munebox | Call me Out

"It wasn't a command."

Sansa stood. Her letter was forgotten, but she would return to it eventually. She could not wholly abandon the project to confirm the identity of Ramsay Bolton's bride, but it could be set aside for now in favour of tugging on a thick-carpet tassel attached to a bell in the castle's depths.

He shuffled and settled on watching.

"Right. Of course."

When the servant arrived, Gendry was taken away to another part of the keep. A basin was filled with hot water and he was given a brush to scrub himself with. He did his best to be quick about it, not wanting to impose any longer than he had. Besides that, he felt strange having servants tend to him. Who was he to get such treatment like that?

He felt as though they must have resented a lowborn being treated a someone of importance. They set out new clothes for him to wear. They were far from lordly, but they were clean. Plain dusty grey leggings and a blue tunic that might have once been a bright blue, but had faded with time. The boots were his own, but someone had cleaned the outside of them to make them presentable. Fortunately they'd been good boots already. He had procured them while with the Brotherhood, from a Frey who no longer had any use for them.

He felt a man again and though he was famished, he did not want to leave her waiting any longer. So after convincing a servant to take him to her, he set about his way through the Keep. Perhaps in time, he'd remember his way around. It wasn't nearly so big as Storm's End.

As strongholds went, the Eyrie was relatively small. Its narrow seven spires held little that was extraneous. At least, little that was extraneous to a lord. Perhaps the commonfolk might see it was lavish, but it was sparse when compared to the Red Keep. Even Winterfell had more to its girth and stonework, for it had the good fortune to stretch across otherwise empty land. The Eyrie's more impressive piece of architecture -- the Maiden's Tower -- was under the sole power of Alayne Stone. Her apartments there were large and lavish, including a dressing room and a private privy. But the real beauty was the stone balcony overlooking the entirety of the Vale.

Quite apart from such personal spaces, there was a small banqueting room for intimate dining. Or else for dining done in solitary should the lady of the castle ever choose not to sup in the High Hall. Considering it was only herself and Petyr who supped outside of the servants chambers, Sansa had been taking more of her meals in the Maiden's Tower. A token few were taken with Petyr, but on days where he was locked up with his own thoughts? She ate alone.

But not tonight. Tonight, she saw the room's fire lit to a furious heat. She ordered a runner taken out of storage and added to the narrow table. It had been a place of isolation before, but the demands of hosting a guess forced her to inject some life into the four walls. And she placed bread and salt on the table, fingertips lingering over the dish even as a servant cleared his throat at the door.

Sansa saw Gendry inside with little more than a tip of her hand. The servant did not leave them alone, but settled just beyond the small hall's door. "My Lord Father commands it," she explained even before a question was asked. Of course, they would require a chaperone. Their brief meeting in the library had been a rare and risky gift.

The scent of good food flooded his senses even as he was led up the tower. The servant had, when pressed, told him where they were heading and named it the Maiden's Tower. When he asked why it was named that, the servant only smiled.

He could guess what that meant. She'd best stay a maiden.

Gendry hadn't even needed to raise the question when he entered. His thoughts were on the food and realization they were alone. Mostly alone.

"Is this... is this for me?" He knew it was for her as well. But this was unlike anything he'd done before. Not he worried he was about to make a fool of himself. He had no idea how lords and ladies ate.

She may have been through her own kind of gauntlet, and she knew her own kind of hardship, but she had no inkling of how impressive even this modest spread was to a boy from Flea Bottom. Sansa had always understood that the common folk did not eat so lavishly, but even Winterfell did not eat as lavishly as the Red Keep. She never considered the difference might be even more disparate between her experience and his, still assuming he would have bread on his table and meat in his stew.

This table was graced with decidedly Northern tongue in mind: beef and bacon pie; honeyed chicken with roast leeks; baked apples; mulled wine. But the bread and salt held a place of prominence above these other dishes, and Sansa saw it as her duty to personally lift the plates and hold them out to Gendry in a solemn offering. She hoped he knew what he had to do; she hadn't considered how deep the tradition penetrated through the classes. The bread and salt were not necessary; he would eat regardless, and that would cover it. But it had been Petyr who had suggested she make the hospitality unmistakeable.

Approaching him with the guest right -- a few weeks too late, perhaps -- gave her the opportunity to see him scrubbed and de-grimed. What she assumed to be a Baratheon beneath all that dirt turned out to be a rather handsome Baratheon at that. A broad and reliable face, so wholesome when compared to sharp angles she'd once convinced herself she loved on Joffrey.

"I hope the water was to your liking. Not too cold."

Gendry, at first, do not realize what she was doing. Was she trying to serve him, personally? But after a moment, he gathered what this was. Bread... salt. By offering that, it meant she could do him no harm. In Fleabottom, it was much the same, though they could not always afford bread or salt. But once you offered a meal to a guest, it implied a certain level of honesty and trust.

Which is why it was so terrible what the Freys did to the Starts. What they did to Robb Stark. And to the Lady Stark...

Gendry felt a sudden chill and pushed that thought from his mind. He accepted the food and ate a bit, to signal that he was accepting her hospitality. It was a ritual he'd never explicitly taken a part of before. Even now, he was wary. After all, if the Freys could practice such treachery... and if his own uncle could be equally as treacherous with his sorceress...

He chewed and nodded with his satisfaction. "The water was very warm, m'lady. This food is good, too."

Edited 2013-12-10 04:17 (UTC)

Sansa smiled, albeit sadly. She had never presided over the offer of a guest right, before today. She had watched it happen time and time again, but she had never appreciated its promise and its function until the betrayal of that right robbed her of a brother and of a mother. And maybe more, besides. She had to quickly return the trays to the table, fearing that her fingers might tremble more.

"Sit. Eat. And more than just our salt, because the baked apples are a thousand times better than our salt." She wished they'd had lemon cakes, as well, but Petyr thought even that extravagence was too telling. She had to divorce Sansa entirely from her person, including her preferences.

She took her seat as though she was born to such easy actions. Gentle gestures.

After he sat, he was thinking more on the food than of who his company was and what was expected of him. He could never forget he was lowborn, but he could sometimes forget who he was around. And so, hungry, he began to collect food for his plate, using nothing but his own hands, as he had so often did in the past. It did not quite occur to him that anything would be wrong with this. He thought only of tastes he had never experienced before and a stomach that had nothing in it, save a bit of bread and salt and the gruel from yesterday.

Was his behaviour an example of her courtly ideal? Hardly. But then again, he wasn't entirely unlike certain noblemen at a grand feast. King Robert, certainly, could fill his plate just as lustily. And her brothers had never seen fit to skimp on their meals. Even so, Sansa wielded her knife and fork with grace.

A smarter woman would have had the foresight to warn Gendry not to overextend his appetite, for he'd been too long without regular meals and was likely to make himself sick. A smarter woman would have asked the kitchens to prepare something blander, and more easily digested. But hunger was a hell she'd never known.

After she had allowed him to eat in peace for a solid five or ten minutes, she spoke -- leaning forward to reach for her mulled wine. "Do you suppose it's terribly selfish of me to be glad you were captured?"

Each flavor was an incredible experience for him. Even the foods that he recognized were different, as they were peppered with spices his tongue had never experienced before. He would not be content until he had tasted all of it. And even though the wine was not as good as what the sorceress had served him, it was miles ahead of the mead he had drank in taverns along his long and hard road. It was good she spared him conversation, because he greedily ate the food as if he might never eat again.

The thought did cross his mind that such a thing might be true.

Her question caught him off guard entirely. "... I'm not sure. I don't know why you came to talk to me in the first place. Much less bring me all the way up here."

As he did not phrase his words into a question, she chose not to answer them. Not directly, at least.

"King Joffrey is dead." There was nothing special about it; everyone knew. It was common knowledge. "My Lord Father says the Seven Kingdoms will not gladly suffer a child on the Iron Throne during this...chaotic time."

Petyr had bred such delight into that very word: chaotic.

Gendry set his goblet of wine back on the table. He dared not look at her, so his eyes settled on his empty plate instead. She had entertained such thoughts before, but he still found the idea absurd. Beyond consideration.

"... I'm no king, m'lady. Not even a prince. Even if the people won't suffer King Tommen, there is still my- his uncle, Lord Stannis."

Petyr had even less flattering things to say about Stannis. All Sansa knew was the terror he inspired in King's Landing during the Blackwater.

"For now." The two words almost sounded like a threat against the other Baratheon, but Sansa only spoke them because she knew Gendry was right. The obstacles were insurmountable, and she could only drum up platitudes. "Even without the crown, something could be yours. You may not have birthright, but you have blood. It's been done before; Ramsay Snow holds Winterfell and he..."

She trailed off. What, exactly, was she offering him? Petyr had always said that she was the key to the North. That the Arya sent to Winterfell wasn't Arya at all, and that it was her marriage which would clinch the title of Warden of the North. Currently, that pleasure went to an absentee imp. But with patience and luck, Tyrion Lannister might find himself dead at his sister's hand. And she would be free to...

To what? Hand Winterfell over to Robert's bastard? It would be action, albeit one with little forethought.

"He's a bastard," Gendry said bluntly. "They say the Lord Commander of the Wall is a bastard as well." And our king as well.

"Even if I was the only one of the blood left, that would mean there's no kings left. I thought only a King could raise a bastard. That's how it worked for Ramsay, isn't it?"

Gendry would rarely omit a Lord from the title of his better. But Ramsay was a Bolton and the Brotherhood did not show any love for them. They deserved none. And besides that, as bastards went, Ramsay was even less notable than he was. I have king's blood. He has only a turncloak's blood.

Her gaze fell. She had to confess: "I'm uncertain as to how it works. All I do know is that everything is changing; nothing works the way it was supposed to. Not any longer."

The whole conversation made her reconsider Jon. She never hated her father's bastard, but she had always been cognizant of the fact that Jon brought shame onto her family. He remained separate because of it. But now she was sitting across a table from another bastard, pretending to be a bastard all on her own. Perhaps she should learn how it all worked, since she was supposed to be the very sort of person she professed to know nothing about.

Calmly: "I will have to ask Mya when she next visits."

He felt strangely uncomfortable. His identity had plagued him for over a year now, ever since he first left King's Landing. When the sorceress had taken him to Storm's End, his mind had entertained the idea that perhaps Stannis had some great use for him. That he might be acknowledged and made family.

That had never happened, of course. And his comrades in the Brotherhood had jested about 'King Gendry' enough to sour him to any thoughts of rising beyond his lowly birth.

So he focused on something else. "Mya?"

"You would have been accompanied on the trek up the mountain by a tall woman. Pretty, if only she would dress like a girl. Mya Stone...she..."

Was there any delicate way to put this? Sansa frowned. She groped for some coded way to tell him the truth. "In some ways, she looks just like you..."

He recalled this woman well enough, though he'd not spoken to her, being bound in chains at the time. In truth, he'd given her little attention at all Though she had been pretty. He did see that in her.

But he frowned, not quite grasping her meaning. "Should I be offended? Or should she?"

Edited 2013-12-10 05:25 (UTC)

"I hope neither of you would be." Sansa sliced through the crisp skin of her honeyed chicken. "Mya is your sister, Gendry."

"She's my sister?" He stared, unbelieving. He had only started to come to grips with the idea he had royal siblings. Ones that would want him dead, at that. But now a bastard sister as well...

"Did she know?"

"Maybe she's always known. No one treats it as news, here."

"But she led me here, anyway. I would have rotted in that cell if not for you. And she..."

Whenever I do get family, they turn on me in the end. The Brotherhood, Stannis, and now my sister. Would Arya have done the same?

"And she asked me to go to you."

Sansa supplied the end of his sentence with a sweetened ease. In a perverse way, she could feel her confidence growing. Was this how Queen Cersei felt at her own table, lording over all the news and conversation of the evening? She had demonstrated such control; Sansa had always been intimidated by it. Perhaps control came from the walls around you, and the Eyrie granted her some modicum of it.

That humbled him nearly instantly. His bitterness had grown think in the last few months, ever since his escape from Storm's End. Encouraged by the anger of the Brotherhood's own broken and hurt soldiers, he had fostered a resentment for the outside world. He'd grown to hate Lords and Ladies, despise kin that turned against their own. His own uncle had been named a kinslayer by some, by those who believe he murdered his own brother. The previous king and his hand were killed by the same man, now a kinslayer on the run. And for half a moment, he thought Mya might have been the same, even if only by choosing to turn an eye away from his plight.

He recalled that stupid boy he'd been back on the Street of Steel. He'd made himself a horned helmet, fancying that he'd one day wear it and earn some sort of acclaim beyond a smith's life. But now he was nothing more than a bitter fugitive, whom half the country wanted dead simply because his drunken father was a faithless womanizer who stuck himself into his whore of a mother.

Gendry saw predators everywhere and even now with Alayne, he found himself constantly watching her for her true intentions. Nobody was this nice. Nobody was this generous. And we bastards are the most treacherous of all.

"My apologies, m'lady. I didn't realize."

"I am not the one who deserves your apology."

Her words grew thick. Obscure. She had herself dismissed Mya a little too harshly upon first arriving in the Vale. Old habits died hard, and she was having trouble associating with anyone's bastard child, despite purporting to be one. Without Mya, she doubted she would have ever had the courage of conviction to seek out Gendry.

"Not that she would want it. An apology. She lives...rather rough. Apologies seem to be the least of her worries." But this was not the point she wanted to make by introducing Mya into the conversation. "My Lord Father tells me King Robert once hoped to bring her to King's Landing."

He knew about her; he loved her, in his own way. He could have loved you.

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