The Last Stag • Game of Thrones

28.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.
The Deeper the Scar

The visions haunted her resting hours.

Flashes of blue eyes, white hair, icy skin. A frigid hand wrapping around her throat, the freeze blooming in her lungs and growing throughout her body until she was frozen solid. Wights tearing down the wall, crushing her friends in the avalanche that splintered their heads in half. Goji. Ghost. Davos. Karsi. Edd. Tormund. Jon. The army marching south, blizzards storming over the unassuming head of King's Landing. Tommen frozen solid, his green eyes now a blazing blue. The walkers tearing the child from her womb, crushing it into dust.

She awoke with a start, heart pounding in her chest. Her recently cut curls stuck to her back and neck, her skin glistening with sweat. 

The full moon illuminated the darkness of her room, momentarily quelling Renfri's fears. It was just a dream.

A knock sounded her door. Renfri sniffed, pushing her hair out of her face, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. 

The white night shift clung to her growing bump, now the perfect size that most unassuming onlookers would think that the scarred Princess had simply enjoyed a large dinner. 

"Come in." She called as she lit a candle, sure that it was only one of the guards peeping in to check, concerned at the sounds of her night terrors. 

Instead, the door cracked open just enough for her mother to step through, holding a candle of her own.

"Your handmaiden fetched me. Said you were screaming in your sleep." Cersei looked up. She closed the door behind her, tilting her head at Renfri from across the room. 

Renfri said nothing, her hands closing protectively around her belly. Cersei leaned against the door, her eyes flickering down to Ren's hands.

"Pregnancy suits you." The ghost of a smile flickered onto her face. "I wonder if motherhood will."

"Why did you come?" Ren blinked. "You've hardly looked at me since I arrived."

Cersei pondered this, leaning against the door.

"You're my daughter and I was told you were having a night terror. Of course I came."

"Am I still?" Renfri raised an eyebrow. "Your daughter."

Cersei knitted her brows, confused.

"How do you mean?"

Renfri rose from the bed, candle in hand, stepping off the platform.

"I was fathered by a man you hated so much that you had him killed. We don't know each other." She swallowed thickly. "Not really. Where have these four years taken you, mother? Can you speak of the things you have done? Do you wonder about my sins? How I got these scars?"

They stood a considerable distance from each other, but still quite closer than they had been before. Her mother's face hardened, and she moved further into the room.

"The child that grows inside you. Do you have love for it? Would you do anything to protect it?"

"I would burn the Seven Kingdoms to ash if that's what it took for him to be safe." Renfri narrowed her eyes. 

"There's your answer, little one. Do you think I felt nothing when you and your brother grew inside my womb? When I pushed you out into the world, crying and covered in blood? All of your sins, and yet you still share my blood, my body, even my face, no matter how deeply your scars run. How could I look at you and see a stranger, when I watched you grow into the woman that stands before me?" Cersei turned her back to Renfri, looking down at the cold hearth. "My daughter the runner. The warrior. The usurper. The last stag. Still my daughter. Mine. Remember that, Renfri. You are mine. No one else's."