Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History #1) - George R.R. Martin Page 0,125

the queen said in a voice sharp with derision. “I see no honor in any of this. I knew such things happened hundreds of years ago, I confess it, but I never dreamed that the custom endured so strongly to this day. Mayhaps I did not want to know. I closed my eyes, but that poor girl in Mole’s Town opened them. The right of the first night! Your Grace, my lords, it is time we put an end to this. I beg you.”

A silence fell after the queen had finished speaking, Grand Maester Benifer tells us. The lords of the small council shifted awkwardly in their seats and exchanged glances, until finally the king himself spoke up, sympathetic but reluctant. What the queen proposed would be difficult, Jaehaerys said. Lords grew troublesome when kings began taking things that they regarded as their own. “Their lands, their gold, their rights…”

“…their wives?” Alysanne finished. “I remember our wedding, my lord. If you had been a blacksmith and me a washerwoman and some lord had come to claim me and take my maidenhead the day we took our vows, what would you have done?”

“Killed him,” Jaehaerys said, “but I am not a blacksmith.”

“If, I said,” the queen persisted. “A blacksmith is still a man, is he not? What man but a coward would stand by meekly whilst another man has his way with his wife? We do not want blacksmiths killing lords, surely.” She turned to Grand Maester Benifer and said, “I know how Gargon Qoherys died. Gargon the Guest. How many more such instances have there been, I wonder?”

“More than I would care to say,” Benifer allowed. “They are not oft spoken of, for fear that other men might do the same, but…”

“The first night is an offense against the King’s Peace,” the queen concluded. “An offense against not only the maid, but her husband as well…and the wife of the lord, never forget. What do those highborn ladies do whilst their lords are out deflowering maidens? Do they sew? Sing? Pray? Were it me, I might pray my lord husband fell off his horse and broke his neck coming home.”

King Jaehaerys smiled at that, but it was plain that he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. “The right of the first night is an ancient one,” he argued, though with no great passion, “as much a part of lordship as the right of pit and gallows. It is rarely used south of the Neck, I am told, but its continued existence is a lordly prerogative that some of my more truculent subjects would be loath to surrender. You are not wrong, my love, but sometimes it is best to let a sleeping dragon lie.”

“We are the sleeping dragons,” the queen threw back. “These lords who love their first nights are dogs. Why must they slake their lust on maidens who have only just pledged their love to other men? Have they no wives of their own? Are there no whores in their domains? Have they lost the use of their hands?”

The justiciar Lord Albin Massey spoke up then, saying, “There is more to the first night than lust, Your Grace. The practice is an ancient one, older than the Andals, older than the Faith. It goes back to the Dawn Age, I do not doubt. The First Men were a savage race, and like the wildings beyond the Wall, they followed only strength. Their lords and kings were warriors, mighty men and heroes, and they wanted their sons to be the same. If a warlord chose to bestow his seed upon some maid on her wedding night, it was seen as…a sort of blessing. And if a child should come of the coupling, so much the better. The husband could then claim the honor of raising a hero’s son as his own.”

“Mayhaps that was so, ten thousand years ago,” the queen replied, “but the lords claiming the first night now are no heroes. You have not heard the women speak of them. I have. Old men, fat men, cruel men, poxy boys, rapers, droolers, men covered with scabs, with scars, with boils, lords who have not washed in half a year, men with greasy hair and lice. These are your mighty men. I listened to the girls, and none of them felt blessed.”

“The Andals never practiced the first night in Andalos,” Grand Maester Benifer said. “When they came to Westeros and swept away the kingdoms of the First Men, they