Chapter 1 – The Falcon's First Cry
The Eyrie, 279 AC
The wind screamed through the narrow mountain passes of the Vale, rattling the frost-rimmed windows of the Eyrie like a chorus of ghosts. Snow spiraled in the moonlight, a thousand silver knives dancing in the air. Far below, the Vale slumbered under a blanket of ice and silence. But high above, within the white-cold stone of the Eyrie's eastern wing, sleep had no place.
In the high chamber of Lady Rowena Arryn, the air was thick with firelight, blood, and breathless urgency. Flames crackled in the hearth, but they brought no comfort to the maids and midwives moving like shadows between the bed and the basin. Sweat dripped from foreheads. Hands trembled. The room smelled of iron and fear.
Rowena Arryn, cousin and second wife to Lord Jon Arryn, lay atop a mountain of pillows, her skin pale as milkglass, soaked in feverish sweat. Her long honey-blonde hair clung to her face in damp curls, and her eyes—usually as sharp and commanding as any noble of House Arryn—were distant, unfocused, slipping somewhere between this world and the Stranger's embrace.
Maester Colemon, gray of beard and steady of hand, crouched at the foot of the bed, barking commands to his assistants.
"Hot water—fresh! And bring more linen!"
"She's too weak to push again," the elder midwife said, shaking her head. "She's slipping."
"She has to," Colemon snapped. "Or both mother and child are lost."
The air was heavy with prayers, both whispered and silent. From the Seven-Pointed Star muttered at the hearth to the quiet, desperate begging of a handmaid asking the Mother for mercy, the room became a sanctum of hope pressed under the weight of tragedy.
And just outside the chamber, Lord Jon Arryn waited, still as a carved eagle. He stood tall, shoulders squared in his sky-blue cloak, though the lines on his face betrayed more than age. He had stood on battlefields with men dying around him. He had quelled mountain rebellions and sat judgment over blood feuds. But here, before the uncertain mercy of childbirth, he felt helpless.
This was not the battlefield he knew.
Rowena had been his cousin, his wife of five years, and—strangely, quietly—his friend. She had known the rhythms of the Vale as well as he had. Her counsel was soft, but rarely wrong. He had not married for love, not at his age, not after burying one wife already—but affection had grown in the silent spaces they shared. She was not a woman of idle talk, but she listened. And for a man like Jon, that had become rare.
And now she might die.
He clenched his hands behind his back, as though squeezing his grief into submission. Not yet. Not her.
A scream tore through the stone.
Rowena's voice—hoarse and raw.
Then—silence.
Then—
A sharp, piercing wail.
The cry of a newborn.
The air seemed to still. Even the wind outside paused in its song.
The door opened moments later. Colemon appeared, red-faced, hands trembling—but smiling.
"My lord," the old maester said, "a son."
Jon stepped forward, his boots echoing against the flagstone. "And my lady wife?"
Colemon's face dimmed. "Weak. Fading. But she wishes to see you. Both of you."
Inside, the chamber looked like a battlefield after the storm—bloodied linens, slumped maids, ash-blackened hearthstones. But amidst the chaos, a quiet moment had formed.
Rowena lay propped against the pillows, her face pale and drawn, but her eyes bright with something more powerful than pain.
Cradled in her arms was the child.
The boy was small, yet fierce, wrapped in a blue swaddle bearing the embroidered wings of House Arryn. His tiny fists flexed, and his mouth trembled from his recent cry. His hair was soft and brown, like the sun on the Vale's cliffs. But it was his eyes that made Rowena's heart ache—they were clear and stormy blue, not just infant-wild, but searching. Watching.
Jon stepped closer, his shadow falling across mother and son.
She looked up at him and smiled faintly. "You see him?" she whispered.
He knelt beside the bed. "I do."
"He's stronger than he looks. He held my finger when they brought him out," she said, brushing her hand along the baby's downy cheek. "So small, and already so stubborn."
Jon reached out and placed a hand over the boy's tiny chest. The child stirred but did not cry again. His gaze settled, oddly focused for a newborn, on his father's face.
"Alaric," Rowena whispered. "I want to name him Alaric."
Jon blinked. The name was not from their recent ancestors. It was older. Rooted in a forgotten branch of House Arryn. A name lost in history's dust. Alaric the Just, if he remembered his house's chronicles rightly. A falcon-lord who had ruled in peace after a time of long strife.
"Alaric," Jon said aloud. "A fine name. A name for a lord."
Rowena smiled, then closed her eyes for a long moment, breathing shallow and slow. Jon took her hand, coarse from years of riding and archery, but warm still. The maids stepped back in respectful silence.
"I'm tired," she murmured.
"Rest," Jon said softly. "You've done more than enough."
"I dreamed of this," she whispered. "Not the blood or the pain—but him. In the snow. Laughing. With wings behind him."
"A dream?"
"A knowing," she said, and coughed gently. Blood speckled her lips. "He will fly high, Jon. Higher than even you."
"I will raise him," Jon whispered. "With all the strength I have left. For you. For House Arryn."
Rowena opened her eyes once more. "Tell him I loved him. If I go."
"You'll tell him yourself," Jon said, his voice firm but frayed.
But she shook her head faintly, a knowing sadness on her lips. "You always hope too hard, Jon."
Then, with a last look at her son—a gaze full of aching love, bittersweet as a mountain sunrise—Rowena Arryn, Lady of the Vale, slipped quietly from the world.
The Vale mourned.
Bells rang in the Sept of the Eyrie. Ravens flew to the major houses with black-scarved scrolls. Lords and ladies of the Vale offered their sympathies and sent tokens to the newborn heir. The mountain clans did not cheer, but even they dared not raid during the moon of mourning.
Jon Arryn stood beside his wife's tomb in the crypts, cloaked in silence, his son swaddled in his arms.