The feast began at sundown, and the Great Hall of the Red Keep swallowed us whole.
They had transformed it since our presentation that afternoon. The long tables ran the full length of the hall in rows of six, each covered in cloth so white it seemed to glow under the light of a thousand candles set in iron wheels that hung from the vaulted ceiling on chains thick as a man's wrist. The wheels had been hoisted so high that the candles looked like low stars, and the heat from them gathered somewhere above the columns and pressed down on the crowd in a warm, scented weight. Braziers burned between the tables, and servants in red and black livery moved through the gaps carrying pitchers and trencher boards and platters heaped with food that I could smell from the door.
Father walked at my left and Mother at my right with Erik bundled against her chest in a sling of dark cloth. Ser Tolan followed three paces behind, his hand easy at his belt, his eyes already moving over the room. Jeyne walked beside me and kept close enough that her arm brushed mine when the crowd pressed.
Lord Gunthor had gone ahead with Lady Meredyth to find their seats near the high table, where the Darklyn name earned them a place among the greater lords of the Crownlands. We were directed further down, to a table near the middle of the hall where the lesser houses had been set in a careful order that I suspected someone had spent days arranging. Father held my chair, then Mother's, then sat himself and reached for his cup.
The noise was extraordinary. Hundreds of voices overlapping in a wash of sound that broke against the stone walls and came back redoubled. Men laughed too loudly and women spoke too close to one another's ears and children chased between the benches until servants caught them by the collar and marched them back. Musicians played from a gallery above the main doors, their instruments thin and bright against the deeper rumble of the hall.
I watched the high table.
King Viserys sat at its center in a chair that was smaller and more comfortable than the Iron Throne, cushioned and set with arms he could rest his elbows on. He wore crimson and gold. He smiled at the man beside him and reached for his wine and drank with the easy relish of a man who enjoyed feasts and did not trouble himself to hide it. Queen Alicent sat to his left in green silk, her back straight as a blade, her hands folded in her lap when she was not lifting her cup. She smiled when the king spoke to her and said words I could not hear from where I sat, and each smile was precise and measured and vanished the moment the king looked away.
To the king's right sat a girl.
She was older than me by a year or perhaps two, though it was difficult to judge. Her hair was silver-gold and fell past her shoulders in loose waves that caught the candlelight. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, with a warmth beneath it that showed at the cheeks and the throat. She wore a gown of deep black cut in a style that showed her collarbones and the line of her neck, and a circlet of gold sat in her hair with rubies set along its band.
She was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.
I stared at her and could not stop staring. She turned her head to speak to a woman beside her, lifted a hand to push a strand of hair from her brow, laughed at something with her whole face so that her eyes crinkled and her teeth showed and the sound of it carried across the hall.
The Realm's Delight. I had heard the name on the road and in the halls and whispered among the servants, and I had thought it a flattery of the sort men give to princesses because they are princesses and it costs nothing. The name was earned.
You're gay for blondes, Amy said, and her voice in my head carried a grin I could feel.
I frowned. Gay. I liked looking at the princess, certainly, and it made me feel a kind of gladness, but I did not see the connection Amy was drawing. I was not especially cheerful. The hall was too warm and the noise too loud and my back hurt from the road.
I am not particularly gay at the moment, I told her.
Amy's laughter erupted through my skull with such force that I nearly choked on my wine. It rolled and crashed and kept rolling, helpless and breathless, and she tried to stop and could not. She tried to speak and managed only a wheeze that dissolved into another wave.
I pressed my cup to my lips and drank to hide the flush in my cheeks. Jeyne gave me a curious look.
"Are you well?" she asked.
"The wine is strong," I said.
At the high table, Princess Rhaenyra turned her head. Her gaze swept the hall, casual and thorough, and it found me.
She looked at me for a breath, and then she smiled. The smile was warm and open and unguarded. She raised her hand and waved, a small motion of the fingers, almost playful.
I lifted my own hand before I could think about it, a clumsy half-wave that I pulled down at once and hid beneath the table. My cheeks burned.
Jeyne leaned close. "Did Princess Rhaenyra just wave at you?"
"I believe so," I said, and did not know what else to say about it.
I spent the next quarter of the feast trying to watch the high table without being seen watching it. The food came in courses, each one finer than the last. Roasted swan with a sauce of plums. A pie so large that four men carried it on a board, its crust gilded with egg wash and saffron. Eels in cream. Lamprey served on beds of herbs that smelled sweet and sharp both. A hundred cheeses set on wooden boards and wheeled from table to table by boys in livery.
I ate without tasting most of it. My eyes kept wandering back to the high table, and to the space between Princess Rhaenyra and Queen Alicent. They did not speak to each other. When the king turned to his left to say something to the queen, Rhaenyra looked away. When the king turned right to speak to his daughter, Alicent's fingers tightened on the stem of her cup and did not loosen until he turned back.
Once, a servant brought a dish to Rhaenyra and then turned to offer the same to Alicent, and the queen shook her head with a smile that did not reach her eyes. Rhaenyra saw it. Her own smile dimmed. She set down her fork and reached for her wine and drank too quickly.
Something sat between them. Whatever it was, it weighed on them both.
Father noticed it too. He leaned toward me and spoke low. "Court politics. Do not stare, little bird."
I looked away and ate a piece of cheese and tried to think of other things.
The feast lasted long past the hour when I would normally have been asleep. The musicians played louder as the wine flowed deeper, and men rose from their seats and moved between the tables to clasp hands and speak and argue and drink together. Father excused himself to join Lord Gunthor's table. Mother took Erik upstairs when the babe began to fuss, and Ser Tolan went with her and came back to stand behind my chair with his arms folded.
Jeyne's eyes had gone heavy with sleep, and she leaned against my shoulder and let them close. I sat with her weight warm against me and watched the hall thin by degrees as the lesser lords took their leave and the greater ones settled into the harder drinking that would carry them past midnight.
When Jeyne stirred awake and murmured an apology and went to find her mother, I rose from the table. Tolan moved at once.
"I would like some air," I told him. "Stay close, but not upon my heels. The gardens should be safe enough within the keep."
He did not like it. His jaw set and his hand went to his belt the way it always did when I asked for space. He measured the hall, the doors, the guards posted at the corridor mouths.
"I will be ten paces behind," he said.
"Twenty," I said.
"Fifteen," he said, which was the most he would give.
I walked out of the Great Hall through a side passage that a serving boy pointed me toward when I asked for the gardens. The corridor narrowed and then opened onto a cloister where the air was cool and clean and the noise of the feast fell to a murmur at my back. Columns ran along the cloister's inner edge, pale stone carved with vines and small animals, and beyond them the garden spread in the moonlight.
The Red Keep's gardens were nothing like Velton's kitchen plots. They were shaped and tended with a care that spoke of coin and intent, laid out in beds and borders and pathways of crushed shell that crunched under my feet. The smell of the city still hung in the air, faint and sour, but here it was masked by the heavy sweetness of roses, dozens of them, climbing the walls and spilling from beds in shades I could not distinguish in the dark. White, I thought. Pink. Red. The thorns caught what little moonlight reached them and glinted.
I walked further in. The path turned between two hedges cut to the height of my shoulder and opened into a small courtyard where a stone bench sat beneath an arbor thick with climbing roses. Petals lay scattered on the crushed shell. A fountain bubbled somewhere nearby, soft and steady.
Someone was sitting on the bench.
Princess Rhaenyra sat with her back bowed and her hands on her knees. Her circlet was gone. Her hair hung loose around her face. Her shoulders shook once, and then again, and a sound came from her that was thin and tight and meant to be silent. She was weeping.
I stopped on the path. My foot pressed a shard of shell and it snapped.
Rhaenyra's head came up at once. Her hand flew to the bench beside her, and a thorn from a rose bush caught her wrist, a quick bright line across the inside of her forearm. Blood welled in a thin thread. She did not seem to feel it. Her eyes found me in the dark and widened, and for a heartbeat she looked at me with distress.
Then she put on a smile. It came fast and fit poorly, too wide for her reddened eyes, too steady for the tremor at the corners of her mouth.
"Well," she said, and her voice was thick from crying but she pushed through it. "A guest who cannot sleep. You are not the first the feast has chased into the roses."
I bent at the waist in a bow that was deeper than a curtsy and held it a breath longer than courtesy demanded. "Your Grace. Forgive me. I did not mean to intrude."
"You did not intrude," she said, and wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand. "I am only sitting. Ladies are permitted to sit in gardens. I believe it is written somewhere."
She drew a breath and steadied herself, and the next smile she wore was a better fit, though still a poor match for her eyes. "You are the girl who waved back at me."
"I am, Your Grace."
"Most girls do not wave back at princesses. They curtsy and look at the floor and wait to be noticed. You looked right at me." She tilted her head. "You are pretty."
I felt heat in my face and neck and the tops of my ears.
YOOOOOOOOOOOO! Amy practically screamed.
"Thank you, Your Grace," I managed. "You are kind."
"I am occasionally kind," she said. "What is your name?"
"Amelia Darkwood, Your Grace. Of Velton."
Rhaenyra's brow lifted a fraction. "Darkwood. A cadet branch of the Darklyns, yes? Lord Gunthor's vassals."
"Yes, Your Grace."
"Lord Gunthor is a good man," she said, and her voice went soft. She looked down at the rose stems in her lap, pulled apart and shredded. Her fingers had thorns in them. She did not seem to notice those either. "You came for the tourney?"
"With my lord father and lady mother, yes."
"And you found a princess crying in a garden." Her laugh was short and cracked. "If you are wise, you will go back inside and forget what you saw."
I stood on the path and looked at her, at the tears still wet on her cheeks and the tight set of her jaw and the way her fingers twisted the dead rose stem until the thorns bit. I thought of Father in his hall, listening to petitioners, and the way he had once said that the faces mattered more than the words.
"Your Grace," I said. "What has upset you?"
Rhaenyra looked at me for a long moment. The fountain bubbled in the quiet between us.
"It is nothing," she said, in that practiced way. "Court is a tiring place. The feast was long. I am weary."
I did not press. Instead I took a step closer, and then another, until I stood near enough to the bench that I could see the wet tracks on her cheeks and the places where her fingers had been rubbed raw by thorns.
"Is there anything I can do to help, Your Grace?"
Rhaenyra chuckled, low and tired. "You are sweet. You cannot do anything for my woes, Lady Amelia."
She shook her head. "But I thank you for asking. Most people do not bother."
She looked down at her hands in her lap and went still.
The blood from the cut had run down her wrist and dripped onto the pale fabric of her gown, a dark stain spreading along the inside of her forearm. She stared at it. Then she laughed again, an exhausted sound.
"Gods," she said. "I did not even feel it."
"You offered to help?" She held the wound up to the moonlight and squinted at it and then let her arm fall with a sigh. "I don't suppose you can wave your hand and rid me of this cut."
She was smiling when she said it, rueful and half-turned toward herself. The words were obviously spoken in jest.
My heart beat once, hard.
"May I hold your hand, Your Grace?" I asked.
Rhaenyra blinked. She looked at me with an expression that shifted through surprise and curiosity and something I could not read, and then she turned her hand palm-up on her knee and held it out, shrugging as she did.
"If you wish," she said.
I stepped forward and took her hand in both of mine.
Her skin was warm. The beat beneath her wrist ran steady. I breathed, and let the world narrow, and reached.
The map opened beneath my touch and my eyes went wide.