Three Fires

The Council

Present Day

Dragonstone had not changed. Jace noticed that first, before he noticed anything about the people waiting for him in the hall. The black stone still wept sea damp from every wall. The dragon skulls still watched from the dark above the sconces, patient the way old bones are patient. He had spent his whole childhood believing this castle judged the people who walked through it. He still half believed it now.

He had not set foot inside it in six years.

The summons had come plainly enough. A succession dispute in the Stormlands, a dead lord and two rival claimants, both with just enough right to make the matter a war if it went unmanaged. The Crown needed every voice it could gather to settle it before swords settled it instead. Jace's voice was needed because his claim to speak for the Crown still meant something, whatever else had changed in the years he'd stayed away. That was the whole of the reason, or so he told himself on the boat over.

He believed it until he walked into the hall and saw her.

Margaery sat near the head of the table, a steward's ledger open in front of her, her hair bound back in the plain, practical way she wore it now rather than the way she'd worn it at eighteen. She did not look up right away. She finished the line she was reading first, unhurried, the way a woman reads when she has long since stopped needing to prove she was listening.

Aemond sat beside her.

That was the part Jace's mind kept snagging on, even though he had known it for years, even though he had told himself the knowing no longer cost him anything. Not near her. Beside her. There was a difference, and the difference was the whole of what had happened while Jace was gone.

He watched Aemond reach out, without looking, and turn the ledger a few degrees toward the better light, the way a man turns a chair for someone before they've asked. Margaery didn't thank him. She didn't need to. Her eyes simply followed the page into its new angle and kept reading, and Aemond's hand withdrew, and neither of them had spent a single word on any part of it.

Jace had forgotten that people could speak that fluently in silence. Or he had never let himself notice it before, when it hadn't yet been theirs to speak.

"You made good time," Aemond said, finally looking up. His voice hadn't changed either. Still even. Still giving away exactly as much as he intended and not a hair more. "We didn't expect you until the tide turned."

"I didn't want to be late for this one."

"You've been late for six years," Aemond said, and there was no heat in it, which was somehow worse than if there had been.

Margaery looked up at that. Not at Jace. At Aemond, first, a brief unreadable glance that passed between them and closed again before Jace could begin to read it. Then she looked at Jace, and her face arranged itself into something pleasant and correct, the face of a woman greeting a kinsman she has not seen in some time.

"Prince Jacaerys," she said. "You look well."

"Lady Margaery." He heard how stiff it sounded even as he said it. Six years and that was the best he could do, her name and a title, when there had once been a version of him that knew the exact weight of her hand and the exact sound she made when she stopped pretending to be composed. "You look well too."

"I am well," she said, and there was nothing underneath it that he could find purchase on. She had gotten better at that. Or she had simply stopped needing to hide anything from him, because there was nothing left between them worth hiding.

He took the seat across from them because it was the only one open, and told himself the placement was chance, and did not believe himself even as he sat down.

The council began in earnest not long after, other lords filing in, maps unrolled, the dead Stormlands lord's two heirs represented by their own men, both parties already sharpening their grievances before a single formal word had been spoken. Jace let the business of it carry him for a while. It was easier to talk about levies and marcher rights than to sit with the fact of Aemond's hand on the small of Margaery's back as he helped her rise to fetch a second map, a gesture so unthinking it had clearly stopped being a gesture at all and become simply the shape their bodies made around each other now.

He caught himself watching it anyway. Cataloguing it, the way he used to catalogue an opponent's serve, looking for the tell, the weakness, the place where the form would eventually break. He hated that he was doing it. He did it anyway.

Once, near the middle of the council, when the Stormlands man was droning through a genealogy no one needed restated, Jace saw Margaery's hand drift sideways, not toward Aemond exactly, more toward the space beside her, an old habit finding the place a body had learned to expect. Aemond's hand met it without either of them looking. Their fingers laced. Neither face changed. It happened and ended in under a breath, so small a thing that no one else at the table seemed to notice it happening at all.

Jace noticed. Jace would go on noticing it, he understood, for exactly as long as this council required his presence, and probably a good while after that.

When the session broke for the evening, the lords filing out in twos and threes, Aemond lingered a moment at the table, gathering papers with a care that seemed more habit than necessity. Margaery had already gone ahead, drawn into some quiet exchange with one of her own stewards near the door.

"Six years," Aemond said again, not looking up from the papers. "I confess I didn't think you'd come, even summoned."

"Why wouldn't I come."

Aemond did look up then. There was nothing cruel in his face. That was almost the worst part. He looked at Jace the way a man looks at an old wound that has healed crooked, mild interest, no real anger left in it, just the permanent knowledge of the shape it left behind.

"No reason," Aemond said. "None at all."

He gathered the last of the papers and followed his wife out. Jace watched the two of them go, Aemond's hand finding the small of her back again at the threshold, the same unthinking gesture as before, and then the corridor took them and there was nothing left of either but the sound of a door somewhere further off, closing.

He sat alone a while longer at the long table, in a castle that had not changed, and made himself sit with the plain arithmetic of it. Six years ago he had believed that refusing a marriage was refusing only a marriage, a single answer to a single question, small enough to survive. He understood now that it had not been small. A refusal like that does not simply close one door. It teaches the person on the other side of it how to live without you, and she had learned the lesson so thoroughly that she no longer needed him to notice she'd learned it.

He had come back to Dragonstone believing he was answering a summons.

He saw now that he had only ever been late.