AS HIGH AS HONOR | Jaime Lannister

CHAPTER I

When she glimpses Robert at the Sept, her first thought is that he is still handsome. He was just as attractive as he had been a year ago, his face and body unmarred by war. Jeyne is still a girl who has had limited interaction with handsome men, and she allows herself to appreciate his looks. Her second thought is that he does not smile at her. She is his bride, and he does not smile. When he looks at her with those aquamarine orbs, there is no distinguishable emotion. There is no lust, no love, no happiness, no sympathy. Theirs is the epitome of a political marriage;  the only thing she can gauge is that he is bored from the way his eyes dart occasionally around the Sept whenever the Septon drawled on about love and the importance of Faith. In that, she cannot fault him.

When he seals his great love for her with a kiss, his lips are slightly chapped. Jeyne recalls a vague memory of a poem she read when she was a girl about lovers with soft lips. When the King of the Seven Kingdoms makes her his Queen, she wishes she had not known him half her life. She wishes she did not have pragmatism stamped into her very bones and a dutiful instinct ingrained in her since the day she took her first breath. Jeyne wishes for illusions of love and the grandeur of being Queen rather than the expectation of suffering.

The feast commences, and like all royal weddings, it is a grand affair. Robert sits to her left and besides a hasty, 'You look beautiful,' during the second course does not say anything else. He drank himself into a stupor by the fifteenth and she had caught him staring down Cersei Lannister's corset when she had curtsied before her new King and Queen. Jeyne only begrudges him a little bit for it. She knows she has taken Cersei's position, and she is keenly aware of the Lannister girl's glares directed at the side of her head.

When Robert vomits off to the side after course fifty something, Jeyne realizes she will have to be a forgiving wife. A lump begins to form in her throat. I will not cry, not here.

Her father had told her that there were people who would be unhappy with Robert's choice of her as Queen. Her father, who had made it to the ceremony, but had to miss the reception because he had to go and broker peace in Dorne. Jeyne realizes with a stab of bitterness that she is truly alone here. She wants nothing more than to rip off her crown and shove it on Cersei's golden head. Here, she wants to say. It would look better on you anyways.

While Robert was off flirting with handmaidens at his own wedding, Jeyne was forced to exchange pleasantries with all the guests. Ned tells her she looks beautiful and apologizes that his wife could not make it due to the arrival of their new baby. He grimaces whenever Robert does anything particularly mortifying, and his pity makes Jeyne want to launch herself off the Tower of the Hand. She knows his grief is still fresh, though, from the death of his sister. She has a brief conversation with Varys, the court eunuch, or the "Spider," who slips thinly veiled messages behind silky words that Jeyne cannot be bothered to decipher. Stannis Baratheon bows stiffly before her, and Jeyne gets the impression that he was another one who believed Cersei Lannister should've been Queen instead.

Tywin Lannister greets her in a similar manner and her eye is drawn to his son, Jaime. Kingslayer. Jeyne has heard the term multiple times, often from the lips of her own father. The man who had forsaken all his vows and stabbed Aerys Targaryen in the back. Jeyne had seen him once at the infamous tourney at Harrenhal. He had been younger then and had grown even more handsome since. She had observed him arguing with his sister earlier, but he was now placed precariously a few feet away from her.

As the feast began drawing to an end, anxiety had begun to take root in her stomach. Robert had not been seen since course sixty-five, not that she's counting, but the thought that her dear Lord Husband will not even be sober enough to stumble into her bed and do his husbandly duty is perfectly mortifying. The thought of Robert and her-no. The butterflies in Jeyne's stomach reproduce at the thought.