Chapter 14: Edric
Starfall
There were three things that Ned liked particularly about being home.
The first was the wind. He was not one for the stand-still cold of winter, but if you put him on top of the Palestone Sword as the sun was setting, when not even a windbreaker could keep the air whisking past him at bay, he felt shivers in his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. The second was the sunshine. It got cloudy in Oldtown, which had the same weather patterns of the Reach. A true Dornishman, Ned hated cloudy days with a vengeance. Even if Starfall was on the very edge of Dorne, it was still bright all the time, and he liked it that way. The last was dawn. Ned assumed it had something to do with being so high in the mountains, but dawn was more brilliant at home than it was at school. The red light spilling over purple ridges alone was enough to make him realize why the first Daynes had chosen purple as their house color all those thousands of years before.
Ned was sitting atop the Palestone Sword at dawn, thinking about how perfect it was to be home, doing his best to forget that he'd spent most of the night sitting with Allyria while she tried not to cry into his shoulder.
It was hardest when she tried not to cry.
He could forget it all if he was up on the spire, though.
His great uncle had forbidden him from going up the Palestone Sword when he was a kid. He didn't want little Ned falling off, and was haunted by the niece who had leapt. When he was fourteen, Ned had climbed the circling staircase for the first time, his heart in his throat and, when the wind buffeted him so much that his fingers almost froze and fell off, he found he wasn't afraid.
It was a place for bravery, a place for comfort, a place for peace.
Gods he needed that now.
He wished he were at the fencing tournament. Sparring with Dacey or competing against some twit from the Vale would at least make him feel like he was doing something for the good of others (in that case, the good of Oldtown's fencing reputation).
Allyria smiled whenever she saw him, but he didn't think that his presence was making anything better.
That was the hardest.
There had been a time when just being near Allyria would make her seem happier than before. When she had come home from University to visit him, to laugh and talk about Beric Dondarrion and love and parties and friends, he felt that his being near her made everything perfect.
He didn't know how to handle the fact that that wasn't the case. How being with her didn't make her happier, it just made her marginally less sad.
She never came up here with him. He used to hate it, that this was the one place he couldn't share with her and the one place where he felt so vividly alive. But Allyria remembered Ashara and how she died and refused to climb even so much as halfway up the stairs.
He'd brought Marta up twice. The first time, Marta had been terrified, scared that she would fall or that he would. But he had held onto her tight and buried his face in her neck and pointed to different points along the Dornish coastline. The second time, Marta had given him a blow job, and when he came, he had been scared that he would lose his balance and they would both topple away. They didn't though.
He wondered briefly where Marta was, what she was doing. Their breakup had been amicable, logical, but they had not maintained even so much as a semblance of contact. He hadn't seen her since he had left for Oldtown and she had headed east to Sunspear and only thought about her when he was at his loneliest.
He yawned and pulled out his phone, checking his email.
Service was crap on top of the tower, where the castle's wifi couldn't reach him and the mobile network was shoddy because of the mountains. But he didn't feel like descending back into reality just yet. And he wasn't quite exhausted enough for bed.
To:
From:
Subject: Starfall
Hello,
The Ballroom Dancing team is going to be doing an invitational and workshop at the Starfall School sometime during the second week of break. We'll be staying over in town. Want to grab a meal/tea(/coffee)?
-Sansa
He smiled.
No, smiling was an understatement. But grinning would be an overstatement. It was something in between. Something that he suspected looked remarkably goofy.
Something about Sansa Stark brought this goofy-smile-thing to his face whenever he thought about her. Or spoke to her.
Last semester, he had thought that he had fancied Arya, who was feistiness and fire. Arya, who made him laugh and forget that everything had fallen apart around him, and who told him he was stupid. Yet she had not been what he had wanted in the end. She had not wanted him, she had not needed him, and Ned had realized that he did not like being superfluous—at least not to the person he wanted to date. He had thought that was that and had gone so far as to settle into an even friendship with Arya, even befriended her sister.
And now, though he had told himself not to, he couldn't help wondering if he didn't fancy Sansa.
No. He didn't wonder. He knew. Damn it all.
She probably didn't want anything to do with him—at least, not that way. She probably just wanted a friend, someone who wasn't Joffrey to make her laugh.
Well, he could do that. He was used to being someone a broken girl could rely on.
He leaned his head against the spire again, and did his best not to think of Allyria as broken. She was, of course, but it undid him just a tad to make him think that he couldn't put her back together.
He didn't want to think about putting Allyria back together. It scared him that it might be impossible.
Then, he thought of Sansa again, and hope filled his heart. He remembered Arya at the end of last semester—a mess because her sister was in the hospital, because her sister had had a giant panic attack. He remembered wondering if Arya would also have someone broken to take care of.
But Sansa had pulled together remarkably well. Admittedly, the cause of her whatever-it-was was different from Allyria's but maybe…
He sighed.
He really should know better than to be hopeful about Allyria.
He hoped that she was sleeping now (she didn't sleep enough), but she probably wasn't. She was probably staring out her window at the sea.
He looked back at his phone, at Sansa's email.
He'd reply later, savor the contact. He didn't have to do it now. And besides, typing emails on his phone was a bitch and a half.