Lies in a Book, Let's Overlook
For a long time, Dyanna stared at the looking glass and then held her breath, petrified. The woman looking back – it wasn't her.
The fair one, they called her, as if there weren't other beautiful women around at all, as if Shiera wasn't what Dyanna had been just a few years ago. The bright lady. The lucky one since she had outwitted the Stranger himself and was now carrying a child, instead of lying in the cold earth. And unlike Jena who had recently lost a still unformed babe, she seemed to have all chances to carry it to the end.
The woman in the looking-glass was great with child but she was also stretched grotesquely. The breast that had been sheltering the disease was fuller but sunken in the place where the blade had cut, the marks purple-bluish and hurting. On her lower belly, the hair was spreading so thick that Dyanna feared she'd soon need to shave as often as men did! By the Mother, she had only been warned that carrying her children would feel uncomfortable and painful. No one had mentioned anything about turning into a hairy cat!
It'll fall off once the babe is born, Dyanna tried to comfort herself. What if it didn't?
"My lady…"
The soft voice snatched her from her self-pity and hurled her back in the present. A pair of brown eyes examined her in a quick worry. She smiled. "I'm fine, Saryl."
The smile she got in return was a little shaky, a little full of wistfulness. Dyanna felt incredibly ashamed and shallow. Here she was sniveling over a few hairs when her favourite attendant Saryl Lothston had to battle the bitter disappointment of knowing that she'd never become a mother. It wasn't certain that she'd even be able to lie with a man at all – and there was one. A young one had recently appeared and Saryl was in love with him. He also looked infatuated, in Dyanna's opinion. Dyanna had her children. She had Maekar who still loved and wanted her so much, the changes that the terrible affliction had wrought in her looks meaning so little to him. She was just more sensitive because of the babe.
"You must start getting ready for the feast," Saryl prompted. As if Dyanna could forget!
"Yes," she said.
Her sister Astrea came over and the three of them quickly chose Dyanna's attire, Astrea chatting in a way that made Dyanna wonder if her sister was trying to cheer her up, or she had realized how little joy Dyanna had of courtly functions anymore. Some looked at her as if she was the future; others whispered that she had had a hand in the death of Jena's babe. Dyanna wasn't even sure that the second upset her more than the first. Both were certain to make her enemies.
"Gossip needs conflicts," was all that Maekar would say of the matter but Dyanna felt that he, too, was finding it increasingly difficult to pretend that he didn't see the double parts people ascribed to him. The worst thing was, Dyanna was almost sure that her fecundity had started bothering her goodfather as well… It was a matter of time before Maekar realized this as well.
"I wish we had gone back to Summerhall when I could still travel," she said in one of her rare moments of candour as Maekar rubbed her swollen feet – another burden that had come upon her in the last weeks.
"So do I," he said and she reached out to touch him but of course, the swell of her belly would not allow for such a motion. After a while, he rose and put a few pillows under her feet to keep them high. "Now, that's something I imagine shocks everyone into believing the worst of me," she jested. "Turning a prince into a maester."
"Oh, they would think you got it from your lady mother," he said, smiling back at her. "She did captivate the Young Dragon, after all."
Dyanna's levity disappeared. She tried to rise and fell back. Maekar startled. "By the gods, Dyanna! Take care!"
"My mother did what?" she demanded. "Do you even know what happened between them? She certainly didn't captivate him! Not at all!"
"I know, I know." Maekar looked as if he was sorry he had raised the matter, even in passing. "I know, Dyanna. But the people here… they only know what the Young Dragon wrote in his book."
She stared at him and then rose on her elbow. "What did he write?" she finally asked.
"You mean you never read it?" he asked, incredulous. He would have expected that upon their betrothal, at least, her parents would make sure that she was stepping into her new life fully armed for whatever expectations people had of her.
"Why would I?" she shot back defiantly. "Once, when I was a little, I watched my father reading it. He was furious. He kept pacing around and claiming that those were lies, lies, lies… My mother didn't say anything – anything – for days."
He looked down quickly but Dyanna spotted the pity in his eyes and caught the tip of her tongue between her teeth to stop herself from saying what was burning inside her… that he was not the one to pity her because no matter what, it hadn't been her mother who hadn't seen her for weeks and months, always caught up in something more important while Dyanna was right there.
"You read this… rubbish?" she finally asked when she was sure that she had regained control. She hated when there were wedges between them.
He shrugged. "The King and Queen didn't exactly recommend it to me but I figured I could use it. Little did I know that I'd be reading a legend like those from before the Conquest, with the Young Dragon besting Aegon, Rhaenys, and Visenya together."
"He was no dragon," Dyanna said sharply and paused, stunned to realize that in the years she had spent here, the word had lost the meaning it had held for her since her birth. Maekar was a dragon. Baelor was one. Their father was another one, as much as the fools claimed that he wasn't. Daeron the Boy? He was about as much of a dragon as Daemon Blackfyre and they had both found the ending they had deserved. Her hand went over her belly protectively. Was this the way people would talk about her children one day? Naming them dragons, the way she had thought about Maekar for years as a child? That notion pained her.
"Find me the book," she finally said, surprised by her sudden desire to read it. She recognized her curiosity as a sick one, yet she was unable to resist. Perhaps it was the wish to know what people truly thought of her based on their former king's words? She couldn't say but suddenly she wanted to know all about Daeron's lies. Perhaps take a few lessons? No. She might not be able to always resist embellishing the truth and spinning stories out of thin threads but hers were never malicious lies. Never to make herself look better. Really, they were no lies at all.
The afternoon of the next day found her with puffy eyes and jaws that hurt from grinding. And she had thought that she was a mistress of untruths! She couldn't hold a candle to Daeron Targaryen, the Fist of His Name. Reading his words, she felt she was supposed to think that once he won another glorious battle, with the blood spilling out of nowhere and not human bodies, the lands he had gained stopped mattering. He only mentioned how many men he had lost and how many his army had killed, making them as numerous as ants. Dyanna couldn't believe that anyone took him to his words, from the description of his exploits to the numbers of Dornishmen.
Her family was here as well, their names mentioned often. Something like admiration for her father and uncle's courage in the face of the tortures inflicted on them by Daeron's torturers. How Vorian Dayne had died after being so brave and had been thrown in a secret, unmarked grave out of fear of the rebels that were, in fact, all of Sunspear and the shadow city's men, women and children – the surviving ones – had not merited a mentioning, let alone the small detail that her father had carried the damages of his courage with him till the rest of his too short life. Her paternal grandmother had fared better – although Daeron had been unable to keep himself from commenting on Dyanna Dayne's haunting beauty and fierce violet eyes, he had spared the time to make a note of the great respect she had earned among her countrymen and women and her unwavering battle against him. Of course, it only served to highlight his own greatness in prevailing against her but he had mentioned how, after one son's death, another one's failing health, and her daughter's taking as a hostage, she had sold all the jewels his men had not found in Starfall to buy arms for the war effort. "My son is dead and my other one is unable to wield a spear right now," he recalled Dyanna Dayne as saying and to the young Dyanna, that was about the only truthful part of his fanciful medley of lies, "but once he can rise from his bed, he'll take one into the fight. If I had five more sons, I know they would all have followed." Not a word about the harassment the men he had sent to keep her in check at Starfall had inflicted upon her, quickening her death.
In those pages of disgusting bragging, Dyanna's mother stood sharply out as the only one who wasn't maligned. In fact, there were so many glowing words for her – how beautiful she was, how dignified, how true to her House, as mistaken as that House was in their behavior, how gentle and kind, how smart… He could have branded the three-headed dragon on Elsbet Toland's forehead, to the same effect, claiming her as his mistress, no different from Cassella Vaith, only that he was that great knight, unlike Aegon the Fourth, cursed be their names! Dyanna remembered the whitening of her father's jaw as he had read the book. Davos Dayne had certainly known what portrait Daeron had painted of his lady wife!
At least he had refrained from repeating the ugly rumours about Elsbet's paternity. Dyanna was well aware that there were many who thought that Alyn Velaryon, the Oakenfist, had had a good time in Lady Toland's bed as her older husband had been lingering. She couldn't imagine that he would have voluntarily chosen to omit such a delicious detail. Perhaps he had included it but his formidable uncle, Viserys, had stepped in? Perhaps the Young Dragon had been afraid of his Hand, just a little?
She kept reading until she could not tolerate those writings a moment longer. She threw the book against the wall and felt a rush of pleasure when it fell down with an audible cracking of the leather binding. For a while, she stayed in her chair, her heart pounding, and then nodded at Saryl to collect the book. With a quill in her hand, she started correcting, a line for a line. Fury shook her to the core and her words came on the page twisting, like snakes. When she finished two pages, she looked at them and her truth took just as much place as his lies. He had been unable to write anything truthful, or almost anything. Dyanna was particularly incensed with the description of her grandmother's second husband being tortured for information, the detail that his first son by Ileria Toland had not rushed to defend his father with his bare hands but was grabbed by animalistic terror and fear for his own safety. This arrogant boy, always supported by the very numbers of his army and surrounded by seven men who wanted nothing more than to die for him, turned other people into nothings and detested them for not being brave enough when confronted with murderers like him. He must have gone thoroughly mad, Dyanna thought. It isn't possible for anyone to think so and be sane.
"I wonder if he knew how old Mors was at the time," she finally said, scathingly. "I guess such a great man could not be bothered to check such tiny details. And it's more dramatic this way."
"How old?" Saryl asked because it was expected of her, although she was quite sure she didn't want to know. "How old was he, my lady?"
"Four year old," Dyanna said. "Four! I wonder what Daeron expected of a child this age, to throw himself against Daeron's torturers in the darkness because they, of course, brought the black cells with them to the Old Palace?"
Saryl shook her head, silently, and Dyanna kept scrawling. When she looked up, it was already getting dark and her goodmother watched her from a chair.
"I didn't know you were here," Dyanna apologized and nodded in greeting. Mariah did not wish for curtseys when Dyanna was so far along.
"This… book… does have such an effect," the Queen said, the revulsion in her voice evident. Dyanna sipped a little wine as if trying to drive the bad taste in her mouth away.
"So you hated it as well?" she asked.
"What do you think?" Mariah asked. "I was quite tempted to straighten it out myself, a few times. May I have a look?"
Despite the mild voice, it was a command. Dyanna nodded at Saryl to give the book to the Queen and Mariah started reading and nodding. Only once did she stop and shook her head. "This has to go," she said.
Curious, Dyanna waddled over to have a look. The Queen was dissatisfied with something that surprised the young woman very much.
"But there aren't any fifty thousand spearmen in Dorne," she said. "There never were. He just wanted to make his conquest sound more impressive…"
"And those numbers might indeed impressed someone in the future," Mariah explained. "Do you really want to rob Dorne of the benefit of being consider stronger than she is? Another king might try to be the Butcher Dragon reborn. The Reach might try to make a grab if there is another clash like the one we barely survived. Anything can happen. Do you really want to make a conquest easier for anyone? Make a new war safer?"
Dyanna blanched. "It's treason you're mouthing," she whispered, looking at the door anxiously. "Hiding such an information from the Iron Throne is…" But she couldn't find another word. Just treason. Treason to the realm that had accepted Mariah as its queen. Treason to the dragons whom she had borne. And if Dyanna agreed to overlook it, she'd be a traitor as well.
Mariah shook her head, undisturbed. "I hid it from King Aegon," she said. "And Daeron supported me. It's no treason. It's precaution. My sons are aware of our real numbers. I see no reason to inform the world at large."
The way she said it, she made it sound perfectly logical. Still, it deprived the future rulers of the Iron Throne from a chance to know the real power of the region. That could not be considered fair and just, no matter what. After all those years, she's still Mariah of Dorne, Dyanna thought with equal measure of admiration and fear.
At the end, she spilled a little ink over the page, destroying her correction of the number.