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❛ even the sky and the sea cannot contain me, for i am endlessly free. ❜
━━━━ 𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐊𝐄𝐏𝐓 warm by the fire that Robb had spent some time lighting, the babe pressed up against Vhaehrys' chest while she patted his back after she fed him. The mountains in which they had decided to live for the few months that they needed to began to cool with the chill of a winter air, and Vhaehrys took many measures to keep little Eddard warm. Robb spent most of his days training, making sure he never forgot a single lesson he had been taught in his childhood, keeping his body fit and strong for wars to come. The few Stark men that survived the Red Wedding, as it had been called, went out throughout Westeros, trying to find the other Stark soldiers that had escaped from death and were now in exile.
"Robb," Vhaehrys called out into the night air. "It's time for supper, and you've been training all day long. I'm sure you've become quite hungry." The quick slice of a straw dummy that the king had made sounded through the clearing, followed quickly by the sheathing of the sword. While he wanted to keep going, he couldn't deny the rumble that plagued his stomach for some hours, and so he sighed thickly, cheeks pink with blood. Sweat had plastered his curls against his face and neck, having stopped cutting his hair in the past few months that it now grew past his ears and grazed against his cheeks every time he turned.
Seeing Vhaehrys standing there with their son brought warmth to his chest, his teeth glistening in the firelight as he smiled, spreading his arms for a hug. "Of course, my love," he wrapped his arms around her, and Vhaehrys could feel the difference now from when they first got married. He pressed a kiss to her forehead, resting a hand against Eddard's little head as he led them inside of the tent they had prepared a while back.
The plate she had made him consisted of a pot roast (with a deer he had caught that day), a few roasted potatoes from the patch they began planting, and some brown bread made with some wheat they had stolen from a farm. Vhaehrys set down Eddard in the middle of the cot she and Robb shared, and as she sat down opposite her husband to enjoy her meal, she rubbed the inside of her thighs in discomfort.
She would spend a few hours every day riding on the back of her Aegon, wanting to get used to flying and to the swift speeds he liked going, and, in turn, she would often come back sore. When she first began flying, she wouldn't wear Robb's trousers, and the first few times she would come back home with blisters forming on the soft skin on the inside of her thighs, and Robb had to get his mother to alter some of his trousers to fit Vhaehrys to protect her skin. While Robb did love his wife being able to ride her bonded dragon, he still winced every time he would watch her come out of their bath with the insides of her legs a dark crimson from rubbing against the thick scales of Aegon for hours on end.
Thankfully one of the men in his army was a former cobbler, and Robb commissioned him to create thigh-high riding boots for Vhaehrys, made of thick leather that would cover her knees, which she would tuck into a dip between Aegon's wings and his body. While Robb loved that Vhaehrys was now able to fly one of her dragons, he still worried about the state of her body and mind, legs cramping after spending hours hunkered over, completely tired, sometimes having fallen asleep while feeding little Eddard. He's had to wake her up more than once in order to take the babe away from her teat and shushing Eddard as he began to fuss over the fact that he was taken away from the bodily warmth of Vhaehrys, but Robb had a job to do. During these moments, Vhaehrys would wake up hours later, perplexed as to how she made it to bed when she was just feeding her son. When she would feel Robb's body next to her, she then realized that he was the reason why she had made it there.
She felt bad, having spent hours on Aegon and later falling asleep without a meal or even talking to her husband, but when Robb would wake up to her apologies, he would immediately silence her up, envelop her in his arms, and make her lay back down.
"How was training?" Vhaehrys straightened her skirts, placing her own plate on top of her thighs.
"Same as always," Robb had already devoured over half of his plate, having hungered throughout the day, not wanting to break his concentration on training. "I need to create another practice target — the one we have is nearly entirely destroyed."
"Maybe if you went easier on it, it would still have its head," Vhaehrys chuckled, eating a piece of potato. Robb chortled alongside her, setting his plate off to the side. "I know," he become serious once again, a trait that Vhaehrys was sure only the Starks could have. "It's just that . . . every time I practice, all I keep seeing is Walder Frey. His devilish little smile before he tried to get his men to slaughter us, his face of shock when your dragons came to our rescue. It sickens me that I was never able to cut his head off his shoulders.
"For my army, for us, for little Ned."
"Is that what you wish?"
"It's that of what I most promise."
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