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I have had my day with kings,
drinking mead and wine;
now I drink whey-and-water
among shriveled old hags.
— Lament of the Old Woman
“My love," Alys calls him now her hair is free of grey. "My dear love."
He was "my boy" when he first came to Harrenhal.
Her skirt is tartan and bunched up around her hips, leaving her legs bare. Her socks are tight around her thick calves. At the start of Winter, five years ago, they hung loose around her bones.
She's running her fingers through his hair, much as his mother used to.
"Do you need to sleep?" She asks. Yes, he does. He wants to crawl up from her side and rest his head on the pillow of her thighs.
"No," he says. Grass is starting to grow outside the Godswood, breaking through the snow on Harrenhal's lawns and peeking between the cobblestone. Bamboo shoots have started to appear in the Wailing Tower, not even years of weed killer and Winter cold has killed the plant's knotted roots. "You'll be gone soon."
"I'll be sleeping," Alys says, smiling. "It'll be short Spring and an even shorter Summer — the birds have told me."
"Owls can predict the seasons better than the maesters?" Aemond replies. He can see a sliver of her underwear under her skirt.
"The old ones can," Alys tells him.
And owls live long by the God's Eye, she needed say. Every creature besides men seemed to live long here. When they last went to the lake he saw a fish the size of their kayak.
Mud catfish, Helaena told him after he texted her a photo. They never stop growing.
"They live five hundred years," Alys had told him.
"You can't" — he's never asked her before — "stay awake?
"Not unless you find some way to stop the turning of the planet."
He wants to protest — the Cailleach is said to have a staff that can freeze the ground — she once froze the Riverlands into a neck of ice during the Long Winter or so his copy of Wonder Tails of Westeros said.
The hand in his hair traces over his forehead to cradle his cheek. She is cold enough to make him shiver. Aemon shuts his good eye. At the start of Winter her touch would numb him to the point of pain. When they kissed his teeth and pallet would ache like he'd bitten into too cold ice cream. When she touched his bad eye the phantom ache would stop.
"My good boy," Alys cooes. "Are you so loathe to be parted from me?"
Aemond did not recognize the word loathe the first time she used it.
"How could I not be?" Aemond replies. He's very alone — he prefers his solitude but solitariness can coexist with loneliness.
"Come here," Alys' fingers slide along his jaw, making his skin pebble. Aemond rolls up, dirt falling off his jacket. The Hearttree's face appears on the edge of his vision. It is just warm enough that its blood red sap is starting to drip out of its horrible eyes.
She guides his head onto her thighs. Her fingers trace along his chin, then down his neck, making his skin pebble.
He kisses her, feeling her softness. He can smell her. There's no musky sweat or tinge of wetness but she still smells like a woman, his Alys. Her fingers trace back down his face.
She smells, he thinks, like a cave — cold stone. Her thumb rests over his eyelid. Aemond goes rigid. She doesn't press down but, when he blinks, simply rests it over the glass eye, letting him feel the pressure. She lays her other hand on the back of his head.
"Do you want to give me a present?" Alys says. "Something I can remember you by?"
"I'll be here next Winter."
She smiles wryly. "My good boy."
Her thumb wriggles over the glass eye, turning it against the muscles in his socket. Then she touches his nose and the air is sharp with frost.
Then she spreads her legs, Aemond's chin slipping down her thighs. Now she presses on the glass. Aemond ought to shove her away. He used to smack his own mother's hand away from his face when she'd touch his eye.
"Take it if you want," he finds himself saying. The nail that pushes open his eyelid feels like a talon.
My right eye has been taken from me
to be sold for a land that will be for ever mine;
the left eye has been taken also,
to make my claim to that land more secure
— Lament of the Old Woman