Lyonel hit him at full speed, which for a boy of a year and a few moons was not very fast at all, but he made up for it in conviction.
He came across the nursery rug on unsteady legs, arms out, belly first, shrieking with laughter the whole way, and flung himself into Alyn's chest with the reckless faith of someone who has never once in his life been dropped. Alyn caught him, rolled backwards with a theatrical groan, and let himself be conquered. Lyonel sat astride his ribs like a knight on a destrier and pounded on him with both fat fists, laughing so hard he gave himself hiccups.
"Mercy," Alyn wheezed. "Mercy, ser. I yield."
"Ah!" said Lyonel triumphantly, which was most of his vocabulary, and pounded him some more.
He was aptly named. Of the three, he was the biggest, the loudest, the one who laughed at everything—at falling down, at getting up, at the dogs in the yard, at his own feet. He laughed when he was fed and laughed when he was bathed and laughed, once, in the middle of a thunderstorm so violent it had set every other child in the Red Keep howling, standing at the window with both palms pressed to the glass while the lightning cracked over the bay. The Laughing Storm, Robert had named him, after the old Baratheon lord who had once fought seven knights of the Kingsguard for sport. Alyn sometimes thought his father had known exactly what he was doing.
"Lyonel. Gentle." Celia's voice came from the window seat, where she sat mending a small shirt with quick, sure stitches. "Your brother's a prince, not a practice dummy."
"He doesn't mind," Alyn said from the floor.
"I mind. It's my job to return you to the queen with all your ribs."
On the far side of the rug, a nursemaid was attempting to lift Argella from the midst of a scattered wooden army, and Argella was having none of it.
"No," she said.
It had been her first word, and she remained extremely fond of it. She said it to the nursemaids. She said it to the septa. She said it to her lady mother, who had laughed, startled, the first time, and then looked at her daughter with a strange, measuring respect. She had said it once to the King of the Seven Kingdoms, who had roared with delight and tossed her in the air, whereupon she had said it again, louder, and pulled his beard.
She was the fiercest of the three and the most stubborn by leagues. When she did not want to be held, she went rigid as a plank. When she did not want to eat, she clamped her mouth shut and stared at you with her father's blue eyes blazing, and nothing short of a siege engine would shift her. She had bitten two nursemaids and a Kingsguard knight. Ser Boros still would not come within arm's reach.
Argella Durrandon had been the Storm King's daughter, who had shut herself in Storm's End and sworn she would die before she wed a conqueror—and meant it. Alyn looked at his sister, sitting in the ruins of his wooden soldiers with a painted knight clutched in each fist, glaring up at the nursemaid with thunder in her small face, and thought: Yes. That'll do.
The nursemaid gave up. Argella went back to smashing the knights together.
And in the curve of his arm, where she had crept while he was being conquered, Cassana leaned against him and watched it all with her grave, quiet eyes.
She was the smallest still, as she had been from the first. The last to come, the one who had nearly not come at all. She had not grown into her brother's bulk or her sister's fury. She was slight and watchful and still, a quiet little thing with black hair as fine as smoke and eyes that had turned, over the year, from newborn blue to a clear, deep, startling green.
Their mother's green. His own green.
Of the three, she was the only one with Lannister eyes, and Cersei knew it. Alyn had seen the way his mother looked at Cassana—the same way she had once looked at him, as though she had found something of her own in a house full of stags.
Cassana did not laugh often and did not cry often either. She watched. Most of all, she liked the window—would stand at it for as long as anyone let her, one small hand flat against the glass, gazing out over the roofs of the city and down to the grey-green sweep of the bay and the ships moving on it. She would watch the sea for hours, if they let her.
The first Cassana Baratheon had drowned in Shipbreaker Bay, in sight of her own castle walls, while her young sons watched from the battlements.
Alyn tried not to think about that. He was not always successful.
"Ahh," Cassana said, softly, to no one, and put her small hand on his arm.
"I know," Alyn told her. "It's very loud in here."
His father was at war.
The ravens had come in the spring, one after another, black wings over the Red Keep like a scattering of ash. The first had brought word that Balon Greyjoy had named himself King of the Iron Islands and the Salt and Rock, and cast off the rule of the Iron Throne. The second had come from Lannisport, and it had said the Lannister fleet was burning at its moorings. Alyn had been in the room when his mother read that one. He had watched her face go white and then very, very still, and he had known—without needing to be told—that she was thinking of her father, and how Tywin Lannister would take it.
And then there had been no more waiting. Robert had called his banners with a roar that seemed to shake the whole of King's Landing. Lords rode in from the stormlands and the crownlands and the Reach. Stannis sailed from Dragonstone with the royal fleet. Word came that Eddard Stark was marching south from Winterfell with the strength of the North at his back.
Alyn had stood in the yard the morning his father rode out, in the grey light before sunrise, and watched Robert Baratheon mount his great black warhorse in full plate, his antlered helm tucked under one arm, his hammer slung across his back. His father had looked down at him from the saddle, grinning through his beard, flushed and bright-eyed and more alive than Alyn had seen him in years.
"Next war, boy," Robert had said. "Next war, you'll carry my hammer."
"I can carry it now."
His father had laughed until his horse shied. "Aye, I don't doubt you could. But your mother would have my head on a pike. Next war. That's a promise." And he had leaned down from the saddle, and gripped the back of Alyn's neck with one huge gauntleted hand, and looked at him, suddenly and briefly serious. "Look after them, Alyn. Your mother and the little ones. You're the man of the Keep while I'm gone."
Then he was gone, in a clatter of hooves and a thunder of banners, and the Red Keep was very quiet for a very long time.
That had been four moons ago. Since then, the news had come in scraps—a battle at sea off Fair Isle, where his uncle Stannis had broken the Iron Fleet; the host marching west; the siege lines closing around Pyke. The last raven had spoken of rain and siege towers and a castle on a rock in a grey sea. Nothing since.
Alyn read every scrap. He had Jon Arryn's leave to sit in the Hand's solar when the ravens came, and he sat there, silent and attentive, and listened, and remembered. And the whole time, beneath the listening, a single question had been turning over and over in his head like a millstone.
Why now?
The Greyjoy rebellion was supposed to have come a year ago. He was as sure of that as he was of anything the stranger had left him. He had waited for it, braced for it. It had not come, and he had concluded his memory of the calendar was faulty, and had half forgotten about it.
And then, a full year late, here it was.
He did not know why. He had turned it every way he could think of. Had Balon waited because the king had a trueborn heir, and a stable court, and a queen who was not quietly poisoning his marriage from within? Had the birth of three more princes and princesses made the Iron Throne look stronger, so the krakens bided their time? Or had it made the king look soft and domestic, so they struck at last? Had some small thing shifted in some small harbour on the Iron Islands—a ship finished late, a lord who lived who should have died, a storm that blew the wrong way—because a baby in King's Landing had not died of a fever nine years ago?
He would never know. That was the maddening part. The world did not leave a trail of its reasons.
But whatever the cause, the lesson was plain enough. The story he had inherited was no longer a map. It was, at best, a rumour. The marriage of his parents had not curdled. Joffrey had never been born, nor Myrcella, nor Tommen. Three black-haired Baratheons had been born instead. The rebellion had come late. What else had shifted, that he could not see?
The court intrigues he had spent years memorising—who would betray whom, who would poison whom, who would hang whom from which bridge—were ashes. Built on a foundation that had never been laid. He could no more predict the next ten years in King's Landing than he could predict the weather.
But not everything had changed.
Some things, he thought, did not care what happened in King's Landing. Some things had been set in motion long before he was born, long before his father was born, long before there was a Red Keep for anyone to be born in. And those he still had to reckon with.
He had counted them, lying awake in the dark. There were three.
The first is fire.
Somewhere across the narrow sea, a silver-haired girl was growing up. She would be older than him—half-grown by now, perhaps more. She lived on the charity of magisters and merchant princes, dragged from city to city by a brother who talked endlessly of his stolen crown and his dragon's blood and who would, one day, sell her to a horselord for an army.
And one day, if the world went the way the stranger had seen it go, she would walk into a burning pyre with three stone eggs, and walk out again with three living dragons.
Alyn had spent a long time on that one.
Dragons. Actual dragons. The first in a hundred and fifty years. Enough fire to melt castles, to turn armies into ash, to make a queen out of a beggar-girl. The whole reason there was an Iron Throne at all was that Aegon the Conqueror had had three dragons and the other kings had had none. Anyone who could count could see what three dragons in the hands of a Targaryen with a claim would mean for a Baratheon king—and a Baratheon heir.
He could see the simple solution. His father had seen it too, in the story. Kill the girl. Send a man with a knife, or a cup of poisoned wine. End it before it began.
And every time Alyn came to that thought, he found he could not finish it.
She was a child. She had done nothing yet. She might never do anything. And in the story, when she came, she had not come only as a conqueror. She had come to the Wall, in the end. Her dragons had flown north. Whatever else she was, she had been one of the few who fought on the right side when the real war came.
And that brought him to—
The second is ice.
It was the one that kept him awake the longest.
Far to the north, beyond the Wall, beyond the Haunted Forest, beyond every map in Pycelle's library, something was waking. The stranger had seen it, secondhand, on a screen: blue eyes in a dead face, and armies of the dead marching through the snow, and the Wall itself coming down in a scream of blue fire. He had seen the Night's Watch—sworn brothers, men who had given up everything to guard the realm—reduced to a few hundred thieves and old men holding a seven-hundred-foot wall of ice with spit and prayers. He had seen a whole wildling town swallowed in a single night.
The Long Night. Winter, coming down from the north on the backs of the dead.
It did not care who sat on the Iron Throne. It did not care whether his mother had been faithful or his siblings had black hair or the Greyjoys had rebelled a year late. It was coming. It had always been coming. And when it came, it would not matter at all who had won the game of thrones, because everyone who had played it would be dead.
He knew some things. He knew fire killed them. He knew dragonglass killed them—obsidian, the black glass that the maesters dismissed as a curiosity—and that there was a mountain of it lying under Dragonstone, on his uncle Stannis's island, which no one had ever thought to mine. He knew Valyrian steel killed them, and that there were only a few hundred Valyrian blades left in the world, most of them hanging on the walls of great houses as heirlooms. He knew the Night's Watch was dying, starved of men and gold and respect.
He was the heir to the Iron Throne. One day he would sit it. And if he had even a few years of warning, he could—
He could do a great deal. If he was careful. If he was clever. If he did not get himself locked in a tower as a madman first, for talking about snow-zombies at the small council.
The third is harder to name.
It was magic, he supposed. That was the closest word. Magic, and the gods, or the things that called themselves gods.
In the story, the world had been waking. Magic that had been dead for centuries was stirring back to life—in the red priests who could raise the dead and birth shadows from their wombs, in the Lord of Light whose fires showed his servants visions, in greenseers and wargs and a crippled boy in a cave beneath a weirwood tree, who became something ancient and strange with a thousand eyes. The Three-Eyed Raven. The Red God, R'hllor, and his priestess with her ruby and her prophecies. The weirwoods and their old gods, watching.
These powers had plans. They had schemes that stretched over lifetimes. They moved people like pieces on a board—kings, bastards, queens, crippled boys. And they were not, as far as Alyn could tell, bound by anything so small as what happened to one royal marriage.
That was what frightened him most about the third. Because the other two, at least, were enemies. You could plan against an enemy. The third was something else. Something that might want him, or use him, or simply not care whether he lived or died, so long as its own purposes were served.
He wondered, sometimes, late at night, whether any of those powers had noticed that a soul had crossed over from another world into a dying prince's body.
He wondered whether that was the kind of thing that got noticed.
"Alyn." Celia's voice, gentle. "You've gone away again."
He blinked. Lyonel had slid off his chest and wandered away to join Argella in the slaughter of the wooden army. Cassana was still curled against his side, her small fingers wound in the fabric of his sleeve.
"Sorry," he said. "Thinking."
"You're always thinking." Celia bit off a thread and set the little shirt aside. "It isn't healthy in a boy your age. You should be climbing things. Falling off them. Coming back to me with skinned knees."
"I come back to you with skinned knees every day."
"From training. That's not the same. That's work." She looked at him, and there was something in the look he did not quite like—something too careful, too kind. "You'll be old soon enough, my prince. There's no need to rush it."
Yes, there is, Alyn thought. But he only smiled at her, and said nothing.
Because that was the thing that sat on his chest in the dark, heavier than Lyonel.
Every catastrophe he had erased by being born had been, in the story, the shaping of some answer. The war of five kings had been hell. But it had sent Jon Snow to the Wall and made him Lord Commander. It had sent Daenerys fleeing east, where she hatched her dragons. It had driven Bran Stark north to the Three-Eyed Raven—and Bran had only ever gone north because he had fallen from a tower in Winterfell. Because he had climbed where he should not have climbed and seen what he should not have seen: his mother and his uncle, together, in the dark.
His mother and his uncle, who now barely spoke.
If Bran never fell, Bran never went north. If Bran never went north, there was no Three-Eyed Raven. If Robert never sent an assassin after Daenerys, would Drogo ever ride west, and take that wound, and die, and burn? Would there be dragons at all?
He had sealed up the cracks in the world. He had not known—could not have known—how many of those cracks had been the only places light got in.
I've spared the realm its wounds, he thought, looking down at his sister's small black head. I haven't spared it its enemies. And I may have taken away its weapons.
He would have to find new ones. That was all. He would have to be the weapon, if he had to. He had the size for it, and the blood, and the time, perhaps, if the gods were kind—fifteen years, twenty, however many the stranger's story still held true.
He would have to build everything the old story had got by accident, and he would have to do it on purpose.
Cassana tugged at his sleeve. She was pointing at the window.
A raven had landed on the sill outside.
It was a big one, glossy black, its feathers ruffled by the wind off the bay. That was not strange in itself. There were ravens everywhere in the Red Keep—the maesters' birds in their rookery, and the wild ones that followed them for scraps. Alyn had seen a thousand of them.
But this one was not preening, or pecking at the stone, or shifting from foot to foot in the way birds did. It was perfectly still. And it was looking in through the glass.
At him.
Lyonel saw it and shrieked with laughter and toddled toward the window, arms out. Argella saw it and said "No," very firmly, and threw a wooden knight at the glass. Cassana did not laugh or shout. She simply stood, one hand on Alyn's knee for balance, and gazed at the raven with her grave green eyes, the way she gazed at the sea.
The raven looked back. Not at Lyonel. Not at Argella. Past them, over them, straight at the big black-haired boy sitting on the nursery floor.
Its eyes were black. Two of them, just two, like any bird's. Alyn looked and looked, and made very sure of it.
"Shoo," said Celia, rapping on the glass with her thimble. "Go on. Filthy things."
The raven held his gaze a moment longer. Then it spread its wings, dropped off the sill, and was gone—out over the rooftops, riding the wind, a black speck against the grey sky, flying north.
Alyn watched until he could not see it anymore.