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Finally, he gets to visit his brother.
He hadn’t expected to miss him. He didn’t miss Robert, not really, but Robert had always been as bright and shining and faraway as stories of Mother and Father. Stannis was boring, but he’d always been real.
He’s one and twenty, and already starting to lose his hair, which Renly laughs at to cover up how close he suddenly was to crying. He hasn’t cried since the siege, since he was a baby, and he’s never going to cry again.
Stannis pats him awkwardly on the back, halfway through the hug, and then Renly is off.
Dragonstone is amazing. The corridors wind and maze around each other, the dragons laugh and snarl from every window, and somewhere in the dungeons he’s sure there are lost kings. He meant to write to his friends, the group of lord’s sons fostered at Storm’s End, and he’s sure he will, eventually, but there’s so much to do.
Stannis says there would be lord’s sons here, but only the baby Bar Emmon came. (Lord Velaryon offered to send his bastard brother, but Stannis said no). Renly spares the toddler barely a glance. He has new friends now, half a dozen of them. Allard Seaworth’s the closest thing to a lord among them, but that might even be better than back home, because it leaves Renly firmly in charge.
“Haworth says there’s ghosts,” he tells Stannis. “Are there?”
“No.”
Stannis is working. He’ll get married soon, and then there’ll be a feast.
“Oh. Can we spar again tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
That’s better than ghosts, anyway, even if they have to use wooden swords. Stannis never sparred with him back home.
“Do you miss Storm’s End?” he asks. He isn’t sure why. Stannis is never happy. He just seems… less happy, now, than he used to be. Even during the siege.
“…Yes.”
“Good,” says Renly. “You have have Storm’s End, and Robert can give Dragonstone to me.”