PRIDE & GUILT, cregan stark

007

A FAIR EXCHANGE. PART TWO.

— chapter seven.

A bloody rag was held tightly between his hands as he stared down toward the face of his older brother. They shouldn't of sneaked off and away to find who their cousins believed had stolen Vhagar. Jace should of listened. He shouldn't of been so eager. And now his brother, older and braver, wouldn't open his eyes.

Why? Why weren't his eyes opening? The Maester worried, fussing over the boy as the King demanded for answers. As the King demanded that help be aided to his first-born grandson, even as his own son sat and was tended to by another, his eye being stitched.

And the Queen's anger threatened to wrap around the two remaining boys and strangle them as they stood. Wrap them up until they could no longer stand. And Luke felt it, all of it as they always had, as he clung to Jace's side with frightful eyes watching the other sibling in the room.

"Monty. . ." Luke whispers.

Jace grips the rag tighter. He'd been given it in a frantic manner, the very first those trying to help his brother had used, and hadn't let go of it since. Even with the feel of his brother's blood staining his fingertips, and even when he wanted to, demanding himself to let it fall to the ground, Jace did not.

He did not understand why he did not.

And Jace did not understand why Monterys had not woke back up.

"How could you let such a thing happen?" The King demanded answers. His furious gaze piercing through all that stood within the hall of Driftmark, and yet — much to the heated fury that ran through his second wife — such emotion softened most when King Viserys caught his grandson again. "I will have answers."

Jace itched forward, but Luke did not budge. Luke, softer and more gentle, was struggling to handle the sight.

But perhaps Monterys needed something more than the company of a Maester to convince him to re-open his eyes. He did not know the Maester, but he knew Jace, and he knew Jace's presence, and Jace thought that would be enough.

The conflict showed on his face.

Rhaenys pushed the trembling hands of her granddaughters toward her husband, and Lord Corlys brushed them to his side, his grandsons — two of them — on his other, and then hastily placed herself by her eldest grandchild.

Her hand was light on his skin as she cradled his hand, worried but more so furious for the sake of his wound, studying the break of his temple. The blood had been cleaned best as they could with the insistence of the King looming over them, and the stitching did not fill her satisfaction.

"The Princes were supposed to be abed, my King."

Such an excuse was not good enough. Children, that of Princes and heirs, should never of been able to roam the corridors and even made way through an exit, and yet they stood capable of doing just that. The Guards had not been posted as they should of been in the King's mind.

"When will he wake?" Rhaenys quietly asked of the Maester.

"I do not know, Princess Rhaenys."

Was this how her son would lose his own son? In the walls of Laenor's own home? His inheritance? How would Laenor ever be able to rule Driftmark, and command the seas, with the haunting manner of his own son's fate?