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“If needed, I will get you more,” you tell Ellyn of the tea.
“Oh. It will be needed,” she assures and runs her hand under the sheet.
The early sun illuminates the room as you wake to Ellyn slipping into a simple summer dress you don’t recall giving her. She catches your gaze and speaks of helping your mother below. You yawn an agreement and leave her to it, the least agitated you have felt in many moons. Never has a distraction better served purpose. You have harbored no illusions that she latched onto you to survive, but some things can’t be faked.
There was a time once, not long before taking contract with the Kingmakers, when you attended a delegation in the Dornish port of Sunspear with your father. There was a priest there, a septon they are called, dressed in humiliating roughspun the color of the mud beneath his unfortunate toes. He shouted and rambled of the vices of the city and the wantonness of their women. Others mocked and spat at him, but you stopped to listen for a short while. An intriguing fellow, he went so far as to suggest that all women were sluts if they did not turn to maidens. Or it might have been to a single maiden. Regardless, while amusing, it all seemed half mad. Yet here you are with one of the very women the priest so tried to save, and you can no longer fault his endeavors. If you ever see him again, you must inform him of the value you gained from one of his flock not heeding virtues of this maiden he spoke of.
You sit up and look around your old room, again getting the sense that there are things astray. To your best reckoning, it would seem that Sallero has been using it. That he made no attempt at entering it in the night either speaks to his respectable discretion or to how vigorously he spent his night out with your brother. You highly suspect the latter. A curious and not altogether pleasant thought, that. Your cousin has ever sought to distance himself from his father’s reputation and yet now he seems to act the part of his father’s son. All the better if he gets this out of his blood on the mainland.
Descending the stairs proves your suspicions. None are about aside from the women and children. You mess up your nephew’s hair on the way to pouring a hearty cup of mild amber ale from a cask to start out the morning. You worked up a thirst, though, and must pour another. Your mother finds you at it and forces two plates of peppered and deviled gull’s eggs along with biscuits floating in goat gravy.
