CHAPTER FIVE.
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The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

ROBERT FROST
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               FIRE.

     SMOKE.

     SCREAMING.

THROUGH THE HAZE, I see a slip of a girl with blue eyes and chestnut hair. Her gaze is fixed on something in the blood red sky. I look up. A shadow swoops towards me; I feel a blast of hot air, and the buffeting of enormous wings.

Clarysse awakes with a start and is covered in a clammy cold sweat. Her heart races.

The morning sounds of the awakening city greet her through billowing silk curtains, the scents of the bays carried to her on the breeze; but the fresh air does little to dispel her unease. The linked traces of her dream fill her mind: the red-streaked horizon, the girl, the creature in the sky. The girl looked so eerily familiar, that it unsettles Clarysse. Was the girl meant to be her? Or Margaery? Someone else entirely?

Clarysse takes a deep, shaky breath as she submerges her hands into the cool waters of the basin. She splashes some water onto her face, allowing herself to be distracted by the feeling, and sits on the low chair by the basin.

     She scarcely recognises herself in the looking glass, hanging above the basin. Her eyes are granite, her mouth is steel, and Clarysse cannot remember the girl who drank and laughed and danced in the Great Hall of Highgarden in her youth. Surely, she decides, that must have been someone else, and not myself.

     Surely, she wonders, she was never that happy.

After breaking her fast on the balcony, her grandmother invites to the gardens for tea and cake.

     People call Olenna Tyrell frail because of her old age. People are fools, Clarysse thinks, for her grandmother is the most wicked of them all.

Margaery and Clarysse sit around her, skirts spread like pressed flowers on the swept marble floor. Clarysse breathes deeply, appreciating the fragrant smells of the rows of flowers that the gardeners have managed against all odds to cultivate all through winter. She sits primly on the marble bench, very still, with her hands folded in her lap, as if she is sitting for a portrait.

It is quiet, save the distant sound of many voices from the the Keep where an impromptu council is being held.

     Her grandmothers eyes rove over Clarysse's form, assessing. "I've no doubt that you've made an impression with the boy, my dear," Olenna says idly. "Unless he is blind or more interested in your brother."

     Her mother's influence had slowly declined over her children as they grew older, and their grandmother gained more of an interest in them. Sometimes, Clarysse misses her mother's sweet, innocent ways, the doe-eyed looks she would send her daughter so unlike the cool assessment of Olenna Tyrell's hardened, squinting eyes.

She misses the feeling that she is a girl, and not a creature designed, stripped naked by every assessing look to ascertain whether or not she will make a favourable impression upon the next man she attempts to hook.

Not that this can be helped, of course.

     "Do you think so?" Clarysse asks, smiling tensely at her grandmother.

  "It is not what I think, it is what I fear, Clara," Olenna tuts. "Rhaegar has not been right in the head for quite some time. Seven know the king has been refusing marriage offers for his boys for years. It is a foolish quest, even if you manage to ensnare Prince Aegon."

     Clarysse hides a snort with a cough and from the corner of her eye, she sees Margaery smother a grin. "Grandmother!" her sister chides half-heartedly with an amused glint. "There are eyes and ears everywhere."

     Olenna waves her concerns away with a wrinkled hand but Clarysse doesn't listen to whatever sharp retort follows. She stifles a sigh. She craves some quiet.

     "Pray excuse me, grandmother. I shall stretch my legs before the feast this evening."

Lady Olenna gives her a court nod and turns her stern eyes to Margaery. Clarysse doesn't envy her sister.

She waves a guard away and wanders off on her own. There would be a feast with the royal family later and Clarysse wanted to be alone with her thoughts before having to endure endless hours of polite conversation in the evening.

She spends about an hour by the sea, and by the time she turns to less frequented paths of the Godswood, her mood has brightened considerably. There is something about the sea that calms her.

It's high summer. The sky hangs like a watercolour, and the air is hazy. Little wisps of grass glide at the knot of her anklebone. Beneath the thin samite of her dress, the small of her back is warm and damp. Even in the shadows the godswood, the heat is stifling.

     Her brothers have always chided her for sneaking up on them, so it is no surprise that the man in front of the Heart Tree doesn't hear her faint steps, that are masked by the faint midday breeze.

     "Are you praying to the Northern gods, Your Grace?"

He turns towards her, but he's come to recognise her voice. "Lady Clarysse," Prince Jon says, as evenly as he can, face unreadable.

     They've had two or three brief encounters during her fortnight in the Red Keep. She always approached him when they were in a public place and they ended up having a perfectly polite, meaningless conversation.

     Those were enough for Clarysse to realise that the two brothers are different in many ways. Aegon is brash while Jon is cautious, charming where Jon is quiet. Jon doesn't truly know how one speaks to girls, but women love Aegon and he loves them. Jon had openly asked her what she wanted once, and she'd smiled at him. "Do you know how hard is to find a decent conversationalist these days?" she had said and that had matters settled.

She would ask him questions, but rarely answer his own. How he spends his days in the Keep, whether he prefers swordplay to archery, what the North is like.

It had been inebriating at first, when Jon could not quite remember when had been the last time that anyone had asked him about himself. It had gotten unsettling soon after, when he'd been comfortable in answering.

Today, she is asking about his gods.

     "It is not the trees we pray to," he tells her patiently, because a lady like Clarysse Tyrell has to know more about the gods of the North than she is pretending to. He wonders briefly whether she is trying to rile him up. "They are a symbol, not unlike those seven gods of yours, my lady."

     "Oh?" Clarysse smiles encourangingly so as to make her interest known.

     "And as the Seven would be One, the One is divided into seven parts, to better watch on mankind. And as the Seven become the One, all of the world is part of the one principle, as it was in the beginning and will be again at the end of times."

     Clarysse is baffled at first, then laughs; a true, heartfelt laugh that Jon hasn't even believed her capable of, and he feels himself smiling, too. "Are you quoting the Seven-pointed star to me, Your Grace?"

     "Is this how people normally win discussions?"

     She nods, still smiling. "It will win you this one, at least."

He stands almost next to her now, only a feet or so between their shoulders, eyes trailed on the tree in front of them.

"Do your Northern gods listen to your prayers?" she asks suddenly, surprising him, and Jon wonders if perhaps this is more intimate than he suspects.

His thoughts go to the big weirwood in Winterfell and how safe he'd always felt in its shadow, to his uncle and his Northern cousins. Will faith make me a child of the North? He thinks of the day in the woods near Winterfell, when they had found the dead direwolf and its pups, five of them. Five wolves for five Starks, Sansa had said, excited. Is it not just perfect?

He thinks of the three dragon eggs that belong to his half-siblings and his uncle Viserys. There had been no egg left when Danaerys and he had been born, just as there had been no direwolf pup to spare. Neither Targaryen, nor Stark. Neither here, nor there.

Jon keeps staring at the tree, but he can feel her eyes on him. The frown returns to his features. "Do gods ever?"

OBERYN MARTELL IS NOT SURPRISED to find himself unamused by Aegon's admiration of Lady Clarysse.

The prince is quite obviously smitten with whatever idea of Clarysse Tyrell he's built up in his mind. But as Oberyn watches Aegon watching her during an intimate dinner between House Tyrell and the royal family, he sees the lady's unwillingness to catch his nephew's eye. When she thinks no one is watching, a frown tugs at her full lips. Aegon clearly admires Clarysse, Oberyn notes, half amused and half scared by his rapture, but the girl is not interested. At all. He has wondered whether the girl may be more comfortable on the other shore, but Lady Clarysse shows no interest in Rhaenys either.

     Oberyn's gaze lingers on Lady Lyanna for a brief moment. It is no wonder Aegon is so enraptured by her, because in so many ways he truly is his father's son. It's the ones men cannot have, that they desire the most.

     Oberyn knows enough of men to realise that it's the chase Aegon wants, not the lady herself. He knows that Clarysse isn't the woman Aegon thinks, and he wonders how his nephew will react to that revelation. Besides, Aegon's found reason to admire several of Rhaenys' maids and more even of the whores on the Street of Silk, and Oberyn is on the verge of calling for another maester from Oldtown solely to provide enough moon tea in order to prevent there being a Targaryen bastard to worry about.

Aegon is just a man after all. There's things his body wants, needs.

And now Lady Clarysse is one of them.

Oberyn dreads to think what an outright refusal from Rhaegar would entrain – Aegon seems to think himself invincible, a trait Oberyn and Elia are working steadily to beat from him. Even still, from the way he looks at Clarysse, Oberyn can see that Aegon thinks himself a fine match for the eldest Tyrell girl.

From the way her eyes stay clear of the crownprince, she clearly disagrees.

She as well as her sister are lovely, Oberyn admits — who would have thought Mace Tyrell could sire such beauties? — though not his preference. He prefers his women rough around the edges.

     Still, Oberyn is impressed by the girl's candor in her rejection of Aegon. She reminds him of Elia a little, not in her colouring but in the quiet confidence she conveys. He would have to ask his sister her opinion on the matter. She is as observant as Oberyn himself and has surely noticed her son's dilemma. Judging by the way Elia bites back a smile when he raises an inquisitive eyebrow at her, she knows.

They both turn to look at the Tyrell girl, whose smile is polite but empty as she converses with Queen Lyanna.

     Her body is a woman's, and her patience, her gracious manners, those of a lady. It is not her tender years that make her unready to be a wife. It is something else — something in the way she looks at every man, even Aegon. Her brothers have not taught her to fear men thus; Oberyn would wager his life on it. He has seen them interact with each other at court, after all. They bicker like all siblings do but they love each other. No, that is some bitter lesson she had learned somewhere else.

She bears the burden of Aegon's attention like cattle would bear its whippings from a master, or a horse that would pull a loaded cart.

The gods work in mysterious ways, Oberyn muses and hides a bitter smile behind his goblet of wine.