the time will pass anyway

The morning of the day everything changed began like so many mornings before it quietly, with the weight of someone else's choices pressing down on you before you had even opened your eyes.

You woke to the sound of the bells. Oldtown was a city of bells, something you had not known before you came here. They rang at dawn, at noon, at dusk, at every hour in between, marking time with a relentlessness that made you feel like you were living inside a heartbeat. The sound echoed through the stone walls of the Hightower, bouncing off the ancient masonry, seeping into your dreams. On Dragonstone, you had woken to the sound of the sea and the distant cry of your dragon. Here, you woke to bells.

You lay still for a moment, watching the light creep across the ceiling. The curtains were heavy but a single sliver of gold had found its way through the gap, painting a line across the stone above your head. You traced it with your eyes, following it from one corner of the room to the other, and tried to remember what day it was.

It did not matter. The days were all the same now.

You turned your head on the pillow. Ormund was already gone. His side of the bed was cold, the blankets pushed back, the indentation of his body already fading from the mattress. He rose early, your husband. He had a city to run and a household to command. You had learned quickly that he did not expect you to be awake when he left. He did not expect anything from you in the mornings except that you would be there with your legs opened when he returned.

You sat up slowly, pushing the heavy blankets aside. The air in the room was cool, carrying the faint, familiar scent of smoke from the fireplace. Your shift was wrinkled from sleep, twisted around your legs, and you smoothed it down automatically before swinging your feet to the floor.

You crossed to the window and pulled back the curtain, just a little. The view was spectacular, you could not deny that. The Hightower rose above the city like a spear thrust into the sky, and from your chambers near the top, you could see everything. The Honeywine River winding its way to the sea. The rooftops of Oldtown spreading out below, a patchwork of slate and tile and thatch. The Citadel in the distance, its domes and spires gleaming in the morning light. And beyond it all, the Whispering Sound, blue and endless, stretching toward the horizon.

It was beautiful. It was not home.

You let the curtain fall and turned back to the room. Your gown was laid out for you already. It always was. You had not chosen the dresses you wore since your wedding night. They simply appeared each morning, draped over the chair by the hearth, waiting for you. Today's was a deep charcoal grey with silver embroidery along the scooped neckline and long, tight sleeves. The fabric was heavy—it was always heavy—and the cut was modest. You had never worn anything like it before you came to Oldtown, and now you wore nothing else.

Your ladies arrived as you were washing your face. Three of them, all Hightower women, all chosen by Ormund's steward. They helped you into your dress without comment. The laces were pulled tight, the sleeves smoothed down, the high collar fastened close around your throat. You stood still and let them work, lifting your arms when they needed you to, turning when they asked. You had learned that it was easier to comply than to question.

"Your hair, my lady?" Ellyn asked, her hands already reaching for the brush.

You hesitated. "I thought I might leave it down today."

A pause. Barely a heartbeat, but you felt it.

"Lord Ormund prefers it up," Ellyn said. Her voice was neutral. Polite. The voice of a servant who had been given instructions and intended to follow them.

You opened your mouth to argue—it was your hair, after all, your head, your choice—but the words died on your tongue. It was not worth the fight. Nothing was worth the fight anymore.

"Very well," you said quietly.

Ellyn nodded and began to brush. You watched yourself in the mirror as she worked. The girl looking back at you was beautiful—you knew that, had always known that, had been told it so many times it had ceased to mean anything—but she did not look like you. She looked like a portrait of you, painted by someone who had only heard a description. The hair was right, silver-gold and falling in soft waves. The eyes were right, violet and clear. But something was missing. Some spark. Some light.

You looked tired. You looked pale. You looked like a woman who had been slowly fading for weeks and had not noticed until this moment.

Ellyn pinned your hair up in an elaborate twist, securing it with silver combs. You felt the weight of it pulling at your scalp, the familiar tension that always followed. Your mother had never made you wear your hair up. Your mother had let you wear it however you wanted—loose and wild when you were flying, braided with ribbons when you attended court, simple and unadorned when you were alone. Your mother had always said that you were beautiful because you were yourself, not because you looked like anyone else's idea of beauty.

You missed your mother. You missed her so much it felt like a physical ache, a hollow space in your chest that nothing could fill.

"There," Ellyn said, stepping back to admire her work. "Very proper, my lady."

"Thank you," you said, because that was what you were supposed to say.

They left you alone after that, retreating to their own tasks, and you sat by the window for a long time, watching the clouds move across the sky. Somewhere out there, beyond the city walls, beyond the Whispering Sound, beyond the Reach and the Kingswood and the Blackwater Bay, your mother was sitting on Dragonstone. Your brothers were running through the halls, laughing, arguing, living their lives.

And you were here. In Oldtown. Married to a man you barely recognized anymore.

The courtship had been so different. You remembered it now, sitting in the grey morning light, turning the memories over in your mind like stones. Ormund had come to King's Landing two years ago, representing his house at some council or another, and he had seen you across the throne room. You had been ten and eight then, young and shy. He had been thirty-six, a widower with four children, a lord in his own right. He had looked at you with such intensity, such focus, that you had felt like the only person in the room.

He had been charming. He had sent you gifts, books from the Citadel, rare perfumes from Lys, a necklace of sapphires that matched your eyes. He had written you letters, long and eloquent and full of praise. He had sought you out at feasts and tourneys, always finding a way to sit beside you, to speak with you, to make you laugh.

Your mother had been skeptical at first. "He is older than you," she had said, her brow furrowed. "And he is a Hightower. The Hightowers are ambitious, my love. They do not do anything without purpose."

But you had argued for him. You had told her that he was kind, that he was good, that he made you feel special. And eventually, reluctantly, she had agreed to the match. Not because she trusted him—you knew now that she never had—but because she trusted you. Because she wanted you to be happy. Because she thought that denying you this would only make you want it more.

And there was the political reality, too. You had known that, even then. The Hightowers were powerful. The Hightowers were influential. The Hightowers could tip the balance in the coming struggle for the throne. Marrying you to Ormund was a way of securing their loyalty, of ensuring that when the time came, Oldtown would stand with Rhaenyra.

You had been a gift. A guarantee. A hostage wrapped in silk and sent south with a smile.

You had told yourself it did not matter. You had told yourself that Ormund loved you, that he would be good to you, that the political reasons were secondary to the personal ones. You had believed him when he promised to cherish you, to protect you, to make you happy.

You had been so stupid.

The knock at the door startled you out of your thoughts. You turned, smoothing your features into the placid expression you had learned to wear, and called out, "Enter."

It was a servant, one of the many whose names you had not yet learned. He was young, barely more than a boy, and he bowed awkwardly when he saw you.

"My lady," he said. "A shipment has arrived for you. From Dragonstone."

Your heart stopped.

"A shipment?" You rose from your chair, and your voice came out breathless, eager, the way it used to sound before you learned to keep your feelings hidden. "Where is it?"

"In the courtyard, my lady. I can have it brought up to your chambers, if you wish."

"No." The word was too quick, too sharp. You forced yourself to slow down, to breathe. "No, thank you. I will come down myself. I would like to—" You stopped. You did not know how to explain what you wanted. You wanted to see it. You wanted to touch it. You wanted to hold something from home in your hands and remember what it felt like to be yourself.

"Of course, my lady," the servant said. He bowed again and retreated, and you were alone once more.

You did not run. Running would have been undignified. Running would have drawn attention. But you walked faster than you had walked in weeks, your heart pounding in your chest, your hands clasped tightly in front of you to hide their trembling.

The courtyard was busy when you arrived. Servants and guards and grooms going about their daily tasks, none of them paying much attention to the crate sitting near the stables. It was large, nearly as tall as you were, made of dark wood and bound with iron bands. And stamped on the side, clear and unmistakable, was the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen.

You stopped a few feet away, suddenly afraid to approach. It was silly, you knew. It was just a crate. Just wood and iron and the things your mother had sent. But it felt like more than that. It felt like a message. A reminder. A lifeline thrown across the distance between Dragonstone and Oldtown, telling you that you were not forgotten.

"My lady?" A servant—a different one, a woman with kind eyes and flour on her apron—approached with a slight curtsy. "Shall I have it brought to your rooms?"

"Yes," you said, and then, because you could not help yourself, "No. Wait. I want to open it here."

The woman looked surprised, but she nodded. "As you wish, my lady. Shall I fetch a crowbar?"

"Please."

You stood there, in the middle of the courtyard, while she went to find the tools. The sun was warm on your face, warmer than it had been in days, or perhaps it only felt that way because you were happy. You were actually happy. The feeling was so unfamiliar that it took you a moment to recognize it.

When the crowbar arrived the scent hit you first.

Jasmine. Your mother's perfume. The same perfume she had worn since you were a child, the same scent that had clung to her hair when she held you, to her gowns when you pressed your face into her shoulder. It was faint, barely there, but it was enough. Your eyes stung, and you had to blink rapidly to keep the tears from falling.

And then the dresses. They were packed in layers of fine paper, each one wrapped carefully to protect the delicate fabrics. You pulled them out one by one, your breath catching in your throat each time. Silk. Chiffon. Velvet so soft it felt like water running through your fingers. The colors were breathtaking, deep violet, pale blue, crimson, silver, black, gold. Lyseni cuts, every one of them. Flowing skirts and fitted bodices and sleeves that would flutter when you walked.

These were your dresses. These were the clothes you had worn before your wedding, before Oldtown, before everything. These were the clothes that made you feel like a Targaryen princess instead of a Hightower wife.

And then, at the very bottom of the crate, you found it.

The silver-grey gown.

You lifted it from the paper with hands that shook, and the sunlight caught the beadwork, and for a moment you forgot how to breathe.

It was the most beautiful dress you had ever seen. The bodice was gathered chiffon, layer upon layer of it, so fine and sheer that it looked like morning mist made solid. Tiny silver beads traced patterns across the fabric—flowers, vines, delicate spirals that caught the light and sparkled like captured stars. The neckline was a sweetheart, low and elegant, designed to frame the collarbones and accentuate the curve of the breasts without being vulgar. The sleeves were off the shoulder, sheer and flowing, held in place by jeweled straps so fine they looked like threads of starlight. The waist was fitted, structured, creating a dramatic contrast with the flowing pleated skirt below. And the skirt was layer after layer of soft, swirling fabric that would catch the air and dance with every step you took.

It was a dress for a princess. It was a dress for a dragonrider. It was a dress for you.

You held it up against your body, right there in the courtyard, and you could not stop smiling. You probably looked ridiculous—a lady of House Hightower clutching a gown to her chest like a child with a new toy—but you did not care. You did not care about anything except the feel of the fabric beneath your fingers and the sudden, overwhelming certainty that things were going to be better now.

"Would you like to wear it, my lady?"

You looked up. The servant woman was still there, watching you with an expression that was almost a smile.

"May I?" you asked, and then realized how foolish the question was. You were the lady of the house. You did not need to ask permission. But somehow, without thinking, you had.

"Of course, my lady," the woman said. "I think it would suit you beautifully."

You dressed alone. You did not want anyone else's hands on this dress. It was too precious, too personal, too much a part of you. You slipped it over your head carefully, reverently, letting the silk whisper against your skin. You adjusted the bodice, settled the sleeves on your shoulders, smoothed the skirt down over your hips. And when you looked in the mirror—

You gasped.

You were beautiful. You spun in front of the mirror, watching the skirt flare out around you, and you laughed. A real laugh, bright and surprised, the kind of laugh you had not made since your wedding night.

And then the knock came.

"My lady?" Margot's voice, muffled through the door. "The other ladies are asking if you will join them in the solar. They have heard about the dresses and are eager to see."

You took a deep breath. You smoothed your hands down the front of your gown. And then you opened the door.

Bethany gasped first. Loud and delighted, the way only a girl could gasp. "Oh, my lady! You look like a queen!"

Ellyn was more restrained, but even she could not hide her surprise. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened slightly before she caught herself. "It is... very fine work, my lady," she said carefully. "Lyseni, I presume?"

"Yes," you said, and your voice came out stronger than it had in weeks. "My mother sent them. I used to wear this style at court."

The walk through the Hightower was different than it had ever been before. You had walked these halls dozens of times since your wedding, head down, eyes averted, trying to take up as little space as possible. But today, in your gown, you walked with your head high. You looked people in the eye. You smiled.

And people noticed.

Servants stopped to stare as you passed. Guards straightened, their gazes lingering on you longer than was proper. A young squire dropped the sword he was carrying and had to scramble to pick it up, his face bright red. You felt their eyes on you and you did not mind. You had been invisible for weeks. It was nice to be seen.

—

Ormund found you in the solar.

It was late afternoon by then, the sun beginning its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the room in shades of gold and amber. You were sitting by the window, reading your mother's letter at last—it was full of news from Dragonstone, gossip about your brothers, questions about how you were settling in—when the door opened and he walked in.

You looked up and smiled. "Husband. I did not expect you back so early."

He did not smile back. You should have noticed that. You should have seen the storm gathering behind his eyes, the tightness in his jaw, the way his hands were clenched at his sides. But you were still floating on the happiness of the morning, still wrapped in the warmth of your mother's words and you did not see.

"Where did you get that dress?"

His voice was flat. Too flat. The kind of flat that comes before a storm.

"It was in the shipment from my mother," you said, and you heard the happiness in your own voice, bright and fragile and utterly unaware. "She sent me dresses from Lys—the kind I used to wear at court. Isn't it beautiful? I have not worn anything like it since—"

"Stand up."

You blinked. "What?"

"Stand. Up."

You stood. The letter slipped from your fingers and floated to the floor. You stood, and he looked at you, and the silence stretched out between you like a wound opening.

"Ormund," you said carefully, "is something wrong?"

He crossed the room in three strides. He grabbed your arm and pulled you toward the door.

"You will come with me," he said. "Now."

"Ormund, you are hurting me—"

"Now."

He dragged you through the corridors. You stumbled after him, your beautiful skirt tangling around your legs, your jeweled straps digging into your shoulders. Servants saw you—you knew they saw you, you saw their faces turn away, their eyes drop—and shame burned hot in your cheeks. You were the lady of the house. You were a princess of the blood. And you were being pulled through your own home like a disobedient child.

He did not speak again until the door to your chambers slammed shut behind you.

Then he let go of your arm, and you stumbled backward, catching yourself on the back of a chair. Your chest was heaving. Your heart was pounding. And when you looked at his face you barely recognized him.

"What," he said, low and dangerous, "are you wearing?"

You stared at him. "It is a dress. I told you. My mother sent—"

"Your mother." He spat the words like they tasted of poison. "Your whore of a mother sent you a whore's dress, and you decided to parade yourself through my keep in it."

The word hit you like a slap. Whore. Your mother. He had never—no one had ever—

"Don't look so shocked." He stepped closer, and you stepped back, and the chair between you felt like nothing, like paper, like a wall that would crumble at a single touch. "You know what I am talking about. You know exactly what your mother is. The whole realm knows. She spreads her legs for every man who looks at her twice, and now she cannot even control her own daughter."

"That is not true." Your voice came out thin. Reedy. Nothing like the strong, confident voice you had used all day. "My mother is not—you cannot speak of her that way. She is your future queen—"

"She is a whore." He said it flatly. Calmly. Like he was remarking on the weather. "She is a whore who put bastards in the line of succession and expected the realm to bow. She has fucked her sworn shield for years—everyone knows it, even if they are too afraid to say it—and those Strong bastards she calls sons are proof. And now she has sent her daughter to me, dressed like a common bedslave, and I am supposed to be grateful?"

Your hands were shaking. You pressed them to your stomach, trying to steady yourself. "I am not dressed like a—I am not. This is just a dress. This is the kind of dress I have always worn. You saw me in them at court. You said I was beautiful. You said—"

"I lied."

The words stopped you cold.

"I lied." He stepped closer again, and this time there was nowhere to back away to. Your shoulders hit the wall. "Of course I told you that you were beautiful. That is what men do when they are courting. We flatter. We praise. We tell you what you want to hear. And you—" His eyes raked down your body, and you felt naked, exposed, like every inch of skin was on display. "You were a maiden then. Untouched. A prize to be won. I could look at you and imagine all the things I was going to do to you once you were mine."

He paused. His tongue swept across his lower lip, and the gesture made your stomach turn.

"Do you want to know what I really thought, when I saw you in your pretty little dresses? I thought about what was underneath. I thought about tearing them off you. I thought about bending you over a chair and seeing if you were as tight as you looked. I thought about how sweet it would be to be the one who finally got to touch what you were showing everyone."

"Stop—" The word came out as a choked whisper. "Please, stop—"

"But that was then." His voice hardened. "That was when you were a maiden. That was when you were untouchable. Now you are my wife. Now you wear my name and live in my house and sleep in my bed. And my wife does not dress like a whore."

"I am not a whore." Tears were burning in your eyes now, hot and stinging. You blinked rapidly, trying to hold them back. "I am a Targaryen princess. I am a dragonrider. I am your wife, and I have done nothing wrong—"

"Nothing wrong?" He laughed, and it was an ugly sound. Ugly and cruel and nothing like the warm, charming laugh you remembered from the courtship. "You paraded yourself through the entire keep in a dress that shows your tits to every man with eyes. Guards stared at you. Servants stared at you. My squire -your own uncle- dropped his sword because he was too busy looking at your body to remember what he was doing. And you think you have done nothing wrong?"

You had not known about the squire. You had not noticed. But it did not matter. It would not have mattered. He had made up his mind about what you were, and nothing you said would change it.

"It is just a dress," you whispered. "It made me feel beautiful. It made me feel like myself. I have been wearing your dresses for weeks—your grey dresses, your heavy fabrics—and I have not complained. I have not asked for anything. I just wanted one thing that was mine. One thing that felt like home."

"Home?" He sneered the word. "You mean Dragonstone? You mean your mother's castle, where she hides her bastards and her lovers and pretends she is fit to rule? That is not home. That is a den of sin and corruption, and you are lucky I took you out of it."

"Lucky?" The word escaped you before you could stop it, high and incredulous. "You think I am lucky? You think I am grateful for this? For being dragged through the corridors like a prisoner? For being called a whore in my own home? For being married to a man who—"

"Who what?" His voice dropped to a dangerous murmur. "Who what? Say it."

You opened your mouth. You closed it. The words were there, burning on your tongue, but you could not make yourself speak them. You were afraid. You were so afraid.

"Who does not love you?" He finished the sentence for you, and his smile was terrible. "Is that what you were going to say? That I do not love you? Let me tell you something, little wife. I love you more than you deserve. I love you despite your mother, despite your reputation, despite the rumors about your parentage. Everyone knows you are not Laenor's daughter—no more than the Strong bastards are. And now you come here, dressed like a whore, and expect me to be grateful?"

"My father loved me." Your voice cracked, and the tears spilled over at last. Hot and wet, tracking down your cheeks. "Laenor Velaryon raised me. He was my father. And you will not speak of him that way."

"Laenor Velaryon was a fool." Ormund's lip curled. "He raised another man's bastards because he was too weak to do anything else. Just as your mother is too weak to control her own desires. And you are just like her. Weak. Vain. Desperate for attention. You think you are special because you have a dragon? You are nothing. You are a spoiled princess who has never had to work for anything, who has never had to serve anyone, who does not know the first thing about being a wife."

"I am not—"

"You are a piece of property." He stepped forward, and his hand came up, and for one terrible moment you thought he was going to hit you. But he did not. He touched your face instead, his thumb tracing the line of your jaw with a gentleness that made your skin crawl. "My property. Your body belongs to me now. Your hair, your face, your tits, your cunt—all of it. You do not get to decide what you wear or what you show. You do not get to decide anything. You are mine. And I will not have my property parading around like a common whore."

"Let go of me."

You did not recognize your own voice. It was quiet and cold and utterly steady, nothing like the sobbing, broken girl you felt like inside.

He did not let go. His grip on your jaw tightened, just slightly. Just enough to remind you of his strength.

"You do not give me orders," he said softly. "You are my wife. You obey me. You do what I say, when I say it. And if you cannot do that—" His thumb pressed harder, digging into the soft flesh beneath your cheekbone. "Then I will teach you. I will teach you to be grateful for my attentions. I will teach you to be the wife I need you to be. And by the time I am finished, you will thank me for it."

"You are hurting me."

"I am trying to help you. But you are making it so difficult." He released your jaw, finally, and stepped back. His eyes dropped to the dress. To the silver beadwork. To the sweetheart neckline that he hated. "Take it off."

Your blood ran cold. "What?"

"Take. It. Off."

You did not move. You could not move. Your body was frozen, your mind screaming, your heart pounding so hard you could feel it in your throat.

"Please," you whispered. "Please, Ormund, I will not wear it again. I will put it away. I will wear whatever you want. Just please—"

"Take it off, or I will take it off for you."

You raised your hands. Your fingers were shaking so badly you could barely grip the fabric, but you tried. You tried to be good. You tried to do what he wanted. The jeweled straps slipped from your shoulders, and the bodice sagged, and then—

His patience ran out.

He grabbed the neckline with both hands and pulled.

The sound the fabric made was like a scream. A high, rending shriek of tearing silk, and then the bodice was splitting, the beadwork scattering in all directions like falling stars. You cried out and tried to pull away, but he was too strong. His hands found the seams and pulled, and the dress came apart in his grip like paper. Chiffon shredded. Beads flew. The jeweled straps snapped, the tiny stones scattering across the floor and skittering into corners where you would never find them again.

"No, no, no—" You were sobbing now, your hands batting uselessly at his arms, your voice rising to something that was almost a scream. "Please stop, please, it was a gift, it was from my mother, please—"

"Your mother." He grabbed the skirt and tore it from the waist, the pleated fabric ripping with a sound like thunder. "Your mother should have taught you how to be a wife. Instead she taught you how to be a whore."

"My mother—" You could barely speak. The words were choked with tears, your throat raw from screaming. "My mother loves me. She sent me this because she loves me—"

He laughed. It was the cruelest sound you had ever heard.

"Your mother sent you here because she wanted to get rid of you. Because you were inconvenient. Because she has her bastards to think about now, her precious Strong boys, and there was no room left for you. You were a spare. A surplus. A problem to be solved. And I solved it. I took you off her hands when no one else would."

That was when you slapped him.

You did not think about it. You did not plan it. Your hand just moved, arcing through the air and catching him across the cheek with a crack that echoed through the room. You stared at him, your palm stinging, your breath coming in ragged gasps. And he stared back at you, his head turned slightly from the force of the blow, his cheek already reddening. For a long, terrible moment, neither of you spoke.

Then he turned back to you, and his eyes—

His eyes were dead. Empty. Two pits of black that looked at you without recognition, without humanity, without anything at all.

"You should not have done that," he said quietly.

And then he reached for the rest of the dress.

You did not fight him anymore. You could not. Your body had gone limp, your strength drained, your spirit crushed into something small and broken. You stood there, shaking and crying, as he tore the remaining fabric from your body. The skirt fell away in ribbons. The underskirt followed, ripped from the waistband like paper. And then you were standing in nothing but your shift, your arms wrapped around yourself, your shoulders bare and trembling.

He stepped back. His chest was heaving. His face was flushed. And in his hands, he held the ruins of your dress. He held it up. Looked at it. Then looked at you.

Then he walked to the fireplace.

"No." The word came out as a broken whisper. "No, please. Please, Ormund. Please don't."

He threw it into the flames.

You watched it burn. The silk caught immediately, curling and blackening like a living thing in its death throes. The beadwork melted, silver droplets running down the fabric like tears. The chiffon vanished in a flash of orange, there and gone, consumed by the fire that had never felt warm, not once, not since you arrived in this cold, cold city.

You sank to your knees. You could not stop crying. Your whole body was wracked with sobs, your shoulders heaving, your hands pressed to your face to muffle the sounds. You were kneeling on the cold stone floor in nothing but your shift, surrounded by scattered beads and torn silk and the ashes of the only thing that had made you feel like yourself in weeks. And you had never felt so small in your entire life. You had never felt so alone.

And then he was there.

He knelt in front of you. His hands found your face, cupping your cheeks, tilting your head up so that you had to look at him. His expression had changed completely. The fury was gone. The cruelty was gone. In their place was something that looked almost like tenderness. Almost like love.

"See?" he said softly. Gently. As if he were comforting a frightened child. "See what you made me do?"

You stared at him through blurry eyes. You could not speak. You could not think.

"I do not want to be like this." His thumbs brushed your tears away, tracing gentle paths across your cheekbones. "I want to be a good husband to you. I want to love you, and cherish you, and protect you. But I cannot do that when you dress like a whore. You make me angry. You push me to do things I do not want to do."

You shook your head. It was a tiny, weak movement, barely perceptible. But he saw it.

"Yes," he said, and his voice was so certain, so utterly convinced of its own righteousness. "It is your fault. If you had worn what I told you to wear, if you had been a good wife, if you had simply obeyed me, none of this would have happened. I would not have had to raise my voice. I would not have had to rip the dress. You made me do this."

"I did not—" Your voice was wrecked, hoarse, barely audible. "I did not make you do anything."

"You did." He stroked your hair now, smoothing it back from your tear-stained face with a gentleness that made your stomach turn. "You know you did. You knew how I felt about those dresses. You knew I did not want you wearing them. And you wore it anyway, in front of everyone, flaunting yourself like a common—" He stopped himself. Took a breath. Softened his voice even further. "You chose to disobey me. And actions have consequences. You understand that, don't you?"

You did not answer. You could not answer. You were trapped in a nightmare, and the monster was stroking your hair and telling you it was all your fault.

"But I forgive you." He pressed a kiss to your forehead, and his lips were warm and dry, and you wanted to scrub the feeling of them off your skin. "I will always forgive you. Because I love you. Do you understand that? Everything I do, I do because I love you. If I did not love you, I would not care what you wore. I would not care who looked at you. But I do love you. I love you so much it drives me mad. And that is why I get angry. That is why I cannot control myself sometimes. Because I love you, and I cannot bear to see you make yourself look like a whore."

You were shaking your head again, but you did not know what you were denying. The words coming out of his mouth? The gentleness of his touch? The horrible, impossible reality of everything that had just happened?

"Say you are sorry," he said.

"I—"

"Say it." His grip on your chin tightened, just a fraction. Just enough to remind you that he was still in control. "Say you are sorry for what you did."

You were sorry. You were so sorry. You were sorry you had worn the dress. You were sorry you had opened the crate. You were sorry you had been happy, even for a moment. You were sorry you had ever come to Oldtown, ever said yes to his courtship, ever believed him when he looked at you with hunger in his eyes and told you it was love.

"I am sorry," you whispered.

The words tasted like ash.

"Good girl." He kissed your forehead again. "Good girl. I forgive you."

He pulled you into his arms. He held you against his chest, one hand cradling the back of your head, and you could feel his heartbeat. Steady. Calm. Satisfied.

"See?" he murmured into your hair. "It is over now. It is over. I love you. I love you so much."

You could smell the smoke from the fireplace. The ashes of your dress. The death of the girl you used to be.

"I will always take care of you," he said. "I will always forgive you. But you have to learn. You have to be better. You have to be the wife I need you to be. Do you understand?"

You nodded against his chest. You did not know what else to do.

"Say it."

"I understand." Your voice did not sound like your own. It was hollow. Empty. A shell of the voice that had laughed in the dragonpit this morning.

"Good girl." He stroked your hair. "Good girl. We are going to be happy together. I promise you. We are going to be so happy."

He held you there, in front of the dying fire where your dress was ash, and you cried into his chest until you had no tears left and when he finally pulled back and tilted your face up to look at him, you let him see the tears drying on your cheeks and the emptiness in your eyes, and you did not flinch when he smiled.

"There," he said. "That is better. That is my good, obedient wife."

He kissed you. Softly. Tenderly. The kiss of a lover, not a monster.

And you did not pull away.

Because you were learning. You were learning to be the wife he needed you to be. You were learning to smile when you wanted to scream, to nod when you wanted to fight, to say "I love you" when what you really meant was "I am afraid of you."

"we act with holy purpose," and he comes to hear your voice in the wind. it is carried by the trees as they sway under the moon, and his ears give in to your song.

it speaks of sorrow. ancient. cold. it's distorted by want. aching. pulsing.

you wait under the growing moon, you're bathed in silver. patient. waiting. he stands by the edge of the forest, drawing closer to your lair, and is guarded by his flames. patient. waiting.

he knows what you are, and you know what he is.

and he will claim foul play, say you have bewitched him. entranced him. beings of the night have their ways in the dark, and fire does not burn angry enough sometimes.

"we act with holy purpose," but he, as if a moth called towards a flame, as if pulled forth by unseen hands, allows himself to feel all that threatens to swallow him whole.

he feels the hunger, and feels the want, and he realizes they have teeth. they gnaw at his insides, and they're cold and sharp, and the feeling grows inside of him like a raging fire.

it sits heavy under his skin. it tastes bitter against his tongue.

"we act with holy purpose," and it is a dagger unsheathed. fangs that have not risen, and the sort of devotion one does not find in a sept.

"we act with holy purpose," but he runs his fingers down your body, and speaks a prayer to your skin. he spells it out with his fingertips, and swallows it down in a kiss. to the great father i pray, for justice in war, this day—

“we act with holy purpose,” but he kneels at your feet, laps at your slit with a hungry tongue, sucks on your pearl with greedy lips, and comes to lay worship to your taste. he breathes in deep, lungs expanding as he imbues himself in your scent.

"we act with holy purpose," but then the seven turn their heads and he closes his eyes, and his cock—hot, pulsing—drives repeatedly inside your cunt, and knows he can do nothing but pray for forgiveness as he loses himself in your touch.

“we act with holy purpose,” but his thoughts are bent in your shape, and his faith stands where you do, and his devotion is bequeathed to your feeling.

and then the spell breaks, the moon goes down, and the earth is bathed in warm, golden light.

the beacon is not yet alight, but he knows the memory of you—of your touch, of your taste, of your scent—will come back to haunt him when it glows.

and there will soon be another moon hanging full, and there will soon be another hunt.

he will repent. he will do right for his wrongs.

vampire!reader and vampire hunter!ormund being best defined by words of rilke: i’ve never seen you without wanting to pray to you. i’ve never heard you without wanting to place my faith in you. i’ve never longed for you without wanting to suffer for your sake. i’ve never desired you without wanting to be able to kneel before you.

Traitorously, his eyes would trail down to whatever gown she was wearing that day, down to the deep, plunging neckline in between the valley of her breasts and see the soft skin there before dragging his eyes away before she noticed. Through the slit of her dress he can see her long legs as she walked, eyes moving up to her thighs. Ormund cursed himself for being lured into temptation, feeling his pants get tighter and being relived that his doublet hid the bulge.

As if seeing her around everywhere isn’t enough, she starts appearing in his dreams. It starts off innocently enough, a familiar moment where talking to him as usual in her low, entrancing voice, but the dreams quickly change. It grows filthy and depraved, leaving him waking up grounding his hips into his bed, groaning and remembering the phantom feeling of her skin on his hands. Hard and leaking, Ormund wraps his hand around his throbbing length, and spills all over himself with a few strokes only from recalling the sounds she made in his dreams.

Panting hard, he feels shame for the sheer amount of lust he has, but rationalises. It’s not his fault for having eyes, it’s her fault for wearing such clothes around him, for having such a sweet, recognisable scent that he gets restless as soon as he smells it. It’s all her fault for bewitching him. Ormund is only a man, he cannot be blamed.

For the time he was in the city, she was often with her sister, who barely spared his family a glance. Or she was atop her beast of a dragon, dressed in riding leathers that accentuated her figure and made his cock ache. Other times, she was at the Sept. He had been lighting a candle to the Father for strength when he catches a familiar scent, of herbs and incense. Her.

“Lord Ormund.” Gods, her voice. Whenever she spoke, it seemed to settle in his bones, in his soul. He wanted to wrap her around himself so no one would know where he ended and she started.

“Princess.” Ormund greeted, ducking his head to pull his gaze away from her dress. Her eyes glittered in the low light of the Sept, the hue of the candles caressing her skin. Her waist length silvery blond hair was loose, and she looked softer. She was still dressed in a borderline scandalous dress as usual. One firm tug and he could rip it right off, he thought,

“Were you praying to the Father, if I may ask?” She tilted her head curiously, a soft smile on her face as she approached.

“I was. For strength.” She smelled divine, and he was frozen in place, watching as she stepped in front of him, and Ormund was sure she looked just like the Valyrian ladies of old, regal and breathtaking. He fought the urge to lean in and take a deep whiff of her unique scent, clenching his fist to distract himself.

At his words, she just smiled in gentle amusement, laying a hand on his arm and leaning close. His heart stuttered as his nose flared.“Strength? A man such as you has enough strength to me, my Lord. I do not think the Father could grant you more.”

Too fast, too soon, she pulled away with a last smile, walking to light a candle for the Maiden while he watched dumbly from where he was still standing. Seeing her kneel to pray, Ormund recalled a moment in his dreams where she was in the sane position doing something completely different, and cursed yo himself for thinking such undignified things in a holy place such as the Sept.

That night, all he could think about was her. She plagued him every day, and after their moment at the Sept, her touch, her calling him “strong” had him pacing. He didn’t sleep much that night.

Author’s note: I don’t think I can write romance even if my life was on the line, so it’s just this 😭 I’m absolutely struggling to think how they’d finally sleep together tbh…

Having good execution but zero good ideas SUCKS so if any of y’all want to request a plot for Ormund you’re welcome to do so for either this story or another new story altogether

Ormund is calculated, he’s a man worn by battle and adept with his armies as he is his actions, much less his affections for his lady wife. And for all the things that may drive him mad, it is your scent that he can’t get enough of.

Long days and sleepless night serve for one thing. Need. And it has only grown, and still it grows. Once he finds you, alone in your bedchamber, after traipsing long halls and mindless knights to get to you. His embrace claims you, tucking you into him as heavy, long arms hold you. Your hand pressed against his chest, as hard as his armour through he is without it, left in only his doublet.

The kiss is soft at first, tentative and longing, and then it deepens, tongue sliding along your lip as his hand sinks into your hair. It has been too long, however long it has been. Weeks, a day, an hour. It’s too long no matter.

His nose rubs along the curve of your jaw, dropping slowly, teasingly over the hollow of your throat and even slower into the dip of your neck. Inhale. Warm air breathes across your skin, sharp enough to make your shiver, his fingers fingers digging in at your waist where you whine.

“How I have missed this..”

But he doesn’t stop there. He continues. The fingers at your waist curl inwards, bunching at the thin cotton of your nightgown as he backs you into the nearest surface. The bed, the chair, his desk, he doesn’t care. He can’t think, he’s too far intoxicated already. So much so you feel it. The heaviness of his breath, the aching tent forming in his breeches.

And you’re lifted into said surface in his arms with a huff, so fast it makes your head spin.

“There you are..”

His knees open your thighs, caging you in as he steps before you, still pressing close enough to take you in, thumb stroking over your cheek as the other traces up your thigh. Up and up and up until he reaches your aching heat.

Only then does he move downward, right where you need him, right where your fingers tangle through his sandy hair to urge him, beg him. He obliges, quietly, selfishly. Because this is indulgence, this is every part his pleasure as it is yours.

To sink his face into his wife’s cunt while you cry and shake around him.

But he slows as he kneels, bending at the floor to tug you right to the edge of the wooden furniture. And you keen, arching your back where you feel the want on his breath. The friction rubbing between you that inches you closer. Your nightgown rides over your thighs, barely covering you, but shielding you enough, just so the fabric sits right over your slit.

“Perhaps you taste just as sweet as you smell hm?”

His lips purse into a kiss, sloppy and chaste right over the wet line of your cunt. A shudder wracks your body, wetness pooling in a damp circle as his tongue teases you further, tracing, testing, nudging his nose into your swollen clit. Exactly where he wants to be.

“I should think I need to remind myself, don’t I dear wife.”

Ormund rocks his head forward, mouth enclosing round your heat shamelessly, burying his face into you as his hands clamp down at the flesh of your thighs. It’s lewd, it’s sinful. But a groan breaks free from his lips, inhaling once more. It’s all of you, everything at once and it has his cock leaking inside of the tight, cruel material of his trousers.

His tongue flicks sharper then, faster, collecting your taste through the lace and cotton before he’s had enough. Before he’s shoving it right up to your hips and bringing you back down onto his face again. Wet muscle swirls and licks through your folds, sucking down hard onto your clit and sliding down to poke and work open your weeping hole. Moans spill free from your lips, legs curled over his shoulders and tensing as he brings you closer to your peak.

He beckons you, dragging with long flat licks up and down through your cunt until you’re bucking into his face, spreading your wetness onto his chin and releasing onto his mouth. Though he doesn’t stop, not until you’re coated on his tongue, the familar tang of sweetness and sweat, his nose rubbing onto your swollen bud while you shake. And he doesn’t pull away, not completely, instead he kisses up your thighs, licking your juices from his lips and your skin with a loud pop.

The cloth he takes from his pocket is souvenir, dabbing away at the droplets he didn’t lick up from you, where your thighs are soaked in your own sweetness.

So, he does what he should, as a husband, and as a gentleman, or he tells himself. He swipes the remnants from your skin before folding it once over. And again, compacting the little cotton handkerchief before bringing it to his lips, and then his nose. And through your bliss and lidded eyes, you see it, his own rolling back from the scent that lingers on the cotton, a shudder ticking in his shoulders.

So depraved, and all of you. Just like he wants, and has already sworn to have over and over again. A scent far more delicious and intoxicating than any pomander or perfume.. one he can’t be without.

The morning after, he would not let you leave the room.

You woke to find him already dressed, standing by the window with his back to you, his silhouette sharp and rigid against the pale grey light. The bed beside you was cold, he had not held you last night, not after what happened. You had slept alone on your side of the mattress, still trembling, still aching, still smelling the smoke from your burning dress even though the fire had long since died.

You sat up slowly, the blanket clutched to your chest. Your shift was thin and worn, the same one you had been wearing yesterday when he tore the dress from your body. You had not bothered to change it. You had not had the energy.

"Ormund?" Your voice came out small. Hesitant.

You swallowed. Your throat was dry, your eyes still swollen from crying. "You—you did not—"

He did not turn around. "I have been standing here for an hour," he said quietly. "Thinking. Trying to understand how we got here. Trying to understand what I did wrong."

"I did." He turned then, and his face was not angry. That was almost worse. He looked tired. Sad. Disappointed. The face of a man who had been let down by someone he loved. "I have been too lenient with you. I see that now. I trusted you to know how to behave, and you proved that you cannot be trusted. That is my fault. Not yours."

You stared at him, something cold settling in your stomach. "What do you mean?"

He crossed the room slowly, his footsteps heavy on the stone floor. When he reached the bed, he did not sit beside you. He stood over you, looking down, his expression full of what looked like genuine sorrow.

"I mean that I have failed you as a husband," he said. "I should have been clearer. I should have set firmer boundaries. Instead, I let you run wild, and yesterday happened. You embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed me. You paraded through my city dressed like a common—" He stopped himself, shaking his head. "I will not say the word. I promised myself I would not say it again. But you know what I mean."

Your face burned. The memory of the guards staring, the squire dropping his sword, the servants whispering, it all came rushing back. At the time, you had felt beautiful. Now you just felt foolish and cheap.

"I did not mean to embarrass you," you whispered.

"I know you did not." His voice softened, and he finally sat down on the edge of the bed. He took your hand in his, his thumb rubbing gentle circles over your knuckles. "I know you did not mean to. That is what makes this so difficult. You are not malicious, my love. You are not cruel or calculating. You are just… young. Naive. You do not understand the way the world works."

"I understand—"

"No." He squeezed your hand, cutting you off gently. "No, you do not. If you understood, you would never have worn that dress. If you understood, you would know that men do not look at a woman dressed like that and think about her wit or her kindness or her gentle heart. They think about one thing, and one thing only. And the thought of anyone thinking about my wife that way—" His jaw tightened. "It makes me sick. It makes me want to kill someone."

You flinched, he noticed.

"I am not going to hurt you," he said quickly, his voice softening again. "I would never hurt you. You know that, don't you? Everything I do, I do to protect you. Even when it seems harsh. Even when it seems cruel. It is all for your own good."

You nodded slowly. You did not know what else to do.

"But I cannot protect you if you will not let me," he continued. "I cannot protect you if you insist on making choices that put you in danger. And so I have to take steps. Difficult steps. Steps that hurt me more than they hurt you, I promise."

Your heart began to beat faster. "What steps?"

He sighed heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. "I cannot let you leave our chambers today. Not until I have gone out and… repaired the damage."

"Repaired the damage?" Your voice rose, sharp with confusion and fear. "What damage? What are you talking about?"

"The damage you did yesterday." He said it patiently, like a tutor explaining a difficult concept to a slow student. "Half the city saw you in that dress. The guards, the servants, the merchants in the streets. They saw my wife—the Lady of Oldtown—dressed like a woman of ill repute. They are talking about it right now. Whispering about it. About you."

Your stomach dropped. "They are not—"

"They are." He looked at you with such pity, such genuine concern, that you felt your certainty crumble. "I know you do not want to believe it. I know you want to think the best of people. But I have lived in this city my whole life. I know how people talk. I know what they say about women who dress the way you dressed yesterday. And I cannot—I will not—let them say those things about my wife."

You felt tears prick at your eyes again. You had not thought about that. You had not considered what people might be saying. You had just been happy to feel like yourself again.

"I have to go out there," Ormund said, his voice heavy with duty. "I have to speak to the guards who saw you. I have to make sure they understand that what they saw was an aberration, a mistake, a lapse in judgment from a young bride who does not yet know our ways. I have to repair your reputation before it is too damaged to salvage. Do you understand how difficult that is for me?"

You nodded, your throat too tight to speak.

"It is humiliating," he continued. "To have to go out there and make excuses for my own wife. To have to look men in the eye and pretend that everything is fine, that my wife is a respectable woman, when half of them saw her dressed like a—" He stopped again, pressing his lips together. "But I will do it. Because I love you. Because you are my wife, and your honor is my honor, and I will not let anyone drag your name through the mud. Even if it means swallowing my pride. Even if it means humiliating myself to protect you."

A tear slipped down your cheek. You wiped it away quickly, but he saw.

"Do not cry," he said softly, reaching up to brush the tear from your cheek with his thumb. "I am not angry with you. I am disappointed, yes. I am hurt. But I am not angry. I know you did not mean to cause this mess. I know you were just being thoughtless, not malicious. But thoughtlessness has consequences, my love. And now I have to clean up those consequences."

"I am sorry," you whispered. The words felt inadequate, pathetic. "I am so sorry, Ormund. I did not think—I did not realize—"

"I know you did not." He cupped your face in both hands, tilting your chin up so that you had to look at him. "That is the problem, my love. You did not think. And until I can trust you to think before you act, until I can trust you to consider the consequences of your choices, I have to keep you safe. Do you understand?"

You nodded, even though some part of you was screaming that this was wrong. That you were a princess, a dragonrider, a woman grown. That you should not need permission to leave your own chambers.

But that part of you was quiet. Muffled. Drowned out by the shame burning in your chest and the guilt churning in your stomach.

"So I cannot leave?" you asked. Your voice was very small.

"Not today." He stroked your hair gently, tenderly, as if he were comforting a child. "Today, I need you to stay here. I need you to reflect on what happened. I need you to think about the choices you made and how they affected both of us. And while you are doing that, I will be out there, cleaning up this mess. I will be talking to the guards, reassuring the servants, making sure that everyone understands that my wife is a good woman who made a foolish mistake. I will be restoring your reputation. Protecting your honor. Doing the things that a husband must do when his wife cannot be trusted to protect herself."

The words hit you like blows. Cannot be trusted. Foolish mistake. Cleaning up this mess. You felt yourself shrinking under the weight of them, your shoulders curling inward, your eyes dropping to your lap.

"I will make this right," he promised, lifting your hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to your knuckles. "I will fix everything. But I need you to do your part. I need you to stay here, and reflect, and think about how you can be better. Can you do that for me?"

You nodded. You did not trust yourself to speak.

"Good girl." He kissed your forehead. "I know this is hard. Believe me, it is harder for me than it is for you. Do you think I want to leave you here alone? Do you think I want to go out there and have those conversations? It is humiliating. It is exhausting. But I do it because I love you. Because your honor is more important to me than my own comfort."

He rose from the bed, adjusting his tunic, smoothing down his sleeves. He looked every inch the Lord of Oldtown—commanding, dignified, in control. And you—you were still in your thin shift, your hair a mess, your eyes red and swollen from crying. You had never felt so small.

"I will send up a tray for you," he said, pausing at the door. "And I will check on you when I return. We will talk more then, about how we move forward. About how we rebuild trust between us."

He paused, his hand on the door handle, and looked back at you with an expression of such deep, sorrowful love that your heart clenched.

"I do love you," he said quietly. "You know that, don't you? Everything I do, I do because I love you. I just need you to be the wife I know you can be. The wife you were always meant to be. And I am going to help you get there. No matter how long it takes. No matter how hard it is. I am not giving up on you."

And then he was gone.

The door clicked shut behind him, and you were alone. Alone in the cold stone room, with nothing but your guilt and your shame and the faint, lingering smell of smoke from the fireplace.

You sat there for a long time, staring at the door. Thinking. Reflecting, just as he had asked.

Your face burned with shame. You pulled the blanket up around your shoulders, trying to disappear into its grey folds. He was right. He was right about all of it. You had been thoughtless. Naive. You had not considered the consequences of your actions, and now he was out there, cleaning up your mess. Defending your honor. Protecting your reputation. And all you had to do was sit here and reflect.

It was humiliating. But it was what you deserved.

You had embarrassed him. You had embarrassed yourself. And he was still willing to forgive you. He was still willing to fight for you. He was still willing to love you, despite everything.

You did not deserve him. You really, truly did not.

The hours passed slowly. A servant brought a tray of bread and cheese and watered wine, and you ate mechanically, barely tasting it. You tried to read, but the words blurred on the page. You tried to pray, but the words felt hollow and meaningless. Mostly, you just sat by the window and watched the clouds move across the sky and thought about all the ways you had failed.

When Ormund finally returned, the sun was low in the sky, painting the room in shades of gold and amber. You heard his footsteps in the corridor and straightened immediately, smoothing your hair, wiping your face, trying to look like a wife he could be proud of.

The door opened, and he stepped inside. He looked tired—worn, even—and your heart clenched with guilt. You had done this to him. You had exhausted him with your thoughtlessness.

"How did it go?" you asked quietly.

He sighed, running a hand through his hair. "It was difficult. Humiliating. But I think I managed to smooth things over. I spoke to the guards. I spoke to the steward. I made it clear that what happened yesterday was a mistake, a moment of poor judgment from a young bride who is still adjusting to our ways. I think they understood."

"Thank you," you whispered. The words felt pathetically inadequate. "Thank you for… for doing that."

"I did it for you." He crossed the room and sat down heavily in the chair by the hearth. "I did it because I love you. Because I cannot bear the thought of anyone speaking ill of you."

You rose from the window seat and crossed to him, kneeling at his feet. It felt right. It felt like penance. "I am so sorry, Ormund. I am so sorry for everything. I will be better. I promise. I will be the wife you need me to be."

He looked down at you, his expression softening. He reached out and stroked your hair, his touch gentle. "I know you will. I believe in you. I just need you to prove it to me. I need you to earn back my trust."

"How?" You looked up at him, desperate. "Tell me how. I will do anything."

He considered for a moment. "For now, I think it is best if you do not leave our chambers without me. Just for a little while. Just until I can be sure that you understand what is expected of you. That you understand how a Lady of Oldtown should dress, should behave, should carry herself."

You nodded quickly. "Yes. Yes, of course. Whatever you think is best."

"It is not what I think is best for me," he said, his voice gentle and sad. "It is what I think is best for you. I am doing this to protect you, my love. Not to punish you. Do you understand the difference?"

"I understand." And you did. You really did. He was not being cruel. He was being careful. He was protecting you from yourself, from your own naivety, from the judgment of a world you did not fully understand.

"Good girl." He cupped your face in his hands and leaned down to kiss your forehead. "Good girl. I knew you would understand eventually. I knew you would come around."

You closed your eyes and leaned into his touch. His hands were warm, his voice was gentle, and he loved you. He loved you so much he was willing to humiliate himself to protect you. How could you not be grateful? How could you not love him back?

"I love you," you whispered.

"I love you too," he said. "More than you know. And I am going to take care of you. I am going to teach you. I am going to help you become the woman you were always meant to be. You just have to trust me."

"I trust you," you said.

And you meant it.

The letter arrives just as you sit to break your fast.

“Princess,” Rosalyn, your closest childhood companion and only lady you trusted enough to bring with you to Oldtown, rushes in, clutching a small piece of parchment tightly in her fist, “this just arrived. From Dragonstone.”

You fight the urge to roll your eyes at the mention of your familial seat, where your father, sisters, aunt, and her children live.

Thinking of all of them there, being a family, brings a bitterness you hate fill your body. Especially when not one of them batted an eye when Otto Hightower married you off to Oldtown the second he could convince Viserys.

You hold a hand out toward her, unfolding the parchment the second it’s in your hands.

Viserys is dead. The Hightower’s have named Aegon King. Return home. I do not believe you to be safe where you are. -D.T.

You read the words once, twice, even a third time.

“Where is my husband?” You fight to keep your voice steady as you look back up at Rosalyn, who is staring at you intently.

“Lord Ormund is in his study, Princess.”

Gnawing on your bottom lip, you nod before taking a deep breath, “I think I should like to go for a ride today.”

Since marrying, you hadn’t had much opportunity to dragon ride. Ormund hates the smell of you when you return after.

But you need to clear your head. Not leave. Not yet? Maybe? Just a quiet ride to think.

Before she can speak, the chamber door is slammed open and your husband stalks in, a piece of parchment in his own hand.

Stern eyes sweep over you, letting out a quiet hum as gaze locking on the piece of parchment in your hand.

“You are dismissed, Lady Rosalyn. My wife will call for you when she is ready to be dressed.”

Your eyes cut from him over to her, watching as she gives you a small curtsey before walking out.

The sound of the door closing behind her echoes in your head.

Your eyes lock back on your husband, holding his gaze for what feels like hours before he sits in the seat across from you, holding his hand out expectantly.

Hesitantly, you reach across and place in gently in his hand and watch closely as he reads it, waiting with a bated breath to hear what he has to say.

Unexpectedly, he lets out a laugh, causing confusion to cross your features.

“Do you know what this is, sweet wife?” He looks back at you, holding the piece of parchment between two fingers as he points at you.

“I,” This is a test. You know it is, but you don’t know how to answer, “I do not know.”

“A war is brewing as we speak. My Uncle Otto has already written requesting me to call my men and banners.” He glances toward the parchment from your father as his fists clench, “This, this is them calling on you to mount that beast,” he spits the word out hatefully, “of yours to go fight in Rhaenyra’s name.”

He stands, moving to your side of the table and kneeling in front of you, grasping your hands in his own.

“Do you believe I would allow any harm to befall you, sweet wife?”

Yes, but you don’t, no, you can’t say that. Instead, you just shake your head.

One hand reaches up to caress your cheek as the other rubs your knuckles, “All they want from you is that dragon, you know that.”

His words hit somewhere deep inside that you’ve ignored for so long. Your father hadn’t taken you with him to Pentos when he married Laena Velaryon, didn’t come to get you a year later when she gave birth to your sisters.

No, he only returned when his third wife died and left quickly with Rhaenyra to Dragonstone, leaving you in the care of Alicent Hightower and your grandfather, you held you close due to how much you reminded him of your own mother, who died bringing you into this world just as her mother had.

They hadn’t breathed a word when you were married off to the Queen’s cousin who was old enough to be your own father, despite your father’s deep distaste for the family.

“They will discard you to a marriage for an alliance after you fight their battles for them.”

You wonder if he can hear your heart beating in your chest as his words strike something deep in you.

“I have taken care of you, better than they have ever even thought of.”

He presses his forehead against yours, “I have given you a good, purposeful life as my wife, as the mother of my children, while they have given you nothing. And then have the gall to try to call you for a battle you are not built for.”

You aren’t sure who he’s trying to convince more of his words, but it’s working.

He gives your hand a firm squeeze as he leans into you, inhaling deeply, “Your place is by my side, doing as I say. You cannot leave me.”

Before you can respond, his mouth presses to yours harshly, as if he is trying to consume you, stealing all words and thoughts from you at once.

When he pulls away, he grabs your jaw, squeezing slightly as he forces you to hold his eye, “I know you will not even try, because you are a good, dutiful wife. But if you attempt to leave me, to go be on the side of that whore, I will kill you.”

You offer a brief nod of dismissal. He retreats in silence, leaving you with a handful of your highborn companions and servants in the sunlit chamber. You can feel the weight of their wandering eyes and curious gazes trying to discern what exactly your husband has sent. They long to catch a glimpse of the ink, doubtless to trade it for gossip later over their embroidery.

“That will be all for today, thank you.” Your eyes turn to the perfumed women in their vibrant, colorful silks. Your tone leaves no room for argument, and truth be told, none would dare disobey the lady of the castle.

You can see the light dim behind their eyes, their spirits deflating at being dismissed and denied a glimpse into your private marital affairs. Yet, they all rise quietly, murmuring the proper courtesies and offering to remain at your service. You thank them, as politeness dictates.

Finally, the heavy oak doors thump shut behind them as the last of the ladies files out. Only then does the tension in your shoulders ease, the careful, rigid posture you were taught to maintain since childhood melting away. The remaining household servants are as silent as stone, and they know better than to sneak glances at the parchment. Not that most of them possess the letters to read it anyway.

You shift quietly, settling into the silken cushions where you have sat for hours. Your ringed fingers make short, careful work of breaking the green wax seal; the parchment parts with a soft, crisp tear.

Yet, before you even unfold the missive, it is the scent that finds you first. It is the unmistakable, intimately familiar fragrance of your husband’s scented water—the blend he carries with him everywhere.

In the early days of your marriage, you had often made his habit a point of jest, teasing him for clutching an incense filled thurbil like some prissy lady of the court. But through years of shared bed and counsel, you had come to accept it as an essential part of him; your husband simply possessed a rare appetite for the finer things. For sweetness, mostly. In time, you had even learned to love it, for it spoke so entirely of his presence.

Safe to say, the parchment is utterly drenched in it.

You feel an involuntary quickening in your blood—a sudden warmth spreading through your belly at the sheer intimacy of the vapor. He knew precisely what he was doing, all but bathing the very pages he intended for your eyes.

A breathless laugh nearly escapes you, imagining Ormund clad in heavy steel, quill in hand amidst the dirt of the commander’s pavilion, deliberately dousing the sheet with his essences while soldiers marched and shouted just beyond the canvas.

“Always so mindful,” you murmur to the empty air, for the servants remain as silent as stone and would scarce understand the jest regardless.

Your eyes skim over the lines, a familiar sense of comfort washing over you at the sight of your husband’s heavy script. You fail to stifle the smile that softens your lips.

Much of it is the usual talk of how dreary and dull the campaign has proven. He makes mention of the Queen, his cousin Alicent, his other cousin Gwayne, and Ser Criston Cole, the Lord Commander whose host they are soon to join. He writes, too, of the battle at Tumbleton that is likely to follow.

At that, your heart squeezes painfully in your chest. Ormund is one of the finest soldiers and commanders in the realm, but he is a mortal man still; his flesh can bleed, and his bones can break. And after all it is only natural for a wife to fear for her husband.

Naturally, he complains bitterly of the camp—the wretched stench of unwashed men, muck, and horseflesh that hangs thick over the pavilions. In his words it is utterly unbearable.

He speaks of his squire, prince Daeron as well. Noting that he can spy the nervousness in his young nephew, though both the boy and Tessarion stand ready for battle.

Ready to take the Iron Throne itself, should Prince Aemond fall and the burden descend to them—since word has reached the camp that Aemond has proclaimed himself Protector of the Realm. You care little and less for who sits upon the Aegon's seat, you only pray for your husband to return to your arms in one piece.

And then, at the very end, he closes the letter with something that steals the breath straight from your lungs.

Home in three days. Do not wash.

A sudden heat flushes your cheeks a deep crimson.

He is so terribly sure of himself, so entirely confident that no harm will find him, that Tumbleton will be won, and that he will ride back to Oldtown safe and whole. It is so undeniably Ormund.

You bite your lip, the warmth in your belly turning to a dull ache, knowing all too well that a safe return is a promise no man can truly make while the Dance rages on.

At the end of the parchment, he had signed his initials in a bold, dark hand: OH

You softly traced the ink with the tip of your finger, as if the stroke of his quill could somehow bridge the leagues between you. Yet as the moment of sentiment passed, you quickly folded the sheet, pressing it tight within your fist.

Rising from your seat, you paced over to the hearth. It made your heart ache to tear the missive into fragments, but you cast the pieces into the embers nonetheless.

You watched as the parchment caught flame, curling and turning to gray ash, even as your husband’s familiar fragrance still hung heavy upon your tongue. Alas, you knew the scent of water could never compare to the musk of his skin, or the steady thrum of his heart pulsing beneath your fingertips.

A sudden, dark thought pricked your mind—a fleeting wonder if those ashes were the last pieces of him you would ever hold should he fall in the Reach—but you fiercely willed the shadow away.

No, your Ormund would return to you. Or he would die trying.

You inhaled sharply, steadying yourself. The letter had to be destroyed. Its contents were far too scandalous for any prying septa or maester to accidentally stumble upon.

Clasping your hands behind your back, you turned your gaze to one of the remaining maids. “I shall be having no need of the bath after supper today.” you declared.

The woman’s eyes sought yours, a flicker of confusion crossing her face at the unusual command, yet she quickly lowered her head. “As my lady commands it.”

“Very well.”

And with that, you turned your back on the hearth and set off toward the quiet sanctuary of your bedchambers.

It is perhaps, the first day that is the easiest.

You go about your usual duties, overseeing the keep and holding audience with the lesser lords in your husband’s stead. You seek out the sept nestled within the great stone walls of the Hightower, lighting tallow candles and praying to the Mother for your husband’s safe return.

Your hours pass largely uneventful. No fresh ravens from King’s Landing or the battlefield arrive to disturb the peace.

The realm is still in great peril, locked in the throes of a bloody succession, yet you are among those rare, fortunate few whose daily lives do not yet feel the cruel shift of war. Your husband’s absence is the only true sign that the world is bleeding.

It is only when twilight deepens into night, and the hour for your evening bath approaches, that you must dismiss your handmaidens once again.

“But, my lady,” one of the elder women frowns, her hands clasped nervously over her apron. “I mean no insolence, but… you have foregone the hot waters since yesterday morn—”

You cut her off with a look as sharp as Valyrian steel, and she freezes instantly.

“I should find it most pleasant if you did not question my choices,” you say, your voice clipped as you force a veneer of stiff politeness over the reprimand. “Thank you.” You offer a single, final nod.

“Of course, my lady.” A sudden heat flushes her cheeks in embarrassment at her own boldness. “Forgive my insolence.” She mutters.

You hum in cold acknowledgment before bidding her lay out your linen shift so you might change for the night.

Thankfully, none of the others dare question you further, leaving you to slide into the great, empty bed in silence.

On the second day, the irritation truly begins to fester.

It is not even the scent of your own sweat or the slight, muskier heat of your skin that unsettles you most, but rather the heavy, lingering glances from both the highborn ladies and the serving girls. The lords fail to notice, of course. Men are blind to the subtle shifts of the solar. But women... women possess a hound’s nose for such things.

“Forgive my curiosity, my lady,” one of your companions ventures during the mandatory hour of afternoon wine and needlework, her spine stiff and a sharp, a calculating glint in her eyes. “But are you... quite well? Has some sudden ague or illness been troubling you these past few days?”

A few of the younger girls stifle titters behind their silk handkerchiefs, while a seasoned lady snorts softly at the sheer boldness of the question.”

“Nothing has troubled me,” you reply coldly, your gaze sweeping over the circle like winter frost. “And I confess I do not fathom what should prompt such a thought.”

“Of course not, my lady. Forgive me.” she murmurs quickly, dipping her chin and retreating back into the safety of the embroidery circle.

Yet, the silence does not last. Once their heads are bent back over their frames, the murmurs begin—whispers that your wits have been murked by the absence of your lord, or that you have simply grown neglectful of your proper duties as wife now that his eye is far from Oldtown.

One or two even dare breathe the word slothful. But they are only whispers, drifting like smoke through the high stone arches.

You owe them no accounting of your lord’s desires. So you let them whisper.

But without a doubt, it is the third day—the very day your lord husband is expected to ride through the gates—that proves the worst.

It is not the ever-growing musk of your unwashed skin that irks you most, but rather the heavy black raven that arrives with the morning mists, bearing tidings of a grim victory at Tumbleton.

The greens have triumphed, or so the parchment claims. In a twist of monumental treachery, the Dragonseeds—Rhaenyra’s own dragonriders—had turned their fires upon her own host.

Yet, despite the grand declarations of victory, the remaining lines are stripped of any joy.

The sack of the town has been anything but a noble affair. It has been an exercise in absolute butchery. Houses put to the torch, infants slain, and women—even holy septas and silent sisters were not spared— being subjected to the brutal whims of a victorious, drunken army. It is a horror to even contemplate, let alone witness.

You feel a sharp pang of selfishness when your eyes skip past the carnage, desperately searching for a single name. When you find it, confirming that your lord husband lives, unwounded, and is already riding hard for Oldtown with a vanguard of his personal household guard, a ragged sob of relief escapes your throat.

The Dance is far from ended, and the realm will continue to bleed. But the battlefield would have to wait. There are plenty of hungry lords and capable men who can take your husband's place in the mud, if only for a night.

By the time night falls, your husband has still not arrived in Oldtown.

No news has reached the gates, and no scouts have brought sign of his riding party.

Your entire day has been spent pacing the drafty halls of the Hightower, seeking out any task to keep your mind from fracturing with anticipation.

You have seen to it that the entire household is in order, the stones scrubbed clean, and every tapestried hall set aright. You have ordered a plentiful feast prepared to greet his vanguard. You even went so far as to take up your needlework, in a desperate attempt to stave off the madness of the wait.

Alas, the effort ended miserably; shaky fingers and an unsteady mind are poor tools for fine embroidery. Sitting with your highborn companions proved more tedious still, and you dismissed them scarce a quarter of an hour into tea-time.

The whole of the castle is charged with a heavy, restless air, every servant and man at arms waiting on a knife's edge for the return of their Lord.

Your nails are bitten down to the quick, and you have endlessly twisted the rings upon your fingers. When the handmaidens arrive for the evening, they practically beg to prepare the bath.

“But the Lord Ormund—” one of them ventures, her voice hesitant.

“Do you suggest you know the needs of mine own husband better than myself?” Your patience is utterly frayed, and you can no longer keep the sharp edge of your tongue from snapping like a whip.

“My lady.” she murmurs, bowing her head in hasty obedience before scurrying away.

“And take away this boar meat. Leave the arbor gold,” you command, and the remaining servants quickly clear the table.

You turn to the household guards standing post at your door—the men in steel who have trailed you through your duties all day. “Leave the chambers. Let no one inside. You are to enter only to notify me when my Lord husband is at the gates.”

The man in the iron half-helm nods, drawing the thick oak doors shut. The heavy latch falls into place, leaving you alone in the awful, suffocating silence. Waiting.

What must have been minutes felt like hours. Time takes on a strange, twisted shape when one is locked in such nervous anticipation. Yet, the sands in the glass trickle down regardless.

Left with nothing but the loud thrumming of your own thoughts, you tried to lose yourself in a leather-bound history, though you managed scarce a few pages before the letters swam before your eyes.

You smoothed the heavy furs and linens upon the high bed perhaps a dozen times.

You combed out your hair, adjusted the laces of your linen evening shift, and even debated opening the door to ask the guardsmen if they had forgotten your command. But you checked yourself, knowing such frantic fretting would be incredibly unbecoming of the Lady of the Hightower.

And still, in that agonizing stillness, the unmistakable musk of your own unwashed flesh caught up with you. It was no longer a mere unpleasant odor. It was a heavy, ripe scent that hung thick in the small hours of the night.

For a fleeting second, you debated calling the servants back to prepare a hasty basin of hot water before Ormund arrived.

But his written instructions had been absolutely clear. Home in three days. Do not wash. He had kept his part of the covenant; three days had passed and he was riding back to you, whole and alive. It remained only for you to hold up your end of the bargain.

You sought the sanctuary of the castle sept once more, then retreated back to your chambers, the chill air of the drafty stone corridors offering a strange, cooling comfort against your sticky, stale skin.

By then, the hour of the owl had long since passed, and still there was no sign of your husband.

You wanted to wait for him—desperately so. You wished him to find you awake and waiting, so that you might see with your own eyes that the Stranger's steel had spared him.

But exhaustion and the tumultuous toll of the day’s anxiety were fast catching up to you. All that frantic pacing, coupled with a belly empty from a lack of appetite, had sapped the last of your strength. With every blink, your eyelids grew heavier and heavier, like lead.

You tried splashing your face with cool water from the basin and flung wide the shutters to let in the midnight breeze, but even the salt and tar air of Oldtown drifting up from the harbor did little to rouse you.

Defeated by weariness, (alas reluctantly) you finally laid your head atop the silken pillows, burying the heavy scent of your unwashed skin into the linen sheets, which your maids had surely doused with an extra measure of rosewater.

You were drifting in that liminal, strange place where one is not entirely awake yet no longer asleep when you heard it—the distinct, muffled grunt of a guardsman greeting his lord, and the heavy creak of oak hinges before the thick door closed once more with a dull thud.

You just barely managed to stir, shifting clumsily beneath the furs to sit up and rub the sleep from your tired eyes.

The chamber was drowned in half-darkness. Most of the candles you had lit hours ago had long since guttered out; only a handful remained ablaze, casting a scarce, flickering amber light across the stone walls.

Even through the gloom of the late hour, you could make out the great shadow of his figure moving about the room, his movements weary but urgent as he unbuckled and discarded the heavy sword-belt from his hips. The Valyrian longsword of his house Vigilance, which he cherished so deeply, fell to the ground with a dull thud.

“Ormund?” you breathe. The name is both a prayer and a question.

A desperate thing you need to hear spoken aloud to believe. You need to know that it is truly him standing there before you, alive in the flesh, at the foot of that shared bed which has stood cold for far too long.

Your vision is still blurred with sleep, but the moments that follow unfold with such fierce intensity that you know you will remember them for the rest of your days.

In two long, hurried strides, he collapses onto the silken sheets atop you.

Once again, it is his scent that finds you first.

Except this time, it is no spiced water or pleasant courtly incense, all of that is buried beneath an overwhelming stench of dirt, stale sweat, and the unmistakable, coppery tang of blood. Whose… you pray to the Gods, is anyone’s but Ormund’s.

Your hands scramble for leverage, finding the damp nape of his neck and gripping him so fiercely that it must bruise. The skin there is slick—either with the sweat of the road or from some futile, hurried attempt to wash away the field of battle before reaching your chambers.

Perhaps it is both. But you care little and less. He is your husband. Your Ormund, here in the flesh, breathing and alive, smelling of what all men smell of when they have looked upon the face of death and survived.

A sudden rush of tears gathers in your lashes, and a ragged sob threatens to tear from your throat at the pure, blinding elation of his presence.

Narrowly escaping the butchery of Tumbleton and witnessing thousands of men yield up their lives has awakened something primal within him. You can feel it in his shallow, ragged breaths, and in the way his calloused hands grip the bare skin of your arms, even through the heavy layers of your linen shift.

His touch will surely leave marks—blooming into dark blues and purples on the morrow—but you do not care. You would let him carve a place for himself inside your very ribcage if he wished it.

You feel that same desperation as he buries his face into the crook of your neck, inhaling the heavy, ripe musk of your unwashed skin like a drowning man catching his last taste of air.

“Ormund.” You speak his name again, clearer this time, the certainty finally settling into your bones. He is here. With you.

You card your fingers through his tangled hair, which hangs damp and messy with sweat, pulling him closer still—impossibly close, until there is not an inch of air between your bodies.

He is heavy, his armor-stiffened frame nearly crushing you into the bedding, but you do not mind. If the ceiling were to collapse upon you now, you would die content.

“I prayed...” you murmur against the rough stubble of his cheek. His eyes remain closed, his lips silent; he says nothing, needing these few stolen moments of quietude to wash the horror from his mind. “I prayed every morrow and every twilight to the Seven, begging them to return you to my arms,” you confess, your voice shaking with the weight of the tears you can no longer hold back.

A half-choked laugh escapes him at your words, a brief flash of delight breaking through his exhaustion at the knowledge that you kept him in your prayers, that you had spoken to the Seven with his face in your mind.

Gentle Mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war, we pray, stay the swords and stay the arrows, let them know a better day. Gentle Mother, strength of women, help our daughters through this fray, soothe the wrath and tame the fury, teach us all a kinder way.

He nearly groans at the thought, the holy words a stark contrast to the butchery he has just left.

Instead, he buries his face lower, pressing his lips straight against your collarbone. He inhales the deep, unmistakable scent of your skin—the salt of your sweat, the rich, built-up musk of three days without the basin. To a highborn court, it might seem uncouth, but to him, it is simply, purely woman. And woman means alive and real.

To breathe you in is to know he has escaped the cold clutches of the Stranger and found sanctuary in the arms of the one he loves.

What is honor compared to a woman’s love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms... or the memory of a brother’s smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.

In this singular, breathless moment, Ormund feels the truth of those words more fiercely than ever before.

He has won his share of victories, commanded hosts, and broken lances in grand tourneys, but none of it compares to this. Nothing in the Seven Kingdoms or the lands beyond could make him feel more entirely alive than the strain of narrowly escaping the slaughter, riding his stallion hard through the night even as his thighs ached and his sore muscles screamed at him, begging him to simply stop, to yield to the weariness. But he could not. He would not.

Not when you were waiting for him in the Hightower, his lady wife, keeping your quiet vigil until he could return to the warmth of your shared bed. Your shared life.

“Husband,” you nudge his head with a gentle hand, attempting to draw him back only for his grip to tighten. “I have not...” Your cheeks flush a hot, sudden crimson. “I have not bathed,” you admit quietly, the confession tasting heavy on your tongue. “It is most unbecoming of a lady—”

For the first time that evening, he raises his head and pierces you with his gaze. Those familiar eyes, which you have looked upon a thousand times before, are lined with a solemn, bone-deep tiredness, frayed at the edges by war.

Yet, at the very same time, he looks utterly, fiercely alive, the sharp line of his nose and the strength of his jaw all too intimate.

“You received my letter.” He states, his voice gruff and thick with the dust of the road. His fingers do not cease their exploration, trailing over every inch of skin and linen they can find, before his hand bunches up the heavy fabric of your shift within his fist.

“I did.” You reply softly, your eyes dipping toward the sheets, but you feel the firm pressure of his thumb and forefinger catching your jaw, forcing your chin up into stillness.

“Look at me.” He commands. The words bear the weight of a lord, yet they sound far more desperate than any commander who has just tasted victory should ever sound.

You can see it takes everything within him to restrain from simply crashing his lips against your own. “I have ridden hard across the Reach to be here. I have escaped the cold clutches of the Stranger, I have left my men and my host behind, all to return to your side. To rest in your arms. And no one, not the septons, not you, dear wife, not even the Gods themselves will forbid me the luxury of gazing upon you or breathing you in.”

Before you can offer any further reason or protest, his calloused hands bunch the linen of your shift upward, pulling the fabric past your hips and exposing your bare skin to the chill air of the chamber.

Beads of perspiration still cling to your brow, and your fingers instinctively seek leverage, carding through his tangled auburn locks as he bends his weight down between your thighs.

“Husband—”

He groans at the title, his mouth pressing fiercely against the soft flesh of your inner thighs. He marks you with the heat of his lips, tasting, touching, and inhaling sharply as the ripe, unwashed musk of your intimacy and sudden arousal mingles in the heavy air.

“Gods be good,” he rough-whispers against your skin, just loud enough to pierce the quiet of the room. “No host, no King—not even the Seven themselves could have kept me from this. From you.”

He takes his time, deliberately savoring every stolen second, his tongue tracing the tender skin just on the cusp of your heat while he buries his face deep against you.

“I thought of you,” he murmurs, his breath hot against your thighs as he presses a trail of slow, heavy kisses upward. “I thought of you every single wretched hour upon the road. Amidst the reek of horseflesh, muck, and dying men. Amidst the blood of the field, and the fires of the dragons.”

The confession is a heavy, ragged thing, and your breath hitches sharply—not merely from the mounting pleasure, but from the raw weight of his words.

“I closed my eyes and thought only of your smile, your touch... the sweetness of your cunt.” As if to prove his point, he presses his face entirely into the soft folds of your womanhood, inhaling your deep, concentrated musk before his tongue flicks out with a sudden, devastating stroke.

An unrestrained cry escapes your lips, echoing off the high stone arches.

“Only you... my lady wife...” he mutters against your wetness, his tongue exploring you with a fierce, starved hunger. “I prayed to the Mother to keep you whole... prayed to the Father to make your womb fruitful and clean, so that my seed might finally take root within you.”

At his words, a sudden tremor ripples through your entire body, and your thighs instinctively clamp tight around his head as the heat begins to break over you.

“Ormund!” You cry his name, the sound laced with a desperate, breathless heat that echoes shamelessly through the quiet bedchamber.

The household guardsmen standing post beyond the thick oak doors will have surely to play the fool on the morrow, but you care little and less for the gossip of smallfolk.

You can think only of your husband—of the wet fire of his tongue between your thighs and the bruising grip of his fingers pinning your legs wide to keep you open to his hunger.

He works you apart with a starved intensity, making you unravel from the seams, pulling you apart thread by thread as the coil in your belly tightens to an agonizing point. Ormund had ever been skilled at bringing you to your peak with his mouth, but tonight the familiar rhythm is entirely transformed. Gone is the careful, courtly teasing of a lord in his solar; this is something primal. Fierce, and animalistic. Born from the mud and blood of the battlefield.

Seven forgive us, the thought flashes like a desperate prayer in the dim recesses of your mind.

He is not merely pleasuring you; he is quite literally drinking you in, drenching his face in the ripe, unwashed scent of your climax and indulging in every slick, heavy stroke.

Your vision begins to swim, the amber candlelight blurring into streaks of gold as he drives you ruthlessly toward the edge.

“Come for me, sweet wife...” his voice buzzes low against your skin, and you feel as though your entire body has been set ablaze. “Let me taste you... bury me in your scent...”

His words, matched with the fierce, unyielding work of his mouth, finally topple you over the edge. You break with a ragged cry of his name, your fingers knotting tight in his hair as you instinctively grind your weight against his face.

He does not stop. Continuing his relentless strokes even as the climax ripples through you and you ride out the peak of your release. The firm muscle of his tongue drives through your sensitive walls, your juices slicking his cheeks and spilling onto the linen sheets beneath.

Your thighs tremble so fiercely you are certain your legs will no longer bear you. At last, after what feels an age, he comes up for air, though he keeps his face pressed close against the soft mound of your womanhood.

The damp hairs there are heavy with the rich, concentrated musk of your arousal, and you feel the hot expansion of his chest as he breathes it deeply into his lungs.

“Always so good for me...” he murmurs, pressing a final, lingering kiss against your skin while you are still reeling, your pulse hammering in your ears.

Through the faint buzzing in your head, you fail to notice him reach for a square of clean linen discarded by the bedside. You only realize his intent when you feel the cloth pressing against your center. You hiss softly at the contact, your flesh still far too tender from the peak of your release.

“Ormund?” Your eyebrows furrow in the gloom. “What are you—”

“Shh, let me,” he hushes you, his voice thick, and your wits are far too scattered to offer any true protest, nor do you truly wish to do so.

You feel the slow, deliberate swipe of the linen through your folds. You think at first he means to clean you, but as he pulls the cloth away and brings it directly to his nose, the truth settles into your mind.

He is gathering the very essence of your release, letting the fabric drink it deep so that he might preserve it—a token of your flesh to carry with him into the mud and smoke of the next campaign. A soft moan escapes you at the sheer, desperate intimacy of the act.

Yet, you have little time to dwell upon it as his hands are already framing your waist, urging the linen shift up and over your head, before he turns to frantically strip away his own heavy doublet. You lend your shaking hands to the task, helping him loosen the laces until the wool drops somewhere to the floor.

Your bare breasts are caught in the amber glow of the candlelight, and you watch Ormund's gaze fix upon your perked nipples. Reaching out, you catch his calloused hand and guide it to your flesh. He takes the weight of you, squeezing and caressing the soft curve with a starved sort of reverence.

Alas, his patience has reached its end. The heavy, rigid evidence of his hunger presses hard against his breeches, and he makes hasty work of the laces, cursing softly under his breath as he discards the last of his garments into the shadows.

He takes his manhood into his palm, giving it two firm strokes before lining himself up with your entrance. You bite your lip, your body slick and more than ready to welcome the familiar, heavy stretch of him filling you up.

“Tonight,” he murmurs, his words catching you off guard in the dark. “If the gods should grant me, as their humble servant, a reward for serving the Realm and the true King... I pray it be the planting of a son inside your womb.”

His hand reaches up, his calloused thumb gently brushing a stray lock of hair from your damp forehead. “Do you understand, sweet wife?” he whispers, leaning down upon his elbows, his weight pressing you into the bedding as he kisses the corner of your lips. “That you will grow round and swell with child... so that the next time the war calls me away, you will ever have a piece of me with you.”

Before you can muster a breath to reply, he drives forward, pushing deep inside and bottoming out with a barely suppressed groan. A sharp cry escapes you at the sheer, sudden width of him stretching your sensitive walls.

He gives you no time to adjust to the intrusion, mercilessly beginning to pound into you, the cords and tendons in his neck straining with the sheer force of his movements.

Your head is thrown back against the pillows, and he chases your mouth with his own, sealing your lips in a desperate, hungry kiss—a fierce clash of teeth and skin. In his starved frenzy, you are certain he would eat you alive if he could, losing himself entirely within your flesh to wash away the memory of the sword.

“Please, Ormund!” you cry his name for what feels the thousandth time that evening. Your nails claw at his bare skin, gripping his back in a desperate attempt to pull him closer still, and this time it is you who buries your face against him, inhaling the sharp, earthy musk of his sweat-slicked skin. “I need you to—”

“Hush, sweet girl, I know...”

He slows his frantic thrusts for a brief moment, focusing his strength to set a steadier pace, finding a deeper, more deliberate rhythm. With every long, unyielding push, he ensures you feel every single inch of him.

The old endearing term brings a sudden flock of memories rushing back to you—sweet, distant memories of the days when he was still courting you in the high gardens of Oldtown.

“I know...” he whispers hoarsely against the column of your throat, and your thighs lock tight around his hips, anchoring him to you.

“Give me your seed, husband,” you manage to gasp against his ear, the ragged shakiness of your voice betraying the depth of your undoing. “Please, by the gods—I need you, I need it inside me—”

He groans fiercely at your words, at the sheer intoxication of being buried deep within your warmth after weeks of staring into the dark abyss of death.

He feels the sudden, heavy quickening in his blood, signaling that his release is near. He is a man of formidable stamina, possessed of a soldier’s hard-bitten body, but tonight he is reduced to a mere mortal. Acutely aware of the frailty of his flesh and the preciousness of this life.

He manages only a few more messy, desperate thrusts before you feel the sudden, hot pulsing of his release spilling deep inside you, the thick ropes of his seed coating your inner walls.

You wrap your arms and legs even tighter around him as the phantom touch of his climax triggers your own second peak of the night, your body shuddering in perfect unison as you hold him fast, willing him never to let you go

When you part at last, you are both a tangled mess of limbs, reluctantly breaking your interlocked lips to catch your breath. Ormund rests his heavy head onto the pillow beside you—his rightful place—and does not hesitate for a single beat before pulling you securely into his side.

Your soft breasts press flush against the hard, unyielding plates of his chest as he idly cards his fingers through your tangled hair.

For a long while, you remain wrapped in silence, the quiet of the chamber filled only with your heavy, ragged breaths, the musk of your passion and shared lust thick in the air. You glance up, noting the faint smile that softens his tired eyes.

Finally, it is you who speaks first, breaking the serene calm of your shared silence. “Never, ever even dare to leave me again.” You push yourself up slightly, cupping the rough stubble of his cheek with your palm.

He presses his face into your hand, planting a heavy kiss there. “You know I cannot promise such a thing, sweet wife,” he replies solemnly. “Duty...”

“Your duty,” you begin shakily, your voice thick with emotion, “is to be by your wife’s side. Here in Oldtown.” You finish the thought, tilting your chin slightly.

A huff of quiet, weary laughter escapes him at your words.

“You think I jest—”

“No, my sweet wife, it is not you I laugh upon. It is simply...” He pulls you back down against his bare chest, his embrace iron-tight. “It is simply that duty is no simple matter. My family needs me, needs us. The realm and the King—”

You know he speaks the truth. You know he is bound by an unbridled sense of holy purpose and devotion that is utterly unbreakable, with his love for you coming second only to the honor of his house. At times it angers you, but a part of your heart understands that it is a thing so deeply ingrained into Ormund's bones that he cannot help it.

“Who will defend honor, hm? Righteousness, justice—” he reasons softly.

You sigh, the fight draining from you. “All I wish...” you begin, all your barriers and defenses melting away from your gaze, leaving your rawest emotions laid bare before him. “All I mean to say is... I wish it did not have to be you.”

He smiles at that—one of those easy, confident smiles that are so entirely him, making your chest squeeze with a painful fondness. The green silk of the pillows beneath your head suddenly feels as soft as a cloud, and you let out a long breath, settling back into the quiet.

“I know... sweet girl... I know...” That is all he offers, knowing too well that he cannot give you the false comfort of a lie.

After a few moments, you feel his calloused hand trail down from the curve of your hip to where the slick evidence of your coupling still lies fresh. He plunges a finger between the folds of your center, gathering the mixed cream of your releases. At the sudden intrusion, your hips instinctively buck against his hand.

He beams at the movement, a flash of white teeth in the gloom. “Always so jumpy for me…”

You can feel the battle-worn stiffness and the lingering shadow of death finally washing out of the room as he brings his hand back up to his lips, not hesitating for a moment before pressing his fingers into his mouth to taste you.

“You are utterly depraved.” You manage to whisper, watching him lazily lick the pads of his fingers.

He ignores the reprimand, choosing instead to anchor you even closer into the warmth of his chest.

“We will bathe on the morrow, together,” he promises, his voice dropping into a sleepy rumble. “Oh... and remind me, sweet wife, to order a thousand squares of linen from the merchants, so that every last one of them might be drenched in your scent.”

“Ormund.” You let out a breathy laugh at the sheer absurdity of the idea, but as you gaze into his dark eyes, you realize he is entirely serious.

“This way... I shall carry a piece of you with me into the field. Everywhere. Always.” he reasons, pressing one last, lingering kiss into the crown of your head. Finally, his heavy hand moves lower, his palm flattening out to trace the soft skin of your belly. “And you of me.” he whispers against your ear.

©RHAENYRAS-CROWN 2026: I DO NOT APPROVE OF MY WORK TO BE COPIED OR TRANSLATED ANYWHERE WITHOUT MY PERMISSION

gif credits: @ormund-hightower

Beside you, your husband stirred, half-asleep. "Another one?"

You didn't answer right away. You rarely did, not until you untangled whatever message your mind brought you. As you grew older, it was easy to discern what was simply fear, or what was a dream.

This time, though, your fears became reality in your dreams.

You slid out of bed, feet pressing against the cold floor. A thick beam of moonlight came through the window, illuminating your skin as you stood before the night sky.

"My father is dead," you said finally, your voice raspy.

That got his attention. Ormund sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "You're certain?"

You nod. Your mind was racing, already three steps ahead to the conversation you had been waiting to have for years. "The raven will come by morning. Otto wastes no time."

Ormund was quiet as he climbed out of bed, coming to stand behind you. His thick arms wrapped around your waist, his face nestling into the silver strands of your hair.

"Let's go back to bed," he whispered in your ear. "Tomorrow will be a long day. I'd rather we sleep before deciding."

There was no reason to discuss what choice stood before you. The boy or the firstborn. Rhaenyra or Aegon.

"You're the Lord of the Hightower," you murmured, your voice soft. Your hands began to run over his arms, feeling the muscle beneath your palms. "This is a decision you make. Not Otto. Not anyone."

"I know what I am." His grip tightened, not unkindly, but enough to still your hands against him. "I also know my wife well enough to recognize when she's working a man rather than speaking to him."

You stilled.

"You think I don't feel it?" he continued, quieter now, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. "Three years, and I've learned the difference. When you touch me because you want to, and when you touch me because you want something else." Ormund turned you gently in his arms, until you had no choice but to look at him. "Which is this?"

For once, you didn't have an answer ready. It was hard to speak when his eyes pierced into you, causing your knees to buckle and heart to race. It was the reason why you had given him two children already. And one more within the year. A piece of information you'd store for later.

"Both," you admitted. It cost you something to say it plainly, though you didn't let it show. "Can it not be both?"

Something in his expression shifted. His wariness gave way to something closer to exhaustion; the particular tiredness of a man who loved a woman he could never fully untangle from the blood she carried.

"It can be," he said at last. "But not tonight."

"Ormund-"

"Tonight, you are my wife, and I am tired, and the realm can wait till sunrise to fall apart."

He drew you back towards the bed before you could argue. Despite yourself, you let him, feeling grief weigh on your skin already.

While your new husband was kind-hearted, you had heard the future Lord of Oldtown was a Hightower of a different stripe—a true son of his father.

Then, Ormund turned his gaze to you, his lips curling into a crooked smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And to you as well, Princess...”

His dark gaze wandered, raking down your face to your bust, before returning to meet your eyes unabashedly.

“The songs do you a disservice, Your Grace. You are a far lovelier sight than what they claim.”

There was something in the way he appraised you that made you uncomfortable. It was your first encounter with the infamous son of the Lord of Hightower, and yet you knew instantly what sort of viper he was.

Gwayne’s arm, still resting over your waist, tightened subtly—a silent warning for him, also a reassurance to you.

“She has my heart, Ormund, and my sword,” Gwayne replied smoothly, his eyes flashing with a protective warmth as he looked down at you. “The realm has never seen a more beautiful bride, and I am the luckiest man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Why, of course. You have done our house a great service today, Gwayne, and I’m certain you’ll make a fine husband,” he said with a careless shrug, his crooked smile not wavering. He raised his goblet in a mock toast. “May the Light of the Seven bless your union.”

With a final, lingering look at you, Ormund turned on his heel and melted back into the sea of lords and ladies.

“Don’t mind him,” Gwayne hissed under his breath.

The moment his cousin was out of sight, you leaned closer to your groom, noting the sharp clench of his jaw. Sensing your concern, however, he immediately masked his irritation and turned to you with a reassuring smile as he drew you securely against his side.

Yet, as the music surged back to life around you, you couldn’t deny the chill that still prickled your skin. Ormund Hightower would remain at court for the rest of your wedding festivities—

And you had a foreboding feeling you would soon see him again.

The first day of your wedding celebration finally drew to a close. With the feast over, the princess and her new husband were left in the confines of their marital chambers, and—

The time has come for this marriage to be consummated.

A nervous flutter stirred in your chest. Gwayne had given explicit instructions for your handmaidens to leave after removing your headpiece, saying he would take care of the rest.

And try you might to look away as a proper lady should, your eyes kept drifting towards him as he began to undress— all the while bracing yourself, expecting the shift from chivalrous knight to demanding husband.

“If you’re stealing glances at me like an innocent maiden does her first love,” he suddenly remarked with an amused grin, “you’re truly going to make me blush.”

Heat rushed to your cheeks, and you averted your gaze, suddenly finding everything more appealing than him.

Left in just his loose linen shirt, Gwayne had a meaningful smile on his face as he stepped behind you, his fingers reaching out to you to unlace the stiff bodice of your gown.

Oh, this is really happening, is it not?

“We...” You suddenly found it hard to breathe as the heavy layers of your dress came loose. “Are we—”

“Yes, darling?” he chuckled softly, his dimples deepening in the firelight. He clearly found satisfaction in how flustered you had become all of a sudden.

You merely looked down, biting your lip to keep yourself from stammering. Your face felt hot too as his large palm traced the contours of your body— from the line of your ribs to the curve of your waist, and the dip of your hips.

After all, you were inexperienced. You had heard stories of how hurt the first night could be— how rough the men liked it, and how comfort was the last thing a woman should expect.

As his arms circled your waist from behind, pinning you gently against him, you choked out:

“Could you be gentle... at least?”

“Hm?” he hummed, smiling against your skin, his breath warm as he pressed a kiss to your shoulder.

Who could have known that the stern princess could be so shy? Gwayne indulged himself, trailing a path of kisses up the sensitive nape of your neck, savoring the way you shivered beneath his touch.

Precious thing, she truly is.

With a knowing smile, he lifted you effortlessly into his arms, and you gasped, clinging to his shoulders.

He laid you down upon the silk sheets, climbing in above you, and leaned down— immediately pressing his lips to yours in a searing kiss that tasted faintly of sweet wine.

“Mmh...” His mouth moved against yours with hunger, tangling his fingers into the locks of your hair. He kissed you until you felt the room spin— each time he pulled back a fraction of an inch, it was only to catch his breath before leaning down to devour your lips again, deeper and more bruising than before.

His toned hips pressed down firmly against yours, pinning you into the silk sheets. Through your thin linen shift, you could feel the hard, growing length of his bulge pressing against your thigh.

A quiet moan caught in your throat as he started rolling his hips, the friction sending a wave of unfamiliar heat straight to your core. Your fingers grasped the nape of his neck, and he groaned, a low vibration that you felt as much as you heard.

“Do you even know—” he rasped against your lips, still grinding against you, his voice tinged with unbridled desire, “how badly I want you?”

Just as the tension stretched to a breaking point, Gwayne suddenly went still. With a ragged exhale, he pulled away, leaving your lips tingling. He leveled his dark gaze on you, watching you panting for breath.

Lowering his head to rest his forehead against yours, he made no move to strip away the rest of your linen shift. He simply anchored his weight against you.

“Ser Gwayne…?” You blinked up at him, confusion clouding your eyes.

He let out a low chuckle, his fingers tracing the curve of your jaw.

“We have just survived the court of vipers today, my darling. Both of you and I need rest, nothing more.”

“But—”

His eyes then crinkled, his smile softened, looking at you as if he knew clearly what were currently going through your mind.

“What did I vow to you before the Seven?”

Wide-eyed, spellbound, with swollen lips of his making. Gwayne found his princess bride really endearing. Looking at you as he would a treasure, he recited the words he had spoken before the High Septon:

“I pray that my days will be long at your side. May your hand be in mine, by sun and by night...”

His dark blue eyes bored into yours with sincerity that made your chest tighten.

“Let our breaths twine and our blood become one, and even when our bones return to dust... may I find your soul still sworn to mine.”

Once again, he caught your heart with his sweet devotion. The way he was pure in his affections for you made you almost tear up.

Is this what it feels like to feel completely safe?

“There is no rush.” He traced a finger on your lips. “My only desire is to cherish you. With me, you are free to speak your mind— and as I am yours, you are entirely mine.”

He flashed you another sweet smile before rolling onto his side. He reached down to grasp the velvet blankets, pulling the covers all the way up over you both to block out the chill—tucking you securely under his arm and pulling you against his chest.

When you clung to him, he let out a giddy laugh, his hold instinctively tightening around you.

“Thank you, husband,” you whispered against his broad chest, nuzzling your face closer to him.

You received a tender kiss on the crown of your head in return.

For the most part, you were the happiest bride in the Seven Kingdoms.

Everyone in the realm, from the lowly stableboys to nobles, had offered their felicitations, your knight’s devotion was absolute and his tenderness behind closed doors a sanctuary against the court.

Yet, you hadn’t missed the way Ormund Hightower, the heir of Oldtown and Gwayne’s cousin, had eyed you at each and every turn.

His morning greetings had felt entirely too personal for your comfort, and the way he boldly stared at you made your skin crawl. You hadn’t seen fit to tell your husband just yet, choosing instead to give his cousin the benefit of the doubt.

Now, with the last day of your wedding festivities concluded, the gates of Red Keep were open as the lords and ladies of the realm prepared their wheelhouses to leave King’s Landing. Seeking an escape from the noise, you ducked into a cloistered walkway near the Godswood.

But you weren’t alone.

A shadow fell over the stone floor, and before you could turn, Ormund stepped out from behind a carved pillar, blocking your path in the deserted corridor.

“Your Grace,” he greeted with a cold smile.

“Ser Ormund.” Your voice adopting the icy tone you had practiced for years, as you began to question what he was truly after. “Should you not prepare to return to Oldtown? I imagined you would want to be ready for the long journey back to the Reach.”

Ormund didn’t answer right away. He closed the distance between you, tilted his head, a patronizing smile touching his lips.

“Preparations can wait. I merely wanted a private moment to bid my farewell to you.”

“You have had seven days of feasts to bid your farewells,” you retorted.

His smile only deepened. Instead of moving away, he stepped closer, trapping you between his frame and the pillar.

“Now, Princess... You know it as well as I do that we play a less than pretty game here.”

His gaze dropping to your collarbone before lifting to pin yours, with a look of a man who knew how much you weighted before the Iron Throne.

“Everything you lack in birthright is amply compensated by that pretty face of yours.” His blue eyes narrowed. “With a face like that, you could bewitch knights and lords across the Seven Kingdoms. A tragic shame... If only the timing had been right, you could have chosen me instead.”

A wave of disgust rushed through you. “You would do well to remember yourself. You are already wed.”

“A man never knows,” he replied in a sultry whisper, “when he might find himself in need of another wife.”

Ormund chuckled at your horrified expression. He leaned in closer, his eyes boring into yours with a terrifyingly casual entitlement, and in that moment you caught a striking smell on him.

Incense? Pomander? It was a potent smell, but surprisingly and jarringly pleasant.

“Why him?” he sneered, placing both arms against the wall on either side of your head. “An easy prey, is he?”

“He is kind,” you spat, your gaze hardening with defiance, willing yourself not to tremble before him. “A kinder man than anyone could ever be. Now I command you to let me pass, as I will not suffer you insulting my lord husband, Ormund Hightower.”

“Kind, is he now...? My cousin is the very paragon of a gentleman, and you thought you could bend him to your will, no?”

He leaned even closer to your ear that you could feel his breath—his scent filling your being, his blue eyes narrowing and burning into you with cold certainty.

“A word of counsel,” Ormund warned, his voice dropping to a menacing purr. “Gwayne remains a Hightower. The blood of Oldtown runs thick in his veins, and whatever sweet words he whispers in your bed… In the end, he will never betray his own house.”

The words echoed in your mind, striking a sudden chord of doubt— before nausea and fury flared within you.

With a sudden surge of strength, you shoved hard against Ormund’s chest, breaking his hold and causing him to stagger.

Without giving him the satisfaction of another word, you spun on your heel and swept past him, leaving him alone in the shadows of the corridor.

Throughout the seven days and nights of your wedding festivities, Gwayne Hightower had been a man utterly besotted, and he wasn’t reluctant in showing it before the court.

These were, without a doubt, the best days of his life. A dizzying happiness bestowed upon him by the Gods.

And patience was a virtue he possessed and would gladly practice if it meant your comfort. He had no wish to rush you and would like to give you as much time as you wanted, because after all, he knew deep-seated worries a new bride had regarding the marriage bed.

To that end, he had been standing by the hearth for a while now, stoking the coals so the chamber would be warm. When the heavy oak door finally creaked open and you stepped inside, Gwayne turned, already expecting you.

“Well, hello again, darling,” he greeted, an easy smile instantly gracing his features. “Are you ready to retire for the night?”

“Oh—!”

A startled gasp escaped you, and you nearly jumped out of your skin, completely caught off guard to find him waiting. Even from across the room, he caught the rigid hunch of your shoulders and the panic in your eyes. It took only a second to realize how you were shaking.

His smile vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp concern.

“You look unwell,” Gwayne noted, frowning. Immediately letting go of the poker, he stood and crossed the chamber to you.

However, you were always a quick thinker. Meeting his gaze, you forced a placating smile. “No— It is just the wind, husband, and I am weary. I shall summon my handmaiden to help me undress and get ready for bed.”

Now there really was an unsettling weight gnawing at his chest. It was something he realized recently, but you were actually a wretched liar when caught unprepared. And now, you looked fragile, as though you desperately needed comfort.

“Has something happened?” He closed the remaining distance, his hands sliding up to catch you gently by the arm, drawing you closer to him.

His first instinct was to unquestionably provide you that comfort, and he was just about to pull you into the safety of his arms when—

His nostrils flared as he caught the fragrance clinging to you— and the air left his lungs. It was a scent he loathed with a visceral hatred, yet one he recognized almost instantly.

Gwayne went rigid, the blood turning to ice in his veins. A dark, sickening realization settled over him in a matter of seconds.

How?

Just how close had you been... to carry his scent so clearly upon your skin?

His gentle demeanor hardened into a sudden steel, and his voice dropped:

“Were you with Ormund?”

. . .

You wanted nothing more than to collapse in his arms.

You were really going to when suddenly you noticed how his face darkened. Gwayne’s blue eyes locked onto yours, demanding the truth you were trying to hide.

“Why were you with him?”

That striking smell, you realized. “No, I wasn’t—” you stammered, the words catching in your throat as panic flared inside you.

But Gwayne was far from convinced. He immediately let go of you, stepping back as if your very touch burned him. The sudden loss of his warmth made your heart ache with a sharp pain.

He looked utterly lost now, unable to look you in the eye. And worst of all, he looked terribly hurt.

“Nothing happened between us!” you blurted, desperate to bridge the sudden chasm between you. “We just exchanged a few words—”

“Do not lie to me. Ormund has a certain pomander he prefers—a blasted scent I would know anywhere. To carry that scent, you must have been so near to each other, so close that...”

He couldn’t even finish the sentence. The compromising image of you and his cruel cousin choked the words right out of his throat, his jaw clenching as he fought back the raw betrayal burning in his chest.

You, however, wouldn’t allow him to believe the worst. You forcibly threw yourself into his arms, desperate to mend the fracture between you—

“Gwayne, I swear this upon my mother’s name: I would never hurt you in such manner.”

You wrapped your arms around him tightly, burying your face against him. In that moment, even you found a fleeting peace in his warmth and listening to his erratic heartbeat. At first, his entire frame went completely stiff under your touch.

But as your vow settled over him... the tension broke, and he melted into your embrace in surrender, holding onto you with a crushing grip.

Oh. Such a sweet man, he is. The clarity almost made you cry—even when he thought he was in his darkest moment, he silently chose to believe you.

The two of you stayed like that for a while until a sudden, dark terror seemed to occur to him. His eyes snapped back to yours, searching your face for any sign of ruin.

“Did he force himself upon you?” he asked then, his voice uneven, almost trembling with rage at the mere thought. “Because if he did— if he laid a single unwanted hand on you, I will—”

“No!” you fiercely rejected the notion. “Nothing happened! I— I might have incited his displeasure, yes, but nothing more!”

Gwayne let out a relieved sigh, cradling your face with both of his hands to anchor himself, looking down at you like a lovelorn man. The ache in his chest subsided somewhat, and for a moment, he contemplated hearing more.

Ormund was not a kind man. He knew that better than anyone, having spent his childhood under his whims. And Ormund was ruthless and cunning— so if he had approached you, he undoubtedly had a purpose.

It might prove him a fool, and it would cost him another piece of his soul, yet Gwayne chose faith. Just as he had done a hundred times before.

“Whatever transpired between you, I do not wish to hear of it.”

You blinked at him, only to find him staring back with a grave expression.

“Just do not come near him again,” he warned, his voice a low, commanding growl. “Can you do that?”

You barely nodded when Gwayne leaned down and captured your lips in a punishing kiss—one born of relief, jealousy, and a fierce need to erase every trace of his cousin from your skin.

His hands, usually so practiced in their courtesy, lost their gentleness as he crushed you against him. He groaned against your mouth, breaking the kiss only to drag his wet lips down your throat, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin over your pulse point just roughly enough to make you gasp.

The sounds of your mingled breaths and sensual sighs filled the room. Your thoughts burned away by the sudden, suffocating heat of him. He backed you towards the high, velvet-curtained bed, and then swept you off your feet—

“Oh! Ser Gwayne!”

Just like your first night together as man and wife, he laid you down on the marital bed, but this time, he came down over you—his hands tearing at the laces of your dress, his breath hot on your jaw.

“Princess, I can’t—” His voice broke into a growl as he lost it, capturing your lips in another senseless kiss.

Somewhere in the feverish haze, he shrugged off his own shirt, letting out a grunt when he felt the burning touch of your fingertips wandering across his bare skin.

With a single, fluid pull, he rid you of your dress, and only then did he draw back, his dark eyes wide and dilated as he drank the sight of your naked form.

Every inch of you... is dazzlingly woman. How had the heavens deemed him worthy of a wife so breathtaking?

A primal urge flared within him— he had to mark you, to write his name upon your skin. Every lord in the Seven Kingdoms should know that he alone was husband to the princess.

Gwayne buried his face in your chest, suckling your breasts, swirling his tongue around the aching peaks until you arched off the mattress, breathless.

Fuck patience.

He roughly parted your thighs next to devour your sweet cunt with his mouth and lips, making you squirm to hold back your lewd moans. Within minutes, the intense coil inside you burst, your fingertips clawing at the bedsheets as your climax tore through you.

Fuck virtues.

Your head were still spinning in a daze as he proved just how masterful he was in pleasuring you. Before you could properly recover, Gwayne parted your knees wider and settled his weight over you.

“Will it hurt?” your voice came in a whisper, laced with such raw innocence when you realized what was to come that it immediately softened him.

“The first time always is,” Gwayne answered truthfully. “Scratch me, bleed me, scream if you must. Tell me if the pain outweighs the pleasure, and I will stop.”

He aligned himself against your entrance and with a push, inched himself inside you. You winced, a sharp cry escaping your lips at the foreign intrusion, your nails digging into the skin of his back.

“Hush, darling... I have you,” he whispered thickly. He held you tight, anchoring you against the mattress as he drove himself deeper. You trembled beneath him, half in tears and choked by little gasps of pain, your body struggling to accommodate his sheer size.

So tight. Gwayne really was on the verge of losing it when he realized he had broken your maidenhead. Still a maid, and I have claimed her.

When he sheathed himself completely, your body stretched against an agonizing fullness and more tears fell from your eyes. Gwayne held himself perfectly still, giving your body a moment to adjust to his length, before pressing a tender kiss to your lips to soothe you and beginning to move.

As his hips drove into yours with bruising thrusts, the initial sting quickly melted away, replaced by a deep, rolling friction that felt incredibly good, drawing whimpers from the back of your throat.

You looked sinful beneath him. His hands slid up from the mattress to cup your face, his thumbs wiping away the stray tears at the corners of your eyes even as his lower body dictated a merciless pace.

There was only the heat, the slick friction binding you together, and a man utterly possessed.

“You are mine,” Gwayne rasped against your skin, his voice a ragged edge of pure devotion and dark triumph. “From this night... until my last.”

The pleasure wound tighter and tighter within you— until the dam broke, shattering you in a blinding release. You cried out his name, your body clamping tightly around his length.

Fuck.

The pulsing squeeze of your walls was the final blow to his restraints— your husband groaned aloud, as he thrusted into you one last time, before collapsing against you and spilling his seeds inside your womb.

You awoke before him.

With the morning light filtered through the velvet curtains, you observed your husband’s serene, sleeping face. Free from his courtly mask and the heat from the night before, Gwayne looked peaceful, almost like a boy.

Even in sleep, he had one arm on your waist. His red hair was a mess against the sheets, and the blanket barely covered him, exposing the impressive breadth of his back—and the faint red marks where your nails had scratched him last night.

Sweet man, and he’s all mine.

A wave of tenderness washed over you, a deep-seated realization sank that you were truly his woman now. Reaching out, you gently cupped his jaw, the pad of your thumb tracing his cheek.

At your touch, his eyelashes soon fluttered. His eyes blinked open, unfocused with sleep.

“Good morrow, husband,” you fixed a sweet smile, and he blinked blue eyes at you, staring at you in a hazy daze for a moment as his mind worked to bridge the gap between his dreams and reality.

Then, a soft sigh escaped him. He reached out, his strong arms wrapping around your waist to pull you against him, burying his face into the crook of your neck.

“Forgive me,” he murmured in a drawl, his voice muffled against your skin.

You blinked. “What for?”

“I have conducted myself in a manner entirely unbefitting of your husband.”

“Oh?”

“I was far from gentle with you,” he mumbled into your neck. “When you have asked it from me.”

He really thought that? A giggle bubbled up from your chest, the light sound causing him to curl into you even further, hiding his face like a guilty boy.

“I am perfectly well,” you laughed, hugging him close to your chest. “A bit sore, perhaps, but quite intact.”

You stroked his red hair, and he clung to you a little tighter, as if you were the only anchor he needed. However, you were in the mood of being mischievous.

“Although, I must confess, I never knew you had that side in you, husband.” Your lips curling into a smirk as you looked down at him. “I must admit I doubted its existence.”

Gwayne went utterly still in your embrace. Slowly, he pulled back, looking at you with an expression of pure despondence. Then as though he couldn’t bear to look at your face, he groaned, clenching his jaw.

“I am glad my utter lack of composure is a source of amusement for the princess.”

His cheeks had started to redden, and your heart swelled. Reaching out, you caught his jaw with one hand and stole a quick kiss, catching him off guard.

“Am I not your wife?” you teased. “What is there to be so flustered about?”

“Are you secretly a wanton?” Gwayne fired back, a dimpled, shy smile breaking through his lingering embarrassment. “You certainly seem fond of kissing me first.”

Would a man so devoted to you not choose you, when he is faced by the impossible choice between his wife and his house?

Mayhaps that was a question that would find its answer in the years to come.

“This is how you kiss, darling.”

And with that, he leaned in and captured your lips in a chaste yet deep kiss. The shyness that had flushed his cheeks moments ago vanished, replaced by the effortless grace of a man who knew exactly how to cherish his wife.

When he finally parted from you, he didn’t pull away far. He rested his forehead against yours, his breath mingling with your own as the early morning sun caught the rich blue of his eyes, and his grin was the sweetest as he gazed at you.

What is that light shining through the window? It matters less, because you are the sun, and you are in his arms.

You’d laughed then, loud enough to gain the attention of the rest of the courtiers at the long table — because Ser Gwayne was not entirely wrong, to be sure, but he was far too generous for his own good; generous enough to believe that the effort of your marriage actually meant something in the grand scheme of things.

Gwayne Hightower was a sensible man. He was not outwardly affectionate, maybe, but he was no less kind. There was no great love in your union — not like all the songs and fairytales insist, at least — but there was safety. Security. Stability. His presence often found you like the thick walls of an ancient keep, steadfast against the howling winds of a summer storm. You would find no certainty of your future in war, but being Gwayne’s wife meant, at the very least, that you were still alive today.

That unsaid assurance is perhaps a greater gift than any truly loving marriage could’ve been for you. And, perhaps, it was with that unsaid assurance that you came to admire him, without ever realizing you were doing so — always searching for his face in crowds, waiting every night for the familiar sound of his footsteps to walk outside your chamber doors, constantly watching him from a distance (which has become a most embarrassing habit of yours).

You find him now on the western balcony overlooking Blackwater Bay, where the moon climbs high over shimmering midnight waters. The salty breeze mixes with the scent of damp stone and dying fires from the lantern light glittering in the city below. Gwayne stands alone with his forearms propped on the pale stone balustrade, having exchanged his armor for a forest-green doublet embroidered with winding gold vines. The fading torchlights gild his silken auburn hair, stirred loose by the sea breeze.

You linger just beneath the archway, hidden in the place where the torchlight turns to shadow, studying the slope of his strong shoulders and how they rise and fall with each breath. He looks lonely; lonely enough for your chest to tighten with the want to close the distance between you and slip in beside him. But your feet refuse to move. And whatever affection was warming in your chest before pierces through you like a sword.

“You’re staring.” The suddenness of his voice startles you.

“…You’re supposed to be watching the sea,” you respond, half-shy. He doesn’t look back at you when you emerge finally from the shadows; slippers scuffing the cobblestones, black skirts fluttering at your feet.

“I was,” Gwayne nods.

“Then how could you possibly notice I was standing there?”

He turns to face you then, as you settle on the balcony just beside him, keeping a few feet of careful distance between you like you always did — as if, in your union, an invisible line had been wedged between you and could not be crossed. 

The corner of his mouth lifts slowly into a crooked smile. “Because I notice everything about you,” he answers like it’s simple, like he hadn’t just stolen the breath from your lungs.

Heat crawls up the low neckline of your dress, speckling across your cheeks and the very tip of your ears. You turn away, face screwed in a feigned disgust, and busy your hands with an imaginary wrinkle on your sleeve. 

“That,” you murmur. “Is a terrifying thought.”

“Well, it ought to terrify you,” Gwayne quips knowingly, bending softly at the waist to fold his arms along the stone railing. “I’ve seen the way you steal the candied slices off of all your lemon cakes just to leave the sponge untouched, you know? Like an utter madwoman.” 

“Well…” you huff, face flaring hot at the acknowledgment of being so openly seen by another. “It seems I made the dreadful mistake of marrying the observant man in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“And here I thought that distinction belonged to my cousin,” Gwayne jokes lowly, brows raised to his hairline. “I shall write to Lord Ormund at once and relieve him of the title.”

You laugh quietly through your nose and turn away again. Silence settles comfortably over you once more, filled only by the distant clanging of metal as guards change their shift and the far-off crowing of a caged raven. The night feels impossibly dark, emptier than usual. It feels like an omen of sorts.

“It grows worse, does it not?” you wonder aloud through the breath that catches in your chest, as if you were half scared to even ask.

Gwayne’s thin smile slowly fades. His adam’s apple bobs in his throat. “Aye,” he nods. “I fear it does.”

“I keep… hoping that…” You swallow around the invisible hand tightening around your throat. “That they’ll remember I am your wife before they remember whose blood I carry. I feel it’s the only reason they’ve yet to take my head.”

“Of course, they remember,” he assures you.

“It feels less and less so these days.”

“They’re only frightened—”

“I’m frightened,” you remind him.

The admission lingers between you like the salt water scent hanging in the air. Gwayne studies you for a long moment — he sees the flicker of sincerity flashing across your face right before you turn away from him again, and the way your jaw clenches a second later in regret of saying the words aloud. 

He leans an elbow along the parapet to face you fully. And, as if to soothe you, he asks, “If there were no war… No thrones, no dragons—”

“No Hightowers?” you add.

“—If the Stranger himself appeared before you now and offered you another life,” the auburn-haired man continues with a hint of a smile gracing his lips. “What would you do?”

You ponder the question for a moment, eyes zeroed on the navy black horizon ahead as your fingers fidget on the stony barricade. “I should like a farm,” you answer, mouth twitching into an absentminded grin. “Somewhere far away from here. So I could raise chickens—”

“Chickens?” he scoffs a dry laugh, then softens a second later at the sincere look you give him. He swallows hard and nods supportively. “Most ladies would’ve said children, is all…”

“Well, I am not most ladies…” you tell him. “I would have a field of apple trees, and a hundred dogs to protect all my chickens and horses and fluffy cows— you know, the ones that live down in the Reach?”

“Well…” Gwayne croons. “You’ve certainly thought about this, haven’t you?”

“Every day,” you confess. The honesty in your answer strikes him down like a blade; the sorrowful look that heavies your face even more so. The reality of your situation returns to you then, settling over you like gravity’s inevitable weight. You swallow hard before you confess, “I fear they’ll kill me if matters grow worse at Dragonstone.”

“They won’t.”

“You cannot know that.”

“I do,” Gwayne assures you and takes a slow step closer, until the inherent warmth of his skin dulls the bite of the bitter sea wind. He ducks his chin to his chest to chase your gaze, peering down at you with glittering blue eyes. “I swore a vow before gods and men, did I not?”

“So do most men—”

“Well, I am not most men,” he lilts with an air of amusement hanging on the edge of his words. “I actually meant my vows.”

Your eyes soften as they search his face, looking for any hint of hesitation or doubt in his handsome features. You find no uncertainty there; just the maddening, immovable confidence that seems to be stitched into the very fiber of his making.

“If this castle should fall tomorrow…” you whisper to him, eyes narrowing in skepticism. “Or if your family decides that I have become too great a burden to keep here… What happens then?”

“Then I shall stand in the doorway,” he shrugs.

A shocked laugh sputters from your mouth at his boyish conviction. “And if they mean to come through it?”

“Then…” His lips jut softly. “They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“You are a valiant knight, Ser Gwayne, but you cannot fight an entire army.”

“Perhaps not,” he replies with a sad sort of smile. “But armies are made of men. And every man who wishes to reach you will first have to face me... As I said… I meant my vows.”

Something in his words strikes a deep sadness within you. No one had ever spoken of your being like it possessed any value worth defending, and now the words come from the very family you were meant to despise.

But even still, for the first time since the ravens brought the tidings of war and the dragons took wing against dragon, you believed him. You believed that, should the whole realm come crashing down around you, Ser Gwayne would likely be the only one left standing at your side when the last stone fell.

And, gods, how stupid you were to do so.

ii. OATHS & ASHES

The news of your husband’s leaving came not from your husband himself. 

It came, rather, in whispers at court, slithering through the Red Keep like snakes beneath rushes — passing from Gold Cloak to stable boy to serving girl to scullion. “They say Ser Criston and his knights are marching for Harrenhal on the morrow,” says a thick-accented handmaiden. “Lord Hand means to smoke Daemon from the castle. It’ll be Prince Aemond’s before the next moon, no doubt.”

Your stomach dropped so harshly at the whispers that you nearly retched upon the marble. It was not Gwayne’s leaving that frightened you so, but rather what his absence would represent — he might as well throw you to the hounds himself before he goes, because you were as good as dead with him gone.

Your slippers strike the ancient stone in a frantic rhythm as you turn on your heel to storm back the way you came. The harsh echo of the soles catches the attention of surrounding servants, who flatten themselves against the walls as you hurry suddenly past. Your heartbeat pounds like thunder in your ears, far louder than the bells of the Great Sept that toll the evening hour — the combination of both feels like an ominous funeral knell.

You rush up the winding stone staircase with your crimson skirts gathering in your fists. Gwayne’s chambers sit directly opposite yours, and you find the heavy wooden door is cracked ajar. The hinges screechbeneath your palm when you shove it the rest of the way open without warning. The sight you find on the other side hollows you from the inside out — a travel satchel, laid open along the emerald sheets. Inside, a whetstone, riding gloves, a leather-bound prayer book, a sword belt, a flask. 

The careful order of it all feels almost cruel. Chaos, at the very least, would suggest some air of hesitation from the man; a faint pause at leaving you behind. This, however, feels far too final.

Gwayne stands at the head of the bed with his back facing you. His pale hands work with a quiet precision to roll a Hightower-green cloak into his bag. He did not need to turn at the sudden intrusion. He learned the sound of your footsteps long ago.

“I wondered how long it might take,” the man croons distantly. The calmness of his voice, the indifference, sets you entirely aflame.

“Why would you not tell me?” you bite in response.

Gwayne glances over his shoulder at you then. The flickering candlelight turns his hair a more golden shade of Hightower-red, and carves the soft edges of his face out in shadow. He was still every inch the striking knight that the whispers purported him to be — broad as an oak tree, handsome as a saint carved into an altar — but there’s a foreign weariness etched into his features now. It darkens the skin beneath his eyes, turns his gaze a duller shade of icy blue.

“Well, I was going to, of course.”

“When?” The sharpness in your voice could draw blood. 

“…Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Your laugh splinters the otherwise silent room, sharper than broken glass. You shut the door behind you with an aggressive hand and close the distance between you, dress skirts billowing wildly at your ankles. “When you ride at dawn? And you meant to tell me when your horses were already saddled?”

“Yes,” Gwayne sighs, lowering the folded doublet into its place. “I thought I might spare you one night’s grief—”

“You’re abandoning me,” you tell him then, as if to translate the man’s words back to himself. You linger at his side, eyes darting wildly over his profile when he fails to meet your gaze. “Just like all the rest of them. You do realize that, right?”

“The king has given orders—”

“Well, it wasn’t the king who stood beside me at Blackwater Bay not even a week ago, was it?” Your voice lowers into a faux-masculine tone, trying and failing to mock him. “If anyone comes for you, I shall stand in the doorway—”

Gwayne scoffs. “Surely, I do not sound like that.”

“—They shall first have to make a corpse of me.”

“Yes… I remember,” he answers through a slow huff of annoyance, stepping back from his travel bag to drag a pair of weary hands down his face. “I was— well into my cups by then, as you well know—”

“Oh, do not cheapen those words now,” you spit, shoving hard at his shoulder. Gwayne’s features twist in offense as his wide eyes glance down at the hand you’d pushed him with, though he doesn’t move an inch. “Don’t dishonor yourself with a coward’s excuse just to make up for the fact that you lied.”

Gwayne’s composure fractures at that. He had spent too much of his life trying to be a good knight, a good man — one that maybe his callous father could be proud of — so he refuses to stomach accusations of otherwise from you. 

His icy blue eyes harden into a glacial sort of look, more hurt than truly angry. He lays his cloak into place to face you fully.

“Do you not see that I am leaving to keep the fight from coming here?”

“Do not you see that by leaving me here that I’m as good as dead?” you retort through a jaw clenched tight. “If you do not take me with you, then—”

“Of course I’m not taking you with me!” he scoffs with a crooked smile, like it’s funny to him. “You’d be dead before we made it to the God’s Eye—”

“And I will be dead before this war is won if you leave!” you shout, voice wet and fragile with the unshed tears burning the backs of your eyes. “The fight is already here! The people who wish me dead are in these walls! They pour my wine, they wash my hair, they cook my food, they bow when I walk by and whisper when my back is turned! And if you aren’t here, then…” 

You trail off with a ragged breath. Your corset feels suddenly tight against your ribs. You choke back the sob that strangles your throat and blink rapidly to clear the haze of tears blurring at your waterline. You peer up at the man with the sternest gaze you can muster.

“I am… frightened,” you tell him, though your voice cracks into a fragile whisper halfway through.

The anger disappears from Gwayne’s face as quickly as it arrived. His shoulders deflate with a slow huff through his nose as he takes a slow step towards you. His hands release their clenched fists to reach hesitantly for your face. His palms are warm and softly calloused when they cup your cheeks, caressing you with a tenderness he hasn’t shown since your bedding ceremony six or more moons ago.

The quiet half-smile he gives you, then, is weighed down by a palpable sadness.

“To tell you the truth… I have never been more afraid than I am right now,” he confesses in a low murmur, swiping his thumb over the warm apple of your cheek. The softness in his voice threatens to undo you entirely. 

“So then don’t go,” you plead in a small voice, grasping at the front of his emerald doublet until the golden vines wrinkle under your grip. “Please.”

“If Harrenhal remains in Rhaenyra’s hold, and if Daemon rallies the Riverland armies, then the war will come here,” Gwayne continues in a painfully steady voice. “I fear I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“Everyone has a choice,” you tell him, filled with a girlish sort of rage once more. “But, I suppose you’ve already made yours.”

The man meets your scowl with a tired, slightly heartbroken smile. “Please do not make me spend my last night with my wife quarreling with her,” Gwayne jokes quietly, swiping an eyelash from your cheek with the pad of his thumb. “At least leave me with something to hold onto until my return.”

Your tight chest deflates with a slow sigh from your nose. The rage ebbs evenly into grief. “And what shall I have, hm? Considering tonight is very likely my last one alive and all…”

Gwayne laughs. “You are being… catastrophically dramatic.”

Your chest burns with a mixture of rage and desire. He could never possibly understand you, but somehow, he is the only one with the walls of the Keep who ever has. The contrast is dizzying.

“I hate you,” you hear yourself say.

“Perhaps...” Gwayne hums, warm breath fanning across your cheek. “But not nearly as much as you love me.”

Your first instinct is to strike him for the sarcasm in his words; your second is to weep at the truth of them. He kisses you before you can do either.

He ducks down to press his lips to yours in a tender kiss, a mere brushing of your lips. The last time he had done so was beneath the glowing candles of the Sept, following the declaration of your wedding vows. But that was an obligation, a political victory of sorts.

This kiss is far sweeter in comparison. You feel the man heavying against you as he falls deeper into your touch. He opens your mouth with his and flicks the pad of his tongue against yours, like velvet brushing velvet. Your hands tremble as they leave the chest of his doublet to rake through his auburn locks, like silk between your fingers. You sigh against his open mouth at the taste of him — like wine and mint and oranges — sweet enough to get drunk on.

It takes you a long moment to realize his hands have snaked around your waist accordingly. You don’t realize his deft fingers are loosening the tie in your corset until the discomfort in your ribs disappears entirely. Your body acts before your mind, and your arms slither from their sleeves to curl once more around Gwayne’s broad shoulders.

The man folds the top of your dress down until your bare chest is revealed to him. A grumbled moan sounds in the back of his throat as he pulls you back into him with two wide palms along your bare back, pressing your breasts flush against his chest. He thinks, if he concentrated hard enough, he could feel the steady thundering of your heart like this.

“Gwayne—” you whisper against his mouth when you feel something hardening against your hip. Your hands drop from his hair to slide between your bodies, headed for the tie in his trousers to release the stiffness growing there. 

He twists you round in the meanwhile, shoes scuffing the cobbles, until the bend of your knees meets the edge of the mattress behind you. He lays you down without once taking his mouth off of yours, with one wide palm splayed along your ribcage and his other cradling the back of your neck.

He pulls off of you with a quiet smack to catch his breath. A small whimper sounds in the back of your throat when his warm body leaves yours, rising to reach down for your skirts. Your bare chest heaves as you sit up on your elbows to watch him fumble with your dress. “Gods above, how many skirts are you wearing?” you hear him complain under his breath. “I’ve faced hedge knights with fewer defenses than this.”

You giggle when he finally pushes the layers of your dress up to your hips. Your thighs spread on instinct, exposing yourself to him. Gwayne’s mouth waters at the sight of your silken folds, already glittering in anticipation. Your chest tightens when he falls to his knees before you. 

“What are you doing?” you ask on bated breath.

Gwayne flashes you a love-drunk grin and a pair of glassy blue eyes. His warm palms smooth along the velvety skin of your inner thighs to spread them further. “Call it a knight’s act of service, shall we?” he quips.

His auburn head disappears beneath your bunched-up skirts a second later. Your face twists momentarily in confusion before you feel his tongue slotting in the silk folds of your cunt. He licks a fat stripe up the length of it, until his tongue finds something that makes your hips twitch despite yourself. His mouth closes around the sensitive button, suckling at it with a grumbled moan in the back of his throat.

Your head tips back at the feeling. Your lips part as if to moan, but the electric shock in the pit of your stomach knocks all the available air from your lungs. You feel him laughing against you when your thighs clench suddenly around his head, tighter than you realize.

Gwayne pulls off of you with a quick smacking sound. He wears your slick down to his chin as he flashes you a teasing, glassy-eyed look. “I’d quite like to keep my head, dear wife—”

You say nothing in response to his quip. You just dart a head to the crown of his skull and shove his face back between your thighs.

 Gwayne complies without complaint, lapping at the honey you leak for him, until the wet sounds of his mouth fill the quiet chambers. You rock your hips against his face, bracing yourself with the auburn locks you clench in your fist.

His nose nudges the swollen bud that makes you keen, right before he takes it in his mouth again. Your skin buzzes at the foreign feeling.

“Gwayne—” you gasp. A tight feeling settles deep in your stomach, like a fraying knot about to snap. Your back arches off the mattress. Your hand tightens in his hair. Your features screw in a pain look, half-scared at the pleasure welling within you. “I can’t—”

“Mm…” he just keeps moaning against you, letting the vibrations deepen your pleasure. His wide hands smooth up and down your outer thighs when they tremble on either side of his head, clenching around him as your orgasm hits you with a pleasured whine. He laps up every ounce of honey you leak for him, and sighs hard through his nose at the salty-sweet taste of you.

Only when your legs grow finally lax around his jaw does he pull back from your thighs. A smile curls lazily at his rosier, more swollen mouth. The bottom half of his face glitters in the candlelight with a mixture of saliva and cum — you lift your head in time to watch him wipe his mouth with the back of his hand.

“If this truly is my final night alive…” you say through panted breaths, eyes still wide from the shock of your simmering pleasure. “I feel I could finally die a happy woman.”

“I’m glad I could be of service, princess…” Gwayne smiles lazily, grimacing slightly at the ache in his knees as he rises from the unforgiving cobbles. He leans down to lay his warmth back over you. You stop him with a firm hand on his chest.

“I want to be on top this time,” you confess in a breathless whisper, eyes darting back and forth between his.

Gwayne’s brows raise slowly in shock at your sudden display of dominance. The corner of his lip twitches into a smile the same way his cock twitches in his boxers. He nods until the words catch up to him. “As you wish…”

iii. CROWNS & CAGES

You did not weep when they came for you, scarcely a fortnight after your lord husband’s leaving.

Gwayne was gone by first light, perhaps already a league or more away before you stirred awake that morning to the chill of an empty bed. He parted with nothing but a folded scrap of parchment resting where his head had been the night before. In his scrawled handwriting, half-smudged from where his wrist had dragged the ink in haste, he wrote: “Write to me. Don’t die. I’ll build the form for you myself.”

You keep the note tucked safely inside the chest of your corset now, folded so many times that the edges have already begun to soften. You keep it close to your heart like a holy relic, or perhaps, a threat to whatever unlucky son of a bitch kills you first — something to discover on your corpse after they slit your throat, so they’ll know who to answer to upon your husband’s return.

Eventually, the servants ceased asking whether you needed anything, and all your meals came cold. Conversations ceased the moment you entered a room, and doors slammed shut before you could reach them. And then, when word spread that a wild dragon had taken wing not far from here, all eyes of suspicion turned to you — to whom a dragon had never belonged, though the blood in your veins wearied the courtiers all the same. Rhaenyra had already added three new riders to her fleet; she certainly did not need another.

You were no longer a bride, but a prisoner in pretty gowns — it was the Queen Dowager, and your sister by law, who confirmed as much to you.

“I had hoped…” Alicent started slowly, bathed half in sunshine and half in shadow from where she stood before the window in your quarters, watching the distant storm clouds blow in over Blackwater. “That I might never have to ask this of you.”

Her auburn curls swept over her pale shoulder when she turned to face you. Something heavy sat in her round green eyes, as if she wanted you to finish the rest of it for her. But you remained as stoic and silent as ever from where you sat at the small dining table just across from her. Your hands wrung into knots over your skirts, hidden beneath the surface, as you waited for the words of your fate to fall from her lips.

“The council believes that— Should the opportunity present itself, you would attempt to reach the wild beast. The Cannibal, I believe it’s called,” Alicent said. “And through him, Rhaenyra.”

“So…” You sighed, making no attempt to argue the subject. It did not matter whether or not it was true; the possibility was enough to make you a criminal. “The Black Cells, then?”

“No,” Alicent shook her head, half-offended by the suggestion. “Of course not. My cousin, Lord Ormund, he commands the Hightower host. He has agreed to keep you under his… protection for the time being.”

“Protection?” you echoed through a scoff. The word tasted foreign and bitter in your mouth. “What a pleasant name for captivity.”

Alicent’s face flickered with a mother’s sort of sympathy. Her hands wrang together beneath the draping sleeves of her emerald dress.“You will be treated with every courtesy your station deserves, I assure you.”

“If your council means to bargain with me, Your Grace…” you started with a sad smile. “They mistake me for something worth bartering for. Rhaenyra already abandoned e— keeping me hostage will not make her respond to your offered terms.”

“Even still… You would be far safer there than you would be here, whether or not you believe that’s true,” Alicent said. “I know what my brother would wish of me. And Gwayne would never forgive me if I didn’t do everything I could to keep you safe.”

The long journey south smells of wet earth and horse dung. By the time you reach the Hightower encampment — which sprawls across the rolling fields like a second city — your fine silk gown has long surrendered to the dust of the road, and your hands now bear the tenderness of a week spent in the saddle. 

Your broad-shouldered escort guides you through the avenue of canvas tents billowing wildly beneath snapping green banners. The air smells of woodsmoke, cooked venison, and salty sweat — the soft breeze carries with it the sound of laughter, barking hounds, clanking chainmail, and shouted commands.

A pair of guards draw back the heavy canvas of the biggest pavilion in the camp. “My lord,” one says to announce your arrival inside, right before the entrance flap closes heavily behind you.

Inside, candles burn despite the lingering daylight, filling the enclosed tent with the smell of beeswax and parchment from the large map covering the long oak table. Pieces carved from ivory and oak mark castles and armies across the whole of Westeros, waiting to be won or maybe burned. 

A strange man stands over them with his broad hands planted along the edge, visibly built beneath his ornately decorated armor, and standing several inches taller than the rest of the knights in the room.

Lord Ormund was not pretty like Gwayne, but he was his own kind of handsome, made of sharp edges and strong features. His Hightower-auburn curls are less vivid in color and sheared short. He has his family’s pair of striking blue eyes, too, which feel a little like they’re piercing you when he glances up from his map. 

“Leave us,” he commands his guards in a low, melodic voice, keeping his eyes on you as his knights filter out of the tent. Their armor clatters faintly as they go. The man doesn’t say another word until they’re gone. 

“So…” he hums, one corner of his mouth lifting upwards. “The infamous dragon bride.”

Your brows bounce at the title. It feels like another chain around your neck. “I suppose I’ve been called worse…” you sigh, studying him with the same curiosity. “You must be Lord Ormund.”

“I must,” the man nods as he rounds the war table at an unhurried pace. 

His boots sink into the woven rungs laid across the hard earth with each step. He towers several inches over your head when he plants himself in front of you. He smells of steel and sweat and strongly of incense.

“I expected someone… older.”

His brows raise in amusement. “And here I expected someone taller.”

“Well,” you deadpan, eyes narrowing up at him as your hands clasp behind your back. “I’m sorry for disappointing you, Ser.”

“Oh, I’ve endured far worse disappointments, my lady, I assure you.” A ghost of a smile graces his pink lips as his eyes soften slightly around the edges. “I give you my word. While you remain beneath my banners, no harm will come to you.”

You sigh hard through your nose. “Yes… People keep promising me that.”

“I’m sure they have… But I intend to honor it.” The certainty of the man’s words unsettles you. It’s strange, you find, to be looked at like you were something worth protecting. “And if you require anything— anything at all. You need only ask.”

You nod slowly with a deep exhale, considering the offer. “A quill,” you conclude firmly.

Ormund blinks. “A… A quill?”

“Yes,” you say. “And parchment.”

“For… What purpose?” he laughs.

You glance over your shoulder towards the tent’s fluttering entrance, where the last light of the early evening burns gold against a sea of green banners. You wonder, briefly, how many soldiers outside this pavilion would celebrate if they found you dead on the morrow — how many would mourn, how many would care enough to do anything at all. 

You think, perhaps, that in the whole of the Seven Kingdoms, there is only one person who would weep for you. And he was a hundred leagues away.

“So that I may write to my lord husband,” you answer finally. “And tell him that I was right… And that he still owes me a farm.”

Lord Ormund allows you to write to Gwayne that night, and every seventh day after. It was the only thing you could look forward to, since there was little else to do at camp. He had been gracious enough to give you your own pavilion at the edge of the command encampment, close enough for the sentries to watch but far enough away to force you into solitude. 

It was clean and moderately comfortable — with a narrow cot draped in a single wool blanket, a traveling chest for the few dresses you were allowed to bring, a wash basin, and a small writing table tucked beneath the only slit in the canvas that permitted daylight. Inside smelled of candle wax, pressed linen, and lavender soap.

Outside smelled of war — of pressed metal from the blacksmiths, of men cursing over burnt porridge, of stableboys tending to horses who fouled the earth faster than they could shovel it. It was cruel, how the world went on while you could go scarcely a step without an escort. Eventually, you became accustomed to feeling a hundred eyes upon your back — most curious, others suspicious, some outright hateful.

The letters you wrote to Gwayne, at least, gave you the illusion of escape. You tended to each with careful precision — melting the wax, stamping it shut, then tying it off with a ribbon — and watched from afar as one of Ormund’s knights carried them toward the rookery. It was not until the twentieth day at camp, when you wandered further than you were typically allowed, that you noticed that none of your messages had been sent. You watched the knight toss the letter into the fire, flinching slightly when the flames sparked beneath the fresh kindling.

It had been four days since then. 

And you haven’t eaten once in protest.

It took roughly half that time for Lord Ormund’s patience to run thin. He’s suffered the endless whispers of your attempts to starve to death with an increasing displeasure. He commands thousands of knights beneath his banners, serves as the leader of his house with grace, and yet — he still cannot seem to manage to command one lady to supper. It was absurd. Humiliating. And worse, it invited doubt. What army will follow a man whom they believe incapable of governing his own household?

On the fifth evening, after your breakfast tray went untouched that morning, Ormund opts to bring you your supper himself. He marches through the crowded camp with his jaw clenched tight like a soldier headed into battle. His chainmail clanks with every step. Avoiding the stares he gets from surrounding knights feels borderline impossible.

He throws open the entrance of your tent without ceremony. The canvas snaps sharply beneath his aggressive hand as he ducks suddenly underneath it.  The light of the golden evening pours suddenly inside around his towering silhouette before the flap falls shut behind him once more, trapping the two of you inside.

There, he finds you lying on your cot, staring upward at the slit in the pavilion where one lonely shaft of sunlight spills through. Your fingers drift lazily through the rays, as if you were trying to catch it somehow. 

Your head snaps suddenly to the side at the sudden intrusion — your hair is loose and unkempt, because no one ever taught you how to do it yourself, and all of your dresses are now wrinkled and stained with dirt. The thin white nightgown you wear makes you look more sunken, more lifeless. 

Ormund grasps your tray with one hand and reaches for your small writing desk with the other. He lectures you through the distant pang of sympathy in his chest.

“I have commanded men twice your size—” His boots are heavy on the thin rug as he carries the desk over to you. “I have started sieges, I have broken sieges. And yet—” He slams the table in front of you with a dull thump. You try not to cower under the icy blue glare he gives you. “I cannot seem to persuade one prisoner— a lady, no less— to eat her supper. And I confess, it does very little for confidence in my command. So eat.”

Ormund slams the tray onto the desk. The broth steaming in a small wooden bowl sloshes over. Next to it, strips of leftover venison and a broken loaf of stale bread. Your empty stomach twists painfully with a mixture of nausea and hunger.

“So…” you start lowly, clearing your throat when your voice comes gravelly. You rise from your supine position on weak limbs. The fabric of your nightgown rides up your thighs as you turn to place your bare feet on the ground — eyes dull when you peer up at the man from beneath your lashes. “You admit it, then? That I am your prisoner here?”

His jaw clenches tight. His nostrils flare through a sharp breath. He no longer finds amusement in your banter. “Your status here depends entirely on your pliancy,” he spits, ripping off a piece of the stale loaf. “Now eat.”

You flinch when his fist rears suddenly towards your face, holding the broken bread just in front of your mouth. You blink wildly up at him, features screwed in offense. “…Excuse me?”

“Eat.”

You swat his hand away; it moves scarcely an inch. “I’m not a child—”

“Well, at present, you are behaving remarkably like one,” Ormund argues through a tight jaw. “Now open your mouth.”

You respond with only a glare.

Fury rages through the man’s chest. He wishes wordlessly for the strength of the Mother and the Warrior engraved upon his armor as he offers bitterly, “Or shall I make you?”

You spend a long moment staring up at him with eyes cold enough to freeze wine. You hold his gaze as your mouth parts slowly to accept the chunk of bread he pinches between his thumb and forefinger. He places it upon your tongue with a surprising gentleness, considering the wrath he’d had moments ago.

“Chew,” he commands, glaring down the bridge of his nose at you. Your jaw moves slowly. Ormund nods in approval. “Swallow.” 

Your heart lurches into your throat at his order. But you do as you’re told, throat bobbing as the piece of bread goes down. Another piece follows soon after; this time, your lips part before he asks you to do so. Relief crosses over his strong features as he places the food onto your tongue. His shoulders sag with the exhaled breath that it feels like he’s been holding for days.

He looks almost worried for you; relieved, almost, to have fed you. A warm, foreign feeling settles in your chest accordingly.

“I am trying… Very hard to be kind to you,” Ormund confesses, scarred hands twitching at his sides.  “So I cannot, for the life of me, understand why you insist on making this so difficult.”

“My letters,” you tell him. “Why aren’t they being sent?”

“The rookery master feared they could be intercepted,” he answers plainly. “I could not risk one falling into enemy hands. I… meant to tell you.”

“When?” you spit.

“When I found a safer way to deliver them.”

A bitter laugh sputters from your mouth. “What curious men you Hightowers are,” you quip with narrowed eyes. “So fond of deciding what sorrows I ought to be spared.”

His brows lower in confusion. “Is that not a kindness?” 

His answer lingers between you for several long moments. There was no cleverness in his words, only an honesty that strikes you like a fist to the stomach.

“Aye. I suppose it is,” you answer, clearing your throat when your voice catches. 

A strange emotion strangles you, and burns at the back of your eyes as you look down at your dress. Your dull nails pick at a smudge of mud on the fabric that will likely never come off. An embarrassed sort of laugh tumbles from your mouth. 

“Perhaps I… I spent so long waiting for someone to hurt me that I no longer remember what kindness is supposed to feel like.”

Ormund nods through a slow exhale from his nose. He glances to the side and walks the short distance to the stool that the table had knocked over in his rage. Your wet eyes follow his form as he walks away and then back to you, setting the chair on the other side of the table. You can feel the warmth radiating from his body, even in the scarce distance between you.

“I’ll admit— A man spends enough time at war, they start to forget that mornings are not meant to begin with fear,” he says, reaching again for the loaf of bread, but this time breaking it in half. “I forget myself, at times, but… if you’ll allow me… I’d very much like to prove to you that I can be kind.”

Your weary features soften around the edges. “Well, I don’t have much of a choice in the matter, do I?” you tell him, with a more sincere smile hinting at the corners of your lips. “I am your prisoner, after all.”

“So you keep insisting,” Ormund quips with his own quiet grin. “But I should rather you thought of yourself as my… responsibility.”

Your heart stumbles a beat. Responsibility felt much safer than hostage, or bargaining piece, or burden. It felt, you’ll admit, like a kindness.

iv. SILK & SWORDS

You fall into a steady routine at the Hightower encampment by the fifth moon of your captivity.

Each morning arrives with the same mournful groan of a warhorn that rolls across the grass green hills before the sun has even broken the horizon. You wake to the distant ringing of hammers against anvils, hounds barking for gristles off the cookfires, and knights shouting for their squires. The first hours were reserved for armorers; the afternoons for drilling knights whose swords cracked together until you could feel them ringing in your skull; and the evenings for songs, laughter, and ale.

Your days, however, remained painfully empty.

Lord Ormund had been kind enough to provide you with greater comforts as the weeks went by — cushioned pillows and heavier woolen blankets for when the nights got colder; sprigs of lavender for your bedside to keep out the stench of man; more parchment and colored ink to busy your hands when the days were especially long. And all of them were especially long. He’d given you his leather-bound prayer book, too, and even though you were not an entirely pious woman, you’d read through it enough times to recite each passage from memory.

The camp has since grown accustomed to your being there, ever since Ormund slackened his metaphorical leash on you — “You’ve had more than ample opportunity to run,” he’d said beneath the scratching of his quill. “Besides, where exactly would you go? No one else would take you.” No one bats an eye when you leave your tent, after three days of relentless rain had finally broken, to pick fresh berries from the brushes along the treeline.

Your crimson silk dress scrubs the dewy evening grass as you collect wild raspberries into a small wooden bowl. The juices stain your fingertips the color of red wine. The sweet scent mixes with the smell of wet earth and mint leaves crushed beneath your slippers. You bend at the waist to parse through tangled brambles, searching for the ripest berries. For the first time in months — years, maybe — you feel almost peaceful.

“Is that a love letter—?”

The voice cuts through the quiet like a blade. Your heart lurches into your throat as you jerk to full height again. The small bowl of berries slips from your grasp and rolls through the wet clover like so many drops of scattered blood. Behind you, you find a vaguely familiar hedgeknight, scarcely ten paces away — made of broad shoulders, broken teeth, and greasy hair that falls to his shoulders.

It takes you an embarrassingly long moment to catch your breath.

“I’m sorry,” you say through a tightening chest. “You… You startled me.”

“Did I?” he hums gruffly, in a voice that borders on amusement.

You cower into the hedgerow behind you as he approaches you, reaching you quickly on much longer limbs. He looms close enough for you to smell the sweat and ale and horse piss on his chainmail, close enough for you to lift your chin to meet his gaze.

His eyes never quite reach yours. They linger, instead, on your chest. “Letter from your lord husband, is it?” he asks, motioning with his head.

Your chin ducks to follow his eyes, where the rough edges of parchment nestled against your chest peek out from your corset. Your hands lift to cover it instinctively. “Yes. It’s a… a letter. From home.”

“Mind if I take a look at it?” he asks, taking another daring step closer. You wince at the sour smell of him. “What does Ser Gwayne write his pretty wife, hm?”

“Please, don’t—”

His hand shoots out. Thick, filthy fingers hook beneath the neckline of your gown, hard enough to stretch the fine silk with an audible crack. You react on pure instinct accordingly, lifting your own hand to strike him before your mind could forbid it.

The sound of your palm colliding with his bearded jaw cracks through the hedgerow like a whip.

His head turns slightly under the blow.

Your breath catches in surprise at yourself.

The back of his hand catches you across the cheek before you can blink. A red-hot pain explodes from your ear to your jaw as your world lurches suddenly sideways. You hit the unforgiving earth below with a huff when the air rushes from your lungs. Coppery blood pools thick on your tongue from where your teeth had cut the inside of your cheek.

“You little cunt—” you hear the man say, right before he catches a fistful of your skirts to pull you back towards him. The fabric screams beneath his hand. The cool evening air strikes your legs all at once when the silk rips up to your thighs.

You kick wildly at the man. Your slipper strikes uselessly against his shoulder. Your fingernails claw muddy furrows through the soaked earth.

“I am— Gwayne Hightower’s wife—” You tell him through panted, fearful breaths. He flips you onto your back by your ankle. Your foot burns beneath his grip. Your head strikes the soaked earth. Through the lack of air in your lungs, you heave, “He will have your head for this—”

“Oh, will he?” the hedge knight laughs with a brown-tooth grin. “‘Cause he ain’t here—”

The hand not holding your squirming ankle reaches for the tie in his trousers.

Then, in a blink, steel sings with a clean rasping sound. Warm blood splashes from your right jaw up to your left temple. For a flicker of a moment, you can’t quite comprehend why — not until the hedge knight kneels suddenly before you, with open eyes that have gone strangely distant. He topples suddenly sideways with his neck bent at an awkward angle, head half cut off and spouting bright red blood.

You blink wildly through the haze of death until you find Ormund standing just behind the corpse, chest rising and falling beneath his heavy armor. His longsword drips crimson onto the grass where your raspberries lie.

Sweat from the long day clings to his dark curls, wetting them against his temples and forehead. Flecks of blood dot his jaw like crimson stars. His blue eyes burn with something fierce, but his voice remains remarkably soft.

“My lady…”

You open your mouth to answer him, but nothing comes out.

Only then do you notice how violently your body is shaking, buzzing with a white-hot fear, as you scan the scene surrounding you — your torn skirts, the blood staining your chest, the dead body at your feet. You stare at the hedge knight’s gushing throat without fully understanding the sight of it.

Ormund reaches you in three long strides. He sheaths his sword without a word before dropping carefully to one knee. He slides one arm under your leg and his other behind your back, hoisting you upward with a pair of strong arms. The scent of blood and earth gives way to the smell of leather, incense, and bathing oils as he cradles you to the broad wall of his chest.

Your trembling hands clench a fistful of the green velvet cape draped along his shoulder.

“You’re safe, my lady,” Ormund murmurs as he carries you back to camp. “You’re safe.”

Your face finds the hollow space between his jaw and collarbone. You’re not entirely sure if you believe the words he speaks, but you know now that you do believe in the man who speaks them.

v. SANCTUARY & SIN

The weeks that followed could be divided into two — the days before the attack and all the days after.

For a time, you startled far too easily. A dropped shield sent you into a panic. A knight laughing too loudly made your pulse skyrocket. And if a pair of bootsteps walked too closely behind you, you lost all your breath before your mind had time to remind your body that no one meant you any harm. 

Nights proved harder still. You dreamt of nothing but rough hands and torn silk and crushed berries that smelled so sweet the thought alone made you sick. One moment you were suffocating beneath the sweaty body of a hedge knight, and the next, your canvas door was thrown open while you were choking on a scream.

Ormund stood silhouetted before you, barefoot, with a sword in his naked hand. He’d reached you with haste, after having your pavilion packed up and pitched again not quite twenty paces from his following the attack — “It’ll be easier that way,” he assured you. “If another fool decides to trouble you, I’d rather not have to cross half of Westeros to remove his head.” 

His curls were flattened from slumber, his linen shirt unlaced to reveal his broad chest heaving with panic. His sleep-swollen eyes swept every corner of the empty pavilion before they settled finally on you. His steel lowered as he crossed the tent to settle beside you, smoothing a hand up and down your back despite the way your nightgown clung uncomfortably to your sweaty skin.

“We’ll move your bed into my tent,” he’d said. “You’ll sleep there for the time being.” 

It was concern disguised as a command. One you could not refuse if you wanted to.

Ormund’s tent was large enough to pass for a modest hall — maps and banners occupied one half, while the other had become something half-resembling living quarters. Your smaller cot was placed opposite his beneath the same sloping canvas roof, separated by little more than a table crowded with candles and books. You would wake occasionally to find Ormund already seated beside the brazier in nothing but a linen shirt, reading dispatches by firelight while occasionally glancing over to see whether you were sleeping soundly.

You pretended that you were, if only to keep on watching him.

But then the late summer storms arrived; and the unforgiving deluge washed over the camp with enough violence to shake the pavilion you slept beneath. Thunder cracked like an explosion closely overhead, and you woke with another frightened gasp before remembering where you were.

Ormund was already awake, as if stirred in knowing that you were scared.

“If you’re frightened…” he murmured from across the darkness. A flash of lightning revealed his blanketed body, and his face half-smushed into his pillow. “I imagine my bed could accommodate two people without either touching the other."

You crossed the space between your cots and climbed beneath his blankets without another word.  

You haven’t left his bed since.

The days soon settle into something almost resembling normalcy. Ormund, you find, possesses an absurd fondness for taking care of you — always making sure that you’ve eaten breakfast before he’s started his mornings; delivering his wool blankets to you before you can complain that you’re cold, warming your hands between his calloused palms when he does so; and escorting you through camp with a protective hand splayed along the small of your back.

No one ever cared for you with such deliberate attention before — even Gwayne, as gentle as he was, could only love you from a respectful distance before the war had sent him off. Your husband washed away into memory, into the note left abandoned somewhere on the forest floor. 

You did not know whether he still rode beneath banners or if his corpse had been picked clean by crows. You did know, at the very least, that Ormund was here — he was there in the mornings when you woke and each night when old fears crept back into your skin. It was a dangerous thing, you soon realized, to mistake safety for love. Or more dangerous still, to suspect that the two were any different at all.

You watch from Ormund’s bed — freshly bathed beneath your thin ivory slip, with your legs kicking lazily from where you lie on your stomach — as his squire removes pieces of his armor. A sketchbook lies open before you, alongside a collection of colored inks.

“This is what you get for tightening the straps so much,” Ormund hums as Daeron struggles with the final buckle across the man’s broad shoulders. 

“Well, you’d like them to remain attached, wouldn’t you?” the boy quips back.

The man smiles despite himself. “You complain more than any squire I've ever met, do you know that?”

“I learned everything from you, did I not?”

When the final piece of armor comes finally free, Ormund dismisses the boy back to his tent. The entrance cover opens and shuts behind the boy, letting in a rush of cool evening air before it closes again. Silence returns to the expansive pavilion, filled only by the crackling of burning candles.

Ormund, left only in his loose dark breeches and a linen undertunic, walks to the round table to pour himself a goblet of wine. “What is occupying you so completely over there?”

“I’m hard at work,” you answer vaguely.

“So I see.” He eyes you carefully over the glugging of the flagon. A faint, unreadable flicker crosses his face. “Writing to Gwayne, are you?”

“No,” you sigh. “I’m drawing you.”

You set the quill into the inkpot and lift the sketchbook to face the man with a girlish grin, which seems to be becoming more and more frequent as the days go by. Ormund’s light eyes squint to study the page. It was unmistakably him drawn in the ink, though perhaps only if one was exceedingly charitable. The proportions are all wrong: his nose is too large, his mouth is too small, one eye sits higher than the other, and he’s missing his left brow.

His eyes flick to meet yours again. “…Is that intended to be me?” he asks, motioning with the goblet in his fist.

“Of course,” you shrug like it’s obvious.

“Well,” he sighs, raising the cup to his mouth. “I had no idea that I resembled that of a rotting turnip.”

You gasp in faux-offense that’s soon overcome by a fit of laughter. “It is not that bad!”

“My lady…” Ormund huffs sympathetically, abandoning his ale to saunter slowly towards the bed. “This could be considered treason— I should confiscate this immediately."

“You shall do no such thing,” you tease.

“Oh really?” he croons, brows raised in amusement.

He lunges for you in an instant. You jerk back onto your haunches with a squeal, cradling the sketchbook to your chest. You dodge each of his attempts to take it with a girlish gracelessness, laughing harder with each of his failed attempts. Ormund smiles at the sound without realizing it, dropping the table of ink to the rug below before clambering onto the bed to follow you. 

One final tug sends the book flying across the bed, and the two of you go to reach for it at the same time. The momentum carries you forward until you land clumsily against his chest, knocking the breath out of him as his back hits the mattress, with you squarely on top of him.

It takes you a long moment to realize your precarious position — your chest brushing his beneath your thin slip, noses nearly touching, breaths nearly entwining. Your laughter fades first, but you still do not move. Ormund’s smile flickers, but his hands lift to rest lightly along the arms you use to prop up your weight on top of him.

You can feel each of his warm breaths fan against your chin. You could get drunk on the ale stained on his mouth from the proximity between you alone. Closer by an inch or two and you would taste it on his lips.

“We ought not,” Ormund murmurs lowly, as if he can read your mind.

“Ought what?”

“This,” he answers. His blue eyes flick briefly in the space separating your mouths. “You are another man’s wife. My cousin’s wife.”

You swallow hard at the mention of Gwayne. It had been far easier to forget him, in truth. “I have not seen my husband in nearly a year,” you reply in a small voice. “I do not even know whether he yet lives…”

Pain etches in Ormund's strong features before disappearing behind his usual practiced restraint. His hands tremble with the urge to smooth away the frown between your brows, but he does not allow himself the satisfaction. 

“I swore on oath to protect you,” he says. “To serve you in my cousin’s absence.”

You, without possessing a similar self-control, lift a hand to brush a wild curl from his temple. “And do you intend to keep that promise, Lord Ormund?”

He nods against the mattress. “Of course I do.”

“Okay then…” you hum as a smile tugs slowly at one corner of your mouth. “Then serve me.”

You duck down to close the distance between you without a second thought. The tip of your nose grazes the strong bridge of his as you press your lips to his chapped ones, nothing more than an experimental brushing of your mouths. You go to pull away just as quickly as you came, and whatever restraint Ormund had had before vanishes in an instant.

He lifts his head from the tousled blankets to chase your mouth, cradling your neck with a wide hide to draw you back into him again. The second kiss lands with none of the careful uncertainty of the first. This one is slower, deeper, and far more languid. His tongue licks into your mouth, tasting of wine and the mint leaves he always chews after supper. You sigh through your nose to savor it, melting further into his chest.

Your mouths move together with an awkward sort of tenderness, learning one another by the second. Ormund kisses you far rougher than Gwayne ever did — it’s all tongue and teeth and spit, as if he were committing the taste of you to memory: the meat from your supper, the berry from your tea; the guilt from your broken vows, the relief of being found after believing yourself long abandoned.

Your breath catches in your throat when Ormund suddenly takes charge, urging you onto your back with his mouth still on yours. He pulls off you with a quiet smack, wearing your spit on his rosy mouth like gloss. 

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks with heavy eyes that dart back and forth between your glassy ones.

You shake your head against the cushions beneath you, features twisting with a pained look at the thought of stopping now.

“Do you understand what will follow? What… vows both of us will be breaking?”

Your eyes glisten as they dance between his blue ones. “The war broke those vows,” you tell him, half-breathless. “Not us.”

Ormund nods wordlessly for a moment, pleased with your answer. “Then open,” he says.

Your mouth parts for him on instinct. He lifts his middle and pointer finger to your lips, wetting them on your tongue, before sliding them in between your bodies. His hand disappears beneath the skirt of your slip. Your head tips back when you feel his fingertips sliding between your velvety folds, brushing your clit before sinking into your waiting cunt.

Your sigh fills the quiet tent, accompanied by the low groan in the back of Ormund’s throat.

“You’re softer than I imagined…” he confesses, almost to himself.

“Imagining me a lot, are you?” you tease on bated breath.

“Yes,” he answers without missing a beat. “I dreamt of how your cunt would wrap around me… of how you’d soak the sheets… of what noise you’d make when I moved my fingers like this—”

A whine catches in your throat when he crooks his fingers just so, nestling the fatty part of his palm flat against your clit. Your hips buck into his hand despite yourself. Your exhaled whine is half-drowned beneath his breathy chuckle.

“There it is…” he praises.

“Fuck me,” you plead, face crumpling under the weight of your need. One hand twists in his hair, while your other fists in his thin white tunic to keep him close. You only vaguely realize how little you sound like yourself as you plead: “I need it so bad, Ormund, please, fuck me—”

The man goes dizzy at the sound of your begging, as if he brought you into his camp, his tent, his bed, to do anything other than serve you. 

His fingers glitter with your slick when he drags them out of your cunt. He brings them to his nose, nostrils flaring slightly as he inhales the scent of your musk upon them. You whine at the sight of it — half-disgusted, half-intrigued. You watch with heavy eyes when he brings the same hand into his trousers to fist his half-hard cock fully stiff for you.

It’s a mess of tangled limbs for a moment, as you drag his shirt gracefully from his torso while he attempts to free himself from his breeches. He’s made of tanned skin, toned muscles, and a dusting of auburn hair from his sternum to his stomach. It grows more dense at the root of his cock — which is not quite as long as Gwayne’s, but thicker still and adorned with more prominent veins. 

Ormund works himself hard with his fist; the reddened head of his cock leaks pearly drops every time his hand moves upwards. Your mouth waters for a taste. You let him smear it along the folds of your cunt instead.

You curl your arms under his broad arms to splay your hands along his shoulder blades. They flex slightly under your touch as he leans down over you. You tense on instinct when he pierces you with the tip of his cock. “Shh, shh, shh,” he soothes lowly, fighting back his own grunt as you spread so perfectly around him.

He sinks slowly into you, slow enough for you to feel every vein and ridge of his cock as he mounts you until his hips are flush with yours. Your mouth parts. He ducks down to kiss you before a moan tumbles out, swallowing the pretty sound with his mouth. 

He stays still against you for several long, agonizing moments. Your hips buck against his in anticipation. “Please move,” you whine, digging crescent shapes into his shoulders with your nails. “I need you so much, please—”

Ormund’s jaw clenches tight. “Do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been inside another woman?”

Your face screws. “I’d rather not hear about your previous exploits at the moment—”

“Don’t,” Ormund spits, shuddering on top of you when you roll your hips into his once more. He grasps your thigh hard enough to dig bruises into the plush skin with the hand not holding himself up beside your head. His light eyes turn glacial in an instant, darting wildly between both of yours. “I won’t… I won’t last…” he confesses.

Your eyes soften around the edges with a faux innocence. “This isn’t going to be the last time you fuck me, is it?”

The crude word falls so effortlessly from your pristine mouth that it makes his cock jerk within your drooling confines. “I don’t want it to be. No,” he answers, half-shy.

“Then I don’t care how long you last,” you assure him with a lazy grin. “You have kept me hostage for nearly a year— Surely, I’m entitled to make some use of my captor while the realm delays the war, am I not?”

Ormund’s resolve crumbles under your permission. He rolls his hips forward and back again, never quite pulling all the way out of you. He groans quietly when you clench around the sensitive head of his cock; and you swallow down a whimper when the coarse hair below his stomach rubs mercilessly along your sensitive clit. 

Your head tips back. He falls to the hollow space between your neck and shoulder.

Ormund’s open-mouthed breaths fan warm along your burning skin as he stumbles into a graceless rhythm, thrusting hard enough to make the wooden frame of his bed squeak quietly beneath you. 

The pressure on your clit is relentless. You squirm underneath his sweat-slick body, chasing and running from the pleasure all at once. “I know. I know. It’s okay,” you hear him slur against your skin. “Just take it. Just fuckin’ take it— Fuck—” His voice breaks like splintered glass. 

He tenses suddenly above you, taut muscles trembling. You hear his breath catch for a moment, right before a foreign warmth pools in the very pit of your stomach. He groans in time with his release, heavying his weight further against you. 

You aren’t far behind.

He grinds his hips lazily to ride out his high, smothering your sensitive clit as the warm, wet, sticky feeling continues to bloom inside of you. “Ormund—” you gasp, tensing beneath him.

“There it is…”the man praises as you tremble underneath him, smearing his lips against your jaw until they reach your parted mouth. “There it is— Fuck, that’s it,look at me.”

Your eyes snap open at his command, bleary and heavy-lidded. You ride out the rest of your orgasm with your gaze locked with his glassy one. 

The honeyed moment doesn’t last nearly as long as either of you would’ve liked.

“My lord?”

The two of you sober in a flash as the spell between you shatters. Ormund stills suddenly above you, as if pierced by steel. The warmth flees from his features at once, replaced by the hard composure of the commander of House Hightower. You, too, freeze where you lay beneath him — pulse thrumming hard in your throat as the muffled voice drifts once more through the pavilion.

“My lord—”

“Yes, Daeron,” Ormund spits through gritted teeth, nostrils flaring as he breathes through the rage searing in his chest. “What is it?”

The squire hesitates at his uncle’s harsh tone. “Forgive me for the intrusion, my lord…” the boy says carefully, hidden behind the covered entrance. “But a messenger arrived from the river road. He bears urgent word from Ser Criston’s camp.”

You feel your stomach sink — or, perhaps, it’s only the mixture of cum seeping out of your still fluttering confines, soaking the sheets beneath you. You feel unspeakably dirty now, and the lack of regret only deepens the feeling.

Ormund remains motionless above you for a moment before sitting back on his haunches. You shiver at the absence of his warmth, and wince slightly when his softening cock slips out of you. “A letter?” he calls to the entrance, brows lowered. “What news?”

“It is sealed, my lord,” Daeron says. “The messenger said it was to be opened by our hand alone.”

Ormund’s confusion deepens. “And who sends it?”

After another brief hesitation, the voice answers solemnly: “Ser Gwayne, my lord.”