blount looking at him in helpless alarm, while behind the heavy oak, women's voices rose in a flurry of orders and footsteps and the clatter of basins—and, under it all, a low animal sound from his mother that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
The word went through the Red Keep like fire through dry grass. Within the hour the passage was crowded. Grand Maester Pycelle came shuffling past with his chain clanking and his bag clutched to his chest and vanished into the chamber. Lord Jon Arryn came, grave and grey, and stood with his hands folded behind his back. Varys drifted by, murmured something soft and meaningless, and drifted away again, and Alyn did not doubt that every word said in that corridor would be in the eunuch's ear by nightfall.
And then his father came.
Alyn heard him before he saw him—boots on stone, taking the stairs three at a time, a voice like a storm rolling up the tower. "Where is she? Where is she? Seven hells, why did no one ride for me sooner—" He came round the corner in his hunting leathers, mud to the knee, a bow still slung across his back, smelling of horse and pine and the kingswood. His face was flushed with hard riding and something else. He saw the closed door and stopped as though he had walked into a wall.
"Your Grace," Jon Arryn began.
"Don't," said Robert. "Don't Your Grace me, Jon, is she alive?"
"She is in labour, Robert. It has only begun. It will be hours yet."
The King of the Seven Kingdoms stood in the middle of the corridor, big and helpless, and stared at the door. Then his eyes found Alyn, and something in his face eased.
"There's my boy." He crossed the passage in two strides and put a hand on Alyn's shoulder—the grip heavy and warm and not quite steady. "Were you with her? When it started?"
"Yes, Father."
"Was she—how was she?"
"Angry," said Alyn.
Robert barked a laugh, too loud, the sound bouncing off the stones. "Angry. Good. Good! Your mother's never so dangerous as when she's angry. She'll come through this out of pure bloody spite, you watch." He pulled Alyn against his side, his arm heavy across his shoulders. "You watch."
It was not hours. It was the whole of the day, and much of the night.
The light through the narrow passage windows went from white to gold to red to nothing. Servants came with torches and lit the sconces. Servants came with wine and Robert drank it, but slowly, for once—sat on a bench against the wall with a cup cradled in his big hands and hardly touched it, his leg jiggling, his eyes on the door. Jon Arryn went and came back again. Pycelle emerged once, sweating and pink, to say that all was proceeding as the gods willed, and retreated before Robert could get his hands on him.
And behind the door, his mother screamed.
Not often. Cersei Lannister did not scream often, even now. But when she did, the sound went through the oak and through the stone and through the bones of everyone who heard it, and every time, Alyn watched his father's knuckles go white on his cup.
Somewhere past midnight, when the torches had burned low and even the servants had stopped coming, Robert spoke without looking away from the door.
"You were a quick one," he said. "When you came. Half a day. Pycelle said he'd never seen a first babe come so easy. I was in the yard, knocking some fool knight about with a practice hammer, and they came and told me, and by the time I'd washed the sweat off, there you were." He turned the cup in his hands. "Biggest babe the midwives had ever pulled. Fat as a suckling pig. Roaring like one too."
"You've told me," said Alyn.
"I'm telling you again." His father's voice dropped, rough and low. "More women die in childbed than men die in battle. Did your maester ever teach you that? It's true. You can count the dead from the Trident. No one bothers counting the ones who die in bed." He was quiet a moment. "I don't want to lose her, Alyn. Gods help me, sometimes she's the coldest woman I've ever known, and sometimes I want to throttle her, and I don't want to lose her."
Alyn had nothing to say to that. So he did the only thing he could think of, which was to lean his weight against his father's side, the way he had when he was small. And Robert's arm came round him, and they sat there together in the guttering torchlight, the King and his heir, and waited.
At the far end of the passage, where the torchlight did not quite reach, a figure in white stood by the window. Alyn did not know how long Jaime had been there. He had not seen him come. His uncle stood very still, his back half-turned, his face lost in shadow, and did not come closer, and did not leave.
The first cry came an hour before dawn.
It was thin and furious and unmistakable, a tiny, outraged wail that cut through the oak like a needle through silk. Robert came off the bench so fast his cup went flying, wine splashing across the flagstones. Jon Arryn closed his eyes and his lips moved.
"That's one," Robert breathed. "That's one. That's one, Jon—"
Behind the door, voices rose, urgent and overlapping. His mother's voice, raw and ragged. A midwife's, sharp with command. And then, not a quarter hour later, a second cry, a little lower, a little angrier, tangling with the first.
"Two!" roared the King of the Seven Kingdoms, and seized Alyn under the arms, and hoisted him clean off his feet—eight years old and nearly five feet tall, and his father lifted him like a sack of feathers and swung him round. "Two! Two of them, you hear that? You've a brother! Or a sister, or both, or—"
Behind the door, his mother screamed again.
Robert went still. He set Alyn down very slowly. The joy drained out of his face, and what replaced it was something Alyn had never seen there before—pure, naked terror.
"No," he whispered. "No, no, it's done, they're out, why is she—"
The door stayed shut. The voices behind it had changed—no longer the brisk business of a birth well done, but something sharper, faster, frightened. Someone called for more linen. Someone called for Pycelle, and Pycelle's voice answered, high and quavering. His mother screamed again, and this time it went on and on, a long, torn sound that seemed to have no bottom to it.
And then it stopped.
The silence was worse. Alyn felt it in his teeth.
His father took one step toward the door, and then another, and his hand was reaching for the latch, and Jon Arryn was saying Robert, Robert, you mustn't—
And through the silence, thin as thread, came a third cry.
Robert froze with his hand an inch from the latch.
It was smaller than the others. Weaker. A high, mewling sound, almost a kitten's. But it was a cry. And after a moment it gathered strength and rose, and the first two babes answered it, and the three of them wailed together behind the door in a rising, ragged chorus, like a choir of very small, very angry septons.
"Three," said Jon Arryn faintly. "Seven save us. Three."
The door opened.
A midwife stood there, a stout grey woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and blood on her apron, looking as though she had fought the whole Trident single-handed and won. She sank into a curtsey that made her knees crack.
"Your Grace," she said. "The queen lives. She's weak, but she lives, and she's asking for you and for the prince. You've three babes, Your Grace. Two girls and a boy. The last near didn't come, but she came. They're small, the three of 'em, but they're strong, and they're loud." A tired, crooked smile. "The gods have been generous."
Robert Baratheon made a sound that was not a word at all.
The birthing chamber was a battlefield after the battle. Bloodied linens heaped in baskets. Basins of pink water. Maids moving with that dazed, careful slowness of people who have been awake too long and seen too much. The braziers roared and the air was thick enough to chew.
And in the middle of it all, in a bed that had been stripped and remade with clean sheets, lay his mother.
She looked like death. Her skin was the colour of tallow, her lips grey, her golden hair plastered dark against her skull. A maester's poultice lay across her brow. But her eyes were open, and they were green and hard and utterly alive, and when they found her husband in the doorway, something blazed up in them that Alyn would remember for the rest of his life.
It was triumph.
"Well?" said Cersei Lannister. Her voice was a ruin, barely more than a whisper. "Don't just stand there gaping like a landed carp, Robert. Come and see what I've done."
Three cradles had been drawn up beside the bed, and in each of them, swaddled tight in white linen, lay a babe.
They were so small. That was the first thing. Alyn had been told he was a great fat suckling pig of a baby; these were nothing of the kind. They were tiny, wrinkled, red-faced things, fists no bigger than walnuts, mouths wide open in the universal outrage of the newly born. Two of them were still wailing. The third, the smallest, in the cradle nearest the bed, had worn herself out and lay blinking up at the canopy with a bewildered, crumpled little face.
His father stood over them and did not move.
Alyn came up beside him. His heart was going so hard he could feel it in his throat, in his ears, in the tips of his fingers. He made himself look.
The midwives had washed the babes, and their heads were bare, and on every one of those three small heads, the hair was black.
Not dark gold. Not brown. Not the pale fuzz that might darken later. Black. Thick and wet and dark as ink, a full shock of it on the boy, soft wisps like smoke on the two girls. Black as a crow's wing. Black as the stag on his father's banner.
Black as his own.
"Oh," said Robert Baratheon.
Then he started to laugh.
It began low in his chest, a disbelieving rumble, and it grew and grew until it filled the chamber and shook the rafters and set all three babes wailing twice as loud. He laughed until he had to put a hand on the bedpost to hold himself up. He laughed until tears ran down into his beard. He scooped the boy out of his cradle, squalling and red-faced, and held him up to the torchlight, just as he had held Alyn up once, eight years ago, in a different room, on a different night.
"Look at him!" he roared. "Look at that hair! Look at all of them! Big Strong Baratheons, every one! The seed is strong, Jon! You hear me?!"
In the doorway, Jon Arryn smiled his thin, careful smile, and said something about the gods and their blessings. Alyn barely heard him.
Because behind Jon Arryn, half in shadow, stood Jaime Lannister.
He had come to the door. Alyn did not know when. He was looking past the Hand, past the king with the squalling boy held over his head, past the blood and the basins, at the three small black heads in their cradles. And his face—
Alyn had spent eight years watching faces, and he had never seen one do what his uncle's did then. For one instant, everything in it fell open, and what was underneath was so tangled Alyn could not unpick it. Relief, he thought. Surely relief. Happiness? Sadness? But grief, too, grief like an old wound opened. And something that might have been the loosening of a very long-held breath.
Then Jaime Lannister's face closed again, smooth and golden and bored. He inclined his head a fraction toward the bed, toward his sister, who did not look at him, and turned, and was gone, his white cloak whispering down the passage into the dark.
Alyn let out a breath he had not known he was holding.
"Alyn."
His mother's voice, faint and cracked. He turned. She had lifted one hand an inch from the coverlet, and she was looking at him, only at him.
"Come here," she whispered. "Come meet your sisters."
He went. A midwife lifted the smallest girl from her cradle, the last, the one who had nearly not come, and laid her in his arms, showing him how to hold her head, as if he did not already know, as if a man who had once been someone else had not held a niece or a nephew, a lifetime and a world away.
She weighed almost nothing. She was warm, and she smelled of milk and blood and something new, and she looked up at him with the unfocused, cloudy eyes of the newborn, and her hair was black as night.
One small fist worked free of the swaddling and found his finger and closed around it.
There's no map now, Alyn thought.
He had carried the story in his head for eight years like a lantern, guiding his feet through the dark. He had known—or thought he'd known—where every pit and pitfall lay. Joffrey, and the boar, and Ned Stark's head. Five kings and a red wedding and a queen walking naked through the streets. And all of it had hung on one secret: golden children in a black-haired house.
The secret had never been born. In its place lay three small, loud, black-haired Baratheons, a laughing king, a queen who had nearly died and hadn't, and a Kingsguard knight walking away alone into the dark.
The lantern had gone out. From here on, he would be walking by his own light.
His sister yawned, enormously, and fell asleep on his arm.
Across the room, his father was still laughing, and weeping, and holding his new son to the torchlight like a trophy. His mother lay back against her pillows with her eyes half-closed and a small, fierce smile on her grey lips, one hand resting on the edge of the nearest cradle.
And outside the narrow window, over the black waters of the bay, the sky was beginning to grey toward dawn.