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Jean licks his lips and tastes salt. It’s not the same as the dryness he feels on the streets of King’s Landing – where the salt from sea mingles with the stench of rotting fish from the market and the bowls of brown that run through the shadows of the Red Keep and the overwhelming throb of old sex and squalor in the air. Smoke, sweat, and shit, one of his uncles once referred to it. And a touch of treachery, if your nose is keen enough.
No, this is just salt.
Dorne is a strange place, Jean decides, laving his tongue over the sharp taste of the sea that clings to his lower lip and sprawls out over the cliffs before him. They told him that the Summer Sea would be beautiful – that its jade-liked depths made the view from the tallest towers of the Red Keep look like some northern wasteland, but he can’t really see what all the fuss was about.
The coastal road twines around rocky outcrops, barren and unyielding in their sandy browns and yellows – and Jean is so thirsty.
He glances across at the caravan of horses and carriages on which he skitters on the edges, astride a muddy-bay mare, far too big for his young frame and short legs. The other horses whiney and bleat beneath the blaze of the wicked sun, snorting loudly and kicking up puffs of sandstone dust in the still air.
The Lannister banner is sprawled proudly across the flank of his cousin’s palanquin, shielding her from the heat of the sun, but the lion is limp nonetheless. Limp and lifeless, and the red and gold ornamentation of the litter is musty with travel.
Annie has water, and water to spare. She only has to ask, and it’s given to her, ornately decorated gourds made from the clay of the Valyrian shore and painted with the fine lines of the family vigil. Jean doesn’t care about all that – no. Even he can see past the finer things when his throat feels so close to sandpaper as he swallows dryly.
Lannister blood is as valuable as water out here.
It’s a shame Jean only has half a body of the stuff – the bastard blood, the whore’s mix of the golden lion of Casterly Rock and of the street wench swaddled in burlap and hemp. And with his bastard’s blood comes the pains of both worlds and the returns of neither.
He glances over his shoulder at his uncle – tall and blond and mighty on his high stallion, blonde hair shining under the gleam of the sun with all the regale of the king he wishes he could be, yet isn’t. Erwin is a Lannister by birth, and holds himself as such.
Jean pales at the thought of asking him for water – he’d be told firmly by one of Erwin’s aids that they’ve only been riding three leagues, and there’s plenty of water where they’re going.
Jean frowns to himself, and tugs sharply at the reins of his mare when she snorts brashly.
He decides he doesn’t like Dorne. It’s too hot, and too sandy, and the sea is not beautiful. He’s not even usually part of the royal consort – Lannister only by association, and usually kept under lock and key with the other palace urchins, so why – why did he have to be dragged on this parade of a summer expedition to some distant city at the end of the world. (May the New Gods be damned.)
The professors in the Red Keep never tire of regaling him with stories of the Baratheon rebellion, and how the salty Dornishmen – men born of the sea and the sand and of the uncouth love between the unmarried and the poor – chose to side with the Targaryen madmen, rather than the proud banner of the Lion and the Stag and the Wolf.
Jean knows well of even how Erwin turns his nose up in private at the thought of travelling further south than the edge of the Crownlands – it’s the faces he only makes when Jean struggles with the vase of wine in his chambers at night and Erwin bemoans the idiocy of our young King – even though he knows that sort of talk can get you killed. Or worse. (Jean might be a child, but he’s not blind to the ways of the world. Lannister blood is hot to the touch to everyone – even their own kin these days.)
Jean’s tunic feels too tight around his throat and too strict across his arms as he tries not to move them too severely in the sweltering heat. And here he was believing the middle months of the year in King’s Landing were unbearable. And now he has to spend multiple weeks presenting the façade to these deplorable Dornishmen that he’s honoured to be here.
(He hopes, of course, that they won’t care much for his polluted blood, much like the men and women of the court back home. That he can hide away and steal away from these oh-so-fabled Water Gardens once he’s done each night with pouring Erwin yet another glass of wine.)
The Water Gardens of House Martell leave Jean just a sceptical over the tales he was told in the depths of the labyrinth of the Red Keep – so maybe the pale pink marble has a sparkle in the sunlight in the later hours of the day; so maybe the salt breeze blowing in from the sea is gentler now and dissolves in the sweet citruses of the blood oranges that fall languidly from trees and split open on the paves.
It could be nice, Jean supposes, as he dabbles his feet in the lapping water of a fountain decorated in elaborate, stone suns. But it’s not the mirage that everyone spoke of, not to him. It’s just nice.
The afternoon grows late, but he’s lucky for his freedom; the cavalcade had been greeted with open arms by the ruling prince of Dorne – a frail looking man with skin tanned dark by the sun and hair the colour of drawing charcoal – and Jean forgets his name, because he’s never been talented at recalling all that nonsense about sigils and banner man and which of the noble Houses vails a sun and which a rose and which a fish.
But that’s not the point.
The point was that, as Jean leapt from his horse to see about untangling the stirrups from Erwin’s boots for him, a gaggle of children had thundered past them, splashing into the blue pools of water shrouded in thick vines and palms, laughing and cheering as the tallest of the boys had coiled up his body as he leapt, and cascaded an enormous wave up and over the pale marble stones.
Jean had gawped at the sight – at these children running around carefree and dressed in an array of ill-fitting tunics, in silk and satin robes, in peasant wear, in noble wear – careening into the water with a giggle and a shout. He had forgotten himself for a moment, his hands dawdling on unstrapping Erwin’s boots; he supposed he deserved the impatient nudge in the shoulder for slacking.
The Prince had welcomed them with grandeur in the way he gestured wildly with his shining silver-ringed hands, and had clapped Erwin on the shoulder like they were old friends. Annie too, in all her red and gold beauty, had prowled out of the palanquin like a lion roused from sleep prematurely, but had received the Prince’s welcome with a pleasant smile of quirked lips.
Jean had wondered for a while, if he was supposed to follow when they were led inside – left to wonder which side of the threshold his half-Lannister blood left him, until his horse had been seized from his hands by another, dark-skinned, black haired Dornishman, and he had been ushered towards the barrage of children playing in the pools, with the thickly-accented laugh of, “Go on, Lannister. All children are welcome to play here and foster.”
Jean has never been good at making friends with other children, though. In the capital, within the walls of the Red Keep, everyone knows who his mother was – or wasn’t, as the case might be. He’s a playmate for the young ones when it suits, and a squire for the older ones when necessary.
On days when he manages to sneak beyond the walls, escaping out through the dungeons that are lined with the age-old, enormous skulls of titans, there are still no friends to be found in the likes of Flea Bottom, or on the streets that stink putrid. His hair is blonde enough to be recognised, and the second he flashes Lannister gold, they know. They keep their distances.
It’s lonely, at times. But Jean is used to the bastard treatment, and is more than happy to have spent the hours since the greeting wondering around the groves of blood oranges and dappling his toes in the adequate-enough waters of the palace gardens, slipping between pale pillars whenever he heard the gaggling laugh of the parade of children pass too closely to where he meandered.
The fountain at which he sits now is cold and refreshing, and a welcome reprieve from the staunch heat of the coastal road, and of Sunspear, where they left this morning. Sunspear had felt like a city built on drought, despite the looming shadow of its three, enormous walls and of the Old Palace – a squat, ugly keep if ever Jean saw one, that could only succeed in reminding him of a dun-coloured dromond washed to shore and turned to stone. Fortunately enough, they had only been forced to spend a few nights with the view of narrow alleyways and noisy bazaars and mud-brick hovels from their widely-flung windows.
He hopes that Erwin is sleeping through the heat of the day – he was always suited to the temperance of Casterly Rock when they resided there, and Jean thoroughly believes it was a mistake to move to King’s Landing. (The temptation of the crown, even when you’re only fourth in line to the throne, can do crazy things to a man’s mind, Jean figures. Just like the heat.)
Cicadas thrum and dragonflies dance across the surface of the sun-comprehending water, their glass-like wings fluttering and flitting – both in movement and in noise, and it creates quite an amenable melody to Jean’s comfort starved ears. However much King’s Landing reeks of the deplorable, there’s something to be said about sneaking into the balconies of the Great Hall to listen to the ballad of a lute or a minstrel, pure and simple against the jagged outline of the Iron Thrones raised high above the rest of the floor. Jean enjoys the music – and the food too, because he may be a bastard, but they still feed him well, still stuff him on rich, red meats from the Kingswood, on seedless grapes imported from the walled gardens of Highgarden. He still falls asleep on pillows fluffed with duck and pheasant down. It’s the finer things he enjoys – and the blood in his veins at least can grant him that much.
He swirls his legs in the clear water, imagining and ignoring the scolding he might receive for wrecking his travelling clothes in the pools, but the sweet caress of weightlessness around his calves is perfect. He allows himself to close his eyes and focus only on the feeling, pushing to the side all the woes he has about being trapped so far from home for so long, accompanying Erwin and Annie on a trip he sees little point in.
Sometimes he wonders if his mother was from the north – he never met her, of course – but the way the heat slicks uncomfortably up the back of his neck and sticks his hair to his forehead makes him curious. He definitely has the temperament of a northerner – Erwin has remarked on that on multiple occasions before, when his tongue has become too loose with too much wine. Jean usually ignores his words – because maybe he does have northern snow in his circulations, but the thought of the wastelands of Winterfell don’t exactly make his blood burn with longing either.
Jean’s eyes – honey brown, and not glorious, Lannister blue – flit open with the nearby sound of a gentle splash, and meet other eyes of near black. A boy – not much older than Jean really, what with the way his limbs look too long for him, and the roundness that resides in his freckled face – stands ankle deep in the same fountain as he rests, rocking back and forth on his heels on the other side of the fountain, a broad grin stretched tautly across his lips. His hair is thick, dark and unruly, and his skin is waxen and brown – a Dornish boy, clearly – especially when Jean’s eyes stray to the bejewelled belt that hangs loosely on his lanky hips, heavily enamelled and inlaid with burnished copper suns.
Dornish indeed. Jean cannot help but scowl at the intruder to his solitude. He recognises the boy as the one who had leapt so brazenly into one of the fountains earlier.
“Are you a Lannister?” the boy asks, knotting his arms behind his back as he continues to rock to and fro in the water. He waits for no reply from Jean. “I can tell by your hair. There are not many people with yellow hair in this part of Dorne. We call them āeksio vali in the old tongue.”
Jean doesn’t know how to reply – he is Lannister, yet he is not – and on top of that, he doesn’t want to reply.
“I saw you watching us play earlier,” the boy continues, when he receives little more than a grunt from the young mixed-blood. “Even Lannisters can join in, if they want. Everyone is welcome to play in the pools here. All children are the same in Dorne, you know.”
“I’m not Lannister,” Jean says finally, if only to spite the smiling boy. He’s perfectly Lannister in the way his stomach coils at the teachings of his old professors: Dornishmen are not to be trusted. He must remember that.
Jean keeps his eyes bowed low and kicks angrily at the shallow water.
“You look like a Lannister,” the boy grins, wading through the shallows to reach the statue of the sun carved out of a pink marble that protrudes from the centre of the fountain. He wraps his stout fingers around the stone, the rushing water cascading over his dark skin, and trickling down his arm to drip in a steady fleet of droplets from the crook of his elbow. “Your hair is yellow and your skin is white, and I’m pretty sure that’s the lion of Casterly Rock I can see embroidered on your tunic there.”
Jean doesn’t like people who think they’re smart – much the same as he likes little else about this place, even if the water feels good and the dancing dragonflies are distracting. This boy is being smart with him.
“If I’m a Lannister,” Jean mutters gruffly, flicking the water with his toes as he tightens his grip on the stone side of the fountain, knuckles turning translucent, “Then you shouldn’t be talking to me. I could get you arrested for talking to me.”
It’s all boyish bravado – a shield drawn up around Jean’s pride – but if he can fake the serpentine scowl that his cousin Annie wears so freely, then maybe he can scare this feral, pool-jumping boy into leaving him be.
“Mm, I don’t think you could,” the boy sings, his voice tinted with playful laughter as he swings around the statue, his weight hanging off one of the projectiles of the stone sun. “What’s your name?”
“Jean.”
“Maybe you’re right; that doesn’t sound very Lannister for a name,” the boy remarks, and Jean positively glares murder at him. But then he adds, more wistfully, “It sounds like something you’d hear across the sea.”
“It doesn’t,” Jean growls, finally drawing his legs up and out of the water, and scrabbling for his boots, still dust covered from the journey, still resting in the shadow of the cool marble. He tugs them on angrily, his glare not straying from the freckled face of the Dornish hellion. “It sounds like something from King’s Landing. Lots of people are called Jean in King’s Landing, I’ll have you know.”
“Right, right. I’m sure there are,” the boy grins sardonically, and Jean wants little else than to wipe the smug, knowing smile from his face – but he’s scrawny and has had not sword training, and this Dornish boy is at least a hand or two taller than him. “Just as the desert is full of water and King’s Landing is full of beauty. Right.”
“Have you ever been to King’s Landing?” Jean all but spits in the boy’s direction as he spins around the fountain playfully, the glances spared over his shoulder bold and mischievous.
“I haven’t,” the boy admits. “But I don’t think I’d want to, after what I’ve heard of it.”
Jean stands when he succeeds in pulling both of his riding boots on, the leather feeling tight now that his feet have swollen in the warmth of the day. He folds his arms and tries to puff out his scrawny chest, to make himself seem bigger.
“Then you can’t judge it,” he bites, “Anyway, you wouldn’t know anything about beauty. This is the ugliest palace I’ve ever been to – and I’ve been to a lot of palaces, I’ll have you know. I don’t even see how you can call this swamp a palace.”
The boy shakes his head and chuckles to himself, thick ringlets of dark hair bouncing as he slicks a water-wet hand through his roots. His dark eyes glimmer, and it unsettles Jean.
“I suppose you won’t be wanting to come down to the beach, then,” the boy says, “A few of us were going to go down there and see if we can find anything to build a boat.” He unwraps his finger from the column of the fountain, and dries his skin against the yellow-print fabric of his tunic. “Only came over because you were by yourself and wondered if you wanted to join us. Your loss though.” The boy shrugs, and skips back to the edge of the pool, gracefully hopping out over the shallow, stone wall. He glances back over his shoulder at Jean, sparingly. “Shame you like King’s Landing so much.”
The boy doesn’t laugh when he speaks, and his sincerity makes Jean’s stomach twist uncomfortably. As the boy disappears back into the groves of luscious, green trees and sky-blue streams, a flash of yellow and bronze against the undergrowth, Jean decides that everything he ever heard about Dornishmen is true.
And he doesn’t like them.
The following day, the chambermaids instruct Jean to wear his best tunic, and when he slips into Erwin’s chambers as quietly as a dormouse, his uncle greets him with a stern instruction that he is to be present at the welcoming banquet this afternoon, without even sparing him acknowledgement over his broad shoulder as he paws over some old looking parchment at the ornate desk that has been provided.
He doesn’t accept the wine when Jean offers it to him – but it’s no surprise. Jean imagines he’ll be drinking much at the feast. (But at least he won’t have to be the one serving him.)
Jean doesn’t accompany Erwin or Annie to the great hall – he follows meekly with the other members of the household, those whose blood doesn’t flow gold when they bleed. He doesn’t mind so much, because it allows him breathing space, and instead of staring relentlessly at Erwin’s heels, at Erwin’s belt, at Erwin’s tunic tails, he allows himself to stare upwards and marvel at the fluted pillar gallery and the triple archways they pass under, sung to by fleets of emerald-green parakeets that nest in the lavish carvings high above his head.
Erwin and Annie and the other lions of the Rock are clad majestically in crimson and gold on the top table, flanked by the Martell Prince and his family; large and boisterous, Jean notes, but finds no surprise in it. He knows the stories about the Dornish people and their tendency to keep many wives – or many husbands, as it were – even if Jean doesn’t necessarily understand all that. Words like licentious and unnatural are passed around in the court of the Red Keep enough for him to get an idea of how he’s supposed to feel when he sees the Prince seated between two, beautiful women draped in sheaths of gold and ochre.
Jean is led to sit at a table near the back at the hall, sandwiched between two of Erwin’s other squires, who are much older than him, and considerably boring to talk to, when all they moan about is the Rhoynish sun. (Jean can relate, but the quicker he forgets about the blazing heat, the better, in his mind.)
The food is good, and the banquet of fresh fish and sea food is nothing like he’s ever tasted off the streets of King’s Landing, not even remotely rivalled by the trout and salmon hooked from the river mouth outside the Red Keep. Once again, he tastes salt on his lips, and he hungrily devours it.
Jean eats until he’s full to burst, and then some more, in order to tide himself over for the next few days. He loosens his belt by one notch and rubs his belly as the men around him clamour tankards together and conversation at this side of the hall becomes more rowdy and more lewd. He takes the time to let his eyes flicker through the throngs of Lannisters and Martells – a whole lot of red and gold in one place – and comes to rest on Erwin’s stern face as he sips red liquid from a crystal cut glass. Annie, to his right, picks at her food delicately, popping morsels into her mouth sporadically, but her face is so set in stone that no-one around her dares engage in conversation with the true lioness of Casterly Rock. Jean’s eyes scan along the row of the high table, child’s attention drawn to the lustrous gold chains that hang around the swan-like necks of the dark women, and not the ample curves that plunge beneath their dresses. He watches as the Prince laughs bawdily around his own crystal glass, his eyes wild and alive as he talks animatedly to some nobleman who had approached the high table to joke with his Lord. Jean passes over the other woman, the fine net of clam-pearls and gold thread entwined in her cascades of hair, and then – he sits up very straight.
Jean realises he likes the boy from the fountain even less now – now that he sees him sitting at the high table, elbows bent on the mahogany wood as he engages brightly with a younger boy to his side, teasing and jibing openly. A medallion of gold and sea-blue sapphires is strung like a garland over his chest, plastered in the finest silks and rich satins this side of the Narrow Sea, and his dark hair gleams in the sunlight that streams through the dome of marble and coloured glass that covers the marrying cohort. His Martell blood is as plain as the jewellery around his neck, as Erwin’s addiction to the fine taste of fermented fruits, as the sandy colour of Jean’s own hair when it should be yellow.
Jean learns later that the boy’s name is Marco, and he is heir apparent to the ruling seat at Sunspear. He decides, amidst the celebrations of the feast and the sloshing of ale and the slurring of words, that he’s glad he didn’t accept Marco’s offer to go down to the beach.
The middle months of that year pass slowly for Jean – painfully in the way the sunlit days drag on, and the way the salt breeze is always languid and lethargic as it drifts in from the sea. Erwin doesn’t call on him much during the day light hours, preferring the company of his own chamber and escape from the Dornish heat – and as such, he is left much to his own devices, flitting around the overgrown gardens and exploring what he can.
The swarms of children – which he learns are swaths of both nobles and the poor brought up from Sunspear for a taste of the clear water of the fountains and deep pools – race around the pale marble courtyards undeterred and unabashed, and whilst Jean takes it in his stride to ignore them and keep far away from their noise, he cannot help himself in the way his gaze passes longingly over their fun and games and the cacophony of splashes that light up the shadows of the palace even when it grows dark.
Jean doesn’t see the boy – Marco – in the pools again after that first day. He wonders if they might meet again – so that he might be able to describe to him the true beauty of King’s Landing in detail, but his quiet is not disturbed, save for the calls of Erwin demanding him back to his chambers in the early evening, and Jean supposes it must be some reprimand from the Gods reminding him that there is little beauty to be found in the red streets that stink of fish and poverty.
It’s a whole cycle of the moon into their stay at the Water Gardens when Jean stumbles across a stone pathway that leads through the outer walls of the palace, swamped in a curtain of bedraggled vines that shield it from the view of most. He feels a swell of excitement in his boyish chest as he sweeps the drape of greenery over his shoulder and ducks his head beneath low lying stone, slipping out into the orange sand of the cliff face. The path, marked out by trodden foot prints and faded dirt, winds down the rocky out crops beyond the palace walls, and beyond – reveals stretches of untainted, white sand, licked by the jade-blue depths of lapping waves and coral banks, and he can’t help the way his breath catches at the sight.
Jean scrambles down through the dust, smearing his palms in the sand and the dirt and scuffing up the knees of his pants, but when he folds into the white sands of the beach, he throws off the constraints of his boots and flops greedily onto his back to stare upwards, unapologetically, at the suddenly glorious sun.
The tide sings as it slaves across the warm sand, trails of white foam fizzling and dissolving in the heat, water rushing over fine pebbles and fragments of coracle shells with the sound of wind through reeds. Seagulls squawk in untrained symphonies, high above in the blue air or in the crags of the red-orange cliff, but Jean heeds them not, sifting his bare toes through the fine grains.
He barely dares to let his eyes fall open when a shadow falls across his face, in fear of spoiling the small sense of paradise in this accursed place, but he doesn’t have to worry about that – it’s spoiled when the shadow speaks.
“Not even a Lannister can resist the call of the Summer Sea. She’s too beautiful for even us Dornish folk.” Marco’s tone is musical, jovial, but Jean still blinks his eyes open warily, schooling his face into a natural frown as he sees the Martell Prince bowed over him, obscuring his face from the endless blue of the sky.
“Blackwater Bay is just as nice,” is the first thing that tumbles out of his mouth, and with the way Marco snorts, Jean realises that they both know that’s a lie.
“It’s not going to hurt you to admit that you like it here,” Marco crows, as Jean pulls himself upright, twisting around in the sand to face the boy. He’s absent of his regalia, clad only in simple cotton clothes, bland and rolled up around his knees and elbows. The sea breeze licks his hair into cowlicks, and the same, expansive smile as before presses dimples into his freckled cheeks. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Jean grits his teeth, chewing angrily on the inside of his cheek as he stumbles over a sharp and witty response – Marco doesn’t allow him one, however, as he thumbs over his shoulder, to where in the distant, Jean sees a group of boys crowded around something at the shoreline.
“We’re building a boat,” Marco says, happily – unreservedly. “I think I mentioned it to you before, but – well, we’re going to see if it will float. Do you want to join us?”
Jean resents the song of the Summer Sea, because it messes with his head and swirls his thoughts in a languorous riptide, and he nods, swallowing thickly. He can’t believe that Marco’s grin could stretch any wider – but he’s mistaken, as it were, as the young Prince’s beam encompasses ear to ear and he positively glows.
Jean doesn’t take the hand that’s offered out to him, clambering to his feet with his dignity somewhat intact at least, but Marco takes it in his stride, grabbing Jean’s boots from the sand and thrusting them into his arms with an eager abandon.
“Great! I was worried we wouldn’t be able to launch the thing with only the four of us!”
Jean’s nerves are swallowed up by the tide and washed out to sea. The other boys don’t see his blonde hair or his lack of blue eyes. They don’t see the red and gold of his clothes – even as he ditches his tunic on a sun-baked rock and rolls up his breeches to wade into the shallows. They don’t see his bastard blood, because, Jean quickly realises, they probably share it too. Maybe he’s waters, maybe he’s snow – and these boys are sand – but they’re all names born of the earth, and for a few hours, he allows himself to forget. Even Marco becomes just another smiling face around him as they work tirelessly at lashing their driftwood together to form a makeshift raft, which all but sinks below the waves when they launch it with the lightest boy on board.
It matters not, because they laugh and hold their stomachs on the sand, made even more amusing by the way Marco pouts, hands on hips as he watches his hard work disappear beneath the rolling surface of the sea.
“We’ll have to make a better boat next time,” he grumbles, bending down into the foam to collect a stray piece of drift wood that washes ashore at his feet.
“You can’t call it a boat if it sinks,” Jean can’t help but cackle; Marco grins in response, and Jean’s never felt his bones feel so on fire.
When he returns to his chambers that night, he empties out his body weight in white sand from his boots and regrets when his chamber maids insist that he wash the salt out of his clothes, because he’s come to love the scratchy feel against his skin and the tang at the back of his throat.
It takes two weeks of hard graft before they manage to build another boat. Some days there are other boys there, other tanned faces Jean has seen running around the palace grounds, but they do little to help, the youngest ones finding great glee in heaping piles of sand and splashing about in the waves as Marco instructs the rest of them about his vision for the most masterful sail boat that the Dornish coast has ever seen. Other days, there are few of them – Marco and Jean alone on the odd occasion.
Jean has to keep his tongue in check, but Marco gives as good as he gets, and the exchanges between them do nothing to rile Jean really – unless that’s what you call the thrumming of his heart as it’s pumped with adrenaline inside his chest.
Marco teaches him how to tie good sailing knots – knots that won’t come undone however hard you’re thrown overboard on a rough, stormy night. He teaches Jean about which woods float best out of what they manage to salvage, about how to tell which direction to raise the canvas sail they construct to best pick up the wind, even on windless days. He teaches Jean about shells, and fish, and which caves along the coastline cocoon the best echoes when they shout at the top of their lungs into the darkness.
Marco teaches Jean to love the sea, and to love the sand, and eventually, even to love the sheen of sweat that appears on his brow after a day’s hard work in their small corner of paradise.
Some days, however, Marco doesn’t make it down to the beach when Jean manages to sneak away from his duties to Erwin – not that he thinks Erwin notices explicitly that he gets later and later at returning to his chambers as the summer days progress; Erwin tires quickly of the Dornish temperate and doesn’t share Jean’s new found enthusiasm for the coast, and he drinks away their whole provision in wine, so much so that they have to send servants back to Sunspear to collect three barrels more.
Marco dismisses his absences nonchalantly, and Jean supposes that it’s the duties that come with pure blood. He goes days at a time without seeing Annie, and though he doesn’t quite know what on earth could keep his cousin so busy, it is clear that whatever reason they embarked on this trip for, was predominantly for her. Not that Jean cares for that reason any more – because how can she bare being cooped up in those stuffy rooms and marble walls when there’s so much to see just beyond the grounds of the gardens?
Marco prefers not to talk about his noble duties when they’re together on the beach – and even when Jean asks for time to time, to satiate his own curiosity only, Marco dances around the topic, detailing vaguely how he has to take lessons and learn the sword and occupy far too many hours in the company of Jean’s cousin, and that he really cannot understand how someone can suck the conversation out of a room so quickly—
They launch their boat five days before Jean’s count down to his departure ends – and it floats, amidst the whooping cheers of the crowd of boys who stand on the shoreline, as Jean and Marco wave back from the safety of the raft, despite the fact Jean’s free hand remains firmly wound in the sleeve of Marco’s tunic, not quite comfortable with the way the wood bobs erratically over the waves, threatening to throw him off balance.
Marco laughs, and shifts his weight, causing the boat to rock and Jean to blanch – but he throws his arm around the shoulders of his friend, and sings into his ear.
“We’ll make a Dornishman of you yet, Lannister!”
The Lannister convoy departs the Water Gardens on the last day of the lunar cycle of that month – and as Jean helps Erwin fit his boots into his stirrups, he catches Marco’s eye through the throng of red and gold, and he can’t hide the smile that blooms on his face.
He resents the knowledge that he will have to suffer a few more days in the muddy shadow of the Old Palace at Sunspear, and that the welcome back at King’s Landing will be nothing to crow about, and that Blackwater Bay will be as ugly as ever, but he holds with him the memories of salt on his lips as he climbs onto his horse and realises that the stories of his professors could never do any justice to the magic that hides in pink marble and deep, blue pools.
The months of finer weather end prematurely in King’s Landing, but the upcoming winter merely prolongs the stench of disease and death in the air that parades across the entire city. Even high up in the keep, the sea brings with it the waft of decay that makes Jean’s stomach churn – it’s nothing like the clear smell of the ocean of Dorne.
The last months of the year occupy Jean enough from longing thoughts of returning to the shore at the end of the world – with the passing of the Hand of the King, Erwin’s bout for blood lands him with a golden pin on the lapel of his tunic and a seat on the dais of the Iron Throne, one step beneath the child who swings his legs atop that pile of rusting swords.
The Tower of the Hand is high in the tallest turret of the keep, and when Erwin appoints Jean as his personal squire, Jean finds himself resenting that the new quarters give such a sweeping view over such a cesspool of a city. Not even the presence of a wine vase in his hand at all hours of the day can mask the putridity.
Erwin’s appointment to Hand of the King is not well received by all – and any chances of Jean’s bastard status being swept under the rug are a far-fetched dream. Erwin is powerful, Erwin is mighty, Erwin walks with his shoulders back and his chin held high, but his squire is easy pickings for snide remarks in the court. Jean’s skin is forced to grow thick and calloused; he has to let the words sink only one layer deep.
The Queen Regent is the worst, and Jean finds every opportunity as he can to avoid crossing paths with her when he’s not accompanied by Erwin. She doesn’t fail to hide her scorn, spitting out vile words down her nose at the bastard boy who she might grind out under her shoe if he were any smaller.
Jean grits his teeth, and in the few hours he can grab between waiting on Erwin, he dedicates himself to practicing with a wooden sword in his room, and there’s some quiet satisfaction to be found in the feeling of muscle finally building beneath his tunic.
There is solace, also, to be found in the strange sort of friendship he strikes up with the Master of Coin – a strange woman who dresses in men’s robes, hailing, some days from the Valyrian shore, and other days, from the Iron Islands, and more days from places far, far away that Jean’s never heard of before, but interest him none the less.
It happens purely by accident – very literally – as Jean is rushing through the twisting corridors of the keep, arms laden high with a casket of wine, and his foot catches on the upturned corner of a cobbled stone – and it would have been a hefty chunk out of his payment for that month had Hange – the Master of Coin – not been passing the same way at the same time and expertly caught the gourd as it soared towards the ground.
She had laughed heartedly at Jean’s flustered face as he apologised profusely at her feet, but she saw as much of his bastard blood as Marco and the Summer Sea boys ever did – inviting him to make it up to her by ferrying some heavy books between the library and her chambers.
It had happened, as such, that one the books Jean had couriered for her on that first trip had been a document of all the coastlines of Dorne, and Jean had been more than thrilled when Hange had spread the pages out on the desk in her chambers and encouraged Jean to study it with her as she made some corrections to the cartography.
Tracing his fingers along the winding, black lines of ink across the parchment, Jean had murmured over one of the caves Marco had shown to him, forgetting himself for a moment, until he had come tumbling back down from the cloud of a memory to Hange’s brightly gleaming eyes behind her spectacles.
Profuse apologies had done nothing, naturally, as she had not been mad with his forwardness, merely eager to mark on her map the things Jean spoke of, drawing the shake out of his voice and encouraging him to describe every lingering detail that strayed to the fore front of his mind of his months spent on the Dornish coast.
It becomes a habit of Jean’s to slip out of his chambers after serving Erwin’s dinner, and descend the spiralling stairs of the Tower of the Hand, slinking along torch lit corridors to join Hange in the library – the delve and toil over the old maps they find there, and Hange teaches him the way of the cartograph. Jean surprises himself with his skill with a pen, and he throws himself into marking out every last niche of Dorne, and further even, as he finds himself fascinated with Hange’s stories of faraway places – of the wild wastelands of the North which jean once found so deplorable; of the white walls of Highgarden when the roses are in bloom; of the majestic, jade gates of Qarth, across the Narrow Sea. Jean laps it up and he dreams – oh, does he dream of sailing away on a little, wooden boat and seeing all these places for himself one day.
The breath of a tentative autumn passes – even though some fear it won’t, what with the ever present arrivals of warnings from the North, all garbled nonsense about ice and coming winter and the dead walking, and Jean can surely only dismiss it as the talk of madmen and drunkards, beating the northern cold only with a stout tankard of beer.
As the cold – not that anyone can really call it cold in the Crownlands – subsides, and the promise of a short spring lingers in the air, the warmer weather has Jean returning to thoughts of fountains and vines and beaches and salt.
Hange notices his despondency quickly, even if Erwin doesn’t, too caught up in matters of the state, every other word that leaves his mouth some complaint about a Baratheon alliance with the Sapphire Isle, or of some Targaryen descendent marrying into a Dothraki hoard – all Jean can do is nod along and agree when Erwin asks it of him.
“Dorne, is it?” Hange asks, one night in the library as she splays out an old map of the Valyrian peninsula across the desk for the two of them to work on – Jean can’t help but feel himself coil in on himself, unsure of the reason why his chest feels tight and he seems to shrink within himself. “I can’t blame you for wanting to go back. The Seven Kingdoms isn’t a safe place at the moment – and the further you can get away from King’s Landing, the better. All that talk of the Baratheon boy joining forces with Reiner of Tarth isn’t for show; I’ll tell you that much, Jean.”
Jean doesn’t want to tell Hange that’s it’s not for reasons of his own safety that he wishes to return to the shores of the Summer Sea – but for the freedom from his whore’s blood and for the smiles of his friends that he left there.
He’s just a child.
What business would a Baratheon hoard or a Dothraki army have in the life of some Lannister bastard, he believes. The Red Keep has kept him safe for this long – safe, but also ignorant. Threats and whispers are passed around the corridors like nobody’s business, but bloodshed is not something he knows.
People won’t care about his mixed blood when he’s run up on a standard – just another dead Lannister supporter is all they’ll see. They won’t see what colour his eyes were.
The fifth month of the calendar year arrives in the city, but Jean does not have to stomach it long. His heart thrums in his chest when Erwin announces that they will be returning to Sunspear and the Water Gardens for the hotter months of the last dredges of a dawdling summer, and Jean is more than eager to disregard talk of upcoming battles and claimants to the thrown in exchange for the busyness in the hallways of the Red Keep as the servants go about packing for the journey south – he takes great pride in selecting his best clothes and shining his riding boots to within an inch of their lives, even if he knows they’ll clog up with mud and sand before he even steps foot on Dornish soil.
He finds himself nervous in those three leagues along the coastal road, the towering palms of the Martell palace fanning the sky as they trek their dehydrated horses up the winding dirt track – but he knows not the reason from his jitters, and only the way they melt away when he sees the smile of the young Dornish Prince who greets them at the gate.
The months are not long enough to satisfy Jean – he scraps his countdown within the first week of their stay, telling himself firmly that he won’t fully appreciate the time he has if he’s constantly looking towards their imminent departure.
Marco is taller, broader, but still laughs much the same – and when they reconcile for the first time in private on the beach, Marco is unsparing in the way he draws Jean’s thin body into an ecstatic embrace, tirading over words too fast about how he had been trying to persuade his father to invite them back for all of the cooler months.
Jean smiles – his first real one in months – and it feels like he never even left.
Jean falls more in love with Dorne and its people as the days tick by – he falls in love with the taste of blood oranges when Marco drags him out to the groves during the picking season, and they spend the day climbing trees and launching handfuls of the sweet fruit into wicker baskets, yet missing most times when Jean begins to deliberately jostle Marco to throw his aim.
He falls in love with the trips to Sunspear that Marco invites him along to – they saddle up the horses at dawn and are out of the palace grounds before anyone else begins to stir, halfway to the hustle and bustle of the city’s bazaars by the time midday rolls around. Marco thrusts plate after plate into Jean’s mouth as he drags him along back alleys lined with myriads of silkscreened tents, brashly insisting that he knows exactly what they need to try next.
He falls in love with the rush of wind through his body when Marco suggests they try leaping off the cliff tops into some of the secret shoals he knows about, the water so deep that Jean’s feet never once touch the sandy bottoms. They spin around in the gentle whirlpools that swirl the rocky outcrops, and they go diving for peals kept tightly clamped in oyster shells, and they go sailing the inlets of the coast line in the rowboat that Marco managed to procure from who-knows-where over the time Jean was away.
With every ebb and flow of the tide as they ride each rolling wave, Jean feels like every ounce of bastard’s blood in being washed clean from his skin, and he clings dearly to that free feeling that he submerges himself in.
“I’ve never seen a Lannister so at home on the sea,” Marco jibes one afternoon, the two of them having rowed out to a small sandbank that they had been eyeing up from the cliff top for some weeks after Jean – and the Lannister fleet – arrived. “Maybe you were right when you said you weren’t really Lannister. You’re just pale for a Dornishman, is all.”
They ditch the boat on the eaves of the sand and fall graciously onto their backs, limbs splayed and eyes skywards as thin wisps of cloud pass like talc over the sun.
“That’s saying something,” Jean huffs, drawing in the salt air all the way into his lungs. He twists his neck so that he can look at Marco, and watch the rise and fall of his chest too. “And for all that it matters, I would probably make a terrible Dornishman. I still get sea sick.”
“It’ll come,” Marco murmurs, crossing his hands over his stomach as he breathes deeply and exhales through a peaceful smile. “She’s a living thing, you know – as unpredictable as a great stage actor. Calm and welcoming at one moment, arms open to her audience, exploding with stormy tempers at another. She has a playful side too – she enjoys the crowd, tosses over the little children, gives us sailors a helping hand – you love all the parts of her, and she’ll surely love you back”
Waves of briny air roll over the two of them as the water laps the shore, an oceanic melody of hums and rushes that match the pace of Jean’s breathing. Marco stretches his arms high above his head and murmurs happily.
“The sea is my second love, you know.”
Jean doesn’t question it – all the tales he ever heard of Dornishmen being born from the womb of the ocean and not of a woman are probably true. But there is one thing that strikes him.
“What’s your first love?”
Marco doesn’t respond, merely laughing to himself as he closes his eyes and settles into a doze on the sun-baked sand, surrounded on all sides by the vast, salt blue.
The years pass. For each month that ends spent on the shores of the Summer Sea, Jean has to come to terms with the thought he might not return to the sands of Dorne – but they never stay away long, and the marble archways and whispering streams of the Water Gardens become a home away from home that Jean daydreams of on nights when he’s caught late in the library helping Hange.
He grows tall, the rest of his body catching up with the length of his spindly arms and legs, and his chest fills out – he’s six inches off Erwin’s height by the time he reaches fifteen.
Annie becomes beautiful, too, and it takes Jean a few years’ worth of sneaking out of the palace with Marco to come to terms with the reason why they make the journey to Dorne every year. Talk of a marriage alliance between the lioness of Casterly Rock and the Martell Prince becomes common palace gossip as he sneaks between the drapes of silk and satin of Erwin’s chambers.
He’s fifteen, and he’s not blind to the willowy shape of his cousin’s body, of how she prowls the grounds in train of crimson, her gold hair piled high on top her head as Marco trots along at her side, smiling pleasantly and working diligently to pull conversation out of the silence that Jean watches secretively from one of the many terraces that overlook the courtyard.
Marco is to marry Annie, and it’s been in the works for years, Jean realises; all this talk of lost Targaryen princesses across the sea leading armies of Dothraki horsemen and rumoured titans, and of Baratheon claimants marching south and engaging crown armies has people scared. Erwin is keen to foster an alliance with the Dornish peninsula to guarantee the armies of few and far between to rally to the defence of King’s Landing when the time ultimately comes.
Jean remember Hange’s words from time to time – the encouragement to get away whilst it’s still possibly to travel unnoticed – but too often he forgets himself when he passes Marco in a hallway with a knowing look, and an hour later, they’re both stealing away through the gap in the palace walls to their escape.
Jean treasures his time with the Prince closer to his chest as his years pass; too often one or both of them are caught up, Marco forced to patrol the grounds of the palace in Annie’s company, and Jean, sneered at more openly by the pureblood Lannisters for his hair that only grows muddier in colour as he gets older. Even his position as squire to the Hand of the King doesn’t save him, and he comes to recognise that it becomes all too easy to scrape the civil veneer off those he passes in the corridors even so far away from the Crownlands – they whisper and they spit and they laugh.
“Why hasn’t Erwin’s bastard been sent to the Wall yet?” they say. “He’s not a child anymore.”
Jean knows this. He’s not a child any more, and he feels the throes of adulthood like spikes twisting in his gut every time he catches a glance of Marco and Annie together and can’t quite place the sensation that makes him ache. He learns about women too – one of the Dornish girls in the palace pulls him aside in the passages between his and Erwin’s quarters one evening and kisses him against the wall; Jean splutters and pushes her away, blushing furiously as he shakes his head and scrambles out of there scared of the way he can only think of Marco when he sinks down against the wood of his door.
He knows he looks too long when the Prince greets him beneath the fluted pillars – with or without the company of others. He knows the shape of his shoulders beneath his robes, he knows the full curve of his broad chest, the prickle of dark hair on his jaw, the way Jean’s breath always hitches when Marco grabs him by the arm and tugs him into the undergrowth, the eyes of a boy still shining brightly every time he asks Jean if he wants to join him sailing that afternoon.
Jean tries hard to crush the feeling.
In the dreary months spent at King’s Landing – now little more than a blur to pass the spaces between feeling sand between his toes once more – Erwin begins to take him to the brothels that he frequents. It’s awkward at first, because Jean doesn’t know which way to stare as such beautiful women roll around on sofas just in front of him, sharing languid kisses and lustful touches – and he is forced to stand outside of Erwin’s room and wait on him, arms and legs as stiff as stone.
On Jean’s sixteenth birthday – barely a few weeks before they’re due to return to Dorne for the year – Erwin presses a small, leather bag of gold coins into his hand and encourages him to choose a girl. It’s all he can do but to gulp and nod, gesturing shyly at the body of a beautiful, lithe woman with hair like ebony and skin like fine porcelain.
Jean doesn’t know how to kiss, but she teaches him, straddling his lap and pinning his wrists above his head as she moves with practiced delicacy – and he follows her lead, because he knows this is one of the little pleasures in life he’s supposed to enjoy.
He gasps and he moans as his hips roll, and she rakes her nails down his back and fists her fingers in his dirty hair – and he shudders with the release of no name from his lips, but the thought of unruly, brown ringlets and freckles in his mind as the wave of white noise engulfs him for the first time.
Erwin pats him on the shoulder that night when Jean returns to pour him wine, and asks him how it went – and it’s all Jean can do to nod and murmur a response that means nothing to the guilt that plagues the inside of his chest.
He knows how they laugh about the Baratheon boy, Bertolt, and his relationship with Reiner of Tarth on the small council. Jean accompanies Erwin from time to time, hiding in the shadows as he waits to be summoned to pour wine for the Hand of the King and the Master of Coin, and of Whispers, and every other King’s Landing ennobled rat who occupies a chair, and he watches Hange’s face twist in discomfort as the Queen Regent cackles over what something like that says about Baratheon power to rule.
That sixteenth year is painful for the Lannister bastard – and not merely because pressure on Erwin to ship his muddy-blooded nephew to the North becomes something Jean can no longer escape from, even hundreds of leagues from the Red Keep. He holds tight to Erwin’s heel, and dedicates himself to making sure his boots are always shined and his cup is always full, and he thinks – he hopes – that Erwin still sees him fit enough to keep him close. Jean doesn’t want to give his uncle any pause for thought. He has to be the perfect squire.
It’s selfish, too, because Jean stays close as it’s the only way he knows to ensure each passage to the south once every year.
But that’s not why it’s painful explicitly.
The Dornish are open about their paramours, and even a handful of warm months absorbed in the custom beneath his belt can’t stop the prickle that skitters up the back of Jean’s neck at the thought. Jean meets Marco’s paramours for the first time, that year; two of them. The first, a girl: thick, glossy, black hair, and a face not quite yet forgiving of its baby fat – but endearing none the less. Jean realises quickly the nature of their relationship with the sound of giggling on the sea breeze as he’s couriering a letter to Erwin’s chambers one night – she’s not just another Dornish girl at court. Through the ferns and sprawling palms, he sees hands flurrying, and the flash of the Dornish prince’s grin, and chuckling kisses mouthed onto bare necks at the side of the fountain. Jean pretends he doesn’t see, and goes on his way with the parchment in his hand heavier than before.
The second of Marco’s paramours takes Jean by surprise, because he doesn’t realise before it’s really too late for him. They take the boat to Sunspear for the day – sailing around the outcrops of rocky coast, a whole group of them: Marco, Jean, a hoard of noblemen, and a flurry of servant boys. Jean is the only northerner, but he likes it that way; it makes him feel special, with his pale skin and almost-blonde hair.
Servant or noble-born – it doesn’t make a difference when they’re lashing ropes and hauling sails and laughing, Jean’s amber eyes constantly flitting between the cord in his hands, and the prince at the helm, vibrantly laughing with one of the sailor’s sons they’d managed to coerce into joining them on this venture.
“All Dornishmen are sailors,” Marco had said, before clapping this boy on the back when he’d first introduced Jean to him that morning, “Just some are better than others. If we want to get to Sunspear and back in a day, we need the best.”
Jean had nodded, and flashed Marco a confident smile – and the Dornish sailor boy had proven himself with the dexterity in which he handled the wheel and the rudder of their little ship. He watches him now, one hand clamped on the spur of the wheel as he and Marco exchange a joke, and the other hand— sweeping, sneaking, over the shoulders of Jean’s childhood friend, close—
Jean has to tear his eyes away at breakneck speed when the sailor threads his fingers around Marco’s neck and draws him into an open-mouthed kiss, right in the open air of that top deck; but no-one else on board seems to notice.
Jean finds his breath laboured, and even if the stolen kiss only lasts a moment, and Marco returns to join the crew – and Jean – with a skip in his step thereafter, Jean doesn’t quite enjoy the trip as much as he would like.
Jean learns that to love a man or women is the same, in Dorne – because love is love, they say, and they celebrate that. Jean doesn’t know if Marco loves both of his paramours – or either, for that matter – because it’s hard for him to understand how he could possibly split his affections in more than one place. But when he sees Marco in the gardens with the girl, and at sea with the boy, there’s music in his laughter and sunlight in his smile, and Jean has to try hard to conceal his obvious scowls.
It shouldn’t cause the unrest that it does – but Jean is jealous. He knows this.
The middle months of that year swirl like a whirlpool – Jean tries hard to kick away, to devolve himself with Erwin, and learning the trade of a good Lannister bastard, but he can’t help but be born back to the centre of the vortex every time Marco hurries him to the shadows of a corridor, or beneath a low hanging tree, and tells him of his next escapade from the palace walls. There’s a thrill in Jean’s blood, and a thrill in the touches he steals when he thinks Marco doesn’t notice. He tries his hardest to placate himself with the smallest things, but when Marco shares his good humour with everyone they meet, Jean doesn’t know where he stands, or if he could stand at all.
It’s approaching the last few weeks of the trip when, one morning just as dawn breaks, there’s a knock on Jean’s chamber door, which rouses him amidst some confusion and bleary eye-rubbing. He barely has time to peel off his covers when Marco slips through the door, taking care to not let the wood make a noise as it shuts, a broad, lip-biting grin already on his face.
Jean frowns despairingly, and draws his bed clothes tightly across his chest as Marco swans over to perch on the edge of his mattress.
“Morning,” Jean squints, warily; Marco might have a tendency for stealing him away most days, but sneaking into his quarters is a new one.
“Yes – morning, indeed,” Marco chimes, but his mischievous glee is kept hushed. “You fancy going on an adventure today?”
Jean frowns – as much as Marco’s ploys and plans never fail to make a welcome difference to palace routine, he doesn’t fancy the thought of another trip avoiding eye contact with Marco’s paramour as he lauds around with his tongue down the prince’s throat at every conceivable opportunity.
“What do you have in mind?” Jean grouches, earning a look of disapproval from Marco, and a playful shove.
“I won’t ask you next time, if that’s your attitude, Jean!” he jibes, but only shuffles closer across Jean’s mattress, until they’re knee to knee. “Father told me to take your cousin across the Narrow Sea for a few days and show her the free city of Tyrosh – but I suppose you wouldn’t want to go, would you?”
“Tyrosh?” Jean probes, questioningly, as Marco’s eyes glimmer in the pinks and golds of the rising sun that spill through the light, silk curtains around his window. “Just us?”
“Just us,” Marco grins, his dark eyes flickering downwards momentarily as he childishly begins to poke Jean’s knees through the blanket, walking his fingers up and down the Lannister squire’s legs. “Well, us, plus Annie, and her retainers, of course. But Erwin won’t be coming. And nor will father. We’d be at sea for a few days, make land in Tyrosh, explore the city – they’re renowned for their gold and their jewels, you know – and, oh, I never met a Tyroshi who hasn’t had the weirdest colour hair, you’ll love it—”
“And what exactly did you say to get me off the hook with Erwin?” Jean admonishes, kerbing Marco’s enthusiasm momentarily. “I’m not a member of Annie’s party, you know that.”
Marco puffs out his cheeks and shrugs, with an innocent tilt of his head.
“We could tell him you’re squiring for your cousin, or pouring her wine, or being a man servant or a guard, or— well, to be honest with you Jean, we could probably tell your uncle anything, he wouldn’t mind. I can tell the heat’s getting to his head after all these years.” His walking fingers turn into the smoothing of his hand along Jean’s leg through the light blanket, and it sends an electric tingle shooting up Jean’s thigh like he has never felt before. Marco then continues, in a softer, lower voice, “I promise you won’t get in trouble because of me, Jean.”
Jean mulls the words over in his mouth – but they’re more than sweet tasting to him, especially with the way Marco’s hand doesn’t move from his lap.
“And you … you definitely want me to come?” he ends up asking, causing Marco to roll his eyes.
“I want you to come, Jean,” Marco sighs dramatically, but has to bite back a shy smile nonetheless. “I wouldn’t ask anyone else, you know that.”
Jean blushes, and is thankful that the light is low enough in his room that he might get away with it.
They sail within the hour, and Jean has never seen Marco move as quickly as he does, flying around Jean’s room and throwing his clothes into his trunk – and onto his face, much to Jean’s chagrin.
Marco helps Jean carry his bags to Marco’s own quarters, where the prince has a rabbit warren of servants milling around, organising his own stuff and ferrying it out to the ship. Jean’s personal effects are added to the growing pile, but he has barely time to bid farewell to the engraving of the Lannister lion over the lock of his trunk – Marco is eager to show him the ship.
It’s a far greater thing than Marco’s little play toy: with a sea-fairing crew, and cabins shrouded in rich silks and satins, and wine stores full to the brim below deck. Jean catches but a glimpse of his cousin as she’s escorted on board by her lady’s maids and straight to her quarters – but Jean gives her as much birth as Marco does, following the prince’s lead as he excitedly tugs at his friend’s sleeve, wanting to show him what a true, Dornish vessel looks like.
Being cooped up on board is not a bad thing for Jean. He’s gained his sea legs over the years, and could almost spare a snigger at the sight of the Lannister banner men who have accompanied them, bent over the sides and retching into the ocean, faces green with sickly nausea.
He enjoys helping with the chores too – within reason – because feeling part of something so smoothly oiled is welcome, and to only be criticised on his ability to tie a knot (which isn’t half bad, admittedly), rather than on the colour of his hair or eyes, is something he doesn’t really mind.
The other sailors are lenient on him though, because it’s clear – to them at least, and eventually to Jean too – that the Lannister bastard has the favour of the prince, and they’re less often disturbed when Marco encourages Jean to the prow of the ship each morning and evening to see the sun rise and set over the Summer Sea, and, ultimately, over the rising coastline of Essos.
Marco perches behind Jean on the prow, both their legs swinging out into the open air as they balance on the protruding beam of wood, and Jean doesn’t imagine the way Marco’s hands sometimes settle on his hips – steadying him, he supposes. It wouldn’t be ideal if he fell overboard, he tells himself.
They dock after three days at sea, and – Marco was right – the free city is nothing like Jean had ever imagined.
Boisterous and loud, Tyrosh is far larger than Sunspear, and not draped in the same, over-looming shadow of sand and grit and squalor. Merchant stalls of gleaming armour, encrusted with jewels the colour of the sea in Dorne, and weaves and ropes of dyed fabric all the shades of a setting sun line the harbour side, bustling with life – and men with green and pink beards, Jean notices, unable to stop himself from gawping.
Marco laughs at him, and loops his arm with Jean’s, barely offering a passing word to the crew members as they begin to unload the ship – before they’re off, Jean being dragged relentlessly through the hustle and bustle of irradiance.
Helmets – shapes liked birds and animals, and cased with precious metals – are Jean’s favourite by far, of all the things the line the narrow and winding streets, until Marco pushes a pitcher of sweet smelling liquid to Jean’s lips with an encouraging gesture. Jean smiles nervously, and takes a sip: pears, rich and aromatic, and the warm burn of liquor, roll down his throat.
“Pear brandy,” Marco chirps, stealing the cup back, and taking his own sip from it, lips curling over the same place Jean pressed his mouth. “They’re famous for it here.”
The dream that dazzles Jean the most, of course, is the thought of the many miles of land and sea between him and the Red Keep, and the flock of purebloods crooning over their greed for land and money in the chambers of the tallest tower. Here, Jean feels finally free of their gaze and glare, and there’s a great burden lifted from his chest as the Dornish prince leads him through rivers of bright colour.
They stay, the travelling party, that night in an inn that overlooks the sea; Jean sleeps with the cradle of salt and pears and fabric dye rocking him into the easiest sleep he’s encounter in a long time, and wakes, again, with the dawning of the sun.
He misses Marco that morning, the prince bound to his duty to court Jean’s cousin – and thus the purpose of the voyage – so Jean takes the time to wander the streets of the city more slowly, marvelling at the hordes of sea snails kept in large, glass tanks, used for the secretion of a substance involved in the colouring of the garish fabrics that swathe the market stalls.
The colour doesn’t stop in the sheets of cotton and dupion; it’s in the deep skin tones of the people he passes on the cobblestones. People white, like the fresh snow he’s read about in Hange’s books, and flawless in their complexion, and people dark, almost black, like beautiful ebony, smooth and supple, with a polished sort of glow and a pride in the way they bare their own shoulders. There are men who are short, and women who are tall, and some who wear masks and veils of finely-spun silk and gold scales, concealing all but their eyes from those who look in. Jean has never seen some many different people in all his life, and there’s a fire that burns in the pit of his chest that tells him that he has unearthed more than just a great want – these three days will not be enough for him. He wants more of this.
He reunites with Marco some time before sunset, and the prince is eager for relief from the constant formalities of his courtship. He tells Jean of a fountain, murmurs words of how beautiful it looks when bathed in reds and golds as the sun disappears over the horizon, and it’s all Jean can do but nod.
A fountain is not the way Jean would’ve described it. It’s far more than that: pillars of gleaming, white marble, of stone-carved men draped in cloth and commanding the great sea, of bountiful women with the tails of dolphins and porpoises, scales shimmering with the tirades of water that freely flows over them, into a vast pool of cerulean blue. Marco tells him that the locals call it the Fountain of the Drunken God, and Jean can only agree that it is truly a place deserving of the Gods, especially when the last of the daylight clips the rippling water.
They each toss a silver coin over their shoulders at Marco’s suggestion, and the prince encourages Jean to make a wish as his coin tinkles against the bottom of the pool. Jean only has one wish, and it’s unspoken in words, but perhaps not in name. Jean is coming to realise a lot of things about himself and how he feels.
(He wonders, truly, what Marco might be wishing for.)
They sit together for a while, enjoying first the sunset, and then the street performers who appear after dark to parade for money from the tourists and fountain-goers; spitting fire and swallowing swords and pinching out of more than a few pockets, Jean notices with a wry eye as he pats down his own tunic to make sure his purse is still in his pockets.
There is one performer in particular – whom Marco points out with a nudge and a stretch of his finger – who captures Jean’s interest enigmatically. A woman, Jean presumes, judged only by the litheness of her figure, and the milky white of her supple skin, moves in and out of the throng of entertainers, stepping lightly on the stone with dancer’s feet, and offering around an up-turned hat to collect change, but little more. Her hair is dark, raven-black, like the colour of the night sky, and her lips claret red, much like the swamp of fabric she has coiled around her neck and trailing like a plume – but whilst she curls a smile, her eyes do not follow, and it’s them to which Jean is drawn.
She prowls around the edges of the crowd, skirting her dancing kindred in the light of candles and lanterns being lit on the corners of each street that forms the crossroad of the fountain, before she catches Jean’s eyes and makes a tangent for them on the edge of the pool.
Jean feels a stutter in his breath as the salt air mixes with the scent of musky, jasmine perfume, and he almost coils back as the performer slinks up close; Marco, beside him, cannot conceal a chuckle.
She doesn’t say a word at first, holding out the hat in her hands, into which Marco tosses a handful of coins, before nudging Jean to do the same. Jean swallows the lump in his throat with a gulp, and reaches into his pocket for a silver dime, flicking it quickly into her welcoming collection pot. She smiles again, with a sultry tilt of her head that reminds Jean of a tiger – or of what he’s read of tigers – and Jean finds himself very aware of the way her tongue smoothes across her painted lips.
“For that, you can have a fortune told,” she hushes, extending her hand to Jean, “Give me your palm.”
Jean baulks, stare flitting erratically between the face of the red woman and her hand, until Marco prompts Jean with a light push to his shoulder.
“Go on, Jean. Let’s see what she can do.”
Jean winces, shying his eyes away as he reluctantly presents his palm face-up, unfurling his fingers from a fist slowly. The woman does not hesitate to wrap her slender fingers about his wrist, and draws his hand upwards, towards her face, where she inspects the lines that mark him.
Her touch is icy cold, Jean feels – or maybe that’s just the unnerved shiver that runs up and down his spine with scurrying feet, waiting with a baited breath to see what might be said. (Not that he believes in any of this pseudo-witchcraft, he tells himself resolutely.)
“Salt,” she says softly, a slight furrow in her neatly sculpted brow. “There’s salt in your future.”
Salt, Jean thinks. Like the sea. Maybe he can come around to this fortune nonsense sooner than he expected.
“And a long road,” she continues, tracing a finger along the line that spans across his palm from between his second and third finger. “There is … snow, on that road. You will travel to far places.”
Her red lips purse, and her eyes flicker up like the breath of a candle to meet Jean’s wide-eyed stare.
“A reminder to pursue that which you most want.” She lets Jean’s hand drop, and steps away, curtseying deeply to both of them, before treading carefully backwards on nimble feet and moving off into the crowd, already serving for more gold. Jean watches her go, and Marco snorts.
“I feel like that wasn’t worth the money we paid,” he chortles, folding his arms over his chest as he leans into Jean’s ear. “She was pretty though. Are you interested?”
Jean splutters, and turns to face his friend, surprised.
“W-what? I-I … no, Marco!”
Marco tilts his head and scrunches up his mouth in his puzzlement.
“Oh? I thought—” he starts, before stopping himself. “Ah, you know what, never mind. Let’s get going, okay?”
Marco leaps to his feet from the edge of the fountain, hopping in front of Jean, and extending his hand in much the same way as the fortune-teller. Jean stares down at the outstretched fingers like they’re red-hot iron.
“You know you don’t have to pursue the things you want the most,” he says, with a sheepish smile, “I would give them to you. Just ask.”
Jean can’t hide his blush this time, but he knocks Marco’s hand aside with a flick of his wrist, and sighs dramatically at the prince as he gets to his feet.
In the end, the trip is extended nearly a week, principally due for the prince’s fondness for the city streets and its lively atmosphere, and Jean knows for sure that the crew aren’t complaining, enjoying night’s spent in a pear-flavoured stupor in the harbour side taverns.
Marco orders at least three dozen barrels of the brandy to be taken back to Dorne with them as well, although Jean doubts the space they have on board the ship for all these extra goods; even the newly acquired effects of his cousin could sink a small ship with their mass.
Jean returns to the Water Gardens with new robes spun of Lannister gold and crimson, and, at Marco’s demands, a broadsword fresh from the smith’s oven, ivory hilt carved in the honour of a roaring lion. Jean doesn’t think he can accept it on its face value, seeing as his experience with a sword extends little beyond a wooden stick – but as a gift from Marco … he’s lenient.
In those last few, precious days of Jean’s sixteenth year on the shoes of the sea, Erwin keeps him tied firmly down to his desk, scribing long letters from words that tumble rapidly from his mouth. Things are getting serious in the north, and, from what Erwin lectures, Jean learns that the steadily rallying Baratheon army has gathered support from Winterfell, and the rats at King’s Landing are worried.
The concern is infectious, but perhaps not for the same reason. Jean worries for two reasons: first, that a brewing conflict might delay them from returning to the salty, Dornish shore, and two, that Erwin will only be keener than ever to hurry the impending marriage between Lannister and Martell.
Even though he expects it, Jean is more than despondent to receive the news of the marriage announcement when it finally floods the dark, stone corridors of the Red Keep, a few months after their return to the Crownlands. It starts as servant’s gossip, and he hears whispers in passing, and tries to shake them off, but one night, when Erwin calls him in to serve him his evening meal, he sits Jean down and tells him of the fortunate news, and how it will surely change the outcome of this brewing war for all of them.
(Not for me, Jean thinks to himself.)
The castle bustles with wedding preparations all throughout the later months – and Jean is beside himself wondering just truly how many bouquets of flowers and garlands of fruit really need to be shipped up from the south.
It’s a shame, in a sense, because the scent of the Dornish flora that slowly begins to line the Great Hall reminds him of what he’s likely to have to give up all too soon – sweetly smelling and so beautifully decorated with shells from the sea.
Jean catches himself, once or twice, stopping to pause and admire the polished sparkle of razor clams and oyster pearls intermingled with the flowers and ferns wrapped around the stone pillars, a finger trailing over the rough grooves of a cockle shell when he thinks no-one’s looking.
He’s not as subtle as he hopes, of course.
“It’s for the good of the family, you know.”
Jean almost jumps out of his skin, seizing his hand back from the garland as if bitten or stung. He reels away, only to see the fierce, ice-blue eyes of his cousin appear out of the shadows as she prowls around the back of the pillar. Jean feels his stomach tense just looking at her, sleeking draped in red and gold, and the epitome of everything he ever hoped to be as a Lannister born.
“A-Annie, I—”
She drifts past him, tapping her finger on the string of shells that so caught Jean’s longing gaze, her schooled expression as indifferent as ever Jean saw her.
“I’m not blind, cousin,” she says calmly, “I have no more interest in the Dornish prince in that way than you do in me.”
“I … I don’t know what you mean,” Jean stammers, but it’s a poor cover for the way his heart hammers in his chest at the thought of her knowing. Annie rolls her blue eyes, stepping around Jean with a lethal-feeling step.
“We’ve got to win this war. I hope you know that.”
The wedding happens early the following year, in the month of Jean’s birthday. The parade of Dornishmen flying their red sun banners up the Roseroad is a sight to behold, with the caravan of red and yellow threading back through the city walls from the grand view from Erwin’s quarters. Jean shies away from the welcoming party, informing Erwin that he’s come down with blaring stomach pains and that he wishes not to make an embarrassment of himself in front of their southern guests – but the reality is that his pain is more north than that, and it’s his heart that hurts distinctly.
Jean watches forlornly from the tallest tower, the brash beat of drums and trumpets filling the putrid air and overruling the hustle of the city below.
Escaping the wedding itself is a more difficult affair, and Jean is not so successful.
He rouses early, before the sunrise, and the thought of donning his best robes makes his stomach churn – the red embroidery of the lion of Casterly Rock on his breast a reminder of the Tyroshi streets and their brilliant colours and Marco’s promise.
Throwing himself into readying Erwin’s tunic, and polishing his boots until they shine even without the help of the sun, helps – to an extent. He doesn’t have to think about what today means when he’s got wax in one hand, and a brush in the other, and he’s scrubbing madly at the black leather to try and buff out all of the scuffs.
Jean should feel lucky, or at least, that’s what he believes. For once, he finds himself glad of his heritage, pushed onto the table furthest from the high table, amid lesser noblemen of the Crownlands, and a few, young Lannister squires. He can barely see the overlapping banners of lion and sun, and he deliberately chooses a seat facing away from the faces of his cousin and his friend – his prince, if he can dare to think of Marco like that.
Jesters, and pigeon pie, and minstrels playing songs of the sea – but the feasting is good, and Jean eats until he thinks he might burst. It’s better than listening to endless speeches, and twanging lutes, and the warm sound of Marco’s voice, which makes Jean twitch as he downs another tankard of ale.
There’s raucous cheering with the donning of the wedding cloak, and more clapping with the presentation of weddings gifts: a Valyrian steel sword gifted from Erwin, a new title granted by the young King, a wealth of land in both the Westerlands and Dorne, a harp of plated gold … but Jean imagines Marco’s eyes lighting up the brightest when there’s mention of a new ship awaiting in the Blackwater, even if he dares not to turn around and view the face of the Dornish prince himself.
The feasting dissolves into joyous laughter and the clanking of tankards and boisterous singing, but Jean’s face remains sullen, even after Erwin gestures for him to approach the high table, informing him that there is no use having a squire if he won’t serve wine when called upon. Disgruntled, Jean shadows his uncle’s shoulder, never letting his cup fall below half empty, and keeps his eyes trained on the swirling, deep red liquid, so that he won’t be tempted to steal a glance over the heads of Erwin and Annie, towards the bridegroom.
Jean’s never enjoyed parties to begin with – there are too many people, too many eyes casting over him and devolving into whispers he’d rather not here, about how Erwin would dare to have a baseborn not even his own serve at the high table. Jean only wishes he’d had more to drink at his lowly, squire’s table. (Ideally, enough so that he couldn’t even remember his own name.)
Erwin taps the side of his gold cup impatiently, the blocky ring on his finger clinking against the metal as he alerts Jean to the dwindling mouthful left in the bottom. Jean starts from his thoughts, and hurriedly leans over his uncle’s shoulder to replenish his cup, only to have the highborn twist his fingers in the neck of Jean’s tunic, and pull him close.
“Lannisters do not wear their feelings so plainly on their faces, Jean,” he whispers cryptically, before letting him go – Jean springs back, wine sloshing in the jug in his hands. Erwin doesn’t look back at him, immediately raising his glass to his lips to sip graciously.
I suppose it’s a good thing that I’m not a true Lannister then, Jean can’t help but think.
He almost loses it when it comes to the bedding ceremony – one hundred times worse than the thought of any of Marco’s past paramours, and he knows he shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t be so selfish when there’s an allegiance for the coming war in the balance, but … he can’t help it. The cheers of the crowd as they scoop up the newly married couple on their shoulders fall on Jean’s deaf ears, and he doesn’t wait to be excused by Erwin, stealing away into the gardens of the Red Keep to escape this poor form of torture.
Jean doesn’t know how he ever fooled himself into thinking he didn’t have feeling for the Dornish prince. For the longest time, it’s not just been thoughts of sandy beaches and jade-coloured seas that swathed his dreams, but of freckled skin and a brilliant smile, and perhaps, of kisses stolen in the shadows of the Water Gardens.
Soft whispers in the corridors don’t ease his mind, and after he has served Erwin a light supper than night, he retreats immediately to his chambers, deciding to avoid spending the night in Hange’s company, and more importantly, awake.
He strips of his good robes, abandoning them in a scrumpled pile on the flagstone floor, no care for creases or dust that might cling to the expensive fabric. His cotton night shirt feels rough against his bare skin, woven and fibrous and uncomfortable, much like the lumpiness in his pillow and quilt.
Sleep is not easy, and every time he closes his eyes and tries to block his ears of the continued celebrations beyond his window, likely to last for days at this rate, he can picture only the thought of what might be going on in chambers in the tower opposite his. Jealousy of his cousin is something he’s known all his life, but this is a new breed of the green-eyed goblin that sits on his chest, squashing his sternum and compressing the air in his lungs.
(And there’s no respite to be found in imagining himself in the place of his pure-blooded cousin; in imagining himself beneath the covers of the Dornish prince’s bed; in imaging spanning his hand over Marco’s chest and the slow grind of rocking hips.)
Jean drapes an arm over his eyes and growls – low and self-loathing, as he tries to incinerate any and all perverse thoughts from his mind, but to little avail – once the seed of hot kisses on his neck and a slick tongue lathing over sensitive skin is planted in his mind, he can’t expel it.
He barely hears the soft knock at the door – not the first time, at least. He loses it against the sound of drunken laughter beyond his window, and against the pulsation of his thoughts, but the second time – he hears it.
He sits bolt upright, eyes immediately on the door as he wonders if he might have let a moan slip in his fantasy, but the wood doesn’t creak. He swallows thickly, and tries to school himself, swiping the heels of his palms over his eyes swiftly.
“C-come in,” he calls out, though his voice is weak and he resents it. There’s a moment of silence, where Jean considers he might’ve just been hearing things, until the latch clicks, and the door pushes open slowly, a shapeless shadow slipping in through the space, and falling back against the door as it clunks closed.
Jean rubs his eyes again in the dim candlelight, gawping against the darkness as he tries to see who might have just crept into his room – although, stupidly, there is no fear in his bones, and no thrum in his chest or blood in his ears.
The figure – draped in a thick cloth, a blanket maybe, Jean figures – sweeps forward into the aura of the candlelight, before dropping their shroud. Jean swears he’s dreaming.
“M-Mar— what are you doing here?” It comes out as a hiss as Jean throws the covers off his bed and leaps to his feet; the freckled, Dornish prince lets the tapestry rug he has covered himself in fall around his shoulders, revealing ruffled hair and a sheepish smile.
“Heh,” Marco chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck bashfully, “I’m glad I got the right door on the first attempt. That would’ve been really embarrassing otherwise.”
“I-I … you … ” Jean splutters, before shaking his head, hands thrown in the air exasperatedly. “Marco, what in the Seven Hells? It’s … it’s your wedding night, you can’t be here.”
“Well, I am here, so— it’s a little late for that,” he chuckles, but not as brightly, his hand leaving the nape of his neck, but straying to itch the end of his nose. The rug falls from his shoulders with a thump on the flag – he still wears the same clothes from the feast: the same ochre-yellow robe, patterned with embellished gold suns, and rich, aureolin-orange under shirt. He’s lost the jewellery and the medallions since, but his belt remains firmly tied around his waist, and his boots securely on his feet. Jean pauses – and he wonders – but he doesn’t say what he’s thinking outright.
“You’re … you’re … aren’t you supposed to be, you know, c-consummating your marriage?” he garbles, stepping closer to the Dornish prince tentatively. “W-with … with Annie?”
Who else, Jean, he scolds himself, a frown stealing his expression momentarily, before Marco shrugs nonchalantly, also closing the gap by one pace between them.
“Uh … nope?” Marco says, biting his lip as he casts his eyes down for a second, before regaining Jean’s gaze with a newfound intensity. “Annie and I decided that making freckled babies wasn’t … particularly high on either of our lists of priorities.”
“Marco … “ Jean murmurs, trying to find it in himself to force some sort of anger, some sort of annoyance that Marco’s breaking tradition so casually, some part of himself that doesn’t want this to end in the way he’s only stolen dreams of – but he falls flat on all counts. He breathes deeply, steadyingly, and cards a frantic hand through his hair, ripping his eyes away from the prince’s sincere, molasses-brown scrutiny, so attempt to compose himself. “What … do you want, Marco?”
Marco purses his lips and furrows his eyebrows, a hefty crease appearing between them as he muses in an unnerving silence over whatever is in his head. Jean feels the gush of blood in his ears, crashing into his skull like a waterfall, and whipping him around like a whirlpool – he feels dizzy with it.
“What do you want, Jean?”
Jean can feel the hot tingle of a blush soaring skyward through his cheeks and up the back of his neck, into his hairline. Marco’s face is prettily pink in the candlelight, and he chews nervously on his lower lip, despite the wide-eyed intensity of his gaze which doesn’t waver from observation every facet of Jean’s expression. It’s eager – hopeful, even.
(Does Jean dare hope?)
“I … I want …” he stammers clumsily, fists balling at his side as he musters some ounce of courage, and tries to block all memory of today from his mind. He breathes deep – in and out. “I want you.”
Marco needs no telling twice – his covet of the Lannister half-blood has lasted many long summer months, too many thoughts of feverish kisses beneath the shadows of the palace walls, too many moans lost to the warming darkness – and he is across the room in an instant, lips crashing into Jean’s with articulate frenzy.
Jean melts under the scampering of hands beneath his nightshirt, beneath the threading of a soft tongue between his desperate lips, beneath the hitch of his leg around Marco’s hip as they go crashing backwards onto Jean’s mattress.
Marco kisses like he was born of the Seven Hells, so sinful in the way he sucks wetly at Jean’s lower lip, fingers busy exploring Jean’s chest, rubbing circles over sensitive skin and trailing touches over his navel, and lower – palming maddeningly at Jean’s growing hardness, unrelenting in the strokes he gives as the fabric of Jean’s nightclothes become stickily soaked.
Jean’s back arches off the sheets with a gasp that Marco swallows, rewarding Jean with a lick of his lips and a thrust of his tongue – and Jean laps it up greedily. Marco tastes of salt, even now, and Jean would thirst for a thousand years if it meant relishing the taste of the sea on his lips.
As Marco strokes him through the first lustful moans and nervous trembles, Jean clings tightly to his neck, peppering each sheened freckled with a hasty kiss, mouth trailing hotly over the taste of the sea mineral that clings to every square centimetre of skin, as clothes are shed unsparingly, and Jean scrambles for finger holds in the strength in Marco’s shoulders.
He stifles the cry there too, when Marco presses caring fingers into him – a simpering pain giving way to a strange fullness, and then volts of pleasure that course through Jean’s vein as the prince begins to move, curling and uncurling his fingers, pressing almost unbearably against Jean’s sweet spot – there are noises and whimpers that drip over his lips that he never thought he could make.
Dreams of gently rocking hips are no longer just dreams – not with the gasping release of Marco’s fingers, and their replacement by something better – and it’s the shivers down his spine that make him squirm, and Marco’s fist pumping him dry as his hips roll into Jean’s own that makes him shiver, the building of a white-noise crescendo threatening to spill over both of them.
When he comes, Jean does it with Marco’s name on his lips – the wish of a time before – and a shudder, as Marco bows his head to clean him with his tongue, lapping up all trace of Jean’s spent with a locked gaze and roaming hands, which only succeeds in making Jean’s chest burn blazingly.
Marco still tastes of salt when he kisses him sweetly after, collapsing onto his chest with a chuckle – and Jean blushes at the thought that this is a different taste of salt.
The weight of Marco laying on his chest is one Jean knows he could come to love – not a weight like the burden of his birth which he carries around all hours of the day, but a weight that comes with kisses planted on his nose and the gently nibbling of lips – both things Jean immediately knows he loves. He slinks his arms around the sun-tanned shoulders of the freckled prince, and holds him close, sealing their newly discovered promise with a kiss of his own on those coveted lips.
Jean wakes early, disturbed by the rustle of his sheets and the loss of a comfortable warmth leant against the hollow of his neck, and arms draped over his pale skin. He stirs, blearily, feeling sticky and stiff, only to find Marco hurriedly pulling on his discarded robe in the middle of his room.
He watches, for a moment, in silence, eyes trailing the curve of the prince’s back as he stoops to relace his boots, and the flex of his muscular arms as he tugs his belt tight; but then he realises what Marco has to do. His heart plummets away in his chest, and he can only scold himself for it – because he’s the one in the wrong, surely.
(But how can this be wrong?)
“It’ll be a miracle that you’re not caught,” Jean whispers, his throat hoarse from sleep, and from rasping Marco’s name like a prayer the night before. Marco doesn’t startle, much to Jean’s surprise, turning around to face him only when he’s finished dressing; the expression on his face is soft and serene, and it quells something of the fire that threatens to frazzle the fibres of Jean’s nerves.
“No-one will see me,” he hushes, sweeping down over the bed to graze a kiss over Jean’s swollen lips, drawing the breath out of his lungs as a muffled gasp. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you again soon, Jean.”
It’s a promise that transcends just those words, and Jean is fraught to believe it, clinging to Marco’s kiss as he tries to pull away, hoping to leave the Dornishman with a parting gift. Marco chuckles against him, warm air reverberating in his mouth, and is coaxed back into Jean’s embrace for a few moments more.
Keeping secrets comes with an ease that surprises Jean, but he puts it down to his Lannister blood and its idolatry for whispers – and Marco is a glorious secret to be hiding.
There’s more fire in glances thrown his way across the court than any stolen kisses in the corridors could provide him, but those kisses all the same are worth his weight in gold.
Caresses whispered over knuckles when Jean offers to serve wine to the entirety of the top table, and fingers that linger in the smalls of back when heads are turned. Slick flicks of wrists in the revolving darkness, and stories shared beneath the covers of Jean’s bed of places visited and cities longed for.
It’s a conversation about paramours that throws him first – his first wobble and the first fleck of doubt in his otherwise idyllic bubble. He’s stalking around the Great Hall, fetching some parchment for Hange at her request (and considering how much he has ignored her lately, he feels he owes her at least a handful of favours to make up for how much work he’s abandoned in favour of salt) – when he catches the melody of Marco’s voice, echoing from the hard stone. He slows his step, willingly dawdling as he passes the cluster of the Queen Regent’s lady’s maids, swarming around a familiar, absorbing orbit.
“So you’re allowed to keep whores at court?” one woman gasps, her shock sounding insipid to Jean’s ears. “Good gracious.”
“They’re not whores,” Marco chuckles awkwardly, “We call them paramours. They are given a high social status where I come from.”
“Seven Heavens,” another woman gushes, fanning her hand in front of her face – although Jean knows just how eager these women of the court are to gossip, so he sees little sincerity in the astonishment they claim, “Isn’t that rather … novel. And a little unchaste, I must say.”
“I don’t think there’s anything unchaste about love,” Marco reprimands calmly, “Children born from thine own paramours are children born out of love. I personally think that King’s Landing could learn a thing or two from Sunspear—”
The woman titter, their laughter not malicious per say, but judgmental and dismissive as they ridicule the very thought of bringing unmarried lovers to court.
Jean feels their judgement like a strike to his cheek; the Dornish paramours are so often those beautiful women with rivers of chocolate-dark hair cascading around their breasts, draped in gold and jewellery – more regale seeming that any small king on a spikey throne – so what would these women make of the heir to Sunspear taking a paramour of some weedy, pale-skinned half-blood? What would the people of Dorne make of that? Jean knows he stands in blinding contrast to the dark-skinned, full-figured women (and men too, he supposes) that always fluttered around the fountain grounds. A pitiful contrast, he would probably call it.
The threat of further social disdain in King’s Landing weighs heavily on his mind, and he leaves quietly, slipping away to the parchment store without a clip of his boot heels on the flag.
Jean doesn’t make it far – caught by the wrist as he leans on the heavy door to the store, and wheeled around against the way by a bright-eyed prince, eager to claim a pair of lips. Jean is malleable in his hands, and Marco is a fine smith, undoing him at the seam with just one hasty, messy kiss.
“You heard that conversation, didn’t you?” he breathes into Jean’s ear, soothing hands over the flushed cheeks of the Lannister bastard. Jean quivers, but nods, so Marco continues quickly, aware of the predicament of being caught like this so freely in the palace corridors. “You heard what I said about paramours, then?”
“Y-yeah,” Jean murmurs, finding his hands weaving of their own accord through the open neck of Marco’s robe, and roaming willingly over the bronzed hollows of his collar.
“Paramours are loved in Dorne,” Marco whispers, craning back just enough to look at Jean’s face, held firmly between his hands. His thumbs rove in circles over the apples of his cheeks. “Regardless of their birth or social status. Know that, Jean.”
“Am I your paramour, then?”
“If you want to be.”
Jean learns swiftly what love is – and it’s worth all the summer months spent pining and confused. Marco’s laugh and Marco’s smile are the armour he pins himself with, and the salt on his lips is a vow to return with him to the shores of the Summer Sea yet. He holds onto the thought of a life lived far, far away from the red walls of his home – a life lived without the curse of his ashen hair and honey-coloured eyes. A life lived where his love for the Dornish prince wouldn’t reduce him to petty gossip in the Small Council.
Jean suffers when, after two months of sneaking around behind closed doors in some ethereal sort of dream, Marco is called home to Sunspear. He takes Annie with him, despite the fact Jean knows how she despises the heat of the south, but, worse, is the fact that there’s no way Jean can blag his way into Annie’s consort, however hard he tries to suggest the idea to Erwin, and even Hange, when he gets desperate.
Marco sneaks into his quarters on the last night in the capital – just like so many times before, save for the way Jean clings to him and tells him to move faster, rougher, and the purple-flowering marks Marco leaves at the base of Jean’s throat with the promise that the warmer months are not far away.
“I’ll see you again soon,” Marco murmurs against sweat-damp skin, fingers tracing languidly across the ridges of Jean’s ribcage. He presses his lips lightly to the pulse of blood in Jean’s neck. “Only a few months.”
“There’s been no talk of a trip this year,” Jean mumbles, toying with the loose curls of Marco’s dark hair, “All the men are being drafted for the war. They can’t afford so many to go south.”
“Hmm,” Marco hums, breathe reverberating wonderfully on the underside of Jean’s chin as he’s nuzzled affectionately. “Then you should steal a horse and sneak your way down to Sunspear. I wouldn’t complain.”
Jean swats him on the crown of his head, and Marco pouts playfully – but both their hearts are heavy.
“You can get shipped to the Wall for stealing a horse, you idiot.”
It takes Jean a long time to get used to the space of an empty bed again – to return to quiet nights where no knocks on his door and no rasping moans punctuate the relative silence of the night. He rolls over most mornings and reaches blindly for another body on the pillow beside him, but his hands fall emptily against the sheets with a thud each time.
Jean doesn’t see Marco, or the stretches of the Dornish desert beneath his horse’s hooves, that year, as he predicted. Erwin is too concerned in the campaign in the Stormlands, and the knowledge that, should the Twins give passage to the Stark army massing in the north, they will have trouble on two fronts.
The fear is real now – people are more than scared. More than one maid or squire disappears into the night, no doubt stealing their way out of the city, and heading south – the Reach, and Dorne both still claim a semblance of peace, but if they’re smart, they’ll head east, across the sea.
The bustle of soldiers on the streets is like nothing Jean’s ever seen before, noble in their lion-plated armour, and Jean does find himself wondering about the broadsword he keeps stowed away beneath his bed, imaging a day probably too close when he might have to use it.
Talk of stags and sapphire isles and Dothraki hoards and titans fuels the gossip of the court, no longer just a show for gold, but a constant stream of meeting with general-this and Lord-Commander-that, and Jean has to accompany Erwin to every one. He can’t help but feel that they should’ve taken the Baratheon boy more seriously, instead of resorting to petty mockery, and moved whilst they still had the upper hand in this conflict. Now, with stags and wolves closing in from one side, and more-than-just-rumours spreading across the Narrow Sea of the Targaryen daughter, Christa, and her savage Khaleesi, it feels like a blind panic masquerading under strategic meeting after strategic meeting.
Most nights, Jean longs for the peaceful sea breeze and the rise and fall of breath beside him to replace the constant clank of armour plates within the city walls, but the day time keeps him distracted – enough.
Erwin insists he learn to study the sword – and whilst Jean is not unfamiliar with the feel of a blade in his hand, he finds himself schooled with children half his age, pureblood Lannister boys wielding freshly-forged metal barely past their ninth name day. Although clumsy at first, Jean acquires the trade with relative ease, praised by the retainers for his light footedness and dexterity, things he can surely only attest to his endless summer spent gaining sea legs through rocky waves.
He spends evenings in the light of a candle in Hange’s library polishing and repolishing the blade of his Tyroshi sword, whilst being scolded for even daring to bring a weapon of war into a place of books.
Hange means it only lightly though – because with Jean’s help, she manages to update every cartograph in the library of the Red Keep, and that satiates her more than the thought of winning wars, for which she has little care for. In the end, she barely bats an eyelid to Jean practicing his lunges with the lion-hilted sword between rows of books, the pair of them working in a companionable silence.
It takes a little over five months for Jean to reach a proficiency with the blade that has Erwin prompting him to think about joining the army, and possibly the Kingsguard within a few years – Jean’s years as a squire are running thin as it is, and that’s only made clearer by the fact Erwin takes on a new boy as part of his personal escort: someone for Jean to instruct to take over from him come his eighteenth name day the next year.
The boy is scrawny, and short for his age, but with blue and eyes and immaculate blonde hair, Jean knows he’ll be more warmly received than he ever was. His name is Armin, and if Jean’s honest, he reminds him of a sparrow, and he often wonders if he’ll be blown over by the slightest gust of wind.
Armin is encouraged to take up the sword too – Jean learns he’s fifteen, so more than old enough to begin practice – but his natural skill earns sniggers from the other men in the training yard. Jean frowns, often finding himself distracted from his own drills with the remnants of the forces stationed within the Red Keep, when he watches the taller, stronger boys surround the new squire, tripping him into the dirt and replacing his blade with a wooden stick more times than Jean can count.
It’s hard – because he knows he wants to help, to step in an protect the boy from the mindless bullying, but he knows that stepping out of line like that means only bad things for him. He doesn’t want the other men to find a reason to tease him like the lords and ladies in court. So he remains almost silent.
Almost silent, because whilst he can’t help the boy out on the tourney field, he can help him within the palace walls. Armin is a good kid, and little trouble to Jean; he remembers everything after being told just once, and Jean finds himself whispering hints as to how Erwin takes his supper and likes his wine, to make sure he lands in his uncle’s good books. It’s enjoyable for Jean to have someone to talk to again, after so many months of silence, and so many months of wallowing after the last person who gave him the time of days (and smiles, and laughter, and kisses, but he tries hard not to dwell on any of those things).
Armin stumbles across Jean one day when he’s ferrying books back from the library for Hange, and Jean swears the kid’s blue eyes light up like the sea he severely misses. Books are his passion, and Jean is glad for Hange’s glee when he brings Armin along to the library with him, finally having someone to share in Hange’s passion for knowledge, leaving Jean happy to practice his balance with his sword in the corner, secretly enjoying their hurried discussions over things he barely understands, but is not bothered by.
Jean sees Armin’s strengths with ease; he’s always empathised with the underdog, and the sharpness of Armin’s mind genuinely amazes him, enough to suggest to Erwin that he include the young squire in some of his strategic meetings. But Erwin waves it off with a flick of his hand and a gesture to his empty wine glass, too caught up in moving troops around the country on his table-top map of Westeros to have much time for the words muttered in his ear by some low born bastard.
The first year of the campaign, although stressful, sees little bloodshed, and Jean is glad of it. Tension remains rife within the Red Keep, a stony sort of silence that keeps his hackles on end at every waking moment of the day, but he thinks of Marco in the south, and of how he’ll be glad to know that King’s Landing is still safe.
Jean reaches his eighteenth name day without having seen the Dornish prince once – a few months of separation had so easily turned into more than a year a part, and Jean begins to forget the simple things: the lingering scent in his bed sheets, the caress of ghosting hands, the taste of salt.
He studies hard, and finds a place to call his own within the ranks of the guards who stay to man to city walls. They don’t care who his mother might have been before his father bent her over an ale barrel in the back of some mud-bricked tavern within the twisting streets of the stinking city – they only care about three things. Gold. Women. And whether Jean can hold a sword.
And Jean fulfils two of those things, and can fake it through the third. It’s not that he doesn’t mind his eyes wandering over the firm curves of women; he still finds them beautiful, and there’s this one – a willowy girl from the south – with the most perfect smattering of freckles over her shoulders, that makes him weak at the knees – but it’s too close for comfort.
He pays her well in gold to keep her mouth shut when the other soldiers drag him around the city brothels when they should be manning the walls; they shove him behind curtains with bawdy laughter, and he feigns the drunken banter in return, telling them how he’s going to nail her good – but it never turns out that way.
He doesn’t think she minds though – because she gets his money in exchange for little more than a quiet conversation and the burning of some incense, and even wishes him well on his name day when the other men pull him out into the streets to celebrate.
Jean sees Erwin less and less as the months pass. He still accompanies his uncle beyond the city walls, because he’s stronger, and fitter than Armin, and able to hold a sword now, which saves Erwin from having to drag around his retainers too – but it’s Armin who serves the food, and Armin who fetches scripts, and Armin who pours the wine.
Jean’s fine with the company of Erwin’s horse – a bay stallion, called Buchwald, with a playful tendency to nip at Jean’s hair when he’s got his back to him in the stable yard. Polishing stirrups and wiping down saddles is something that doesn’t involve talking to the other members of the royal court, and if being a squire only required this, Jean would be happy enough to continue to be Erwin’s personal lap dog.
It’s five months past Jean’s name day – the sort of time of year when they would, in years past, be returning from the sandy Dornish stretches, when Jean slips up.
(Although, in retrospect, he decides it’s hard to call it a mistake, because how doing the right thing.)
It’s a muggy sort of day in King’s Landing, with humidity spreading over the Blackwater that causes Jean’s bronze-plated armour to chafe and his skin to swelter beneath the heavy leather. He’s in the training yard – a few of the other men are sharpening their swords and their egos for conflict they haven’t yet seen on the whetstone, laughing over the defeat of the Stark army somewhere far more northern than here.
Barely an army, Jean finds himself thinking, as he perches at the edge of the group, Two thousand men of a twenty-thousand strong force waiting for us in the Riverlands.
He listens into the conversation, but all the talk of war makes his stomach queasy, and the thought that one day he might be running through a body with his blade and not a straw-stuffed dummy has never sat well with him. His eyes flicker across the court yard, over soldiers drinking, squires frantically polishing paldrons, and to the group of young boys being lectured to by one of Erwin’s old retainers – a tall fellow, bearded, with a nose like a beak and a face set like steel. Jean sees Armin amongst them, his hand-me-down Lannister armour too big on his skeletal frame, and his helmet rocking around on his hair, tufts of blonde hair peeking through the steel.
The boys are dismissed from their training, and Jean gives Armin a nod when he passes him by, dawdling at the back of the group of over-excited kids who all race ahead. It makes Jean happy when he smiles back, the thought that at least he has one, genuine friend within these city walls, but his smile falters with the coarse holler of one of the men hovering over the whetstone.
“Boy! Hey, you there boy!” the man calls, and Jean feels himself freeze. This can only go badly. “Boy, I’m talking to you – c’mere!”
Armin turns, pointing at his own chest, and Jean sees the hesitance in his step – he’s used to being ignored by everyone else around him, and not standing out from the crowd. Unease crawls up Jean’s spine, and he can only watch.
“Yeah, you!” the man smirks, gesturing Armin forward. “You training to be a squire, boy?”
“Y-yes sir,” Armin squeaks; the men around Jean chuckle, but he himself bares a stony face, lips drawn in a taught line. There’s the bustle of elbows and the murmurs of teasing jibes, and Jean is caught between his blood boiling and running cold.
“You ever held a real sword?” the man leeches, and Armin nods feverently, “You have? You ever been in a real duel?”
“Gotta be in a real duel to become a squire, y’know,” another man pipes up, with a sick grin. Jean can see the worry in Armin’s bright, blue eyes, and he feels himself baulk as one of his kinsmen grabs a short sword from the pile still to be sharpened, its flat edge brittle and rusted with wet weather. “Catch, boy!”
He throws Armin the sword, which the young squire barely manages to catch, fumbling around with the blade and trying not to drop it in the sand. The men laugh. Jean doesn’t.
“Leave him alone, he’s only a child, for pity’s sake,” Jean says sternly, his hand resting on the hilt of his lion-carved sword at his hip. He feels the weight of his armour heavy on his shoulders as he turns only briefly to Armin. “Get going, kid. Scram.”
“Oi, Jean, we were only having a little fun,” the first man bawds, throwing Jean a gaze erring more sharp and daring than teasing; Jean scowls, and curl his fingers tighter around the hilt of his sword. “C’mon, boy – lemme show you the ropes. Show me what you’ve got.”
He stands, and draws the sword at his hip – freshly whetted and glinting in the thick sunlight, Jean notices, and probably sharp enough to cut stone. Armin trembles, still clutching the blunt knife of a weapon in his trembling, white fists. Jean knows which way this is going, and he knows the nature of soldiers – they’re not kind.
“Feet apart,” the man says, stabbing the point of his sword at Armin’s feet to make the squire jump back. “You not been taught a proper fighting stance, boy? There, good. Now, c’mon, take a swing at me.”
The blunt sword in Armin’s hand quivers as he raises it to point rigidly at the brash solider standing square in front of him. Jean doesn’t want to see blood when there are men of their own dying in the north and in the south, and he especially doesn’t want to see Armin’s blood spilt on the hay-strewn cobbles – and that’s where this is heading. He slides off his perch, and steps between Armin and the soldier, gently pushing the squire back behind him.
“Drop the sword, Thomas,” Jean says firmly, one hand still resting on his hilt, but the other held out in front of him, calmly – even if the heartbeat that beats in his ears is like the sound of a drum. “Stop being an idiot – someone’s gonna get hurt.”
“No-one’s gonna get hurt,” the soldier laughs boldly, tapping his blade against Jean’s armour with a clank, “C’mon, move aside, Jean. Stop spoiling the fun or I’m gonna have to cut you too.”
All that thought about northern blood that plagued his childhood – maybe Jean was onto something. It sure would explain his temper, his rashness. It sure would explain the reason he draws his sword then, the ivory lion lying flat against his wrist, drawing on his blood through teeth sunk into his skin.
“Try me,” Jean growls, and although it sounds hollow in his own throat, he sees the flash of fear cross the other man’s face momentarily. It passes quickly, and the other man is fuelled from alarm to anger in the most split of seconds, smacking the broadside of his sword against Jean’s, and wrenching the Lannister half-blood’s arm in its socket.
“Step aside, bastard,” the soldier growls, and it stings Jean with the spike of poison on his heart to think, that even the people he felt at home with, would use that against him. “I’ll do more than fucking cut you.”
He lunges again, with an intent dubious and, whilst not a thirst for blood, a thirst for pride – but Jean is quick, and light on his feet, and his opponent’s moves are bulky and predictable. He dances out of the way of the oncoming sword, and twists the hilt of his own around in his hand – his blade flat against his arm now – and, grabbing the shoulder of the man, he slabs the white-ivory lion into his eye socket with a sickening crack.
Jean learns through Erwin that the soldier later died, his temple ruptured, and the sceptons having found his brain clogged with sticky, black blood when they sliced him open for a better look.
The thought makes Jean’s stomach churn – and Armin’s too, as the young squire skitters away to vomit, loudly, in the chamber pot he has just finished cleaning – the knowledge that the first blood drawn by the sword gifted to him by the Dornish prince had to be that of a kinsmen.
And it’s not even that, Jean decides. It’s the thought of killing anyone that makes him green and nauseous, and deaf to Erwin’s erratic pacing over the flag as he lectures him on what this means.
“The Queen Regent will use this as an excuse,” Erwin says, but Jean couldn’t care less about what the Queen Regent has to say about him – it’s always been the same, all eighteen years of his wretched life. “Servants are executed for less, Jean. Less than kinslaying. What were you thinking?”
He wasn’t thinking. That’s the point. Or at least, not about hurting that man. Only about protecting Armin. He tries to tell Erwin that, but his uncle is having none of it, pinching the bridge of his nose as he stops pacing abruptly.
“I’m going to send you to the Wall.”
Jean baulks, hurtled back to the present with a crash landing that all but shatters his bones.
“The … the Wall?” he manages to splutter as his mind races. Snow. Snow. He understands that now, as the premonitions of the Tyroshi fortune teller plays over and over again inside his head, like a poor man’s lute.
Snow is dissolved by salt, and snow will take him far from any thought of the arms of a Dornish lover.
“Yes, the Wall,” Erwin grits, sweeping a hand through his neatly parted hair, raising it in cowlicks for the first time that Jean has ever seen. “You’ll take the Black, you’ll live out the rest of your life serving the realm, and you’ll be able to see a lot of the country on the way—”
It’s all shit Jean can’t listen to, and whilst Erwin regales him with desperate details of his sentence, Jean rests with his heads between his knees, his hands fisted in his hair, and thoughts of sand and sea and swollen lips tumbling through his empty headspace.
He won’t ever see Marco again.
“I … I need to stay,” he hoarses, his throat cracking, “I have to stay, uncle. I have to. I have to.”
He can only think of Marco, coming back to King’s Landing with his lioness bride and a parade of Dornish banner man, but finding Jean nowhere. He can only think of Marco asking Erwin, asking the Queen Regent herself, of where Jean might be – and them denying such a person ever existed. He can only think of Marco’s face.
Erwin turns on his heel and shakes Jean’s shoulder roughly, bringing the Lannister bastard’s eyes to the same level as his fierce blue. He would gulp; he would shake – if it weren’t the plague of numbness quickly stuffing every nerve in his body with wads of cotton.
“You are going to join the Night’s Watch,” Erwin hisses – not aggressively, but intensely, fingers digging into Jean’s thin shoulders. “You are not going to throw your life away, you idiot boy.”
Boy, yes. Boy. Let him return to the childish innocence of the summer past, where bare feet roamed in the sand and calloused hands worked hard at lashing driftwood together to make sea-fairing boats. Take him back. Jean’s not cut out for adulthood.
He longs for the sound of rushing water, yet he knows he’ll never get to lay eyes on the Water Gardens again.
Jean is bundled up that night, with Erwin instructing a still shaking Armin to fill Jean’s trunk with his clothes – not that there’ll be much use for red and gold in the far stretches of the snowy north, where all there is is black and white.
Jean slumps on the edge of his bed as he watches Armin’s busy hands work: folding clothes, wrapping his armour, swaddling his sword in sheaths of soft cotton. He’s blank, devoid of any swirling storms or fierce riptides of thoughts, and the world is grey around him, even with the softness in Armin’s gaze as he packs a pile of Hange’s books in the very top of his travelling trunk, patting their covers with smoothing hands. Jean doesn’t know what they are – but that’s because he doesn’t care to look.
It’s no proud-footed horse or glamorous paladin to take him north, no. It’s the back of a rain-rotted wagon, crammed shoulder to shoulder with the dirt of the city streets, who definitely don’t care that half his blood is gold, and half his blood is mud. It doesn’t matter to Jean – not as he watches Armin’s huddled figure disappear into the obscurity of the candle lit night, and his body jolts against each limping rock of the cart as it bounces over the cobbles.
Jean tries to wish he had never let Marco gift him that sword – but it’s a hard wish to fulfil. He just wishes he’d never swung it.
Despite Erwin’s words, and all the evenings spent in the library of the Red Keep with Hange, poring over maps of all the places Jean could dream of visiting, and all the nights spent wrapped in Marco arms listening to tales of his journeys to the farthest reaches of Westeros, Jean sees little on the road north.
There’s nothing to like about the rolling wastelands of the North, and he comes to actively despise the burn of cold that threads through his fingers and wriggles down his neck, however tight he pulls his thin cloak around his shoulders. There’s no beauty to be found in plateaus of dying grass, and of crumbling stone roads, and of distant castles built of grey stone, and not even in the first flecks of snow that begin to fall and crust in his hair when they pass the gates of Winterfell.
He struggles to make friends with any of the other boys thrown around by the rattling wagon – opening his mouth requires effort he long since abandoned, and he embitters himself over the thought of what thieves and rapers and murders he might be sharing the ride with.
You’re a murderer too, Jean, he tells himself every night, huddled under a moth-eaten blanket that the Crow who whips the horses throws his way. He sleeps with his sword beneath his pillow none the less, fooling himself into thinking it’s for his own protection (he’s seen more than one boy be skewered in a jealous rage by another captive on the journey thus far, and he doesn’t fancy bleeding out on the side of some northern road in the middle of a cold Hell), but the reality is: the closer the cold steel is to his cheek, the more he forces himself to remember what he’s done.
(Don’t forget what you are. Murderer. Kinslayer. Bastard.)
Avoiding the other boys is not a difficult task; they all share the same misery as Jean, all having been uprooted from their homes in the warmth of the south, and all dreading the thought of year-round snow crunching beneath the boots. There’s a resigned silence that marauds over the wagon as they trundle north, stinkingly thick – until they roll into Last Hearth.
Snow falls fruitlessly on the sunken, deep grey stone of the Great Hall and the house of Umber, and whatever fire crackles in lanterns strung above tavern doors is shrouded in flecks of white and the density of the northern night, and Jean shivers.
Beneath the rotting wooden frame of what is little more than a shack in Jean’s eyes (but an inn, in practice, reads the peeling sign above the door), they collect a single boy: short in stature, and bundled in scraps of fur and wool melton, but a head shaved bald.
Jean thinks it must be cold – and maybe that was part of his punishment for whatever it might have been that he did – but the boy shows no sign of discomfort, a hive of energy and marching songs as the cart continues on, further north.
His name is Connie, Jean discovers one night, when he’s offered the remnants of an over-cooked rodent of some sort, with the excuse that he’s one hell of a skinny southern bastard and won’t survive a day in the true North. Jean scowls, but he doesn’t turn away the offer of free food that still bears a semblance of the fire’s warmth, and he finds himself sparing an ear to Connie’s endless rambling.
Loud and boisterous, Connie is everything Jean despises, and a Karstark to boot: the enemy of his household. Jean plays his cards close to his chest, quite literally, hiding any signs of red and gold and lions beneath his cloak, and making sure to keep the hilt of his sword always covered. No-one needs to know.
The North owes allegiance to no-one save the winter, and Jean discovers this as the days pass and the wind grows colder as it bites at his skin. There’s something to be said for Connie’s chipper spirits, and his gallant stories of the girl he left behind in Karhold, and even his never ending insistence for Jean to give up his grump – and dare Jean admit it, he thinks the bald-headed boy grows on him. He wishes the wind and snow would too, but that’s probably hoping for far too much.
His fingers sting for days, and rubbing his hands between his thighs or under his arms does nothing to stem the feeling of being cold to his core, each of his organs wheezing as they fend off the threat of frostbite that claims the digits of more than one of the other boys doomed for the Wall.
Jean doesn’t understand seven-hundred feet high, until he sees it with his own eyes: the towering barricade of ice that stretches the entire span of the horizon, and further. It’s terrifying, but it’s also the first sign of beauty Jean sees in the North – waking up at sunrise grants him the one pleasure of his journey: the scattering of pale pinks and icy blues of light projected across the vast sheet of ice, glimmering and dancing like the auroras he read about, once, long ago now, and far, far away.
The first sight of the Wall is still three days’ journey from Castle Black, and with each creeping mile Jean feels the press of its shadow and the howl of the wind that floods over the top, from the reaches of the wild lands beyond. It even quells Connie’s spirit, his songs going quiet for the first time in days, and they all wait the ride in a dull-eyed, head-bowed silence, swaying with the gait of the cart as it jerks over the blocks of ice and snow that conceal the Kingsroad from sight.
Castle Black could be mistaken for an outcrop of snow-covered rocks at first look. The land is barren and bare, the white only disturbed by rock and stone, and not a tree of sign of life – and the stronghold of stone towers and timber keeps has no walls, and no lights to be seen through the bitter hurricane of snow that batters the air and Jean’s cheeks raw.
The caw of crows can be heard though, even despite the hiss of wind. It echoes in the air with the throes of debauchery and death, and makes Jean’s skin crawl and spine tingle. He closes his eyes and tries to remember what summer feels like, but to no avail. These are the Lands of Always Winter, after all.
Life at Castle Black is hard for the Lannister bastard, rough without the frump and comfort of palace life. He never thought he’s miss the lumps in his mattress in the Red Keep until he’s forced to sleep on straw that clings to the smell of rat droppings, or the putrid heat of the city in heat until he learns what it’s like to feel always cold to your bones and to have every icy vein in his body chattering with the flurry of constant snow.
The food is tasteless, the gruel he fills his bowl with each morning grey and watery and barely warm. The fur he shrouds his collar in is itchy, and infested with fleas that bite at his white skin, and the boots he’s given are too large and rub his feet raw and bloody each night when he throws them off.
Fire is barely yellow this far north, and it definitely does little to defrost the icicles in Jean’s fingers when he crowds the burners on top of the Wall, watching the white flames dance against the stretches of nothingness that pan out as far as the eye can see. Beyond the Wall is all prickly trees, bare and knarled like claws, and rugged mountain ranges that pierce the veil of constant, sluggish cloud, and the deep, bone-shaking howl of direwolves on the great, northern wind that eats away at the once soft skin of his boy-rosey cheeks.
There’s one thing though, and that is that everyone is equal beneath the shadow of the wall. Their birth rights equal, and their death rights equal, and their terms – all equal. But equally shitty, and smiles are rare in the training yard.
Jean is thankful for his skill with a sword, and it keeps him off his ass in the snow-covered dirt, and in the favour of the high-collared Crows who prowl the boardwalks above. The clang of metal on metal is often the only thing to dispel the whistle of the wind, but there’s something therapeutic in it – or at least in the way it gets Jean’s blood pumping and warmth rising.
The Lord Commander is not as easy impressed as the other men and officers though. The first time Jean meets him is by accident, and not under the best of circumstances either.
He’s in the training yard with Connie, teaching the Karstark how to hold a sword like a soldier, and not a farm boy with a pitch fork – a difficult enough feat, with the bald-boy’s inability to concentrate for long, and eagerness to smack Jean when he’s not looking with the flat side of the blunt sword he’s been given.
“I’ll whip your ass, you Karstark bastard,” Jean growls after the third of Connie’s unwarranted interruptions. “You’d get your fucking hands severed and served to you in King’s Landing.”
“If I hear one more thing about how much you miss the smell of piss,” Connie cackles, “I’m gonna shove your head up your ass myself, Jean. Actually wait – you’ve already done that for me.”
“Not my fault I know how to appreciate the finer things in life,” Jean spits, taking a swipe at Connie – but the guy is small and nimble, and easily dances backwards with a sly grin on his face. “Bet you’ve never seen a God-damn piece of real Lannister gold in your life, you poor bastard.”
Connie’s smirk turns sour in a second, and Jean thinks he’s said something out of place – until he feels a black glower on the back of his neck, and barely has time to twist around before his feet are swept out from beneath him. His back cracks painfully on the frost-hard ground, and his head spins as he groans, staring upwards at the face that scowls down at him: black hair and black eyes, and a white face wreathed in thick, black fur.
“Ain’t no lions of Casterly Rock or any of their gold in Castle Black,” the man seethes, slamming the heel of his boot down – hard – on Jean’s shoulder, “Only the shit on the bottom of my boot. Do you understand, Crow?”
His name is Levi, and he has been Commander of the Night’s Watch for nigh on twenty years – and has seen men come and go to their graves more times than anyone dares ask. Jean sees it in his eyes – both then, when he lies on the ground, wincing in pain, and every time after, when he passes the Commander in the tunnels below the keeps – because they’re frozen and lifeless, like everything else around him in this hellhole.
Jean learns to keep his mouth shut after that, and sheds the last of his lion’s main for the feathers and fur of the Watch. Mentions of their lives before the Wall earn men extra nights spent on the watch, which only means extra hours spent at risk of losing their fingers to the biting chill.
It’s one month to the day of their arrival that the Lord Commander deems the new recruits fit to take their vows. Whilst Jean’s lips move reverently over the much practiced words beneath Levi’s untiring watch, Connie heads through the tunnels below the Wall in pursuit of a white tree – some northern tradition to the Old Gods, Jean understands, although the thought of a tree with a face is a little unsettling to him.
But in the end, it’s all the same – Jean doesn’t think there are any Gods this far north. And no-one would hear the recital of his vows through the howling of the wind anyway.
“I pledge my life and honour to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”
Jean doubts his honour, but doesn’t doubt the endless nights that stretch out between now and his last day, which is probably sooner coming than he would like. If there’s one thing that’s certain on the Wall, bar the ever-lasting cold, it’s the weight of death hanging in the air with each, crackling crow’s caw.
The night of his vows, Jean doesn’t sleep well. It’s not the first time since arriving at Castle Black that he dreams of Marco, but it’s the most vivid, and the words of his pledge intermingle with the cruelty of the things he left in the far south.
He longs for the sweet warmth of the Summer Sea when he’s curled up into a ball beneath coarsely-woven blankets, and for the salt-calloused hands of the prince when he’s forced to wrap himself in his own arms to fend off the cold. It’s been many long months since that dream was ever tangible, and Jean shudders, only will power holding himself back from the brink of crumpling.
His lips whisper each line of his vow, over and over again, searing them into his brain to out-root memories of sun and sand; they become a feverish prayer of sorts, and he holds them close to his chest – because they’re all he now has.
(“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honour to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.”)
Connie and Jean both become Rangers, even if Jean raises an eyebrow at Connie’s skill with a sword. Still – it’s better company than his own thoughts when he’s left to nights atop the wall.
Connie has an ability to fuel the fire with the warmth of his words and his undying enthusiasm that crackles louder than any flame that tickles Jean’s gloved hands. He tells Jean stories of where he comes from, of the magnificence of the Grey Cliffs, and how his father made their living hunting seals for their meat and blubber, and of the chestnut-haired girl he left behind there, with a laugh that could light beacons on even the harshest of winter nights.
Jean learns that Connie was caught stealing a ring to give to his girl – a proposal of marriage – which he could never dream of affording, and was shipped away from his home by his own father, with parting words that told him to not show his face until he had made a man of himself by taking the Black. Jean feels Connie’s pain the pit of his stomach, despite the way the Karstark boy retells his story with a heavy-handed indifference and a shrug of his shoulders beneath his fur – abandoned by his family and separated from someone he truly loved. Jean can appreciate the sentiment.
When Connie turns his brackish questioning on Jean, probing him for what he did to be shipped away to the Wall, Jean hesitates. The escape from judgmental glares and whispers in castle corridors has been the one respite for the cold and the misery, and the thought of Connie’s persecution wounds him. Kinslayer, he reminds himself bitterly.
Jean mulls for three days and three nights, but eventually discovers himself to be trusting of the earnestness in Connie’s face – maybe because it reminds him of the person who he left behind, and the warmth in his smiles and loving kisses. He tells Connie whilst they warm their hands atop the Wall, and waits for recoilment – but receives none.
Connie studies his face for a while, an unusual frown and an unusual silence that feels like ice down Jean’s back – but he doesn’t judge.
“Each to their own,” he says, almost darkly. “You had a reason.”
Jean nods, but doubts there is reason enough in the world to ever scrub off the blood that coats his hands when he removes his gloves every night.
Jean deigns to call Connie a friend after the first few months – and it certainly makes things easier to bear for him. He tries not to see him as a substitute for what he misses, but it matters not, for Jean struggles poorly against the tide in trying to shrug off the memory of the prince he’s destined to never see again.
He finds Marco under his fingertips, as if the dust of his laugh has settled upon the dust of snow that covers everything he owns. He tastes him in his food, as if the absence of his taste is a flavour of its own. He feels him on empty nights – every night that’s not spent on the watch – which stretch out, too dark, too quiet, too cold.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Connie tells him own morning when they’re ascending in the wooden elevator up seven hundred feet, “And you haven’t slept in weeks. I know, ‘cus I don’t hear your snoring anymore.”
Jean murmurs gruffly in response, nuzzling into the thick throes of his fur cloak, the fibres scratching his nose but warming his breath. He doesn’t know how to say that he’s haunted, yet doesn’t believe in ghosts. Connie is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but even he has moments of surprising astuteness when the weather fairs well.
“You left someone behind, didn’t you? You left a girl.”
Not quite, Jean thinks. Not quite. But I did love him.
“Well, I’ve got just the thing for you,” Connie continues, jostling Jean with a playful grin, “A couple of us were thinking about sneaking out to Molestown tonight – my girl sent me a letter and says she can meet me there. But I heard the ladies there aren’t too bad – we can take your mind off it, y’know.”
He knows Connie means well, and he reminds himself of that as they saddle their horses that night and sneak out of the gates into the dark, racing hard against the wind towards the glimmer of light in the far distance. He knows Connie only wants to help – but the thought of sharing a bed with someone else but Marco is a sting more bitter than any blackening frostbite.
Molestown is little more than a thicket of privies and shacks on the surface when they stay their horses from a gallop; it would smell of all things rotten and damp with decay, save for the fact that everything is frozen solid, even the casing of the red lantern that hangs over the door of the hut at which Connie lashes his horse.
He knocks a rhythm on the door with his ear pressed against the wood – followed by a moment of awkward silence punctuated only by the whip of wind – until it opens to the broadly grinning face of a young woman with chestnut hair.
Jean burns brightly with envy as Connie’s face lights up and he swings his arms around the waist of the girl, twirling her in ecstatic circles. Her name is Sasha – Jean learns – and she is the girl Connie was planning on proposing to before his turn in fortune. She’s pretty, with a quirk in her smile and a twinkle in her eyes, but Connie slaps Jean on the back of the head for staring too long as they’re ushered inside.
The door leads straight onto a set of crumbling stairs that descend below the earth, where three-quarters of the village lies in a series of interconnected cellars.
The brothel itself smells dank and damp, and Jean’s boots squelch on the straw-matted floor, and he finds it difficult to share in the excitement of his brothers on their hunt for buried treasure, as they delicately call it.
There’s nothing pert or sprightly about the women of the North – all waxy haired and saggy skin, but Jean’s brothers care little for the appearance of who they’re about to fuck, and bawdy laughter fills the low-ceiling cellars. Jean stands back, watching as britches drop even before they stumble into curtained rooms, and loud moans bounce from floor to ceiling.
Connie disappears into the maze, led by his girl, and Jean is left alone, leant against the dripping, stone walls, glad not to find sun-kissed freckles in any of the girls who try to tempt him from his money.
It takes a while, but eventually he’s plied with a stout pint of something far stronger than ale or wine, and he throws it back with the encouragement of his brothers’ drunken cheers, the spirit hazing his mind and blurring away the memories that plague him.
There’s a hand in his, and wild, green eyes swimming in his vision, and he finds himself stumbling onto a straw mattress and pressed down by strong hands as he words slur. He feels devilish hands sneaking beneath his cloaks of fur and leather, racing over the hair on his chest and palming roughly at the hardness between his legs, whilst a mouth moves hotly and wetly over each hitch in his throat, impatient teeth nipping hard at his skin.
Jean is digging in his pockets before he knows it, and flashes the last dredges of his Lannister gold to the boy – it’s a boy – who hovers over him with greedy hands. The coins are snatched away, and Jean feels the sharpness of the cold air against his flushed skin as his britches are hurriedly discarded and the boy buries his face in Jean’s soft curls and sucks.
His name is Eren. Jean learns this because he returns within the month, and again in the month after that, until it becomes routine.
His skin is dark – not tanned, but dark in birth – and his eyes are the most brilliant green that Jean has seen in many, long years. There’s something wild about those eyes, and in his mannerisms – in his gait, and the way he snaps his hips into Jean’s as he bounces on his lap, hungry teeth gnawing at the skin on Jean’s shoulder.
Jean’s grows to appreciate his uncomplicated company, because it’s wildly different from Marco’s touch, and stirs something in his stomach that feels much better than the numbness of the cold. Eren speaks little, but his kisses are animalistic and haggard, and his thrusts of his hips sharp against Jean’s chafed skin, and his laugh scathing like the fierce, northern wind from over the Wall.
Jean never allows himself to fall asleep with the sprawling mass of the warm boy on his chest though – he’s happy enough to talk, happy enough to exchange rutting grunts, happy enough to fuck – but never happy enough to stay. Eren never says anything about it though, which Jean supposes is for the best. It’s only business. It’s only someone to keep his mattress warm.
Eren is an enigma though, and Jean makes bets about him, in his mind.
The Lord Commander tells them stories of the Wildlings scaling the Wall and fleeing south – and Jean dares not wonder from what – but he makes the connection to Eren. The jilt in his tongue and the accent Jean can’t place and the pillow-talk of dreams of heading south, south, always south.
Jean laughs at those promises of his, telling him longingly that Dorne is lovely at this time of year – whatever time of year it might be, for he’s lost count – but Eren can tell no difference between Dorne or any other place in Westeros.
“You’re not from here, are you?” he asks bluntly, his arm trapped under Eren’s head and both their chests rising falling in a pumping unison, drawing in exerted breathes over slick lips. “From this side of the Wall, I mean.”
Eren glares at him from across the itchy pillow, green eyes vibrant even in the dim and grimy light, but says nothing, lips firmly clamped shut. Jean continues.
“You’re one of the free folk,” he says, “A wildling. I know it.”
“Doesn’t matter who I am, or who anyone is,” Eren murmurs in response, rolling over so that he faces away from Jean and presents him with his sweat-damp back. “Ain’t no riches your gold can buy either side of that Wall, Crow. You die on both sides.”
Over time, Jean learns to forget the sea and the sun, and embraces the way of the Black; becomes used to the snow; licks the taste of salt he needs from Eren’s chest and from Eren’s lips. He and Connie ride out beyond the Wall many times over the rolling months, and on the clearer days, when the sky is blue, and the clearer nights, when the sky is pitted with stars, he even comes to love the majesty of the Frostfang mountains, and the chase of the white stags through the forests, and the resonant howling of the direwolves at the moon (which Connie can never resist howling back at, the crazy Karstark bastard with a death wish).
The coldness ingrained in his bones becomes the norm, despite a norm that never quite becomes bearable.
In the month of his nineteenth name day, Jean receives a summons to the Lord Commander’s chamber in the depths of the night. (Not that night ever seems to leave them, Jean notes, as he treads through the fresh snow between the barracks and Levi’s quarters, drawing his cloak around his chest as tight as possible.)
There’s no dawdling around the point – because Levi is a man of few words, and those words he does say are chosen carefully and to the point. He tells Jean that he received a raven from King’s Landing, and that a Lannister bastard like him might want to know what’s become of his homeland.
He presents Jean the parchment with disdain and a flick of his wrist, and Jean hurries over the scribed letters as fast as his eyes can move. The language is familiar – and not in the sense that Jean recognises the scrawl, which he does, seeing as it’s Armin’s – but in the sense that there’s a cordiality in the words that clearly came from Erwin’s lips, and now Jean knows why his uncle was so keen for him to take the Black than face up for punishment. (He wonders if the Lord Commander came from the Crownlands, once upon a time, or if not there, then if he once knew the halls of Casterly Rock.)
Erwin details a siege of the Blackwater at the hands of the Baratheon fleet, who had only been beaten back to the sea by way of green fire and heavy, Lannister losses. He writes of how their blood stains the beaches red, and the water – once black – is now crimson for hundreds of yards out to sea.
Levi remarks, over Jean’s shoulder, that Erwin shouldn’t be calling it a triumph if they lost so much of their army, and Jean is inclined to agree as his eyes flit down the page. The words blur as his mind wonders – wonders to the thought of why Levi might be so willing to look out for his interests and tell him of home, when before he was so adamant about there being no affiliations with sigils when under the Black.
Jean has little time to dwell on it then, however, as Levi holds out a second parchment to him, still bound with the seal of Erwin’s ring in the wax.
“This one also arrived,” he says sternly, lowering himself into a chair and crossing his legs, his stare on Jean pointed. “It’s addressed to you.”
It’s been months since Jean’s fingers were so eager and could move so fast despite the cold, but he rips open the wax seal with a baited breath. The words are Armin’s, and Armin’s only, not taken from his uncle’s mouth. The letter is headed with Jean’s own name, and he feels his heart lurch in his chest like it’s tied to a string and someone, far away, is pulling hard.
Armin writes plainly of Marco’s return to King’s Landing – his company of a Dornish army and a coronet upon his head of little regard for Jean – and of how the Dornish prince had sought after him less than subtly. It pains Jean to read the things he feared – of the Queen Regent denying any knowledge of a bastard Lannister squire, and of Erwin lying straight to prince’s face of his whereabouts – but there’s some shard of comfort in the knowledge that Armin managed to catch him in the corridor and tell him the truth.
Jean tries to imagine the face that Marco might have worn at the news from Armin’s lips, but it’s hard: Marco’s face blurs, and Jean realises he’s been letting him slip too much.
The hollowness returns to Jean’s heart, and he throws himself more recklessly into his tasks, nursing stinging cuts and bruises in his bed at night, the hiss of breath through his taught lips as he applies cold cream not a patch on the hiss of smoke that seems to fill his head and make him burn pyroclastically.
He comes too close to the brink of death on a mission over the Wall, ushering his horse after a fleeing Wildling when Levi calls him back with a brisk shout; he forgets about the traps set beneath the snow, and his horse stumbles with a scream when sharp metal clamps around its forelegs and tears the flesh, Jean flying from his saddle and losing consciousness to a bottomless darkness as he hits the ground.
He awakes on a stretcher, head spinning and arm bandaged in a sling, with Levi riding on his black horse beside him, a thick stream of blood clotted on his brow. It had been a trap, like the funnelling of a rabbit, and they had been snared in it by the lone Wildling – and their escape had only been at the expense of the lives of many of Jean’s brothers in black. Levi wears a steeled frown, but Jean knows he fucked up. He fucked up.
He’s stripped of his Ranger’s rank by the Lord Commander himself, who publically kicks him to his knees on the boardwalk above the training ground, and twists his fist in his hair, screaming into his ear with a caw that deafens Jean and makes him see stars even in the day time. Jean has bruises on the backs of his knees for weeks.
Connie watches Jean forlornly as he’s left sweeping up dust and dirt in the yard as the Karstark mounts his horse for mission after mission, and even the thought that his days are spent in the relative warmth of the stone halls does not placate Jean of the sinking feeling in his gut.
Even when Levi asks for him as his personal squire – claiming that his last had no real experience of how to serve – Jean finds himself unable to throw himself into his duties like he once could; unable to block out the wind and the snow and the misery that drowns him. Polishing boots and sharpening swords and waxing saddles causes his days to blur into one.
It doesn’t take long for the Lord Commander to call him out on it – how long, Jean’s not exactly sure, with his inability to count days – but it doesn’t come as a surprise when the shorter man grabs him by the ear and drags him into a chair, shoving him onto the hard wood with a jolt.
“I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children,” he growls, pinning Jean to the back of the chair with one hand and his piercing, black glare. “Do you remember that, Crow?”
Jean knows that Levi read his letter from Armin. Jean knows that Levi knows what ails him. Jean knows that the recital of the chastity oath is to remind him that there is no place in Castle Black for wants or desires.
Jean promises him that he’ll forget about the boy from the Summer Sea, and in return, Levi won’t throw him out of the castle gate for all the times he’s snuck out to Molestown under his watch.
The years pass – although it’s just one, eternal winter for Jean. He fills out his armour and his boots, and grows tall in one last growth spurt that puts him at least two heads above a jealous Connie. He rises up the ranks in Castle Black, being made an officer shortly after his twenty-first name day, and his word becomes Levi’s law.
Before, when the blood of the lion flowed more freely in his veins, he would have used his power differently – and he knows that. But not now. Jean is different, and everyone is equal here. The men like him for that, and he often finds them coming to him for favours and pardons, rather than seeking council with the Lord Commander. The memories of the sea grow fainter as he grows older, but they never quite leave, always strays on the frays of his dreams on the calmer nights of the ever-present storm.
Jean is twenty-three when Eren disappears, but he’s honestly surprised that he stayed in Molestown as long as he did. Not that Jean ever took his declarations of flying south particularly seriously, but he supposes that the milder weather of that year had been as good an excuse as any.
(He recalls a conversation from the last night they’d spent tangled in Eren’s bed.
“Why south?” Jean had asked him casually, “There are wars and everyone is dying, no matter who they are or aren’t. You don’t want to go south.”
“Better than what’s coming,” Eren had said.)
Jean surprises himself in how easy it has become to discard the temptation of fleeing south too, which is something his teenage self might never have been able to do. But he finds purpose, now, within the snow-clad walls and the black cloaks of the Watch, and he makes do.
In the seventh year after Jean’s arrival at the Wall, Connie’s girl falls pregnant; Jean finds out only because he’s the one who catches him sneaking out after dark, and he’s the one who Connie uses to maintain his cover.
Jean is irked at first, torn between his duty as an officer and his duty as Connie’s friend, but in the end, he’s glad that Connie bribes him to let him skip out on a mission over Sasha’s due date, because the worst that could happen, happens.
They’re caught in an avalanche on the south slopes of the Frostfangs, and Jean watches horses and riders crumple beneath the waves of white, and their supplies become lost to the depths of unforgiving snow. He doesn’t quite know how they survive as long as they do without food and shelter, making do on scraps of squirrel meat and branches lashed together to make a roof, but he also has to watch the surviving members of his team succumb to the frost, fingers blackening, faces rotting, and, eventually, eyes glassing over with the cold.
Jean’s not sure how he makes it back to the Wall, but he is the only one, and now he knows why Levi wears the graveness that he does. He slinks through the training yard, after handing his horse over to his squire, and waving away the offer of help from the blundering new recruits, trails of his frost-crusted cloak sweeping through the powder.
The boardwalk creaks under his weight, and the steps up his quarters groan, but he welcomes the flicker of candle light already lit within his window – he’ll have to thank his squire for that at least, he thinks, as he turns the handle of his door.
The fire simpers in the corner, flecks of burning orange and yellow crackling the wood, and Jean sighs a heavy sigh as he sheds his over clothes and toes off his boots, sinking down into the chair that faces his hearth.
His peace is short lived, however, with the rustle of blankets and the slither of movement of a shadow in the corner of his eye. A young Jean might baulk or draw his sword, but the bitter Jean, the weathered Jean doesn’t even turn to face his intruder – experience telling him that it’s likely some shy new boy from the far south too afraid to tell the Lord Commander that his blankets are too thin to keep him warm.
“Go back to your barracks, Crow,” Jean breathes gruffly, sliding lower in his chair as he feels the lick of the flames warm the aching soles of his feet. The stranger rustles again – the unmistakeable sound of heavy fabric hitting the floor – but no-one passes Jean for the door.
Jean scowls, and he twists in his chair, his tongue feeling sharp and his fist unrelenting on tonight of all nights, but he stops. He stares.
He shakes his head and laughs. There’s a God up there that is cruel indeed, making this man appear to him now, after he’s started to get used to the cold.
Marco stands in the centre of Jean’s room, a discarded rug at his feet, and a sheepish, boyish smile on his lips.
“Good evening, ser,” come the first words from his lips, and Jean can only laugh bitterly, shaking his head as he turns back to face the fire as it flickers, pressing a palm over his eyes and he squeezes them tightly shut. He’s old now – not in body, but in soul. He can feel, in the awkward shuffle that sounds behind him as Marco shifts his weight, that the Dornish prince is still young. “J-Jean?”
Jean’s laughter dies with the sound of his name in Marco’s rich tone, and his breath is short and sharp. He recognises the smell of blood oranges from the groves of the Water Gardens, a gentle lilt against the song of burning wood, but it’s there. It’s there.
Marco rounds Jean slowly, like he’s afraid to spook him, but Jean dare not bring his eyes to watch the prince, remaining focussed on the fire as he lets his hand drop to his mouth and hold his own, prickled chin tightly. His breathes become laboured.
He would see a face difficult to read, and a furrowed brow, and a desperate twitch in longing hands that don’t dare to move from Marco’s sides. He would see fear in his molasses-brown eyes, and a smattering of new freckles in his sun-kissed skin. He would see the lines of age that strain his face – of loveless marriages, of failing wars, of bloodshed on the battle field.
But he would see the spirit of the boy he fell in love with first.
“You know,” Marco whispers with a tentative chuckle, “They say the Lannisters will lose the throne before the year is out, and if that happens, my house will crumble too. I was thinking I should take up the Black to avoid the Martells having to own up to whoever wins this war – what do you think?”
It’s a joke, of course, and Marco would never, but Jean’s lips form words. Soft.
“You would hate being so far from the sea.”
He raises his eyes to meet Marco’s fire-warmed gaze, and there’s a moment – just a moment – where they stare, and Jean realises he has finally been found. Years stretched over miles and miles of sand and snow, and he knows, now, that his blood is Marco’s blood. A decade or so of want burns in his veins as he launches himself out of the chair and into the prince’s welcoming arms.
Marco’s lips hurry across Jean’s skin, as if trying to assign every inch of him to memory, and each breath that escapes the prince’s lips is hitched as he deftly strips Jean of all his fur and weaponry. (And Jean cannot remember the last time he was so warm despite being so naked.)
Hands fly over fiery skin, and Marco grabs eagerly at Jean’s hips, manhandling their bodies together, moulding Jean with his touch.
Jean buries himself in deep, heated kisses as he bucks his hips to Marco’s uneven strokes, sloppy, messily, and unceremoniously. Marco finds a rhythm when he slicks his fingers and feels his way to Jean’s sweet spot with a gasp that’s shared across their lips and an arching of Jean’s spine off the floor in front of the glowing fire; his fingers grab at Marco’s chest, at Marco’s shoulders, and settle in the tangles of Marco’s hair, open-mouthed as he tries to press him harder into his kiss.
Marco loops Jean’s thighs around waist, and his fingers give way to rhythmic thrusts where their hips meet; breathy gasps and shaking shoulders and Jean’s mouth moving wet down Marco’s throat and savouring the taste of his skin.
Salt.
The wave builds between them, and Jean shakes with fingers gripping tight and sliding in their sweat as he bucks desperately for a deeper hit, before falling apart so perfectly with a cry mindless and a slickness on both their stomachs.
Marco kisses him breathily through the sensitive tremors, stroking himself as his hips continue to grind Jean into the floor, and he spills with a shaking sigh and a heady gasp into Jean’s ready lips.
It’s a while before either of them move, bonding in sweat and salt and snow and all the things between, weakly seeking lips and trembling hands clutching cheeks and guiding foreheads together.
Jean loves reverently, and as he staggers to his feet, his cheeks flushed red and his legs weak with seismic tremors, he drags Marco to his bed, and they wrap around each other – Jean also knows that this is something that will never die. He loves endlessly.
Jean saddles Marco’s horse himself as the sun rises over the Wall, spilling palettes of pink and yellow over the ice. He wraps Marco in his own fur, and kisses him warmly in the cold air, sharing their puffs of snowy breath.
He helps him onto his horse, caringly guiding Marco’s feet to the stirrups, before finally stepping back and giving him a surly farewell. Marco nods and casts him a smile as he wheels his horse around with a snort that mushrooms in the frosty air. There are promises unspoken but not unheard, and Jean wears them like armour over his leather, daring the months that stretch between them to try him. He is no lion, and he spares no lion's blood. He is sea-fairer, he is boat-builder, he is map-writer, and sword-swinger, and kinslayer. He is Crow.
He has weathered harsher storms.
(“We will sail the Summer Sea together again someday soon.”)