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“i was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”
“we do.”
jacaerys velaryon x fem!siren!reader
words: 23.2k
notes: this was written before s3e1, but still contains major spoilers. non canon compliant. i have a lot of new followers since i last posted & im v happy to be back writing here; pls feel free to stop by my inbox to chat or request something <3 description of reader is intended to avoid physical features, including skin tone. this is relatively unedited so sorry for any errors.
warnings: heavy discussion of death. fear. angst/grief. graphic injuries, mild horror & gore, vomiting, allusions to blood eating. fluff tho! reader is a siren and not human so (?). sex - piv, nudity. light praise kink, inexperienced jace, experienced (?) reader. light power dynamics but relatively tame smut. fluff & a surprisingly happy ending for me !
WHEN HE FALLS FROM THE SKY, THE SEA DOES NOT CARE THAT HE IS A PRINCE.
In fact, it does not care that he is the story of the sky and the sea both, nor that he carries within him both a line of an old empire and a claim to a kingdom. No, the sea does not care that Jacaerys is a prince; it takes him all the same.
Scorched by a burn down the throat of Dragonfire – though not in flame, but the aftertaste of it, he sinks; orange veins through black, smoke threaded deep into his lungs with the craning roar of Vermax long since vanishing from his ears through the crushing depths around him.
There is no color left now, not enough to discern banner from banner or hull from hull, scale from scale. Bizarrely, what remains is red, and it lingers both in the water and his mouth; And soon, true as the gods and their cruelties, it is also drifting in thick ribbons from his shoulder.
Though he is well submerged in water, in an instinct at the basest of his kind’s nature, Jacaerys inhales.
Choked immediately by the force of salt down into his very being, Jacaerys tastes iron and brine and something scorchingly distant, the residue of dragonfire made to liquid, swallowed back down into the deep as it tugs at himself, too; rolling in fizzing bubbles of fire and thundering waves overtop his back.
He does not remember the fall, and he hardly remembers the splitting of both sky and earth; Only that glassy world between the two, reflecting in depths and in minds alike, echoing the sound of groaning hulls and roaring beasts and the warbled screams of dying men.
It is a deep descent, crushing with a searing pain that emanates in the ribbons of red that float out from him, flying leathers heavy, dragging him down, down, down.
He is learned enough to cease his useless inhales as the salt hardens and grows deeper, meeting that which flows through his veins, dizzying his mind until water and salt and blood are all he tastes. The fire of war becomes a distant thing high above his sinking body as his consciousness loses him for what might be the last time.
Indeed, he hardly feels it when the sudden, ripping jerk tugs his body; up, or sideways, or some elsewhere – through something darker than anything he’s ever known.
WHEN HE WAKES, JACAERYS BLINKS AGAINST A SKY FAR TOO VAST.
The smoke of battle has thinned into a distant smear upon the horizon, a notion he gathers only after coming to and completely emptying his stomach of kelped water, scraped with barnacles and blood and shipwreckage splintered into his throat in their ascent from his guts.
A length of broken timber presses beneath his spine, which is his second gathering; Perhaps a spar from his grandsire’s fleet, or perhaps merely the rib of some lesser ship cracked open like a carcass to be feasted by the vulturous gulls of the Narrow Sea.
When at last, sluggish and stinging, his eyes open – they do so with a fluttering knot of long lashes, and he must squint into the vastness above and around him, feeling the wilt of hope dying like a low wyck in his chest. There are no sails near him now; nor cries, nor banners.
Jacaerys well and truly and fully floats alone.
He lets himself stare, just for a moment, to gather himself. A fine day, by any standards less measured with the smoke and searing screams of both sky and sea, the sun hanging upon its bright band in the heavens and oppressive enough to give Jacaerys need to close his lids once more. Gulls circle lazily in the distance, a sole sign of life in a deserted plane of rocking water.
Well, then. He is far from the Gullet now.
Indeed, he is far from anything, as indicated by squint of his eye; The sea rocks him on his raft like the cradle of a cherished babe, horrible but lulling as his mind drifts further than his body. He lies flat upon it, cradled by splintered wood that dips and sways with the sigh of the sea.
Perhaps it would be a gentle thing, if not for the arrows lodged deep through the flesh of his shoulder and chest.
He had not felt their strikes, though now he indeed feels them. Each shift of tide drives the shaft in his shoulder deeper, grinding splintered wood and barbed iron into bone and muscle alike, a searing ache that permeates each stretch of his being. The shallower one, Gods be true, lies in the fleshy muscle of his chest, lodged but loose enough to flounder like a babe newly-horsebacked with each shift of wave. Because of this, breath fractures into something ugly and thinly agonized, pressed by cheek against the splintered wood beneath him.
He does not give himself more than a moment with this unceasing pain; instead a hand rises, weakened and trembling and searing with the protest of barbed metal against bone, to tug at the wood protruding from his chest. The shoulder, he knows, is no use to try and save now; but the nearly insouciant rhythm of the shallow arrow upon his chest mocks him with its pulsing agony, and thus he tugs at it with all the dwindling strength he may remain. A roar rips from chapped lips, burning with the taste of bile and dragonsmoke; and still he pulls, the sinewy rip of arrowhead as it dislodges itself from its shallow grave and frees, violently, into the salty air. Jacaerys lets out no more than a whimper at the gaping, pulsing pain now ebbing from his wound; the arrow in his grasp is listlessly cast from his palm, down into whatever depths now lie below him.
The wound pulses with every faint heartbeat, and though he should surely press it to fend too much loss, he finds himself weakened with agony and exhaustion. Water still lives there, salty and ancient, in his lungs; he feels it with each inhale he takes. A warmth both viscous and determined seeps sluggishly down his side and crawls into the dip of his collarbone and throat, pooling in a glistening ruby shimmer before diluting pink into the endless blue beneath him.
Jacaerys watches the darkest parts of him go with not so much a single sound besides wafery breaths delivered sparsely between groans of aching ribs and short, wet coughs.
A prince should not bleed so quietly, he thinks.
Though it is for hours Jacaerys floats like this – if he is so to believe the lies spun by the sun in the sky – shifting upon agonizing weight every few moments, feeling the life of him seep out with every weak pump of his tremored soul. He floats limply, one weakened boot dragging in the cold water beneath his torrid liferaft of broken war.
It is too lonesome for a boy like him, perhaps. All that emanates from his brain is an ache of heart, the memory of screeching; of the jerking strike and dragging descent, such a slow death. Jacaerys floats for hours and hears wailing; sees the final glance of his lifelong companion, his truest friend; feels the sinking again, the horrible moment when he and his Vermax were swallowed beneath the surface. He wonders, in that dim place between consciousness and sleep, if there are those looking for him. If Rhaena and that wild beast are back on land; if Corlys and Baela and the rest are safe, dry perhaps, unscathed; if his mother remains still untouched by danger. It was a fair trade, he thinks. Their lives for his own.
The agony in his chest and shoulder grows as the sun slips into a smoky horizon. He is blistered by the sun and drained of half his life, memories of his drowning roving sluggishly in his mind more as sensation than coherence: A sharp tugging, far less than natural, from the very depths of the sea. He recalls, only faintly and through some hazy delirience, that he did not resurface, nor did he pull himself rightwards onto this very raft; He has hardly the strength to move his arm at all, and knows best that he did not, indeed, save himself from the death that found him just hours ago in the Gullet. A horrible thought pulses just beyond coherence; the sensation of wrongness permeates the prince as he lies, motionless and alone, in the middle of a silent sea.
Jacaerys falls in and out of the world with heavy, tear-laced eyelids and a ceaseless ache in his torso.
WHEN HE NEXT FINDS HIS CONSCIOUS, THE SUN HAS BEGUN TO DANCE VIOLET AND ORANGE ALONG THE GLISTENING RIPPLES OF SEA.
He stirs not from pain nor hunger nor any kind of distant tremoring sound; instead, he is roused by the sensation of something brushing his ankle.
Unable to do much else, he only stiffens; The water beneath him is darker than it ought to be, sheared in half by a bright and burning glint reflecting from the horizon, a shifting pane of glass so v ery fathomless and swallowing in its wholeness. He squints at the burning orange searing the water and lives, for a blissful for moments, in the belief that it is only delirium of a dying man that makes him feel the brush against his boot, surely only the blood clotting his sight into the watery depths which his leg splays into.
But then he sees a flicker.
Silver, or perhaps its more shyly shimmering cousin; some reflective thing which catches the light, winking like ancient dragoncoin beneath sand, glinting against the oppressive glare of dying sun splitting his vision in half.
Blinking salt and dying sun from his gaze, he lulls his cheek back upon the raft, tasting his blood as it resides within the grain of wood and the split of his lips alike. His wounds are near dried now, though he is no fool. He suspects the Stranger will visit him quite soon.
But then, a drifting, long-winding vision once more through the water, near his boot beneath the shifting of his splintered raft. Long and swirling like weeds at sea, it coils and slinks just out of sight; though still, Jacaerys is given a startled pause.
Hair?
A squint against the sting of salt in lashes, hazeled eyes catch not the jerking dart of fish, nor the rolling glide of a seal or any such beast. It is real – perhaps only in the way visions might be real to one on the brink of death – though real all the same as the arrow through his shoulder or the wound in his chest.
Whatever it is, it circles.
His pulse thunders weakly, and in a delirious moment recalls stories of pirates across the sea who leak from the cracks of the Stepstones and surface from the sea itself; men who swim upon unattended boats to thieve the pockets of men who lie shipwrecked.
“Go,” he rasps madly, though his voice is hardly more than wind over broken mast, matted with pain and expiring life. It takes the last of his very soul, the raw and trembling memory of green scales sinking into the sea, that he presses. “Please. I’ve…I’ve nothing left to steal.”
And a tragic truth his words are. The sea answers the Prince with a soft lap against wood, echoing gently as a kiss against his cheekbone; and then, as though relenting, the shape vanishes.
Wildly, perhaps madly, Jacaerys laughs once; though the salt and brine have made a home in his lungs, and blood slicks his lip now. Yes, death will find him quite soon, it seems. He tastes himself again, metallic and fading. If this is death, he thinks, it is far quieter than he imagined.
He lets his head fall back, and the sky blurs.
HE DREAMS OF WINGS BURNING.
Or something of the sort. Scales which rot, boys with laughter like bubbles in the depths, a garden with a rusting gate and a fog that seeps into his mind and twists his feet until his boots are gnarled roots; he dreams of dragons sweeping in from the skies, of an ancient beast swallowing an entire dragon in its maw, of fire upon fire, claws tearing and blood weeping over entire ships until the whole ocean lay rubied and burning. He sees odd things, indeed, in his dreamy death: girls trapped under ice, brides kneeling at empty graves, men growing into trees; he sees moons and suns dance, he sees women with sharp teeth and soft skin, he sees tears that fall like moonlight. He sees poisoned teacups, singed butterflies fluttering out of spiderwebs; black cats slinking like shadows around breathing roots.
It is peculiar, perhaps, that he dreams so many deaths so vividly, and yet Jacaerys wakes only after their horrors subside.
He jolts to consciousness violently to find that the sky is enormous above him, a vault of black pricked with viciously indifferent stars. His wake comes body-first, mind trailing behind as the residue of sleep melts away, fading thoughts of smooth skin giving way to coyish glints and roaring waters and sighing voices.
And there, nearly indistinguishable from above or below, the sky’s twin yawns in a stretch, that dark mirror – the sea. He watches that glassy expanse breathe slow, tidal sighs against the splintered timber that keeps him from sinking.
For a moment he does not remember where he is, only that the world is vast and he is very small within it.
But then it is when he takes a breath, and in such a daring intake, shifts his shoulder just partially; then true, raw agony explodes down his arm and across his chest. A broken noise spills from him before he can swallow it back, dampened only by the largess of the world around him, the depths swallowing the pain of one mere boy.
The pain, it seems, tears more than breath from him. Memory follows, from the expiring mind: of smoke and fire and ships and men dying and women screaming on dragonback. The moment comes to him far too soon and with it, a wash of agony so raw and true that he suspects the last time he felt such a way was when he lost his brother.
“Vermax,” he calls, throat raw and cracking, and like a boy he waits, tears slipping and burning against his sun-scorched visage, staring up as though a shadow might pass over the stars. As though green wings might descend from the heavens or surge up from the starry depths below. He knows, though, that even beyond the horizon – beyond wherever he is, now – there does not remain a dragon searching for him.
The sob which escapes him is restrictedly delved in searing pain from his wounds; his cries die on the water, so unlike a prince, as he whispers the name once more into the dark, followed only by a weak call for his mother.
The name is swallowed there, along the starry water, as is his grief.
In a turn of mercy, the pain surpasses enough to render him lack of thought; after only a final hitching breath, Jacaerys is stricken mind-numbed with a plaguing grief, tamped only by the unending agony haunting his form. A turn of cheek presses a metallic mouthful of seawater through sunscorched lips, and he coughs it back out into the deep with tormented effort.
The glint strikes him, then, as he coughs his blood back into the sea.
Across the glassy pane of stars, just an arm’s reach away: A lurking thing, reflecting back whatever meek light survives the night’s breath across the sky.
He cannot make it out fully, but it ceases his mind cold with a sharp turn of familiarity, that lingering horror of nails trailing down the back of one’s nape or the draught of chill in an empty graveyard.
Jacaerys blinks at it with that same low strike of horror; At first he deems it merely the moon fracturing the water’s skin, some trick of depth and distance. He blinks once, slow and heavy, as if that might wash the vision clean; But the shape does not break. It lingers there until the doubt in him thins, until even his certainty of illusion begins to feel like a falsity he has begun to assure himself for the sake of breathing; and only then, in that false security, does he come to understand what the shape truly is.
Eyes.
Eyes, true as the gods, fixed upon him and tilted upward from the depths below, bewilderingly catching the moonlight instead of merely catching it. As the raft dips in a slow wave and relevels, he catches the curve of a forehead, too – and then, gods, the slow inky spread of salt-threaded hair; he sees it then, flowing out its tendrils like weeds of the sea towards the measly splinter of wood upon which he lies.
Panic surges up raw and ancient in Jacaerys; older than any crown or dragon or war, something buried deep in marrow that recognizes the shape of a predator in the basest part of a man before his mind might dress it in the common tongue.
There is a woman in the water, a strange thought comes to him, lucid in its stillness, and he begins to wonder whether delirium has perhaps granted him some courtesy of idiocy. A woman, where no woman should be.
A lurch of the body, called upon by sole instinct; Every lesson beaten into him since boyhood demands that he rise and reach for a sword no longer hanging at his hip, that he make himself larger than his fear and meet such danger standing rather than waiting for it to devour him.
Instead, agony flowers white through his shoulder and chest, so bursting and complete that his limbs answer with little more than a miserable tremor, feverish and vitiated, and his near-valiant effort dies unborn. Among the shards of moonlight glass shattering the sea, he is pinned not by rope or chain, but by his own ruined flesh and the arrow lodged deep within it. Should this woman – this creature – wish to come for him, there is naught left with which to refuse her.
His eyes, ambered in the brightest of his days but now sooted with the grim ash of war and loss, do the only thing left to do; stare back. And this creature, this nightmare, this woman – whomever she may be, she remains there in her pool of ink and watches him in patient return.
And so, time sifts.
The moon lays a narrow road of silver across the water, and in that thin illumination he conjures only fragments of her horror as she finally nears; the smooth curve of forehead breaking the surface, a sharpened gleam fixed upon him, so unnerving in its patience; the breath of cheekbone and brow, far too fine to belong to any storm-battered sailor’s daughter. When the sea parts, next come her tresses, which fan outward along the surface like ink spilled in the dark night, water-darkened tendrils drifting and coiling as the lulling coax of kelp swaying in the tides.
Perhaps Jacaerys has gone mad. For, as he stares helpless as a babe unto a descending knife, he comes to understand that she is beautiful.
A vision of moonlight upon ruins: she is jagged, obscured and sharpened only where soft sighs hide themselves away; though he is not a man wholly mad-made yet, for her beauty – however intrinsic it might be – does not beget the wrongness of her presence, the impossibility of eyes at this hour, in this emptiness, so far from shores that even gulls have long abandoned him.
His pulse stammers painfully against his ribs, and the sharded arrow in his shoulder throbs in time with it, each beat threatening to unmoor him from the fragile raft entirely. Though fear licks itself in shivers of agony across his spine, he dares not move again.
Eyes – those glinting coins so mad under the grace of moon – do not blink once.
The prince swallows against a throat flayed raw by salt and smoke and swallowed seawater, and his lengthed voice is scarcely more than wind dragged over broken wood.
“Are you real?”
A question which drifts uselessly into the air, swallowed by stars both hanging in the sky and swallowed in the depths below; she nor the sea answers his question, only rippling and sighing, only her eyes ever-staring, unceasing.
She remains still for so long that Jacaerys begins to blink out the thought of the eyes at all, wondering if his mind had tricked him into conjuring up company in the middle of the world where there is none.
Perhaps that is all there is to death, Jacaerys thinks: some slow unspooling of the mind, a final merciful trick where pain and terror are softened into symbols and story until what remains is merely a dream stitched together from drowning thought and fading blood.
What strange mercy, he thinks distantly as consciousness slips from him, that the mind, standing upon the threshold of oblivion, should choose not horror but a beautiful woman waiting beneath the water.
HIS DREAMS, IT SEEMS, DO NOT CEASE EVEN ONCE HE WAKES.
When he stirs again, it is to a sky rinsed pale and enormous above him. And, he registers in turn, to her.
A startled jerk drives a battered back to jerk faintly against waterlogged wood; an agony of dying-man’s pain ripples from sunscorched lips which part in raw, pulsing horror. Fire explodes through his shoulder; his ribs protest with a sickening ache; his vision burst in lurching lashings of white, until sea and sky become one blinding smear which remains even when his lids sew shut.
He breaths out a disbelieved sigh. Cursed as they are, Jacaerys always thought dreams to be faithless things, ones which vanish with coming daylight. Though here one lies, lurking in the dredges of nightmarish deep waters even in the forgiving breath of day.
A petrifying thought, which permeates his sleep-laced mind with a strike of cold deeper than the sea itself: She remains here, in the silver light of dawn, as though she had kept watch through every pained unconscious hour.
He finds the strange woman half-emerged from the deep blue waters, elbows resting lightly upon the broken spar of wreckage which keeps him from the deep. Her chin is balanced upon interlaced fingers in a posture nearly – gods preserve him – nearly girlish; the pose occurs so absurdly innocuous that, in any other place or perhaps upon any other woman, he might have mistaken it for idle curiosity.
Though there is nothing idle about this creature, no thing innocent at all in the incessant bore of her gaze; a luminous thing, glowing like mother-of-pearl and flashing deep as his stare of horror meets her own hungered one.
Then, with the flow of tresses across a bared shoulder and the sharp flash of a blinding, pearly smile, she speaks.
“Am I real?”
The fear finds its home burrowed beneath the wounds of his chest, the splintered wounds seeming suddenly to send dark roots through his body, tendrils of fever and terror winding together in a spreading, helpless dread. He stares, and stares, and stares; a gaping thing, a helpless thing, marooned upon a floating shard of war with a woman he believes is far too beautiful to belong anywhere land might dare reach.
Jacaerys finds no words to offer; instead a gaze skitters in disbelief, lower and lower, until it dares the water itself.
The tide, it seems, remains loath to surrender her entirely from its foamy grasp; yet the dawn has stripped away the moon’s deceptions. Jacaerys sees, in its bareness, the horrible line where soft flesh churns into something iridescent and blooming; a vision of scales delicately breathing down curve of hip, only to vanish beneath the shifting blue. Light fractures there, living colors or breath – silvered coin to heavy moss to bruised violet; it is the sight of crushed old jewels and of forgotten gods, a thing from so deep it seems to swallow the sun.
Within his ruined chest, a fevered breath snags.
The stories conjure to him in a half-breath’s moment, swirling in his mind with the faintness of memory; His father's voice upon the deck of a ship as he taught his sons to read the currents and to never hearken singing over open water.
His grandsire’s grim tales at Driftmark, softened by the spray of ocean as he told how the sea keeps daughters as well as tides. There too had been stern faces of septas beneath vaulted ceilings of that keep of Red, with their hands folded within sleeves and eyes far too sharp for jest. There are creatures whom the Stranger did not intend for the land.
There were things in the sea, they all said; things older than the kingdoms who watched ships and learned of the longing which laced itself into the weak fabrication of human hearts.
Old stories shake loose from childhood until they drift before him like wreckage: Sirens whose bellies hung swollen with the flesh of drowned men; whose true faces, septas insisted, belonged only to the daylight: slack with rot, mouths split too wide for any mortal smile, eyes filmed pale by the abyss; and yet when the moon pours itself across the sea, that same cold light becomes their greatest deceit, veiling evil beneath impossible loveliness until lonely sailors mistake hunger for some kind of beauty.
He remembers an old captain, spoken of as though he had once truly lived, who abandoned his helm to answer a woman's laughter floating over calm water; how weeks later they found him cast upon the strand, tangled in flowering kelp with his body bloated white and his eyes pecked hollow by gulls unwilling to look too long upon whatever he had seen beneath the waves.
There were darker tales still: Of fishermen, taken whole into the green-black depths, where the sunlight and the Seven alike surrendered their potency; of merchant princes lured ashore into hidden coves by women whose songs promised warmth and whose mouths promised kisses, until those same hands opened a man from throat to belly and peeled apart their ribs like the bars of a cage.
It was said, too, that sirens slept inside the hollowed remains; nesting deep within the boned ruins of the men they lured.
There had been a time that Jacaerys had laughed at such tales. After all, there is little room for fear of monsters in the heart of a boy who commands one of his own; though now, upon a broken raft with death bleeding slowly through his flesh, he finds the old tales returning with only sufferance.
He lifts his eyes to her once more.
But he finds that, despite the tall tales which ebb and flow within his fevered mind, she is not the grotesque nightmare promised by septas; he finds no slack-jawed carrion thing crowned in weeded sea nor whale bone.
Indeed if anything, the dawn is crueler still – for it reveals that her beauty belongs only to her.
Her hair, lighter now with the glint of early sun and lacking in distortion of depth, spills over her shoulders, threaded with strands that catch silvery and oddly pearlescent when the light tilts just so; wet tresses cling to the graceful hollow of her throat, to the slope of her collarbones, garnering affection from the droplets of seawater which gather there greedily before falling one by one upon the weathered timber. Her eyes are clear, no longer luminescent but merely intent, fixed upon him with an unwavering and unsettling stillness.
Jacaerys stares at this creature because he cannot do otherwise.
She is the only solid thing in a world that hours ago dissolved into blood and brine; and those eyes, wide and reflecting and sweet and hungry, watching him back without embarrassment, without coyness, as though he is the creature newly risen from myth and she has been only patiently waiting; stilled in predatory wait for centuries, to examine him. Perhaps he should feel stronger fear than has settled into his bones; Perhaps he should scream, or merely attempt as much, with what little life he has left to fight.
“I’ve died,” he says instead.
His voice is thin, scraped raw by salt and disbelief, and it falls along the flat plane of sea that stretches around him farther than the eye can strain. From his rather blunt observation blooms the faintest crease between her brows, a consideration almost scholarly in its descent over so sinless a visage. For a moment her eyes travel along the span of his ravaged, waterlogged riding leathers, the ripped remnants of war – then up to the lick of his exposed, blood-beating skin; Her gaze deepens. He feels his heart, a slow-march but suredly still there, thump within the mass of his chest’s swollen flesh.
But then a slight intake of breath breaks loose from her parted lips in a sudden laugh.
The sound is the quick silvered cry of a gull cutting across morning air, not dissimilar to those harkenning echoes of song which wailed across the sea in the darkest hours of night past. Shivers rise beautifully along Jace’s chest at the sound and he watches her eyes follow their trail over the exposed skin of his neck. The echo of her laugh stills the salt air and cloudless sky high above; and, though it fractures the heaviness between them, it does not fully dispel it – for it rings chillingly and yet entirely captivating nonetheless, a note plucked from the sweetest, coldest reaches of the sea itself.
“No,” she sighs just then, a tilt of head to expose a curve of throat, the water which lives there so sweetly in the junction of neck and chest. The water pearls, too, where her palms cradle her chin. Her eyes do not blink. “Though… you nearly did.”
Her voice is wrong, he thinks, for a nightmare; for it falls so incredibly soft, so full of wonder and voracious low-buried hunger, and he finds himself more unsettled by it than any shriek might have rendered him – though still, some low-reaching part of his gut shivers in an expression less than fearful. Hungry, he thinks faintly.
And she is wrong, he thinks; indeed, the proof of it is there, in the souring wound of his chest, in the blood which has begun to seep once more from the arrow lodged firm in his shoulder upon his startling wake and the feverish haze which has crept through base of skull to linger front-of-mind. No man survives such wounds.
No man survives drowning.
Breath grows shallow from both injury and the vastness of what he does not understand – and then comes the growing churn of unease within his stomach that might possibly be starvation, too. Might a dead man starve?
“What are you?” he asks faintly; the question trembles upon that string of reverence and accusation and she studies him with an unsettling seriousness, lonely only to the wake of lapping waves. It is too quiet for far too long in that solace of sights, rocking upon his death.
“Hungry,” she answers at last.
The word slips into him and coils low in his gut once more, birthing a horrid sensation which is not wholly fear but perhaps something darker and more unknown, the basest of human instinct sacrificed to churn instead some anticipation he knows not how to tame.
Though accompanied with a bitter, half-delirious laugh, his voice carries a fragility; the cadence of a man who has already crossed one threshold and suspects another waits nearby.
“Have you eaten me, then?”
That same laugh touches her mouth again, soft enough to be swallowed by the very foam of the sea which cradles her, and it sends a new jolt of shivers through his whole being; though seared pain chases those quivers immediately. The moan of suffering he lets out at the shifting of his shoulder draws her gaze to the faint rust-colored pond of the junction of his throat, where his blood has pooled and since half-dried into a congealed offering before the sea might fully claim it.
Her head tilts with the rocking of the raft. “Not yet.”
It is a thing that would make a sane man recoil.
He knows he ought to perhaps demand whether her teeth hide long and sharp behind that gentle curve of lip – whether she means to devour him and take his bones to whatever cathedral of wreckage lies beneath her domain; But the sea around them is impossibly calm, stretched glassy and infinite to a horizon so distant it seems to play more of a trick of eye than any such reality, emptied of sails and smoke and war and left only in calm.
There is nothing but the prince and the siren and the fragile slab of driftwood that, in this moment of death and between, binds them bizarrely together.
Perhaps from his startle, blood has begun to leave him once more in streams; little rivulets this time, which twist down and drip in lurches onto salt-swelled wood. Jacaerys’ head grows heavy, and the dizziness comes creeping through like fog at the corner of garden gates, slinking through the darkening edges of his mind, rendering him aired and heavy in the same labored breath.
“It was you, then.” The words come as wreckage to rocky shore, splintered into odd sensations of memory into near-coherence, laced with strange visions of women with teeth lodged within their cheeks and talons long as his own sword; of bubbles swallowing a massive beast and the shock of sharp chill as his own body sunk to a watery grave in the Gullet’s roar. “You pulled me from the deep.”
When his eyes open once more, he finds hers resting upon him with that same patient stillness. “No.”
A crease grows upon his brow. His neck slackens against the splintered timber, too weary now to hold itself upright, landing below with a weak breath of expiring life. Above him the sky yawns open without end; he imagines it swallowing him whole.
“I promise you,” her voice comes, a soothing balm, so very cool where the sun has left him burning. “I kept you from it.”
He might have responded, in another life. Though now, pain has ceased to belong to any single wound; It wanders him now, crawling beneath skin – living fire, it finds fresh places to bloom and scorch until he can no longer remember what it felt like to possess a body untouched by suffering.
Somewhere beneath the fever, Jacaerys accepts that his consciousness will soon be lost; to either the tide, or the Stranger himself.
The knowledge, as it comes, is strangely peaceful. So in his last moments, Jacaerys lets himself mourn as he stares at the strangely beautiful woman in the water, at the dawning sky and stretching sea behind her.
His mother's face comes first, as it always has; followed by his brothers, blurred by memory until laughter and quarrels and childhood become indistinguishable in his slogging mind: and Baela, Rhaena, Joffrey, Aeg and Viserys; all of them, in the breath of a moment. The sea rocks him in agony as he thinks of Dragonstone rising black from the sea, of Vermax banking through cloud and soaring through breathless air; of the long hall of the Keep, of the salt upon Driftmark’s shores; of the gleam of Ser Steffon’s blade when Jacaerys squired for him in that final tourney; of his grandsire’s knee, upon which he perched on that throne of swords and heard the promises he’d been deigned since birth.
Whole kingdoms rise and vanish behind his closed eyes; wars begin and end, lives he has lived and those which he will never reach – hundreds of deaths and hundreds of lives split apart and seal themselves in the seams of his mind, all in the space of a single trembling breath, before dissolving into the tide.
His cheek settles once more upon the weathered wood, eyes drowsy in the pale-lilac of early morning. You pulled me from the deep. The fight in him is nearly gone; only one question remains upon his tongue.
“Why?”
A shift below the depths as she pushes upon the raft with flattened palms, and Jacaerys watches in awe how water yields so willingly round the soft flesh holding her ribs; the sensation of the war-battered raft tilting him down, tantalizingly closer to those singing depths hardly breathes across his mind.
A tongue passes thoughtfully across glossy lips. “You were sweet,” she murmurs at last, a chill of breath crossing over his own cheeks, loosing a wave of shivers through his spine. He can only watch as her arms give way once more to sink down, as the sea – so resentful to lend even this much of her to daylight – claims all but her shoulders and head.
There is blood in his mouth now; he tastes iron upon tongue as his eyes fall shut, a spinning sensation conjuring to his mild the felled taper of a feather, fluttering to lie at rest upon a pond. An odd death for a prince, indeed. His voice escapes him as little more than a frayed whisper. “S-sweet?”
He can think of no stranger a word to be labeled in those last moments of battle. Sweet. His eyes slide beneath their lids, a slogging thing in their sun-dried, salted shells, laced shut with exhaustion and perhaps delirium.
“Your blood,” her voice murmurs, and it has become near enough now that he can hear the movement of water bubbling when she breathes; a lulling sweetness which sticks to his teeth and dances upon his tongue. Just a taste, he thinks just then, rather absurdly.
“It tasted of the sky,” comes that voice once more, a bubbling wet sound as though her mouth has descended to taste whatever now leaks into the water. “And… I wished to know you.”
Nausea finds him at the thought. “You tasted me,” he grunts through pain-wired teeth, delirious, odd visions of swimming scales and lace-frilled fins skittering from outreached hands. He imagines that river of blood seeping from him now, flowing into an open, hungered mouth.
“I did.”
This pain is too much for life, he believes. It consumes him, so intense it has numbed him, bled a fever into his mind and stretched the tendrils of infection through each last vein in his body.
“Then I am dead,” he decides quietly. For what else would he be?
The water stirs, and when he feels her presence once more his gaze strains to return, blurry and searing when he pries his lashes apart.
She leans close enough once more, close enough that he might smell the sweetness of her, something so peculiar for mid-sea; breeze and softness and shadowherbs lace through his inhale and stir some hollow hunger in his gut, a piercing, ravaged thing that brings a bout of nausea to return.
“If you were dead,” her lips are glossed with the sea, “you would be far below me.”
His pulse answers in a hare’s pace, quickening beneath skin rotting and infected and plagued with a slow death. “Then,” his tongue darts out to soothe the pain upon sunscorched lips, but instead is met with dry air and dripping blood, slicking from his mouth. Her eyes glint at the sight, an observation which twists unease deeper within his gut. “...Where am I now?”
The smallest smile touches her mouth – a thing soft enough that once more, upon another countenance, it might almost have nearly been kind.“The sea,” she says. “Of course.”
Of course. Heavied, his head falls once more against the weathered timber, a movement slow and borne from exhaustion; drowsy eyes gaze into the endless blue where sky and water seem forever to pursue one another without meeting. Here he lies suspended between them all the same: neither upon the land nor surrendered to the abyss, neither wholly living nor yet claimed by death, merely adrift upon that trembling boundary where one world dissolves into the next.
The woman watches him stare out at the expanse for another long while before speaking again.
“You must rest, Prince.”
The title bears itself foreign upon her tongue; Jacaerys wonders, with a rather dislocated peculiarity, how she might know it belongs to him at all. In three-and-twenty years, he has never once heard a tale in which a siren urged a man to sleep for any purpose save to ease his passage into her hunger; though still, true as the gods, fever laps at the edges of his thoughts.
His eyelids descend by degrees, each blink lingering longer than the last against the shimmering yawn of morning, until the daylight begins to disappear between his lashes, swallowed by that other abyss. “If I do,” his breath utters weakly, wondering to himself whether he asks from futile hope or some simply morbid curse of curiosity. “Will I ever wake?”
His vision is betrayed; all which he knows are the steady rock of his rotting raft and the ache of his agonized body. The plaguing sun scorches one side of his visage whilst the sea cools the other; and he thinks, as his lashes flutter again sun-oranged lids, that he hears a voice once more through the waters:
“Perhaps.”
THROUGH HIS UNCONSCIOUSNESS, JACAERYS STILL FEELS.
Peculiar enough that his mind churns even as it once did when he lived on land and rode through the sky; And yet it is more peculiar still that he so faintly in his fever registers himself being turned; dips with the wreckage as it tilts beneath him, feels the lick of sea shift its grasp upon his failing, limp body. An interruption of the boiling heat; some chilling presence pressing firm against his chest and splaying over the slow, weakened pulse of his heart. Agony is a memory, a faint pulse like the outer ridge of a bruise or rime over spring fields in the Vale.
While Jacaerys dreams of a hundred deaths, he dreams, too, that the arrow in his shoulder leaves him without the violence of pain.
There is no fresh burst of agony as when he’d expelled the first one, no sharp white flare behind the eyes; It is as though the wound inhales and exhales and then merely forgets its own carved carnage, the blood that had been pulsing from him like a rubied river beginning to reverse its direction.
The deaths come to him in fits not unlike the rolling pangs of arrow wounds: He dreams of Vermax dragged from the sky, of Luke swallowed by stormy sea; of his mother’s crown dripping and glinting red as fresh meat.
Most peculiar yet in this sluggish purgatory between slumber and awake, he feels something freezing and dragging against his throat; lapping, like the waves upon the shore. He feels, too, how that chilling sweetness spreads within him in a foreign rush, coming as nothing so familiarly savage as dragonfire – that blaze he has known since childhood – but instead as something slower and stranger, a cooling calm which seeps instead of burns, which travels along his veins like tides instead of flames.
Only then does he wake once more.
THE SUN, THAT GREAT OPPRESSOR, HANGS MIDDAY WHEN HIS EYES OPEN.
For several moments Jacaerys mistakes waking for dying once again; Light pours over him, molten vast sheets which strike the water until the sea becomes a field of shattered mirrors, the sky above a merciless blue, immense and empty as eternity. He lies upon the slab of rotting wood and wonders if this is what remains after death has finished with a man.
Though grief, such a fickle thing, sneaks itself back through his weary bones, tearing with a force that casts his mind about and settles where fever once lived. Only then does he become aware of his body: a shift in his chest as he lets a small sound escape him, ragged as he wakes.
He swallows, bracing instinctively for the agony of grinding iron lodged in bone; but there is nothing.
It occurs then that his shoulder is bare to the slight seabreeze, and wholly unburdened. The arrow is gone; the wounds which had poured him into the sea exist now only as faint blushes of new skin, smoothed and unbroken with the passing of months which could not have passed in the space of a single night. Even the salt-burn that had left his skin raw and flayed has disappeared, flesh warm and sun-browned rather than blistered and fevered.
Impossible. His riding leathers are gone; everything above his waist has vanished entirely – save for the leather riding boots which sit propped sidelong near his breezed, salt-laced trousers – left only in bared skin and a scattering of freshly silvering scars. Wonder and horror mix within his gut as fingers flex experimentally, braced for pain which never comes, save for a faint weariness of tightened muscle.
It does not occur to him that this was anything else but the work of that creature from the water. And so, habit asserts itself; for he is still Prince as much as he is castaway, it seems, and dragonlord still before any such prey.
“Show yourself,” he commands to the shards of mirrored ocean, voice hardened with some falsity of health he has yet to fully take to mind – for he knows, indeed, that this was no immaculate recovery of mercy from the gods.
Though the fever has left him, weakness remains; he cannot yet sit wholly upright, the cords of his stomach quivering with an insatiable hunger and exhaustion.
The day lives on silently, for a moment, and within him grows an impatience sprouted by nerves; he is healed, miraculously so – and in those odd, faint memories of dying rest, did he not feel touch, feel that chilled drag laving over his very skin as a parched hound might a fresh pond?
The sea stirs and then, only after another moment, she surfaces several yards away.
With her comes no violent breach of the surface nor shrieking gulls; she comes to the glassy glint of eye with the sea parting its dark skirts, water streaming from her in glistening threads to cling to the lengths of long tresses and running in shining rivulets over bare skin of sunbreathed beauty. A sight to be seen – particularly for a prince so lonely.
Jacaerys stares once more, stripped of every certainty and left with only wonder and dread to keep him company. A wonder it is, her bareness hinted only by the breaking surface of reflected pools at the soft turn of her chest; and Jacaerys draws away his eyes in some gathered lucidity of shame, no longer coaxed to desire by fever. He swallows back a hoarse laugh, cheeks heated by not merely the sun’s glare but her beauty so raw and unmodest in front of him.
She waits for him, all those reaches away, watching with a peculiar apprehension as though he might perhaps take her down to the depths instead to give some odd, murky end to her own life.
“You healed me,” he says at length, accusation and gratitude so closely twined in his words that neither might be separated from the other. The sea seems to breathe for her, and it trembles with some unknown nerves.
Her head inclines by the smallest degree, that odd glint in her gaze once more. “Yes.”
The simplicity of it disturbs him, he believes, far more than denial might have done. “You admit it so easily,” he says then, because he can think of little else to say.
A flash of a pearled, glinting grin that brings even the sun-kissed sea to shame. “You wished to know.”
As though this were answer enough; As though all truths are equally plain to her and require no ornament nor human ceremony of explanation. Jacaerys draws a slow breath, tasting salt and sunlight and the faint metallic tang of his own fear lingering upon his tongue.
“I was told sirens drag men to their deaths.”
She, it is no denying, has floated closer to his small raft of living death. Her eyes watch unblinkingly; a chin tips until only the soft peaks of shoulder and bottom lip peak out from the murky sea. Her visage has gone dark with some horrible hunger.
“We do.”
There comes no hesitation in her reply, nor turn of trick, and the honesty of it brings him no refuge in disbelief. His stomach seems to fall away beneath him; for it rings with it the realization that he is alive, indeed. He is alive, yes, only stranded – a castaway clinging to a forgotten shard of war in the middle of an endless sea; alive only because a creature of the deep has chosen, for reasons he cannot yet fathom, to keep him so.
It leaves him strangely breathless. “Why?” he asks, roughened by salt and disuse. “I was – I was dying. Y-you could have taken me.” He is unsure what compels him to remind her of her own nature, though fear laces itself tight around his abdomen.
For several heartbeats she only regards him, and in that silence there is something so old and fathomless that it makes the skin along his arms prickle. Then, at last, she speaks.
“I’ve known of your war for some time,” her voice comes low. “One drowned sun past, I watched your great beast’s fire swallow the men who have hunted me and my sisters for eons. I watched you kill those men and leave them for my sisters below.” Silence comes between them, save for the gentle dripping cascade of water from her countenance to return to the sea. “And I saw you as you fell.”
Jacaerys’ eyelashes flutter in a sudden sting of salt and memory, though he dares not speak.
Her tongue sweeps once more over glossed lips. “The cries of the men upon the hippocampi ships said that you are a prince,” she murmurs, leaning closer as though a thought too reverent to speak aloud, “a son of both salt, and fire.”
How wrong she might be, he thinks – for he is not son of salt; Velaryon blood runs not through his strong veins, though still the words are cold water poured over a fevered brow, spoken with a strange and almost reverent note.
“My sisters have told stories of your kind,” she says, and her eyes drift briefly toward the horizon as though somewhere beneath it lay the endless kingdom from which she had come. “Those humans whose blood carries flame, who ride the sky upon winged beasts. We have watched them for longer than your kingdoms have stood.”
A faint smile ghosts across her lips, and it is haunting as it is ethereal, glinting in the sharp edge of teeth. “I had never seen one close enough to taste.”
Her eyes glint, and he feels the familiar churn of unease. “I wondered” A tilt of her head, studying his bared chest and visage with a curiosity so untouched by human shame. “If the sea claimed a son of fire,” Her gaze drops briefly to where the arrow once buried in his shoulder, “...would he burn beneath the water?”
Despite himself, despite the bewilderment and discomfort threatening to steal him away once more, a breath quite near a laugh escapes him. “I’ve disappointed you, then.”
She, it seems, is quite unfamiliar with the mortal crutch of humor. “You’ve done no such thing,” she assures dazedly, though her gaze has unsettlingly drifted toward the bare expanse of his chest once more. Jacaerys stiffens in nature, his own hand rising without thought to his throat; The touch of something wet and careful in memory, the blood which had gathered at his neck and collarbone, laved away, cleaned with a voracity which only bordered on tender.
He nearly recoils at the thought. It had been her, indeed, who tasted him again. With it comes another bout of nausea; though quieter, and more treacherous still, is the hungry and awed way in which he cannot cease his staring.
She is beautiful – in the line of flesh so cool beneath the water, such swirling, glinting eyes and gentle turn of cheek; that glint far below, silvered as mother-of-pearl and strange iridescence as she moves with the tide.
It is perhaps this trance, this pull of fate or of fools, in which he extends his fingers – weak still despite their healed wounds – towards the very water which clings to her shoulder. There are glinting marks there, some half-scaled beauty, and he moves slow enough for her to vanish into the depths if she wishes.
She does not move – only watches him nearer with a stillness so harrowingly unnatural.
His fingertips brush her shoulder, so very cool to the touch; enough so, such a respite from the beating oppression of the midday sun, that Jace lets some strangled breath loose from his throat, a half-relief at the sensation of cooled, glinting flesh so sweet against his burning palm.
She, in turn, leases a short inhale, chilling enough to send ridges of thrill across his bare spine. The noise which leaves her is none he has known of man nor beast; a sound of glistening shores and soaring seas, of sunkissed reaches and tidepools swirling in slow wakes.
A jolt from his touch, swallowed of regret and instead burgeoned by a sharp motion, her fingers perhaps tightening somewhere below the greened depths of the mirrored sky. Glossed lips then tremble, eyes flicking to his and down to the slip of wood which separates his warm shoulder from her sea.
“I’ve brought you something,” she says gently, and when her elbows beach themselves as they had yesterday upon the edge of his raft, he finds her palms abound with bounty.
In one hand comes a small, dripping bundle of greenery – dark fronds and pale, tender shoots which look as though they sprouted from some moonlit cavern far beneath the waves; in the other she bears a cluster of oysters and other mollusks, their shells slick with salt and glinting beautifully in the sun’s breath.
Jacaerys watches in startled awe as she lays them before him upon the raft, visage painted with some odd, nearly unnatural shyness about her. His lips part, though the tearing, churning hunger persists violently within his stomach; she offers food to him now, as she keeps him alive and afloat. “You must eat.”
Her voice is a sound which bubbles gently against the lapping of water over her elbows, bare skin warmed only by the sun.
Jacaerys does not waste a moment more.
It is an effort, indeed, to rise himself to his elbows; hauling himself upon rippling, quivering muscles into a position where he might grasp the kelp and seaweed by the handfuls and tear at their stringy flesh with his teeth. He eats them handful by starving handful.
A savage, he must be; for he does not so much as turn his mind over as he swallows the pale stalks tasting of pepper and brine, nor do his lashes flutter in the slightest when she bends her head and, with the sharp glint of nails he hardly glances, pries open the shells one by one.
The meat of them lie glistening and large, singing with a gentle grace of saviour to his ears as he finishes the greenery in mere minutes.
Her nails, nearly claws, rip through shell seams as though they’re merely sheaths of parchment; the sound of it sends shivers through him and goosepimples along his flesh, lets his voice splinter in a half-moan of hunger as she pierces into them as though shell and flesh alike are no obstacle to her will.
In her clutch comes the first scallop, offered to his lips.
He eats from her grasp as though he has not tasted food in weeks, perhaps longer; he tears at the meat with a hunger never felt before, brine running down his chin and slpping onto his chest. Still he scarcely pauses, too ravenous to care for such things as propriety, and all the while two glinting eyes watch him with such concentration it nearly feels like a touch.
For a long while they remain suspended between sea and sky as the prince gathers strength one careful mouthful at a time; the siren only lingers beside the raft, elbows anchored lightly upon the weathered timber. The tide whispers in patient breaths as sunlight wanders across the waves, reaching her face and fracturing into shifting gold upon her damp skin.
“Gods,” his voice nearly cracks only once the remains of broken shells and the trails of oysterjuice track down the sun-browed skin of his chest. His finger graces over the oystershell nearest his knee as he half-sits, energized from the sustenance. “Thank you.”
She smiles at this; a bizarre yet gentle thing, just a breath away, with her own elbows perched upon the raft. His fingers brush the shell again, tracing the smooth curve worn soft by the endless overchurn of the sea.
“It is a shame,” he finds himself murmuring absently, “that there was no pearl within.” With his words come a strange bashfulness, an emotion so foreign upon him that he’s struck to hear it at all. There is little left of the prince in his voice now; Only a boy adrift upon broken wood, speaking to a creature who should belong only to nightmares. “I would have had something to give you in return.”
A dip of brows upon her ethereal visage; an expression enough to rouse a dusting of heat to his cheeks.
“We give pearls as gifts,” he explains quietly, watching the blank confusion linger across her countenance. “To those who are…special.” The words catch faintly, tumbling in sheer awkwardness as he wonders faintly if the fever ever truly left his mind. “I suppose it is not the same for your kind.”
The sea dips them; her coiled hair, shining with the remnants of the deep, curls over the broken timber where the ship’s remains have since become the expanse of this strange world. His hand rests near it, close enough that the strands occasionally brush against his fingers when the sea moves.
She stares at him, always so watchful; Even as saltwater slips over her lashes and gathers upon her gleaming eyes, she does not blink.
“Have you gifted pearls before, my Prince?”
Heat touches his face, caught entirely unprepared. He looks away with a faint, embarrassed breath that might have once belonged to some other boy – some boy who’d not fallen from the sky, nor stared at the starry sea of death and found a woman waiting beneath the waves.
“No,” his voice is far softer than he’d endeavored. “I’ve not.”
This, it seems, affects her. A strange flicker warms her expression, fleeting as first light of dawn; not human, but recognizable in itself as Jace watches her lashes dip over her pearled eyes. Shyness, he thinks wondrously. A creature who could drag ships beneath the waves and rip men open whole; and she is shy.
I’ve gone mad, he thinks, and the vision of her is so impossible under the midday sun that he nearly smiles. The sea rocks them gently upon the raft, the movement drawing her hair away from her shoulders which gather sunlight in soft, golden sighs; Jacaerys realizes he’s been staring for farr too long and casts his gaze upward, half-closing his eyes to feel the sun true and warm upon his countenance once more.
For some time, they remain like this: the prince regaining his strength, the siren floating beside the raft, the smell of the seabreeze between; The water whispers around them in secret sounds, and when Jacaerys tips his gaze to levy her once more, he finds the sunlight trembling over her features, rendering her unreal in the golden shimmer of warmth. At last, very quietly, he speaks.
“You are quite kind, I think.”
The words seemed to startle her even more than his touch had; her eyes dart, skittish things, from his propped elbow and down towards some unseeing depths which linger far beneath them. Still, he continues. “You saved me. You healed me, fed me.”
Marked by the silence of the sea, Jacaerys lets his head fall back to hang upon a stretched neck, exposing his throat to the open air, to the sun, to the salt; there is a prickling awareness there, of her gaze upon the pulse beneath his flesh, though he does not, for once, return her stare.
“If you mean to drag me beneath the waves one day,” he continues – and he is mad, surely, for there is now a faint, unsteady amusement in the curve of his mouth, “then perhaps I am a fool.”
He glances back toward her to find surprise glinting so slight and fleeting over her visage; a small trace of humor lingering in her own curve of cheek.
He shrugs, a half-boyish thing belonging to another lifetime. “But you are kind nonetheless.”
The silence which follows swallows; it is full of her watching, and of the sea breathing around them. Kind, that word conjured once more – she acts as though perhaps she’s unfamiliar; As though no one has ever looked upon her and chosen any name but monster.
Then, for the first time since he had seen her rise from the depths of the murkiness the night past, she truly looks away – and before he can ask what he has done, she slips beneath the surface entirely.
The water closes over her, merely a shadow of shoulder and hair lingering like shadow before it is all swallowed by the blue – a final glimmer of silver follows, that glint of treasured coin; and then she is gone. She leaves behind only the trembling of ripples and the bright, indifferently gilded sunlight scattered across the vast expanse of sea, a blinding thing now that there is no beauty to obstruct its harshness.
The tide shifts beneath his raft, and for the first time since he fell into the water, Jacaerys is well and truly alone.
HIS SIREN, SHY AS SHE MIGHT BE, RETURNS WITH THE SUN THE NEXT DAY.
And, indeed, the same time the day following. Habit grows within this drifting life so quietly that Jacaerys notices it not until it has rooted itself far within him; for three days pass in the very same rhythm, churning with the slow grace of heat and then chill, shivering and sweltering, some warmth in his skin which bleeds not and sheds not but always persists in hunger, if not for sustenance than company, or its more wretched and unknown twin.
The sea becomes his tell of time; tides mark the hours better than bells ever had, and somewhere in those long hours between sunset and moonrise, she always appears.
Sometimes he finds her instantly; that coy shape glittering in sharp glints beneath dark water, silvered scales catching and vanishing amongst the waves. Sometimes she watches him first, a sensation which comes to him as a strange awareness upon the nape of his neck and deep below his stomach, lingering as though some odd thing awaits for him across the water.
Always, though, she brings him food. Bounties of shellfish, mollusks, fish gleaming like polished coin, strange seafruits and vegetation which taste of figs and peppers and salt and brine; once she returns with an odd brown-haired hard shell, which contains within it not only a sweetly hardened white fruit but also water – a sugary kind, which drips itself across his thirsted flesh and dries tacky until the next morning he wakes to his skin laved fresh and clean once more.
There are many things he learns during this time. Most of all, he learns that questions mean very little to her; and answers, perhaps, mean even less.
When he asks how far they are from land, one morning as the sun rises soft and pale over the endless blue, she only tilts her head. “The sea touches many lands,” she provides in response, a notion which is incredibly uneasy as it is exacerbating. Jacaerys discovers then that the creatures of the sea do not measure distance as men do; They do not count leagues or days or the fading hope of a distant horizon finally appearing, for the ocean is no obstacle to them, but a home.
There are other times in which her companionship is close as he can remember to any other; She learns of him through the little movements of his human visage – captured things, the pull of amusement at his lips and the lowering of sadness at his eyelids. He catches her watching him often, studying these small betrayals of emotion; One afternoon, as the sun dances upon her bared back, she attempts to replicate his amusement upon her own ethereal reflection.
A near imitation of a smile grows too intentional and solemn, reflecting a study of joy yet not yet a true wielder of it in the flesh. The sight pulls a laugh from him, boyishly bright, doubling him from the waist in amusement.
She, at his outburst, reflects a ture smile – not forced or painted but merely grown of inordinate pride that she might create something so bright within him. It is the first instance, perhaps of many, in which he finds himself watching her lips with a very specific intention of curiosity.
Days pass, or weeks; Time behaves strangely upon the sea, and he watches suns rise and fall, tides come and go, no stretch of land or ship or life in any distance.
THough each day and evening she returns, and eventually he learns the sound of what passes for a name amongst her kind. It is a sequence of beautiful notes which his human throat cannot wholly reproduce; and each time he attempts it, she only laughs, a sound somehow more beautiful than what she is called, and it rises and falls like water spilling through caverns. Eventually, with some fond exasperation, she allows him a shortened thing, a simpler name which his tongue can manage. In return, she learns his; and she calls him Jacaerys in that watery lilt of hers, so low and fresh and pulling.
One night, as she brings him a supper of squid and weeded sea, she requests something of him in return.
“Tell me of your kind.”
He looks up from the small task of fastening reeds and torn netting together, a distraction made for himself to tear his eyes away, for at least a moment, from her cloyingly alluring countenance. His nose scrunches against sun-kissed freckles, tipping his head. “Men, you mean?”
Her tresses are floating tendrils in the near-dead sun, so different from their glimmer of day, and he watches in entrancement as she shakes her head; Another human instinct she’d learned from him in days past. “Your kind,” she repeats, coming closer to the raft. He no longer recoils at her proximity; now, when she approaches, his first instinct is dizzying anticipation instead of fear. “The ones whose blood tastes of fire.”
His stomach finds a chill at her words, though he only leans back upon calloused palms and glances up and the nail-sliver of moon peeking through bruise-crushed curtains of sky.
He tells her, then, of Old Valyria; of dragons filling the sky and empires of families, the dredges left of them who crossed both Doomed ash-shores and poisoned seas, carrying the last embers of a dying civilization. When he thinks he’s finished, or that she might tire of his voice, she only asks more – starry eyed and curious, leaning her head against the wood and asking how it feels to fly upon the sky.
It’s only after the sheer blackness of night has found the sea that he speaks of Dragonstone. He murmurs of his own family, too; he tells her of soaring towers black as dragonglass and fields of lurching green which become swallowed up by jagged volcanic breath, of his mother and the war in her name. He whispers of his Usurper uncle; of Luke and Arrax – and that is when words truly start to tremble. He does not realize he weeps until he tastes the salt of them, until she lifts a cool finger to wipe them away and taste them instead upon her own tongue.
He whispers the rest – of Meleys and her rider; then of Vermax and of the end in the Gullet. And when he finishes, she remains silent for a long while.
Her voice comes in the watery traces of a whisper. “You have been lonely.”
He does not respond to her.
He couldn’t have, even if he’d wished to; there are truths too large for the mouth to carry, and this is one of them.
So he turns his face away, letting his gaze drift over the restless dark of the sea, over the silvered shiver of moonlight trembling upon the water’s skin. But she has watched him long enough to understand despite this, and the glint of her is dimmed under the blackness of the sky, that mirrored world broken only by her sweet form half in the glassy depths.
“I have sisters,” she says then. “I know I’ve spoke of them to you before.”
And though she’d indeed mentioned it days past, still it is odd to think a woman like her – if she is to be labeled such a thing, so swathed in tide and shadow – might have a family at all; His eyes find her and try to conjure the thought of a life down below. Within him he finds something curious and tender. “Do you have many?” he asks, because it is the easiest of his questions.
She nods, a spill of hair along her shoulders. “Yes.”
“How many?” he asks then, shifting upon the raft to lie closer along the edge, his bared shoulders freckled even beneath moonlight, their faces so very close.
And so with a dip of her chin, she tells him in turn of the hundreds of sisters which live down in the depths, of the Mother-sister which birthed them and watches them, and of the ribbed-world of bleached bone and darkness which she came from. He asks her of her childhood, and of her people; and when she gives him all in kind, he finds himself pondering – with a distant recall of dragonseeds and countless nameless silver-haired visitors to the island – how abundance itself can be another kind of exile.
ON THE EVENING FOLLOWING, SHE COMES TO HIM WOUNDED.
He had waited for her through the expanse of the day. It was a strange thing, he thinks now, how he had once every morning begun with thoughts of war and strategy, of what ravens might arrive and what battles might be waiting beyond the horizon. Now, he wakes with the sun and listens for the sound of water changing.
He’d fashioned something resembling a task for himself; a crude thing, a boy’s invention against the endless boredom alone at sea; With reeds and pieces of his torn trousers and the remnants of salvaged seanet, he has rigged a small tether, a foolish little snare which occasionally lures fish close enough for him to catch if his hands are quick and his luck is kinder. Still; after exhausting himself upon the empty bounty of fish his game provided him, he’d waited for her for far too long.
When she comes, it is in the glint of moonlight which catches red upon the curve of skin, and his heart thuds once within the cave of his chest when he finds the long, horrid lacerations crossing one shoulder like clawmarks across her flesh.
“What did that?” he asks her sharper than intended. She only watches him; She has brought him a handful of shells, gathered carefully in her torn and bloodied fingers, a sight which churns painfully in his chest. She has come to him injured, and still carrying gifts. “Are you all right?” he attempts again, kinder this time.
It is silent for far too long as she dips her head, working open the few shells for him with jagged nails, which he takes hungrily, though not distracted enough to forgive the strained stiffness of her normally voracious movements. At length her voice comes in a quiet tense, low as a groan.
“My sisters are displeased.”
It is enough for Jacaerys to study her, those lacerations and such sweet skin ripped apart, and understand enough that the wounds have something to do with him and, indeed, with the food she brings to the surface each turn of sun. Perhaps, too, with the sheer notion that he still breathes at all.
“Because of me,” he whispers, and she says naught but a small trembling sigh; though when his knuckles raise to tenderly trace along the marred flesh of her shoulder, she does not turn away. A churn of water, she keens to his touch, coming nearer until and she is close enough to drop a weary, shivering cheek upon the cloth of his thigh. Heat burns there, roving from the seeping chill of her bare cheek upon his pant. She gazes up at him once more from his lap, a reflective but morose thing, as though she doesn’t quite understand why he sees her suffering as so horrible; as though perhaps it is merely the price of wanting something and keeping it.
He whispers to her then, when she asks – tales of Princely youth and sailing upon the sea with his father; and she whispers quietly of her own life, of the schools of fish which keep her company and guide her to the most treasurous depths of the sea.
And that night, after she leaves, he lies awake and watches the stars.
They are cruel things, stars – so beautiful and yet unreachable. And the songs, as they always do, begin sometime past the hour of Ghosts, reaching him across the water from the odd-hazed distance; the song of her sisters, he’s come to understand. He lies upon his raft and wonders if she will return tomorrow – and then, if she might one day decide he is no longer worth the trouble, worth her pain.
He thinks then of his mother, and of Dragonstone, and all those who must believe him dead; who have likely carried on in the war that he has so reluctantly left behind.
And beneath it all, in that endless sky of stars, there remains one true wish upon his tongue: that his siren might come back unharmed.
TWO DAYS PAST, AT THE EDGE OF THE BAT’S HOUR, SHE FINALLY RETURNS TO HIM.
She reveals to him in a depth of shimmer, dancing upon a surface of purple and orange which streaks his tanned skin and curls his hair with salt and warmth, still in the early eve of the day. Water warms him; the sunset bleeds crimson across the horizon and Jacaerys sits at the edge of the wreckage with both legs dangled within the sea.
She surfaces soundlessly between his knees, an appearance so sudden he nearly startles back; with a glint of amusement she stares, brows ticking upwards in an impossibly human expression. Jacaerys, warmed through his unease shock, lets his lips curl in a fond relief.
In an urge so boyish; a thing laced with sheer hope and solace, he forgets himself and, indeed, the weakened state in which she’d appeared to him two long nights past.
“Hoping to drown yourself?” he jests before he remembers himself.
She – having since learned the human habit of jesting and recently found herself one for the same sharp wit he often bears – only tips her glinting, glimmering eyes skyward in a roll of vexation, a thing she’s also long learned from him to do.
“I cannot drown,” she chides, voice like seafoam, amusement leaked so warmly through her mouth that he nearly forgets the glint of teeth which live just beyond those sweet lips.
“No,” he, solace at last to have his siren returned unharmed, only smiles. “I suppose you cannot.”
Her hands settle upon the timber, mere breaths from the outer line of his thighs as he leans back upon palms to regard her fully. “Are you well?” He wonders – and then, with a faint heat upon his cheeks that grows not only due to the dying sun, “I worried for you.”
It casts something bright upon her eyes and twitches the coltish smile which belies her lips; and the shimmering is there once more, so evergreen in her beauty as she pushes only closer to him, her cheek ghosting that giving fabric which clothes his inner knee.
For a moment he merely gazes down upon her visage, raining with beauty and dripping still with that unsettling stillness. Her eyes glint only faintly in the dying day, so beautifully lit between his thighs.
“You should come in,” she says in response.
To this, Jacaerys laughs. It is not the first offer; indeed it is a thing she’s supplied in more than a handfuls – when the sun reached its blistering peak and he winced at the searing upon his flesh, when the moon made whatever hides below her hips in the depths glow, even when the breath of conversation dwindled in the easy laze of the heat, the water so inviting as it kissed over her skin.
And Jacaerys might, these days, be a mindsick – or lovesick – fool; but still, he knows better.
“You hide it well,” he murmurs, only partial in his jest though some lace in the back of his mind truly yearns to yank himself from the pull of those depths, to coil away in fear of the creature between his legs. “But you cannot trick me, siren.”
She does not particularly enjoy the name; though still she only tilts her head, a coy thing he resents only so far as it makes the urge to slip into the water even stronger, to feel her skin between the warmth of the water and his own salted skin, cooled by the depths below.
“I only wish for you to join me,” the words rise from her with the hush of tidewater slipping through black stone, soft and inexorable, the sea itself speaking so longingly through her mouth.
There is little mirth in the laugh he gives once more. He mirrors the tilt of her head boyishly, curls tangling with lashes. “And be dragged into the depths?”
The levied gaze upturned against the glint of dying day does not waver from his visage; in the dimming light her eyes hold such strange, fathomless brightness, submerged stars peering at him through leagues of darkened water. “ I would not drag you.”
It is so sweet, the lie; and perhaps it is not inherently such a thing, but instead borne from those odd, coiling natures which juxtapose her very being – to tear flesh and to soothe it, to lave upon fear and to charm it away. She is kind, and she is, despite it all, sweet – though yet, Jacaerys remains uneager to discover yet whether her self restraint survives immersion into the sea.
Nonetheless, he cannot help his faint tick of a grin, amused perhaps only at the absurdity of it all.
“I am not eager to test your limits,” he confesses.
A ribboned smile, lurking against the water as her hands grasp the wood beside his knees. Something in the depths brushes his ankle; boot against something stronger, faint and fluttering though still startling enough to ridge his bare spine. She hums. “Do you think so little of me, Jacaerys?”
It is a song, to hear his name from such lips. The sea rocks impatiently, and he feels the leverage of his hips tilt just so against the tides. She rocks with them, a gentle flow that splays tendrils of hair across bare shoulders, glimpses of sweet skin lower than his eyes dare dip. “I think,” he says with a wettened lip, “you have already admitted to dragging men beneath the waves.”
She finds amusement in this, it seems, and she gives a small tilt of head. “Men.” Such emphasis comes with a tightened flutter across his chest, and his brow lifts, emboldened so as to lean forward until their breaths meet the same stretch of salted air.
“Am I no man to you?” he wonders.
Her eyes, those unblinking lives of dying stars through the last breath of day, flare with some kind of heat from the expiring sun. “You’re far more than that.”
In her wake washes aboard his wooden raft a fresh kiss of sea, straining her bare chest against the expanse of plank between his thighs; the movement is a gentle rocking, though it brings them keenly close, so close indeed that Jacaerys is rendered dizzied by the sweet smell of her once more, of the cloying honesty in those deepened, reflective eyes.
Jacaerys has lived a life told of titles and beings; prince, son, rider, piece upon the board of kings and queens, bastard and heir, all of the muddled things which lie between old bloodlines indistinguishable from myth.
He watches that myth now, splayed before him, and silently marvels at her tangibility. So he says her name, her common-tongued name, and tips his head boyishly. “You say such strange things,” he murmurs.
Her head tilts in a mirror, one which makes his heart skip over itself faintly, the lick of warm sea against his knees lapping over the salted air. Her skin glows under the red-streaked sun, a thing of marvel and unconfounded beauty. “As do you, prince.”
A laugh escapes him, bubbled from the space between them as it rocks, the sea yearning for the two hearts which beat not together nor on the same natural track but instead in some odd counterbeat of each other; and Jacaerys lets the water dip him forward just so, enough to see the iridescent lines shimmering upon her cheeks. Her face is so very pure in the setting death of sun.
He tips his head sidelong, somewhat intrigued by her words. “And what strange things have I said to you?”
She, who never blinks, is overcome with some minute breath of shyness, a mirror memory of nights before, and her gaze drops to the fire-streaked water before looking to him once more. “You call me kind.”
Of all things, the prince thinks; Of all the impossible, absurd madman things she has witnessed him do: speak of dragons, bleed upon the sea, command her to rise from the depths as though he still possessed a court and the shadow of a crown to succeed – this is what remains with her.
“You find that so strange?” he shakes his head faintly, letting his lip lift slightly. “You have spent every day proving it.”
She says nothing; The silence between them is no longer the terrible silence of their first meeting, for it is now laced through with those more sweet things, a vulnerability shared through salt-laced glances and small smiles.
“You healed me,” he continues quietly when her voice still shies away from sound. “When there was no reason to. And you fed me when your own kind would sooner have fed upon me. You listen when I speak, though I imagine my life must sound terribly unexciting beside yours.”
This, at last, coaxes a small curve of glossed lip to her visage.
His smile is slight, too, though still he continues. “And when I grieve...” He lowers his eyes toward the darkening glass slipping between the broken planks, thinking of ancient wings and smoldering waters. “...you still care, even if my troubles seem so minute to you.”
The sea breathes around them in spilling sighs of waves; She studies him with that unnerving patience once more, until she asks, in a voice so soft he almost mistakes it for the tide, “is that truly kindness?”
His brow knits, struck at once by both her honest bewilderment and, too, her capacity for tenderness. The breath which slips his lips is one of wonder. “What else would it be?”
Her gaze drifts beyond him, toward the place where the sun has nearly drowned itself beneath the world’s edge, and her head tilts in that learned habit, a small mirror of his own.
“My sisters sing until men forget they are afraid. And then they feed.” she says after a long while. Her fingers trail idly through the water, and the sea bends around them as though eager for the touch. “When I first saw you upon your beast,” Her eyes lift to meet his once more, startlingly bright. “I thought I might do the same.”
His heartbeat stumbles; a thought which should bring terror but, in its absence, only reminds him how very alive he still is. She speaks before he can dare.
“I do not know why I did not.” A draw comes upon her brow, a tremble of her lips. “I only know that when you sleep...” she murmurs, almost wonderingly, “...I do not wish to leave you.” Her fingers curl and he watches them catch upon the pearl of sea. “When you laugh, I wish to hear it again, and when you hurt...” Her voice catches upon something. “...There is… pain in me, also.” A shake of tresses, bewildered. “I have never known that before.”
A burgeoning warmth spreads across the very fibers of his being. The last breath of day lingers across the water between them, red as banked embers beneath ash, and Jacaerys stares at the woman who saved his life, wondering how she has gone a whole life without ever hearing a gentle name spoken of herself.
“I should think,” he says softly, scarcely above the whisper of the tide, “that whatever name your sisters would give such a feeling…” His heart skips its own beat within his chest, watching how her eyes dance with the light of late eve, “…among my people, we would simply call it affection.”
The evening deepens around them; she does not respond but instead leans closer to him, just slightly so, her bared beauty brought higher momentarily. The sun has nearly swallowed itself unto the horizon, leaving only the last remnants of gold bleeding beneath the line between sky and sea; the water beneath his knees is dark and glassy, reflecting the first early stars as they begin to appear one by one.
“Affection,” she repeats, a sweet thing from lips so parted, wondering. Warmth spreads boyishly across Jacaerys’ visage, and he only nods gently.
It is this very moment that she chooses to spill her grace onto the palms steadying her between his legs; he watches her rise higher from the sea, arching until the water gives way to the scaled glow beginning below her hips.
Early moonlight pours over her as though it has waited all evening for this very purpose; and his gaze follows the hush of young moon over the sky of deepening violet, tracing how beauty glows through the curve of her breasts as she breathes shakily in the salted air. Lower still, with heated cheeks, his eyes fall – down where human shape surrenders into luminous impossibility.
He must have stared too long, for her mouth parts in a chilling breath. “You stare at me often, Jacaerys.”
“You are difficult not to.” It comes from his lips with no such reservation of courtly politeness nor intent to charm; it is a simply known truth, one he’d likely repeat with each breath, if she so wished to hear. “Surely, you know such things.”
Seabreeze breathes the wet strands of her hair in damp kisses across her cheek; the sea rocks gently beneath them as though to lull him closer – though he needs no more encouragement than the sight of her alone.
“I truly wish you would come in,” she chides, and her voice – a thing nearly lost beneath the hush of the water and the gentle streaks of dead sun; a confession of sorts, some private form of longing which spills from glossed lips into the air of hunger between them.
Her breath ghosts upon his cheek as she leans impossibly closer between his thighs. “Though, I suppose I must come to you instead, prince of the sky.”
A quiet smile ghosts across his mouth, a jilted thing borne from nerves and, perhaps, fate; If such there is a thing. And there, beneath the youngest stars of the sea’s early night – after days of floating in the wide expanse of nothing – he kisses her.
Her lips are cool as water beneath shade; rainfall upon fevered skin, and from sugary lips comes the faintest breath of her surprise. She presses against him with an eagerness bolstered by uneven weight, a lamb unstable upon fresh legs, some sweet hunger that calls to him louder than the songs of her sisters which have already begun to leak over the surface of the horizon.
Lips shift, sliding salty and sweetened with hunger. The raft shifts beneath them at her eager lurch; Jacaerys’ hand comes to steady himself upon the wood as his hips cant, slipping further towards the edge of that abyssal water, and still he does not resist, he merely lets his other palm, the one so hungrily pressed to the flesh of her collarbone, slide upon wet skin. Her own ripple upwards like waves upon shores, threading like rivulets through his curls and the other casting her chilled palm over the warmth of his pounding bare chest. Webbed, he thinks faintly, as her fingers splay over his skin; The stars above seem to tremble upon the water in her rippling wake as she presses closer still.
Tongues prod and slide, a slow dance neither is particularly familiar with though the beat alone brings them closer, breaths melting into soft sighs and gentle hiccups of need. Her lips are of brine and sweet seafruit, and he finds himself insatiable to the taste.
His hand, hungry and of its own mind, slides past supple flesh; he squeezes only where her sighs come out with faint sounds of enticement – exploring where the deepest keening of her throat meet his own, whilst her own exploration tugs at his scalp and grasps sharply at his warm skin. Hunger and that deeper urge mix deliciously within the basest instincts of his manhood; though his hand pauses at the place where her skin changes, where the familiar ends and the sea wholly begins. Perhaps, days ago, he’d have recoiled at such a sensation – though the man he is now only feels wonder.
And so he pulls her closer, close enough to taste the brightness of her tongue, so cool and familiar in his memories of his bloodied flesh, so hungered and placant still. And when she pulls back, hardly enough to breathe, her forehead presses cool against his.
“You taste of fire,” she whispers, a trembling and insatiable thing.
A smile touches his mouth, and he imagines she can feel it all upon her own lips. “And you of salt.”
For the first time, she laughs against his mouth; and the sea, ancient and endless, carries the sound away.
JACAERYS IS NOT LOOKING WHEN THE WORLD RETURNS.
Indeed – as has become the quiet habit of these strange and borrowed days – his gaze has long since abandoned the horizon in favour of the creature beside him. The world has narrowed these days to a single pair of luminous eyes and a curve of shoulder which rises with the tide; to the silvered wake she leaves whenever she slips, laughing, beneath the glassy panes of water and vanishes into whatever hidden depths lie beneath the waves. He watches her instead, the compass by which all mornings begin and all nights fall.
Seamist sighs over the Narrow Sea in wandering veils, drifting along the horizon and stitching the heavens to the waters with threads of pearl; The sun has drowsily set itself an ascent, still seeping pale across the panes of water, when she grows suddenly still.
“What is it?” He inquires, voice still syrupy with the dredges of sleep. He lies upon the swollen and salt-rotted board, one arm draped lazily over the edge of the raft, fingers absently threaded through the cool silk of her hair so unable to ever fully dry from the cloying breath of sea.
She does not look at him, nor answer; a glossed gaze remains fixed upon the immeasurably distant horizon. Perhaps, if he were not drunk with the drowsiness of morning laze and early heat – if he’d not given up the hope of such sights days ago – he’d have turned and looked with her.
Only after so long a silence that he almost repeats himself do her lips part.
“Land.”
This, indeed, sobers the prince entirely. He rises at once, the raft pitching beneath him as he lurches quickly upon one knee. Fingers, still caught amongst her hair, loosen hurriedly lest he pull her with him; He shades his eyes against the low morning light.
Afar stretches the same rolling sea, thick with mist and silent as a phantom, that horrible blue which has swallowed days and weeks from his life. His eyes strain, a sharp sting of salt and sun, though still he soon makes it out.
It’s a far distant thing – far beyond the rolling waves, hardly more than a shadow painted against the morning; despite such meager an observation, Jacaerys lets out a breath through laced teeth. A miracle, a blessing answered by the gods who had watched him drown and then live in the same eve.
How many nights had he whispered it into darkness? When his fever burned, and the sea seemed endless, when the empty sky swallowed the empty sea and rocked him, lonely and stranded, in a cold nothingness.
Land.
For the first time in what could be weeks, or months – or perhaps merely some strange lifetime lived entirely between one sunrise and the next – Jacaerys feels the world opening again, yawning back into a wide berth of cliffs and coves and spine-ridges mountains, of valleys and lakes and beaches and forests.
And an odd thing passes him, then. Jacaerys has now lived so long suspended in this place, so far between water and sky, between continents, between worlds; how odd to remember a life, as though peeking into a jarred, seaside old bottle-scroll of another man’s dream.
When he lowers himself again, it is not the distant shore that once more first claims his attention.
She has drifted nearer without his noticing, borne gently upon the breathing swell until her face nears the side of the raft, a glint of silvery tendrils curling just beneath the sun-shattered surface. His boots, which lie at the end of the disintegrating raft, dry in the early morn; she leans a cheek drowsily upon the sun-warmed wood near his knees, and he has a mind to trace the soft curve of her there, that sweet expanse of skin. Though her words come before he might even think to lift his palm.
“I will bring you there.”
The words are gentle, and only after he takes time to study her face does he discern it: Shine glistens there, upon her cheeks – no seawater nor salted spray, but some pooling glisten of silvery glum. It pools there, clinging to her lashes for a final moment before it slips soundlessly along the delicate slope of her cheek, falling unto the weathered timber between them where it shines for one heartbeat before the thirsty wood drinks it away. Another follows, then another. She is crying.
The sight unmakes him.
Though not one to ever endure the tears of any woman so disheartened, this proves impossibly more grievous: This creature of the deep, born of sea and darkness, who he once believed belonged only in stories meant to frighten babes – weeps now with all the helplessness of any mortal girl. The tears which fall from her eyes catch the light of morning; pieces of the moon itself, dissolving upon her skin.
A man at his very core, his words come foolish, perhaps. “Why do you weep?” His hand rises to instinctively brush away the shining path glittering beneath her eye.
“It is foolish,” she murmurs, a thing so nearly human that Jace forgets himself; wrought, momentarily, with visions of some garden back on his Island, of curling tresses and sweet fruits and quiet whispers and gentle laughter.
“You’re no fool,” he insists with a whisper of her name, quiet as the waves coaxing them closer to that distant promise on the horizon. Jacaerys soothes beneath her eye as one rescues dew from the petal of a flower; his signet glinting upon his thumb though he possesses neither dragon nor kingdom here. Touch has grown familiar now, a thing he’s been gifted to explore for the better of four passed days together, natural as the sunrise.
“There are those who still wait for me,” he says quietly, a sprout of hope tugging at his chest at his own words; and though her visage remains sweet as the sunlight, lashes tangle and loosen a small wave of silvered sorrow onto the wood. He leans upon elbow now, so close he might feel her chilled breath upon his own lips. “My mother, m-my family, my people, my… my home.”
At this, her eyes flutter open, kind as she is understanding. “You belong to the land, Jacaerys.” her lips wilt with the beautiful breath of shared sorrow. “I have long known this.”
He, unable to help himself, searches her face; a twinge of desperation, that old thing, tugs within his chest. His eyes sting. “And you?”
A curious sadness enters her expression then, a flicker of some emotion Jacaerys thinks is, perhaps, not fully known to man. She says nothing again, and in this silence, his gaze flickers toward the scars that still cross her shoulder – though the wounds have begun to close beneath whatever strange grace lives within her blood, they remain angry against her skin.
The sea moves around them and it churns restless, unhappy; dangerous as the land in the distance, roving and hungry as those ancient creatures who lie in wait, far beneath. His lips part in a horrible fear. “Your sisters.”
At the flinch of her visage, he only cradles her further in his palm, tipping his face to find her gaze watery, silvered even in the breath of morning. His own gaze swims with tears. “Will they hurt you, for what you’ve done?”
Her gaze remains on his, and the reflection of them brings a small mirror of his own sorrow. “There will be no place beneath the water for me as there was before,” she breathes, as though exile is merely another current she must learn to swim against. “Though I knew this the moment I chose to take you.”
The words ache all through his marrow, coiling tenderly in the notches where once arrows had struck through him. She speaks of it as though kindness is a betrayal; some selfish thing instead of the most selfless thing a creature might ever do.
It is a horrible moment in which Jacaerys looks toward the distant shore, voice imbued once more with the memory of smoke and fire, of burning ships and dragons swooping from clouds. A lifetime, it seems, has passed.
He takes her hand, that webbed softness which boasts tender flesh and frilled wonders of silver, and when she takes him in kind, the feeling is still just as strange and wonderful as the first time he felt her under his palm.
“I cannot remain upon the sea forever,” he says. “There is a war waiting for me. A life.” The taste of salt upon his lip; in the distance, a swooping shadow dives toward the pane of sea, and Jacaerys sees the first gull he’s seen in days. “But..” he murmurs, and a faint smile touches his lips. “There could be a life waiting for you, too.”
There is some gleam in her eye, a terribly sad thing. Her cheek lifts from the wood to near his own visage, sweet and chilled by the breath though none the less warm in her unending kindness.
Her lips curve into a watery smile. “You promise impossible lives, Prince Jacaerys.”
“I promise the only one I possess.” He only pulls her closer, lifting her hand between both of his. "Dragonstone rises from the sea; Every stone of it knows the tide. If there is a place in this world where sea and fire have ever learned to live beside one another…” His smile, though weary and water-laced, has found him at last. “...Surely it is there.”
Hope is perhaps too dangerous a thing for a creature such as her to possess. He wonders, fleetingly, whether she has ever known it at all. She looks at him then, and he finds not hope within her gaze but something gentler, infinitely sadder: the aching desire to believe him, shining there with its silvery terrible nakedness. Very quietly, she asks, “And if the sea wishes for me back?”
Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers, and her skin carries with it the scent of salt and deep places untouched by sun. His own lashes flutter shut.
“Then it may ask.” A faint shake of his head, voice scarcely stirring the morning seabreeze. “It has taken enough from me.”
He feels the tremble of something across her lips; and then, before the shore can steal another heartbeat from them, she rises just enough for her lips to find his.
He turns instinctively to meet her, his mouth yielding beneath the cool sweetness of hers, tasting of salt and seafruits and sweet residual of those peculiar sweetwater shells. Her hand comes to rest against his chest, splayed lightly over the place where once an arrow had sought his heart; his own disappears into the silken weight of her hair, drawing her nearer. A sighing thing, the sea, as it lifts their joint mouths and sways Jacaerys closer still to the depths she hales. Wood sighs beneath their joint weight, small waves claiming its splintered sides; the morning is still, water softly hushing around them. There are no birds in the sky.
Jacaerys thinks, for a moment, that if the world were to end now, it would do so quite gently.
WHEN LAND FINALLY CLOSES AROUND THE RAFT, IT SWALLOWS THEM WITH A FUNEREAL QUIET.
In the very last stretch of current, spurred by both tide and whatever ethereal tail lies below her hips, the sea narrows gradually; great walls of black stone rise from either side as they float nearer to the shore, until the open world is swallowed behind them into a small opening, a breath of sunlight through the keyhole of some grand door. Jace sits upon the wreckage, watching the horizon as that endless breathing vastness that had carried them for so many days retreats into a distant strip of silver; When the land swallows the last of the abyssal sky, he is finally welcomed by the first breath of shaded light he has felt in what might be ages.
It is a balm to his being.
An old-born tyrant, weeks beneath the sun’s gaze has tanned and chapped him; Salt lives in every crease of him, wind has carved into his bones. A sigh of seeping shade crossing overhead, the looming shadows of the cliffs are cool, rich with the scent of stone and moss, and Jace draws a breath so deep it begins to ache in those places where the arrows once lived.
Passing into the mouth of a cave the size of a small ship, the rock shoots high overhead, blacker than any rock he’s yet to see in his three-and-twenty years; The slate slices sharp from the water, scarred and riddled with smaller caves whose mouths yawn open toward an emptier abyss further within the dark. Some are no larger than doorways, though others crack open high to the heavens, large enough to swallow entire fleets.
Jacaerys finds himself staring at their scars; the sea has gnawed these caves for a thousand years, and its teeth marks rake through sharp stone everywhere.
Soon, the cove opens around them, and the water becomes clear; and there, so close he could perhaps dive and swim to it, the water yields to a rocked edge of beach.
Breath catches within his throat; a stretch of black beach, soft as velvet to the eye for a slope which turns flat with slabbed black rocks, warmed by the breath of sun but cooled by the deep cavernous chill. Pools gather within them in fragments of captured sky; He looks into them and feels a tremendous relief.
It is only then, that his gaze falls upon the bones.
Lying strewn among the rocks is a whale’s skeleton, half-entombed, the great spine twisted through the stones; ribs arch upward in weather-worn curves, bleached white as old moonbone. The wind moves through them with a hollow music, a sound so mournful it brings shivers cascading down Jacaerys’ bare spine.
As they near the cove’s shore, there reveals more bones beyond the whale’s shattered being – and these are not the bones of beasts. With the creeping dread of a fever dream, the cave peels back its own skin: A skull half-buried in stone, empty sockets filled with shadow and crystallized salt; A yellowed hand thrust up through the earth, still crawling itself towards the spot of dripping sunlight from high above; Fragments of a spine tangled in driftwood and root. Jacaerys feels that cold thing so long past creep over his chest once more. Death has not passed through here and moved on; indeed, it has become one and the same with the cove – one with the rocks and caves and tide pools.
His breath only ceases entirely when he finds the skeleton laid beneath the nearest cavemouth. Ribs have been forced apart; shattered not by storm nor time but instead pried wide apart with care, a doorway of the corpse, a nest.
A gaze lies upon its mangled shape in horror as those same old stories of youth now rise in him like bile; His stomach tightens, mouth stuffed of cotton and pulse pounding within his chest.
Nearby – scattered among the rocks as though left by pilgrims or fools, lie offerings of silvered halfgroats and Tyroshi copper, greened with age; strings of fine stones dulled by salt, salt-rotted silk, fragments of pottery, even a rusted gilded dagger.
Jacaerys feels, once more, impossibly small upon the broken raft. How many men have stood where he stands now, trembling before the dark; How many had crossed black waters with pockets heavy from gold and bellies full of fear, believing that beauty might yet bargain with death?
With a flick of fear, his eyes shift to the glistening clear waters. Beside him still, she watches from the shallows, and he finds that she remains beautiful as the sea when it means to kill a man; floating in the clear waters, visage kissed from pearled ripples, entirely at home among the bones as though she has spent all her life here with the dead to keep her company. Perhaps she has.
Old as it is, still the fear returns to him, surging to his throat at the sight of the pried ribs, to the trail of finger-bones littering the nearest tidepool, to her. And, after all, Jacaerys is only a man.
“Are you going to eat me?” His voice calls out quiet, but in the wake of silence, it rebounds through the cave – a sonorous thing, not trembling though surely frightened the same: eat me, eat me, eat me. It falls dead after its repetition, laying to his expanse of bare back a cool whistle of breeze which sets the hair upon his nape on end.
Her eyes still in the water, as still as the day he first caught glimpse of her. What comes next is a minute shift; a fall of gaze, some learned softness drawing away as a crab takes to its shell, and the cove falls still. Even the water ceases, for a breath, its incessant lapping at the black-beached shore.
“The death of so many suns,” comes her voice at last; a thing scarcely louder than water finding a path along the sand. “And birth of so many moons.” Her eyes lift, and within those wisps of lashes, so sweet and salt-clinging, he finds only that very moon she speaks of, reflected so deep, so sharp and luminescent. “And still, you fear my mouth.”
Jacaerys opens his own to answer; though worse still is the breathless thievery of his chest – the lack of words which crawl to his throat yet remain perched upon his tongue. Words gather there, frightened birds against the bars of his ribs, yet refuse to fly – because he knows not what he might say.
For he has spent weeks dying in the water with her hands upon his skin, her voice in his ears, her lips upon his own; with her keeping breath inside his ruined body. And perhaps he could tell her that still, beneath all such tenderness, a frightened boy remains – that the songs of his childhood are carved too deeply into him; that men are weak creatures who inherit fear long before they inherit wisdom. Silence answers for him instead.
His gaze returns to her, then.
And he finds that here, in the lucid water of the cove, nothing is so softened by darkness; the sea renders her wholly to him now, silver scales glinting as hammered mail and stitched from both woman and abyss alike. Fins, a near translucent thing, taper along the delicacy of hips and fold in the current of a dreadful languor of tail; a strong shing, a terribly powerful thing which scatters ribbons of light across the cave walls as she shifts.
Her gaze rests upon him, so eternally unblinking, and a faint smile touches her mouth then – a smile made of frost and moonlight, beautiful and dangerous and far too sad to any longer be called kind. “I could have eaten you when your blood first touched the tide.”
The sea stirs around her hips as she shifts. Her gaze does not leave his own. “I could have eaten you when your fever took your senses and you hardly knew your own name, when all you could do was cry out in the dark.” Tresses curl, tendrils cloying towards the edge of the wood. “I could have eaten you when I drew the wounds from your flesh and cleaned your blood.”
Eyelashes burn as Jacaerys watches her, helplessly foolish to hois own nature; he traces how her visage shifts under the reflections of the shimmering waters.
“I could have eaten you when you first laid your mouth on mine.”
His breath catches in a shamed flush to his cheeks, for memory betrays him all at once: her laughter beneath the stars, the cool sweetness of her lips, the shy turn of a smile after a handful of shells were deposited upon his lap. That she should speak of it all now, with such resentful sorrow – a horrible emptiness within him gapes further.
“But you ask now,” eyes lift to him once more, moonlit and wounded even in the light of day. “even after I have done each kind thing you once praised of me?”
Regret coils ugly within him. He lurches toward the water without thinking, knees upstable upon the disintegrating salt-logged wood. “Wait,” he calls, hand outstretching in some boyish fit of desperation, as though command might counter the hurt he’d levied.
She only slinks away, velveted water swallowing more and more of her.
Sorrow, that horrible thing, falls deep within him at the sight. “Please.” The word breaks from him then, raw with a desperation he cannot hide; The cliffs catch it and throw it back at him once more in a hundred dying echoes – please, please, please – the cove lamenting his grief.
Her eyes shimmer with unspilled silver. “I know you do not wish to fear me.”
It is then that she lets herself fall back into the sea. Scarcely a small sigh of water; Jacaerys is helpless to himself as the dark swallows her, absorbing the shape of her glinting scales as completely as though she had never existed at all.
He is left quite alone.
Silence occupies not just the ear but his bones themselves; Jacaerys remains kneeling where she vanished for some time, a hand suspended foolishly above the water in hopes the tide might, struck by some late compassion, yet choose to return what it has taken from him. Water kisses the edges of his boots and the splintered ruin he floats upon, and only when the last warmth of day has wholly bled from the cliffs lining the mouth of the cove does he at last force himself to move.
His limbs, it seems, have long forgotten the labor of belonging to him; For weeks they had been sustained by the cool touch of her palms against burning skin in the dead of night – that curious miracle by which each waking day found him a little less dead than the evening before.
Rising upon his feet calls forth a strength he’s not attempted in what feels like true moons.
Boots sink into the black sand; Solid earth has haunted his prayers through endless nights upon the water, yet now it feels strangely faithless and wholly dead with its lack of sway and ease. He walks because standing still becomes unbearable in both his limbs and mind.
Slowly the prince wanders the little cove she had chosen for him. He threads first between the vast white arches of whale skeletons; then, fingertips drift across stone polished smooth by centuries of tides. Here and there the sea has driven whole ships into the stone, timber petrified into the bones of the earth; Human skulls peer from beds of mussels, seagrass growing through the hollows of their eyes; And yet nowhere among these countless things might he find the single thing he seeks.
In time, night paints the caves into a black mouth, moonlight catching to glow horribly upon saltbleached bones. Jacaerys could leave; There is land beneath his feet, a miracle for which he once would have traded kingdoms, and somewhere beyond these cliffs there must surely be roads or villages with harbors and living men.
He does not go.
Instead he returns to the water’s edge and lowers himself among the abyssal sand, and tells himself that he will wait only until morning, when either his siren returns or daylight might reveal some path for him inland. He makes no fire, for the darkness feels less lonely when it remains unbroken; hips upon land and back against sharp rock, Jacaerys stares at the shifting current with broken regret.
And when dawn finally begins to silver the eastern rim of the cave, washing the black water pale as beaten steel once more, bleeding with that softened lilac, Jacaerys is still there, watching with sunscorched eyes for any hint of silver within the waves.
JACAERYS WAKES TO COLD.
No chill which lives in the memory of his bones – not that of blood seeping from a dying body; he wakes to the roll of the frigid tide reaching calves, just where he’d collapsed upon the sand. Water laps over his boots and retreats again, a chilled thing as eyelashes unlace themselves from their salted hold upon his consciousness.
For several breaths he reposes where he is, suspended in that memory of sleep and waking. A turn of head, pressing cheek to softened volcanic sand; and then his eyes open in memory, a lurch of disorientation at the sensation of land beneath him.
What he finds, instead, are eyes.
They are waiting for him from beyond the dark shelf of rock where the cove deepens suddenly into black water, faintly luminous now beneath the gentling dawn. He is struck with such immense relief that he laughs before he knows he has done so.
He croaks out her name, carrying with it all the lonely hours of the night between them as he rises swiftly, stiffness of limb protesting with the neglection of weeks upon the raft. His balance falters upon the uneven stones, though he crosses the cove as swiftly as the gods allow, ducking through whale ribs to where she waits where the black stone falls sheer into fathomless water, only her shoulders and head above the tide, hair spreading behind her.
Jacaerys lowers himself carefully onto the warm volcanic rock, stretching close so he might lie upon his stomach along its edge, one arm hanging over the precipice towards her watchful countenance. The tide slips lazily between her tresses, coiling shyly.
“I was cruel.” He murmurs, gentler than the lick of tide which coaxed him awake though the words scrape against his throat. “I have no excuse.”
She studies him without expression, unsettling enough that he cannot tell whether she means to forgive him or leave him once more.
“I am so sorry,” he whispers, one last offering cast into the cove alongside the coins and daggers and futile silks of drowned things long past. Nothing answers him but the crashing wave, coaxing the glint of purpled crabs alongside the underbelly of his rock.
Only then does her arm emerge from the water; with an upward reach, she glances up at him – and there he finds a bewildered heartbeat of hope that she might touch him again. Instead, her fingers unfold; in the glint of morning glare, Jacaerys blinks upon her palm, leaning further once more to find there, resting in the center, something shining.
A pearl, fresh and small enough to disappear beneath his thumb. Morning gathers itself there upon its surface, a stolen captured piece of dawn pale as milk and luminous as mist-laced moon.
Lashes flicker momentarily as the breath catches within his chest, a small laugh of absurd affection rising sweet and sharp in his throat as his eyes burn with emotion.
Hesitation sits so strangely upon so beautiful a creature; her eyes glisten with those silvery tears, too, as her lip trembles. Her voice comes between pressed lips, a rather bashful countenance among the waves. “I wished to bring you one before you left me.”
Her palm, he registers, trembles with the small thing, a glinting haze of the cave; affection burns bright through him as Jacaerys takes her palm with his own, closing her fingers gently around the pearl.
“I don’t wish to leave you,” he says instead, and the confession comes before pride can catch it, before the careful walls built by a lifetime of crowns and expectations can remind him that princes are not meant to plead with the sea. His fingers remain around hers, warm against the strange coolness of her skin, the pearl hidden between their palms as though they have together captured some tiny fragment of the moon itself. “I wish to stay with you,” he whispers wetly.
Her eyes swim just as the ancient, beautiful tail of shimmering silver does beneath the waves; currents curl and fold, and she remains utterly quiet for one moment, hand trembling within his own. Her gaze lowers briefly to the pearl still enclosed between them, then lifts again.
“The place you spoke of,” her voice ripples along the whisper of the tide. “The stoned castle that watches the sea, the home you say waits for you beside the water.” A lip trembles before it is speared with sharpened, pearled teeth. “You would truly bring me there?”
Dragonstone. He thinks of black towers rising from volcanic earth and halls warmed by fire, his mother’s chambers and dragons circling above cliffs where the wind wails.
“Yes,” he says, lacking any such hesitation of a prince with the duty of war still looming upon his back. “I meant it. Truly.”
Something changes in her face then, though still he leans closer, lowering himself further over the stone until the water nearly reaches his bared visage, nearly kisses his chest. But before he might let his body follow that burning instinct of his heart to slip into the water after her, her hand slips from his own to disappear into the water.
The pearl lies in his own palm; He watches her once more leave him.
“Wait,” his voice tapers, though his disconcertion grows so completely that he remains frozen upon the rock, watching as the sea carries her not away this time, but instead towards the shore.
It is only once she reaches the sand, long taloned things grasping in wounds through the dark, that the prince snaps upwards, heartbeat thundering upon his throat. A grieving veil, the dark water shifts and folds along her body, so unwilling to surrender what it has kept for longer than most men have had names for their gods; glassy folds climb her skin and slip over the silvering scales which remain among her sun-breathed skin.
The unnatural grace begins in a wail of tide; a large crash of seafoam submerges Jace, his lungs filled once more with burning salt and unforgiving sting; when he surges to, upon his knees against sharp rock, he hears it: a wailing horror, splintered as shards of bone snap against echoing cave walls. His siren screams.
Salt slides in drips from his vision, though still he finds the horror, a darkened sea of shimmering deep – no color of mortal blood, but perhaps an open vein in the ocean itself which spills a piece of its darkness upon the sand.
The stories return once more of the she-creatures coming to land to nest; and, for the first time, the sound that leaver her is not some haunting sweetness meant to lure men closer.
It is sheer agony, and it jolts him to action quicker than any war bell.
Screams echo through the cavern, horrible and dragging; and hands catch the sharp of rock as Jacaerys descends, a scrambling desperation of fear as his knees strike the cold sand and stumble twice. The strength that has carried this far was never his own; it has always belonged to her and the breath she gave him, the kindness of a creature he once feared. Now, he spends what remains of it reaching her.
He rears the largest rock just as the last of the blooded dark water retreats; waking itself only in foam and silver upon the shore.
And just there: His siren lies still upon the sand.
Upon reaching her, he falls to his knees. He finds, in trembling breaths, the sea’s remains upon her: laces of that old magic, shimmering scales along her skin; a strange elegance to her form, a brightness reflecting in her gaze, so akin to mother-of-pearl.
She is no ordinary woman, but his woman.
A trembling palm rises to brush away the remnants of foam and weeded sea, clinging to her as a dying man might his lover; and she only meets his own watery gaze, a small puff of air passing her lips. “I told you, I wished for you to come in.”
The words undo him, loosing a laugh helpless in its wonder and grief, watery in bewilderment. Glossed lips curl, that same old glimmer in her eyes as she whispers next: “I suppose I once again had to come to you instead.”
A hitch of his breath, swallowed in a rush of thrill as a palm comes to cup his own jaw, soothing as fingers spread along the curve of his cheek. “My prince of the sky,” she chides, her eyes carrying pools of the very same, that broke-open expanse of light high above the cavernous dark. Fingers brush away his salt-laced curls.
He gathers her to him wholly, and she comes so very willingly, no longer divided by anything so distant and unknowable as the sea.
A simple miracle; for she is warming, a living thing against him, breath trembling and falling in ripples of warmth along the bare of his shouldered back. Here she is, in his arms.
Jacaerys presses his face against damp tresses and closes his eyes, overcome by the strangeness of the world having allowed such a thing to happen; and she in turn tightens her grasp round him in a gesture so truly human that it nearly brings the sting of tears to eye. The cove roars louder now, perhaps distraught with its loss; the water thunders along their bared legs, and at length, Jacaerys slowly pulls back.
Slow, his gaze drops to her legs – the unfamiliar grace of twitching tissue and flesh and muscle and bone beneath the morning light; concern touches his heart and perhaps, too, his visage.
“Do they hurt?” he asks softly, tipping his head to catch her eyes. “Your legs.”
She looks down as though considering a question yet to be occurred within her mind; and then at length, she lifts one supple foot and nudges his side with a shy, almost playful firmness. A gesture moves through him, lips curling in a gentle affection at her nudge.
“I have had them before,” she reminds him then, in hint of faint pride and amusement. He only smiles, no longer afraid of what she has been before him, what she is. For she is his, too – and he, hers.
“Does it feel the same?” he wonders, gaze lingering over each sweet part of her, so real upon the shore.
For the first time since she came ashore, she falters nearly unconfident; a startling transformation which renders Jacaerys marveled at such bashfulness. Her gaze slips away from his, and when she answers, her voice is barely above the whisper of the tide.
“No,” she hums, a small thing; and her fingers tighten faintly against his bared shoulder, nails blunt but sharp still. He can see how warmth touches her cheeks, how her lip catches upon sharp teeth. “This… feels far better.”
Jacaerys smiles then, a hand falling tenderly upon her face. A thumb brushes the dampness at her cheekbone, the silver traces still glimmering there like moonlight caught so stark against the real nature of her skin.
And then he kisses her, slow as fate; a warmed mouth lingers against hers, patient and gentle, her hands rise to his back solidly to grasp at his warm flesh; the sea groans behind them, and the wind howls through the bones along the shore.
Her breath catches when his hand slides to the sides of her – and he feels the shiver that passes through her then, not of fear but of sensation, an old recognition of something newly awakened. It answers in him at once, too, so low and bright and aching.
She leans closer once more, and he meets her there.
The kiss deepens unhurried and tender; fingers curl in the muscle of his back, his own palm reaching the strange, living warmth of her skin, the quickening pulse there, the breath of her body now made real in his world. When she makes a small sound against his mouth, soft and startled by her own response, he draws back only enough to look at her. Her eyes are wide in a dawning tide of astonishment, swimming with the same heated thing that kisses across that sweet skin which once never knew the true touch of warmth.
Jacaerys rests his forehead against hers and smiles, his own breath uneven now, his heart no calmer than her own within their beating cages. “Are you alright?” he murmurs.
Her answer is to kiss him first. Jacaerys makes a low sound against her mouth and gathers her closer once more, one hand at the nape of her neck, the other spreading along her waist, feeling the tremor there as though her body is remembering itself once more upon land. It is a sweet thing, a tangle of tongues languid, enough to perhaps remind her that tenderness can be just as fierce as hunger.
She moves against him with a wonder that undoes him; She has known desire, he can see that in the way she breathes, in the way her fingers tighten at his shoulders, in the bright, startled heat of her gaze, the memory of muscles when he shifts to press himself hard along the line of her own wanting body. Indeed, she is not one who hesitates; She knows the language of wanting better than he does, and he is not ashamed to learn from her now.
When he draws away only enough to look at her, her lips are parted, her eyes dark with a confusion that is almost pain.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says softly, the words trembling with nerves that guide her closer to him still. “T-tell me if you do not want this, please.”
Her hand rises to his face, and the touch warms across him, spreading down trembling throat and quivering chest, far lower, igniting some spark within him.
Her thumb brushes his mouth, and there is a smile which graces across her own. “I want,” she says, and the ocean crashes itself against their shore, folding over their hips as though it, too, wants.
He swallows, his body already hard with his own wanting; his voice comes lower, hungry for the sweet softness beneath his palms. “What do you want?”
Her gaze holds his. “You,” she says, helpless to the unnatural flow of tresses which still seem to float gently round her beauty even left of the tide. “Only you, Jacaerys.”
Eyes shut for a heartbeat, if only in effort to steady himself; and when they open she still watches him in that patient, unsettling way.
“Please, let me be careful with you,” he whispers, nearly desperate. She only nods, so ethereal under the breath of faraway sunlight, and her words come in the same tremble of needed breath. “Let us learn of each other.”
And so he leads her from the waterline of the softer black sand and up where the dawn has begun to warm the flatter, kinder stones. And there, beneath the pale opening sky, he eases the salt and cold from them both.
Fabric, fear, distance - one by one they fall away from their entwined forms until there is nothing left between them but breath and the bright, trembling ache of wanting. He lays her down with care, and when he follows her onto the sand, his mouth finds her throat first, then the hollow beneath her ear, then the place where her pulse leaps beneath the skin. She arches into him at once, a soft gasp breaking from her when his hand slides over her waist, then lower, learning her with a cruel patience.
“Jacaerys,” she breathes, a plea, a praise which makes him shudder. He answers only by kissing her harder, one hand threading through her hair, the other braced beside her head as he lowers himself over her. Her fingers clutch at his shoulders, then rake along his back, unsure whether to pull him closer or hold herself steady; He gives her both – indeed, he gives her everything he can.
His mouth moves over hers, then down again, tasting salt and warmth and the faint sweetness of her breath, ghosting over the tantalizing flush of skin upon her breast, teeth scraping only softly. When she trembles, he stills at once, looking upon her with salt-kissed lashes. “Too much?” he inquires gently.
Her eyes are dark, her lips swollen from his kisses, and she looks nearly frenzied at the though of ceasing.
“No.” The answer is breathlessly hungry and he smiles against her skin, slower now only because he wants her to feel every stroke of his hands, every tendered bite of teeth, every careful press of his body against hers. Her hips lift to meet him; it sends a sharp pulse of heat through him which coaxes a soft groan, lost to the plush of her skin, and she startles – perhaps at the effect she has on him.
“Again,” he begs, guiding her with his hands though his lips leave their marks upon silver flakes along her skin.
She moves once more; the black sand clings to their skin and the morning wind cools the sweat at their backs.
And when he finally joins her, it is with a groan that feels torn from somewhere deep in his chest; she tightens around him in a surprised thing, melting into wanting, then wholly his in that moment. He pauses only long enough to look at her, to make sure she is with him; and when she nods, brow knit with a pleasured desperation, with her fingers digging into his shoulders and drawing half-moons of red, he presses into her warmth nearer to worship than any prayer that’s ever left his lips.
First, with the wash of waves, it is a slow thing of breaths and shaking laughter and trembling moans – though it grows deeper, growing a heat that builds and builds until the air between them seems to crackle with it, until his pleasure rolls over him in heavy immense pressure, until her own gasps sharpen and their fingers fall, entwined together, to find the spot upon her which coaxes her eyes back in ecstasy.
Her head falls back against the sand and lips part upon a sound that is half-gasp, half-plea. He drinks the song, kisses the line of her throat, the curve of her breast; finger turn, pressing gently in a caress along the trembling place where her body meets his, and each touch draws another shiver from her. She is beautiful like this, so flushed and undone by pleasure and trust alike; the sight of her makes him impossibly harder still, makes him want to give her everything, makes him want to keep her here in this moment forever or keep her upon a throne or wherever she might wish to be.
“Look at me,” he begs, a broken sound.
And the sight of her eyes on his, dark and dazed and full of him, is enough to make him lose the last of his restraint. He moves with a steadier rhythm then, one hand at her hip, the other braced beside her head, grasping along the smooth rock, his mouth returning to hers whenever he can bear to leave her skin. She meets him with such growing fervor, hands roaming, learning the planes of his muscled back, the line of his jaw, the taper of his hips, the damp hair at his temples.
Pleasure gathers tighter and tighter between them; The sea roars in the sonorous echo of two exiles making a home of one another. It is only then, as she pulls his chest upon hers and lets out a soft tremble of sigh, that they find the peak of their ecstasy in harmony.
It rolls within him as tide turns stones upon the shore – sun-drenches and ebbing, his pleasure tumbles, his groan falls into a taper of her name, or that which his tongue can form; and she, in turn, with trembling legs and wettened eyes, smiling at the bewilderment of such earthly delights. When he comes to lie beside her, when their sweat and sand-laced skin sticks gently to one another in a lazy, sweet whispering sigh of exhaustion, her eyes meet his once more.
A shared laugh, one of relief and bubbled affection, curls around their small cove. It is not untouched by grief, nor lacking in the gods’ cruelty – though it drifts out still across the water, and echoes only in sweetness as their foreheads press.
And when at last he draws her down with him, when the last of the morning light spills over them and the cove becomes all hush and salt and the soft ruin of restraint, it is not hunger that remains between them but love – deep, astonished, and newly named.
For some time, the waves come and go.
It is when the sun fully glints through the clear tidepools that his siren rises, and offers her palm. When they gather themselves from the rocks and sand, pearl stowed within the pocket of battered sunbleached riding leathers, Jacaerys finds pieces of old silks among the bones; he wraps her in them, a first garment for a woman who crossed from one world to another.
She laughs when he fusses over the tie of her new dressing, attempting in gentle adjustments to ensure it bothers not the scars which still stretch across her shoulder; the sound of her laughter follows them as they move away from the shore.
The path upward out of the cove is narrow and ancient, carved through stone by years of rain and wind and the endless pummel of waves. They walk slowly, dually unsteady beneath the unfamiliar weight of land, rendering both their bodies unsure; for once, neither belonging to this world but both traversing it, sharing in stumbles and laughs and small conversation.
At the top of the path sunlight finds their skin, and the world opens; horizon stretches wide before them so endless. In the breath of the world once more around him, grief and death melt; water dries upon warm skin and his siren lets out a breath of shock, of wonder. Jacaerys holds her palm as her other runs over the tall wildgrass swaying around them in a tide of seabreeze, holds her tightly as she throws her arms round him with bubbling laughter.
It is only then that the shadow passes in the distance. His breath catches, her own coming only a moment later; For far along the coast, beyond the cliffs and the rolling sea mist, something enormous moves through the sky, massed and raining shadow upon the earth. Even at a distance, even as only a shape against the morning for, he knows.
He remembers the curve of the wings and the weathered roar even before it meets their ears; knows the glint of faint gold and rubied heart along the breast of the great beast as he knows the back of his palm.
His mother’s dragon.
And so together, with splintered breaths and wettened eyes, hand in hand, Jacaerys and the siren run toward the shadows in the distance, unaware of the rising smoke and distant screams beneath it.
whew! that was long
requests open.
starting new taglist; pls lmk if you'd like to be on it.
masterlist
“commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to your husband's awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.”
jacaerys velaryon x wife!reader
words: 4.7k
notes: jacaerys & reader are aged up to 23. i cut a scene from one of my ongoing fics today & decided to rewrite it for a standalone instead ! hope u enjoy this is severely unedited
warnings: afab reader, married bickering, alcohol consumption, tbh porn with no plot but a lot of dialogue, vague timeline, fluff & romance. ONE gentle & good-natured smack to jace’s head. smut - oral (fem receiving), teasing, hair pulling, sliiiight sub!jace if you squint, he's really teasing, sort of spoiled reader but its bc hes is so in love. be warned this is mostly foreplay.
masterlist
“THEY ARE FOOLS.”
The sound of your husband’s voice comes breathed over a wide-spread map, sent by raven from the Sea Snake and then poached in haste from the hands of a squire as you’d both left the council chambers. Now the parchment sits, spread over the large oak of your shared solar, pinned at one corner with a tallow candle and another with a bowl bearing the remnants of cherries. The hour of Eels approaches upon the high moon out your casements, though inside you are well-lit in torch and company alike.
He has not yet troubled himself to remove his doublet, though he’s shed the heavier dressings of office in the spaces between your shared solar and bedchambers, left discarded across the back of a chair with a sigh. His hair, so often kept neat, has suffered the abuse of his own hands at least twice since since leaving the council chamber; you can see the furrows of it, dark and disordered, and there too lies ink, faint along the side of his palm where he’s already begun marking the map before you’ve even properly closed the door behind you. He does not look at you yet - no, he looks only down at King’s Landing, at the coastline along Massey’s Hook, at all the small failures of an evening he has clearly not finished refighting in his own head. Recalling the incessant irritations of the council, you endure the harrowing thought that his pricked stipulations from this evening might yet haunt you both for some hours to come.
Though, in the spoken words of your husband lives less a true anger and more some worn frustration after such a laborious handful of hours cooped within the war council chambers. “The lot of them.”
You unclasp your own cloak, soothing your skirts as you cross towards your husband. In attempt at jest, you let your lip lift faintly. “You name your Queen a fool?”
A glance over his shoulder coaxes you to relent the daring accusation, sighing as you lift your hands in placation.
“Never,” he still responds in kind to your needling, shaking his head faintly. “Only–”
Though his frustration breaks in his words, and he only sighs. You only watch as he reaches for the cup at his elbow, finds it empty, and reaches instead for the flagon, pouring himself with rather more generosity than the hour calls for. Once near the brim, he pushes it toward you and, in your mild amusement, you smile into the lip of his cup.
He watches you drink, and shakes his head faintly. “Lord Celtigar thought it madness, my mother thought it madness–” he huffs, turning to you sidelong, visage shrouded in golden candlelight. A gesture toward you, as he undoes the buckles of his sword belt and drops it upon the long table beside the map. “Did you note, too, how Lord Bar Emmon thought my proposition madness at such volume he nearly cracked his own voice?”
You laugh before you mean to, wine halfway from your lips. It is a small relief, for you both - so scrupulously dutiful in matters of council and of war - to find some private wickedness reserved only for each other, behind doors no lords nor councilmen may follow you through. And, dramatic as he is prone to be when alone with you, your husband is not wrong to have taken his irritation from an evening so agonizingly wasted.
“He does have a gift for it,” you concede, passing the cup to Jacaerys’ hand. You watch, in turn, as he drinks, and continue: “I counted three occasions upon which he mentioned the same counter.” A gesture of half-exasperated, half-helpless amusement from you, you lean your hip closer to the table to face your husband. “And each time it felt as though it were newly occurring to him. It truly astounds me, in a way.”
Jace conjures the princely decency to appear mournful even as he smirks at your words. “Always about the tides, that one. He is very fond of the tides, have you noticed?” Your husband lifts the half-drunk cup of wine to glare at Lord Corlys’s map over its rim, and you must bite back a fond grin.
“I’m nearly forced to suspect he has no other thoughts at all,” Jace huffs into the cup, “that his mind simply produces ‘the tides, my prince’ whenever pressed on any matter. It pertains to no matters, as it stands, though he proceeds as though only the waters along Massey’s Hook exist for consideration at all.”
Your lips purse in amusement, biting along your grin only for a moment.
“The tides, my prince,” you presently intone, pitching your voice low and pompous in rather unfair imitation.
Jacaerys nearly laughs outright, though it is smothered in some attempt to remain in his ire from council past. Your husband does not deceive you; his lips still waver faintly, his eyes still gleam and dance in the torchlight as they regard your imitation.
It is this which spurs you to press on, “I only consider, my prince, that Vhagar might not read the Maester’s almanacs–”
“Don’t,” your husband interjects in amusement, grinning helplessly as he swallows his sip of wine, “don’t, or I’ll spit this across Corlys’s map.”
“–and so cannot be expected to observe the tides in her own campaigns of war–”
Jace laughs outright now. “Stop,” he insists, coughing faintly from his swallow of wine; and, delighted, he reaches across the edge of the table to cover your mouth with two ink-stained fingers. You promptly bite lightly in retaliation, though this only makes his smile widen.
The Lord Celtigar fares little better a moment later, invoked and verbally torn between the two of you in the same breath; a provocation born of an endless habit of throat-clearing before every single sentence, you exchange poor imitations of the innocent man until the two of you are leaning towards each other across the table, half-drunk on wine and flushed with relief of duty. It is a rare thing, to be nowhere near a council chamber, with no one in the room requiring anything of either of you at all tonight.
“Gods,” Jace murmurs at last, dragging a hand down his face, “You’re quite lucky I haven’t choked.”
You soothe your dress, crossing to perch instead beside him rather than corner; And, the very moment you open your mouth to return the sentiment of relief, he speaks once more.
“The tides, my prince,” he says again.
It absurdly brings you both into laughter once more, wine-loosened and gilded in warm light, muffled by palms and chastened lips as though you both know it is foolish and hardly as amusing as it feels. Though it proves no matter besides, for you and your husband finish your cup of wine and fill it once more before the laughter fully ebbs.
It is once the last sigh has bubbled past your lips that he reaches for you properly, cupping your jaw in his whole palm to kiss you. Your lips find his slow, warm; wine and spice upon the tongue, you lean further into his taste eagerly. A palm skates up your side, sliding back to gather you by waist against him.
“Far better company than the council,” you murmur against his mouth, not quite breaking the kiss to say it. A low hum rolls through his throat, echoing faintly between your mouths.
“Immeasurably,” he agrees, the word half-lost between your lips. Faithfully Jacaerys kisses you, leaning wholly into your space as he keeps himself propped with a palm on the map below. He leans back only a breath then, lips pressed and parting. “Bar Emmon,” he says absurdly, still smiling into the kiss, “does not kiss half as well, I’d wager.”
A sound of displeasure from you as you lean back; disturbed, faintly, at his eagerness to bring back up the man who pestered him so much all evening. “I should hope you’ll never discover for yourself,” you manage, laughing faintly even as his mouth finds yours again, swallowing any such attempts to speak further.
A huff of laughter escapes him despite his mouth upon yours, and it’s in such a sound that chases off whatever glum irritation cast the council had left behind. And so you merely let him laugh, one hand fisting in the front of his doublet to keep him close, solid, yours in a way the council chamber rarely lets him be these days.
After a moment, he pulls away once more. “We should be studying the map,” Jace decides only a few moments later, an observation which causes a roll of your eyes. “The Lord Hand lent it to me with intention of regaining it soon.”
Lips part, only the glossy string of your shared affection connecting you for a moment in the candlelight as you lean faintly against the table, sighing. “Might it wait just for a moment, my Prince?” you suggest.
“It cannot wait,” Jace says, though he certainly makes no move at all to leave you, forehead dropping to your skin instead. His lips brush along your neck as he continues, “the ink is barely dry, wife, and half of it is guesswork besides. Corlys marked the shoals from memory, he said in his raven, and memory seventy years old at that. If I do not commit it to my own hand soon–”
Perhaps it is impatience, or simply confusion as to why your husband has taken up cartographic studies with his grandfather in the midst of war; whatever it is, you only sigh, pressing yourself more firmly to the line of his own warm body, feeling his breath hitch faintly against your throat.
“Commit it to ink tomorrow,” you whisper, leaning closer to his awaiting lips, “and commit yourself to me tonight instead.”
And indeed, whatever protest he means to make next is lost entirely as you kiss him again; he, in what might be a surge of either affection or mild frustration, only pushes further into your warmth.
Though his enthusiasm proves too eager, for between the two of you and the oaken table and considerably more enthusiasm than sense, you overbalance together: his knee catches the chair, yours tangle ungracefully in your own skirts, and you tumble in a sudden sprawl backwards across the map itself, parchment crackling and ripping faintly beneath you. It is a faint clatter you hear before you smell the wine spilt over the edge of the table, though neither of you seem particularly rushed to right the fallen cup.
He catches himself above you on one forearm, laughing outright once again, the sound of it rich, startled through your chamber. Your heart still – after all the moons wed to him – flips at the sound.
“Oh,” you tut, shaking your head in faint tease, “And now you’ve just certainly ruined Corlys’ map,” you inform him gravely, one hand still fisted in his doublet, refusing to let him retreat even the small distance his laughter has suddenly put between your mouths. He hums in agreement, though seemingly entirely unrepentant as he glances down to where your shoulder has scuffed clean through some careful notation of the Gullet’s currents. He purses his lips. “I suppose the council will have my head.”
A huff from your lips, tipping your head. “Well, after Aegon and Aemond’s, I imagine there will be little room left on the pike for a head like yours.”
Laugh spills regretfully from full-kissed lips above you. He is wholly pressed against you now, slotted rather wonderfully between your thighs as you lay upon the table, caged by arm and breath. You lips your chin only faintly, just to bump your nose against his own.
“A comforting thought,” his nose brushes yours, dimple deep now, all the solemnity of an hour ago nowhere to be found in him.
You, fought and lost against your own battle of grin, only shake your head. “I suppose you may keep your own in the meantime, then.”
A palm snakes beneath your tresses to cup your head, turning you in kind until he has clear access to the junction of your throat and clavicle. “Generous of you,” he muses dryly, a dimpled grin flashing as leans, shifting closer into you to stir a hitch of excitement through your breast. “And here I thought you were planning to sow my name in disgrace for my impropriety laying you upon this map.”
“Your impropriety,” you scoff in echo, though the word catches somewhere breathless in your throat as his mouth finds the soft skin below your ear. “That itself is rather the whole trouble tonight, seeing as it was you who kissed me first, you who could not be persuaded to leave off Corlys’s precious shoals for even a moment, you who cannot forgive Lord Bar Emmon for his blunder, and you who has now ruined the very map you are so determined to defend–”
Your words, though breathed out quickly, are lost scarce to a shiver of pleasure; for Jace has latched himself upon the tender sensitivity of your throat, and only smiles against the goosepimples rising beneath his tongue. Still, you do not give up, even as teeth scrape along your pulse gently. “So I suppose you’ll–” a breathy sigh, “have to forgive me if I find it difficult to accept the blame for your own temper. It was merely distracting.”
A hum presses along your chest, dragging a fiercely hungry heat through your very core. His lips brush over the neckline of your dress before lifting his chin.
“Was it?” He does not sound remotely remorseful, and indeed his amber eyes melt into the candlelight with mirth. “I shall have to remember that, then, for the next council you find too tedious to bear–”
You lean back, exasperated by half in his mention of council once more.
“Jace.”
He beams; a beautiful man, your husband, and you cannot curb the smile you helplessly give in return. His lips part in echoed tease of your impatience.
“Wife.”
You shove at his shoulder, only half in earnest, and he lets himself be shoved, rolling half onto his elbow beside you amidst the ruin of parchment and spilled wine, both of you grinning now. It is when his mouth finds the junction of your throat once more that the hunger comes back thrice as strong, and you pull him right above you once more even as you glance at the ruined map beneath your sprawled figure, the creeping stains of spilt wine.
“We ought to resolve this mess, I suppose,” you sigh, hoping he will indeed ignore your words and continue the path he makes with his lips now across your chest.
And, it seems, your Prince has a mind to ignore your orders this eve - for he merely continues his own line of thought as though you'd been discussing it all along. “I’m only saying,” he begins, apropos of certainly nothing as he lifts his head enough to look faintly wounded – unconvincing as it is, given the grin still tugging at the corner of his mouth – “A word from you, and he might have folded twice as fast.”
Your head falls back in exasperation, even as his teeth nip at the soft skin of your neck. Back again he’s circled, to the man in the council – as though there lies no other pressing matters he might attend to at present.
“You are meant to be resolving the mess,” you remind him, gesturing at the ruined parchment beneath you both, though your hand finds its way to the back of his neck regardless, pressing him instead closer to where your breasts rise and fall through your dress. His mouth follows willingly, nosing along the neckline to press his lips against your beating skin.
“I am resolving many things at once,” he murmurs, entirely too pleased with himself, and returns his attention to your body once more as though the council chamber has not just risen between you a third time this hour. He huffs only faintly, the breath of which sends a shiver across the valley of your breasts. He begins to speak again: “You might resolve my grievance while you’re at it–”
Your groan of impatience and disbelief ricochets through the solar, though it is drowned by your husband’s incessant prattling even as his tongue dips across the flush of your breasts, pulling at the hem of your dress to reveal more sweet skin to his blabbering lips, “–It would only take a word: ‘Jace was right, and Lord Bar Emmon a tedious old fool, and I shall say so plainly next time for all to hear.’”
With fingers threading through thickened dark curls, you let out a flighty laugh, the desire molten through you despite the unfavorable topic he cannot seem to let go. “You want me to rehearse a speech whilst you ravish me?” You murmur.
That cursed mouth curves against your skin. “I want my wife’s loyalty declared before the whole council,” he leans back only a breath, enough to slip the shoulder from your gown, sliding it gently over your skin to reveal your breasts. Though you nearly gasp at the chill of air, any such discomforts are remedied as his breath fans across such tender skin, lips trailing as he pleases. You sigh softly, fingers tightening within his hair.
Helpless to his charming idiocy, you laugh, tugging gently upon his hair until he lifts his head to look at you properly, mock-solemn amber eyes meeting yours in the candlelight.
“You are dreadfully greedy tonight, husband,” you receive his eager kiss between your words, well aware of how his eyes hook and remain only on the sweet form of your lips as you speak, “for a man who won an argument twice in council over without any help from me at all. You’ve been brooding as though you lost it wholly.”
A pout, one which you can only help to lean forward and kiss; you catch his lower lip between your teeth and drag back, unhurried, until whatever else he meant to say dissolves into a rough, startled groan. He grins around his words, dipping his head once more to nip along the soft of your flesh.
“Well, please forgive me for preferring when you fight at my side. It is far preferable to being left on my own.”
He does not witness the roll of your eyes; though, all the same, for he has endeavored to slowly drag your skirts in a bunch upon your thigh with his palm, slow enough to drive you mad but pressing enough for you to understand his intentions. A tantalizing thing, even as you scoff.
“I was at your side,” you insist, and a soft gasp escapes you as one palm rises from your neck to instead palm along the curve of your breast, a soft thing despite how his teeth catch at your skin. “Though it seems I’ve wounded your pride, seeing as you’ve returned from council only to complain further, even with your wife so willingly beneath you.”
He hums something rather insolent and you only smile, far too indulgent as your hand slides to grip his shoulder and hold on to the warmth there. A sigh leaves your lungs as you purse your lips, “So I suppose I must make it up to you in some way or another.”
A slow grown grin, then, pressed into soft skin beneath your ear; and whatever further words you intend to further dole him scatter from your tongue as he hums low.
“Attend your husband, then,” he whispers, his palm coursing finally from your lifted skirts to the warm flesh of your upper thigh, coaxing your knee to hitch along his hips, “He has endured a rather trying council, and a map now ruined besides, and he would have–”
“He would have,” you cut in, hand sliding from the breadth of his shoulder to fist gently in his hair once more, drawing his face back to yours before he can talk himself further into mischief, “rather less of his own voice, and rather more attention paid to his wife. Yes?”
A hum so near to a moan comes from kiss-bitten lips, warm against your mouth. He nods faintly in some eagerness, biting his lip only faintly as his eyes dance between your own. “As my lady wife commands,” he absconces.
And at last, he holds his tongue of words and endeavors instead – as all good husbands must learn to do – to use it in far more pleasurable ways.
It is mere moments in which his palms grasp at your hips; with a gentle enough tug, he brings you nearest the edge of your table, bare from his hitching of your skirts and dragging of your neckline. A gasp from you, not scandalized as much as jesting at his sudden eagerness, coaxes a small glint of amusement in your husband’s amber gaze. It remains there, flickering in his love and hunger alike for you, as he sinks to his knees right there upon the stone floor.
And, though you’d prefer not to allow such weaknesses, still you let yourself sigh a shaky, flighty thing as the sensation of his lips drag teasing, horribly slow kisses along the inner plush of your thighs.
“Jace,” you sigh, a half-plead half-scold as his eyes glint up at you, the flash of a dark-dragoned signet ring upon his finger disappearing as he bunches your skirts further above your hips. And then he has the gall, it appears, to shush you; a placating thing, a rush of air upon shivered skin. “Shh,” he murmurs into the sweetness of your thigh, and you cannot attempt to feign resentment for the action as it conjures a rush of arousal further through you.
Gathered upon your elbows, you’re helpless to watch as those dark curls glisten in candlelight, wax weeping round your stuttering breaths, the scent of wine heady in the evening air and humming with a terrible anticipation. Cruel, your husband can be, in his teasing. So very cruel indeed.
It is through the anticipation and silence in which you crack.
“Jacaerys–”
You let out a sharp moan instead at the taper of his name, whatever command you had dying on your tongue; for his lips have pressed soundly upon your womanhood, roving a shiver of pleasure through your very core. A canting tilt of your hips arches your spine in surprise, a warm rush of pleasure flooding your whole being.
And he, the horrible man, dares smile against you.
It is with little remaining control that your hand rises to grip through his curled tresses; a trembling thing as his own large palms move to lift your thighs until he is settled firmly between them, humming to himself as your heels come to rest over broadened shoulders. Brushing away strayed curls, you gaze upon your love with some mix of awe and worship as he laves against you, tongue gathering your desire and letting out a low moan of his own at your taste.
Your own breath leaves your lips in gasps; sharp at first, though his ministrations cease suddenly as your husband lifts his chin slightly. A loss of pleasure shutters through your chest and you loosen your grip upon his hair, glancing down at him in half-lidded confusion.
“You've a beauty mark just here,” he murmurs against your inner thigh, tracing it slow with his mouth. “I don't believe I've properly admired before.”
You love him, with your whole soul and being; and yet you might scream; A horrible tease he is, indeed speaking far too much for the promises he’d made to you not moments ago. “You’ve admired it a hundred times,” you get out impatiently, breathless as you are – for he has begun to trail his path of kisses directly to your core once more. A hum from him, as one palm grasps wholly round your thigh to spread you further for him to admire. A shameless thing, perhaps, though the heat of it spreads pleasure along your chest just as warmth kisses your cheeks in droves.
“And I intend to admire it a hundred more, my love,” he murmurs into you at length, rendering you straddled upon that terrible line between pleasure and tease. “Some things bear repeating,” he then decides. And it is as though you see the thought cross his mind through his eyes; though before you can tell him to cease it before it comes past his lips, a soft laugh, half-muffled against your heat, startles you.
“Unlike Lord Bar Emmon’s arguments,” he mutters then, the irritation of which boils suddenly beneath your skin, coaxing your eyes wide with disbelief as he dares continue. “–Which improve with exactly no amount of repetition–”
Your palm smacks lightly across the back of his head, disturbing the gloss of curls at rest between your thighs.
"Jace." You catch a fistful of his hair this time, not ungently, tipping his face properly up to yours. "Cease speaking, entirely, I–I mean it.”
And perhaps it would have come strong from your lips, if not for the shakiness, that trembling desire he’s seemed to coax within you despite his teasing. “Entirely,” he repeats, testing the word as though it truly offends him. You huff out an impatient sigh, well aware of both your impatience and your insatiable desire for your husband at present; though too, you are well aware of your Jacaerys’ predisposition to spoiling you in all aspects of your marriage – and he, quite often, finds it a true struggle to say no to you. He goads you, you know this. WIthin such a handsome visage lies a glint of amusement he gains at your slow torture. “That seems a rather severe–”
“Jacaerys,” you all but whimper, and that does it; something in the word dissolves whatever torturous, inopportune argument he’d been building, and the grin that spreads over his face is helpless now, boyish, all pretense of debate abandoned.
“Alright, yes, mercy. I’ll yield to my pretty wife.” His lips brush against your aching desire, shoulders shaking with amusement. “How horrible,” he then dares utter, as though speaking to himself. “The Prince of Dragonstone, brought low by his own wife, in his own solar, over a map–”
You make to sit up, cheeks hot with the hazy mixture of desire, pleasure, and sheer irritation. “Speak once more about that map, and I swear to you I will leave this chamber.”
At this, he goes rather properly still between your thighs, the teasing drained out of him all at once; and for a few breaths, neither of you moves at all. Candlelight licks along the ruined parchment beneath you both, and the scent of wine is strong enough within the chamber that you imagine it’s breached the edges of the map, too – blooming ruby along the rivers and coasts etched with ink, spreading its tendrils closer as though it, too, wishes to touch the man between your thighs. The torchlight catches its own gold warmth along the line of his jaw, and his eyes are amber gone dark and steady; they flick, searching your face as though to be certain the threat is only half meant. It is, of course.
Still, in the heavy breaths between you, neither you nor Jace look away; a shared thing so deep there are no words, an understanding perhaps only known between two people who have shared a bed and a war and worlds worth of trust between them and know each other too well now to need explaining.
A smile blooms, first across full lips, glistening with desire; then along carved cheekbone, spreading to warm his eyes until the whole chamber feels, for a moment, infinitely warm and gentle. Your own smile creeps along your visage, just as easy as dusk chases sun.
You could not love him more, you think.
“Not another word,” he swears to you then, earnest enough as he is cheeky; he's already smiling against your skin, mouth finding the soft of your thigh in silent apology, one hand splaying warm along your stomach to ease you down again, unhurried and certain as only he could ever be with your body. A warmth spreads through you, that familiar affection that pricks along your cheeks and flutters your heart.
And then, after far too much anticipation, a slow press of his lips; your sigh soothes along the breath of the torches as his fingers gently press into the thick of your thighs, soothing the tense of your muscles. Eyelashes flutter as his tongue laves slowly upon your heat, nudging your bundle of nerves enough to have you keening, whispering his name into the quiet of the chamber. Indeed, you begin quite immediately to quiver at the sensation; A shuttering breath of pleasure exhales from your lips, brows stitching together with a thread of sweet ecstasy. Though after only a few more moments, his lips whisper once more against you. “I’ll be the very picture of silence, I swear it, my love.”
And he is not, quite, what he promises to be; a murmur here, a low hum of arousal there, some fresh and foolish endearment breathed against your skin every time he thinks you've forgotten to scold him for it – but he is close enough, with his mouth upon you and his hands finding each breath of your body they’ve long since memorized, that you let it go entirely.
i just read your “from eden” horror series and it blew my MIND. so good, i can’t believe i waited to read it for so long but it was soooo worth it! already planning on a reread
eeee thank you bb !! ive said this before but it was rly fun to write so im happy you ended up enjoying it :’) you’re so kind tysm!
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thinking about jace and a love-hate relationship with a dragonseed that rhaenyra picked out for extra riders (like hugh and ulf) .. thinking about the tension and the bickering and eventual understanding? give me your thoughts 🧠
kindly, wishing you well, morsel anon
i feel like this concept is so compelling bc in so many ways they’d be mirrors of each other in some ways !
immediately both thinking the other’s attractive but maybe one small miscommunication or moment where dragonseed!r does something improper bc she doesn’t know court processes or manners. & after that they just sort of don’t get off on the right foot even though they have to admit each others intelligence and bravery etc.
& forced courtesy is actually soooo yummy in this scenario like their eyes saying all the things their lips can’t!!
& also not to mention the throughline of tension of jace’s insecurities over birthright, rumors of his bastardy, his desire to prove his worthiness to the throne & his mothers claim BUT how the dragonseed doesn’t fully understand the scope of this angst in him
& dragonseed reader noticing how he is as kind and patient as the songs and tales say with other folk, that even the servants and household like him - but he’s not particularly warm w her. in fact he sometimes seems bothered by her presence etc. when they butt heads even if it’s subtle
& dragonseed r naturally internalizing it and thinking that he’s just prejudiced against the dragonseeds BECAUSE they’re lowborn and thinking they don’t belong near him.
& her just barely missing the jealousy aspect of his aloofness around her. idk maybe i just love misunderstanding tropes and feel like it’s the most realistic way jace would have these kinds of love/hate dynamics
& the bickering would be snide comments and even one-upping each other subtly maybe during war endeavors or just general competition. r would think jace couldn’t understand where they’re coming from even though he is probably the best person that could understand besides other seeds yk
& once they eventually get along it’s mostly bc the bickering turns into good hearted needling that they both act awkward about but def think about constantly. i feel like due to his tragic nature (™️) people often forget jace likes to tease & joke & have a good time lmao.
& i feel like once his princely demeanor is gone a bit, in private the reader would feel much more comfortable around him & theyd even start unintentionally flirting or being very familiar. idk what im saying i don’t know anything
& once that initial discomfort & disdain fades they’d become close quick. & feelings would be there from the start, so wrapped in a kind of guilt or that ‘this is wrong’/‘duty & honor’/intense desire is a great point of tension too. i think once they get close i think they’d fall v quick for each other idk
this also made me start thinking abt jace & a dragonseed being sent together to harrenhal (an au i suppose in which they’re there post-KL to watch it over while the new lordship remains undecided/there’s unrest in riverlands and rhaenyra wants dragons close for suppression purposes)… they don’t rly get along, but it’s not vicious. some quips here & there but never enough to point fingers, just enough to agitate the other. things are awkward & not to mention the odd dreams they’ve both been having of each other…
& then them essentially being forced to spend time together & their preconceived notions of each other wear down until they realize it’s sort of a mirror. & then their romance is v inevitable :)
sorry if this was confusing i have a splitting headache !! <3 hope you’re well morsel
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This isn’t really a ask !! but I wanna tell you how much I appreciate your writing like holy. I’ve never read such a good fanfiction until I stumbled upon your blog. Genuinely you’re writing is heaven.

heyyyy thank you so much ! this is incredibly kind & im v v happy you've enjoyed my works <3 ill have more for u soon !!
Jacaerys Velaryon x fem!mermaid!reader [no use of y/n]
Word count: 9k
Summary: Fix-it fic in the aftermath of 03x01.
You do not know what’s bringing you so far from your home, across the Narrow Sea, but you stumble upon a beautiful, injured young man and decide to save him.
Warnings: description of violence against women (mermaids), physical and emotional hurt/comfort, reader is insecure about her appearance as a mermaid.
a/n: How are we coping guys? I’m in such deep denial I decided Jace doesn’t die :) I really hope you’re going to enjoy this story, I hadn’t been so productive writing non-fiction since I started my master’s dissertation.
feedback is welcome and appreciated <3
(images are taken from pinterest)
You could not tell how long it had been since you had last ventured so far from your cave.
You had not needed to, after all. Why would you leave the warm shore and its idyllic light blue hues to face the dark, deep waters of the Narrow Sea and its violent tides? There was nothing of value there; the fish were too bitter, the currents too strong – you were built for shallow waters, carved to enjoy the softness of the laced patterns made by the sun rays on the clear sand, to feast on urchins and relish in the colours of corals. To live far from mariners and their boats, near the surface without reaching it, if not for the thrill of slithering your upper body out of the water to feel the hot air against your skin before plunging back into your realm.
And yet, something – someone – had called you on the other side of the Narrow Sea. A shiver that had run through your entire body from your hair to your tail fin. The feeling was not painful per se, at most uncomfortable: the urge that had taken over you made you believe you were going to die if you did not go, like you were a bubble about to burst. There was no sensible explanation for this overtaking compulsion, no legend mentioned foreseer merfolk, but you did not care for rationality. You cared for action.
In a heartbeat, you were gone from your cave with nothing but your talisman necklace, an opalescent seashell, the last connection to your people after you elected a life of loneliness – of tranquillity, you argued. As soon as you had crossed the border of your lagoon, you had been reminded of your nature as a shallow-water mermaid. You were maladapted for the cold and abyssal sea: your thin tail lacked power, and the current made every push a fight; your fins were too long and made you an easy prey to catch for the predators of the place; your pupils weren’t adjusted for such darkness and turned your travel into a haphazard route.
You were careful not to go too deep, afraid of what you might encounter there, but you could not rejoin the surface, where navigating would be easier because of the boats. You had not seen them, couldn’t identify how many there were, but they stirred the water from miles away. That was the one rule you had been taught from your birth – stay away from men and their rumble. As a child, you used to run back to your sisters the moment you sensed the smallest ripple above your head.
Men were trouble.
You had heard many tales growing up, and they had gotten more graphic as you had gotten older. Stories of mermaids hunted, harpooned and captured outside of the water. Sailors laughing at their helplessness and degrading them in every possible way. Laughing at their “fishy smell” while they reeked of alcohol. They found the girls horrible. Repulsive. Abominations that should have been exterminated long ago. That did not stop them from grabbing them by the hair and-
Apparently, mermaid fins were worth enough to turn the poorest man into a king.
You shuddered, and you could not tell if it was from the coldness of the sea or the images your mind had conjured. The roar of the boats was endless, stretching on for miles as you kept on fighting your nature. You had closed your eyes to save energy, not that they were very useful at such a depth. You did not need to see anyway. Something greater was guiding you – instinct, premonition; you were not sure of its nature. All you knew was that the fire in your stomach was growing stronger with each wag of your tail. And, as your brain was telling you to turn away and regain the safety of your cave on the spot, you kept going towards the havoc.
As you struggled towards your destination, something strange happened – the sea calmed down. The overwhelming yet regular rhythm of the oars decreased before completely stopping as you reached shallower water, relief flooding your system.
You remained careful. An absence of boats did not equate to an absence of men. They could be malicious and cowardly, creating a trap and waiting for you to rush into your demise. You skidded between the misshapen rocks as low as you could, your tail caressing the sand, your hair gently haloing around your head. Something was off with the water, and not in the same way as the sea. The sea was scary; it was unfamiliar and destructive. But this? This should have felt good, the same clear water you were used to, if not for a little colder.
It was not clear enough, though. Some sort of haze was forbidding you from seeing as acutely as you should have, and when you opened your mouth and let it flood down your throat, its taste was bitter and metallic. Without dropping your guard, you hurried up. The faster you would find whoever called you, the faster you could leave this mess.
You kept weaving along the sandbank, exiting the thin passage you had entered to reach a wider space. There was no trap awaiting you at the end of the narrow crossing, but what you faced was not any better. In front of you was laying the grimmest, most desolate landscape you had ever laid eyes upon. A morbid, macabre, distinctly man-made spectacle.
Ships were broken down into pieces, sinking under the weight of the wet wood, torn flags sadly waving with the current, bitter symbols of the failure of their houses. Engraved swords, decorated armours, every statement of wealth now revealed its true nature as tokens of hubris, that of the men now floating. Mouth agape, eyes widened with terror, their skin had turned into a gradient of grey and blue, if not for the red holes and scratches that scattered their bodies. From those injuries emerged dark clouds of blood that tainted the water around them and blurred your sight, already affected by the dust and embers floating across the sea.
Overwhelmed by your surroundings, you stayed still. You felt dirty, like the muddy water was sticking to your skin and tainting you with the horrors it carried. There was nothing to salvage in this desolate landscape, yet your guts were telling you to keep looking for something, anything. Perhaps one of the wrecks contained a rare treasure, a beautiful pearl, a sacred companion. Beauty in the midst of disaster.
You dove a little deeper, where the sand was still whisked into pale curls. There was a shiny shape a little further which you couldn’t quite make out even as you squinted your eyes. It was partially hidden by the sand and wooden planks, but you were sure it was organic. The way it reflected the light reminded you of your own tail and its thin scales, which seemed to almost change colours as you glided underwater.
Carefully, you made your way towards the mass that grew bigger with each wag of your tail. The creature was still, though you did not want to assume its death and be surprised by an attack – these foreign waters might be home to some strange scavengers that would mistake you for a part of the carrion left by the disaster that had occurred. And, based on its size, it could kill you in one powerful bite.
The creature never moved. As you got a better look at it, an insidious doubt crept along your spine. The scales had led you to assume it was a marine creature, but as you saw its tail, you couldn’t help but notice the lack of fins. There was something distinctly terrestrial about it.
That was when you saw them.
The wings.
You had never seen a dragon before, but the elders had recounted tales of those giant apex predators terrorising the land, catching cattle with their claws before charring it by spouting fire. Formidable hunters and mounts, masters of the air and of the land, even the sea could not protect you from them – the heat of their flames could burn you as you lay under the surface. That was the second rule that you had kept from your people: when those titans would come again to scorch the earth, dive as deep as you can.
That dragon, however, did not look ferocious. It looked weak, powerless, dead. What a strange sight that was, to see a terrifying creature lie helpless on the sand with glassy eyes. Even in this state, there was a certain wild majesty to it. Whichever god had created them had done it with great care, shaping them to be as ferocious and yet as elegant as possible, all soft edges and sharp lines. Its stillness was uncomfortable; such a powerful brute was fashioned for movement.
There was something uncanny about its lifeless gaze and shocked expression. You had never assumed dragons could show emotions, but you would be blind if you missed the suffering and fear in this creature’s eyes. You repressed a shudder. What could have possibly scared the one beast at the top of the food chain? Clenching your jaw, you followed its gaze, unsure of what to expect. A giant, bloodthirsty monster? A legendary being that spawned from the gods? Something that had to be bigger, eerier, something that would perhaps be the last vision before you met your inevitable end.
Definitely not a man afloat.
You knew it when you saw him. That calling that had brought you here had materialised into this frail frame drifting in the soiled water, leaving wreaths of blood in its wake. Time slowed around you as you observed the gentle motion of his hair, the spasm of his fingers, the bubbles that escaped his mouth…
Wait.
You rushed towards the man, throwing away all of your doubts and anxieties. If a miracle had protected him so far, every second counted towards his survival. You weren’t even sure why you were so eager to save him in the first place – he was a man, like all others, feasting on blood and dominance. But he looked so fragile at this moment, so… human, in all of their weaknesses. The awkwardness of their legs, the limits of their lungs. You pressed two fingers against his wrist; his skin was cold and wrinkled by the water, but you could feel it, a faint, almost nonexistent pulse. You rushed him out of the water.
The fresh air smelled like smoke, and you choked on the thick, grey mist left by the battle that had taken place. You furrowed your brows, shrugging away your own unease as you watched the man expectantly. His mouth opened on its own, his face still unconscious, and you stared at the shape of his throat as his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. A glimmer of hope shone in your eyes, but it disappeared as fast as it came. The man was not breathing, at least not breathing clearly. Instead, he let out a gargling sound as blood spewed out of the side of his neck, where an arrow was stuck.
The head of the arrow was not lodged too deep, but it was in a compromising spot. Near the jugular, without piercing it totally – otherwise he’d already be dead. The pressure from the water had slowed the bleeding down, but now that he was out in the open, you had to think fast and act even faster.
Your options were limited: you needed to properly bandage his neck, which wouldn’t be too hard if you were back home, where you knew every medicinal plant and alga like the back of your hand. Here, it would be more uncertain. However, you doubted you could reach your cave in time to save him. The current should push you in the right direction, but the additional weight of the man and his thick and soaked clothes would slow you down.
You settled on a compromise, patching him up well enough for him to survive the journey to your cave and properly tending to his injuries there. Yeah. That sounded perfect, that was going to work.
Gathering your strength, you hauled him up on a rock, careful not to push any of the arrows deeper. He had been lucky; two of the arrows had been stopped by his elegant leather clothing, and you could dislodge them with little difficulty. They left behind holes in the luxurious fabric – such a shame when they had been sewn with visible care – but had not reached the skin beneath. The third arrow, the one that had pierced the skin of his throat, represented a bigger threat. You could not remove it yet; that would be a death sentence: he would bleed out in a matter of minutes. Your best shot was at shortening its shaft to ease travelling and sealing the wound as tight as you could.
You plunged, trying not to let panic get the best of you. You took deep breaths to slow your frantic heartbeat, which had the opposite effect as you gagged on the bloody water. Tears prickled your eyes and you ignored them, reaching the soft sand and searching for seaweeds long enough to bandage the man. You had to be quick; you did not enjoy leaving him on his own, exposed and vulnerable. The leaves in the area were annoyingly short – sea life here was nowhere near as lush as it was back home, and you were quick to blame humans for this – but you managed to gather a small harvest. You also grabbed a sharp stone to cut the shaft of the arrow.
Praying you had not taken too long, you rushed back to the surface. You could see that the man’s chest was barely rising and falling, but the wheezing sound he made meant he was still breathing. With steady hands, you got to work. This was not your first time tending wounds – you had had to assist some of your people after they escaped fishermen. You had seen ugly injuries, broken bones, punctured tails; you had seen despair and pain in the eyes of your peers; yet you had never felt so helpless. You had never been on your own to carry the responsibility of saving someone, especially a human. Humans were so fragile, an intricate assembly of bones so small you did not understand how they could stand and walk without breaking into two.
The man did not fight back against your foreign touch. You saw the muscles of his face twitching as you cleaned and swathed his skin, but it was not enough to stir him into consciousness. Back when you were stitching up merfolk, you remembered wishing for them to stop fighting back and hissing at you, but you found yourself wishing the man was more expressive. You could not tell whether you were hurting him or not, whether you were aggravating his state or helping. He was still breathing. You took it as a good sign.
The world around you had gone still. The sun was setting towards the horizon, piercing through the light grey clouds that formed a lid above your head, adding to the oppressive feeling that reached you whenever your bust left the water. Seagulls were hovering, their screeches piercing the silence and raising goosebumps along your skin. You wanted to reach your cave before nighttime.
Next to you, the man groaned. A muttered “sorry” escaped your lips before you could repress it, but you received no answer. You sighed as you closed your arms around the man; his weight less bothersome once you immersed his body, trying to find a position that allowed you to keep his head out of the water while swimming comfortably.
The current was going in the right direction. That was the only positive element you could find in the journey back home. Carrying a human while speeding through the waves was tedious and exhausting; it forced you to dance with the surface of the sea, an awkward rhythm you failed to find. As the sky turned to liquid lava with beautiful and vivid shades of red and orange, the tide grew stronger. Your arms and your tail were sore, begging for a break you could not afford to take, not when you could see your bandage peeling off, not when the water was getting colder and the man’s lips bluer. If you did not hurry up, all of your effort would be reduced to nothing.
You kept pushing.
Relief flooded over you when the waters turned calm at once. Softer. Warmer. You were back in your lagoon and its shallowness had never felt more comforting. Gathering the last bits of energy in your body, you rushed and laid the man on the white stony islet that stood in the middle of your cave before plunging into the water and shaking the atrophy of your muscles away. Today had been surreal, and you needed this moment of immersion to ground yourself. You could have slept for a full day, perhaps two, but you had to tend to your unconscious patient first.
It was much easier here. You could have found everything you needed with your eyes closed – medicinal plants, spots of clean water, oysters and urchins for the moment the man would wake up and need to regain his strength; you even took the time to collect large seashells and fill them with clear water. You felt serene, acting almost instinctively. You did not need to overthink; you just let your meticulous hands cut, cleanse, bandage, and skim. His skin was cold and smooth, ashen if not for the dark, deep red of the wound.
It was not a pretty injury, but it seemed clean. There were no signs of infection, and you hoped it would mean a quick recovery. You had not really considered the after; you assumed the man would stay here until he would feel ready to go his own way, find a connection to civilisation, a hamlet he would call home. For now, he was still asleep, breathing more easily now that you had removed the arrow from his neck and some layers of heavy, soaked fabric. His hair was drying, small curls falling on his forehead.
Without noticing it, you gently pushed his hair behind his ear. The man shuddered and you plunged back into the water, observing him through the ripples, but he did not wake up. You lifted your head up in the air again, keeping your distance. Bathed in the cold, soft light of the moon, you realised that he was pretty. Very pretty. Actually, you did not know men could be pretty.
Fair to say, you had not seen many of them, but all of the ones that had crossed your path had been carved by the salt of the sea with hollowed cheeks, raw skin and scruffy beards. They reeked of sweat and alcohol for miles. This man was the opposite. Everything in his appearance felt neat, from the opulence of his clothes to his shaven jaw. His features looked like carved marble with high cheekbones and a sharp jaw. There was something regal, almost holy about him. Was this why you had felt drawn towards him in the first place, to save an emissary from the heavens?
He slept during the entire following day, undisturbed by the warmth of the sun that infiltrated the cave from the small gaps between the rocks. You checked on him from time to time, making sure his neck was healing nicely – and sighing with relief when you saw that the wound was looking better – and leaving him some fresh food and water in case he woke up while you were away. He was a beautiful sight, surrounded by coral formations and reeds, seashells and moss. You took pride in how you had turned your cave into a peaceful haven, and for the first time, you considered the fact that your hard work could be appreciated by someone else.
Other than your regular visits, you tried to go through your day as usual. You removed undesirable seaweeds from your underwater garden and collected seashells to make jewellery. You were remarkably inefficient. No matter how you tried to keep your hands busy, your mind wandered back to the man in your cave, your beautiful stranger, your mysterious envoy. Blush crept up your neck; never had you been in such a state of frenzy, and for what, a human? Those who forced you to hide in caves, who treated you as exotic goods, those you had sworn never to approach.
This one was not a huge threat, though.
You were standing at the entrance of the cave when the sun set. It had always been your favourite moment of the day, the moment the sky and the sea merged into honey, golden and shiny. You wished you could freeze time and leave the world bathed in this warm light ad vitam aeternam, when everything was softer. Lying lazily against a tall rock, you did not realise you had started singing.
Singing was part of your nature. How could it not be, when you were surrounded by the slow murmur of the waves, the high shriek of the birds, the foreign tune of the whales? The universe was an orchestra and you were one of its most willing instruments, harmonising seamlessly with the wilderness, reaching highs and lows effortlessly. Your voice was not a danger, at least not in the way it was presented in myths. It was tantalising, perhaps, but it did not drive men insane – they did that part on their own. They could enjoy your art if only they set aside their lust for flesh and for glory.
Singing meant harmony. It meant grounding, painting the big picture, being aware of the world around you. You forgot yourself a little in those moments; you were one with the rock you rested your elbows against, with the gentle rhythm of the waves against your tail, with the softness of the sand under your fins.
A disturbance broke the moment. It was faint, you probably would not have heard it if you had not been so keenly attentive to your surroundings, but it was here; the rolling of gravel beneath feet at an unsteady rhythm. You plunged. He was awake.
“Hello?” His voice was hoarse, and you heard him clear his throat with a painful, high-pitched inspiration. “I- I heard you.”
You stayed hidden, in apnoea. The footsteps became louder, and you could visualise the man reaching the edge of the ground, contemplating the endless stretch of water in front of his eyes and the rocks that emerged from it to form abstract statues. And you, pressed against one of them, just out of his sight. He muttered some unintelligible words.
“Thank you for the bandage and for the food. I’d just like to know where I am. Guess that’s all I wanted to say.”
And with this, he walked back into the depths of the cave.
You breathed out with relief. Relief that he was alive, of course, but also relief that he had not spotted you. That was silly; you had never thought you’d care about a human’s opinion of you. But everything about him was so perfect, it made you painfully aware of all of your differences, everything about your appearance which you had considered normal, until you had not. The words your people had reported back to you after their escape.
How your tail was grotesque. Your scales, sticky. Your fins, monstrous. You were a rotten fish, a terrifying creature. A freak.
You did not want to see the weight of disappointment in the man’s eyes when he would lay eyes on his saviour.
You started acting differently. You stayed underwater, paying close attention to the sounds coming from the cave – the echo in the place had never proven more useful. You waited for silence to fill the space to check on his injury and bring him food and water, careful not to linger for too long. You took care of your lagoon. You settled back into a routine, a strange routine, granted, one that gave you the feeling you were tiptoeing in your own territory, but a routine nonetheless.
You kept on singing every evening. That was one concession you could not make, giving up on this moment for the sake of being discreet. You stayed hidden behind your rock, but your voice did not falter once. You knew he was listening; you could hear the crush of pebbles under his footsteps, which were getting firmer and more self-assured every day. You did not mind his presence; you were not trying to make him believe he was alone; you were just avoiding his gaze.
He’d thank you for the food after your song. That was the only form of communication you shared. A melody and an acknowledgement. You did not ask for more.
Your cat and mouse dance went on for about a week. Then, on one of those nights when the heat seemed thick and sticky as treacle, your little bubble of comfort burst.
Everything had started the same as usual: you had waited for the moon to rise to tend to your guest. It was remarkably dark, the orb of night forming but a thin crescent, like a slit of light in the navy blue sky. Had you not known your cave by heart, you would probably have stumbled upon one of the irregularities of the sandbank. You placed oysters with delicacy alongside something new, a couple of fruits you had found a little further along the coastline. It had not been easy harvesting them, but you hoped it would prove a welcome change of diet for the man.
You looked away for a second. Just a glance outside the cave, alerted by an unexpected noise. When you turned back to the man, his eyes were on you.
“I finally got you,” he whispered, barely audible above the sound of your heartbeat pulsing.
You tried to rationalise your racing thoughts. You back against the little light that had penetrated the obscure cave, he could not see you. At best, he could perhaps make out your frame, but nothing else. Hell, you could barely see the glint of his eyes, and you had heard many times that humans had particularly weak night vision.
“I was beginning to think I had made you up,” he added. His voice was soft, confessional. “My mysterious saviour.”
“You don’t want to see me,” you murmured back in a voice you did not recognise. “I’m glad to see you’re healing nicely.”
“The more you hide, the more curious I get.” A thin smile brightened his features. “Where am I?”
“A cave, somewhere in the Narrow Sea. I’m not exactly familiar with human geography.”
“So that’s true?” His voice got a little louder. “Mermaids really do exist? And here I thought it was all a myth created by sailors going crazy.”
You scoffed. “Well, unless you’re going insane, I’m very much real.”
“Who knows. Maybe I’m dead, and I’m hallucinating you.” There was an edge to his voice, a tint of bitterness. “I really thought my time had come.”
You kept quiet. What were you supposed to answer to this? “Oh, actually, you survived because I felt drawn towards you with no explanation and I decided to save you”? He’d think you were a madwoman. Plus, you weren’t exactly comfortable chit-chatting with your guest. You were desperate for some privacy and some sleep.
“I guess it was not”, you finally said under your breath. “I should go.”
You started swimming towards the entrance of the cave in a hurry, spraying foam around you, when you heard the man again.
“Wait.” He had not been loud or demanding, yet you felt compelled to stop and look at him over your shoulder. It was fascinating to see how he could speak with both authority and gentleness. “I don’t even know who you are. My name is Jacearys.”
You nodded and told him your name. It would have been silly not to, at this point. It was just a name; it did not mean anything.
He repeated your name softly, and you could not help but shiver as you heard it roll off his tongue so easily. It had been so long since anyone had called you by your name that you had thought it would feel strange, alien. It did not. In fact, it felt like he was meant to say it.
“Thank you,” he repeated your name and waved. “For everything.”
You waved back and plunged into the water.
You were ready to rule this off as a one-time incident, a night of insomnia on his part, a lack of care on yours. Instead, it became a ritual. Almost every night, you would find him awake, his gaze lingering to decipher your shape as you carefully insisted on turning your back to the moon. He kept on making small talk, trying to understand how he had ended up here and, more importantly, who you were. Your short, enigmatic answers did not discourage him. If anything, he seemed to relish this little game. He was growing more curious with every shrug and monosyllabic sentence.
He started to grow on you, and you hated that. Hated that you began looking forward to nighttime, to the intimate moment you’d share in the dark. Hated that you were charmed not just by his regal appearance, but also by his bright personality. Hated that you actually wanted to learn more about him and began shooting back questions. And as he wore you down, you opened up like a pearl oyster. And so did he.
Jace – he had told you to call him like this – was a prince. An actual, real-life prince. Well, it was a little more complicated. He told you about the ongoing war, the usurper, and how he had been fighting for his mother on this dreadful day. In exchange, you told him about the seaweeds that you had used to bandage him, and all of the medicinal plants that grew underwater. He listened to you with attention, picking up on your explanations to learn more. It was strange, to be heard in such an intense manner, to feel like what you said mattered to someone.
“Could you show me your garden one day?” He asked
You froze. You wanted to say yes, you dreamed of it, of entangling your hands and guiding him through the clear water of the lagoon and teaching him everything you knew. You almost said yes, but the words died in your throat. “I don’t know if this would be safe for humans,” you answered instead, the words leaving a sour aftertaste in your mouth.
That was a lie. Most of your crops required a lot of light and were buried in remarkably shallow spots where Jace could probably walk. You had spoken with enough conviction, however, for him not to notice your dishonesty, and he accepted your answer without insisting. He was sitting at the edge of the islet, mindlessly dipping his fingers in the water, drawing abstract shapes, unaware of the way he was hypnotising you.
Days went by. You talked about your respective families, surprised to see that Jace could one-up your large, bizarre family lore. He told you about Aegon’s conquest of Westeros and his heirs, about his mother and how much he admired her and wanted to keep her safe, about his brothers. His gaze saddened when he mentioned Luce, and you took his hand without even realising it. It was warm under yours, slightly calloused but soft where it mattered. He did not rebuff you.
In exchange, you told him about your folk, how family meant more than bloodline. Babies were carried from arm to arm, every member of the clan acting as a sort of aunt or uncle. Days were joyous, filled with games and songs. It was a peaceful way of growing up, so different from Jace’s grim, dark castles.
“So why did you leave?” He asked after a moment of silence.
“When I grew up, I started to feel… I don’t know.” You sighed. “Maladjusted? I wanted calm and silence, and to do things at my own pace. They did not like my tendency to solitude, and I did not like how dependent they all were. Having to rely on others made me feel weak.”
“You’re never going to go back?”
You shrugged. “I’m not sure. I would probably be welcomed if I did – maybe not at first, but merfolks are not resentful. Perhaps one day I’ll miss their antics. For now I enjoy my tranquillity.”
“Not too bothered that I came along to disturb it?”
“No,” you answered a little too quickly to your own liking. You had grown accustomed to Jace so easily it had altered your view on your life on a fundamental level. You used to think of yourself as a lone wolf, but a feeling of dread would creep up your spine when you considered the possibility of Jace leaving. The loneliness you had cherished for years now had an acidic aftertaste, and you weren’t certain you could go back to your routine without the sound of his feet against the gravel and your late-night conversations. You knew he would leave one day; he wasn’t your captive. You just tried not to think about it too much.
Maybe he understood the trouble that weighed your silence, because he came a little closer – though not close enough for you to flinch and retreat further in the darkness – and whispered, “good, then. I’d feel bad if I was overstaying my welcome.”
One night, you finally gathered the strength to ask him the burning question which had been quietly on your lips for the whole time since you had seen him in the water, above the gigantic, scaly creature.
“Did you have a dragon?”
You already suspected the answer, and the sadness that struck his features made you regret you had not bitten your words.
“Yes,” he eventually whispered, falling promptly into silence.
You were about to apologise for your prying when he opened his mouth again. “His name was Vermax. I’ve known him since I was a child; it’s like he’s always been part of my life. He was incredibly beautiful and so smart as well. You should have seen him gliding in the air and searing the sky.”
He kept on talking, and you did not interrupt him. He told you about the adrenaline rush he’d feel when he went for a stroll with his dragon. How he had taught him to obey his very order. Describing in great detail the intricate lacing of his scales, the fire in his eyes. Admiration showed through his voice, but the trembling notes at the end of his words revealed something deeper.
“Maybe… I can’t help thinking that maybe if Vermax had not listened to me so well during the battle, if he hadn’t changed course the moment I told him not to attack the other dragon, he’d still be alive.” He explained how Vermax had been trapped underwater, leaving no choice but to abandon him to the depths of the Gullet. You did not comment on the tears that prickled his eyes, but your hand found his.
That was the only form of physical contact between the two of you. Your hand dampening his, your coldness calming down his heat, fire and water finding a middle ground instead of destroying each other.
“Those few seconds between the moment I let go of Vermax and the moment I got shot were the most horrible of my life,” he confessed. “A Targaryen is nothing without a dragon. People love saying we are closer to gods than to men, but that’s because we have them. Without dragons, we are just power-hungry maniacs.” He let out a humourless laugh. “At that moment, I thought I was a disgrace, that maybe death was my best shot. That if I made it out alive, my mother would kill me upon my return.”
“That’s not true,” you said under your breath.
“I know. I knew when I felt that arrow piercing my skin. She would be angry at me, of course, but I realised how ludicrous I had been thinking death would be some kind of deliverance. She would have to mourn yet another son, and it was all my fault. Fate works in a funny way, don’t you think? I spent what felt like an eternity waiting for death to hit me, and it’s only when it did that I realised how much I wanted to live.”
“And you did.”
Jace nodded and lightly pressed your hand. “And I did. Thanks to you.”
Silence settled between you two. It seemed that it always found its way to slither inside the cave. It did not feel awkward, though. Silence was a blanket wrapping around you, comfortable and familiar. In these moments, you just took in Jace’s presence – the speed at which his chest went up and down, much faster than yours; the warmth that emanated from his skin. You could feel his gaze on your shadowy frame, trying to make sense out of your features without ever deciphering them.
“Why do you always come by night?” He finally broke the stillness in the cave.
Your stomach dropped, and you removed your hand instantly, like the contact had started burning you. Turned out, your desire to know the other better could lead you both to make a faux pas.
You considered lying. It was easy, tempting, a low-hanging fruit. Only, you could not think of a single excuse that he would not see right through. It had been easier to lie by omission when you were two strangers, but now that you had grown accustomed to one another, you were convinced he could read your voice like an open book. It felt wrong, too, lying to him after he had shown so much vulnerability and talked to you about the deepest, darkest feelings that had haunted his heart. He deserved to know.
“I don’t want you to see me.”
He arched his brows, a thin wrinkle appearing on his forehead. A chuckle escaped his lips. “And why is that?”
“I don’t want you to think I’m a monster,” you answered after a pause.
“What?”
You weren’t sure if his question came from disbelief or from the fact that you had slurred those words at a remarkably low tone. You cleared your throat and repeated your answer so that he could hear it. His frown deepened.
“You’re a mermaid, aren’t you? I was always told mermaids were beautiful.”
You sighed, trying to keep your composure. “Men love saying this until they see one and decide she’s so ugly they should kill her.” The more you spoke, the less control you had over your voice, which trembled with anger. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, they find us attractive enough to violate us, but that doesn’t stop them from degrading everything about our appearance. We’re nothing but goods to men, goods to use and to sell for glory. A good mermaid is a dead mermaid.”
Jace kept quiet as you continued your rant. “I’d rather keep you from the horrible vision I would offer, so you can keep on picturing me however you want. Make me perfect, make me your fantasy, ignore the disappointing truth. I think it’s better for both of us.”
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he took in your words. The cave was colder now; the light of the moon that used to embrace you with tenderness had turned unforgiving, too harsh, too white, too impersonal. You wanted to leave and hide underwater until your skin had forgotten the caress of its rays.
“I had no idea you were treated like this.”
You huffed, arms crossed over your chest. “Jace,” you sounded more cutting than you wanted to, but his question had opened the valves to the rage that had built up within you since you had first heard of one of your sisters’ fates. “Really? Aren’t you a Velaryon?”
If you hurt Jace on this evening, he did not hold it against you. You did not hold his words against him either. You stood a little further from the ground, he sat a little further from the water. There was no contact, no hand-holding, but no thick, palpable awkwardness either. You both knew which subjects to keep off the table.
Part of you wished you’d stayed angry at the man. It would have been easier to deal with him if the blood pumping in your veins whenever you saw him came from resentment rather than infatuation. Because, yes, that was what it was. Infatuation, a stupid, almost teenage crush which you could not get rid of.
You wondered if he had noticed your feelings – if he did, he did not let it slip. He was effortlessly charming, listening to your stories with interest and blowing you away with his tales. And he made you laugh – though you did not know if he was really funny or if you were desperately head over heels, pathetically giggling at his words.
He was doing better every day. His wounds were turning into thin, red scars that shone under the moonlight but did not threaten to bleed or reopen, and he was recovering his strength. You could sense he was craving more movement, limited by the little islet of the cave. He was pacing back and forth for hours, sometimes risking an arm into the water, but he never plunged into the lagoon.
Until he did.
It happened on a drizzling afternoon. The clouds were hanging low and heavy, painting your entire world with shades of grey. You loved the rain. You loved floating right under the surface of the lagoon and watching the droplets of water fall into small, harmonious ripples and soft music. But, on this day, you could not afford the leisure. Invasive seaweeds were threatening your garden, and you could lose years of hard work if you did not intervene on the spot.
You heard him before you saw him. Your hands were buried in the dampened sand, brows furrowed with focus, when the distinctive sounds of a body splitting through the water got your attention. You did a full body turn, apprehension taking over you, when you ended up face to face with Jace. He had left his armour in the cave and was standing there, waist deep in the lagoon and messy, soaked hair trickling down his toned, bare chest.
He opened his mouth and then closed it, like a fish out of the water. Your first instinct was to hide, but the water was too shallow, too clear, too revealing. It was too late.
“I- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Jace’s words hung in the air. He kept looking at you, taking in every little detail – the way your scales changed colours with each gentle wag of your tail, the see-through lacing of your fins and the way they emerged from your body like mountain ranges. The way your skin merged in chaotic patterns with your animal features, like the two parts were fighting a chaotic battle for dominance. You crossed your arms over your chest as if they would protect you, hide any part of you to the man. You had never felt more naked or vulnerable than at this moment.
This simple movement brought his eyes up to your torso, and he stopped there for a second before reprising his ascension, cheeks reddening. When his eyes reached your face, the expression he read there made him wince, and you gritted your teeth.
“I asked you for one thing, Jace, one thing,” your voice was sharp, unforgiving.
“I did not know you were there,” he protested, his gaze still fixated on your face, unreadable.
You scoffed. “You could have closed your eyes. Looked away. Swam in another direction.”
Guilt softened his features, and he let go of the view you offered to stare at the water around his waist, the little ripples he made with each movement, the blur of his legs underneath the surface. This should have been simple, yet it seemed like tearing his eyes away from you was the most taxing action he’d ever performed. He did not move further, and neither did you. Gently, the rain stopped, as if the clouds did not want to stand witness to the scene.
“You’re nothing like a monster,” he finally said, his words starting a fire across your body. You did not answer – you did not know what to say. His eyes still on the water, he kept going. “I think sailors are scared, but not because you are ugly. You are too majestic.”
“So…” You spoke carefully, making sure you heard him right, “are you scared of me?”
He did not move his face, but his eyes flickered back to you, brightened by a glint which took your breath away. A smug smile stretched his lips when he answered.
“I’m a prince, not a sailor.”
You swam towards him without even realising it, until he was within reach. He raised a hand near a patch of scales on your arm, silently asking you for permission. You gave a quick nod, and his fingers brushed the zone. His hands were warm, softened by the sea, but they raised goosebumps along the rest of your skin.
“Do you know what you remind me of?” He whispered, his eyes studying your arm. He took your silence as an answer. “Of a dragon. The way your scales reflect sunlight is identical to theirs. The colour is impossible to pin down.”
“Maybe I’m the closest thing the lagoon has come to a dragon. I’m prey in the deep ocean, but I’m the apex predator here.”
Jace’s smile grew and he met your eyes. “Should I fear for my life, then?”
You marked a teasing pause. All of your anger had receded under the ardour of his gentle scrutiny, leaving only a lingering warmth in your stomach. His fingers were gentle on your arm, applying barely any pressure, and you whined when he let you go.
“Don’t,” you said, both as an answer to his question and an order to his hand, which found yours instead, his eyes darker than you had ever seen them, pupils so dilated they almost entirely masked the rest of his irises.
That’s when the realisation washed over you like a cold shower, which put out the fire under your skin.
The adoration you could see in his eyes was perhaps even worse than if you had scared him off. Because now, you had to come to terms with the fact that the man who got your heart racing, who could reduce you to a babbling mess in one look, felt the same.
He was a man. A prince. An heir to the Iron Throne, even. He should be leading armies and political councils, instead of playing in the water with you. He was destined for greatness; you were yearning for anonymity.
You could not keep him here. It was egoistical. Your folks had always reproached you for it, your tendency to do things on your own, to follow only your own flow when everyone was always acting as a shoal. That was why you had left, at the end of the day. Your desire for calm was only the consequence of your own selfishness, in their eyes.
That was your one opportunity to prove them wrong and make things right.
“You can swim,” you stated, words heavy on your tongue. He chuckled, surprised.
“Nice observation.”
You shook your head, panic gnawing at your insides. “No, I mean. You can swim, you can reach the coast, you can find a boat to Westeros.”
Jace frowned, eyes travelling over your face to read your expression. “Do you want me to leave?”
“No!” You answered just a second too fast. “I mean… I’m not saying I want you to, but you have a war to win, duties, your mother, a betrothed…”
The confusion and hurt on his face shut you up.
“They all think I’m dead.” He said. “They’re grieving me, I don’t know if I can just… come back like this.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s so much more complicated than that. Plus, I need to be careful, supporters of the usurper are everywhere and would be more than pleased to bring him my severed head.”
“Oh…”
He let his arm go limp by his side, apprehensive. “Are you sure you are alright? Have I done something wrong? I’m really sorry, like I said, I did not mean to-”
“Jace,” you stopped him. “You did not do anything. I mean, you did, but obviously my fears were not founded.” You let out a shy chuckle.
“What is it then?” He inquired.
You blinked slowly, as if in a dazed state. As the evening settled, the world slowly turned golden around you, the lagoon shimmering around your bodies. You fiddled with your hair, trying to put some order in your thoughts to no avail. Jace was still waiting patiently, eyes inquiring but not prying.
“I…” The last dam in your mind broke down, and words started flowing out of your control. “I didn’t stumble upon you like I said I had. I can’t explain why, but I swam all the way to the Gullet not knowing what for until I saw you. There’s… There’s a connection, like a thread that was linking me to you. And I like you, Jace. I know it’s wrong because you’re a human, and you’re a Prince, and you deserve better than what I can offer, but I still like you. I should have told you earlier; you deserved to know, but I was so scared of ruining everything.”
Your voice died in your throat. For a moment, you could not bring yourself to look at him, but when you did, you did not see the disappointment or the disgust you expected to find. Instead, Jace seemed to be in awe, mouth agape, eyes just a little too wide open, like a form of mania had taken over him.
“I called for you.” He said. “When the arrow struck, when I realised I didn’t want to die, I called on the Gods, all of them, any of them, begging to be saved. And you came. I… I don’t know which of the Seven decided to access my request, but I know they sent you; I knew it from the first time I heard you sing. It was written by the Gods.”
You looked up at him and softened at the glint of mischief in his eyes. He pushed back a strand of hair that was falling in front of your eyes, and you melted in his gentle touch.
“All this time,” he kept going, his voice barely over a whisper, “I was hoping that you were feeling this link.”
A giggle escaped your lips, drawing Jace’s eyes towards them. “So you had not noticed I was blushing like an idiot all the time,” you answered.
“To be fair, you made it really hard for me to see your face.”
You bit your lip. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult, but I was so scared from the moment I caught feelings towards you. I couldn’t undo all this stuff I had learned as a kid…”
“Shh,” Jace interrupted you. “It’s okay. I get it.”
Silence settled between you, familiar and serene. You were mere inches away from each other, not touching, tension so thick you could cut it with a knife.
“Maybe one day, when the war is over,” he whispered, face serious, voice barely audible above the sounds of the sea, “if you feel like going on an adventure, I could show you where I’m from.”
“I’ve travelled far from my lagoon to reach you; I could do it again.” He crossed the invisible border that stretched between you two as his hand cupped your cheek, and you covered it with your own to keep it there. The ghost of a smile lingered on his lips before he answered.
“But, in the meantime, I could stay here for a while. If you don’t mind.” His thumb stroked your skin. You tried to ignore the intense sound of your heartbeat, so loud it seemed determined to burst out of your chest.
“I think I don’t mind. I think I don’t mind at all,” you smiled back, reaching a little closer, until your noses almost touched. You looked at him through your half-lidded eyes, shivering under the intensity of his brown gaze that set your blood on fire. “In fact,” you whispered against his lips, “I think I’d like you to stay.”
He kissed you as an answer. His lips were salty and soft, pressing gently against yours. You closed your eyes, wrapping your arms around his neck to deepen the kiss, only letting go when you both needed to take a breath.
You looked at each other, cheeks flushed and stupid grins splattered on your faces. He kissed you again with more urgency this time, like he was trying to learn every curve of your lips and of your body.
“Are you sure you don’t mind staying here?” You murmured as he let go of your lips to assail your jaw with kisses. You took him in, the last rays of sunshine painted his face with pure gold, and gathered the last bits of self-control in your body to say, “You’re a Targaryen, Jace. You are made out of fire and blood.”
He stopped his manoeuvre to look at you with intense, hungry eyes. “I’m a Velaryon first. I was shaped by salt and sea.”
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,745
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist
Chapter Two ✢ Sealed in Blood
The valley of the Kingswoods was plunged into near darkness even though it was the mid-morrow, the sky low and heavy, thick clouds coming in from the Narrow Sea, brought by the sharp winds that danced with the tide.
Near the edge of the cliff, where Jacaerys had learned Queen Aemma and Prince Baelon had been put to rest as well, two pyres were waiting, side by side like allies, when in truth they had been foes. Under the blanket of this dark sky, Aegon and Rhaenyra would bid farewell one last time and returned to ashes, to be buried together. While the gesture weighed heavily on Jace’s mind, he knew it was the right one if he wished to be known as a merciful, peaceful ruler.
This time there would be no dragon upon the hill to cast its fire—Rhaena’s Morning was still too small, and the only grown dragon that remained, Silverwing, was riderless once more. The Council had made a suggestion, that perhaps Jace could travel to Dragonstone and attempt to claim her, to add a strong symbol of legitimacy to the start of his reign, but the prospect of riding another than Vermax made him nauseous.
At his side where Lucerys and Joffrey ought to have been, Jacaerys was instead escorted by Cregan Stark and Baela, who had made the journey from Driftmark, taking the risk to leave her grandsire so close to the Stranger’s door. While those were the two people he trusted more than anyone in this world, the absence of his brothers ached fiercely, as much as the loss of his mother.
Torch in hand, he could hardly raise his arm to light the pyres, and where a word from him would have been expected, he could not summon his words. Instead the Maester recited a prayer in High Valyrian that he did not hear over the rush of his own blood in his ears.
“All eyes are on you, my king,” Cregan murmured once silence had returned to the assembly, not as a stern reminder, but as encouragement.
With a reassuring glance over his shoulder, to the nobles that had gathered, along with the Rivermen and the Northerners, as well as the Dragonkeepers, Jacaerys finally took the step forward. As he lit the pyres one by one, he prayed that wherever she was, his mother forgave him for his perceived sins.
Despite his reason knowing it was the order of things, there was no escaping the feeling that he had stolen the crown from her. It was unfair, against the very laws of nature, he would argue, that he would be king when she never had the chance to reign.
The assembly watched the pyres go up in flame, the smoke adding to the heavy sky above their heads.
“She would be proud of you,” Baela said in a whisper, meant only for him and Cregan to hear, but he could not accept the praise.
Instead he walked away without a word, dismissing the Kingsguard that offered to open the door to the litter for him. He mounted his horse, choosing the path that would lead him through the city unguarded, but he refused to be scared of his own people. Cregan and Baela followed on their own horses, flanking him as they had done all day, two pillars holding him up.
Once he would have crossed the gates of the Red Keep, he would have to disappear once more, instead replaced by the crown, the monarch, and there would be no time to mourn.
“All day long I am plagued by demands and advice that often contradict one another, how am I to know which decision is right?” he lamented as the party made their way back to the city's gate. “They all expect me to guide them, but how might I know that I am not leading this realm into war, once again?”
“Surround yourself with counselors you trust, who look out for the interests of this realm and not their own,” Baela advised, and he regretted that she could not stay, but he understood her reasons for returning to Driftmark. He knew that before long, the matter of the succession to the Driftwood throne would arise.
“I should dismiss Unwin Peake, then,” he spat, then once the vitriol had been spoken, came to a wiser, more useful conclusion. “I shall write to my mother's cousin, Jeyne Arryn. I will need a trusted Hand once you have gone back to the North,” he said, glancing at Cregan.
The young man frowned, but gave a nod of agreement. “I hope you do not see this as disloyalty,” he said.
Jacaerys almost laughed, a mirthless exhale pushing past his lips again. “There hasn’t lived a man as loyal as you, Cregan.”
“I shall stay and serve as your justice until it is done,” his friend promised, and he was grateful for such a strong presence at his side—it also comforted him in his decision that Jeyne would be an apt replacement. She was kind to her kin, in her own way, but stern and unyielding towards other matters, and that was what he needed.
“And I shall answer any call,” Baela reminded him firmly. “I am only across the Bay.”
Jacaerys looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, taking in her kind smile and earnest eyes, the strength he knew she carried in her body and spirit. In another life, perhaps, she would have made a good queen.
For a fortnight you remained a distant spectator to the start of Jacaerys’ reign, and as he had promised, no harm came to you while you waited to know whether your blood would come, or you would be burdened with Aegon’s child. The prospect of carrying a contender for the throne was one you feared, and even though you knew many were still loyal to your bloodline, the truth of the matter was that you remained a woman, and would only gather support in a son’s name.
Were you to bear Aegon’s son, you would be raising him to be at war with his own family, while Jacaerys had offered you a crown and a promise of peace.
The trials saw many men executed or sentenced to the Wall, when Cregan Stark seemingly judged there still remained enough strength and honor in them. In some ways you wondered whether the Northerner was ruling as he pleased, instead of acting on the orders of his king.
In a gesture of good will and mercy, Jacaerys had allowed you to visit your mother for a half hour, and while you were escorted to a small chamber deep inside Maegor’s Holdfast, you felt as though you were being led to the jails. The chamber was plunged into darkness even though it was afternoon, heavy curtains drawn against the sun, and the whole room smelled of prayer incense. The stones were cold under your feet, even through your slippers and the carpet.
When you had first crossed the threshold, Alicent had held you long and tight. She was dressed almost as a Septa, in black clothes that made her look thinner and more frail than she was. Gone was the woman who had welcomed you to the capital nearly three months prior, dressed as was proper for the Queen Dowager, and confident the war was being won.
Since then Aegon had died, poisoned by those he kept close, and so had Rhaenyra, her wounds festering until a fever took her, and a boy now sat the throne. “What is happening out there?” she asked, leading you further into her room. “I am not allowed to know any of it. Are we to stand trial as well?”
“I do not know, mother,” you said. “Many men have been put to the sword, or sent North, but it seems even Jacaerys isn’t certain of our fate.”
Something dark crossed your mother’s face then. “My son should be sitting the throne, not this—” Alicent nearly whimpered, clutching the rosary she carried everywhere these days, the points of the star digging into her palm.
She cut herself off, but you knew what words lurked beneath the surface. “All things considered, he has been merciful, mother,” you protested weakly, knowing full well you could have suffered terrible consequences for your confession.
“He might be merciful, but that doesn’t make him true. If there is a rightful king it should be Daemon’s son, the little Aegon,” she accused, the name sounding awful in her mouth.
You said nothing for a while as Alicent sat in an armchair, the weight of their downfall visible on her shoulders and in the lines of her face. You poured the bitter tea your mother preferred into two cups, watching the fragrant steam rise. “On advice of his council, he has offered me his hand in marriage,” you finally said, setting the strainer aside and putting the lid back on the pot.
“Oh, my daughter, you would be queen?” Alicent asked, rising once more and rushing to you. “In those circumstances, it would be well to use this to your advantage. Men are easily swayed by beauty, if you know how to work your charms,” she explained in a hushed tone, taking your hands into hers.
“Do you mean for me to seduce him?” you asked.
Alicent shook her head. “He is young and still malleable. He has just acceded to the throne, and his council and courtiers hold the power now, but you may influence him as well. Be agreeable to him and he will come to trust you, and listen to you, eventually.”
“I understand,” you nodded—it all seemed logical to you, in a sense.
Alicent looked nearly mad in the low light of the candles, her eyes blown wide and her hands trembling where she was clutching you. “And when the time comes, he will bare his back, and we will have our revenge,” she whispered. “You may still light the way for us.”
Alicent’s words ringing in your head, you made your way back to your chambers once the half hour had come to an end, wondering what path would be yours to take, muttering prayers as you climbed the stairs, pleading for a sign of what was right.
The Gods seemed to hear your desperate pleas, and as you reached the top of the staircase, a sudden ache in your core speared you into place. Gasping, you rushed to your chambers, heart in your throat, and slamming the door behind you, took a handkerchief that you wiped between your thighs.
The white linen came wet with a bright red smear.
You did not know whether to be relieved or devastated—one way or another,your fate was nearly sealed.
Late at night was the only moment in the day Jace was able to have some solace—or perhaps in the early seconds of the morning before he fully woke, still on the edge of slumber, when the whole world was at peace and he was not king yet, just a young man clinging to his dreams.
He spent most of his evenings at his desk, answering his private correspondence or writing in his journals, reading the diaries of former Maesters and lords, educating himself on the preceding reigns. He had taken to learn everything he could about his great-grandsire, Jaehaerys—the way he had built a strong, powerful reign, and the way his legacy had collapsed within the next three decades following his passing.
Jace was eager to learn from the past, and not repeat its mistakes.
To his relief, his mother’s cousin Jeyne Arryn had acceded to his request, and was now on her way to the capital, leaving her young nephew behind to regent the Vale. She had already proven herself, ruling the Vale for the last decade and a half while bearing the burden of being a woman, and such was the sort of advice he needed.
A sharp knock at the door came to interrupt him—he pressed the seal into the freshly poured wax, waiting until it hardened before peeling it back, and then called the visitor in. Ser Adrian Redfort, a white cloak personally chosen by the Lord Commander to protect Rhaenyra, stepped into the room.
“My king,” the man greeted. “The princess is requesting an audience.”
Jacaerys discarded his letter and waved for him to let you in, suddenly wary that an unfortunate news was to come. He remained seated as you entered, crossing his trembling hands at his lap, partially hidden by the tabletop. The look on your face was grave, but you did not waste any time before you spoke, putting an end to his torment.
“My blood has come,” you said, almost too quiet to hear, and he had never been so relieved to hear of blood. “I am not with child.”
Seated behind his desk, the young king seemed relieved, though he attempted to hide it, but you could see the way his frown smoothed over, and the corners of his mouth eased slightly. “Very well,” he replied.
“I have thought of your proposal,” you said. “I will marry you for the sake of the realm.”
“Before you agree, there are terms you should be aware of,” Jacaerys immediately answered, his gaze lowering to the desk in front of him where various letters were scattered over a map of the Reach.
“I am listening,” you said, your own eyes lingering to the coast where Oldtown sat, heart aching at the memory of your youth in the sun, far from the schemings of the capital.
“Lord Lyonel, your cousin’s son and heir, now rules House Hightower,” Jacaerys said, allowing you time to respond.
“I know him well, we were children together,” you replied, crossing your wrists at your belly, trying to gather some composure at the terms you would next be offered—all the while knowing you had no choice in the matter, and those would be orders instead of proposals.
“He is on his way to King’s Landing to treat with me,” Jacaerys explained, rising slowly until you were face to face, the large mahogany tabletop standing between the two of you . “He could treat with us together instead, if you could guarantee to think of the good of the realm instead of pride.”
Closing your eyes for a moment, you dropped your chin to your chest, reminding yourself of your mother’s words. “The realm has too long been at war,” you murmured.
“Neither of us will ever convince the other of their good right, but together we have a chance to put an end to this,” he said, so earnestly you raised your gaze to him again. You understood then that he truly believed it, and you wanted to laugh in the face of such blatant optimism.
“While the overwhelming advice is that I wed you for the common good, I would not bring an enemy into my bed,” he continued, and the menacing glint in his eyes made you shiver.
“No matter my thoughts on your legitimacy, you now hold the power,” you admitted bitterly.
“As queen, you would have power as well,” Jacaerys assured you, slowly walking the desk until he was standing so close you could see the flickering candles reflecting in his dark eyes. “Convince Lyonel to stand down and bend the knee, and I will grant you my trust. I don’t intend to keep my queen in chains.”
While you had never been an outward romantic, and you had always known you would marry for political gain or alliance, you had never thought you would one day be a pawn to bridge the chasm left by war. It was unfair, in many ways, on both you and Jacaerys, to be sacrificing yourselves for the good of the realm, but you supposed it was the role of both king and queen.
It did not feel right to be called queen when that title belonged to your mother and your departed sister, but Alicent had been right. This was the only way you could take back some authority, yield some political influence and perhaps, restore what had been stolen. You were the way to put Hightower blood back on the throne—Gods willing you would have a son, and then perhaps honor would be restored.
A royal wedding should have been a cause for celebration and rejoicing, instead it was a solemn ceremony held under the eyes of all in the city, nobles and commoners alike, a show of unity and reconciliation. Soon word would spread in the realm and all would know that the two lineages born of Viserys were one, and the conflict was well and truly over, or so Jacaerys seemed to hope.
Tradition was to be upheld, insisted both the Council and the Faith, but Jacaerys asserted that there would be no bedding ceremony of any kind. “I will not have anyone in this room. The Maester may come in once it is done,” he admonished, closing the doors to the king’s quarters in the court’s face once you had been escorted to his chambers.
“Thank you for that,” you whispered once the two of you were alone.
“I did it for my sake as well,” he confessed, looking nervous.
You did not answer and instead walked to the bed, ready to once again lay on your back and allow your husband to claim you as was his right. It would be the second time you would look at the moldings on the ceiling and forget about your own body until a man was done with it.
However, Jacaerys stopped your endeavor. “No,” he called, and you tilted your head in a silent question, confused as to what he expected from you. “I would not share your bed by force. I would not touch you until you wanted me to.”
“It is your right as husband and king,” you reminded him, a mirthless laugh on your lips.
Jacaerys went to his desk where a pitcher and cups sat, and swallowed a mouthful of wine, desperate for composure, loath to be in such a vulnerable position. “I have never been with a woman, and I would not have the first night I am to be a forceful occasion,” he confessed, and you could hardly understand how it was relevant.
“I am your wife, to do with as you see fit, you cannot force yourself upon me,” you replied, and it made him nauseous.
“We shall disagree on this, then,” he said, setting the wine aside, the sweet taste of grape turning sour in his mouth. “It will not be our last disagreement.”
Fear struck you then, as you remembered your mother’s words vividly. Your position would not be safe until you truly were the wife to the king, the rightful queen. The future of your blood rested in your hands, and no matter how honorable he was, you could not allow him to compromise your position.
Without a word you came to him and reached for the clasps of his doublet, undoing them swiftly, but he stopped you once more, grabbing both your wrists gently. “Please, your hands are shaking,” he said gently. “Is this what you truly want?”
You hated to admit it, but he had been honest towards you since the beginning, and thus you could not find it in yourself to lie. “No,” you said quietly, your eyes still fixed on the dragon brooch at his shoulder.
“Then you shall not lay a hand on me nor I on you,” he said firmly, letting go of you.
Your arms fell to your sides, defeated. “The Maester will know and our marriage will be invalid,” you protested.
“Leave that with me,” he said, gesturing to the armchairs in front of the fire. Uneasy, you still complied and sat where he wished, staring at the flames and wondering what other foolish ideas he had, if you had put yourself in danger by complying, if instead you should be the one to force his hand—he seemed unsure of himself at times, perhaps you could convince him.
You heard the sounds of a belt coming undone, then the ruffle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath. For a moment too long you sat there, listening to the rhythmic ruffles and short breaths, and it took you a minute to realize what was occurring, and when you did, you felt yourself flush in embarrassment.
Time stretched and his panting grew more frantic, until Jacaerys cursed under his breath. “Should I help?” you asked, biting your lip.
“No,” came the sharp answer. Finally, after a minute more, another sharp intake of breath pierced the air, a bitten groan that reminded you too well of your first wedding night.
You heard him undress, then wash his hands in the basin. “It is done,” he said. When you rose again, his doublet was discarded and his shirt as well. He had put on a robe over his bare chest—he looked flushed, his high cheekbones tainted with red. His hair looked as though he had raked his fingers through his curls, giving them an unruly look.
Jacaerys felt your eyes on him as he picked up a small knife from his desk, a seal opener, and cut the inside of his arm near the crease of his elbow. It would be easily hidden by a sleeve, and none would be the wiser. He smeared some of the blood on his palm, then wiped it on the mattress where the evidence of his solitary act laid.
“What is it?” you asked when he went back to staring at you.
“Your hair,” he answered, almost embarrassed. “It is too… tidy.”
“Oh,” you breathed, then reached for the braid and undid it, raking a hand through your mane. You were obviously embarrassed as well, and he thought it served him well.
As Jacaerys opened the doors to his chambers once more, and both the Septon and the Maester came into the room, you were reminded of the night of your first marriage. For the second time your humiliation was to be witnessed, your virtue publicly claimed by a man you did not love ; tears came to your eyes and you wished that Jacaerys would send you away soon, to pray for guidance and plan your revenge.
Now you had been queen twice, and yet you felt as powerless as you ever had without the crown.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Thank you so much for the amazing feedback on the first chapter, it went straight to my heart. Chapter three will be posted next Saturday, July 18th.
Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239
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i don’t feel like i should ever have to say this but NEVER use my work in any way to assist or create with AI. i’ll address this fully at a later time but unless someone has explicitly stated they’re okay with you using it for AI — the common assumption is NOT to do it.
it’s theft, it’s assisting in every negative decline in society, it’s deeply personal, it’s deeply offensive, and i’m rightfully angry that my work was used to create a character ai bot that has over seven hundred THOUSAND interactions — with absolutely NO credit given to me. it wouldn’t have excused it whatsoever, but it’s genuinely just salt in the wound.
this is discouraging, upsetting, maddening, and it truly makes someone feel all kinds of disgusted.
i know im very friendly and personal on here, because thats just who i am, but please take me seriously when i say i’m truly and genuinely disgusted by this behavior.
