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Margaery Tyrell—Queen Margaery Tyrell, Her Grace—has obtained a litterful of kittens for her husband, each as black as Robert Baratheon's hair. For a moment it looks as though Tommen has his hair, too, and then the kitten moves, claws bedding into his clothes, and the boy laughs and picks him down, and his little wife leans close to inspect whether he's lost blood. Jaime pauses on his way to his chambers, to watch their play. Ser Loras, apparently ignoring the children to track eyes across the garden, notices him first—His Grace and Her Grace are too busy squealing over the little balls of fluff. He shakes his head when the boy gestures to the stone bench empty beside him, and almost turns to walk back into the shadows, strangely reluctant to walk into the afternoon sun, but Tommen has seen him by then, and he has no choice but to go to them.
It is passing strange to sit at ease here in the sun, and know the little King his son, and know in himself the hope that the Roses of Highgarden are not privy to that knowledge, and know he does not care overmuch, at the moment, if they do. The Imp knew his children better than he, and killed his eldest, with that knowledge, and he could not even find it in himself to mourn his passing. I am Ser Uncle to my only son, and cannot even pull him into my lap for fear I will be known his father. He does not care overmuch for much, now, and has not since they chopped off his sword-hand and left him useless—even a dead lion is better than a maimed lion, at least a dead lion is good for a cloak, or a rug on some fair lady’s floor. Cersei will have his skin for a rug, if ever she finds out how close to treachery his thoughts skim these days, and how little he holds the value of the half-grown cub their brother butchered. Well, but Joffrey was a little beast, and Myrcella he rarely saw and knows nothing of save she has her mother’s beauty—the Maid give she has none of her mother’s poison. But Tommen. Tommen is a likely lad, though yet a little given to childish things.
“Does it amuse you,” Loras asks, and he turns a little, enough to see the smile on the boy’s face, eyes still on his youngest, “or do you think it unmanning, for the King to play with kittens?”
“The King is eight, and thinks kittens as good as a joust,” he replies, and turns more fully, enough to see the bitter glint in the boy’s eyes.
“Should I be offended, then, to lose to cats?”
“I did not say he thought them better, Ser.” There’s an odd joy in matching wits with Renly’s little rose, as he will never again match swords. Measuring cocks, Tyrion would say, and laugh.
“So I’m merely being compared to cats. My apologies, Ser.”
They break off as abruptly as they’d started speaking, and he watches Tommen try to push himself tall enough to snatch a kitten from Margaery. What must the girl think of this, when she’s twice his age, and married twice. He cannot believe Joffrey would not have tried, at the least, to fondle her—he’s heard about Sansa Stark being stripped for punishment—and whatever else Renly was, he had an eye for beauty. To go from a man to a boy to a child in the space of a year must be tiring, especially for a maiden so newly flowered. From her laughter, she likes Tommen well enough, but it only serves to tell the King he pleases you, however young he might be. Or how drunk or seemingly blind. “You’ve been called worse,” he says, and watches the words make a momentary dent in Loras’ armour—he wears courtesy like a high-born maid.
“Far worse,” the boy agrees—man grown, seventeen years old, a man blooded and knighted and tempered in war. Still, seventeen is young enough to feel words cut into too-tender spirit, even if swords can no longer find the weakness in armour.
“You should be used to it, by now.” He’d been used to it, at seventeen or near enough, so soon had the shame of his crime caught up with him. “The faster the better, Knight of Flowers.” Her Grace has been looking at them many minutes, now, and has considerately moved herself away, and Tommen followed her like a pup—like the direwolf cubs the Stark children had had, and how they had howled when the boy fell. The things he does for love. The cloak was stained long before he spilled a king’s blood on it. That sevenfold-cursed cloak that is all anyone ever remembers.
The boy stares at him like he’s a child who will break under an adult’s glare, right hand—such a beautiful hand, how perfectly formed—clenched around the hilt of his sword, and Jaime waits a beat, then two, before his shoulders fall and he sighs. “I cannot say I know what you’re talking about.”
Smart little boy, but he’s known that since he rode a mare in heat into a joust. “You were not so careful,” he drawls, “when you had Renly to… pray with.” He wants to put a hand under the boy’s chin and force his eyes up, and say, It matters nothing, if only you fight as well as you do, if only you laugh at the names they call you, if only you remember that none of them can best you with a sword and so they try to shame you with words. But the boy would take it as an insult or an invitation to prayer, and, besides, he hasn’t his sword-hand anymore.
And the boy turns such a beautiful red; it would be shameful to not watch him. “You would know, Ser Kingslayer.”
He laughs, tipping his head back, and finding himself absurdly fond of Loras. “I would, little Rose. I do.” Do they call him Kinglayer? Poor little rose, so soon plucked and so easily wilted.
“I should go look for them,” Loras says, after a silence that feels strangely comfortable to Jaime, and as evidently not to him.
Jaime wraps his left hand around the boy’s wrist, fingers closing around ring-mail, and hopes he will not pull away—to send a Lannister sprawling to the ground, screaming with pain, might be a small victory, but there are many who would jump at it, and with less cause than Loras. “The Queen Regent will not have you for master-of arms,” he says, harsh, and, gentler “you were a fool to ask her.”
“She won’t find a better,” the boy says, glaring down, the sun gilding his hair, and for a wild moment Jaime thinks it is he somehow seventeen again, mocking eyes resting on his ruined arm.
“She does not need a man who is the flower of chivalry, Ser. She needs a steady man.”
“I am steady, I can teach children, and.” He has made no move to pull away, to wrest his hand from Jaime’s grip, and for that he will forgive a lot. “And, well, His Grace likes me.”
“Renly liked you,” he says, and lets go of Tyrell’s hand, and finds himself reluctant to do it. “You cannot blame my sister…”
“I’m a member of the Kingsguard, Ser.”
“So guard Her Grace,” he says, vicious with the kindness he is too wary to let himself show. “Surely your sister is who you first came to King’s Landing to protect?”
“I swore to you I would protect him,” the boy says. Seventeen, for all his bravado and all his bravery, seventeen and easily hurt, and hurt most easily by this. “He’s a child, Ser, no more than eight.” And wed to your sister, but then you cannot use that, can you?
“How old were you,” he says instead, and feels his Lannister mouth curl into a Lannister smile, “when you were being fostered at Storm’s End, when you were a squire to Renly Baratheon, as you would have Tommen Baratheon be a squire to you?”
“I was old enough,” the boy says, angry enough, now, to not care who he speaks to. Hurt most savagely by this, the thought that his perfect love may have been less than perfect, that there was lust in it, or calculating manipulation. Seventeen. “He did not.”
“No,” Jaime says, and feels himself old—an old man, past fighting, what good is a soldier who cannot hold a sword?—and weary to the bone of speaking to children and fools. He stands with clearly-shown effort, hand braced on the stone, and walks slowly to Loras Tyrell, who looks at him as though unable to decide whether to draw his sword or cry. “No. Renly was an honourable man. And you loved him.”
“He loved me.” Or perhaps he loved the alliance with Highgarden you brought him, little Tyrell, and your beauty in his bed that all the golden dragons in the seven kingdoms would not buy him. Cruel to say it, though Tyrion certainly would. And Cersei, but suddenly the simple thought of doing aught that she might is anathema to him. And perhaps Renly did love his little Rose, and certainly the lad is still in love with Renly.
So he puts his left hand under the boy’s chin, and tilts his face up, and kisses his forehead in benediction, and does not say, I would’ve made you master-of-arms, had I the giving of the post, and does not wait to see if the boy takes his affection as an insult—to him, to the Kingsguard, to his dead King—or invitation, and does not pause to look back at the picture they make, the child King and maiden Queen and invert Warrior.
He is old, and easier away from the sun, and so too his secrets.