Work Text:
An overcast sky hung over King's Landing. The misting drizzle had led most of the lords and ladies of the court to sequester themselves in their lodgings, afraid to soil their bejeweled and delicate finery. For this very reason, Deidre was all the more determined to venture out.
After over a year returned to court, she still felt the walls of the Red Keep suffocated her—even worse now than in the days of her girlhood. Now that her eyes had been opened, the stillness of the dead stone bore down upon her, and the constant broken whispers of a thousand scheming upstarts in her dreams drove her to the edge of madness. Alys had told her she would learn to drown the noise out in time, just as a babe learns to walk, or a bird learns to sing. Yet her patience was running thin.
With a blessedly undisturbed morning for once, when neither the princess nor queen had summoned her, and with her husband Samwell off to attend his duties with her father, the Hand of the King, Deidre decided to take the twins and hide away in the gardens before their rare solitude was interrupted.
She dressed in a plainer gown, one of blue cotton in the Riverlands style that might be frowned upon should she wear it while attending her official duties. Since the twins had found their feet and could now toddle about on their own, she dismissed their nurse to have time alone with her babes. A blanket slung over her arm, she slipped out to the gardens with little notice, Tristan calmly plodding beside her, grasping her hand tight, while she had to call out several times for Dyana to slow down as she ran ahead of her mother, giggling.
They waded through the colorful flowers and past the fruit trees of Rhaenys’ garden, and Deidre chased the children under the skirts of willows and wisteria in Visenya’s gardens, before she led them to the heart of the Godswood and spread the blanket at the foot of the Heart Tree. Then, nestled amongst the roots of the weirwood, Dyana and Tristan fell asleep in each other’s arms while Deidre quietly drew in her notebook. The misting rains had left them all a bit damp, but in the balmy summer climate, it helped to keep them cool.
Deidre sketched her twins, taking a rare moment to soak in the small details of their faces in slumber. She traced out the shape of her nose scrunched up on Tristan’s and the telltale signs of her high cheekbones on Dyana’s. She drew her son’s eyes, a copy of hers, from memory, and Dyana’s thick braid, already long for a child her age. Her stomach clenched when she shaded in the ebony of her daughter’s mane though, and traced the soft curl to her son’s hair and his gentle smile. Dyana’s dark eyes and olive complexion showed her Dornish heritage plain, and Tristan’s curls hung far too loose to come from the Strongs. Traces of their father stared back at her every day, reminded her of the choices she’d made, the life she had sentenced them to, as children of the Rivers with no true family name, all for the sake of some whispered doom she still could not fully comprehend.
She had to put aside her charcoal as her throat grew thick, wiping at her eyes to prevent any tears from falling. She could not and would not cry over the path she had chosen for herself. Deidre reached behind her and splayed her hand on the weirwood trunk she leaned against, drawing strength from the gods that dwelled within. Her babes looked so small and helpless now, in their sleeping huddle near her skirts, but they would do great things—the gods had shown her so.
She felt his presence before she heard the approach of his footfalls in the underbrush. Deidre felt his gaze upon them often when she managed to sneak away to the Godswood with the twins, or they wandered through a courtyard with Rhaenyra and her new babe. It burned into her skin whenever she paid a visit to Alicent and her little ones, ever watchful, but he never dared approach. Yet in the quiet, his footsteps now drew closer, lighter without his armor.
“You cannot keep doing this.” She kept her voice low so as not to wake her little ones, and stared hard at the half finished drawing in her lap. She refused to look at him.
“I am free to spend my time off duty as I like, Lady Blackwood. Taking a stroll through the Godswood is hardly a crime.” He spoke in a flat and formal manner that still made her chest ache.
Deidre looked up at Criston finally. Not much had changed about him. He still only wore a simple linen tunic and breeches outside of his Kingsgaurd armor, though his boots had been polished to a shine. Criston had never held a desire for wealthy signs of vanity. Yet now he had the demeanor of a different man. A face of hard unyielding lines that once twitched at jokes shared among friends and softened entirely for her in secret. His dark eyes, a reflection to Dyana’s, held none of her spark, the very same spark he used to have when he talked of or did something that stirred the simmering passion underneath his formal façade. His gaze instead now held a distance that no one could breach—not even her.
Criston stood in a rigid stance, hands clasped behind his back, even off duty and out of uniform. Deidre felt an urge to move in front of her children as his eyes settled on them. Yet she knew she owed him at least the right to look. “How do your wards fare?” he asked. Deidre flinched at his question. Wards. She could not even call her babes her own, and neither could their father.
“Very well. Their steps have grown steady enough to go on walks now. It’s become a favorite activity of ours.”
Criston swallowed as he stared at the sleeping children for a long moment before replying. “I know.”
Deidre wrung her hands at the quieter tone, gentler but tinged with longing. “You cannot keep following after us as you do, Criston. I feel your eyes on us far too often, and it must stop.”
Any softness in Criston’s expression melted away as his mouth pulled down into a scowl. “Why must it?” he whispered harshly. “You have taken everything else from me. You would take simply watching them grow from me too?”
Deidre bit lip and shut her eyes, trying not to cry. “I do not ask this of you to be cruel. I just want to spare your life!”
Criston’s jaw tensed. “What life?” he spat. “As a slave to a crown I no longer wish to serve, while I an forced to watch you raise my children with another man?”
“Criston!” Deidre stood, glancing around frantically before she glared at him. “You cannot say such things! No one can know—”
“They are mine,” Criston growled as he clenched his hands. “Just as you once were, before Blackwood stole you away.”
“Sam has nothing to do with it! I chose to marry him and return to court.”
“All I know is that one day you were mine, and the next you were gone. Then you returned to the capital a different woman, one I didn’t know talking madness.”
Deidre froze, stuck between the urge to cry and slap him across the face. Yet then she reached out and felt the pulse of the earth, the wind’s whispers and the trees’ songs. They subsumed all her other emotions, her personal wishes and desires, in the heavy calm of a duty to more than just realms and kings. “I never lied to you during our time together, Criston. We lived in the moment, and walked the path together that we were meant to.” She glanced at her children. “Then my path led me elsewhere and so did yours.”
“Such a poetic excuse for taking the easy way out,” Criston scoffed, awash in bitterness. “While I must suffer. While they must suffer.” He motioned to the sleeping twins, his amber eyes softening once again to reveal the agony underneath the anger.
“They want for nothing!” Deidre snapped, suddenly defensive about the treatment of her children.
“Yet this is not the life I want for them. It is not the life I wanted for us.” His voice cracked on the last word and he flinched, clenching his eyes shut as he tried to patch the break in his wall of stoicism.
Deidre felt her own tears coming back up, her throat tightening uncomfortably. She moved forward without a thought to place a hand on his arm. “It was not the life I wanted for us either. Yet there was too much at risk to have what you wished, and it would have come at too great a cost.” Once again she tried to get him to understand the burden she carried in her heart.
“Twas a cost I would have paid to the end,” Criston whispered, briefly brushing his hand over hers before he grabbed it and pulled gently free of her grip. “You just decided you would not pay it.” The hard edge crept once again into his eyes.
“If the price had been your death, it would have been too high! I wouldn’t be able to endure living for long after, if you had died for my sake!” Deidre exclaimed, anger seizing her as tears she had hidden for so many nights flowed unbidden down her cheeks.
Criston’s hand twitched towards her, but he restrained himself, simply pursing his lips at her agony. “Do not say such things. In the Light of the Seven, we should cherish what life we are given, for it is not up to us when it is taken.” He recited the words, as if from rote memory, perhaps a verse from the Seven Pointed Star. Deidre did not study the text enough to know. She made a face at his turn towards the dead gods of stone in absence of her for comfort.
“My life has a purpose with a path I must walk, but that does not mean I haven’t suffered to walk it, Criston.” Deidre shook her head, wiping her eyes as her breath hitched. “You have a path of your own you must walk, and you must walk it alone, as we once walked together. I just ask you to not do anything to cut your journey short, for the gods still have a plan for you yet,” she pleaded as she settled back down in her place near the twins.
“All you care for are your tree gods, is that it? Was a path you had to walk all we ever were?”
“No! I loved you! I love you! How could you even—” Deidre bit her lip and bowed her head.
Criston waited a moment, but when she spoke no more, he shook his head in resignation. He then glanced at the two young children huddled near them, the little boy with his smile and the little girl that was the very image of his mother, and he reached in his pocket. “I have wanted to give the children these.” He held out his hand, “Or you may give them if you wish. I care not. I simply wish for the babes to have them.”
Deidre snapped her head up at the tender words paired with a hard tone and saw two small toy knights in his hand, exquisitely carved from white bark-stained red inside. She would recognize his own craft and the wood of her sacred tree anywhere.
Her heart fluttered but her head denied. “Criston, I can’t. It’s too much of a—”
“If you say risk…” The knight’s voice came out low and dark. His jaw clenched as he withdrew his offered hand. His anger warred against restraint on his face and through his entire body as he shook, drawing a few deep breaths before he spoke in a more measured voice. “Deidre.” Even in anger, her given name on his lips made her heart race. “You awakened a love in me that I never thought possible. I still have a love in me, the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and born of it, a rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot, if I am not allowed, to satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” The words came out harsh, but honest, a warning that then turned to a plea as the desperation trickled into his voice. “I am not an honorable knight nor a good man. I have long come to see that. Allow me to indulge in this one act of love to my children, to protect them from afar, so I can cling to the one good thing that still exists after my follies. The one bit of good I helped bring into this world.” His stare was wide, and his voice trembled as he offered the toy knights again. “Give these gifts to them, so these knights may be companions and champions to them where I cannot. Please. Let our babes have a small piece of me when I can give them nothing else.”
Deidre did not stop her tears anymore as she slowly stood and accepted the gifts for Dyana and Tristan. Her hand lingered with his for far too long as their fingers brushed. Deidre cradled the toys and studied the little carved knights. The details were exquisite, first men runes in their swords, almost too small to see, and little leopards on their shields. Her lips trembled as she ran her fingers over them. “I will paint these first I think, then give them to Dyana and Tristan for their name day. They shall love the gifts and make all the little princes jealous.”
Criston’s lips twitched at her words. “Thank you, my lady.” He took her free hand impulsively and brushed his lips over her knuckles. “You do a great service to a wretched knight,” he whispered.
“You are the truest of knights, Ser, anything but wretched, and our paths are still entwined. They always will be. There’s still a great story ahead to be told.” She moved their joined hands to brush his cheek. “A story for us.”
An old light came back into Criston’s dull eyes, that of hope. They just stared at one another, shedding tears in mourning for paths not taken and stories not told. Yet all too soon the moment passed, as a silver haired terror came flying through the trees, and woke the twins from their nap by dog piling them. Criston withdrew quickly to an acceptable distance, standing at a rigid at ease, with hands tucked behind his back once more.
“Lady Dee! We’ve been looking all over for you! Why were you playing hide and go seek?” Prince Aegon demanded of Deidre while sprawled out across the two younger children. Tristan awoke with a whine of displeasure and Dyana with a scream.
“Aegon!” Queen Alicent called, rushing from between trees with a smaller retinue then usual. Only an on duty Kingsgaurd to protect her and nursemaid behind bearing little Helaena. Her face pinched in consternation, she pointed to her side. “Get off those poor children and return to me at once! What have I told you about—”
Deidre was too slow to reach them before Dyana popped up on her feet and gave Aegon a shove, making the young prince fall to the ground and let out a wail of his own.
Even as he went to assist the young prince up, Criston bit back a chuckle, and Deidre covered her mouth to hide a grin. In that moment, she felt finally able to breathe again. As the sun began to shine through the gloom of the clouds, hope began to shine through the cracks in Deidre’s heart, that maybe, despite the whispered dooms that haunted her, she might become whole again one day, and her family would too.