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Storm Untamed
The Trident
Life could always surprise one, they had both learned it young, kept learning it again and again. Life had taken Orys from the fish in broths, fish in stew, roasted fish, fish that was not sufficient to keep him fed from time to time to the most magnificent evening feasts of so many courses that he had no physical ability and certainly no desire to taste them all; from the small wooden barrack where winds howled in vengeance, making the wood rattle, to the dragon castle and then a castle of his own. A peasant boy and a warrior-to-be, a powerful lord and Hand of the King – he had played all the parts.
"You weren't a pawn of the Seven," Argella would say because what she couldn't say was, "You don't owe it all to Aerion and Aegon." He would never believe her, the memories of his childhood as vivid as ever, and it would only lead to new arguments, with him going on the defensive for himself, for them. A them Argella was no part of. "You carved your own fate," she'd say because this, he could believe. How he could believe both things at once, she could not fathom, but believe both he did. He did not see the contradiction. Over the years, her desire to make him arrive at the light had reached feverish levels as her affection for him grew and their marriage no longer felt like the chains it had been in the beginning. Or perhaps she had come to love being chained? Anyway, when he asked, "What's the purpose, Argella? To stop being grateful? What will it help? Will it unmake me your father's murderer?", to this, she had no answer but at least she realized that there was contradiction! More than what could be said for her lord husband!
As to the way life had surprised her, the winding roads it had taken her – about this, she liked not to think about and Orys did not press her. Perhaps he was afraid that if he pressed her the way she pressed him, what would come out would be ugliness. Ugliness that he could not live with. "Out of the two of us, you're the more courageous one, I sometimes think," he told her more than once and she did not disagree but it no longer filled her with the contempt she had once felt, those first few times when she had seen him as human and fallible.
Death could always surprise one, it came out now. After two times of hundred years, they did learn something new about themselves. "Isn't this what you wanted from me?" Argella asked bitingly, her grudging tolerance for Orys' ridiculous loyalty to the Targaryens finally having reached its limit in the face of the last, greatest insult the dragon kings had dealt their House. After Steffon and Cassana had died in their quest to provide a worthy match for Rhaegar Targaryen, worthy in Aerys' eyes, that was it; in Argella's, the first half-mad peasant along the road would do, as it had for Duncan the Small, he had deemed taking Lord Baratheon's betrothed the greatest idea of all. "Has he learned nothing from the Lyonel moment?" Orys had asked, astounded. "Does he not fear the consequences? Does he not fear us?" The last bit had been certainly better than his reaction to any of the offences House Baratheon had suffered but unfortunately, Argella was in no mood to appreciate his progress. At this speed, he'd say something uncharitable about the Targaryens in another two times of hundred years if not four!
"Isn't this what you wanted from me?"
They would happily leave this damned tower in the midst of nothing and that was about the greatest thing they had in common right now. Neither of them wanted to be here, in Dorne, of all places, watching Lyanna Stark sway between cursing Rhaegar and weeping for him to come back because she loved him and he was not to blame… Argella could sympathize with the girl's grief for her dead father and brother because it was no doubt genuine and at the same time, with her love for the man who was going to war against her remaining brothers because she had come to love her father's murderer as well… and at the same time, she wanted to reach down, shake her and yell at her to bloody choose a side and decide who she was weeping for! Of course, she couldn't but at least she could rant and rage at Orys who was equally undecided… and he could hear her.
"Did I want you to weep for me?" he snapped back. "Oh yes, I did… You could have learned some things about love and loyalty from her, my lady."
This was so irrational that Argella lost her speech. Love and loyalty? Learn them from the girl who had shirked her duty and loyalties without bothering to inform the parties involved what she had done? Who was still undecided whom she was loyal to? He cannot mean it, she thought and then realized that he well could. He had always been torn between his love for her that naturally led him to want to align his values with her and this terrible, enslaving gratitude to the Targaryens for not leaving him to live his life as a fisherman. As they had left their bastards for generations! And this parallel led him into condoning the deliberate offence the blasted girl had dealt their House.
"I can see why you think so," she said coldly when she finally found her voice again. "And you could leave something about those from Rhaegar Targaryen, I suppose. I can't think of a better way to prove your love to someone than leave your wife for them practically in the birthing bed."
That had been one of the things Rhaegar Targaryen had said trying to calm the girl down, after all. That he had left his wife and children to be with her. Argella had seen the insincerity but she couldn't say what it was. Amazingly, Lyanna Stark seemed to have grasped it as well because she had flown at him screaming once again.
This last blow hit home. It had been in the aftermath of their second child's birth, when she had been tossed this way and that between life and death when it had been his name that she had been calling. Not her father's. Not the betrothed who had died along with King Argillac. His. This confession that despite his weakness, despite her being the mentor in ruling and the stability he clung to after his return from Dorne, despite the weaknesses he had shared with her as they lay on one pillow, she did consider him her protector. The one who could save her, although, of course, at the end she had been the one to save herself. That had been the first time he had known for sure that he was in her heart, not her practical mind.
"I wouldn't have liked it if you had been like her," Orys finally said and Argella glanced at him, surprised, to be met with his own surprise. Orys had wanted her love from the very beginning… but now, faced with the confused, frustrated love, clinging to it and denying it of a strong, yet so vulnerable girl, he realized that he had had it better – a stable progression from hatred, distrust, and practicality to fragile truce, peace, broken heart being slowly mended and opening to him just as slowly, despite the scarlet veins of scars that never faded. In all his longing for his new lady wife's loyalty of the heart, he had never stopped to think what it would have meant to her, them. How it would have changed her. How he could have never trust such love to be constant and not underpinned with remorse and hatred.
Argella was once again staring the girl, pity and anger battling across her face. "You little fool," she said softly but her sympathy was quickly gone when she remembered that it was her House Lyanna Stark had spat upon without thinking twice, the House that she had started building with hatred and reluctance, to finally put her life and blood into it. But her anger towards the Prince was much greater. How many times had he thought the Targaryens could demand of House Baratheon to put up with their offences? Did he think her descendants his slaves, for all that the slavery had been extinguished in Westeros? Aegon had certainly thought this way about Orys! Worse, Orys himself had worn his chains happily, imagining that a benign master was better than him being free…
"Yes," Orys agreed, taking her hand. "A little fool she is. The bigger fool will be made to realize his folly soon enough."
Argella smiled. "She wouldn't have been a good Lady of the Stormlands anyway," she said, pleased enough to be able to think rationally. "Robert needs reining in and someone to keep pushing him in the right direction. Do not let his charm deceive you. He's inefficient and he'll stay this way if left to his own devices."
But of course, Orys would not be deceived by this kind of charm. He had been unrelentlessly loyal to a man who had had none of that.
"She would have kept him company riding and circling around the Stormlands and the rest of the realm," he agreed and remembered how he had yearned for those things when Argella had taken him to their educational trips. For years. But at the end, he had emerged a competent lord. Perhaps it was not bad that this child would never be the Lady of the Stormlands now. Two people too preoccupied with their pleasures were more than his lands – he was still ready to make everyone who dared claim they weren't his a head shorter – could take.
Which did not justify the insult, of course. This last offence. Last for now, that was it. As he watched the two armies on their respective sides of the river, he could only shake his head. Had no one told the boy that leaving the unminted warriors behind was a sure way to summon defeat if at any moment the battle turned against them? Leaving them in the rear meant giving them more chances to flee. Or perhaps he had been told and he didn't listen. Of course, there was a chance that no one had dared or even known because a seasoned battle commander like the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard had been left behind to guard the Northern girl from… whom? The rebels, on the contrary, had made the best of their more limited numbers. Orys would not have expected less from men seasoned in battles as he knew they were. Robert stood out, tall and imposing, a king in all but name. Just by looking at him, Orys would have thought that he'd be the victor… but he had thought the same about an old king long time ago and he had emerged from the battle with not only the king's life but the king's daughter as well.
"What's going to happen now?" Argella asked, voice uncertain. Even in their first months together, when she had been so carefully polite that he could feel her contempt for his ineptitude of ruling, she had valued his knowledge of battles. Causing death.
"I don't know," he said honestly but when he saw the Targaryen, a presuming boy in a man's body, riding towards Robert, he knew. A giant against a man. A warhammer against sword. Had no one in the Red Keep ever taught Rhaegar Targaryen to assess chances? He'd fall. His army would scatter. Orys didn't need to watch in order to know that.
"Is this the Targaryen code of honour?" Argella hissed. "He robbed him and now he's trying to kill him? That's what the Targaryens had always inflicted on us – pain and death, and dishonour!"
Orys could object that as ill-advised as Rhaegar's actions were, they were hardly governed by any wish to inflict further harm on Robert. He had rationally arrived at the conclusion that killing the Lord of the Stormlands would saw confusion amidst his more seasoned warriors… and here, his rationality ended. But he felt no inclination to point it out. The anger that he had always gathered in him to unleash against those who opposed Aegon was now building up, aimed at Aegon's descendant, against all the wrongs over the years that he had tried so hard not to see. And when Rhaegar fell and Argella let out a victorious cry, he smiled. And didn't tug his hand out of hers, although she was squeezing it so had that there was blood trickling under her nails.
"We won," Argella breathed, forgetting for a moment that a man who was not good enough for the Stormslands could hardly be good enough for a realm where Orys felt sure Robert would end up.
He took a deep gulp of air, if the action of a ghost could be called so, and the air felt different. More… free. Unscented by a stalwart loyalty and everlasting gratitude for having been benevolently used. He could now think of Aegon, his half-sisters, and their father simply with love.
Argella's smile engulfed her entire face. She let go off his hand but she looked no less victorious than Robert. He could almost hear her voice, "Aegon Targaryen, I deprived you of something you held dear just as you did to me."
The End
