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“But these pastel-colored excesses, all the cool, rainy country of his birth could offer him, never satisfied him; his ferocity would attain the coloring of the fauves only when he took it to the torrid zones and there refined it until it could be distinguished from that of the beasts he slaughtered only by the element of self-consciousness it retained, for, if little of him now pertained to the human, the eyes of his self still watched him so that he was able to applaud his own depredations.” – Angela Carter, “Master”
_
Any man that looked upon the girl would know she was no maiden. It was in her eyes, black and gleaming and full of illicit knowledge, if not intelligence, and devoid of innocence. If he had not known her since she was nine years old, Lord Roose Bolton may have assumed that she had always had that look about her, just like the rest of her countrywomen, who seemed to have never been children, let alone maidens. What a turn of fate, he thought, that he had not seen the shores of Pyke since she had. Man and wife, they were now equally as separated from her homeland by time.
Her hair was dark, her eyes were dark, her garb was dark. The maids whispered that beneath her shift when she bathed you could see that her areolae were dark, too. As she stood before him in his bedchamber unbraiding her hair, he could see they were correct. “I hope you do not mind it, my lord husband,” she said of her intricately bound hair. Always dutifully addressing him as if she thought she would forget if she did not say it every time, like a slow student. Perhaps she was doing it to irritate him – perhaps it was working. He did not expect much of her, but had no desire for an idiot wife. “They braided it very tightly and it pulls at my scalp.” She shrugged then, smiling as if to herself. “I suppose it’s my fault for not telling them to stop.”
Quickly as a startled animal, her entire demeanor shifted, her eyes widening, tense and unblinking as if she were in dread. “I did want to make a good impression. My lord husband, I am aware as you are how important this is, and I want nothing more than to do all I can to help the King rule over a peaceful and united North.” She sounded as though she rehearsed the words, and spoke slowly, as if trying to placate a wild animal.
Lord Roose Bolton always made sure to be aware of the business in the land. It was said by some that this slip of a girl with black fish-scales for eyes had insisted to the King that she would go through with the proposed marriage; the boy king had not wanted to let her do it. Roose understood that this girl had much to prove, of course. But seeing her stand before him taking down her long, shining hair – almost like Bethany’s in the dim light – made him wonder what exactly she meant to do in proving her loyalty.
“I am sure you will do your duty,” Roose told her, raising her shift above her knees to position her on the bed. Her long hair unbound spread around her, black and thick as her maiden’s cloak. She did not move or resist – she had evidently learned from her father, that to submit was to live. Her limbs were lean and muscled, but slight; her hips narrow and straight; her bosom flat, even the soft flesh of eunuchs would have made a more voluptuous sight than her. Yet she had a comeliness to her that he had to admit was not in spite of, but aided by, her strange far-apart eyes that looked like they would glimmer even in darkness like the sea beneath the moonlight. They were widened as if she were nervous, but surely, she knew exactly what to expect. Her pulse, in her neck and wrists and heart, beat like war-drums under his appraising fingertips.
When he took her, she did not fight or say a word; but neither did she moan or cry out as the wanton men said she was. Yet she was not as silent as Bethany, his strange and flawless Bethany.
She was biting her lip to keep herself from making any noise, as if afraid he could hear her. She did not bite deep enough to draw blood- that would have been much more interesting.
He found her entrance was dry, more so than he had expected; yet the rest of her perspired, her flesh giving off the taste of salt.
_
When he had been to the Isles, he was younger, more impulsive. He had made boots of the flesh of his fallen enemies, wearing their skin into battle. Even the tough and weathered skin of ironmen was unsuitable for leather, though. But his reputation for wearing human skin as his forefathers had done centuries ago persisted. It was only rumors and tales, and even in his younger days he was far more mindful of what he did in his own lands. Besides, going about wearing the flesh of men was unwise.
Still, the way of his house was to seek an understanding of the body in ways even a maester would not learn. There were some who would do it gently and meekly; Domeric, sensitive boy that he was, had ideas about the possibility of transferring an organ to a foreign body, as he had read something about it in a book about the magics of Asshai, and believed all myths had a truth behind them, so it could one day be possible to perform such a feat of anatomical art. For what purpose, my boy, Roose had asked, amused. Why of course, healing, father, Domeric had answered. Yes, in some ways he was soft, but it took a hardness to look upon healing with the practicality of one who knows a knife like a sixth finger, one who knows what lies under the skin. Domeric had been raised from a young age to understand what Roose did, even if he had in his childhood needed to be fostered in a household with other noble youths, so he would have a more balanced and full education among suitable companions.
He did not intend to create an heir with his new wife. There are good reasons why men did not take ironmen’s daughters as wives- among them, that a man simply could not have a half-ironman heir. The girl was a slattern, weekly moon tea would likely have eroded her womb anyway, likely the most she would be able to produce would be a half-formed babe come months too early, doomed to lie alongside Domeric’s only trueborn brothers. Her skin fascinated him, though, its smoothness, its salty taste, the hardness of her muscle in her lean arms as her limbs tensed as stiff as a corpse beneath him. Were he even ten years younger, he would have lost control with her as he did with many of her countrywomen during that fateful uprising. She bled all the same, and smiled at it nervously, as if everything she did must please him or she would be thrown from a tower- but the strangest smiles seemed to reach her eyes sometimes, making her look a bit mad.
“Such prowess, my lord husband,” she had said, her black eyes unblinking and blank, her hands trembling. He had not thought she would be afraid; in truth he had assumed she would be too foolish to appreciate the gravity of her situation. Well, he thought to himself, every man must be wrong sometimes.
“Your eyes, little wife,” he said to her as they readied themselves for bed, the night after the wedding night. He tied a woolen robe around himself, and she combed her long hair quietly. They blinked then, those unearthly glimmering scales ripped from some monstrous creature of the deep, in her foxlike face. “They call to mind the words of Maester Haereg. Are you familiar with his works?”
It seemed to take her a moment to gather herself, as if the question was unclear. “I am, my lord husband,” she said quietly. “The Maester at Winterfell, Luwin, it was he who gave me my lessons there. It was Haereg who believed the ironmen were from a place beyond the Seven Kingdoms, some place where the First Men did not come from...” she seemed to stare far beyond the walls for a moment. Across from her, across from the bed, was a tapestry- maidens in a weirwood forest, dancing naked but for their masks- the faces of beasts. “It was Haereg, who said the famous line about our eyes, the eyes of the ironmen.” She was very grave as she said this, as if she did not know how to say the words.
For it was, of course, Haereg who said the timeless proverb she spoke of - You may dress an ironman in silks and velvets, teach him to read and write and give him books, instruct him in chivalry and courtesy and the mysteries of the Faith, but when you look into his eyes, the sea will still be there, cold and grey and cruel.
It was all true of this new wife; simply exchange the Seven for the Old Gods, though he imagined she had no loyalty to either, nor a true understanding of the depth of the Old Gods’ religion. She had been raised a worshipper of the god of the ironmen, which many called a demon, and such traditions are rooted deep, even with the work to educate her. In the time of dragons, Aenys had banned proselytizers from the Isles; his weakness lay in his sympathy for the savages’ desire for autonomy, but perhaps in his own way he had realized it was a pointless endeavor.
Perhaps this was why it was so easy for the Westermen to try and kill every last one of them by starving them, if they saw no possibility of reconciliation or peace with them, down to the last man, woman, and child. But this, Roose thought, had failed, and only made those people even more determined to survive, even when they did not have much worth living for.
He had seen it, this spirit of the sea in her eyes, defiant and futile, as he put his house’s cloak on her, over her black velvet gown with golden tasseled trim, her Northern-style braided crown, her wolfskin-trimmed collar. She did not belong, and she knew it. Did she long to go back, for good and not just a visit as an envoy, or had she understood that what she wanted never mattered, and her sea-god was not real? It interested him, to imagine how far it could be taken, how much one like her could truly be educated, how much of her nature could be finely sifted out like beach sand, how much would need a firmer hand, how much would have to stay. She knew she did not belong, but how much did the others truly understand this, after all these years, with her silently following along?
Perhaps he could understand her. He had a secret self, too. Perhaps she could understand this- a woman and a savage she may have been, but she was not entirely stupid, no matter how she acted.
“Do you mean to say my eyes remind you of this quotation? …My lord husband,” she asked stiffly, her voice low with nervousness. She did not sound surprised- she understood the truth of it, he surmised. That her nature was inherent. “I mean no disrespect, my lord,” she said then, looking to him directly in his eyes. A small reflection of himself appeared in her dark irises. “I swear to you as true as I swore fealty to our King.” She pleaded- but with force, as if making her case at a trial. Not begging meekly.
“I think you prove Haereg’s words much more than anyone can see in you,” he told her, leaning forward, taking a rigid shoulder in one hand, her sharp face in the other. “But I see.” She flinched.
“I am sorry,” she said, freezing in his hands, made still as a stone in terror. “It is simply that your hands were cold-”
“I see your nature,” he continued, “and I will not let its potential go to waste. If you are to be a lady of my house you will be educated anew, with lessons I can teach. And I think you will take to it more than you might expect.”
Lord Stark had sought to correct her by teaching her to be gentle and loyal. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to civilize her by harnessing her ferocity for a productive cause. In any case, he’d soon find out.
She did not answer. Widening with the knowledge of possibilities before her that she could not yet comprehend, her eyes seemingly agreed for her.
_
She did not look like a sportswoman, his wife, but she was. An archer and a hunter, not simply for a pastime but for food as well. It was unseemly for a woman, yet he supposed it was understandable that she may never have felt before the need to be seemly. No one had ever expected her to.
She would mount her horse, who snarled at all others but rubbed his face against her like a wolf pup to its mother, and ride until dusk. The first time, she came back in the evening with a large turkey, as if they were in need of meat. She had the quality Domeric did, of loving not only the ride but caring for the animal, too. She hunted swiftly, and with respect for the beast’s nature, and clearly with gratitude for what the carcass could give, as she always made use of it. So, he did not believe she was using her excursions as a screen for harlotry. Who out in the woods would she meet with, anyway? He was beginning to wonder if she was not a wanton after all; now that he lived in close proximity to her, he could see little about her that would interest most men, and she seemed to not take interest in other men either.
He asked her what she meant to do with this carrion. “Game, my lord husband,” she said to him gravely, as if she meant to defend herself. “I shot it for it to be cooked for dinner.” What kind of household did Eddard Stark keep, Roose thought to himself, where hostages are trusted with their own sustenance and that of others, and girls run around the woods with weapons?
He drank his hippocras and ate his stew; she her ale and turkey that the kitchen servants had cooked- thankfully, she did not test his patience by trying to cook it herself. Even pulled back, her hair was out of place in many strands from her strenuous riding, like a woman who had been in bed.
“How do you choose your game?” he asked her. She was usually too nervous to speak first, he could tell, despite her straight posture and her smiles. She looked at him, clearly surprised by the question. But the eyes in her face, they were alert, they did not blink. She had her answer, then.
“Well, my lord,” she began, setting down her utensils, “I find that for the most part the easiest prey is not worth an arrow.” This caught his interest. He set down his drink and looked closer at her, at her eyes narrowing in concentration, as if she were riding through the wood. “A slow or sick or injured creature is not game you want to eat. It’s the same with fishing, you need to take in the surroundings as well as the animal itself. Polluted waters can kill the fish, only a fool or a madman would cast their line in them. Look and be patient, is what I do, and then strike immediately, but only if it is possible. The harder chase is the one you must stick with most of the time, I find. You must be quiet and quick elsewise the animal will sense you. You need to disappear into the air and become one with your weapon, and understand the mind of the animal in order to hunt it.” She seemed taken aback by her own words, as if she thought she’d said too much. But if he was to be frank, this was the greatest show of strength he’d seen from her; it was nearly respectable.
“What do you know about becoming one with a weapon?” he asked, bemused. “Aside from slaying turkeys, of course.”
She stared at him, her mouth open just slightly. Her lips shone, as if covered in Lysene cosmetic, with the grease of the poultry. “Enough to survive,” she said somberly, a far-off look in her eye. “I was nine years old when I first held Lord Eddard Stark’s longsword, lord husband. Every time a man was to be executed, I brought that sword out, and held it close to me, knowing it could be the thing that killed me, and I told myself if I held it steadily enough if it would be the thing to keep me alive.” A hardness in her eyes, in her voice, betrayed her. He doubted she intended to express herself so openly, her resentment all laid out before him.
“And did it keep you alive?” he asked her. He wanted to know what she would say.
She took a long drink of ale. “I do not know, my lord,” she said, “something must have. I do not think I have myself to credit.” There was a bitterness in her voice.
He took a moment before continuing to his point. “You are no longer a ward of Winterfell, but a lady of House Bolton. I spoke to you earlier of this, but did not come to the full conclusion. Which is to say- there are blades in this house you would benefit to acquaint yourself with, at my guidance. Even though you are a woman, you are now a Bolton. We have always been few. And we keep one another’s secrets.”
She gave a small, tense smile. “It is said that a naked man has few secrets and a flayed man has none,” she said, and laughed nervously.
“Yes,” he nodded. “It is, and for good reason.” He was quiet for a long enough moment that she began to return to her dinner. Her face was downcast, looking at her cutlets, her hair hanging in half-undone plaits coiling like snakes on the tabletop.
“You will begin as my son did, practicing on corpses,” he told her, and bit his tongue as she made her best attempt to suppress a shudder, in horror, perhaps, or also, he thought, the guilt of the anticipation and pleasure in her wild heart that her silken cloak hid. Shock froze her face; it did not seem to be a ruse, she did not seem to have the self-control to lie, or at least, lie well.
With perfect table manners, she cut a piece of meat off for herself. He wondered if she would cut the flesh of man so finely and so precisely.
_
He indulged her for the one night as, if he was truthful, it amused him, and he could have his own dinner anyway. But he told her that it was not seemly for a lady of House Bolton to hunt for her own meals, and she accepted, though he could see in her eyes she did not quite understand or agree. But she said nothing, so there was no need to correct her. She made a good, strange little wife, for what she was.
In truth, he indulged her a great deal; it was wise, he thought, to let women have their little interests. And so the bedchamber now was crowded with trunks overflowing with dark gowns embroidered and laced and brocaded, boxes of necklaces and earrings and bracelets and rings, books about hunting and shipbuilding and history. He had not expected her to read, and about such practical things either. There was a small glass vial she placed on the windowsill; at first he had thought it was perfume, but a closer look showed it was gritty with sand. It was, she said, ocean water from Pyke. “But you are right, it could be perfume, I suppose,” she said, seemingly with good humor, a strange and thin unwarranted smile across her face. “I am sure you remember the smell.” Her voice seemed to come from far away. Like the old trick of putting a seashell to an ear, hearing something that is not inside.
“I would never forget an event as significant as the campaign to put down your people’s treason,” he told her, patting her shoulder. “You should know me better by now, little wife, than to doubt my recollections.” He did not say it sternly, but firmly- not without a degree of the odd humor she had. “You have the king’s ear, I know,” he said, and she tensed again.
“I have not spoken to our king in person since out wedding,” she said, the tone of defense in her voice once more, not without fear.
“I understand,” he told her. “I mean to say that it is good for you to have the king’s ear. But it follows that he has yours. Be mindful and be prudent,” he warned her. He expected her to react as if threatened, the hunted prey without the strength to outrun the predator, as she so often seemed to emulate. She seemed, however, pensive.
“There are many things he does not know about,” she said, betraying her familiarity – and distance – from their boy king as she looked him in the eye, her gaze flat and resigned. Good, he thought, this, he could work with. He could convince her of much. Perhaps she would even want to without his persuasions. “It has always been that way. Do not worry, my lord husband. I have learned by now that nothing leaves the Weeping Water.”
That night when he took her, her entrance was warm with her moon blood. He could smell it – it smelled different, muskier and thicker, than blood of veins. In the dim candlelight he imagined her white shift covered in the red blood of a flayed man. It would come natural to her, it would suit her; he imagined, she was a wild creature wearing the flesh of a mere woman. His little wife from the dark islands where men originated from a strange and unknown place, his black-eyed wife from a people that refused to die out, even when they had been starved to near death. Roose supposed he could appreciate the tenacity of these people, to survive an attempted extermination.
In the dark, her sharp features were obscured as if behind fog; in the dark, she could almost look like Bethany.
In her sleep, she stirred and thrashed and cried out, as she so often did, and he wondered what sort of dreams she must have, that could drive someone such as her to such frenzy.
The next day he would take her to the dungeons.
_
This is the body, deceased and still. The flesh, pliable and ready to be opened, not yet cold. The layers of tissue underneath, red and still warm with the recently departed life. Inside, the organs, thick and firm and full of small veins. This is life and this is death, the two sides of the one coin. Look at the knife, sharp and firmly held. How it cuts, how it lays bare.
He said this to her as he held her close to him, her back to his chest, his arms penning her in between him and the table as he went to work on the corpse before the both of them, so she could see up close. She was still; she seemed to be entranced or in shock or both. He allowed her to wear a cloth tied around her mouth and nose like an outlaw, so the smell would not send her into convulsions; she was after all a woman, despite her fierce blood, and he wanted to lesson to be imparted without distractions. Besides, after she put it on, he found he liked the look of her; her mouth covered, only her sharply gazing eyes staring out.
“How did he die?” she asked. He assumed she really wanted to ask how he had gotten him, if the man had been killed. Bethany was direct with him, that was how she asked it. She asked it without judgment, without passion, as if she did not care either way. It was strange to him. He had liked that.
“It isn’t relevant, you know that,” he said. “Once a man ends up in the dungeons of the Dreadfort, he is dead to the world as if he had never existed in the first place.” She seemed to contemplate that quietly before she turned her head over her shoulder.
Her eyes imploringly widened, her head tipped to the side. “What does that mean for us?” she asked. He could have sworn she was smiling grimly from the way her eyes narrowed.
Well, of course, all men died. And women, and children, and animals, everything that lived must die. Roose Bolton knew that one day, likely sooner rather than later, he himself would die. It was the way of nature.
“It means, wife, you must pay attention,” he said, trying not to lose his patience. “Look. This technique- a careful, shallow cut, and not a stab like a butcher- is how the process must be undertaken. Dead or alive, the skin must be removed with great delicacy.”
“I see,” she said, her voice tense- she likely was not able to say anything else.
“The flesh itself is an organ,” he continued. “Maesters and woods-healers do not have much of an understanding of it, of course, but in our age where magic has become a story for children, we must make the advancements to understand ourselves, while of course, keeping important traditions, too.” The knife glided in his hand, and the skin fell back to reveal what lay underneath the front of the forearm. His wife gasped. “My House has flayed men since the beginning. It is one thing to use the knife, quite another to think about what it can do, to consider it as a field of study. Anatomy, blood, death and decay- the business of all men. The business of my House. It concerns me to know it as well as possible. To seek the knowledge when I can.”
Domeric had his ideas of healing, but there was only so far that can be taken, only so much that can be done in the inevitable face of the death that would come for all mankind one by one. Roose Bolton found it more prudent to gain an understanding of life and death, than to wish its realities away.
“Yes,” he said. “It is an incredible thing to behold the first time. You will grow accustomed to it.” He took her right hand in his left hand, and guided her fingers to the hilt. “Now, you try.”
“I…” she inhaled a shuddering breath. “I don’t know if I could.”
“I just showed you how,” he whispered into her neck. He could feel her swallowing hard- she knew she was to obey. Her hands trembled, and the skin broke, and he could hear the satisfying sound of the sharp metal parting the flesh, clean and wet. Her whole body shook then, and she was silent.
Behold, he thought, the flayed man.
“There,” he told her. “That was not hard. What you see before you is only the beginning. The true challenge is when they are alive and breathing.”
He thought she would say nothing, or collapse to the ground. She looked up, unblinking, from the table, and spoke to him, though, her voice flat and dry. “I can imagine,” she said, stunned, but not drained of that quick wit of hers.
He almost laughed. It would be interesting, he thought, to see what will become of this one.
_
“So,” he asked her as he came into his bedchambers after being leeched, and saw her at the edge of the bed taking off her stockings, and how she tensed and startled, “tell me what you thought about today.” He sat next to her on the bed and put his hand over hers, and she did not hesitate to look him in the eye. She knew how it was. There was no fighting it. He did not mind that she was silent for a moment. She would need to gather her thoughts, she supposed. After all, it was late at night, and she was likely tired.
“My father told me something once,” she said, her voice faraway, her eyes looking at him, but also beyond him, far beyond. A long moment had passed before she began to speak. “About when he was very young. When his own father was lord of Pyke. His father wanted to bring the ways of green men to the Isles, and he brought in a maester. One day…” her chest rose and stayed in place, her breaths trapped inside of her for a moment until she shuddered out a breath. Her small frame heaved. “One day my two youngest uncles were playing a game called the finger dance. I don’t know if you have heard of it. It’s a game many play. Sometimes blood is shed from it, but it is never deadly. The thing you must understand now is that it is never meant to be deadly…” she bit her lip again, one sharp canine tooth pinching at her lip. He wondered if it would draw blood.
“My young uncle,” she said, her eyes unblinking and hollow, “he lost a few fingers. It was nothing that couldn’t have been dealt with. They were small wounds, and many men lose fingers and still live their lives. Are you familiar with the method of burning wounds to clean them and bring about healing?” she looked as if she did not expect him to, as if she was expecting to be called insane. And in truth, it was not what he knew to be a common method- but Roose Bolton had heard of many different things when it came to the flesh and its fragilities, and he of course knew about the burn-healing.
“Yes,” he said, feeling rather indulgent of her. “I have.” He did not know how to describe the look that passed over her face, and was for a moment concerned she would become hysterical.
“You have!” she said, sounding almost mad, smiling sadly, and nodding her head. “Yes, you have. Of course you have- but the thing is, my lord husband, the maester had not. It is not…considered a legitimate means of healing by the majority of greenlanders. No, when this was proposed, the maester dismissed it as barbarism and refused despite my family’s pleas.” Roose could have guessed where the story was going. But he let her speak. “And my uncle, just a boy, was butchered by this maester, who sewed his fingers back on in a filthy and agonizing procedure. His hand grew gangrenous, so they took off his arm, but the infection had spread too far. He suffered for weeks.”
She seemed to come from in and out of a trance. One moment she would speak with barely stifled rage, her jaw clenched and her voice shaking and smiling in bitter disbelief; the next, her eyes would stare off and she would sound like she was speaking from the bottom of a well. “What I mean to say, my lord husband,” she said then, speaking to the floor, “is that I understand. I did not understand at first, I will admit. But I must admit that there is merit in studying man’s body.”
“You sound like my son,” Roose told her, bemused. “All his tender-hearted ideas of using the blade to heal.”
“You must have taught him very well,” she said softly. “I am sure you are proud of him. From the times we have spoken, I have only seen good in him. I imagine it is strange for him to have a good-mother who is of an age with him, but to tell you the truth, I do not feel like a good-mother, or any kind of mother at all.” She shrugged, and gave him a little smile, as if to impart to him that nothing she said was to be taken too seriously. After all, she was just a woman. That game may have worked with other men, but Roose Bolton knew his wife too well by now to believe that she was only a silly girl, even if that was what she was a lot of the time.
“Do you yearn for heirs?” he asked her levelly. The question was inherently accusative, but he was calm as he asked it.
“Domeric is good enough for you, and he is good enough for me,” she said. It was probably wise to keep their contact to a minimum, Roose thought to himself. He did not think his wife would turn adulterous with his own boy, but she would likely influence Domeric to excessively sympathize with the ironborn, as if he needed another wretched subject to waste his charitable nature on; and while she could not be expected to act as a mother, she could hardly be a sister or kinswoman, not now, at least, not when she was still learning.
“You did not marry me for heirs, I know that much.” She put her hand over his. “What kind of child could I have?” she asked aloud. It seemed that she was not looking for an answer from him. “Any child of mine would have nowhere, would belong nowhere. My children would have no life at all. You must understand that, my lord.” Roose considered himself fortunate, to have a wife who understood the balance of things. “Besides,” she said, continuing, “why would I ever want to get with child? Only a madwoman would want that.” He did not know what to say to that.
“What did your father ever do about the maester?” he asked her then.
She looked straight ahead. “My father had the maester’s fingers cut off, and made his father’s wife of the green lands sew them back on,” she said tonelessly, but he could see her mouth twist in a small grimace, almost a smile, as if the flesh was being pulled by a small knife. It was enough to make him want more, but moderation, he knew, was more than sufficient. He would think of this expression very often, he knew. His little wife, as mad as her mother and aunt, as likely all women of her land, fierce and violent and hateful. But able to be controlled. “He died raving, I was told.”
“Are you glad of it?” he asked. She did not answer for a while, and something in her eyes flashed as if she wanted to protest.
“I am sad for my uncle Urrigon, who died before he could live,” she said, “and sadder still for my dear uncle Aeron, who carried the loss of his brother on his shoulders and would speak of him when he was in his cups. I feel nothing for the maester I did not know, and who would have butchered me the same only to look at me in disgust and blame when I festered.” She sounded somewhat defiant, and smiled sadly, as if to herself. He thought to ask her if she looked at disgust at the corpse, if this was a confession to her interest. Still, she had more to say. “I am glad for nothing at all.” Perhaps, he thought, this was the true confession. She was devoid of all happiness. There was an emptiness inside of her where others would take satisfaction or at least contentment.
It made his blood run. He had known a woman of similar humors.
In the dark, she could be Bethany. In the light of day, she would be whatever he fashioned her as, or close enough. As Haereg said, the eyes would always tell. And they did, Roose Bolton knew that much. The eyes showed the soul and the blood could never be changed if it was bad. The rest, though, could always be worked with.
He took her by her hair and kissed her fingertips that still smelled of blood. Some underneath her fingernails had been stuck as she tried to clean it out, evidently. One by one, he sucked the dried flakes from beneath her fingernails. She was making strange sounds, he could not tell if she laughed nervously or cried softly - it sounded so similar.
Afterwards they lay side by side. “Do you pray to your ocean god?” he asked her. He had never considered it before. It was the sight of the vial of seawater on the windowpane that must have brought it to his mind, like a wooden idol of the Seven always watching over them in this bedchamber.
“He wouldn’t hear my prayers from here,” she said.
“And would you, if you believed your prayers could be heard?” he asked her. He could see her body tense as she clung tightly to her pillow.
“I used to, my lord,” she said, her voice so small he could barely hear her. So, she had given up, and the rebellion in her soul had died long ago. He looked over and in the dark, even in the shadows, she was small and weak and so out of place. In that moment she was nothing. It disappointed him.
But Roose Bolton had lived with disappointment before, and always made the best of it. “Go to sleep, little wife,” he said. “Rest is good for the blood.”
In the night she tossed and turned, as she did every night, and even raved in her sleep, speaking incomprehensibly. Only in her sleep, it seemed, the rebellion in her soul, in her nature, could come out.
_
The maids styled her- at his request, of course. Her hair in Northern-style braids and her head topped with a rounded headdress, silk of palest pink. Her face was covered in white powder and she was perfumed, she smelled of thistle. The perfume had been Bethany’s, from one of the forgotten vials left in her chambers after her death. Her dress – pale pink to match the headdress, with pale blue threads, like veins on flesh- was one of Bethany’s, too, from soon after she was married, when she had not yet been with child- he did not want to alter her old dresses, and asked the maids to find one that would fit his new wife, with her small frame and body barren from moon tea. He suspected she’d already found a woods witch to supply her with the drink. That, though, was for the best, he supposed.
Everything was perfect except her eyes, of course. They were wide with confusion, even a hint of fear. The maids had done their best. But all the work simply made her look even more out of place, only emphasized how strong her nature showed itself. There was still work to be done, he supposed.
She looked frozen. “What would you have of me, my lord?” she asked quietly.
“There are prisoners to be seen, my Lady Bolton,” he told her. “They must face their justice. But first, I must ask something of you.”
“Yes, of course,” she said nervously. It seemed as though it took all of her nerve to look him in the eye. But she did it all the same.
“The vial of ocean water,” he said to her, “you must get rid of it. It is old and must be very unclean. I will not have such bilge in my house displayed like some pretty trinket.”
“What?” she said, her response delayed by a moment of silent disbelief.
“I think you heard me very well,” he said coolly.
“I…” she looked down at the floor. “I don’t-” her eyes widened pitiably. “Why?”
“Because you cannot change your blood, but that does not mean your nature should be indulged,” he answered. “Your own wardens in Winterfell made similar efforts, but I see, they could have been far more vigilant. It is for everyone’s best interest, including your own.”
“I see,” she said quietly. She seemed to ponder the statements, like a student at a lesson. She walked to the window and took the vial in her hand. Raising her hand, the glass glimmered in the sunlight. She looked at it as if she was seeing it for the first time. For a moment, he thought to himself, he had expected she would have put up a fight.
She drew it in closer to herself and uncorked it with her fingers, and drank the water down as if it were a flask of medicine. He could smell the brine in the air, see the water dripping on her mouth as she swallowed it. Without even looking, she slammed the empty glass against the wall. It was thick, so it did not shatter, but it cracked, like a breaking bone, and clattered to the carpet. He watched her close her eyes and gnaw on her lips. The water had washed away some of the face powder.
“There you are, my lord husband,” she said, inclining her head in what would be unquestioningly a gesture of respect in any other context. “I have done what you asked.”
She challenges me even in her obedience, he thought. She is ready.
Even with the windows opened, the room smelled of salt for days.
That night, he brought her to the dungeons once again; this time, a live prisoner.
_
With every day- or, more accurately, with every night visit to the dungeons of the Dreadfort- she grew more worn, hardened. Her already small frame became gaunt and her eyes often looked hollow, but he could not say he thought she was weakening or failing, more that she was whittling away the parts of her that had been too weak to survive, and leaving behind the sharpest and most precise version of herself. She was quieter, and on those nights in the shadows underground merely looked to him without asking any questions the way she had did on her first venture into the ways of the knife, knowing that whatever she needed to know, he would tell her.
With practice her movements became smoother and her hands shook less. There was a flatness in her gaze that took no pleasure even as her eyes widened, stretching at the sockets as if she were strangled. As if her eyes were not seeing what was before her, as if her senses were concentrated only on the feel of the metal in her hands and its passing through the warm, thin flesh.
One night, though, she did ask him a question. She had bathed the blood off of her, scrubbing the flakes of blood beneath her fingernails and tensing in the cold water as the leeches took her own blood. It was said by some archmaesters of the Citadel whose tomes on the human body he had pored over that the skin changes over the years to the point that a man’s flesh will become a completely different flesh than it once was, as certain and clear as the changing of a cloak. Could a woman’s blood be replaced in such a way, he wondered, could the secret to civilizing the ironmen lie in their very blood itself? Well, he supposed, time would tell. And she was too fatigued after the process to be regularly leeched, anyway; surprisingly delicate was she, like Domeric, whose blood was fine as it was.
Lying in bed, her energy spent from the leeching, so exhausted her eyes could barely stay open, she lolled her head to the side anyway. “My lord husband,” she asked drowsily. “Why do you teach me these things? I am only your wife. I am… only a woman.” He thought for a moment she would fall asleep, as she was quiet and laid still. Yet she had more to say, to his surprise. “People always told me I couldn’t learn anything,” she murmured. “They told Lord Stark it was a waste to give me lessons…I could read when I came here…did you know that? No one knew that because they did not think I could…”
It endeared him, the simple admission. How hard she must have tried all these years, his little wife, and with no one appreciating the efforts. He took her in his arms, laid her head on his pillow. “Dear wife,” he said, realizing he was glad for her sudden questions, even if it took her being leeched to near delirium, “that is why I must teach you these things. Because you are my wife. Have I not made it clear to you before?” he asked her. Perhaps the blood loss was making her mind clouded, he thought, and he decided to be gentler. “And yes, you are only a woman. I know you are more than proficient in archery, a suitable weapon for a woman, as it is not close-range, and more importantly does not depend on physical strength. Neither is what I teach you- it is the fortitude of your intellect and resolve that must be strengthened. Because someone needed to teach you something, or else all you would have would be the sea churning inside of you forever.” He waited, to see if she was registering his words. Something he could not quite pinpoint passed over her face, something close to grief. “Yes, Lord Stark gave you lessons, but clearly not enough. It’s all right. You have me now. I will do what he would not do for you.”
She was trying to murmur something again, half-asleep, as if from a dream. Not father, it sounded like. He closed her eyes with the tips of his fingers and placed the wolfskins on his bed over her, to keep her warm; she would need the heat.
No, he thought, he was not her father. But Lord Stark had taken the place of her father, and he had taken the place of Lord Stark in her life, and as a woman trades her maiden’s cloak for her bridal cloak, she passes from her father’s house to that of her husband’s. And, as a warden dies and leaves the care of the prisoner to his successor, so the same had come to pass. Perhaps not an ideal situation, but from one like her, perhaps it was for the best. This was the best life she could have, even if she may not have realized it, even if she dreamed still of a vial of seawater on the windowsill, sparkling when the sunlight hits the glass.
She did seem at least to be grateful for it, and he supposed Lord Stark succeeded in teaching her gratitude, as did his son the Young Wolf, in instilling loyalty.
She slept slack next to him, breathing, but not speaking; smelling of Bethany’s perfume, the faintest purple marks beginning to show where the leeches had kissed away her salt-bitter blood.
_
When she recovered, she was restless, and went off riding into the wood- with his leave, of course. But as the sun begin to sink into the horizon, a red jewel into the darkness of the trees, she still did not return, nor did she return when the moon shone in the sky round and full. Deep into the hour of the bat, she did not return. He told his men to search the wood for her. Her health, he said, was delicate.
But he was uncertain if that was the reason, if she had risen from her bed too soon after an intensive leeching- or if she had absconded. Or if something had befallen her- if she had fallen from her horse, if she had gone too deep into the wood to find her way out.
Or, of course, if his bastard had found her. This was, in fact, his first thought when she did not return. The fact was, it was always a gamble, allowing her to ride through the woods Ramsay prowled through like a rabid beast. Perhaps Ramsay did not know the wood the way Roose did- but he had the field advantage, Roose had to admit, compared to his strange little wife, who came from a weak and inferior, if fierce, people who could not even win when they had the field, and sea, advantage.
Roose vacantly imagined watching Ramsay falling down a well, and doing nothing about it either way, and so not truly being a kinslayer, as he listened to Domeric speak the next morning.
“You said you thought she was speaking with a woods witch, did you not, Father?” Domeric asked. “It could be she is staying with her, or with some other person she knows. She has been in the North a long time, after all. But if she is lost, she could be in grave danger. I wouldn’t mind looking for her myself. I know the wood, Father, I would know my way blindfolded.”
“I know, my boy,” Roose said wearily. “I know you do. But there are things within it you do not know about,” he said, his voice hardening.
Domeric went quiet for a moment. “The Old Gods, in their weirwood trees,” he said, his voice hushed. “Is it to do with-”
“No, no,” Roose waved his hand. This was not a subject Domeric should broach, no matter what he thought he knew about his house keeping to the old ways. “It’s my bastard I am thinking of.”
“My brother?” Domeric asked, his eyes widening.
“Domeric, I have told you before, and I will tell you now, he is no brother of yours. I have let you entertain the idea of meeting him for too long, but now, regardless of what has happened, the possibility is that he has spat on my charity and done some ill to your good-mother.” Domeric seemed surprised.
“Just because he’s a bastard…” Domeric shook his head.
“You have been in the Vale too long, my boy,” Roose shook his head, and took Domeric by the shoulders. “I take no joy in shattering whatever ideas you may have had of brotherhood. I know you have lost brothers, brothers of your own blood, but you must take solace in the fact that those unfortunate babes are worthy of being your brothers, and that they are with the Gods. If you were here, you would have heard the stories told of Ramsay by both smallfolk and nobles alike.” It was clear that Domeric believed Roose, even if he was grieved by what he was hearing. Good, Roose thought, he must believe this. “And I have confronted him on it, Domeric. He is proud of his butchery. Of chasing women and feeding them alive to his starved dogs.” Domeric’s eyes widened in horror. “He consorts with a former servant of my household, a man who lays with corpses, including the corpses of the unfortunate wenches my bastard hunts. A few have even escaped to tell the tale. But all you would have to do is just ask Ramsay himself, and he will proudly tell you he names every litter of his hounds after his prey.”
This, Roose thought, would be more than enough to disabuse Domeric of the notion that Ramsay was worth the effort of being welcomed as a brother, let alone trusted. Roose had, in his day, partaken in foolish and pointless carnality for the sake of excitement, but even then he had kept quiet about it, and not bragged like an adventurer who had discovered a city of gold in Sothoryos. Domeric’s gentle, sensitive nature, Roose knew, would also ensure he would no longer defend Ramsay. Roose wondered why he had not done this before. He had not wanted Domeric to know this vile truth, he realized. Domeric was perhaps not capable of what a Lord of House Bolton should be- but he was a good lad, an honorable and strong lord he would be. And Roose truly resented his bastard for coming between himself and Domeric, for surely, Domeric would think twice about whatever he had believed of his blood and his father, once he knew the truth of what sort of individual shared that same blood, that same father. It disgusted Roose to know what he had created in Ramsay, just as much as he took pride in Domeric. Would Domeric, Roose wondered, be disgusted with his father, or with himself?
Domeric was silent for a long moment, clearly pondering all he had just heard. “Then we should arrest him for his crimes when he is found,” he said evenly.
“And when he is found guilty, you would be obligated to pass judgment on him. Would you become an accursed kinslayer?” Roose asked calmly. He did sympathize with Domeric’s desire for righting the wrongs of his bastard brother, but what Domeric did not realize is that there was little, if nothing, that could be done.
Domeric closed his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath, as if steeling himself. “If I am to be accursed for protecting my people and bringing justice to my lands, then to bear a curse will be my duty,” he said then.
Roose did not know what exactly to make of that. If Domeric was truthful, or simply just naïve. He realized Domeric could not ever be allowed near Ramsay. Not when the bastard could well have fed the new Lady of the Weeping Water to his starved dogs.
Roose took a deep breath, and poured himself some hippocras. He was certain his wife would at least have put up a good fight, knocked the smug confidence off his bastard’s face, if only for a moment. He drank, and remembered the night he waited for the maesters to tell him whether or not Bethany would live.
Footsteps, hard and fast, came down the hallway in an echo. “My lord,” a page shouted, a young boy gasping for breath, as he must have been running. “My lord, the men are outside. They have found her.” The page bent over to catch his breath. Domeric shot up to his feet.
“Father,” he says, “we must go.”
“Does she live?” Roose asked, still seated. The page nodded, yes.
“She looks like she fought a bear, but yes,” the boy said.
“Was she alone?” Roose asked, leaning forward over the table.
The boy nodded again. “Only with her horse.”
“I see,” Roose said. He was certain of less than before, but he could not show that. “Come, Domeric.” He stepped forward and walked calmly down the hall, wondering what could have happened.
My little wife, he thought, what have you done?
_
She would speak to no one but him about her ordeal, they told him. She looked to him like she would have a difficult time speaking- her throat was ringed with dark bruises. All in all, she certainly looked as though she had escaped death. One eye swollen shut, the other bloodshot and gazing flat and unblinking like a man who had been to war. Twigs and leaves threaded in her hair like ribbons; she’d clearly been running through thickets, or dragged on the ground. Blood had been spilled, much of it. It was splattered over her face, stained on her remaining clothes, running from her nose. One of her earlobes was split, as if someone had ripped out an earring.
The maester saw to her and concluded she would certainly live, she was just badly bruised, and her cuts needed to be washed. The maester, clearly frightened of Roose, did not ask questions. “You will be back ahorse soon enough, my lady,” he said, smiling nervously. She smiled bitterly at that. Her teeth were stained with blood.
When the maester left, he sat at her bedside. She was still hale enough to find it within her to tense up and back away into the headboard. Still there was fight in her. “Do not worry,” he said, “I will do no harm to you for telling the truth. But you must tell the truth. This is the work of my bastard, is it not?” Asking the question was tedious, there could be no one else who would dare do such a thing to his liege lord’s wife, even if said wife was an islander.
She would not answer.
“I will take your silence as an agreement,” he said then. “It is not too late to tell me what you know. I have always maintained that though he is my son, his blood is bad. He is…regrettable. A mistake that cannot be rectified.” She looked confused at him, staring with her one open eye for a long time. She exhaled shakily, as if not allowing herself to believe the truth.
“And what if,” she said, her voice so low he could barely hear her, her words tremulous, “what if … the mistakes were all rectified?”
He had began to get up from the bed, but her words stopped him cold. He was not a foolish man, he knew what she was implying- and she did not have Domeric’s softness to believe that the nature of one such as Ramsay could be altered. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Roose Bolton dared to hope.
“You are saying…” he began, unsure of how to phrase the question. “You are saying you have slain my bastard?” She looked down at the furs on the bedspread, as if afraid to meet his eye. “No, look at me, my wife,” he implored. “If this is true I shall never be able to repay you.”
She looked up at him as if in awe, or shock. “I…” she said. “He was on me and his hands were on my neck and I took a rock in my hand and….it took a while, my lord. I was only thinking of keeping myself alive. I did not dare say anything for fear your men would flay me.”
“That is only nature, to do what you did,” he told her gravely. “It is understandable that you thought only of survival. And I cannot regret it. Besides, no one is flayed on my watch without my leave.”
It was, in a way, commendable that her survival came at the cost of Ramsay’s. Perhaps, he thought, this was her salvation, too. If her blood, her nature, triumphed over Ramsay’s bad blood and savage nature, then perhaps she no longer bore the burden of savagery. Perhaps she had done what no ironman before her had done- she had attained civilization.
“I didn’t know if he knew who I was,” she was ranting then, near hysterics, “but he recognized the sigil on the saddle you made for Smiler,” – he had forgotten the ridiculous but fitting name for her horse.
“You returned on the horse, and the horse was uninjured. What of his dogs?”
“The dogs…?” she said. “His hunting dogs did nothing to me. He commanded them to chase me but they would not harm me. They ran alongside me as if playing a game,” she said. This, he had never heard of. Strange, he thought. Still, she continued. “When I first saw him he was on his horse and began riding alongside, I thought he was a neighborly stranger seeking to join my hunt at first but-” it must have taken a great strain for her to press her face into her knees and weep, but she did it all the same.
“Come now,” he told her, “everything is all right. There is no need to grieve.”
She kept her head in her hands. “You never told me,” she said.
“He is a stain on my reputation,” Roose said, “but yes, I suppose I should have told you.” In truth, he was grateful it had all happened, if he really thought of it- Ramsay was gone, and now Domeric would have to understand that his father had been right all along. About this, about everything. “Where is he, may I ask?”
She took a deep, shaking breath. “I hid in a grove of weirwoods,” she said. “That was where he chased me at the end of it. That was where we fought hand to hand. Where he breathed his last. I left him with the gods of the forest.” She was quiet for a moment. “There was something in there,” she said, almost whispering. “Among the trees.”
“Yes,” Roose said to her. “There is. I cannot say what it is, if it is god or demon or ghost or something there is no name for. Whatever it is, it is what we call the Old Gods. It is real, and whatever it is, it must be paid tribute to, if not worshipped.”
“It said my name,” she said to him then. “As I fought for my life, and I saw the light leave his eyes with every dash of the rock against his head, it spoke to me. It called out-”
Bethany, he thought. A fine name for a civilized Northern woman. Not his Bethany, but a woman of the same name; there were many people with the same name. There were many Rooses before him. There would be many Bethanys in later times.
“Thecla,” she said, recalling the revelation she had heard from the trees, as if saying her name for the first time.
_
When she was healed, he took her to the dungeons, once again. But this time, he told her, it would be different. There was something special this time. Something very important. He took her hand and led her to the center of the dungeons. “Stay still, child, and hold my torch for me,” he told her, kneeling to the ground, where he brushed aside the dirt that covered the trap door. Reaching into his cloak, he took the key and unlocked it. Below there was a ladder going down into the ground. “I will go first. Do not worry.”
“What is it?” she asked. “What is underneath there?”
“Nothing you should fear,” he told her simply. “We both know if I wanted to harm you, I would have done it already. I could have just locked you in one of the empty cells aside you. Some men would do that to their wives, for killing their bastards. But I think I am a reasonable man. I think you can trust me to lead you to this hallowed, secret place, that I do not trust others with.”
“You are not asking me,” she said then, “it is your will that I go.” She took a deep breath as if steeling herself. A wise move, he thought, to not fight. In her long life, most of it had been lived with the clear knowledge she had no choices in what would become of her. Now, she at least had the guarantee she would not be executed. A smart girl, she was, to act with gratitude for that.
He went first down the ladder, holding out his torch so that she could see the rungs in the light. She went down quicker and easier than he had expected, as if she was trying to get it over with, holding the torch in one hand and grasping the ladder with the other. He stood aside her as she stepped onto the ground, into the hard earth. “Look,” he said into her ear, nearly a whisper, as he grasped her by the shoulder and held up the torches so she could see it all.
He heard her gasp as if coming up from underwater. Speechless for a moment, he could feel her nearly collapse into his hands. “By every god in every heaven, what place is this,” she exhaled.
She saw the cavern before her. The roots of the weirwood trees gathered and twisted here, some as thick as a man’s waist, some as thin as a blade of grass, all white and luminescent in the fire light. Her breath fogged into a cloud, the underground air was cold, and there was, most of the year, a layer of frost in the cavern. The cold was useful for preservation. A wooden altar here before one set of roots; another set of roots stained brown with dried blood that had been spilled in offering. A flayed body impaled at the end of a thick root, other roots growing through its torso, fungi glowing green in the dark. In an icy corner, layers of flesh and muscle, cut at various different levels of thickness; kept intact by the frozen temperature.
Her hands were at her face, covering her mouth. She looked to him in wordless horror.
“I know this will come as a surprise,” he said evenly. “But it was time you saw it, you see. I do not trust most people with this. No one alive aside from myself has seen this.” Whoever had dug the cavern, possibly centuries ago, were lost to history. They could have been his very forefathers. “I showed another wife this place, once. And now that you are my true wife, now that we are truly one, united in blood- this place and what it means is your undertaking, too.”
“What is it?” she asked, barely audible.
“It is an old place,” he said. “I do not know when it was made, perhaps by the gods themselves or the forces that we call the gods, only that it must be maintained. It is here where I pay tribute to them, the true prayers they require, not words but blood and life. It is here where I may study blood and life itself, the flesh, undisturbed and unhindered. You see, the cold preserves the dead flesh, which is invaluable to studying it. Have you never wondered, my girl, what we are made of, and what it means? Someone would have wondered a long time ago, and had an understanding of it that is not innate to man, as the technique of flaying was mastered by my people long ago. The removal of skin, to reveal the inner workings of man underneath. If this can be done- and if it must be done- then what else can be done? What else is inside of us, laying underneath in wait? What is in our blood? Whatever beings that set their roots here long ago, they know. As their acolyte, it is my duty to follow the traditions, and also refine them to suit the concerns of the age.”
“This is for the gods?” she asked, seemingly in disbelief. “You do not fear their punishments?”
“This is for the gods, in a way, yes. And it is for making sure things are as they must be. If the gods have punished me, they have already done so with my bastard- but then they have rewarded me, too, by ridding me of him. Which would make you their instrument. It fascinates me to wonder why you would be considered for such a purpose- but I suppose it means there is more to you than anyone ever saw. You are an enactor of justice, Bethany. You have been blessed by these so-called green lands and made one of its people.”
“What name did you just call me?” she asked him.
“You heard me well, my wife,” he said pleasantly. “It would suit you to have a Northern name, now that your old blood has been shed, and you are as anew. Now,” he said, “I will bring you the maiden cloak, as we are to be bound in nature, now, not just by the law. Whatever gods exist are watching here, where their roots are. There will be no sacrifice necessary. Ramsay has already breathed his last among the trees in the forest above us.”
She was still as an effigy as he put the cloak over her, a newly tanned cloak of human flesh. It would not do to wear such garments outside as if they were ordinary fashions, he knew that now in his mature age, but for ritual purposes, such things were useful and necessary. Her shoulders writhed when the flesh was placed over her, but she bore it. In the darkness lit by torches and white weirwood and glowing fungi and blue subterranean ice, she was unearthly, ethereal, a flickering shadow. There was no sea in her eyes now, there was nothing but the reflection of the lights around her as if she had died and been resurrected here, as if she had never been anything else, but of course she had, that was why it was significant to see her.
She was beautiful, he thought.
“There are many things in this world,” she said, “that we do not understand. I see, now. I see why you have done this. I have known men, I think, who have tried similar things…” He wondered if she was really speaking to herself, or to him.
He took her in his arms and carried her to the roots of the largest tree, and lay her down. He wondered if they would speak to her, if they would now call her by the name she had earned herself. He thought he could hear her whispering something to them, but perhaps she was only speaking to herself. As he took her, she did not once look to him, but her eyes stayed open the whole time, nearly unblinking, as if she needed to see whatever it was she was looking at.
_
His beautiful lady wife Bethany has taken to her station, truly. She is discreet, and does not discuss private matters that must stay between husband and wife, even with Domeric, who is fond of her, as any good son would be of his father’s wife. You have raised a fine son, she says to him. She does not say he is a fine father, but then, he supposes he is not, to have fathered an abomination. A smart girl, she is, to not lie, but to also be careful with the truth.
He does not even mind her hunting for her dinner anymore, now that it is not unsafe. She has served venison with seasoning for their private dinner, and has changed into finer clothes after returning from the hunt. Instead of riding clothes she wears a viscera-pink bliaut gown with an embroidered woolen belt around her waist, the threads coming together to form the sigil of the flayed man in a dark red. Her hair is neatly braided in a crown around her head. Her left ear has been re-pierced, the new hole right over the gash left where the old one once was, and her earring, a long piece of rose quartz, covers the slashed lobe. She looks to him, and smiles.
“Are you enjoying your dinner?” she asks him.
“Of course,” he says, “it is as fine-tasting as the hunter.” She smiles even wider at that. It is fortunate, he thinks, that her ordeal in the forest did not damage her teeth too badly, even if the maester did have to remove a molar in the back.
“They starved my people, you know,” she says then. “The greenlanders.”
He looks at her for a long moment. She still smiles, her eyes looking far away. He does not comprehend what he sees in them. “Yes,” he says, “I have heard the stories.”
“We call it the Great Starvation,” she says, her voice faraway. “My father taught me temperance and self-discipline, because plenty never lasts. We ate small meals. We knew anything could be tainted, anything could be stolen, anything could be used against us as a weapon, and so we must be prepared to survive it. They think we deserve it, and so there is nothing that stops them. We knew even since before we had been born, we were never supposed to be alive.” She falls quiet for a moment. “You once asked me why I hunted. I think that is why.”
“That was a long time ago,” he tells her. “Both the starving-times, and your time with your father.”
“They told stories of you in the weeks before I left home,” she says. “There were stories of many of you, though.”
“I see,” he says, unsettled, and beginning to be displeased. He will have to be leeched after this, he can feel it. His skin is heated, his heart is beating fast, as if he has run a far distance. Perhaps the meat was undercooked. In any case, whatever game she is playing is deeply disappointing. “I was a different man in my youth.”
“Yes, I know,” she says, her voice full of judgment, “you have become a distinguished lord now. Most distinguished lords hate my people, I would say. The distinguished lords in the Great Starvation dumped vats of oil and waste into the seas to pollute the waters and kill the sea life so any fishing would yield an inedible catch. The fish washed up dead on the shore, their gills smothered, all year. The fish that were born after came out of their eggs malformed and small. The ones who survived that year and the years after learned to accustom themselves to the most extreme scarcity. The ones who were died were put to rest in poisoned waters. And so people took to burying their kin in the grounds. Even today the grave sites overflowing with white bones are found by surprise. They died by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, more and more they died, the longer it had been since the greenlanders had sailed away.”
He can feel the heat in his drying mouth, and he knows what she is saying.
“You foolish whore,” he chokes out, “you wretched savage. After all I’ve done for you-”
“Yes,” she says, more somberly than he’s ever seen her. “I suppose you may be right.” She smiles bitterly at that. “Even the Weeping Water flows to the ocean. I thought about that a lot when I was fighting for my life there. There is an area of the water where hemlock grows. I thought at one point to try and poison your son’s water canteen, but, well, that did not happen, as we know.”
“You,” he coughs out, “learned…nothing. You were never Bethany.” He laughs at that, just a bit, at the farce of it all.
“No,” she says, “I certainly was not.”
“What do you think you will get out of this?” he asks, every breath a labor. He leans back against his chair.
“I will be able to leave here,” she says, as if it is obvious. “I will be a widow. I need never marry again. No one needs a widow, and no one here will need an ironborn widow.”
“So there will be no place for you, you foolish girl,” he says, shaking his head. She smiles sadly.
“My lord, there has been no place for me for a very long time,” she says, “I have learned to deal with it.” She takes a drink from her cup and sighs. “Do not worry,” she says. “I will not tell your secrets, because, you made sure they would be mine as well. And who will believe my word? I would be killed for your crimes.” She shakes her head bitterly, laughing to herself. “Your legacy is safe with me. Unless Domeric will say anything, but I doubt he will. I think it would destroy him to know the truth, so I will not tell him. He is a nice boy. Nice boys like that don’t need to know the truth often times.”
Some perverse part of him wants to thank her for that. Some sentimental part of him could thank her for freeing him from his greatest curse, but it is hard to speak.
“Be happy,” she says. “I know you and the king would have come to conflict. You will die soon enough and everyone will think you fell ill from a cold. And it will be as it always is. The writers of your histories will absolve you, even praise you for the restraint you showed to such savages as myself. This is what they do. They expect gratitude for their supposed mercy, their civilized mercy, when they cannot even be honest enough to admit they will kill you after all and they will enjoy it.”
She swallows then. “You were honest,” she said, “I will give you that, my lord. In all your horror and evil, you entrusted it all to me, and claimed it without abandon.” She smiles at him and her eyes are wide with something like awe, something like horror.
Perhaps she did learn a few things after all, even if they weren’t what he expected her to take away from him. Perhaps he learned a thing or two from her, as well, his strange wife whose eyes, for a reason he cannot decipher, glimmer with salt water tears, his little wife whose eyes are full of the ocean after all.
And he understands, then, that this, too, was her fighting for her life. The way of nature often results in fighting to the death. And this girl, who was never meant to be alive, who was never meant to survive, who was marked for death since childhood, and somehow survived everything- what else would she have done, but keep fighting for her life?
He understands. He does not blame her.
As he hears Thecla call for help, for a maester to come, that her husband is ill, he thinks he can hear, calling him through the sounds of howling winds and waving branches, Bethany’s voice saying his name.