... I must tell you,
I must tell again and again,
How sweet it is to live, how sweet it is to conquer
The seas and girls, enemies and words.
(c) Nikolai Gumilev
When Lionel looked at Arya, already knowing that he was engaged to her sister, he smiled to himself, thinking that he had gained another little brother. But Arya was undoubtedly a girl: from the very first day, she seemed to be sulking at Lionel for no apparent reason and had no intention of recognising his authority or becoming his younger companion. The Starks were stubborn and uncompromising in this sense, as if their father had held the old title of King of the North and was not a vassal of the ruling dynasty, but among all the Starks, Arya was the most prickly and wild.
Watching Arya in Winterfell and watching her watch him, Lionel tried to understand why he cared what she thought of his clowning around during training fights, why he was interested in whether she would outdo her brothers in archery, and why he couldn't say for sure whether he wanted her to win or lose.
Lionel was young, but he knew himself and his peers well enough, so in this situation he looked at the root of the problem: first, Arya had short hair, and all the women and girls at court wore their hair long, in imitation of the queen. Secondly, Arya almost always appeared in trousers rather than a dress and was a real tomboy: not that there were few such girls on the streets of King's Landing, but they were all commoners who could not read and spoke in a coarse manner, Arya was a northern princess, someone whom Lionel, had he not unexpectedly become engaged to her sister upon his arrival at Winterfell, could have loved and even respected.
Thoughts of Arya as a northern princess caused Lionel to make a small mistake: upon learning that Bran had fallen from the roof, Lionel, for some reason, went first to Arya and considered his duty done, as if nine-year-old Arya could accept his condolences on behalf of the entire family.
"If I can help, I will do everything I can for your brother," Lionel said firmly to the sad Arya.
"How can you help?" Arya replied angrily, as if unwilling to share her feelings with Lionel, and his calm response surprised her.
"I don't know exactly what's wrong with him, so I can't say if I'll be able to help," Lionel said confidently and simply, and neither he nor she realised at the time that this was the voice of a man capable of rallying his people even to a hopeless battle.
Lionel's uncle, the sharp-tongued dwarf Tyrion, made sure that Lionel did not forget the rules of proper behaviour while thinking about Arya and her misfortune.
"You should have gone to Lord and Lady Stark long ago to offer your condolences," Tyrion said a little angrily when he met Lionel, shrewdly deciding that the girls were again to blame for Lionel's absent-mindedness, which, in Tyrion's opinion, was a rather excusable reason.
"I seem to be a fool," Lionel admitted, whom Tyrion loved for his honesty and lack of resentment.
"I think so too, in that case," Tyrion remarked more peacefully with his usual smirk.
The next person Lionel met on his way to Lord Eddard was the old maester, Luwin.
"I hear you want to help the boy," said the maester, who was tired from a night of vigil, with some surprise. "Alas, I fear you would need to be a wizard to do that. And of course, I hope no one else will ever learn of our conversation, for I was asked too strongly to break certain rules of my profession and speak to you so frankly about the state of affairs.
"I also hope that no one will find out about our conversation," said Lionel, listening to the master, and a few hours later, in the silence of the night, a strong bald man with clear, piercing eyes appeared next to the sleepless Catelyn, who was sitting by the bed of her dying son.
"I am Toros of the World, my lady," the unexpected guest reintroduced himself to the startled Catelyn. "I am a priest of R'hllor, Lord of Light. You are expecting a miracle, but miracles are not wrought by men, but by gods.Toros of the World had more tournament victories than souls converted to his faith, but at the right moment he could be very convincing, and ten minutes later he was standing right next to Bran's bed, placing his hand on his forehead. Toros whispered prayers and began to feel the powerful will of an unknown nature, which he, as a priest of Rglor and a monotheist, should have attributed to the Great Other and tried to exorcise, but the unworthy priest loved the maxim "whoever is not against you is for you" too much, which he had read in one of the few sacred texts he had mastered, and so he adapted to this will, leaned on it, and began to do what he had come to do.
"Summer," said Bran, opening his eyes, and his direwolf immediately responded to his new name, placing his paws on the bed and beginning to lick the boy's face, while Thoros of the World, stunned and devastated, stepped back, trying to break the connection with the unknown will that kept Bran alive.
"You have more friends in King's Landing than you think, my lady," Thoros replied evasively to all of Catelyn's questions about who had sent him, and that was perhaps exactly what she needed to hear.
Lionel earned Arya's forgiveness for what happened at the Trident with a song: by then, he already understood that trying to appease Arya and beg her forgiveness would lead to nothing good, even if it might seem to work at first glance. Instead, Lionel found Arya and her wolf far from the camp, abandoned his horse, and fearlessly approached Arya, ignoring the growling wolf, who seemed to be angry with him along with her mistress.
"What's her name?" Lionel nodded at the wolf, he really hadn't asked before for some reason.
"Nimeria," Arya replied curtly, and the noticeable pause at the end seemed to indicate that Arya had not yet decided whether to call the wolf back or set her on Lionel.
"A good name," Lionel approved. As far as Arya could remember, he was probably the first person who thought that the she-wolf deserved the name of the queen of the Roynar and the Dornish princess, and it was then that Lionel had the idea to sing to Arya about Queen Nymeria. "There's a good song about Nymeria.
"I know," Arya shrugged, not looking at Lionel, but still breaking her promise not to talk to him anymore. "About ten thousand ships, it's a long one."
"There's also a short one about Prince Galen, Nymeria's brother, and the war between the Royners and Valyria," said Lionel, and without asking if Arya wanted to hear it, he began to sing a strange song without a beginning or an epic narrative. The song began at the end and immediately struck the heart, as if the singer was afraid of not finishing it in time or the author was afraid of not finishing composing all the verses.
Tell me, heather, tell me,
Is your summer dress green?
Is your blossoming robe light,
Under which my brother sleeps,
My beloved brother, my forgiving brother?
Arya wanted to object that Prince Galen was not Queen Nymeria's brother, but rather her first and fatal love, but the strange song seemed to tie Arya's tongue, drawing her along with it — and then Arya realised with surprise that the song, which suited Lionel's rather low voice, was written for a female voice, as if it were really being sung by Nymeria, standing on the Dornish shore and looking out at her abandoned homeland hidden beyond the sea.
Tell me, memory, tell me,
How he left everything he had,
What light shone in him,
How he dared to foresee
Our bitter fate, our cursed fate?
"Look, sister, look, love will leave a scar on me.
Misfortune and pain are far away—my feet will never tread there!
But I said:
"Brother, I will go on ahead.
The day has faded above us, but there, in the distance, the sunrise is burning.
It's not easy to sing to a girl who has turned away from you, especially if you grew up as a crown prince and are used to ruling and winning, but after just three verses, Lionel caught Arya's burning gaze, which seemed to burn him, and parallel to their duel of eyes, the song told of a hopeless war between the brave Roynars and hundreds of Valyrian dragons.
Tell me, shore, tell me,
How we renounced our gifts,
How we lost our blood...
And under the bitterness of loss
My brother, my beloved brother, went forward.
It is unlikely that the song was written by one of the minstrels, for whom glory and victory are like trinkets and flowers with which they generously adorn the heroes of the past. Most likely, the harsh and proud words were written by someone who really fought, died and lost, and perhaps it was Queen Nimeria herself.
Tell me, glory, tell me
What could you offer us?
You met us in the bloom of lies,
In the slander of foreign rewards,
And looking back, my brother said to me:
"Look, sister, look, death has married pride.
Here you have to be like everyone else—I'm afraid I can't do that.
But I said:
'Brother, I will go forward anyway.
We have no hope, but there, in the distance, the sun is rising.
At that moment, Lionel won the staring contest, because Arya surrendered to his song and lowered her eyes to hide the tears welling up in them. In the song, Queen Nymeria led the remnants of her people to safety, who were destined to later disappear among the Dornishmen and other peoples of Westeros, but there was more strength in the hopeless stubbornness of Prince Galen, who died in the dragon's flames, and Prince Lionel proved to be just as strong, whose voice Arya now felt like an invisible hand holding her heart and having power over it, given by his fortitude and determination. Lyonel's face remained impassive, only his voice lived, and for the first time in her life, Arya could neither raise her eyes, nor run away, nor escape from the power of the voice leading her.
Tell me, loyalty, tell me,
How do you conquer hearts?
Why was my only brother
Was my only brother,
My beloved brother, the brother who forgave everything?
Tell me, death, tell me,
How, among shadows and bonfires
He chose your gloomy call,
How was it stronger than me
The rustle of your wings, your merciless wings.
Aria did not like ballads and especially despised sweet love lyrics, dreaming of one day hearing a real song without cheap, clichéd words that always made the listener feel a little awkward. She heard it, and now she bit her lips to keep from crying, and Lionel's voice was already her life, the one she had always dreamed of: harsh and beautiful, devoid of pity and making no concessions for weakness or age.
"Look, my brother, look, there is no peace for the heart.
We have one soul, but how different are our paths!
But there, at the end of our separation, in a land without sorrow or hardship,
A golden dawn will rise over our meeting. **
The song ended, and Lionel stepped towards Arya, taking her by the hands. It was probably the first time he had touched Arya, who had shunned and avoided him before, even before the Trident. But now everything was forgotten: the resentment, the fact that they were quite close to the camp and looked like lovers, and the fact that it was unseemly for a prince, betrothed to her sister, to sing songs of great unhappy love to Arya.
"When your father and mine fought side by side, my father always said: you must make peace before it is too late," said Lionel: he never asked for forgiveness, in this he was very much like Robert, and, like Robert, he did not need to.
"Sing it again," Arya asked, looking up at Lionel with tear-filled eyes.
"Later," Lionel replied sternly. "You don't sing that twice."
At that moment, Lionel could still have become a brother to Arya, but he was young, and the powerful and passionate blood of great families flowed through his veins: the Baratheons, the Lannisters, and even the Targaryens." And, feeling for the first time the power over Arya's proud and unapproachable heart, Lionel no longer wanted to remain on the periphery of her life as someone she could always rely on, but who would go his own way, allowing Arya to go hers. Now he wanted to become the centre of her world and would not settle for anything less.
The next morning, Arya found a note tied to Nymeria's paw with a piece of leather cord, either torn from the hilt of a sword or cut from a travelling jacket. In the sharp, uneven handwriting of a man whose hand was more accustomed to a sword than a quill, the note contained the words of Queen Nymeria's song, and nothing else — no salutation, no signature, so that it was even a little rude, as if Lionel refused to sing for her and suggested that Arya sing for herself. But it was exactly what she needed.
Of course, one song, even the most wonderful, could not win Arya's heart. Moreover, Lionel was even surprised the next day at how quickly Arya had recovered from yesterday's shock. He was her friend again, and his offer of peace had been accepted, and that was all. Could he take Arya's hand again? Of course not, not even when they were alone — and Lionel soon realised that he had never tried so hard to get a girl to do that before. He was smart enough to understand that such strictness promised much more than indifference, which would have been easier for him to accept in such a trivial matter, but he had too much pride and too little self-control not to get caught up in this game, which, unlike all his previous romances, didn't even have rules: one day Arya was lying in his arms, and he was carrying her through the crowd, and the next day she again refused to let him take her hand until Lionel's first prayer to the Old Gods reached its destination and Arya reached out to him from the edge of the roof, walking along the wet tiles around the chimney.
However, Lionel was no less cunning with himself than Arya was with him: if her behaviour could be explained by the fact that she had no intention of stealing her sister's fiancé, even if he was young, handsome and crowned, Lionel explained his behaviour to himself as concern for his family and his kingdom. The young king rightly believed that Arya would obey only one man in all of Westeros — the one who won her heart, and the more Lionel became convinced of her inaccessibility and strength of will, the more likely it seemed to him that no such man would ever be found, and in a decade, not just rumours would spread throughout the kingdom, but very true stories that the king's sister-in-law had run away from her tiresome husband, who had failed to live up to his claims to family authority, or that she had taken her husband under her wing and ruled his castle and estates in his place. And it was highly likely that Arya would reign in the Eagle's Nest, or, God forbid, at Casterly Rock, was better not to imagine at all, because the imagination too vividly pictured the Guardian of the East or West in light armour and with ready barbs and insults for her royal brother-in-law, who had lost his actual power over a large part of the kingdom because of her waywardness. All this could end in disgrace for the royal family, and Lionel had not yet thought about the scale of the scandal if he succeeded, taking advantage of his father's advice to first get involved in the fight and then see what happens. But thinking about it would not have helped, because there was no way out: Lionel had not lied to Sansa when he said he loved her, and with Sansa it was no longer a game, but real passion, a fever of love, the first for both of them and therefore especially intense.
The time for his secretly planned departure for the Wall was approaching. Lionel, so as not to draw attention to his preparations, gathered everything he needed outside the castle, wandering around King's Harbour with his hood pulled over his eyes and making the necessary purchases. while Arya left the Red Castle by routes known only to her and met Lionel where only the castle wall was visible, and then, in the crowd, she took him by the hand. In the deserted alleys, if they cut a corner, Arya simply walked beside him, and when Lionel once tried to embrace her, putting his arm around her shoulder, Arya jerked her shoulders so that he thought she was about to jump back against the wall and, God forbid, try to stab him again with her thin blade.
"Leo..." Arya said reproachfully instead, and the young king's heart skipped a beat because it seemed to him that victory was close: a few more well-chosen words, now or tomorrow, and Arya would throw back her hood and lift her face to him, finally surrendering and closing her eyes, and then he would be able to lean down and kiss her.
Lionel did not know what would happen after that, but his beautiful heart told him that he would come out a scoundrel, so the next day, on the last day before his departure, he left the city earlier than usual and turned into the cheerful port streets to get properly drunk.
The effects of alcohol on a person are inscrutable, and even the wise Euler Targaryen, who predicted the date of Valyria's Doom, could not predict the intervals between spasms of the diaphragm during drunken hiccups, for hiccups are above all law, let alone more complex reactions to alcohol, which depend on the individual, the amount drunk, and the sequence. A crude mind might try to see some patterns in this: for example, sober Robert Baratheon was fierce and cruel, while drunk he was good-natured and cheerful, and his son, on the contrary, often became cruel and dangerous when drunk, but when sober, he turned out to be a kind and conscientious person, repenting of his harsh and warlike drunken antics. But in reality, the voice of conscience sometimes caught up with Lionel even when he was drunk, and between the seventh and ninth stages, this stern voice became simply thunderous and crushing, especially if this stage was reached from the other side, as he sobered up.
It was in this stunned state that Arya found Lionel at the end of his farewell ride through King's Harbour, and she bravely jumped out of the window into his bedroom when she saw Lionel lower his head in despair.
"It's all pointless," Lionel said desperately. "We're wasting our time. I'll go alone."
"Jon won't listen to you," Arya said firmly, her pity for Lionel still battling her resentment at him for not wanting them to go.
"But he'll listen to me," the young king continued to sink into despair. "It's a pity, it must be deadly boring on the Wall. And I have no family: my father is dead, my mother is in exile, my brother is no brother to me..." And Lionel, in a fit of drunken candour, told Arya everything Eddard Stark had told him about her mother and uncle, thereby achieving much more than all his cunning attempts to win her over.
Arya, who was only slightly taller than Lionel when standing, hugged his troubled head and stroked his hair.
"I won't let you go anywhere," Arya said. "And don't ever say you have no one again. I'll always be here for you. I promise."
"Listen, let's be honest," suggested Lionel, hugging Arya around the back and looking into her eyes, and she didn't even think of pulling away. "We're hiding from each other. If it weren't for Sansa, and I don't want to hurt her any more than you, we would have left together. And even if there was a scandal, everyone knows how trips like that end...
"As if we can't do without it," Arya objected with such conviction, as if she had spent her entire childhood wandering around Westeros in the compromising company of good-for-nothing but somehow very noble men.
"Maybe we could," Lionel admitted. "But neither of us would want to. And we both know that's the truth."
"And what are you going to do with that truth now?
"I'll follow King Aegon's example.
"Don't even think about it!" Arya flared up and tried to dive under Lionel's arms, but he held her back, and she ended up on his lap.
"I'm not talking about the fourth Aegon, but the very first one," Lionel explained. "Aegon the Conqueror was an honest man and always married, even if he was already married," Lionel said, glancing at Arya and realising that she didn't believe him one bit, just as one shouldn't believe much of what a drunk man says. But Lionel felt better for being honest, and Arya stopped being shy and settled comfortably on his lap.
"Well, you told me, remember, that a normal marriage isn't for you," Lionel teased her. He was young, but he already knew that this was what almost all girls said to men they didn't intend to marry. Once they found the man of their dreams, all the "unusual" and "different" girls immediately wanted a wedding, a wedding dress, three children and a husband by their side, not off into the sunset in pursuit of adventure.
"That's not what I meant at all," Arya laughed.
"So I misunderstood," Lionel admitted. "I thought, well, okay, I'll go along with it."
"You're such a fool, Leo," Arya smiled and kissed Lionel on the cheek. "Please, don't drink anymore."
Lionel wasn't entirely right in thinking that Arya didn't believe him when he talked about Aegon the Conqueror, who was indeed married to two sisters. She was more frightened and turned it into a joke because when she returned to her room, Arya took out the words to Queen Nymeria's song that Lionel had written down for her and looked long and hard at his only letter to her, even though she had long since memorised the song. Arya really did not want to become the wife of a lord who lived only on his name or courtly and tournament bravado, and perhaps the harsh Old Gods responded to her desires, which she had boldly uttered in her heart even in the godswood. Perhaps, for the first time without hiding from herself, Arya thought, she had been struck by the love of a warrior, sharp and reckless, not asking or charming, but demanding: determination, courage and choice. Either follow him as a faithful companion, making his fate her own, or walk away and regret it for the rest of her life, pouring out her longing in songs like those of Queen Nymeria, because even grief with him was sweeter than happiness with anyone else.
What Lionel had proposed, if he had indeed proposed it and not made a cruel joke in his drunkenness, as he was wont to do, and not blurted out unformed dreams, was outrageous, though honest in its own way. And it was up to Sansa to decide — Arya had never shirked responsibility before and sometimes thought her sister was too soft and weak, but she would have been happy to dump such an unexpected burden on Sansa or Leo. Arya was very young, and yet she was a girl, and so she did not realise that she had already made her decision when she first suggested that the three of them go to the Wall and had just promised Leo that she would always be there for him. She still hoped that everything could be reconsidered or that she could wait until life or Lionel decided for her, and so she continued to agonise and torment herself for a long time.
***
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