How to Handle Your Rebel King Husband Who is Too Young to Conceivably Die of Natural Causes—Westeros Edition

Written by Israel Loxley Frey

So your husband is a rebel king, is he? So he won, did he? Well, congratulations! Now that you've settled into your palace and this husband of yours has returned to your home, you've got a lot of responsibility. From attending orphanage openings to writing letters to foreign royalty to locating a tonic that can stop your stress-related premature hair-fall to waxing everything below your eyebrows, you're suddenly swamped with work and will not be able to find a single free minute to sit down, cradle your head in your hands and ask yourself 'what the fuck is going on here?'. Yep. You've become the queen of a recently freed northern kingdom, and boy, isn't that exciting (insert sarcasm here)?

Now I could go on for years about the duties as a monarch—the charity work, the orphans, the politics—but this is not about how to handle being a queen. This is about how to handle being the wife of a king. If you're looking for some way to feel better about yourself, for someone to hold you and whisper softly into your ear that you are perfect as you are, to make you feel better about yourself, then put this down and walk away as fast as you fucking can. If you want to know the answers to all the harder questions, however—what do I say to the scheming asshole steward who drinks as a response to my every word? How can I subtly feed critical, judgmental bitches to my wolf without guaranteeing myself a stint in the dungeons? Is there a tonic that can make my husband's sex drive drop below ground for three months straight?—these are the sorts of questions that you will find the answers to within these pages. So if you're looking for ways to deal with all of the above, then by all means, turn the page. A quick note however—just so we're clear. This is not a self-help book. It's a survival guide.

Smile

I don't care if the world is burning and your first born son's stuffed dismembered head has been mounted on a pike by your bedroom window. Smile like your face has been frozen stiff and that smile had damn well better stay put. As the king's wife, you will have to deal with work weary stonemasons, disgruntled locals, a smoothly subtle mother-in-law and a husband who will be watching your every move very carefully. You are not allowed to feel anything but effervescent joy. A tower has been demolished to be rebuilt from the ground up? Oh, joy! The king thinks that the color you chose for the marble floors of the great Sept is 'pretty'? The marble floors that you spent ages picking the colors for and coordinating for hoping to hear the words 'gorgeous' or 'stunning'? Oh, joy! Any situation where you are dealing with the ungrateful shits where things are going even remotely well, that smile is glued to your face with pitch and sealed with plaster. How much you smile when people are watching should be inversely proportional to how much you frown when no one is.

Cry

Do not do it. Not excessively, anyways, but enough for people to know their queen isn't a machine. I don't care if your soul is colder than the height of the Long Night. If an orphan sits on your lap and talks, then you shed a fucking tear. I don't care if they're singing about unicorns. Your eyes had better well up.

Chew, Swallow, Digest

People talk. People like to talk. They especially like to talk about people they hate, and boy, do they hate Freys. Half the time, they'll hate you, and the other half they'll hate that they're not you. Either way, there's a lot of hate going around and as careful as everyone is, someone is going to slip up occasionally and you're going to hear some rather unsavory things about being too young and inexperienced and having no clue what you're doing even though literally the entire reconstruction process is nearly complete and eulid stone makes Winterfell literally glow in the fucking sunset. You're also going to hear annoying things like how you're pretty for a Frey girl and how you're not a total failure for a Frey girl and how you dress nicely for a Frey girl and generally every other sort of surprised insult that ought to be taken as a compliment because people would not typically attribute such positive qualities to a Frey girl. There's only one way to deal with this sort of shit. Chew, swallow, digest. Just like bad meat, it'll pass through your system and you'll shit it out eventually, so just let it go. Starting a fight over a petty remark isn't going to help you any, and you can't afford to look catty when the whole kingdom is already searching for a reason to tell you that you can't do your fucking job. Chew, swallow, digest also works for the husband in question. Because Gods, does this guy like to rile you up.

Nights

When your husband is a king, it goes without saying that your nights are bad. When your husband is a young king, it goes without saying that your nights are terrible. When your husband is a young king with a record setting sex drive, it goes without saying that your nights are fucking catastrophic. Yeah, I'm sure any girl wouldn't mind climbing over this guy, but when the extent of your communication is skin and a fur lined bed, then it doesn't take long before you're praying for deliverance. It turns out that there is a flower whose seeds, when crushed, can be dropped into wine and actually stem the flow a little, which can buy you as many as two nights of peace a week. Unfortunately, he's still gonna snuggle up against you and stroke your hair and play with your hands and shit. Just close your eyes and pretend that you're asleep. Eventually he'll leave you alone. Keyword: eventually.

Bear in mind that you do have to fuck him. Being his wife and all—it's sort of required. This little rule is specifically for those queens of the north whose husbands go all night, every night like fucking rabbits.

Sleep

You will not sleep. Ever. Maybe you might in the first few days before it all sets in and the job actually starts, but once it's begun then it's over. You'll be taking sleeping draughts every night so you can get some shuteye before the sun peeks over the horizon and your maid is waking you up. This is inevitable. Go ahead and say you can sleep through the apocalypse. Sure, sure, I get that you do. For now. But once you're queen in the north, the apocalypse will sleep through you. Whatever that means. I'm not entirely sure because you see, I haven't slept through the night in a few months now.

Women

So kings are kings in the end, right? This crown that they wear on their heads gives them this stupid idea that they can fuck anything with a pulse. If your husband is a choosier type of guy, then you are either very lucky of very unlucky. If you ask me, I'd personally rather have a husband that sleeps with every girl he makes eye contact with than a husband who will bed only me and then whisper the name of a lost love in his sleep. Because it happens, you see. It'll happen the first time, and you'll sit on it because it might seem like an accident and you can let it slide. But then he does it again. And again. And now that you're aware of what he's dreaming about—who he's dreaming about—it's not exactly easy to pretend that you can sleep beside him at night. And once this door has been opened, you have to make a choice: speak up and keep him on his guard or hold your peace and continue to be called Talisa her name every night? The choice is yours, my apprentice queen.

Secrets

You will keep so fucking many. Whether it's about the lady love whose visit you covered up with the aid of your mother in law or the Kale flask you have hidden behind the loose stone in his study, there will be so many secrets to be kept. You will keep so many secrets and tell so many lies that you will not keep them straight anymore. So—like a senile old crone—you will have to write them down to keep them straight. I'm not fucking kidding. You will do this.

Comparisons Pt 1: Actions

So everyone is going to be comparing you to your mother in law, your sisters in law, your cousins in law, any relative in law they can find. Why? Because the in laws are family, familiar, accepted as a part of the gang. You, however, are not. You are the outlander, the foreigner, the freak from another dimension who has arrived to eat their brains/rule the realm. They will never say anything to your face. They are far too subtle for that. They will, however, be observing you very closely. And that can be manageable. It can be handled. What cannot be handled, however, is when the husband starts doing it, too. He's even more subtle, so watch out. He won't appear to be observing you when you're looking over a blueprint, or signing off on a design, or delegating stonemasons. But he will. He will be watching you like a fucking hawk. Like a hawk with really good eyesight. Early morning? The sun's not up yet? My wife might be asleep? She might not be interested in being woken up? What a perfect time to shake her awake and go for a ride through the crisp, winter air! And then once you're out there, groggy, exhausted, rubbing your eyes and inhaling air so cold that it might crystalize your lungs, clearly looking like the fact that you're on a horse is enough, why the fuck not suggest we race to the fucking tree line?! And if you've been paying attention, then you'll have followed rule 1. You'll have smiled and done it, and by this point he's smiling, to and by the way he's laughing you know—you just know—that this is the sort of thing he used to do with her. People compare you to his family, and that can be handled. But he compares you to her, and it's going to be a long while before you know what to do about that.

Comparisons Pt. 2: Suggestions

You know what I mean. "I like your hair. You should wear it down."

Um, you're not the one who has to deal with wearing it down.

If, like me, your hair falls thick and heavy, then sometimes it's easier to pull it into a ponytail or braid it out of your face. If you know that lost lady love used to wear her similarly colored hair down, then you pin it up.

Comparisons Pt 3: Subtlety

So maybe these other comparisons worked. Maybe you started wearing your hair down to shut him up about how nice it is. So maybe you've made the ungodly morning ride through the lung freezing-air a daily thing. So maybe he's winning. But it's not enough for him. You know it's not, and you know that because if it were then he would not have purchased a bottle of honeysuckle fragrance oil for you. If your husband is sneaky, then he'll have even gone the extra mile and placed it in your perfume cupboard so that it's right there for you to drip into your bath and you don't even notice that you've picked up the wrong bottle until you've dripped it into your custom made bathtub imported from Pentos worth an entire year's allowance. But of course by then you've already dripped it into the water, so you're stuck smelling like honeysuckle the entire day. He's full of compliments over how good you smell, as if there's anything wrong with the perfumes you used before. You're sour about this, but you've noticed a change in him because of it, which leads us straight to Comparison rule part four.

Comparisons Pt 4: Acceptance

So you want to pin your hair up again and you want to sleep through the sunrise again and you want to stop smelling like a fucking flower. Okay. Except that husband of yours is awfully finicky. He likes you the way you are—'the way you are' here being the person that he's slowly turning you into—and he doesn't think you should change a thing. He still crawls into bed with that predatory look in his eyes and you still have to poison him two nights a week to get some peace of mind. But the comparisons seem to stop when you're like this, so it's always better to just suck it up and keep moving. Don't be petty.

Love

Love is an emotion that most of us know very little about. If, like me, your heart is really just a mass of Valyrian steel, then it's something that you know virtually nothing about. But unfortunately, it's something that sort of matters in a marriage as I'm told. I'm also told that you tend to love your spouse over time. I suppose it'll come. Of course, I'm too early into the process myself to know much about handling it.

On the subject of love, you should be advised about the biggest challenge that your king in the north may present you with—the display of love. Once you start to remind him more and more of his lost lady love, he starts to get more touchy feely with you. And once he feels like you're adjusted to this, he will start to get touchy feely with you in public. He will place his hand on your ass in the hallway on his way to the council chamber. He will make out with you at the dinner table. He will stare at your cleavage and watch your hips as you walk and laugh at his drunk friends' dirty jokes in front of you and he will do these things in plain view of the entire palace and woe betide anyone who tries to stop him. And the people, being crude little mouth-breathers that they are, will find this amusing. He will follow you out of the great hall at night and you will hear the humorous laughs of everyone in there and he'll have his hands on your hips the entire way back to your room and you will want to poison him every night of the week, but because you are a team player and you know that that is immature, you let him get away with it as long as things don't get too nasty. You'll say it once or twice. Stop trying to dry hump me on the dinner table. He will not fucking listen. You can try to just stay in the great hall after dinner until he is too tired to actually fuck you, but it will not work. He will come take you by the hand and lead you the fuck out of there. No one will mind, and again, you will hear it. Frey Girl. That's an absolute. 'Of course she's going to keep him up all night, the Frey girl.' 'No, he's busy making babies with the Frey girl.' 'The Frey girl seems to have teased the Frey out in all of us. Let's go have a romp of our own, shall we?'

And they'll all saunter off and come morning, they'll be crediting you for instigating the world's largest orgy and the only person who won't be floating on clouds and rainbows and unicorns and smiles will be—guess who—you. This is where the line needs to be drawn. Yes, it is perfectly acceptable for your husband to want to rip your clothes off every time he looks at you. No, it is not acceptable for him to actually try or give the hint in front of people that he might. Or to have your ass tapped in public. Or to have your face sucked like plunger at the dinner table. Some would argue that it's embarrassing. I'm not shy about shit like this, but dammit, it isn't proper. The Frey girl is already hearing shitty preconceptions thanks to her father as it is. She doesn't need to add 'voyeurism' to the list.

About the author:

Israel Frey was born and raised at the Twins. She currently lives in Winterfell with her husband Robb and two savage wolves, a wild he-she horse and a falcon that likes to shit on people that piss it off.