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Alicent looked up as the door opened. When she saw it was Ser Criston she shook her head and scoffed. “What do you think?” she asked hollowly, returning her gaze to the hearthfire. “That I have gone mad? That I have disgraced myself?”
“No, Your Grace. I’ve been thinking of the night that I let my rage get the better of me, and I acted… out of turn and caused a scene in front of the gathered realm—in front of the Velaryons.”
He paused a moment to see if she would respond. She did not, nor did she look his way, yet he sensed she was listening, so he continued on.
“For an instant it felt good, freeing the fury burning through me. Then it felt like the weight of the world collapsing down upon me. I’d brought myself lower than she ever could’ve done to me.”
Alicent gave a little dry chuckle of understanding.
Criston went on. “I’ve been thinking about how I was so sure that was the end for me; that there could be no possible way forward after that. And I think of how you were there, and you led me through the night.”
Alicent took a moment before responding, still staring into her hearth. “All these years later, what do you remember of that night?” The frustration in her tone had given way to something more thoughtful.
He considered. “I remember you leading me into the sept. It was dark—I think they’d been cleaning the sept for the wedding? There were no other candles. It was as dark as one of the hells. You knew the way by heart; you led me by hand to the altar, telling me when there were steps up. When we got there you said we were to light a candle. You struck a flame, and offered it to me. That’s the image I remember most, the light in your hand. It was so bright; like the beacon of the Hightower leading an doomed sailor to safe harbor.”
Alicent spared him a glance for the first time since he'd entered the room.
“I thought we might go to the sept again tonight,” he suggested.
“I shall not let them look upon me like a rabid curr as I pass through the halls,” she said dully.
Criston glanced around the room until his eyes lit upon a prayer candle that sat on a side table. Gesturing to it with an incline of his head, he asked, “Might I, Your Grace?”
She glanced over, then nodded her ascent.
He lit the candle and kneedled before it, resting his clasped hands upon the table.
Alicent watched warily. “I do not have it in my heart to ask for the Mother’s mercy just yet,” she said quietly, with aching honesty.
Criston smiled over his shoulder at her. “That is not quite what I had in mind, Your Grace,” he said, before turning back to the candle. “Smith,” he prayed, “grant us skill in our craft. Show us when to swing and when to hold back.”
He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “It was hard,” he said, “not to pummel Harwin. I held back not because he didn’t deserve it, but because it would not aid me—would not aid you. It was staying my hand that yielded the victory we sought.”
He’d meant this as a gentle way to say he did not reproach her outburst’s sentiments, only its methods. Yet upon hearing this, Alicent snapped at him. “I know!” She took a deep breath, fists clenched. “I have stayed my hand every day of my life.” Her voice shook. “What has my life been if not mastering the art of restraint?” She gave a bitter little snort of laughter, then added, “Mastering it insufficiently, it seems.”
Criston did not know what words to offer her at that, so he silently offered her his hand instead. For a moment he thought she would rebuff him, locked away inside herself in her anger. But after a moment she rose from her chair and crossed to kneel beside him, taking his hand in hers.
“What has it brought me? All that restraint, all that duty—what has it yielded?” The bitterness in her words made his heart ache.
She was kneeling right beside him now, hand in hand, eyes locked onto his and she searched his face.
In the span of a single breath Criston realized they stood on a knife’s edge.
Strung between them was a decade of private glances and soft smiles. A thousand, “Good morning, Your Grace. You look beautiful today.” Half a dozen tourneys where he’d worn her favor. An unspoken understanding.
Sometimes during long dull hours on watch, Criston entertained febrile fantasies of consummation, half wistful and half horrified. He did not want that, not truly. Alicent was not Rhaenyra and he adored her for that. Alicent loved him too well to do that to him. She respected him too much to treat him as a whore. She had too much regard for him to tear him from the moorings of his life. It was, paradoxically, the reason Criston could entertain these lines of thought. He could wonder—even wish—safe in the knowledge it would never come to pass.
Yet tonight Criston was suddenly uncertain. He had been unquestionably sure that his steadfast queen would never ask him to do anything that would strain his vows—yet tonight she had asked him, in front of the king, to bring her a boy’s eye. Tonight the queen’s ironclad restraint was cracked, shaken down to her bones, and she thrumbed with something dangerous.
And now she knelt beside him, trembling, her hand warm in his own and her eyes beseeching.
“All that restraint,” she repeated, and she was so close he could feel her breath on his skin as she spoke. “What has it amounted to?”
Yearning burned in his heart and dread grew heavy in his lungs.
Would that I. But my gracious lady, don’t do this to me.
“You,” he said simply. “All that restraint has made you you, and that is a precious thing.”
She stared at him one moment longer, eyes wide and dark and lost. Then she shuttered and began to sob.
“C’mere,” he said impulsively, opening his arms to her.
She crumbled into his embrace. “It is exhausting,” she whispered into his ear.
“I don't doubt it,” he whispered back, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
He had never held her in his arms like this before. It felt safer than where they’d been a moment before, but if the door was to be flung open right now and someone saw them like this it would be suspect. The explanation—“the Queen was in need of comfort”—sounded no better. Still, this was not untoward enough to trigger complacent old Viserys into action or actually making a decision, was it? It was a stretched version of permissible.
His skin hummed at the points of contact. He held her close and stroked her hair, committing every detail to memory. He knew he would spend the following year recreating this moment in his mind.
“On the night you found me in the godswood you talked about blood sacrifice. Do you recall?”
“Barely.”
“You said it better than I will, but let me try. You said something about how what I was proposing—spilling blood at the roots of a weirwood tree—was one rite to the old gods. I was about to spill my entrails too, and there was another rite where they hang the entrails of criminals in the branches. The Faith of the Seven does not ask for a blood sacrifice, and it has at times been called ‘soft’ for that. But your gods ask for the hardest thing of all: life. Life is the hardest thing we will ever have to do. It ofttimes grinds us to dust, and takes every last might of strength we possess. Life is a much bigger ask than death. The infidels’ blood sacrifices are easy, but to grant the Seven your life? That is hard. To try, knowing that you are human and will inevitably fall short in one manner or another, and yet to try anyways? To try and fail and then try again? That is the hardest thing of all. And yet that effort, that struggle, is where the gravitas, the power, the glory lies.”
She was quiet for a long moment, then took a long shuddering breath. “Thank you,” she whispered.