Chapter 2: Confessions in Vinegar and Regret
The Rusty Tankard was aptly named. Garon shouldered the door open, the motion a clear statement of ownership that made the patrons within glance up, assess, and quickly look away. The air inside was a solid thing, a soup of smoke from cheap tallow candles, damp wool, and the ripe, yeasty scent of poorly-brewed ale. It clotted in the lungs. The walls were timber gone black with age and soot, the floor a patchwork of stained, warped planks sprinkled with sawdust that did little to soak up the spills.
He didn’t offer his arm, didn’t check to see if she followed. He simply carved a path through the crowded room to a small, battered table wedged in the back corner, near the cracked hearth where a meager fire struggled. He sat with his back to the wall, a soldier’s habit, giving himself a view of the entire room. The cut on his cheek had started to crust, a dark line against his pallor.
Alysanne gathered the skirts of her fine gown, a deep emerald silk embroidered with gold thread that screamed of a different world, and sat on the rough-hewn stool opposite him. She placed her hands on the sticky tabletop, then thought better of it and folded them in her lap. The contrast was absurd. She was a songbird that had flown into a smithy.
A serving wench with a tired face and forearms dotted with old burns came over. She looked at Garon, then at Alysanne, her expression flat with disbelief. “What’ll it be?”
“The red. Two.” Garon’s voice was a low rumble. He didn’t look at the woman.
“We’ve only got the one red.”
“That’s the one.”
The woman left. Garon finally focused on Alysanne, his stormy eyes narrowing. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You invited me,” she pointed out, her tone light. “Vinegar and regret, you said. It sounded poetically dreadful. I had to experience it.”
“I didn’t invite you. I stated a fact. You invited yourself.”
“Semantics, Lord Garon. Are you always so literal?” She leaned forward slightly, the firelight catching in her green eyes. “Or does the famed Baratheon diplomacy usually involve more shouting at celestial bodies?”
He grunted, a non-answer, and looked away, scanning the room again. The silence between them wasn’t comfortable, but it was charged, like the air before a lightning strike. The wine arrived in two crude clay cups, dark as old blood. Alysanne took a cautious sip. Her eyes watered. It was sour, bitter, and left a taste of oak and dirt on the tongue. It was, indeed, horrible.
He watched her reaction, a faint, grim satisfaction touching his mouth. “Told you.”
She took another, deeper sip, mastering her expression into one of thoughtful consideration. “It has character. Unlike the Arbor gold they serve at the manse, which only has notes of sycophancy and ambition.” She held his gaze. “This, at least, is honest.”
He stared at her, then took a long, hard pull from his own cup, draining half of it in one go. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing the dried blood there. “Honest,” he repeated, the word tasting strange to him. “You want honest, Tyrell? Honest is knowing that within a fortnight, my father’s ravens will be flying, and yours will be answering. Honest is they’ll parchment over a century of bad blood with a marriage contract. Honest is you’ll be shipped to Storm’s End to stare at the rain-lashed sea and breed little storm lords for a man you were taught to despise.”
The words hung in the smoky air, brutal and plain. This was the unspoken truth of their chance meeting in the alley, the fuel for his drunken rage. He laid it out like a corpse on a slab.
Alysanne didn’t flinch. She swirled the vile wine in her cup, watching the dregs slide down the side. “You assume I’ll go quietly.”
“I assume you’ll do your duty.” He said it with a certainty that bordered on scorn. “Just as I’ll do mine. That’s what we are. Signatures on a page. Strategies.”
“Is that what has you brawling in gutters and cursing the moon? The impending joy of your strategic duty?” Her question was soft, but it cut.
His jaw tightened. The muscle in his cheek jumped near the wound. “Maybe.”
She leaned back, assessing him as she would a complex ledger. The fierce independence, the resentment that radiated from him like heat from a forge. He was a man who wanted to choose his wars, his loyalties, his life. And he saw her as a surrender. An ambush he couldn’t fight with a sword.
“You know,” she said, her voice conversational again, “if it were to come to that… a marriage, I mean… I’d likely run away before the vows were said. Join a mummer’s troupe. Or book passage to Pentos. I hear the magisters have lovely gardens.”
He didn’t smile. “You wouldn’t.”
“I might. My cousin Lorys says I have a rebellious streak. He finds it deeply tiresome.” She took another sip, her nose wrinkling. “Frankly, given the alternative of being leg-shackled to a brooding, belligerent stag who communicates primarily in grunts and tavern brawls, I believe I’d rather marry a Dothraki horselord. At least the scenery would change, and I imagine the conversation, while limited, would be more enthusiastic.”
It was a throwaway line, meant to lighten the suffocating reality he’d just described. A piece of her courtly armor, deflecting with a jest.
It had the opposite effect.
Garon went perfectly still. His eyes, which had been glowering at the table, snapped to hers. The storm in them wasn’t fury this time, but something colder, sharper. A flash of something that looked remarkably like pain, quickly buried under a landslide of insult. His hand, resting on the table, closed slowly into a fist. The knuckles turned white.
Then he picked up his clay cup. His grip tightened. There was a sharp, distinct crack.
Dark red wine, the same shade as the blood on his cheek, seeped through his fingers as the fractured pieces of the cup bit into his palm. He didn’t seem to notice. He just stared at her, the pulse beating visibly in his throat.
Alysanne’s breath caught. The noise in the tavern—the shouts, the laughter, the rattle of dice—seemed to recede. She had miscalculated. She had meant to prick his pride, to engage him, not to draw real blood. The sight of the wine and the fresh trickle from his clenched hand was a shock.
“Garon—” she started, her flippancy gone.
The tavern door burst open with a slam that shook the wall.
Ser Devon filled the doorway, his travel-stained cloak swirling, his face a mask of frantic anger beneath his helm. His eyes, wide and alarmed, swept the room, finding her in an instant. They narrowed further as they took in her companion, the shattered cup, the blood.
He crossed the room in four long strides, his hand on his sword hilt. Patrons scattered from his path. He loomed over their table, his gaze darting from Alysanne’s face to Garon’s bleeding hand. “My lady,” he said, his voice taut with controlled panic. “You must come. At once.”
Garon didn’t move. He didn’t look at the knight. He kept his eyes locked on Alysanne, his fist still slowly dripping onto the sawdust. The message in his gaze was clear: See? This is what duty looks like.Interruption. Control.
Alysanne found her voice, forcing calm into it. “Ser Devon. As you can see, I am perfectly safe.”
“Safe?” Devon’s voice rose. “Consorting with him? In this den? Your lord father would have my head on a spike if he knew you’d slipped your guard to… to…” He seemed unable to articulate the madness of it. “You were not in the light of the lanterns, my lady.You vanished. I’ve been hunting through every piss-strewn alley for an hour!”
“I am here,” she said, her own temper beginning to fray. “And I am not ‘consorting.’ We are sharing a drink. Poorly.”
“The drink is concluded.” Devon reached for her arm, his touch firm. “You are returning to the manse. Now.”
Alysanne looked at Garon, an apology, a defiance, a dozen unspoken things tangled in her look. He finally broke his stare, looking down at his ruined hand with a detached curiosity, as if it belonged to someone else. He said nothing. Offered no protest. He was a fortress withdrawing behind its walls.
“Very well, Ser Devon,” she said, her tone regal and cold, pulling her arm from his grasp but standing. She looked once more at Garon. “Lord Baratheon. Thank you for the… honest wine.”
He gave a barely perceptible nod, still not looking up.
As Ser Devon shepherded her through the gawking crowd, his body positioned between her and the table, she heard the knight mutter, low and fierce, “Have you lost all sense? Laughing with that brute? His own father calls him a half-wild dog.”
They pushed out into the cold night air, the tavern door swinging shut behind them, cutting off the light and the warmth and the suffocating tension.
Inside, Garon Baratheon slowly, methodically, opened his injured hand. Shards of clay fell to the table, mixed with blood and wine. He stared at the shallow cuts across his palm, the sting a welcome, concrete pain. The barmaid approached cautiously with a rag. He took it from her without a word, wrapping his hand tightly.
The ghost of Alysanne Tyrell’s words hung in the smoke around him. I’d rather marry a Dothraki horselord.
He signalled for another cup. The wine still tasted of vinegar and regret. But now, it also tasted of her green eyes in the firelight, and the terrible, galling truth that she was just as trapped as he was, and somehow, that made it all infinitely worse.