"She is a child," Stannis says. "I have no use for her whatever."
"Nay, likely you don't," Robert returns, already half-soaked with ale and whatever else has been poured into his cup. Even here, victorious in battle, he is a sot and a wastrel. Were he any other but the King, Stannis' lip would curl in disgust. As it is, he barely restrains himself. "But you will have her nonetheless. The treaty has been fought out and signed, and your hand is a part of it."
Ned Stark stands behind Robert's shoulder, worried and sad as he always is, but not at all inconvenienced. How could he be so? He is to take the last Greyjoy boy to ward, true, and the chance that he might have to put a child to the sword is likelier than any honourable man might like.
But he has his wife, who he professes to love so much, and his heir, and no great challenges ahead of him. The North loves the Starks, and he faces little unrest from his bannermen. No, it is Stannis who is weighed down already by those Houses formerly sworn directly to House Targaryen, who has no wife and no heir and therefore no escape.
"She is a child," he says again. "What use is in taking her?"
Oh, he knows the use - she is so clearly her father's favourite of his two surviving children, and the stronger and brighter of the two. Already she seems brazen and bold, and Stannis dreads her haring around Dragonstone before they have even boarded a ship for home. Marrying her into the King's own family will leave her father reluctant to act against Robert, at least for a time. Stannis can see the attraction of tying her to House Baratheon - what he cannot see is the advantage of tying her to him, considering how close in age she and Renly are.
"You will have her as a wife," Robert says, his tone final. "I'll seek out some wife for Renly to shut the Reach up, and we'll have no more about it."
No more about it.
Robert had said something similar when Stannis had protested at being given Dragonstone in place of Storm's End. Had dismissed him out of hand, dismissed the dishonour Stannis was being done as though it were a thing of no matter whatsoever.
"She seems a bright girl," Davos offers, as if that is a comfort - as if Stannis were the sort of man to seek comfort in the first place! "Clever enough, and brave, I think. She's not flinched in all the time aboard your ship."
Davos doubtless thinks the girl's bravado is worthy of praise, of admiration, and would be glad of the same in his sons, but Stannis cannot agree. A woman has no place wearing breeches and hiding a knife in her boot, as this brat was when brought aboard - Robert found a woman to tend the girl, and the two have fought tooth and nail all the way down the coast, past the Shield Islands and the Arbour and now almost as far east as Starfall.
"I would rather," Stannis says, "that she were sensible."
Asha Greyjoy announces that she is already a woman grown when they arrive on Dragonstone.
"I've had my bleeding," she says stoutly, looking ill at ease in the black woollen gown Robert's woman had found for her. "And I've danced the finger dance. If you plan to wed me, wed me now, before I steal away one of your boats and return home."
"I won't bed a child," Stannis says, taking her by the arm and tugging her toward the castle. "So you will stay where you are, and learn how to be a woman. There's more to it than bleeding, I'm told."
"Not that you'd know otherwise," the girl says, leering up at him. "I hear you wouldn't know what to do with a woman if she was stripped naked and left in your bed."
He ignores that. It works sometimes with Renly, if not with Robert, and he can but hope that youth is the common factor.
"If you wed me," she says after a long silence, which brings them almost to the doors, "and my father rebels again - will you take my head? As Stark will take little Theon's?"
Stannis spends much of his time in King's Landing, serving Robert, and has only reports to tell him of his betrothed.
Even in this, Robert favours Renly - Varys murmurs his surprise when it is announced that Renly will wed Mace Tyrell's daughter (that Mace Tyrell will get his hands on Storm's End after all!), because when Stannis was to wed into the Reach, it was a daughter of a lesser branch of House Florent who would have been his bride.
No, only the very best for Renly. The scrapings will do for Stannis.
Cressen writes that the girl has asked for companions, and that only the Evenstar's daughter, a girl of one-and-ten, was sent in response to her requests. An odd pair, neither one even half a proper woman, he's told, but Cressen says they get along well enough.
"The girl is five-and-ten," Robert says one day while ignoring a draft Stannis has brought before him for approval. "Your girl, the Greyjoy girl. High time she was wed."
"I plan to wait," Stannis says, "another year. She is my ward, and it is my choice."
"A girl like that won't have a maidenhead for you to take if you wait much longer," Robert cautions him, half grinning over the lip of his cup. "Best you get in ahead of your squires and stableboys, eh?"
Dragonstone reminds her of Pyke, sometimes.
Oh, not the people - no matter that they live on an island, they're greenlanders to a one - nor the castle, which though dark and a little damp is grand in a way her father's keep never was. The sea is too soft, the winds too warm, but it all smells of salt and sky, and when she looks out the window of her bedchamber she sees only water to the horizon.
She even has a friend. Brienne is brave and clever under her shyness, and has a smile so disarming for its rarity that it makes a wonder of her plain face. They've lamented together over flat chests and boyish shoulders, too-long, too-strong legs and rough hands, and they train together with Brienne's master-of-arms, brought from Tarth, for as long as they can before being chased inside by the septa sent to teach them what the greenlanders consider ladies' arts.
Asha had protested that she kept no Seven, and could maintain her observances to the Drowned God without supervision, and the septa was replaced with Ser Davos' wife, a woman as plain and sensible as Asha and Brienne themselves by the name of Marya, trailing her little sons behind her.
In spite of herself, she does not hate Dragonstone. Her life is not so changed as she thought it would be, and sometimes Ser Davos even lets her aboard his small, slim ship, and she learns to sail as a smuggler as well as she ever could as a reaver.
She does not even hate the man who they're forcing on her. He won't insist on bedding her every night, she suspects, and won't even impose himself on her for company over dinner. An odd one, but not a man who'll demand her love, nor even that she wears a dress about the castle.
Until-
"The King will be arriving tomorrow," Stannis Baratheon says, slamming the door of her little solar shut behind him. "You will be properly attired while he is here, and neither yourself nor Lady Brienne are to spend any time on the practice yard-"
"But Brienne's father has sent her a new sword!" Asha cries, furious, because Brienne so hates being paraded before guests - and so does she. She'll be a curiosity for these stupid greenlanders to poke and prod-
"Lord Selwyn will be coming," Baratheon says, "as will half my bannermen. There is a new dress ready to be altered for you in one of the trunks. You will also have jewels and such as are appropriate for your station."
If half his bannermen are coming, that can mean only one thing.
"I thought you wanted to wait," she says, through teeth gritted even tighter than his, "until my next nameday. Has your famous iron will dissolved at the chance of fucking a maiden, my lord? Are you no different than your kingly brother?"
"It is because of my kingly brother that we are doing this," he snaps, rigid with obvious fury, and for a moment, Asha thinks that he will strike her - but his fists never rise from his sides, and she finds herself almost disappointed. At least if he smacks her, she will have solid reason to hate him - look here, Brienne, see what Lord Stannis has done to me, this man you all say is so fair and fine.
"Lady Seaworth has been given the dress," he says, shoulders loosening, "and you will be ready on the morrow."
And then he leaves.
Marya Seaworth arrives not long after, a beautiful black velvet dress thrown carelessly over her shoulder so she has two hands free for an enormous basket overflowing with sewing supplies, Brienne trailing helplessly in her wake.
"His lordship has a good eye for size," she says, "but he didn't think to bring something for Lady Brienne, so I'll need you to hold everything in place while I pin it, and we'll all be sewing until the wee hours, I suspect, to get you both dressed right."
Asha looks to Brienne, who looks back, and Marya begins to laugh.
"Come on, then," she says, "fetch a stool for me, Lady Asha, I'm not small but few women are so tall and fine as Lady Brienne."
Brienne flushes blotchy pink from hairline to collar, and Asha reminds herself to spare more gentle words for her little friend in the future - not that Brienne is little. Four years Asha's junior and already four inches taller than her, Brienne will be the tallest person on the island again she's finished growing, and feels every inch of it terribly.
Asha thinks she's magnificent, but saying so makes Brienne blush and her bright eyes shine with tears, so Asha has learned to hold her tongue.
"Now, my lady," Marya says, stepping up onto the stool when Asha sets it by Brienne. "If Lady Asha will only bring over my basket, we can begin - a nice blue, I think, a nice dark blue to offset your fair skin and bring out your lovely eyes, what do you think?"
Robert arrives with his usual furore, Renly trailing after him, both dripping gold and splendour.
Stannis glances along the line of his household, satisfied that they are all suitably attired, and decides not to think any more of it. Ostentation has never been his way, and he has not the resources for such things anyway.
The girl does look well in her black gown - she sheared all her hair off with a knife, he was told on his arrival, but combed and held in place with a yellowish ribbon it does not look terrible, he supposes. She and the Tarth girl make an odd pair, one handsome but brazen, the other ugly but demure, but he supposes some would say the same of himself and his brothers, or himself and Davos.
"Get inside," Robert roars, jocular and overbearing, "out of this confounded wind!"
The wind is not so bad, but there is no wine outside the castle.
Asha did not expect her wedding to happen the day Robert Baratheon arrived, but it does. She finds herself pushed forward into the sept almost as soon as the King has had his bread and salt.
The sept is a tidy little building, but it feels hollow and alien to Asha - the Drowned God needs no halls of worship, not when he has all the sea, and it makes these Seven feel so small and false that she feels a traitor for even acknowledging their existence.
She has no maiden's cloak - the haste of this wedding makes her wonder if her father is once more stirring on the coast, and her husband-to-be has not been told - but there is a bridal cloak, old and smelling of something sweet and sharp, as if it was packed away for a long time.
"It was my mother's," Baratheon grumbles, when he sees her look askance, "and now it is yours."
His lips are frowning-thin when he kisses her, and she almost laughs at that. Here he is, a man of six-and-twenty, more afraid of what must come than she, barely more than a girl, is!
Once the ceremony is complete, once they have emerged from the sept and they are all together standing in the blustery sunlight, she turns to the King.
"Now I am your sister," she says, "I wish to speak freely - has my father risen up again, that you do me the dishonour of denying me even a wedding feast?"
Mercifully, he roars with laughter rather than rage, and Asha wonders - will he always find such forthrightness amusing, or will she outgrow it? Best not to test it. She can charm the truth from one of the pretty blonde boys behind him later, when they are all drunk and she is not.
Two days later, when Asha watches her new husband sail away with his brothers, safe in the knowledge that her head is safe on her neck because her marriage has only been rushed to quiet the King's goodfather's nagging, she loops her arm through Brienne's with a sigh.
"Marriage," she says, "is going to be a very strange thing indeed."
"Was he cruel?" Brienne asks, a hushed whisper that rises her ever-close blush up her neck. "In- in bed, I mean?"
Asha laughs, and then laughs some more, and then turns Brienne for the castle that she supposes must be hers now, since she is Lady Baratheon.
"Do you know, Brienne," she says, "I think that I had a better notion of what to do than he did."
"Poor, stupid Robert," Asha says idly, legs over the arm of her chair and Ormund sleeping against her breast, even though he is likely too big for such things now. Shireen, sitting on the floor by the foot of her chair, leans her pretty little head into Asha's down-stretched hand, and together they look to Stannis. "You will wear a crown, I presume?"
"Who will support me if I do?" he returns, bitterness twisting his frown as he comes close, brushing a hand over Ormund's feathery black hair, accepting Shireen's sudden, shooting embrace with a little less discomfort than usual. Asha knows that Shireen loves Stannis' embraces if only because he never shies away from her scales - even now, he idly runs the backs of his fingers over her scarred cheek, as though it is nothing at all.
"Your bannermen," Asha says. "And perhaps some of the Stormlands, since you have a fine male heir, where your brother has a lovely wife but no children - how odd, isn't it, that you are the one with the cold reputation, and yet neither Robert nor Renly has a legitimate son - or at least, that Robert has no legitimate son of his own blood."
Stannis scowls, gently eases Shireen to sit on the edge of Asha's chair, and begins to pace.
"My father, too," Asha says, "might be enticed to rise against the Lannisters in the West - he never has liked old Tywin very much."
Stannis does not approve of her father, not that Asha cares very much, but she thinks that he will take what help Balon Greyjoy can give him. He is nothing if not practical, after all.