She kneels by the hearth of her very small room.
Jaime knows that the girl is from a smaller House, but the room she had been given was an adjourning room to the larger set of rooms outside, belonging to her scum of an Uncle. The wench that had been her handmaid had been gifted the rooms meant for Melara.
Another small and petty way they had hurt her.
Jaime watches as she removes a stone from the lower part, and wiggles it out. Bellow it, the masonry had been chipped and gouge leaving way to a little alcove. She removes a couple of things. A scrap of cloth, burned, the span of perhaps two fingers. Frayed and charcoaled. A ribbon he thinks… A blacked glass stopper of what he thinks may belong to a perfume bottle. It is also seemingly burnt, but he thinks it is expertly carved into the shape of a cluster of flowers. Small. Unassuming.
But lovely. Remnants of ruined things, Jaime realizes. Of things the wench and the bastard had destroyed and had been possibly Lady Melara's precious things. Why else would she hide them away? Things so beloved even ruined she could not throw them away.
She touches them carefully, delicately with hesitant fingertips.
She then removes a tome- large, thick, leather-bound thing of perhaps lamb skin, burnished and supple. The only intack and unburned thing in the pack.
She flips through it, until she reaches midway through it.
"This was the last thing my father ever drew," she said softly, fingers hovering above the page.
What Jaime sees breaks his heart.
It's Melara. A fine, astonishingly beautiful painting in soft water paint. A woman is next to her, who shares her dark red hair and fine-boned face. They are laughing. They seem to be on a ship of some sort. It is a candid, lovely thing. Jaime aches for Melara to smile as wide as that.
"We took a sailing trip around the Isle of Hethers. My mother loved sailing. As a child, she once sailed all the way to Faircastle from the Driftmark in a small sailing ship by herself. Father liked it fine enough, but his favored pass time was drawing. It was how my mother fell in love with him. He gifted her a portrait he had made of her. And he had promised to make her his Queen of Love and Beauty if he won the joust in the Tourney they met in."
"Driftmark Tourney of 263," said his Uncle Tygett, "Ser Tybalt Hetherspoon gave the crown to your mother after breaking twenty-one lances. Many found it scandalous considering the fact that he was forty to her twenty namedays, and she considered favored by her father to leave for King's Landing as Lady Joanna's new attendant at the time."
Melara smiled. Small.
"They ran away together, married on the Isle of Hethers Sept after months of sending ravens between them. Did you know my father proposed with another drawing? A drawing of my Mother wearing the Hetherspoon colors. She replied by showing up on the Isle, windswept and with nothing but herself and her love."
"I didn't know," said Ser Tygett, smiling.
"That's a beautiful story," said Jaime, a lump in his throat.
Melara's hands touch on her mother's face in the drawing.
" ' We're all stories in the end' ," she whispers, "And my parents had their story be a happy one."
Jaime hopes Melara's story will be a happy one, a beautiful one.
He will endeavor to make it so.
I swear it, Melara Hetherspoon , he thinks to himself, I will make your story a happy one.