GROWING STRONG ... j.lannister

chapter seven; periwinkle

PERIWINKLE – TENDER RECOLLECTIONS

THE HALL of a Hundredth Hearts is awash with music and revelry. Men laugh louder than the music, their tankards full of ale hitting heavy against long wooden tables, slapping each other on the back, harder and harder and harder until someone falls from their bench and sprawls across the stone floor. Laughter roars around them and they submerge themselves in more ale. They will wake tomorrow with sore heads and be forced to participate in a tourney, with their helmets feeling too tight around their skulls.

The Tyrells sit with the Tullys, both families far quieter than the others. The eldest Tully daughter has been nestling the same cup of wine for the past hour while her sister keeps pouring more and more for herself, face growing flushed as the night drags on. She almost falls over herself trying to flirt with whichever handsome knight sits closest to her. Janna and Mina whisper scathingly about her tits almost falling out of her bodice and laugh just as harshly. They are poisonous flowers, beautiful to see fluttering in the wind, dangerous to pluck from their roots.

A few tables across are the Starks and the other Northmen, all dressed in drab shades of grey and black and navy, having tossed their fur aside for the heat of the South. Most of them have long, dour faces but when they smile, it is like watching a wolf flash its teeth before it jumps. Caecilia feels no safer around wolves. Robert Baratheon, tall and handsome with thick black hair covering his head, wearing shimmering shades of black and yellow that hug his thick arms, crosses across the hall to sit with the Stark siblings. He jostles Eddard as he does, causing the brown-haired Stark to spit out half of his ale. He laughs and wraps his arm around Robert, brothers after all their years of training under Jon Arryn. Eddard's younger siblings, Lyanna and Benjen, glare at the pair. Their brother left them behind and returned with another man to call his blood. Robert grins at Lyanna, his betrothed, but she can barely bring herself to return to motion. She purses her lips together and turns to him to continue to whisper to her younger brother. If the Baratheon notices, he does not let it deter him.

Caecilia sips more honeyed wine as she watches the unfolding of events. Lunette is updating her and Trevyr on all the gossip she managed to procure from her seat in the middle of the tourney stands. Robert Baratheon's bastards springing up around the Stormlands. Brandon Stark's duel with some Tully-raised Baelish over his upcoming marriage. Every whispered truth, every scathing lie. It fills their ears as they sit and drink wine and keep their eyes on every noble sitting around them.

Silence falls for a moment and Caecilia's eyes follow the lack of noise to a group of ivory-caped knights leading a dastardly beautiful prince to a seat in the middle of the room. He seats an intricate harp with silver strings on his knee and blows the hair out of his eyes with a laugh. Others laugh with him. Rhaegar Targaryen. The Dragon Prince. The Silver Prince. The Last Dragon. Nobody can tear their eyes off of him as he starts to pluck a few of the strings with his long, elegant fingers adorned with silvery rings. He is tall even when sitting, and his silver-blonde hair is reminiscent of moonlight as it falls just past his shoulders. When he finally looks up at the crowd watching him with bated breaths, he grins with dragon fire hidden behind his teeth and his violet eyes scour the watching faces to find one in particular. Caecilia would have expected it to be his wife, but she is at another table with her friend, Ashara Dayne, and the Martells and he is busy staring across the crowd at a grey-eyed she-wolf.