Alicent Hightower stood before his hearth, and for a long, taut heartbeat neither of them spent a word.
Corlys's gaze settled briefly on her hood, then on the dark riding gown beneath it, its hem stiff with dried mud.
She had come without a circlet or jewels, her auburn hair pinned back without a maid's hand. It did not make her smaller. If anything, the plainness only bared the hard line of her spine.
"Lord Corlys," she began, her voice catching slightly on the first syllable. "Forgive the hour. And the manner of my coming."
"Your Grace," he said. That was the whole of his welcome.
She did not flinch at the cold in it, though her eyes went, just once, to his hands.
He hadn't stripped off his riding gloves. Lamb's blood had dried dark and stiff into the leather seams of the left one—a detail he hadn't noticed until her eyes found it and lingered a fraction too long.
Corlys worked the gloves free finger by finger, the damp leather groaning as he did, and tossed them onto the table between them. "Why are you here?"
"I came because of the letter," she said. "I argued against it."
"Did you?" Corlys's voice stayed low, yet there was salt and iron grinding underneath it. "Or did you hold the inkpot while your father penned it? You've come a long way across dark water just to gloat, Your Grace. I didn't think you had the stomach to do it to my face."
Alicent's cheeks coloured faintly, but she held his gaze. "I didn't come here to gloat, my lord."
"Then what did you come for?"
"I came to speak for myself. Not my father."
Corlys regarded her a moment. "Does your father know you're here?"
"No."
"So you came alone. Without your father's knowledge, and directly against what I imagine would be his considerable wishes." Corlys searched her face for the seam of a lie. "That is either very brave of you, Your Grace, or remarkably foolish. I haven't decided which."
"I don't suppose it need be only one."
Corlys regarded her for a moment, then gestured toward a high-backed chair near the fire. "Sit, then. If you mean to stay."
She remained standing, her hands clasped before her waist. "I'll stand, my lord, if it's all the same to you."
"It is not all the same to me. Yet sit or stand, as you please." Corlys crossed to the sideboard, poured a single measure of arbor gold, and didn't offer her a drop. He drank half of it in one slow swallow before turning back.
"So what did you say in council?"
"That it should never have been done."
"Against Otto."
"Against my father, yes." There was no hesitation in it. "I don't pretend that buys me grace beneath your roof, my lord. I ask only that you not mistake me for his echo. I have a voice of my own, little good as it's done either of us tonight."
"Forgive me if I find that difficult to swallow, Your Grace. The last time you stood beneath this roof, your voice and your father's sang in remarkably fine harmony." His mouth twisted, cold and humorless. "Or was it someone else who stood in my hall and demanded my grandson's eye?"
Something flickered across her face. "It was me."
"At that time as well your house claimed a dragon from mine. Yet you defended it then. You seem to have found your objections rather late, Your Grace."
"I was angry," she said. "My son had been maimed, and I wanted someone to answer for it. I won't pretend I was fair to you. But I did not come here to tell you I had always been on your side."
"No, you've come to tell me you've now grown a separate conscience."
"I came," she said, "because I was sick to death of being right in a room where no one listens. I thought you deserved to know the council wasn't unanimous."
"And if I tell you that it matters nothing to me whether one Hightower whispered no behind closed doors while another stole my son's dragon in the open?"
"Then I crossed the bay for nothing," she said. "And I knew I might. Do you think me fool enough to believe my word puts Seasmoke back on your ridge? I know it changes nothing. I simply refused to let you sit in the dark believing every soul in King's Landing wished this grief upon you."
Corlys didn't answer. He let the quiet rush back into the room and left it untouched—an old habit that allowed men to talk themselves past the edge of what they had ever meant to give away.
It worked on her just as it worked on them. Alicent's fingers twisted once tightly around each other before she forced them still against her skirts.
"He wrote it himself," she said quietly. "Earlier, you asked if I held the pen. I didn't. Viserys wrote every word alone, in his own hand, and wouldn't let even the Grand Maester copy it clean. He doesn't trust anyone else with the parts of himself he still believes are kind. He thinks writing it himself softens the blow."
"It tells me something," Corlys said, staring down into his cup. "It tells me he knew there was dishonour in the taking. Else why trouble himself to hide behind his own hand?"
"Perhaps." Her gaze drifted to the table, where the broken crimson seal still lay beside his blood-stained gloves. "Hear that plainly, and don't mistake it for a plea for forgiveness—I know better than to ask for what isn't mine to have."
"How restrained of you." Corlys set the silver cup down with a sharp click against the wood. "But the ship has already sailed, and the dragon has taken flight. So what would you have me do with this, Your Grace? Thank you for your honesty? Think better of you for it? What is it you hope to gain by telling me this?"
She said nothing.
When he spoke again, the sharpness had bled out of his voice, leaving only the heavy, salt-worn weight of his years. "When I first offered Laena to the King, you were still half a girl yourself."
Alicent stood motionless, only the pulse beating fast at the base of her throat betraying her.
"It would have been a true match," he went on, his eyes fixed somewhere past her shoulder, back in a warmer, brighter world. "Old Valyria answering Old Valyria. My daughter a queen." His gaze snapped back to hers, flat as slate. "The King chose otherwise."
"I was chosen," she said.
"I have never once decided," Corlys said, "whether to thank the gods my daughter was spared your husband's bed and whatever ruin waited there—or curse them that she died instead half a world from home, burned to ash before her time." He held her steady. "Tell me which mercy you'd have me choose, Your Grace. You know the inside of that marriage better than I."
"Neither," she said, and the word dropped without a shred of comfort to soften it. "There was no mercy in either one."
"Then it seems only Otto walked away the victor." Corlys's jaw tightened. "Still, you served his purpose well enough, whether you meant to or not. Does he count tonight among his triumphs as well, do you imagine?"
Alicent's expression hardened. "I came here of my own accord, my lord. What use my father might make of it is beyond my command."
"Is it?"
She held his gaze a moment longer, then seemed to accept that nothing she could say would satisfy him. "I have said all I came to say. I will leave you to your night, my lord."
She inclined her head—a fraction deeper than courtesy required, and turned toward the door.
"Alicent," he called.
She paused, half-turned, her hand resting on the iron latch. It was the first time all night he had spoken her name, and the slight widening of her eyes told him she had noticed.
"If you ever cross to my hall again under cover of dark," he said, "let it be for an errand that doesn't require you to answer, by candlelight, for blood drawn in the sun."
Something not quite a smile touched the corner of her mouth, and was gone in an instant. "A fair rebuke, my lord."
Then the heavy door clicked shut behind her, and he was left alone with the dying fire, the crimson wax, and the lingering ghost of southern roses.
Corlys walked to the narrow window and stood there a long while, listening to the black water slap unseen against the seawalls below. Somewhere out in that darkness, a vessel was waiting to carry her back toward the city.
He could make a weapon of this night before she returned. A single raven, and within the week every lord from Dorne to the Wall would know that Otto's daughter had crept across the Blackwater alone in the dark to beg a Velaryon's grace. It would cost her everything it had cost her to come. It would cost him nothing at all.
He didn't move to call the maester.
At first light he would send the Dragonkeepers back to King's Landing—with a fair wind, an honest breakfast, not a single word of protest. He wouldn't hand Otto the grievance he wanted, nor grant Viserys the cheap comfort of a quarrel he could magnanimously forgive. He would let this night sink straight down beneath the surface, deep past where any eye in King's Landing could reach it, and wait.
The tide always came back around in its own time. In sixty years at sea, Corlys had never once had to hurry it.