The courtyard smelled of damp straw and powdered wood; the keep beyond its low wall breathed slow and patient beneath a pale sky. Brynden stood with his bow half-raised, the string humming where the princess's arrow had just left it. You watched the pin-straight feather bury itself in the target and smiled as if the world had done nothing more remarkable that morning than obey your arrow.

You were more a daughter of Naerys than of Aegon when you laughed — softer at the edges, with that careful mercy the queen favoured — but in the sweep of your hair and the set of your jaw there were hints of the king. Brynden's eyes kept finding the hollow at your throat when you tipped your chin to settle a stray curl back beneath the gold net. He told himself it was the habit of a man who had taught you since you were children: watch the grip, the elbow, the shoulders. Do not watch the throat.

You drew, your shoulders setting like a young queen on a small throne. "Bend your left," he murmured, the words soft as a seam. "Keep the elbow up. Look at the target, not at—"

"Not at you?" You smiled without turning, and there was that laugh of yours he had learned to read as if it were a map. It stung like salt.

He should have answered with the steadiness of a man who knows his station and his fortunes: bastards have other uses than marriage and kings will choose what they will. Instead he found the old, foolish softness at the back of his voice. "Stand with your left foot forward. Feel the string, not the bow. Trust where the eye tells you the target is."

You obeyed. The arrow snapped away and struck two hands' breadth from the target. You pouted, then looked at him with the unashamed hunger of a child who wants praise. "Again."

He set another arrow upon the string and watched you draw. The bow bent like a curved promise; the arrow left, and his heart made a small, traitorous leap. He told himself he had seen the princess since you was a girl learning to fit feathers to shafts, that he had guided the same hand as it learned to find the air. It was duty. It was fondness. It was memory braided with hunger.

He had seen you with Daemon earlier — not more than courtesies, perhaps, but enough. A hand at the elbow, a look that lasted a half breath too long. The bastard who wore the ancestral sword walked like a man who had been given the world as a toy and thought it prudent to begin with the most dangerous pieces. Daemon's smile had always found the soft seams; Brynden's had gone to the hardened parts. They were different kinds of keen: one was the blade, bright and simple; the other's was a poisoned nettle, all shadow and snare. Both, the queen had said once with tears half-dry on her face, loved the same thing, and one day the Seven Kingdoms would bleed for it. She had said it in that small voice queens use when telling truths no one wants to hear.

"You are jealous," you said, and you did not say it angrily. You know him very well. There was curiosity rather than accusation in it, as if you were measuring the weather from the shelter of the eaves.

The word was a clean thing he could not deny. Jealous — of Daemon, of a glance, of a sword that had a name and a past and a better beginning than his. He had learned to wear a hundred faces: the quiet watcher, the whisperer, the servant of secrets. But no face could hide the way his hands tightened on the bow when you turned toward him.

"I am," he admitted. "And I am ashamed. Jealousy is a poor garment on a man who has never had a right to any hand."