Behind the Ballads

Thrice

All that mattered came in three.

Three heads had the dragon. Three times had his father been offered the crown before he accepted. Say something thrice, and people knew you meant it.

"He's of the First Men, two times over," people murmured and while in the beginning, he had bristled at the implication of backwardness and yes, honouring the old gods, as he grew up, he found himself fascinated with the times and rituals of the First Men. Fascinated – and scared.

"But your House has produced dark-haired ones while House Dayne looks Valyrian," he had used to insist to his mother. "How is it possible that they were both First Men?"

"You and Jaehaerys look quite different and yet you're both my sons," Betha would answer reasonably.

When into his cups, his uncle Daeron often looked at him and smiled with no joy. "You're of the First Men, Duncan, are you not? Do you feel it?"

Sometimes, Duncan did. Sometimes, the dead godswood at Raventree Hall whispered to him but he could never make their words out. The volcano at Dragonstone murmured threats that he misliked, although it never delivered.

"I do hope that when this Prince That Was Promised comes, he'd obliterate this hellish fire," his aunt Rhae once said. Like Duncan, she didn't trust the volcano at all.

"Is he going to come?" Duncan wondered. "Aunt Rhae? Uncle?"

"He will," Aemon said. "The prophecy is a very old one."

"But is it true?"

"I think it is. Daenys the Dreamer's was," was Aemon's reply but when Duncan wished to know more, he said he had to be somewhere else.

"Oh yes, it'll come true," Daeron assured him. "I can see the world exploding in ice and fire… the wall so thick that it isn't even clear anymore, the great castles reduced to rubble, the stones of old ruined ones rising back to life and the dragons with them, dancing. It will happen… soon."

But whenever he said anything about this particular vision, he was always so drunk that he couldn't remember anything about it in the morning, or at least said that he couldn't.

"Do you not see it, Duncan?" he asked sometimes. "Are you of the First Men or the dragons?"

Both, Duncan thought as he listened to the weirdwoods or the volcano or leafed through a book he had borrowed from Jaehaerys. Old prophecies did hold some strange appeal.

Perhaps the Prince That Was Promised would be born from his own line. How else? He'd be king one day and while his brothers were as much the blood of both dragons and First Men, they didn't belong to the First Men. Weirdwoods didn't speak to them.

"Enjoy your ravens," Jaehaerys told him on their progress south, a few years into their father's reign. "I have the feeling that Lady Jocelyn won't like them very much and this time next year, you'll be wed to her."

"And you think I'll do her bidding?" Duncan snapped but Jaehaerys didn't look impressed.

"She strikes me as a lady who'll have her own way," he said. Jaehaerys liked Jocelyn – and it was easy for him to do so. He wasn't expected to wed this pale, bloated girl with pimpled face and thin lips. Though where he had gotten the idea that she was imperious, Duncan could not fathom. She was extremely reserved and silent. So was he, in a way, so he didn't appreciate the thought of sitting day after day with someone who wouldn't talk to him and he wouldn't talk to in return. But fortunately, there was no requirement for him to love his queen. Just honour her. Which he would do.

Until he met her. Jenny with flowers in her hair. Jenny who bathed in the river and offered him the bunch of flowers that she had just picked up without any false modesty. "Come again before dusk," she told him, "and I'll show you something truly wonderful. But take care to wear something simpler," she added, giving his garb a critical look. "Clothes are expensive enough nowadays and you might ruin this nice one."

Duncan nodded. His tunic was plain enough, he thought, but his ideas of plain didn't actually coincide with hers. Not that she knew who he was. And he preferred to keep it this way.

"Where are you going?" his father asked as he tried to creep away unnoticed as the court prepared to make Harrenhall its home for the next week or so.

"Oh! I'm just going to have a look around," Duncan said casually. King Aegon's eyes went over his son's brown garb but he wasn't one to scold him for looking… well, like a peasant. Or the son of a moderately successful merchant.

Jenny waited for him at the shore of the pool that might be bright blue in the day but at dusk led a life of its own, all rising darkness, loud frogs, and souls of unfortunate people who had lost their lives in its depths. She took him by the hand and led him down a path in the side of the abandoned hill, so narrow that they couldn't walk abreast, and so undisturbed by human feet that it was almost invisible. He almost screamed when, at a sudden turn, he found himself staring into… nothingness. A deep gorge. How many had this path led to their deaths? Jenny's hand stuck behind her, impossibly white in the twilight, and he grabbed it. "Are you trying to kill us both, or what?" he asked, fear turning to fury, and she laughed.

"You're safe, as long as you're with me," she said. "And the gods watch over us. It's their place, from the foot of the hill to the sky and above."

He had the uncomfortable feeling that she didn't mean the Seven. His own mother entered Baelor's sept and observed all worship that a queen really couldn't go without but her gods weren't his. They were Jenny's. A thrill went through him – not an unpleasant sensation.

"Look!" Jenny cried. "Here they are!"

A lonely figure hovered over them. Another one shot from a hole in the hill – a cave? – and joined it. A third and a fourth, and then the entire sky turned into black lace of wings, and Duncan shook his head. "Bats?" he asked, revolted.

"Aren't they lovely?" Jenny asked, tugging him left, and then they were on a broader patch of flat land, and here, with the ground safely under his feet and her fascinated face shining like a white spot, her dark eyes huge and the bats shrieking, he thought he could perhaps find some beauty in them. Jenny took a fistful of berries from her pocket and threw them down in the precipice and Duncan watched, hypnotized, as the first bat shot down to catch them.

"You're a boy from the town, aren't you?" Jenny asked. "You aren't accustomed to such wonders. Care not, I will teach you."

"I can't wait," Duncan said, knowing that he'd come back to this strange, wild girl.

At the time, he didn't think once of his betrothed, with her awkwardness and the thin lips.

Then, he started thinking of her – when Jenny sat down in the grass next to him, chattering about old stones and old gods, and her own supposed glorious ancestors. What fascinated him about her was her liveliness and ease. She took pride in the lineage she touted so proudly but she could laugh at the idea of how her ancestors found out the wonders of the first privy. She talked about the people mocking her and calling her a wilding without hatred but rejoiced in her own peculiarities – could she not be peculiar, after all? Her parents had died soon after her birth, leaving her in the care of a woman locals called witch and Duncan wholeheartedly agreed. What he didn't expect was that she'd turn out to be a real witch but when he saw her listening to the trees, he did.

"Oh, she's a woodwitch," Jenny said lightly when he asked her about it. "And she thinks I have a part to play in shaping the future of Westeros. Perhaps I'll be queen one day!" And she laughed. "Can you imagine this? Jenny of Oldstones! Queen of Westeros!"

"Yes," Duncan said slowly. "In fact, I can."

Once having entered his head, the idea would not leave it. He knew that prophecies were a thing that existed, no matter the fools who derided them. Jenny was destined to play a part far greater than this of the weird local girl. And the things that mattered came in three.

Jenny was of the blood of the First Men.

Thrice.

And his betrothed's lips were thin and pale and she preferred to sit silently, all too aware of her own deficiencies.

The prophecy was of the Prince Who Was Promised, not the Bastard Who Was Promised but he had more sense than saying it to his father. Aegon wanted no part of visions and prophecies – he believed that they had killed his brother and contributed to his uncle's death because a man who sought all answers in thick books would lose the general good health that could help him repel the rotting in the lungs. Of course he would. He braced himself for coming clean to Jenny about lying to her – he expected that she wouldn't take his deception lightly, and he was right.

What he had expected not was his father's visceral reaction when he brought the subject forward, very carefully. Now, it dawned on him that for all his love of smallfolk, King Aegon did consider himself so above them that the idea of marrying his son and heir to one of them was simply intolerable. "Make her your mistress if you must," was the first sentence not of pure ire coming from his mouth, and Duncan shook his head.

Not the Bastard Who Was Promised.

It was fate.

He had not expected Lord Baratheon's reaction either.

"By the Seven, why?" he asked in disbelief. "I gave up the crown!"

Oh how it burned him to know that he had to give up what was his to make the salvation come true! Should it come to a war, also?

"You still dishonoured his daughter." There was no mercy in his father's eyes like there had been none in Ormund Baratheon's when he had left court after four years spent here. Duncan hoped that one day, the two of them would be able to renew their friendship but he was starting to feel that it might be a hard task indeed.

"Ser Duncan?" he yelled when his father's idea of the single combat became clear. "I won't have it! How did it come to Ser Duncan? Why Ser Duncan?"

His father's eyes were stone. "Because I need us to win," he stated flatly, not even trying to disguise his assessment of his son's chances. "And I'm sure he will. Lord Lyonel will show no mercy if he prevails but Ser Duncan won't kill him. The last thing the realm need is one of the two of you dying."

Duncan turned a pleading eye to his mother but Betha returned his look with a stony face. "I will be known as the one who fled," he said, softly this time.

"You're already known as the one who shirked his duty," the Queen reminded him without sympathy and so it was without sympathy that he saw Lord Lyonel's defeat, any guilt he might have felt before the man fading as he had to sit there and pretend that it was a sign of royal majesty that the Lord Commander fought his combat for him.

When he heard the terms of the peace, his laughter died. "You can't send Rhaelle there!" he yelled, horrified. "They'll tear her apart."

"This is no concern of yours." His mother's eyes were dry but red, the skin of her face taut. She had wept. "You lost your right to pretend care when you refused to give up a single girl for the realm, after you witnessed how many young men never returned to their girls to save our throne."

Her voice was clipped and cold, her eyes piercing, full of animosity and blame that he fully deserved. From now on, it would be like this. Just for a moment, he wondered… What if he was wrong?

Thrice. His grandfather and Dyanna Dayne. His father and the Blackwood lady. It didn't make sense for the pattern to be cut in time. None.

"Will you be good to her?" he asked Ormund when, breaking his pride, he went to talk to him after it became clear that Ormund only cared to escort his betrothed to his home and not rekindle old friendships.

Ormund flashed him a grim smile. "I will treat your sister better than you did mine," he promised. And then, before Duncan could feel relieved, "I will wed her and bed her."

With this, he spun around and strode away, Duncan's impulse to catch up with him dying the very moment it had been born. Unlike Lord Lyonel, Ormund was a reasonably… well, reasonable boy. Duncan had relied on him to help smooth the ruffled feathers. Instead, Ormund had cut off his fostering with the King's Hand on his own accord and left court before his father could even summon him. The months in between had not cooled his cold rage and Duncan mourned their friendship and feared for Rhaelle.

"Don't try to tell me you're sorry," his father said sharply. "I don't want to hear it."

So Duncan didn't and the unspoken guilt stayed in his chest like a war wound.

"I'll make up for it," Jenny promised. "I will make you happy."

Do it, he thought. Please do. But even this felt suddenly soiled, for despite his love for her he had not told her of the prophecy she was to bring about. He drew her close and as her scent overwhelmed him, the thought of his lucky escape from the uncomfortable silence and the thin lips flashed through his mind, just for the length as a breath. "Give me a son, my flower," he whispered. "Give me a prince."