questionable madness

"I am not—"

"But you are," you interrupt, humming, lifting a hand to thread your fingers along the surface of the water as you speak. "Every time you join me, you do nothing but stand there and brood," the sound of your tongue clicking follows, as if expressing your distaste for this odd tradition your lord husband has instilled in the moons you have been wed. "It disturbs my repose."

Cregan scoffs, having half a mind to not roll his eyes at your audacity. He should be used to it by now, seeing as you have never shied away from making it abundantly clear how much you love being indulged and enjoying your reprise without a single interruption.

And yet, he was not going to allow you to discard him with a flick of your hand and a defiant tilt of your chin whenever you wished to be undisturbed. He was your husband, and if he wanted to be in attendance at whatever ridiculous southern pompous customs you had, he would.

That's why he had asked the servants to put an armchair in your bathing chambers, close by the tub, where he shall sit every time he has the luxury of disregarding or postponing his duties for a while, just so he can watch you bathe and pamper yourself. Cregan did not care if word filtered through the walls that The Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North spent part of his pastime sitting splayed out in a chair in his wife's bath chambers, feasting on one of the most exquisite viewings in the Seven Kingdoms. Let them talk and whisper. He did not need to explain himself to anyone, least of all to gossiping servants and sycophants alike.

His wolfish gaze was shameless as it traced the damp, dewy skin of your neck and shoulders, fingers drumming onto the wooden arm of the chair, faltering in rhythm just a tad whenever you shifted, the water lapping at your curves. He swore sometimes you were moving with the intent to drive him to madness, even if it was the most minute gesture.

"Disturbs your repose," he parroted, lips twitching with amusement at your feigned disdain for his presence. "My apologies for being such a pest to my own wife," Cregan continued, "I was not aware bathing oneself required such solitude."

Your expression shifted, a scowl marring your pretty features as your chin tipped upwards, as if his words had no place even reaching you. "It always requires solitude. You are just adamant to perturb it," you complained, sighing, as if the mere thought exasperated you, which made Cregan's mouth curl further, dripping with mounting enjoyment. "You stand there watching me like some kind of lecher," you accused, scowl deepening, a scoff leaving your plush mouth. "It is unbecoming of a husband to ogle his wife so shamelessly. You northerners have no decorum."

And oh, the way your lips curled every time you mentioned his culture, tone haughty and dipped with venom at the edges, as if spitting out the very word, made his blood sing.

"Just brutes with no finesse," you finished, chin raising just a bit higher, showing him you were above such things, above him, above his culture.

Gods, he wanted to haul you out of that bath and spank you until you cried those fat, pretty tears again, cheeks flushed and voice wet from babbling at him to stop. Cregan was not a man given to punishment easily, especially with the woman he was bound to by law and vow, but he came to understand that there were few ways he could make his wife see reason, and even then, only if you wanted to give in to his whims and relent.

"If you wanted a soft southerner lord with nough but a flaccid cock and no mind of his own, wife," he spoke, lips curling into that slow, wolfish grin, the one where his canines peeked through. A wolf showing his teeth without biting, but making it clear he could if provoked further. "You wouldn't have accepted my proposal so readily, riding for Winterfell not even a fortnight after our sigils were put on parchment."

You scoffed, rolling your eyes in that infuriating way Cregan loved and hated in equal measure, as if his words were nothing but white noise you were forced to listen to. "It was in my best interest to accept," you protested, inclining a little higher, leaning back against the tub, the water lapping at the tops of your damp breasts. A muscle in Cregan's jaw twitched as his eyes followed the movement. "Why would I be the lady of some lesser lord when I can be Lady of Winterfell?" The words were accompanied by a hum, evidently pleased with the title you possessed. "I am nothing but a woman of great ambitions, as you're well aware, husband."

Cregan huffed, more amused than anything, head tilting, not taking his eyes off the way he could make out the pebbled shape of your nipples just shy of peeking above the milky, fragrant water. He knew what you were doing. This little game of yours was as old as time.

You were losing ground, not pleased with the way he was biting back at your attempts to unnerve him, and had no other alternative but to call to his most primal, animal instincts that reside as deep as the marrow of his bones. He was a man, after all, and no stranger to the cravings of the flesh, more so when it came to his infuriatingly enticing wife, bare and glistening, lounging in the tub, indulging his eyes with glimpses and flashes of your body, willing to make him falter in his resolve.

"You never cease to remind me of the fact, wife," he said, feeling his chest puff up a tad at the way you huffed at his words, clearly displeased that he was not indulging your whims still. Not yet. Cregan was enjoying this more than he wanted to admit. "No woman in the Seven Kingdoms can rival you in that regard."

"What about other regards?"

Cregan's mouth twitched again, but he reigned in his expression for now. "Other regards?" He feigned confusion, tilting his head to the side, dragging his eyes from where they traced the shape of your damp breasts, up to your narrowed, inquisitive gaze. "I fear I do not follow. Must you be so kind as to specify, wife?"

Your brows furrowed, body shifting slightly into the tub, the water lapping at your skin, wetting it anew, drawing Cregan's eyes towards every patch for a few moments, rough fingers twitching onto his armchair, but he won't be baited this time. Raising one eyebrow, he waited, grey eyes now solely focused on yours, keeping you ensnared until you gathered the words to throw back at him.

"Am I rivaled in other regards by the women of the Seven Kingdoms?" You asked, chin held high, trying to absolve yourself of the vulnerable undertone woven into the question, gaze sharp, narrowed. But the way one of your hands lifted to grip the edge of the tub, curling around it, gave you away. You needed to ground yourself for this sort of fragility, and it made Cregan's heart soften just a tad every time, melting the frost of the North around it and giving way to the ceaseless warmth you brought with you from the South.

He huffed, letting his mouth form that tender, soft curl reserved only for you, grey eyes crinkling at the edges with barely concealed fondness. "No, wife," Cregan said, tone glazed with honeyed affection, letting his eyes feast on the way your chest heaved with a soft breath, as if his words had eased an unknown burden curled beneath your breastbone. "There is no woman in all the Seven Kingdoms who could dream of besting you."

And still, you scoffed, protest ready on your tongue, bristling in the milky water, never one to cease when you wanted certainty. "If your words are baseless, you may keep them, for I have no use for-"

"Not in my eyes," Cregan interrupted you, tone lowered but firm, halting your tongue before you could descend into yet another one of your haughty deflections.

It was ever pleasing, the way you faltered in the face of his sincerity. Blinking akin to a startled doe, your expression passing from one emotion to another, offense to confusion to reluctant preening. He could see it. Your chest heaving with soft breaths, plush mouth parting, pupils dilating wide enough to encompass the color of your eyes, leaving behind pools of black. And then, the flush. That warmth spreading from the tops of your breasts and climbing up, up, up your throat, splotching over your cheekbones and reaching the tips of your ears.

Mhm, he got you good this time. Cregan might have to ride the high of such an accomplishment for the fortnight to come, if he was lucky. The Gods were ever so merciful to grant him such a gift and let him savor it, too.

"The smell of the bathing oils must've affected you a great deal, husband, to say such theatrical musings," you mumbled, not meeting his eyes for a heartbeat, two, before looking into that northern gray you preached you found so insufferable. "It makes you sound like one of those flaccid men you mentioned earlier."

Cregan could only huff, amused, watching as you tried in vain to deflect and throw whatever attempt at diffusing the meaning of his words back at him. "Sound, maybe," he said, offering you a slow, wolfish curl of his mouth, baring just enough hint of teeth to allude to a threat, but not bestow it. "But I am anything but flaccid, wife. You, of all people, should be familiar with the hardness of—"

"Silence!" You shrieked, one hand dipping beneath the water's surface and swatting upwards, sending droplets of water towards him, attempting to will him into silence. "Have you no shame, you brute? To speak of such things in the company of your wife?"

But he was not perturbed; on the contrary, his lips pulled into a smirk, pleased and smug. Making you bristle truly was the thing he favored most, aside from the feel of your body and the sound of your voice. "Should I speak of such things in the company of someone else, then?"

"Don't you dare! Gods, you're giving me a headache," you fussed, swatting water at him again, eyes narrowed as you demanded. "Help me bathe, so you may amend for your wrongs."

And who was Cregan to refuse such a decree from his wife?

You glance at him from the corner of your eye—the way his shoulders loosen by a hair, the small easing at the corner of his mouth. Dragonstone had been your honeymoon: wind-scoured and echoing, just the two of you and minimal staff. A place for first nights and first silences. Here, there are voices already ricocheting off the courtyard stone, running feet, the distant clang of steel where someone has stolen a practice sword they’re not supposed to have. A door slams, a dog barks, someone shouts for “Prince Aegon!” in a voice frayed by exasperation.

“Of a sort,” you echo. “It smells less like something is about to crawl out of the sea and eat us, at least.”

Baelor huffs—half a laugh, half a sigh. “High praise from a northerner.”

The doors of the main hall open as if pushed by the sound alone. Maekar stalks out first, in mail with his sleeves rolled up, forearms bare and scarred, looking as if he’s just come from drilling someone into the ground. Sweat darkens the linen at his throat; there’s a smear of dirt along his throat, a healing scrape at his knuckles. Behind him—

“UNCLE BAELOR!”

Egg reaches you first.

He’s all elbows and knees and wild pale hair, sticking up in sleep-flattened tufts where he’s clearly dragged a hand through it one too many times. His tunic is two inches too short and ink-stained, his boots mismatched and one laceless. He barrels past a guard who makes a strangled sound and nearly drops the spear he’s supposed to be holding, then skids on the flagstones and collides with Baelor’s leg hard enough to make the prince grunt.

Baelor barely rocks. His hand comes down in a habitual, automatic arc, closing around the boy’s shoulder in a way that looks thoughtless and is anything but.

“Careful,” he says. “You’ll break your nose, not the mailed Dornish line.”

Egg tips his face up, violet eyes bright, freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and into his hairline.

“You’re back,” he declares, like an accusation he’s been saving for weeks. Then, as if remembering you exist, he twists around and beams at you instead, sudden and blinding. “And you brought her.”

You barely have time to swing down from the saddle before he’s wrapped himself around your leg, clinging like a limpet. His arms barely make it halfway around your thigh, but the intent is clear. You can feel his pulse, fast and delighted, through the fabric.

“Aegon,” Maekar growls, striding closer. “Forgive him, my lady. My sons forget themselves at times.”

His tone says constantly. His eyes say something else when they meet yours—tired, appraising, and, just for a heartbeat, relieved.

“Nothing to forgive,” you reply, fingers automatically finding their way into Egg’s tunic collar to steady him as he tries to climb you and wave at Baelor at the same time. The cloth is warm and a little crumpled from hard play. “In Winterfell, if they don’t knock you off your feet when they greet you, you start worrying they’ve taken a chill.”

Egg makes a pleased noise at that and tightens his hold, kicking his heels in triumph. “Hear that?” he crows at Baelor. “She says I’m a proper northerner.”

“Gods preserve us,” Maekar mutters, but the corner of his mouth twitches like it wants to lift and doesn’t quite dare.

Behind him, another boy has appeared in the hall’s mouth. Daeron, older, near-grown shoulders in a tunic that hangs a little too loose, as if he’s lost weight recently and no one’s quite had time to notice. His hair falls into his eyes, silver-gold and half-tamed, like he ran a comb through it once and then forgot the rest. He’s not carrying a cup, not yet—but you can see the ghost of one in the way his fingers twitch at his side, as if they’re used to circling glass.

Aerion is a splash of sharper colour beside him, all restlessness and edges. He’s at that awkward age where his body hasn’t yet decided what to do with itself: elbows a little too pointy, legs a little too long, wrists too thin for the strength gathering in his hands. His hair comes down past his shoulders still, loose and bright, catching the light in a dozen pale strands. His eyes are already too old, taking everything in and cutting it apart for weaknesses.

Right now, they are fixed on you. On the way Egg clings. On the way Baelor’s shoulder almost brushes yours, his nearness a constant. 

“Your Grace,” Daeron says, stepping forward when Maekar thumps a hand against his back. His voice is a little hoarse, like he’s been talking to himself more than to people, or shouting at something in his sleep. “Welcome back.”

He looks at you when he says it, as if the welcome is meant mostly for you, and Baelor is a package deal.

Aerion does not bother with being pushed.

He strides ahead of his brother, ignoring the way Maekar’s jaw tightens, and drops into a bow that is two degrees deeper than necessary and therefore a little insolent. His hair swings forward with the movement; when he straightens, he flicks it back in a gesture that is almost theatrical.

“My lord uncle. My lady aunt.” His mouth curls around the last word, tasting it. You’ve been married long enough now that he’s not supposed to call you that and sound surprised, but he still does, every time. As if the world hasn’t quite gotten over the audacity of you joining it, and neither has he.

“Prince Daeron,” you greet, and then, because you have learned there is no good in pretending not to see a dragon when it is in front of you: “Prince Aerion.”

His eyes flicker, pleased that you didn’t forget him in your courtesy; a flash of satisfaction, quick and sharp, before it’s folded up and put away.

Maekar huffs, crossing his arms as Egg transfers himself from your leg to your side with alarming agility, trying to climb you now like a tree. You brace your weight and let him, your cloak tugged askew by his scrabbling boots.

“You see?” Maekar grumbles to Baelor. “A pack of pups. Not a dragon among them when she’s about. They trail after your she-wolf like she’s the last fire left in winter.”

At that, Aerion’s attention snaps to his father, then to you. Something flares in his face—not quite anger, not quite hurt. Resentment, maybe, that the words are said like a fault and he is lumped into them whether he likes it or not. Baelor’s mouth curves. His hand finds the small of your back, steadying you as Egg scrambles, fingers warm through the layers. He does not seem remotely bothered by the accusation.

“There are worse things,” Baelor says mildly. “Than pups, brother.”

Maekar snorts, but something in his shoulders eases, just a fraction. “Aye, well. I’m too old to chase them all alone.”

You look at him then, properly.

He’s still hard-edged Maekar—jaw like Winterfell stone, eyes that miss nothing, temper simmering close to his skin. But there are more lines at the corners of his eyes now. War and the loss of his lady wife have carved him thinner. For a heartbeat, you see past the roughness to the man who has watched his brothers unravel in different ways, and now watches his children for the same cracks.

You know the feeling.

“Lucky for you,” you say, “I’ve some practice with unruly litters.”

Egg beams. Daeron’s mouth twitches, the ghost of a smile that looks like it has to fight its way through fog. Aerion’s lips do something too quick to name, a brief, sharp, almost-smile that vanishes the moment he notices you looking.

You feel Baelor’s gaze on your profile, warm and intensely pleased. Aerion sees that, too. His jaw tightens, very slightly, before he looks away.

—

Summerhall’s solar is brighter than the Red Keep’s. The windows here are tall and narrow, but there are more of them, and the light that pours through is softened by climbing roses instead of stained glass—the shadows pink and green instead of bloody red and dragon-dark. The stone under the rushes holds the day’s warmth; the air smells of beeswax and old parchment and the faint, metallic tang of Maekar’s armour drying in the corner.

You sit in a long, low chair by one of the windows after supper, your shoes off and tucked under you, the stone cool under your bare feet through the thin scatter of reeds. Outside, the sky is smearing itself into evening, clouds catching fire in a way that would make old Valyrians nostalgic—a wash of molten colour over the dark line of the trees.

Egg has migrated into your lap somewhere between the second story and the third.

You didn’t see exactly when it happened. One moment, he was on the floor, cross-legged, carving something dubious into the leg of a bench with a stolen knife. The next, he was half on the arm of your chair, half on you, and then fully settled with his head against your shoulder, his knees drawn up, his small, bony weight a familiar presence now. His hair tickles your jaw when he shifts; it smells faintly of smoke and whatever soap the Summerhall maids favour.

He’s talking. Of course he is. The words spill out in an inexhaustible stream—about the new knight in Maekar’s service who tripped over his own sword and nearly skewered a chicken, about how many steps there are from the kitchens to the rookery if you take them two at a time, about a book he found in the Summerhall library that has a drawing of a direwolf that looks more like a malformed sheep.

“I could show it to you,” he says, eyelids drooping with the slow certainty of a child who knows sleep is coming for him but refuses to acknowledge it. “If they haven’t taken it away. Aerion says I’ll turn my eyes square if I read too much, but Aemon says—”

“Aemon is not here,” Daeron cuts in quietly from his post at the window-seat. “And Aerion is an ass.”

“Aerion can hear you,” Aerion reminds snippily from the hearth, where he’s lounging against the wall with the lazy bonelessness of a cat who has eaten and is now pretending to be harmless. His arms are folded, one ankle hooked over the other; the firelight picks out the fine bones of his face, the hints of the dangerous beauty he will grow into. “And Aerion agrees.”

“Mind yourselves,” Maekar grunts from his chair nearer the fire. He’s not really listening; his gaze is on his eldest, on the faint redness around Daeron’s eyes and the tightness of his mouth. There’s a cup on the table near his hand, but you’ve noticed he hasn’t touched it all night. He keeps looking at it like it’s something that might bite.

Daeron catches you noticing him watching, and looks away sharply. Out the window, into the dark that’s gathering beyond the glass. His shoulders curl in on themselves a little, as if it might shield him from whatever he sees there.

“Daeron,” you say, gently.

He doesn’t answer. But his fingers are worrying at the edge of the window-seat cushion, pick-pick-picking like they’re trying to unmake the fabric.

“You were telling me,” you continue, as if he had been, “about the dream with the river.”

His head snaps towards you. For a moment, his eyes are pure, unguarded panic—who told you, who else knows—but then he remembers. He told you himself, the last time you were here, when wine loosened his tongue, and he spilled it all in a rush at your feet like a boy emptying his pockets of stolen sweets.

“It wasn’t a river,” he mutters. “Not really.”

“What was it?”

His throat bobs. You see Maekar shift, only slightly, as if he’s not listening. You know better. The whole room has tilted subtly toward this without moving: Egg’s chatter has stilled, Aerion’s lazy sprawl has coiled a fraction tighter, Baelor’s hand around his own cup has gone still.

“It was… walls,” Daeron says. “High ones. Made of… ice. Or glass. Or something that wanted to be both.” His hands move unconsciously, shaping it in the air. “And a shadow on the other side, with eyes that were wrong. And I was—” He smiles, suddenly, bitter and far too old. “Drinking.”

“Daeron,” Maekar warns, low.

“What?” Daeron snaps, too quickly. “It’s the dreams that are wrong, not the wine. The wine just makes them… softer.”

You feel Baelor beside you go very still. He’s been quiet all evening, letting you and Maekar’s boys fill the room, content, for once, to simply watch and count breaths.

“Wine makes everything softer,” Baelor says, after a heartbeat. His voice is mild, but there’s something iron under it. “Until it doesn’t. Then it makes everything sharp. Take heed, nephew.”

Daeron’s jaw works. “I know,” he mutters under his breath. “I know, I know.” His fingers dig into the cushion hard enough to whiten the knuckles. “I just… sometimes I feel like if I don’t drown it, it’ll crawl out of my mouth and walk into the world. The dream. And then it will be my fault.”

The words hang in the air, heavy and young.

Egg has gone quiet against your shoulder. Aerion has stopped pretending not to listen; his eyes are fixed on his brother, pupils blown wide in the lamplight. His mouth is a hard, unhappy line.

You shift your weight, careful not to jostle the boy in your lap. “Come here,” you say to Daeron, stretching one hand out toward him.

He hesitates. Then, with the air of someone accepting judgment, he stands and crosses the room, his bare feet whispering on the rushes. You can feel every gaze in the solar track his progress. When he takes your hand, you tug him gently down—not into your lap. He’s too old for that, and you suspect he’d bite before he allowed it. But onto the floor, to sit at your feet, his back against your chair. Within arm’s reach. Within the circle of your small, stubborn influence.

“You are not your dreams,” you tell him. “Any more than I am the winter storms in my father’s hall.”

“You don’t see them,” he argues shakily. “You’ve never… you don’t wake with blood in your mouth.”

“No,” you agree softly. “I’ve only woken with snow on my blankets and wolves at my window.” Your free hand leaves Egg’s shoulder to rest lightly in Daeron’s hair, the same stroke you sometimes use on restless direwolves. His hair is warm and slightly damp at the roots, as if he washed and didn’t quite dry it. “Still. They are both only… weather. They can’t walk on their own. They need feet.”

Across the room, Aerion’s fingers curl against his own forearm at the sight of your hand in Daeron’s hair. He looks away for a heartbeat, jaw clenched, as if the softness of it offends him—and something inside him envies it.

Daeron breathes out. The sound seems to deflate him a little. “Whose?” he asks, so soft you might have imagined it.

“That,” you say, “is why we watch where we walk. And why your father watches you. And your uncle. And me.”

His head tilts back, just enough that he can see your face. There’s something wary in his eyes, something fragile as half-melted ice.

“Do you always look at people like that?” he asks.

“Like what?” Your mouth curls, baffled.

“Like you’re… counting us,” he says, searching for the words. “Weighing us. Like… like you’re making sure we’re all still here.” His voice drops, embarrassed. “Safe.”

You blink. You hadn’t realised how transparent it was.

“In the North,” you articulate slowly, “we keep count of our own in storms. It’s easy to lose someone in the snow if you don’t look. So you learn to do it without thinking. One, two, three, four. All the heads above the drifts.” You squeeze Egg gently; he makes a muffled noise, half-protest, half-contentment. Your hand drops to Daeron’s shoulder, a reassuring weight, fingers light. “I suppose I haven’t unlearned it.”

Daeron swallows. “It’s… unsettling.”

“Apologies,” you say.

Then he adds, in a rush, as if the words are being dragged out of him by your fingers in his hair: “But. I don’t hate it.”

Your chest does something uncomfortable. You smooth his hair back once, like you might for a younger boy, and pretend you don’t notice the way his shoulders ease a fraction under your hand.

Across the room, Aerion makes a scoffing noise that is sharper than it needs to be.

“What?” you say without looking at him.

“You’ve turned him into a pup,” Aerion complains snidely. “He’s supposed to be a dragon. Instead he’s lying at your feet like some kennel whelp.” His eyes flick down to where Daeron’s back rests against your leg, then up to your face, then away again, too fast.

“You’re the one sneaking closer,” Egg mumbles sleepily into your shoulder. “You were by the fire a moment ago.”

You glance up.

He’s right. Aerion has drifted closer to the circle around your chair, inch by careful inch. He’s close enough now that the lamplight throws gold into his hair, makes his eyes look more violet than blue. Close enough that you can see the faint white marks of old ink-stains along his knuckles, where he’s scrubbed at them until they almost vanished.

He bristles under the look. “I am observing,” he snaps back. “Like a man with sense. It isn’t my fault that all of you decided to huddle.”

Maekar snorts, half amused, half exasperated. “I told you,” he mutters to Baelor. “Pups. They howl when she goes and whine at her feet when she’s here. Even him.”

“Even me?” Aerion repeats, affronted, his ears flushing pink. “I am not—”

He stops when he realises you’re watching him with that same steady Stark attention. It makes him straighten unconsciously, as if you’ve called his name without speaking.

“You, too,” you say. “Come here.”

He hesitates. His pride wars with something else: the same restless want that brought him three steps closer without him noticing.

“I’m not a child,” he sneers.

“I noticed,” you reply calmly. “You were twice as tall, last we met.”

“You measured?” he asks, suddenly unguarded.

“Against the doorframe in my memory,” you tell him softly. “Now come here before you tip the whole room over, hovering in that corner.”

His mouth twitches, betraying him. Then, with exaggerated reluctance, he pushes himself off the wall and saunters across the rushes until he’s within arm’s reach. He doesn’t kneel. He perches on the arm of your chair, lean hip a whisper from your shoulder, one long leg stretched out, the other tucked under him. Close. Above. A dragonling trying to remember how to be a cat.

“Better?” he asks archly.

Egg mutters something about there not being much of him to begin with; Aerion toes his brother’s ankle in retaliation. The kick lacks its usual venom, more habit than intent. His hand lands on the carved wood of the chair back, fingers curling there. They brush the edge of your sleeve once, lightly, as if by accident. Neither of you mentions it.

Baelor watches the small brawl, his mouth soft, eyes flicking over the three of them as if counting them, too. Maekar watches you, his gaze sharp and oddly distant, as if committing the picture to memory. She-wolf on a Summerhall chair, one boy in her lap, one at her feet, one by her shoulder. His boys. Not clawing at each other’s throats. Not cowed. Just… there.

“So,” Aerion says after a moment, tipping his head, studying your profile like it’s some riddle he refuses to let best him. “Do you?”

“Do I what?” you ask, eyes on the fading light at the window. The clouds are going purple now, the first stars pricking through.

“Always look at people like that.”

You turn to him. “We are still on that?”

He shrugs one narrow shoulder, feigning nonchalance. “Daeron complains,” he says. “Egg preens. I wish to… understand.” His gaze flicks briefly to where your hand rests in Daeron’s hair, then to Egg curled into your side. There is a flicker of something ugly and young in his eyes—what about me?—before he shutters it.

Something in his tone makes you smile despite yourself. You reach up, fingers brushing lightly over the back of his hand where it rests on the chair. He goes very still at the contact, like a hawk feeling cloth for the first time.

“Yes,” you say simply. “I do.”

“Even Father?” Egg murmurs, half-asleep.

“Especially your father,” you answer, purposely mild. “He forgets he is part of the count.”

Maekar grunts. “I don’t need—”

“To be watched?” you finish for him. “Everyone does, sometimes. Even dragons.”

Aerion’s hand tightens under your fingers, just once. “Do you count yourself?” he asks, quieter now.

You think of Blackwind in Winterfell’s yard, the way your direwolf used to circle back for you in deep snow, checking, always checking.

“Someone has to,” you say.

Silence stretches for a moment. It’s not uncomfortable, not quite. Just… unfamiliar. A room that expected fire finding itself warmed by coals instead.

Egg’s breathing evens, soft and heavy, his head a warm weight on your collarbone now. Daeron’s shoulders have relaxed under your hand; his eyes are still on the window, but whatever he sees there is further away. Aerion is the only restless thing left, his thumb moving in a tiny, unconscious back-and-forth where your fingers touch, as if testing whether you’ll withdraw. You don’t.

“They’re too attached,” Maekar says abruptly into the quiet. The gruffness in his voice doesn’t entirely hide the rough edge under it. “It’s not…” He gropes for the word. “Prudent.”

Baelor makes a low sound in his throat that might be agreement, might be protest. You speak before he can.

“Too attached to their aunt?” you shoot back, raising a brow. “They’re children, Maekar.”

“They’re dragons,” he insists. “Men will… need them to be that.” His jaw works. “But when you’re here, they go soft. They follow you like… like…”

“Like pups,” you supply when he can’t quite bring himself to say it again.

He snorts. “Aye. Like that.”

“And what’s wrong with wolves?” Baelor asks mildly. “They hunt as a pack. Dragons mostly hunted alone, and look how that went.”

“Dragons burned whole armies,” Maekar snaps. “Wolves freeze in their dens and starve.”

“Not if someone keeps count,” you say. “Not if someone makes sure they all get home.”

Maekar’s gaze cuts to you, then to his sons. Egg, dead asleep in your lap, mouth slightly open. Daeron, watching you with that faintly dazed, grateful look, as if he can’t quite believe the noise in his head has quieted for a moment. Aerion, pretending he doesn’t care, every line of his body angled toward you anyway; his eyes narrow slightly at the mention of starving wolves, as if he recognises something of himself there and resents it.

“My sons,” Maekar says slowly, “are more likely to drown themselves in wine, set their own hair on fire, or run off to Gods know where than they are to die in their dens.” His mouth twists. “If I thought you’d keep them from that as easily as you collect them round your chair, I’d chain you to Summerhall.”

Baelor raises a brow. “You’ll have to fight me for her, brother,” he says lightly.

Heat crawls up your neck. Aerion’s gaze flicks between the two of you, quick and sharp, taking in the soft look Baelor aims at you, the way your shoulders tilt towards his hand when it lands on your chair back. His jaw tightens again, like he’s grinding his teeth on something sour.

Maekar grunts, something that might be a laugh if you stand on your toes to hear it.

“You’ll regret encouraging this,” he predicts darkly. “They’ll never leave her alone now. Aerion will sulk if anyone else sits near her. Egg will refuse to sleep anywhere but under her bloody chair. Daeron will—”

“Breathe,” you interrupt gently. “He’ll breathe, Maekar.”

Maekar looks at you, long and hard. Then, finally, he nods—once, as if you’ve passed some test you didn’t know you were taking.

“Fine,” he mutters. “Keep counting, then. Just…” His gaze flicks to Baelor. “Don’t lose yourself doing it.”

Baelor’s hand finds your shoulder, squeezes gently. “She has me for that,” he says quietly.

You lean into the touch without thinking, the weight of his palm as familiar now as the weight of your own cloak. For a heartbeat, the whole world narrows to this: the warmth of the boy asleep in your lap, the solid line of the prince at your back, the tense, begrudging trust in a hard man’s eyes. Aerion’s stare catches on that lean, on that trust, and something hot and bitter pulses behind his ribs—he doesn’t have that. Not yet. Not the way they do.

A pack, you think. A strange one—dragons and wolf and whatever Daeron is becoming, whatever Aerion might yet be—but a pack all the same.

“I’ll keep count,” you say. “That’s all I know how to do.”

Aerion shifts beside you, his voice closer to your ear now than before.

“And if we wander?” he asks. “If we go where you can’t see?”

You look at him. At the boy he is and the man he might become. At the jealousy he’s trying so hard to bury under arch words and sharp smiles, at the hunger in him that has nothing to do with supper.

“Then,” you say gently, “I’ll look for you until my eyes are sore. And if I can’t find you, I’ll make sure someone else does.”

He looks away quickly, as if the words are too bright to stare at head-on. But his hand, ink-scarred and restless, hooks more deliberately into the edge of your sleeve now, not pretending at chance. As if he’s testing the truth of what you’ve said by touch alone—and staking a small, silent claim against the world that keeps asking him to share.

Egg sighs in his sleep. Daeron leans back just a little more into your knee. Maekar watches, the lines in his face carved deeper but—just for tonight—less sharp. Baelor’s thumb moves once, soothing, at your shoulder.

Outside, Summerhall breathes. Inside, for the first time in a long while, so do they.

—

Summerhall wakes softly.

You realise it slowly, in layers: first the absence of Dragonstone’s thunderous sea, replaced by birdsong and the faint trickle of one of Summerhall’s little fountains; then the quality of the light, not that cold grey slit that forced its way through the narrow windows of the ancient fortress, but a warm, honey-coloured wash pressing at your closed lids. Warm stone, warm air, that drowsy southern stillness that makes the whole castle feel as if it is lying on its back in the sun.

And under it all, the weight at your back.

Baelor is wrapped around you like he has no intention of ever letting go. One arm under your neck, the other banded around your waist, his chest a broad, steady heat along your spine. He’s not just holding you; he’s got you gathered, hoarded, his forearm snug across your middle as if he’s shielding something from sight. His breath stirs the loose hairs at the nape of your neck in a rhythm you’ve come to recognise in the last months—that deep, even pattern that means he has finally dropped all the armour of the day and given himself to sleep. His legs are tangled with yours, one calf hooked over your ankles so neatly you half-suspect he did it even in his dreams, just to be sure you couldn’t slide away.

You lie there and let yourself feel all of it.

The linen sheets, warm and faintly rumpled, smelling of sun and soap and your mingled sweat. The fur thrown carelessly over the foot of the bed, slid half off in the night so that it hangs like a dark waterfall over the carved endboard. The early light catches on the band of gold around his finger, where it rests against your waist. The way his fingers have curled into the fabric of your shift, not quite tight enough to bruise, just enough that some part of him still doesn’t quite trust the world not to steal you while he dreams.

You shift slightly, meaning only to ease a cramp in your foot. The arm around your waist tightens at once, forearm solid, hand flattening over your stomach as if he could pin you to this moment by touch alone.

“Mmm,” Baelor murmurs into your hair, voice thick with sleep, rough at the edges. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” you ask, amused despite yourself.

“Leave,” he says, and there is something so unguarded in the word that your chest aches. It comes out low and automatic, more reflex than request, as if the fear of your absence lives closer to the surface than he’d like to admit. He blinks at last, lashes dragging up, and you feel rather than see the moment he truly wakes. The muscles along his chest shift against your back, tightening, then easing. “Morning,” he adds, softer.

You roll over in his arms until you’re facing him. He lets you go only enough to make room for your turn, hand sliding with you so that contact never quite breaks, fingers skating over the curve of your waist, the flare of your hip.

Summerhall’s light is kinder than the Red Keep’s. It kisses the shadows under his eyes instead of deepening them, turns the silver at his temples into something deliberate, as if the gods simply meant to mark him. His hair is a sleepy, ruffled mess, sticking up in ways it never does once his attendants have had at him; you can still see where a damp lock dried in a curl against his forehead. His beard—heavier now that he’s let it grow out in these days away from court—is rough against your palm when you touch his cheek, your thumb brushing the faint line where his jaw clenches in his sleep.

“Morning,” you echo.

For a few heartbeats, you simply look at each other. You, at the man who has been prince and promise and now husband; he, at the wolf-girl from the North who should have been made of ice and instead keeps turning up with fire in her palms. His gaze roams your face openly in this soft, private light: your sleep-creased cheek, the smudge where his beard roughed your skin last night, your mouth bruised from biting back laughter and other, less pious sounds. He lingers.

There is a particular way Baelor’s expression softens when he looks at you like this, a loosening around the eyes, the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth. You’ve seen it in council, when you stride in unannounced, and he’s drowning in lords. You’ve seen it on the training yard, when he catches sight of you at the railing, and his sword-arm changes shape without him noticing. You will never quite get used to seeing it from three inches away, with nothing between you and him but breath.

“Sleep?” he asks quietly. His thumb has found its way to the small notch of your spine, rubbing there in slow, absent circles through the linen, like he’s trying to soothe away the last weeks of dragonstone storms and court whispers by touch alone.

“Better than I have in weeks,” you admit. “Your lords don’t lurk in the rafters here.”

He makes a low sound that might be laughter, chest shaking against your forearm. “Give Aerion time,” he jokes. “He’ll find a way to replace them.”

You groan and hide your face against his shoulder. His skin is warm under your cheek, the faint, clean smell of last night’s soap clinging to him, overlaid now with the salt of sleep. “Don’t summon him,” you mumble into his skin. “It’s too early.”

Baelor’s chest moves under your cheek in another silent laugh. His hand slides up, over the line of your spine, a slow, broad stroke that makes heat curl low in your stomach despite the cool air of the chamber. He drags blunt fingers up the knots of muscle along your back, presses his palm briefly between your shoulder blades, then lets it wander lower again, easy and sure, as if his hands have decided that now they know this body, they mean to map it every dawn just in case the land has changed overnight.

“We are still newly wed,” he reminds you, voice dropping, words humming through his chest into your bones. “Dragonstone or Summerhall, it’s still just you and me.”

“Until your nephews wake,” you remind him, though the protest sounds thin even to your own ears. His thumb is drawing idle patterns at the small of your back that make it very hard to remember Egg and Daeron and their unholy alliance with the sunrise.

“Egg can be bribed with honeycakes,” Baelor whispers, his lips ghosting along your hairline. You feel the faint catch of his breath as he inhales, like he’s learning the scent of your hair by heart. “Daeron will sleep until noon if no one shakes him. Aerion… we’ll bolt the door if we must.”

The picture that conjures—Aerion hammering on a barred door like an offended cat—makes you snort despite yourself. It also does something oddly feral to Baelor’s mouth; you feel it, the little curve against your temple, pleased and territorial.

He takes advantage of your helpless little huff. His hand, which had been decently at your back, slips lower, cupping the curve of your hip through the linen. He draws you closer, the length of him fitting against you with practised ease, as if this is the shape his body has been waiting its whole life to fall into. You can feel that he is very much awake now, all available attention devoted to the small radius of the bed that contains you both.

“Baelor,” you say, but there is no real reprimand in it. Not when his nose is nudging into the curve where your neck meets your shoulder, not when his thigh slots between yours like he has every intention of staying there until the sun sets again.

“Mm?” he breathes, mouth already following the path his nose has drawn. He plants a slow, open-mouthed kiss there that makes your toes curl in the sheets, heat sparking outwards in an embarrassingly fast rush. Another kiss, a fraction lower, teeth scraping lightly in a way that turns your muscles to water.

“You have duties,” you say weakly, though your fingers have curled into his hair of their own accord, tugging him closer instead of pushing him away. The strands are soft and slightly tangled under your hand, thick as fur.

He hums against your skin. “Later.” Another kiss, higher now, hungrier, right beneath your jaw. “Much later.” His teeth graze very lightly, and you feel your breath catch. “Right now, my only duty is to my wife.”

It’s ridiculous, how easily he can do this to you. You’ve faced down howling winter storms, stood before your father’s bannermen and argued for grain and justice without blinking. You’ve ridden out through whiteout snow with only a rope and your own sense of direction to get you home again. And yet all it takes is his voice, low like this, his hands steady and sure, the solid heat of his body pressing you into the mattress, and your carefully tended composure melts like frost in spring.

You tilt your head, giving him better access because you are, apparently, a coward where this particular battle is concerned. You feel him smile against your skin in quiet triumph, the curve of his lips smug and fond all at once. His hand finds the lacing at the front of your shift almost absently, fingers working with more familiarity than any septa would approve of. The sheet spills further down your arm, the cool air a shocking contrast to the heat of his mouth and the path his fingers promise.

“Baelor,” you say again, a little hoarse.

“Say my name like that again,” he rasps, “and I will—”

Someone hammers on the door.

You both freeze.

The knock is not the discreet tap of a servant, nor the authoritative rap of Maekar’s knuckles. It is a rapid, impatient drumming, accompanied by a very familiar voice already pitched to carry.

“Aunt,” Aerion calls. “Uncle. Are you awake? I know you’re awake. Egg says you snore.”

Baelor closes his eyes briefly, as if summoning every ounce of patience he has ever possessed. The muscles in his jaw jump once, his hand flexing at your hip like he is considering launching the nearest object—or nephew—out of the nearest window. His forehead drops lightly to your shoulder with a muffled thud.

“I am going,” he mutters into your skin, very quietly and very sincerely, “to throttle that boy.”

“Aerion,” you call, trying to gather the sheet in one hand and what remains of your dignity in the other. You can feel Baelor’s disgruntled heat all along your side, his breath hot and frustrated against your collarbone. “It is early.”

“It is nearly midmorning,” he counters through the wood, scandalised. “Egg has eaten twice. Father has been in the yard. Daeron has already had his first cup.”

There is a muffled scuffle, as if someone has attempted to clap a hand over his mouth and been shrugged off.

“I require,” Aerion continues, undeterred, “your expertise.”

Your expertise. Of course.

Baelor lifts his head enough to look at you, incredulity and amusement warring in his eyes with the remnants of thwarted desire. His hair is thoroughly disordered now, thanks to your fingers; his mouth is reddened in a way that makes something inside you preen.

“Of course he does,” he says under his breath.

You swallow a sigh and call, “On what?”

“A matter of great importance,” Aerion says at once. “Concerning… northern customs. And… wolves.”

He is a terrible liar. His voice always goes just a little too clear when he thinks he’s being clever. Baelor huffs a quiet, murderous sound into your shoulder.

“Let him wait,” Baelor murmurs, teeth grazing your earlobe now in a last-ditch effort, his hand still scandalously confident beneath the loosened lacing of your shift. “He can torment the ravens for an hour.”

“He will start pounding again,” you say. “And Egg will join in. And then Maekar.”

“As I said,” Baelor replies at once, “we can bolt—”

“Aunt,” Aerion says, and there is something in the way he draws the word out, a plaintive, wheedling note that makes your already-wavering resolve warp. “Please.”

You grimace. Baelor sees the battle on your face and groans, actually tipping his head back against the pillow in mute appeal to whatever gods are listening.

“Starks,” he mumbles under his breath. “Softest hearts, hardest heads.”

“You married one,” you remind him, reaching up to press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth. His lips chase yours, deepening it by sheer reflex; for a heartbeat, the world narrows again to heat and the rasp of his beard and the way his hand tightens on your hip like he’s trying to memorise the feel of you to hoard against the rest of the day.

Then Aerion knocks again, faster this time, as if he can sense happiness and must stamp it out.

“Coming,” you call, breathless, breaking away. You extricate yourself from Baelor’s arms with difficulty; he clings like a particularly stubborn piece of armour, fingers catching on your shift as if they refuse to accept that morning exists.

“Traitor,” he accuses, but there’s no venom in it, only hoarse amusement and the thin edge of frustration.

“You can have me back for supper,” you say, still breathless and amused and a little regretful all at once. “If Aerion hasn’t dragged me to the bottom of a well by then.”

He makes a low sound that promises you will, indeed, pay for that later—in entirely pleasant ways—then reluctantly lets you go, hand sliding away from your waist at the last possible moment.

You pull on your gown quickly, fingers nimble with long practice, the familiar weight of Stark-grey wool settling over your shift. You twist your hair into something that at least looks intentional, pinning it back with more speed than care, and smooth your hands down the front of your skirts to hide the slight tremble in them. Behind you, you can feel Baelor’s gaze on your back like sunlight—warm, steady, reluctant to move.

When you open the door, Aerion is practically pressed against it.

He rocks back on his heels with a small, triumphant noise, as if he fully expected you to have barred it and is delighted to be proved right. He’s still in his nightshirt, though someone has clearly bullied breeches and boots onto him. His hair is wild around his face, sleep-tangled, a curl falling over one eye. That eye is bright. Too bright, devouring. There’s a flush high along his cheekbones that is not entirely from the climb up the tower.

“Aunt,” he says, as if he hasn’t been shouted at from the other side of the door for calling in the first place. “There you are.”

“There I am,” you agree dryly. You are painfully aware of the warm presence at your back and the state of the bed behind you. “Your Uncle Baelor is—”

“Busy,” Aerion says smoothly, stepping into the doorway in a way that blocks your view back into the room and Baelor’s view out. It is a neat little move, practised, you suspect; he plants his shoulder against the doorframe, lean body an efficient barrier. “Yes, of course. Far be it from me to disturb his… princely repose.”

Baelor makes a noise behind you that is not princely at all.

Aerion’s gaze flicks past you for half a heartbeat, sharp and assessing. He takes in the disordered sheets, the fur half-slid to the floor, the glimpse of Baelor’s bare shoulders as he props himself up on one elbow in the tangled bed. His mouth twitches—almost a smirk, almost a sneer, something caught between envy and delight at having interrupted.

Then his attention slams back to you, full and hungry.

“I thought we could walk,” he offers, words tumbling over one another as if he’s afraid you’ll close the door if he pauses. “You said you wanted to see the lower gardens properly in daylight, and Father is in the yard and Egg is… somewhere… and Daeron is… not fit for company at present.”

“Daeron is hungover,” Baelor calls from the bed, resigned. “Say it plain.”

Aerion ignores him, a muscle ticking once in his jaw at the interruption.

“Besides,” he adds, nonchalant as a cat that’s already got the cream, “I wished to ask you about northern hunting packs. And about wolves. And about—”

He breaks off, searching for something that will sound scholarly rather than needy.

“Snow,” he finishes triumphantly.

“Snow,” you repeat, carefully straight-faced.

“Yes,” he confirms. “You mentioned once that it can fall so heavily you lose yourself if you walk out without a rope. I find that concept… fascinating.”

He does not find it fascinating. You have seen his fascinated face, and it usually involves fire or cruelty, or both. This is something else entirely: a boy desperate to anchor you somewhere he can have you to himself, disguising it as curiosity because he has learned that “teach me, aunt” gets him further than “stay with me” ever will.

Behind you, Baelor shifts. You can feel his attention like heat against your shoulder blades.

“Northern weather lessons,” he says, and you can hear the smile he’s not bothering to show. “At this hour.”

“A prince’s education is never done, uncle,” Aerion answers primly. He tips his chin up, a little defiant tilt that reminds you uncomfortably of Baelor when he’s about to dig his heels in at council.

“And your brothers?” you question. “Would they not benefit from knowing how not to get lost in hypothetical snow?”

“They hate the cold,” Aerion replies too quickly. “Egg complains if a breeze blows on him. Daeron—” he hesitates, then shrugs, mouth flattening. “He’s busy.”

Meaning: he wants you alone. Meaning: he’s learned that if he frames it as learning, Maekar will nod and Baelor will sigh, and you will feel your duty and whatever kernel of fondness you have for him tug where your heart already leans.

“You don’t have to go,” Baelor says softly behind you.

You look back.

He’s sitting up now, sheet around his waist, hair still a disordered halo. His eyes are clear and steady on yours, no reproach in them. Only… choice. His hand rests on his knee, fingers splayed, as if he is physically stopping himself from reaching for you again in front of his nephew. There is hunger there still, banked but very much alive, and a fondness so open it makes your ribs tight. You think of Egg, clutching your tunic last night as he told you about the book with the ridiculous direwolf drawing. Daeron, breathing easier with your hand in his hair. Aerion, hovering at the edge of the firelight until you called him closer and gave him a place.

Found family, the maesters might call it. In the North, you’d simply call it a pack.

You sigh.

“I’ll steal him back later,” you tell Baelor quietly. “You can glower at him over supper.”

“I’ll do more than glower,” Baelor mutters.

“To me, or to him?” you ask, arching a brow.

His mouth curves, heat flickering in his mismatched gaze. “Both.”

Heat curls in your stomach again at that, but you only nod and turn back to Aerion.

“Very well,” you tell him with a sigh. “A walk. But if your brothers wish to join us, they will.”

You watch his expression carefully. For a breath, something petulant flashes there—sharp, childish, ugly. Mine. Then it’s gone, smoothed over into a bright, eager smile so practised it almost hides the way Aerion’s fingers tighten briefly around the cuff of his nightshirt.

“Of course,” he says smoothly. “If they can keep up.”

He offers his arm with exaggerated courtesy. You take it, because refusing would only make a different kind of trouble, and let him lead you down the corridor, his stride a little too quick to be entirely casual. Behind you, you hear the soft thump of Baelor falling back against the pillows, followed by a heartfelt, muffled curse into the mattress. It makes you smile all the way to the stairs.

“You interrupted,” you say mildly as the door shuts behind you and Aerion’s shoulders loosen a fraction, as if now that the barrier is between Baelor and you he can breathe easier.

“Did I?” he asks, wide-eyed. The innocence would be more convincing if his ears weren’t pink and if he hadn’t looked so pleased with himself at the state of your hair.

“You know you did,” you say. “You have the worst timing in the realm.”

“On the contrary,” Aerion answers loftily, a secretive twinkle in his eyes. “My timing is impeccable. I arrived precisely when I meant to.”

“That,” you retort dryly, “is what I’m afraid of.”

He glances at you, lips quirking. There’s a sharp, sly satisfaction in his gaze now, something too knowing for his years. He saw more than you’d like in that doorway and is already filing it away, another stone in whatever little castle of obsession he is building around you in his mind.

“You’re still here,” he points out, fingers tightening on your arm just for a moment, grip a shade too firm for mere gallantry before he forces it to relax. “With me.”

“For now,” you say. “Do not abuse the privilege.”

His smile widens, all teeth and charm and something brittle at the edges. “As if I’d dare,” he says lightly.

You don’t believe him for a moment.

But as you step out into Summerhall’s bright, green court, the air smelling of roses and wet stone, the sun warming the flagstones under your boots, Aerion at your side and Baelor’s warmth still lingering on your skin like a second layer, you think—just for today—you will let yourself be pulled in two directions.

There will be other mornings. Other almosts. Other times when you can tangle yourself in your husband’s arms without a dragonling battering at the door. This morning belongs, unfortunately and completely, to the jealous boy at your elbow, who has decided that if he must share a queen with a king and a realm, he will at least have these small stolen hours all to himself.

No one can see the knife hidden beneath the layers of silk and extravagance of your gown, tonight more in style with southern fashion to mark the final night of your stay in King’s Landing. No one would notice, except men who know how to look and where. Maekar knows. You feel it in the way his gaze snaps—quick, almost imperceptible—to the seam of your sleeve and back up to your face.

You place your fingers in his hand, standing from your spot beside your father.

You let him lead you onto the floor.

There’s no softness in Maekar, not even in dance, only effort; you can feel the strain of his restraint, the way he holds himself back from guiding too hard, from jostling your healing shoulder, from doing anything that might draw attention to the fact you are not whole. The steps are simple enough. Old patterns you’ve been taught since you were young, familiar turns and rhythm. Maekar moves through each rotation like you saw him fight—efficient, clean, no wasted motion, no flourishes. He doesn’t smile for the watching eyes, and he doesn’t pretend to enjoy himself. His hand settles at your waist with firm steadiness and nothing else.

For a few beats, you let the music speak for you. You let the room watch the wolf and the dragon’s son move in a neat, obedient circle. A pretty picture bards can write songs about one day, perhaps, all while another man’s taste still lingers on your lips. Hours have passed since Baelor led you back to your room and kissed you hard against your chamber doors to bruise, both hands on your face, a low groan caught in his throat. He watched you in the low torchlight after, palms still hot on your skin, for what felt like an eternity, with an expression that thrilled and frightened you, before bidding you good night and leaving you with a kiss against your brow. 

Maekar breaks the impasse first, his words low enough that the sound doesn’t travel beyond you two, “He’s absent.”

Your throat tightens anyway, your fingers briefly tightening around his.

“He’s been absent all day,” you say, a question tucked carefully into your observation. “Is he punishing the hall by denying it his presence?”

Maekar’s mouth twitches like it wants to be humoured by your words and can’t quite make it. “I haven’t seen him since morning. He left the council early. Said he has… matters to attend to.”

“Matters,” you echo quietly, meeting Maekar’s hard stare with a thoughtful hum. 

Maekar’s hand tightens once at your waist, a small tell you try to examine and fail, then he steadies again. His gaze slides forward, fixed on some harmless point beyond your shoulder, seeing something there you can only guess at. Maekar, who has known Baelor all his life, who has bled with his brother and fought beside him since they were nothing but small princelings, looks uneasy in the hazy light. 

“Either he’s running,” Maekar mutters, an edge to his words, “or he’s finally stopped.”

You don’t need him to explain what he means by those words. What would the world be like in reality where Baelor stops being dutiful, stops being careful, stops holding himself leashed, choosing the realm and the good of everyone else over his own wellbeing, over his own happiness? Memory hits you so bright it feels like heat under your skin: Baelor by the altar, one hand braced on stone as if it is the only thing keeping him upright, his voice raw with want, You shouldn’t ask me. Because I won’t stop. And your own voice, greedy with burning desire to drive him over the edge with your taunt, then forget.

And he did. Baelor answered you. Where does that leave you? Where is he now that his father sits at the high table, watching you and Maekar dancing with a thoughtful, serene expression, the future of both your house and his captured in the space between your body and his youngest son’s. 

You turn beneath Maekar’s arm, skirts whispering, shoulder tugging, and for a heartbeat, the hall blurs around the edges. Your body returns towards him, both of you settling into a new rhythm. 

“Are you angry with me?” Maekar asks suddenly.

Your eyes snap to him, and you feel a small indent form between your brows. “For what?”

“For being the one they chose,” he replies stiffly, jaw pulsing once. “For standing where he wants to stand.”

You can feel the court around you, pulsing and moving like a living being, tracking you both greedily, pretending not to, so they can latch onto some scandal. Because they know something is amiss, that a prince who doesn’t entertain frivolous court attics is dancing with you, while the usually dutiful son and heir is nowhere to be found. Your father’s gaze burns between your shoulder blades, as biting as first frost in Winterfell, and you try not to seek his weathered face for comfort. King Daeron watches, too, you know, as do his sons and his queen. 

“I don’t blame you,” you tell him frankly, because that much is true. 

Maekar frowns, an unconvinced tug to his mouth. “You should.”

“Why?” you ask softly, and this time you don’t bother softening the edge in your words, your stare meeting his. “Because your father is a king who thinks of peace before his sons’ happiness? Because men keep trying to move me like a piece? What happened is not your fault, My Prince. We’re both victims of circumstance. I don’t wish you to be my enemy, only my friend, perhaps, if you are open to such a notion.”

Maekar makes a thoughtful sound at the back of his throat, rough and almost irritated in its gruffness, but his gaze jumps to the seam of your sleeve and back up again. He knows. He’s seen you with your blade back when you all went riding, seen you use it, though the blade pressed to your body today is nowhere near as noticeable, instead a gift from someone who is more shadow than man, more whispers than pretty speeches. Because you’re a wolf that learned, too young, that pretty halls are still dangerous, that sometimes the only way forward is to move yourself. 

“You’re armed.”

Your expression doesn’t change at his challenge. “Am I?”

His mouth flattens, then, almost grudgingly, “Good.”

The set ends, but he doesn’t release you immediately. His hand lingers at your waist for one heartbeat too long while you both wait, watching each other—long enough for looks to be exchanged and whispers to start up because it’s too easy to misread this tension between you—then he steps back and bows over your hand with the same stiff courtesy.

You dip your chin respectfully in return. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Maekar answers under his breath, and briefly scans the crowd with lethal, warrior focus. “Not until we see what bites.”

You’re about to answer him, about to ask where Bloodraven is watching from, because you can feel him even when you can’t see him, like a thread pulled taut through the hall—

The great hall doors creak open with a groaning boom. The sound pierces the room, momentarily drowning out the chatter and the fiddles, strings plucking into silence. Conversations stutter all around you, one by one, like strings being cut. Laughter thins into silence, heads swivel in a single wave, drawn toward the sudden spill of cooler night air that cuts through the hall’s heat like a blade.

Baelor steps inside. He should look like a prince arriving late to his own feast. Beautiful but controlled, desired and hated both. 

He doesn’t.

There’s something loose about him, just like last night—unlatched, unbound, moving like liquid, like when he pressed his fingers covered in holy oil into your skin. His hair is slightly mussed, dark as ink, as if he's dragged his hands through it too many times to count, but doesn’t care about it enough to fix it for once. His collar sits open enough to show the line of his throat, powerful and sun-kissed, less restrained than usual. He wears no chain of office tonight, no Hand pin, no visible weight of duty. Just a man in fine robes, here to enjoy his night without any other weight on his shoulders. 

It makes him look lighter and somehow more dangerous all at once. 

Baelor pauses just inside the threshold, taking the room’s measure with those mismatched eyes. His gaze sweeps over his father, over the high table, over the packed hall, over your father’s rigid posture—

Then it catches on you and pins you with such force, you feel the breath in your lungs punch out of you in one hit. The air itself seems to change density around you, your lungs momentarily forgetting what they’re supposed to do. Maekar stills beside you, soldier-instinct sharpening, like he can sense something in his brother that even you can’t comprehend easily.

Baelor crosses the hall unhurriedly, arms at his side, expression one of that easy serenity, nothing like the agonised weight you’ve seen him wear these last few weeks, and people part for him without thinking. They always do. Crown or no crown, Baelor makes his own gravity.

He stops a few paces away from you and Maekar. Close enough that you see every line of his handsome face, the earnest way he typically holds himself dulled enough to make him look genuinely relaxed in a way that dries your mouth. He inclines his head, bare minimum courtesy, gaze roaming over your face.

“My lady,” he says.

There’s nothing courtly about how he says my, so much so that Maekar makes a small, strangled sound beside you. You feel a dozen eyes on you three, tracking, measuring, crafting a narrative. You also feel the knife warm against your body, a small, steady reassurance that no matter what happens, you’re not helpless, not tonight.

You hear your own voice before you cautiously decide to speak. 

“Your Highness,” you begin, a controlled greeting, and you level him with steadiness you have bled to earn. “Will you dance with me?”

A hush falls over the hall. Not perfect absence of sound—candles still crackle, someone’s cup still clinks as a trembling hand sets it down in a rush—but the human noise drops away like every soul in the court has collectively leaned in at once. A ripple of shock rolls through the crowd, gaping mouths and bulging eyes all around you at your gall. A respectable lady shouldn’t ask a man for a dance, much less a prince, much less the future king of the Seven Kingdoms.  

Maekar’s gaze snaps to you, sharp with disbelief, but Baelor doesn’t hesitate.

“At once, my lady,” he says warmly, and holds out his hand, nodding at his brother as he does so.

His eyes burn, warm and hungry in such a gentle way your insides squirm. Despite what you’re trying to do, your plans, you reach for his hand eagerly, letting your fingers curve around his. Baelor’s fingers close around yours the second your skin touches, warm and certain, like his hand was carved for the sole purpose of holding yours, and the memory of him below the keep, at his mother’s altar—saying he won’t stop, warning you he will forget himself entirely—flares so vividly your breath catches again. He leads you further in the dancefloor, his thumb brushing your knuckles once absently, an intimate graze, like he can’t help himself, this indulgence you know at least several people standing closest notice. 

The musicians scramble into motion at a subtle nod from the high table. The tune shifts into something slower, older, a melody that moves you both in an unhurried, intimate spin. Baelor’s hand settles at your waist. Not so low that it would be seen as scandalous, not high enough to be proper. 

Exactly where it needs to be to feel like possession, a man touching his woman, the subtlest of claims.

“Are you trying to kill me?” he murmurs, voice pitched low beneath the strings. "Looking like that tonight."

“Not yet,” you answer, and the bite of humour is the only thing keeping your pulse from spilling out of you.

His gaze drops to your mouth for a heartbeat, then rises again. Baelor doesn’t pretend he didn’t do it. The whispers that follow your moving figures are loud enough, even over the upbeat music, and you try not to cringe away and hide. 

“You shouldn’t have asked me,” he remarks, almost casually.

“I shouldn’t do a great many things,” you reply, letting the dance turn you, letting the court watch the twitch of your mouth. You search the edges of his face instead, letting your suspicion show. “You’ve been absent all day.”

His mouth twitches, almost playful. “Have I?” 

“Yes,” you say flatly, eyes narrowing. “Unless you’ve learned to haunt rooms without being seen.”

Amusement flashes in his eyes, warming his features, wiping years off his face and your neck prickles. The longer this goes on, the more eyes are on you, the more eyes are on you, the more opportunity there is for something to tip. 

“I’ve been getting my affairs in order,” Baelor tells you, still in that same infuriatingly calm voice.

He says it carefully enough to set off alarm bells inside your skull. In all the weeks you’ve known Baelor, he’s never once struck you as a man to use his words lightly. 

“Your affairs,” you echo, testing the ice underfoot. 

The dance draws you close for a beat, almost chest-to-chest, faces bowed towards one another. Baelor leans in as if he can’t help himself, breath warm against your ear.

“You’re armed,” he murmurs, so softly it threads under the music, under the hall’s noise. His hand at your waist doesn’t move, but his thumb presses into the hollow there like he's anchoring himself. “You always are.”

You don’t look away. “Someone has to keep pretty princes safe.”

A quiet exhale slips from him—almost a laugh, but closer to a growl. His hand tightens at your waist for half a beat, then eases, careful with your shoulder even in this.

The dance brings you closer again, and when you’re close enough to exchange air, he says, “I can’t do this.”

Your throat tightens. “Do what?”

“This,” Baelor repeats, and his voice goes rough at the edges like it’s scraping itself raw on truth. “Be what he needs. Be what the realm expects. I thought I could. Gods, I know I should, but then you kissed me back.”

He looks at you then, so deep it’s like he’s reaching into you, and the careful prince is gone. You see dragonfire smouldering behind his eyes without leash or bridle this time. Worse—better—he looks happier like this than you’ve ever seen him look while doing everything right.

“It’s done. I’m done.”

Your fingers clench around his hand. “Baelor—”

“I’m going to abdicate,” he declares with a small laugh, and the words suck the oxygen out of the hall. 

Everything around you disappears. Your world narrows to the warmth of Baelor’s hand at your waist, and the sound of your own pulse pounding so loudly you momentarily forget where you are.

“You can’t,” you force out.

Baelor’s mouth curves into a pensive line. “Can’t I?”

“The realm needs you,” you hiss, and it comes out like you’re trying not to bite. “Your father—your brothers—”

“My father has three other sons,” he reminds you, and you can’t quite read his tone or how he feels about this fact. “My brothers will live. The realm will live, it always does. There are plenty, I’m sure, who will be glad to hear this news.” His gaze is piercing when it meets yours again, adding, “And I cannot keep living like a man already dead.”

You swallow down all the emotions trapped in your throat. “Where have you been all day, Baelor?”

Baelor’s hand flexes at your waist. You feel it—him fighting the urge to pull you closer, to press his mouth to yours like he did at the altar, messy and greedy, like the world couldn’t exist if it were not you and him in it. You remember his mouth on yours, his breath stuttering against your cheek, his voice half-choked don’t stop. You remember the way he protected your injury even when he was lost in want, how that care only made you want him more.

Baelor leans in again, just enough that his words warm the shell of your ear.

“Writing letters,” he murmurs. “Closing doors. Opening others. Saying things I’ve put off for years because I thought I could be… good.” A beat. His voice turns almost amused, almost disbelieving. “As if goodness is a kind of armour.”

“It can be,” you whisper.

“It can also be a cage,” he corrects, and his thumb presses into your waist harder, an intimate pressure that makes your breath go thin around the edges. “I have been in a cage my whole life.”

The dance turns you once more in another rotation. His hand guides you effortlessly through the pattern, like he could move you through any storm with those fingers alone.

“Baelor. You cannot give up the throne for me.”

Because as much as this thrills you, as much as you want nothing more than to reach forward and kiss him, right here in front of everybody, the thought of being the spark that burns him down makes something in you go cold.

“I’m doing this because of me,” he disagrees softly. “Because I’ve reached the point where I can’t pretend the chain doesn’t chafe anymore.” His gaze flickers over your face—your mouth, your eyes—then locks back on your eyes, everything in his perusal shameless in a way you’ve never seen him be shameless. “And because wherever you go, I find myself going too.”

Your heart clenches so hard it takes everything to keep your expression steady.

“You said something like that,” you manage to choke out, voice low, “before.”

Baelor’s mouth softens. “I meant it then,” he says gently. “I mean it now.”

You lift your chin a fraction, staring him down the way you did last night, your heart roaring in your ears. “Say it.”

Because if he means it, if he’s truly mad enough to even suggest something like this, if he wants you enough to give up the very thing that’s always defined him, that’s been meant for him from the day he was born—

Baelor’s gaze sharpens like a blade pulled from a sheath. “You are the shape my heart has taken,” he says softly, and the words are quiet enough that only you can hear them, “and always will.”

Your breath catches hard enough that it hurts. The entire hall is watching you. You can feel the weight of that expectation pressing into your skin from all sides like a brand. But Baelor’s doesn’t seem to care. For the first time, he looks like a man who has decided his life is his own.

“I don’t care anymore,” he adds, softer, rougher. “That’s—” He laughs low under his breath. “That’s the worst and best of it.”

Duty demands that you put a stop to this foolishness. That you remind him that even if he wishes this, there’s no feasible way Daeron would ever permit his heir to simply disappear into the northern snow, never to be seen again. That he was born for duty, for a crown, and it’s his to bear. 

Instead, you hear yourself say, “Then don’t stop.”

You hear Baelor draw in a deep breath, his broad shoulders moving with it. His gaze drops to your mouth again, hungry and open. The memory of his kiss flashes between you again. The messy greed of it, the scrape of teeth, the sound he made when you bit his lip, and he couldn’t pretend anymore. 

It’s madness, you know, you will have to claw for even a chance of this, but together you can try, together—

Baelor leans in—

And the hook snaps tight.

A servant threads toward the edge of the dance floor with a tray held steady at shoulder height, his head bowed. House Peake colours, plain and unremarkable, made to vanish in the blur of the feast. He moves like someone used to going unseen, but you see him anyway. Maybe it’s Bloodraven’s words lodged under your ribs. Maybe it’s the wolf in you that never stops listening and anticipating, your father’s lessons bred into you before your feet could touch the floor. Maybe it’s simply that his eyes never lift—not even as he nears the king’s heir.

The tray holds cups.

And a slender carving knife that shouldn’t be there.

He dips his head as if offering refreshment or moving past you. Then his hand flashes, and steel catches candlelight. The knife comes up in a fast, piercing arc, angled for the space beneath Baelor’s arm where it can slip deep and quick.

Time slows into sharp, precise pieces. You move before thought finishes forming in your head. Your fingers rip free of Baelor’s hand, your body leaning into the strike. Your sleeve knife slides into your palm with the ease of something you have practised in the dark for years, a small, unfamiliar weight that makes your blood go calm and cold in your veins. Metal meets metal with a piercing ping, your blade catching his with a sharp, ringing scrape that vibrates up your arm. Shock flickers across the man’s face—brief as a blink—because he doesn’t expect a wolf to have teeth.

He snarls and twists, trying to roll his wrist and slip past you, switching targets with the desperate speed of a man who has already failed once. His blade flashes toward your throat now.

Baelor descends on him like a storm. 

His hand clamps at your waist, not to hold you still but to move you, wrenching you sideways in a pivot that keeps you within the dance’s pattern for half a breath, two bodies turning as if the song is still the thing driving you and not violence instead. His other arm drives across, a brutal, efficient strike into the attacker’s forearm.

You hear the impact more than you see it. The bone gives with a sick, dull crack. The carving knife jolts free, spinning, catching the light once, and clatters into the rushes under a swirl of skirts, then vanishes. The man lunges anyway, empty-handed now, grabbing for Baelor’s throat like he thinks he can tear dragonfire out by force. Your knife flashes again, a clean slice across his forearm, a shallow, precise cut, just enough to open skin and make him flinch. Blood blooms dark and immediate across the man’s sleeve.

Baelor doesn’t draw a sword. He hits the man with his fist again, a furious, deadly strike. Knuckles meet jaw with a sound like meat struck on a block. The attacker staggers from the sheer force, and Baelor catches him by the collar in the same motion, hauling him in close for one heartbeat—close enough that Baelor can snarl something only the man hears—then driving him down into the rushes with brutal force.

The hall erupts around you in a roar. Screams, shouts, chairs scraping back, steel singing as the Kingsguard draw swords—

And inside the chaos, you and Baelor move like you planned to move. Like you have already spoken about where you will stand, where you will turn, what you will do if the hook catches, and the fish thrashes. What happens if the fish finally takes the bait carefully laid out for it all night. 

Because you have. 

The attacker tries to spit through bloody teeth, eyes wild with hatred. “Long live the Black Dragon—”

Then shadows move. Not Kingsguard or gold cloaks. Not brave lords suddenly remembering they have swords and need to defend the royal line.

Bloodraven’s men.

They’re on the attacker with practised speed—hands snapping manacles onto the man’s wrists, a cloth shoved into his mouth before he can bite down on poison or shout anything scandalous to the hall. Maekar is with them, face pinched tight, but Baelor was right when he said his brother would refuse to sit this plan out, hauling the attacker up like he weighs nothing at all. His face is hard, merciless fury.

Your father is on his feet at the edge of the floor, his sword in hand, standing in front of the queen and king, eyes locked on you like he’s counting your limbs to make sure you still have them all.

Baelor’s hand is still at your waist, the touch burning through the silk. You breathe into his touch. 

“Easy, Your Grace,” Bloodraven urges Maekar, strolling through the crowd, as the prince yanks the attacker’s head back by his hair. 

Maekar’s eyes flick to the master of whispers—savage, bright, and furious—then he forces himself still by sheer will alone. His jaw clenches so hard you see the muscle jump there. Because tonight isn’t for easy revenge. Tonight is for catching.

Baelor turns his head slightly, gaze skimming over you worriedly. “Are you hurt?” he asks, voice pinched low.

“Maybe my pride,” you murmur in response, your heart beating in your throat, because if you answer honestly, you will say I’m alive, and you’re touching me, and the realm is watching us, and I still want you like fire wants air.

His thumb presses into your waist again, steadying, a small, possessive caress. “Stay with me.”

At the high table, King Daeron rises to his feet, guards close at his side. The hall is still in disarray. A lady is sobbing somewhere to your left. Bloodraven bows his pale head towards the Daeron marginally, then flicks his fingers towards his little birds in a tiny gesture that has them hauling the prisoner away at once.

Daeron steps forward and looks out over the chaos with tired, iron calm. The room quiets the way prey quiets when the larger predator enters the clearing.

“You see,” Daeron calls out, voice soft but carrying, “what old mistakes look like when we pretend they have healed.”

Silence grips the hall in a hard fist. Daeron’s gaze sweeps over drawn swords and all the pale faces, over the bleeding traitor being dragged toward the doors, over you—wolf with a knife, his son’s arm around you like an iron band—and then to his other son on your other side. 

“We tell ourselves the Blackfyre wound has scarred,” he continues. “That the fever has broken. But it takes only one loyal fool with a blade to remind us that rot lingers beneath the skin.”

He pauses, eyes sharpening, looking, just for one moment, lost in his own head.

“Bravery is not only found in battle,” Daeron says. “It is also found in the moment a man looks at history and chooses not to repeat it, even when repeating it would be easier. Perhaps safer.”

His gaze goes to Maekar—clenched, furious, controlled by will alone. To Baelor—flushed with adrenaline and something looser, more dangerous. On the way both of them stand half-turned toward you without thinking.

“Tonight,” Daeron continues, “I was meant to make an announcement.”

You feel Baelor go still as stone beside you. A tiny movement, like he means to step forward, to intercept, to stop this before it’s too late, before his bravery can take shape and be rewarded.

Daeron’s eyes cut to him at once, a knowing gleam there. “Stand down, Baelor,” Daeron orders calmly.

Baelor’s jaw works, his grip on you growing tighter for a single breath. Daeron exhales at the sight, a tired, worn sound.

“I have spent my reign trying to fix past mistakes,” he says, and for a heartbeat, you hear the man beneath the crown, hear that same weariness you heard in him yesterday afternoon when he told you about his sister. “Trying to be wise. Trying to put the realm first, even when it asked for blood.”

He angles his chin. Your pulse drums loud in your ears. Daeron’s gaze finds you again in the chaos, every inch the king. “Lady Stark.”

Your title sounds too small and insignificant for the weight of the moment. Daeron takes several measured strides towards you, his guard moving with him. “You came south as a guest. You bled for my heir. You’ve been used as a symbol and a story by ambitious men in these very walls.”

A ripple of discomfort moves through the crowd because they know it’s true, but didn’t expect Daeron the Good to accuse them so bluntly. 

“You will not be used without your consent again. I intended to bind North to the crown with a match that made sense on paper,” he explains, a remorseful tilt to his mouth. “Steel and winter. A son with fewer burdens. A marriage that would not provoke the realm.”

Maekar goes rigid beside you. Baelor’s hand tightens until it almost hurts against your ribs.

“But I did the sensible thing once already,” Daeron says softly, “and the realm bled for it anyway.”

The hall is so quiet you can hear candles popping.

“Therefore,” King Daeron announces, his voice lifting, carrying through the hall, lifting his eyes to look at you, side by side, fused together. “I name my heir, Prince Baelor Targaryen, betrothed to Lady Stark of Winterfell.”

At first, no one breathes, then the hall explodes into gasps.

Maekar turns his head slowly toward Baelor, expression carved of stone and something like shock. Baelor stares at his father as if struck—then his gaze snaps to you, disbelieving and bright with something dangerously close to joy.

At the edge of the hall, near the shadowed arch where the traitor was dragged away, you catch a glimpse of pale hair and a ruined face half-hidden in dim light, one red eye gleaming as it watches you.

Bloodraven’s mouth quirks, thin and sharp, satisfied in a way that should probably chill you. And you realise, all at once, that the whole display tonight—the dancing, the daring, the knife he gave you, and the eventual catch—has always been a kind of bait, just not the one you thought you agreed to.

You’re not the helpless thing to be moved around anymore.

You’ve learned how to move yourself. 

Now, as the Red Keep’s gates yawn open ahead of them, the word tolls through Baelor’s skull like a bell.

—

They thunder into the yard a mess of dirt and steel and torn white cloaks.

The city’s stink still clings to him—river and tanneries and hot stone—but the keep has its own smell: smoke, old rushes, the faint tang of oil on the hinges of the great doors. Grooms and guards scatter as the party crashes in under the arch. A stableboy drops a bucket; water fans across the cobbles, turning dust to mud that splashes up the legs of the nearest horse.

Baelor swings down before his gelding has fully stopped.

Pain lances up his left thigh as his boot hits uneven stone; he realises distantly that at some point in the chaos, something has wrenched, that his knee is swelling under his boot. It doesn’t matter. The leather of your bridle burns his palm as he catches it when your mare dances, eyes rolling white at the sudden dark of the gate. You’re still slumped forward over the saddle-bow, arm hanging limp.

“Easy,” he murmurs to the gelding, not looking at his own horse at all. “Stand.”

Maekar hits the ground beside him with a thud. There’s blood on his cheek that is not his own, drying in a flaking streak from hairline to jaw. His mace hangs heavy in his hand, crusted dark. One of the Kingsguard is missing a piece of his cloak; another’s shield looks like someone took a bite out of it.

“Clear the yard!” Maekar roars, voice cracking across the stone. “Make way for the maesters—move, damn you!”

Servants freeze for a fatal fraction. Then the shout penetrates; they scatter, pulling benches away from the path, grabbing at startled chickens, dragging a cart back by its wheels. Gold cloaks pour in from the walls, some wide-eyed, some already reaching for swords, faces sharpening as they see the limp, grey-clad figure draped over the northern saddle.

Baelor reaches up.

Your body is dead weight in his arms as he lifts you down, cradling you to his chest. Your head lolls against his shoulder; your hair is stuck to your neck with sweat and blood. The arrow is gone now, but the tear in your gown gapes, dark and wet around the ugly puncture of the wound. The flesh around it is starting to discolour—angry red spiking outwards into a faint, sinister shadow under the skin.

Poison, one of the knights had said.

Baelor holds you tighter.

“Prince Baelor.” A maester shuffles at his elbow, breathless, his chain clinking. It’s not the old man from Summerhall, nor the thin crow Daeron keeps in council; this one is thick around the middle, hands surprisingly steady. “We must get her to the healing rooms. I’ll need light, hot water, and my stores. That wound—”

“Then move,” Baelor snaps.

He is aware, dimly, that he almost never speaks like that to men of learning. Maesters are his father’s favoured tools as much as his own; he’s learned to husband their goodwill. Right now, he does not care. The world has shrunk to the weight in his arms and the way your breath catches in shallow, uneven pulls.

“Your Grace!”

The voice cuts through the yard like a trumpet.

King Daeron is already striding down the steps from the keep, cloak thrown back, a pair of white cloaks flanking him. He must have been told at the gate, or perhaps he heard the yard erupt and came of his own accord. Either way, he looks nothing like the gentle scholar most of the realm names him when they think he can’t hear.

There is fury in him, banked and sharp.

Baelor has seen his father angry before. At lords who played too freely with peasant lives, at Blackfyre pretensions, at his own father’s, Aegon’s, old ghosts. That anger has always worn the civilised face of statecraft: clipped words, cold decrees, ink that might as well have been blood when it dried on parchment.

Now, for the first time in many years, Daeron the Good looks very much like a dragon.

“What happened?” he demands, voice ringing off the stone. His gaze flicks over the yard in one sweeping cut: the torn cloak, the dented shield, Maekar’s blood-streaked face, the way Baelor clutches you like a man afraid someone will try to take you from him. His eyes narrow, settling on the black smear around your wound. “Is that—”

“Poison,” the maester confirms grimly. “A slow one, by the look of it, Your Grace. Not the Stranger’s kiss, but not kind either.”

Colour drains from Daeron’s cheeks, leaving his skin waxen around the mouth.

“In my own Kingswood,” he says softly. “An arrow for the heir of Winterfell. In sight of my city walls.”

One of the courtiers hovering at the edge of the yard opens his mouth—some platitude, some coward’s suggestion about bandits. Daeron does not look at him, does not raise his voice. He simply says, very clearly, “If the next man who speaks the word ‘bandit’ in my hearing is not carrying a bow and a deer, I will have him flogged.”

Silence slams down.

Then Daeron’s gaze comes back to Baelor. For a heartbeat, prince and king look at one another over the curve of your body. Baelor feels it—the old, familiar weight of expectation, the question without words. Are you hurt? Are you whole? Can you stand?

“Yes,” Baelor forces out, though his throat feels tight enough to strangle him. “We were ambushed, Father. Blackfyre sympathisers. There were… there were sigils. Inverted dragons. They knew our route.”

Daeron’s jaw clenches. “We will speak of that. Later.” His eyes drop to your face—the pained tightness, the sheen of sweat on your upper lip, the way your lashes lie too still against your cheeks. A muscle jumps in his cheek. “For now, get her inside. Quickly. Every moment we waste talking in this yard is a moment that poison has to root itself deeper.”

Baelor shifts his grip, ready to carry you himself.

The maester steps in. “My prince—let the porters—”

“No.” The word comes out raw, so sharp the man flinches back, startled. “She—”

A hand clamps on his arm. Maekar’s fingers are like iron bands around his bicep, biting through the leather of his sleeve.

“Bael,” his brother says under his breath. “Let them work. You’ll slow them, and you know it.”

He does know it. That’s the worst of it. He can see, in some cold, rational part of his mind, the path: maester, table, knives, clean cloth, tinctures. Yet his arms will not give you up. The porters hover at the edge of his vision, faces tense, hands empty and ready. The maester watches him with professional impatience, poorly masked as concern. Over all of it, Daeron’s gaze, heavy and intent on his brow.

“Baelor,” his father says, quieter now. “Son. Give her to them.”

The plea in it nearly undoes him.

Your head lolls against his shoulder; your lips part on a tiny, unconscious sound. He feels it more than hears it, a little vibration against his collarbone. The skin around the wound is darkening further now, the veins radiating out faintly like ink drawn through paper.

If he hesitates any longer, he will be the one doing harm. Baelor swallows, feeling something in his chest crack, and forces his hands to loosen.

“Careful,” he grinds out as he transfers your weight into the porters’ arms. “If you drop her—”

“We won’t,” the maester assures him. There is none of the usual obsequiousness in it; only a man sworn to save lives speaking to another who understands that oath. “I swear it, my prince.”

They bear you away at a near-trot, the maester bustling ahead, shouting for hot water, clean linens, wine, willowbark, the pale blue vial he keeps under lock for snake-bites. The little procession disappears under an arch, swallowed by the keep’s shadow.

Baelor’s body sways after them.

He takes one involuntary step, then another. The need to follow is a living thing under his skin, clawing at his ribs. It wants him moving, wants him in that room, wants him between you and everything that might hurt you further—including the maester’s knives.

Maekar’s grip tightens.

“Leave them to their work,” he growls under his breath, digging his fingers in harder. “You’ll be in their way.”

“She—” Baelor hears his own voice and hates it. Thinned, frayed, too close to breaking. “Maekar, I—”

“I know,” Maekar cuts in, and there is something rough in his tone that catches Baelor’s attention through the fog. “I know. But unless you’ve suddenly taken the chain, you’re no use in that room. Here—”

He shifts his stance, subtly angling his bulk between Baelor and the door through which they carried you. It’s not much—he’s not their father, he cannot command with a glance the way Daeron can—but it creates the smallest of barriers. Enough for Baelor to smash himself against instead of the wall.

He realises his hands are shaking. Baelor curls them into fists at his sides, flexing until his gloves creak. The yard is full of eyes; he can feel them crawling over him. Gold cloaks. Grooms. Courtiers. The lords who happened to be close enough to come running when the shouts started. All of them, watching the king’s heir with the wolf’s blood on his hands.

He drags in a breath that tastes of horse and iron and panic and forces it back out slowly.

Control, he reminds himself. You cannot lose it here. Not in front of them. Not while Father is watching.

Daeron has not moved far. He stands a little way off, conferring in a low, tight voice with the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, eyes still cold as the Narrow Sea in winter. As Baelor watches, a page sprints up, white-faced, stammering something. The king’s head snaps toward the gate.

Northern banners.

The direwolf on grey comes into view a moment later, wind-snapped and grim, followed by a column of riders splashed in road-dirt and sweat. Barthogan Stark had ridden for the Kingswood as soon as the first rider reached the city with the news, but even a northern horse can only eat so much ground. They have arrived too late for the fight.

Not too late for the aftermath.

Baelor feels the temperature in the yard drop as the Stark column pushes in. It’s not the wind; the day is still southern-hot, the stone still radiating heat. It’s something else. The way the air changes around certain men. Daeron’s anger burns. Barthogan Stark’s wrath chills to the bone.

He swings down from his horse in one smooth motion, barely waiting for the animal to stop. There is dust in his beard and at the hems of his cloak; his hair has come half-loose from its tie, silver and dark hanks falling around a face set in a line that looks carved from rock. His eyes—those cold, north-sky eyes—go at once to the blood on the cobbles.

“Where is she?” he snarls, without preamble, voice low and dangerous.

“Inside,” Daeron answers, stepping forward to meet him. There is an entire history in the way they stand facing one another: Aegon on the Neck, dragonfire over the Wall, oaths sworn and kept. “My maesters have her. An arrow—”

“An arrow,” Stark repeats, gaze snapping to Baelor, taking in the torn state of his armour, the smear of your blood on his hands, the pallor under the summer tan. “In your king’s own woods. On your watch.”

The words hit like blows. Baelor feels each one land. “I was there,” he says quietly. “I pulled her away. I—”

“Not fast enough,” Barthogan cuts in, his voice cold as river ice. “Not hard enough. You were meant to keep her safe, dragon. Not give the realm a story about how Stark heirs bleed so prettily for your family’s quarrels.”

Heat flashes up Baelor’s spine. Guilt rears, teeth bared, eager to agree with every syllable. It was his ride. His road. His failure to see the crack before the river gave way. He opens his mouth—he doesn’t even know yet if it’s to apologise or to promise, either way, to accept the blame—but Daeron speaks first.

“Take care, Barthogan,” the king speaks, voice gone very soft. It’s the softness that makes grown men flinch. “You speak of my son and my Hand.”

Stark’s head turns toward him slowly. For a moment, Baelor thinks he will push it anyway; northern tempers are headstrong things, not easily soothed. Then something in Daeron’s face—the iron under all his good-natured courtesy—registers, and Barthogan reins in with visible effort.

“My pardon, Your Grace,” he grinds out. The words are ice, not warmth. “Grief makes my tongue jump the leash.”

“It has every right to strain it,” Daeron allows. A flicker of something like old friendship passes between them, quickly drowned by the moment’s immediacy. “But remember also who stands before you. Baelor did not put that arrow in your daughter’s flesh. He threw himself between her and the worst of it.”

“He should have thrown himself in front of the damned shaft,” Stark snarls.

“He tried,” Maekar interjects flatly.

All eyes swing to him.

Maekar’s face is bare of courtly compromise. There is blood on his jaw and a fresh cut along his forearm; his leathers are scored and dark in places where something splintered too close. He looks like he’d rather still be in the trees, swinging his mace.

“Your daughter,” he goes on bluntly, ignoring the attention, “showed more courage than half the knights sworn to our house today. She sank her teeth into the hand of a man who came for her, then stepped into the path of an arrow meant for Baelor. If you’re set on blaming someone, Lord Stark, don’t start with the one whose life she’s already bled to keep out of the Stranger’s reach.”

It is as close to praise as Maekar Targaryen ever gives anyone. The fact that he offers it now, blunt and unadorned, drops into the silence like a stone into a well. Something flickers in Barthogan’s eyes at that. Pride and terror, twisting together. The idea of you, teeth bared, blood in your mouth, stepping into the path of a shaft meant for a prince—it is clearly both exactly what he would have expected of you and the very thing he has dreaded since you were old enough to hold a knife.

His hand flexes at his side, fingers digging into his own palm.

“The best maesters in the Red Keep are with her,” Daeron says, more gently now. “And I’ve already sent for my son Aerys. No man living in this castle knows more of poisons than he. If anyone can unmake what those bastards meant to do, it’s him.”

Baelor clings to that as if it were a rope thrown to a drowning man: Aerys, with his ink-stained fingers and his quiet, unnerving knowledge of plants that kill as easily as they heal. Aerys, who prefers books to blades and will, for once, be the weapon they need.

Barthogan’s jaw works.

“If she dies,” he growls at last, “no song in the realm will sweeten this alliance.”

“If she dies,” Daeron replies, grim and tired and furious all at once, “it will not be at my son’s hands. Nor mine. It will be at the hands of men who think the realm is a board they can upset at will. And those men will learn that even a good king has teeth.”

For a moment, the two of them stand in that cold, shared understanding. Then Barthogan turns on his heel, cloak flaring, and strides for the arch where they took you. The guards there begin to move to bar his way, then think better of it when they catch the look in his eye. Wolves on a scent. Only fools and dead men try to stand in front of a father desperate to see his daughter safe.

He disappears into the keep, following the trail of your blood. Daeron watches him go, shoulders tightening under his cloak. Then he looks back to the yard; it’s already filling again with people who smell opportunity the way hounds smell meat. Lords. Courtiers. Men who will want reassurance that this is not the first move in some wider war.

“I must speak with them,” he says, weary certainty in every syllable. “If we don’t seize this tale now, others will. Maekar—”

“I’ll see the men sorted,” Maekar answers at once. “We’ll have every survivor questioned before dusk. And the bodies—”

“Drag them into the throne room if you have to,” Daeron mutters. “Let the realm see what comes of loosing Blackfyre arrows at my guests.”

He moves away then, already gathering lords and captains into his wake, his voice dropping into that measured cadence Baelor knows so well: the tone of a king shaping a narrative before the chaos can. The yard begins to empty around them as people pull into the orbit of duty. Grooms lead horses off, clucking. A Kingsguard limps away toward the armoury with his dented shield. Servants squabble quietly over the best way to scrub wolf-blood from stone.

Baelor stays where he is.

His hands are still sticky. He looks down and sees the stains on his gloves—rust-dark, drying. The knowledge that it is your blood turns his stomach. Maekar doesn’t let go of his arm. Not until the last of the crowd has thinned enough that the yard feels almost, if not private, then at least less full of mouths. Only then does he release his grip, flexing his own fingers as if they’ve cramped.

For a moment, he merely studies Baelor’s profile.

Baelor can feel it like touch, that familiar, infuriatingly thorough assessment. Maekar has never needed words to take a man apart; his gaze does it for him. It ticks from the rigid set of Baelor’s jaw to the hollows bruised in under his eyes, to the way his shoulders hold a fraction too square, too high, as if he’s holding himself together by keeping everything clenched. It catches on the minute tremor in his right hand where it hangs at his side, fingers flexing against ruined leather as though they still remember your weight.

There is blood on Baelor’s neck too, he realises distantly—tacky where it has dried, a thin crusted line running from just under his ear to the collar of his doublet. It flakes when he swallows. He doesn’t know whose it is. Yours, probably. It always comes back to that.

“Well,” Maekar says at last, voice dropping into that heavy, disgusted fatalism that usually precedes him breaking something. “Seven bloody hells.”

Baelor huffs out a sound that might, in kinder light, pass for a laugh. Here in the bright, pitiless yard, it feels more like air escaping a cracked vessel.

Maekar scrubs a hand over his face, palm rasping against stubble, smearing the half-dried streak of blood on his cheek into a wider, uglier smear. He stares at his own hand for a heartbeat, as if surprised to see it shaking, then curls it into a fist.

“I thought—” He stops, grimaces, the words catching on something sharp on the way out. Starts again, rougher. “I thought you’d have more sense than this.”

Baelor turns his head, sharply enough that his neck protests. “Than what?”

Maekar meets his gaze without flinching. In this light, one of his eyes is deep violet, the other a softer lilac, the colours Daeron passed to his sons like odd little curses. Right now, they are both as hard as cut stones. There’s no mockery in them, no easy brother’s baiting. Just a tired, furious sort of knowing.

“Not the she-wolf,” he mutters. “Anyone but the gods-damned she-wolf.”

Baelor goes very still.

Still in that way he learned as a boy at court: no visible flinch, no outward recoil, just every muscle tightening by a hair, as if bracing for a blow. He feels the words slot into place between his ribs with obscene precision. Not because they’re wrong, but because they land so close to a truth he has been circling for days without daring to look at it head-on.

Images rise, unbidden, with horrible clarity. Your waist under his hand in the corridor, the warm give of you through wool. Your voice in his ear on the Wall, low and wry and entirely too steady for the height. The exact shape of your mouth when you said, My Lord Prince. The way your body twisted between him and that arrow in the dappled green of the Kingswood, as if the most natural thing in the world were to make yourself into a shield for him. He remembers the feel of you hitting him—shoulder to ribs, breath knocked out of him, his world lurching—and then the sound of you being hit in turn. That awful, wet, muted thunk. The way your eyes went wide, then dazed.

His stomach turns over.

He does not deny it.

Baelor feels his throat work once, twice, swallowing down the first instinctive rush of words: protest, excuse, minimisation. She is a guest. She is our ally. I would have done the same for any lord’s daughter. All of them lies, or half-lies so thin they might as well be.

There’s no point. Maekar has eyes. Maekar was there when Baelor’s mind blanked to a screaming white the moment your body jerked with the arrow’s impact, when for one terrible heartbeat all the careful discipline in him blew apart and left nothing but a man on his knees in the dirt with his hands slick in a woman’s blood.

Instead, Baelor drags in a slow breath that tastes of dust and iron, and lets it out through his teeth. He feels the air scrape his lungs raw on the way.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, and the lie tastes like dirt between his teeth. “What matters is this: they knew where we would be. When. How many men would ride with us. That is not luck. That is not some farmer’s son with more courage than sense. That is treachery.”

Maekar’s expression shutters, the flash of brotherly exasperation folding neatly away under the weight of something more familiar: the prince, the soldier, the man Daeron calls for when he expects to need steel, not speeches.

“Aye,” Maekar says, voice gone flint-flat. “I figured as much, too.”

Baelor nods once, the movement small, controlled. “We left by a gate we weren’t supposed to use. Our route was decided late, after the council. The timing was tight. And they still managed to be waiting in just the right stretch of road, with just the right number of men, with sigils they were arrogant enough not to fully hide.” He flexes his hand again, feeling the grind of dried blood tightening the leather over his knuckles. “Someone talked. Someone inside these walls.”

Maekar’s mouth goes thin. “Could be a servant,” he suggests. “Loose tongue in a wine cellar. Stableboy trying to impress the wrong ears.”

“It could,” Baelor concedes. His voice has levelled out now, losing the ragged edge it held in the yard, taking on a different quality altogether. Calm. Measured. Cold. “Or it could be a lord with a Blackfyre cousin and more ambition than caution. A squire with the wrong father. A guard who’s been bought thrice over. I intend to find out which. And when I do—”

He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. He lets the thought hang there between them, heavy as a hanging chain. No threats. No bright promises of dragonfire. Just the simple, unadorned certainty of a man who has given the realm his whole life in careful, bloodless inches—and is now, finally, prepared to take something back with all the ruthless precision he’s spent years using on its behalf.

Maekar watches him for a long moment.

He’s seen Baelor angry before—sharp flashes, quick to bank. This is something else. This is ice over deep water, cracked clean through.

“Father will want to proceed carefully,” Maekar says at last, a half-warning, half-reminder. “He’ll talk of proof. Of not feeding Blackfyre tales of persecution.”

“I know,” Baelor says. “And he will be right. We cannot afford to punish the wrong man in our haste and drive the right ones deeper underground.” He looks back toward the archway where they took you, to where, somewhere inside the keep, your blood is seeping into white sheets and maesters’ hands. His throat works once. “But understand me, Maekar: I will not let this pass. Not when they aimed at the North to strike at us. Not when they turned their swords on us this brazenly. Not when she—”

His voice trips, catches; he rides over the stumble by sheer force of will.

“When she lies in there with poison working through her veins because some coward thought cutting down our ally’s heir would weaken the king’s hand.”

Maekar’s gaze darkens, something vicious flickering up through the soldier’s calm.

“That,” he says slowly, “sounds a great deal like you planning to tear the castle apart with your bare hands.”

“If I must,” Baelor replies, and the quiet of it sends a small, involuntary chill up even his brother’s spine. There’s no heat in it at all, only intent. “But I would prefer to start with questions. With records. With Aerys’s lists of men who’ve been writing too many letters to the wrong corners of the realm. With the names of every guard and scribe and groom who knew about our ride, who shouldn’t have.”

His eyes lift, meeting Maekar’s squarely. “Help me.” It isn’t a plea. It’s an invitation, laid between them like a drawn sword, sharp edge up.

Maekar’s jaw works once. Twice. Baelor can almost see him turning it over: the insult to their house, the sight of your body hitting the ground, the memory of your teeth in a man’s hand and your shoulder jerking as the arrow struck, the knowledge that if you hadn’t moved, he would be standing here without a brother at all.

Then he gives a short, savage nod.

“Always,” he answers, voice gravelly. “You think I don’t want those bastards’ heads on spikes as much as you do? They made me call that girl brave.” His mouth twists as if the admission is both bitter and oddly satisfying. “I don’t hand that word out lightly.”

Baelor’s lips twitch, the ghost of a smile that doesn’t quite make it to his eyes. There’s gratitude in it, and something rougher; a shared, silent promise.

“Then we start,” he says. “We wait for word from the maesters. We pray to any gods who will listen that Aerys gets here before the poison does what it was meant to. And in the meantime, we pull every thread we can find. We tug until something gives.”

He looks back at the arch once more.

For a heartbeat, the yard seems to tilt around him. He sees, overlaid on the sun and stone, the Kingswood again: shafts hissing through leaves, your body jerking, your hand leaving a smeared print of your own blood on his cheek as you shoved him out of the arrow’s path. The look on your face, shocked and stubborn all at once, already fading as the poison bit.

Baelor sets his shoulders.

Whatever waits beyond that door, whatever news the maesters bring—good or ill—he will meet it. And then he will make sure that somewhere, in some cold cell or shallow grave, the man who loosed that poisoned shaft—and the one who put the bow in his hands, and anyone who whispered the time and place into their ears—understands, down to their bones, what it means to strike at a dragon through a wolf.

Maekar’s hand comes down on his shoulder once, hard, the weight of it more vow than comfort.

“Come on, then,” he says gruffly. “Let’s see which of these bastards flinch when we start asking the wrong questions.”

Baelor nods.

He casts one last look at the doorway where they took you—at that shadowed threshold between the world where you stand at his side and the world where you might not—and then turns away, his face smoothing into something colder and sharper than any helm.

—

By the time the castle goes quiet enough that he can hear his own thoughts, the light has gone.

Not wholly—King’s Landing never truly sleeps—but the day’s harsh brightness has bled out of the corridors, leaving only pockets of lamplight and the odd guttering candle in a niche. The sounds have changed, too. Less clang of armour, more the muted shuffle of servants, the distant clatter of pots from the last of the kitchens. 

Baelor realises, dimly, that he has not eaten since dawn.

He cannot bring himself to care.

He climbs the last flight of stairs to the healing tower with his hand on the wall more from habit than need, fingertips brushing the cool stone. It steadies him in a way his own legs no longer do. His knee aches fiercely now that the day’s work is done, swelling against the confines of his boot, but he keeps his stride even. The guards outside the maesters’ door straighten as he approaches.

“Your Highness,” one calls out promptly. “Lord Stark is within.”

“Good,” Baelor replies.

He means it. He would rather face a dozen Blackfyre men in the trees again than walk into that room empty of anyone who loves you.

The healing chamber smells of vinegar and old stone and crushed herbs.

It is not large, but the maesters have made it feel crowded. Tables bristle with glass and clay: vials, bowls, little pots of salve. A brazier glows low in the corner, its heat pushing the air heavy and close. Wisps of steam curl from a basin of water gone pink at the edges. The narrow window is cracked open just enough to let a line of cooler night air lick at the ceiling.

You lie on the bed nearest the fire.

The arrow is gone now. In its place: bandages, tight and clean, white now but already bruised by the faint seeping of red at their centre. Bruises are blooming along your collarbone and shoulder where the impact tossed you. Someone has washed the blood from your face and neck; your hair is damp at the temples, laid back in heavy strands around your head. A sheen of fever-sweat shines at your throat.

Your chest rises and falls. Not easily, but it moves. That is enough to make his knees want to give.

Barthogan Stark sits at your bedside like a carved thing.

He has taken off his cloak and sword-belt, but nothing about the man looks less armed. His hands are braced on his knees, big and scarred and too still. The lamplight hollows his weathered face, carving the lines around his mouth deeper, turning the streaks of silver in his hair to threads of dull iron. His gaze is fixed on your face with an intensity that could melt metal. It is not the wild rage of earlier. This is something colder. The fury of an old wolf who has spent all day not tearing out throats, but only because there were none here he could reach.

A maester sits at a table a little way off, bent over notes. Another dozes in a chair by the fire, head lolling, hands still curled loosely around a cup of some dark infusion. Baelor recognises Aerys’ hand in the clutter: the fine glass phials, the bundled sprigs of plants from the east, the faint metallic tang in the air of an antidote already brewed.

They say the poison has been checked, for now. That much, at least, they have bought her.

Baelor pauses just inside the threshold.

For a beat, he can do nothing but look at you. Everything he has been holding at bay with tasks and questions and rage presses up against his ribs at once, clamouring. He feels it in his throat, behind his eyes, in the tremor that threatens his fingers.

Barthogan’s head comes up, dangerously slow.

“Your Highness,” he says.

The title lands like a thrown spear, perfectly aimed. Polite. Icy.

“Lord Stark.” Baelor’s voice is hoarse; he does not clear it. “How fares she?”

“Alive.” Stark’s gaze slides back to you, then to him, as if he is weighing how much information he’s worth. “Your brother’s pet maester thinks the worst of the poison has been drawn.” His mouth tightens. “He also says the next two days will decide whether she keeps the life she has or slips it.”

The words sink into Baelor like stones into deep water. Two days. As if your fate could be measured in something as small as that.

“The arrowhead was barbed,” the maester at the table explains without looking up, voice thin with fatigue. “They had the cruelty to roughen it, too. It tore more than it need have.” He makes a small, helpless gesture. “But the venom was not as quick as some. We had time to bleed it, and Prince Aerys sent instructions for a counter-draught. Her blood takes it, for now.”

Stark’s jaw clenches at the mention of the arrow; Baelor sees his fingers curl briefly into fists on his knees.

“Give us the room,” Barthogan orders without turning.

The maester blinks. “My lord, I should—”

“I am not asking.” Stark’s eyes remain on Baelor, but his voice carries to the corners of the room. “If she worsens, you’ll hear me shout from the yard.”

There is a heartbeat of hesitation. Then the maesters bow themselves out, gathering notes and cups, casting quick, assessing looks at Baelor and the old wolf at his daughter’s bedside. The door shuts behind them with a soft click that sounds louder than it should.

Silence settles.

Baelor takes a few steps closer, until he is near enough to see the way your lashes throw faint shadows on your cheeks, the way your fingers twitch now and then against the linen, as if chasing something in a dream.

“Was it worth it?” Stark asks.

Baelor looks up. The northern lord has not moved, but his eyes are on him now, stormy and merciless.

“She dragged you out of the way of that arrow,” Stark goes on, voice low, every word honed to hard ice. “Took it in her own flesh. I rode south with a daughter and an heir, dragon. You would tell me if that bargain was worth the cost?”

There is no good answer. Only the truth.

“I would have died,” Baelor admits quietly. “If she hadn’t moved me, I would not be standing in this room. That is not conjecture. The angle, the distance—” He forces himself to swallow. “It was meant for me. She interposed herself.”

“And you call that worth it?” Stark’s mouth twists dangerously. “My daughter’s life for your hide.”

Baelor takes the hit. Lets it land. There is no point ducking what he already believes.

“No.” The word is soft, and it is the hardest thing he has said all day. “No life is worth hers in that calculus. Least of all mine. But she chose to move. I do not have the arrogance to decide she was wrong.”

Stark’s eyes narrow a fraction. “So you’ll put the blame on her shoulders, then,” he says. “Convenient.”

Baelor’s temper flares, quick and hot, then is banked again by sheer habit. He makes himself breathe in and out.

“I will wear the blame for this until the day I die,” he responds, and the steadiness in his voice surprises even him. “I brought her into those woods. My men rode with us. My guard failed to catch the cracks in our line. Whatever she chose to do once the arrows flew, the fault that there were arrows at all is mine. I will not pretend otherwise.”

He takes another step until the end of the bed is a bare arm’s length away.

“But hear me, Lord Stark,” he says, and this time there is something harder under the words. “What she did there—the courage she showed—is not a weight I will ever set on the wrong side of the scales. That arrow changed the shape of my debt to your house. It is not one I mean to forget.”

Stark watches him for a long, measuring moment. He looks very tired, Baelor realises. It sits under the anger like an old wound. The lines at the corners of his eyes are deeper tonight; his shoulders sag a fraction, though his spine remains straight.

“She is my only child,” he says, voice gone hoarse. “Did you know that?”

Baelor looks at you. At the way your hand lies open on the coverlet, palm up, as if reaching for a sword hilt that isn’t there.

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

“She has no brothers,” Stark goes on. “No pack to lose her in or to guard her. Just me, and a keep full of men who think they know what’s best for her.” His jaw ticks, a shadow passing over his rugged face. “I would mourn every man who rides under my banner, if I lost him. But she—” he looks down at you, and something in his face loosens, raw and unguarded, “she is my heart made flesh. You have younger brothers, Baelor. You’ve watched your mother look at you boys as if the whole world could fall and she’d still be holding it by the scruff for you. You ought to understand.”

“I do,” Baelor says again, more quietly.

Silence stretches. The fire pops. Somewhere below, a bell chimes the hour.

“The crown,” Barthogan says at last, “brought her south. The crown promised this was a visit for peace, for closer ties, for some bright tale about wolves and dragons not tearing at one another’s throats. The crown owes me an accounting for why my girl lies full of southern poison on a Targaryen bed.”

Baelor meets his gaze. Does not look away.

“Then let me start paying,” he says.

The words come out before he can overthink them, clear and absolute.

“I swear to you, my lord, this is a debt I will never forget. The crown will stand with House Stark until I am gone and my bones are ash. As long as I draw breath in this castle, there will be no hand raised against the North that does not find mine raised against it in turn. What she has done—what you have risked by sending her here—binds me.”

Stark’s eyes flash, something like grim satisfaction sparking under the ice, and something wary.

“You are bold,” he voices, and there is a faint rasp of impatience in it now. “But you are not king. Not yet. You cannot speak binding fealty for your father, not in those words. I will not have you swearing oaths that do not belong to you to give.”

“I know my place,” Baelor replies.

Then, before he can talk himself out of it, he steps to the side of the bed, turns, and drops to one knee.

The stone is hard under him, his bad leg protesting, but he barely feels it. His hand finds the familiar curve of his sword-hilt and rests there, not drawing, simply anchoring himself in the old forms.

He looks up at Barthogan Stark from his knees, the old wolf’s shadow falling long across him in the lamplight.

“I do not speak now as Hand.” His voice is low but sure. “Nor as Daeron’s heir. I speak as Baelor, son of Old Valyria, man of this house.” His fingers tighten on the leather-wrapped hilt. “Whatever kings decide, whatever storms the realm walks into, I will watch over your daughter until the day I die. In court, in council, in whatever field the gods are cruel enough to throw us onto—I will stand at her side. You have my word on that, and if there is any worth in my name at all, I lay it here.”

The words leave him feeling strangely lighter and more burdened all at once. It is, in truth, only the shape of what has already settled in his bones. Saying it aloud feels less like an oath and more like admitting something he has been carrying for longer than he knew.

Stark looks down at him.

For an unnerving moment, his face is unreadable. Then something in it shifts—a tiny softening around the eyes, a fraction’s easing of the hard line of his mouth. The old wolf’s gaze flicks from Baelor’s face to yours and back again.

“You’d make that vow,” he says slowly, “for any highborn girl with a good sword-hand, would you?”

Baelor holds his stare. “No,” he says simply.

The admission hangs in the air, stark as winter sky. Something like understanding passes through Barthogan Stark’s eyes. A grim amusement, perhaps, or resignation, or the bitter, reluctant recognition of a pattern: Targaryen princes and Stark girls, always drawn like storm and snow.

“You look at her like your father once looked at Dorne,” he mutters. “As if you’ve seen the piece you were missing and now can’t imagine the board without it.”

Baelor’s breath stutters, just once.

“I look at her,” he says carefully, “as a woman who saved my life at the cost of nearly losing her own. As a lord’s daughter who walked into dragon country with her head high. As someone, the realm will be the poorer for if we let her slip away.” His gaze drops to your face, the sheen of fever on your brow. “As someone I would rather not have to learn to live without.”

A corner of Stark’s mouth twitches—not quite a smile, not quite a snarl.

“Then you had best speak with your father,” he says, a weary glimmer in his gaze. “Plainly, for once. About the true nature of this visit. About what kind of bond the crown intends to forge with the North.” His eyes narrow. “If Daeron means for my girl to be a southern pawn, he can say so to your face. If he means her to be more, he can stop playing at shadows and put the truth on a page.”

Baelor thinks of the half-said things in council; of the way Daeron’s gaze had lingered on you over supper in the hall, watching you speak plainly of winter roads and lean harvests with a small, approving tilt to his mouth; and of the ride, when you’d almost told him what your father had laid on your shoulders and then swallowed it back, right before all hells broke loose.

“I will,” he says. “He owes you that honesty. He owes her more than this.” His hand tightens reflexively on his sword again. “And so do I.”

Barthogan studies him for another heartbeat, then nods once, curt and decisive.

“Good,” he grunts. “Then we understand one another.”

He pushes to his feet with a faint grunt, old joints complaining. He stands looking down at you, the lines of his face softened by something that has nothing to do with Baelor or crowns—just a father watching his child breathe.

Then he turns.

“You have ten minutes with her,” he tells him, voice back to that rough, practical cadence. “No more. After that, I want you gone out of my sight for the night, prince or no. If I see you again before dawn, dragon, we may say things we can’t take back.”

Baelor inclines his head. “Ten minutes,” he agrees.

Lord Stark gives him one last, long look—as if fixing the sight of a prince on his knees beside his daughter’s bed into memory—and then strides past him, out into the corridor. The door closes with a quiet thud.

The room feels larger and smaller all at once. Baelor exhales, only then realising how tightly he has been holding his breath. Slowly, he rises from his knee, his bad leg complaining in earnest now. He steps closer to the bed until he can rest his hand lightly on the edge of the mattress, close enough to touch you if he dares.

For a moment, he simply stands there, looking down at you. The lamplight paints your skin and shadow. Your lips are parted just enough for breath. He can see the flutter of your pulse at your throat, a frail, stubborn drum beneath the smear of salve.

“Ten minutes,” he murmurs, mostly to himself.

He reaches out and, very carefully, takes your uninjured hand in both of his. The bones of your fingers feel small and strong against his palms. Your skin is hotter than it should be.

“I am here,” he says, barely louder than the crackle of the brazier. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

For the first time since the arrow flew, the knot in his chest loosens by a fraction.

For a while, Baelor only sits. The chair at your bedside is hard and too low; it puts a kink in his bad knee and a twinge in his back. He doesn’t move. His whole world has shrunk to the strip of mattress where your hand lies and the narrow rise and fall of your chest.

He traces the lines of your fingers with his gaze, the way other men might trace maps—learning them, committing them to memory. The callus along your forefinger from a bowstring. The faint, jagged scar at the base of your thumb that he’s never noticed before. The way your nails are cut, blunt and neat, fit for leather and reins rather than courtly embroidery. He swallows and shifts, just enough to bring your hand closer. Very carefully, as if afraid you’ll break, he cups your fingers between his palms and lifts them. Your skin is hot, fever-bright, but the weight of your hand is its own kind of anchor.

He bends his head and presses your knuckles to his forehead.

The contact is small, almost nothing, but it cracks something in him wide open.

“I am sorry,” he breathes, and the words scrape raw on the way out. They hang in the quiet room like smoke. “Gods forgive me, I am so damned sorry.”

He doesn’t know who he’s apologising to, exactly. To you, for bringing you into his father’s woods with only a handful of white cloaks and a promise. To his own gods, perhaps, for being foolish enough to think he could braid peace out of old grudges without anyone bleeding for it.

He breathes in, your hand still at his brow, and lets it out slowly.

“The Mother,” he begins, because that is where everyone begins. “You have sons enough across this bloody realm. One more will not strain you. Watch over her. Ease the pain if you can. Give her… give her back to her father with breath in her lungs and that tongue still sharp.”

His mouth twitches, despite everything, at that.

“The Father,” he goes on, quieter. “Judge me for this if you must. I will not argue the sentence. But judge her kindly. She came south in good faith. None of this was her doing.”

His thumb strokes absently along the back of your hand, feeling the fragile hammer of your pulse.

“The Warrior,” he murmurs. “Stand at her bedside for a while. You know she’d hate lying here helpless. Lend her some of your stubbornness until hers wakes up again.”

He hesitates over the next.

“The Stranger…” His jaw tightens. “You keep away from her. Do you hear me? You’ve had enough Starks these past years. Go haunt the bastards who loosed the arrow instead.”

It feels blasphemous to speak to the gods like recalcitrant children. It also feels, inexplicably, right. If any man in this realm has earned the right to talk back to heaven, it is one who has spent half his life trying to keep it from falling on people’s heads.

Baelor exhales and shifts your hand in his grip, turning it so that your fingers rest more easily against his mouth.

He kisses your smallest knuckle first, a ghost of a touch. A rite whispered into skin instead of stone.

“Forgive me,” he breathes against it.

He moves to the next. The third. Slow, reverent, the words unspooling in time with the soft press of his lips.

“For the road I chose.”

“For the guards I trusted.”

“For not seeing the crack until it broke under us.”

He kisses the line where your fingers meet your palm, eyes closing for a heartbeat.

“Forgive me,” he breathes out, “for thinking, even for a moment, that my life was worth the risk you took.”

He feels ridiculous and utterly sincere all at once.

If you were awake, you would probably roll your eyes at him, make some cutting remark about Targaryen theatre and the way dragons like to wrap guilt around themselves like cloaks. The thought nearly makes him smile. Nearly.

By the time he reaches your thumb, his mouth lingers.

“And forgive me,” he says softly, “for wanting things it is not my place to want.”

The admission hangs somewhere between you and the rafters. Baelor does not unpack it, even in his own head. It is enough that it has been given shape. Slowly, reluctantly, Baelor lowers your hand. He smooths the blanket beside you and lays your fingers there, arranging them with a care that would seem absurd to anyone watching. Thumb tucked just so, palm relaxed. As if you might wake and be irritated to find it cramped.

For a long moment, he simply looks.

He tries to fix the sight of you in his mind—not as you were in the wood, bloodied and reeling, nor as some court painter might one day try to catch you: all heraldry and poise. Just you. Hair damp and messy against the linen. Brow furrowed faintly even in sleep, as if arguing with someone in a dream. The set, stubborn line of your jaw.

He takes it in like a man drinking before a long march.

As he watches, something else loosens and shifts inside him, like a stone turning over at the bottom of a river.

He thinks of his father’s face these past weeks; the way Daeron’s eyes have flicked between you and him in council. The careful questions about northern customs. The way talk of marriages has crept closer to the Stark name each time the subject returns, always from some lord’s lips, never the king’s, and always redirected with a mildness that leaves too much unsaid.

He hears again Barthogan’s words: You had best speak with your father. Plainly, for once.

He has been telling himself, until now, that this visit was about trade and peace and the pleasant fiction of tours and hunts and unity. That his father’s silence on betrothals has been courtesy rather than calculation. That he, Baelor, could stand between you and any bargain he did not like simply by refusing to give it his name. Now, with your hand still warm from his lips and your blood still seeping into his father’s sheets, he allows himself to see it as it is.

Daeron means to bind wolf and dragon with more than ink.

It hits him, then, what he has been pretending not to see: that when his father looks at you, and then at him, he is not only thinking of peace and grain tithes. He is seeing a future drawn sharp as ink—you at Baelor’s side, not as a guest, not as negotiated ally, but as wife. As queen.

The shape of his life tilts beneath that thought.

For the first time, he lets himself follow it out fully: you in crimson and black at his right hand, your voice at his shoulder in council, your hand resting casual and steady on his arm at court. The two of you riding out from this keep side by side. Your laughter off the stone of his solar, your wolf set loose in the dragon’s den and utterly unafraid. It is dizzying, how easily the picture comes once he stops fighting it.

And under all of that—hot and startling and entirely, selfishly his—the sudden, treacherous awareness of what it might be like to kiss you without restraint or fear of consequence. To feel your mouth open under his, not in some fevered, guilty imagining, but as a right given and returned. The idea burns through Baelor so sharply he’s abruptly glad he is sitting; if he were standing, he thinks, his knees might have betrayed him.

His whole life, he has trained himself not to want. Want makes princes careless; it makes kings cruel. He has been content with duty, with the clean, cold satisfaction of doing what is needful.

Now, for the first time, he wants so much that the wanting itself feels like a living thing in his chest—and the cruellest part is how possible it suddenly seems.

It terrifies him.

It steadies him.

“Of course,” he whispers, more to himself than to you, “this is what he meant.”

He sits back slightly, drawing in a slow breath, feeling the contours of this new certainty settle around his ribs.

If you live—and the thought is a hard, unforgiving if—the path ahead has changed. Not in some hypothetical, distant way, but in the precise angles of conversations he will need to have with his Father, with Lord Stark, with the realm. He is his father’s Hand. He has spent years shaping other people’s futures in small, careful increments. He has never truly let himself consider the shape of his own.

Now, holding your hand print still faint on his lips, Baelor begins to.

“Wake up,” he says gently, leaning forward, his voice barely more than breath. “We have work to do, you and I. Deals to make. Old ghosts to settle. My father to needle.”

He allows himself one last touch—his fingertips brushing a stray strand of hair back from your forehead, careful not to disturb the bandages at your shoulder.

“Just… stay,” he adds, so quietly he is not sure whether even the gods can hear it. “Stay, and I will make the rest of it right. As much as any man can.”

Outside, somewhere in the depths of the castle, a bell tolls again, marking the passing of another hour.

His ten minutes are nearly gone.

Baelor sits there a moment longer, fixing the sight of you, the feel of your hand, the shape of his own resolve in his chest. Then, with a reluctance that aches in his bones, he eases his fingers from yours and rises to his feet.

He looks down at you once more.

“Until tomorrow, then,” he says softly. “Try not to terrify too many maesters in my absence.”

Baelor turns toward the door, his knee complaining, his shoulders set. 

His father waits. 

—

Daeron’s solar is still lit when Baelor finds his way there.

The torches in the corridor outside have burned low; their light throws long, wavering shadows over the dragon-carved door. Two white cloaks stand guard, helms under their arms, expressions carefully blank. Baelor nods to them; one reaches for the handle at once.

“His Grace is—”

“Awake,” Daeron’s voice calls from within, dry and precise. “Let him in.”

The solar smells of ink and cooling wax, with a lingering thread of something softer—citrus and myrrh, the scent of Dorne.

Maps and ledgers litter the great table in the centre of the room, pushed into uneasy heaps. A decanter of wine stands half-empty, two cups beside it. One of them is clearly Daeron’s: smudged where ink-stained fingers have gripped the stem. The other is untouched, its surface unbroken, catching firelight in a dark, garnet gleam.

By the hearth, in a tall chair pulled close to the warmth, sits Queen Myriah.

She has shed her courtly armour for the night: no jewels, no stiff brocade, only a deep red gown that falls soft over her, silk sleeves pushed to the elbow. Her dark hair is braided loose over one shoulder, a few silver threads winking where the light catches. A piece of embroidery lies forgotten in her lap, needle still caught in the half-finished spray of orange blossoms. Her bare feet rest on a low stool; she looks, for a moment, less like a queen and more like a tired mother sitting up too late.

Her head comes up as Baelor steps in. “Bael,” she breathes, the syllable soft with relief.

Daeron stands with his back to the room, hands braced on the stone sill, looking out at his city. He has shed crown and cloak; only the simple chain at his throat marks him as anything but a thin, weary man of middle years. The lamplight picks out the streaks of silver in his golden hair, the familiar line of his shoulders. His reflection in the glass is more dragon than scholar tonight—hard mouth, hard eyes, a contained fire.

“Busy day,” he notes without turning. “I’ve just spent an hour assuring half the realm’s loudest lords that the North is not about to rise in open rebellion because we let their wolf princess get shot on our doorstep.”

Baelor closes the door behind him. The sound clicks into the quiet.

“How did they take it?” he asks. His voice comes out steadier than he feels.

“In the way of men who would like something to be frightened of,” Daeron replies. He straightens, rolling his shoulders, then finally turns to face his son. “Half of them smelling opportunity, half of them smelling doom. All of them, for the moment, leashed.” He studies Baelor’s face for a heartbeat; his gaze catches on the smear of dried blood still at his collar, the hollows under his eyes. “How is she?”

“Alive,” Baelor replies. The word has become a litany. “For now. Aerys believes the worst of the poison has been checked. The next days will decide how much of her the venom tried to take with it.”

Something in Daeron’s face eases. Not much. But enough that the lines at the corners of his mouth soften.

“Good,” he says quietly. “The realm is fragile enough without us murdering our guests, however accidentally.”

Behind him, Myriah lets out a breath she’s been holding since he spoke.

“Thank the gods,” she murmurs in her lilting accent. She rises from her chair with the easy grace that never quite left her, even as the years piled their small indignities onto her joints. Crossing the room, she reaches Baelor in a rustle of silk.

Up close, she smells of sun-warmed fruit and smoke from the fire. Her hands come up to his face without hesitation, thumbs brushing the edge of the dried blood at Baelor’s jaw, as if reassuring herself that it is not his.

“My son,” she says softly, Dornish vowels smoothing the words. “You are whole.”

“For now,” he echoes, and tries to smile for her.

Myriah’s mouth trembles. She leans in and kisses his cheek, just below the smear of red, as if staking her own claim over the mark. Her fingers rest a moment against his jaw, warm and firm.

“I have sent prayers for her every hour,” she tells him. “For the wolf-girl. The one who dragged you out of the path.” There is a fierce gratitude in her eyes now, brightening the tiredness. “I will send more.”

“Thank you, Mother. Lady Stark will appreciate all the help she can get,” Baelor says, and his voice comes out rougher than he meant.

Myriah’s gaze lingers on him, searching, weighing. She has always been better than his father at seeing the spaces between what he says. Daeron clears his throat lightly.

“Myriah,” he prompts gently. “Baelor and I need a moment.”

She glances over her shoulder at him, one brow lifting.

“Alone?” she asks. There is a wry aside in it: as if the last time she left the two of them alone, they were boys with stolen lemons.

“This time, yes,” Daeron answers. “We won’t be long.”

She looks back at Baelor. “Then I will go and sit with the girl’s father,” she decides. “He looks like a man who might snap if left alone too long with his thoughts. I know something of those.”

Her hand squeezes Baelor’s cheek once more before she lets him go.

“Do not stay on your feet all night,” she chides gently. “You walk like your grandfather when the rains come. Rest when you can. She will not wake faster for you wearing yourself to bone.”

“Yes, Mother,” Baelor says, because it is easier than promising anything else.

Myriah smiles, small and sharp and achingly fond. Then she pivots on bare, ring-gleaming feet and crosses back to the door, gathering her shawl from the back of a chair as she goes. The white cloaks outside straighten as she passes; she nods to them as if they are old acquaintances.

The door closes behind her with a soft thud. The room feels different without her—the warmth she carries gone in an instant, leaving ink and wax and dragonstone chill. 

Daeron gestures toward the table.

“Sit, if you can stand to,” he says. “You look like a man who’s been dragged behind a horse all day.”

Baelor almost laughs at that. Almost. Instead, he stays where he is, just inside the room, fingers flexing once at his sides, as if testing whether they will obey him.

“There is something I need to ask you,” he says tightly.

Daeron’s brows lift a fraction. “Only one thing? Either you are merciful, or you are very focused.”

“I’m trying to be,” Baelor answers. He draws in a breath that tastes of old smoke and wine. “What are your intentions toward House Stark?”

The question hangs in the air, blunt as a hammer. Daeron regards him for a long, silent moment.

“Specific,” he hums thoughtfully. “You must be very tired indeed.”

Baelor doesn’t look away. “Father.”

“Very well.”

Daeron exhales and pushes away from the window. He moves with that deliberate, unhurried gait that always makes courtiers forget how quickly he can strike if he chooses. The hem of his robe whispers over the stone. He comes to a halt on the far side of the table, resting his hands against the scarred wood where a hundred other arguments have been fought and settled.

“You are not a fool,” he begins. “You have seen the talk circling. You can likely recite by rote half the arguments I would make about glaciers and dragonfire and what it means, symbolically, to yoke North and South in marriage rather than war.”

“I have,” Baelor admits. His voice feels thick in his throat. “I would rather hear you say it plainly.”

Daeron inclines his head, the motion small, the chain at his throat catching the light.

“Plainly, then,” he says. “I have proposed a match between our houses. A formal alliance. Blood for blood. Wolf and dragon, bound by law and gods both.”

Baelor’s heart beats once, hard, like a fist against his ribs. Heat and cold wash through him in the same breath.

“And the match is?” he asks. The words feel strange in his mouth, as if his tongue has forgotten the shape of them.

Daeron’s gaze sharpens, weighing him with new care.

“To Maekar,” he answers calmly. “Stark’s girl for my youngest son. The North for the steel in our hand, not the quill in it.”

Everything inside Baelor goes very, very quiet.

The solar doesn’t spin, the floor doesn’t drop; there is no shock like an arrow’s impact. It is slower than that. A steady, inexorable tipping somewhere deep behind his breastbone, as if someone has taken the board of his life and leaned it, letting all the neat, ordered pieces tumble into a new pattern he doesn’t recognise.

He feels the words hit, one after another.

To Maekar.

Stark’s girl.

Not you.

The dragon in him—coiled so long under iron discipline it has almost forgotten its own name—unfurls in a sudden, searing lash of instinct.

Mine, something in his blood whispers, hot and ugly and very old. She stood between us and death. She bled for us. She walked into our fire and did not flinch. Ours.

He clamps his teeth on it, jaw aching. Across the table, Daeron is still speaking. The words come from a long way off, as if through water.

“—a practical match,” his father is saying. “Maekar is a soldier; the North understands that kind of strength. They will trust him to hold a line with them, to bleed with them if need be. It gives him a power-base that is his, not mine, which he will need when you wear the crown, and he has to reconcile himself to standing a step below you. It tells the realm that we value the North for more than its spears—that we are willing to give them a prince and not some third cousin with a dragon on his cloak and nothing behind it.”

He’s thought this through. Of course, he has. Baelor can see every tidy line of logic, laid out like a game of cyvasse already half-won. Black and white, glacier and dragonfire, all in their proper places.

Under it, his own need prowls, furious and bewildered.

He thinks of Maekar, broad-shouldered and blunt, sitting at your bedside trying not to look worried. Maekar, who grumbled and swore and then called you brave, as if the word had been dragged out of him with tongs. Maekar, who has never wanted the crown and would take the North with grim, competent hands and never think twice about the girl at the centre of the bargain, except to be loyal in the way Baelor already knows he would.

It should comfort him. It doesn’t.

The dragon in his chest snarls again, quieter but more persistent now, pressing hot against his ribs.

He will take what you want and not even know he holds it. He will have her laugh, and her temper, and the way she looks at a man whose word she trusts. He will have the right to stand beside her when the snows come. And you will have a story about peace to tell yourself in the dark.

“And now,” Daeron goes on, oblivious to the stillness forming on Baelor’s side of the table, “this attack sharpens it. She has bled to keep the crown prince safe. You could not ask the gods for a more potent argument. We can take this… outrage, and turn it. Show the realm that such loyalty—standing between dragon and arrow—is honoured. We marry her into our blood, lend Stark our name, make it clear that we value this kind of courage above all else. It strengthens the story, Baelor. It strengthens us.”

He looks up, eyes bright with a tired, grim sort of conviction. He believes this. He has held this realm together with stories like this—hurt turned to heraldry, wounds turned to warnings.

Baelor hears his own voice break the air.

“No,” he says.

The word falls into the room like a dropped blade. Baelor doesn’t recognise the sound. It is too flat. Too hard. There is none of his usual careful tempering in it. No softening for his father’s sake, no instinctive bend toward compromise. Daeron blinks, the flow of his reasoning checked as cleanly as if someone had knocked over all his little carved dragons.

“Baelor—”

“No,” Baelor repeats. The second time, it comes easier, pulled up from deeper. “You cannot use this.”

His father’s mouth tightens. “Use—?” There’s a flash of real offence there, under the exhaustion. “Gods, boy, I am trying to make it matter. To ensure this is not just another pointless hurt. We were struck through her. We answer by raising her. That is not exploitation; it is—”

“No,” Baelor says again, and it costs him more than any order he has ever given men in the field. “You will not bind her to Maekar. Not for this.”

The ringing in his ears is louder now than the crackle of the fire. He can feel his pulse in his fingertips, his throat. His hands are shaking. He curls them into fists until the leather of his gloves creaks in protest. Every lesson of his life screams at him to stand down. To soften. To turn the word into something more palatable—perhaps, Father, or we should consider other options. To swallow the raw edge and offer it back in a shape Daeron can take without cutting his hands.

The dragon in him bares its teeth and refuses.

She is not a piece for you to move, it hisses. She is the hand that knocked the arrow aside. She is the one who bit a man’s hand to keep breathing. She is ours.

Daeron straightens fully, the years falling from him in an instant. The king is there suddenly, not just the worn man staring down an ungrateful realm. His presence fills the solar the way heat fills a forge; the air feels thinner, tighter around the edges.

“Be careful,” he says softly. “You have never spoken to me this way before.”

“I know,” Baelor answers, and that, too, is true. Every syllable feels like treason against habit, against love.

He loves this man. Loves him in that endless, bone-deep way that comes from watching him hold a shattered kingdom together for years. Baelor has built half his life on being the son Daeron can lean on without having to look, the one who does not make trouble, who smooths and soothes and mends.

And still.

“I cannot allow this match,” he forces out.

The words fall between them and stay there, heavy and undeniable. Silence stretches, taut as a drawn bowstring. In the hearth, a log settles with a soft sigh and a flurry of sparks. Daeron’s eyes narrow—not with immediate anger, but with something more dangerous: dawning comprehension. He has always been quick at reading the currents under men’s words; he would not be the king he is otherwise.

“And why is that?” The question is soft, almost gentle; the steel is all underneath. “You have spoken at length, these past years, about the value of Northern steel and the need to bring the Starks closer. You have argued for marriages with less enthusiasm than this house deserves. Now, when the alliance is all but offered, you balk. Why?”

Baelor looks away.

His gaze finds the window, the dark smear of the city beyond. The glass gives him back a ghost of himself: hollow-eyed, jaw clenched, a smear of someone else’s blood at his throat. Behind that reflection, faint and doubled, his father waits.

Say it, the dragon in him urges savagely. Tell him she is yours. Tell him you will not see her in another man’s arms while you still draw breath, even if it’s your blood.

Baelor’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.

“Do not make me say it,” he manages.

“A king,” Daeron replies coolly, and there is no give in him now, “does not build on what his sons cannot bear to name. You want to stand at my right hand and at my place when I am gone, you will speak plain. I will not be led by stammers and silences. Not in this.”

It is unfair. It is entirely, precisely fair.

Baelor’s breath comes shorter. The room feels too small; the walls too close. He pushes away from the patch of stone where he had unconsciously braced himself, crossing the solar in three quick strides. The map-strewn table stands between them like a painted battlefield. Little carved dragons and wolves dot its surface, marking supply lines and winter stores and levy strengths. It looks, suddenly, obscene.

He sets his hands on the wood, fingers splaying against the old cuts and ink stains. The urge to sweep it all onto the floor—to send their tidy plans flying—is a hot flash in his muscles. He masters it, straightening instead, drawing himself up as if he were armoured.

His heart is beating too fast; he can hear it in his ears, feel it in his neck and in his teeth.

“If you wish,” he says, each word chosen and placed like a stone, “to wed Lady Stark to anyone in this house…”

He steps around the edge of the table, closing the last of the distance. Now there is nothing between them but air, and blood, and the weight of the day—the memory of you crumpling in the leaves, the taste of your name in his prayers.

The dragon in him lifts its head, eyes bright, teeth bared.

“... then it will be me.”