all her paths are peace

So you had gone to Oldtown the way you had gone to every foreign town throughout your childhood. A ghost wandering a half-gone graveyard, a stranger let loose in another man’s sanctuary — hoping, always hoping, that someone might finally decide you were something worth keeping. 

When the city rose finally before you in tiers of sun-bleached stone, with a towering lighthouse crowning its center like a great white candle, you believed that you had only traded one kind of nothing for another — as you had done your whole life.

Septa Enith leads you through the corridors of the tower with her habit whispering faintly behind her. You follow a few paces back with your eyes downcast, dressed in a gown of plain wool that marked your status — lesser, unfinished, a novice still — lacking the septa’s seven-pointed veil you had not yet earned, and allowing your hair to hang loose behind you.

“Septa Enith,” Lord Ormund greets from further inside his office upon her entrance. The room is warm with early-morning light, turning motes of dust aglitter where they drift through the tall stained-glass windows. The air is sweet with the scent of pine logs smoldering low in the hearth, where a young boy lingers — Daeron, you figure, still soft-cheeked with the last days of childhood.

His uncle rises from the great oak desk, full of organized letters and ledgers. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome to the point of devastation. He comes around the desk, boots padding softly along the cobblestone. 

“This must be the girl you wrote me of.”

You sink into a small, practiced curtsy with your gaze fixed on the cobbles. Septa Enith introduces you like a woman would present her own handiwork — that you were traveled and well-taught; a little green yet, but still diligent and pious beyond most girls your age.

But you were not devout, in truth. Not really. The gods were like your parents in that regard: neither one was coming to look for you now. And in the few times you had sunk low enough to beg the gods for mercy, they only seemed to shove more suffering down your throat to keep you from crying out again. But devotion was never the point — a girl so alone in the world, with no dowry and no kin to speak of, had precious few paths laid before her. The grey wool and the seven-pointed star was, perhaps, the only one that would ever choose you back.

With your eyes still lowered, you see only Lord Ormund’s polished boots enter the narrow scope of your downcast vision.

He lingers before you, close enough for you to catch the scent of him — leather, incense, and musky bathing oils. He waits with a polite grin for you to lift your eyes, and raises his brows to his hairline when you don’t. 

He ducks his head instead, made of short, dark-auburn curls, trying almost playfully to catch your gaze from below — the way a young boy might peer beneath a table to startle someone hiding there.  He leans closer then, enough for you to hear the soft pull of breath he draws in through his nose.

You flinch involuntarily at the nearness of his warmth, before willing your body back into its practiced submission once more.

“Rosewater…” Ormund mutters, almost to himself, as if he were solving some sort of riddle. “And something else beneath it— orris root, I’d wager.” 

He straightens then, satisfied with his guess, and waits again for a response from you that never comes. 

It was always easier to be quiet, you found, after so many years spent in the company of high lords and ladies who cared not if you lived or died. You had learned to stand so still in a room that you all but vanished from it, refusing to give away even the smallest, truest piece of yourself.

Ormund’s grin grows wider at your silence. His deep, melodic voice is coated in amusement as he quips, “Septa Enith hasn’t sent me a silent sister, has she? I’d hate to think my nephew’s new tutor has sworn off speaking entirely."

“No, my lord,” you answer finally, though the words are swallowed back down again almost as soon as they leave you.

“She speaks!” Ormund chuckles, the sound ringing through the quiet expanse of his office. “A voice like a mouse, yes, but a voice all the same.”

Still, though, you fail to lift your eyes to meet his own. You’re grateful when the man doesn’t press you any further for it, though you can feel a tension that suggests he wants to — like the glimmering heat off a flame. There’s something strangely gentle in his palpable restraint; a simple courtesy that costs him nothing, though he seems to take a private pride in offering it nonetheless.

“You needn’t be frightened,” he tells you, gentler now. “You’ll be treated kindly here. Enith keeps a fair house, as I’m sure you know, and Daeron is no great trial— are you, boy?”

He glances over his shoulder towards the hearth, where Daeron stands with his hands folded behind his back and his eyes watching the exchange with an attentive, green-eyed stare — a future knight in the making no doubt.

“No, uncle," Daeron answers, firm but gentle, and with a deep voice that still fractures slightly with the remnants of boyhood.

Lord Ormund's pink mouth curves into a pleased grin. “Well, what do you think, then? Shall we keep her?"

He poses the question lightly, as if you were a piece of livestock being brought to market. You suppose he means it in jest, or at least, as something far more light-hearted than the words truly sound, but it strikes you deep in the chest anyway.

“If it please you, uncle,” Daeron responds politely. 

Lord Ormund turns back to you then, still sporting the same polite grin. His brows bounce with amusement as his pale gaze sweeps your form in a slow, daunting pass.

“Then yes…” he hums to himself. “I think we shall…”

Your days, for the first time since childhood, take a shape that feels almost permanent. 

You rise each morning before the sun, kneel through your morning prayers alongside Enith and the other septas in the hush of the sept, break your fast on stale bread and watered wine, and then report to the small, sunlit chambers where Daeron takes his studies. Septa Enith watches every day from her chair by the window, tending to her needlework while you lead the young prince’s lessons, and correcting you only rarely.

Daeron, as you had come to find after weeks within the Hightower keep, was a perfect pupil. He was quick, attentive, and always very sweet. He minds his histories well and his prayers even better, and only rarely drifts his attention out the window toward the training yards where the squires train with blunt swords. But you had been a child once, too, even though it felt a very long time ago now — and you deign to crack his knuckles with the pointer stick the way your teachers had once done to you.

“We’ll start easy,” you say from across the low table, where a scattering of parchment lay between you. “The Hightowers of Oldtown."

“‘An old, just, and true line,'" Daeron recites the text easily, with his eyes fixed out the window and his finger drumming with a boyish distraction. “‘Keeper of the light, guardian of the Citadel and the Faith.' Words: We Light the Way."

“Good,” you hum. “The Tyrells of Highgarden?”

“Words: Growing Strong. Their sigil is a… a golden rose on a green field. They hold Highgarden by right of the Gardener kings— though they were stewards once, not lords."

“The Lannisters of Casterly Rock?"

“Words: A Lannister always pays his debts—”

“A common phrase, yes, but not their true words,” you correct gently, lips pursed to keep from smiling. “Try again.”

“Words…” he trails off, wrinkling his freckled nose in thought. “Hear Me Roar. Their sigil is a golden lion on crimson. They say they're the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms, though Septa Enith says rich men are always saying that about themselves—”

“That was not meant for you to repeat, boy,” the older woman scolds without looking up from her stitching. Daeron ducks his head with a grin pursed to the side of his mouth, and you allow yourself the smile you’d been holding back all lesson.

A steward arrives in that moment, rapping twice along the door frame to announce his presence. “Begging pardon, Septa,” he says with a polite bow of his head, just before his eyes find you. “Lord Ormund has requested your presence in his office.”

“Oh—” Your eyes widen as you glance back at Daeron, then to the half-done lesson laid out before you, and then to the lanky man across the room. “I— We’re still at our studies, ser. Might I come after we’ve—”

“Girl,” Enith snaps, her voice cutting through the room like a whip. All eyes turn to her in an instant. Her wise, watery gaze hardens at you. “Lord Ormund does not wait on the patience of novices. You will go to him now, and you will be grateful he thought to send for you at all."

Heat crawls up your neck from the high collar of your woolen dress. You swallow through the distant shame of being scolded before your own pupil, as if you were a child of Daeron’s own age, and rise with a murmured apology to no one in particular. You follow a few paces behind the steward with your eyes fixed on the floor. 

Ormund’s office, you find, is washed in beams of silver-gold from the morning light spilling through the high windows. He stands within the rays with his strong hands clasped loosely behind his back as he gazes out over the tower's long descent to the river below. 

The sound of the door clicking shut behind you draws his attention. He turns his head, and the light catches in his sheared curls, turning them a richer shade of auburn. 

“There you are,” he greets with a kind smile, motioning to his desk in the center of the room with a broad hand. “Come in. Sit, if you like.”

You do not move from your place. You remain just inside the door, with your head bowed and your hands folded obediently in front of you, the way you had been taught. You say nothing in response until he asks.

“How does my nephew’s lessons fare?”

“Well, my lord.” Your voice comes out smaller than you mean it to, trembling at the edge of each syllable despite your attempts to steady it. “He’s very smart. He’s very clever, too, as I’m sure you already—”

“Come closer, won’t you?” he interjects suddenly, though not unkindly. “I can hardly hear a word from you all the way over there.”

Your slippers pad along the cobbles as you near him with small, hesitant steps, and with your breath caught somewhere in your throat. You stop an arm's length from him before the great stained-glass windows — Ormund closes what little distance remains himself, smothering you in his warmth and the incense clinging to the silver pomander hanging at his sword belt.

His wide hands lift to rest along the outsides of your elbows without warning. You’re perhaps more startled by the gentleness of his touch rather than the touch itself — you can feel the warmth radiating from his palms even through the thick sleeves of your dress. He dips his head the same way he had the first time he met you, trying once more to catch your downturned gaze.

“You needn’t be frightened of me,” Ormund tells you softly, though it did very little to loosen the perpetual knot in your chest.

“I am not, my lord,” you tell him, half-strangled, and wonder distantly if a lie is still a sin if it’s meant to spare someone else the trouble of you.

Ormund says nothing for a long moment. When you dare to lift your eyes, you find that he’s already leaning in — the way he had that very first day. Your pulse falters a beat when you hear him draw a slow breath beside your temple. You go very still, like a trapped animal going quiet in the hope of being spared.

“Lavender,” he muses to himself. “And… beeswax.”

He straightens once more, pleased with himself, and smiles down at you again. 

“The motherhouse must be running thin, if you've had to make do with the castle's plain milling,” he quips with an attentiveness that feels borderline intrusive. “I’ll have something better sent along to you at once.”

You say nothing. There is nothing to say to that, you think — nothing that wouldn’t feel like spurring on his kindness, which has started to feel like comes with a debt you didn’t agree to owe.

“Well,” he says in response to your silence, dropping his hands to his sides. The warmth in his strong face returns again, with the negligible tenderness of a lord dismissing one of his middling servants. “I won’t keep you from your duties any longer. Go on back to my nephew— I imagine Enith's grown fond of her needlework again, now that she's free to listen to you instead.”

You drop into your usual curtsy with a“yes, my lord,” murmured beneath your breath. You rise again and turn to go, but Ormund catches you before you can. 

He ducks down and presses his mouth to yours in a parting kiss that a great lord might bestow on any woman of his household. His lips are soft and light against your own, but lingering nonetheless — long enough that the peck turns from well-mannered to borderline indecent.

You go rigid at the shock of it, too stunned to do anything more than stand there with your hands clenched into fists at your sides until he pulls away from you again.

“May the Seven be with you, sister,” Ormund says with a kind, untroubled grin, as if nothing strange had passed between you at all.

“And with you, my lord,” you manage through the invisible hand still wrapped around your throat. 

It takes the length of the corridor outside for you to remember how to breathe again. You feel the ghost of his mouth on yours for hours after he’s let you go.

Something about Ormund sticks in you like a splinter under the skin. The thought of him grows on you like ivy on cobblestone — quiet and quick and everywhere. It was his unwavering tenderness, you think, or maybe the way his eyes always seemed to linger on you a beat longer than courtesy required, which left something raw and unfamiliar in its wake. Like what little you remember of love in your girlhood, a childhood infatuation that was usually very fickle but always very intense.

It was this same constant turning-over of him in your head that made it so easy to suspect him when your slips began to disappear.

It was a small thing at first — a sliver torn from the edge of your thin linen, leaving the hem pulled and frayed. A rat, you assumed, gnawing for fabric for its nest; or a splintered edge, maybe, from where your trunk had snagged it. And when a second strip vanished, this time cut clean from the chest, you believed it had been a rat then, too.

But then an entire slip had disappeared outright, gone from the wicker basket of unwashed linen, and no amount of searching your small chamber seemed to turn it up.

Septa Enith called you mad when you told her of your suspicions, but you knew what kind of man Lord Ormund was. 

You had felt his breath along your temple, heard him murmur rosewater and lavender and beeswax against your skin with the quiet reverence typically reserved for prayer. And, thus, the thought crept into your skull unbidden, shaped like that same warm breath along your skull. Try as you might to laugh it off as foolishness — the overactive fancy of a girl raised with gossiping novices, forever seeing shadows where none existed — the thought did not leave you. And after a time, you understood it would not leave you until you knew if it was true.

And so you lie.

You tell Septa Enith that you were feeling poorly and asked if she could take Daeron’s lessons herself that day. You bore her subsequent scolding with your eyes down and your hands folded — that you ought to have more of a backbone than to let a little queasiness keep you from your duties; that a septa's calling was not so easily set aside as that. You had already memorized the prayers of contrition you would say for it later, kneeling before the Mother to confess the small sin honestly.

But for now, you spend the rest of the morning in your chambers — sitting first upon your bed and then, when that grew tiresome, at the writing desk by the window. You watch the morning light drift across the ancient floorboards and feel more and more foolish by the minute. By midday you’ve nearly convinced yourself that you’ve wasted a perfectly good lie on nothing, and that the missing slips had simply been misplaced; that Lord Ormund had far better things to occupy his time than a novice septa's undergarments.

Then you heard his voice in the corridor, exchanging some brief word with a passing servant outside — “See that the eastern rooms are aired before the Citadel men arrive,” he says.

It would have meant nothing to you at all if it hadn’t been drawing nearer to your bedchambers. Your heart lurches wildly in your chest as you scramble from the desk and into the small adjoining bathing room — easing the door shut until only a hair’s-breadth crack remains. You press yourself against it, scarcely daring to breathe.

A knock comes at your door a moment later. It’s soft and courteous, two sharp raps against the wood, as if to make certain that no one at all was behind it. The heavy door creaks open without invitation. You hear the scuff of boots against the floor and the click of the door easing shut, just before Ormund comes into view.

Through the crack in the door, you watch the man move slowly through the narrow confines of your quarters. The late morning light catches the auburn flecks in his curls as he passes the window by your writing desk. He lingers there for a long moment, studying the things scattered across its surface as if he were already well acquainted with them. 

He lifts the smooth river stone you’d kept since childhood, somehow already knowing where to find it, and runs his thumb mindlessly over the smooth edge. As he does so, he dips his head to skim through the parchment scattered there — clumsy sketches, scant prayers, and miscellaneous writings of dried ink.

Ormund touches nothing else. He only looks, cataloging the smallest parts of your life with his eyes alone.

He sets the small stone down with a quiet thud and crosses to the hamper of unwashed linens tucked beside your washstand. He peers inside and, without hesitation, plucks one of your slips from the pile.

Your heart goes still but very loud all at once as you watch the man bring the linen up to his nose to inhale the scent of you upon it — of rosewater, soap, and faintly of sweat. His strong chest rises beneath his emerald doublet as he takes a slow breath in. His eyes fall shut on the long, lingering exhales that follow. 

You see only the profile of his broad form from where you stand. He goes quiet and still thereafter with something that seems almst peaceful.

When his hand moves into his trousers, with the linen slip still caught in his fist, you do not move from the doorway. You stand frozen in disbelief while his hand disappears in his pants, while the rest of your slip hangs lazily at his thigh. You scarcely breathe — because your heart has moved so far up into your throat that you cannot, maybe; or because you long to hear the man’s grumbled groan as he works himself hard with his fist.

His adam’s apple bobs in his throat when he tips his head back. His moan comes from the very back of his throat, sounding like distant thunder as it rolls across the quiet room. The pleasured sound feels like a hand between your thighs, where a strange throbbing has started to settle — an ache that longs to be smoothed out.

“Yes…” Ormund groans to himself through a jaw clenched tight. 

And, as if spurred on by his own words, you feel your hand reaching down to lift your skirts — and to shove your fingers where the dull pulsing has settled. 

Your pointer and forefinger slot wet between the velvety folds of your cunt. You pierce yourself with them slowly, the way it had been down to you by a young knight somewhere between The Twins and Riverrun in your girlhood. 

You remember the way he attempted to pleasure you with his fingers, dragging them in and out and in and out of you. And even though you failed to orgasm then the way the knight said you ought to have, you fight now to chase that pleasure warming in the very pit of your stomach now.

You brace yourself against the doorframe with your free hand and watch the man stroke himself with a lidded gaze — with the same violating scrutiny he always seems to watch you with. 

You’re no different than he is, a cynical voice screams in the very back of your head. The two of you are made out of the same kind of sin. But even still, you find yourself hunting the feeling simmering in your stomach; a knot pulled tight and threatening to snap.

Ormund tenses in place, bracing himself with a strong hand along your bedframe as his towering body quakes with the tremors of his orgasm. His knuckles go white around the ancient wood, gripping there hard enough to splinter it. 

His moan sounds like thunder in his chest — “Fuck…” he grumbles lowly. “Fuck, yes…” 

He reaches his pinnacle before you do, and when the aftershocks have subsided and his limbs have stopped shaking, Ormund pulls your dress from his trousers. Something sticky darkens the pale fabric where his fist had held it. You catch only a sliver of the stain before he tosses it back into the basket of unwashed linens.

Your heart slams against your ribcage; hard enough that you worry he might hear it through the door as he slips back out of your bedchambers, just as quietly as he had come in.

You remain in the crack of your own bathing room door long after the sound of his footsteps has faded down the corridor. 

You wonder how many times Ormund has let himself into your chambers while you attended your lessons and prayers each day. You wonder how many times he’s pleasured himself using your garments as a rag, and how many of those garments you must have washed without noticing his pleasure stained upon it. 

You wonder, even more so, if you should feel more violated by the thought than you do — if it would be such a sin to take pleasure in the thought of being so carnally desired.

You drag your fingers, finally, from the depths of your pulsing confines. The pads of them have started to prune with the slick gathered upon them, shiny with honey and slightly stringy when you separate your middle and pointer finger from one another.

What are these hands supposed to do now? the voice berates you still, while your loins tingle with a lingering pleasure. Because they are certainly far too stained now to pray.

You need a mother to comfort you; a father to shield you; someone older and wiser to cry to, because the skies are empty and no god has answered you yet. 

Your attempts to tell Septa Enith what you’d seen had failed you entirely. You had gone to her that afternoon, before the courage could leave you, and found her in the small garden off the sept where she typically took her afternoon needlework. You told her what you had witnessed (and nothing of what your own fingers had done to yourself while you witnessed it). 

Her needle stilled mid-stitch. For a moment, you thought she might believe you, as her wrinkled face twisted in shock at your confession. But when she finally spoke, her voice came flat with something closer to anger than alarm.

“So you lied to me this morning?” she asked after several moments of daunting silence.

“Yes. I did,” you answered honestly from where you knelt beside her chair, with your hands clasped in your lap like a penitent child. “And I do mean to repent for it, Septa, for however long you think fit. But I saw him. With my own eyes, in my own chambers. I saw him take my—”

“Oh, enough of that,” she grunted, as if she were dismissing a child mid-fancy. Her face screwed with annoyance as she berated you. “I have known you since you were a girl of seven years. Sniveling and friendless and full of stories that were never true; stories you told yourself to escape the real truth of things. I remember it. The other septas remember it besides.” 

You cowered at her words. Her mouth thinned into a tight seam; her watery blue eyes hardened in a way that you had not seen since your earliest, clumsiest days under her instruction — when you were still learning which lies got a girl a slap and which got her days of confinement.

“And now you would have me believe that Lord Ormund — a kind man who has shown you nothing but courtesy since the day you set foot in this tower — has been sneaking into your chamber to steal your smallclothes and use them to… pleasure himself like a lovesick stableboy?"

“I saw it," you repeated, voice cracking with a desperation to be believed. You blinked away the haze of tears burning at your waterline as you begged her. “Septa, please—"

“Enough,” she shoved your pleading hand away and stood, smoothing out her skirts with hands that were not quite steady. “I’ll not hear any more of it. You'll do your penance tonight as you've promised, and you'll pray besides for honesty — and for gratitude, perhaps, that a house such as this took in a girl with no name and no prospects and gave her some purpose at all.”

You stayed where you knelt as the woman moved towards the tower, heavy with the sinking feeling that she was moving to Lord Ormund’s solar to carry your confession to him herself. 

“I’d have thought you'd grown past your stories by now,” she scolded without looking back at you.

The summons, which you knew was inevitable, doesn’t come until the sun has dipped low over the horizon — turning the cloudless sky into a mixture of deep orange and dark lavender. A steward knocks at your door and does not meet your eyes when he tells you that Lord Ormund awaits your presence in the castle sept. You had lain through the afternoon anticipating exactly this, but your stomach still flips in spite.

The sept is empty and quiet with the remnants of evening prayer. The air is stale and thick with the scent of burning incense and glowing candles. What little light remains falls through the stained glass in slanted beams of color across the ancient wood — deep red where it touches the Warrior’s carved shield, soft green pooling at the Mother’s feet, and jewel-blue catching the folds of the Father’s robes where he stands in eternal judgment above the altar. 

You find Lord Ormund standing near the front with his back to you, and with a leather-bound copy of the Seven-Pointed Star in his hands. His voice is low and even as it carries through the empty nave, reading aloud to no one at all: “…And the Crone raised her lantern, saying: truth is the light by which the righteous find their road, while falsehood is a mist that leads only to darkness.” 

He speaks the words as if he knew precisely when you would arrive, and had arranged the moment accordingly to catch you in some sort of trap.

Ormund does not look up when your slippers pad along the narrow aisle. He lets you linger there instead, like a stupid lamb walking itself to the slaughter. The silence grows too suffocating to bear. You feel the weight of the sept pressing down on either side of you — old wood and candle-smoke and the watchful, carved eyes of seven gods who had never once troubled themselves to answer your prayers.

“Septa Enith came to speak with me this afternoon,” Ormund says in lieu of a greeting when he turns finally to face you. His smile is thin-lipped and gentle, if not a little disarming. “She tells me you’ve become… distressed.”

It takes you a long moment to find the courage to speak. The words well up into your throat like bile but refuse to come out, lingering bitterly on your tongue instead. The candles crackle in the silence you leave behind.

“I— I only told her the truth, my lord,” you tell him. And though your voice does not waver, your folded hands start to tremble despite your effort to keep them still.

“The truth…” he echoes, as if he were tasting the word on his tongue for the first time. He saunters down the steps of the altar with the leather-bound book tucked beneath his strong arm.  “You believe, truly, that I entered a novice’s chambers without invitation? That I used her garments for something so sinful? That I’ve been… stealing pieces of her garments for my own keeping?” 

A laugh leaves him then, warm with amusement.

“Surely, you do not think so little of me as that.” 

“I only know what I saw,” you answer and hold his gaze until it feels like a little rebellion. It’s the first time you’ve ever offered him your eye contact so freely, to be sure, and it feels like it costs you something to do it.

“Would you swear it?” Ormund asks, approaching you like a hunter would a prey animal caught in a snare. The candlelight catches in the strong curve of his jaw and the blue of his eyes, carving him out of flickering gold and shadow. “You would swear it before the Father himself. Invoke His judgment upon your soul, should you speak false."

Your mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water until you find the breath to answer. “I… I would never lie before the Seven, my lord.”

“No,” the man hums with a shake of his head, studying you still from a few paces off. Something in his chiseled features turns gentle, or seemed to besides. “I do not believe you would.”

You think the words are meant to comfort you. 

They do not.

“But I do believe something else," Ormund continues without his gaze straying from yours. “I believe loneliness makes strange companions of the mind. Wouldn’t you agree?”

You stiffen from where you stand before him, bracing yourself for his following words, which you know are bound to find you like a rod to the thigh.

“You grew up without mother or father. Without kin of any kind, as I’m told,” Ormund rambles with all the tenderness of a man delivering some sad, gentle truth. “A child left alone in such a place learns to invent reasons for the things she cannot understand, does she not? It is not a fault in her, to be sure. It is only what loneliness does to a mind left too long to its own devices."

“I am not a child,” you try to argue, though the words come out more strangled than you intend.

“No,” Ormund grins, devilish enough to squint the edges of his eyes. “But perhaps some distant part of her lingers in you yet."

Your hands clench into fists. Your dull nails bite crescent shapes into the delicate skin of your palms. “I saw you—”

“You've always had a fondness for stories, haven’t you?” he interjects, almost fondly so. “Septa Enith told me as much herself— said that you used to… frighten all the other girls with tales of dragons in the rafters, of shadows that moved on their own in the dark.”

“I was a child then—”

“She said you often mistook the wind for voices; and shapes in dark corners for things with faces,” Ormund continues with a grin, tilting his head until the candlelight pools in the hollows of his eyes. “So tell me, sister, and weigh it honestly, as the Seven would have you weigh it… What is more likely— that a lord of this tower crept into a servant's chamber to steal her smallclothes like a common thief? Or that a girl who has spent her whole life inventing stories has done so once more?"

His words close around your throat like a pair of cold hands. You search desperately for a response but find nothing immediately waiting. Your voice has sealed itself shut around whatever truth you might have offered him, choking instead on the smothering weight of his.

Ormund steps closer and holds the Seven-Pointed Star out between you. His voice comes out sterner this time as he commands, “Read. I’ve already marked the page for you.”

“My lord—"

“Read."

Your hands tremble when they reach for the book he motions towards you. You find the leather still warm from his palms and impossibly heavy between your fingers as they fumble for the scarlet ribbon tucked inside. The thin pages turn heavily, until the inked words swim finally before you, blurred at the edges with time and something hot building behind your eyes.

“Aloud,” Ormund presses at your silence.

Your voice is scarcely more than breath when it finally comes to you.

“False witness is… is a wound upon the soul. For the tongue that fashions lies… distances itself from the light of the Father— and the Mother turns Her face from deceit until repentance is sought…” you swallow hard through a tight throat, fighting the tremor in your voice. You press on before you lose the nerve, and pretend not to notice the weight of Ormund’s stare fixed upon you.

“Let he who bears false tales examine his own heart before… before casting stones upon another. For the Crone's wisdom teaches that the eye deceived is— is no less guilty than the tongue that speaks the falsehood aloud—”  You cut yourself off with a shake of your head, a stubborn refusal at Ormund’s plain attempt at manipulation. “I cannot.”

“You can,” the man nods, warm and almost encouraging. “Continue.”

Your voice cracks in two, but you obey regardless — because some well-worn part of you never learned how to do otherwise.

 “…And let the penitent seek not to defend his pride, but to humble himself before the Seven. For truth asks no champion, and innocence need fear no judgment,” you continue, voice thick and wet with unshed tears, breath hitching occasionally in your throat. “Bow thy head before the… the Father, confess thy trespass before the Mother… and the Smith shall make whole— that which falsehood hath broken. So shall mercy be granted— unto the contrite, but the stubborn shall… shall dwell in the Stranger's shadow… until the last of their days—”

By the time you reach the passage's end, your vision has dissolved entirely into tears. They burn hot and humiliating down your cheeks and chin until one strikes the page before you could catch it. It blooms dark against the old vellum. You scrub at it with your sleeve, as though you might undo the stain before it set.

“I—I’m sorry," you stammer — to the book, maybe, or to Ormund, or to the Seven watching from their carved and unmoving faces. 

The man says nothing for a long while. When he finally speaks again, the sternness has slipped entirely from his voice — replaced by something that sounds, almost, like kindness.

“You’ve carried a great deal on your own, haven’t you?” Ormund wonders suddenly aloud. You peer up at him with your eyes still glittering like stained glass. His hardened face has softened slightly, because of the tears clouding your vision maybe, or perhaps due to a newfound warmth.  “You've spent your whole life learning to survive on what you need. But tell me, my girl— What do you want?"

You don’t realize until then that no one has ever asked you that before — not once, in all your years of learning to be small,  useful, and no trouble to anyone who might otherwise have turned you out into the cold. The question moves through you like a key turning finally into an old lock that’s long rusted shut.

“I…” you try hard to speak, but your breath catches somewhere in your throat before you can. “I don't know, I… I’ve never…”

You trail off, shaking your head. Ormund ducks down to catch your gaze when it falls away once more.

“Tell me,” he presses gently, brows softly furrowed. “Speak true.”

“I’ve… I’ve never belonged anywhere, my lord,” you confess for the first time aloud. “I don't remember my mother's face. Nor my father's. No one’s ever… ever chosen me before. The only reason the sept took me in was because there was nowhere else for me to go, I… I think that— I’ve always been in… in someone's way. I don't— I don’t even know what I’m supposed to want.” 

A laugh sputters from your mouth, all watery and ashamed. You trail off again, so quietly you can barely hear your own voice over the pounding of your heart. 

Your face screws into a pained sort of look as you admit to him, “I think… I think I only want someone to— to tell me what to want, what to do.”

The candles gutter along the altar, though no draft has moved through the sept. Your words cling so ardently to the incense-thick air between you that you wish so desperately that you could reach out and put them back in your mouth again — suddenly terrified that you’ve given away far too much of yourself.

Ormund steps forward, close enough to smother you with the warmth radiating from his towering form. He plucks the leather-bound scripture from your trembling hands, closes it with a resounding thud in one broad fist, and tosses it blindly to a pew just beside him without once looking away from you. The book hits the wood like a door slamming shut. Your shoulders jerk as the sound echoes through the quiet sept.

You try to will your hands to stop shaking at your sides as you peer at the man from beneath lashes clumped wet with tears. He spends a long moment staring down the bridge of his nose at you, chest rising and falling with even breaths beneath the clasps of his doublet.

When he speaks again, his words come out low and steady from his mouth — far gentler and far more certain than any god has ever been to you before.

“Kneel,” he commands plainly, needing no further adornment to carry the weight of the word.

You stand frozen before him for several long moments thereafter. 

The last color pooling from the stained glass thins now as the sun sinks somewhere beyond the windows — crimson bleeding to rust, green fading to a negligible yellow, blue fading to the color of an old bruise. Above the altar, the Seven look down upon you with nothing but judgment. They offer you no counsel, no rescue, no sign that they had ever been listening to all your years of prayer.

Then, with your cheeks still wet with thick streaks of tears, you clasp your hands tightly together and lower yourself to your knees. They meet the cold wood with a quiet thud, and the chill of it climbs up through your skirts. 

Your lowered gaze lifts slowly to the man towering above you. You find no comfort waiting in his strong features. There is nothing behind his light eyes except the flickering candlelight and the same coldness as the Father looking down from his stone alcove — as if Ormund, too, felt owed something you had not yet given.

“There can be no absolution without obedience…” he says without taking his eyes off yours, even as his hands reach for the buckle of his sword belt. 

The gold clinks faintly together; the leather hisses faintly when it’s pulled through. At first you think he means to spank you with it — bend you over his knee, lift up your skirts, and whip you bruised. Your stomach twists with excitement at the thought. 

A mixture of dread and self-deprecation consumes you a moment later, when he tosses the scabbard aside and reaches for the tie in his trousers instead.

“…Show me the second,” Ormund continues, this time with his fist hidden in his pants, massaging himself there the same way he had in your chambers. “And perhaps I’ll be gracious enough to give you the first.”

Your mouth waters like a starving hound when he frees his cock from the confines of his slacks, tucking the hem beneath his balls. It’s heavy and half-hard in his fist — a shade paler than the rest of his skin, and glowing a faint pink color at the tip. This one is far bigger, far prettier than the cocks you’d seen throughout your teenagehood — when high lords and lanky knights would pull it out for you, “c’mon, just kiss it,” they’d beg, right before berating you when your face screwed in disgust instead.

All that repulsion seems to leave you now. Your mouth parts without further command from him, as if an unconscious part of you had longed to wrap your lips around his cock and taste the glittering spend he’d buried into your slip that morning. Your tongue darts out in a soft kitten lick to collect the pearls drooling from the tip, more salty than sweet.

“All of it now. C’mon…” you hear the man coo above you, like a parent urging their child to finish their supper. 

You abide him willingly and take the rest of his cock into your mouth. Your eyes squeeze shut as your hands ball the fabric of your dress into fists, fighting back the gag that rises in your throat as you force yourself to take the entire length of him — if only to prove to yourself that you could, that you would lay the whole of your obedience at his feet for the smallest word of praise from his lips.

Ormund’s head tips back. A mixture of a laugh and a moan rumbles in his throat when the tip of your nose buries in the coarse thatch of brunette hair above his cock, smelling of sour sweat and musky bathing oils. Tears prick at the backs of your eyes like burning embers. His wide hand splays along the crown of your skull, more gentle than forceful, and it feels like an act of clemency.

“The gods weren’t enough for you, were they?” Ormund says, a lazy grin audible in his voice, as his thumb smooths over your hair. “No, you needed someone real to teach you, didn’t you? Someone real to belong to…”

His words make you nauseous. 

You feel the urge to puke, but stronger still is the urge to make him feel good. You want to please him and murder him — you want to be obedient to him alone; you want to make him smile; you want to make him proud; you want him to forgive you and hate you and desire you all at once. You want to kiss him all over, and then beat him for making you so unholy, and then kiss him so more, and then let the hounds consume his sin to the bone.

You let him cum in your mouth instead.

“Take it all. There you go…” he praises in murmured slurs, keeping you pressed against him while he tenses above you. You nearly gag when the first drop of his spend stains your tongue, heavy and slightly bitter. “Take it all, and I’ll make you holy again,” Ormund babbles, almost to himself, as he shivers against you. “I promise… I promise…” 

He pulls you off him with his fingers twisted tight in your hair, though not quite hard enough to hurt. He stares down at you with lust still swimming in his glassy blue eyes, and you wonder what you must look like from his perspective — on your knees, swollen-mouthed, heavy-eyed, wearing a mixture of cum and saliva down to your chin. The statue of the Father looms just behind him. You pretend not to notice.

“Open your mouth,” Ormund commands before you can swallow. 

You do as you’re told, careful not to let the pearl-colored spend drip off of your tongue when you show it to him. Ormund’s chest heaves at the sight, as if it had snatched the breath from his lungs entirely. And then, before you can blink, he kneels before you — holding you by the chin with the hand not knotted in your hair, and kissing you hard enough to swallow you whole.

His tongue swipes against yours to collect his own cum and sighs hard through his nose at the taste of it, a mixture of himself and you. You can taste the ale on his lips and the lemon dessert from his dinner right before he pulls away from you; still close enough to run the tip of his broad nose over the bridge of your nose.

“Have you ever done that before?” he whispers, breath fanning warm against your mouth. You shake your head against him, too breathless for words. “Good…” he hums, then wonders aloud with all the sheepishness of a young boy. “Has anyone ever made you cum before?” 

“They’ve tried,” you confess.

A smile curls slowly on his lips at that, pleased by your answer.

Ormund drops his hand from your chin to your dress skirts. His palm is warm and calloused as it creeps up the hem. You hold your breath in anticipation, waiting to feel his fingers slip into your cunt the way yours had done when you watched him pleasure himself. They slip around your thigh instead, digging into the skin hard enough to leave bruises when he drags you suddenly into his lap.

You brace yourself on his broad shoulders at the sudden shift in position, reminding yourself to breathe when the newfound proximity forces him to lift his chin to look at you properly. He keeps one hand on the back of your head and his other on the swell of your ass. His whisper fans across your jaw as he says, “If absolution is what you want… Then claim it.” 

Before proper reasoning can take over, you grind your hips up and down his strong thigh, chasing the same pleasure you’d been so close to giving yourself earlier that day. 

With your dress skirts now pushed up to your hips, your cunt is able to press fully to his trousers — the delicate skin parts along the fabric with every pass, exposing your sensitive clit to the merciless rhythm. You can already feel the wet spot you’re leaving on him there.

Your broken whine of pleasure and embarrassment echoes throughout the empty sept.

Ormund grins wider at the pathetic sound. “It’s okay, my girl… Take it… You can do it…” he praises lowly, helping you rock your hips up and down his thigh with his free hand. “There is no sin here that I cannot pardon for you. Leave your guilt to me and let go. That’s it… Let it go.”

Your hips lose their rhythm, hopelessly chasing the warmth swelling in the pit of your stomach — a rope pulled tight and fraying, bound to snap at any moment. 

“You’re so needy for it now, aren’t you? After you couldn’t pleasure yourself with your fingers earlier? Hm?” he whispers in your ear, then smiles wider when you falter. “No, don’t stop now. Keep going. There you go.

You bury your face in his shoulder and twist your trembling hands in his shirt, choking on the pleasured moans welling in your throat. You feel dizzy and half-disgusted with yourself, as your heart hammers harder with every word from his mouth.

“You thought I didn’t notice, did you?” Ormund hums with an audible grin. “I could hear you whimpering behind the door… You liked watching me using your dress to make me cum, didn’t you? …Hm?”

You nod wordlessly into his neck, and feel the rumble of his laughter there as he chuckles to himself. 

“I knew you would… I knew the kind of girl you were when you stepped into my office— the kind who mistook her loneliness for devotion…” he mumbles against you, helping your hips move up and down his thighs when your own rhythm falters. “The kind who prayed for guidance and got only silence in return… Well, the gods might’ve abandoned you, my girl— but I will not.”

You peer at the altar ahead with teary eyes, where all the eyes of the Seven look down upon you as you unravel in your sin. You cum with a fragile whimper in your throat a second later, trembling in Ormund’s lap and holding onto him like a raft while your sensitive cunt drools on his thigh.

“Yes…” the man praises in your ear, smoothing his nose across your temple just before he presses his mouth to the burning skin there. “There it is… Give me all of it, my girl. I can take it...” 

Ormund continues his sweet murmurings until the aftershocks have passed – until you’ve gone lax on top of him, with your body heaving enough to melt against his. You want to be soldered to him, just like this, with his cheek against your cheek and his hands in your hair and your cunt to his thigh. Perhaps this was your purpose, you think to yourself, as the last of your pleasure drips onto his thigh. Perhaps the gods sent you here to find religion in the crooks of his body, and Ormund in the crooks of yours.

“Am I forgiven now?” you ask in a small, teary voice. Though whether the question is meant for the gods staring down at you from their alcoves, blurred now by the unshed tears clouding your vision, or for the man holding you through every wave of pleasure and guilt — you cannot say.

“Yes,” Ormund answers instantly, soft mouth brushing the shell of your ear as he smooths your hair from your temple. He feels your body slacken with a breath of relief against him, as if some unbearable weight has finally been lifted from your shoulders. “You will always be forgiven, my girl… So long as you remember that you must kneel to me to ask for it.”

You close your eyes at that, distantly ashamed of the relief blooming in your chest, unable now to tell where the comfort ended and the feeling of captivity began.