— Are you ashamed of me, Father?
— When you were an infant, a Dornish trader landed on Dragonstone. His goods were junk except for one wooden doll. He had even sewn a dress on it in the colors of our house. No doubt he'd heard of your birth and assumed new fathers were easy targets. I still remember how you smiled when I put that doll in your cradle. How you pressed it to your cheek. By the time we burned the doll, it was too late. I was told you would die. Or worse, the greyscale would go slow. Let you grow just enough to know the world before taking it away from you. Everyone advised me to send you to the ruins of Valyria to live out your short life with the stone men, before the sickness spread through the castle. I told them all to go to hell. I called in every maester on this side of the world. Every healer. Every apothecary. They stopped the disease and saved your life. Because you do not belong across the world with the bloody stone men. You are the Princess Shireen of House Baratheon. And you are my daughter.
