[CENTER][sup][h1][img]https://i.ibb.co/FqsyH0Yn/snjyzcto7wj71.jpg[/img] [b][color=khaki]T H E K I N G S R O A D[/color][/b][/h1][/sup][/CENTER] Their train had been making good time, even with the heavier guard and that a litter had been necessary for transporting two women, one of whom had flatly refused to ride the many weeks’ journey to House Frey’s castles. All good things needed to come to an end, it was more surprising they had covered more than half the distance than it was that they finally suffered a difficulty. Though they had seen signs of the war along the Kingsroad, they had largely been left unmolested. They could see smoke in the distance some days, heard tales of it when they stopped at inns and small keeps, the knights and men who escorted them had become dashing accessories, boredom threatened to consume them. That day though, the litter had listed for the better part of the morning before its axle gave entirely and it sounded like the crack of green wood in a fire. The guards were woken from their boredom and reached for steel before they understood what had actually happened. Shiera pushed the curtain aside to see men with steel turning to look at her descent from the now cockeyed litter. They quickly returned swords to scabbards, some managing a sheepish look of apology for the overreaction. Shiera stepped out onto the road with an expression of someone who had decided that composure itself was a form of protest. She found that Elaena was already out and making her way around. The older woman had felt it coming through the sway and creak that had begun hours earlier. The guards were already looking past Shiera to the aging princess for their instructions. They were given without raising her voice and the men moved. There were spare horses in the train, two were swiftly brought up the column, prepared for the ladies to ride in their traveling gowns. Shiera looked at hers the way she looked at difficult people at court, a long and assessing silence that contained an entire argument she ultimately decided she would not have as she had already won but would do the thing anyways. She allowed one of the men to help her mount, her hand holding on to him more tightly than needed and longer than necessary. The young woman said nothing to him, nor spared him a second glance once it was done. She arranged herself and soon found themselves making way again, this time in far less comfort. It was a good road, as roads went. They were on flat ground, the Green Fork ran somewhere to the est of them through the trees, the land broad and pale in early summer heat. It was pleasant, or should have been. It was the kind of day that flattered the idea of travel, that made the journey feel more important than the destination. Elaena had settled her horse into an easy pace and let the guards pull ahead of them. One of them glanced back and was met with a look of stillness that contained all the instruction he needed. The gap widened again after just a moment and soon enough it was just the sound of hooves on the packed earth, birdsong, and the occasional creak of the remaining wagons behind them. There was nothing else, and little likelihood of anyone to hear the two women’s conversation. Elaena looked over her charge and decided she was riding better than she’d led them to believe at the start of their journey. Of course she was, the cunning girl. “You can be angry about it.” Elaena said, after a while. “I’m not.” “I didn’t say that, just that you could be.” Shiera looked at her sideways. Her eyes were striking, sapphire and emerald, vibrant and full of life. She used them the way her mother never had a chance to teach her to but would have; lessons learned early that beauty could be an armour, if she practiced it. “Would that change things?” “No, but maybe you’d feel better.” “I feel fine.” Elaena said nothing to that. Their road turned slightly, following a curve in the land. The guards were ahead of them, dark smears. Though they could not see the river, the smell of it hung in the air. Blessedly that was all, they were again shielded from the battles that carried on around them. “I hate horses.” Shiera offered, breaking the silence. “No you don’t.” “No. But I do hate [i]this[/i] horse.” Beneath the complaint, it nearly sounded like Shiera attempted a joke, something to laugh at if only to avoid crying. Elaena could understand that, though not for whatever trivial reasons the girl held. She had seen forty-six namedays when Daena died. She would be forty-seven by the time they reached the Twins. Daena had been just fifty-one. Should see the next few years out, she would finally be better at something than her sister. The distance that had grown between them had always been there. Some part of her always thought that there would be time to mend things between them, between all of them. Yet now Daena was dead five months and she still had not sent a single letter to Rhaena. There was time still, she would correct it soon. There was always time until there wasn’t, she wouldn’t do that again she resolved to herself one more time. Whatever had happened in those last days were unknown. Daena was dead and Daeron tried to quell the rebellion’s embers before they could fully take hold only to throw kindle to the smolder and ignite it fully. The princess could not accept that Daena’s death was natural and could not accept that someone could have caused it directly. Look as she might, she had yet to find a third option. Is this what Daena would have wanted, her boy, her only child, in revolt against their cousin? If Daeron wasn’t who he was, perhaps Elaena could have supported it. But he was and she was tired of the messes men kept making of her life. She was angry at the mess her sister had created when she escaped the Maidenvault. Her companion now seemed determined to make the same mistakes. Stupid girls entangled with stupider men. She realised she had been quiet too long when Shiera spoke. “You don’t have to look at me like that.” “I’m not.” “You are, and you have, four times in the last mile.” “I’m thinking.” “About me.” Elaena considered denying it outright, but had no desire to explain the full context of her mind. “Partly.” She agreed. Shiera straightened in the saddle, bracing herself. “If you’re going to tell me again that I should return to Kings Landing…” “I’m not.” “...or that Brynden will wonder…” “Shiera.” She stopped speaking, her name landed differently when Elaena used it without a half-beat of patience around it. Shiera heard that because not actually foolish, no matter how much she chose to behave like someone who was. “I know you spoke with Aegor,” Elaena said, finally deciding to bring up this particular topic. “Before they began this nonsense.” A heavy silence hung between them. Shiera looked straight ahead, as if the road would open up to swallow them both and free her from this conversation for good. “You told me yourself.” Elaena continued, her voice quiet and low. “I know you didn’t mean to. When we rode through Rosby. You said ‘the night before he rode out’ and then you stopped. I didn’t press then, I could see you didn’t want to be.” She paused. “I can see you still don’t want to be.” Shiera’s voice was shrill. “Then why do you now?” “Because we have days ahead of us on this road and you are too young to be carrying whatever it is you are carrying. You are young enough to correct it so that you do not carry it your entire life.” She pressed her thin lips together. “I would rather we speak about it now, on the road in summer rather than…” Her tongue flicked out over dry lips. “Rather than not have the chance at all.” It was quiet and safe and it had been, but that could change in an instant. Shiera’s jaw as set, delicate features made harsh in the expression. She had a quality when she worked at not showing something of a kind of a terrible stillness, a person waiting for the pain to peak and pass. She used it, and then it broke, a glimpse beneath the exterior. “I don’t think it was my fault.” She said at last, carefully but not measured, as though she only sought to protect herself from hearing the truth spoken aloud rather than obfuscate it any more. “He had already made his decision, I know that. Nothing I said could have…” She stopped and looked down at her horse’s neck. Her head hung so that hair and veil obscured her face and Elaena wouldn’t be able to see if the tears fell or not. “But I did say something, something that he knew but didn’t want to know and hoped that I wouldn’t.” Her explanation said everything hidden beneath its vagaries. “And then he left.” Shiera could see the look in those deep violet eyes, in the hardness of his face somehow hardened further when she uttered the last word. Maybe if she had reached for him, or told him to stop, or hadn't sought him out at all. Elaena offered nothing in response. “I know what you think.” Shiera said, her voice shifting, cracking. “You think I didn’t understand what I was doing.” “I think you understood part of it.” “I thought…” Now her lips pressed together, the threat of tears dissipated and she lifted her head again. “He was going to go regardless. I thought maybe I could show I cared, that that would matter even if…” She shook her head and her silver hair moved with it, even slick from sweat under the afternoon sun. “I thought it was kind thing to do.” “It was.” Elaena agreed. Shiera could not hide her surprise as she turned her head to face Elaena. “It was a kindness.” Elaena reiterated, and meant it. “It also may have consequences that have nothing to do with your kindness. Both can be true. They usually are.” “Brynden doesn’t see it that way.” “No.” Elaena agreed again. “I imagine he sees it as a ledger.” “And Aegor, he thinks -” “I imagine I know what Aegor thinks too.” Elaena said, this time carefully neutral. Brynden was elegant in all the ways his half-brother Aegor was not. Truly, Aegor was his mother’s son, and he had little in common with the rest of the bastards Aegon had sired. She wondered how Shiera could somehow see something in two men so different from one another save their love for her. Perhaps, that was all that it was, their grasping attempts at what they would offer up as devotion. The girl was a vain creature, though she hoped to break that and mold it into something more, into the promise that was not far beneath the surface. The road straightened again. The guards ahead had lost track of themselves and slowed. Elaena noted the reduced gap with irritation. “I want to go to the Twins.” Sheria said with a sudden clarity, the complaint stripped out of it. “I want to be somewhere that isn’t…Somewhere I can be useful and can do something that is mine.” She paused and bit her lip, a faint line marring her porcelain skin. “Not because of them.” “I know that too.” Elaena less charitably thought that at this point the girl really had no choice but to go. It was a long stretch of nothing between their last stop at the Crossroads Inn and the Twins. She wouldn’t share that information, it was better for the girl to make a decision than feel there was no other choice. She did not look forward to the first night that they would need to sleep on the ground rather than a bed, even one of straw. “Then why does it feel like everyone believes that’s the only reason?” “You are your father’s daughter.” Elaena said bluntly, “and people are lazy.” She said it with a tonal shrug, no heat behind the words. “They see a Valyrian woman and think they know everything that comes after it. They did the same with your mother, they do it with all of us.” As she said it, she felt the weight of Daena somewhere underneath the words. Daena who shared their imprisonment and dealt with it as she did, and whose son was currently burning the Reach. Elaena had dealt with it differently, yet her own choices or lack thereof, had set her on her own path. Different but the same. “It’s infuriating, you can acknowledge that, but also know that it’s not going to stop.” Shiera was looking at her with an expression that was trying not to be grateful. That would feel like a concession and that would feel like losing. “I’m never going back.” Shiera said. “I’m not telling you to.” “Not even after the Twins?” “Perhaps I would have before. But what’s happened has happened and maybe there is some other way I can assist in keeping you away from the Red Keep even if I must return to it.” Before her husband has a thought that he should take more direct action as Master of Coin. The man occasionally misunderstood his role in things, maliciously or not. Something moved across Shiera’s face that was not quite a smile but could have been if youthful petulance had not won out in the end. Elaena looked ahead to the guards and gave the look. They quickened their pace without turning around again. The Green Fork ran west of them. Somewhere behind them the broken litter would be stripped for parts or left at the roadside, she didn’t particularly care which. Ahead of them, the Twins sat across the river. With Freys who would be eager to capitalise on their hosting of what they hoped would be a pivotal moment, and House Stark eager to gain some advantage to send their strength south in support of the throne. They had not been invited as such. They rode to the Twins with their own reasons, not unlike those that Elaena now silently judged for their opportunistic natures. She rode and ignored the hypocrisy, she tucked away her grief once more, and said nothing else for a while. It had been enough, for now.