Devotion (GOT Fanfic)

Chapter I

The room was fairly simple and very much to Leila's liking. It was one long bed with lavender colored sheets, two large lamps on the sides of the bed in the two round tables gilded with subtle hints of silver. There was a small desk with two quills resting abreast the top of clean white parchments and a bottle of ink inside a cylinder of glass, waiting to be touched. There were two wide windows on each side of the bed, though Leila dared not to open it.  There was a fire place filled with unlit fresh lugs. That too smelt like lavender.

Her luggage was placed on the edge of the bed, safely placed there and all the embellishments that hinted her person was obvious. The wide lion's head roaring loudly in the middle of the red ruby chest was very much that of a Lannister's prideful beauty, Leila knows and with all of it being seen in the city, banners of Lannister flying about the battlements of the city she doubts that none knew it. Her family was a great house, no one was going to not know such thing. She wondered if her uncle had to pay much more money to keep their presence here a secret. 

Everywhere, everyone had spies and she hated that. Leila knew the essential means of spies. Her father had spies, whose loyalties were never questionable and were only for house Lannister or else, their heads would be in the battlements of Lannisport. And she knew very well that everyone else had spies, everyone wanted to know what everyone else was doing and she was not a fan of such a thing. Leila found that privacy was important to her, the manner of which her life was not viewed and enjoyed by everyone else, she felt uncomfortable with that even at such an early age.

That's why she keeps up appearances, masks for all different occasions where she would smile and act delighted to be around certain groups of people. Leila grew up sheltered by the caverns of Casterly Rock, then free to be a woman of her choice in Dorne and she wanted nothing more to than to be free from the shackles of being who she was. She prayed in her mind for the days when all the sorrow would end, to be in the arms of her dear Oberyn travelling in vast lands and being the happiest woman on earth.

She just needed to finish her business with her father first.

"Are you alright, niece?" She turns to stare to his uncle's features, standing at the edge of her doorstep. "You seem frozen in time."

"I'm fine, just...there are much in my mind, uncle." She confesses. "I have no business to be here."

"No." He agreed. "But your father summons you and he being your father, your overlord and Hand, you obey him with all you have."

"I was very happy in Dorne."

"Yes, I listened to your aunt Genna read the letter to me and your uncles." He smiles, walking over to her and placing the misplaced strand of her beautiful golden locks into the side of her ear. "I am very delighted for you, you know that? Not all of us can find love in such matches of political convenience."

"Well, certainly not you." Leila grinned at her uncle, causing him to chuckle and nod.

"No, certainly not me, dearest niece." He agrees with her. "Still, a princess of Dorne? Not bad for you, my niece. And a ladyship before you even wed, that is very generous of princess Loreza."

Leila was not happy to hear Loreza's name just yet but she smiled despite of it. It was still a generous thing for the princess to have done for Leila. "Yes, it has been so very shocking me."

"I have no doubt your father's pride will increase at the thought his own daughter has her own lands." He chuckled once more. "Though, I should wish I'll have something to give my daughter Joy other than money."

Leila remembers her little cousin Joy very dearly. She was a bright beaming girl with the prominent Lannister curls about her head. Like her uncle, she smiles often and her name fits her well. She was a joyful little girl. Despite her status as a daughter of wedlock, Leila sees the girl as a Lannister as much as the rest of Lannisport's offspring.