#emmon frey

[seaworthit]

From a Feast reread last year

[dyannawynnedayne]

Emmon Frey and Genna Lannister, love these assholes

[mypage4sure]

"as Tywin's useless good brother once said"

Oh my God they where talking about Emmon Frey, I thought order of the greenhand just took a random jab at Kevan.

[cynicalclassicist]

Genna is a fun character. And that's probably to make the second red wedding more tragic. Yes, Emmon Frey and his kin are presented as quite unlikable. Emmon is ridiculous as he waves his paper about and his kin are just vile. But Genna will die along with the rest of the new House Frey of Riverrun to remind us of how terrible vengeance can be.

I might be wrong but, in the books, doesn’t Tywin have a sister how married a Frey? If so, what happened to her?

Genna Lannister is married to Emmon Frey (Walder Frey’s second son, but not very high in the line of Frey succession due to the many descendants of his older brother), and they have four sons and two grandsons. (12 and 10 years old, the children of her eldest son Cleos.) Well, that should be had four sons – her son Ser Cleos Frey was sent by Cersei to bring terms to Robb, then assigned by Catelyn to help Brienne bring Jaime to King’s Landing, and was killed by outlaws on the way. Her son Tion Frey (about age 15) was a squire and prisoner of war, murdered by Rickard Karstark in revenge for Jaime killing his sons in battle and then being released by Catelyn.

Genna and Emmon used to live in Casterly Rock, where Emmon was far overshadowed and frequently humiliated by his intelligent, outspoken, and bossy wife. Genna has a deep loyalty to her oldest brother Tywin, due to the fact that when she was betrothed at age seven to a frankly terrible match (because their father Tytos was so eager to be liked that when Walder made the offer he just said “sure!”), Tywin was the only one who spoke against it. (And he himself was only 10 at the time.) Nevertheless, Genna did her duty and gave her seven-years-older husband four sons, or at least she claims they’re his and nobody dares say otherwise, not in the least Emmon. Genna was shapely and busty in her youth– but as she’s gotten older (she’s 55 now), she’s gotten fatter and wider (and even more busty), and is now rather square-shaped. She’s about twice as heavy as her husband.

At Casterly Rock, Genna served as a mother-figure to Jaime and Cersei and Tyrion after their mother Joanna died. For example, she helped Cersei get ready for the feast where her betrothal to Rhaegar was supposed to be announced, and after that fell through, promised that Tywin would find her a better match.

Genna is an excellent judge of character, of her brothers and others. At some point she told Tywin that Tyrion was the child who was most like him, which made Tywin so angry that he didn’t speak to her for like six months. She’s worried about the future of House Lannister now that Tywin’s gone, specifically because Tyrion is so much like him.

After the Red Wedding, Edmure Tully was attainted, which means Riverrun and its lands were taken away from him by the crown. Tywin granted them to Emmon and Genna. (To both of them, not just Emmon.) But they had to wait to move in, because Brynden Tully, the Blackfish, was still in Riverrun and perfectly prepared to withstand a siege for years, but Jaime successfully negotiated the situation. (Genna was in the war councils btw.) Emmon immediately tried ordering people around like he ran the Riverlands, and Jaime had to remind him that Tywin just gave him Riverrun – the actual control of the Riverlands was granted to Petyr Baelish, new lord of Harrenhal.

In her conversation with Jaime at the siege of Riverrun, Genna showed her political aptitude, being somewhat critical of how the late Tywin had divided up the Riverlands. She thought it was a bad idea to give them Riverrun, and that it would have been better to give them Castle Darry, as Cleos’s wife is a Darry. Though Jaime noted that Riverrun was a much better prize, Genna said it was a poisoned prize as Edmure was still alive and his wife Roslin Frey was pregnant, which made their establishment in Riverrun not all that secure. But Genna also noted that if Roslin has a girl, she could marry her grandson Tywin “Ty” Frey, which would neatly sew up the claims to Riverrun. A boy would make things messy, though.

Genna was also very critical of Cersei’s royal command to re-establish the Faith Militant, citing the war between them and the Targaryens, all the history that Jaime had forgotten about. She was also highly critical of Cersei’s choices of idiots and incompetents for the Small Council and Handship, as well as Cersei’s stopping payments on the Iron Bank’s loans to the crown, which caused them to call in loans from all the merchants of Westeros. Also, after the siege, Genna was somewhat critical of Jaime’s decision to let the Tully garrison leave with (no weapons or armor and) just a promise not to take up arms against Emmon or the Lannisters, and that he didn’t torture any to find out where the Blackfish escaped to.

So, currently Genna and Emmon are in Riverrun, with a garrison of 200 men. That might not be super-secure, considering. Also note that Jaime told Tom O’Sevens, a musician, that if he wants to stay in Riverrun he should try to please Genna, noting that his repertoire of bawdy songs should make them get along very well. However, as Tom O’Sevens is secretly a spy for the Brotherhood Without Banners… that may not have been Jaime’s most spectacular idea. Only time will tell how that situation’s going to turn out, and while I hope for all the best for Genna (hell, I hope she inherits Casterly Rock, she’d be great at running the place), I’m really not sure things will work out well, especially if she attends her cousin Daven Lannister’s wedding to a Frey girl. Ah well, we’ll just have to see…

[jonsnowwesterosworld]

Emmon Frey was a fretful man with nervous hands. He might have weighed ten stone ... but only wet, and clad in mail. He was a weed in wool, with no chin to speak of, a flaw that the prominence of the apple in his throat made even more absurd.

[tweedfrog]

People: "omgg Catelyn was such an evil bitch if she was so hurt at Ned she should have taken it out on him instead of Jon who did nothing wrong!"

Westerosi noble husbands who have full legal and social control of their household (including their wife) if their wife ever attempts to "take something out on them":

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

When The World Is Crashing Down [Chapter 6: I Am Missing You To Death]

Series summary: Your family is House Celtigar, one of Rhaenyra’s wealthiest allies. In the aftermath of Rook’s Rest, Aemond unknowingly conscripts you to save his brother’s life. Now you are in the liar of the enemy, but your loyalties are quickly shifting…

Chapter warnings: Language, warfare, violence, a Wolfman update, serious injury, alcoholism/addiction, sexual content (18+), dragons, murder, suicide, say hello to the Crab Fam! 🥰🦀

Series title is a lyric from: “7 Minutes In Heaven” by Fall Out Boy.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy And All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me” by Fall Out Boy.

Word count: 9k (she chonky!).

Link to chapter list: HERE.

Taglist (more in comments): @tinykryptonitewerewolf @lauraneedstochill @not-a-glad-gladiator @daenysx @babyblue711 @arcielee @at-a-rax-ia @bhanclegane @jvpit3rs @padfooteyes @marvelescvpe @travelingmypassion @darkenchantress @yeahright0h @poohxlove @trifoliumviridi @bloodyflowerrr @fan-goddess @devynsficrecs @flowerpotmage @thelittleswanao3 @seabasscevans @hiraethrhapsody @libroparaiso @echos-muses @st-eve-barnes @chattylurker @lm-txles @vagharnaur @moonlightfoxx @storiumemporium @insabecs @heliosscribbles @beautifulsweetschaos @namelesslosers @partnerincrime0 @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @yawneneytiri @marbles-posts @imsolence @maidmerrymint @backyardfolklore @nimaharchive @anxiousdaemon @under-the-aspen-tree @amiraisgoingthruit @dd122004dd @randomdragonfires @jetblack4real @joliettes

Let me know if you’d like to be tagged! 🥰💜

There’s fire on the table, ice in your blood. Alicent and Helaena are prisoners in their rooms, and tomorrow Otto will be beheaded in the Dragonpit, but you are here in the Great Hall surrounded by candles, cider and beer and wine, rare roast boar sweating blood like rubies, raucous celebration.

Your father and Clement are laughing with Medrick Manderly, Lorent Marbrand, Luthor Largent, other men of Rhaenyra’s council; when they toast their wine, it sloshes carelessly out of the glass goblets. Corlys Velaryon—whose navy helped secure the city—is pensive and withdrawn, saying very little. At the center of the high table, the woman who calls herself queen is manic: color in her cheeks, light in her eyes, but not a warm life-giving glow, a hollow glint like the flash of coins or swords or moonlight. She is receiving a litany of congratulations for her victory from the lords of loyal houses: Blackwood, Bar Emmon, Costayne, Tully, Frey, Dustin, Cerwyn, Grimm. Frequently and unmistakably, Rhaenyra glances across the hall to where Daemon is conspiring with her military commanders, his back to the wall and arms crossed and face daunting yet distracted somehow, reminding you very much of Aemond. He does not look at his wife. He looks elsewhere, into the future, into the past, into the northwest where Nettles and Baela are waiting for him to return to the cursed corridors of Harrenhal.

“Please eat something,” Everett says quietly. He is carving off the least-bloody pieces of roast boar and laying them on your plate, where they remain untouched. He doesn’t have much to talk about with the other men as long as the topic of conversation hinges on combat. He knows books, not blades. Everett can walk, though only slowly and with great difficulty; he does not ride horses, he does not fight, he does not have a wife and in all likelihood never will. He reads and he watches, sharp eyes like a hawk’s.

“I’m alright,” you reply with effort that feels like lifting iron, stones, the dead weight of a man.

“You’re not,” Everett says, pained.

“Cregan Stark is a good man!” your father is telling his compatriots. He has grey hair and a crafty grin and speaks with dramatic sweeps of his arms. “When he heard of my daughter’s tribulations, borne with such courage, such resilience, he assured me that his intentions to wed her were unchanged. He pledged to forgive her any transgressions suffered at the hands of the Usurper.”

“A better husband than any of us!” Clement trumpets, toasting his wine glass with anyone who will accommodate him. Clement does have a wife—and two sons so far, the infant heirs of House Celtigar—but he spends far more time writing to Lord Stark than his family back on Claw Isle. “Gallant! Merciful! The most clever and civilized Northerner to ever live!”

“Hear hear!” his audience answers spiritedly, though Everett only frowns.

“And soon Cregan will leave Winterfell,” your father continues. Rhaenyra is now listening attentively. “He will finish rallying and fortifying his men, and then march south to crush the last vestiges of this infernal, traitorous uprising!”

Resounding cheers, fists drummed against the table. Clement picks up where your father left off: “Already Roddy the Ruin and his Winter Wolves slaughtered 2,000 Lannister men at the Fishfeed. Can you imagine the carnage when Cregan arrives with his host of young, fresh, able-bodied warriors?! We will eviscerate the Kingmaker! We will avenge Rhaenys, Lucerys and Jacaerys! And when we find the Usurper, when we drag him out of whatever hovel he’s crawled into on his belly like a snake, we will cut him open to see if his guts are green as well!”

As men roar all around you—men who have killed, men who are starving to do it again—you stare down at the reflection in your wine, a vacant face that barely resembles yours. You cannot write to Aegon. He cannot write to you. Where and how he is will remain a mystery until you meet again…or until the Blacks uncover his fate. In your mind, he is both alive and dead; he is sick, he is well, he is suffering, he is finding solace in another woman’s bed, he is lying broken on the side of the road, he is sailing under the cover of darkness into Dragonstone on a borrowed ship, he is drunk, he is sober, he is burning up with fever, his is reunited with Sunfyre, he is in desperate need of you, he has forgotten you completely.

“I bet he’s at Storm’s End!” Medrick Manderly bellows, motioning with a turkey leg as if it’s a dagger. “We should send assassins to slay him!”

“No, no, the Reach!” Luthor Largent counters. “He’s probably on his way to meet his brother Daeron there!”

Theories are lobbed back and forth like the arrows of archers, none of them right. No one asks you. No one has asked about the abuse you supposedly endured either. It was taken for granted as truth; what else could anyone expect from a captor as notoriously depraved and insatiable as the Usurper? Your melancholic demeanor is proof enough. Inquiry beyond that would be impolite. And then Rhaenyra says, startling you: “Is there any chance he’s gone to Dragonstone?”

“He cannot be there, Your Grace,” your father assures her. “It is impossible to take Dragonstone without there being signs, ships in the sea and smoke from the kitchens and the like. We would have heard from the lords of the Crownlands who reside near the island.”

Unless they have silently abandoned Rhaenyra’s cause. Unless Aegon and Larys have won them over. You have to protect him. You have to distract the side you once called your own. You twist the dragon ring on your left hand, gold wings and jade eyes. No one asks about that either; sometimes you think they don’t really see you at all. You say softly: “He spoke often of Dorne.”

“Dorne?” your father muses, stroking his short beard.

“Of course he did,” Clement says. “Degenerates are quite at home there.”

Medrick Manderly is muttering: “We’ll never find him if he gets past the Marches…”

Rhaenyra gazes at her husband again, a hollow, vulnerable sort of desperation, a plea that echoes against stone walls. He knocks back the last of his wine, turns his back on her, and strides out of the Great Hall. Rhaenyra’s pale eyes—a treacherous, oceanic sort of blue like Aegon’s—are glossy with despair. You’ve crossed paths with her before, of course, usually from a distance; but you are fascinated by how much she has changed. With each person she loses—King Viserys, infant Visenya, Luke, Jace—another piece of her is cut away like a man being flayed. The so-called queen is more erratic, more cold. She has had her remaining children brought to King’s Landing: Joffrey, Aegon the Younger, Viserys who is a sickly and disengaged toddler, his eyes and nose always running. They are tucked safely away in their rooms currently. They are glorified prisoners, just like you; they have no role in shaping the world they will one day inherit.

“My lady?” Autumn says, tapping your shoulder. The Blacks know her only as a handmaiden who assisted you in escaping the clutches of the Usurper when he fled King’s Landing. They have no idea who might have fathered the child in her rounded belly. It would not be safe for them to know. Before her time comes to deliver, Autumn will have to go someplace where the Blacks will be unaware if her son or daughter has the silvery hair of a Targaryen. You promised her a new home, but you cannot give it to her yet; nothing you own is truly yours, and Aegon left too suddenly to gift her property on your behalf. Autumn, curiously, does not seem to be in any hurry to leave you.

“I’m alright,” you say again, another leaden lie. The men are now discussing how the Usurper should be executed once they’ve found him: beheaded, hanged drawn and quartered, fed to a dragon, burned alive, some combination thereof. Medrick Manderly is suggesting that they have him flayed alive. When Cregan Stark arrives at last, surely there will be Boltons in his retinue.

“You are exhausted,” Autumn announces, loudly enough for the others to overhear. “You have been through so much. Please, my lady. Allow me to escort you back to your rooms.”

“Will you, please?” Everett asks Autumn. His eyes flick to hers, his fingers tapping his chin thoughtfully. “I’ll check on her before I retire for the evening.”

Autumn offers you her hand. This is a kindness, an escape. You take it and rise from the table.

“My daughter!” Bartimos Celtigar laments, gesturing to you. His spectators, men rabid with bloodlust, nod and murmur sympathetically, like it is almost something too distasteful to speak of. Murder can be discussed openly, torture, weapons, war; but the violence women collect and carry in their bones? Those are details best left unsaid. Perhaps it strikes too near to their own deeds, if they dared to think hard on them. Your father approaches and kisses you twice, once on each cheek. Rhaenyra drinks her wine and stares blankly at the place where Daemon had stood. “So wronged, so mistreated, and yet she is still with us. She will rise again. She has a glorious future ahead of her. We all do. All of us who serve Rhaenyra, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men. To the words of my house: Perpetual Resurrection!”

The men lift their cups and shout, none more deafeningly than Clement: “Perpetual Resurrection!” Everett mouths it quietly to himself. Corlys Velaryon says nothing. Rhaenyra holds her head high, sorrowful but defiant. You retreat from the Great Hall with Autumn, the hem of your gown flowing out behind you, black like the faction the Celtigars have aligned with, black like mourning.

“No,” you tell Autumn as she starts up the stairwell that leads to your bedchamber.

She is puzzled. “Where then?”

“Take me to the dungeons.”

“What? Why?” Then she understands. “Oh. Oh no. You don’t want to go down there. It’s awful, dark and grimy, dried blood on the walls, handprints and fingernails. Spiders and bones. Rats everywhere.”

“So you know the way.”

“Yes,” she admits cagily, tugging at a coiled lock of her coppery hair.

Your eyes narrow. “When were you in the dungeons?” You met Aegon there? He took women there? Before the war, before he was burned, before he met me?

“Don’t ask questions you wouldn’t want the answers to,” Autumn says primly. Then she ushers you through doorways and shadowy stairwells that lead down, down, down.

Grand Maester Orwyle is in the black cells. Jasper Wylde has already been executed; Tyland Lannister is being tortured until he reveals the location of the Greens’ stores of treasure. Otto Hightower, condemned to death, is housed on the floor of the dungeons reserved for prisoners of noble birth. There are torches burning in the corridor, rage-orange luminescence like dusk bleeding into the cells through gaps in the iron bars. Autumn does not leave you alone there, but she does wait at the end of the hall to give you—and the man who three times served as the Hand of the King and was twice removed from the same office, first by King Viserys and again by Aegon when Otto proved too cautious for his liking—some semblance of privacy.

Otto peers up at you from where he sits on the floor of his cell, strewn with dirty straw and glowing firelight. He appears old, impossibly old; the flesh has evaporated between his skull and his yellowed skin. He already looks like the skeleton he will be soon. He once counseled Aegon against flying into battle with Sunfyre, and Aegon hated him for it. But Otto was right, wasn’t he? “Did you tire of all the merriment upstairs? Or have they run out of roast boar? I could smell it cooking, you know. All day long as rats chewed at my ankles.”

“I imagine you now regret not running when you had the chance.”

Otto shrugs haggardly. “My odds would have been as good on the road as here. Out there, I might have been descended upon by a bear or a shadowcat or a band of thieves who left me gutted on the roadside. At least my death will be clean and swift.”

“Is there anything I can bring you?” you ask him, gently now. “Anything I can do for you? Before…tomorrow?” Before your life is ended. Before the Greens lose one of their greatest assets.

His gaunt face stretches into a slow, taunting grin. “You have chosen a side, Lady Celtigar.”

That’s true, isn’t it? By not spilling the Greens’ secrets. By falling in love with their king. “If Rhaenyra wins, I have to marry Cregan Stark and Aegon dies.”

“And you want him to live so he can marry you.”

It stuns you so much it takes a moment to find your words again. “Well, that’s not possible.” He already has a wife, no matter how insane she is now.

“I would not assume that any form of depravity is beyond his skill.” Otto sighs deeply. “Before that bitch took the city, I was corresponding with the Dragonseeds called Ulf the White and Hugh Hammer. They claim they will switch to our side for titles that Rhaenyra denies them. Ulf wanted Storm’s End—delusional, the drunk could not manage a fishing village, he spells half his words wrong—and Hugh asked the Blacks for Casterly Rock. Apparently Daemon was actually amenable, but Rhaenyra refused the notion entirely. How fortunate for us. If we offer these Dragonseeds the seats of lesser houses—Costayne and Merryweather, I’d suggest, both traitors to Aegon’s cause—I think they’ll declare for us. Alicent must write to them. With Aemond, Criston, and Daeron on the battlefield, and Aegon gods know where, she must be the one to negotiate for our side now. She is capable of it. I know she is.”

“She can’t get to the rookery.”

Otto smiles up at you cunningly. “I suspect her letters will somehow find their way there,” he says. “And you are now more knowledgeable of the would-be betrayers’ whereabouts than I am.”

You nod. This is true, for the Blacks speak openly around you. While Corlys’ alleged bastard Addam Velaryon—who accompanied the navy into King’s Landing—now patrols the skies above the city on Seasmoke, Ulf and Hugh are currently stationed at Maidenpool in a remote corner of the Riverlands and awaiting further instruction. Rhaenyra dislikes them, you can sense this already. She has heard tales of boasting, drinking, whoring, brawling, bottomless greed. She does not trust them. She does not understand how the gods allowed her sons to be killed and those scoundrels to live.

Otto says: “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What is it that draws you to Aegon?” He speaks with profound, genuine confusion. “What is there to admire? To yearn for?”

You see him, playful crooked smile and dazed eyes, careful hands, tiny silver braid. Unaware that you’re doing it, you twist the dragon ring on your finger. “He’s brave. He’s kind. I don’t understand why none of you can see it.”

“Ah.” And now Otto at last comprehends. “I was in love once,” he says wistfully, very far away, gazing at the stone wall, gazing at nothing. “I don’t remember what it felt like. But I remember that it happened. I suppose I will see Alicent’s mother again tomorrow. I hope she still recognizes me.” His eyes return to you, reflecting torchlight that shifts and distorts. “These dark, contagious facets of life change us all. They ruins us. Time, heartache, violence. You become capable of inconceivable things. You would scheme and deceive. You would murder.”

You can hear Aegon’s voice in the silence of the dungeons: I ruin causes. I ruin people. I couldn’t do that to you. “I’ll help your side however I can.”

“Do not allow the Blacks to discover your treason. You are far more valuable to us as someone who can drift between worlds than as a professed ally, assuming you cannot turn the Celtigars.”

“I can’t.” You could convince Everett, perhaps. But he isn’t the heir to Claw Isle.

Then Otto smiles, and it is the softest, most tender thing you’ve ever seen him do. “Please tell Alicent that I love her.”

“I will.”

“Now go,” he says. “Before you are witnessed here. Before you endanger what you want most.”

To end the war. To stop this suffering. To be with Aegon again. You hesitate, not knowing how to say goodbye. What is there left to say when the man in front of you is already dead?

“Go,” Otto Hightower orders again; and this time you obey.

He dies at 9:00 the next morning. Sunlight streams fierce and blinding into the Dragonpit. The smallfolk applaud and cheer, though perhaps mostly because Syrax and Caraxes are perched atop the domed roof and waiting, fangs bared, to devour anyone who dissents. In the people’s eyes, you see less savagery than terror. You can read the thoughts that dart between them, infectious like fever: We do not trust Rhaenyra, this ruthless queen, this Maegor with teats. We do not trust her bloodthirsty uncle-husband. We do not want to burn if Aemond and Vhagar return to reclaim the city.

Daemon swings the blade himself. It takes three blows to sever Otto’s head. This must have been intentional; you know what an expert swordsman Daemon is.

~~~~~~~~~~

You sit compliantly with your family at meals, dances, executions. You stroll in the gardens. You bring Helaena flowers, lilies, irises, tulips, daisies, roses. You bring Alicent paper and quills and ink. You take the letter she writes to the rookery above the chambers where Grand Maester Orwyle once resided. As the raven departs for Maidenpool, black wings flapping in cerulean summer air, you stare through a window that looks out onto Blackwater Bay towards Essos, Driftmark, Dragonstone.

Is Aegon there now? Is he alive?

You have no way of knowing; while ravens pass between King’s Landing and the Riverlands frequently, you cannot risk someone noticing correspondence with Dragonstone. But you feel that Aegon is safe on that fearsome, windswept island. You feel that he might even be gazing out of his own window, back towards the mainland, back towards you.

When you return to your bedchamber, Everett is there. He is seated at the writing desk and pointing to pages in a book about animals of the Crownlands, bears and dragons and crabs. The book is for children; the words are large and accompanied by colorful illustrations. Autumn is sitting in Everett’s lap, giggling as she repeats the words that he croons through her firelight hair.

You pause in the doorway. “What are you doing?”

“Learning how to read!” Autumn replies brightly.

“I thought you weren’t interested in that.”

“I’ve been struck by sudden and forceful inspiration to shed my commoner ignorance.”

“Autumn, dear,” Everett prompts. She climbs out of his lap, sweeps him a teasing girlish courtesy, and sails out of the room. Everett looks to you. “Come. Sit.”

“Not in your lap, hopefully.”

He laughs. “Where on earth did you find her?”

You take a seat at the edge of your bed, toying with your ring. Your fingertips glide over the bumps of those gleaming jade eyes. “A brothel here in King’s Landing. I don’t know what sort of family she was born into.”

“Oh,” Everett sighs sympathetically. Your father and Clement would be viciously pejorative, would demand Autumn’s removal from your service immediately. But Everett is a different sort of man. He was even before he was burned, and he’s far more so now. “The poor thing.” Then his eyebrows leap up. “Wait. How did you end up visiting a brothel…?”

“It doesn’t matter.” You peer out the window that overlooks the beach. You’re always watching the sea now, as if it can tell you its secrets, as if it can whisper to you in a language made of gull cries, breaking waves, starlight and moonbeams reflected on indigo currents in the dead of night.

“It’s strange,” Everett says. There is a soft, sad smile on his face. “Your body is here with us, but your soul isn’t.”

You don’t know how to reply. You don’t know how to explain everything that’s happened.

“The Usurper must have harmed you terribly.” Everett is not asking, but he is opening the door; you can tell him anything that is burdening you, and he will keep it to himself. You once sat with him as he lay dying, or at least when everyone believed he was; everyone but you and Maester Arthur back on Claw Isle. You once helped bring him back to life. That is a bond forged with something stronger than iron, something deeper than blood.

Aegon? Harm me? “He would never do that.”

Now Everett’s eyes are fixed intently on you. He is reading you like calculations of taxes, expenses, accounts, gains, losses. He realizes, hushed and alarmed: “You weren’t taken to King’s Landing by force.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

His jaw drops open, his eyes blink incredulously. “Do you…do you think he’s the rightful king?!”

“It’s not about that for me.”

“You are betrothed to another man.”

“Yes,” you agree.

“The Usurper is married.”

“Yes,” you say again. “And yet…”

“Seven hells,” Everett exhales. He shakes his head. “But…the Usurper…Aegon…he…he…he’s a monster, isn’t he? A rapist, a degenerate, a slothful and selfish wastrel?”

“No. He’s not. Just like Rhaenyra isn’t a sweet, serene mother to her kingdom.”

Everett smirks ruefully. He can’t argue with this.

“Aegon will pardon any Celtigar who rebelled against him. All they need to do is swear fealty upon being captured.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“I know where he was planning to go. I don’t know if he made it there.”

“And you worry for him,” Everett says softly.

You nod, unable to speak. You can feel the threat of tears scorching in your throat, dark churning clouds that forecast lightning, cyclones, floods.

“His burns have healed?” Everett asks. “Everyone knows he was horribly wounded at Rook’s Rest.”

“They’ve scarred over. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be alright.”

Everett understands this, he remembers the discussions the two of you once had with Maester Arthur. Severe burns weaken the organs, even years after the flesh is no longer raw and weeping. Survivors are prone to failure of their kidneys, liver, heart. They must be careful to avoid further trauma. Aegon does not have that luxury. “I don’t know what remedy to offer you,” Everett says remorsefully. “Rhaenyra met with Alicent, and the dowager queen put forth a generous compromise. Alicent proposed that the realm be divided. Aegon’s seat would be at Oldtown, and his jurisdiction would include the Reach, the Westerlands, and the Stormlands. Rhaenyra would continue to rule from King’s Landing and preside over the Crownlands, the Riverlands, the Vale, the Iron Islands, and the North. Both branches of the family would survive.”

“Rhaenyra could have ended it.” You marvel at the simplicity, the doomed slighted possibilities. “Here and now. The bloodshed would be over. Aegon could return to me.”

“Rhaenyra rejected the notion of any concessions whatsoever. Our father and Clement encouraged her. I would advocate for a peaceful resolution, I would advance your interests, sister. I would, I swear I would. But it is futile. You know they don’t listen to me.”

No, not in the arena of warfare. Everett is the heir to your father’s skill with trade, but Clement is the future Lord of Claw Isle, and it is he who wields swords and shields and leads men into combat. Everett cannot fight. Other men will never regard him as their full equal. “You have listened to my treason and not condemned me. I cannot ask for more from you than that.”

Everett stands from his chair, a slow, laborious undertaking. He crosses the room gingerly, lifts your chin to break the trance as you stare down at your ring, beams like the sun. “You want him.”

“Yes,” you admit helplessly.

“You’ve never wanted any man.”

“Just him. It can’t be anyone but him.”

Everett nods, thoughtful, amused. “Then I will pray that Lord Cregan Stark takes a wrong turn on the Kingsroad and ends up in the Vale, or the Iron Islands, or Essos, or perhaps even walks right into the sea. He’d sink, I’m sure. All those furs must be heavy when wet.”

“If anyone asks, you believe Aegon to be in Dorne.”

“I certainly do.” Everett smiles, touches his lips to your forehead, shuffles off to find Autumn and tell her that she can come back now.

Some nights, if you can enter without being noticed, you steal into the bedchamber that was once Aegon’s, the place where you brought him back from the dead, the place where he made you crave things that had once only filled you with dread, fear, revulsion. No one else has claimed Aegon’s rooms. No one else wants them. They make jokes about the debaucheries his walls must have seen, the unholy stains that surely riddle his mattress, rugs, curtains. They don’t know him at all, and nothing can make them want to. Tonight, there are quarreling voices coming from outside. You go to the open window, your lungs expanding with cool indigo air, and look out.

“Where are you going? Daemon? Daemon!” Rhaenyra is raging after him, following him onto the wet sand of the beach. “Back to Harrenhal? Back to your whore?!”

He does not answer. He strides arrogantly, he storms away from her, this woman he once loved for her tenacity and pride. He has no appetite for weakness. He has no patience for pruning those creeping, thorny vines of madness that are growing into her mind, her veins. Already Caraxes is landing in the surf to take him back to his foothold in the Riverlands, to Baela, to Nettles.

“Then go!” Rhaenyra screams after Daemon. And if you can hear this, surely others can as well. “Just go! We don’t need you here! I don’t need you here!”

Lies, lies, lies. Desperate and transparent lies.

Daemon and Caraxes take flight and disappear into the nightscape darkness over the ocean. You climb into the bed that was once Aegon’s, curl up in a nest of his blood-flecked sheets, breathe in lingering wisps of rose oil and the echoes of his low, drowsy voice, thick with wine and milk of the poppy and forbidden desire for a woman who sheds and replaces her skin again and again and again.

~~~~~~~~~~

A week later, you go to the gardens and read under the heart tree about cures and poisons. When you return inside—clutching a glass jar containing sticks, leaves, grass, and a single wriggling caterpillar, a gift for Helaena—the Red Keep is in chaos. Servants and guards are gossiping feverishly. Upstairs, Alicent is howling with grief. You glimpse Autumn racing up a staircase towards the dowager queen’s rooms to comfort her. There are sounds of celebration in the Great Hall, cups being toasted and cheers loosed like dragonfire. You follow them, suffocating terror constricting your throat like a noose. Is it Aemond, Criston, Daeron? Is it Aegon? Have they found him, have they killed him?

At the center of the high table, Rhaenyra is wearing a gown of black and red on her body and a smile of soulless satisfaction on her face. She holds a glass of maroon wine high above her head. “To vengeance!” she calls, and the lords that fill the hall thunder the words back to her. “To victory!”

“Father…?” you say, rushing to Bartimos Celtigar’s side. Clement is shaking hands with Manderlys and Blackwoods and Costaynes, grinning radiantly. Everett and Corlys are peering around grimly, looking uneasy, looking ashamed.

What have they done now? Who have they murdered in cold blood?

“Father, what—?”

“He has no more heirs,” Bartimos Celtigar tell you, as if it is the most joyous of surprises, as if is a gift like a gemstone or a rare book.

“Who?”

“The Usurper. Both of his sons are now dead. Neither of his brothers have children. Aegon has no heirs!”

“Maelor,” you whisper, envisioning that defenseless white-haired child, giggling, affectionate, anxious, sobbing in the arms of Sir Rickard Thorne. The jar tumbles out of your grasp and shatters against the stone floor. “Maelor is…he’s…he’s been killed…?”

“By a mob of Black loyalists at Bitterbridge,” your father says. “The Greens were trying to smuggle the child to Oldtown. Our supporters attempted to seize the boy so he could be brought to us. Alas, they were too boisterous. He did not survive, and neither did his keeper Rickard Thorne.”

They tore Maelor apart? They clawed and yanked at that little boy until there was nothing left but shreds of muscle and moon-white bones? You gape up at your father, unable to recognize him, unable to keep the horror from your face. “You’re celebrating the murder of a child?”

“They did the same when Luke was killed.”

Because Aegon thought they had to. Because he wanted to protect his brother. “It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.”

“You are too compassionate, daughter,” your father says, smiling with a puddle-deep, patronizing fondness. Was he always this way? Has he changed so much, or have you? He touches your cheek, and you want to flinch away from him. “You lose sight of the scale of this war. Each child of the Usurper that dies spares thousands of others. Aegon now has no heirs left, not unless you count that little girl who’s hidden away somewhere, and don’t the Greens reject the right of a daughter to inherit the throne? Isn’t that what all of this havoc has been about, preventing Rhaenyra’s ascension? This is a resounding triumph for our side! This is something to commemorate!”

They tore Maelor apart??

Corlys gets up from the table and leaves the Great Hall. Everett is watching you with wide, fearful eyes. He is pleading silently: Don’t react. Don’t panic. Not where they can see you.

“Are you well?” your father asks you, concerned now.

“I feel ill,” you hear yourself answer. You grip the back of his chair so the floor can’t rip itself out from under you.

“Just a moment,” Everett says, rising in that labored way, the scar tissue straining painfully at his ankles and knees and hips. “I’ll accompany you back to your rooms…”

But you can’t wait for him. The tears are already flame-hot and misty in your eyes. You rip away from the Celtigars, away from all the Blacks, and escape upstairs. Breathless, sobbing, you go first to Helaena’s bedchamber. Aegon’s wife is standing in front of her window that overlooks the sandstone courtyard, cobblestones of muted earthy gold. You can hear courtiers chattering far below. You can hear the carousing reverberating from the Great Hall. Helaena does not turn when you arrive; she does not give any indication that she is aware of you.

“Helaena,” you gasp. “Your Grace, I…I’m so sorry…what has happened…it’s despicable, it’s soulless, I cannot stop Rhaenyra’s men from reveling in it but I would never defend their actions, I would never join them, I am horrified and heartsick and appalled—”

“It’s a travesty,” Autumn says from the doorway, and you glance over at her. When you look back to the queen, she has vanished.

“Helaena?!” you shout. You and Autumn bolt to the window. Down in the courtyard, courtiers are shrieking and fleeing from the mess. On the cobblestones, Helaena lies sprawled; her arms and legs are bent at impossible angles. A pool of blood spreads out from under her like a river swelling in a storm until it spills over. Guards are hurrying to the scene, their armor jangling. “Helaena!”

“She’s gone,” Autumn says, bundling you into her arms before you can make for the hall, the stairwell. Her belly presses unyieldingly into you. “There’s nothing you can do. Don’t go down there. You can’t help her now.”

You cover your face with both hands and scream: for Maelor, for Helaena, for Alicent, for Aegon, for the world full of people who can’t stop paying the debts others incurred.

“Don’t go down there.” Autumn’s voice is warm and hushed, her grasp strong. “You can’t help Helaena now. You can only hurt yourself. You don’t need to see it. You don’t need her blood on your hands.”

Everett appears, looks out the window to investigate the commotion in the courtyard, backs away with a hand covering his gaping mouth. “Oh, gods. All the gods, Old and New. What a goddamn fucking disaster.”

Autumn at last releases you, and you dash into the hallway with Everett following as quickly as he can and Autumn walking with him, one arm looped through his. You find Alicent in her rooms, standing motionless beside her bed in an emerald green gown. She is trembling and speechless, she is in shock. You embrace her. “I’m sorry,” you say, tears falling on the velvet of her dress. “I know that doesn’t make it any better, but I am.”

Everett and Autumn enter the bedchamber and shut the door behind them. “What—?” Everett begins.

“I have to go to him,” you say. You step away from the dowager queen and wipe your eyes with your sleeves, black like onyx, like obsidian, like death.

“Who...?”

“Aegon. The king,” you tell them. “He’s going to hear of this. He’s going to know what happened to Maelor and Helaena. I can’t let him face that alone. I can’t let him fall into despair.”

“But he…I mean…” Everett is trying to choose his words sensitively. The state of the royal marriage was no secret anywhere in the realm. “Was he even…involved with his wife and children? In any meaningful way?”

“It’s not about them, it’s about him thinking that he’s responsible, that he’s a curse to anyone he touches, that he ruins people, I…” You shake your head franticly. “I can’t stay here. I have to go. I have to be with him.”

“Go where?!” Everett exclaims.

“Dragonstone,” Autumn answers for you.

“Dragonstone,” he repeats numbly. “You can’t be serious! How will you get there?!”

“I’ll take a horse to Crackclaw Point and then pay a boat to ferry me across the water.”

“Alone?!” Everett says.

“I’ll have to be. You cannot travel by horse, only carriage. And your absence would be noticed too swiftly. Father would send soldiers after you if he feared you’d been captured.”

“You’ve never gone anywhere alone, now you’re going to travel a hundred miles over earth and ocean to Dragonstone?!”

“She won’t be alone,” Autumn says. You and Everett turn to her. She is grinning. “I mean no offense, my lady, but you know nothing of the world beyond your castles and gardens and books full of naked men drawings. You would not last a day on your own.”

“You can’t ride a horse either,” you object. “You’re with child. It could be dangerous.”

“I’ve done far more vigorous activities while pregnant, believe me.”

“You’re really going?” Everett says, quiet, mournful. It seems that you’ve only just reunited with him.

“I have to. Aegon thought I’d be safe with the Blacks, and I am, I suppose…but I’m not really a Black anymore. And I can’t let him suffer alone. I…I…”

“You love him,” Alicent says. She gazes at you with huge, glassy, void-dark eyes, like those of a doe felled by arrows. She is half-here and half-not, and thank the gods for that. Her loss is too great. She cannot bear it all at once. Part of her knows her only daughter is dead on the cobblestones outside, her last grandson was torn apart by a mob that were more beasts than men. And then part of her is only aware of this room. “Properly. Entirely. In a way he can understand.”

“I do,” you confess. I do, I do.

“I’m glad,” Alicent says dully. “Someone must.”

She staggers to her bed, lies down on it, curls up like a wounded animal, rips away her golden necklace of a seven-pointed star and throws it to the floor.

~~~~~~~~~~

In the night, you and Autumn leave King’s Landing on horses Everett procured. There is only a skeleton crew of guards left in the Red Keep; the rest are partaking in the festivities that pulse in the Great Hall like a heartbeat, candlelight and music and manic glee. Yet among the smallfolk, no one is celebrating. They are in mourning for their misfortunate, benign queen and her toddler son. They are hissing venomously about Rhaenyra, Daemon, Bartimos Celtigar.

The court will not notice Autumn’s absence, not for days at least, perhaps not ever. Everett will upend your bedchamber before he goes to sleep, knocking over chairs and tables, yanking sheets from the bed. In the morning, he will tell your father that he assumes you are still resting from your illness, from the insurmountable stress of the past months. Women are so fragile, after all; their lives are one tragedy after the next. When at last someone checks on you—hopefully not for a few days—it will appear that you have been taken after a struggle. You did not leave. You were kidnapped by fiends using the secret passageways. You are a prisoner of the Greens again, and likely spirited away to the Stormlands or the Reach or perhaps even the remote, golden sands of Dorne.

You and Autumn travel by night and sleep through the day, staying at roadside inns paid for by the heavy sack of coins Everett gifted you. It is not difficult to blend in among countless travelers and refugees displaced in the wake of the war. You have no distinguishing characteristics, no Valyrian-white hair or ragged burns or sapphires in place of eyes. In fact, Autumn attracts more attention than you do. She is beautiful, talkative, effortlessly flirtatious. Men trail after her at every inn. You receive exemplary service, the hottest soup and the cleanest rooms. She complains to you about how difficult it is becoming for her to rest as her belly grows: perhaps five months along, perhaps six, she isn’t certain, her cycle was already irregular from the lemonweed tea brewed at the brothel.

In a small town called Eagle Harbor at the base of Crackclaw Point, you need to hire a sailor to take you across the narrow strait to Dragonstone. You fumble through stilted inquiries at a tavern until Autumn takes charge, half-drags a bald, bearded man back into the pantry, emerges with him five minutes later, and orders a pint of ale that she sips with a lazy, arrogant smirk.

“May the Mother have mercy!” the sailor says unsteadily, wiping sweat from his brow. “I’ll go to Dragonstone and back ten times for this red-haired demon!”

You and Autumn board his humble vessel at the end of the town’s lone pier and set off through choppy, night-draped waters towards Dragonstone. On the way, the sailor informs you that he’s made this trip a handful of times in the past two weeks, delivering an assortment of workers to the island: servants, guards, maesters, cooks.

“Rumor has it,” the sailor says with a conspiratorial grin. “There is a very illustrious occupant currently holding Dragonstone. He is scarred, but he is growing stronger. Surely you know of whom I speak. He must have beckoned you to join him. Perhaps you are servants. Perhaps you are whores. He has a famed appetite for them.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” Autumn offers casually.

“Many here in the Crownlands are aware,” the sailor continues. “But you will not catch anyone being too loose with their gossip. The Beggar King is no enemy to us. The Bitch Queen is an enemy. That money-grubbing Bartimos Celtigar is an enemy. But the Greens will end the taxes he put on us. The sooner the Beggar King is well again, the better. He and his dragon too.”

When the sailor docks at Dragonstone, Autumn helps you up onto the pier and then gets back in the boat. “You aren’t staying?” you ask her, baffled, troubled. You have grown terribly attached to her. Cold night rain falls onto the island, growing heavier by the minute. Lightning snaps through the darkness and strikes near the castle.

“No. I want to be with Everett.” Autumn smiles. “And I know the king would not wish for me to impose upon Dragonstone.”

She’s probably right. “Why is he so cold to you? So avoidant?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Autumn says. “He doesn’t want you thinking about him fucking anyone except you.” She grins, winks, gestures for the sailor to unmoor his boat again. “When the Greens come to retake the capital, please ask them not to incinerate me.”

“I’ll pass the message along.”

“Good luck,” she says, waving. “We’ll wait to set sail until you’ve started up the steps.”

Through the darkness, through the driving rain, you trudge up the beach and then ascend the stone steps carved precariously into the cliffside. The grey stone is slippery; for parts of the climb, you walk on your palms as well as your boots. Your ring clinks against rock. When the clouds momentarily blow away from the moon, the gold wings glimmer in the silver light. There are torches burning in the mouths of iron dragons as you near the entranceway of the castle, towering walls that disappear into storm clouds. There is candlelight flickering in the corridors and chambers within. You can see dots of miniature infernos in the windows.

Aegon is in one of those rooms.

Suddenly, a screech startles you so badly you nearly plunge off the steps. Fire blooms in the night air only yards from your face. He’s clutching the cliffside, glaring at you with molten gold eyes set in an angular skull, snarling, smoke drifting skyward from his nostrils. You scream before you can stop yourself.

Sunfyre!!

You crouch down on the steps, squeeze your eyes shut, and wait for him to burn you alive. Seconds pass, ten, twenty, thirty. When you look at Sunfyre again, scales shimmering in the moonlight, he is observing you not with hatred but with curiosity that is clever, almost catlike. You have never been this close to a dragon before. You’ve never wanted to be, and now is no exception. He smells like smoke and sulfur, earth and ash. Sunfyre clambers nearer to you, his muzzle outstretched. You flinch away, whimpering, but he is not deterred. The dragon sniffs and nudges at you, his breath hot, his snout bumping against your arm and shoulder.

“Stop!” you squeak, petrified. “Sunfyre, don’t!”

At last, he seems to realize he’s frightening you. The dragon retreats with a low grumble from deep in his chest. You scramble up the remainder of the steps before he can change his mind.

There is distant shouting, and someone cranks open the castle gate for you. You hurry into the courtyard, running now, as rain pours down on you and thunder booms. There is a figure in a hooded cloak trotting out of the castle entrance. At first you don’t believe he can be Aegon; he is standing too tall, moving too brisky. You have never seen him so well before. But then he calls to you, and there is no doubt.

“Angel?!” Aegon shouts in disbelief over the drumming of raindrops. He is rapidly closing the distance between you. The wind tears off his hood. Beneath it his hair is longer than you remember and wild except for a single small braid down the left side of his face. His cheeks are ruddy. Tears stream from his eyes. He has heard what happened to Maelor and Helaena; he has been weeping for them, for the impending ruin of anyone he’s ever touched. “What the hell are you doing here—?!”

And instead of waiting for an answer he kisses you, or you kiss him, or you both do it at once, an unspoken covenant written not in ink but in the blood that whispers to each other through the veils of vessel walls, muscle, scarred skin. His hands are cradling your jaw, his lips ravenous. He smells like rose oil; he tastes like wine and rain and the clean salt of tears, the ageless mineral blue of the ocean.

“It has to be you,” you tell Aegon, a ghost of a voice in the maelstrom of the storm. Your thumbprint skates across his full bottom lip before you kiss him again, more slowly now, entwining yourself with him, hipbones and ribcages and handprints that will never wash off. Do you see what I’m offering? Do you feel what I want? “You’re not ruining me. You’re saving me. And it can’t be anyone but you.”

Aegon studies your face, stunned eyes murky like the waves, and then hungry as well: depths that swallow ships, watery graveyards that feast on bones. Then he takes your hand and leads you into Dragonstone. Inside, Larys Strong is waiting under a cascade of torchlight. He blinks at you as if you might disappear. When you don’t, he tilts his head to the side, intrigued.

“Lord Larys,” Aegon says curtly. “Make yourself invisible for the rest of the night.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Larys purrs with a bow. Then he vanishes into the shadows.

“This way,” Aegon says, and you follow him up a staircase and down a corridor to a bedchamber illuminated only by a few flickering candles and flashes of lightning. In the corner of the room, you glimpse swords and armor; on Aegon’s bedside table, there is a glass bottle of rose oil and the hollowed-out shell of a crab, boiled red like fresh blood. And then you are on the bed and Aegon is beside you and there is not a single thread of you, muscle or marrow or nerve, that is afraid. “Are you sure?” he’s asking between deep, insatiable kisses, his fingers working on the laces of your gown. “We don’t have to. We can stop.”

But does he want that? No, no, he’s starving just like I am. “I’m sure, Aegon.” And you uncover each other with hands that rip away cotton and silk like trees are stripped bare in the winter.

His clothes are gone, cloak and trousers crumpled on the floor, and he pauses with trepidation in his eyes. His scars riddle him with uneven swaths of white, pink, red, a burgundy so dark it’s almost the violet of a bruise. The macabre patchwork stops at the lowest part of his belly, where his skin becomes abruptly pristine, pale, velvet-soft. “I guess…” He swallows noisily. “I guess this isn’t what you imagined the man you’d sleep with would look like, huh?”

“No,” you agree, smiling, pulling him in close again. I never imagined enjoying this at all. “And I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything. Don’t keep me waiting.”

Aegon helps you tug off your gown and loosen your hair; it spills freely over the bedsheets. He’s on top of you, his warm weight perfect and welcome and right. Too swiftly for you to be nervous, his hand has settled between your legs. He strokes you, only on the outside where there is no threat of pain, as his tongue darts into your mouth and wetness soon coats his fingers. Then his fingers venture lower, seeking to enter you, the first time anything ever has. And you feel it, though you wish you didn’t, involuntary and uninvited: your body tensing just as his finger attempts to glide inside, a biting pain that makes you wince.

“No,” you yelp softly, a betrayal of your own flesh.

“Okay,” Aegon murmurs reassuringly. “That’s okay. Not a problem. Here…” He sits upright, draws you to him, bites lightly at your throat as you settle in his lap. “You’re in charge. You decide if and when it happens. And if this time doesn’t work, that’s fine, that’s completely fine, we can try again later, I can wait—”

“Are you alright like this? Am I too heavy?”

He grabs your face with his left hand—fingers hooked around your jaw, his eyes locked with yours—and says roughly: “Don’t ask about me again.”

“Okay,” you moan into him as his right hand skims down to touch you, to coax the fear out of you, to draw powerful circles around the place where your pleasure is greatest.

“This is about you.”

“Okay,” you say again, only a whisper this time, obedient, desperate.

“Please let me have this,” Aegon begs, resting his forehead against yours, his silver hair grazing your cheeks. “Please let me take care of you this time.”

“Yes,” you sigh, breathing him in, roses and heat and wine and sharp, oceanic, mineral lust. You lay your palms against the gnarled scar tissue of his chest and Aegon chuckles bitterly.

“I can’t even feel it. I’m a monster.” Then you press your bare hips to his, gradually finding a rhythm, slipping his cock through slick, warm folds that are aching more ardently than you ever knew was possible. “Oh fuck,” he gasps. “I felt that.”

“I want you,” you plead. “I want you, I want you.”

“Not yet…”

You are aware that your tension unraveling, your muscles opening as Aegon massages you until his hand is soaked, until you’re so wet the friction is almost nonexistent. Outside waves crash and lighting flashes and thunder growls like a dragon. I can’t wait. I need him. You lift up and Aegon holds his cock steady, coating it in your wetness with a quick pump of his hand, so you can lower yourself onto him. Slowly, you can feel his cock sinking into you, an indescribably foreign sensation, fullness and stretching and dull, strange contentment that is more like the potential of pleasure than anything else. There is discomfort as well, yes, a burning and a stinging that swells as he fills you. You try to keep it from your face; still, Aegon can read the pain there like black ink on pages.

He shakes his head and murmurs: “Stop, stop, I’m hurting you.”

“I want it. I can take it.”

He’s kissing your lips, your cheek, the slope of your jaw. “Give yourself time to adjust. There’s no rush, Angel. I’m not going anywhere.”

You wait until the pain seems to have vanished, then—carefully, tentatively—you rise up and lower yourself again. Yes, there’s definite pleasure now, less sharp than where he touched you before but deeper, more total. You try this again, again, faster now. Aegon’s breath hitches. He’s trembling; sweat glistens on his forehead and dampens his hair.

“I’m going to show you something,” he pants. “But you have to help me out.”

“Help how…?”

“Tell me what I’m doing right.” His fingers are on you again, pressing, circling. And there’s something about this combination of two very different colors of pleasure—dull fullness inside, intense ecstasy dancing over the skin—that lights a spark in you like striking flint.

You cry out, your pace as you ride him quickening, any last remnants of pain banished to distant memory. You are conscious now that you are working towards a peak of some sort; you can feel it building in you like fire in the mouth of a dragon.

Aegon asks: “Faster? Slower?”

“Faster,” you reply, and his hand obeys. You moan, fingers knotted in his hair and lips against the scar tissue of his throat, grisly webs that you cherish for knitting him back together, for saving his life.

“Harder or softer?”

“Harder,” you beg him in a whisper. And all at once, the pleasure is overwhelming, unstoppable, incomparable to anything you’ve ever experienced or ever wanted to, anything you thought was possible, anything you believed you were worthy of. It wrenches everything out of you, desire as well as turmoil, every thought in your skull and fear in your bones. It passes, leaving your heart thumping violently and an involuntary throbbing that squeezes Aegon’s cock, releases it, squeezes it again.

Aegon lays you down on your back and thrusts into you, shallowly at first to make sure you’re alright, then deeper and more powerfully. There’s no pain at all, only a hazy calmness, a need to be near to him, to tangle up closer and closer until you share everything, veins and arteries and the capillary beds of lungs. He’s exhausted already; you notice a few needle-thin split seams in his scar tissue. There are faint stains of crimson blood on your belly, your chest. His fingers link through yours, his moans grow louder and more jagged. He comes so hard tears spring into his eyes, and you feel one more thing you hadn’t expected to: not vulnerability but power, pride, satisfaction.

“It’s like that every time?” you ask, drowsy and amazed as he rolls onto his side and pulls you against him. The rain is still falling outside. Lightning paints the windows; thunder quakes them.

“If it’s done well.” Aegon is pink-faced, breathing heavily, staggeringly beautiful. “See? Nothing to be afraid of.”

“No wonder you’ve fucked hundreds of women.”

He laughs. “Not that many.” He grins as he kisses you, brushing your hair back from your face. “You’ve rid me of them all. You’ve burned them away.”

“I love you,” you say without planning to.

Aegon replies, but not in words you can understand. He whispers something in High Valyrian, his eyes dip closed, he is asleep before you can ask him what it means.

[cynicalclassicist]

Not quite as cartoony as you often find images of the Freys to be! But yeh, that works for him.

THE LANNISTERS: Emmon Frey

Emmon is a small man, thin and nervous and mostly bald. The sullen Emmon has a prominent apple in his throat.

Emmon went to Casterly Rock at the age of fourteen to marry the boisterous Genna Lannister, who was half his age. The match by Genna’s father, Lord Tytos Lannister, outraged Lord Roger Reyne and Genna’s brother, the ten-year-old Tywin Lannister. Emmon has since been fearful of Tywin, now the Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West.

Although House Frey allied with House Tully and House Stark at the onset of the War of the Five Kings, Emmon took the side of House Lannister. As part of the deal between Lord Tywin Lannister and Lord Walder Frey, Emmon is to be given the Tully lands and titled Lord of Riverrun, as the crown has declared the Tullys forfeit to all land and titles in the aftermath of the Red Wedding. Emmon is to receive Riverrun once Ser Brynden Tully yields the castle.

Emmon is among the Freys at the siege of Riverrun, encamping south of the Red Fork, and he insists that Ser Ryman Frey hang the captive Lord Edmure Tully, to no avail. For a time Emmon believes he is the new overlord of the riverlands until Ser Jaime Lannister points out that honor is held by Petyr Baelish, the new Lord Paramount of the Trident. Emmon also objects to any assaults on the castle by Jaime or Ser Daven Lannister.

Although Jaime resolves the siege, Emmon is furious when Brynden the Blackfish escapes through the River Gate. Emmon, now age sixty and Lord of House Frey of Riverrun, holds Riverrun with a garrison of two hundred men. He pontificates to the castle’s servants, and Tom of Sevenstreams decides to remain in Riverrun to sing for the Frey lord. ———— This image will be featured on my upcoming map of the Westerlands.

[melrosing]

rare twow theorising. taking it as a given that red wedding 2.0 is happening (as I do)….. I think they’re gonna flood Riverrun w the Lannisters and Freys trapped inside

- Daven suggesting to Jaime they just flood the whole place instead of laying siege in JAIME V, AFFC

- Tom of Sevenstreams laying on the foreshadowing as Emmon Frey moves into Riverrun

[dwellordream]

female adultery in ASOIAF and why it's not akin to modern day cheating

frequently fans insist on treating adultery within the world of ASOIAF as it it were the same as modern day infidelity. this, of course, ignores the fact that most marriages among the nobility of Westeros are arranged.

this does not mean every marriage is miserable, of course, but there is significantly less emotional attachment between the couple beforehand, unless they have known one another since childhood.

with that said, fans quite often do use this argument in defense of adultery- not for wives, but for husbands. a frequent claim put out is that men like Rhaegar, for example, don't owe their wives any loyalty because the marriage was not their choice. while technically, yes, no one is mandated to love their spouse or to respect an inherently broken marriage system, this ignores the fact that a woman like Elia is not free to carry on an affair the way her husband would be. women's bodies and sexualities are far more policed than men's in Westeros.

even with her husband's permission to take a lover on the side, most women would face extreme social ostracization and scorn if they were found out to be having affairs. and especially for the wives of princes and kings, this carries the weight of treason, because it puts into question the parentage of any royal heirs. Elia could have been outright killed if she was found to have a lover, regardless of Rhaegar's personal feelings on the matter.

the vague exception to this rule would be in the case of a woman like Genna Lannister, who is considered to have been forced to marry 'beneath her station', to a Frey, and thus, the jokes and insinuations that she may be cheating on Emmon do not carry quite the same weight. yet even so, I doubt Genna Lannister would ever openly announce she had a lover or directly discuss having an affair with her husband.

to go back to my original point, I am far more interested in female adultery than male. this is primarily because one of the few ways most Westerosi noblewomen can fight back against a forced or arranged match, or against an abusive or neglectful husband, is to secretly pursue their own pleasure and ambitions with a lover.

that is not to say that I think cheating is moral in these situations, but it is certainly not the same as a modern day woman having a fling while her husband is oblivious. a woman like Cersei, for example, did not choose to marry Robert. she was initially happy to become queen, but she quickly became disillusioned with her marriage, and Robert proved an extremely abusive and contemptuous husband.

Cersei cannot divorce or leave Robert, and even if she attempted to, would likely lose all contact with her children. nor does her family support the idea of her ending her marriage. given these parameters, Cersei cheating on Robert is simply not the same as it would be in a modern AU.

similarly, Rhaenyra is often bashed by the fandom for likely carrying on an affair with Harwin Strong during her marriage to Laenor. while there is zero indication in F&B or HOTD that Laenor was ever abusive or cruel to Rhaenyra, we know she did not freely choose to marry him. while HOTD presents the match as something Rhaenyra accepts and tries to use to her advantage, in F&B, Rhaenyra initially strongly protests the marriage until her father threatens to disown her if she does not accept Laenor as a husband.

in F&B, Laenor and Rhaenyra's marriage is depicted as stable but distant. the couple does not spend much time together and while Laenor appears to have tolerated Rhaenyra's relationship with Harwin, and to have had his own lovers, he obviously expected Rhaenyra to still have children who would be publicly presented as his offspring.

outside of any arguments over Rhaenyra's actions during the Dance or her time as reigning Queen, was Rhaenyra wrong to pursue a relationship outside her marriage, and to claim the children from that relationship as legitimate? I don't think so. 'legitimacy' is a construct of the feudal system in ASOIAF. while this doesn't mean it doesn't cause real trauma and pain, both to children raised knowing they are bastards, children who are accused of being bastards, and women who are expected to silently tolerate their husbands potentially pitting their own children against one another, it is not, actually 'real'.

Rhaenyra's sons are still her sons. her sexuality and personal autonomy shouldn't, outside of the context of the story, actually be something she is judged on. so it is strange to me when people insist that Rhaenyra having an affair or claiming her sons as legitimate is openly tyrannical or malevolent. there is plenty to criticize her character on- much as there is plenty to criticize Cersei on- but choosing to defy the institutions around her is not one of those critiques that should be valid.

[aegor-bamfsteel]

In your opinion, is Catelyn Stark a warm person? Or, at least to people who she isn’t particularly close with, do you think she comes across as cold in many of her interactions? Genuinely curious what you think

Instances of Catelyn being warm to strangers/people she doesn’t know well:

Wanted to bury/put under a cairn the men killed in her service from an attack by the mountain clans, saying they deserved better than to be carrion, and wanted the gods to forgive her when told they had to keep moving. —AGOT Tyrion IV

Personally gave each of the oarsmen on the Storm Dancer a silver stag (and a copper to those who carried her to the inn) because she feared Captain Tumitis might want to keep the money for himself. —AGOT Catelyn IV

Asked Mya Stone about “her love” Mychel Redfort, and smiled at her dream of marrying him even though she knows the class difference makes it impossible. —AGOT Catelyn VI

Tried to talk down armored knights from killing Brienne, helped distract Emmon by braining him with a brazier during the duel, taking her with her escort to Riverrun to avoid being killed by Renly’s men, then convincing Brienne not to throw her life away to seek Stannis immediately. This was after one conversation and just feeling Brienne was innocent of Renly’s death. —ACOK Catelyn IV&V

Making sure the Silent Sisters are provided with fresh horses and guards to escort Ned’s bones to Winterfell. —ACOK Catelyn V

Despite her own sadness and misgivings on them being there, allowed Desmond Grell to break open wine casks and for the smallfolk to have a party following the victory at Stone Mill. —ACOK Catelyn VI

Tried to comfort Jeyne Westerling as Robb is getting more distant, telling her about how the Starks belong to the Old Gods, despite not approving of the marriage. —ASOS Catelyn III

Tried to comfort Lynesse Hightower’s despair at how out-of-place she felt at Bear Island by relating her own experience as a southerner with a Northern husband. —ASOS Catelyn V

Strangers to whom Catelyn is courteous (not necessarily warm, but not rude either):

Ser Donnel Waynwood, asking for Maester Colemon to treat Rodrik’s wounds —AGOT Catelyn VI

Ser Vardis Egen, trying to prevent the Vale lords from executing Tyrion —AGOT Catelyn VII

Lord Walder Frey, asking to open the gates for Robb’s men to cross— AGOT Catelyn IX

Margaery Tyrell, saying she was kind to console her for Ned’s death—ACOK Catelyn II

Robar Royce, for escorting her to and from a Bitterbridge Sept —ACOK Catelyn IV

Times when Catelyn was cold/sharp/snappish to people she doesn’t know well:

When Petyr Baelish has her summoned to a tower in the middle of the night by the City Watch, after not seeing her for years —AGOT Catelyn IV

When Tyrion insinuated she had slept with Petyr Baelish. —AGOT Tyrion IV

When Tyrion boasts of Lannister pride, considering she thinks he killed her son at the time. —AGOT Catelyn VI

When Jaime snarks that he doesn’t have her brother, father, and daughters (all in Lannister hands at the time) around, after he’s been captured —AGOT Catelyn X

When Randall Tarly insinuates Robb is less than a man for not coming to parley himself, she sharply protests that Robb is fighting in a war and not a tourney —ACOK Catelyn II

When Stannis and Renly refuse to put their quarrel aside and fight the Lannisters together. —ACOK Catelyn II

When Martyn Rivers tells her that Robb fed Stafford Lannister’s heart to Grey Wind. —ACOK Catelyn V

When Jaime admits to pushing Bran out of a window and insults Ned’s honor. —ACOK Catelyn VII

When she tells Roose about the accusations (rape, murder) against Ramsay. —ASOS Catelyn VI

From these instances I’ve collected, I can conclude that Catelyn is warm to strangers who have helped her, who she sees herself/her family in, or who are innocent and need comfort. She is courteous to strange lords in their own territories when she needs something from them (crossing bridges, medical care), or out of common politeness when they haven’t been rude before. She is cold to people she doesn’t know well who insult her family or have done them harm, gloss over atrocities they/their underlings have committed, or when courtesy has failed and she’s trying to remind them of the larger picture. The interactions with those she does know well (Edmure, Ned, Rodrik, Blackfish, Hoster, Lysa, Robb, Theon) have more dimensions, ranging from affectionate to disappointed to appalled; and she admits she might be too harsh with Edmure or Robb at times, which causes them to freeze her out (ASOS Catelyn V), or that since they’re kings/lords now, she can’t be as openly affectionate (AGOT Catelyn VIII). But I don’t think she comes across any colder than most people when interacting with strangers: she’s kind to those who help/need comfort, polite but reserved according to normal circumstances, and cold when a person is actively hostile to her/her family.

[cynicalclassicist]

No wonder Tywin Lannister doesn't think much of his good-brother!

But the Freys besieging Riverrun are meant to look sort of ridiculous and without any nobility.

Do you think there's irony with Tywin talking about how men who say they are king aren't king and his good-brother Emmon going on about his piece of paper making him Lord of Riverrun, making him look ridiculous, especially compared to the noble captive Edmure?

The Freys are the clowns of that particular circus, no doubt about that.

[goodqueenaly]

@windriverdelta reblogged your post “You said you were worried about Jeyne Westerling....”

Another thing worth adding is that it's not clear whether Tom O'Sevens knows that Jeyne Westerling is innocent. If he doesn't, then Lady Stoneheart won't be forewarned and instead assume that the Westerlings were all in on the Red Wedding, in line with her indiscriminate approach. In that case, it might be her that kills Jeyne rather than Prester - which is more dramatic and thematically appropriate IMO. If he does, then it gets a bit murkier - @turtle-paced and @goodqueenaly do we know whether Tom O'Sevens was around for Jaime's meetings with the Westerlings?

It’s unclear where Tom o'Sevens was exactly, physically speaking, between the end of “Jaime VI” (when Jaime leaves Tom to sing “The Rains of Castamere” to Edmure as Edmure is in the bath) and near the end of “Jaime VII” (when Jaime reencounters Tom as the latter listens to Emmon Frey’s long speech to the people of Riverrun). While there is certainly no mention of Tom being present when Jaime speaks with Jeyne and her mother (or, rather, to Jeyne and with Sybell) - only the nameless guardsman who notifies Jaime of the Westerlings' arrival and the guardsman (who may be the same individual) who escorts Lady Westerling from Lord Tully’s solar - it’s certainly at least remotely possible that news or rumors of this conversation reached Tom somewhere within the castle or the surrounding camp. Of course, even in such a scenario, you might think Tom or other onlookers would have noticed and/or heard about either Jeyne’s tearful declarations of her devotion to Robb or her small but spirited attempt to show herself in mourning for her husband - a pretty solid piece of evidence in Jeyne’s favor against any condemnation by the brotherhood.

In any event, I tend to see Jeyne’s death, as I mentioned, coming not at the hands (or rope) of Lady Stoneheart and the brotherhood but rather at the hands (or arrows) of Ser Forley and his men. For one, I don’t see any indication in the books that Lady Stoneheart and/or the brotherhood without banners believes that the Westerlings were in on or responsible for the Red Wedding. Certainly, nothing in either Merrett Frey’s or Brienne’s encounters with the brotherhood and Lady Stoneheart seems to imply that the group is looking for the Westerlings. Lem tells Brienne that Lady Stoneheart wanted “the men who killed [Robb] dead”, whom Lem himself identifies as “Freys and Boltons”. Too, while the brotherhood and Lady Stoneheart were certainly willing to hang Brienne and her companions, the obvious (though far from simple or sinister) connections between Brienne and the Baratheon-Lannister crown generally - the ultimate architect and beneficiary of the Red Wedding, of course - and Jaime specifically - that is, the man Roose Bolton wryly referenced before stabbing Robb - might hardly make Brienne (much less Tyrion’s former squire and Randyll Tarly’s former sworn man) appear innocent in the hardened, merciless eyes of either the brotherhood or Lady Stoneheart (again, the actual inaccuracy of such judgments notwithstanding). Yet what would Lady Stoneheart remember of the Westerlings except Jeyne’s devotion to Robb (coming from both Jeyne’s conversation with Catelyn and Jeyne’s unwillingness to part from him), the apparent attempts by Sybell to encourage Jeyne’s fertility with Robb, the open insults against Jeyne and the Westerlings lobbed by the Freys - and, of course, Raynald Westerling’s own death at the Twins? (Not to mention Brynden Tully’s devoted guardianship of Jeyne and her family in the aftermath of the Red Wedding.) Without the inside information we as readers know about Sybell’s plot against Robb and the Stark cause - and even then, Jaime’s conversation, as well as Jeyne's appearance thereafter, would have made it pretty obvious Jeyne herself was not a willing participant in her mother's plan of betraying the Starks - I’m not sure the brotherhood would see the Westerlings generally and/or Jeyne specifically as any more guilty for the Red Wedding than, say, Edmure, who will be in the convoy as well, to be joined eventually by his Frey bride.

More to the point, I think the author not very subtly highlighted Jeyne’s fate at the hands of Forley Prester and his men in “Jaime VII”. There seems to me very little point to have Jaime quite frankly tell Forley Prester that Jeyne would be “twice as dangerous as Edmure if she were ever to escape us” and demand that Forley “keep some archers near” Jeyne (not to mention Jaime’s decision to quadruple the escort’s numbers from its original setup) if the very crisis Jaime envisioned would not seem (to Forley and his men) to come to pass. Whether or not the actual intention of the brotherhood will be to free Jeyne from the Lannisters (and again, I’m not even sure what the brotherhood knows about Jeyne and/or the Westerlings at this moment), the mere appearance of the brotherhood attacking the Lannister convoy will I think be enough to scare Forley and his men into thinking that the “twice as dangerous” Jeyne is the target of a rescue attempt. 

Too, I don’t think it’s narratively unfitting for Jeyne to die in such a fashion. Indeed, Sybell had previously trusted in a Lannister promise to keep another one of her children safe: as Sybell admitted to Jaime, Raynald “knew nought of any … [sic] of the understanding with your lord father”, and expressed her hope that Raynald was “a captive at the Twins” - an idea mocked by Edwyn Frey and Walder Rivers, who reveal to Jaime that Raynald “took a quarrel in his shoulder and another in the gut” before falling in the river during the massacre. Just as Sybell and Walder Frey had each made pacts with Tywin Lannister, but not with one another, regarding the Red Wedding, so Sybell and Forley Prester have each had conversations with Jaime, but not with each other, about the future of her children - and just as the Lannister-sanctioned violence of the Red Wedding allowed the Freys the opportunity for family vengeance against the Westerlings, so I think the Lannister order to eliminate Jeyne in a possible future crisis (in Jaime’s mind) will win out over the life or lives of one or more of Sybell’s surviving children. Forley Prester neither knows nor, I think, would care about any agreement Sybell may have made with Tywin to give Jeyne and her sister Eleyna “worthy marriages” to “[l]ords or heirs” (not to mention any remaining reward for their brother Rollam); he had been given a mission by Jaime as the representative of the Lannisters and the Iron Throne, and as a hardened Lannister veteran, Forley I think would have every reason to prioritize such an order no matter what Sybell may think or say. Having helped arrange the betrayal of Catelyn’s son, at the hands of his ostensible bannermen, for the ambitions of Tywin Lannister and his regime, Sybell will I think find herself punished in kind - watching her own daughter (and perhaps her other children as well) be killed on the orders of of her own ostensible allies. 

Which is not to say the brotherhood and Lady Stoneheart might not hang anyone. Indeed, if Sybell is our POV for the prologue of TWOW - and I very much think she will be - then I could imagine Sybell may herself be hanged by the brotherhood and Lady Stoneheart at the end of this chapter. Her far from charitable attitude toward Robb - both dismissively referring to him as "the rebel" and admitting, at least to Jaime, that she had purposefully denied him children - will I think find her no favors with the woman who had not only in life been Robb's devoted mother but who herself still carries and contemplates the crown her son had worn - the very crown whose mate Sybell had roughly taken from Jeyne's own brow. (So much the worse for Sybell if she, Sybell, still has Jeyne's crown on her and asserts that it is no more than a "little crown" made for her by a dead rebel.) Just as Merrett Frey had attempted to justify first the Red Wedding and then his role in it, so perhaps Sybell will attempt to justify her own role in the pre-planning for the Red Wedding - a justification that would, It think, end for Sybell just as it did for Merrett.

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

What will Jaime's reaction and development in response to the probable slaughter of Freys and Lannisters ("Red Wedding 2.0") by Lady Stoneheart, and the rebellion of the Riverlands that will likely follow, be? While there are a lot of valonqar theories and theories of how he might survive the encounter with Stoneheart, but for some reason I don't recall any theories on this front. Might there be a realization that his family's, and his, actions in the Riverlands from AGoT forward were wrong?

Generally people who theorize about Red Wedding: Back 2 Tha Hood have this elaborate fantasy about Jaime being tied up and forced to watch. Usually in conjunction with the theory that he's already half mad because he had to kill Brienne, who sacrificed herself for him. I think the latter theory is highly contrary to both plot and character, so I've been rather doubtful of the former theory as well. (As well as it being in Riverrun: no this is not an invite for proponents of that element of the theory to tell me about it, I've seen it all before and nothing but TWOW will move me.) Personally, I think RW2: First Blood could be one of those downbeat refusal-of-catharsis moments GRRM does sometimes, which includes no direct POV, just hearing about the atrocities after the fact. It may be otherwise, but I'm still sure fans will not be remotely as satisfied as they expect to be.

Anyway. Jaime already knows the actions of his family in the Riverlands were wrong. His whole arc from ASOS onwards just rubbed his nose into it over and over and over again. Notably including his encounter with the Bloody Mummers his father brought to Westeros, notably returning to Harrenhal and finding the house of horrors Gregor had turned it into, notably the whole siege of Riverrun where he's hating the Freys, hating every moment he has to reward idiots like his uncle Emmon or a "scheming turncloak bitch" like Sybell Spicer. Just look at his conversation with Hoster Blackwood in ADWD:

"My father had a saying too. Never wound a foe when you can kill him. Dead men don't claim vengeance." "Their sons do," said Hoster, apologetically. "Not if you kill the sons as well. Ask the Casterlys about that if you doubt me. Ask Lord and Lady Tarbeck, or the Reynes of Castamere. Ask the Prince of Dragonstone." For an instant, the deep red clouds that crowned the western hills reminded him of Rhaegar's children, all wrapped up in crimson cloaks. "Is that why you killed all the Starks?" "Not all," said Jaime. "Lord Eddard's daughters live. One has just been wed. The other…" Brienne, where are you? Have you found her? "…if the gods are good, she'll forget she was a Stark. She'll wed some burly blacksmith or fat-faced innkeep, fill his house with children, and never need to fear that some knight might come along to smash their heads against a wall." "The gods are good," his hostage said, uncertainly. You go on believing that. Jaime let Honor feel his spurs.

This is not a man who is happy with his life and his or his family's actions. Especially considering he took the very first opportunity to abandon it all to help Brienne with her quest.

Now, if you mean, will Red Wedding 2: The Revenge cause Jaime to admit out loud that he and his dad done bad? *pfft* Not a clue in the world. Jaime's going to have a lot going on in TWOW, not in the least however he and Brienne escape (my personal theories including divine Bran intervention; there's a reason why the Brotherhood's cave is full of weirwood roots and has a weirwood throne just like Bloodraven's), and not in the least whatever the hell Cersei gets up to in KL and her probable flight to the Rock. I'm afraid that prejudging Jaime's personality changes that may come from all this is beyond my power, sorry.

________

@windriverdelta replied to your post “What will Jaime's reaction and development in...”:

Yeah, it was the "Now, if you mean, will Red Wedding 2: The Revenge cause Jaime to admit out loud that he and his dad done bad?" question - because for all what he knows and thinks, he's still doing these bad things.

​aha, so you're asking more like, will he stop. And like I said, Jaime's going to be very busy, I think his Riverlands enforcement tour will be well past done by the time he gets out of it all. Mind you, I don't think he's going to ever give up entirely on the Lannister state of mind (Tywin's ability to give people complexes is very hard to shake). But a lot of the Riverlands tour was guilt over being responsible for his father's death (since Jaime freed Tyrion and gave him a reason to kill Tywin), which undoubtely made him extra-Lannistery for a while. And also Jaime was trying to get away and deal with his Cersei issues (by using Ilyn as a rubber duck therapist who beats you up), so a lot of his um, complex actions greatly depend on what Cersei ends up doing and how that makes him feel. (Even if they've "broken up", they'll always be connected.) And however the valonqar plays out, alas...

[nrilliree]

When I uploaded a map, Greens wrote "but there were more people living in the green territories, so it doesn't count!" So now I'll put it another way:

Team Black:

Velaryon

Celtigar

Staunton

Massey

Emmon

Darklyn

Bracken

Hayford

Harte

Crabb

Brune of Brownhollow

Brune of the Dyre Den

Stark

Dustin

Manderly

Cerwyn

Hornwood

Tully

Butterwell

Strong

Mooton

Darry

Frey

Blackwood

Charlton

Mallister

Piper

Vance

Smallwood

Deddings

Perryn

Chambers

Bigglestone

Penny

Grey

Wode

Beesbury

Caswell

Costayne,

Footly

Grimm

Merryweather

Mullendore

Oakheart

Rowan

Tarly

Buckler

Fell

Arryn,

Borrell

Corbray

Royce

Sunderland

Team Green:

Hightower

Lannister

Wylde

Peake,

Fossoway,

Ambrose

Rodden

Graceford,

Leygood

Butterwell

Rosby

Bourney

Mooton

Lefford

Swyft

Reyne

Redwyne

Baratheon

Swann

Tully

Vance

High Council of the Triarchy

Three unnamed lords and landed knights, slain during the Second Battle of Tumbleton

I guess we all know why Alicent and Otto preferred to take over the throne rather than calling a meeting of the great council?