Storms End

"Tell me again, Grandmother. Tell me again about this time you were prisoner here."

"I wasn't a prisoner," the old woman corrected. "I only felt like one."

"Tell me!"

She sighed. Why not? It wasn't as if they had many other things to do. Lately, she had been reluctant to leave her chambers because all around Durran's castle she encountered gaunt faces, dull eyes, hopelessness equal to her own. Hunger, hunger, hunger.

"Very well. I arrived during a great storm that had left my entourage and myself drenched and our horses wondering if they should go wild or stomp their feet…"

Renly laughed. He always found this part very funny. Horses stomping their feet four times one after another. But his laughter was a pale echo of its true self. Hunger.

"And when we finally arrived, the Laughing Storm took one look at me and grabbed me in his arms to carry me to the fireplace…"

"And you were afraid that he'd throw you right in…" her grandson continued.

"Do you see? You know it better than me."

"Go on!"

The creaking of the door made them both turn around. Stannis entered, carrying a plate of onions. Again. Without looking at them. Again. Rhaelle thought he had gone even thinner, although, objectively, she knew it was not possible for a change as big as the one she imagined she was seeing to take place so fast, literally overnight. His eyes had turned to blue holes into the ashen planes of his face. "Eat," he said and Renly, who had long given up on his complaints that he did not want to eat onions again, dug in.

Stannis extended Rhaelle an onion. "Only if you take half of it," she said.

He sighed. "I appreciate your concern, Grandmother, but I am not the sixty-year-old one here."

"Neither am I," she retaliated. There were two moons left until her nameday… or were they three? It was so easy to lose track on time when under the siege in a castle, surrounded only by hope, thoughts of deflection, and hunger. Hunger.

He glowered at her in a way that made most of Robert's bannermen and everyone else in the castle recoil. Not her. He had much to learn about impressing her. She had withstood Ser Duncan the Tall and Lyonel the Laughing Storm! She was not about to yield to her grandson, of all people.

Sullenly, he cut the onion in half and looked at her expectantly. She ate her half.

"Go on, Grandmother!" Renly insisted when he had eaten his fill and to her surprise, Stannis lingered as well. He was not the one to listen to this story as eagerly as Renly and Robert before him but he stayed.

"And I felt like I'd never leave this castle where I was closely guarded. I felt like living in a constant storm – your great-grandfather was such a storm and a fair man though he was, the offence committed against his House stopped him from seeing me like a daughter for a very long time… What?"

"You didn't frame it like this when you told us the story," Stannis said.

Surprised, Rhaelle Baratheon, Princess of House Targaryen looked at him and then looked at the grey sky beyond the window. A new storm was coming. "No," she slowly said. "I suppose I wasn't."

So great had been her wish to leave the past behind! Steffon's friendship with Aerys had pleased her because it ended the old accounts in which she had ended up the coin. Now, Rhaegar Targaryen had opened them again. After all these years, Rhaelle had finally understood her goodfather's feelings. His daughter had been deemed lesser than a peasant who had died illiterate. House Baratheon's loyalty and dignity had been given no consideration. And now this pampered prince had repeated the offence and the Stark fool had decided it was better to be a prince's whore than Lady of the Stormsland. Oh yes, an offence it was. And Rhaelle was no longer inclined to pretend that past offences had never taken place in the hope of a reconciliation or at least truce that the House she had been born to broke as easily as it breathed.

A good man and true, Lord Lyonel had been. He had promised that he would take care of her and he had – both him and Lady Margrat. Rhaelle had never lacked for anything. Lord Lyonel had taken care to shut up any unflattering talk about her family on her behalf. He had done all his duty by her but it had taken years for her to find warmth between the walls of her prison – and even as young as she had been, she had recognized it as such. And even more years for her to turn Storm's End into a home of her own – hers and Ormund's. Now, her House threatened her home again but this time, her own family's very life was at the stake. As always, she forbade herself to think of her grandsons actually starving to death. What alternatives did they have? Surrender to save themselves from starvation, only to have her mad nephew chop their heads off?

Almost sixty and a prisoner at Storm's End again! How life turned! Sometimes, she could not stop herself and went to the walls to watch the Tyrell men feast. The winds carried the aromas to her, sometimes so violently that her stomach lurched. She recognized them: roasted boar, rosemary, cheese pastries… She took them in until her head swam and the pit in her stomach became deeper. Then, she ground her teeth and vowed that she would live through this and eat all of those very soon but the swimming would overtake her again until an enraged Stannis would arrive to take her inside, summoned by a scared guard who thought that the defences of the walls were not enough and trembled at the thought of what would happen to him if he incurred Stannis' wrath.

"Grandmother?" Renly urged her. "The story!"

She startled. "Ah yes. So, Lord Lyonel used to say I was brought to him by the storm…"

Suddenly, she paused. Her eyes of a woman who had dwelled here as long as any stormslander told her that there was something unusual about this grey sky. These were not storms. This was… dust.

"What is this?"

Stannis came close and quite contrary to his usual behavior, shoved her out of the way to better see through the window. "Horses," he said. "This is the dust kicked off by hooves… many hooves."

Without saying anything, they rushed to the door, with Renly trying desperately to keep up. Stannis cursed, leaned over and grabbed him.

In the hallway, Maester Cressen came towards them, panting. "My lord," he gasped, "my lord, you should see this…"

"I know," Stannis said curtly.

When they reached the top of the wall, the dust had come close enough to emit its content: men. Many men. Rhaelle drew a deep breath when she recognized the wolf banner.

All around them, the castle sprang to life. Shouts, running feet, people rushing to the walls to see, loud guesses what this meant. Rhaelle felt a flame of slow, soul-infusing malice when she saw how the Tyrell men abandoned their feast and hurried desperately to meet Stark in less unfavourable – to them – conditions. For all the lack of ravens that they had been suffering for months, the arrival of the North could only mean one thing.

After so many months, weeks, days, minutes, and seconds of slow starvation eating its way to people's very core, the end of this storm came surprisingly fast. And yet when young Lord Stark rode in under the portcullis which creaked in protest at being lifted for first time in months and dismounted to give a bow, his people around him sweeping the yard with their helmets as his second had roared at them to greet the King's grandmother, the feeling that her entire world had been shaken and reformed into something that she did not recognize was almost as great as her relief that Robert was safe, that Stannis and Renly would not find death by hunger after all… and her deep-seated feeling of a bitter, tear-stained but contented triumph.