The hour was late, and her guardsmen found both girls asleep, sharing a bed in Lady Perianne’s chambers. The queen had them brought before her in her solar. Their three young lords were in the dungeons, she told the girls. If they did not wish to join them, they would tell the truth. It was all she needed to say. Sweetberry and Pretty Peri stumbled over one another in their eagerness to confess. Before long both of them were weeping and pleading for forgiveness. Queen Alysanne let them plead, never saying a word. She listened, as she had done before at a hundred women’s courts. Her Grace knew how to listen.

It was just a game at the start, Pretty Peri said. “Saera was teaching Alys how to kiss, so I asked if she would teach me too. The boys train at fighting every morning, why shouldn’t we train at kissing? That’s what girls are meant to do, isn’t it?” Alys Turnberry agreed. “Kissing was sweet,” she said, “and one night we started kissing with our clothes off, and that was scary but exciting. We took turns pretending we were boys. We never meant to be wicked, we were only playing. Then Saera dared me to kiss a real boy, and I dared Peri to do the same, and both of us dared Saera, but she said she would do us one better, she would kiss a man grown, a knight. That’s how it began with Roy and Jonah and Stinger.” Lady Perianne jumped back in then to say that afterward it was Stinger who did the training for all of them. “He has two bastards,” she whispered. “One in the Reach, and one right here on the Street of Silk. Her mother is a whore at the Blue Pearl.”

   That was the only mention of the Blue Pearl. “Neither of the trulls knew the slightest thing concerning poor Tom Turnip, as irony would have it,” Grand Maester Elysar would write afterward, “but they knew a great deal about certain other things, none of which had been their fault.”

“Where were your septas during all of this?” the queen demanded when she had heard them out. “Where were your maids? And the lords, they would have been attended. Where were their grooms, their men-at-arms, their squires and serving men?”

Lady Perianne was confused by the question. “We told them to wait without,” she said, in the tone of one explaining that the sun rises in the east. “They’re servants, they do what you tell them. The ones who knew, they knew to keep quiet. Stinger said he’d have their tongues out if they talked. And Saera is smarter than the septas.”

That was where Sweetberry broke down, and began to sob and tear at her dressing gown. She was so sorry, she told the queen, she had never wanted to be bad, Stinger made her and Saera said she was a craven, so she showed them, but now she was with child and she did not know who the father was, and what was she to do?

“All you can do tonight is go to bed,” Queen Alysanne told her. “On the morrow we shall send a septa to you, and you can make confession of your sins. The Mother will forgive you.”

“My mother won’t,” said Alys Turnberry, but she went as she was told. Lady Perianne helped her sobbing friend back to her room.

   When the queen told him what she had learned, King Jaehaerys could scarce credit a word of it. Guards were sent forth, and a succession of squires, grooms, and maids were dragged before the Iron Throne for questioning. Many of them wound up in the dungeons with their masters, once their answers had been heard. Dawn had come by the time the last of them had been led away. Only then did the king and queen send for Princess Saera.

The princess surely knew that something was amiss when the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard and the Commander of the City Watch appeared together to escort her to the throne room. It was never good when the king received you whilst seated on the Iron Throne. The great hall was almost empty when she was brought in. Only Grand Maester Elysar and Septon Barth had been summoned to bear witness. They spoke for the Citadel and the Starry Sept, and the king felt a need for their guidance, but there were things like to be said that day that his other lords need never know.

It is oft said that the Red Keep has no secrets, that there are rats in the walls who hear everything and whisper in the ears of sleepers by night. Mayhaps so, for when Princess Saera came before her father, she appeared to know all that had happened at the Blue Pearl, and be not the least abashed. “I told them to do it, but I never thought they would,” she said lightly. “That must have been so funny, Turnip dancing with the whores.”

“Not for Tom,” said King Jaehaerys from the Iron Throne.

“He is a fool,” Princess Saera answered, with a shrug. “Fools are meant to be laughed at, where is the harm in that? Turnip loves it when you laugh at him.”

“It was a cruel jape,” said Queen Alysanne, “but just now there are other matters that concern me more. I have been speaking with your…ladies. Are you aware that Alys Turnberry is with child?”

It was only then that the princess came to realize that she was not there to answer for Tom Turnip, but for more shameful sins. For a moment Saera was at a loss for words, but only for a moment. Then she gasped and said, “My Sweetberry? Truly? She…oh, what has she done? Oh, my sweet little fool.” If Septon Barth’s testimony is to be believed, a tear rolled down her cheek.

   Her mother was not moved. “You know perfectly well what she has done. What all of you have done. We will have the truth from you now, child.” And when the princess looked to her father, she found no comfort there. “Lie to us again, and it will go very much the worse for you,” King Jaehaerys told his daughter. “Your three lords are in the dungeons, you ought know, and what you say next may determine where you sleep tonight.”

Saera crumbled then, and the words came tumbling out one after another in a rush, a flood that left the princess almost breathless. “She went from denial to dismissal to quibbling to contrition to accusation to justification to defiance in the space of an hour, with stops at giggling and weeping along the way,” Septon Barth would write. “She never did it, they were lying, it never happened, how could they believe that, it was just a game, it was just a jape, who said that, that was not how it happened, everyone likes kissing, she was sorry, Peri started it, it was such fun, no one was hurt, no one ever told her kissing was bad, Sweetberry had dared her, she was so ashamed, Baelon used to kiss Alyssa all the time, once she started she did not know how to stop, she was afraid of Stinger, the Mother Above had forgiven her, all the girls were doing it, the first time she was drunk, she had never wanted to, it was what men wanted, Maegelle said the gods forgave all sins, Jonah said he loved her, the gods had made her pretty, it was not her fault, she would be good from now on, it will be as if it never happened, she would marry Red Roy Connington, they had to forgive her, she would never kiss a man again or do any of those other things, it wasn’t her who was with child, she was their daughter, she was their little girl, she was a princess, if she were queen she would do as she liked, why wouldn’t they believe her, they never loved her, she hated them, they could whip her if they wanted but she would never be their slave. She took my breath away, this girl. There was never a mummer in all the land who gave such a performance, but by the end she was exhausted and afraid, and her mask slipped.”