If Jason Lannister was left penniless, gelded, and broken, he would still have one thing to his name.
His audacity.
He held himself about court not in the way a man who recently lost his wife would be, not in the way of a godly man, but in the way of a scandalous bachelor who had caught a very large, very rich fish.
He frequently touched Jeyne in public, disrespecting courting traditions and her chastity by doing so. His hands oft wandered across her arms, her shoulders, even once he had fixed her hair. It was too much for Jeyne to bare.
He had even called her by her given name—no title, no honorific. Just Jeyne. Something most men at least saved for their wedding nights. Jason Lannister flaunted his wealth, his status, and his name to anyone who would listen and had even begun to introduce her.
Her! The cousin to the queen, to the king's children. The girl that had lived at court for almost four moons on her own, navigating and learning the ways of the people. She prayed and lit candles in the sept, she stared at the stars for hours on end praying and begging to the gods to just do something.
They had been so present to her in Oldtown. The gods gave her sweet dreams, good health and near everything a woman of her station could ask for. So why had they abandoned her in King's Landing?
She was well and truly falling apart.
Jason Lannister was the bane of her existence, if she married him, she'd surely go mad.
No, she argued with herself. Jeyne, get it together!
She threw herself into her wedding preparations, into letters filled with false joy that went to every corner in the kingdom and flower arrangements and feast menus. She embroidered, bejeweled and embellished until her fingers were cracked and bleeding.
Her maiden's cloak—the last garment she would wear of her house colors—was a ten-foot-long cloak of crushed velvet colored like deep, moist forest moss. While traditionally, her house's sigil was a tower with red-gold flames on a field of gray, it had changed since the Princess Rhaenyra's wedding, where Queen Alicent had arrived in a gown of green and gold. Now—it was green, the color the Hightower burned when calling its banners to war.
Jeyne had never thought of it before, but if the queen's marriage had been anything like Jeyne's would be, she understood.
The cloak had sprawling vines of gold that crawled toward the white tower emblazoned on the green field. Gold flames protruded from the crest of the tower, licking upward into where her hair would sit. It was heavy, uncomfortable, but even holding it made tears come to her eyes.
For perhaps the first time in her life, Jeyne gave herself permission to be ungrateful. She gave herself permission to curse the gods, the ones whom she had given her entire life to only to be repaid with a future filled with... well... ungodliness.
She didn't want to marry Jason Lannister.
She didn't want to be shipped off to Casterly Rock, always second to a mistress and his baseborn daughters.
Most of all, she wanted to let go. Jeyne had given her lives to the gods, to piousness and good. All it had ever brought her was years of blind trust. Maybe Aemond was right. Maybe... Maybe the gods didn't care about her.
Lord Lannister summoned her for supper on the first day of the fifth moon, near two moons after the beginning of their betrothal.
He summoned her with a young boy dressed in an intricate golden tunic, embroidered with black thread over black cotton breeches. His hair was dark brown, wide eyes blue like water. His face was clean, and he smelled of flowers. The boy couldn't have been older than five years.
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Salvation - Aemond Targaryen / Aegon Targaryen
Fanfiction"Where are your gods, mother, now that our family is gone?" Salvation: deliverance from sin and its consequences.
