ASOIAF fic: The skies are full of them
The skies are full of them.
Lysa Arryn. 7300-ish words. Rated M just to be safe.
The skies are full of them
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
Planetarium -- Adrienne Rich
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x.
In the beginning they are children.
In the beginning they are children and everything remain unfinished around them; warm, hard children-bodies surrounded by infinite possibility and a lack of endings. Riverrun is a fortress, a battlefield, a magical forest where the gods and the dragons hide in every shrub, behind each stone large enough to conceal them.
Lysa, of course, is afraid of the dark.
Lysa is afraid of everything.
She’s afraid of heights, of the roaring river that surrounds them, of dogs, of large boys and their wooden swords and of knights and their shining steel; she fears nightmares and sickness and deep wells where you can drown within a heartbeat if you're careless. She's afraid of being alone, of falling behind, of not finding her way back from the land of dreams and sometimes she wakes up breathless, tangled in sheets and that membrane of unreality that takes a few moments to shake off whenever you open your eyes in the mornings.
Cat teases her because Cat is not afraid of anything and Lysa wishes - at time she wishes so hard that her body bends around the desire - that she could be as brave, as daunting.
"Come with me," Cat calls and Lysa follows, breathing in her sister's fire and strength.
"You have a cut there," Lysa says when Cat undresses in the evening and the flames from the fireplace make her skin look almost unnatural. "Here, let me see."
And Cat complies, allowing her craven little sister to tend to her wounds with that older sister-smile playing in the corners of her mouth; there is a hint of being mocked but Lysa doesn't care because Cat is close enough to hold on to and Lysa's fingers travel hungrily over the small cuts and bruises, thinking I can mend you.
That's how they grow up, separately and together, filling in each other's blanks and missing words.
In the summer they bathe naked and giggling and run away from Mother's outstretched arms, sprawling on the soft grass to dry in the sun, like creatures made of clay or the immense sandstones of their castle.
In the long autumn that follows, they play hide and seek across the garden and the godswood, pretending to be knights and princesses, kings and usurpers.
Lysa is the best at hiding, the skill for it as natural to her as breathing. There are days when she is gone for so long she can catch a small edge of worry in Cat's voice as she climbs into the cramped places that make such good hiding places.
"Lysa!" she says, frowning. Cat is so much like Mother sometimes, like an echo or a perfectly drawn copy. One day, Lysa knows, someone will love her sister the way Father loves Mother, with a quiet sort of affection that still somehow seems to flood the whole castle and its vast grounds. Cat is created for that kind of love; sometimes she can even make Lysa believe that she is, too.
"You found me." Lysa looks up, smiling, knowing that her sister never stays mad at her if she smiles.
Sitting down beside her on her cold stones, Cat sighs, but there's a softer expression on her face as she reaches for Lysa and pulls her closer.
"I always find you, Lysa." Her voice is warm puffs of air in Lysa's hair. "My silly little sister."
And even though that is the truth - Cat always finds her and Lysa is rather silly - and even though it’s cold and damp where they sit, there’s a sense of perfection in these moments, these pieces of the game where they rest with their faces nestled so close together, their arms and legs an intricate and unsolvable puzzle of limbs in the dusk.
They cannot tell us apart, she thinks and feels Cat’s heart as it beats rhythmically against her own chest.
x.
Like the dragons and the ghouls in their long-winded stories, Lysa hides.
In their games, that is her role - it's a role that doesn't change much as they grow older but rather roots itself in their lives, their world. Everything else changes: they have a little brother and Mother falls ill, Father agrees to foster a boy from the rocks of the Vale and Cat is almost a woman grown, tall and thin now, with a different shape under her dresses.
But Lysa still hides.
Often Cat is the one who finds her first, her voice more admonishing now and with the threads of amusement thinning a little for every time - you shall be a woman soon, Lysa, and women do not hide; sometimes Edmure toddle about fast enough to give a loud announcement that reveals Lysa’s hiding place. But in all of her favourite games, it’s Petyr who discovers her.
He’s quick and clever like a mouse, small and wiry unlike the butcher’s boys and the young lords that come to visit sometimes. Their large frames and loud wills and big gestures. Their boy-bodies that take up so much space, their voices that are always rising to the ceiling, drowning Lysa’s own without even meaning to.
Petyr is different. It appears, at least to her, that he always means everything.
"I know you always come in here," he says, not without triumph, when he finds her secret spot in the most secluded part of the stables. Here, where the horses don't even come and the knights and guards are far away, Lysa sits for hours. She thinks here. Thinks or writes in her journal that Father had given her for her nameday, the journal that is bound in leather and embellished with gold; it's the most beautiful thing she has ever owned. Once, Petyr tried to read it. She knows this because he is not as subtle and smooth as he believes himself to be, but it is no matter because the words in the journal are her own. And Cat's.
He slumps down on the ground beside her, crossing his legs. Lysa looks up, snaps her book shut.
"I know you do," she says.
She doesn't say that this is why she comes here; she doesn't tell him she wants him to find her, that she can share her hiding place with him. She doesn't tell him that if he only asked her to, she would even tell him the secret language of her journal.
There is something in him that doesn't take kindly to kindness so all the movements and words linger in Lysa, bubbling under her skin.
She is always surprised he can't see them.
x.
There is a word for 'secret' that only Cat and Lysa know.
A word for 'dreams', for 'promise', later also a word, spoken with bathed breath and flushed cheeks, for 'Brandon'. There is never a word for 'Petyr' because Cat pretends she doesn't know about his wide-eyed dedication and Lysa would never admit that she, in turn, follows him like a shadow.
When they are children, they sit side by side and communicate silently in their secret language by writing the words, letter by letter, in each other's palms. Skin against skin; Cat's long, cool fingers pressing into Lysa's hand and her own blunt fingertips coding the replies, eager and obtuse but Cat is patient and kind and when Lysa gets it wrong she says oh never mind and they alter the language until she can spell it, too.
There is a word for 'mother' and it tastes of ashes.
The sun breaks through the clouds the day Mother dies. The sun washes the grey mountains and the green fields, puts silvery treasures in the river that suddenly seems so dangerous to them all now that Mother isn't there to scoop them up in her arms, warding them against everything.
In the great halls of Riverrun, the sunbeams dance over the furniture and the floors and Lysa stands at her father's side, trying not to be afraid of the bleak hollowness of his voice as he turns to look at her.
"Go find your sister," he says; she feels his hand on the back of her head but it's like he doesn't touch her at all, he seems to be somewhere else.
Lysa nods and walks away.
"My mother is dead, too." Petyr says it so matter of factly that it seems to be a different sentence altogether. As though he is really saying mothers die, it is nothing.
Cat gives him a sharp glance, but Lysa rests in the words, willing herself to feel the same, to shift this heavy grief off her shoulders.
x.
Father's desk is made of dark wood and bears a faint scent of oil that the servants use to polish it. Lysa stands with her hands on it, her fingers running along the surface of the table, tracing what looks like veins.
"We shall have the Lannisters at Riverrun shortly," Father announces and she knows, before he even speaks the words what they mean. The sinking feeling in her chest tells her as much. "And we will be splendid hosts."
A fortnight later Lord Jaime and his father - the terrifyingly composed Lord Tywin - stands in front of her and Lysa pretends she is Cat, pretend it's her sister who takes a step closer and raises her gaze from the floor to look the guests in the eyes.
"My lady," Lord Jaime offers politely as his father gives him a look that allows no protests. They say the Hand of the King never smiles. Lysa wonders what sort of creature that can live like that, what kind of man it makes him. She wonders, too, if his son shares his father's ruthless cold.
"My lord," Lysa echoes, her voice thin as smoke.
Then Cat greets their visitors and all of a sudden Jaime Lannister smiles, a bright and wicked smile that lands somewhere in Lysa's chest like a forlorn little sigh, and answers her unspoken question even though it is not done in a way she would have chosen if the choice had been hers.
In the company of Jaime Lannister, all boys pale somewhat, fading into the backdrop. Like Brandon Stark, he seems much bigger than he is, much taller and braver and more handsome. It is, perhaps, in the way he moves; he is confident like a man grown, his gestures and words as arrogant and cutting as his father's even if they may seem very different.
Long after the guests have left, his presence lingers. For a moment Lysa thinks Cat will invent a word for 'Jaime' as well, but when she asks, her sister scoffs softly and never speaks of the Lannisters again.
Petyr scoffs too, for different reasons.
"I think you are much more handsome," Lysa says very quietly but he doesn't seem to hear.
x.
Everyone knows Petyr is nothing next to Brandon Stark.
Everyone knows, and they still let him duel. A poor knight's son ought to know his place even if it kills him.
Lysa forces herself to watch with eyes wide-open as the cruelty of that scene plays out and Cat's posture beside her stiffens to stone before it's over.
"Do not kill him, Brandon," she says in a voice Lysa cannot recognise. "Let him live with this."
"As my lady wishes," Brandon agrees, releasing his opponent with a careless shove. Petyr falls to the ground and Lysa's heart almost comes to a halt before she can discern the distinct groan rising from his bloodied mouth.
"Let us never speak of this again," Father says, sternly.
"Do you see now?" Cat asks her quietly in the corridor that separate their bedrooms. She wears their mother's face again, their mother's concerned frown. "Do you see now that he is beneath us, Lysa?"
Lysa says nothing. Not until night has fallen and she seeks out her father again, standing on the doorstep to his office like she used to do as a little girl when he held the keys to the world and she could make him smile. He rarely smiles these days.
"Let me care for him," she begs of him now.
"Lysa-"
"Please, do not send him away. I could not bear it."
Her palms are sweaty and cold when she brings them together, rubbing them to warm herself. Even with the fireplace burning, the room feels like a slice of winter cut out and presented to them. Father always says it is better for his books to have a cool temperature, claims that his scrolls and journals suffers ever y summer and spring.
To her, the room resembles a crypt.
When Father sighs his reluctant approval, she doesn't bother hiding the tears that well up in her eyes; he in turn, doesn't bother to cover up the concern in his gaze that seems to keep her from leaving his presence.
x.
Petyr doesn't talk to her for several days; he doesn't look at her as she sits by his bedside and talks to him, reads to him, tends to his wounds. Every day she sits there.
In the bedchamber that has belonged to him for many years now, the walls are decorated with shields and bookshelves and she knows the exact spots of everything in here by heart because every time she has been allowed inside has been an adventure that she treasures the way one treasures the illusions of what is impossible.
"I'm so bored with your stories," he tells her the first night he speaks.
The injuries are healing but he is still weak, though he's growing more impatient for ever y day. Lysa picks up a different book and opens it, spreading it out in her lap without looking up at him. He is probably right, she decides. They are too old for her stories.
One night, three nights after the first time he speaks, she finds him propped up on his elbows in bed when she enters the room; his face is flushed, his eyes distant and hazy. He startles slightly at the sound of the door closing and Lysa curses her clumsiness.
"It's just me," she whispers, as though her presence disturbs something. He often gives her that impression even if he never says it.
Petyr says nothing, but she can see him relax against the pillows again, letting out a breath that sounds like a sigh.
When they were children, Cat and Lysa would sneak around the servant's quarters to pick up on the maids' gossip and the crude teasing thrown between them, jests full of bad words and forbidden knowledge. Then they would return to their bedchamber, giggling, and make up stories to match the maids' tales. Brave knights and handsome heroes who will sweep them away, who will ask for their favours; they are Tullys who will behave like proper ladies and perhaps blush at the attention but then - and this they agree on with cheeks that flush with more than embarrassment - they shall very much enjoy to be kissed and cherished. Because that, Cat tells her and Cat knows so much, is how the gods plant babes in a lady's belly.
Lysa thinks of the maids' stories in this room. Thinks of the seams of reality and fantasy and how stark it sometimes is, the border between the two.
She undoes her dress, baring her shoulders and chest.
Men will go to war for a woman's honour, the ballads claim. For a woman's heart, for a lady's grace. For women like Lyanna Stark and for Cat men will always raise their swords and banners. Women with wolf blood, who are bold and headstrong like boys but know how to mask it behind a woman's virtues; women who are nothing like Lysa.
No one will go to war for her. No man will raise his banners for her shyness and clumsy feet, for her patience and fear and her boring old stories.
This, she thinks as the smooth fabric of her dress slides down her back, is all she can offer.
Petyr sighs.
"Why are you here?" he asks, tipping his face up towards the light. There's a glint of something in his eyes when Lysa steps closer and he notices her naked skin. A blend of fever, milk of the poppy and sheer surprise, she gathers. And that hard edge in him, the refusal to accept her because she is not what he wants. "I'm hardly dying."
He sounds like he wish he was and it wrings and twists in her chest, beneath all those fragile bones.
"I want to be here. I-I love you," she says, forcing her voice to carry. "I do, Petyr."
Petyr gives a bitter laugh, but reaches for her like a man drowning and she slips into bed, nearly stumbling on her own eagerness. She thinks of Cat, of how Cat would never do this, of how Cat would never tremble or give herself so easily to someone who is so far beneath them. She thinks of Cat as she feels Petyr's body against her own, wondering what he thinks of it, what he makes of her. If he sees her at all.
She wants to say I don't pity you like Cat does or I understand but she cannot find any words because Petyr's hands are suddenly everything as they roam over her body and tangle in her hair that falls across his chest; he draws a sharp breath when she moves above him.
"Yes," he says, and there's an urgency in his voice that sends a hot jolt of impatience through her, spreading in the pit of her stomach. "Like that."
"Yes," he says again, later,when Lysa is beneath him and he plants an open-mouthed kiss on her lips, his breathing heavy and rough and Lysa clings to his shoulders as she feels him inside her, her entire body so heartbreakingly open and he is so close, closer than she could have dreamed. "Catelyn."
Lysa does not say a word, does not make a single sound.
Afterwards, in the comfort of her own bed, she tells herself it was nothing.
They cannot tell us apart, Cat says in her restless dreams and for the first time, Lysa thinks it sounds like a threat.
x.
The war, when it comes, changes everything.
They stand on the brink of it, waiting. Cat stands proud and tall, her hand warm in Lysa's own, her voice a soothing memory of childhood in the air around them. It feels like a lifetime ago that they were playing hide and seek in these ancient fields, a lifetime since Lysa would burst into tears at the sound of a barking dog and Cat would curl up with her and sing a song of the blind old wolf who travelled the seas or make up a fairy tale of how Riverrun rose up from the bottom of the river, shaking off the fish and the crabs like a dog.
Oh, Cat.
"Brandon will come back," Lysa says.
But of course he doesn't and the world breaks around them.
x.
"How is she?" Petyr asks on the eve of the day when the rider reaches them with the news of Brandon Stark's fate; for a brief moment he sounds so small, so helpless in his own misery. He's slumped in an armchair by the window, a bottle in his hand and an empty one on the floor.
"She is heartbroken," Lysa replies and they both know that she is truly saying: she will never love you. She feels the cruelty in her chest give her words a different edge, feels their impact on the one person she never wants to hurt. I don't deserve you, she thinks, feeling the disappointment well up inside. You know that too. That's why you turn away.
"That's what you get for being infatuated with a man who is too foolish not to run into every trap set for him." He's drunk, Lysa can almost taste the wine on his breath. In the dusk of the room, she notices that his movements are sloppy, too, revealing a different man than the one he pretends to be.
Lysa knows that man. She prefers that man even if he is being washed away and etched out. It is one of the many things she will never tell him.
"I thought you might be hungry." She holds out the tray of food she has taken from the servants. It suddenly seems pathetic. Lysa with all her bowls of food and mugs of ale, her constancy and hope that never seems to fade.
Shaking her head, she puts down the tray and turns on her heel to leave again.
There's a creaking sound behind her as Petyr shifts in the chair; she throws him a glance over her shoulder and for a second, their eyes meet. It seems strange now, but he was once a stranger to her, an alien shape in this room. They have laughed here, she thinks, willing herself to remember the good times. They have claimed this castle with laughter and pranks, with stolen goods and kissing games. If she closes her eyes, she can see Cat throwing her head back and Petyr's gaze - covetous and full at the same time - lingering at the curve of her neck. Stolen summer wine in their mouths and on their lips and Lysa remembers leaning against the wall, laughing so hard her stomach had felt like a hard, warm knot.
It seems important to anchor the images in her, somehow. Keeping her heart from misremembering.
Petyr lets out a soft groan that sounds equal parts conflicted and annoyed. All his little cracks, Lysa thinks, all the small ways in which he is imperfect. She wants to put her hands over them, gently; she isn't certain if she wants to soothe him or tear him apart.
"Wait." She stops, almost holding her breath. She wishes that he would say her name but he does not. Even in this drunken stupor, he cannot be that honest. "Stay."
It's not what she wants him to say; it's more than she can ever ask for.
He will not remember this in the morning.
x.
It takes one day and one night to drive the child from her body.
There is nothing she can say that will change her father's mind, nothing that will allow Petyr to stay. So she says nothing. Not to Father, not to Cat, not to anyone. She stands in her chamber and thinks about oaths when the blood seeps out of her, slowly, slowly.
"The bleeding, my lady. Has it stopped?"
Lysa doesn't look at the maester; she can hear his footfall and feel his sour breath behind her. There's something rotten in him, she thinks, something dark and corrupted in him to match the things he does in this castle.
"Yes." She looks at the stars, the faint spots of light behind the clouds that sometimes break through the veil. The sky is full of them, she knows, even when they are nowhere to be seen.
Lysa's hand moves over her stomach, blunted through her skirts; she can feel it as flat as the window sill, hard as the stones that surround her. She had wanted to tell Petyr, had wanted to explain but he had seemed unsurprised as they sent him away, as though he had been expecting it, as though it had all been part of the plan. He always wants things to fall into patterns, Lysa knows, biting her lower lip as the image of Petyr crosses the border she has placed around her mind.
The sour breath is less prominent now, the sound of the maester's footfall tells her he is stepping away. There's a brief pause before he inhales.
"Your lord father wishes to know if you are in pain, my lady?"
"No," she says and it is not a lie because there is nothing left that can hurt her. "No, I'm not."
x.
"We all have to do our duty," Cat says when they stand in front of the mirror in their wedding dresses.
There's a sense of urgency in the room, a touch of desperation in the silk they are clad in, the pearls resting in their hair. Lysa feels unclean despite the scented oils on her skin. The dress hangs limp and shapeless from her shoulders; she has not been eating much lately.
Weddings in war times had always seemed so romantic in their stories and make-believe, but there are no ballads to be sung about today. They do what is asked of them because they must.
Lysa has overheard a thousand muffled conversations between her father and her uncle, leading up to this point. Has heard the Lannisters insult me and if they think I will marry my daughter to their imp, they are sorely mistaken from her father's mouth and her uncle's responses, clipped and curt, asking her father is he had truly expected anything else.
She has overheard enough to know that Jon Arryn of the Vale is the only suitable man in Westeros in a urgent enough position to accept her hand in marriage.
"Think of how important your alliance will be." Cat stands in front of her now, tugging at the sleeves of Lysa's dress, rearranging them in a final attempt at creating something beautiful of this. "Lord Arryn is a good man of great influence."
Lysa nods and musters up a smile that seems to satisfy even her sister, a smile that is hopeful and dutiful enough to soothe.
She doesn't want to ruin Cat's wedding day, after all.
x.
On their wedding night, her husband doesn't kiss her.
She isn't particularly saddened by it but the way he goes about it and the way the scene plays out still lingers at the back of her mind. When they are alone, her lord husband - who she will never think of as Jon, she is certain of it - undresses her; his hands are warm and dry and she bites her bottom lip to keep from making any kind of noise. There's a torrent of words inside her, filling up her mouth, but she cannot give them a voice. She must not.
We all have to do our duty.
Her lord husband lacks the passion of her dreamed knights, the urgency of her handful of couplings with Petyr - frantic, wrong, quick, always hiding from something or someone, his fingers inside her and her head against the stone walls.
This is different.
Her lord husband gives her a small nod as she stands stark naked in the room, nothing but the tingling heat from the fireplace covering her skin.
"My lord," Lysa says and lowers her head.
"Jon," he corrects her, with a quick smile. Then, very slowly, he leads her to their bed.
The slowness seems to capture his essence, she thinks: he's a careful man, one who does not give in to his impulses, a man in control.
Even his body's response to her, Lysa soon finds, is slow and laboured. She never knew it could be such a painstakingly dutiful business even for a man. As he takes her hand and guides it, urging her to help him, she catches herself wondering if Lord Arryn had loved his first wives or of he had come to their beds with the same unwillingness.
Wondering, too, if it is the gods' will that she must never share the bed of a man who truly wants her there, if she will ever look into a man's eyes and see herself reflected there.
Husband. Such a heavy word, yet somehow carrying the faintest edges of future.
The hair on his chest is grey. It seems an odd thing to notice when her lord husband is moving above her, his breathing heavy and uneven and his body so large from this angle, all of it so heartbreakingly uneven in her eyes. Jon Arryn is a good man and she cannot love him - will not love him - the way a wife ought to love her husband and the hopelessness in that insight makes her quiver, pressing her teeth together to not burst into tears.
There's a pause, a shift, a pair of eyes that is suddenly focused directly on her.
"Am I hurting you?" And the touch of surprise in his voice, Lysa thinks, closing her own eyes. He knows. Of course he knows. They might as well have branded her like farmers brand their cattle; her shame is impossible to hide.
"No." She shakes her head.
"Very well." He nods, as though sealing a contract.
And when it's over - not long after that - Lysa lies awake for many hours, listening to her lord husband's snoring and trying to shape her life around it, around this.
x.
One year after the wedding, the second child she is not allowed to have bleeds out of her body.
Some moon turns later, it happens again.
She has felt them both inside her, has spoken to them when no one can hear; she has felt the ghost-weight of their souls in her belly and it's a queer thought that they are nothing more than blood, in the end.
"It is no matter," her lord husband says, when the news reaches him. He barely looks up from his work; behind the piles of documents and books on his desk he seems to disappear slightly but it's an escape that fortifies him, nothing like hiding in the stables. "These things take time."
The room smells of dust, a scent that tastes of salt at the back of her tongue. There's a word for 'mother' and it tastes like ashes.
Be a good wife and the gods will bless you with sons, Father says in her head, an echo from a memory best left forgotten.
The gods of the Vale know her failures. She can plead with them until her throat's dry and she has run out of prayers; they see right through her lies.
When her lord husband asks her to come with him to King's Landing, Lysa nods, almost desperately.
x.
King's Landing is a blessed place, someone mentions to her as her husband asks her to come live with him there, in the Hand's quarters. The grass grows green on the fields and the gods are generous with their gifts.
Lysa walks around in the lavish chambers that are granted them because of the Hand's service, wondering if the gods look at the men and women here in a different light.
She wonders if the gods see her lord husband when he uses the secret entrance to come and go without disturbing her or if they see her when she uses the same passage, breathing freedom with every dangerous step down the ladder.
She wonders if they see Petyr as he returns to her, older, harder but still the same misplaced boy beneath the young lord's mask. It is a secret to everyone else at King's Landing because the years make ghosts of the children they were, but in her eyes and in her heart, Petyr is the scrawny little boy who looked at Jaime Lannister with fiery, insatiable jealousy masked as disrespect.
"I am with child," she confesses to him one hot summer afternoon when the heat has drenched the corridors and courtyards in a thick humidity.
He arches an eyebrow. When he first came to the city there had been a slight shift in the pattern, a temporary discrepancy between what they have always been and what her recent rise in the ranks has done to them. It is gone now. His detached little half-smile tells her as much. "Why are you telling me that?"
Lysa thinks of the gods as she laughs it away, shaking her head.
x.
Women are the life-bringers of the gods, someone tells her once with a squeeze of her shoulder. It is said casually, meant as an admonishing or an incitement, though Lysa sometimes have trouble telling them apart.
Life-bringer, she thinks, as she closes her body around the pressing, urgent pain of her abdomen and the equally urgent words over her head.
Life-bringer, she thinks as they hold up her firstborn whose screams will never echo in these halls. Women are the life-bringers of the gods.
But all that comes out of Lysa is mute, cold death.
x.
The shadows of King's Landing creeps under her skin.
Once, when she was a girl and Cat still sat on her bed at night, running her fingers through Lysa's hair and telling her stories, Cat had told her a story of Lor the Liar. Every time Lor spoke untrue, a shadow grew beside him and followed him around. After a while - she can still hear Cat's voice rise and fall, pausing for dramatic effect - he had disappeared behind the shadows that walked with him everywhere and he could no longer be seen.
People here never speak what is one their minds and the shadows, Lysa knows, are swallowing her because she is weakest of them all.
No one tells her this, but she knows.
She drops behind in the exhausting conversations at court and she cannot, at least not for very long, pretend to have any interest in the endowment of the latest tourney the King wishes to host. More than anything else she misses Cat, like a prisoner would miss his freedom or the sunshine and the thought of her sister at Winterfell, surrounded by snow and children and that demure husband of hers twists inside. Letters are scarce and Lysa finds herself struggling with her own replies, as though her hands hesitate to put her life into words these days.
And then there's the grief over having displeased the gods, of having failed her lord husband, her family, her duty - the feeling is too vast to have any shape. The children she has never held in her arms, their invisible marks in her memory so empty and therefore limitless. She doesn't know how to treat it, how to move within its boundless waste and because of it, it traps her, ensnares her.
There are times when she catches herself crying without even feeling sad; times when she wipes the tears away with the back of her hand and picks up the matter at hand again, other times when she bursts out laughing without having anything to laugh about.
"You were made for a quieter sort of life," her lord husband tells her once. "Perhaps you would feel better in the Vale."
It's a fortnight after she bleeds her seventh child into the bathtub an early morning and screams until the servants come to carry her back to her own bed. She had not even known she was expecting, yet somehow the loss of it takes something from her and leaves a waste of nothing behind. This is your fault, she thinks as she meets her husband's gaze. You will never have any heirs. You're an old, disgusting man and there can never be any life in your seed.
Or perhaps she says it out loud. He doesn't share her bed again in nearly two years.
x.
She tries to get rid of her last child.
Twice, she tries. With moon tea and exhaustion, with carelessness and a fury bordering on grief she does what she can to cleanse her body of the death in her belly before it corrupts what little that still remains of her. If she takes a deep breath, she can feel the shadows inside, like iron and poison in her blood. The gods will bless the good wives with children but Lysa is not one of them so she must fight a different battle. Best them at their own game.
It had been simple enough back in Riverrun. A quiet business washing herself clean of the deed her father would never address in words afterwards; she had bled so much - too much, she learned - but it had not been difficult.
This time it's impossible, it's a fate written in stone.
She bows her head.
x.
"He is not strong, my lady."
Lysa looks at the boy in her arms. They call him trueborn. Heir. Son. She frowns at the fragile little shape of arms and legs and pink, cold skin that seems to never get warm; she places a finger on his belly, drags it up across his chest, watching the faint mark her touch leaves behind.
He's unwritten.
He is alive and this is the strangest thing in the world.
"I wanted you dead," she whispers against her last child's downy head and she knows, there and then, that this is the greatest fault she will ever do. That there is nothing - no shape and no word - that can ever mirror this.
Cradling him in her arms, so hard that he gives a low sound that sounds like a stifled sob, she swears the rest of her life is his; she wraps her useless body and all of her faults around him as a shield. Perhaps it is a curse, but it is all she can give him.
x.
Sometimes they take their supper together.
Her lord husband to her right, Petyr on the opposite side of the table and Lysa teetering in between, paying more attention to the silverware than to the conversation soaring around her. The private dining room in the Hand's quarters is quite small but richly decorated and always on the verge of becoming too warm between the fireplace and the guests. It seems like an obstacle to eat in this room.
It's a room made for important conversations and solemn decisions and deceit; she feels it in her body, that heavy air of uncertainty that terrifies her because she doesn't understand it.
Lysa looks at the neatly cut meat on her table and thinks of shadows.
"The King has planned to take the Queen on a hunting trip in a fortnight," her husband says, barely looking up from his plate. He takes food seriously and pays everything a lot of attention as though he wishes to study every bite.
Petyr says something low and sarcastic that Lysa doesn't quite hear, her lord husband responds. She wonders if they would notice if she vanished before their eyes.
They do notice the wailing scream coming from the other side of the door and Robert, rushing inside.
"Mother!" His pale cheeks are flushed, his hands ice cold as they cling to her legs. "Mother!"
Petyr gives her a glance as she raises to her feet to her feet to pick up her son. But neither he nor her husband says a word as she makes her excuses and leaves the room. Out in the corridor the septa waddles breathlessly in her direction, shame colouring her cheeks, giving them the same flush as little Sweetrobin's.
"My lady," she lowers her head. "My lady, I am terribly sorry; he ran away."
"I was lonely." Her son looks up at her, defiant and frowning. There's a worried expression in his face that seems permanent, she thinks, a dark sort of thread in him, running through his thoughts. Sometimes, at night when she can't sleep and sits in bed, counting his breaths, she cannot close her eyes to the death in him. It's there, right beneath his fragile shell; it's inevitable and so impossible to image that she clenches around it, her entire being a quiet scream over his fate.
Behind the door in the fancy room that is made for great men and their importance, the seven kingdoms are ruled but they mean nothing to her. Perhaps they did once - she can't remember and her mind has a lot of blanks these days, a few spots where she knows she once had other thoughts, other knowledge. She knows she once cared for other things, simple things: stories, words, to run over the fields and bridges of Riverrun with Cat ahead of her, laughing out loud; Father's conversations and Mother's warm hands.
"It's no matter," Lysa says to the septa and then, kneeling down, she takes her son in her arms. He trembles a little against her before digging his fingers into her arms, as though they're claws and he's an animal with his prey and Lysa buries her face in the curve of his neck thinking we're both prey and they will not hurt us; they will never hurt us.
He is the only thing of importance in the whole wretched world.
x.
They stand in the shadows of the Hand's quarters again, older and more careful.
"The Queen?" Lysa's voice catches around the magnitude of what she is saying, of what they are speaking of. "But why would the Queen-"
She falls silent. It's the wrong question, she knows when she sees Petyr's expression shift slightly. She has been silly again, has slipped. It infuriates her sometimes to think about how he never reveals himself, never cracks, that his armour always hold up. Always this calm, detached control. He's no more whole than I am, Lysa thinks at times when they find each other in the unwatched corners of King's Landing. But the shadows stay away from him. She prays every night that her Sweetrobin has his father's blood and heart and none of her own faults.
She thinks of Robert as she looks at Petyr again, already knowing what her answer will be. Whatever he asks.
"Why would I want to decieve you?" Petyr's question is full of promise and sweetness.
Outside, the cold, long autumn seems to crack open and reveal a full-blown winter.
x.
As a child, you live only a breath away from everything.
Now when she’s older and neither dreams nor sleep come so easily any more, she spends her nights counting the endless distances between things: between Catelyn Stark and the girl who taught Lysa to read, between the handsome, clever boy she would have married and the arrogant man who besieges Riverrun, between the girl she was and the woman she was meant to be.
She thinks about all this longing, all the desire that has been left behind, abandoned on the fields and in the enchanted groves where other children play now.
She thinks she would have preferred to remain a child, that she was meant to remain one; in the pale light of dawn she thinks that the woman in her bones has become twisted, stifled, as though there never was enough room for her. There are fragments left of it, of family and duty and honour and a stout, patient heart full of hope, but they slip through her fingers.
I always find you, Cat says in her head and Lysa wishes it was true.
"You fill your head with such silly thoughts," Petyr says to her, softly, from the bed and she knows she has spoken aloud again. She never seem to notice her own borders at all any more; everything spills over.
x.
"Only Cat," Petyr says to her, just as softly but a couple of years later, in a different life that she cannot make any sense of.
That look on his face. The hard edges around his frame, the streaks of dark in him, the things she has always loved and will always love in the hopeless, irredeemable way one loves the impossible. There's nothing beautiful about it, nothing that can be found in ballads; it can bring forth no life, only death.
We are not so different, Petyr, she thinks or perhaps she says it, because when he looks at her, that last time, there’s contempt in his eyes and she is not so certain if it’s meant for her.
Lysa Arryn. 7300-ish words. Rated M just to be safe.
The skies are full of them
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
Planetarium -- Adrienne Rich
----------
x.
In the beginning they are children.
In the beginning they are children and everything remain unfinished around them; warm, hard children-bodies surrounded by infinite possibility and a lack of endings. Riverrun is a fortress, a battlefield, a magical forest where the gods and the dragons hide in every shrub, behind each stone large enough to conceal them.
Lysa, of course, is afraid of the dark.
Lysa is afraid of everything.
She’s afraid of heights, of the roaring river that surrounds them, of dogs, of large boys and their wooden swords and of knights and their shining steel; she fears nightmares and sickness and deep wells where you can drown within a heartbeat if you're careless. She's afraid of being alone, of falling behind, of not finding her way back from the land of dreams and sometimes she wakes up breathless, tangled in sheets and that membrane of unreality that takes a few moments to shake off whenever you open your eyes in the mornings.
Cat teases her because Cat is not afraid of anything and Lysa wishes - at time she wishes so hard that her body bends around the desire - that she could be as brave, as daunting.
"Come with me," Cat calls and Lysa follows, breathing in her sister's fire and strength.
"You have a cut there," Lysa says when Cat undresses in the evening and the flames from the fireplace make her skin look almost unnatural. "Here, let me see."
And Cat complies, allowing her craven little sister to tend to her wounds with that older sister-smile playing in the corners of her mouth; there is a hint of being mocked but Lysa doesn't care because Cat is close enough to hold on to and Lysa's fingers travel hungrily over the small cuts and bruises, thinking I can mend you.
That's how they grow up, separately and together, filling in each other's blanks and missing words.
In the summer they bathe naked and giggling and run away from Mother's outstretched arms, sprawling on the soft grass to dry in the sun, like creatures made of clay or the immense sandstones of their castle.
In the long autumn that follows, they play hide and seek across the garden and the godswood, pretending to be knights and princesses, kings and usurpers.
Lysa is the best at hiding, the skill for it as natural to her as breathing. There are days when she is gone for so long she can catch a small edge of worry in Cat's voice as she climbs into the cramped places that make such good hiding places.
"Lysa!" she says, frowning. Cat is so much like Mother sometimes, like an echo or a perfectly drawn copy. One day, Lysa knows, someone will love her sister the way Father loves Mother, with a quiet sort of affection that still somehow seems to flood the whole castle and its vast grounds. Cat is created for that kind of love; sometimes she can even make Lysa believe that she is, too.
"You found me." Lysa looks up, smiling, knowing that her sister never stays mad at her if she smiles.
Sitting down beside her on her cold stones, Cat sighs, but there's a softer expression on her face as she reaches for Lysa and pulls her closer.
"I always find you, Lysa." Her voice is warm puffs of air in Lysa's hair. "My silly little sister."
And even though that is the truth - Cat always finds her and Lysa is rather silly - and even though it’s cold and damp where they sit, there’s a sense of perfection in these moments, these pieces of the game where they rest with their faces nestled so close together, their arms and legs an intricate and unsolvable puzzle of limbs in the dusk.
They cannot tell us apart, she thinks and feels Cat’s heart as it beats rhythmically against her own chest.
x.
Like the dragons and the ghouls in their long-winded stories, Lysa hides.
In their games, that is her role - it's a role that doesn't change much as they grow older but rather roots itself in their lives, their world. Everything else changes: they have a little brother and Mother falls ill, Father agrees to foster a boy from the rocks of the Vale and Cat is almost a woman grown, tall and thin now, with a different shape under her dresses.
But Lysa still hides.
Often Cat is the one who finds her first, her voice more admonishing now and with the threads of amusement thinning a little for every time - you shall be a woman soon, Lysa, and women do not hide; sometimes Edmure toddle about fast enough to give a loud announcement that reveals Lysa’s hiding place. But in all of her favourite games, it’s Petyr who discovers her.
He’s quick and clever like a mouse, small and wiry unlike the butcher’s boys and the young lords that come to visit sometimes. Their large frames and loud wills and big gestures. Their boy-bodies that take up so much space, their voices that are always rising to the ceiling, drowning Lysa’s own without even meaning to.
Petyr is different. It appears, at least to her, that he always means everything.
"I know you always come in here," he says, not without triumph, when he finds her secret spot in the most secluded part of the stables. Here, where the horses don't even come and the knights and guards are far away, Lysa sits for hours. She thinks here. Thinks or writes in her journal that Father had given her for her nameday, the journal that is bound in leather and embellished with gold; it's the most beautiful thing she has ever owned. Once, Petyr tried to read it. She knows this because he is not as subtle and smooth as he believes himself to be, but it is no matter because the words in the journal are her own. And Cat's.
He slumps down on the ground beside her, crossing his legs. Lysa looks up, snaps her book shut.
"I know you do," she says.
She doesn't say that this is why she comes here; she doesn't tell him she wants him to find her, that she can share her hiding place with him. She doesn't tell him that if he only asked her to, she would even tell him the secret language of her journal.
There is something in him that doesn't take kindly to kindness so all the movements and words linger in Lysa, bubbling under her skin.
She is always surprised he can't see them.
x.
There is a word for 'secret' that only Cat and Lysa know.
A word for 'dreams', for 'promise', later also a word, spoken with bathed breath and flushed cheeks, for 'Brandon'. There is never a word for 'Petyr' because Cat pretends she doesn't know about his wide-eyed dedication and Lysa would never admit that she, in turn, follows him like a shadow.
When they are children, they sit side by side and communicate silently in their secret language by writing the words, letter by letter, in each other's palms. Skin against skin; Cat's long, cool fingers pressing into Lysa's hand and her own blunt fingertips coding the replies, eager and obtuse but Cat is patient and kind and when Lysa gets it wrong she says oh never mind and they alter the language until she can spell it, too.
There is a word for 'mother' and it tastes of ashes.
The sun breaks through the clouds the day Mother dies. The sun washes the grey mountains and the green fields, puts silvery treasures in the river that suddenly seems so dangerous to them all now that Mother isn't there to scoop them up in her arms, warding them against everything.
In the great halls of Riverrun, the sunbeams dance over the furniture and the floors and Lysa stands at her father's side, trying not to be afraid of the bleak hollowness of his voice as he turns to look at her.
"Go find your sister," he says; she feels his hand on the back of her head but it's like he doesn't touch her at all, he seems to be somewhere else.
Lysa nods and walks away.
"My mother is dead, too." Petyr says it so matter of factly that it seems to be a different sentence altogether. As though he is really saying mothers die, it is nothing.
Cat gives him a sharp glance, but Lysa rests in the words, willing herself to feel the same, to shift this heavy grief off her shoulders.
x.
Father's desk is made of dark wood and bears a faint scent of oil that the servants use to polish it. Lysa stands with her hands on it, her fingers running along the surface of the table, tracing what looks like veins.
"We shall have the Lannisters at Riverrun shortly," Father announces and she knows, before he even speaks the words what they mean. The sinking feeling in her chest tells her as much. "And we will be splendid hosts."
A fortnight later Lord Jaime and his father - the terrifyingly composed Lord Tywin - stands in front of her and Lysa pretends she is Cat, pretend it's her sister who takes a step closer and raises her gaze from the floor to look the guests in the eyes.
"My lady," Lord Jaime offers politely as his father gives him a look that allows no protests. They say the Hand of the King never smiles. Lysa wonders what sort of creature that can live like that, what kind of man it makes him. She wonders, too, if his son shares his father's ruthless cold.
"My lord," Lysa echoes, her voice thin as smoke.
Then Cat greets their visitors and all of a sudden Jaime Lannister smiles, a bright and wicked smile that lands somewhere in Lysa's chest like a forlorn little sigh, and answers her unspoken question even though it is not done in a way she would have chosen if the choice had been hers.
In the company of Jaime Lannister, all boys pale somewhat, fading into the backdrop. Like Brandon Stark, he seems much bigger than he is, much taller and braver and more handsome. It is, perhaps, in the way he moves; he is confident like a man grown, his gestures and words as arrogant and cutting as his father's even if they may seem very different.
Long after the guests have left, his presence lingers. For a moment Lysa thinks Cat will invent a word for 'Jaime' as well, but when she asks, her sister scoffs softly and never speaks of the Lannisters again.
Petyr scoffs too, for different reasons.
"I think you are much more handsome," Lysa says very quietly but he doesn't seem to hear.
x.
Everyone knows Petyr is nothing next to Brandon Stark.
Everyone knows, and they still let him duel. A poor knight's son ought to know his place even if it kills him.
Lysa forces herself to watch with eyes wide-open as the cruelty of that scene plays out and Cat's posture beside her stiffens to stone before it's over.
"Do not kill him, Brandon," she says in a voice Lysa cannot recognise. "Let him live with this."
"As my lady wishes," Brandon agrees, releasing his opponent with a careless shove. Petyr falls to the ground and Lysa's heart almost comes to a halt before she can discern the distinct groan rising from his bloodied mouth.
"Let us never speak of this again," Father says, sternly.
"Do you see now?" Cat asks her quietly in the corridor that separate their bedrooms. She wears their mother's face again, their mother's concerned frown. "Do you see now that he is beneath us, Lysa?"
Lysa says nothing. Not until night has fallen and she seeks out her father again, standing on the doorstep to his office like she used to do as a little girl when he held the keys to the world and she could make him smile. He rarely smiles these days.
"Let me care for him," she begs of him now.
"Lysa-"
"Please, do not send him away. I could not bear it."
Her palms are sweaty and cold when she brings them together, rubbing them to warm herself. Even with the fireplace burning, the room feels like a slice of winter cut out and presented to them. Father always says it is better for his books to have a cool temperature, claims that his scrolls and journals suffers ever y summer and spring.
To her, the room resembles a crypt.
When Father sighs his reluctant approval, she doesn't bother hiding the tears that well up in her eyes; he in turn, doesn't bother to cover up the concern in his gaze that seems to keep her from leaving his presence.
x.
Petyr doesn't talk to her for several days; he doesn't look at her as she sits by his bedside and talks to him, reads to him, tends to his wounds. Every day she sits there.
In the bedchamber that has belonged to him for many years now, the walls are decorated with shields and bookshelves and she knows the exact spots of everything in here by heart because every time she has been allowed inside has been an adventure that she treasures the way one treasures the illusions of what is impossible.
"I'm so bored with your stories," he tells her the first night he speaks.
The injuries are healing but he is still weak, though he's growing more impatient for ever y day. Lysa picks up a different book and opens it, spreading it out in her lap without looking up at him. He is probably right, she decides. They are too old for her stories.
One night, three nights after the first time he speaks, she finds him propped up on his elbows in bed when she enters the room; his face is flushed, his eyes distant and hazy. He startles slightly at the sound of the door closing and Lysa curses her clumsiness.
"It's just me," she whispers, as though her presence disturbs something. He often gives her that impression even if he never says it.
Petyr says nothing, but she can see him relax against the pillows again, letting out a breath that sounds like a sigh.
When they were children, Cat and Lysa would sneak around the servant's quarters to pick up on the maids' gossip and the crude teasing thrown between them, jests full of bad words and forbidden knowledge. Then they would return to their bedchamber, giggling, and make up stories to match the maids' tales. Brave knights and handsome heroes who will sweep them away, who will ask for their favours; they are Tullys who will behave like proper ladies and perhaps blush at the attention but then - and this they agree on with cheeks that flush with more than embarrassment - they shall very much enjoy to be kissed and cherished. Because that, Cat tells her and Cat knows so much, is how the gods plant babes in a lady's belly.
Lysa thinks of the maids' stories in this room. Thinks of the seams of reality and fantasy and how stark it sometimes is, the border between the two.
She undoes her dress, baring her shoulders and chest.
Men will go to war for a woman's honour, the ballads claim. For a woman's heart, for a lady's grace. For women like Lyanna Stark and for Cat men will always raise their swords and banners. Women with wolf blood, who are bold and headstrong like boys but know how to mask it behind a woman's virtues; women who are nothing like Lysa.
No one will go to war for her. No man will raise his banners for her shyness and clumsy feet, for her patience and fear and her boring old stories.
This, she thinks as the smooth fabric of her dress slides down her back, is all she can offer.
Petyr sighs.
"Why are you here?" he asks, tipping his face up towards the light. There's a glint of something in his eyes when Lysa steps closer and he notices her naked skin. A blend of fever, milk of the poppy and sheer surprise, she gathers. And that hard edge in him, the refusal to accept her because she is not what he wants. "I'm hardly dying."
He sounds like he wish he was and it wrings and twists in her chest, beneath all those fragile bones.
"I want to be here. I-I love you," she says, forcing her voice to carry. "I do, Petyr."
Petyr gives a bitter laugh, but reaches for her like a man drowning and she slips into bed, nearly stumbling on her own eagerness. She thinks of Cat, of how Cat would never do this, of how Cat would never tremble or give herself so easily to someone who is so far beneath them. She thinks of Cat as she feels Petyr's body against her own, wondering what he thinks of it, what he makes of her. If he sees her at all.
She wants to say I don't pity you like Cat does or I understand but she cannot find any words because Petyr's hands are suddenly everything as they roam over her body and tangle in her hair that falls across his chest; he draws a sharp breath when she moves above him.
"Yes," he says, and there's an urgency in his voice that sends a hot jolt of impatience through her, spreading in the pit of her stomach. "Like that."
"Yes," he says again, later,when Lysa is beneath him and he plants an open-mouthed kiss on her lips, his breathing heavy and rough and Lysa clings to his shoulders as she feels him inside her, her entire body so heartbreakingly open and he is so close, closer than she could have dreamed. "Catelyn."
Lysa does not say a word, does not make a single sound.
Afterwards, in the comfort of her own bed, she tells herself it was nothing.
They cannot tell us apart, Cat says in her restless dreams and for the first time, Lysa thinks it sounds like a threat.
x.
The war, when it comes, changes everything.
They stand on the brink of it, waiting. Cat stands proud and tall, her hand warm in Lysa's own, her voice a soothing memory of childhood in the air around them. It feels like a lifetime ago that they were playing hide and seek in these ancient fields, a lifetime since Lysa would burst into tears at the sound of a barking dog and Cat would curl up with her and sing a song of the blind old wolf who travelled the seas or make up a fairy tale of how Riverrun rose up from the bottom of the river, shaking off the fish and the crabs like a dog.
Oh, Cat.
"Brandon will come back," Lysa says.
But of course he doesn't and the world breaks around them.
x.
"How is she?" Petyr asks on the eve of the day when the rider reaches them with the news of Brandon Stark's fate; for a brief moment he sounds so small, so helpless in his own misery. He's slumped in an armchair by the window, a bottle in his hand and an empty one on the floor.
"She is heartbroken," Lysa replies and they both know that she is truly saying: she will never love you. She feels the cruelty in her chest give her words a different edge, feels their impact on the one person she never wants to hurt. I don't deserve you, she thinks, feeling the disappointment well up inside. You know that too. That's why you turn away.
"That's what you get for being infatuated with a man who is too foolish not to run into every trap set for him." He's drunk, Lysa can almost taste the wine on his breath. In the dusk of the room, she notices that his movements are sloppy, too, revealing a different man than the one he pretends to be.
Lysa knows that man. She prefers that man even if he is being washed away and etched out. It is one of the many things she will never tell him.
"I thought you might be hungry." She holds out the tray of food she has taken from the servants. It suddenly seems pathetic. Lysa with all her bowls of food and mugs of ale, her constancy and hope that never seems to fade.
Shaking her head, she puts down the tray and turns on her heel to leave again.
There's a creaking sound behind her as Petyr shifts in the chair; she throws him a glance over her shoulder and for a second, their eyes meet. It seems strange now, but he was once a stranger to her, an alien shape in this room. They have laughed here, she thinks, willing herself to remember the good times. They have claimed this castle with laughter and pranks, with stolen goods and kissing games. If she closes her eyes, she can see Cat throwing her head back and Petyr's gaze - covetous and full at the same time - lingering at the curve of her neck. Stolen summer wine in their mouths and on their lips and Lysa remembers leaning against the wall, laughing so hard her stomach had felt like a hard, warm knot.
It seems important to anchor the images in her, somehow. Keeping her heart from misremembering.
Petyr lets out a soft groan that sounds equal parts conflicted and annoyed. All his little cracks, Lysa thinks, all the small ways in which he is imperfect. She wants to put her hands over them, gently; she isn't certain if she wants to soothe him or tear him apart.
"Wait." She stops, almost holding her breath. She wishes that he would say her name but he does not. Even in this drunken stupor, he cannot be that honest. "Stay."
It's not what she wants him to say; it's more than she can ever ask for.
He will not remember this in the morning.
x.
It takes one day and one night to drive the child from her body.
There is nothing she can say that will change her father's mind, nothing that will allow Petyr to stay. So she says nothing. Not to Father, not to Cat, not to anyone. She stands in her chamber and thinks about oaths when the blood seeps out of her, slowly, slowly.
"The bleeding, my lady. Has it stopped?"
Lysa doesn't look at the maester; she can hear his footfall and feel his sour breath behind her. There's something rotten in him, she thinks, something dark and corrupted in him to match the things he does in this castle.
"Yes." She looks at the stars, the faint spots of light behind the clouds that sometimes break through the veil. The sky is full of them, she knows, even when they are nowhere to be seen.
Lysa's hand moves over her stomach, blunted through her skirts; she can feel it as flat as the window sill, hard as the stones that surround her. She had wanted to tell Petyr, had wanted to explain but he had seemed unsurprised as they sent him away, as though he had been expecting it, as though it had all been part of the plan. He always wants things to fall into patterns, Lysa knows, biting her lower lip as the image of Petyr crosses the border she has placed around her mind.
The sour breath is less prominent now, the sound of the maester's footfall tells her he is stepping away. There's a brief pause before he inhales.
"Your lord father wishes to know if you are in pain, my lady?"
"No," she says and it is not a lie because there is nothing left that can hurt her. "No, I'm not."
x.
"We all have to do our duty," Cat says when they stand in front of the mirror in their wedding dresses.
There's a sense of urgency in the room, a touch of desperation in the silk they are clad in, the pearls resting in their hair. Lysa feels unclean despite the scented oils on her skin. The dress hangs limp and shapeless from her shoulders; she has not been eating much lately.
Weddings in war times had always seemed so romantic in their stories and make-believe, but there are no ballads to be sung about today. They do what is asked of them because they must.
Lysa has overheard a thousand muffled conversations between her father and her uncle, leading up to this point. Has heard the Lannisters insult me and if they think I will marry my daughter to their imp, they are sorely mistaken from her father's mouth and her uncle's responses, clipped and curt, asking her father is he had truly expected anything else.
She has overheard enough to know that Jon Arryn of the Vale is the only suitable man in Westeros in a urgent enough position to accept her hand in marriage.
"Think of how important your alliance will be." Cat stands in front of her now, tugging at the sleeves of Lysa's dress, rearranging them in a final attempt at creating something beautiful of this. "Lord Arryn is a good man of great influence."
Lysa nods and musters up a smile that seems to satisfy even her sister, a smile that is hopeful and dutiful enough to soothe.
She doesn't want to ruin Cat's wedding day, after all.
x.
On their wedding night, her husband doesn't kiss her.
She isn't particularly saddened by it but the way he goes about it and the way the scene plays out still lingers at the back of her mind. When they are alone, her lord husband - who she will never think of as Jon, she is certain of it - undresses her; his hands are warm and dry and she bites her bottom lip to keep from making any kind of noise. There's a torrent of words inside her, filling up her mouth, but she cannot give them a voice. She must not.
We all have to do our duty.
Her lord husband lacks the passion of her dreamed knights, the urgency of her handful of couplings with Petyr - frantic, wrong, quick, always hiding from something or someone, his fingers inside her and her head against the stone walls.
This is different.
Her lord husband gives her a small nod as she stands stark naked in the room, nothing but the tingling heat from the fireplace covering her skin.
"My lord," Lysa says and lowers her head.
"Jon," he corrects her, with a quick smile. Then, very slowly, he leads her to their bed.
The slowness seems to capture his essence, she thinks: he's a careful man, one who does not give in to his impulses, a man in control.
Even his body's response to her, Lysa soon finds, is slow and laboured. She never knew it could be such a painstakingly dutiful business even for a man. As he takes her hand and guides it, urging her to help him, she catches herself wondering if Lord Arryn had loved his first wives or of he had come to their beds with the same unwillingness.
Wondering, too, if it is the gods' will that she must never share the bed of a man who truly wants her there, if she will ever look into a man's eyes and see herself reflected there.
Husband. Such a heavy word, yet somehow carrying the faintest edges of future.
The hair on his chest is grey. It seems an odd thing to notice when her lord husband is moving above her, his breathing heavy and uneven and his body so large from this angle, all of it so heartbreakingly uneven in her eyes. Jon Arryn is a good man and she cannot love him - will not love him - the way a wife ought to love her husband and the hopelessness in that insight makes her quiver, pressing her teeth together to not burst into tears.
There's a pause, a shift, a pair of eyes that is suddenly focused directly on her.
"Am I hurting you?" And the touch of surprise in his voice, Lysa thinks, closing her own eyes. He knows. Of course he knows. They might as well have branded her like farmers brand their cattle; her shame is impossible to hide.
"No." She shakes her head.
"Very well." He nods, as though sealing a contract.
And when it's over - not long after that - Lysa lies awake for many hours, listening to her lord husband's snoring and trying to shape her life around it, around this.
x.
One year after the wedding, the second child she is not allowed to have bleeds out of her body.
Some moon turns later, it happens again.
She has felt them both inside her, has spoken to them when no one can hear; she has felt the ghost-weight of their souls in her belly and it's a queer thought that they are nothing more than blood, in the end.
"It is no matter," her lord husband says, when the news reaches him. He barely looks up from his work; behind the piles of documents and books on his desk he seems to disappear slightly but it's an escape that fortifies him, nothing like hiding in the stables. "These things take time."
The room smells of dust, a scent that tastes of salt at the back of her tongue. There's a word for 'mother' and it tastes like ashes.
Be a good wife and the gods will bless you with sons, Father says in her head, an echo from a memory best left forgotten.
The gods of the Vale know her failures. She can plead with them until her throat's dry and she has run out of prayers; they see right through her lies.
When her lord husband asks her to come with him to King's Landing, Lysa nods, almost desperately.
x.
King's Landing is a blessed place, someone mentions to her as her husband asks her to come live with him there, in the Hand's quarters. The grass grows green on the fields and the gods are generous with their gifts.
Lysa walks around in the lavish chambers that are granted them because of the Hand's service, wondering if the gods look at the men and women here in a different light.
She wonders if the gods see her lord husband when he uses the secret entrance to come and go without disturbing her or if they see her when she uses the same passage, breathing freedom with every dangerous step down the ladder.
She wonders if they see Petyr as he returns to her, older, harder but still the same misplaced boy beneath the young lord's mask. It is a secret to everyone else at King's Landing because the years make ghosts of the children they were, but in her eyes and in her heart, Petyr is the scrawny little boy who looked at Jaime Lannister with fiery, insatiable jealousy masked as disrespect.
"I am with child," she confesses to him one hot summer afternoon when the heat has drenched the corridors and courtyards in a thick humidity.
He arches an eyebrow. When he first came to the city there had been a slight shift in the pattern, a temporary discrepancy between what they have always been and what her recent rise in the ranks has done to them. It is gone now. His detached little half-smile tells her as much. "Why are you telling me that?"
Lysa thinks of the gods as she laughs it away, shaking her head.
x.
Women are the life-bringers of the gods, someone tells her once with a squeeze of her shoulder. It is said casually, meant as an admonishing or an incitement, though Lysa sometimes have trouble telling them apart.
Life-bringer, she thinks, as she closes her body around the pressing, urgent pain of her abdomen and the equally urgent words over her head.
Life-bringer, she thinks as they hold up her firstborn whose screams will never echo in these halls. Women are the life-bringers of the gods.
But all that comes out of Lysa is mute, cold death.
x.
The shadows of King's Landing creeps under her skin.
Once, when she was a girl and Cat still sat on her bed at night, running her fingers through Lysa's hair and telling her stories, Cat had told her a story of Lor the Liar. Every time Lor spoke untrue, a shadow grew beside him and followed him around. After a while - she can still hear Cat's voice rise and fall, pausing for dramatic effect - he had disappeared behind the shadows that walked with him everywhere and he could no longer be seen.
People here never speak what is one their minds and the shadows, Lysa knows, are swallowing her because she is weakest of them all.
No one tells her this, but she knows.
She drops behind in the exhausting conversations at court and she cannot, at least not for very long, pretend to have any interest in the endowment of the latest tourney the King wishes to host. More than anything else she misses Cat, like a prisoner would miss his freedom or the sunshine and the thought of her sister at Winterfell, surrounded by snow and children and that demure husband of hers twists inside. Letters are scarce and Lysa finds herself struggling with her own replies, as though her hands hesitate to put her life into words these days.
And then there's the grief over having displeased the gods, of having failed her lord husband, her family, her duty - the feeling is too vast to have any shape. The children she has never held in her arms, their invisible marks in her memory so empty and therefore limitless. She doesn't know how to treat it, how to move within its boundless waste and because of it, it traps her, ensnares her.
There are times when she catches herself crying without even feeling sad; times when she wipes the tears away with the back of her hand and picks up the matter at hand again, other times when she bursts out laughing without having anything to laugh about.
"You were made for a quieter sort of life," her lord husband tells her once. "Perhaps you would feel better in the Vale."
It's a fortnight after she bleeds her seventh child into the bathtub an early morning and screams until the servants come to carry her back to her own bed. She had not even known she was expecting, yet somehow the loss of it takes something from her and leaves a waste of nothing behind. This is your fault, she thinks as she meets her husband's gaze. You will never have any heirs. You're an old, disgusting man and there can never be any life in your seed.
Or perhaps she says it out loud. He doesn't share her bed again in nearly two years.
x.
She tries to get rid of her last child.
Twice, she tries. With moon tea and exhaustion, with carelessness and a fury bordering on grief she does what she can to cleanse her body of the death in her belly before it corrupts what little that still remains of her. If she takes a deep breath, she can feel the shadows inside, like iron and poison in her blood. The gods will bless the good wives with children but Lysa is not one of them so she must fight a different battle. Best them at their own game.
It had been simple enough back in Riverrun. A quiet business washing herself clean of the deed her father would never address in words afterwards; she had bled so much - too much, she learned - but it had not been difficult.
This time it's impossible, it's a fate written in stone.
She bows her head.
x.
"He is not strong, my lady."
Lysa looks at the boy in her arms. They call him trueborn. Heir. Son. She frowns at the fragile little shape of arms and legs and pink, cold skin that seems to never get warm; she places a finger on his belly, drags it up across his chest, watching the faint mark her touch leaves behind.
He's unwritten.
He is alive and this is the strangest thing in the world.
"I wanted you dead," she whispers against her last child's downy head and she knows, there and then, that this is the greatest fault she will ever do. That there is nothing - no shape and no word - that can ever mirror this.
Cradling him in her arms, so hard that he gives a low sound that sounds like a stifled sob, she swears the rest of her life is his; she wraps her useless body and all of her faults around him as a shield. Perhaps it is a curse, but it is all she can give him.
x.
Sometimes they take their supper together.
Her lord husband to her right, Petyr on the opposite side of the table and Lysa teetering in between, paying more attention to the silverware than to the conversation soaring around her. The private dining room in the Hand's quarters is quite small but richly decorated and always on the verge of becoming too warm between the fireplace and the guests. It seems like an obstacle to eat in this room.
It's a room made for important conversations and solemn decisions and deceit; she feels it in her body, that heavy air of uncertainty that terrifies her because she doesn't understand it.
Lysa looks at the neatly cut meat on her table and thinks of shadows.
"The King has planned to take the Queen on a hunting trip in a fortnight," her husband says, barely looking up from his plate. He takes food seriously and pays everything a lot of attention as though he wishes to study every bite.
Petyr says something low and sarcastic that Lysa doesn't quite hear, her lord husband responds. She wonders if they would notice if she vanished before their eyes.
They do notice the wailing scream coming from the other side of the door and Robert, rushing inside.
"Mother!" His pale cheeks are flushed, his hands ice cold as they cling to her legs. "Mother!"
Petyr gives her a glance as she raises to her feet to her feet to pick up her son. But neither he nor her husband says a word as she makes her excuses and leaves the room. Out in the corridor the septa waddles breathlessly in her direction, shame colouring her cheeks, giving them the same flush as little Sweetrobin's.
"My lady," she lowers her head. "My lady, I am terribly sorry; he ran away."
"I was lonely." Her son looks up at her, defiant and frowning. There's a worried expression in his face that seems permanent, she thinks, a dark sort of thread in him, running through his thoughts. Sometimes, at night when she can't sleep and sits in bed, counting his breaths, she cannot close her eyes to the death in him. It's there, right beneath his fragile shell; it's inevitable and so impossible to image that she clenches around it, her entire being a quiet scream over his fate.
Behind the door in the fancy room that is made for great men and their importance, the seven kingdoms are ruled but they mean nothing to her. Perhaps they did once - she can't remember and her mind has a lot of blanks these days, a few spots where she knows she once had other thoughts, other knowledge. She knows she once cared for other things, simple things: stories, words, to run over the fields and bridges of Riverrun with Cat ahead of her, laughing out loud; Father's conversations and Mother's warm hands.
"It's no matter," Lysa says to the septa and then, kneeling down, she takes her son in her arms. He trembles a little against her before digging his fingers into her arms, as though they're claws and he's an animal with his prey and Lysa buries her face in the curve of his neck thinking we're both prey and they will not hurt us; they will never hurt us.
He is the only thing of importance in the whole wretched world.
x.
They stand in the shadows of the Hand's quarters again, older and more careful.
"The Queen?" Lysa's voice catches around the magnitude of what she is saying, of what they are speaking of. "But why would the Queen-"
She falls silent. It's the wrong question, she knows when she sees Petyr's expression shift slightly. She has been silly again, has slipped. It infuriates her sometimes to think about how he never reveals himself, never cracks, that his armour always hold up. Always this calm, detached control. He's no more whole than I am, Lysa thinks at times when they find each other in the unwatched corners of King's Landing. But the shadows stay away from him. She prays every night that her Sweetrobin has his father's blood and heart and none of her own faults.
She thinks of Robert as she looks at Petyr again, already knowing what her answer will be. Whatever he asks.
"Why would I want to decieve you?" Petyr's question is full of promise and sweetness.
Outside, the cold, long autumn seems to crack open and reveal a full-blown winter.
x.
As a child, you live only a breath away from everything.
Now when she’s older and neither dreams nor sleep come so easily any more, she spends her nights counting the endless distances between things: between Catelyn Stark and the girl who taught Lysa to read, between the handsome, clever boy she would have married and the arrogant man who besieges Riverrun, between the girl she was and the woman she was meant to be.
She thinks about all this longing, all the desire that has been left behind, abandoned on the fields and in the enchanted groves where other children play now.
She thinks she would have preferred to remain a child, that she was meant to remain one; in the pale light of dawn she thinks that the woman in her bones has become twisted, stifled, as though there never was enough room for her. There are fragments left of it, of family and duty and honour and a stout, patient heart full of hope, but they slip through her fingers.
I always find you, Cat says in her head and Lysa wishes it was true.
"You fill your head with such silly thoughts," Petyr says to her, softly, from the bed and she knows she has spoken aloud again. She never seem to notice her own borders at all any more; everything spills over.
x.
"Only Cat," Petyr says to her, just as softly but a couple of years later, in a different life that she cannot make any sense of.
That look on his face. The hard edges around his frame, the streaks of dark in him, the things she has always loved and will always love in the hopeless, irredeemable way one loves the impossible. There's nothing beautiful about it, nothing that can be found in ballads; it can bring forth no life, only death.
We are not so different, Petyr, she thinks or perhaps she says it, because when he looks at her, that last time, there’s contempt in his eyes and she is not so certain if it’s meant for her.