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loc. the red keep, king's landing. 118AC.
SLEEP EVADED HER like a bitterly-departed friend.
Belphoebe lay in the dark, surrounded by noise. The capital, it seemed, never slept; the stink slipped through the pocked-lead windows and pervaded every, slinking over her skin like a filth. A grime. And no matter which way she lay, the bed felt too big for her small body, as though it were trying to swallow her whole.
And the noise. Oh, the constant noise. Horsehooves and clinking metal and shouting. She hears words she never has before, the kind her brothers stopped her from hearing by clasping their hands over her ears.
She'd been bathed. Queen Alicent had relegated two of her own handmaids to the task, both girls much older than her. They crooned over her, pinching her cheeks and exclaiming; a willowy brunette with almond-shaped eyes who called her sweetnames in Myrish. The other was a simple girl from the kitchens with ashen-blonde hair, quieter in her tasks, but her callused hands were gently as they soaped Belphoebe's hair.
There were lotions and liquids she'd never seen, scents she'd never caught in her life before. The bathwater was sprinkled with the petals of a bell-shaped purple flower that one handmaiden told her was called a cerialis that perfumed the air with something light and heady.
Belphoebe thought she should be grateful. For the sweet soaps and the wash, for the sisterly handmaidens, for Queen Alicent's graciousness and that she did not have to look at Lord Reyne tonight.
But she wasn't. She could not be grateful for any of it.
She wanted her brothers. They used to slip in bed with her when she was plagued by nightmares as a child. Aelius told her stories he had read, having started learning at the behest of maester Parsin. He would tell her about the other houses and their sigils and point them out to her on a map. Avel could not read as well as their older brother, but he would light a candle and make clever shapes with his hands, sending shadowed shapes upon the wall, and Belphoebe would squeak with delight upon recognition. He always ended with his fingers manipulated to look like a bird—a raven, he assured her when she guessed with an overzealous shriek.
She wished she could crawl into bed with them again.
But she never would. It was finally starting to truly sink in. There were the day before, and the days after, and these were the days after. Like rainfall after a sunny day, like a beautiful dream you could never return to.
Aelius and Avel only existed in the past now.
She sniffled, turning on her side, and wondered about her mother and father. They must have wept for them too. And for her. She supposed it was as though they had lost all of their children, not just two. And her father, her poor father, he had lost a brother and a nephew, too.
