Chapter Text
The first time he sees her she’s a blur of dark grays breaking down into a girl of three and ten, legs around Ned’s waist and arms thrown around his neck, peppering kisses on his face.
A tumble of dark hair hides her face, which takes residence against her brother’s shoulder; Ned’s half-amused, half-appalled laughs barely registers in the crisp northern morning.
Robert isn’t sure he’s ever heard him laugh like this, so truly and obviously happy. It’s no wonder. Robert himself would be laughing joyously as well if he had a three-and-ten maid’s legs wrapped around him, ankles crossed on the small of his back and butterfly kisses on his face, sister or no sister.
“You’re back, you’re back,” she’s chanting like a prayer as she clings to her brother – a behavior more fitting for a girl half her age – for a boy – and Robert thinks it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. The skin of her legs shows as her skirts rucks up; she’s wearing riding boots so well worn they put even his to shame.
“Lya, do behave yourself,” Ned tries to scold her, and fails. It doesn’t help that he’s smiling too wide to make him any more stern.
“Ah, Ned, just let her be,” he says good-naturedly.
This is when she turns to him for the first time.
Robert’s heart freezes in his chest.
Robert was always a little wild. He’s scarcely old enough to be more than half a child, at sixteen, but he’s the lord of Storm’s End and thus his name and his station in life decide his fate before he can even think of it. He’s no innocent: he has bedded women of all classes and ages and fought in brawls and tourneys alike; some say he has a child in the Vale and he isn’t entirely sure he doesn’t. He’s sixteen but already with a kill or two under his belt, the vagaries and joys of life.
But he has always been a good man as well, wildness aside (in that he’s no different from her brother Brandon, he reasons). He’s even less sure about being wedded than he is about the babe; it feels too soon, too early, but even Robert knows his lot in life. He knows, too, that wedded or not it’d be splendid to have a woman and a life and a child of his own, maybe, something he only half-remembers from his youth. A shadow of a mother, a scant memory of a father and Renly’s sweet smiles, whenever he visits Storm’s End.
(It isn’t often.)
It should be nice, he reasons, to have a family. His only family is Ned and Jon Arryn, and to be wedded into the Starks is a wondrous gift. He’s spent most of this journey north (the North’s far and so weary, so cold) hoping his betrothed was not frigid, that she wasn’t ugly or proud or catty –
(Winter is coming, are the words of House Stark.)
When she turns that look at him, at the sound of his voice, that look of absolute seriousness and absolute gravity on her face, the blankness in those eyes, that – they are grey, her eyes, like Ned’s, and like Ned’s they are serious, but what he sees there is something else altogether.
Lyanna Stark looks at him – no, she sees him. She sees him right down to his very bones – and what she thinks of him only the gods must know, because behind the flesh of her eyes there is nothing, nothing at all.
And Robert, that is when he knows that he wants her. Wants her more than any woman he has ever known, this girl not even flowered, legs crossed around her brother’s waist, her chin propped on his shoulder, eyes cold as the northern wastes beyond the Wall. Not a hint of a smile on her face, not a word spoken to him.
She disentangles from her brother, shamelessly, and just as shamelessly drops a small curtsy to him – it means nothing, just instinctual behavior ingrained in her since youth – and says, “My lord.”
Robert is lost.