Chapter 3: and who are you, the proud lord said, that I must bow so low?
"Take care that your son does not grow to be more dragon than stag, brother."
"I amnota dragon, or a stag. I'm a boy," Steffon protested.
"My son will grow to be his own man."
"Must a stag bow to the dragon, always?" challenged Harbert. "Our lord father did not believe so."
For days and days after his return from King's Landing, Steffon delighted in regaling everyone in Storm's End with various tales of his Targaryen relations. It seemed almost miraculous to a boy who previously had known 'family' to consist only of his mother, his father, and his uncle Harbert, to suddenly be surrounded by various uncles, aunts and cousins; not to mention a grandmother and a grandfather who were flesh and blood and living, not merely stories and remembrances sketched out by the sons they had left behind. (For how could memory - and somebody else's memory at that - ever hoped to compete with the real thing, in the eyes of a child?)
Uncle Harbert, however, was noticeably less than eager to hear Steffon's myriad tales. He pretended not to hear, when the boy prattled on about this uncle or that cousin. He would claim that an urgent task was awaiting him, when Steffon endeavored to query him about how well he had known Uncle Daeron. (Uncle Daeron had mentioned being in the lists with Uncle Harbert at various tourneys over the years, and had asked to be remembered to Steffon's uncle from the Baratheon side.) He even went so far as to walk away, abruptly, when Steffon started describing his Targaryen grandfather, sitting regally on the Iron Throne.
It all came to a head during supper, one night, when Uncle Harbert had been drinking heavily, downing one goblet of wine after another, sitting silent and tight-lipped while the conversation went on around him.
"Take care that your son does not grow to be more dragon than stag, brother," Harbert finally spoke, his voice dangerously low, his eyes scrutinizing his brother's face, interrupting Steffon's long recitation of all the food they had been served during the feast in King's Landing. (The spun sugar treats, shaped to imitate the dragon skulls hanging on the walls of the throne room, had particularly delighted Steffon. "I ate three dragons!" Steffon declared, emphasizing the number with his waving fingers.)
"My son will grow to be his own man," Ormund replied, returning his brother's gaze with a sharp glance of his own.
"I am not a dragon, or a stag. I'm a boy," Steffon protested.
Ormund laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh. A laugh to deflect the tension palpable in the room, rather than one of true merriment.
Addressing his nephew, Harbert said, "You will not be a boy forever, lad. It is time you learn that the dragons are too high and mighty for the likes of us. Common stags are never good enough for those glorious and special creatures." Turning to his brother, Harbert continued, "Even our elder sister was not good enough for them, glorious and awe-inspiring as she had always been in our eyes."
Her voice soft, but still sounding very determined, Rhaelle reminded her good-brother, "This Targaryen married a Baratheon."
"Because you had to," Harbert scoffed. "If you had been given the chance to get out of the betrothal, you would have done so, like all your other siblings with their trails of broken betrothals. But sadly for you, good-sister, our lord father had learned his lesson by then. He knew better than to put his faith and his trust on Targaryen's promise, on Targaryen's word of honor."
His face red, Ormund declared, through gritted teeth and clenched jaw, "That is the Lady of Storm's End you are addressing. A princess of the blood. My lady wife. Your good-sister. Apologize, now."
"Must a stag bow to a dragon, always?" challenged Harbert. "Our lord father did not believe so."
"Our lord father was the reason we are in this mess in the first place," Ormund snapped. "If King Aegon had been a different kind of king, had been altogether a more ruthless man, House Baratheon could have been wiped out of existence after Father's failed rebellion. Death is the punishment for treason. Have you forgotten that? Our heads stuck on pikes, decorating the Red Keep, is that your wish?"
Harbert set down his wine goblet on the table with a loud thud. "Father's loyalty and leal service to King Aegon had never been in doubt before Prince Duncan dishonored our sister!"
"Even so, a rebellion is still a rebellion," Ormund countered. "There is a price to be paid, for everything. And we have been paying it for years. We are still paying it now, all of us, your good-sister included."
"Father was twice the man you could ever hope to be, brother," Harbert proclaimed.
It happened so fast; Steffon's father standing up, his hand reaching out to slap Uncle Harbert's cheek. Steffon was too shocked to make a sound. For a moment, Uncle Harbert looked as if he might retaliate, his fist clenched tight, his face flushed red, but it was Steffon's mother who put herself between the two Baratheon brothers.
"What would your lady mother think, if she could see you now?" Rhaelle asked. "How much grief would this have caused her, to see her sons coming to blows, to see the boys she raised so lovingly so at odds with each other?"
Uncle Harbert dropped his raised fist, opened his mouth as if he was preparing to speak, but then he walked out of the room abruptly, before any word could come out from his mouth.
Mother's hand was on Father's shoulder. "Ormund," she said, just the one word, and nothing else.
"Take Steffon to his room," Father said, not meeting Mother's eyes.
When Mother hesitated, looking as if she was unwilling to leave Father alone, Father said, "Rhaelle. Please."
Steffon was the only one still sitting down, staring at his plate, not daring to look up in case the tears pooling in his eyes would fall down his cheeks. He had never seen Father so angry before. He had seen Uncle Harbert losing his temper quite a few times, true, but always with other people, never with Father. And he had never heard Uncle Harbert talking to Mother in that sneering, unpleasant voice before.
Mother held out her hand, and Steffon reached for it wordlessly. They walked out of the room quietly, Steffon holding on tightly to his mother's hand. He glanced back, once, just the once, to see his father sitting down heavily, his head in his hands.
Back in his room, Mother handed Steffon to Dalla, telling her in a distracted voice, "Put him to bed, quickly. He has had too much excitement tonight."
Mother kissed Steffon on both cheeks, and she was about to turn and leave the room, when Steffon tugged at her hair, beckoning her closer, whispering, "Is Uncle Harbert angry because I was talking too much about my other uncles? I talked about him to Uncle Daeron, and to Grandfather. Grandfather said he used to bounce Uncle Harbert on his knees when Uncle Harbert was a babe. But Uncle Harbert did not want to hear anything about that, when I tried to tell him. I haven't forgotten about him, just because I have met those other uncles."
Mother sighed, one hand busy smoothing Steffon's hair, the other clenching the sheet. "It is not your fault, Steffon."
"Then whose fault is it?"
"The gods, probably," Mother muttered, quietly, under her breath, but Steffon heard her nonetheless. "Perhaps it is better not to mention your trip to King's Landing, when Uncle Harbert is around," Mother continued, in her normal voice this time.
Steffon nodded. He would have been willing to say anything – or not say anything, in this case – to avoid seeing Father and Uncle Harbert acting the way they did tonight.
His father and Uncle Harbert were both absent at breakfast the next morning. "Lord Ormund rode for Blackhaven not long after dawn, Your Grace," Maester Cressen told Steffon's mother, when he was summoned.
"My lady, Maester. Here, in this castle, I am the Lady of Storm's End, not a princess of House Targaryen." After a pause, Rhaelle asked, "Did Ser Harbert ride out with him?"
"No, my lady. Lord Ormund took only a few household knights and men-at-arms with him. Ser Harbert is in the training yard. Do you wish to summon him, my lady?"
"No," Rhaelle swiftly replied. "I will leave him to his tasks. And you too, Maester."
Cressen took the hint and quickly departed.
Recalling his mother's words the night before, Steffon asked, "What was Father's lady mother like? Was she like you, Mother?"
Steffon had been told how his Baratheon grandmother and grandfather died. "My mother caught a fever, and my father would not leave her side throughout her illness. They died within three days of one another," Steffon's father had told him.
He had been told that Lord Lyonel and Lady Shireen were cousins, that they had known each other all their lives, having been born only seven days apart. His father and his uncle Harbert had spoken of their lady mother often, more often that they spoke of their lord father, certainly; but before last night, Steffon could not remember hearing his mother ever talking about her good-mother.
"She was not like me at all, Lady Shireen. She always had a smile on her face, even when she was angry, or even when she was sad. Especially when she was angry, in truth," Rhaelle replied.
"Was she fond of you?"
"I don't know. She was not an easy woman to read, or to know, in truth. She was never unkind to me. She never had a sharp word to say to me, and she tried to protect me as best she could, but I do not know if that was due to fondness, or because she thought it was her duty. Either way, I was grateful to her, but I could not claim that I knew her at all, or that she ever truly knew me in return."
"She protected you? From what?" Steffon asked.
Ignoring Steffon's question, Rhaelle said instead, "She loved her children, of that I am certain. She loved her husband, and was beloved by him in return. Their marriage reminded me of my own mother and father, and their marriage. Strange, to think that Ormund and I came from these people, from these marriages. And yet –" here she broke abruptly, aware of having said too much, but she was relieved to find that her son was no longer paying attention to her words, too busy arranging the pieces of bread on his plate to resemble a dragon skull.
Later that morning, when Steffon was playing monsters and maidens with Dalla's two youngest children, Alla and Allard, he caught a glimpse of his mother and Uncle Harbert, standing in the garden, talking quietly with solemn expressions on both their faces. (Alla was the only girl, so she should have been the maiden, but she was the oldest and the biggest of the three children, and always insisted that she had to be the monster doing the chasing, every time they played the game.)
Hiding from Alla behind an overgrown bush, Steffon overheard scraps of conversation between his mother and his uncle.
Uncle Harbert was apologizing to Steffon's mother. Why he had not done this last night, when Steffon's father had told him to do so, was a mystery to the boy. Father would not have slapped you, if you said you were sorry, Uncle.
"Do you hate them still?" Rhaelle asked. Then, amending her question, she asked, "Do you hate us still?"
"I never hated you. You were an innocent, as much a pawn as my sister had been. How could I hate you? What kind of monster would that make me?"
"Yet when you see me being the Lady of Storm's End, this woman with Targaryen blood flowing in her, sitting where your lady mother used to sit -"
"You have been the Lady of Storm's End these past six years, since the day you recited your wedding vows, since the day my brother draped that Baratheon cloak over your shoulders. I have never begrudged you that, not for a moment, despite my rash and harsh words last night. It is not about that at all."
"Then what is it really about?"
Harbert's reply was jumbled and disorderly, full of pauses and incomplete phrases. "Steffon … the thought of Steffon so amazed to be surrounded by all those happy and flourishing Targaryens, when we, all of us - even you, Rhaelle - when we had been … when we have been so … for so long … how could they live so freely, so happily, with such easy conscience, as if nothing had happened?"
Her hand grazing her good-brother's palm, Rhaelle said, "I do know how you feel, for I feel it too, in my bones. But things are not always what they seem, Harbert. They have their own sorrow." She paused, before adding, carefully, "And your brother has his own sorrow."
Sighing heavily, Harbert said, "I did not mean it, truly, what I said about Ormund being less of a man than our father. But he infuriated me so, when he spoke of our dead father in that manner."
"You might not have meant it, but he believed it nonetheless."
"Oh surely he knows his own brother better than that! Surely he knows how prone I am to uttering rash words, when I am in my cups," Harbert protested.
"The trouble is, he half-believes it about himself. And his own brother saying it out loud only confirms it for him."
Harbert shook his head violently. "No, you are wrong, good-sister. You could not be more wrong. Ormund has always been convinced that our father behaved in a reckless manner when he declared himself the Storm King, that Father had put pride before sound judgment, had endangered the safety of his family and gambled with the fate of House Baratheon for the sake of his fury. Ormund would have done things differently in the same situation, with caution and restraint foremost in his mind, and he would have been convinced that his way - not Father's way - was the right way. Why would he think of himself as being less of a man than our lord father, if he believes that Father had been in the wrong?"
"Because a son might disagree with his father's actions, might even go so far as to doubt the father's sound judgment, while still caring deeply – perhaps too much – about what his father thought of him, while still fearing that his father had found him wanting, a grave disappointment as a son," Rhaelle pointed out.