"When you sit on that throne, you are alone. No gods, no men, no army could come to your rescue. On your own head be it, every decision, every mistake, every choice."
He had made her sit on the Iron Throne. Her father. She was only a girl at the time, just past her twelfth nameday. "You must know how to sit so the throne does not devour your flesh, and the crown does not consume your very being."
He had not been talking only about the throne itself - the physical entity forged from the swords of Aegon Targaryen's vanquished enemies - but also about the perils or kingship. And queenship. Shireen did not understand it at the time, but she had more than made up for her belated comprehension lately.
"Your Grace?" Devan called out from the door of the throne room.
Shireen recoiled at the greeting. He is dead, Devan. This man you are calling out for, he is no more. How could you have forgotten so quickly? You were by his side when he died. You held his head in your lap. It was your hands that closed his eyes. His blood was smeared on your clothes, on your face, on your hands.
Shireen had not been by her father's side when he died. She was safe inside the Red Keep, on her father's insistence, far from the site of the battle, far from the fighting. Devan's father had been commanded by the king to stay behind as well, despite Davos Seaworth's vehement protest. "The Hand of the King must protect the heir to the throne," the king had declared, in a voice that brooked no argument.
But King's Landing and the Red Keep would soon be the site of another battle. The dragon queen was on her way to the city, with her dragons and her sellswords and her men. To take back what was hers with fire and blood. To take it back from the pretender's daughter sitting on the throne, so she claimed.
The pretender was dead, butchered by the dragon queen's men, so Shireen supposed she was the pretender now. She was no longer the pretender's daughter, or anyone's daughter for that matter.
Mother, tell me a story of you and your cousins as children, to calm my fears and ease me to sleep.
Her mother could not have replied; she had been dead longer than Shireen's father was.
The Targaryens lost their claim to the throne when Robert Baratheon defeated the Mad King, her father had insisted. "I was Robert's heir, and you are my heir, Shireen. If Daenerys Targaryen wants the throne, she will have to win it in the fields of battle like Robert did, not by asserting rights that do not exist any longer."
Daenerys Targaryen did not come to Westeros with her dragons when they thought she would, years and years ago. What finally made her decide to cross the sea now was anyone's guess.
Words in a letter. Phrases on a scroll. Bend the knee. Bend the knee, my lady, and you and your men will be shown mercy. Do not follow the example set out by your bold but terribly misguided father. His pride and his stubbornness proved to be his undoing in the end.
Whose words were those, truly? Not Daenerys Targaryen's words, Shireen suspected, though the letter bore her name and her seal was stamped at the bottom. Words that sounded as if written by someone who had known her father. Someone who had perhaps served with Stannis Barathon in King Robert's Small Council for many years.
The Kingsguard was now the Queensguard, but it was a different queen Barristan the Bold had chosen to serve, not Shireen Baratheon.
"My queen?" Devan's voice again, sounding more insistent this time. He was now standing at the foot of the throne.
My queen. That could be Ser Barristan's voice calling out for his queen.
"Your Grace, are you coming to the nightfire?" Devan asked.
"It would not be wise, ser," Shireen replied. "For a queen to be seen choosing a side. My people will be filling the septs and the godswood too, praying to their gods, not just the nightfire."
The northmen had been her father's biggest supporters in the last war, and King's Landing now teemed with men and women from the north, making their home in the city, still worshipping their old gods. The Faith had seen it as an encouraging sign at first - if King Stannis was willing to let the northmen continue following their own god instead of forcing them to convert to R'hllorism, then the Seven must be safe as well. But in time, the Septas began to chafe at what they saw as their loss of influence, in a city now divided between three major religions.
Devan still prayed at nightfires. His father had gone back to the sept and the Seven, but not Devan. "I have seen things. The Lady Melisandre has shown me many things in the flame," he had confided to Shireen once, reluctantly, when she had insisted on knowing his reasons. "I could no more shed my faith in the Lord of Light than I could shed my own skin."
"Are you certain it is not the Lady Melisandre that holds the main share of your faith?" Shireen asked, in a deceivingly playful tone. She had seen the way Devan looked at the red woman, with a cross between fear and longing on his face.
She hated that look. Hated that Devan could look at Lady Melisandre, or at any other woman for that matter, with that mix of fear and longing. But she could no more explain why she hated it, than she could explain why her father was the way he was. Both were matters inexplicable, unfathomable, mysteries beyond her comprehension.
"You should come to all three, Your Grace," Devan was saying now. "The nightfire, the Great Sept, and the godswood. To pray with your people, of all creed and faith."
Shireen bit her lower lip. Her father grinded his teeth when he was annoyed, angry or irritated. Shireen bit her lip. "Praying will not protect them from the flames unleashed by the dragons," she replied, trying not to show her impatience.
"Fear and despair will sap their will to fight sooner than the sight of any dragon could. If they believe that the gods are on their side –"
"Which god? R'hllor? The old gods? The Seven? And what if the gods disagree? What if R'hllor wishes for me to emerge victorious, but the Seven has another outcome in mind? Should we hold a tourney for the gods? Let them battle it out among themselves with lances and swords." The deep bitterness in her voice lingered in the air.
This is not me. Those were my father's words, my father's beliefs, my father's bitterness.
But that was not the whole truth. Shireen had grown to believe them too, those words. Since the day her father was buried.
Devan was stroking his chin, looking troubled. It was something he had started doing, perhaps unconsciously, since he grew his beard. It was a full beard, the color much darker than his brown hair. It made him look much older than his twenty years, like a man who had seen too much and wanted to hide his expression behind all the hair.
There was once a boy who was fiercely proud of the blond fuzz on his cheeks and chin, a boy who called Shireen my princess, a boy who was her constant companion from the age of ten, a boy who stayed when Cousin Edric was sent away, a boy who refused to leave her father's side in defeat twice – once when her father had survived, at Blackwater Bay, and the last time when he had not.
Where was that boy now, Shireen wondered? The fuzz that would have shamed a proper peach had grown into a full beard, its color darkening into a brown so dark it looked almost black under a certain light. The sweet, sincere earnestness Shireen remembered well had been transformed into a bone-deep solemnity that seemed to preclude smiling or laughing. She could not remember the last time a smile had touched Devan's face, nor could she recall the sound of his laughter.
They used to laugh, Shireen and Devan, once upon a time - in Aegon's Garden playing hide-and-seek with Edric and Patchface, at Castle Black exploring all the empty rooms and spying on the giants, in the Red Keep trying to adapt to a new life. What happened to that boy and that girl?
Life happened, her father would have said. Duty and responsibility beckoned, and they heeded the siren song, as they should. It was time to put away childish things and childish concerns.
Is happiness a childish concern? How about taking pleasure in the joy of others?
Father?
Her father remained stubbornly silent.
"Your own faith, or lack of it, is hardly the point." Devan's voice interrupted Shireen's journey to the past. "The only thing that matters is that your people need you, Your Grace. Now more than ever. You do not have to believe in anything yourself, you only have be there for them. As their queen."
"I have done all I can, have I not? All that I should do to protect my people. Ensuring the city is well- protected and well -armed, sanctuaries for women, children, the infirm and the old, the list goes on and on. Tell me, Ser Devan, which duty have I failed to do? In what way have I neglected my people?"
She did not wait for Devan's reply. "Where is your god now, Ser Devan? In our moment of greatest need, where is your god? And where was your god when my father died?" Shireen demanded.
Where was the god who had anointed Stannis Baratheon His chosen one?
"Did you pray for my father, as he was dying in your arms? Did it not clue you in into the futility of it, when my father still died, despite your prayers and your faith in your god?"
She had never forgiven Devan for being the one to be with her father, in his last moments. It should have been Shireen. She was his daughter, his only child.
This was the secret she was ashamed to admit to anyone, even to herself.
The boy she once knew would have looked stricken, crushed, in despair, listening to her torrents of accusations. This man standing in front of her had an inscrutable look on his face, as if nothing could touch him, nothing could hurt him more than he had already been damaged.
Devan still had a father. Otherwise, he would all alone, just like Shireen. A brother without brothers, a son without a mother, a knight without his king to serve.
Devan cleared his throat. "May I speak bluntly, Your Grace?"
Shireen raised an eyebrow. "I did not know you were being disingenuous before. But go on. Yes, you may be as blunt as you wish, ser."
"I knew a girl once, who cares about the feeling and the well-being of others not because it is her duty, who has kindness in her heart and generosity in her soul."
"That girl is long gone, ser," Shireen snapped.
And so is the boy you once were, Devan. We are lost, both of us.
Forever lost,never to find their way back home again, to who they once were, to the people they had once been, a lifetime ago.
She said none of this aloud, but he seemed to have read her mind, or at least remembered the connection they once shared, tenuous and rusty as it was now.
"We can find our way home again, if we are lost," he said.
We. He had said 'we', not 'she', or 'you'. He had not been blind to his own wanderings after all, as she had once thought.
"And what would happen then? When we have found our way home?" Shireen asked.
He smiled then, a sad approximation of a smile that actually resembled a ghostly grimace. "We can die without any regret," he said, his voice losing its hard-earned composure.
She knew what Devan was really telling her, without him having to say the words out loud. Her father had died full of regrets. Her father had lost his way as well, and had never found the way home. Devan had bear witness to that, had been the one to accompany her father in his last moments on earth.
She could truly mourn her father now, knowing the hard truths, knowing the very worst. She could finally mourn her father in all his multitudes - the man she knew, the boy she had never known, the king she had feared and revered in equal measure, the father she had loved, despite everything.
Her eyes closed, she asked, "Where do we go from here?"
"You are the rightful queen, Your Grace. And I am your man," Devan replied.