The Stormlands had a word for children born as his were born, and the word was cradle-close, and it was not a compliment; it was an assessment, the way a fisherman assesses a sky.

They said it in the villages and they said it below stairs and by the twins’ first winter they were saying it in the hall: cradle-close, one scarcely out of the wicker before the next is laid in it, the blankets never cold between them. The older midwives had a second phrase, older and stranger, and it belonged properly to poor cottages where a mother’s milk was the whole of the larder — one-milk children, they said, of brothers and sisters near enough in age that both might still turn to the breast when frightened or tired, and might both be given it, and might both remember it. The phrase had no business in a lord’s keep. It arrived at Storm’s End anyway, because Storm’s End contained the only consort in the Seven Kingdoms who had never once in his life permitted another woman to feed his children, and who intended, as he informed the maester with the letter-opener laid all the way open, to go on not permitting it until the day they came for him with the shroud.

There had been one substantial pause in six years, and the household counted it from a windless night, and it had lasted from a small grave under winter glass until a small silver figure with his mother’s exact face arrived to bring the count to four; and after that the pause was over, and the pause did not come again.

So: Maegor, five, and taller than most sevens. Visenya, four, who spoke when the occasion warranted the expenditure and was arming herself, at that age, the way other children collect stones. Aemond, rising two, silver and composed and unhurried, being weaned. And, since the autumn, the twins.

Five children, and not one of them six. Five carryings in six years. Storm’s End had stopped resembling an orderly noble household somewhere in the fifth of them, and had begun instead to resemble a small kingdom under siege by a force it was legally obliged to feed — and the guards’ name for the nursery floor was the breach, and the kitchen’s word for the hour before supper was the assault, and the coast, which had watched all of it, would not have exchanged one hour of the racket for peace in any other castle in Westeros.

Of the birth itself, the household did not speak.

It is worth setting down what that silence was made of, because it was not the ordinary discretion of servants, and because it explains the whole of the season that followed. There had been an autumn night — the great gale of that year came in on top of it, which was traditional and, that once, unbearable — and the sea-facing rooms had been closed for the better part of two days, and the third watch had been quietly doubled at the foot of the eastern stair, and the household had learned in the way households learn that there were two in there and always had been, and that no one had known it, not the horn, not the hands, not the mother himself, until the first was out and the second was still coming. Daena arrived first, loud, furious, and altogether present, roaring before her shoulders were free. Daemon arrived after, smaller, and quieter, and blue, and for a stretch of time that Marra would not describe to anyone and Wylla of the Tor would only ever call long enough, entirely still — face down along a Dornish forearm, with a hand thumping his small back and a voice going gravel-hard in a tongue that was not the Common one — and then he had cried, thinly, and gone on crying, and the coast learned that it had been standing at its shutters again from the sound the guardroom made when the word came down.

That was all. That was the whole of the household’s account, and it was more than the household ever gave anyone.

Two things came out of that night besides the twins. The first was Wylla, who had held her banner and had not lost that bed, and who had aged, the kitchen swore, five years in two days, and who did not sleep well again for a long time. The second was the Lord of Storm’s End, who had been in the room the entire time — this house makes its own weather, and the custom had been dead five years — and who remembered, in the exact and pitiless order of a man who had been made to stand still while it happened, several things his husband did not remember at all.

Aerion Baratheon had lost perhaps three hours of that night. He did not know where they had gone, and it enraged him — a gap in the ledger, a page torn out of his own book by a hand that was not his — and he had asked Wylla for the missing entries once, flatly, in the first week, and Wylla had looked at him a long moment and said, “No, princeling. Not that page. Not yet, and maybe not ever; and you may hate me for it, and I have been hated by better and outlived them all.” And Lyonel, asked the same question in the black hour, had done a thing he had never once done in six years, which was to lie to him — badly, deliberately, letting the lie show, so that it would be understood as a door closed rather than a wall built.

“Nothing worth having,” said the wall. “You worked, and it was hard, and they came, and you slept.”

“You are the worst liar in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Aye,” Lyonel agreed. “It’s my whole charm. Go to sleep.”

So the twins were a moon old, and the mother of them was still recovering, and the mother of them was furious.

He hated it the way other men hate an occupying army.

Weakness was permissible in the world; the world was full of it; the world could not help itself. Weakness in him was a breach in the outer wall, and he could not abide it being seen — and it was being seen, everywhere, all day, by every soul in the keep: the stairs he now took at half his speed, one hand on the rail he had never in his life needed; the pallor that arrived at odd hours like a herald bringing news he had not requested; the way his hands, holding a letter, had begun at the second week to develop a faint fine tremor near the end of a long afternoon, which he had solved by holding letters for shorter afternoons and by having Marra hold them altogether, which was worse. The household, seeing it, went soft-footed and gentle and helpful, and it was the gentleness that nearly killed him. He grew vicious in exact proportion to what he could not do. He flayed a groom over a strap. He reduced a visiting hedge knight to component parts over a matter of forms. He conducted the household’s business from a couch for eleven days with the manner of a war-captain giving orders from a litter, and made it clear to every person who came near him that any expression of tenderness on the subject of his health would be received as an act of war.

And Lyonel Baratheon watched him the way a man watches weather at sea.

He counted what Aerion ate. Not aloud — he had learned that much in six years; he counted, and the count went into a tally he kept in his own head with the same care he gave to grain, and when the count came in short he did nothing so crude as remark on it: he simply became hungry himself, loudly, at the wrong hours, and had food brought for two, and ate his own half with barbarous enthusiasm until his husband, out of pure contempt for the performance, ate the rest to make it stop.

He watched his color. He knew, within a day, exactly how far up the eastern stair Aerion could get before the pause — and arranged, over three weeks, for an astonishing number of things that required his attention to occur at the precise landing where the pause happened, so that the pause could be spent in conversation, and cost nothing.

And he intervened, once, at the lacing.

That was the morning the thing came out into the open. Aerion had risen at the fourth week, and dressed, and stood at the glass while Marra worked, and had said, in the level silver voice, tighter; and Marra’s hands had stopped; and Marra, who had dressed him since the Red Keep and had gone into the sea and come out again with this family, had said, very quietly, “No, m’lord,” and stood there with the laces in her fists and her chin up, mutinous, terrified, immovable — and it was into that particular silence that the Lord of Storm’s End had walked, taken the laces out of his dresser’s hands, said “Thank you, Marra,” and, when the door had shut, drawn them to precisely the tension Wylla’s written doctrine allowed, and tied them off, and said, to the mirror:

“No.”

“I did not ask you.”

“You didn’t, and I’m answering anyway; put it in the ledger under the wall speaks out of turn, it’s a long entry, you’ve read it before.”

“I am shapeless, Lyonel. I have been shapeless for a moon; I look like a sack of grain that has been given a courtesy title—”

“You look like a man who bled for two days.”

“*Do not*—”

“— and who is not going to lace a wound shut to spare the feelings of a hall full of lords who could not survive a hangnail.” The great hands finished their work and rested on his shoulders, and the storm-blue eyes came up in the glass and did not look away. “You may hate me. It’s Tuesday; you generally do.”

“You are treating me,” said Aerion Baratheon, to the mirror, with lethal precision, “like cracked glass. Before my own household. Before the servants, Lyonel — do you understand what you are building? They will be nursing me by midwinter. They will be tucking me in. I have spent six years making that coast afraid of me and you are down there every day quietly rebuilding me into an invalid with a title—”

“Cracked glass,” said Lyonel Baratheon, “has better sense than you.”

“—I beg your—”

“Cracked glass has the sense to sit still. Cracked glass does not go up on the battlements in a wind because a letter came from the Reach. Cracked glass does not tell my castellan it will walk the whole wall or dismiss him, three weeks after a bed I—” and there it snagged, and both of them heard it snag, and Lyonel stopped, and set his jaw, and went on differently: “Aye. I am watching you. I’ll be watching you a long while yet. You may take it as an insult if it comforts you, and I’ll go on doing it, because there is a thing I know about that night that you do not know, and I am not going to tell you what it is, and I am never going to un-know it. So: hate me. Lace loose. Both.”

The silence had teeth in it. It might have gone anywhere — the hall below was already tuning itself, the household holding still, the way it did — and what ended it was not either of them.

It was the nursery.

Two cries went up in two different rooms at almost the same instant, and everyone in the sea-facing rooms could tell them apart before the second breath, because the twins had been distinguishable from the hour of their arrival to anyone with ears: Daena’s, from the east — a full, outraged, gale-force bellow, absolutely without grief in it, the cry of a creature who has been inconvenienced and intends the world to know the scale of the offense; and under it, from the small room across the passage, thin and rising and wrong, Daemon’s — which was not a hungry cry, or a wet cry, or a tired cry, and which everybody in that household had already learned to identify inside a heartbeat, because it had precisely one cause.

“She’s hungry,” said Aerion, already moving.

“Sit down—”

“And he is bereaved,” said the consort of Storm’s End, “because some fool has carried her out of the room without him. It is the fourth time this sennight. I shall be speaking to the nurses. Move, my lord, you are standing in the door like a portcullis with opinions.”

Lyonel moved. He also went with him, and took the stairs at his husband’s slowed pace as though it were his own, and said nothing at all about the hand on the rail; and Aerion, who noticed everything and forgave almost none of it, allowed the escort, and hated allowing it, and allowed it.

They found the nursery in its usual state of insurrection. Maegor was on the floor with a wooden sword and a strategic argument. Visenya had a nurse pinned by the elbow with a question. Aemond stood in the window recess, exactly where the light was best, silver and unhurried, holding a small carved wooden dragon in both hands and watching everything and saying nothing whatever. And in two separate corners of that great warm room, two very small people were producing between them enough noise to be heard in the yard.

Aerion took Daena from the nurse without breaking stride and Daemon from the second nurse without slowing, and sat himself in the great chair by the fire — sat rather more heavily than he meant to; Lyonel’s hand arrived under his elbow and was ignored with murderous grace — and settled the two of them, one on either side, and opened his robe, and the room went, within the space of about six heartbeats, from riot to silence.

Daena latched like a raider taking a ship. Daemon took longer — he always took longer; he had to arrange the world first — and could not begin at all until one small fist had found the loose silk at his mother’s shoulder and closed on it, and the other hand had been laid, flat and unhurried, against the warm skin of his mother’s breast, and he had turned his head enough to establish, past all doubt, that the noisy one was there, on the other side, occupying the other half of the country; and then, and only then, having audited the state of his holdings, he began, slowly, to feed.

The fire cracked. Somewhere below, the sea went about its eight-thousand-year argument.

Maegor, on the floor, resumed his campaign in a whisper.

And Lyonel Baratheon, standing in the doorway of the breach with his arms folded, watched the thing he had watched at every hour of every day for six years and had never once got used to: the wreck of a man in that chair — hollow-eyed, silver-pale, thin at the wrist, furious, four weeks out of a bed that had nearly kept him — going, between one breath and the next, entirely steady. Not gentled. That was the mistake the whole realm made about him and always would. Not softened, not quieted, not made meek. The tremor left his hands. The silver came back into his spine. The eyes, over the two silver-and-black heads, went clear and cold and awake, sorting the room, marking the nurse who had carried Daena out, filing it, weighing what it would cost her — and he lifted his chin at his husband across the nursery with the letter-opener smile arriving from somewhere it had no business coming from, and said:

“Well? Bring the Reach letters up. I can read and be a spectacle at the same time; I have been doing it since Maegor. And send someone to tell the castellan I shall walk the wall on Thursday.”

“You’ll walk half the wall on Thursday.”

“I shall walk the whole wall on Thursday, and you may follow me the length of it looking tragic, which is the only exercise you get.”

Daena, outraged by the pause in service that the conversation represented, kicked her mother in the ribs with both heels and made a noise like a small siege engine.

“—Yes,” said Aerion, without looking down, “thank you, I am aware of your position, it is noted, it is always noted—” and Lyonel Baratheon went to fetch the Reach letters, and stood a moment in the passage with his hand over his eyes, and laughed once, silently, into his own palm, the way a man laughs when the thing he has been most afraid of for a month sits up in a chair and starts issuing threats.

They were not mirrors. That was the first thing anyone said about them, and everyone who said it thought they were being clever, and they were all quoting Wylla, who had said it in the first hour, holding them both.

“Not one child in two skins,” she had said. “Two children in one clutch. They’re not the same coin, lording. They’re the two faces of it — and you’ll never get one to lie flat without turning the other up.”

Daena was the elder, by something less than an hour, and made the most of it.

She had her mother’s hair — silver, fine, already thickening — and through it, at the left temple, a starburst of Baratheon black: a spray of dark that grew in a stubborn cowlick, refusing every comb Marra owned, standing up in a small defiant crest whenever she had been rolling. Her brows were her father’s, dark and level and improbable on so young a face; and the left one was cut through, cleanly, by a narrow slash of silver, as though a knife of light had been drawn across it. Her eyes were storm-blue, bright and direct, and they arrived at your face without preamble and stayed there.

And her mouth was Aerion’s. Precisely his: the same haughty architecture, the same fine dangerous line that had ended careers in three kingdoms and closed a Reach lord’s household by post.

She used it, almost exclusively, to smile.

“Storm and dragon fought over that one,” said a Marcher lady at the churching feast, sighing over the cradle, meaning to be gracious.

“Both won,” said the consort of Storm’s End, without turning around, and went on with what he was doing, and the lady went away and repeated it to four people, and by spring it was the coast’s own line, said with a coastal pride nobody could have explained.

Daena was sturdy, and warm, and perpetually in motion. She kicked free of blankets the way convicts leave prisons. She rolled toward voices. She screamed with genuine outrage when anyone stood between her and a thing she was looking at, and the offense was never the interruption; it was the obstruction of the view. She hated lying down when she might be held upright, and hated being held when she might be crawling, and would work her way to the edge of any lap she found herself in with the patient industry of water finding a crack in a wall.

She smiled early, and she smiled at everyone.

That was the thing about her that the whole household found either delightful or unbearable, depending on the hour: she smiled at scarred knights and at serving girls; at visiting lords, at dogs, at hearth-flames, at polished mail, at her mother’s rings, at Meraxes the goshawk (who did not smile back, and was, in Daena’s assessment, simply a difficult acquaintance who required more work); she reached both hands for absolutely everything, from a candle-flame to the Prince of Summerhall’s dagger-hilt, with an expression of frank and total welcome. Where Aemond, at the same age, had surveyed a stranger’s face for a full ten heartbeats before conceding the existence of the stranger, Daena assumed every creature that entered a room was fascinating until it proved otherwise, and most of them, under the assault, obliged.

She was not brave. Bravery requires knowing better. Daena Baratheon was fearless in a much simpler and more terrible way, and her mother saw it before she was three moons old and never once stopped seeing it:

She did not yet believe the world would let her fall.

Lyonel wanted that trust kept, and taught, and gently trained, the way you train a young hawk — kept whole, kept flying, given a longer creance year by year.

Aerion wanted it destroyed. Now. Before the world could take it apart itself, at a time and in a manner of the world’s own choosing, in front of her, in some hall, at some price he could not pay.

They did not agree, and the disagreement was theirs for that whole year, and they did not resolve it, and — this being that marriage — they built a household on it anyway.

Daemon was the younger, and was born, and remained, on the other face of the coin.

He was black-haired, thickly and unmistakably Baratheon, with the storm-country curl in it already — and from the right temple back through the black there ran a streak of silver-white, narrow and clean, exactly answering his sister’s slash of black, as though someone had made two children out of one bolt of cloth and been very careful to waste nothing. His eyes were violet: pale, and clear, and set in the broader bone of Lyonel’s house, so that the whole architecture of his face was his father’s, and refined — the width narrowed, the heaviness drawn fine — into something that was, unmistakably, from the first sennight, and to the private and unspeakable dread of the man who owned it, Aerion’s face.

Not as Aemond was Aerion’s face. Aemond was a copy from the same mint, and had been from the first hour, and the realm had long since made its jokes. Daemon was the same face translated — the same beauty arrived at down a different road, storm-built, blue-shadowed, half a stranger — and the effect was, in a way nobody in that keep ever managed to explain to anyone who had not seen it, considerably more unsettling.

People stopped talking when they saw him. That began in his second moon and never stopped.

Daena’s expressions were open, and immediate, and entirely without government: she felt a thing, and the thing was on her face, and the face was a proclamation. Daemon’s were considered. He watched before he smiled. He was not a solemn child — that was the mistake strangers made, and it cost them — he was a child who had, apparently, decided at some point in his first fortnight that a smile was a thing one gave for a reason; and when he chose to spend it, the smile that arrived was slow, and sweet, and complete, and it disarmed grown men in armor, and it made his mother’s eyes narrow every single time.

He was affectionate. He was also selective, and the selection was his, and no one had a vote.

He pressed himself flat against Lyonel’s chest and took fistfuls of his clothing in both hands and held on like a man in rigging. He slept most readily against Aerion’s heartbeat, and would sleep nowhere else at all if he could hear it in the room. And he tolerated his elder siblings according to a private order of precedence that no adult in that keep ever fully mapped, though Marra tried, and left notes.

Maegor was safe. Loud, vast, entirely harmless, a weather event with a name; Daemon slept through him from the first week.

Visenya was respected. When she came near the cradle he woke, and watched her, and did not object to anything she did, and did not take his eyes off her either.

Aemond was fascinating, and would become, in time, the great strange loyalty of his life.

And Daena belonged to him.

That was not sentiment. It was, from the beginning, the plainest fact in the nursery, and the household organized itself around it the way sailors organize themselves around a rock they cannot move. If a nurse carried Daena out of a room and left him in it, Daemon became inconsolable — not fretful; inconsolable, a small implacable grief that no rocking, no food, no warmth, and no other pair of arms in the castle could touch, and that ended the instant she came back through the door and could be reached. If she cried, he cried in answer, without knowing why, in a kind of loyal echo. If an elder sibling took something out of her hands, Daena forgot it in nine heartbeats, and Daemon did not forget it for a fortnight, and made this known, at the next opportunity, to the sibling, with his eyes.

They squabbled before either could speak. Daena crawled over him as though he were furniture she was fond of; stole from him without malice and without hesitation; woke him from dead sleep by lying on his head. He objected bitterly, at volume, and then — this was the part that undid people — went on lying there and let her.

And separated too long, both of them fell apart.

“It is a clutch,” Aerion said, watching them sleep in the great new cradle with Daena’s heel against her brother’s ribs and Daemon’s fist closed in her sleeve. “That is all it is. Dragon eggs from the same clutch are stacked together in the sand and they warm each other, and if you take one out too long the other goes cold. It is not sentiment. It is husbandry.”

“Mm,” said Lyonel Baratheon, who was already looking at something further down that road, and who said nothing else about it for another five moons.

The names were announced together, in the sea-facing rooms, before Maester Harmund and the officers of the household, in the manner that house had used since Visenya; and Maester Harmund, who had survived Aemond and believed himself thereby fortified against anything the world might bring, discovered his error.

“Daena,” said the consort of Storm’s End. “And Daemon.”

The quill did not stop this time. Maester Harmund had learned. Maester Harmund simply closed his eyes for the space of one long breath, in the manner of a man watching a wave come over the bow of a ship he has been assured is unsinkable, and then wrote them both down in his fairest hand, and blotted them, and said, faintly, “Shall I have the copies made at once, my lord consort, or would you prefer the ravens leave after the household has eaten?”

“Immediately,” said Aerion. “They’ll digest better on an empty stomach. And Harmund — you’re improving. I had hoped for hysteria and I have got dry insolence. This house is corrupting you.”

“It is, my lord consort,” said Maester Harmund, “at speed,” and went to arm the ravens.

The realm, when it read them, reacted as though a rebellion had been declared out of a birthing bed.

Daena was bad. Daena the Defiant — the caged princess; the king’s sister shut up in the Maidenvault for the crime of being unmanageable; who had gone out over a wall regardless and come back with a child in her and would not name the father, and had died still refusing to be told what she was for; and who had borne, out of all that defiance, one black-haired boy called Daemon Blackfyre.

Daemon was not bad. Daemon was a wound.

The realm’s own king had put down the Blackfyre Rebellion twelve years before; there were men living, and men serving, and men on the small council, who had stood on the Redgrass Field; there were widows in every one of the Seven Kingdoms who could name the hour; and half the great houses had cousins on the wrong side of it who had been quietly not mentioned at family tables ever since. Daemon Blackfyre was treason. Daemon Blackfyre was beauty, and a black sword, and a bastard’s claim, and a realm cut down the middle, and thirty thousand dead in a single afternoon on the grass.

And the consort of Storm’s End had just hung the name on a newborn son of House Baratheon — a house whose blood ran back through Rhaenyra, and whose lord sat the Stormlands, and whose children were, whatever the letters patent said, dragonseed — and had done it in the same breath as Daena.

“Are you,” said Lyonel Baratheon, into a very long silence in their own rooms that night, “starting a war? From the bed? Because I’d like some notice, love. There are levies to raise, and I’ll want my armor out of the—”

“They sound well together.”

“Aerion.”

“They do. Say them aloud. Daena. Daemon. It is a matched set; it has balance; there is not a septon in Oldtown with an ear that fine—”

“Aerion.”

The consort of Storm’s End looked at the fire for a while.

“Daena the Defiant,” he said at last, in an entirely different voice, “was put in a room. For years. By her family. Because she would not be governed, and because she was inconvenient, and because the shape of her life had been agreed upon by other people before she was born, and she declined to occupy it — so they shut her in a room, my lord, and the realm has spent seventy years finding it charming.” His hand had gone flat on the arm of the chair; the rings were very still. “And Daemon Blackfyre was told, his whole life, in a thousand small courteous ways, that he was very fine, and very beloved, and very nearly — and then the door was closed in his face by his own blood, politely, with excellent reasons; and he went and got thirty thousand men killed trying to open it, because no one had ever once told him plainly what he was. Caged, and denied. That is the whole of it. That is what those two names mean, and the realm can faint into its soup all it likes.”

He turned around.

“I am not going to cage her,” said Aerion Baratheon. “Not for her own good, not for the realm’s peace, not for anything. And I am not going to leave him uncertain of a single thing — not one, not ever, not for an hour. They will have their names, and they will have them plainly, out loud, from the first day, and they will grow up hearing exactly what happened to the last two people who bore them and exactly why it will not be happening in this house. That is not a rebellion, my lord. It is a warning notice, and I have posted it where the realm can read it, which is the only place I have ever posted anything.”

Lyonel Baratheon was quiet a moment.

Then he crossed the room, and put his hand on the back of his husband’s neck, and set his brow against his brow, and said:

“Then they’ll want improving, both names. Poor things — they’ve had a hard century.” He straightened. “Enter them, and let them be spoken in this hall until they’re only the children’s. That’s how a name gets taken off the realm and given to a person. It’s slow. It works. Ask your Aemond in twenty years.”

And that was the whole of the argument, and Lord Swann’s raven of horror was answered with a recipe, and the small council’s letter of concern was read aloud at supper for the general benefit, and the High Septon was informed, in writing, that the consort of Storm’s End would be delighted to receive instruction on the naming of children from any man who had ever had one.

The raven from Summerhall came a fortnight later, six words in the iron hand, and went into the framing wall by acclamation of the guardroom:

Strong names. Both. Again. — M.

The maester raised the matter of wet nurses on the ninth day, and lived, which says a great deal for Harmund’s footwork.

He did it properly — in writing, through Marra, at a distance, having learned the whole of his craft on this one subject over six years — and he made the case as well as it can be made: that the consort had come through a two-day labor and a great deal of blood; that he had, in Wylla’s own estimate, spent more of himself in that autumn night than in the three deliveries before it together; that nursing one child draws on a body the way a siege draws on a granary; and that nursing two, at once, through a winter, while recovering from what he had recovered from, would demand more of him than any carrying yet — and that the keep contained four healthy women, at that very hour, whose milk was in and whose loyalty was beyond question, and who would count it the honor of their lives.

It was a good letter. It was, in fact, correct in every particular. Wylla, consulted, said so.

Aerion Baratheon read it twice, and heard exactly one sentence in it, which was: we do not believe you are able.

The explosion took the better part of an hour and cost two panes and the last of Marra’s patience. The doctrine came out entire, hardened by six years and three children and never once dented: that his milk was his children’s by right and by blood; that the blood of the dragon quenches the blood of the dragon and nothing else does; that he had been given to a wet nurse himself, at Summerhall, on the third day, and could remember — could remember, and had never once said so aloud before that hour, and said it then in a voice like a blade being drawn — the exact color of the woman’s kirtle, and nothing else about her, nothing, not her name, not her face; and that not one child of his body would spend one hour of its life at a breast that had been hired.

“And that,” he finished, standing in the middle of the room with the letter in his fist and his color very high, “is the end of it, and if any of you raise it again I shall—”

“I want you alive.”

The consort of Storm’s End stopped.

Lyonel Baratheon had not risen. He was still sitting where he had been sitting, in the low chair by the fire, with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging loose between them and his eyes on the floor; and when he looked up his face was not the wall’s face at all. “That’s all it is. That’s the whole of the letter, if you strip Harmund’s Citadel manners off it — and I’ll tell you plainly, since we’re shouting: I don’t care whether they take milk from you or from a woman in the village or from a goat. I want you alive, Aerion. I have wanted it very badly for one moon. I stood in that room for two days—” and he stopped, and mastered it, and went on, level, “and there is a thing I know that you do not know, and I told you I’d not tell you, and I won’t. But it is standing behind me at every meal I watch you not eat. So: nurse them. Nurse them both; I’d not take that from you for a kingdom, and I’d fight the maester and the Citadel and the Faith for you over it, and win. But do not ask me to watch you spend yourself down to nothing out of pride, on my children, in my house, while I stand there being tactful. I’ve a limit, and I have found it, and it is here.”

The fire went on with its business for a while.

“…They are my children too,” said Aerion, but the silver had gone out of it.

“They are. And I am not the one saying you can’t. I’m the one saying you can’t do it alone, on no sleep, on a third of a supper, while walking the whole wall on a Thursday to prove a point to a castellan who already fears you. Those are different sentences, love. You’ve been hearing the first one your entire life and you cannot hear the second one when it’s said, and I’ll go on saying it anyway, because I’m slow, and because it’s true.”

The treaty took two days to draft and was, both parties agreed afterward, the most disgraceful capitulation of Aerion Baratheon’s public life.

He would nurse both twins himself. That was not negotiable and was not negotiated; it went into the first article in the letter-opener’s own hand. In exchange — the word he used, invariably, was in exchange, and later, when telling it, under duress — he would eat what Wylla put in front of him and eat all of it, and be seen to; he would sleep whenever the twins slept, at whatever hour of the day that fell, without argument, without letters, and without reading; he would surrender to Marra, to the stewards, to the nurses, and to his own husband every task in that household that did not require his particular person; and he would submit to Wylla’s hand and Wylla’s scale once a sennight, in private, without complaint.

He complained about the clause forbidding complaint for four moons.

He referred to the treaty, in company, as the occupation; to the meals as the tribute; to the enforced sleeping as the internment; and to his husband, on the days when the sleeping was enforced, as the gaoler, in a voice that carried; and he kept every article of it, to the letter, for a year — because the articles were enforced by a man who did not shout, did not threaten, did not bargain, and simply did not move, and who could stand in a doorway with a bowl of broth in his hand at the hour of the wolf until dawn, and would, and had.

“You are enjoying this,” Aerion informed him, from the bed, at noon, with a nursing infant on either side and his hair down and murder in his eye.

“I am not enjoying it. I’m seeing to it.” Lyonel took the empty bowl. He was — and there was no possible way to argue about it — smiling. “There’s a difference.”

“There is no difference. You are the same creature at grain-tallies. You have that look. You had that look at the Even-Measure.”

“Aye, well,” said the Lord of Storm’s End, going out with the tribute, “I like a full granary.”

And out of all that fighting came the picture the household kept.

They kept it the way houses keep the pictures that turn out, later, to have been the whole meaning of a season: the consort of Storm’s End at the great table in the small council chamber, with a twin at either breast, dictating.

He gave the arrangement no ceremony whatever, which was the entire point of it. The nursing hours fell where they fell, and the council’s business fell where it fell, and the two of them met, as they always had, in his lap; and he had ceased, sometime around Visenya, to consider that any business of the Seven Kingdoms. So the tariff on Tarth wool was renegotiated over Daena’s head. The dispute at Bronzegate — two brothers, one mill, forty years — was settled by a consort with a child on each arm and one silver-and-black head slipping steadily down toward his elbow, and settled well, by a judgment that both brothers signed. A letter of exquisite and lasting cruelty was composed at that table for a Reach lord who had been unwise in print, dictated in an undertone so as not to wake the sleeping one, which improved it beyond measure.

Daena fed the way she did everything: greedily, impatiently, without dignity, and at speed. She kicked. She got a fist into her mother’s hair and hauled on it as though ringing for a servant. If a pause was necessary — a burp, a change, an interruption from a lord who did not know when to stop talking — she registered her outrage in a bellow that could be heard in the yard, and was heard, and was reported, at first, as an emergency.

Daemon fed slowly, and with one condition, which was never once waived. There had to be a hand on him — his own hand, closed in the silk of his mother’s shoulder, or laid flat and warm against his mother’s skin — and if it was moved, he stopped, and waited, with terrible patience, until it could be put back. And his eyes, all the while, tracked his sister: across the room in a nurse’s arms, over on the far side of his mother’s body, down at the elbow going to sleep. If Daena was carried away before he had finished, he did not cry, and he did not stop feeding, and he did not once look at the room.

He looked at the door she had gone through, until she came back through it.

The lords learned to manage. Most of them managed by looking fixedly at the middle distance and speaking a little too loudly, which fooled no one, and which the consort of Storm’s End permitted, with visible enjoyment, for exactly as long as it took him to decide the man was harmless. One or two could not manage at all: a Reach envoy of high birth and low nerve, in the twins’ fourth moon, first went scarlet, and then went pale, and then made the mistake of suggesting — delicately, with a little laugh, addressing himself entirely to Lord Baratheon, as though the arrangement’s principal party had temporarily left the room — that the noble consort might be more comfortable withdrawing, and that the council would of course await his convenience.

The consort of Storm’s End did not raise his eyes from the child at his breast.

“Ser,” he said, mildly, “I am extremely comfortable. It is you who are suffering, and I find I am able to bear it. The levies stand at four hundred; I have read your lord’s counter and it is arithmetic performed by a man who has never fed anything in his life; and if the sight of a child being fed by its mother distresses you, you may look at the tapestry, which is very fine, or at the door, which is very near. Now. Four hundred.”

He got four hundred. The envoy wrote an account of the interview to his lord which survives, and which concludes, in a hand that had clearly steadied by the third page: He conducted the whole of it so, my lord, and settled the matter to his own advantage inside the hour, and I am forced to record that I have never in my life seen anything half so terrible, and that I would trust that man’s word before any lord’s in the Reach.

And in the window recess, all that winter, saying nothing, stood Aemond.

He was rising two, and he was being weaned, and the timing of it was a cruelty nobody had chosen and nobody could undo. He had been the last child in that house to have his mother to himself, and he had had him utterly — the armored hour turned inside out and given back as a whole first year, the councils, the mews, the long unhurried evenings at the sea-window with a silver head asleep on a silver shoulder — and he had been, at eighteen moons, still going to the breast at night, because Aerion nursed his children long and would have gone on nursing that one until the child himself grew bored of it out of pure disdain for the wet nurse he had never had.

Then, in one autumn night, there were two more; and there was not enough of anyone left to go around; and Aemond Baratheon, who was clever, and watchful, and two years old, drew the only conclusion the evidence supported.

He did not have a tantrum. Maegor would have had a tantrum; Maegor, at two, had had tantrums that were still spoken of. Visenya would have conducted an audit and issued findings. Aemond simply — withdrew, quietly, over about three weeks, the way a garrison withdraws in good order from a position it has decided cannot be held.

He stopped climbing into laps. That was the first sign, and only two people in the keep noticed it, and one of them was a Dornishwoman of sixty who noticed everything. He became polite. That was the second sign, and it terrified the household, because polite in a two-year-old is not a virtue, it is a symptom — he said thank you to nurses; he waited, standing, without asking, until someone thought to lift him; he began to eat his porridge without being reminded and to go to bed when told, and Marra, reporting this in the passage in a whisper, was white to the lips. He watched the twins nurse from the far side of the room with his carved dragon in both fists and his face perfectly composed, for as long as it took, every time, and never came closer, and never once asked.

And he stopped asking to be held. Altogether. Because he had concluded — with the pitiless clean logic of a child who has done the arithmetic and got a correct answer from a false premise — that there was no room.

Aerion found him on the eleventh day of it, under the great table in the small hall, in the dark between the trestles, sitting bolt upright with the wooden dragon clutched to his chest in both arms.

He was four weeks out of that bed. He could not kneel and get up again without help and he knew it. He got down on the floor of his own hall anyway — slowly, badly, with one hand on the table-leg and his teeth set and a sound coming out of him that he would have flayed any man in the Seven Kingdoms for hearing — and he lay down full length on the cold stone in the dark under the table, and put his head on his arm, and looked at his son.

Aemond looked back at him. He did not move.

For a long time neither of them said anything, and the hall went on above them, and the fire made its noises, and two small silver faces regarded each other in the dark.

“They took your cradle,” said Aerion at last.

Aemond’s chin came up a fraction.

“They did. Both of them, and it was yours, and nobody asked you. They have taken your cradle, half your blankets, your place at the fire, most of your nurses, and every hour of sleep in this castle — I have not slept since harvest; I am composed entirely of spite and broth — and they will go on taking things, my love, that is what they are, they are two very small thieves and one of them has your father’s shoulders.” He watched the small face. “Say the thing you are not saying, Aemond. This house lets people say the thing.”

The dragon’s carved wings creaked in the small fists.

“…Two new,” said Aemond Baratheon.

“Two new. Yes.”

And then, in the flat, precise, unhurried voice that was already, at two, so exactly his mother’s that it stopped the breath in his mother’s chest — no tremble in it, no plea, nothing but a small clerk reading out a total he had arrived at alone, in the dark, under a table:

“Because I was not enough.”

The rage that went through Aerion Baratheon under that table was the whitest of his life. It was up and moving before he had drawn breath — it wanted a name, it wanted the nurse, the septa, the fool, the mouth, whoever had said it, whoever had let it be said in his hearing, and it wanted them in the yard within the quarter-hour, and it was, for one blazing instant, entirely prepared to take the hall apart to find them —

— and then it went out. All at once. The way a fire goes out when the door of the cellar is shut.

Because nobody had said it. He knew that with total certainty within two heartbeats, and he knew how he knew, and the knowing was the coldest thing that had happened to him since the windless night. Nobody had said it. Nobody had needed to. The child had built it himself, out of nothing, out of a shut door and a full room and his own excellent mind — the way a boy of six had once built, out of a corridor and a green rug and a father who left rooms, an entire cathedral of a conclusion that had taken sixteen years and one Stormlander to pull down; and there was not a soul alive in the Seven Kingdoms who understood the architecture of that particular fear better than the man lying on the floor.

“Come here,” said Aerion.

Aemond did not move.

“*Aemond.* Come here to me.”

He came — cautiously, sideways, one hand out and the dragon still clutched in the other — and was taken hold of, and pulled in, and arranged along his mother’s chest on the cold stone under the table, silver head under a silver chin, and held there so hard that he squeaked; and Aerion Baratheon put his mouth against his son’s hair and said, to the underside of his own high table, in the voice for the hawk and the skull and the very small:

“Now hear me, and hear it as law, because it is law, and it is the oldest law in this house and it was made for you before you were born.

“You were not the reason. There is no arithmetic in the world in which you are the reason for anything, and I will tell you what the reason was: your father and I wanted more of what we already had, because what we already had was you, and your brother, and your sister — and a household is not a cup, my love. It does not fill up. There is no line on the side of it where the last child fits and after that it spills. It is a hall. And every soul that comes into it makes it bigger, and I have the accounts to prove it and I am very good at accounts.

“They have taken your cradle. They have not taken me. I was yours before they came.” He tipped the small chin up with two fingers so that the pale violet eyes had to meet his own, and said it deliberately, one word at a time. “I am yours now. And I shall still be yours when you are old, and hideous, and far too proud to admit you ever needed me at all.”

Aemond considered this for some time, under the table, with the whole of the gravity of two years.

“I won’t be hideous,” he said.

Aerion looked at him: the face, his own face, minted new, entirely composed, having taken the one point in the entire speech which it judged to be in error and corrected it.

“No,” he agreed, unsteadily. “No. I suppose you will not.”

They lay there a while longer, the two of them, on the floor of the small hall, in the dark under the table, until Marra came looking with a candle and stopped dead at the sight and went away again without a word, and told no one for eleven years.

The ritual began that same night, and it lasted for years, and it was the making of that child.

He did not nurse. That door was shut and Aemond, being Aemond, never once tried it again after it was explained to him — but at the blue hour every evening, when the twins were fed and Maegor was roaring somewhere and Visenya was auditing the guard, a small silver figure came to the sea-window without being sent for and was lifted, without a word, into his mother’s lap; and lay along him with his ear directly over his mother’s heart; and heard it. That was the whole of the arrangement, and the child had worked out its terms himself and had never had to state them: he was not being fed. He was being listened to, and he was hearing the sound that had been the whole of the world for the first year of his life, and it was there, and it was his, and no one else was in the chair.

And Aerion told him stories. In High Valyrian — which the older children had learned as a lesson and which Aemond, alone of all of them, learned that winter the way a man learns weather, by living in it — the old stories, the ones out of the libraries of a family that kept every account of itself: the Fourteen Flames; the freehold and the folly; dragons over the Rhoyne; the ones who were monsters in the histories and had been something else in life. He told them to a two-year-old, at length, unedited, in a dead tongue, because he had decided, on the floor under a table, that this particular child was going to grow up knowing exactly where he came from, and exactly what had been done to the people who wore his face, and exactly who had lied about it.

And within a fortnight of the ritual’s beginning, there was a second listener.

Daemon began to watch Aemond.

Not the way he watched Visenya (respect) or Maegor (sleep). He watched him the way he watched doors his sister had gone through — with total, unhurried, personal attention — and it began at the blue hour, from the crook of Lyonel’s arm across the room, violet eyes fixed on the small silver figure in the mother’s lap and the low unfamiliar tongue going on and on; and it did not stop; and by midwinter Daemon Baratheon would not settle in the evenings unless he had been carried close enough to see him.

Aemond, informed of this by Marra, looked coldly across the nursery at the enormous eyes regarding him from the cradle.

“He may listen,” said Aemond Baratheon, two years old, in his mother’s exact voice.

He was the first person outside the clutch that Daemon ever chose. He was also, in the end, the last one who never had to be told what the choosing cost.

By the second and third moons, the twins had built a language, and no one else was ever fluent in it.

It was not words; it was not near words; it was a settled system of position, breath, and complaint, and the nurses came up against it the first week and never got the better of it in a year. Placed at opposite ends of the nursery, both wailed. Placed in one cradle, Daena kicked her brother in the head at some point in every night and Daemon woke roaring, and then both of them slept, deeply, for six hours, which no nurse in that keep could explain and none of them dared disturb. Daena turned toward the sound of Daemon breathing the way a plant turns to a window. Daemon, asleep, reached — and if the reach found a fistful of his sister’s sleeve, he sank; and if it found nothing, he woke, and did not go back down until it did.

When one woke, the other woke, generally within the quarter-hour, and generally in support.

“The cradles cannot be apart,” the head nurse reported to the consort, in despair, in the second moon, “and they cannot be together, m’lord, and I have run out of rooms—”

Aerion ordered a new cradle built.

It was delivered in the third moon, and it was, by any honest reckoning, absurd: a great low broad thing of oak and cedar, twice the width of any cradle in the Stormlands, with a rail down the middle that came out, and a second rail that could be put in, and rockers a grown man had to test with his boot, and the family arms at the head of it, and space in it for two children to be near each other and still be beyond the reach of a heel.

Lyonel Baratheon looked at it for a long moment when it arrived in the nursery.

“That’s not a cradle. That’s a small ship.”

“It is a cradle.”

“It has a keel, love. It has more beam than the fishing boats at Weeping Town. If you put a mast in that thing you could run wool to Tarth—”

“Stormlanders,” said the consort of Storm’s End, “would know a great deal more about ships if they did not habitually build their castles directly against the cliffs and then affect astonishment when the sea eats their cousins. It is a cradle, my lord. Get out of it.”

“I’m testing the rockers.”

“You are lying in it.”

“It’s a very good cradle,” said Lyonel Baratheon, from inside it, with his boots hanging over the side and both twins deposited on his chest by an obliging Maegor, and the household lost the whole of that afternoon.

Maegor appointed himself guardian of the ship on the day it arrived, and held the post, at five, with total seriousness and almost no practical competence.

His system had three parts. He sang to it — loudly, and badly, and at length, and chiefly songs from the guardroom that no one had ever taught him and everyone denied teaching him, and the twins slept through all of them like sailors. He reported every noise from within it as an emergency, at a volume that reliably created one. And he attempted, twice, to introduce weapons into the cradle for the twins’ defense, on the sound reasoning that they had none of their own: the first time a wooden practice sword, laid ceremonially at Daena’s side, where she found it, and beat her brother with it; the second time a real dagger, which he had thought about very carefully and had blunted himself, with a stone, over the course of an entire afternoon, before he was intercepted by his sister approximately four feet from the nursery door.

Visenya took it out of his hand without breaking stride.

“No.”

“It’s blunt, I made it—”

“It’s iron, and she eats things, and you are a fool,” said Visenya Baratheon, four years old, and confiscated the dagger, and reported the incident to no one, which Maegor understood, correctly, to be the greatest act of love of his life to that point.

Visenya’s guardianship was of another order entirely, and she never once called it that.

She corrected the nurses. She checked the blankets — every night, personally, the last thing before her own bed, an inspection so thorough that the household eventually stopped remaking the beds before she came, on the grounds that she would only do it again. She woke adults, twice that winter, at black hours, because a breathing sound had changed in a way she did not like; and she was wrong the first time, and was not wrong the second, and Wylla of the Tor, coming up the stair at speed in her shift to find a four-year-old standing over a cradle with her chin out, said only, “Good girl. Move,” and got the child breathing again inside three minutes with a steam-kettle and a foul-smelling cloth, and afterward sat down on the floor rather suddenly, which the household did not speak of either.

“I don’t like babies,” Visenya informed the room, generally, that same night.

Nobody in the room contradicted her. Nobody in the room believed her. Aemond, from the window recess, said, “Mm,” in a tone so exactly like his mother’s that Marra had to leave.

And Aemond sat beside the cradle, in the evenings, and said nothing at all.

That was his whole participation for a moon: a small silver figure on a stool, at the rail, with a book he could not yet read or a dragon he would not put down, watching the two of them the way he watched everything. Daemon studied him back, unblinking, for the length of entire evenings. Daena grabbed for him whenever he came within reach and, when she could not reach, shouted at him about it.

And one evening in the fourth moon, without ceremony, Aemond Baratheon slipped his carved dragon through the rails of the ship and left it there.

It was his. It had been his since his first nameday. It went everywhere he went; he slept with it in his fist; he had once, at eighteen moons, bitten a nurse over it.

Daena had it in her mouth inside four heartbeats.

Daemon put one hand flat on top of it and held it there — not taking it from her, not pulling; simply covering it, a small proprietary palm laid over the whole transaction, establishing something for the record — and looked up at his brother.

Aemond looked at the two of them for a long moment: his dragon slimed to the elbows in one twin, pinned under the paw of the other, both of them gazing back at him with placid and total confidence.

“They are ruining it,” he said, to his mother, deeply and formally offended, at the door.

“They are,” Aerion agreed.

“…It’s all right,” said Aemond, and went to bed.

Two more carved dragons — a great black one and a smaller grey one, from the same hand as the first, at a price the steward entered under sundries and did not query — arrived in the nursery a fortnight later, and were given to the twins, and Aerion Baratheon declared, publicly and repeatedly and to anyone who raised the matter, that he had no notion whatsoever how Aemond’s first dragon had found its way into that cradle, and that the nurses were plainly not to be trusted, and that the whole affair was a mystery of the sort one simply had to live with.

Aemond kept his dragon. He also — the household noted it, and hoarded it — never once took it back out of the ship at night.

Daena loved her father the way the coast loves a gale.

He was the biggest thing in her world and he made the most noise and he could put her higher than the room, and from the fifth moon on she greeted his arrival anywhere with a full-body detonation of joy — both arms up, both legs kicking, the whole small frame going off like a signal beacon, shrieking, at a pitch that took the hall’s dogs out from under the tables. She pulled his beard with both fists and hauled. She got a hand into his hair and used it as a bridle. She rode his shoulders through the yard at eight moons, screaming with the pure ecstasy of altitude, while her father held one ankle in each enormous fist and the master-at-arms turned away with his fingers pressed to his eyes.

Daemon’s attachment to Lyonel Baratheon was of another kind entirely, and it was, in the end, the more dangerous of the two, and it took him about four moons to build.

It began at councils. He was carried in, at first, because he would not settle in the nursery when the room’s two largest bodies were elsewhere, and he was set down against his father’s chest as an expedient — and he stopped crying instantly, and pressed himself flat, and took a fistful of the Lord of Storm’s End’s collar in each hand, and went to sleep in the middle of a discussion of the winter levies with an expression of such profound and settled proprietorship that Ser Arstan lost the thread of his own sentence.

After that he lived there.

He gripped Lyonel’s thumb in both hands, and held on, and would not be moved. He watched Lyonel’s face while other men were speaking — not the speakers; his father; measuring, always, what the great weathered face did when a man said a thing, which was, Marra observed to Wylla in the passage, the single most disquieting habit she had ever seen in a creature that could not yet sit up unaided. And by the sixth moon he had learned the whole shape of it, and had begun, without one word, to court.

He smiled when Lyonel came into a room. That was the beginning. But he did not smile at once — he waited, with a patience that no child of that age ought to have possessed, until his father’s eyes had come around and found him and had been looking for the space of a breath — and then he smiled: slow, and sweet, and entire, up out of the crook of a nurse’s arm, aimed like a shaft.

Lyonel Baratheon was defenseless. He knew he was defenseless; he said so; he said it aloud, in the hall, to men who could give him no help whatsoever. “He’s doing it again,” he would say, faintly, halting mid-sentence with a treaty in his hand. “Look at him. He waited. He waited until I saw him and then he — Arstan, he’s managing me—” and he would cross the hall, and pick his son up, and be gripped by the collar in two fists, and go back to the treaty with a small black-and-silver head jammed under his jaw, entirely conquered, absolutely aware of it.

“Favoritism,” Aerion observed, from the other end of the table, without looking up.

“It is not.”

“It is the most naked favoritism I have ever witnessed and I was raised at court. You gave him your dagger to hold.”

“He was reaching for it—”

“He reaches for everything; he is nine moons old; last week he reached for a brazier. You have four other children, my lord, several of whom would be astonished to learn there is a lap in this castle.”

Lyonel Baratheon set down the treaty.

“Let us have the whole account, then,” he said, “since we’re auditing. He sleeps under your chin. Not near it. Under it, in your bed, in the small hours, and I have twice had to eat my breakfast standing up because there was a child asleep on my chair and you would not have him moved. You permit him to pull at that silver-thread collar that came from Myr and cost more than my horse — no, don’t, I’ve seen you let him — you have threatened three servants for waking him, one of them by name, in writing—”

“Those things,” said the consort of Storm’s End, “are entirely unrelated.”

“Oh, aye,” said Lyonel Baratheon.

He also became his mother’s accomplice, and that took rather longer to become true, because at the outset the whole of it was invention.

Aerion had always narrated his children. It was one of the great pleasures of his life and he had done it since Maegor: assigning motives, drafting speeches, providing a running account of the infant mind for the benefit of the room, in the voice of a herald reading out a declaration of war. But Maegor’s narration had been weather and Visenya’s had been law, and Daemon’s, from the first moon, was something else, and the household noticed it before Aerion did.

When Daemon turned his face from an ugly knitted cap sent by a Marcher lady, Aerion informed the room that the child had taste, and that it was a mercy somebody in this house did.

When Daemon regarded a visiting lord across the hall with a long, cool, unblinking stare and then looked away, Aerion announced that his son had judged the man and found him wanting, and that he would be following the boy’s guidance in the matter of the mill dispute.

When Daemon, being burped over a shoulder in a crowded solar, brought up a quantity of milk directly onto the sleeve of a septon who had recently been unwise on the subject of omegas in governance, and then — having been turned around — looked at the septon and smiled, Aerion Baratheon laughed until he had to sit down, and told the story at three consecutive suppers, and improved it each time, and would say to his dying day that the insult had been deliberate and that he had never been prouder.

It was all nonsense. Everyone knew it was nonsense. It was the family’s own particular way of loving a child out loud.

And then, somewhere between the ninth moon and the first nameday, it began — quietly, and in small ways, and unmistakably — to stop being nonsense.

He learned to hide things. That was first. A stolen spoon, a bright button, a jewel worked loose from somebody’s hem: not thrown, not chewed, not waved about, but put — under a cushion, behind a chest-leg, into the deep fold of a hanging — with an unhurried air of ordinary business, and left there, and remembered, and gone back to, three days later, in front of a nurse who nearly took a fit.

He learned distraction. This was worse, and it was in service of his sister, which was worse again. The nursery’s account, corroborated by three witnesses and disbelieved by everyone who heard it: that when Daena set out across the floor toward one of the four or five places she was forbidden — the fire, the stair, the hound, the open chest — Daemon would, with excellent timing, produce something. A cry. A cough. A fall (he did not fall; he was careful; but he could produce one). Once, memorably, a smile of such devastating sweetness, aimed directly up at the nurse leaning over him, that the woman lost fourteen entire seconds gazing back at him and turned around to find her charge halfway up the nursery stair, and Daemon Baratheon lying exactly where she had left him, entirely at peace, looking at the ceiling.

And he learned the noise.

It was a small sound: a soft, wounded, breathy little oh — not a wail, nothing so vulgar as a wail — produced whenever he was checked or scolded or had something taken from him, and produced with the eyes going wide and the mouth going down at the corners and the whole beautiful uncanny face performing a grief so exquisite that it emptied rooms of every adult in them.

And then — and this was the thing; this was what Aerion saw, one evening, from across a solar, and what took the smile off his face as if it had been struck off with a blade — the eyes came up. Level, dry, and calm, out of the middle of the performance, to check.

To see whether it had worked.

Aerion Baratheon knew that check. He knew it in his marrow; he had invented it, or something so like it that the difference was of no interest to anyone; he had done it at Summerhall in front of septas and nurses and once, disastrously, in front of his father, at an age when he could not yet reliably work a door-latch. He knew every tool the child was reaching for, because they were his tools, laid out in the order he had laid them out himself near twenty years before: watch the room; find the softest thing in it; be beautiful at it; and then check the readings.

His first response was delight. That was the shameful part, and he never once denied it to himself: for about a fortnight he was delighted — he watched Daemon dismantle a nurse and felt something in his chest turn over with unholy joy, my son, my clever thing, my accomplice — and he found himself, in that fortnight, doing something he could not afterward explain: performing for him. Doing it a little more, in front of him. Letting a visiting lord be flayed with the letter-opener while a pair of violet eyes tracked the whole operation from a cushion with the fixed attention of an apprentice at a forge.

And then, on an ordinary evening in the eleventh moon, he watched Daemon do the small wounded oh at Maegor — at his own brother, who had taken back a ball that was his — and watched Maegor, who was six and made of thunder and could not have found guile with both hands and a lantern, go instantly and totally to pieces with remorse and hand over not only the ball but the small ivory horse he had been saving for a nameday —

— and watched Daemon accept both, and look, briefly, up.

At him.

Not at Maegor. At his mother, across the room, over the top of his brother’s bowed head: one flat, level, entirely calm violet glance, lasting perhaps a heartbeat and a half, and containing, unmistakably, the thing a young apprentice’s eyes contain when the work has gone well and the master is in the room.

Did you see?

The consort of Storm’s End went out of that solar without a word to anyone, and stood in the passage with his back against the cold stone for some considerable time.

He was not learning it out of the air. He was not learning it out of the blood, either, whatever the letters said, whatever the septons said, whatever a tribunal in a windless season had once tried to prove.

He was learning it by watching.

And he was watching, chiefly, one person; and that person had spent near seven years teaching the rest of this household to ask before it took, and to strike where the fire was earned, and had made a law and a coast and a marriage out of the difference — and had never once, in all that time, seriously considered the question that was standing in front of him now in the cold passage, wearing his own face, eleven moons old, holding a stolen ivory horse:

What do I do with a child who is like me?

He had been afraid of many things in his life and had admitted to none of them. He admitted, standing in that passage, to being afraid of this.

By the fourth moon and into the sixth, the differences between them stopped being charming and became structural, and the household stopped calling them the twins and started calling them, behind their hands, the tempests — because they were two storms out of the same sky and they came from opposite quarters.

Daena moved first. Of course she moved first. She rolled at four moons, and having discovered rolling, rolled everywhere, and could not be left on any surface with an edge; she twisted, and lunged, and hauled herself forward on her forearms across the rushes like a soldier under fire, and made the nursery door — the nursery door, at the far end of a room forty feet long — at six moons and a fortnight, and was recovered from the threshold by a nurse who had turned her back for the length of a sneeze and who never fully recovered her nerve.

She approached obstacles by attacking them. This was invariable. A chest in the way was to be climbed, and if it could not be climbed it was to be beaten. A skirt she was tangled in was to be fought. A stair was to be ascended, immediately, without regard to descent, and the descent — the discovery of the descent — cost the household two years off its collective life and Daena Baratheon precisely nothing, because she landed on her back at the bottom of three steps, considered the ceiling for a moment with an expression of scientific interest, and then rolled over and began, without any change of mood, to climb them again.

Daemon was slower, and better.

He did not crawl for a long time; he sat, and he watched her crawl; and he watched her attack the chest, and fail at the chest, and attack it again, and get over it; and then, some days later, when no one was making a fuss, Daemon Baratheon went around the end of the chest.

He hated falling. That was the difference in one word. Daena fell forty times a day and did not appear to regard it as an event; Daemon fell, and his face went white and still, and he did not cry — he almost never cried at pain, which frightened Wylla more than screaming would have — he simply sat where he had fallen with an expression of profound and personal insult, and did not attempt the thing again that day, and attempted it two days later, differently, having thought about it.

And when his body would not do what his mind had plainly already worked out — this was the one thing in the world that could make Daemon Baratheon truly, incoherently furious — he raged. Not at the object. At himself: at his own hands, his own knees, the whole ill-made apparatus that had failed to execute a plan he could evidently see with total clarity; and these tantrums were brief, and violent, and horrible to watch, and Aerion, who recognized them from the inside of his own skull, took to removing him from the room without a word when they began, and holding him, without speaking, until the fire went out.

Their looks came on together, in opposite directions.

Daena’s silver thickened and grew, and the black starburst at her temple grew with it — a spray of storm-dark in a silver sky, standing up in its stubborn crest, the despair of Marra and the delight of every soul in the keep. The silver slash through her left brow stayed. Her storm-blue eyes got, if anything, bluer, and more direct, and arrived at strangers’ faces like a hand on the shoulder.

Daemon’s black thickened into curls, and the silver-white streak at his temple sharpened against it until, in candlelight, it looked like something that had been done to him rather than something he had grown — a mark, a brand, a bolt — and his face, moon by moon, resolved itself further into the one his mother saw in mirrors, on the broader bone of his father’s house.

Put together, standing up in the same room, dressed alike, they were the two houses arguing — and losing, both, and winning, both — and the court, which loves a phrase, said so at every opportunity all that year.

“Storm and dragon fought over that pair,” said one lord too many, at one feast too many.

The consort of Storm’s End, passing behind his chair with a child on each arm, did not stop.

“Both won,” he said. “Sit down.”

Lyonel discovered, in the sixth moon, that Daena loved the air.

It began as nothing: a lift, an upward swing, a great pair of hands going straight up over a bearded head with a shrieking eight-moon-old at the top of them — and the shriek that came down was of such unmixed, transcendent, whole-souled joy that the entire yard stopped what it was doing, and the Lord of Storm’s End, being an alpha of one-and-thirty who had never in his life been able to resist that sound, did it again.

Within a fortnight there was a game.

It had a name (Lyonel called it the gull; Daena, later, in the first sentence of her life that any witness agreed on, would call it UP); and it had a whole grammar of ascent: the slow lift; the swing; the shoulder-ride at speed through the yard; and, at the summit of the thing, the toss — a hand’s breadth, no more, a great pair of hands releasing her into the air for the length of a heartbeat and taking her again out of it — and Daena Baratheon, at the top of that arc, with the whole sky above her and nothing at all beneath, laughed in a way that stopped grown men where they stood.

The consort of Storm’s End came out onto the gallery in the seventh moon, in the middle of the levies, and saw his daughter in the air.

He did not scream. Everyone who told the story afterward agreed on this, and disagreed on almost nothing else: he did not scream, and he did not run, and something in the way he came down that gallery stair emptied the entire yard in under a minute.

“Put her down.”

“She’s—”

“Put her DOWN.”

Lyonel put her down. Daena, deposited on the cobbles, immediately raised both arms again and demanded, in the only word she had, to be returned to the sky.

What followed was the worst quarrel of that year, and it was conducted in the solar with the door shut, and the household heard every word of it and pretended for a decade that it had not.

He accused him of risking their daughter’s neck for sport. Lyonel said she had never for one instant been in danger — that he had hands that could hold a warhorse, that he had never dropped anything in his life, that he had done the same for four other children and would have done it for a fifth if the fifth had liked it. Aerion said that danger did not cease to exist merely because Lyonel Baratheon was arrogant enough to command it not to; that the world was not obliged to consult his lordship’s opinion of his own hands; that stone did not care how strong he was, and neither did chance, and neither did a wet cobble, and neither did the falling, which took no notice of anybody’s confidence — and his voice, at the end of that, went up somewhere it had not been in a long time and cracked, and stopped.

And Lyonel Baratheon, who had been building an entirely reasonable rejoinder, put it down where he stood.

Because it was not about the toss. Of course it was not about the toss. He had been married six years to a man who had lost one child out of a body that had been doing everything correctly, and who had built an entire coast out of the wreckage — the food doctrine, the household book, the provision, the guards, the tally of every cough in every nursery on the floor — and who governed, and governed, and governed, in order that nothing should ever again be permitted to simply happen to anyone he loved; and here was his husband, in the yard, in front of everybody, throwing their daughter into the air and trusting the world to give her back.

He did not laugh at him. He did not, in six years, ever once laugh at that fear, and it was the greatest single act of his life.

“All right,” said Lyonel Baratheon, quietly. “Hear what I’ll do, and hear what I won’t.

“I’ll not do it again without telling you first. Not once. You’ll never come round a corner and find her in the air again as long as I live — that was mine, and it was badly done, and I’m sorry for it.

“And I’ll not stop.”

“*Lyonel*—”

“I’ll not stop, love, and I’ll tell you why, and then you may throw whatever you like at me.” He came and stood in front of him. “She trusts her body. She’s eight moons old and she trusts her own body and she trusts the hands that catch her, and there is no way in this world to give a child that if she hasn’t got it. You can only take it away. And I’ll not be the one that takes it; not from her; not to make myself easy. It’ll get taken — aye, I know it, I’m not a fool, the world will do it eventually, it does it to everyone; it did it to you, and I have spent six years watching what it cost. But I’ll be damned if I do the world’s work for it in my own yard while she’s laughing.”

The silence went a long way down.

“Trust,” said Aerion Baratheon at last, “is only the moment before the betrayal. That is all it has ever been. That is all it was for me, every single time, and I was right, my lord, that is the thing you will never understand — I was right every time, and being right is what kept me alive to marry you.”

“Aye,” said Lyonel. “And it near killed you, and it would have taken you off that cliff eventually, and you know it, because you told me so in a firelit room, and I have not forgotten one word you said to me in six years. So.” He put out his hands, palms up, in the old shape, the one that had founded everything. “Come and watch. That’s all I’m asking. Not once — every time. Every single time, and I’ll not do it if you’re not there, and when I take her out of the air I’ll put her straight into your arms, and you can see for yourself what comes down.”

The compromise was ugly, and slow, and took two moons, and it was the making of both of them.

He watched. He came out into the yard and stood at the foot of the gallery stair with his arms folded and his face like the north face of the keep, and watched his husband put his daughter into the air, and did not breathe, and got her back — warm, whole, shrieking, furious that it had ended, both hands already grasping over her mother’s shoulder for the sky she had just been taken out of.

He watched it a dozen times. Then twenty. He remained, throughout, entirely rigid — Marra swore his hands were bloodless in the sleeves — and he never once, all that autumn, said that it was permitted.

And on a bright cold afternoon in the twins’ tenth moon, at the top of the arc, with the sky behind her and her mother’s whole soul stopped dead in his chest, Daena Baratheon looked down at him — found him, deliberately, out of the entire yard, from the top of her flight — and laughed, straight at him, wide open, with her arms out and her whole self offered to the falling.

And Aerion Baratheon, against his will, and against his judgment, and against the entire architecture of his life, smiled back.

The thing with Daemon came to a head in the sixth moon, in the solar, at a perfectly ordinary hour, and its instrument was a visiting noblewoman with excellent intentions.

She was a Dondarrion, and she was fond of children, and she picked Daena up out of the rushes because Daena had crawled to her hem and hauled herself upright on it and demanded, with both arms, to be taken; and then, still talking, she carried her away across the solar to show her to the window.

Daemon watched.

That was all, at first. He was on the rug, on his belly, five feet from where his sister had been, and he did not cry and he did not move; he watched the woman’s back, and the silver head bobbing over her shoulder, and he went entirely still in the way that Aerion, in the chair by the fire, had learned in six moons to find far worse than screaming — and then, quite suddenly, the whole room smelled of him.

It was faint and it was unmistakable and every alpha, beta, and omega in that solar registered it in the same half-second: distress, sharp, bright, and personal, coming off a creature of six moons with the clarity of a struck bell. Lyonel’s head came up from the map. Marra crossed the room. And when the Dondarrion lady turned away toward the window with Daena in her arms and Daena’s face went out of view —

— Daemon began to scream.

It was not a baby’s crying. It was grief with a cause, and it went on, and it did not moderate, and it did not respond to Marra, or to the nurse, or to his father, or to the warm familiar shape of his mother’s hands; he was inconsolable in the plain and literal sense of the word — he could not be consoled, because the thing he wanted was in another woman’s arms across the room — and when the Dondarrion lady, appalled, brought Daena back and set her down beside him on the rug, he stopped.

Not gradually. Stopped, in the middle of a breath, mid-wail, like a tap being shut — and both small hands went out and closed in the cloth of his sister’s sleeve, and he lay there gripping it, shuddering, with his face against her shoulder, and did not cry again for the rest of the day.

Daena, throughout, was delighted with everyone.

“That,” said Aerion Baratheon, when the solar had emptied, with something in his voice that was very close to tenderness, “is the finest thing I have ever seen in a child of that age.”

“Is it,” said Lyonel.

Something in the way he said it turned his husband around.

“He loves her,” said Aerion. “That is what you have just watched. It is not a fault and it is not a symptom and there is nothing in it that wants correcting. They are a clutch. Eggs from one clutch lie together in the sand, my lord, and they keep each other warm, and if you take one out of the nest the other one goes cold — that is not sentiment, it is the plain nature of the —”

“They’re not eggs.”

“—the plain nature of the thing, and I do not require a Stormlander’s opinion on the subject of dragons—”

“Aerion.” Lyonel had not moved from the map table. “They are not eggs. She is not a thing that keeps him warm. She is a person, and she is going to grow up, and she is going to want the whole world — you’ve seen her; she reaches for fire, she reaches for hawks, she reaches for everything — and one day she is going to reach for something a long way from him, and he will still be exactly what he was on that rug this afternoon, and what he does about it then is being decided now, in this room, by us.”

“He is six moons old—”

“Aye. And that’s why it’s now.”

Aerion Baratheon went to the window and stood with his back to the room. Below, the sea was doing what it always did. “You are proposing,” he said, in the level silver voice, “that we teach a child not to love his sister.”

“You know I’m not.”

“That is precisely what you—”

“I am proposing,” said Lyonel Baratheon, “that we teach him he may love her as fiercely as he likes, and that it gives him no title over her whatsoever. Those two things can both be true. They have to both be true, love, or he’ll spend his whole life confusing one for the other, and it will end badly for him, and worse for her.”

“And you imagine yourself well placed to instruct anyone in that distinction,” said Aerion, turning round, and the letter-opener was out. “*You.* Who put four men on the nursery stair when a Fossoway looked at me sideways at my own table. Who has not let me walk down a corridor unescorted since the autumn. Who stood at that door for eleven hours on a stair in the Red Keep — do not stand there in your castle, my lord, wrapped in the flag of your own restraint, and lecture me about possession, because I have read you since I was six-and-ten and you are the most possessive creature I have ever met in my life.”

The room was very quiet.

“I am,” said Lyonel Baratheon.

Aerion stopped.

“I am,” he said again, without heat, and came around the table, and stood in front of him. “I’ve never once told you otherwise, and I’d not insult you by starting now. I want you where I can see you. I want to know where you are in this castle at every hour of the day, and I do know, and it isn’t because I fear for you — well, it is, but it isn’t only that. I would like to keep you in my two hands and let nothing in this world so much as look at you, and there’s a thing in me that would have done it, that first year, if I’d been another man; I could feel the shape of it; I know exactly what it is.”

He put his hands, very lightly, on either side of his husband’s face.

“That’s not the point. The point is what a man does with the thing he feels. You may feel the chain, Aerion.” His thumbs did not move. “That doesn’t mean you close it round somebody’s throat.”

Aerion Baratheon went entirely still.

He would not have been able to explain, to anyone in that keep, what happened to him in the ten heartbeats that followed. Marra, coming in with the lamps and going straight back out again, said afterward only that the consort had gone white to the mouth and had not seemed to be in the room at all.

Because he was not in the room. He was in a hall of firelit years, sitting in a chair that a century had made for him, opposite a young man in black with a sapphire where his eye should have been — I was a provision, nephew. Article and clause. He was not clever, and he was not kind, and there was no law, no word, no door, that stood between what he was owed and me — and the young dead voice went on, in that solar, in his own skull, in perfect order, the way it had gone on every night for a year and more: the hatred of the held. And: he got them on me; read the verbs; even the lie tells the truth if you read the verbs. And: I loved them sideways; do not let this hall tell you monsters cannot love; we love — we merely love like men signaling across a canyon.

And, at the very end, out of a young ruined face a hundred years cold: the first time I heard that such a word existed, and was kept, I sat in this chair and wept out of the eye they left me.

He had come out of that dream with a child in his arms and had thought — for a year and more, he had thought, with the clean satisfaction of a man who has closed a ledger — that the message had been for Aemond. The face was not the fate. Teach him the accounting. Proof by success.

He had never once considered that the hall might have been briefing him about a child who had not yet been conceived.

Daemon. Six moons old, on a rug, with a fistful of his sister’s sleeve in each hand and his whole small body shaking. Who did not cry when he was hurt and cried when she was taken. Who remembered offenses on her behalf for a fortnight. Who was learning, at that very hour, from watching his mother, that if you are beautiful and clever and you find the softest place in the room, the room will give you what you want.

Give that boy fifteen years, and a house, and a sister who wants the world.

“…Say the rest of it,” said Aerion Baratheon.

“There isn’t any rest of it.”

“There is.” His voice had gone somewhere very quiet. “You have been walking around it for five moons, my lord; you have that appalling patience; say the whole of it now, out loud, in this room, and aim it at me, because I find I would rather hear it from you than work it out for myself at three in the morning at a window, which is what I have been doing all autumn.”

Lyonel Baratheon looked at him for a long moment.

“He watches you,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. He watches you the way you watch a court — and he’s good at it, love, he’s frighteningly good at it, and he is going to be beautiful, and he is going to be clever, and he is going to want to keep the people he loves in a room where nothing can reach them. And I know exactly where he got the last one, and so do you, and it wasn’t out of the blood.” He let his hands fall. “So we teach him. That’s all. Not to feel it less — we can’t, and I’d not want it; he’d be a colder man than I’d like him to be. To hold it. To feel the chain and keep his hand off the latch, and to know, before he is old enough to be dangerous, that a person who cannot leave you was never staying with you in the first place.”

The fire went on with its business.

“That,” said Aerion Baratheon at last, “is not a lesson for Daemon.”

“No,” Lyonel agreed. “It’s for the whole house. Yourself included. That’s why it’s taken me five moons to say it.”

He did not concede. Not that night, and not that fortnight; he was Aerion Baratheon; he went out of the solar with the letter-opener still out and made a Reach envoy’s life hideous for two full days on entirely unrelated grounds.

But a sennight later, in the nursery, at the blue hour, Daena hauled herself upright on a chest at the far end of the room and set off — determined, wobbling, delighted, gone — and Daemon Baratheon, abandoned on the rug, saw her go, and the small face crumpled, and the great violet eyes went at once to his mother, who was three feet away, who had only to reach out one arm; and he raised both hands to be lifted and carried across the room to her, as he had been lifted and carried across every room in that castle for six moons.

And his mother did not carry him.

His mother came down onto the rug beside him — slowly; it still cost him; he was five moons out of a bed that had nearly kept him — and gathered him up against his chest, and sat there with him, on the floor, holding him, while he wept with outrage and grief and reached over his mother’s shoulder for a small silver head that was busy across the room, thirty feet away, entirely happy, entirely elsewhere.

“No,” said Aerion Baratheon, into his son’s hair, in the voice for the hawk and the skull and the very small, while the small body strained and shook and fought him. “No, my love. Not this time. She has gone to look at the chest — that is all she has done; there is no treason in it; the chest is very interesting and you are not, at this hour, and I am aware that you find that intolerable. So did I. So do I.” His hand moved on the small back, unhurried, steady, unmoving. “Now attend, because this is the whole doctrine and you are going to be hearing it from me for the next twenty years: I am here. She is there. You are neither of those things and you are not going to die of it, and I am not going to fetch her back to you, and I am not going anywhere, and in a little while she will come back on her own, because she always does, because she is yours and you are hers and none of that requires you to be holding her.

“Yes. Yes. I know. It is unbearable.” He pressed his mouth to the black-and-silver head, and shut his eyes. “You may be unbearably sad about it in my arms for as long as you like. That is the arrangement, small one. It is a very good arrangement and it took your father six years to teach it to me.”

It took eleven minutes. Marra timed it, from the door, not breathing.

And at the end of the eleven minutes, Daena Baratheon — having conducted a full and personal investigation of the chest, and having found it, in the end, to be a chest — turned herself around on the rug and came back across the room in her own time, at speed, with a look of enormous good cheer, and arrived, and sat down heavily against her brother’s leg, and put a hand on him.

And Daemon, wrung out, blotched, still shuddering, in his mother’s lap, reached down without lifting his head and took hold of her sleeve.

It was a very small thing. The household did not remark it. Nothing in the sea-facing rooms was different that evening, and no letters were written, and no decrees were issued, and the coast never made a story of it at all.

Aerion Baratheon sat on the floor of the nursery for a long time after both twins had crawled away, and did not get up, and when Lyonel came looking for him at supper he was still there, with his back against the leg of the great ship-cradle and his hands loose on his knees, looking at nothing.

“Eleven minutes,” he said.

Lyonel sat down on the floor beside him without a word.

“Eleven minutes,” said the consort of Storm’s End, “and I have never in my life done anything harder, and if you say one word to me about it I shall have you drowned.”

Lyonel Baratheon said nothing at all. He put his arm around him, and they sat there together on the nursery floor until it got dark.

The twins attended their first true feast in the eighth moon, and Aerion dressed them for it while announcing, at intervals, to anyone who came within range, that they were not decorations.

Daena went in pale silver-blue with black embroidery at the hem and the cuffs. Daemon went in black velvet with silver work, and violet stones sewn at the shoulder — carefully, deliberately, beyond the reach of his own hands, a precaution Marra had recommended and which was, within the hour, vindicated. Set side by side on the high table’s dais, silver-and-black and black-and-silver, they were an argument in two parts, and every eye in that hall went to them and stayed.

“They look,” said Lyonel Baratheon, from behind his cup, “like a threat delivered in two cradles.”

The consort of Storm’s End took this as praise. It had been meant as praise.

They destroyed the effect inside the hour.

Daena took possession of a dish of mashed squash and applied it to her gown, her hair, her brother, and — reaching across with the unhurried confidence of a small tax-collector — to the sleeve of Lord Buckler, who was seated in the place of honor and who received the tribute with a fixed and gallant smile. Then, having established relations, she took hold of his jeweled chain of office in both fists, and pulled.

Lord Buckler, laughing, tried to disengage.

Daena did not disengage. Daena made a noise — a low, indignant, entirely serious growl, from somewhere down in her chest — and hauled harder, and the high table lost its composure, and Lord Buckler was obliged to bend forward over his own plate at an angle that his dignity did not survive, while a nine-moon-old in silver-blue conducted a siege of his person in front of four hundred people.

And while everyone in that hall — every single soul, the lords, the servants, the guards, the parents — was watching the war for the chain, Daemon Baratheon leaned quietly out of the crook of his father’s arm and took a loose jeweled clasp off Lord Buckler’s other sleeve, and put it under the tablecloth.

Aerion saw him do it.

He was the only one who did — his eye had gone to the child out of a habit six moons old, and he caught the whole operation, from the reach to the concealment, and the small hand smoothing the cloth back down over it afterward with an unhurried air of ordinary business — and Daemon, having disposed of the article, raised his eyes, calmly, past his father, past the hall, past the entire besieged high table, and looked directly at his mother.

And smiled.

Slow, and sweet, and complete, and entirely aware.

The consort of Storm’s End was obliged to turn his face away toward the fire and hold a napkin to his mouth for the better part of a minute, and was afterward heard by two witnesses to make a sound that was, unmistakably, not a cough.

Lyonel made him give it back.

“It is spoils,” said Aerion, in the passage, holding the clasp between two fingers with the air of a man displaying a captured banner. “It was taken in the field, in open hall, from a man who did not notice. There is no law in Westeros—”

“Our son is eight moons old.”

“He is nine, and he has better instincts than half your bannermen—”

“He is not permitted,” said the Lord of Storm’s End, “to conquer my bannermen during supper.”

“You are the most tediously legal creature I have ever—”

“Give it back, love.”

He gave it back. He gave it back to Lord Buckler personally, at the high table, in front of the hall, with a speech of such glittering courtesy that Lord Buckler was heard to say, on his way out of the keep the next morning, that he did not know precisely what had been done to him at Storm’s End but that he suspected he had enjoyed it.

They found the sea in the ninth moon, both of them, in their own ways, and neither of them ever let go of it again.

Daena found it the way she found everything: with her whole body. She crawled to every window in the keep that had a sill she could reach and hauled herself up on it and shrieked at the gulls; she beat her palms flat against the stone whenever a wave went in below and sent the spray up past the glass, and roared with laughter, and beat the stone again as though she had caused it.

Daemon found it by going quiet. He would sit — propped against whatever was nearest, for as long as anyone left him there — with his violet eyes on the black water and the moving weather, and watch, for stretches of time that were not natural in a child of that age, and that made the nurses uneasy, and that his mother recognized the instant he began doing it, having spent his whole life doing it himself.

And on a wild grey afternoon in that ninth moon, the Lord of Storm’s End took all five of his children out onto the eastern sea terrace to watch a storm come in.

It was a defensible thing to do. That must be said, because Aerion Baratheon never once conceded it: the terrace was the old one, cut into the seaward face, walled to the chest in stone two feet thick, with a lip and a rail and a doorway a man could bar; it had been used by Baratheon children for eight thousand years for precisely this purpose; it was the safest place in that castle to be out in weather, and it was where Lyonel’s own father had taken him at three years old to teach him, as he put it, what the neighbors were like.

The consort of Storm’s End came looking for his family at the blue hour, was told where they were, and went up the eastern stair at a speed that had not been seen in him since the autumn.

He came out into the wind and the noise and the flying salt, and he saw:

Maegor at the rail, six years old, both fists up, roaring challenges into the gale at the top of his lungs — actual challenges, in words, the entire storm addressed by name and invited to do its worst.

Visenya at the wall, five, entirely calm, methodically testing the height of the parapet against her own head and the reach of her own arms, and having established that it was sound, testing it against Maegor’s, and finding that satisfactory too, and going back to counting the intervals between the lightning and the thunder on her fingers.

Aemond a little apart, wrapped to the eyes in a cloak he had insisted on, arranged against the wall in an attitude of profound and elaborate suffering — pretending, with total conviction, that he hated every second of it, and having chosen, unprompted, a position from which he could see the entire sky.

Daemon jammed securely against his father’s side inside the great cloak, silent, motionless, his violet eyes wide and fixed on the black water and the lightning walking up the bay — watching the storm, Marra said afterward, as though it were performing for him, and he intended to be fair about it.

And Daena Baratheon, out of the cloak entirely, up in her father’s left arm, held to the wind with her silver hair standing straight out from her head and the black starburst blown into a crest and the rain hitting her full in the face — laughing. Laughing so hard she was choking on it. Both arms out at the sea.

“*INSIDE,*” bellowed the consort of Storm’s End. “ALL OF YOU. NOW—”

The wind took it. Took the whole thing, the entire order, silver voice and letter-opener and two-and-twenty years of authority, and rolled it away down the bay like a scrap of parchment; and not one of his five children heard a word of it; and Maegor, glancing round, saw him, and waved, and turned back to the storm and roared at it again.

He crossed that terrace in a temper that would have emptied a hall, prepared to break his husband over the parapet and dismiss half the household in the doing of it.

Lyonel Baratheon turned around with a child in each arm, and put them both into his.

The twins did not consult each other, and never had to.

Daena grabbed a fistful of her mother’s hair in one hand, and took hold of the side of his face with the other — squarely, wetly, the whole small palm flat over his cheek and the fingers hooked in his ear — and pulled his head round to face the sea, and shrieked at it, delighted, and beat his shoulder with her heel, demanding that he look.

And Daemon, at the same instant, went in under his chin. Where he lived. Where he had slept every night of his life that anyone would permit it. Both fists in the collar of his robe, cold nose in the hollow of his throat, sea-wet, shaking with the cold and not caring, entirely still.

The rage went out of Aerion Baratheon like water out of a cracked jug.

And Lyonel Baratheon, without a word, unpinned his great cloak and brought it round the three of them and gathered them into his chest, and set his chin on top of his husband’s head, and turned them both to face the weather.

They stayed on the terrace.

The storm came up the bay in three great walking columns of rain and put the whole sea on its feet, and the children of Storm’s End shouted at it. Maegor bellowed. Visenya counted, and corrected the thunder when it came in early, and was ignored, and told it so. Aemond, when a fork of lightning went down into the water half a mile out and lit the entire bay green-white, forgot himself entirely for one instant and made a small ecstatic sound, and then arranged his face again immediately and pretended it had come from someone else. Daena howled at the sea with her whole body straining out of the cloak, and Daemon watched it with his ear against his mother’s heartbeat, and neither of them was frightened for one moment of that whole hour, and there was no reason on earth that they should have been, because they had been born in a castle that had been standing in this exact weather since before there were kings.

And after a while, in the middle of it, the consort of Storm’s End — the dragon-blooded creature who had been dragged to this coast against his will at six-and-ten, and had hated the sea, and had called it an argument, and had spent six years pretending to endure it —

— shouted too.

Once. Wordless. At the top of his voice, into the gale, with his daughter’s fist in his hair and his son’s face at his throat and his husband’s cloak around all three of them; and the storm took it, and gave nothing back; and Maegor Baratheon whipped round with his whole face on fire and roared in reply, and Visenya said finally, and Aemond looked away and smiled where nobody could see him.

They came in soaked to the skin, every one of them, and Wylla of the Tor met them at the head of the stair and said several things in Dornish, and made all five children drink something hot and foul, and made the parents drink it too.

Nobody caught cold.

“That,” said Aerion Baratheon at the fire that night, with a sleeping twin under each arm and his hair drying into a wild silver ruin, “was an act of criminal recklessness, and you knew what you were doing when you did it, and you did it anyway, and you will never take them up there again without me.”

“Without you,” Lyonel agreed. “Aye. Never.”

“…The wall is sound. I looked.”

“Visenya looked. Twice.”

“She is the only competent person in this family,” said the consort of Storm’s End, and put his head back against his husband’s shoulder, and shut his eyes; and the storm went on all night against the seaward wall, and inside it the whole household slept like the dead.

Near the end of the first year, on the same day, within the same quarter-hour, the twins committed their first true offenses.

It was a septa who paid for it — a new one, brought in from Blackhaven for the older children’s letters, a well-meaning, rigid, entirely unimaginative woman who had been at Storm’s End nine days and had not yet understood one single thing about the house she was in. She had it in her head that the twins should be made to sit still.

She sat Daena down. Daena got up. She sat her down again, and held her — one hand on each shoulder, firmly, not cruelly, but held, planted, pinned, while Daena’s whole small body went rigid with an outrage that was, in the household’s later and unanimous judgment, entirely predictable to any person with eyes.

Daena Baratheon bit her.

Not a nip. She got the woman’s hand as it came across her, and she bit down with everything she had, and she held on, and the septa screamed.

And Daemon — who had been on the rug four feet away, and who had watched the pinning without moving, and whose scent had gone up like a struck match the instant his sister’s face changed — got to his hands and knees, and crossed those four feet at a speed nobody had ever seen out of him, and dug his nails into the septa’s other wrist and twisted with the whole strength of both small hands.

She let go of Daena. She would have let go of anything.

By the time Marra got there, the septa was standing in the middle of the nursery bleeding from two places and shaking; Daena had removed herself to the far corner and was regarding the entire proceeding with an expression of magnificent, unrepentant satisfaction; and Daemon was sitting exactly where the septa’s feet had been, holding his sister’s discarded shoe, having achieved the objective, entirely calm.

The household — the whole of it, the guards, the kitchen, the nurses — expected the consort of Storm’s End to be delighted.

They had near seven years of evidence for that expectation. They had the framing wall. They had the letter to Lord Westerling and the Reach lord’s four minutes in the hall and aim it at me, and see what comes back. They fully expected their consort to arrive, examine the situation, and reduce the septa to salt.

He arrived. He examined the situation.

And what the household saw come over his face, standing in the door of the nursery, was something nobody there had ever seen on it before, and Marra — who had known him longest — knew it at once, and it stopped the breath in her.

It was recognition. It was not pride.

Because he had seen, in the space of one heartbeat, exactly what he was looking at, and it was not two babies making a nuisance of themselves. It was a highborn child who had been thwarted, and who had hurt somebody weaker than herself, and who had felt entirely justified in doing it, because being thwarted felt like a reason — and that child was eleven moons old and she had his mouth. And it was a boy who had watched somebody he loved be held down, and who had gone across a room and made it stop by causing pain, and who was sitting there now, calm and unmoved, holding her shoe.

He had been the first of those children at six years old, at Summerhall, with a candle and a septa’s sleeve.

He had never in his life had a chance to be the second one, because there had been nobody to be the second one for.

Lyonel Baratheon had to leave the room.

He got as far as the passage. He did not make it to the stair. Because Daena, in her corner, was giving the entire nursery a look of such colossal, unbudgeable, sunny defiance that it was very nearly a physical assault; and because Daemon, having sat placidly through the whole aftermath, had chosen the moment when the septa’s hand came free of his sister’s arm to smile — sweet, slow, complete, satisfied — and the Lord of Storm’s End, who had been raised by a man who laughed at all the wrong things and had inherited the whole of it, went out into the passage with his face working and put his forehead against the cold stone.

“*Do not.*” His husband’s voice came through the doorway like a blade. “Lyonel. Do not you dare—”

Lyonel Baratheon’s shoulders shook.

“I can hear you.”

He could hear him. So could the guard on the stair, who had to be sent away.

The consort of Storm’s End was left, therefore, to conduct the entire business alone, and he conducted it, and it took the better part of an hour, and it was — the household agreed, in the years afterward, when they understood what they had watched — one of the two or three most important hours of that family’s life.

He did not shout. He got down on the floor of the nursery, which cost him, and which he did anyway.

To Daena, in the corner — who was eleven moons old and understood approximately one word in nine of what was being said to her, and who understood, entirely, the tone, and the face, and the fact that her mother had come down to the floor to say it:

“You may scream. Scream all you like; you have the lungs of a herald and it is your right and I will hear you from anywhere in this castle. You may run. You may kick the floor until your heels ache. You may come and find me — at any hour, in any room, in the middle of a council, in the middle of the realm — and I will come out and I will make it stop, because that is what I am for, and that is what I have always been for, and if any creature alive holds you down against your will, my love, you may scream this castle to the ground and I will come.

“You may not bite someone who cannot bite you back.”

He said it three times, slowly, in three different ways, to a child of eleven moons who could not possibly have understood the sentence; and he knew perfectly well that she could not; and he said it anyway, because he was not saying it to the child she was. He was saying it to the woman she was going to be, and he was saying it first — before the world could get in and teach her that rank is a defense and that anger is an argument — and he was laying the rule down flat and early in the exact place where its absence had made him what he was.

And to Daemon, whom he lifted into his lap and held, and who curled in against him at once, and gripped his collar in both fists, and gazed up at him with his own violet eyes out of his own face, entirely trusting, entirely unrepentant:

“And you. Listen to me, because you and I are going to be having this conversation for the rest of our lives, and this is the first time, and I want the first time to be correct.

“You love your sister. Good. Love her; love her as fiercely as you like; there is nothing wrong with the size of it and I am not going to take one ounce of it away from you. But it does not — “ and his hand closed, gently, over one of the small fists gripping his collar, and held it, and did not pull it away — “it does not give you title. Not to her, and not to anybody who displeases her. You do not get to hurt the world every time it fails to please your sister, and if you build your life on that, my love, one day she will look at what you have built for her, and she will see a cage, and she will go — she will go, Daemon, she will walk straight out of it and she will never look back, because she is her father’s daughter and she was born believing the world will hold her.

“Feel it. Feel every ounce of it. Keep your hands off the latch.”

He was aware, the entire time, of exactly whose speech he was giving.

The septa’s hand was bound. And then the consort of Storm’s End made both of his children touch it.

Daena, brought over and set down and shown the bandage, was made — with her mother’s hand very lightly over hers — to lay her palm on it, gently. She did. She then looked up at the septa and produced a sound, a small forced hooting noise entirely without contrition, which the household charitably entered in the record as an apology.

Daemon watched all of this with total attention. Then he was brought forward; and he looked up at his mother; and, having read the room exactly as he read every room, he put his hand on the bandage in precisely the same way and made precisely the same noise, in perfect imitation, and looked up again to see whether it had answered.

“Yes,” said Aerion Baratheon, unsteadily. “That will do.”

Whereupon Daena, having completed her obligations, immediately attempted to steal the septa’s ring of keys off her belt.

And Daemon, seeing it, smiled up at the septa — the great smile, the disarming one, the one that emptied rooms — and held it, and held it, and the septa, hypnotized, smiled back down at him for the four entire heartbeats it took his sister to get both hands on the keys.

There was a noise from the passage like a horse falling downstairs.

“*I shall have you sent to the KENNELS,*” said the consort of Storm’s End, without turning round.

He conceded, later, in the dark, in the bed, with a wrecked and shameless Lord Paramount of the Stormlands wrapped around him, that it had been slightly amusing.

“I know,” said Lyonel.

“I shall have your teeth out.”

“I know.”

“You are the worst father in the Seven Kingdoms and I am going to write to the Citadel about you—”

Lyonel Baratheon kissed him, and went on kissing him until he stopped, which took some little while, because the consort of Storm’s End was laughing.

The fear came out three nights later, and it came out sideways, because it always did.

It began as an attack on Lyonel’s parenting, delivered at the fire, apropos of nothing, in the flat conversational tone that everyone in that castle had learned to fear more than shouting: that Daemon was being ruined; that he was learning, at eleven moons, that a pretty face is a writ of exemption; that his father encouraged it by smiling — every time, without fail, at the exact moment when the child had done something he should not have done — and that between the two of them, Lyonel and the entire fawning household, the boy would be an accomplished tyrant by the time he could walk.

Lyonel Baratheon listened to all of it. He was very good at listening to all of it.

Then he said, mildly, into the fire: “And where do you suppose he learned it, love?”

The consort of Storm’s End got up out of his chair.

It went badly for a while. It went about as badly as things ever went in that house, which was very badly indeed: there were two or three sentences said in the next quarter-hour that would have ended a lesser marriage, and one of them was about the Red Keep, and one of them was cruel enough that Aerion stopped in the middle of it, of his own accord, appalled — and Lyonel Baratheon stood in the middle of the room with his arms at his sides and took every one of them, and did not move, and did not raise his voice once.

And in the wreckage afterward, standing at the black window, with his back to the room and his hands flat on the cold stone of the sill, Aerion Baratheon said the true thing.

“He watches people the way I watch people.”

“I know.”

“He is charming on purpose. At eleven moons. He does it deliberately, he tests it, I have watched him check the readings — and he remembers offenses, Lyonel, he remembers them for a fortnight, he remembered a ball for a fortnight — and he has taken his sister as a possession and he is not one year old.” The stone under his hands was very cold. “I know exactly what he is. I know it because I am looking at it every morning in a glass. He has my face and my eyes and my — appetite, my ability to find the soft place in a room in four heartbeats — and I have spent my entire life being told, by every court in this realm, that what I am is a disease, and I have spent near seven years in this castle proving them wrong, and now I have made another one.” He turned round. His face was terrible. “So. Tell me the thing you have been not-telling me for a moon. Has he got the worst of me?”

Lyonel Baratheon did not tell him he was wrong.

That was the whole reason it worked; that was the thing no septon and no maester and no comfortable friend would have had the sense to do. He crossed the room, and he stood in front of his husband, and he considered it, honestly, for a good long moment — the boy, the tools, the road — and then he said:

“Aye. Some of it. Maybe a good deal of it.”

Aerion Baratheon closed his eyes.

“And now hear the rest,” said Lyonel, “because you’ve only ever done half this sum and you’ve done the half that hurts. He has your gifts. Every one. He’s beautiful, he’s clever, he watches, he wants, he keeps.

“And he has five things you never had.

“He has a mother who recognizes it. Not a septa guessing at him, not a maester writing more dragon than man in a margin and closing the book — a mother who has the same weather inside him and knows it from the inside out and can tell him, at nine years old, I know what you are feeling and I have felt it and here is what it costs. Not one soul on this earth could do that for you. You could not even do it for yourself; nobody had taught you the words.

“He has a father who will correct him. Every time. Without heat and without fear of him and without flinching when he turns that face on me — and he will turn it on me, love, he’ll be twelve and he’ll be beautiful and he’ll be extraordinary and he’ll try me, and I’ll say no, and he’ll try me again, and I’ll say no again, and he will grow up knowing to the marrow that there is at least one man alive whom he cannot charm out of a no. You’d have given anything for one of those. Your father gave you corridors.

“He has brothers and a sister who love him and are not afraid of him. That’s the whole of it, right there, and it’s the thing that saved you, and you got it at six-and-ten from me; he’s getting it at one, from four children who will pull him out of trees and steal his supper and tell him to his face when he’s being unbearable.

“He has the laws. He’ll be raised inside them; he’ll never be able to remember a time before them; nothing gets answered that hasn’t been asked, and the fire falls where it’s earned, and there’s a word that halts — and he will have all of it before he is old enough to be dangerous, and he will not have to build it himself out of nothing at three in the morning while bleeding, which is how you got yours, and you have never once been given credit for it, so let this room record it now.

“And he has one thing more, and it’s the one that matters, and you know exactly what it is.” He put his hands on his husband’s face. “He isn’t alone. That’s all it ever was, Aerion. The fire was never the flaw. You’ve said it to me yourself, in this room, in the dark: they gave you the fire and then they left you alone in a corridor with it, and everything they hated in you afterward was what a boy builds in a corridor with no one to hand him the water. Well.” His thumbs moved once. “This one is not in a corridor. He is in a nursery with four other children and two parents and a Dornishwoman and a woman from the laundry-court who would knife the realm for him, and he has never spent one hour of his life alone and he is not going to.

“He isn’t doomed, love. He’s being raised. You keep saying the word inherit as though he’d been handed a sealed chest and none of us had a key. He hasn’t. He’s been handed a forge, same as you were — and there are five people standing at it, and one of them has done this before.”

The consort of Storm’s End stood there for a while.

“…That,” he said at last, hoarsely, “is precisely the sort of thing a smug alpha says when he is angling to keep all of his teeth.”

“It is,” Lyonel agreed, and kissed him.

Aerion permitted it.

They went up late, and did not go to their own bed, because the nursery had been a wreck all evening and both twins had ended in their parents’ rooms and nobody had had the heart to move them; and so the last thing that happened on the night the Lord of Storm’s End made his argument was this, and Marra saw it, coming in at dawn with the fire:

Daemon Baratheon asleep on his mother’s chest, black-and-silver head under a silver chin, one fist closed in the collar of his mother’s robe, the whole small body rising and falling with a heartbeat he had been sleeping on since the night he was born.

And Daena Baratheon sprawled flat on her back across her father’s stomach with her arms flung wide, occupying rather more of the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands than seemed physically possible, dead to the world, one heel in his ribs.

The same clutch. The two faces of the coin.

Marra built the fire very quietly and went away and let them sleep.

Daena walked first, which surprised no one, and which she did entirely on her own business.

There was no ceremony about it. She was eleven moons and some days old, and she was holding onto a bench, and Meraxes the goshawk went past the nursery door on Steffon Connington’s fist — and Daena Baratheon let go of the bench and went after her.

Four steps. Possibly five; the household argued about it for years. She got four and she was reaching for a fifth when the floor arrived, and she went down hard, on her hands and her chin, and the whole nursery froze.

She did not cry. She sat up. She looked at the floor — at the floor, specifically, with an expression of black and personal fury, the offense entirely the floor’s — and then she got her hands under herself, and hauled herself up on the bench, and let go, and went after the hawk again.

Daemon watched the whole thing from the rug without moving.

He did not try to copy her. He did not try for a fortnight. He sat, and he watched her do it, twenty times a day, forty; watched her fall and get up and fall and get up; watched her arms come out for balance and watched what happened to her feet when she turned; and Aerion, who saw everything, watched him watching, and said nothing to anyone, and waited.

And on an ordinary grey evening in the twins’ twelfth moon, in the sea-facing rooms, with the fire lit and the nurses gone down to their supper and nobody in the room at all except his mother in the window chair and his father half asleep by the hearth —

— Daemon Baratheon got up off the rug, on his own, holding nothing.

He stood there for a moment, swaying, with his hands out, testing it — checking the whole apparatus, the way he checked everything — and then he set off, three feet, four, deliberate and slow and absolutely level, entirely silent, his eyes fixed on one place in the room the whole way.

Not the hawk. Not the door. Not the world.

He walked to his mother, and he arrived, and he put both hands flat on his mother’s knees, and looked up.

Aerion Baratheon did not make a sound. He got his son up into his arms, and put his face into the black-and-silver hair, and sat there in the window chair with the sea going about its business below and the fire ticking behind him, and did not say anything at all for a long time.

Daena had walked toward the world.

Daemon had walked toward him.

Lyonel Baratheon, who had come fully awake at the first step and had not moved a muscle since, looked at his husband’s face over the top of their son’s head, and had the extraordinary good sense — for which he was rewarded for the rest of his life — to say absolutely nothing.

After that they went everywhere, and they went together, and the household gave up.

Daena ran before she could properly walk and fell a great deal and did not care. Daemon proceeded at his own pace, one hand on a wall, a bench, a chest, a passing brother, refusing every offer of help with a small dignified violence — and when Daena went down, he stopped, every time, and waited until she was up. And when Daemon stalled at some obstacle he had not yet solved, Daena came back for him — thundering back across the room, seizing his hand or his sleeve or a fistful of his hair, and hauling, with the total confidence of the elder by three-quarters of an hour.

She dragged him at the world.

He taught her, without ever knowing he was doing it, to pause at the edge of it.

Their nameday feast was extravagant past all decency, and everybody in that hall knew exactly why, and nobody said it aloud.

The consort of Storm’s End had survived the year. The twins had come through it, and thrived, and were, at one year old, radiantly and obnoxiously healthy — and there was a thing under the whole feast, running beneath the music and the four hundred guests and the ruinous quantity of food, that the household could feel in its teeth: we kept them, and we kept him, and no one had said any part of that out loud since a night in the autumn, and no one said it that night either.

Daena wore pale blue and silver and refused her shoes.

She refused them at the door, comprehensively, with both feet, and was praised for it by her grandfather’s own knight — who thought it charming and said so, loudly, in front of everyone — and Daemon, who had been perfectly content with his own shoes until that moment, observed the entire transaction with great care, and removed one of his, and sat looking at the room with total innocence and one bare foot.

They escaped in the third hour.

Nobody ever established how. Daena went first — barefoot, at a dead run, still unsteady enough that the run was more of a controlled fall, out of the hall and into the covered courtyard beyond, shrieking with the joy of it, silver hair and black starburst flying — and Daemon went after her, more slowly, hand over hand along the benches and the wall, with a face of terrible determination, absolutely refusing to be left.

Maegor was sent after them, because Maegor was the eldest and had been given the order.

Visenya went after Maegor, because Maegor was approaching the task with the tactical sophistication of a landslide.

And Aemond — two and a half years old, silver, composed, arranged in a window embrasure above the courtyard where he had gone specifically to avoid the noise of the hall — watched the entire chase unfold below him with an expression of lofty and unshakable indifference.

Until Daena fell.

She went down at speed on the courtyard flags — hands out, palms first, the whole small body skidding — and there was a half-second of appalled silence, and then she began to scream: not pain, the household said afterward, or not chiefly pain; shock, the pure outraged shock of a child to whom the world has, for the very first time in her life, said no.

Aemond Baratheon came off that window ledge before anyone else in the courtyard had moved.

He was the first to reach her. He was two and a half; he could not lift her; he got down on the flags beside his sister and got both arms around her anyway and said, in a voice that nobody had ever heard out of him, “*Stop it. Stop. I’m here.*”

Daemon arrived four heartbeats later, and Daemon was furious.

He was furious at the stone, which he struck; and at the courtyard; and at the entire situation; and — because he had arrived to find another person’s hands on his sister while she screamed — at Aemond, whom he shoved, hard, with both hands, at her shoulder, trying to get in, trying to get her out, small face contorted with a rage that had nothing in it but terror.

And Aemond, who had never in his life raised his voice, whipped round on him and said, sharply, with the letter-opener already fully formed at two and a half years old:

“*I am HELPING her.*”

Daemon stopped.

He stood there, one hand still fisted in Aemond’s sleeve, breathing hard, looking from his brother’s face to his sister’s; and something went through him that the entire courtyard watched happen and nobody could name; and then he sat down on the flags on her other side and took hold of her sleeve, and stayed there, and did not shove anyone again.

Aerion arrived at a dead run and had his daughter off the stones before anyone else could reach her.

He went over her the way a maester goes over a wound: every finger, both palms, the chin, the knees, the whole small furious frame, twice — and there was nothing, there was nothing at all, two scraped palms and a knee going pink and a great deal of noise — and he was, by the time he had established this, already turning with his face going white and terrible toward the courtyard itself.

“Take up the stones,” said the consort of Storm’s End. “The whole court. Sand them, or lay rushes, or—”

“Aerion.”

“—*look at her hands*—”

“Love.” Lyonel’s hand closed over his shoulder. “Look at her face.”

Daena had stopped crying almost the instant her mother had picked her up, which was traditional, and which was not the point. She was now, in her mother’s arms, twisting round bodily — furious, damp, hiccupping, with both scraped palms open — and reaching down, with her whole body, at the ground.

She wanted to be put down. She wanted to be put down immediately. She wanted to go again.

“No,” said Aerion.

She struggled harder.

“No. No, my love — you are hurt, you have—”

“She wants to try again,” said Lyonel Baratheon.

“She has already been hurt.”

“Aye,” said the Lord of Storm’s End. “And now she knows she survives falling.”

The consort of Storm’s End stood in his own courtyard, in front of half his household, with his daughter fighting to be released from his arms.

He looked at Lyonel. He looked at Daena — at the black starburst standing straight up, and the storm-blue eyes furious and streaming and entirely undefeated, and the two skinned palms held out and open and already reaching past him at the flags that had done it.

And then he looked down.

Daemon was standing at his feet. He had followed them; of course he had followed them; and he was standing directly below his sister with his face turned up and both hands raised, all the way, as far as his arms would go — not to be lifted. Not for himself.

Waiting for her.

Aerion Baratheon closed his eyes for the space of one breath.

Then he bent down, and set his daughter on her feet, on the cold stone, on her own two legs, and took his hands away.

Daena wobbled. She stood. She looked at the flags with an expression of undying enmity — and then she took a step, and another, out into the courtyard, unsteady and barefoot and scraped and entirely unbroken, with the whole hall watching from the doorway.

Daemon fell into step beside her. He put one hand on her sleeve and left it there, and walked when she walked, and stopped when she stopped, and did not once try to hold her back.

And Aerion Baratheon stood in the middle of his own courtyard with his hands empty and his heart going like a hammer, and understood that his children had just taught him two entirely separate things in the space of a minute, and that he had spent three-and-twenty years believing the opposite of both.

Defiance, he had always known, meant refusing to kneel to something that wished to destroy you. It had never once occurred to him that it might also mean bare feet, and skinned palms, and laughing, and getting up.

Love, he had always known, meant closing your hands hard enough that nothing could be taken out of them. It had never once occurred to him that a boy of one could put his hand on his sister’s sleeve, and walk beside her, and not pull.

The campaign for the sixth child began in the spring, and it began, as all his campaigns began, with everything except the truth.

It was conducted obliquely, at odd hours, in the manner of a man laying siege to a castle he intends to be seen strolling past. It opened with the nursery has room — delivered at breakfast, apropos of nothing, over the accounts, in the voice used for tariffs. It advanced to five is an inelegant number — a fact upon which Aerion Baratheon expanded, at some length, on three separate evenings, with reference to symmetry, to the seven, to the arrangement of place-settings, and, on the third evening, to what he called the aesthetics of the succession, which caused Ser Arstan to leave the room. It brought up its heavy engines in the summer: that the twins were cradle-close and it would be a cruelty to leave them the youngest, since the whole coast agreed that cradle-close children fared better with another below them; that House Baratheon required a strong generation; that the Stormlands’ bannermen were a superstitious people who counted heirs the way farmers counted seed; and that in any case Wylla had pronounced him mended, entirely, in writing, and had he mentioned that the nursery had room.

Lyonel Baratheon listened to the whole of it, over four months, with the immovable courtesy of a coastline receiving weather.

And then, on a night in the autumn, in the sea-facing rooms, when the argument had run itself round to the aesthetics of the succession for the ninth time, he put down what he was holding and said, without heat:

“No.”

The room stopped.

“Not no to the child,” said Lyonel. “No to all of that. I’ll not have it. You’ve been talking at me since the thaw about place-settings and bannermen and the shape of the table, and I have sat here and let you, because you needed the running-up, and you’ve had it, and now you’re done.” He turned round. “I’ll tell you where I stand, and then you’ll tell me the true thing, and we’ll be finished with this and go to bed like people. Here’s my ground: I would gladly wait. Not a year — five. I’d wait five years, Aerion, and count myself the richest man in the realm the whole time, and I want you to hear why, and I want you to hear it before you say another word about symmetry.

“Five children and not one of them seven,” said the Lord of Storm’s End. “That is not a failed beginning in want of correction. That is a dynasty, love. Half the great houses of this realm would sell their grandmothers for what’s asleep two floors down. There is no lack in this house. There is no hole in the books. Nobody is owed anything by you — not the realm, not the coast, not my father’s ghost, not the succession, and not me, and if you have been lying awake doing arithmetic on my behalf then you have been doing it with numbers I never gave you.

“So no. Not the nursery, and not the bannermen, and not the shape of the table. Tell me the true thing or we shall go to sleep.”

The consort of Storm’s End stood at the black window for some little while.

“I want another child,” he said.

“Aye,” said Lyonel Baratheon. “That’s it. That’s the whole of what I ever needed. Come here.”

But Aerion did not come; he stayed where he was, with his back to the room and his hands flat on the cold stone, because the true thing had come out and had brought its friends with it, the way true things do.

“You are afraid,” he said.

“Aye.”

“You have been afraid since the autumn before last, and you have hidden it very badly, and the household has taken bets on your face, and I have permitted it because I did not wish to look at whatever is standing behind you.” He turned round. The chin was at war-height and the voice was quite level and his hands, when he brought them together, were not. “But I cannot permit it now, my lord, because I am asking you to make a child with me, and you are going to say yes, and you would say yes if it killed me, and I will not have that. I will not have your yes bought with a thing you are carrying alone. So.”

He crossed the room, and stood in front of his husband, and it took him three breaths to say it, and he said it.

“I am asking you. Properly. In the form of this house. Nothing gets answered that hasn’t been asked — and I did not ask, in the first week, I hunted, and you were right to shut the door on a hunt. I am not hunting now. I am asking. What happened in those three hours?”

Lyonel Baratheon stood very still.

Then he took his husband’s hand — not the face, not the shoulders; the hand, the way men take a hand at an oath-taking or a bedside — and he led him to the fire, and sat him down in the chair, and sat down himself on the floor in front of it with his back against the hearth-stones, which he had not done since he was a boy in his mother’s solar; and the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands looked into the fire, and opened the ledger he had been keeping shut for a year, and read it out.

He told him the hour it turned, which was the fourth. He told him what the blood had done and how fast, and that Wylla had stopped speaking the Common Tongue at some point and had not come back to it for a long while, and that this was how he had known — not the blood; the language. He told him that Daena had come out roaring and that nobody in the room had had one hand free to be glad about it. He told him that he had held his shoulders while a Dornishwoman put both arms into him to the elbow and turned a second child that was lying wrong, and that Aerion had said something then, in Valyrian, that Lyonel did not understand and had never asked anyone to translate and did not intend to.

He told him that the boy had come out grey.

He told him about the nine heartbeats.

“I counted them,” said the Lord of Storm’s End, to the fire. “I’ve never told anyone that. Not Wylla, not Marra, not Arstan. There’s a thing that happens to me when it goes bad — you’ve seen it; you married it — everything slows down and gets very clear and I start counting, because if I’m counting I’m not doing the other thing. So I counted. She had him face down along her arm and she was hitting his back and swearing at him in Dornish and there was no sound in that room at all, love, none, and I stood at the head of that bed with your blood on me to the shoulder and I counted nine heartbeats between my son and the world.

“And on the tenth he cried.

“And I looked down—” the great voice went; came back— “and you were gone. You’d gone under between one of those heartbeats and the next; and for about a quarter of an hour, which is the longest measure of time that has ever been invented, I stood in a room with two living children and I did not know whether I still had a wife, and Wylla would not look up, and nobody would tell me, and I could not do one useful thing about any of it except hold your hand and count.”

He stopped. The fire went on.

“That’s the page,” he said. “That’s the whole of it. And now you know why I’ve been an insufferable, hovering, food-counting nuisance for a year, and why I would wait five, and why I’ll never once make you feel it. There. It’s yours. You asked.”

Aerion Baratheon sat in his chair and looked down at the top of his husband’s head for a long moment.

Then he got out of the chair, and got down onto the hearth-rug beside him, and took Lyonel Baratheon’s face in both hands and turned it, and made him be looked at.

“You have been carrying that alone,” he said, “in a house whose entire law I built to prevent exactly that, for a year, while counting my food.”

“Aye.”

“That was very stupid.”

“Aye.”

“You are the wall,” said Aerion Baratheon, unsteadily, “and walls are not permitted to stand on the far side of their own door, my lord; that is the one thing I know about them; I have been to school on it.” And he leaned in, and put his forehead against his husband’s forehead, and held it there while the fire cracked and the sea worked at the cliff below. “*Ask me next time.* You are so relentlessly certain that you are the one who does the holding that you have never once considered that I might be adequate to it — and I am, Lyonel, I am very adequate to it; I held a keep together for nine days on nothing but spite and a ledger; I can hold you.”

“…I know,” said the wall, into the space between them. “I’ve always known. That’s not the trouble. The trouble is that I’d rather be crushed than let you carry an ounce of what I saw. And I know what that is. It’s the same disease you’ve got, wearing different boots.”

“It is precisely the same disease. It is your half of it.”

“Aye.”

“Well. We are neither of us going to be cured.” Aerion sat back, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand in a movement of great irritation, and looked at the fire. “So. That is the page. And I have read it. And now attend, because I am going to say the thing that follows it, and I want it said by firelight and not muttered in the dark afterward where it can be pretended away:

“I want another child.”

Lyonel shut his eyes.

“I know the price now. I have read the ledger; I know what it took; I know exactly what is standing behind you and I am looking at it, and I am not looking away, and I am telling you that I want another child.” He turned his head. “That is not defiance. That is not the brat prince spitting at a bad sky. That is a man who has counted, my lord, and is choosing, and who requires you to hear him choose it — because if we do this and it goes hard, I will not have you standing at that bed for one instant believing you talked me into anything. You did not talk me into anything. I have never in my life been talked into anything, and you may ask the entire Stormlands.”

The Lord of Storm’s End laughed — one cracked exhausted shout of it, at the fire — and put his hand over his face for a moment, and then reached out and hauled his husband bodily against him, and they sat there together on the hearth-rug like two boys, and the sea worked away at the cliff, and after a while Lyonel Baratheon said, into the silver hair under his chin:

“Then we do it with the door open. Wylla plans it — from before, not from the fourth hour; she’s been wanting to say so for a year and I’ve been wanting to let her. And when I’m frightened, I say so. Out loud, to you, in the room.”

“Yes.”

“And when you’re frightened—”

“I will lie about it magnificently,” said Aerion Baratheon, “and you will smell the ash on me and hold me anyway, as you have done since I was six-and-ten, which is the entire arrangement, and we have both known it for seven years, and I am not going to start being sentimental about it at this hour of the—”

He was kissed, at that point, which he had rather intended.

He knew on a morning in the winter, which is to say he knew a full moon before Maester Harmund was permitted to know anything at all.

There was no cellar this time. That was the strangest part, and he stood at the sea-window turning it over like a coin of unfamiliar mint: the cold-handed thing did not come up the stair. It was there — it lived in the house now; it had a chair by the fire and a place at the table and it would never again be evicted; and it looked up when he came in, and it folded its hands, and it waited to see what he would do.

And what he did was go on with his morning. And that, he thought, standing in the flat winter light with one hand not yet touching himself, is what the two bright years and the black season and nine heartbeats he had never heard had cost, and bought.

He told Lyonel that night, and he had no speech prepared, which was itself a kind of first.

The twins were in the bed. They had been in the bed almost nightly since the nameday, having discovered the trick of escaping the small ship, and no one in that household had yet located the moral authority to send them back; and so the news of the sixth child was delivered across the sleeping bodies of the fourth and fifth, at the black hour, in a whisper.

Daena lay flat on her back with her arms flung wide, occupying rather more of the bed than seemed physically possible for a person of one year, mouth open, entirely at ease in a world that had never once managed to hurt her badly enough to make her cautious.

Daemon lay curled toward her, on his side, as he had lain since before either of them had drawn breath — one hand closed, in sleep, around a fistful of his sister’s sleeve.

“Lyonel.”

“Mm.”

“Wake up. I am carrying.”

The great body came awake all at once, the way it did — no drift, no argument, a wall going from asleep to load-bearing between one breath and the next — and there was a silence in the dark; and then Lyonel Baratheon began, helplessly, to laugh: soundless, shaking the whole bed, one hand over his mouth so as not to wake the two small tyrants sleeping between them, laughing into the dark like a boy.

“*Good*,” he said. “Gods. Aerion. Good.”

“You are shaking the bed. You will wake the—”

“I don’t care. Come here. I can’t reach you; there’s a daughter in the way—” and he reached over both of them, carefully, immensely, and got his hand round the back of his husband’s neck and held it there. “Good. There. That’s my first answer and I’ve had it in my mouth for a month and I’m not ashamed of it.”

“And the second?”

The pause was long enough to be honest.

“Frightened,” said Lyonel Baratheon, out loud, in the room, as treatied. “Properly. All the way down. I’ll be frightened for nine moons and I’ll tell you every time and I’ll not once ask you to carry it.”

“Good,” said Aerion. “That is correct. That is a correct answer.”

“And now I’ll ask you mine, and you’ll give me the true one, because we are done with the other thing.” The hand at his neck did not move. “How do you feel, love? Not what you’ll tell the coast. Not what you’ll tell Wylla when she asks in the morning, which she will, and you’ll say perfectly well and she’ll write down liar. Me. In the dark. With them between us. How is it in there?”

And Aerion Baratheon, who had spent three-and-twenty years constructing the finest defensive works in the Seven Kingdoms, and who had learned, in seven years, that they were of no use whatsoever against the simple direct question asked at the black hour by a man who intended to wait all night for an answer, lay still and let it be true.

“…Quiet,” he said at last.

“Quiet.”

“It goes quiet.” He was looking at the ceiling. “It is — Lyonel, you have no idea what it is like in there. It is never quiet. It has never once been quiet since I was six years old; it is a hall full of people all talking, all of them me, all of them furious, and every one of them is correct, and they do not stop, not at council, not at table, not in the dark. And when I am carrying—” his hand moved, at last, flat, over the country below his heart— “they stop. Everything in me that goes hunting for something to burn simply — turns around, and comes home, and sits down. It has somewhere to be. I am less crowded inside my own skull than I have been at any other hour of my life, and I have never said that aloud to a living soul, and I have just said it to you, and I would be obliged if you would not look pleased about it.”

“I’m not pleased,” said Lyonel. “I’m listening. There’s a difference; you taught it me.”

He was quiet a moment.

“Now hear me,” he said, “because this is the one thing I’ve never said to you and I mean to say it once and be understood. You are not a field, Aerion. I don’t keep you carrying to keep you calm, and I’ll not have you thinking, in some black hour when the count’s gone bad, that the children are the price you pay to be loved in this house. They are not the rent. There is no rent.” His thumb moved, once, at the nape of the neck. “I loved you when you were six-and-ten and cruel and had never carried anything but a grudge. I’ll love you when you’re old and dried up and hideous and shouting at the sea, and there’ll be no babes in it then, and I’ll be there anyway, in the chair, listening to you be right about everything at enormous length.

“I’m glad you love this. I’m glad it gives all that fire of yours somewhere kind to go. But if you never carried again — if you told me tomorrow that you were done — you would still be the whole of it. Every last inch. There’s no version of this where you have to earn me. I only wanted you to know that the door’s not locked from my side, because I’ve a suspicion nobody ever told you that about anything, ever, in your whole life.”

The dark went on for a while.

“You are unbearably sentimental,” said Aerion Baratheon, in a voice with no floor left under it at all.

“I am.”

“It is the single most embarrassing quality in a Lord Paramount and I have no notion how you have concealed it from the realm for—”

“Mm.”

“—*Stop smiling*, my lord, I can hear you doing it in the dark—”

He did not stop.

Between them, Daena Baratheon rolled over, kicked her mother in the ribs with perfect unconcern, and flung one arm across her brother’s face. Daemon, without waking, without loosening his grip on her sleeve, pushed the arm off, and settled, and slept on.

Daeron came in the spring, a moon after the twins’ nameday, with no escort worth the name, two changes of linen, and a headache he described as historic.

He arrived at midday and was drunk by the blue hour, which the household had long since ceased to regard as a scandal and had begun to regard as weather; and he was, as always, entirely welcome, and would have been welcome if he had arrived on fire.

Daena liked him at once. She liked him because his doublet was three years old and coming apart at the shoulder in a long trailing snarl of gold thread, and because he was the first adult in her experience to sit down on the floor unasked, and because when she got both fists into the loose embroidery and pulled with her whole body, hard enough to unseat him, he did not remove her hands. He fell over. He lay there. He appeared to find the entire arrangement extremely satisfactory.

“She’s undressing me,” Daeron observed to the ceiling.

“She does that,” said Lyonel.

Daemon was another matter.

Daemon sat on the rug at a distance of four feet with his back against his mother’s ankle and looked at this new person for a very long time — the black-and-silver head tipped, the violet eyes doing the thing that made grown knights check their sword-belts, the whole small engine running its survey without the slightest attempt at concealment; and Daeron the Drunken, second son of the Prince of Summerhall, who could not have hit a barn door with a thrown boot, lay on his back with a girl-child looting his shoulder and said, without turning his head:

“That one’s costing me. What’s the toll?”

“He has not decided,” said Aerion, “whether you are worth the trouble of knowing. It generally takes a fortnight and I would not attempt to hurry it.”

“Mm,” said Daeron. “I’ve a coin.”

And he reached, one-handed, into a sleeve that appeared to contain the entire contents of a market stall, and produced — as though it had been waiting there since the world’s making for precisely this hour — a small stone. Nothing; a pebble; grey-and-white banded, polished by a river to a smoothness like an egg, gleaming a little in the firelight. He set it on the rug at the exact midpoint between himself and his nephew, and took his hand away, and went back to being looted.

Daemon Baratheon looked at the stone.

He looked at his uncle.

He crossed the rug — hand over hand, with the terrible deliberation of a boy who did not care to be seen falling — and took up the stone in both hands, and turned it over twice, and put it in his mouth, and removed it, and considered; and then, having reached his finding, climbed directly into Daeron’s lap, sat down in the middle of his uncle’s ruined doublet as though it were a chair he had been assigned, and leaned back against him, and closed one small fist tight around the stone, and did not move for an hour.

Daeron looked down at the black-and-silver head under his chin with the expression of a man who has been handed something he does not consider himself qualified to hold.

“He has annexed you,” said Aerion.

“So I gather.”

“You will not be permitted to move. Not for anything. I once stood for two hours at a window because he had gone to sleep on my arm and Ser Arstan had to read me the tolls.”

“Aeri,” said Daeron the Drunken, quite softly, watching the small hand close and unclose around the stone, “what a house you have built.”

They came at last, that evening, to the naming.

He had been watching them all day — Daena at the gallop across the solar’s rugs, barefoot, silver hair standing straight up around the black starburst at her temple, falling, rising, roaring; and Daemon after her, hand over hand along the furniture, black curls and that one white-silver streak, arriving always four heartbeats late and never once failing to arrive — and Daeron sat with his cup, and his eyes went strange the way they went, and the wine in him seemed to draw back from something.

“The little one runs like water going downhill,” he said. “There’s nothing in the world in her way. She hasn’t found out yet that there’s such a thing as in her way.” He drank. “Look at her hair. Look at it in the firelight. Silver, all silver, and then the storm broke in on it — that black star. You could put a fleet out by that hair.”

“Marra despairs of it.”

“Marra is a woman of great sense and no vision,” said Daeron. “That is a moon, brother. That is a little moon dancing upon black water.”

The room went quiet in the way rooms did when Daeron stopped being a drunkard for a moment.

“And him,” he said, and his eyes went to the black-and-silver child, who had stopped at the edge of the rug and was watching his sister run without the least intention of catching her, and with every intention of never being farther from her than four heartbeats. “There. Look. He’s not chasing her. Do you see it? He’s keeping her in sight. He’s the shadow that follows the moon home.”

Aerion Baratheon did not say anything at all.

“Don’t look like that,” said his brother, comfortably, drinking. “I’m three parts gone and I shan’t remember a word of it by morning; I never do; it’s the one mercy in the whole miserable arrangement. You may weep freely; I’ll deny everything.”

Later — much later, when the fires were low and the household had gone to its beds — Aerion came looking for his brother and found him in the north gallery, where the windows gave onto the sea, and where a storm had come up the coast in the last hour and was making the glass ring; and Daeron was not alone.

Maegor was with him. Maegor, six years old, in his nightshirt, out of his bed without leave for the eleventh time that moon, standing at the window with his uncle’s hand on his shoulder and his whole thunderous face lifted to the black sky.

Aerion stopped in the doorway, in the dark, and did not announce himself, which was a thing his mother had done to him once, and which he had sworn at the age of nine he would never do to a child, and which he did now without a shred of remorse.

“—dreamed dragons in it,” Daeron was saying. “Not on it, mind. In it. Nesting in the thunderheads like herons in a wood.”

“Can dragons live in storms?” Maegor demanded, at a volume adequate for a battlefield.

“*These* can,” said Daeron the Drunken.

And he crouched down — awkwardly, drunkenly, a hand on the sill for balance — and put himself at the boy’s height, and pointed out into the black weather over Shipbreaker Bay with a hand that had gone perfectly steady.

“Pale wings,” he said. “Under the black clouds. There, and there — you see it, don’t you; of course you see it; you’ll see it your whole life and they’ll tell you it’s the lightning. And a violet fire behind blue eyes, and it doesn’t burn the nest; that’s the trick of it; it’s a warm fire. And down at the foot of the cloud, standing in the rain, with his head down and his horns up, there’s a great antlered beast, black as the water, and he doesn’t move. He’s not there to fight the storm.” Daeron’s voice had gone very quiet. “He’s there so the storm can’t get at the nest.”

Maegor Baratheon considered this with enormous gravity.

“That’s Papa,” he said.

“Aye,” said his uncle. “It is.”

“And the dragon’s Mama.”

“Well,” said Daeron, “there’s a deal of dragon in that cloud, lad, and not all of it’s your mother.” He straightened up, and put his hand back on the boy’s shoulder, and looked out at the weather. “Your mother is afraid of a thing, and he’d sooner be flayed than say it, so I’ll say it for him some night when he’s not listening. He’s afraid that the dragon runs out. He’s afraid that it stops with him — that you’re all called Baratheon, and you’ll all be storm-lords with storm-names, and in three generations there’ll be nothing left of what he is but a bit of silver in the hair and a temper in the blood, and no one will know what it was.

“That’s rot, of course. Names are cups, Maegor.” He tapped the window-glass, once, gently, with a fingernail. “Blood’s the wine. You may break the cup any day of the week and all it does is run somewhere else. Nobody’s ever lost a drop of anything by pouring it into a bigger vessel — remember that when you’re grown, and when they start talking to you about lines, and when some fool with a chain tells you what you are.”

Aerion Baratheon stood in the dark of the doorway with his hand pressed flat over the earliest curve of his sixth child and did not make one sound.

Daeron turned round.

He looked at his brother across the length of the gallery, and for one moment — three heartbeats, no more, and Aerion would remember it for the rest of his life — the wine went entirely out of his face, and out of his voice, and what stood at the window in his place was something old and very tired and completely sober.

“Send him to bed,” Daeron said, “and come and look at this with me.”

And when Maegor had been sent, protesting, and had gone (Visenya intercepting him in the passage, having risen at some point, from pure habit of office, to see that he did), the brothers stood at the window together and looked down; and below them, in the covered courtyard, lit by a single storm-lantern, two very small people who had also escaped their beds were conducting a chase across the wet flags — a silver one, running; a black-and-silver one, following.

“The girl,” said Daeron the Drunken, “will never once in her life let a cage mistake itself for a home. Not a gilded one, not a comfortable one, not one built out of love by people who mean well. She’ll be up and out through the roof of it, and she’ll take the roof with her, and she’ll be laughing, and she will not understand for one moment why anyone found it difficult.” He drank. “You needn’t fret for that one. The world will have to fret for that one.”

“And the boy?”

Daeron did not answer at once.

“The boy,” he said, “will love the cage. If everyone he loves is inside it.” He watched the small dark figure pause, and wait, and gather itself, and go on after the small bright one. “He will build it himself. Out of good materials. With his own hands, for the best reasons in the world, and he will not know he is doing it, and by the time he is old enough to know, he will be so good at it that no one who loves him will be able to explain what is wrong. And it will not be cruelty, Aeri. That’s what nobody will ever understand about him. It will be tenderness, all the way down. That’s what makes it a cage instead of a wall.”

Aerion Baratheon stood there with his hand over his belly and his mouth gone entirely dry.

“Then what do I do,” he said.

And his brother turned and looked at him with the pale violet eyes of a man who would remember none of this in the morning, and said:

“You teach him the door opens from both sides.”

The rain came on harder. Down in the courtyard, the silver one fell over, and got up, and the black one arrived beside her, and put a hand on her sleeve.

“Teach him early,” said Daeron, “and teach him often, and teach him when he is too small to argue and again when he is too proud to listen, and be sure he can say it back to you. Because he will be able to open it from his side without ever being taught, that one; that’s a gift and he was born with it and he’ll have his mother’s grip. It’s the other half he won’t learn on his own. Nobody in our family ever has.” He finished the cup. “Six of nine, little brother.”

Aerion went very still. “I have five.”

“You have six,” said Daeron the Drunken, with enormous patience, moving off down the gallery in the direction of more wine, “and one of them is a tree; I don’t make the rules; I only dream them. And there’s a seventh in the hall this evening, and it’s raining on him, and I have not the first notion what that means and neither has any maester alive. Good night. Tell your husband his beer is an insult to a great house.”

The last of the light went out of the winter sky at the fifth bell, and the household of Storm’s End came down its corridors to supper, and did not get there, because the twins were loose again.

They were fourteen moons old. They had been loose, by Marra’s exact reckoning, on nineteen separate occasions since the nameday, and the guard had ceased to sound the alarm and begun simply to fall in behind them, at a discreet distance, in the manner of an honor escort.

Daena went first, because Daena always went first.

She came out of the nursery passage at a dead run — barefoot on the cold stone, because shoes remained an oppression she declined to recognize; silver hair flying, the black starburst at her temple standing straight up like a flag run up on a mast; storm-blue eyes fixed on some object at the far end of the world that only she could see and that she fully intended to have — and she ran the way she did everything, without the smallest provision for stopping, laughing so hard she had to keep pausing to get her breath and then setting off again before she had got it.

Daemon came after her.

He came more slowly, because he had made a study of the matter and had established that speed on wet flags was a fool’s article: hand along the wall, hand to the bench, hand to the door-jamb, black curls bouncing and the white-silver streak at his temple catching the torchlight — arriving late, arriving carefully, arriving without fail, and with an expression of such fixed and total determination that two grown men-at-arms flattened themselves against the wall to let him by.

Maegor came thundering after both of them, having been given the office and taking it, as ever, with complete seriousness and no practical competence whatsoever.

Visenya came after Maegor, at a walk, because Maegor was going to run straight past them and she had known that before he started.

And in the deep embrasure of the gallery window, above the covered court, arranged with a book he was too young to read and an air of profound and studied indifference to the entire proceedings, sat Aemond.

He did not look up when they came out into the court below him. He turned a page he could not read. He was, his whole small silver person announced to the passing world, a person of serious habits who could not be expected to concern himself with the affairs of infants—

“*AEMOND,*” bellowed his sister, from the flags, at the top of her lungs, with her arms already going up.

He was off the ledge before the echo came back off the stones.

He crossed that courtyard at a flat run, and he was two and a half years old and not large, and she hit him at full speed and from the air — because Daena Baratheon did not slow down to be caught; she launched herself at her brother from four feet away with the total, unhesitating, unshakable faith of a person who had never once, in fourteen moons of continuous assault upon the physical world, been permitted to hit the ground when it mattered — and Aemond caught her, staggered, went back three steps, and held.

And Daemon arrived four heartbeats later, breathing hard, and took hold of his sister’s sleeve in one fist, and stood there with his hand closed on it — checking, the way he checked, the way he had checked since before either of them could see — and did not pull her away from their brother, and did not try to get in between; and after a moment he put his other hand up and took hold of Aemond’s sleeve as well.

Both of them. One in each fist. The whole of what was his, gathered in and accounted for and not going anywhere.

At the head of the gallery stairs, Aerion Baratheon stood and watched his children.

He had one hand resting over the earliest curve of the seventh of them, which was not yet showing to any eye but his own and Wylla’s and one other’s, and which he had taken to guarding without noticing that he did it; and behind him, arriving the way weather arrives, came his husband, and stood at his back, broad and warm and smelling of rain on hot stone; and Lyonel Baratheon’s great hand came round and covered his hand where it lay.

Below, Daena was already fighting to be put down. Aemond was already objecting. Maegor had arrived at a gallop and was explaining the situation, at volume, to nobody. Visenya was inspecting her sister’s bare feet with the expression of a quartermaster who has found the boots issue exactly as bad as she predicted.

And Aerion made his count, because he always made his count.

One, at the door of a boy made of thunder. Two, at the door of a girl who read weather. Three, under winter glass, in the south corner where the sun pooled, with a black star weathering in his branches and the best-informed ground on any coast in the world. Four, silver and composed and two and a half years old, holding his sister up off the flags with both arms because she had called his name.

Five, barefoot, laughing, entirely unbroken.

Six, with one hand in each of them.

And under his own hand, quiet, unannounced, not yet spoken of to anyone but his brother’s wine-dreams and his own black window: the next.

They had come out of him and they were not him. That was the thing he could still not entirely hold in his hands, and he turned it over nightly, the way he turned over everything: that the two down there in the court were not opposites at all, whatever the whole coast said. They were one argument, split in half and given legs — his fire and Lyonel’s steadiness, his watching and Lyonel’s open hands, the same quarrel that had been running in the sea-facing rooms for seven years without ever once being settled or lost; and it had walked out of them both and gone downstairs and put on shoes, or in one case had declined to. Even the hair had done it: the storm broken in on her silver, the silver broken in on his black. Each of them carrying a piece of the other where anyone could see it. Neither of them able to be told apart from the family they came from, and neither of them the least bit like anyone in it.

Once, he had known exactly what defiance was. It was refusing to kneel to something that meant to destroy you, and it had cost him seventeen years and every friend he might have had, and he had thought it the finest thing about himself.

His daughter, at one year old, barefoot on a wet courtyard with both palms skinned, was patiently teaching him that it could also be a thing done for the joy of it — that you could get up laughing, and mean nothing by it at all, and go again.

Once, he had known exactly what love was. It was closing your hands hard enough that nothing could be taken out of them; and he had learned that in a corridor, in a house where nothing was ever asked and everything was taken, and it had very nearly made him a monster, and on a windless night it had very nearly finished him.

His son, at one year old, with a fistful of his sister’s sleeve in one hand and his brother’s in the other and no notion in the world that he was being watched, would spend the next twenty years teaching him the rest of it — that you may hold on, and hold on with your whole strength, and still leave the door open on both sides. That keeping is not the same as caging. That instinct is not law.

They would neither of them ever know they had taught him anything. That was the arrangement. That was, he was beginning to suspect, the entire arrangement.

“They are going to be impossible,” said Lyonel Baratheon, with enormous satisfaction, at his shoulder.

Below them, Daena had got herself put down, and had immediately fallen over, and had immediately got up. Daemon had let go of Aemond’s sleeve and taken hold of his sister’s again. Aemond was telling both of them, in a voice of great weariness, that he was helping.

“They are yours,” said Aerion.

Lyonel Baratheon kissed his temple.

“Ours,” he said.

And Aerion Baratheon leaned back against him, and let the wall take his weight, and for once in his life did not argue.