Charlene Lannister

It was not joy alone that heavied your chest at the sound of his name. It was much closer to dread, which burned as it rose into your throat like bile — alongside something that should’ve felt like love but had since grown into something far more complicated in your last few moons as prisoner. You turned from him at once and shoved the tent flap aside just in time to exorcise your sickness onto the dewy grass below.

The dread did not leave with it, and neither did the guilt.

Now you sit at the long table of another manse’s dining hall, far humbler than that of the Red Keep but still a palace compared to the war tents, and watch the last of the orange sunrise die over the hills through the arched windows. Somewhere down that road, your husband rides towards you — alone and hunted and entirely unaware of what awaits him in these walls. 

“You’ve hardly touched your supper,” Ormund says beneath the soft scrape of his knife as he cuts himself a slice of honeyed boar. Despite not having properly dined since the war began, he eats with a methodical sort of restraint. He takes small bites, chews each of them thoroughly, and doesn’t talk again until he swallows. “I’m not going to have to feed you myself again, am I?”

You miss the amusement dancing on the edge of his melodic voice with your attention fixed on the window, where the dark edge of the hill meets the violet sky. “I’m not hungry,” you answer distantly.

“Yes. You said as much yesterday as well,” Ormund sighs with all the exasperation of a man grown tired of losing his battles with you. “I’d have thought you might be glad to have a proper kitchen. With proper cooks. With proper food.”

His apathy cuts you like a blade, which has grown sharper and more frequent since the letter arrived at camp. It seemed to sever whatever spell had briefly held the two of you together before now; or otherwise shut something in Ormund that has not opened since he learned of his cousin’s imminent arrival.

“Well, forgive me, my lord,” you say with a voice as thin as Valyrian steel. “If my husband’s sudden return from the dead has rather spoiled my appetite.”

Ormund’s eyes snap up from his plate at once. They’re pale and unreadable and utterly void of the warmth you’d grown so accustomed to. When the blue of his eyes are warm, they’re like swimming in the languid blue of a summer sea. They carry none of that silken familiarity tonight.

“He is not dead yet," Ormund reminds you with his brows raised to his hairline. “So far as either of us knows, anyway.”

Yet. The word alone makes you flinch, though you cannot yet tell if he means it as cruelly as it feels. You find more and more these days that you can no longer tell the difference with him now.

“What am I to say to him?” you wonder suddenly aloud, as if the question had been building in your throat since you learned of Gwayne’s arrival. Your anxious hands twist in the charcoal-silver skirts borrowed from Lady Footly’s closet; a gift, Ormund called it, despite it not belonging to either of you. “When Gwayne arrives— what do I tell him? How am I meant to look at him?”

“You are his wife,” Ormund responds plainly, with one careless roll of his broad shoulders. “I suppose you’ll look at him as you always have.”

Your face screws with a choked-back anger. “That’s not an answer—”

“No. But it’s the only one I have.” He sets his fork and knife on the plate with a heavy clink and leans back in his chair. He tilts his chin upward to stare at you over the top of the glittering candles between you, ringed fingers fidgeting over the pale white cloth.

“I have an army to feed, men to protect, and walls to build before Rhaenyra’s dragonfire can swallow the castle whole,” he continues in a monotone. “Unfortunately, I no longer possess the luxury, or the patience, of coddling your guilt.”

His words burn red-hot through your chest, searing you like a brand. You flinch away from them as if he’d struck you physically, though it might’ve hurt less if he had. Your eyes sting as your throat tightens around all the words you want to fling back at him — perhaps that he had not seemed so burdened by you a week past, when his mouth was on you and his fingers were in you; that he had not been so burdened by your guilt all the weeks before that, when he swore your safety mattered to him above his cousin’s own claim to you.

But you swallow down the accusations now and throw your napkin onto your untouched plate instead. Your chair scrapes hard against the cobbles as you rise from the table in a rush of black and silver silk.

“Where are you going now?” Ormund huffs.

“For a walk,” you answer without looking back at him.

“You haven’t even touched your food,” he calls to your retreating figure, motioning to your uneaten plate with a ringed hand. His even voice begins to fray at the edges, “Sit down and eat—”

“Feed it to the hounds—”

“Sit!” His voice cracks through the room like thunder when your hand curls around the cold brass door handle. The sheer volume of his voice, the raw bite underneath it, roots you in place. Your head turns slowly to find the man glaring at you from his spot at the table, though the scowl on his chiseled features disappears just as quickly as it came on.

His eyes flutter shut as his broad chest inflates behind his emerald coat, with a slow breath in through his nose. You watch the man walk himself down from some invisible ledge — tense shoulders dropping, clenched fists easing, rough breaths coming easier again.

“I’m sorry…” Ormund says when he opens his eyes again. The light in the pale blue of his gaze has returned to him, you find, and so has the softness in his smile when he rises from his chair to meet you. “I am sorry, my love— I forget myself— This war has driven me half-mad, if you could not already tell.”

He exhales a faint laugh that you do not join him in. He crosses the distance between you in a few short strides, wide hands settling along the outsides of your elbows — warm, even through the thin sleeves of your gown. You peer up at him through your lashes, uncertain whether the tenderness he extends to you now is real or simply the version he’s allowing himself to show you.

“If ever I am… cross with you. Or short with you in any way— It is never because of you, understand?” Ormund confesses lowly, eyes darting back and forth between your weary ones. “It takes me a moment to remember myself, is all… You understand that, don’t you?”

You swallow hard and nod wordlessly in response, though what you most desperately want to tell him in that moment is that Gwayne had never been so cross with you. That not once in your moons of marriage had he so much as raised his voice at you or frightened you the way Ormund has in such short time. You want to say it if only to see it hurt him the way his words have hurt you. Instead, you say nothing. 

“He does not have to know,” Ormund murmurs to you, thumbs brushing your arm in an absent, reassuring gesture. “Nothing occurred between us that was not asked of me. I gave you only what you wanted— Surely a man cannot be faulted for answering his summons.”

Your brows lower over your narrowed eyes. “Are you saying that… that what we did is my fault alone?”

“Of course not!” Ormund laughs, broad hands rising to cup your burning cheeks between them. His palms are warm and calloused; they feel like velvet as they brush your skin. “I’m saying neither of us is at fault— You said it yourself, did you not? The war broke your vows. Not us.”

Some traitorous part of you, so desperate for absolution, nearly softens into his touch at that. You did not ask to be taken from the Red Keep; you did not ask for Ormund's protection; you did not ask for a husband to ride off at dawn and leave you to wonder all these months whether he was living or dead.

You are desperate and half-convinced in your own madness, but you think that perhaps Gwayne will understand that. That surely a woman who believed herself abandoned and already widowed cannot be faulted for the comfort she found in the meantime. It is a thing far too fragile to build a conscience on, but you cling to the comfort of it anyway.

“My cousin rides to Tumbleton alone— without his own army and with Daemon’s surely hunting him,” Ormund coos gently to you, sweeping his thumb across your skin. “It is entirely possible that he will not survive the journey here at all. And then there would be nothing for you to confess… And you would’ve spent all these days worrying for naught.”

The words settle over you like ice in your veins. Your eyes dart back and forth between his own as you search for something human within him — some acknowledgment of what he’s just comforted you with — and find nothing in return.

“You speak of his death like it would be a mercy to me,” you whisper, voice thick with unshed tears. 

“I speak of it only as a possibility," Ormund corrects softly. “I only mean to spare you the fear of it, my love. Is that not a kindness?”

You do not answer him. You could not even if you wanted to; not with the invisible hand curling its way around your throat, as you listen to the man who’s protected you from certain death frame your husband's demise as a kindness done on your behalf.

But when Ormund ducks softly down to press a sickly sweet kiss to your mouth, tasting of the sweet wine and honeyed figs from supper, you cannot seem to pull away from him. Gods forgive you, but you lean into it instead; you ball the collar of his coat into fists and chase the comfort in his mouth the way you’ve chased the safety of his hands since you were brought to his side.

You think of the man who fed you bread from his own fingers when you would not eat; who cut down a hedgeknight before he could harm you; who wrapped you in his blankets and warmed your fingers in his hands on particularly freezing nights. 

That man is still in there, somewhere, hidden beneath the throes of war. 

You fear what might become of him before it’s done.

vii. MUD & MERCY

You stand before the tallest window of the Tumbleton manse, overlooking the winding ivied streets below. They lead straight to the western gate, where the scouts had seemingly spotted a rider without banners in the distance — a messenger from another camp, they said, or maybe Gwayne. The dying sunlight paints the sky in milky orange hues while you pick at the ragged skin of your thumbnail in an absentminded worry. The delicate nailbed splits and blooms red.

You do not notice until a silken handkerchief is motioned suddenly in the corner of your eye.

Your head whips to find Daeron standing at your elbow, green eyes glimmering and pink mouth fixed into a firm line of boyish solemnity. He stands taller than you now, which hadn’t been the case when you first arrived at camp — now you have to look up to properly meet the young boy’s gaze.

“Oh,” you say within a surprised breath. “Thank you.”

You take the cloth from him with a trembling hand. The pale linen blooms pink when you press it to the raging skin of your bleeding thumb. Daeron grimaces sympathetically in return, though you aren’t looking at him to see it. 

“Are you nervous?” he wonders aloud, hands crossed firmly behind his back.

“A bit…” you confess in a sigh, dabbing at the wound and knowing that there is no string of words you could possibly put together to express just how nervous you are.

“Aye,” he nods. “I suppose I am, too… I’ve not seen him since I was a child.”

Your head turns slowly to flash the boy a knowing look. “You are still a child, my prince,” you remind him with a smile.

“A younger child, then,” Daeron mutters sheepishly back, freckled cheeks flaring as he turns back toward the window. His long, auburn tendrils sway softly at his shoulders when he shakes his head. “Long enough that I can no longer recall the last conversation I had with him… Though I’m sure it was about you, no doubt, with his betrothal to you and all…”

“Well, he spoke of you often,” you tell him, and watch the boy’s pale eyes flicker with a newfound life when he turns to you again. “He made it clear he was quite proud of you… And if it’s any consolation, I did not intend to steal him from Oldtown.”

“I’m glad for it,” Daeron blurts, then shakes his head at himself when the words don’t come out right. “Not that he left, of course, but that it was you he was given. There are far worse fates, to be true…” 

He trails off and watches your face twist with confusion. His anxious gaze drops to the blood-spotted handkerchief as the tips of his ears glow pink. The words seem to escape him without a single thought in his floundering attempts to explain himself. 

“I only mean that— that he is good. My Uncle Gwayne. The best of us, really, and Ormund is…” Daeron forgets why he brings up the older man the second his name spills from his lips, though he cannot seem to stop talking. “Ormund is good, too, I’m sure. Somewhere deep down. But he— He does not lose well, my lady. And I’ve learned that… that it's a dangerous thing, to— to be the prize he’s decided he’s won.”

The words come out of him in a rush; sentences half-formed and stumbling. He glances at you only once in a quick and searching look, before looking away again like he can’t stomach a second more of the contact. Your stomach twists in a sick feeling at each word from his mouth. Your throat runs dry as you choke on whatever response you might have given him — some careful deflection, maybe, or a warm laugh to soothe the boy — but a horn sounds from the tower before you can find any response at all. 

Three short, sharp blasts send the keep into motion immediately.

“He’s here!” someone yells, far off in the distance. “Open the gates— it’s Ser Gwayne!”

Your feet seem to move on their own accord. Despite the dread sitting heavy in your belly, your legs carry you instantly towards Gwayne. You hold your dress skirts in your fists as you rush down the winding stone stairs, through the crowded hall, and out the heavy oak doors of the entrance. The humid, evening summer air takes the breath from your lungs as it strikes you across the face; it becomes near-impossible to take another one in, with your heart climbing so suddenly in your throat.

The thundering of hooves against cobblestone finds you before you’ve made it down the steep stone steps of the ancient castle. You’re blinded, briefly, by the setting sun until you hold a hand over your squinted eyes. Armored knights and groomed horses come into view — straddled loosely behind Bold Jon’s mare is Gwayne, though his face and hair are so caked with dirt and blood you scarcely recognize him.

Gwayne tries and fails to dismount on his own. His legs betray him after days of nonstop walking, and the exhaustion makes them buckle almost instantly. “Gwayne!” he hears you shout, right before he feels your hands reach for him before he can fall. 

Your arms curl beneath his own to keep him upright. He leans the bulk of his weight against you without ever really meaning to, clinging to your warmth and the scent of floral bathing oils he isn’t quite used to. And, though he smells like dirt and death, you hold him back just the same. 

“You’re alive,” you pant, breaths fanning in his muddied hair.  “Gods, you’re alive—”

“Well…” He huffs a not-quite laugh that you can feel in his shoulder, pulling just far enough away to meet your wet eyes with a pair of duller, paler ones. “I told you I meant my vows, didn’t I?” 

His words come out in rasps, voice dry from days of thirst and weeks of shouting. His chest sears with a foreign feeling at the way you’re looking at him now — like he’s half stranger, half god. “Apologies for my appearance, dear wife,” he pants and swallows down the sudden urge to cry. “But I have had a… rough go of things as of late…”

Your features crumble under the weight of your own tears. You shake your head at the man, and at his sorry attempt at a joke. “Gods, I’ve missed you...”

Gwayne exhales slowly through his nose as his cracked lips curve into a crooked smile, visibly exhausted but his even still. “Not nearly as much as—”

“Ser Gwayne.” The voice cuts through the bustling courtyard at once.

You feel every muscle in your body seize on instinct as your head whips back towards the stone steps, where Ormund stands at the top of them. His eyes scan the scene below — of you and Gwayne and your bodies only just now easing apart as the red-haired man attempts to stand on his own. 

The silver chain of Ormund’s pomander clinks faintly in the newfound quiet as he brings the perfumed incense up to his nose, inhaling deeply to rid the scent of sweat and blood and death from his nostrils.

“I see you’ve made it,” is all he says.

Gwayne exhales an exhausted huff, a mixture of a laugh and a scoff. He sways softly on his muddied boots and clutches onto your shoulder with his free hand. “It’s good to see you too, cousin…” he responds in a monotone.

Ormund turns to Daeron, who’s hovering just beside him with his pale hands clenched into fists — it takes every bit of strength in the young boy’s body not to run down to his uncle alongside you, worried about how Ormund might react. 

“See that a room is made ready for your uncle. And a hot meal is sent with haste— whatever the kitchens can manage quickly,” Ormund says to the boy, then pauses as his eyes drift back to Gwayne’s. “And perhaps a bath.”

Gwayne’s cracked lips curl into a slow smile. He breathes a laugh through his nose as he watches his cousin spin on his heel to walk away. “You always did have delicate sensibilities…” he attempts to call to the man, though he fails to muster the strength in his voice to be heard. 

It is you who insists on escorting Gwayne to the bath. You wave off hovering knights and Tumbleton servants with a firmness that surprises even you — no longer a prisoner of war, but a high lord’s wife. 

Gwayne, it seems, is much too spent from the journey to do anything more than lean into your shoulder the whole way up the winding castle. He braces himself on your firm weight as you peel the ruined layers of clothing from his body and coax him gently into the steaming tub. 

Your own borrowed gown joins his tattered things in a forgotten heap on the cobbled floor as you sink into the water alongside him. The warmth laps gently at your waist as you shift yourself over his lap, resting the bulk of your weight on his thighs.

The bathwater turns the color of weak tea by the time you’ve worked the worst of the grime from Gwayne’s pale skin. Dark streams of dirt and old blood swirl away beneath the cloth in your hand, brushing a tad too gently over his shoulders and chest and back, as if anything too hard might break him entirely.

Gwayne sits slumped against the tub, eyes half-closed and head lolled back. The war had certainly taken its due upon his pretty features — the new hollows beneath his cheekbones, the fresh scar above his brow, the deep grey exhaustion under his once bright eyes. There’s a leanness to him now that suggests missed meals and weeks of marching; and a sort of heaviness in his gaze that suggests longer weeks of grief.

But still he softens for you, minute by minute, as you drag the cloth over the angle of his dirtied jaw. He exhales slowly through his nose and leans instinctively into your touch.

“You needn’t do this to yourself, you know?” the man murmurs, but makes no further move to stop you. “There are servants more than capable of tending to my bath.” 

“I want to do it,” you tell him simply, dabbing at a speck of blood on his cheek. “I’ve missed you too much— I’d rather not share you with a servant just yet.”

He gives you a tired, crooked smile in response. “I missed you, too,” he says with a sigh, fingers clutching you harder by the waist beneath the water’s surface, like he’s still trying to make sure you’re still real. “Gods, you cannot imagine how badly…” 

You rinse the cloth in the cooling water and press it gently to his hairline, dabbing at the remnants of dirt clinging stubbornly to him there. His adam’s apple bobs as he swallows through a tightening throat — being touched this gently threatens to undo him entirely, after weeks away and days of nonstop bloodshed. 

His tense shoulders finally sink beneath the water as he admits, “I thought only of you… The entire way here… I fear it’s the only way I managed it— knowing that I could not die without seeing you first.”

Your throat tightens as guilt strangles you all over again; the bitter reminder of what you’d done, and all the nights you forgot to miss him back. Your fingers move anxiously to set the cloth on the rim of the tub and dip into the ceramic dish lying there. You scoop a handful of lavender soap onto your fingertips, and work it between your palms until it starts to foam.

“I thought of you, too,” you tell him with an averted gaze, which is true enough even though it feels like a lie when it escapes your mouth. “Every day.”

“And what of Ormund?” Gwayne wonders aloud, cracking one pale eye open to study your face as you rake the suds through his long auburn hair. The dull, muddy strands slowly return to their proper flaming color with each gentle pass of your fingers, as the last of the war’s blood and grim streams down his pale shoulders in dark rivulets. “I trust my cousin treated you well in my absence. He can be insufferable, I know, but he is not unkind… Not truly.”

You falter at the mention of him. Your hands still briefly in his damp tendrils as a sick feeling curls in the pit of your stomach. You swallow hard through the cold hands of guilt strangling your throat and force your fingers to keep moving, praying he does not notice how they tremble faintly against his scalp. 

“He was… accommodating,” you answer carefully, eyes trained on his hair rather than on his attentive gaze, lest he read the whole truth of it plainly upon your face. “He kept me fed. Housed. Safe… For the most part— Tilt your head back; let me rinse your hair.”

You lift yourself slightly off the man’s lap to reach for the pitcher resting on the table beside the tub. Glittering rivulets of bath water cascade down your arms, glimmering in thin ribbons over the curves of your breasts in the dancing candlelight. Gwayne tips his head back to oblige you when you settle astride his scruffy thighs once more. His long, pale fingers smooth absently over your hips beneath the water, tracing idle circles along your soft skin.

“You’ve gone rather short with your answers, dear wife…” he observes lowly, peering at you from the bridge of his nose. “That’s not like you…”

“I’m just tired, is all…” you deflect, cupping one hand over his brow to shield his eyes while your other pours the clean water steadily over his hairline. The suds run clear down his temples and trickle back into the bath below. “It’s been a long day… A long several months, if I’m honest…”

“Yes… For us all, I’m sure,” Gwayne sighs and lifts his head once more when you shift to place the pitcher back onto its table. He arches an auburn brow and musters a quiet smile; the simple ease of being with you returns to him by the minute now, as his fingers settle over your ribcage again. “Though I do hope my letters kept you some company… Small comfort as they must have been.”

You go suddenly very still above him, muscle locking despite yourself. The guilt that had been simmering in your chest surges up your throat all at once now, in a red-hot flame that makes you feel halfway sick. For a long moment, you fail to make sense of the words — his letters — after so many months of waiting to hear from your husband, and after so many months of hearing Ormund tell you each day that there had been not a single word from him.

“…Your letters?” you repeat on bated breath.

“Yes,” Gwayne nods, brows pinching at your confusion. “I wrote every time I could manage it— At every stronghold we arrived… Did you not receive them?”

Your mouth opens and closes as you struggle to find the words to respond — words that would placate your own confusion without disclosing what you had been doing in the days awaiting his letters. “Perhaps… Perhaps they got lost. Along the road…”

Gwayne scoffs a humorless laugh at the thought. “Well, I pity the poor hand who got my letters instead of you…” he croons lowly.

“Why?” you press with a wavering grin. “What did they say?”

“Nothing of substance,” he shrugs his bare shoulders. “Just… foolish things.”

“Like…?” you trail off, soothing your palms down the pale canvas of his chest.

A faint uncertain smile tugs at his mouth as he watches your hands dip below the waterline. “I wrote of… what fields I passed. What foolish things Ser Criston said that day. What I’d seen— What I missed of home, what I missed of you…” 

He trails off when your fingers find his cock, lying limp along his left thigh. He feels like velvet in your fist as you massage him slowly hard. “Keep going…” you coo to him.

His hips twitch beneath you when you tighten your grip on his stiffening length. “I— I wrote of your hands,” he manages, and swallows hard when your thumb swipes across the sensitive tip of his cock. His eyes grow heavy with desire as he watches you work at him through the haze of cloudy water. “How I missed the— the feel of them on me… Gods…” 

“Go on…” you murmur, smearing your lips along his jaw.

“I wrote that… that I missed your smell,” he confesses, fraying with each slow pass of your hand. “Your hair after a bath… The wine on your breath after supper… The sweat between your thighs after a long day— Seven fucking hells.” 

His jaw clenches tight when your free hand dips down to cradle his balls, squeezing the sensitive sack between your fingers until his cock jerks in your fist. His heavy head lolls into your kiss; he feels you smiling against his cheek. 

“You’re already close, aren’t you?” 

He swallows hard. “You have no idea how long it’s been…” he confesses in a blissful sigh.

“I’m sure there were plenty of whores on the road,” you singsong in his ears.

He shakes his head instantly in protest. “None as beautiful as you…” 

His denial does little to comfort you. Instead, you feel a white-hot rage searing in your chest. Some distant, ugly part of you wishes he had taken a thousand whores while he was away, if only to take the weight of your own betrayal off your shoulders. At least then you could share it, this guilt, instead of living alone in your sin. You hate yourself most of all for even wishing it, and you feel very suddenly disgusted in your own skin — eager to be free of him and this moment altogether.

“Then cum,” you command against his pulse, jerking his cock faster in your fist. Gwayne’s fingers clutch at the plush skin of your hips hard enough to etch bruises there, and you revel in the hurt as his grumbled moan fills the bathing chambers. “Come on. Cum for me—”

He makes a broken sort of sound in the base of his throat as he seizes just beneath you, tense and trembling as his high hits him full force. The cooling water threatens to slosh off the rim as he twitches through his orgasm, which spurts into the cloudy water in short ropes of pearly-white, until he relaxes finally with a sigh.

“Give me a moment…” he pleads through ragged breaths. “I’ll make you feel good, I just— I need a moment…”

“I’m alright,” you assure him with a shake of your head, and with a sad smile that he doesn’t catch with his eyes still closed. “You rest tonight… I’ll see you in the morning.”

viii. CAGE & CONFESSION

You do not go to find Ormund until long after Gwayne’s breathing has steadied. 

He takes up the whole of the bed in his inhuman exhaustion; one leg straight and the other bent beneath the quilts, one pale arm slung over his bare stomach and the other left reaching out for your empty side of the bed as you slip from beneath the silk. You storm for Ormund’s solar in the dimly lit halls in nothing but your thin ivory nightgown; the fabric catching at your ankles with every furious stride in the man’s direction.

You find the room lit by a sea of glittering candles when you throw open the door without ceremony. It strikes the wall a harsh bang, far too loud for the late night; the wind of the blow makes the flames gutter wildly in their sconces. 

Ormund’s head snaps up from his dispatches at the sudden intrusion. His quill pauses on the parchment — because the work of war is never truly done, not even at the dead of night. His eyes are cold for a flicker with a soldier’s instinct, then warm again all at once when he finds no threat — only you. The corner of his mouth curls into a slow, knowing smile accordingly.

“Come to warm my bed already, have you?” the man lilts in his usual melodic voice, setting his quill aside as he slouches back into his cushioned seat. “I confess, I hardly expected to see you tonight, what with your husband so newly returned. Bold of you, really—”

“Don’t,” you snap. 

The word slices through the solar like a blade, and wipes away the smug curve of his smile in an instant. Your nightgown billows around your ankles with every furious step inside; the shadows of the fabric catch in the candlelight and turn you into something half-spectral as you loom over the desk across from him.

“He wrote to me. For months, he wrote to me,” you agonize. “And when he asked whether I’d received them, I sat there like a fool, knowing I hadn’t gotten a single one.”

Ormund draws a long, even breath through his nose. His ringed fingers settle flat over the desk as he keeps a measured composure about him, even though yours unravels by the minute.

“Ah…” he hums under his breath.

A shocked laugh escapes your mouth. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

“What would you have me say?” he asks, pale eyes locked with yours as he braces himself on the arms of his chair to rise. The wood scrapes harshly along the cobbles when he stands to full height. “That I kept them from you? That I— read them for myself and burned each one in the hearth when I’d finished? Very well… I did.” 

The plain admission threatens to knock the breath from your lungs. You had braced yourself for denial, to be true, to spend these late hours coaxing the truth from his lips. You were not prepared for confession; not so soon, and not so easily. 

“Why?” you demand, half-breathless with tears. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because I did not wish to hurt you,” Ormund says, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “You wept for that man every night for the better part of a moon’s turn. I thought it might ease you, if you’d believed he didn’t care enough to write to you at all. I thought I was sparing you the grief of it.”

“That was not yours to decide!” you shout, voice shaking beneath the weight of your girlish fury. “Those were my letters, Ormund! My husband's words! You had no right—”

“No right?!” he thunders through an emotionless laugh, ocean eyes flickering with madness in an instant. “You are my prisoner! Or have you so quickly forgotten, given how generously I’ve treated you?”

You flinch back as he rounds the desk, though you cannot seem to leave the spot ahead of him as he inches towards you like a predator to prey.

“You’re lucky you’re standing here at all. Any other Targaryen beast would be in chains, but you…” he continues, prowling another step closer. “I let you share my tent, my table, my bed. And I did it gladly because I came to love you despite the— taint in your blood.”

You peer up at him through teary eyes when he towers finally in front of you — brows raised, eyes hardened, jaw clenched tight.

“But… you are still my prisoner,” he reminds you evenly. “You have been since the day you arrived at my camp. So I have every right to decide which letters enter your hands and which ones do not.” 

Each word strikes you like a physical blow — worse, somehow, than the searing one the hedgeknight had dealt you, which has caused an unnatural cracking of your jaw ever since. Maybe because these cruel, cruel words come from the same mouth that has kissed you, pleasured you.

“Prisoner?” you repeat tearily, features screwed in disbelief. “You say you love me and yet you call me beast in the very same breath. Wh… What am I meant to make of that?”

Ormund’s face falters finally at the sight of your tears, clinging to your lower lashes and glimmering gold in the candlelight. A soft crack splits down the unforgiving marble of him as he shakes his head down at you. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says and turns away.

“Like what?” you spit at the back of him.

“Like I've wounded you,” he snaps, long coat fanning slightly at his waist when he turns to face you again, now several paces away. “Where was your Gwayne when you hadn’t eaten in five days, and I fed you bread from mine own hand? Tell me that.” 

Your mouth parts, but nothing comes out.

“Where was your dutiful husband when that hedgeknight had you pinned in the dirt with your skirts torn to your thighs?” Ormund continues, palms splayed at his sides for effect. “Because I did not see him riding to your rescue as I had. I did not see him holding you through the nights you woke screaming. That was me— Only me— And yet you still stand here and weep over a handful of mindless letters, as if that erases the whole of what I've done for you.” 

Your chin jerks back as you flinch hard at his words, at the weight of them, which you can feel heavying your chest until every new breath feels impossible. Ormunds goes silent for a moment; the shadow of his clenched jaw comes and goes as he grits his teeth. His fists open and close at his sides until they finally relax, when the anger within drains into mourning.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters suddenly, boots padding along the cobbles as he closes the distance between you once more. “Forgive me. You’re right, I— I should not have kept them from you. I only meant to spare you, you understand that, right?”

His wide, gently calloused hands reach for your cheeks with a tenderness that feels maddeningly sincere compared to the vitriol he’d thrown at you moments ago. He lifts your chin and ducks his head into your eyeline when you do not meet his gaze. His blue eyes go round and wet with a boyish grief as hurt sears through his chest.

“I only want to keep you safe,” he whispers. “Whatever else I’ve done wrong— that much has always been true… You know this, don’t you?”

He peers down at you and waits on bated breath for a response. You say nothing just yet. Your trembling hands reach from the gold buttons of his coat. At first, he thinks you mean to push him away — you want nothing more, in fact, than to push him away and wrench yourself from his hands and return to your place in bed next to Gwayne.

You do not.

You just close your eyes, exhausted past the point of arguing any further. The threads of guilt and love and fury and anguish tangle together somewhere deep in your chest, until one is utterly indistinguishable from the others. The only thing you know now for certain is that the whole of your life can be categorized into two groups: those who have stayed and those who have gone. 

Your own family had sailed across the Narrow Sea and left you behind without so much as a backwards glance; and Gwayne, gentle as he is, still rode off to serve a cause that mattered more to him than you. 

Ormund is, perhaps, the only person in your life who has never once abandoned you. Whatever else he has done to you before now — however cruel or calculating or maddening he has since become — he has never once walked away from you. Not when you intended to starve yourself, not when you were pinned in the mud by your skirts, not when you woke up screaming on particularly brutal nights.

You hate how much it all matters to you, however fickle it may seem. You hate it, and you hate that cannot make yourself stop needing it all the same.

“I don’t know what to do…” you confess in a broken voice, clutching him hard by the collar of his coat. His softened face is bleary behind the tears burning in your eyes. “I feel so guilty, Ormund— I do not know for how long I can bear it. It sets heavy on my chest, all the time, and I cannot set it down—”

“Then let me carry it,” he tells you. His grip goes more solid when you attempt to turn away, thumbs pressing harder into your cheeks. “I can bear it well enough for the two of us, I swear it—”

The breath of his words fans across your chin when he ducks down to kiss you, hard and sudden and searing. He tastes of wine and mint leaves when the velvety pad of his tongue licks into your mouth without warning. 

You sigh hard through your nose at the feeling of him and cling to the front of his coat as he walks you backward a few paces towards the desk. The edge of the wood catches hard against the backs of your thighs. Ormund’s hands dip from your face to your hips, balling the fabric of your gown until it rises up your legs.

“Did you take him into your bed tonight?” he pants rough against your mouth, with the tip of his broad nose nudging yours. “Your husband? Did you fuck him? Tell me.”

“No,” you shake your head on an exhaled breath. Your fingers curl into his dark curls as his wet mouth drags along your neck, down to your exposed collarbone. “I only pleasured him with my hand. Nothing more.” 

Ormund nods swiftly, as though pleased by the admission. He peers up at you through his lashes as he kisses down your clothed chest. “Always a giver, aren’t you?” he hums lowly, mouth quirking softly at the edges. “Allow me to return the favor, then…” 

He sinks to his knees, with your ivory skirt now pushed up to your thighs. You keep one hand splayed along the back of his knuckles and the other tangled in his curls as he kisses your cunt like he would your mouth. He moans when his tongue slots between your sticky folds, a muffled growl you can feel in the very pit of your stomach.

Ormund is not quite as measured with his mouth as Gwayne had been the evening before he left you. He’s fast and sloppy and loud — you can hear his tongue as it flicks against you, his lips as they suckle your clit, his moans as your honey pools on his tongue.

You swallow down a moan before it can swell through the quiet room. It turns into a whimper in your throat instead. “Ormund—” you gasp quietly, tugging him hard by the hair as his tongue laps at your swollen clit.

His bleary eyes open to peer up the length of your body — your heavy head tilted to your chest, your gaze lidded and glassy with pleasure, your chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. “Let me have it,” he slurs against your pussy, and smiles to himself at the pretty sound you make for him in response. “That’s it— Let me have it…” 

Your mouth presses into a tight line to choke back a moan when his mouth returns to your cunt, suckling the sensitive button between his lips and flicking his tongue against it simultaneously. You shudder against his mouth when you cum for him, whimpering when he buries his moans and muffled murmurs of praise against your drooling pussy.

You do as you’re told — you give it all to him, you let him bear it — while Gwayne sleeps off the remnants of war across the hall.

ix. GARDENS & GHOSTS

The gardens of Tumbleton are modest things compared to the grandeur of the Red Keep, though you struggle to remember it so vividly now. Here there are only a few neat rows of late-summer roses gone wild for want of a gardener, an overgrown path winding between shaggy hedges, and a slowly weeping fountain gone quiet and still. You spend Gwayne’s second evening at the foreign castle walking beneath a canopy of drooping wisteria, with your hands looped loosely through the crook of his arm and your dress skirts whispering against the stone with every languid step.

“I’d nearly forgotten what this was like…” Gwayne hums, studying the wilting roses with distracted interest. “Walking somewhere without waiting for an arrow to find me first…”

“Don’t worry, Ser Gwayne…” you squint with a teasing lilt. “I’ll keep you safe.”

And though Gwayne hasn’t so much as seen you hold a real sword in your hand, he flashes you a tight-lipped smile anyway. “Of that, dear wife, I have no doubt…” 

You fall into an easy quiet thereafter; the ordinary rhythm of marriage, though it still feels a bit foreign to you now. He asks only about small things: if the summer storms had frightened you too badly, if the men at the Hightower camp treated you well, and if you’d truly meant what you said about that farm. You answer each in turn, grateful for the ease of it — or, at least, for the brief illusion that nothing had changed between you at all.

“And the encampment?” Gwayne asks then, flashing you a knowing look from the corner of his eye. “You’d said precious little of it thus far. Surely, it wasn’t so unbearable— Though I’m sure my cousin likely wasn’t making it easy for you.”

“There isn’t much to say,” you shrug with a feigned air of detachment, though the words come out a little quicker than you mean them to. You catch the faint furrow of confusion between his brows, and pretend to be more preoccupied by the wilting wisteria overhead instead. “It was… eventful. I suppose. In its own way.”

“Eventful?” Gwayne repeats with an arched brow. An unsure laugh sputters from his chest a second later. “I can’t tell whether that’s meant as a comfort or a warning…”

“It’s nothing worth troubling over,” you tell him. “Truly.” 

Gwayne’s eyes flit down to where your wrists are curled lazily around his bicep. The dull nails of your right thumb and forefinger pick aimlessly at the already marred skin of your left. He stops instantly in place — he had sensed something amiss since you caught him in the yard, to be true, but he sees it more plainly in your being than he had the night before.

“Did something happen?” he blurts.

Your head whips to him, eyes widening in an innocuous look. “I… I don’t know what you mean?”

He swallows once and rephrases. “Something happened…” he repeats, this time as a firmer statement. “At the camp. Something you’re not telling me.” 

You exhale a slow and shaking breath, though it does little to loosen the tightness in your chest now. You find that, once cornered and with his pleading eyes searching your face, you cannot quite bring yourself to lie to him again.

“There was a… a man," you start unsteadily, eyes fixed on the overgrown hedge behind his shoulder rather than his face. “A hedgeknight. I was out gathering berries, and he— He asked me about a letter. The one you left me. And when I wouldn't— He tried to—”

“He tried to what?" Gwayne presses when you trail off, ducking his auburn head into your eyeline when you avert your gaze. His voice is low and careful, but you can hear the tension straining beneath it already. 

“He grabbed for it… And I struck him, without thinking, and he struck me back…” Your fingers lift absently to your cheek, brushing the ghost of a bruise with your finger, long since healed but not yet forgotten. Your gaze goes glassy and unfocused with the recollection of the memory — the smell of the berries, the taste of the blood, the feeling of the wet earth beneath you. The rest of the words come out in choppy and nonsensical. “And I fell— and my skirts— I think he meant too— I don’t know truly, but I— I could not stop him—”

“Gods…” Gwayne huffs, as if the breath had been punched out of him entirely. His pale, handsome features screw together in horror as his pale eyes glitter with anger at himself. “I should’ve been there… I never should’ve left you.”

“Ormund killed him,” you add quickly and watch a complicated look flicker behind Gwayne’s eyes at the name. “Before he could…”

Gwayne nods when you trail off, signaling that you need not go on any further. “I am glad for that, at least,” he says, though there is a strain in his voice that suggests something other than gladness. His palms reach for your hands then, preventing you from picking at the skin there. “I am glad my cousin was there for you. Truly. I was a fool leaving you behind. I should’ve stayed, I should’ve—” 

You shake your head in protest of his apologies. “No—”

“I should’ve been there—”

“Don’t,” you tell him, though the word spills broken from your mouth when you jerk your hands free from his. The sudden loss of his touch leaves your fingers strangely cold. “Don’t apologize. I do not deserve it.”

“Deserve it?” Gwayne echoes with lowered brows. “What do you mean, deserve it?”

“Your kindness,” you sniffle. “I don’t deserve it.”

Gwayne blinks owlishly at you, and feels a strange searing in his chest when you flinch back from him as he tries to step closer. “Why are you saying this?” 

“I have— I have sinned.” Your breath catches hard on a sob. Your wet eyes try and fail to meet his gaze. “I have betrayed you.”

Gwayne tenses at once. His face goes still and solemn; the warmth he’d had for you moments ago drains slowly from his features now. “What do you mean?” he wonders lowly.

“With— With Ormund— We— I,” you attempt to speak through hitched breaths, though you cannot seem to get any of the words out. “I cannot express to you— how unspeakably lonely I have been—”

“Lonely?” he repeats, spits back at you like venom. “Do you think I was not lonely?”

“You at least had a war to fight!” you argue tearily. “I was taken prisoner, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“And do you think I would not have rather been home?” Gwayne shouts. “With you, instead of watching my men die in a field over a war I never wanted any part of?”

“You’re the one who left!” you exclaim when he turns away from you, already retreating down the gravel path before he can lose his composure completely. “If you stayed, we could’ve been together! And none of this would’ve happened! You act like someone was dragging you by your boots to go fight a useless war!”

Gwayne stops at that, a few paces ahead. His shoulders are rigid beneath his borrowed doublet when he turns to you again, though not enough to face you fully. Only his profile is visible to you now, with his auburn hair falling over his brow and his emotionless grin hinting at the corner of his mouth.

“I did not… want this marriage…” he confesses in calculated murmurs. “Not at first, anyway. That much I’ll admit, but… From the moment I wed you, it never once crossed my mind to seek comfort elsewhere.”

“Gwayne, I—”

“I meant my vows,” he tells you and turns, finally, to face you fully. You found no trace of fury in his face now, only a pained sort of look that turns his pale eyes a glassier shade of blue. “I have always meant them.”

“I didn't know if you were alive!” you agonize through a sob. “Don’t you understand that? Months, Gwayne — months without a single word! Not knowing whether you were breathing or rotting in some unmarked grave! And I couldn't even write to you to ask, because Ormund told me it wasn't safe. He said the letters might be intercepted, might lead Rhaenyra's army straight to you, and I could not risk that—”

“Ormund told you that?” Gwayne interjects, voice gone dull and cold. “That your letters weren’t— safe to send?”

“Yes,” you nod. “He said that—”

“And mine?” Gwayne presses with a slow step closer. “I presume he kept mine from you as well. That’s why you never got them, isn’t it? Because of him?”

You go quiet, unsure of how to answer — like there’s some joke here somewhere you have not yet been let in on. But, to Gwayne, your silence is answer enough. He exhales a long, shuddering breath through his nose.

“Ormund and I used to play a game,” he tells you suddenly, with a humorless smile ghosting across his mouth. “Run the tower, we called it— a footrace to the top beacon. And I let him win. Every time. Because he could not bear to lose even the smallest thing.”

Your eyes widen slightly, as you remember Daeron’s warning in the castle window — his anxious, hardly intelligible ramble. “It’s a dangerous thing to be the prize he’s decided he’s won,” the boy had told you. You hadn’t understood what he meant by that until now.

Gwayne’s features screw with a withheld fury, one that Ormund would’ve already unleashed on you tenfold by now if the roles were reversed.

“He was a thin-skinned twat even then. I thought it harmless, at the time. I never imagined…” he trails off, clicking his tongue against his teeth when he turns to you again. He shakes his head as his mouth twitches into a sympathetic sort of smile. “If you think Ormund loves you, dear wife, I assure you, he does not. He simply decided that you were another game worth winning.”

He does not wait for your response. He turns on his heel, and when he walks away this time, he does not stop. 

His feet carry him down the overgrown path, through the winding unfamiliar castle, and straight towards Ormund’s solar — without him ever fully registering any of it; not until he swings open the heavy oak door, at least, and is met instantly with the humidity of an incensed bath. He nearly chokes on the musky oils sitting heavily in the air.

“Leave us,” Gwayne orders Daeron in lieu of a real greeting. The boy’s eyes widen in shock at the sudden intrusion from where he stands obediently off to the side, robe in hand. His gaze flits to Ormund’s on instinct, who gives him a curt nod of approval without looking up, before scurrying out of the room.

The older man sits submerged to the chest in a steaming copper tub. A wooden tray sits balanced across the rim, with his inkpot and parchment laid before him. His quill scratches against the paper in swift strokes until Gwayne unsheathes his long sword with a sharp hiss. The older man tenses when the steel kisses the soft skin of his throat.

“You will explain yourself,” Gwayne says, peering down at the man from the bridge of his nose. “Or, by the gods, I will open your throat right here in this tub.” 

Ormund does not so much as flinch when he sets his quill back into its inkpot. He tilts his chin just slightly to look up at the man and feels the faint pressure of the blade against his adam’s apple. Amusement flickers in his blue eyes.

“She told you, then,” he hums — not quite a question but not entirely a statement either. “I did wonder how long that might take.”

“She told me everything,” Gwayne bites out through clenched teeth. “The letters— mine to hers; hers to me. Months of lies, cousin, you called protection.”

“Yes. I protected her," Ormund nods without reservation. “More than you ever did, seeing as you were hundreds of leagues away and all. I fed her when she attempted to starve herself grieving you. I killed a man who meant to rape her in a berry patch while you were off playing at war like a child—”

Gwayne tenses at the accusation buried in his words. The edge of the blade presses harder to Ormund’s throat, but still, he does not waver.

“I gave her a place to sleep when the storms came, and warmth when the nights grew cold, and company when she felt no one else in the entire realm cared whether she lived or died,” the man lilts evenly. His voice does not rise and his stare does not yield, not even with the cold steel resting steadily against his pulse. “So, please, spare me the outrage, cousin. I only gave her what she asked for— freely, and often, and more enthusiastically than you can imagine.”

Gwayne’s whole body goes rigid. A mixture of fury and humiliation prickles red-hot at his pale skin. His knuckles turn white around the hilt of his sword, but the blade does not move an inch.

“Well, go on, then,” Ormund tilts his head, eyes glimmering with amusement. “Finish it, if you mean to. Open my throat here, in my own bath, and we’ll see who she weeps for. You or me.”

Silence fills the empty solar. Gwayne grits his teeth and wills his hand to move; to either strike the man down or turn away entirely. He cannot seem to do either. 

Ormund lifts a lazy hand to swipe the blade away without a word. He rises slowly from the bath a second later. Rivulets of water glisten as they rush down his lean body and trickle audibly when they hit the surface again. He stands before his cousin, unabashedly bare, and reaches for the linen cloth draped over the edge of the tub. 

“For what it’s worth, cousin,” he says, swiping the nettle across his toned, golden skin. “I never intended to make an enemy of you. And I rather think, whatever she may tell you now to spare your pride, that she’d choose to stay exactly where she is, if given the choice.”

Gwayne opens his mouth to argue.

“Daeron!” Ormund calls out before he can. 

The door creaks slowly open a second later. The younger boy reappears with an obvious hesitance, refusing to meet either of their eyes as he rushes to his uncle’s side. He settles the emerald fabric over the older man’s broad shoulders, and Ormund slides his arms through the long sleeves. He ties the sash with slow hands and with an expression that looks almost sympathetic.

“Best wash up soon, cousin,” he grins. “It’s nearly time for supper.”

x. STEEL & SUPPER

Supper that evening is a small and wretched thing; four places set at a round table dragged in from some lesser hall to make the arrangement feel less tribunal. It’s close enough that you can feel the heat of both men suffocating either side of you, along with the cold, watchful silence of Daeron across the way; young enough to shift awkwardly in his seat at the tense silence, but old enough still to understand exactly what such silence truly means.

No one speaks a word of the hard truth of it out loud. Neither of you needs to — the whole of your sin sits at the table like an uninvited guest, souring the wine in every cup and thickening the air until you can scarcely draw a single breath around it.

“So…” Ormund says first to break the silence. He talks beneath the soft scraping of his knife against the porcelain as he cuts into his meat. “Ser Criston fights on, and yet you alone have returned to us… Why is that, I wonder?”

Gwayne turns slowly to glare at the man with dull, blue eyes, already too annoyed for idle blather. “Because fighting on is madness,” he answers distantly.

Ormund scoffs with a wad of food in his cheek. He smiles as he swallows it down, angling his head in the young prince’s direction. “Do you think me mad, boy?”

Daeron’s eyes shoot up from his plate. His spine straightens instinctively at his uncle’s sudden attention. “No, sire,” he answers quickly.

Ormund nods, pleased, and then turns slowly to you. A fondness flickers in his pale gaze behind the challenge in his eyes. “And you, my—” He catches himself half a breath too late; my love, he’d nearly said, though you cannot tell if it was an intentional attempt to rile his already aggrieved cousin. “My lady… Do you think me mad?”

Your brows bounce in response, though your gaze never lifts from your lap as your nails work relentlessly at the already torn skin of your thumb. “I don’t think you want me to answer that—”

You freeze in place when Ormund’s wide hand reaches suddenly to splay his calloused palm over the back of your knuckles. Your head whips in his direction. You struggle to tell if the action is heedless or entirely uncaring, as Gwayne sits close enough to watch the exchange on the other side of you. The man inhales sharply through his nose and straightens his spine as he reaches for his goblet, trying hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed it at all.

“Why do you insist on ruining yourself this way?” Ormund wonders lowly, as his thumb rubs soothingly over your marred one.

“Seems to be a common affliction as of late,” you answer distantly and draw your hands from beneath his touch. “Messing with things we ought to leave well enough alone…”

“You are aware—” Gwayne says gruffly as he swallows down his bitter wine, setting down his chalice with a bit more force than likely necessary. “—That while you’re all in here playing happy families, there’s a dragon sitting on the hill above us? And five more not thirty leagues away?”

“Why do you think we came here, cousin?” Ormund scoffs and waves his concern away with a lazy flick of his knife. “Rhaenyra will not burn her own subjects. She is a woman, after all. Squeamish, by nature.”

A short laugh spills suddenly from your lips. “Squeamish?” you echo. “Says the man who requires a milk bath twice daily, lest he make it everyone else’s burden to bear?”

The jab earns a proud smile from Gwayne that he tries hopelessly to bite back, and a small grin from Daeron that he conceals behind the rim of his goblet. Ormund swallows hard through the embarrassment strangling his throat, angled jaw clenching as he grits his teeth.

“Well… If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were taking up the usurper’s cause.”

“I’m not taking up anyone’s cause,” you mutter. “I just want to go home.”

“Oh?” Ormund hums with a feigned air of curiosity, though you do not miss the bite in his words as he wonders aloud, “And where is that precisely? King’s Landing? Oldtown?”

“Well, it’s certainly not here—”

“No,” he agrees instantly, warmth freezing over in an instant. “But when the usurper’s host comes here, we will fight on our own terms, on our own ground— turning King’s Landing against that overweening cunt, little by little, bite by bite… And when we expose her as weak and unsuited to rule, the great houses will flock to our side, and then, my lady, we can all go home.”

“Have any yet come?” Gwayne wonders knowingly. “Great houses, I mean.”

Ormund’s gaze snaps in his direction. “The patient hunter gets the kill, cousin,” he says through gritted teeth. “I’d have thought you’d learned that much by now.”

“Only one of us at this table has actually been hunted, if you’ll recall…”

“Yes, you have endured much,” Ormund huffs and returns to his boar. “Though I’m sure you find some solace along the road… with whores, perhaps, or your… brothers in arms…”

The insinuation sits heavily in the quiet, thicker than smoke and choking the three of you accordingly. Gwayne’s jaw tightens hard enough to make the muscle flex. Whatever retort had been rising in his throat at that moment is killed instantly by the sudden creaking of the heavy door across the room. Bold Jon enters, flanked by a couple of punier squires. 

“My lord,” the older knight announces. “House Baratheon has sent an envoy. They mean to bend the knee to House Hightower.”

Ormund is aglow in an instant. The sourness of the previous moment rolls off of his broad shoulders as a newfound satisfaction kindles behind his blue eyes. “Let the Stormlands lead the way…” he mutters to himself, mouth curling into a grin. “Highgarden will have no choice but to follow…” 

He flashes you a proud and knowing look as he rises from his seat. “Alright. Stand up,” he says and begins to round the small table. When no one follows him quick enough, he snaps, “Stand up! All of you.”

You rise at once, abandoning your plates as you follow him to the front of the dining table. The three of you fall into line beside the high lord, who stands just ahead to greet the incoming knights Ser Jon ushers in. The knights are caked in dirt from the long road; their yellow cloaks are crusted thick with mud, and their boots track dark prints across the fine pale stone beneath them. They smell like earth and sweat, hardly noticeable to you, though you spot Ormund’s shoulders tensing instantly when the stench hits him.

“Lord Ormund Hightower,” Roxton announces formally. “Beacon of the South, Defender of the Citadel, and Voice of Oldtown.”

“Well met, Ser Ormund," the head of the envoy greets with a polite nod, arms propped along the pommel of his longsword. “I come on behalf of Lord Borros Baratheon, Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.”

“Mm…” Ormund hums, ringed fingers fidgeting at his sides as he attempts to swallow through the invisible hand strangling him. “You are quite welcome, Ser…?”

“Ser Arrion Baratheon. Cousin to Lord Borros.”

You freeze at once. A newfound fear settles ice-cold in your veins. Your eyes squint as you study the stranger’s bearded face more closely — his curls, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. You find that he looks nothing like the Ser Arrion you had once met, at a tourney some several moons back; the one where you first laid eyes on Ser Gwayne Hightower.

The man himself tenses at your elbow. His jaw clenches tight with knowing as he turns slowly to flash you a single, silent glance. You communicate without words. His folded hands fall casually beside the sheathed sword at his hip; yours cross behind your back, as you reach blindly for the fruit knife idling somewhere beside the plates of supper.

“I most regret presenting ourselves to you in this state,” the stranger continues. 

Your jaw clenches tight in frustration as your fingers miss the handle in several agonizing attempts. You slide it closer with the very tip of your middle finger, slowly so as not to draw attention, before your fingers close finally around the hilt. You grip the blade to your back, palm going clammy around the grip.

“The road was long and filthy, but I thought it best to speak to you immediately.”

“We are honored to receive you,” Ormund assures him, entirely unaware. “And what word does Lord Borros send?”

“House Baratheon offers its banners in alliance with House Hightower,” the envoy says. “I have been charged to swear fealty on Lord Borros' behalf.”

“Well,” Ormund grins. “Your lord has made a wise choice—”

“Ser Arrion?” you call at once, stepping forward and drifting instinctively in front of Daeron with your arm still tight around your back. The boy’s eyes widen when he catches sight of the blade behind you. Your smile remains as artificially sweet as ever, despite the way your heart hammers hard against your ribs. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

The man’s heavy brows furrow as confusion flickers across his bearded face. He musters a similarly fake grin. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, my lady—”

The hesitant answer is confirmation enough. Gwayne unsheaths his sword in a blink and slices the imposter across the neck before he can finish his sentence. His throat splits wide open, bright crimson blood gushing out instantly. You feel it splattering across your cheek as the man falls limp to the ground in front of you.

The dining hall erupts into chaos in a blink. The shouting of Baratheon imposters and Hightower knights fills the room at once. One lunges towards you, trying to get to Daeron, you figure, though he’s met with the small blade clutched in your trembling grip before he can. 

You drive the knife into the first soft place you can find — his eye, you think, and then the side of his neck, before he crumples to the floor screaming.

“No!” Ormund’s voice shouts over the ringing of colliding blades, flashing a fiery look at Ser Jon. “Stop them, you fool!”

Daeron steps quickly in front of the older knight. “No!” he says to the man, small as he is, but standing his ground regardless.

“These are assassins!” Gwayne shouts over the clash of steel, kicking one knight down before striking him across the skull. “Sent for Daeron— and probably you!”

A pair of thick hands close hard around your wrist, cold and calloused and unforgiving. It yanks a memory from some buried place in your mind — spilled berries, wet earth, pooled blood in the mouth. You do not know whether or not he intends to strike you, or if he truly does, or if he only means to stop you. You only feel a girlish fury clawing its way from your throat as a buzzing adrenaline prickles at your burning skin. 

The bloody knife in your fist cuts him clean across the face — his throat, his jaw, his cheek, his eye, his temple. He stumbles back against the wall, bloodied and unrecognizable, but still you do not stop. Your blade follows him as he sinks to the ground in a gurgling, limp ball. His blood splashes warm across your face, clinging sticky to your fingers, but you still do not stop.

“Enough, enough…” you hear a voice say from behind you, muffled through the ringing in your ears. You feel a warmth press against your side and a gentle hand curl around your wrist. Gwayne’s voice follows more clearly in your ear, “He’s dead… It’s over now...”

The adrenaline seems to ebb from your veins at once, with a raw sob sputtered from your mouth. The knife slips from your limp fingers, clattering audibly to the bloodied cobbles below. You feel something warm trickling across your forehead and reach to wipe it with the back of your hand; blood smears wet across your brow in its place.

Across the wrecked hall, Ormund hunches over the back of his chair on the other side of the table. His face has gone pale-white; made more ashen, perhaps, behind the drops of vivid crimson splattered across his face. The thick copper stench of it settles in the back of his throat, along with the sweat and mud and death and shit hanging in the air.

“How—” he chokes hoarsely out. “How did you know— These men were false?”

“I was nearly betrothed to Lord Borros’ son once,” you hear yourself answer, though the words sound a bit distant, like they’re coming from someone else’s mouth. “I met his cousin… Lord Arrion…  at a tourney in King’s Landing years ago… I gave him my favor that day—”

“Right before I cut him down,” Gwayne adds through panted breaths, with a distant satisfaction in his voice at the memory. “The real Ser Arrion Baratheon has hair of light chestnut, stands near a foot taller and is, as it happens, far more comely."

Ormund makes a low, strangled sound in the back of his throat. “I will cleave the bitch— From crown to cunt—” he manages between heaving breaths “—She will die wishing she never dared to... dared to…” 

His body seizes as he retches — once, then twice — before doubling over the table and vomiting his supper along the plates ahead of him.

Gwayne watches on with a grim sort of amusement. “Best wash up now, cousin,” he hums in jest, as drily as Ormund had to him earlier that day. 

His amused smile fades when he catches you swaying in the corner of his eye.

The room seems to tilt on its axis under your feet. The cobbles sway softly beneath you, as if you were standing on water instead of stone. You reach blindly for the back of the nearest chair to steady yourself; you watch your fingers curl around the embellished wood, though you cannot feel it under your palms. Daeron’s quick hand catches you beneath the elbow in a small attempt to steady you.

“My lady?” he mutters softly, beneath Gwayne’s firmer, “Are you hurt?” 

Your mouth parts, but it takes a moment for the words to come out. They fall from your tongue in strange slurs that sound nothing like your voice. “My back…” You trail off before choking on a whimper. It is not pain you feel, not completely, but rather a cold numbness blossoming wide along the left side of your spine.

Ormund perks instantly, swiping a hand along his chin and fighting off his own dizziness when he watches Gwayne close the distance between you. His long, pale fingers skim carefully along your shoulders as he examines the back of you. They settle finally just above the thin tear in your bodice, where the fabric of your borrowed dress starts to bloom a darker crimson from the blood spreading from underneath it — from where a soldier’s blade must’ve kissed you in the chaos.

“Gods…” you hear Gwayne breathe just behind you. “You’re bleeding— Someone call the maester!” 

Your knees buckle underneath you as the strength spills from your body like sand through your fingers. Two sets of hands keep you upright; one smaller and trembling, the other wider and far more steady. They guide you into the seat before you can collapse. You watch Gwayne kneel into your vision with his palms resting firmly on your knees. The world continues swaying all around you.

“Let me see it,” Ormund says through panted breaths, gripping the table’s edge as he attempts to walk to you despite his own weakening state. He’s still pale and sheening with sweat from the blood clinging to his skin and nostrils.

“You can barely stand yourself,” Gwayne scolds drily. “She is my wife— I am more than capable of tending to her.” 

Ormund attempts to laugh, though the chuckle comes out wearier than he means to. “Are you?” the older man manages to choke out. “Because you surely haven’t cared about tending to her while you were off playing at war—”

“Enough…” The word comes out slurred and hoarse from your mouth. The men fall silent at once. Their heads whip in your direction with matching expressions of concern that would’ve felt almost comical in any other moment.

The pain has started to sharpen now beneath the somewhat pleasant numbness. A hot, insistent throb begins to settle in its wake, searing through you like fire.

Your first instinct is to reach for Gwayne, but the guilt of what you’d done to him weighs on your hands like cement — what right do you have, you think, to reach for him now with bloodied hands, after months of reaching for another? 

And then you think inevitably of Ormund and the particular safety you’ve always found in his hands, after he’s already seen you blood-soaked and broken and ugly from war, and never once flinched away at any of it. And then you think of the burned letters and the lies, and then of Gwayne’s departure with only a sliver of parchment left in his wake. 

You reach, in the end, for neither of them.

“Daeron,” you call instead to the boy hovering beside you. You turn your swimmy gaze to his wide and frightened ones. Your voice is unnaturally thick in your throat as you ask him, “Can— Can you help me up to my chambers, please?”  

The boy blinks and forgets to look to his uncle for approval first as he nods. “O-Of course, my lady,” he stammers and loops your arm carefully over his shoulder. “Lean on me…” 

You do not look back at either man behind you as Daeron eases you from the chair and guides you slowly towards the door; but you do feel both of their eyes following you like twin points of heat searing through your dress, just like the soldier’s blade had. Neither Gwayne nor Ormund says a single word; the hollow sound of your fading footsteps fills the silence as you go. 

The two of them are left standing alone together, amid the bloody wreckage of the unfamiliar hall, staring at the space where you’d once been.

The Meeting:

            The halls of the Keep were dark and cold and angry, if such a thing can truly be attributed to walls; the stench of blood and dragons and rot clinging to the stonework. Ormund didn’t like it, his father having instructed him long ago in the fact that the Targaryens are sinful, that they are rot and ruin and destruction, driving the land to chaos. 

            “Disgusting dragon riders,” he whispers, scuffing one booted foot along the carved stone floor. 

            “That’s not very nice, now is it?” a voice calls out from the shadows, one light and young and pretty, lilting through the air, echoing off the coldness like fire, wrapping him in warmth. He looks around, craning his head to catch a glimpse of the speaker, but he sees nothing. Nothing but stone and torches and tapestries and shadow. 

            “Who is there?” he calls out, his voice still young, still that of a child, the boy of seven which he is, the one tryingso hard to be a man for his father. To show his father that he’s worthy of the Hightower name, the seat, the power. 

            “It is I, the ghost that haunts these hallowed halls,” the voice continues, a bit of laughter contained in the wavering soprano sound. 

            “The ghost of what?” he asks, turning fully now in circle after circle looking, looking, looking and seeing nothing. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

            “You don’t believe ghosts?” the voice says, the words lilting up in a question yet tinged with a darker edge, a blade over his neck threatening to fall. “You, who live in the time of dragons and dragon riders. You, who live in the time of witches and magic and power, don’t believe in ghosts?” The voice seems to come from everywhere all at once, surrounding him with the darkening, deepening edge. 

            “N-no,” he stutters, straightening his shoulders, attempting to regain his composure, his power. The strength of the Hightower blood, the one not tainted by sin as his father says. 

            “You are a fool,” the voice says, blunt and cruel and tinged with hatred, anger. Disdain. Disdain for him? The Hightower heir? “And I am the ghost of the Dragon Queen.”

            “There is no such Dragon Queen in our history,” he says, now fully believing that it is simply a figure he cannot see, crossing his arms with the arrogance that only a seven year old lord can have. 

            “History is told by the victors, young Hightower,” the voice says. “Not the losers. Not the women who serve only as tools in the narrative you men create.”

            “You speak in blasphemy,” he says and above him he hears rustling. He looks up just as you drop down, dressed in riding clothes, landing on the stone floor in a crouch, eyes narrowed on him, cold and cruel and assessing despite the youth in your cheeks, the innocence that seems to radiate from you. “You are no ghost.”

            “You’re quite the genius, aren’t you?” you counter, crossing your small child arms over your chest, big eyes rolling at him in annoyance. “I am the Princess Targaryen at your service.”

            “You are not Princess Rhaenyra,” he says, having already met the silver-haired, tainted blood offspring of a poisoned, corrupted king. 

            “There are two princesses, you idiot,” you reply, eyes rolling once again and he struggles to see you as a child of five, a shadow haunting your eyes that makes you seem infinitely older. 

            “You are the half-borne,” he says, no malice in his tone yet your face twists, pinches, curls inwards, rage shimmering in your non-Targaryen eyes. 

            “Rhaenyra is my twin,” you hiss, stepping closer to him, your small chubby finger jabbing into his chest with more force than he expected. “Borne seven minutes before me. It does not matter if the rumours are true and we came from the same womb or not. I am her twin and she is mine. I am her other half, her opposite.”

            “If you are her twin,” he says, reaching forwards to touch your hair, feel it in his fingers, but you slap it away with your other hand, such force for a girl of five. “Then why are you not…” he trails off, unsure of how to word what he wants to say, unable to play the diplomatic game like his father. 

            “Not Targaryen?” you finish and he nods, your eyes rolling again and he wants to say that it is insolence to your better, but technically your station is higher than his and even though tainted blood runs through your veins, Ormund feels a strange sort of power. The kind that one would bend the knee for, serve for when there is no one else like it. “I am the darkness and she is the light.”

            “What do you mean dark? Light? There are no such denominations in the Seven,” he says, already knowing his scripture more than his history, Oldtown for piety and true faith. Not like King’s Landing, like the Keep. Like the Targaryens. 

            “You cannot find everything in your gods, young Hightower,” you whisper, stepping back from him. “I am the dark because I will do whatever she will not. I will cross any line.” With that, you smile once, a smile that makes you look like the five year old you are before melting backwards into the shadows. 

            In the space of one breath and the next, Ormund finds that you are gone. Completely. Faded away like you were never there at all. 

            And yet…Ormund is left the idea that perhaps tainted blood does not mean tainted people. 

            Perhaps…perhaps his father is wrong.

The General:

            Ormund is back in King’s Landing, sent by his father to see his uncle, his cousins. A diplomatic exercise, one where one must learn to see their enemies’ weaknesses in order to exploit them later on the battle, but he wishes that were still home. Still in Oldtown, waking in his bed, the familiar scent of prayer rather than the lingering stench of human refuse and dragon. 

            “Come on! Is that the best you can do?!” a voice, familiar and pretty, yet edged like a sharp drawn sword echoes along the stone walls and he steps forwards, away from the carriage which brought him back to the Keep, away from his family, towards the sound. The one he’s held onto since he was seven. 

            The one of power unmatched despite the tainted blood. 

            The one that made him question—makes him question—his father’s rulings. Beliefs. Makes him want to know himself and what he thinks rather than what he was told to believe. 

            “Princess,” replies an aggrieved, tired voice, accompanied by the clang of metal on metal, a sword blade hitting a sword blade. “I will hurt you if I give you all I have.”

            “Ser Rickon,” your voice replies, cocky and light and soothing to the now fourteen year old Ormund. Soothing in ways he doesn’t entirely understand. “I’ve been holding back too.” Ormund steps around the bend of the Keep, taking in the sight of the training yard, of you the Targaryen-not-Targaryen bedecked in fitted armour, holding a sword and clashing, pushing back against the fully grown, aged Kingsguard with a fury in your movements that he could never track. Not completely. 

            He knows, without a doubt, that anyone set against your blade would lose. It seems like you hold the ability toknow your opponent’s next move before they do. Anticipate and change your strike for soon the Kingsguard is on the ground, his sword kicked aside and your blade pressing against the hollow of his throat. 

            “I shall speak to my father,” he hears you say, stepping back and offering one hand to the man, which he takes, letting you haul him to his feet with more strength than one would expect from a girl of twelve. A princess no less. “Training must be improved. If this is what protects our lives…pity.” You turn, eyes scanning the yard, settling upon him, lips curling back in a smile that is strange and delightful as you lift a singular gloved hand up to wave at the same the guard comes up behind you for a stealth attack, one you’ve already anticipated, stepping to the side, his body collapsing on the ground. “Honestly, Ser Rickon! You do not fight in the yard when a lady’s back is turned! Manners, Ser. Manners.”

            “You’re quite good, Princess,” Ormund calls out, aware of the way your gaze has never left him even as you kick the guard in the side lightly as he lets out a broken chuckle, your steps moving up the hill towards him, his family behind him. He can practically hear the gears turning in his uncle’s head, Otto forever trying to figure out ways to make the throne a Hightower affair, his in truth. 

            But all Ormund cares about is you—the ghost of the mythical Dragon Queen, the darkness to Princess Rhaenyra’s light. 

            “I’m not bad,” you reply, now stopping before him, digging the point of your elaborate sword into the ground, stepping towards him, offering him your metal gloved hand for a shake. One he takes, a strange urge inside of him to feel your skin against his. To feel what you would feel like, if your hand would fit to his as if by the Seven’s creation. “But I have a long time to improve.”

            “Why do you practice?” Ormund asks, his uncle’s scoff audible behind him, his cousin Alicent’s small laugh, your eyes narrowing past him at them, lip curling and jaw setting before you turn back to him. 

            “Because one day,” you whisper, stepping closer, your hand still in his as you pull him to you, your bodies close yet not touching, “I will be a general. I will fight for my honor, my sister’s and the throne. Your family does not believe a woman can do so…I say,” you pull back, letting go of his hand, lips curved in a smirk as your eyes turn behind him, no doubt focused on his uncle, “all the more reason to prove the fuckers wrong.”

            You spin, turning away, the back of your armour, emblemed with a singular dragon appearing to claw up and off your back, hand reaching forwards, grabbing the sword from the dirt, sheathing it on the strange contraption on your back and walking away as his uncle sputters about manners, propriety. 

            Everything that being a princess is—but being a general is not. 

            “The General Targaryen,” Ormund muses beneath his breath, watching as you walk away, the only Targaryen seemingly free of the curse of taint and sin and disgust. The only one who seems proper even if you break all the rules. “The General Hightower.”

            He likes the sound of that title better. But not for him. 

            He likes it for you. 

            He just doesn’t yet understand why. 

The Betrothal:

            “Sister!” Rhaenyra calls out, her voice arching through the room, bouncing off the stone walls, surrounding you with the lightness. The lightness that has been darkening as all has come to pass. All that you have foreseen, all that you have known. All that you have plotted for and against. 

            “You are betrothed, I presume,” you call out as she steps into the room, her crown upon her head, the Princess of Dragonstone in entirety. 

            “I don’t like it when you do that,” she says and you twist on the stool before your dressing table, taking note of the way her face is drawn tight, the expression only slightly more open than before. You remember when she yelled at you, screamed and cursed the fact that you let the marriage between Alicent and your shared father commence. 

            It did not matter if you have seen there was no way to circumvent the union, only options before you to ensure your sister’s throne. She was angry and hurt that she did not know. She took it out on you, only now doling out bits of her love and attention, warming back up to you just in time for you to lose her again. 

            “I can’t help it,” you reply, folding your hands over your knee, fingers interlaced, her hands twined in the dark red skirts of her gown. “It is my gift.”

            “You don’t mean that,” she says, her voice soft in a way it hasn’t been in so long, her face crumpling in on itself as she steps in, collapsing upon your bed, her body seeming to fold in on itself. “You think it’s a curse, don’t you?”

            “No,” you tell her, the words thoughtful in only the way that true honesty can ever be. “I view it as useful neither gift nor curse, but a tool. If I didn’t…” you pause, tears stinging at your eyes, tears that you refuse to let fall because it is not strong, it is not what a future general does. Not what the Hand of the Queen does. 

            “If you didn’t what?” she asks and you look at her, your perfect, precious sister, still yet untainted by the blood of war, of the scent of death, things you have lived a thousand times every night, death after death after death as you struggle to find that way to victory. The way to win. You’ve died a thousand times every night, working towards that gleaming thread of victory, of your sister on the Iron Throne. 

            “I didn’t, I would break under the weight of what I see,” you whisper, looking down at your hands, the ones interlaced over your knee, together. Everything is stronger when there are more. 

            “Father always said we dream in cryptic ways,” she says, rising from the bed, her movements graceful and princess-like. Everything you are not from the silver hair to the violet eyes and the courtier way that she moves. “Yet nothing you dream is cryptic. Is it?”

            “No,” you answer, looking up with haunted eyes, only half here and half in those tangling threads, things to unravel, to solve. To solve before the dragons dance and blood runs through the streets, painting cities red. “It’s just not quite clear.”

            “I see the future Lord Hightower has been writing,” she says, her gaze snagging on a letter, one scrawled in Ormund’s careful, pious hand. “And here I thought the Lord Hightowers hated us.”

            “Otto, Alicent and Gwayne do not,” you counter. “They are friendly.”

            “They are not the shepherds of Oldtown,” Rhae counters, lifting the letter, her eyes scanning what’s been written in his hand, the pledges of friendship, of faith. Of belief. “He believes in you. In the Hand of the Queen.”

            “Shut up, Rhae,” you hiss, reaching and pulling the letter from her hand, the paper crinkling in your touch as you lay it aside, the scent of sandalwood still clinging to the paper. He douses his papers with it, said in the first one that he wanted it to be as if he were there, as if he were speaking to you. 

            “You have a plan,” she says and you look at her, lips pursing, one eyebrow arched. 

            “I always have a plan. You just don’t always know what it is—nor do I.” Your serious expression lasts for only a moment before the two of you are laughing, the sound like the times of girlhood, of innocence. 

            Before the real world reared its ugly head and prophecy overcame reality. 

            Before your sister was set to marry a Velaryon. 

            Before you had to sacrifice the freedom you’d been promised long ago. 

            All for the Queen on the Iron Throne.

            “Father?” you call out, stepping into his solar, boots scuffing along the seam between rug and stone. “Father, I need to speak with you.”

            “Come in, my darling,” he calls out and you follow the sound of his voice, crossing through the darkened rooms to where his desk rests, his body folded into the chair behind it. “What’s wrong? What have you foreseen?”

            “Many things. Wars and blood and Iron Thrones,” you reply, crossing the room to collapse into the second seat before his desk, leather clad legs tossed over one of the armrests, back against the other. “I have seen ways to ensure that Rhae is queen for a long, long time.”

            “Is that why you are here? To ensure it?” he asks and you look at him, your hand pulling the Valyrian steel blade from its sheath, the one Daemon gave you while Rhae got the pretty useless necklace. 

            “Yes,” you tell him, pressing the tip of the blade against the soft pad of your index finger, twirling and finding the lack of pain startling and yet so useful. “I need you to marry me off.”

            “You wanted freedom. I promised you that.”

            “I need that promise broken,” you tell him and his lips purse, his expression darkening but he nods, consenting, assenting, relenting. 

            “Daemon has been looking for a new bride—”

            “No,” you cut your father off, shaking your head and tipping your head back to look at the stone ceiling, the one carved by hands over centuries for the people with the blood of dragons in their veins. The conquerors who never understood the power of the individual. “The Hightower boy.”

            “Gwayne? Very well,” your father says and your lip curls as you look back to him, teeth grinding against one another, a squeaking sound in your ears. Loud and abrasive. 

            “No, the one to be the lord,” you tell him and he cocks his head at you, the look he has when assessing you and you do not know what he sees, but you can see something in his eyes. 

            “They don’t like us,” he says and you shrug, kicking your legs up and over, sitting up straight in the chair, ignoring the twinge of pain in your lower back from the press of the armrest. 

            “It doesn’t matter. Power is a potent aphrodisiac, Father. You should know better than anyone.”

            “I shall send a message,” he says. “We shall go from there.” You rise from the seat, nodding once at him, turning to go, to leave, but he stops you with his next words. “I am sorry, you know.”

            “For what?” you ask, the words scraping against the sides of your throat, rough and painful in a way that you rarely let anything be. 

            “For marrying her. I know what it’s done to Rhaenyra, to you. And I am sorry, but it was necessary.” It is no secret that publicly Rhae has always had your father’s favour, but you are the son he never had. You are the soldier, the knight, the general. The one with magic, with skill. The one who sees no lines, only what must be done. 

            “They will not say no,” you tell him and with that you leave, gritting your teeth, setting your jaw as a single lone tear slips down your cheek, trailing over your skin with a searing, burning feeling that feels far more painful than any fire from any dragon. 

            Even if your own dragon, Cannibal, burned you. 

            “The Targaryens want you to marry the that second borne daughter,” Ormund’s father says, tossing the official parchment onto the table in disgust, his lip curling as he tosses his letter opener aside, the metal clanging against the wood of the table. “What a disgrace.”

            “Father,” Ormund whispers, swallowing hard, the memory of your last letter, the sight of the places where you had pressed your quill deeper, the scent of your skin lingering on the paper burning deeper inside of him because why would he settle for letters when you could be his. When he could be yours. 

            He understands now that he loves you. That he has since he was seven and you, the impossible five year old dropped from the sky. That he has since he saw you defeat the Kingsguard, since he wanted you to be General Hightower, not Targaryen. 

            That he has even long before he learned that you were the one chosen by the fiercest and largest dragon of them all. An abominable creature of course but…was it really so bad? So sinful?

            Ormund doesn’t know. Only that he wants to be yours. 

            “What is it, boy?” his father says, looking at him, Hightower green eyes narrowed, nostrils flared. 

            “Power is important. It would put us closer to saving the realm…a proper ruler, one day,” he says, swallowing hard again, but not from want this time, but rather fear. Fear that his father will hear the love he has for you, will try to beat it out him, reinforce the idea that you are sinful. A disgrace. A rot to be carved away. 

            “You want to marry her?” he asks, tone already deepening, darkening but Ormund holds true, nodding, setting his jaw to appear strong, fierce and not scared. 

            “Purify the line,” he says and he holds his breath as his father looks away, eyes narrowing before finally nodding, assenting. 

            “Very well, my boy. You shall have her.”

The Courtship:

            The only thing that makes King’s Landing tolerable is knowing that you are here, that soon instead of the stench that clings to everything here, he will smell you, that strange perfume of your skin that is at once both sweet and strong. The strange perfume that he wants to have surrounding him at all times, you with him in truth. 

            But he would settle for your scent if you had to be away. 

            “The princesses are out riding, my lord,” one of the servants says, bowing low, eyes not meeting his, rather focused on his boots. Ones that shone in Oldtown, but here in the Keep have already picked up a fine layer of dust. Disregard as the rest of this place. He will be glad to have you out of it. 

            “Riding what?” he asks, but he needn’t have for he can hear the loud, overloud, sound of wings beating air, fast and furious and all too large. He turns, glancing out at the training yard, noticing Cannibal and Syrax both, growing larger as they near. 

            Cannibal had never been seen before he bonded you when you were four, saved you from danger and no one had any idea why he did so, only that he refused to let anyone near you and stayed under your window for the entire time you were a child. 

            You spoke to him before any courtier, it is said. 

            But Vhaegor was believed to be the largest of the dragons, until Cannibal. He can see how huge he is now as he dips to the side, his body canting and you leap from him, your figure small and dark as you land on the ground, your body rolling into a ball, rolling before you land on your feet, Cannibal already turned around, flying away. 

            Meanwhile, Syrax lands, dipping a wing and letting Princess Rhaenyra off gently, ensuring she is safe before departing after yours. 

            “You must have a death wish, dear sister,” he hears Rhaenyra exclaim, your laughter sounding in the yard as you loop your arm around her neck, pulling her in close before marching onwards, closer to him. 

            “I only do what you will not,” you reply, your voice light, still ringing with your laughter and he finds himself suddenly nervous, hands shifting to adjust his doublet, ensuring that it’s straight and he puffs out his chest, his heart speeding up when you look at him, your eyes narrowing, lips pursing before you break away from your sister, walking towards him. “Hello.”

            “H-hello,” he stutters, swallowing hard at the end of his words, your scent overwhelming, intoxicating. He feels slightly ashamed of his reaction to you, the way you change him from the strong heir to Oldtown to a stuttering young boy crushing for the first time, but when you smile at him, he finds he does not care. 

            “I have to change,” you tell him, reaching forwards, your hand finding his, fingers interlacing with his and all the blood seems to leave his body, rushing to all different places in his body at the feeling of your bare skin against his. 

            He wondered what it feel like, if it would mold to his and you do. It’s like you were made for him, like the Seven had intended this to be. Like the two of you were forged for one another. He follows after you, blood pulsing in his head as you drag him through hallway after hallway, up stairway after stairway before stopping outside an ornate door. 

            “Wait here,” you tell him, disappearing inside the room, the door closing behind you and he does, waiting patiently, leaning against the wall, interlacing his hands together in front of him, pretending that his hand is yours. That you are still touching him as casually as you did. 

            Touching him like you loved him as he loves you. 

            It’s no time at all before the door is pushed open and you step out, in a deep black gown, interspersed with bits of red. He swallows hard, his mouth feeling dry, like the wetness typical of a mouth has fled all of a sudden to his palms. He wipes them on his breeches as discreetly as he can but by the way your eyes track the movement, he knows you noticed. 

            “You look…” he trails off, his eyes tracing every line of your figure, caught up in your beauty, unsure of quite how to express the fact that he thinks you are a goddess. The most beautiful woman to ever live. 

            “Like a princess?” you ask and he startles, looking back up and meeting your eyes, nodding once, the movement jagged. 

            “Yes.”

            “You and I should probably become used to it,” you remark, stepping forwards and taking his hand again, looping it around your arm, “as this is how I must dress to be your Lady Hightower.”

            Your voice is resigned and he wants to tell you that he would never cage you as his lady, that he wants you, the General, but he cannot find the words for it.

            So, he says nothing at all.

            The gardens are well-tended, perfectly maintained, but even the scents of the prettiest flowers cannot cover up the permeating scent of rot that lingers in the courtyard, in the Keep. In all of King’s Landing. 

            But your scent, your touch is enough. It’s intoxicating to him, truly, the way your hand fits into and against his, the way your fingers fit the grooves between his as if you were always meant to hold his hand, as if this was fated, created. Deemed truthful by the Seven. 

            “How d—” he breaks off, pausing, bending his bend before the statue of the Mother, her effigy in the grounds. He feels you still, imagines you bent like him, paying respect to the idol of the god, one the many seven faces. 

            “You truly believe?” you ask and he jerks his head, a twinge of pain in the far back, like something snapping, his eyes wide with the surprise and shock coursing through his veins. 

            “You do not?” he asks and you shake your head, eyebrows arching as your free hand strays to your hip, stance asymmetrical as you look at him. 

            “I do not believe in your gods, no,” you tell him, your eyes flitting up and away towards the sky, eyes shuttering for just a moment, a thousand reflections of emotions glimmering in those perfect, precious eyes of bravery and truthfulness. 

            “Why not?” he asks and you look back at him, lips curving with a smile as if you cannot look at him without feeling joy. 

            “Because I do not believe in gods that do not exist. I believe in the gods in the world I can see. The Old Gods, the gods of nature. The ones who listen when you must pray. The ones who created us, but gave us the freedom to live. I believe that everything that happens is because of what we do. Not some mythical seven faced thing,” you tell him, your voice lilting and rising, shifting through the air like he always imagined a goddess would sound. 

            “But your father—”

            “My father does not know what he believes,” you counter, gesturing at the effigy of the Mother which stands before the two of you, the one gleaming in the sun, heat broiling off of the marble in strange visual waves. “He acts like a follower of the Seven, but it is not true. He does not go to sept or prayer. He rules and plays the sides that he must play.”

            “But the Seven are the only gods that truly matter,” Ormund counters, the lifetime of learning and prayer rearing within him. Lessons beat into him by his father’s hand, his belt, his knife, the fireplace pokers with red-hot ends. 

            “No,” you whisper, your expression softening on the edges, gaze going dreamy as if you remember something. “I do not believe in gods that cannot hear the prayers of the believers. No god can hear you through a sept, through a prayer mandated by man. No god can see through the candle smoke. You do not humble yourselves before them, you do not make an offering. You do nothing, but listen to some so-called holy man tell you what you must do. I do not subscribe to lies. I believe in the truth. In the gods in the wind and the sky and the ground and the water. That’s what I believe. I believe in that which I can see and hear and feel.”

            “Well,” he pauses, swallowing hard, fighting back against his father’s teachings that threaten to rear their head, have him lecturing you, making you believe. “I shall have enough faith for both of us in the Seven and you…can have enough for the two of us in your old gods.” And the toll that sentence, concession, takes on him is worth it to the smile on your face, to feel your arms as they wrap around him in a hug, his face pressed against your neck, your scent the only thing he can smell. 

            All he ever wants to smell. 

            Propriety be damned.  

The Wedding:

            The hall is full, you don’t even have to be inside it to know, you can hear the rustling of people inside of it, the sounds of whispers and murmurs and prayers as you stand, the gown on your frame heavy, far too heavy. This was what you never wanted. You wanted freedom and armour and swords and war. You wanted to fly on Cannibal’s back over the world, serving your sister, the Queen. 

            Instead, to ensure her throne, you must be wed. Become the Lady Hightower, rather than the Princess Targaryen you have been your entire life. 

            “My child,” your father calls out and you turn to him, your eyes heavy-lidded and tired, lined with tears, tears you will never let fall for it’s not strength to cry where people can witness weakness. “It is time.”

            “Of course,” you whisper, your hands twining in the layers of your white and silver skirt, the one that matches the one your sister’s, save for the gold that was on hers. The General has the silver; the Queen has the gold. You lift the heavy folds into your hands, stepping towards him, unsure of how to step and move in a gown like this when most of your life has been comprised of armor. 

            You know that gowns are a different sort of armour, ones made for ladies, ones made to present them as proper while hiding a multitude of secrets, but they have never been your favoured kind. Nonetheless, you cross the room, taking your father’s arm, the black and red cloak around your shoulders, soon to be replaced with ones of green and gold—Hightower colours. 

            The doors to the hall open, revealing the crowd of people curious and watching, whispering about your legitimacy, whether you are Targaryen at all, but it is nothing new. What is new, is the boy of no more than twenty who stands at the top of the stairs, looking at you with awe in green eyes, a nervous hand running through dark brown curls that are overlong and falling into his eyes. 

            A sight that makes you smile. 

            In truth, you love Ormund and it is no burden to marry him. You could have married Gwayne or the Tyrel lad or the Martel prince. There were other options, other ways to ensure that your sister would be the first woman on the Iron Throne, one who would not bleed, but you grew fond of the boy who wrote you letters. 

            The boy who said he believed in you. Something no one else had ever said. 

            “You will be fine, my dear,” your father whispers as the two of you begin the walk along the red roll of carpet, the one with golden tasselled edges, opulence and Targaryen power in a simple display. 

            “I know, Father,” you reply, your attention focused on the boy ahead, the one who’s Adam’s apple bobs hard, his chest rising and falling in erratic ways. “I have seen the outcomes. I will be wonderful.” The feeling is strange when Viserys pulls the cloak from your shoulders, your arms bare for a moment, skin prickling with goosebumps, coldness seeping in through the loss of the house which has been yours since before you were born. 

            But the coldness recedes when Ormund steps forwards with the green and gold cloak of the Hightowers, placing it over your shoulders, his palms pressing down against them for a moment, his touch grounding and precious and everything you need to survive through the rite of the Faith that you do not believe in. You would rather kneel before a Weirwood tree, the skirt of your gown digging into the damp, cold earth, the white stained black with soil. 

            But you find that this is okay too, your hands finding Ormund’s as the Septon speaks, his voice arching loud and clear through the hall, Ormund’s green eyes locked upon you the entire time. 

            And when you are pronounced of one flesh, you find that the kiss he gives you is sweet and grounding and promising. As if the press of his lips against yours is a promise like his Faith says: a promise to love you forever. 

            To believe in you.

            Ormund cannot take his eyes from you, his wife, clothed in white and silver wearing the cloak of green and gold, a Targaryen no longer. No, you are his wife. He wants to shout it from the rooftops, declare it to the entire world, but he refrains, contenting himself with dancing with you, his hand never leaving yours. 

            It is now, watching you spin in a swirl of skirts and cloaks that he remembers from that first day in the courtship, the walk around the gardens when you said that you believed in what you could see. In gods that could hear you. 

            “My love?” he says as he pulls you back in, his hand finding your waist, fitting to the curve as if it was always supposed to. “Is this marriage…real for you?”

            “It is before the Seven,” you whisper, eyes looking just past him, at someone over his shoulder, as if you cannot lie to him if you look at him. 

            “How can I make it true to you?” Your eyes find his again, shocked and surprised, wide open, pupils flaring and contracting and flaring again as they trace every line of his face, his skin flushing beneath your gaze. 

            “Take me to a Weirwood tree,” you whisper, your cheek pressing against his, lips at his ear, breath coursing over the shell of it, causing goosebumps to pebble along his skin, blood to rush to places it really shouldn’t in a public place. “On our trip, take me to Weirwood tree and there we shall make it real.”

            “So it is said,” he replies, his voice equally low and quiet at your ear, “so mote it be.” And he knows that he does not imagine, the tremor in your body, the shiver of your skin in his hands. You desire him as he desires you. 

            “You waved the bedding ceremony,” you remark, your hands coming to the clasp of the cloak, the golden leaf hooking around gold twines. “How will they know it’s true?”

            “Blood,” Ormund says, his back to you, muscles stiffening, rippling beneath the fabric of his doublet, his breath hitching as his arms move, the overlayer of the doublet shrugged off and onto the floor. 

            “Ah, I see,” you whisper, crossing the room, your cloak left behind in a pool on the stone floor. You cross to him, your hand resting in the place between his shoulder blades, rubbing a small circle as you step around to look at him, at the vein pulsing in his jaw, the way the line is sharp, taut, his neck tight and rigid. “Do you not want to consummate? Are you not ready? For if you’re not, I shall cut my hand and it will be done.”

            “NO!” he blurts out, the word too fast and too loud for the stillness of the chambers, his cheeks reddening as he looks down, down at his boot covered feet. “I just want it to be proper and I…” He swallows hard and you understand. 

            “You don’t know what to do,” you conclude and he nods, cheeks still red, ruddy as he looks at you, green eyes apologetic. Fearful. “Well luckily,” you whisper, stepping closer, watching as his Adam’s apple bobs with another hard, fearful, nervous swallow, “I do.”

            “How?” he asks, the blush fading, his brows drawing together and eyes flaring with anger, with jealousy and possessiveness. Perhaps the most potent aphrodisiac. More potent than power for here is power in love, a man who truly wants you as his. 

            “My uncle is a…an interesting man,” you whisper, lips curving in a sardonic kind of smile, your free hand, the one not resting between his shoulder blades, finds his, interlacing your fingers with his. “And he…he took my sister to a brothel one night and I followed. Not to see or know, but rather…because my blades are quite sharp.”

            “And?” Ormund whispers, his body pressing against yours, his body moving steps to you, to feel you against him even through the layers of fabric. 

            “And I saw what the act is,” you whisper, your gaze dropping from his eyes to his lips, his soft lips, the ones that you have felt against yours merely hours ago. The ones that made you feel what you supposed those people at the brothels did, except yours was made of love. “I know what to do.”

            “Teach me,” he whispers, his forehead dipping, pressing against yours, his eyes closing as he breathes in your scent, the one he says is everything he’s dreamed about. “Teach me so that I may know—for you.”

            “Very well,” you whisper, surging up, pressing your lips against his in a kiss that is hungry, that is full of love and desire. He gasps, eyes flying open, surprise glimmering in them before he melts against you, his hands finding your waist, your shifting to twine around his neck, lacing through the curly strands of his hair, his body pressing you back, back, back against the wall. 

            His mouth has opened, slanting, his tongue sliding into your mouth, sliding along yours in a way that leaves you breathless, his hands sliding from your waist, to your back up to the ties of your gown, the laces of the bodice. Your skin is fevered, flushing with want, a coil in your stomach from the press of his body against yours, the feeling of his lips and tongue and the way in desperation your teeth have clashed. 

            “Is this right?” he whispers, pulling back, pulling away as his fingers work the bodice ties loose, a line of saliva stretching between you and him. “Am I doing this right?”

            “I mean,” you pause, swallowing hard yourself, skin flushing anew, burning, burning, burning at the way his eyes track the movement of your swallow, green eyes black with desire. “I feel something so I assume so.” The scent of his skin like that of sandalwood and papyrus is all you can smell and it is intoxicating, but not so intoxicating as the way his eyes widen when your dress loosens, when you shrug out of it, the gown pooling underneath you on the floor, a halo around your feet. 

            “My god,” he rasps and then he’s kissing you again, his hand fisting in your hair as he pulls you against him, enough that you can feel his bulge, the one not growing so much as already grown. It’s hard and stiff and his hips move against you of their own accord and you wonder how he knows to do this when he has never done so before. 

            “I thought,” you gasp out as he finds a spot underneath your ear, his teeth working at the skin, tongue soothing the bite, “you’d never done this before.”

            “I haven’t,” he murmurs against your neck, “but with you, it seems I know.” He breathes in the crook of your neck, breathing in your scent, his nose pressing against your skin before he lifts his head, the bed now behind you, your knees pressing into it, threatening to buckle as he pushes against you. “What is next?”

            “They, um, they,” you pause, breaking off, images flashing before your eyes, things that at the time you wished you hadn’t seen, but are useful now. Fingers at the place you never thought of as anything, hands and lips over chests, hips slamming against hips. “The men prepare the woman.”

            “How?” he asks, pulling back, pulling away from you, mouth pinching as though even this small bit of separation pains him. 

            “Their fingers,” you whisper, sighing when he looks confused, brows knitting in a way that is adorable, yet far too clueless. You remove your smallclothes, letting them fall to the floor, a heady rush of lust and love in your veins when you see the way he’s looking at you, when you hear the deep sound that escapes him. 

            You fall back onto the bed, shifting, spreading your legs, your hand going to your cunt, finding your clit, placing pressure against it, a bolt of something running through you, a small sound escaping your lips involuntarily. 

            “Let me,” Ormund whispers, his clothes now shed, his cock erect, hard, a clear bead resting on the tip as he climbs over your body, replacing your hand with his, his thumb pressing down on your clit, a curious finger dipping between your folds, pressing inside of you, the stretch burning and strange but at the same time, perfection and you let out a small sound, one that has Ormund looking at you with absolute lust. “You like this?” he asks, clarifying as he moves his finger in and out, tracking every reaction you have, every twist of your face, the way you move against him. 

            “Yes,” you breathe out and his lips curve in a cocky kind of smile, another finger sliding inside of you, knuckles dragging along your walls, his thumb never ceasing. 

            “Not enough,” he whispers and before you can ask him what he means, he’s shifting, lifting your hips, his tongue pressing against you. He’s tasting you and his fingers are moving, his tongue building a rhythm with them around your clit, his chest moving, rising and falling as if he’s breathing in the way you smell. Delighting in it. 

            It’s not long before the coil in your stomach is snapping, that feeling of heat and pleasure surging through your veins as he rises, his body over yours, his chin and lips still glistening with your release. 

            “Divine,” he whispers, his eyes hungry in a way you’ve never really seen before. “What’s next?” You can’t help but laugh a little, kind of laugh made of surprise, his lips curving up at the sound, his lips peppering kisses all over your skin, making you laugh all the more. 

            “You know what’s next,” you say and he pulls back, a solemn look in his eyes as he nods. 

            “Yes,” he says, “and you must know before I do that I love you. I feel you should know it before we do something that can never be taken back. I know…” he pauses, even as his cock presses against you, kissing your entrance. “I know that I may not have been your choice.”

            “You were my choice,” you tell him and he blinks, the look in his eyes like he is rewriting every thought he’s ever had. “I saw many options and my father did not suggest you. I did. I wanted you and I have you. I love you.” He presses his lips against yours, pressing inside of you, inching in and your gasp of pain is swallowed by his lips, a single tear sliding down his cheek as he pushes in, the burn echoing throughout your body. 

            “I’m sorry,” he whispers and you lift one hand from his back, wiping away the tear with the side of your finger, drawing him back to you in a kiss as he begins to move inside of you, building a rhythm, one punctuated by murmurs of love you. Love you. Love you. 

            And when his thrusts grow sloppy, you can feel his release nearing, yours drawing close again from the way he kisses you, his hands trailing over every inch of your body and the way his cock drags along your walls. 

            “Love—you,” he cries, just as your release comes through, that same feeling of pleasure, of heaviness in your limbs as he spills inside of you in thick hot ropes, his body collapsing beside yours, drawing you close to him, his eyes closing as he breathes you in. “I love you.”

            “And I you,” you whisper, your hand tracing the side of his face as his eyes open, lips pulling back in a smirk as he looks at you. 

            “I shall never tire of hearing you say that,” he whispers. “Can you say it again?”

            “I love you, I love you, I love you,” you whisper and he sighs in contentment, pulling you down beside him, your gaze snagging on a bruise on his shoulder, one dark and deep and in the shape of a belt. “What is that? Who hurt you?”

            “It’s nothing,” he whispers, a shadow falling over his face. “Just a reminder of the weight of blood. Something that…” he pauses, pulling the covers up and over the two of you, the ones which had been folded at the end of the bed, “I forget when I’m with you.”

            And you say nothing more, simply pressing a kiss against the purpling bruise and holding him while sleep claims you both.

            The Weirwood tree is tall and large and strong, wizened in a way that Ormund has never seen another tree be. It is a marker of the Old Gods, the Old Faith, something his father hates, something he should hate, his father’s message having been beaten into him a thousand times before, but standing here, his hand in yours, he finds he disagrees. 

            As he always does with you. 

            “What do we do, my love?” he asks you and you turn to him, a smile alight on your face as you pull him towards it, a small giggle escaping your lips, body clothed in a green and gold gown, beautiful and perfect and yet a part of him wishes you were wearing armour, clothes you loved above all else. 

            “We speak the truth,” you reply, kneeling down in the damp earth, not only the hem of your dress gathering dirt, but rather all of it. “We tell the tree how we love each other and then we say we take the other as our partner. It is that simple.” He kneels down with you, the scent of you and damp earth overwhelming him and he knows that for the rest of his life, when he thinks of his wedding it will be this: you in a dirt-stained gown and loose hair and the scent of dirt, your warm hands in his. 

            “Well then, I love you. I have since you dropped from the ceiling when you were five and I was seven and I will continue to do so forever.”

            “I love you as well,” you tell him, your smile softening, becoming loving in a way it’s never been before. “I have loved you since you sent your first letter and said that you believed in me and addressed me as General Targaryen because no one had ever believed in me before. And I could not imagine losing you, my letter boy, to anyone.”

            “What now?” he whispers, his heart seeming too large for his chest and he wants nothing more than to take you here and now—now that he understands everything to do. 

            “Now you say you take me for your wife,” you tell him and he squeezes your hand. 

            “I take you, Y/n Targaryen, as my wife.”

            “And I take you, Ormund Hightower, as my husband,” you whisper and then he’s letting go of your hands, his fingers framing your face as he cups you, pulling you to him and pressing a searing kiss to your lips. One that leaves you both breathless because you know.

            This is the moment that you became real. 

The First Child:

            Ormund waits, his hands twining together as Cannibal comes into view, his true name something only you know, a secret that you keep and that he does care that you do. He can practically hear his father’s mutterings, curses about you and your polluted blood and sinful nature, but he does care because he loves you. 

            He loves the things you’ve told him of your line, of your sister, of your mother. He has grown to love the things you love, his father’s messages be damned. 

            He watches as you leap from Cannibal’s back, landing in a roll, springing to your feet as Cannibal takes off for some distance place, someplace you can call him back from in some way that he does ask about. Your dragon is the only secret you keep and he does not care. 

            What he cares about is the wide smile on your face, the way your skin is glowing as you run to him, the scent of fire and ash clinging to your dark leather riding gear. He opens his arms and you run straight into them, your week away with your sister having taken a toll on him. 

            He spent the entire time pouring your oils on your pillow and holding it to him, wishing that it was you, even though he knew it wasn’t, the smell being off. Wrong. 

            “My love!” he cries as he picks you up, spinning around the courtyard of Oldtown. “How are you?”

            “I’m pregnant,” you blurt out as he sets you down, everything inside of him freezing in place. 

            “You’re what?” he breathes and watches as your smile widens, deepens, tears lining your perfect eyes. Eyes that are glimmering with a strange sort of happiness. 

            “I’m pregnant,” you whisper and he’s dropping to his knees before you, the dirt of the courtyard digging into his clothed knees, one hand on your hip, the other on your stomach as he looks at it. He expects to see the child moving inside of you already but it’s early, he knows. He just can’t believe it. 

            An heir, already. 

            “My miracle,” he whispers, looking up at you, tears gathering in his green eyes. “My forever miracle.” And he rises, pressing a deep kiss against your lips as he pulls you against him, every line of your body against every line of his and there is the thing he missed, the things your oils lack. The mystery ingredient: you. Just you. 

            You and another.

            “What do you think of the name Aemon?” Ormund says, stepping into the room, his attention on you, but his eyes still scanning the book of names he found in the library. 

            “No,” you whisper and he looks up at you, you who stands tall, belly round and protruding, five moons in now, the child kicking hard against you, wanting out, wanting to breathe air. “I want to name him Baelon—or, if it’s a girl, Baela.”

            “Why?” he whispers, taking note of the tears that line your eyes, tears that fall more easily now since the baby. 

            “My brother,” you whisper, voice thick as a single, glittering tear rolls down your cheek. “My brother was named Baelon.”

            “Very well,” Ormund says, dropping the book onto the bed, crossing to you, stepping behind you, interlacing his fingers beneath your bump and lifting, reliving you of the pressure for a moment. “Baelon it is.”

            Ormund hears your scream echoing off the stone walls of Oldtown, ricochetting to him in his solar, the new solar for the new Lord of Oldtown, his father now nothing but ash. It is a deep scream, a primal scream and he runs, leaving everything behind, every instinct in his body simply to get to you, pushing past servants and guards and anyone who gets in his way, bursting into the room just as you scream again, your hand on your stomach and a pool underneath you on the stone. 

            “MIDWIFE!” Ormund roars, his voice a matching primal sound for yours. “NOW!” The midwife runs in, followed by the Maester and they try to remove Ormund from the room, but he fights against them, fighting to stay with you, your hand reaching for him and his reaching for you and they soon give up on trying to separate you. 

            For there is something no one knows, save you and he: you are of one heart, one body, one mind. 

            By whatever God’s decree. 

            Twenty hours of labour, of your screams and cries, of your hand squeezing his and cursing him in the same breath that you confess how much you love him. Twenty hours for a silent child.

            “My lord,” the midwife says, the child in her arms silent and still. “He is not breathing.”

            “GIVE HIM TO ME!” you cry and she startles, body seizing for a moment but Ormund nods and she hands the green and gold bundle to you, one which you push back from the stillborn face. “Listen to me Baelon,” you whisper, “you will live. Even if I have to fight every god in the world, you will live. You will breathe and cry and scream because I am your mother and I am telling you to live.”

            He reaches for you, wanting to look you in the eyes and tell you that the child is gone, but it’s that moment that a sharp and keening cry breaks through the air, the baby screaming in your arms, face ruddy in only the way that a baby can be. And it opens its eyes to show startling green. 

            “Welcome Baelon,” he whispers. “You are a miracle, just like your mother.”

            It was after the labour, as you were penning your letter to your sister that a raven landed on the sill with a message. One that you opened, passing yours onto the bird, instructing it to take the message to Princess Rhaenyra. The message was written in your sister’s scrawling hand, a mere few words. Just: Jacerys Velaryon and his date of birth.

            Exactly two days before Baelon. 

            It must be a twin thing.

The Children:

            Five children, a miracle for the Hightower line, every single one carrying some piece of Valyria and Oldtown. Five children, four sons and one daughter. Baelon as the oldest, the heir to the Oldtown legacy, Aerys, the youngest, the most reckless. Rhaegar, the third born and the most studious, fascinated by the Andal faith. Matarys, the fourth born, the warrior. The most like you. 

            And Daenerys, the youngest, the only daughter. The one with red hair and green eyes, every inch the Hightower girl, but a mind of a Targaryen, steel and fire and swords. Spoiled beyond belief, but tough beyond all measure. 

            And now, a ward, a son of Alicent, your brother. Little more than a babe, one that you will raise. Young Daeron. 

            It seemed that your life was full, yet a dreamer always knows that the worst battle is around the corner and you knew that nothing would be solved before the green banners flew black. 

The Dance of the Dragons:

            “What?” you whisper, your throat thickening at the words still ringing through the hall, your father is dead, Aegon is king. “That is not his right!”

            “Rhaenyra is not fit,” Ormund says, the letter sealed with the Red Keep seal in his hand, the folded parchment flapping in the movements of his hand. “Daemon is a threat.”

            “Daemon is an idiot in love! And it is not his right! You cannot support this!” you cry, but Ormund’s face draws closed, shuttering as he sets his jaw. 

            “I am a Hightower and I support Aegon as king. His bloodline is partly pure. And you are a Hightower by marriage. You follow what I say.”

            “Don’t forget yourself, Ormund,” you hiss, stepping closer to him, your finger jabbing into his chest. “I am not a simple-minded fool and if this comes to war as I know it will, you do not want to be on my bad side.”

            “We have been married for seventeen years and yet you doubt me?” he whispers, his voice low, the door of his solar creaking open, a presence behind the two of you and you can feel your heartbeat in your throat, can hear your blood pulsing in your head. 

            “If you are not with me,” you hiss, “you are against me.” You turn and walk away, your chest feeling like it’s caving in, the warning from your father all those years ago ringing through you, the fact that Hightowers hate Targaryens. 

            You wonder, if perhaps, your love for the letter boy clouded the truth of the war you saw. If you made a wrong choice that will cost your sister her throne. 

            “Mother,” Baelon hisses from the shadows of the halls, stepping out, Aerys not far behind him. “We must leave. Our loyalty is to Aunt Rhae, not Alicent. Not Aegon. We cannot stay. We have to leave. Fight.”

            “I can’t,” you whisper and the tears that you have been feeling since your father died, since you heard the throne was stolen, boil over, spilling down your cheeks as your body shakes, your eldest son, a man grown, enfolding you in his arms. The arms which did not move until you ordered them too. Your miracle child.

            “Why not?” he whispers and you cry harder, the sobs wracking your body. 

            “Because I love him.”

            “We fly the banner of Aegon,” you hear Ormund say, his voice loud and dominating in the small space. “We support a righteous king.” You gasp, your chest aching, your hand pressing against your sternum, green gown never heavier than now. 

            “Mother,” Matarys whispers behind you and you turn, seeing your youngest son, his violet eyes gleaming with their own tears, his mind haunted by dreams. A dragon dreamer or possibly a battle seer, you are not yet sure. But his mind is haunted with fire and smoke and a shadow with jaws of steel. 

            “Yes, my darling?” you say, your voice cracking with the weight of tears. 

            “We need to leave,” he says and the pain rams through you again with all the force of a battering ram and you shake your head, pressing your lips together as you hold your arms out for your small son to run to. 

            “Not yet,” you whisper. 

            “Why not?”

            “Because I love him.”

            “The dragons are ready whenever you are, Mother,” Rhaegar says, his body leaning against the stone wall of your solar, your sons all gathered before you. You’re sharpening your sword, the one given to you by Daemon when you took Baelon to retrieve his egg as a child. 

            “I cannot leave,” you tell them. “I love him too much and when you all fall in love, you will understand.”

            “But you swore to Aunt Rhae,” Baelon cries and you shrug, tears slipping down your cheeks, an admission of weakness because Ormund has always, will always, be yours. 

            “What will it take for you to leave, Mother?” Rhaegar asks, logical to a fault, scholarly like Ormund. 

            “If he threatens us, you and me. Then I will leave. If I do not kill him first.”

            You can hear murmurs behind the closed doors of Ormund’s solar and you push the doors open, to see Ormund seated beside Daeron, whispering about power and righteousness and the taint of Targaryen blood. Of their sin.

            “Sins?” you call out and he looks up, startled, shame flooding his green eyes. Eyes that used to look at you with love, but have since become as dark and convoluted as his father’s. “You are despicable, Ormund!”

            “Why? Because I speak the truth?!”

            “BECAUSE YOU ARE BECOMING YOUR FATHER!” you scream, the sound bouncing off the stone walls, Daeron’s face drawing tight, fear and curiosity warring in them. “Daeron,” you say, tone softer, his face relaxing when he looks at you, the only mother he has ever known, “go.”

            He does, running from the room and closing the doors behind him with a echoing bang. 

            “I am not my father,” Ormund says, stepping around the table, towards you but you shake your head, lip curling as you step away from his touch. 

            “You are crazed, half-mad. Claiming my blood, the blood in your children is sinful. You are becoming exactly as he taught you to be and I swear if you lift a hand to my children, I will make you regret it. Do not do it.” And then you sweep from the room, the tears burned away now by anger and rage and an understanding that soon you will leave. 

            That soon he’ll finally do something that means you must flee. 

            It comes at dinner that night. 

            “All Targaryens,” Ormund mutters, his knife stabbing against his plate with particular force, “ save for young Daeron, should burn by their own dragon fire.” It’s like someone has stabbed you, pain spreading from your chest through your body and you can feel your lips open, a horrid sound echoing through the room as you push your chair back from the table, limbs weak and heavy, Ormund’s head lifting with urgency, gaze clearing as he looks at you, body already moving towards you. 

            And that’s what’s cruel, because for a second it looked like he was your Ormund. The boy you fell in love with and the man who set you free. 

            But soon the shutter falls and the monster is in its place. 

            “Mother, are you alright?” Baelon calls out and you close your eyes for a moment, drawing strength from the blackness of your closed eyes, the darkness, nodding once, teeth grinding against themselves. 

            “I will be,” you whisper, “later, most likely by tonight.” You don’t even need to see your children to know that they understand. 

            Tonight is the night that you’ve finally snapped. 

            Tonight is the night you leave. 

            “You know,” Ormund says, his hands undoing the laces of your gown, a ritual of undressing one another that you began in the early days of marriage, “this war will have costs.”

            “And let me guess,” you reply, tone arch and blood boiling at his touch, at his proximity, the kind of hate and anger that can only be borne of love, “you will pay them all.”

            “No,” he says, his answer surprising you, your breath hitching. “I will not pay the price if it is you. You are the only thing I cannot lose. You keep me sane for only am I complete with you. You are the price I will not pay.”

            Your chest feels hollow, scraped clean, his words running through you as you turn, your gown falling from your body as you pull him to you, pressing a kiss against him, one deep and searing, the two of you merely a tangle of tongues and teeth and limbs as you stumble to the bed. As you say goodbye even if he doesn’t know it yet. 

            And when he’s asleep, you rise from the bed, grabbing your sword, dressing in riding clothes as quietly as possible before slipping from the room, running to your children, banging on their doors, their bodies emerging, ready as you are. 

            “Mother,” Daenarys says when she emerges, “should we leave a note?”

            “No,” you tell her. “Your father lost that courtesy when he said we should all burn. Now, let’s go.” And the six of you slip from the castle soundlessly, crossing the courtyard to the edge where you call out into the night, in a language that is not human, that merely sounds like chuffs and chirps. 

            The language of the dragons, the language Leviathan (Cannibal’s real name) taught you when you were a child. 

            The language he promised you that he would hear no matter how far away he was. And he does not let you down, his large form rising above the five other creatures behind him. 

            The language that is the reason you are able to flee with your children, flying to Dragonstone, to battle, to Iron Thrones and Iron Crowns and your sister. 

            To the battle you saw all those years ago. 

—

            Ormund wakes to an empty bed, your side cold as if it was never slept in at all, only the faintest edge of your scent clinging to the cloth. He rises, dressing, calling for you, yelling your name through the halls, running to every place you go, the hill, the yard, the library, armoury. Everywhere.    

            And you are nowhere. 

            “WHERE IS SHE?! WHERE IS MY WIFE?!” he cries once he’s gathered all the servants in the grand hall, a single soldier stepping forwards, eyes cast to the floor. 

            “She and your children were reported to have left last night,” he says. “On dragonback. Cannibal led the charge with her on him.”

            Ormund can feel the last bit of his sanity disappear, everything shuddering into place as his father’s son. 

            “She is a traitor then,” he says but it is not him, not really, for the real Ormund is locked away, war making monsters out of men. 

            But the real Ormund whispers that he will get you back, no matter the cost because you were the only thing he never wanted to pay. 

            “If you see her,” he says, “kill her.”

—

            “You did not leave quickly,” Rhaenyra says, your hand twined with hers as the two of you stand on the balcony of her rooms in Dragonstone, her crown heavy on her brow and your new title as her Hand and General of the armies, Protector of the Land, heavy on yours. 

            “No,” you whisper, looking out at the dusky, smoke-filled sky. 

            “I had rather hoped you’d never leave at all,” she says and you turn to her, taking in the aged look on her face, the face that you know so well, have known and will always know better than anyone else in all the Seven Kingdoms. 

            “That hurts,” you say, your tone teasing and she laughs, just a bit, a small laugh, short and sharp and nostalgic all the same. 

            “I had hoped that love would be too strong,” she says, her lips pressing into a saddened, heavy smile. “I had hoped Ormund would be different.”             “You are not the only one.”

—

            “Lucerys should not go,” you whisper. “I see a shadow that takes him. It’s too dangerous.”

            “We need this diplomatic mission,” Rhae says and you reach for her hand, lifting it and pressing it against your heart, your head shaking. 

            “We might lose him.”

            “So, send me,” Matarys calls and you startle, looking back at him, your brows knitting and breaths changing, deeper and yet shorter, fear choking you. 

            “What? You said you see a shadow before you die,” you say and he stands, rising from his seat at the Black Council table, his body spindly and thin like a strong wind would blow him over. 

            “Let us change fate.” Rhae looks at you for a moment before shaking her head and nodding, assenting to the mission.

            “Very well.”

—

            You should never have let the mission go on. You should have gone with them, instead here you stand, looking at the two boys dead. 

            “The boys who clung to us, who hid their faces in our skirts,” Rhae whispers, her body pressing against you, hip to your hip, arm around you, the two of you holding each other up, “dead, all so I may sit upon a throne of swords?”

            “War has costs,” you whisper, your tears having long since dried away, evaporated by rage. “And I shall pay them just to have Aemond’s head on my wall. Oh my boy!”

—

            “Sir,” the messenger cries, stepping into the room. “News of the Targaryens.”

            “Say it and then leave,” he orders, jaw already gritting, a pit of fear that he refuses to acknowledge growing as he fears that he will hear that you are dead. That you are gone. 

            “Matarys and Lucerys have been killed by Aemond on a mission.” Ormund can feel that chokehold of anger, that familiar pain as he lifts his glass of spirits and hurls it at the wall, the glass shattering in a million shards. 

            “Get out.” And when he is alone, Ormund lets the tears of sanity slip down his cheeks as he thinks of the small boy who used to swing from his arms lying dead on a funeral pyre, set alight by dragon fire. 

            He cannot bear it. 

            He would rather death claim him now.

—

            “Before the battle, before I leave,” you hiss to Rhaenyra, drawing her aside, “I need you to listen in case when you take the throne, I am not there. Alright?”

            “Alright,” she says, her tone cautious, hesitant. 

            “Wear full body armour before you sit upon the throne and put cloth in case the moon curse comes. Make sure no blood will be seen upon your body. Promise me or else all will have been in vain and our sons will have died for nothing.”

            “I promise,” she vows and you nod, turning from her and leaving the hall, closing your eyes for a moment as the wind whips into your face, cold and cruel and cutting. 

            You will not come back from this battle. 

            Of that you are sure. 

The Battle of the Gullet:

            “Foolish girl,” you hiss at the sight of Rhaena atop Sheepstealer, the dragon out of control, not bonded in a true way to her. “To Jace,” you chuff at Leviathan and he huffs, the sound not a word, but a snort of indignation as he roars, the sound splitting the sky, Sheepstealer turning, veering, leaving Vermax in its path. 

            But then Sheepstealer’s tail swings, hitting Vermax and it’s the sight you saw in your dreams, the arrow soon to come. You squeeze your legs around the seat of Leviathan’s body and he dives, flying forwards, enough that as you hear the arrow launch, you are able to jump, leaping from Leviathan’s body, the arrow cutting through your armour, three others following in quick succession, ripping through your body. 

            “Y/N! NO!” Jace cries as your body falls, plummets, blood trailing from the wounds, your body landing atop the seat of Leviathan, but you cannot feel it. You cannot even feel what once was searing pain from the arrows cut. 

            Rather you feel nothing. 

            You feel empty, your blood trickling from you, falling onto Leviathan’s body, his words angry and worried and harsh.

            “You want to talk about foolish girl, little human? That’s you! You are my human and you are not allowed to die!” His roar is the last thing you hear before everything goes black, an image of green eyes surging up to meet you as you feel the gods reach down for you. 

            You fought off death all those years ago for Baelon and now it has come to collect. 

            You knew you would not come back. 

Daenarys’s letter:

Dear Father,

I know you may not even read this, may see my name and think betrayer but you should know that it is you who betrayed us long before we left. 

You betrayed us every time you spoke against Targaryens for that is what we are. Hightower blood may run through my veins, through my brothers’ veins, but not our mother’s. Not your wife’s. You said all should burn and you forgot that that was her. 

You said that your own wife should burn. 

And you should know that we had pressured her to leave from the moment the war broke, but her response was always “I cannot because I love him.” Her limit was you threatening her and us. And you hit it. So, we left. 

But do not let your hurt let her die without you saying goodbye. She took four arrows for Jace at the Battle of the Gullet. She’s dying, Father. They do not think she’ll make it. Please come. 

Please say goodbye because I know you love her as she loves you. It is the only thing I’m sure of, Father.

Please.

Your loving daughter,

Daenarys Hightower

—

            “My army,” Ormund calls, his heartbeat frantic, mind erratic. He wishes he had a dragon so that he could fly to you in no time at all and never have to worry about being too late, “we are to march to King’s Landing.”

            “To kill the Queen?” one asks and he shakes his head. 

            “No,” he answers. “To serve her. Fly our banners black. Now let us go.”

The Reunion:

            “Let me up!” you cry, the bandages tight around your body as you shift from side-to-side, trying to rise but finding that it hurts, giant ripping pain. “Come on, Daemon. Help me up.”

            “And let you die?” he asks, violet eyes narrowed on you, lips curved up in a soft smirk. “I think not, young General.” His arm is around Rhaenyra’s fingers and you lift your arms into a prayer clasp, shaking them at her. 

            “Please, sweet sister,” you cry and she laughs, a choked kind of laugh, tears falling from her eyes as she shakes her head. 

            “I cannot lose you. The Maesters are hopeful your bleeding is done, but they’re not confident.” You sigh and let your hands flop back to the bed, the motion jarring and you grunt, teeth gritting, eyes falling on Jace and Baelon, standing side-by-side, future King and Hand together. 

            “Jace, you owe me your life,” you sing-song, but he shakes his head. 

            “No can do,” he says, and Baelon glares at you, green eyes lined with tears, anger in those eyes that are a mimic of Ormund’s. 

            “I wish Matarys were here,” calls a soft voice, that of Rhaegar, but the mention of your youngest son, the one with violet eyes and dark curls causing a pain to rip through you, choked sobs leaving your lips, the kind that have your body heaving, aching, tearing. 

            Rhae crosses the floor, sinking down upon the bed beside you and drawing you to her as you did when you were little, your tears falling fast as you mourn the child that you had. That Aemond killed. For no reason but a throne. 

            One your sister sat on without bleeding, despite the period blood she found after. She listened and now she shall be Queen for years. 

            “I want my son,” you cry and Rhae’s arms tighten around you. 

            “I miss him too,” calls a voice that has your heart racing, your head turning, tears falling faster, sobs racking your body. Ormund. 

            “Here to kill us all?” Daemon sneers, drawing forth his sword, placing the blade against the hollow of Ormund’s throat, a bead of blood on the edge of the sword. 

            “No,” he answers, his hand waving at his simple, black garb, not a single weapon in sight. “I am here for my love.” He looks at you with green eyes clear, sane, not a hint of the broken man forged by his father’s hand. 

            “You’re here, truly,” you whisper and he nods, stepping around Daemon’s blade to go to you, falling onto his knees before the bed in a repentant pose, taking your hand and pressing it against his lips. 

            “I told you before,” he whispers, “that war may have many costs, but you are the only cost I would not pay.”

            “Where are your men?” Rhae asks and he lifts his head from the bed, from your hand, his green eyes meeting her violet ones. 

            “Here, flying the black banner,” he says. “My armies are hers. I am whatever side she claims in war. Because I will not pay the price of losing her.”

            “You mean it?” you ask and he looks at you, reaching his hand forwards to cup your cheek as he nods. 

            “You are and have always been, their general.”

The End:

            The war concluded with Queen Rhaenyra succeeding, her brother Aemond killed by her sister, Y/N. Aegon, Alicent and Helena also perished, war having shown that Side Black was the winner. 

            Vhaegor, the unbonded dragon, made a new choice—Ormund Hightower, the husband who rode with his wife when she went to slay her brother on the back of Leviathan, the mythical Cannibal. 

            Ormund gave up his seat at Oldtown to his second son Aerys and had two more children by his wife Y/N: Lucerys, the son and Matarya, the daughter. 

            Rhaenyra was succeeded by her son, Jacerys whose Hand was his cousin Baelon. And history has learned. 

            And history continues. 

********************************************

People whisper of a beast that lives in House Hightower.

A beast that bludgeons men who anger him, destroys rooms, and burns down buildings.

You hear the servants warn each other of it, their whispers reaching your ears during quiet spells in the night.

During your first months at House Hightower, you wondered if this beast actually existed, or if it was a mere horror story told between serving staff to keep them on their best behavior.

But slowly, as more time passed during your stay in Oldtown, you began to hear it.

Shouts carry through the hallways. You hear screaming from areas you did not know existed. You see servants running from something that you have not witnessed yourself.

Prince Daeron is the one to finally explain it to you.

The two of you sit together in the Hightower library reading through histories of the Gardening when you hear the sound of glass shattering on one of the floors above you. You then hear heavy footsteps, and a crash that is so loud it makes you flinch.

Two guards run past the library doorway, and you begin to fear something is wrong.

“It is only my Uncle Ormund,” Prince Daeron tells you, noticing your expressions. “You needn’t worry, he will not come down here.”

“Lord Ormund?” Your shoulders jump as you hear another crashing of glass. “Is he okay?”

“He must have received a letter he did not like.”

“It sounds worse than an ill-received letter.”

“It is actually quite tame for him.”

You don’t understand it.

Lord Ormund Hightower appears to be the very definition of prestige and class when you are near him.

He is a man that never slouches, never curses, never complains. He is a compass of what a good man should be, and he carries himself as if he is the role model for the world.

“He hides that side of himself from you,” Daeron once confessed to you. “He is easily angered, and is quick to react with violence. He tries to pretend he is well tempered but he is not.”

“I have seen him angry,” you tried to reassure him. “You have not seen him angry. You have seen him upset. He is different when he is angry. He will break everything in his path. He will destroy an entire room. He will wound servants that are near him.”

“It is a sin to harm an innocent in anger-”

“He is different,” Daeron insisted. “That is what I am warning. He believes you to be too gentle to see such a thing, so he hides it, but he is a beast at times. You must be careful.”

A beast. His word choice set you on edge.

It was difficult to believe the almighty Ormund Hightower was the beast everyone spoke of, and not the dragon that lived in the lowest level of the tower.

Even after all the warnings, you still thought people must have been exaggerating to scare you. For months you lived in Oldtown, and you never once saw Ormund raise a hand to anyone.

Until you reached your second year with the Hightowers.

That was when you first saw him physically punish Daeron with a slap to the face. It had been a petty crime Daeron committed, being caught having a taste of his uncle’s wine when he thought he wasn’t looking. It scared you so badly you could not look the Lord in the eye for a week.

By the time your third year here came around, Ormund would frequently discipline the Prince by striking the back of his hands with a leather rod.

Seeing such things made you…wary of him. But he never placed an unkind hand on you.

Daeron says he’s soft for you.

Now, as you neared your fourth year in Oldtown, you find yourself unsure of your attitude towards Ormund. He was a Lord, so you respected him. You try to remember how you have been raised, all the politeness you must show, so you put your personal feelings aside so that you can do your duties properly.

Your duties, which involve the education and faith of Prince Daeron, are difficult at times.

Especially today.

You have sat Daeron down in the library, and you are attempting to get him used to more diligent notetaking, yet he is fighting back with everything he has.

“We spend so many hours in this library,” he complains. “Can we not go somewhere else?”

“We can visit the Sept.”

He lets out an uninterested grunt.

“We can take a break once we reach mid-hour,” you offer. “We’ll take a walk through the gardens.”

Daeron fidgets in his seat. “I wish to visit Tessarion.”

“You know that is not allowed.”

“It’s not recommended. I am the Prince, I can order you to take me anywhere if I really want to.”

“It would be much easier if you just finish your notetaking.”

He sighs as he looks down at the paper. His quill finally starts moving again.

“Perhaps we can ask your uncle at dinner if he can take you down to Tessarion.”

“He would never agree to that, he dislikes her.”

“There is no harm in asking him. The worst he can do is say ‘no’.”

You hear Daeron chuckle, like you have made a joke. “Only you would say such a thing.”

You place down your book. “And why is that?”

“Because you are the only one he does not throw a fit in front of. He’ll hold his tongue for you.” Daeron risks another smile as his quill scrolls across the paper. He uses a mocking voice. “Uncle Ormund says that you are a proper woman, and should not have to bear witness to such foul, abhorrent language.”

You straighten yourself to better posture, surprised by the comment. Lord Ormund was one of the most prestigious, well-classed men you have ever met. To hear such a compliment from him was beyond meaningful.

“Well, that is true,” you say. “Foul language should not be said around ladies.”

“And what of your foul language?”

“I do not use foul language, it is a sin.”

Daeron’s smile turns to a smirk. “You do not think of the word ‘bastard’ as foul? Or do you assume your context of calling the street merchant a ‘bastard’ acceptable?”

Your shoulders slouch, and you feel heat rush to your face. “That was a moment of wrongfulness, and you heard me pray for the Mother to forgive me for it.”

“Perhaps I should tell Uncle Ormund all the words I’ve heard you use so that he is less worried about exposing you to such language-”

“You will not.” Your words come out flustered. “I hardly ever use such language and-and if I have it was well deserved.”

Daeron is even more amused. He leans closer, and fakes a gasp. “You dare believe someone deserves such a name? And here I thought you were supposed to be aiding me in my ethics of the Seven.”

“You stop it,” you tell him. “I have prayed for my wrongdoings. But even if I didn’t...that merchant ripped my coin pouch right from my hands. Had you not retrieved it, your uncle would have never allowed us back to the market again.”

Daeron chuckles, leaning back in his chair. “Alright, I agree. The bastard was deserved. And I have to admit it was quite humorous to hear my proper teacher shouting that word across a crowd.”

“You should be finishing your notes, not trying to rile me up,” you tell me. “Let me see your paper so I can be sure you complete your studies before dinner.”

“Let me see your paper,” Daeron counters.

He reaches over, but you quickly flip the book over. “I am not the one who needs to take notes.”

“But let me see yours, so I know I am taking notes correctly.”

You pull your book away.

He smiles wider. “Unless, perhaps, my teacher has not been taking notes. Perhaps she has just been drawing.”

Your face grows hotter in embarrassment. He knew how to get under your skin so easily.

“As the teacher, I am asking to see yours-Daeron!”

He reached over and snatched your parchments from you. He laughs, flipping it back towards you to say, “It is a beautiful flower you have drawn.”

“I have learned these lessons before, I can draw if I wish.”

“Shall I tell Uncle Ormund that you are wasting time in the library with such drawings?”

“You will do no such thing.”

You would be humiliated. You could picture it now. His stern stare looking down at the stupid flower, and then back up at you, silently labeling you as incompetent for the rest of your time here.

“I will keep my mouth shut if we end lessons early today,” Daeron says. “And you allow me to visit Tessarion.”

“Lord Ormund is displeased when you visit her.”

“He would also be displeased by this,” Daeron countered, waving your drawing in front of him.

You are tired of the library anyway, so you figured there was no harm in a quick visit downstairs. You sigh. “Fine. But you must wash before dinner so that he does not smell her on you.”

Daeron smiles again, like he tricked you into giving him the upper hand. Though, in all honesty, he was the Prince. He could have left the library at any time, and you had no true power to stop him.

“May I at least see that you have taken notes?” you ask.

He flips his book around to show you his parchment.

There were no notes. There was only a drawing of you sitting in front of him, drawing a flower.

You open your mouth to lecture him, but quickly shut it. “We will be going to the Sept tonight, and we are going to pray about your lack of enthusiasm for your education.”

He paid no mind to your words. “Come on. I’m sure Tessarion had been missing me greatly.”

The days are always like this with Prince Daeron. Amusing. Frustrating. Happy. Exciting. Nerve wracking. You feel every emotion with the boy everyday.

And it brings you more joy than anything.

When you first arrived at House Hightower, nearly four years prior, Daeron hardly spoke to you.

He had recently turned the age of ten, and at the time you were barely ten and six. He was a quiet boy, and you were a quiet girl. It was extraordinary to see the difference in him now.

Originally, you had been sent to Oldtown by your father, who was a strong believer in the Faith of the Seven. He wanted you to learn how to pray from the Septas of Oldtown, the most devoted women in the realm.

It was Gwayne Hightower that offered for you to stay in House of Hightower, your mother having been a dear friend to Alicent and him in their younger days.

You were meant to be in Oldtown for one month, and then you were to be sent home.

But the gods had a different plan for you.

It was Ormund Hightower that spoke to your father about you becoming an aid for the young prince.

Lord Ormund was a man of religion. He visited the Sept every morning and every night. He was quick to notice, staring on the morning of your arrival, that you did as well.

He admitted to your father that he was impressed with your faith, and even more impressed with how often you partook in prayer.

“Daeron has become very lonesome being so isolated from his siblings,” Lord Ormund had said to you. “It would be beneficial for him to have the company of a girl as mindful as yourself. A girl proper in her ways, and a devoted servant to the Seven.”

When the offer of a more permanent stay was first given to you, you were wary of it. “This is the first time I have been away from home,” you admitted. “I do not know if I would be able to assist the Prince as well as a Septa could.”

“Septas know only scripture,” Ormund reasoned. “They are the education of the spiritual world, and you will help teach him the ways of the physical one.”

In honesty, you felt too young for such a position. Ten and six, you still felt like a child. You were frightened to be so far from your mother, and even more frightened to be in a position responsible for royalty.

And in the beginning, you were frightened of Lord Ormund as well. You had been so scared to talk to him the day he brought his proposal up to you. You had never spoken to him prior to it, and the only reputation you knew was that he was a serious man who was easily disappointed.

So you try to be honest with him, hoping he would understand your hesitancy. “I do not know if I am equipped to handle such a task, my Lord.”

He had smiled at you. A warm smile that made him appear as such a kind and considerate man.

Placing a hand upon your shoulder, he told you, “You are a good girl, (Y/N). All I need is your help in raising my nephew to be just as good.”

Now, nearly four years later, Oldtown feels more like home than your homeland ever did.

Because your brother is here.

Daeron Targaryen, Prince of the realms, will always be the brother you never had. Not a blood brother, like the ones from your homeland, who were cruel to you in your childhood and would throw things your way when you became bothersome. Daeron was a real brother, and seeing him grow up to be kind was the best gift the Mother could ever give you.

“Come,” Daeron hurried you as the two of you descended down the staircase to where Tessarion was kept. “She has been alone for so long, she must be dying for company.”

You disliked the way the Hightowers treated Daeron’s dragon. But you knew it was not your place to interfere with such a thing.

Daeron’s face lights up like the boy he is as he sees her. You stay back against the staircase as Daeron jogs down the steps and over to the creature. “Here I am, girl. I promised I would return to you.”

The sight of the large dragon always makes you wary. Even as she makes screeches of joy as she sets her eyes on her rider, you feel yourself fearing for him.

Yet, he nuzzles his head against hers, and she appears to nuzzle him back. “There you are,” Daeron whispers with a laugh. “Shh. Shh. I told you, I can come down here more often if you are quiet.”

“Be cautious of her claws,” you say as she paws near his feet.

“She knows her strength, she will not harm me,” Daeron assures you.

You rest against the wall, and listen to him whispering soft words of admiration to her.

You are patient as he takes a brush to draw over her scales, grooming her body. He glances over to you. “She is not a monster like they say,” he tells you. “I have raised her to be good.”

You give a soft nod. “She is good, I know.”

“Would you...” He hesitates. “...Would you like to pet her?”

You take a quick step back, shaking your head. “I will keep my distance.”

“She will not harm you, you have my word.”

“Lord Ormund warns they are unpredictable with those that do not have the right blood.”

“Please,” Daeron says. “She sees you so often. I want her to actually meet you.”

Your eyes take in the creature. You stiffen as she stares right at you.

Daeron holds a hand out. “I will be right beside you.”

“What if she dislikes me-?”

“She will not. I promise.” Daeron steps close to you with his hand out. “Trust me, Lady (Y/N).”

It takes a moment of contemplation before you finally decide you do trust him. And if your trust gets you burnt, so be it. You take his hand, and he leads you to the dragon.

He lifts your arm and slowly places it on Tessarion’s head. The texture catches you by surprise and you flinch back.

He chuckles. “It is an odd feeling, isn’t it?”

You choke back a scream when Tessarion moves her head against your stomach. You stumble back, but Daeron places an arm out to steady you. “Daeron-”

“It’s alright. She just wishes to feel you too.”

You force yourself still. The dragon runs her head along your abdomen. Slowly, you lower your hand back onto her. The scales are not so frightening now.

“See,” Daeron smiles. “She likes you.”

“That is very relieving,” you laugh.

“Sometimes I think she can sense how I feel about people,” he tells you. “And that’s how she judges them.”

“Does that mean if you decide you hate me, she will eat me?”

“I would never hate you,” Daeron says. His voice grows more somber. “You are the only true companion I have ever had.”

“For now,” you say. “I am sure you will gain allies over time.”

“Allies,” he repeats. “Not friends.”

“I have no other friends either,” you tell him. “It is not so bad.”

As an aid to royalty, you are secluded from the outside world. Lord Ormund has insisted on it.

‘There is no room for distractions when it comes to your care of my nephew,’ he told you when you first arrived. You were just a girl then, so it made sense to you. But now, nearing your twentieth summer, you feel the seclusion is less necessary. Yet, he still insists on it.

It does matter your opinion, however. It never does with him.

Lord Ormund is the man of the house, so you must bend your knee to his orders.

Daeron is quiet for a moment. He brushes along Tessarion’s back.

“...I wish you were my true sister,” he whispers. “So that I did not have to fear you leaving.”

He has said this before. It makes you feel sympathy that he is so far from his real family, he sometimes forgets he actually does have a true sister.

“I would not leave,” you quickly insist. “I promised I would remain at your side for the rest of your youth.”

“And after?” he asks.

You sigh. “I do not know the plans my father has for me after.” You look again at the creature that has settled comfortably with leaning against your body. “But Tessarion will be here forever, at least for that you are certain. So be good to her.”

“I am,” he swore to you. He leaned his head against the dragon’s once more. “Aren’t I good to you?” he whispers to the dragon.

He was so gentle with the creature.

Daeron was always so gentle, and so kind.

You could not be more proud of him for it.

**********************************************************

A few weeks pass, and the weather becomes warmer. It causes Daeron to lose energy in the day.

“It is shameful to sleep in the Sept, Prince Daeron,” you chide softly, “It is best you wake before someone else sees you.”

The boy barely stirred. Head resting on the pew in front of him, arms folded beneath him, he muffles, “I am not sleeping, I am praying.”

The yawn was still in his voice, and it made you chuckle. “You’ve been unmoving for fifteen minutes.”

“Deep in prayer,” he insists.

Another laugh. “It is almost time for dinner, Daeron. Come. Raise your head, and pray with me once more before we go.”

Daeron slowly lifts his head. He rises from the bench, and comes to kneel beside you in front of the candle altar. He clasps his hands together, and waits for you to begin.

You let your eyes flutter closed and pray, “Mother, please grant us peace of mind in these upcoming weeks. Give us honor in what we do.”

Daeron repeats, “Mother, please grant us peace of mind in these upcoming weeks. Give us honor in what we do.”

“Warrior, please send strength to King Viserys. Please give him health and extend his kingdom.”

Again, Daeron repeats after you. “Warrior, please send strength to my father. Please give him health and extend his kingdom.”

“Crone, please give Prince Daeron wisdom in his studies, and the foresight to see the consequences of laziness-”

“I am not lazy.”

You laugh, and continue, “Please make him into the best scholar he can be.”

Daeron eyes you, before praying, “Mother, please give (Y/N) a kinder heart that is less overbearing-”

“Shh,” you laugh, sticking out your hand to cover his mouth. “Do not say that to her.”

Daeron smiles as he continues, “Crone, give her the wisdom that reminds her I am her Prince, therefore I am in charge-”

“Daeron,” you scold with amusement, “We do not play with the gods.”

“I am not lazy. Take it back.”

“You were sleeping in the Sept.”

“Exhausted, not lazy.”

You huff, yet a smile still plays on your face. “Fine. You are not lazy. But you better be careful. What would you have done had Lord Ormund heard you snoring?”

“I do not snore.”

You shrug. “You would not know.”

You catch him rolling his eyes, to which you criticize, “Do not roll your eyes in the house of the gods.”

“Then let us leave the house of the gods. I am starving.”

“In a moment,” you tell him. “Allow me to do a prayer for our food.”

He sighs, but he stays kneeled beside you. He is patient with you in the Sept, just as you are patient with him with his dragon.

When you two are finished, the guards escort the two of you to Lord Ormund.

It became customary over the last few years for Daeron and yourself to have dinner with Lord Ormund in his private study. The Lord often complained that the Hightower dining hall was unappealing, that it was too close to the kitchens, the aromas were too strong, and he was unable to eat there. The difference in rooms mattered very little to you. You did not mind eating in his study. In fact, it felt like a compliment that you were even invited. It made you feel more valued that your company was enjoyed by both the Lord and Prince.

You are still laughing with Daeron over mundane things as you make your way through the halls.

“What brings such laughter from my nephew?” Ormund asks as the two of you arrive at his study.

You greet the Lord with a curtsy of respect. “Good evening, Lord Ormund.” You rise and smile, “Daeron speaks of plans for his fourteenth nameday.”

“Ah,” he grins. “Yes, that is arriving soon.”

As always, Lord Ormund stands as you enter, and he pulls out your chair for you. You take it with a gracious, “Thank you, my Lord.”

“What kind of celebration would you like?” Ormund asks as he takes his seat. He sits at the head of the table, as always. You take the left side of him, Daeron is sat on the right.

The prince smiles shyly. “I need nothing extravagant. I only wish to have a feast with the three of us, as always. With cake. Perhaps Uncle Gwayne can be here.”

“I can prepare you a cake,” you tell him. “It would be my honor.”

“You need not do it,” Daeron quickly says. “We will pay a baker.”

You tilt your head. “You do not trust my cooking?”

He chuckles. “No offense, my Lady, but I have yet to see you in a kitchen. It seems you do not get much practice at it.”

You let out a laugh. “Is that so?”

“Careful, Daeron,” Ormund chides. “Insulting a woman’s cooking is as if she were to insult your sword fighting.”

“She knows I jest,” Daeron says. “But either way, you should not waste time on such things, Lady (Y/N). Any day that honors me should honor you as well.”

The words warm your heart, and you wonder if this is what motherhood is meant to feel like. “You flatter me.”

“It is true. I feel I am becoming a great man due to your teachings. You as well, Uncle Ormund. I believe I am growing into my strongest self here in Oldtown.”

Ormund smiles proudly at his nephew. He reaches over and places a hand on his shoulder. “The Father smiles upon you, Daeron. You are a blessing to us all.”

“My father sends coin on my nameday,” Daeron says. “I would like to purchase gifts for the two of you. As well as Uncle Gwayne.”

“That is very thoughtful of you, Prince Daeron, but it is not a day you must buy gifts for others. Others should buy gifts for you.”

“I want to,” he says. His tone becomes shy. “I…would like to show my appreciation. With something you will be able to cherish.”

The idea warms your heart.

“Besides, I need nothing,” Daeron says. “And I want for nothing. I would donate my coin rather than hoard it.”

You smile wider, and you meet Lord Ormund’s eye. “He is a very noble boy, your nephew. You should be very proud of him.”

“I am,” Ormund smiles. “My nephew is growing to be flawless.”

“Flawless.” Daeron chuckles. “Except for the snoring, I suppose.”

You laugh. “Yes, except for the snoring.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see Lord Ormund lean back against his chair.

“I am very much looking forward to hearing from my mother,” Daeron continues. “She writes to me an especially long letter on my name day each year. My father as well.”

“Perhaps you can have a portrait made to send them,” you suggest. “I’m sure your mother misses your face dearly.”

He lights up at the idea. “A portrait. Yes. I have not had one of those done in a few years.”

“Me neither,” you admit. “I fear my mother has not seen a new portrait of me since I was the age of ten and seven.”

“Then we could all have portraits done. Uncle Ormund, do you think you could call upon an artisan to-” Daeron’s smile drops and his words cease.

Your attention turns to Lord Ormund. A pit forms in your stomach.

He is not looking at either of you. He is simply staring ahead, silent.

Daeron becomes tense. “…Uncle?”

Ormund continues staring ahead, only his finger moving as he taps upon the table, quickly and precise, as if counting the seconds.

“I need no portrait,” Daeron quickly says. “It was only an idea.”

Lord Ormund is angry. You do not know why, or over what, but you know that this is his first stage of anger.

He stares.

He stares, and it gives him time to think. And the more he thinks, the angrier he gets.

Daeron becomes a shade paler at the lack of response. “I-I do not look forward to hearing from my mother as much as I look forward to seeing you, Uncle,” he spurts out, going through every last word he said to think of what could have angered him. “I do not take my place here for granted.”

Ormund’s head tilts to the side, his stare still blank and ominous.

When his eyes land on you, his gaze is so piercing that you flinch.

“My nephew snores?”

You blink, caught off guard by the question.

His hands open and close. “How would you know my nephew snores, Lady (Y/N)-?”

“I fell asleep today,” Daeron quickly cuts in. “I apologize for it. I drifted off, and she-she merely teased me for it.”

Ormund’s eyes don’t leave you.

You have been scolded by Lord Ormund before, plenty of time in fact. But there is something different in his voice now. Those scolding were small corrections, his voice never, ever rose at you. Even now, he speaks calmly. But the look in his eye makes you feel cold.

He does not speak again, simply waiting and watching for you to answer.

“It was only for a moment,” Daeron repeats with worry. “No wrong was done.”

Ormund continues to wait for your response only.

You swallow before speaking, “The Prince drifted off today, as he said. I allowed him to rest for a few minutes because he was tired. I should not tease a Prince about such things, I am sorry.”

“Where did he fall asleep?”

Daeron’s posture is rigid. You bite your lip, considering the consequences of your answer.

“Lady (Y/N).” He speaks your name softly, but there is an edge to his voice that you did not want to press.

You look again at Daeron, and feel as if it would be against your faith to tell on him. Daeron must’ve seen it in your eyes that you were unwilling.

Internally, you make the decision not to answer. You did not fear his uncle harming you for your silence.

But Daeron feared it.

Daeron quickly answered for you, “It was in the Sept.”

His uncle frowned. His head slowly turned to his nephew. “In the Sept?”

“Yes-”

“In our most sacred place of prayer?”

His voice is only a whisper. “I am sorry.”

Ormund slowly pulls his napkin off his lap, folding it and calmly placing it onto the table. He stands to his feet, his boots heavy on the floor as he walks to stand behind Daeron’s chair. He asks, “Did you pray for forgiveness before you left?”

“I...” He swallows. “I did not think to pray for that specifically-”

“Both hands flat on the table.”

Daeron’s face goes completely pale.

Ormund crosses the room to his bookshelf.

Your heart slams in your chest as you rush to your feet, hurrying over to Ormund’s side, trying to match his quick strides. “He said prayers before leaving, my Lord.”

He ignores you. He grabs the leather strapped rod he keeps on the shelf.

The sight of it surges your panic. You struggle to remain by Ormund’s side, placing a hand on his arm to slow him. “He did not mean to offend the gods. He was only tired from the heat of the day-”

“If he did not pray for forgiveness, I will administer punishment.”

“He will not commit the offense again.”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child. He will receive seven lashes. One for each god he offended.” He snaps at Daeron, “Both hands flat on the table. Now.”

Daeron shuts his eyes tightly, doing as told.

You run forward and force yourself in front of your prince. “The lashes should be mine,” you tell Ormund.

Daeron tries to push you away. “No-”

“I was in charge of him, the fault is mine. Allow me the lashes, not him.” In a surge of protectiveness, you try to hide Daeron behind your body. “I offended the gods, not him.”

Lord Ormund watches you with critical eyes.

You knelt down, and place both hands flat on the table.

Daeron’s voice is a quiet whimper as he says, “(Y/N), get up, this is not your punishment.”

You physically push his hands back to his lap, and lay yours flat on the table once more. You stare up at Lord Ormund, whose eyes are still so meticulous.

He stays staring at you a moment longer, and every second that passes, you feel your heart will give out from beating so fast.

Finally, Ormund drops the rod onto the table. Slowly, he kneels beside you and rests his elbows on the table, clasping his hands together. “Lady (Y/N), lead us in a prayer of forgiveness for Daeron’s offense.”

A shaky breath of relief escapes your lips. “Y-Yes, my Lord.”

Daeron quickly kneels beside you as well.

“Mother, please forgive the transgressions of Daeron. He has committed an offensive act that he shall not commit again. Please, allow him grace and hospitality.”

Daeron quickly repeats, “Mother, please forgive my transgressions. I have committed an offensive act that I shall commit again. Please, allow me grace and hospitality.”

Ormund speaks next. “Mother, please forgive the transgressions of Daeron. He has committed an offensive act that he shall not commit again. Please, allow him grace and hospitality.”

Another nervous breath. “Mother, please-please put mercy in the heart of Lord Ormund. Please allow him to grant us the patience and grace that you would.”

Daeron hesitates, his eyes shooting to his uncle, as if terrified of the consequences of this prayer.

“Daeron,” his uncle urges.

Daeron follows, “Mother, please put mercy in the heart of Lord Ormund. Please allow him to grant us the patience and grace that you would.”

Ormund finishes, “Mother, please put mercy in my heart. Please allow me to grant them the patience and grace that you would.”

“And so it is.”

“And so it is.”

“And so it is.” Ormund rises to his feet. “Let us finish dinner.” He pulls out his chair for you to sit.

The rest of the dinner is silent. You have lost your appetite, but try to finish the plate anyway. Lord Ormund is strict with your diet, and if you do not eat now, you will not be allowed food again until morning.

The time ticks by slowly. Daeron fidgets more and more as each minute passes.

“Daeron, you are excused,” Ormund speaks after he is finished with his own meal.

You see in the prince’s eyes that he does not want to leave you.

“Go on,” you tell him. “I will see you in the morning at the library.”

He hesitates only a moment longer. Ormund clears his throat, and he finally goes.

You are left alone with Lord Ormund.

“It is not your place to stand between that boy and his punishments,” he tells you.

You stare down at your hands. “I apologize, Lord Ormund.”

“You apologize, yet if it came down to it, you would do so again.”

You do not lie. “I would.”

Ormund sighs. He rises to his feet. He walks to you, and leans upon the table beside you. His fingers ghost your chin, and he tilts your head up to face him. “I hope you are not allowing your loyalty towards him to cloud your judgement.”

“I am not.”

His fingers graze the side of your face, pushing your hair behind your ears. “I do not only feel responsible for Daeron, (Y/N), I also feel responsible for you. I want what is best for you, I hope you know that.”

“I do, my Lord.”

His hand brushes down the back of your hair. “You have always been such a good girl for me.” His hand stops on the back of your head, and you flinch as his hand suddenly grips your hair. “But I need you to remember that your obedience is to me before my nephew.”

His grip does not hurt, but it frightens you.

You force your hands to remain in your lap. “Y-Yes, my Lord. I remember.”

“The next interference, I will not spare the rod on you.”

You swallow. “I understand.”

Ormund smiles at your agreement. His hand loosens on your hair, and he cups your cheek instead. “I have been told I have a weakness for you, Lady (Y/N). That I am too lenient when you are around, that I lack appropriate sternness.”

You have been told the same thing about him. That he is fond of you, that he treats you kinder than others, that your faith in the Seven makes him more gentle.

Ormund’s hand lingers on your cheek a moment, before he turns your head to the side, and reaches out to wipe away a bead of sweat that began to form on your temple.

“You would not dare use that against me, would you?”

“Never, my Lord.” You realize your hands are forming sweat as well. You open and close them to try to release the nerves. “I-I appreciate your mercy, but it is never expected.”

“Good.” He turns your jaw to face him head on. “Because my patience is not limitless.”

You do not know what he wants you to say. You wonder if he even wants you to say anything at all, or if he just wants to frighten you so you do not interfere again. You simply repeat, “I understand, my Lord.”

You think he will let go of you, but he does not.

Instead, he leans closer, and you hear his long inhale. It is what he does whenever the serving boys bring him new scented powders.

“You smell of candle smoke,” he tells you.

“From my prayer in the Sept, my Lord.”

Your answer satisfies him.

Another moment passes of uncertainty for you. You have never been alone with Ormund for this long before. Your mind goes back to Daeron, and where he might be.

“I think it is time we find a perfume for you.”

The comment catches you by surprise. “A perfume, my Lord?”

“Noble women choose perfumes for themselves. Ones they reorder time and time again. They spray it upon letters when they send it away, and sometimes gift small portions of it to women in their service. It will help mask the scent of the other tasks you attend to during the day. You are old enough now to go and choose your own.”

The idea uplifted you. “I will be able to choose?”

“You will be taken to the market tomorrow. You will pick three scents you like, and I will make the final decision on which one will be yours.”

“Any perfume?”

“Any you desire. There is no budget when it comes to a woman’s cleanliness.”

You feel yourself getting excited over the prospect of shopping. Lord Ormund usually hand picks everything for you, without your opinion on things.

Your excitement makes you bold. “May I choose a new dress for myself as well? It has been a long time since I have had myself fitted.”

His eyes flicker over your face. “You push your luck.”

Your heart drops, and you think you have angered him.

But he merely asks, “What would it be for?”

“For my visits to the Sept,” you quickly tell him, because you know he will not refuse this. “A dress with a thicker skirt so that my knees do not ache at the end of the day.”

Ormund leans back and contemplates. “You recall the rules of modesty for clothing?”

“Of course, my Lord. Neckline higher than the collarbone. Skirts passed the ankles. Arms to the wrist.”

He reaches down and drags his hand up the side of your arm, feeling the material. It was as if he was imagining something new. “Very well then. You may pick up a new dress.”

Your smile grows. You lean up, and you place a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, Lord Ormund.”

His smile warms, and his expression turns kind. He is happy with you, and you hear it in his voice as he relents, “I will allow two dresses, if it pleases you.”

“Yes.” Your spirits raise even higher. “Yes, it pleases me greatly, thank you.”

Ormund chuckles at how elated you have become. He leans down and places a kiss onto the top of your head.

He lingers for a moment. You hear his gentle inhale, his quiet judgement of what he smells.

“What oils are used for your hair?”

“Roses, my Lord.”

“Do not choose roses tomorrow. This scent is tied to your girlhood with Daeron. You must find a new scent for womanhood.”

You find the comment odd, so you risk a laugh. “I am already a woman, Lord Ormund.”

His response is just a repeated, “No roses.”

Your laugh goes away. You shake your head. “No roses.”

209 A.C Flea Bottom

The first thing you ever remembered was your brother’s hands.

Not your mother’s face, that was gone, worn away like a coin passed through too many fingers. You could summon the shape of her if you concentrated: the blurred watermark of a jawline, the suggestion of a mouth that laughed like a cracked bell, the smell of cheap wine and cheaper perfume that clung to her hair long after she stopped breathing. But her face? No. That belonged to the dark now, along with everything else from before.

But the hands, those you remembered. Dunk’s hands. Too large for a boy of eight, the knuckles already crosshatched with scars from street fights and kitchen fires, but impossibly gentle as they lifted you from the straw mattress where your mother lay cold and still. You had been five years old. You had not understood death, only that Mother would not wake. It was Dunk who wrapped you in a blanket thin enough to see through. Dunk who carried you out into the grey morning, your face pressed to his neck so you would not see the body being hauled away. Dunk who said, in a voice that splintered because he was barely more than a child himself, “I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”

And he had, you slept in doorways at first, curled together like kittens against the cold that seeped up through the cobblestones. Dunk learned quickly which bakers threw out day old bread and which watchmen could be bribed with a sad eyed look. He found work at an inn in Flea Bottom and the innkeeper’s wife let you sleep in the stables so long as Dunk scrubbed the floors and hauled the kegs and made himself useful in a dozen small ways. You would sit in the corner while he worked, your knees drawn up to your chin, watching him. Watching the boy melt away, season by season, into something that looked more like a man. He grew taller and broader and harder, his shoulders widening, his voice dropping. He was three years older than you, but sometimes he felt like thirty. He had never been a child. Neither of you had.

But you had each other. And that was enough. It had to be.

Every night, after his labors were done, Dunk would come to you in the stables. He would reek of sweat and sour ale, and he would lower himself onto the hay beside you with a groan that belonged to a man three times his age. And then he would tell you stories he’d gathered like dropped coins from travelers and old soldiers and the septon who sometimes came to beg a bowl of soup. Stories of knights who never faltered, dragons who spoke in riddles, castles of white stone that caught the sunrise like mirrors. Maidens so beautiful that kingdoms burned for a single glance.

You were twelve when the men began to notice you. It happened on an ordinary night, with an ordinary drunk who’d had too much ale and too little sense. You were carrying a tray of empty cups back to the kitchen, your arms aching with the weight, when a hand came out of nowhere and closed on your backside. You froze, no understanding of what the sudden heat crawling up your neck meant or why your body had locked itself rigid as a board. The man laughed and then Dunk was there.

One moment the drunk was leering at you, his hand still on your body, and the next he was on the floor with blood fountaining from his nose and Dunk standing over him like a thunderhead. He threw the man out into the mud, and when he came back inside his hands were trembling with a rage so profound it seemed to warp the air around him. “Stay close to me,” he said, and it was not a request. His voice was quiet, too quiet, the kind of quiet that lives on the far side of fury. “Always. Do you understand? Always.”

You understood. From that day forward, you were never more than arm’s reach from your brother. When he walked to the market, you walked beside him, your fingers sometimes hooked into the rope that acted like a belt, when the crowds pressed too close. The men still looked, by fourteen, you had grown into the kind of beauty that stilled conversations mid sentence, your mother’s eyes and your unknown father’s soft mouth arranged on a face that seemed to belong in a ballad rather than a Flea Bottom inn, but they looked from a distance. Dunk saw to that.

You were inseparable. Joined at the hip, the innkeeper’s wife liked to say, shaking her head with a fondness that bordered on bewilderment. “Never seen the like. That boy would tear the world apart for his little sister.”

You were sixteen when everything ended. The festival came in the spring, an eruption of color and noise that spilled from the gates of the Red Keep and flooded through the city like a tide. Mummers on stilts, jugglers with flaming torches, singers with harps slung across their backs, knights in armor that caught the sun and threw it back in a thousand glittering shards. Dunk had been given the night off—a rarity—and he had taken your hand with a grin you hadn’t seen since you were children hiding from the rain under a stolen tarp. “Come on,” he said, and his eyes were bright in a way that made your chest ache.

You laughed and followed. The crowd was too thick. The torches made everything swim, light and shadow bleeding together until faces became masks and masks became faces. Dunk kept his hand clamped around your arm for the first hour, his grip unwavering, but then a knot of drunkards staggered between you and in the space of a single heartbeat, you lost him.

“Dunk?”

You rose onto your toes, straining above the heads of the crowd. You saw him turn, saw his mouth open to call back to you, saw the sudden alarm flash across his features, and then the surge of bodies carried you sideways, a riptide of flesh and noise, and you stumbled into an alley to escape the crush.

That was when they took you. There were three of them. You never saw their faces clearly, only hands. Rough and quick and impossibly strong, one clamping over your mouth, another banding around your waist and lifting you clean off the ground. You tried to scream. You bit down on the palm pressed against your lips, tasted blood and salt and felt the man curse and shift his grip, but there was no time. A sack came down over your head, coarse and stinking of something you did not want to name, and the world went dark and muffled and small.

The last thing you heard was the festival. The music, the laughter, the endless churn of celebration. It went on without you, as if you had never been there at all.

Dunk searched for three days. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He tore through Flea Bottom like a storm given flesh, overturning carts and kicking down doors, bellowing your name until his voice shredded into something barely human. He went to the City Watch, and they laughed, a girl from the slums, what did he expect? He went to the sept, and the septon only clasped his hands and murmured prayers that tasted like ash. He went to every inn, every brothel, every lightless corner of the city where a girl might be hidden or sold or worse, and he found nothing. Nothing. Nothing and nothing again.

On the fourth day, a woman came to him, she found him in the alley where you had vanished, sitting against the wall with his head in his hands, and she knelt beside him.

“You’re the one,” she said. Not a question. “Looking for the girl with the H/C hair. The pretty one.”

Dunk’s head came up so fast his neck cracked. “Where is she?”

The woman shook her head. Slowly. Deliberately. A gesture that held everything he did not want to know. “They found her in the water this morning, lad. Some men…” She paused, and something that might have been pity flickered across her ruined face. “They took her. And when they were done—” Her hands made a twisting motion, a brutal pantomime that needed no translation. “The women who found her said she was hardly recognizable. They’ve already burned the body. Too much damage, they said. You don’t want to see that. Trust me. You’re better off remembering her the way she was.”

Dunk did not speak. He simply sat there, staring at the woman’s face, and something inside him cracked straight down the middle and bled dry.

“Who?” His voice did not sound like his voice. “Who did it?”

“No one knows. Drunkards, maybe. Travelers passing through. They’re long gone now.” The woman rose, joints creaking, and looked down at him with something that was not quite pity and not quite indifference. “I’m sorry, lad. Truly.”

She left him there. And Dunk stayed. He stayed in that alley as the sun bled out and the moon rose pale and indifferent and the city settled into its night noises around him. His little sister was dead. He had promised—promised—to protect her, and she was dead. And the world, which had never been kind to either of them, now seemed to hold no color.

—

213 A.C Ashford

The gardens of Ashford Castle were not as grand as the ones in Summerhall but they were still beautiful. You had been here for less than a fortnight, arrived as part of Prince Maekar's retinue for the tourney celebrating Lord Ashford's daughter's nameday, and already the place had worked its way under your skin. The roses were in full bloom, cascading over stone walls in waves of crimson and gold and softest pink. The hedges were trimmed into the shapes of birds and beasts.

The little girl was running through the grass ahead of you, her silver gold hair streaming behind her like a banner caught in a high wind, her bare feet slapping against the earth with the unselfconscious joy of someone who had never known hunger or fear or the back of a stranger's hand. She was two years old, small for her age but fierce, so fiercely alive that it stopped your breath sometimes, with violet eyes that missed nothing and a laugh that could fill an entire hall and still demand more room.

"Rhaenyra," you called, and you tried to sound stern, you really did, but the smile kept breaking through no matter how firmly you set your jaw. "Come back here before you trip and ruin that dress."

"Won't," the child announced, with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been wrong about anything in her life, and kept running.

You sighed, gathered your skirts in both hands, and gave chase. The dress you wore was finer than anything you had owned before Aerion had claimed you, a gift he had given you specifically for this journey. Pale blue silk that whispered when you moved, with silver embroidery at the sleeves and neckline. He had wanted you to look presentable at Ashford. You suspected, though you had not said it aloud, that he also wanted to show you off. To remind his family, and perhaps himself, what he possessed.

You were twenty years old now, no longer the trembling girl who had been thrown into a black carriage while a brothel burned behind her, no longer the hollow eyed creature who had learned to disappear inside her own body while men did what they pleased. The past months and years had reshaped you, smoothed some of the sharp edges and hardened others.

But there was something new in you now, something forged in the long nights of learning to survive Aerion Targaryen and the longer days of learning to love your daughter. You knew how to bend without breaking. And you knew, with a certainty that lived in your bones like marrow, that you would kill any living soul who tried to harm your child.

Rhaenyra had tripped over an exposed root and was sitting in the grass, more affronted than injured, examining a smudge of dirt on her palm with the grave concentration of a maester confronted with an ancient and inscrutable text. You scooped her up before the tears could organize themselves, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head, breathing in the smell of sunshine and crushed grass and something warm and sweet that was just her.

"Told you," you murmured into her hair. "You fell."

"Didn't cry," Rhaenyra pointed out. This was technically true, and there was a note of such fierce pride in her small voice that your heart performed an odd, painful little flip in your chest.

"No," you agreed, pulling back to look at her solemn face. "You didn't. You're a brave little dragon, aren't you?"

The child beamed. She adored being called a dragon. It was one of the few gifts Aerion had given her that did not make your stomach twist into complicated knots. This inheritance of fire and blood and the unshakeable conviction that she was meant for something magnificent.

You carried her back toward the castle, her small arms wrapped tightly around your neck, her voice a ceaseless ribbon of chatter about the butterfly she had almost caught and the bird that had flown directly over her head and the flower she had picked that was pink, Mama, pink and pretty and can I keep it forever please please please. You made the appropriate sounds of wonder and encouragement, your eyes scanning the courtyard as you crossed it, your body perpetually aware of who was watching.

The servants of Ashford avoided your gaze, much as the ones at Summerhall did. They had learned, over the course of the tourney's first days, to treat you with a careful neutrality. Not quite respect, not quite disdain, something suspended in the ambiguous space between. They knew what you were. Prince Aerion's paramour. The woman he had brought with him from Summerhall, installed in a guest chamber near his own, paraded through the grounds like a provocative piece of art he wanted everyone to see whether they wished to or not. They did not speak to you unless absolutely necessary, did not meet your eyes, did not acknowledge the child in your arms except to incline their heads stiffly and step aside.

Ashford Castle was a crowded place during the tourney. Lord Ashford's daughter Gwin had turned thirteen, and to honor her nameday, her father had declared a tourney that would last five days. Knights and lords from across the Reach and beyond had gathered to compete, their banners snapping in the spring breeze, their pavilions spreading across the fields like a crop of colorful mushrooms.

Prince Maekar's entire family had come with his children. You saw them sometimes, in the corridors or the courtyards or the great hall at supper, but you never spoke to them. You were not permitted. Prince Maekar had made that blisteringly clear from the very beginning, his voice cold with a disgust he did not bother to disguise.

"The woman stays in her chambers," he had told Aerion when he first met you. "I will not have her parading about in front of the children. She is a whore, Aerion. A whore and you will not embarrass this family."

Aerion had not argued. He rarely argued with his father directly. But he had kept you anyway, had dressed you in silk and silver, had installed you in a room that connected to his own. And now you were here, carrying your daughter back toward the keep while the roses nodded in the breeze and the distant sounds of the tourney grounds drifted over the walls like distant thunder. You had not been permitted to attend the jousts. Not since the yesterday.

You closed your eyes for a moment against the memory. It had been horrible. Aerion's tilt against Ser Humfrey. You had been watching from the stands, Rhaenyra on your lap, your heart in your throat the way it always was when he rode. He was a skilled jouster, your prince, but he rode with a recklessness that bordered on suicidal, and sometimes you thought he would not be satisfied until he left someone broken in the dirt.

This time, he had aimed too low. Deliberately, you were almost certain, though you would never say so aloud. His lance had struck Ser Humfrey's horse in the neck, a brutal, illegal blow that sent the animal crashing to the ground with a scream that would haunt your nightmares for weeks. Ser Humfrey had been thrown, his leg twisted at an angle that made your stomach lurch, and the horse had thrashed in the dirt with blood pumping from its throat.

The crowd had broken through the barriers. Prince Baelor Breakspear himself had risen from his seat, his face a mask of disgust, and you had seen the way he looked at Aerion. The way everyone looked at Aerion. Like he was something monstrous. Something broken beyond repair.

Aerion had found you afterward, still flushed with adrenaline, his eyes too bright. He had forbidden you from attending any more of the jousts.

"It's not safe," he had said, his grip on your arm just shy of bruising. "The crowds are unpredictable. The horses are dangerous. You and Rhaenyra will stay in the castle or the gardens. I don't want you anywhere near the lists."

You had not argued. You rarely argued with him about things that mattered. But you had seen the truth behind his words, the truth he would never admit. He did not want you to see him lose. He did not want you to see the way the other knights looked at him after what he had done.

So you had stayed away. You had walked in the gardens, and played with Rhaenyra, and smiled your careful smile whenever Aerion returned to your chambers in the evenings, bruised and bristling and desperate for the praise only you could give him.

"Up," Rhaenyra demanded as you approached the castle's side entrance. "Up high, Mama. I want to see."

You lifted her higher, settling her higher on your hip with the practiced ease of two years of motherhood, and she gazed around the corridor with the same wide eyed wonder she brought to everything. You loved her so much it scared you sometimes. Loved her with a ferocity that made the love you had felt for your own mother, dim and distant and blurred at the edges, seem like a candle held up against the sun.

"You spoil her."

The voice came from behind you, and you did not startle. Months with Aerion had taught you the particular cadence of his footsteps, the faint jingle of the sword he wore even at peace, the way the air in a room seemed to tighten and grow watchful when he entered. You turned, shifting Rhaenyra to your other hip with a fluidity that had become second nature, and offered him the smile you had perfected over your time together.

It was not a false smile. That was the strange thing, the thing that still surprised you when you stopped to examine it. It was not false at all. There was calculation in it, yes. There was calculation in everything you did, a habit you could not have broken if you tried. But there was warmth there too. The warmth of a woman looking at a man she had somehow, against all odds and reason, come to care for.

Love. The word still felt strange in your mouth, like a garment that did not quite fit. Aerion was not kind. He was not gentle. He was not good, in any sense that your brother Dunk would have recognized. But he was yours, in his possessive, consuming, infuriating way, and you were his, and somewhere in the crucible of the past years, that mutual belonging had transmuted into something that looked, from certain angles, remarkably like love.

He was not a tall man, standing at five and a half feet, and you knew it rankled at him. Knew that every inch he lacked compared to the warriors he trained with was a splinter under his skin. But what he lacked in height he more than compensated for in presence. The way his boots struck the stone floors, deliberate and commanding. The sharp, hawkish beauty of his face, all angles and shadows. The particular weight of his attention when it landed on you, heavy as a hand on your shoulder.

"My dragon," you said, and the word was warm, intimate, a private jest between you that no one else would recognize. "She wanted to explore the gardens. You know how she loves the roses."

He stepped closer, and Rhaenyra immediately lunged toward him, her small arms outstretched, her face alight with the uncomplicated adoration of a child who had never been given a reason to fear her father. "Papa! Papa, I found a flower!"

She had dropped the flower somewhere in the garden, of course. You had seen it fall, a little pink bruise against the green grass, left behind in her headlong rush toward the next thing and the next and the next. But Aerion did not know that, and you suspected he would not have cared if he did. He took the girl from your arms with an ease that still surprised you, settling her against his chest as naturally as if he had been doing it all his life.

Aerion, who was never gentle with anyone. Aerion, whose hands had left bruises on your body in the early days. Aerion, who had aimed his lance at a horse's throat and watched it die without flinching.

But Rhaenyra had never seen that side of him. Rhaenyra saw only the father who bounced her on his knee and called her his little dragon and looked at her as if she were the single good thing he had managed to produce in a life full of sharp edges and bad decisions. And you saw both versions of him, the monster and the man, and you had learned to hold them both in your mind at once, to love the whole complicated, contradictory mess of him.

"A flower," Aerion repeated, bouncing Rhaenyra gently against his chest. "What color?"

"Pink!"

"Pink," he said, with the solemnity of a man receiving a sacred revelation. "Pink is an excellent color. You have impeccable taste."

Rhaenyra giggled, burying her face in the curve of his neck, and Aerion's eyes met yours over the top of her head. There was something in his gaze. A flicker of warmth, a flicker of something that might have been gratitude. It made your heart clench in that way you had long since stopped trying to explain away.

I love him, you thought, and the thought did not feel like a lie. It felt like the truth, strange and inconvenient and slightly terrifying though it was. Gods help me, I truly do.

You knew what people would say if they could hear your thoughts. How can you love him? After what he did to that horse? After what he did to you? After what he is? And they would not be wrong to ask. The early days had been brutal; there was no use pretending otherwise. He had hurt you, in ways that still surfaced in your dreams on bad nights. He had fucked you without asking, had demanded without giving, had treated your body like territory to be conquered and your compliance like tribute to be extracted.

But then something had shifted. Slowly, incrementally, in the way of seasons changing. He had begun to see you. The woman who praised him when no one else would. The woman who listened to his fears and his rages and his strange, tangled dreams of dragonfire and destiny. The woman who had given him a daughter and held his hand through the disappointment and taught him, patient as a stone worn smooth by water, how to be something other than cruel.

And you had seen him, the man underneath, the one who craved praise because he had never received it, the one who lashed out because he had never learned another way to ask for what he needed. You had seen him, and against all wisdom, against all self preservation, you had loved him.

He still hurt you, sometimes. When his black moods descended and his hands grew rough and the words that came out of his mouth were designed to wound. But those moments were rarer now, spaced further and further apart, and after each one he would come to you with his arms full of gifts. Dresses of silk and velvet, jewels that glittered in their velvet nests, books with leather bindings and gold leaf on the pages that you devoured in the quiet hours when he was training and Rhaenyra was napping. He would hold you afterward, his face pressed into your hair, his arms wrapped around you like a cage he was afraid you might slip through.

"You understand me," he would whisper, and his voice would crack on the words in a way that made your heart splinter. "You're the only one who does. The only one who ever has. Don't leave me. Promise me you won't leave."

And you, holding him in the dark, would stroke his short silver hair and murmur the words he needed to hear. "I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. I'm yours."

You meant them, too. That was the strangest part. After everything, you meant them.

Where would I even go? you thought, watching him bounce your daughter in his arms in this borrowed garden in a borrowed castle, surrounded by roses that belonged to someone else.

You looked at Rhaenyra, at the small, fierce face that was so clearly her father's, and you thought about the day she had been born.

It had been the longest day of your life.

The labor had lasted nearly eighteen hours. You had screamed until your voice gave out entirely, had bitten straight through the leather strap the midwife had given you, had prayed to gods you had not believed in since childhood to make it stop, please make it stop, I can't do this, I'm going to die, please let me die. Aerion had paced outside the door like a caged animal, his boots wearing a groove in the stone, demanding updates every few minutes and threatening bodily harm to the maester whenever the news was not to his liking.

"Is it a boy?" he had shouted through the door, over and over, his voice fraying at the edges. "Tell me it's a boy. It has to be a boy. I'm going to name him Maegor. A strong name. A dragon's name. Tell me!"

You had heard him, even through the wall of agony that had swallowed the world, and you had felt a cold dread settle into the pit of your stomach like a stone dropped into deep water. Maegor. He wanted to name his son after Maegor the Cruel. You had prayed then, harder than you had ever prayed in your life, with what remained of your shredded voice and your failing strength. Not a boy. Please, not a boy. Whatever else you give me, don't give me a boy who will carry that name.

The gods, for once in their capricious existence, had listened.

When the baby had finally emerged, slick and furious and impossibly, breathtakingly alive, the maester had looked between her tiny legs and pronounced, with the careful neutrality of a man who knew exactly how dangerous this moment was: "A girl, my prince. A healthy girl."

The silence that followed had been more terrifying than any scream.

Aerion had burst into the room, his face pale as milk, his short hair standing up in wild disarray from running his hands through it for eighteen hours. He had stared at the child in the maester's arms. At the tuft of silver gold hair plastered to her scalp, at the violet eyes that were already open and glaring at the world with an indignation that seemed profoundly personal. His expression had twisted into something ugly.

"A girl," he had said, and his voice was flat. Hollow. A room with all the furniture removed. "I waited nine moons. Nine moons. For a girl."

He had not touched you. He had not touched the baby. He had simply turned on his heel and walked out of the room, and you had heard his boots ring down the corridor, and then the distant slam of a door, and then nothing.

The next three days had been the darkest of your new life. Aerion did not come to your room. He did not send for you. He did not acknowledge the existence of the child at all. He ate his meals with his family, trained in the yard with a brutality that left his sparring partners bloodied and bewildered, and refused to speak to anyone who so much as mentioned the baby's existence. The girl, the servants called her in whispers, because she had no name yet, and a child without a name was a ghost.

You lay in your bed, your body slowly knitting itself back together, your breasts aching with milk, and you held your daughter against your chest and wondered if this was the end. If Aerion would cast you both out, send you back to the streets of King's Landing with nothing but the clothes on your back and a bastard child in your arms. You made plans in the dark hours. Foolish, desperate plans, the kind of plans that only seemed reasonable at three in the morning when you were alone and terrified and your stitches still pulled every time you moved. You would run. You would find Dunk if he was still alive, throw yourself at his feet, beg him to take you back even though you were ruined and used and nothing like the sister he had lost. You would find work, honest work, kitchen work, anything, and you would raise your daughter to be strong and fierce and free, and she would never, ever know what it felt like to be owned.

But on the fourth day, the door had opened.

Aerion stood in the frame, and you barely recognized him. His eyes were ringed with shadows so dark they looked like bruises, his short hair a disheveled mess, his fine clothes rumpled and stained as if he had been sleeping in them, or not sleeping at all. He had been wrestling with something, you realized. Himself, his pride, his expectations, his disappointment. And from the look of him, he had lost.

"Let me see her," he said. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw, as if he had been shouting or weeping or both. "Let me see my daughter."

You did not trust yourself to speak. You simply lifted the baby from your chest. She was awake, her violet eyes tracking the movement with that unnerving intensity newborns sometimes had. And you held her out toward him.

Aerion approached slowly, cautiously, like a man approaching a wounded animal that might bite. He looked down at the small, wrinkled face, at the silver gold fuzz on her head, at the tiny fists that clenched and unclenched in the air as if she were already fighting battles only she could see. And something in his expression shifted. Not softened. Aerion did not soften, not in any way you had ever witnessed. But cracked. A fissure in the ice, unexpected and profound.

"She looks like me," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes," you whispered, your voice still ruined from screaming. "She's a true dragon, my prince. Just like her father."

He reached out one finger, just one, his hand trembling almost imperceptibly, and touched the baby's cheek. Rhaenyra turned her head toward the contact, her tiny mouth opening and closing in that instinctive rooting reflex.

"Rhaenyra," he said. "I'll call her Rhaenyra."

You knew the name, of course. Everyone in Westeros knew the name. The princess who had been called Maegor with teats, who had fought a war that tore the realm in half and refused to surrender even when the odds were hopeless. It was a name soaked in controversy, in blood, in the stubborn refusal to be anything other than what she was. It was a cruel name to give an infant daughter, in some ways. A challenge. A provocation. A reminder that girls could be as dangerous as boys, if they were bold enough.

But it was not Maegor. It was not the name of the Cruel. And on that fourth day, with your daughter finally named and Aerion's hand resting awkwardly, almost shyly, on your shoulder, you had decided to be grateful for small mercies.

"Rhaenyra," you repeated, trying the name on your tongue. It tasted like strength. Like fire. Like survival. "My little dragon."

And now, two years later, watching that same daughter tug impatiently at Aerion's doublet while he laughed, that hope had only grown. Rhaenyra was fierce and stubborn and clever and alive, so vibrantly alive, and you would make certain she stayed that way. You would die before you let that happen. You would kill before you let that happen. And the truth of that, the absolute crystalline certainty of it, was the most liberating thing you had ever felt.

"Y/N."

Aerion's voice pulled you back from the precipice of memory. He was watching you over Rhaenyra's silver gold head, his expression hovering somewhere between amusement and irritation.

"You're brooding again," he said. "You get that look on your face when you're thinking too hard. I've told you. I don't like it."

You let your expression shift, the distant look replaced by something warmer, more present. But you did not apologize; you had learned, over your time together, that apologizing for your thoughts only made him more suspicious. Instead, you reached out and straightened the collar of his doublet, letting your fingers brush the skin of his throat, a gesture of casual intimacy that you knew he craved even if he would never admit it.

"I was thinking about how happy she looks," you said, and it was the truth, or a version of it. "You make her happy, Aerion. You know that, don't you?"

He grunted, but you caught the flicker of satisfaction that crossed his features before he could suppress it. Praise. He could never get enough of it, had been starved for it his entire life, and you had learned to feed him with the same regularity you fed your daughter. All this time, and he still turned toward your words like a flower toward the sun, drinking in every affirmation, every acknowledgment, every whispered you are magnificent, you are powerful, you are loved.

"She's a dragon," Aerion said, adjusting Rhaenyra on his hip with practiced ease. "Dragons don't get sad. They incinerate the things that upset them."

"Papa," Rhaenyra said, with the sudden, intense solemnity that only a two-year-old can muster, "I want to incinerate something."

Aerion threw back his head and laughed. A real laugh, full throated and genuine, the kind of laugh that transformed his sharp features into something almost boyish, almost approachable. "That's my girl," he said, and pressed a kiss to her forehead with an uncharacteristic tenderness. "That's my little dragon. We'll find you something to burn later."

You watched them, this strange, fierce man and this strange, fierce child, and your heart performed that complicated maneuver it had been practicing for years, folding affection and exasperation and hope and fear all into one impossible shape.

This is real, you told yourself. Whatever else is happening, whatever else they say about us, this is real. He is my Aerion, and she is my daughter, and this is my life, and it is real.

Aerion shifted Rhaenyra to his other arm and extended his free hand toward you. His earlier tension seemed to have eased, replaced by something almost eager, a restless energy that crackled just beneath his skin.

"There's a play tonight," he said. "Some puppeteers have set up in the village. I've heard it's about a dragon." His mouth curved into that sharp, knowing smile you had come to recognize. "I thought we might go after supper. You and me and the little dragon here. She should see something worthy of her name."

Rhaenyra's head came up at the word dragon, her violet eyes bright. "A dragon play, Papa?"

"A dragon play," Aerion confirmed, tweaking her nose. "With fire and scales and everything a proper dragon ought to have. Would you like that?"

Rhaenyra's shriek of delight was answer enough. She bounced in his arms, clapping her small hands together, already launching into a stream of questions about whether the dragon would be big or small, whether it would breathe real fire, whether she could meet it afterward and be its friend.

You smiled, and this time there was no calculation in it at all. Aerion was trying. In his own strange, possessive way, he was trying. He had brought you to Ashford to wound his cousin, yes. He had paraded you in front of his family like a trophy, yes. But he was also here, in this sunlit corridor, planning an evening at a play with his paramour and his bastard daughter, and there was something in his face that you had learned to recognize as hope.

"That sounds wonderful," you said, and meant it. "Rhaenyra will be talking about it for weeks."

"She'll be talking about it regardless," Aerion said dryly. "The child never stops talking. She gets that from you."

"From me?" You pressed a hand to your chest in mock offense. "I am the very soul of silence, my prince."

Aerion snorted. It was an undignified sound, entirely at odds with the sharp, cruel prince the rest of the world knew. "You are a terrible liar, Y/N. You always have been."

But he was smiling when he said it, and when he offered you his arm, you took it without hesitation. Rhaenyra was still chattering about dragons, her small voice filling the corridor with improbable questions and even more improbable declarations. Aerion answered her with patience, with warmth, with the particular tenderness he reserved for her alone.

And you walked beside them through the halls of Ashford Castle, your hand on Aerion's arm, your daughter's laughter echoing off the stones, and for this moment, this single bright moment, you let yourself believe that everything would be all right.

—

The screaming started before you understood what was happening.

One moment there had been music, the thin reedy piping of a flute and the thump of a hand drum, and Rhaenyra had been bouncing on your hip with her small hands clapping together in delight. The painted dragon had been swaying above the stage on its strings, its wings catching the torchlight, its jaws opening and closing in roar while the puppeteer below made a rumbling growl deep in her throat to give it voice. Rhaenyra had laughed. You could still hear the echo of that laugh, bright and silver and utterly without fear.

Then Aerion and the white cloaks moved, and the world splintered. The first tent pole went down with a sound like a thunderclap. Silk billowed inward, red and gold and orange, catching the torchlight and becoming flame even as it fell. People were screaming. People were running. A woman stumbled into you from behind and you curled around Rhaenyra on pure instinct, your spine curving, your arms locking, your body becoming a shell with your daughter at its center. Someone's elbow drove into your ribs and you felt something grind and shift and send a bright white bolt of pain up your side.

"Mama," Rhaenyra whimpered, and her voice was small, so terribly small, the voice of a child who did not understand why the world had turned cruel between one heartbeat and the next. "Mama, I want to go. I want to go home."

"Shh," you breathed into her hair, though your own voice was shaking so badly the word hardly had a shape. "Shh, my love, my dragon, Mama's here. Mama's got you. Close your eyes, sweetling. Close your eyes and it will be over soon."

She buried her face in the curve of your throat. You could feel her tears, hot and wet, soaking through the silk of your gown. You could feel her heart beating against your chest, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. You could feel every tremor that ran through her small body, and each one was a knife slipped between your ribs.

The guard Aerion had assigned to you stood at your back like a statue carved from ice. Ser Harrold, his name was, you had begged him to escort you from the pavilion the moment the violence began. You had turned to him with Rhaenyra clutched against your chest and pleaded with him to let you leave, to let you take your daughter somewhere safe, somewhere the screaming did not reach.

He had looked at you with eyes that held no more warmth than a winter pond. "Prince's orders," he had said, and the words fell from his mouth like stones dropped into still water. "You stay until he says otherwise."

"But she's frightened," you had said, and you had hated the tremor in your voice, hated the way it made you sound weak when you needed to be strong. "She's two years old, Ser Harrold. She doesn't understand what's happening. Please."

"Prince's orders," he had repeated, and he had not looked at you again.

On the stage, Aerion had the puppeteer by the wrist. She was young. That was the detail that lodged itself in your memory like a splinter, the detail that would come back to you in the dark hours of the night for years afterward. She was young, perhaps your age. Her mouth was open in a scream that you could not hear over the roaring of the crowd, and her free hand was beating uselessly against Aerion's chest, against his arm, against the unyielding iron of his grip.

She had made a dragon out of paint and wood and string. She had painted scales on its wings with her own hands, had worked its jaws with her own fingers, had given it a voice that made children laugh and grown men cheer. She had made the terrible, fatal mistake of letting her dragon be killed in the story she told. The knight had slain it with his sword and the audience had gasped and clapped and cheered the hero's victory.

Aerion had not cheered. Aerion had stared with a face like a thunderhead, and then the Kingsguard had begun to move, and now he was on the stage with the puppeteer's wrist in his hand and her dragon lying forgotten at his feet.

He started with her fingers. The first one broke with a sound like a dry branch snapping underfoot in the depths of winter. It was surprisingly quiet, that sound, almost delicate, almost polite. The puppeteer's index finger bent backward at an angle that made your stomach contract violently, and she screamed, a high thin shriek that cut through the chaos of the pavilion like a blade through silk.

Rhaenyra flinched in your arms. "Mama," she whimpered, "why is the lady screaming? Is she hurt? Mama, I want to go."

"Close your eyes, sweetling," you whispered again, and your voice was breaking now, splintering into pieces you could not put back together. "Close your eyes and think of something nice. Think of the roses in the garden. Think of the pink flower you picked. Think of anything but this."

The second finger broke wetter than the first. A muffled, grinding crack that seemed to echo in the hollow of your chest. The puppeteer's legs gave out beneath her, but Aerion held her up by her ruined hand,ìand his face, his beautiful face that you had kissed and praised and learned to love, was alight with something that went beyond cruelty into a territory you had no name for.

Pleasure. A bright, burning pleasure that lit him from within like a lantern lights a room. His violet eyes were wide and shining, his lips parted slightly around his bloodied teeth, his breath coming in short sharp bursts that were almost sexual in their rhythm. He was enjoying this. He was enjoying this in a way he had never enjoyed a single moment of the years you had spent together, and the realization crashed into you like a wave into rocks, cold and brutal and undeniable.

You love him, you had thought earlier in the gardens. No, you hate him. That was the horror of it, the horror that would never leave you no matter how many years passed. You loved him, you loved the father of your child, you loved the man who had burned down a brothel for you. You loved him, and he was standing on a stage in a village called Ashford, breaking a girl's fingers one by one because her puppet show had insulted his pride.

The third finger made a sound like a walnut being crushed in a vise.

"Please," you heard yourself saying, and you did not know if you were speaking to Aerion or to Ser Harrold or to the gods who had never listened to a single prayer you had ever sent their way. "Please, someone stop him. Someone make him stop."

Ser Harrold's hand closed around your upper arm, immobilizing you. He was wearing gauntlets, the leather stiff and unyielding against your skin. "Hold still," he said, and his voice was the voice of a man who had learned long ago that obedience was safer than conscience.

The puppeteer's fourth finger snapped.

Then the giant came out of the crowd. His hair was dirty blonde, cut short against his skull in a way that suggested practicality rather than fashion, and it was matted with sweat and dust and something that might have been blood. His face was a shadowed blur in the torchlight, his features obscured by the angle and the distance and the chaos, but his size. Gods above and below, his size.

He was enormous. Seven feet of bone and muscle and righteous fury, with shoulders broad enough to block out the firelight behind him and hands the size of dinner plates curled into fists at his sides. He did not slow. He did not hesitate. He cleared the edge of the stage in a single stride, and then he was on Aerion, and his fist was connecting with the prince's face with a sound like a hammer striking an anvil.

Aerion staggered backward. His grip on the puppeteer's wrist broke, and she crumpled to the stage in a heap of brown wool and ruined hands, sobbing. Blood flew from Aerion's mouth in a dark arc that caught the torchlight and glittered like rubies scattered across the stage. He hit the wooden planking hard, his head snapping back against the boards, and for one impossible, crystalline moment, the entire pavilion went silent.

Then the Kingsguard moved. They came from every direction at once, white cloaks streaming behind them like wings, white enameled armor flashing in the firelight. Six of them. Seven. More, perhaps. They swarmed the big man the way wolves swarm a bear, throwing themselves onto his back and his arms and his legs, trying to drag him down by sheer weight of numbers. He fought them. Gods, he fought them. You saw one Kingsguard reel backward with blood pouring from the visor of his helm. You saw another take an elbow to the throat and go down choking, clawing at his gorget. You saw the big man's fists rise and fall and rise again with the relentless rhythm of a blacksmith's hammer, each blow carrying the weight of a righteous anger that no amount of white armor could withstand.

But there were too many. There were always too many. They dragged at his legs and his arms and his neck, six white cloaked knights and then seven and then eight, and still he nearly threw them off, still he nearly got free, still he nearly made it back to his feet with his massive hands reaching for Aerion again. Then one of the Kingsguard drove the pommel of his sword into the back of the big man's skull, and his knees buckled. Another kicked his legs out from under him. Another twisted his arm behind his back at an angle that made the joint scream in protest even from where you stood watching.

They forced him to his knees on the stage. One of them, a tall man with a captain's bars on his white cloak, grabbed a fistful of that dirty blonde hair and yanked his head back, forcing his face up into the torchlight.

Aerion rose to his feet. He moved slowly, carefully, the way a man moves when he is holding onto his composure by the thinnest of threads. His lip was split open, a gash that ran from the corner of his mouth nearly to his chin. Blood sheeted down his jaw and dripped onto the white silk of his collar, staining it crimson. He probed at his teeth with his tongue, grimaced, and spat a wad of blood and saliva onto the stage. Something small and white and hard skittered across the wooden boards.

“Why did you throw your life away for this whore” Aerion said.

"You've loosened one of my teeth,"

The pavilion had gone very quiet. The screaming had stopped, or perhaps it had simply receded to a distance where it could no longer reach you. The only sounds were the crackle of the torches, the soft sobbing of the puppeteer still huddled on the stage, and the ragged, labored breathing of the big man as he knelt in the grip of the Kingsguard. Aerion's voice was soft, almost conversational, the voice of a man discussing the weather over a cup of wine. It was more terrifying than any scream could have been.

"So," Aerion continued, prodding at his mouth again with his thumb and forefinger, examining the blood that came away, "we'll start by breaking out all of yours."

"No." The word came out of your mouth before you could stop it, a reflex as automatic as breathing, as instinctive as flinching from an open flame. "Aerion, no."

He did not look at you. He was not capable of hearing you, not in this state, not with the blood of a puppet show on his hands and the taste of his own tooth in his mouth. He was looking at the big man the way a child looks at an insect he has caught in a jar. Curious. Utterly without pity.

One of the Kingsguard, the captain with his hand still fisted in the big man's hair, forced his head down toward the stage. Another moved to stand on either side of him, gripping his shoulders, pinning him in place. A third stepped forward, removing his gauntlets one finger at a time, flexing his bare hands with the deliberate precision of a man preparing to perform a task that required both strength and care.

"Hold him still," Aerion said. "I want to watch."

Rhaenyra was sobbing in earnest now, her small body shaking with the force of her terror. She did not understand what was happening. She understood only that her father was on the stage and there was blood on his face and the safe bright world of the puppet show had collapsed into screaming and white cloaks and a big man on his knees who was about to be hurt in a way she had no language for.

"Mama," she wept, "Mama, I want Papa to stop, make Papa stop, please make him stop."

"I can't," you whispered into her hair, and the admission was a wound that would never fully heal. "I can't, sweetling. Mama can't make him stop. Close your eyes. Close your eyes and don't look."

The Kingsguard with the bare hands stepped forward. He was flexing his fingers, working the joints loose, his movements unhurried and methodical. The captain still had the big man's head forced down at the angle required for what was about to happen. The other guards braced themselves, digging their heels into the wooden stage, preparing for the struggle they knew would come.

The big man lifted his head against the pressure of the captain's grip. It was a monumental effort; you could see the muscles of his neck straining, the veins standing out like cords, the sweat cutting tracks through the blood and dirt on his face. He lifted his head, and the torchlight fell full upon his features for the first time.

You saw his face.

Time did not slow. It did not fade. It stopped. It stopped completely, absolutely, as if some vast and terrible hand had reached down from the heavens and seized the mechanism of the world itself and held it motionless. The torches froze mid-flicker. The screaming faded to a hum that existed somewhere beyond the boundaries of hearing. The blood in your veins turned to ice and then to fire and then to something that had no name at all.

You knew that face. You knew the hands. The enormous hands that had lifted you from your mother's deathbed, that had carried you through the cold morning while the other whores watched with pity and disgust, that had wrapped you in a threadbare blanket and held you against his chest while he promised you in a cracking boy's voice that he would always, always have you.

Dunk. He was alive. He was on his knees on a stage in a village called Ashford with a Kingsguard's hand in his hair and another Kingsguard's bare knuckles preparing to break his teeth out of his skull one by one, and he was alive.

"Dunk."

You did not recognize your own voice. It did not sound like a voice at all. It sounded like something that had been torn out of you by the roots, something that had been buried so deep and so long that pulling it free left a bleeding hollow in the center of your chest.

"Dunk."

Louder this time. Louder, and it cracked on the second syllable, cracked like your mother's laugh had cracked, like a bell that had been rung too hard and too long and had nothing left inside it but splinters.

"DUNK."

Time restarted itself with a violence that made your vision swim. The torches flared back to life. The screaming returned, a wave of sound that crashed over you and through you and left you gasping. The Kingsguard hesitated, their hands pausing on their prisoner, their white helms turning toward you with the synchronized precision of hunting dogs catching a scent.

Dunk turned his head. The captain still had his fist twisted in his hair, still had his neck bent at that brutal angle, but Dunk turned his head against that grip with the slow, inexorable force of a continent shifting, and he looked at you.

His eyes found yours across the chaos of the ruined tent. You saw the recognition hit him. Saw it travel through his body like a physical blow, a shock wave that started in his eyes and rippled outward through his shoulders, his chest, his hands. His face went slack with it, the tension draining out of his jaw and his brow, replaced by something that was too raw and too vast to be called surprise. It was disbelief. It was hope, the kind of hope that had been dead for so long its resurrection was indistinguishable from agony. It was joy and grief and guilt and love, all of them crashing together in the space of a single heartbeat.

His mouth moved. Formed the shape of your name. You could not hear it over the screaming, over the roaring of your own blood in your ears, but you saw it, saw the way his lips shaped the syllables he had not spoken in years, the name he had called across a hundred alleys and a hundred dark streets while he searched for you, the name he had whispered to himself in the long nights when he believed you were dead and gone and never coming back.

He surged against the guards holding him. Not fighting to escape now. Fighting to get to you. His massive shoulders bunched and heaved, nearly throwing off the two Kingsguard who were gripping his arms. A third lunged in to reinforce them, his white cloak tangling around his legs in his haste. Dunk did not seem to notice. He did not seem to feel the hands dragging at him or the knees pressing into his back or the captain's fist still grinding into his scalp. He was looking at you and only at you, and he was trying to reach you, trying to cross the impossible distance between the stage and the place where you stood with Rhaenyra in your arms.

You surged forward to meet him. You did not think about it. You did not calculate the odds or weigh the consequences. Your body moved before your mind could catch up, driven by an instinct older than thought, older than fear, older than anything you had learned in the years since they took you from the festival. Your brother was here. Your brother was alive.

Ser Harrold's arm locked around your waist like an iron bar. "Hold still," he snarled, and he was no longer calm now, no longer indifferent. He was struggling to hold you, struggling to keep his grip on a woman who had spent years learning to be still and silent and obedient and had finally, in this single shattering moment, forgotten how.

"Let me go!" The words tore out of your throat with a force that made your vision white out at the edges. Rhaenyra was screaming in your arms, her small fists beating against your shoulders, her voice a thin high wail that you could barely hear over the roaring in your ears. "Let me go, that's my brother, that's my brother, let me GO!"

"Aerion!" You were screaming his name now, the name of the man you loved, the name of the monster on the stage, the name of the only person in this pavilion who had the power to make the nightmare stop. "Aerion, please, please, you have to stop, he's my brother,please, Aerion, PLEASE!"

Aerion turned to look at you.

His face was still smeared with blood, his lip still split and swollen, his violet eyes still bright with the pleasure of the violence he had been orchestrating. But something flickered in their depths when he saw your face, when he registered the raw, unvarnished desperation in your voice. Confusion first. Then irritation, a flicker of the familiar petulance that crossed his features whenever something did not go the way he had planned. And then something else, something that chilled you more than any cruelty could have done.

Something calculating.

"What," he said, and his voice was a blade drawn slowly across a whetstone, "the fuck are you doing? What is she screaming about?"

You could barely form the words. Your throat was raw, your chest heaving, your arms trembling with the effort of holding Rhaenyra while Ser Harrold's grip threatened to crack your ribs. But you forced them out, forced them past the sobs that were building in your chest, forced them into the space between you and the man who held your brother's life in his bloodstained hands.

"He's my brother. He's my brother, Aerion." Your voice cracked on his name, splintered into something that was half a plea and half a prayer. "The brother I told you about. Dunk. The one I thought was dead. The one who raised me. Please. Please don't hurt him. I'll do anything. I'll give you anything. Just please, Aerion, please don't hurt my brother."

Something moved in Aerion's face. A muscle in his jaw jumped. His eyes narrowed, the bright pleasure of the violence draining out of them, replaced by something harder and colder and infinitely more dangerous. He looked at you, and he looked at Dunk, and he looked back at you, and you could see him putting the pieces together. The brother you had wept for in the dark hours of the night, the brother whose name you had whispered in your sleep, the brother Aerion had forbidden you from ever mentioning again.

The brother who was now on his knees in front of him, bloodied and defiant, the man who had dared to strike a prince of the blood, and his expression closed like a door slamming shut in a winter gale.

"Take her back to her chamber," Aerion said. He was not looking at you anymore. He was looking at Dunk, and his voice was utterly without warmth, utterly without the history that stretched between you, utterly without anything that might have been mistaken for mercy. "Lock the door. No one goes in or out until I give the order."

"No." The word was barely a whisper. Ser Harrold was already dragging you backward, his arm still locked around your waist, his heels digging into the trampled grass of the pavilion floor. "Aerion, no, please, you can't do this."

"Take the child to the nursery," Aerion continued, as if you had not spoken, as if your voice did not exist, as if you were already gone. "She does not need to see any more of this. Make sure she stays there."

"No!" The scream that tore out of you was not a sound. It was a living thing, a creature with claws and teeth and a heart full of desperation, and it ripped its way out of your throat and into the torchlit air of the pavilion with a force that made the nearest Kingsguard flinch. "You can't separate us! She's my daughter! She's MY daughter!"

Rhaenyra was shrieking now, a high thin sound that rose above the chaos like a needle sliding into flesh. Her arms were wrapped around your neck so tightly that you could feel her small fingernails digging crescents into your skin, and her legs were locked around your waist, and her face was buried in the curve of your shoulder, and she was screaming, screaming, screaming. "Mama, Mama, don't let them take me, Mama, please, I want to stay with you, Mama, MAMA!"

Ser Harrold was dragging you backward. Another guard, a man in the pale grey of Prince Maekar's household, was trying to untangle Rhaenyra from your arms. His hands were gentle, gentler than you had expected, but that gentleness made it worse somehow, made it more real, made it a kindness that was not a kindness at all. He was murmuring something to Rhaenyra, some meaningless reassurance that neither you nor she could hear over the screaming, and his fingers were prying at her small grip one digit at a time.

"Don't," you sobbed. "Don't take her. Please. Please don't take my daughter."

But your arms were being pulled backward, and your strength was failing, and Rhaenyra's grip was slipping. You felt her fingers lose their hold on your dress. Felt the warmth of her body pulled away from yours. Felt the cold air rush in to fill the space where she had been, and that cold was worse than any physical pain, worse than the bruises blooming on your arm where Ser Harrold held you, worse than the raw burning in your throat from screaming, worse than anything you had endured in the brothel or the alley or the long dark nights when you believed your brother was dead.

"RHAENYRA!"

She was being carried away, still reaching for you over the guard's shoulder, her silver-gold hair bright as a candle flame in the torchlight, her violet eyes wide and streaming with tears. "Mama! I want my mama! Give me back my mama!"

You fought. You fought the way Dunk had fought, with every ounce of strength in your body, with your teeth and your nails and your fury. You twisted in Ser Harrold's grip and raked your nails across his face, felt the skin of his cheek tear beneath your fingers, felt the hot wet rush of his blood against your palm. He cursed and tightened his hold, and something in your side gave way with a sharp bright spike of agony, but you did not stop. You could not stop. Your daughter was being taken from you, your brother was on his knees with a prince's boot on his neck, and the world was ending, and you could not stop.

And then, cutting through the chaos like a blade through silk, a young voice rang out across the pavilion.

"No! Don't touch him!"

Everyone froze. The Kingsguard with his bare hands paused mid-motion, his knuckles inches from Dunk's clenched jaw. The captain's grip on Dunk's hair loosened slightly in surprise. Even Aerion turned, his bloodied mouth twisting into an expression of annoyed bewilderment.

The boy who stepped forward from the chaos of the crowd was small, skinny, with a shaved head that gleamed in the torchlight like a polished stone. He could not have been more than nine or ten years old, and he moved with the absolute, unshakeable confidence of someone who had never been told that the world did not bend to his will. He was bald and his clothes were the roughspun of a stable boy, dirty and sweat-stained, but he wore them like a prince wearing borrowed silks.

Dunk's voice was a ragged gasp, desperate and afraid in a way it had not been when the Kingsguard were beating him. "You stupid boy! Hold your tongue or they'll hurt you."

The boy did not slow. He did not even glance at Dunk. His eyes were fixed on Aerion, and there was something in them that made the prince's expression flicker with the first hint of uncertainty you had seen all night.

"No, they won't," the boy said, and his voice was calm, steady, the voice of someone stating a fact as immutable as the rising of the sun. "If they do, they'll answer to my father."

He stepped past the Kingsguard as if they were not there, as if the white cloaks and the white armor and the drawn swords were no more substantial than morning mist. He stopped directly in front of Aerion, this small bald boy in dirty clothes, and he lifted his chin and looked the prince full in the face.

"Let go of him," the boy commanded. "Wate, Yorkel, do as I say."

And the Kingsguard obeyed.

The captain released Dunk's hair. The other guards stepped back, their hands falling away from his arms and shoulders, their white helms inclining slightly in gestures of deference that stopped your heart in your chest. They knew this boy. They knew him, and they obeyed him, and that could only mean one thing.

Aerion stared at the boy. His violet eyes narrowed, studying the shaved head, the dirty clothes, the small defiant face that was upturned to his own. And then, slowly, recognition dawned across his bloodied features like a sluggish sunrise. It was followed immediately by annoyance, a deep and profound irritation that seemed to cut through even the pleasure he had been taking in the violence moments before.

"You impudent little rat," Aerion said. His voice dripped with contempt, but beneath it lurked something else, something that sounded almost like wariness. "What's happened to your hair?"

The boy did not flinch. He did not blink. He looked at Aerion with the steady, unblinking gaze of someone who had spent his entire life watching and learning and understanding things that others missed, and when he spoke, his voice carried the unmistakable weight of royal blood.

"I cut it off, brother," he said. "I didn't want to look like you."

Brother. The word landed in the center of the pavilion like a stone dropped into still water. Brother. This boy, this small bald boy in stable clothes, was Aerion's brother. Which meant he was Prince Aegon Targaryen, the youngest of Prince Maekar's sons, the one you had glimpsed occasionally in the corridors of Summerhall, the one who had looked at you like you were a puzzle he was trying to solve.

And he had just intervened to save your brother's life. The revelation halted the attack instantly. The Kingsguard could not carry out Aerion's orders now. Not against a man who was connected, through his squire, to the royal family. Not against a man who was protected by a prince of the blood, however young and however bald and however inexplicably dressed in the roughspun of a stable hand. The captain stepped back further, his white cloak settling around him like folded wings, and the other guards followed suit, leaving Dunk kneeling alone on the stage.

Aerion's face was a study in frustration. The pleasure had drained out of him entirely now, replaced by a seething, impotent fury that he could not express without defying his own brother, his own blood, in front of half a dozen witnesses. His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. The blood from his split lip still dripped down his chin, and his violet eyes were dark with a rage that had no outlet.

But he was a prince, and he knew the rules, and striking a man who was connected to the royal family was a crime that even he could not simply burn his way out of.

"Take him to the cells," Aerion said finally, and his voice was flat and cold and utterly drained of the pleasure that had animated it before. "He struck a prince of the blood. That crime remains regardless of whose squire the little rat has chosen to become. He will await trial and judgment, and lock her in her chamber."

Ser Harrold hauled you backward through the ruins of the pavilion. Your legs gave out beneath you, and he dragged you the rest of the way, your heels scraping furrows in the trampled grass, your head lolling against his shoulder, your voice reduced to a raw and wordless keening that did not stop. You passed overturned benches. You passed torn silk and scattered cushions and a child's abandoned shoe.

The last thing you saw before the tent flap closed behind you was Aerion. He was still standing on the stage, his red tunic splattered with blood, his face a mask of cold, distant contemplation. He was not looking at you. He was looking at the place where Dunk had disappeared, and there was something in his expression that you had never seen before. Something that went beyond jealousy, beyond possessiveness, beyond the casual cruelty of a man who had never been denied anything.

He looked like a dragon counting its hoard, and finding a single coin out of place.

—

The door slammed shut behind you with a finality that echoed through your bones.

You had screamed until your voice gave out. You had beaten your fists against the iron banded oak until your knuckles split and bled, leaving dark smears on the wood that looked like accusations. You had thrown yourself at the door again and again, your shoulder bruising, your strength ebbing, until finally your legs had given way beneath you and you had slid to the cold stone floor with your back against the unforgiving wood and your face buried in your bleeding hands.

Rhaenyra was gone. Dunk was gone. Everyone you had ever loved had been ripped away from you in the space of a single night, and you were locked in a borrowed chamber in a borrowed castle with nothing but the silence and the dark and the terrible, circling thoughts that would not let you rest.

You pressed your forehead against your knees and tried to breathe.The hours crawled past like wounded animals dragging themselves toward death. You did not move from your place against the door. You did not lie down on the bed, though it was soft and wide and covered in Ashford's finest linens. You did not drink the water that had been left on the side table, though your throat was raw and burning from screaming. You simply sat, curled into yourself, and waited.

For Aerion. For news. For something, anything, that would tell you what was going to happen next. You thought about the look on Dunk's face when he recognized you. The shock. The joy. The desperate, agonized love. What must he have thought? What must he have assumed about you, about your life, about the choices that had led you to this place?

The shame of it burned in your chest like swallowed fire.

You did not know how long you sat there. It might have been hours. It might have been minutes. Time had lost all meaning in the darkness of the chamber, with the candles unlit and the fire unbuilt and the only light coming from the pale sliver of moon that crept through the narrow window high in the wall. But eventually, eventually, you heard the sound you had been dreading and hoping for in equal measure.

Footsteps in the corridor. Boots on stone, deliberate and unhurried, the particular cadence of a man who knew that the world would wait for him. The jingle of a sword at the hip. The faint, almost imperceptible sound of a key turning in a lock.

The door swung inward, and Aerion Targaryen stepped into the room.

He had cleaned the blood from his face since you last saw him. His lip was still swollen. His silver gold hair had been combed back from his face, still damp from washing. He had changed his clothes; replaced by a simple black doublet that made his pale skin look almost luminous in the moonlight. He looked almost calm. Almost controlled. But his violet eyes were too bright, too sharp, the eyes of a man who was holding onto his composure by the thinnest of threads.

He closed the door behind him. You heard the lock click into place.

"My dragon," you said, and your voice came out as a croak, raw and broken from screaming. You tried to rise to your feet, but your legs would not hold you, so you remained on the floor, your back against the wall, your hands still stained with your own blood. "Aerion, please. Please tell me what's happening. My brother. Where is my brother? Is he all right? What are they going to do to him?"

The change that came over Aerion's face was instantaneous and terrifying. The careful mask of composure cracked like ice hit by a hammer. His jaw tightened. His eyes narrowed. His hands, which had been relaxed at his sides, curled slowly into fists.

"I come to you," he said, and his voice was a blade being drawn from its sheath, slow and deliberate and full of promise, "after being attacked in front of half the nobility of the Reach. My lip is split open. My tooth is loose in my skull. My dignity has been trampled by some hedge knight with dirt under his fingernails and hay in his hair. And the first words out of your mouth are not 'Are you all right, my prince?' Not 'Let me tend your wounds, my love.' Not a single word of comfort or concern for me, the man who saved you from a brothel, the father of your child, the prince who has kept you fed and clothed and protected for years."

He took a step toward you. Then another. His shadow fell across you like a shroud, blocking out the pale moonlight, plunging you into darkness.

"Your first words," he said, and his voice was rising now, climbing toward a register you had learned to fear, "are about him. A stranger. A man who struck me. A man who loosened my tooth and spilled my blood in front of the Kingsguard. That is who you ask about. That is who you care about. Not me. Not your prince. Not the father of your child. Him."

"He's not a stranger," you said, and your voice was barely a whisper. You knew you should stop. You knew you should placate him, soothe him, tell him everything he wanted to hear. That was what you had done for years, what you had become so skilled at doing. But you could not. Not tonight. Not with Dunk's face still burned into your memory like a brand. "He's my brother, Aerion. He's my brother. He raised me. He protected me, and you have him locked in a cell like a criminal. Please. Please, just tell me he's all right. Just tell me you haven't hurt him."

Aerion stared at you for a long moment. The torch from the corridor outside cast his shadow long and dark across the floor, stretching toward you like a grasping hand. His breathing was audible in the silence, harsh and uneven, the breathing of a man who was losing a battle with his own rage.

"You love him," he said finally. The words were flat, toneless, utterly without inflection. "This brother of yours. This hedge knight with his dirty hands and his dirty hair. You love him more than you love me."

"That's not true," you said, and it was the truth and it was a lie and it was everything in between. "I love you, Aerion. You know I love you. But he's my brother. He's my blood. I thought he was dead. I mourned him for years. And now he's here, and he's alive, and I just want to know that he's safe. That's all. I just want to know that he's safe. Please."

"Safe." Aerion repeated the word as if it were a foreign language, a concept he had heard described but never experienced. "Safe. You want to know if the man who struck me is safe. You want to know if the man who humiliated me in front of my family and my father is safe."

He laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. It was the sound of something breaking.

"You're mine," he said, and his voice cracked on the word, splintering into something that was half rage and half desperation. "You have been mine since the night I bought you. I paid fifty gold dragons for you. I burned down a brothel for you. I gave you a home, a place in my household, a daughter who bears my name. I have given you everything. Everything. And you stand there, bleeding on my floor, asking about another man."

"I'm not standing," you whispered, and you did not know why that was the detail you chose to focus on. He crossed the distance between you in three swift strides. His hand closed around your arm, hauling you upright with a strength that would leave bruises, and you cried out as the blood rushed back to your legs and the pain in your side flared white hot.

"You are mine," he said again, and his face was inches from yours, his violet eyes blazing with a fire you had seen directed at others but never, never at you. Not like this. Not with this intensity. Not with this complete and absolute absence of restraint. "Say it. Say you're mine."

"I'm yours," you gasped. His grip on your arm was agony, his fingers digging into the bruises Ser Harrold had left, and tears were streaming down your face. "Aerion, please, you're hurting me."

"Good." He shook you, once, hard enough that your head snapped back and hit the stone wall behind you. Stars burst across your vision. "Good. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll remember who you belong to. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll stop asking about other men. Maybe if I hurt you enough, you'll finally understand that the only way you leave me is in a shroud."

"My brother," you sobbed. "He's my brother. Not another man. My brother. Please, Aerion, please try to understand."

"I understand perfectly." His free hand came up to grip your chin, forcing your face toward his, forcing you to look into his eyes. "I understand that you have spent years telling me you loved me while you dreamed of someone else. I understand that the moment he appeared, you forgot everything I have done for you. I understand that you are a whore I pulled from a brothel, and no matter how many silk dresses I put on you, no matter how much of myself I pour into you, you will never, ever stop being what you are."

The words hit you like physical blows. Each one was a fist to the gut, a slap to the face, a knife slipped between your ribs. You had known, intellectually, that this was how he saw you. You had always known. But hearing it spoken aloud, hearing it thrown at you like an accusation, like a crime you had committed against him simply by existing, was something else entirely.

"Aerion," you whispered, and your voice was so small, so broken, that you barely recognized it as your own. "I have never been unfaithful to you. I have never looked at another man. I have never wanted anyone but you. He is my brother. My brother. Why can't you understand that?"

"Because I don't care!" He screamed the words directly into your face, his spittle flecking your cheeks, his breath hot and sour with wine and blood. "I don't care who he is! I don't care if he's your brother or your father or your long lost lover! The moment you chose him over me, the moment you screamed his name instead of mine, the moment you fought my guards and clawed Ser Harrold's face to try to reach him, you made your choice! And now you will live with it!"

His hand released your chin and came across your face with a crack that seemed to echo off the stone walls.

The backhand caught you across the cheekbone, hard enough to snap your head to the side, hard enough to send a spray of blood from your already split lip, hard enough that your legs gave out beneath you entirely. You fell. You did not fall gracefully, did not fall the way women fell in the songs Dunk used to tell you, floating down like petals on a breeze. You fell like a sack of grain, heavy and graceless, your hip striking the stone floor with a jolt of pain that made you gasp, your palms scraping raw against the cold flagstones, your already injured side screaming in protest as you landed.

You lay there for a moment, stunned. The taste of blood filled your mouth, copper and salt and something that might have been despair. The world swam in and out of focus. The moonlight from the window seemed very far away, a distant silver promise of a world that existed somewhere beyond this room, beyond this night, beyond the man who was standing over you with his chest heaving and his eyes blazing.

Then he was on top of you. His weight pressed you into the cold stone floor, heavy and immovable, the weight of a man who had trained with sword and shield and lance, the weight of a prince who had never been denied anything in his life. His knees pinned your thighs. One hand caught both of your wrists and forced them above your head, pressing them into the stone with a grip that made your fingers go numb. His other hand was at your throat, not squeezing, not yet, just resting there, a reminder, a threat, a promise.

"You're my whore," he said, and his voice was a growl, low and guttural and utterly without the cultured refinement he wore like armor in the daylight. "Mine. You have been mine since the night I bought you, and you will be mine until the day you die. Do you understand? Do you understand what that means?"

"Get off me," you gasped. Your voice was barely audible, strangled by the hand at your throat and the weight on your chest. "Aerion, please, get off me, I can't breathe."

"It means," he continued, as if you had not spoken, as if your words were less than nothing, as if your voice did not exist in any way that mattered, "that I own you. Your body. Your heart. Your soul. Every breath you take, you take because I allow it. Every night you sleep in a warm bed, you sleep there because I permit it. Every moment you spend with our daughter, you spend because I have chosen to let you. And the only way you leave me, the only way you ever leave me, is if you are dead. Do you understand? Dead."

He was tearing at your dress as he spoke, the silk that he had given you, the dress he had chosen, the dress you had worn to the puppet show, the dress Rhaenyra's tears had soaked through. You heard the fabric rip, felt the cold air on your skin, and you found what remained of your strength and pushed against him. Your hands were still pinned above your head, but you bucked your hips, twisted your body, tried to throw him off the way Dunk had thrown off the Kingsguard.

It was useless. It was always useless. He was stronger than you, heavier than you, and he had the advantage of gravity and rage and years of training in violence that you had never received. He pressed you back down against the stone, and his hand left your throat to grip your jaw, forcing your face toward his, forcing you to look into his eyes.

"Say it," he demanded. "Say you're mine. Say you belong to me. Say that no one else matters. Not your brother. Not anyone. Say it."

You did not say it. You could not say it. The words were locked in your throat, trapped behind the tears and the blood and the terrible, crushing weight of what was happening to you.

You tried to squeeze your legs shut, but his knee drove between them, forcing them wide. He was hard and the sight of his cock made your stomach turn.

"Look at it," he hissed, grabbing a fistful of your hair and yanking your head forward. "Look at what you made me do. This is your fault. If you had just obeyed—"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. He pressed the head of his cock against your entrance, already sore and swollen from the first time, and you whimpered, a high, broken sound that seemed to please him. He held there, just barely breaching you, letting you feel the pressure, the promise of invasion.

"Please," you whispered, your voice cracked and raw. "Please, Aerion, please don't—"

He thrust.

The sound you made was not a scream. It was something worse, a choked, guttural sob that tore from your throat as he buried himself inside you in one brutal push. The angle was wrong, too deep, too dry despite the precum already coating your thighs. You felt every ridge and vein of his cock as it forced its way deeper, splitting you open, claiming space that did not want him.

He paused, buried to the hilt, and let out a low groan that was almost human. Almost tender. Then he began to move.

Not fast. Not yet. He fucked you slowly, deliberately, with a cruelty that made every inch of the motion deliberate. He pulled almost all the way out, then slid back in with excruciating leisure, watching your face contort with each stroke. His eyes were locked on yours, challenging you to look away.

You did. You turned your head, pressing your cheek against the cold stone, staring at a crack in the floor until your vision blurred. But he would not allow that. He grabbed your jaw, forced your face back to his.

"Watch," he commanded. "Watch me take what is mine."

His pace increased. The slow, torturous rhythm gave way to a sharp, punishing fucking that drove the air from your lungs with every slam of his hips. The wet slap of skin against skin echoed off the walls, mingling with your ragged breaths and his grunts. He leaned down, his chest pressing against yours, and bit your shoulder, not a kiss, a bite, hard enough to break skin. You cried out, and he licked the blood, humming in satisfaction.

"That's it," he whispered against your ear, his breath hot and uneven. "Make sound for me. Let the whole castle hear how much you hate it. Let them know who you belong to."

He drove deeper, harder, angling his hips to hit that spot inside you that made your back arch despite yourself. A spark of unwanted pleasure shot through your pelvis, and you bit your lip so hard you tasted copper. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He slowed down, grinding against that same spot, watching your body betray you as your hips began to rock in counterpoint to his thrusts.

"There she is," he breathed, almost reverent. "There's the whore underneath. You can't hide her from me. She wants this. She needs this."

"No," you gasped, but your body said yes, clenching around him, drawing him deeper. Hot shame flooded through you, hotter than the pain, as your cunt began to slick with something that was not blood. He felt it too, he groaned, his rhythm faltering, his grip on your hips tightening.

"I'm going to fill you," he snarled, his composure cracking. "I'm going to pour every drop of my seed into this worthless hole until you're pregnant with my heir, a son this time, and then I'll do it again. And again. And—"

He came without warning, a guttural roar tearing from his throat as he shoved himself as deep as he could go, his hips stuttering, his cock pulsing inside you. You felt the hot flood of his cum, felt it spill out around him, felt it mix with the blood and your own unwanted wetness. He collapsed on top of you, his full weight pressing you into the stone, his breath hot and ragged against your neck.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. Then he shifted, pulling out with a wet sound that made you flinch, and rolled onto his back beside you. The moonlight had moved, illuminating his face now haunted gleam in his violet eyes that looked almost like regret.

But you knew better. You knew he would do it again. And again. And again. Because in his world, you were already dead. You just hadn't stopped breathing yet.

He did not speak. Neither did you. You lay on the cold stone floor with your torn dress twisted around your body and your wrists still aching from his grip and your thighs slick with the evidence of what he had done, and you stared at the ceiling, and you thought of nothing at all.

After a long time Aerion rose to his feet. He straightened his clothes with mechanical precision, adjusting his doublet, smoothing his hair back from his face. He did not look at you. He did not offer you a hand to help you up. He did not speak a single word of apology or comfort or explanation.

"Your brother will stand trial," he said, and his voice was the voice of a stranger, flat and cold and utterly devoid of the passion that had consumed him moments before. "For striking a prince of the blood. The sentence will be severe. How severe depends entirely on you."

He paused at the door, his hand on the latch, his back to you.

"If you try to see him again," he said, "if you try to contact him, if you so much as speak his name in my presence, I will have him executed. Do you understand? His life is in your hands. Remember that."

The remainder of the night passed in darkness. You did not move from the floor. You could not move from the floor. The torn silk of your dress had dried stiff and crusted against your skin, and you had not bothered to cover yourself. There was no one to see. There was no one to care. The moonlight crawled across the stone floor inch by inch, and you watched it the way a corpse might watch the shifting of its own shroud, with a detachment that went beyond despair into something vast and empty and still.

Morning came grey and cold through the narrow window. The sky outside was the color of old iron, heavy with clouds that had not yet decided whether to rain. You heard the castle waking around you. Footsteps in the corridor. The distant clang of the blacksmith's hammer. Servants calling to one another in voices too muffled to understand. The tourney, you remembered dimly. The tourney was still happening. Lord Ashford's daughter still needed her champion. The world was still turning, indifferent to the ruin of your life.

Someone brought food. You heard the door unlock, heard the tray scrape against the stone as it was pushed inside, heard the door lock again. You did not get up to look at it. The smell of bread and broth turned your stomach. You had not eaten since the puppet show, since before the puppet show, since the garden when Rhaenyra had found the pink flower and you had believed, foolishly and desperately, that everything would be all right.

The morning wore on. The light shifted. The clouds outside the window thickened and darkened and began to spit a thin, miserable drizzle that streaked the glass like tears.

And then, sometime in the afternoon, you heard the commotion.

It started as a distant murmur, a disturbance somewhere in the lower levels of the castle that grew louder and more urgent as it climbed toward your door. Shouts. Running footsteps. The clash of something metallic hitting stone. You lifted your head from the floor for the first time in hours, your neck aching, your vision swimming. Something was happening. Something was wrong.

The door crashed open. It was not Aerion who entered first but a maester, an old man in grey robes with a heavy chain around his neck and blood on his sleeves up to the elbows. Behind him came two guards, household men in the pale grey of Prince Maekar's service, carrying between them a litter on which lay a figure you recognized only by the silver gold of his hair.

Aerion. He was unconscious. His face was nearly unrecognizable. His lip had been split anew, a fresh gash that ran up toward his cheekbone. One of his eyes was swollen shut, the skin around it purple and black and glistening with some kind of salve. His chest was bare beneath a makeshift bandage that wrapped around his ribs, and the bandage was soaked through with blood, bright red and seeping, the color of life escaping. His right arm lay at an angle that was not natural, and his breathing was shallow and labored and made a wet, rattling sound that turned your stomach even as it ignited something else in your chest. Something you did not want to name. Something you did not want to feel.

You scrambled backward on the floor until your shoulder blades hit the wall. Your torn dress bunched around your knees. Your hands came up in front of you, a defensive gesture that was pure instinct, the instinct of a woman who had spent the night being broken and had no more pieces left to give.

"What," you said, and your voice came out as a croak, barely recognizable. "What happened? What is this?"

The maester did not look at you. He was directing the guards to lay the litter on the bed, his hands already reaching for the blood soaked bandages, already issuing orders about hot water and clean linen and milk of the poppy. But one of the guards, a young man whose face was pale and shocked and streaked with someone else's blood, paused long enough to answer.

"Trial of the Seven," he said, and the words meant nothing to you. "The prince demanded it. Against the hedge knight."

"Trial of the Seven?" The phrase was foreign, nonsensical, a collection of syllables that refused to resolve into meaning. "What are you talking about? What trial? What hedge knight?"

The maester looked up from his work at last. "The hedge knight," he said, and his voice was clipped and efficient, the voice of a man who did not have time for explanations. "Ser Duncan the Tall. The hedge knight demanded a trial by combat. The prince escalated it to a Trial of the Seven. Fourteen knights in the lists. The hedge knight's side won, but the prince was wounded. Gravely wounded. We have done what we can for the immediate injuries, but when he regained consciousness briefly, he insisted, quite forcefully, that he be brought to you. He said he wanted you to be his primary caretaker."

The words washed over you in a tide of incomprehensible information. Trial of the Seven. Fourteen knights. The hedge knight's side won. Dunk's side. Dunk had won. Your brother had won. Your brother was alive and he had won his trial and he was free, he must be free, because if the hedge knight's side had won the trial then the gods had judged him innocent.

But Aerion was on your bed with his ribs crushed and his arm broken and his face beaten into something barely human, and he had asked for you. Even after what he had done to you on this very floor. Even after the things he had said, the things he had called you, the violence he had visited upon your body. He had regained consciousness long enough to demand that you, and no one else, be the one to care for him.

You stared at the maester. The maester stared back at you, and something in his expression softened, just slightly, at whatever he saw in your face. Perhaps it was the bruises on your wrists. Perhaps it was the torn dress. Perhaps it was the way you sat huddled against the wall like a wounded animal that had learned to expect only more pain.

"I have done what I can for the immediate wounds," the maester said again, more slowly this time. "The prince will live, though his recovery will be long and painful. But he needs constant care. Someone to change his bandages, to administer his medicine, to watch for fever. He asked for you. Given his condition and his royal status, we are not inclined to refuse him."

You looked at the figure on the bed. The man who had raped you on the stone floor less than a day ago. The father of your daughter. The monster you loved. The prince who had promised to execute your brother if you so much as spoke his name. He lay unconscious and broken, his breath rattling in his chest, and you were being told that you would be his caretaker. That you would sit by his bedside and change his bandages and mop his brow and listen to him breathe.

The absurd cruelty of it was almost beautiful, in its way. A kind of poetry written in blood and bruises and the particular viciousness of men who believed they owned the women they had purchased.

"Leave us," you said, and your voice did not sound like your own. It sounded like the voice of someone much older, someone who had survived worse things than this and would survive worse things still. "I will care for him."

The maester hesitated. "My lady, there are instructions I must give you regarding the dressing of his wounds. The risk of infection is significant, and the milk of the poppy must be administered precisely. Too much will stop his breathing. Too little and the pain will be excruciating. Do you understand?"

"I understand," you said, though you understood nothing. You understood only that your brother was alive and free, and the man who had destroyed you was lying broken on your bed, and you were supposed to heal him. You were supposed to sit beside him and tend his wounds and keep him alive so that he could continue to own you, continue to threaten you, continue to hold your brother's life in his hands like a coin he might spend on a whim.

The maester gave you his instructions. You listened with half an ear, nodding in the appropriate places, filing the information away in a part of your mind that was still functioning, still capable of processing data and making decisions. Change the bandages every four hours. Watch for red streaks radiating from the wounds. Administer the milk of the poppy in doses measured by the small copper cup on the bedside table. If he wakes, give him water. If he develops a fever, send for the maester immediately.

And then they were gone, the maester and the guards, and the door was closed, and you were alone with him.

You stood in the center of the room for a long time, staring at the bed. At the rise and fall of his chest beneath the bloodied bandages. At the hand that lay limp and pale against the silk sheets, the hand that had struck you across the face, the hand that had pinned your wrists above your head, the hand that had held your chin and forced you to look into his eyes while he destroyed you.

You could let him die.

The thought came to you fully formed, as if it had been waiting in the back of your mind all along, biding its time. You could let him die. The maester had left you with the milk of the poppy and precise instructions about dosage. You could administer too much, or too little. You could neglect to change his bandages and let the infection take hold. You could hold a pillow over his face while he slept and press down until the ragged breathing stopped forever. There was no one else in the room. There were no guards at your door, not anymore. You could end this. You could end him. You could free yourself and your daughter and your brother with a single act of will.

You looked at the copper cup on the bedside table. You looked at the pillow beneath his head. You looked at your own hands, still bruised, still crusted with your own blood, still capable of doing what needed to be done.

And then you crossed the room, and you sat down in the chair beside his bed, and you began to prepare the first dose of milk of the poppy with hands that did not tremble at all.

If you let him die now, his father would investigate. There would be questions. There had been a maester here, and guards, and they had seen you alone with him. If Aerion died under your care, the blame would fall on you. You would be executed, or worse. And Rhaenyra would have no mother at all.

Not yet. But the knowledge was there now, a small cold seed planted in the dark soil of your heart. Not yet. But someday, perhaps. Someday, if the opportunity presented itself, if the circumstances aligned, if you could be certain of escaping the consequences. Someday, you might be free of him.

—

The days that followed blurred together like watercolors left in the rain. You were not permitted to leave the room. Aerion made that clear the first time you asked, your voice carefully neutral, your eyes on the floor. He had been awake for perhaps an hour, propped up on pillows that you had arranged behind his back with your own hands, his broken arm splinted and bound, his ribs wrapped tight in fresh linen. His face was still a ruin of purple and black and sickly yellow green, his lip still split, his eye still swollen half-shut. But his voice had lost none of its edge.

"Leave?" He had laughed, a humorless sound that turned into a wince as his ribs protested. "Why would you need to leave? Everything you require is here. Food will be brought. Water for washing. Fresh bandages from the maester. You have no reason to go anywhere."

"Aerion, please. I only want to see Rhaenyra. Just for an hour. Just to hold her and know she's all right. She must be so frightened. She's only two years old. She doesn't understand why her mother disappeared."

His expression had darkened, a cloud passing over the sun. "The child is fine. She is being cared for by the nurses. She does not need you hovering over her like a hen with one chick. What she needs is a father who is not an invalid, and what I need is a caretaker who does not spend every waking moment asking to leave."

"Aerion..."

"Enough." The word was a door slamming shut. "You will stay here. You will tend to my wounds. You will keep me company. You will not leave this room unless I give you permission. Is that understood?"

So you stayed. You woke when he woke, which was often, his sleep broken by pain and fever and the strange, feverish dreams that made him thrash and cry out in the darkness. You changed his bandages with the careful precision the maester had taught you, peeling back the old linen, examining the wounds for signs of infection, applying the salves and poultices with gentle fingers. You fed him broth when he could eat, spooning it into his ruined mouth one careful measure at a time. You helped him with the bedpan when he needed it, a humiliation that made his jaw tighten and his eyes go cold, as if his body's weakness were a personal insult you had somehow engineered.

You did all of this in silence, for the most part. He did not want conversation. He did not want to be soothed or coddled or reassured. The man who had craved praise like a drug, who had turned toward your words like a flower toward the sun, was gone. In his place was a creature of pure, distilled bitterness, a man whose humiliation had curdled inside him until it became something toxic.

He had lost. That was the core of it, the wound beneath the wounds. He had been beaten by a hedge knight in front of half the nobility of the Reach, and then he had demanded a Trial of the Seven, the most sacred and dramatic form of combat the gods permitted, and he had lost that too. His side had lost. The gods themselves had declared against him, had declared in favor of the dirt-smeared giant who had loosened his tooth and spilled his blood and stolen his dignity. Aerion Targaryen, the prince who had burned a man alive for making a joke, the prince who had broken a puppeteer's fingers for telling the wrong story, the prince who believed with every fiber of his being that he was a dragon in human form, had been brought low by a nameless hedge knight with hay in his hair and dirt under his nails.

And you, who had witnessed the beginning of that humiliation, had become the vessel into which he poured all his bile.

"I should have you hanged for being related to that oaf." His hand shot out and closed around your wrist, hard enough to make you freeze. "Why would a brother fight like that? Why would a brother look at a sister like that? Tell me the truth. Was he your lover before he was your brother? Did you share a bed in the slums of Flea Bottom, before I found you?"

The accusation was so vile, so utterly, grotesquely wrong, that for a moment you could not speak at all. You could only stare at him, at his swollen face and his blazing eyes and the jealousy that was consuming him from the inside out like a fire that would not be quenched.

"He is my brother," you said, and your voice was quiet and steady and utterly without the rage that was boiling in your chest. "My brother. My blood.Nothing more. Nothing less. I have never lain with him. I have never wanted to. The very thought is disgusting to me, and it should be disgusting to you too."

Aerion held your gaze for a long moment. Then he released your wrist and turned his face away.

"Finish the bandage," he said, and said nothing more for the rest of the day.

Sometimes, rarely, they brought Rhaenyra to see you. It was never for long. Ten minutes, fifteen, never more than half an hour. A servant would bring her to the door, and she would run across the room on her unsteady two year old legs, bewildered relief of a child who did not understand why her mother had vanished from her life. You would scoop her up and hold her against your chest and breathe in the smell of her, that particular sweetness of soap and milk and sunshine that you had missed like a severed limb.

"Mama," she would say, her small hands patting your face, your hair, your shoulders, as if reassuring herself you were real. "Mama, where did you go? I looked for you. I cried and cried but you didn't come."

"Mama was taking care of your father," you would say, and your voice would be steady even though your heart was breaking. "Your father is very sick, sweetling. He needs Mama's help. But Mama loves you. Mama thinks about you every moment. Do you understand? Every single moment."

She would nod, her small face solemn, and then she would launch into a breathless account of everything she had done since she saw you last. The bird she had seen on the windowsill. The game the nurses had taught her. The dreams she had dreamed. You drank in every word like water in a desert, memorizing the cadence of her voice, the animation of her expressions, the way her tiny hands moved when she was telling a particularly exciting part.

And then Aerion would stir in the bed behind you, and the servant would step forward, and Rhaenyra would be lifted from your arms.

"No," you would say, every time, reaching for her even as the servant pulled her away. "Please, just a few more minutes. Just a little longer. She's only just arrived."

"Prince's orders," the servant would say, and the door would close, and you would be alone with him again.

The nights were the worst.

During the day, Aerion was mostly manageable. Irritable, demanding, prone to dark silences and darker accusations, but manageable. You could distract yourself with the work of caring for him, the constant rhythm of bandages and medicine and meals. You could count the hours until the next time Rhaenyra might be brought to you. You could lose yourself in the small, finite tasks that kept your hands busy and your mind from wandering to places it should not go.

But at night, when the candles burned low and the fire died to embers and the only sound was the soft, labored rhythm of his breathing, the monster in him stirred.

It started on the fourth night. You had been dozing in the chair beside his bed, your neck cricked at an awkward angle, your body aching for the comfort of a proper mattress. You were dreaming of the garden, of Rhaenyra's laughter, of pink flowers crushed beneath bare feet. And then a hand closed around your forearm, and you were jolted awake with a gasp.

Aerion was looking at you from the bed. His eyes were fever bright in the near darkness, and his hand was hot and dry against your skin. The blanket had slipped down to his waist, and you could see the bandages around his ribs, the splint on his arm, the bruises that spread across his torso like storm clouds. But you could also see, in the shadows beneath the blanket, the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.

"Come here," he said. His voice was hoarse, rough with pain and desire in equal measure. "I need you."

"Aerion," you said carefully, "you're injured. The maester said you need to rest. You could reopen your wounds. You could..."

"I don't care what the maester said." His grip on your arm tightened. "I've been lying in this bed for four days. I've lost everything. My pride. The hedge knight walks free, and I am trapped in this room like a cripple. The least you can do," and his voice hardened on the words, "is give me this."

"You're not well. Please, just wait until you're stronger. I promise, when you're healed..."

"When I am healed, I will take what I want anyway." He pulled you closer, and you could smell the sourness of his breath, the stale sweat of his unwashed body, the cloying sweetness of the milk of the poppy that still lingered on his tongue. "But I want it now. I have spent four days flat on my back like a turtle overturned, watching you flutter around me with your careful hands and your careful voice and your careful eyes that never quite meet mine. I know what you think of me. I know what you think when you look at me. You think I'm a monster. You think I got what I deserved."

"No," you whispered, but it was a lie and you both knew it.

"Yes," he said. "You do. And I don't care. You can hate me all you like, in the privacy of your own mind. But you are mine.Now. Come. Here."

He could not be rough with you, not in his condition. His broken arm lay useless at his side, and his bandaged ribs prevented any sudden movement. But he did not need to be rough to make you feel the weight of your captivity. He directed you with his voice, that voice you had once praised and soothed and loved, telling you where to touch him, how to move, what he wanted from you. He could not take you the way he had on the stone floor, could not pin you down and force himself inside you while you sobbed and pushed at his chest. But he could make you take him in your mouth while he lay back against the pillows with his eyes half closed and his hand tangled in your hair. He could make you straddle him carefully, carefully, moving with the slow precision his injuries demanded, while his one good hand gripped your hip hard enough to bruise.

"That's it," he murmured, his voice thick with pleasure and pain and the strange, twisted satisfaction of ownership. "That's my good girl. My sweet girl. You know what I need. You always know what I need."

"Now you should rest." He was already drifting, the exertion combined with the milk of the poppy pulling him back toward unconsciousness.

"You're the only one," he mumbled, his voice slurring with sleep. "The only one who stays. The only one who doesn't leave. Don't leave me. Promise you won't leave."

You did not promise. You dried your hands on a cloth and returned to the chair beside his bed, and you watched him sleep, and you thought about the copper cup of milk of the poppy on the bedside table, and you thought about what it would be like to be free.

—

The servant came for you on the seventh day. You were sitting in the chair beside Aerion's bed, your hands idle in your lap for the first time in what felt like years. He was sleeping deeply, the milk of the poppy dragging him down into a place where even his dreams could not reach him.

The door opened without a knock. You turned, expecting another servant with a tray of food, another maester with fresh bandages, another summons from the nurses saying Rhaenyra was crying for you and would not be soothed. But the woman who stood in the doorway was not a servant you recognized.

"Prince Maekar requests your presence," she said. Her voice was flat, neutral, the voice of a woman delivering a message she did not fully understand. "You are to come with me immediately."

You stared at her. Prince Maekar. The man who had called you a whore to your face, who had forbidden you from speaking to his children, who had looked at you for years with an expression of cold, unwavering contempt. He had never once spoken to you directly, had never acknowledged your existence except as a problem to be managed. And now he was summoning you?

"Prince Maekar," you repeated, and your voice came out uncertain, almost afraid. "Why would Prince Maekar want to see me?"

The servant's expression did not change. "I was not told, my lady. Only that you are to come at once. Prince Aerion is sleeping. He will not miss you. Please, follow me."

You looked back at the bed. Aerion's chest rose and fell in the slow, steady rhythm of deep sleep. His good hand was curled loosely on the pillow beside his face, his fingers twitching slightly as he dreamed. If you left and he woke to find you gone, there would be consequences. There were always consequences. But the servant was watching you with her sharp grey eyes, and something in her manner told you that this was not a request. This was an order, delivered with the full authority of the man who ruled Summerhall.

You rose from the chair. Your legs were unsteady beneath you, your body still aching from the nights of sleeping in chairs and on pallets, from the strain of lifting and turning and tending a man who outweighed you by half.

The castle was quiet at this hour. The afternoon light slanted through the narrow windows, casting long shadows across the stone floors. You had not been outside Aerion's room in seven days. The world seemed larger than you remembered. Brighter. More dangerous.

The servant led you through corridors you did not recognize, up a flight of stairs, down another corridor, until you stood before a heavy oak door banded with iron. She knocked twice, a sharp, deliberate rap that echoed in the silence.

"The woman is here, my prince," she said.

A voice from within, muffled by the door, said something you could not make out. The servant pushed the door open and gestured for you to enter.

You stepped inside. The room was small, sparsely furnished. A table. A few chairs. A narrow window that looked out over the castle's eastern wall. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers, casting the room in shadow and flickering orange light. And standing near the window, one hand braced against the wall for support, a thick piece of wood tucked under his other arm to hold him upright, was your brother.

Dunk.

You stopped in the doorway as if you had walked into a wall. Your heart seized in your chest. Your breath caught in your throat. Your hands flew to your mouth, pressing against your lips as if to hold in the sound that was trying to escape, a sound that was half sob and half scream and half something that had no name at all.

He looked terrible. His face was a mess of bruises, purple and black and yellow-green, one eye swollen nearly shut, a gash across his cheekbone held closed with clumsy stitches. His lip was split in two places. His left arm was wrapped in a sling, and the piece of wood under his right arm was a crutch, crude and hastily made, the kind a maester might fashion for a patient who refused to stay in bed. He was leaning heavily on it, his massive frame listing to one side, his shoulders hunched with exhaustion and pain. He looked like a man who had been through a war and had only barely survived.

"Y/N," he said, and his voice was exactly the same as it had been when he was eight years old and lifting you from your mother's deathbed. Cracked. Hoarse. Full of a desperate, aching tenderness that made your chest splinter into a thousand pieces.

One moment you were standing in the doorway with your hands pressed to your mouth, and the next you were in his arms, your face buried in his chest, your shoulders shaking with sobs you had been holding back for years. His good arm wrapped around you, pulling you against him, and you felt the crutch fall away, felt him stagger and brace himself against the wall so he would not fall. He was so big. He had always been so big. Even broken and bruised and barely able to stand, he surrounded you, enveloped you, made you feel for the first time in longer than you could remember that you were safe.

"I've got you," he said into your hair, and his voice was breaking, splintering, cracking into pieces that sounded like your mother's laugh and your father's name and every promise he had ever made you. "I've got you. I've always got you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I looked for you. I looked everywhere. They told me you were dead. They told me they found your body in the river. They said you were burned beyond recognition. I believed them. Gods forgive me, I believed them."

"I didn't know," you sobbed into his chest. Your fingers were twisted in his tunic, gripping the rough wool as if he might disappear if you let go. "I didn't know they told you that. I thought you were still looking. I thought you would find me. I waited for you. Every night, I waited for you. I never stopped believing you would come."

"I'm sorry, i believed them. I believed you were dead, and something inside me died with you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, little sister. I should have kept looking. I should have known. I should have..."

"Stop." You pulled back just enough to look up at his face, at the tears that were cutting tracks through the blood and the bruises. "Stop apologizing. You searched for me. You believed what they told you. Any man would have believed it. I don't blame you. I have never blamed you. I only ever wanted you to know I was alive. I tried to send word. I tried so many times. But Aerion..."

You stopped. The name hung in the air between you like a curse. Dunk's expression darkened. His good arm tightened around your shoulders. "Aerion," he repeated, and the word came out like a growl. "What happened to you, Y/N? Where have you been all these years? How did you end up here, with him?"

You pulled away from him gently. Your legs were shaking. You found a chair and sank into it, and Dunk lowered himself awkwardly onto the edge of the table, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, his crutch clattering to the floor. He did not take his eyes off you. He watched you the way he had watched you when you were children, with that fierce, protective intensity that had once been the only thing standing between you and the darkness of the world.

"They sold me," you said, and your voice was quiet and hollow and did not sound like your own. "The men who took me. They sold me to a brothel on the Street of Silk. A high end place, for lords and merchants. The madam... she was cruel. She said I was special. She said I would make them very rich."

Dunk's hands tightened on your shoulders. His face had gone very pale beneath the bruises, and his jaw was clenched so hard you could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin.

"And then," you continued, "Aerion came, he bought me and never left me"

And then you told him about Rhaenyra.

"Her name is Rhaenyra," you said, and your voice softened on the name, the way it always did. "She's two years old. She looks like her father. But she's kind. She's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. She's the only good thing that has come out of any of this. And she's the reason I can't leave."

Dunk was silent for a long moment. His face was unreadable, a mask of bruises and exhaustion and something that might have been grief. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.

"I'll take you away," he said. "Both of you. You and the little girl. I'll find a way. I have friends now. A prince and a lord. We can protect you. We can hide you somewhere Aerion will never find you."

You shook your head. The tears were streaming down your face again, hot and silent, dripping off your chin and onto your hands. "You don't understand. He would never let me go. He would hunt me down like a dog. He would burn cities to the ground to find me. He told me... the night after the puppet show, when he came to my room, he told me the only way I would ever leave him was in a shroud. He meant it, Dunk. I have seen what he does to people who defy him. I have seen him cut a servant's hand for spilling wine on him. I have seen him laugh while a man burned alive. If I tried to run, if I took Rhaenyra and disappeared, he would never stop looking. And when he found me, and he would find me, he would kill me. He would take my daughter and he would kill me, and Rhaenyra would grow up without a mother, raised by a monster who would teach her that cruelty is strength and kindness is weakness and love is just another word for ownership."

"He would have to go through me first," Dunk said, and his voice was hard, the voice of a man who had faced seven knights in single combat and emerged victorious. "I lost you once. I believed you were dead for years. I mourned you, Y/N. I sat in that alley and I let the darkness take me because there was no light left in the world. And then I found you again, alive, here, in this place, with that man. I am not going to lose you again. I don't care if he is a prince. I don't care if he has a hundred Kingsguard. I will find a way to get you out of here. I will find a way to keep you safe. I swear it. I swear it on our mother's grave. I swear it on everything I am."

"Dunk." You reached out and took his enormous hand in both of yours. His knuckles were swollen and bruised, the skin split and scabbed over. The hands that had lifted you from the mattress where your mother had stopped breathing. The hands that had carried you into the cold morning while the other whores watched with pity. The hands that had promised you silk and lemon cakes and a world where no one would hurt you. "I want to believe you. I want to believe there is a way out of this. But you have to understand what you're risking. He will kill you. He will kill you without hesitation, without a trial, without anything but the cold satisfaction of removing an obstacle. And if you die, if you die trying to save me, I will have nothing left. Nothing. Do you understand? You are my brother. You are the only family I have in this world besides my daughter. I cannot lose you again."

He squeezed your hands. His grip was gentle, impossibly gentle for a man who had killed knights and broken bones and fought his way through horrors you could only imagine. "You won't lose me," he said. "I promise you, little sister. You won't lose me."

—

You ran. Egg had barely finished speaking before you were out the door and flying down the corridor, your heart pounding so hard you could feel it in your teeth, your lungs burning with every breath. You did not care if anyone saw you. You did not care if there were questions. All you cared about was getting back to Aerion's room before he woke, before he realized you were gone, before the fragile illusion of your obedience shattered into a thousand irreparable pieces.

You reached the door to Aerion's chamber and paused, pressing your palm flat against the wood, forcing yourself to breathe. You could not go in looking like a woman who had just run across half the castle. You could not go in looking like a woman who had been crying in her brother's arms. You smoothed your hair with trembling hands. You wiped the tears from your cheeks. You arranged your face into the careful mask you had worn for years, and you pushed open the door.

Aerion was still asleep. He had not moved since you left. His breathing was slow and steady, his bruised face relaxed in the depths of his drugged slumber. The milk of the poppy still held him in its grip. The bandages on his ribs were unrumpled. His splinted arm lay exactly where you had arranged it. He had not woken. He had not called for you. He had not noticed your absence at all.

You closed the door behind you and leaned against it, your legs threatening to give way beneath you. You had made it. You had made it, and he did not know, and you were safe. For now. For this moment. For as long as you could keep the mask from slipping.

You returned to the chair beside his bed and sat down, and you waited.

Days passed. Aerion healed. Slowly at first, then with the stubborn, grinding determination of a man who refused to be seen as weak for a moment longer than absolutely necessary. The bruises faded from black to purple to yellow-green. The swelling around his eye went down until he could open it fully again. The split lip closed, leaving a thin white scar that tugged at the corner of his mouth when he spoke. The ribs were slower to mend, the maester said, and he would need to be careful for weeks yet, but the splint came off his arm and he began to flex his fingers, to test the range of motion, to push against the limits of his own body the way he pushed against everything else in his life.

By the end of the second week, he could walk with a stick. You were the one who helped him take his first steps. His arm draped over your shoulders, his weight pressing down on you until your knees buckled, his breath harsh and labored against your ear. You walked him across the room and back again, step by agonizing step, your body bearing the burden of his in a way that felt like a metaphor for everything your life had become.

"Good," he said through gritted teeth when he finally lowered himself back onto the bed. “That's good. I'll be out of this room by the end of the week.”

"My father is sending me away," he had said, and his voice was flat, toneless, drained of its usual fire. "Lys. A city of whores and perfumed merchants. He calls it self reflection. A chance to contemplate my actions and return a better man. But we both know what it really is. Exile. He cannot bear to look at me. He blames me for Baelor's death, even though it was his own blow that killed him. He blames me for everything."

You had not known what to say, so you had said nothing. That was safest. That had always been safest.

"You and the girl will come with me, of course, Lys is said to be beautiful. Warm. The sea is the color of sapphires, and the women walk around in silks so fine you can see their skin through the fabric. You will like it there."

You would not like it anywhere he was. But you had smiled, because that was what you did, and you had told him that Lys sounded lovely, and you had turned away to prepare his next dose of medicine so he would not see the despair in your eyes.

After that, things shifted slightly. Perhaps Aerion felt guilty for uprooting you. Perhaps he was simply trying to secure your loyalty before the journey. Whatever the reason, he began to allow you to visit Rhaenyra in the nursery. Not for long, not unsupervised, but every day. Every single day, you were permitted to leave his chamber for an hour and go to your daughter.

It was the only thing that kept you sane. You would sit in the nursery with Rhaenyra on your lap, her small body warm and solid and alive against your chest, and you would listen to her chatter about the games she had played and the songs she had learned and the dreams she had dreamed. You would brush her hair and sing to her in the soft voice you used for no one else. You would tell her that you loved her, that you would always love her, that there was nothing in the world she could do that would make you stop loving her. And you would try very hard not to think about the fact that in a few weeks, a few months at most, you would be on a ship to Lys, and the only world Rhaenyra had ever known would disappear behind her forever.

It was on one of these days, when you returned from the nursery with Rhaenyra's laughter still echoing in your ears, that everything fell apart.

You pushed open the door to Aerion's chamber and stopped dead in the doorway. There were two guards in the room. Between them, kneeling on the stone floor, was the servant. The one who had come to you days ago. The one who had said Prince Maekar requests your presence. The one who had led you through the corridors to the room where Dunk was waiting.

She was barely recognizable. Her face was a swollen mass of bruises, her lips split in three places, her nose broken and crusted with dried blood. One of her eyes was swollen completely shut, and the other stared at the floor with the glassy, unfocused gaze of someone who had retreated so far inside herself that she might never find her way back out. Her dress was torn, stained dark with blood and sweat and things you did not want to name. Her hands, folded limply in her lap, were missing three fingernails.

You knew, in that moment, that you were going to die.

Aerion was standing by the window, leaning on his stick, his back to you. He did not turn when you entered. He simply stood there, silhouetted against the grey afternoon light, his shoulders rigid, his free hand clenched into a fist at his side.

"Close the door," he said. His voice was calm. Too calm. The calm of a sea that had gone flat and glassy in the moment before a tidal wave.

You closed the door. Your hands were shaking so badly you could barely grip the latch.

"Aerion," you said, and your voice came out as a whisper, thin and reedy and full of the terror you could not hide. "What is this? What happened to her?"

Now he turned. His face was the face you had seen on the stage of the puppet show, cold and cruel and utterly without mercy. His violet eyes were dark with a rage that had been simmering for days, waiting for this moment, and his mouth was a thin hard line that made the scar at the corner of his lip stand out white against his skin.

"Is it true?" he asked. His voice was still calm. Still quiet. Still terrible. "Did you betray me? Did you see that treasonous bastard of your brother?"

Your heart stopped. Your blood turned to ice. The world narrowed to the space between you and him, the fire in the hearth, the broken woman on the floor.

"Aerion, please, let me explain..."

"Did you see him?" He did not shout. He did not raise his voice at all. But each word was a hammer blow, driving the breath from your lungs, the strength from your legs. "This woman, this servant, has told me everything. How she came to you while I was sleeping. How she led you through the castle. How my father, my own father, arranged for you to meet your brother in secret behind my back. Is it true? Answer me. Is it true?"

Your mind raced, scrambling for a lie, a deflection, anything that might save you. But the servant was kneeling on the floor with her fingernails torn out and her face beaten to pulp, and you knew that whatever you said, whatever excuse you offered, he had already made up his mind.

"It was not my choice," you said, and your voice cracked on the words. "The servant came and said your father wanted to see me. I did not know it was a trick. I did not know Dunk would be there. I went because I was afraid to refuse. Please, Aerion, you have to believe me. I did not seek him out. I would never..."

"Liar." He spat the word like a curse. "You have been lying to me since the moment you saw his face in the pavilion. You have been lying to me while you changed my bandages and brought my medicine and performed your little duties like the devoted whore you pretend to be. All this time, you have been dreaming of him. Planning with him. Scheming behind my back. Did you think I would not find out? Did you think I would not have you watched? Did you think I was stupid?"

"No, I never..."

"Be silent." He took a step toward you, and the stick thumped against the stone floor like a death sentence. "I have listened to your lies for years. I have listened to you whisper that you loved me while your eyes were always looking somewhere else. I have listened to you promise that you were mine while your heart belonged to another. I am done listening. Now you will listen to me."

He gestured to one of the guards. The man stepped forward, his face still grim and impassive. You barely had time to register the movement before his gauntleted hand cracked across your face.

The blow sent you sprawling to the floor. Your head hit the stone with a crack that made stars burst across your vision. The taste of blood filled your mouth. Your ears rang with a high, thin whine that drowned out everything else. You tried to push yourself up, but your arms would not hold you, and you collapsed back onto the cold stone, gasping.

"Take her away," Aerion said, and for a moment you thought he meant you. But the guard was already hauling the servant to her feet, dragging her toward the door, her head lolling on her broken neck. The other guard followed, and then the door closed, and you were alone with the dragon.

Aerion stood over you. The stick thumped against the floor as he took another step closer. You could see his boots from where you lay, the fine black leather, the silver buckles shaped like dragon wings.

"Let me tell you what happens now," he said, and his voice was soft, almost gentle, the voice of a man explaining something to a child. "You are going to Lys with me. You are going to share my bed and warm my sheets and perform your duties as you have always done. You are going to smile and praise me and tell me that I am magnificent. You are going to be exactly what you have always been. My whore. My property. My thing."

He lowered himself slowly, painfully, until he was crouching beside you. His hand came down and gripped your chin, forcing your face up toward his. His fingers were cold and hard and utterly without tenderness.

"If you ever see your brother again," he said, "if you ever speak to him, if you ever so much as learn his whereabouts and fail to tell me, I will not kill you. No. Killing you would be a mercy, and I am not feeling merciful. What I will do is make you pray for death. Every single day, you will pray for it, and it will not come. Do you understand?"

You tried to speak. No words came out. Only a thin, animal whimper that you barely recognized as your own.

"And Rhaenyra," he continued, and your blood turned to ice water. "If you betray me again, if you give me even the slightest reason to doubt your loyalty, I will take her from you. Not just for a few days. Not just to the nursery. I will sell her. Do you understand? I will sell her to a brothel the moment she has her first bleeding. She will spend her life on her back with strange men between her legs, just like her mother before her. Just like the whore who whelped her. That is what happens to the daughters of traitors. That is what happens to the children of women who forget who they belong to."

"No." The word tore out of you, a desperate, animal sound. "Aerion, no, please, she's your daughter, she's your blood, you can't..."

"I can do whatever I want." His voice was flat. Final. The voice of a god passing judgment. "She is mine. You are mine. Everything you have, everything you are, exists because I allow it. Your life is a privilege. Your motherhood is a privilege. Your identity as a mother, as a daughter, as anything other than what I tell you to be, is a privilege. And privileges can be revoked."

He rose to his feet with a grimace of pain, leaning heavily on his stick. He looked down at you, crumpled on the floor at his feet, and his expression was utterly without pity.

"Your only duty is to me," he said. "You are not a mother. You are not a sister. You are not a person with a past or a family or a soul. You are my whore. That is all you have ever been. That is all you will ever be. Everything else, every moment you have spent with Rhaenyra, every breath you have taken as a free woman, has been a gift. A gift that I gave you. A gift that I can take away."

He turned to the guard who remained. The man had been standing motionless by the door, his face a mask of professional indifference. He had watched the whole thing without flinching. You wondered, distantly, how many women he had seen broken on the orders of the men who paid him.

"Incapacitate her," Aerion said. "I want her unable to walk. Not permanently. I still need her to be able to perform her duties. But I want her to remember, every time she takes a step, what happens when she forgets who she belongs to."

The guard stepped forward. You saw him coming, saw the purpose in his eyes, and you tried to scramble backward on the floor, your heels slipping against the stone, your hands clawing for purchase. It did not matter. He was on you in three strides, his hands closing around your ankle, and you heard yourself screaming, heard Aerion's voice saying something you could not understand, and then there was a sound like a branch breaking in deep winter, and your leg exploded into white-hot agony.

The world went away for a while. When it came back, you were still on the floor. The guard was gone. Aerion was still standing over you, leaning on his stick, watching you with an expression that was almost curious. As if your pain were an experiment he had conducted and he was evaluating the results.

"The maester will come to set the ankle," he said. "You will tell him you fell down the stairs. You will not mention the guard. You will not mention this conversation. You will not mention your brother or your disobedience. You will smile, and you will thank me for my concern, and you will continue to perform your duties. Is that understood?"

You could not speak. The pain was too much. Your leg was a column of fire, and every heartbeat sent a fresh wave of agony through your body. But you managed to nod, a tiny, jerky motion of your head, and that seemed to satisfy him.

"Good," he said. "I am glad we understand each other."

He limped to the door, his stick thumping against the stone with every step. He did not look back at you as he left. He did not offer you a hand to help you up. He simply opened the door and disappeared into the corridor, and you were alone.

Dunk had promised. Dunk had sworn on your mother's grave, on everything he was. And Dunk had never broken a promise to you. Not once. Not ever.

You held onto that ember as the darkness closed in. You held onto it as the pain in your ankle pulsed and throbbed and dragged you toward unconsciousness. You held onto it as the door opened and the maester's voice exclaimed in shock and you heard yourself saying, over and over, the lie Aerion had given you. Fell down the stairs. Fell down the stairs. Fell down the stairs.

And when the maester's hands began to work on your ankle, when the world went white with pain and then mercifully black with oblivion, you held onto it still.

“Oh,  I haven’t posted this photo on Facebook…” Her lashes, thick with black mascara, flutter with the realization. “Will you give me a second?”

“Sure,” you answer flatly, stepping back and leaning against the counter. You wonder if saying “no” would make a difference.

Her loud, cheerful “HAH” is followed by the rapid tapping of her thumbs, making you wonder if she’s already replying to comments. She must be retired by now, yet she’s one of those people whose age is difficult to guess. If only you could be that carefree. So many things wouldn’t matter. Your mind wouldn’t spiral. Perhaps your head wouldn’t have turned into a battlefield.

You can feel your phone watching you from across the kitchen table, curious too about what you’re going to reply to Cregan’s message: “I’ll be at our place tonight, at 7 PM. Join me?”

The moment he sent the first text weeks ago, part of you lit up, as if whispering, finally. As if this moment had always been meant to come. You hadn’t planned to talk about your writing progress, but message by message, you eventually opened up about your novel, set to be published at the end of the summer.

When he responded with “Glad your stubbornness persists,” it felt like a happiness injection. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long-lasting. The teddy bear, still sitting on the floor where you’d left him, no longer looked cheerful, like something in his buttoned eyes had dimmed.

“Done!” she announces proudly, as if she might’ve just been cast as Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend. 

“Cool, um—Mrs. Silvi, would you like to see the flat?”

The question stumbles from your mouth, an awkward attempt to bring the conversation back on track. The abrupt transition triggers your inner people-pleaser to press the red panic button: SHE’LL EVICT YOU.

Luckily, she doesn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, sure! Let’s see it!” she chirps, and for a second, you swear, if you hadn’t reminded her, she’d leave without inspecting a thing.

You trail behind her, your slippers making a soft shuffle. If it weren’t for the height difference, you could’ve mistaken yourself for her shadow. Her perfume, sweet and oriental, wafts through the corridor, swallowed eagerly by the faded beige walls. The same scent that haunted the air for weeks after your move-in.

She abruptly pauses at the living room threshold, causing you to almost bump into her.

“Jeez!” she exclaims, her hand dramatically flying to her chest. She couldn’t have spotted the cigarette spots on the windowsill from that far.

“What a lovely thing!”

You come up beside her to follow her gaze, unsure of where this is heading. Relief sweeps through you when she lifts a teddy bear so delicately it might be mistaken for a brittle antique.

You hover at the threshold awkwardly, as if it’s your first time in the flat.

“Where did you get it?” she asks, brushing off some invisible dust from his fur.

But before your lips even part, she resumes, “Oh, I know!”

Her sly smirk makes you furrow. By now, you know better than to try inserting a word into her monologue. It’s pointless. Even if you do speak, she’ll just talk right over you.

“It must be your gentleman.”

Your mouth forms a silent O, which prompts her to giggle. She clearly interprets it a “yes”. Sylvi settles onto the sofa, the plush toy in her arms like a newborn. When she nods to the side, you have no choice but to sink down beside her.

“How I miss those times when I was younger,” she says, her voice laced with longing, her confession aimed at Ewan. “I mean, I am still young, but back then... I had a whole parade of gallants fighting over my heart.”

Weirdly or not, you have no doubt about that.

“They would’ve done anything for me. Bombarded me with presents, flowers, skipped classes just to walk me home after the conservatory. But I was always waiting. Waiting for the one. You know?” She pauses, and the conversation seems to have taken a turn you weren’t ready for. “The right one.”

Her gaze lands on you, expectant. You nod, perhaps too quickly, a gesture meant to mask the unsettling twist in your chest. The idea of the right one feels foreign. You thought you knew it back then, with Cregan. But now… things are messier than ever.

Gazing down at the teddy bear only fuels the guilt further.

If you agree to meet Cregan tonight, you’ll end up betraying… Aemond.

“Of course you know!” she continues, misreading your silence, her large, round Cleopatra-style earrings jingling as she nods her head. Her gaze flicks down to Ewan, then back to you. “You’re the writer,” she adds, her hand gently covering yours, pulling you back to the present. Her skin is slightly wrinkled but warm and soft. “These things must come naturally to you.”

You force a smile, clearly not planning to share your concerns about your ex and the demon.

Her eyes narrow, just a flicker. It’s a look of knowing, of recognition, as if something gave you away. It prompts her to open up further.

“My husband—” You brace yourself, anticipating a long story about him.

“—passed away two years ago.” Her hand twitches, then withdraws, as if through the touch she could reveal more than she’s willing to.

You blink, caught off guard by the revelation. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

“I married him… God knows why, to be honest.” She shakes her head, a weak smile tugging at her lips. Her gaze drifts, not quite seeing the teddy anymore, but something else, someone else.

“He didn’t meet half the criteria for the man I thought I was waiting for. And yet… he was the most real thing that ever happened to me. Drove me terribly mad.” The way she stresses the word is supposed to showcase her anger, but it seems like the only reason for the emotion is his absence.

“Why?”

The most intentional question you’ve asked her. A small part of you, perhaps a naïve one, wonders if this conversation might help you make up your mind. But the answer, as always, isn’t what you expect.

She smiles, but not at you.

Her gaze is hazy, clouded with memory.

“Because he’s always been on my mind.”

She silently passes the teddy to you, and your breath hitches, just like the day Aemond first placed it in your hands. Suddenly, you understand what the button eyes have been trying to tell you.

What started as a “flat inspection” has drifted so far from its original purpose that the word almost feels absurd. After a few more moments of chatting about exes and travels, she declares that she’s seen enough and announces that she’s late for a visit with an old friend.

“I’m so late!” Sylvi says, slipping on her heels. You can’t help but admire her energy. Her babbling personality manages to soothe your ache.

“Oh—almost forgot! I brought you a present!”

“For me?” you echo, watching her dig through her giant tote bag with such enthusiasm that you wouldn’t be surprised if she pulled out a puppy.

“Ta-dam!” She holds out a small green frog statue. It’s heavy in your hands, oddly so for something so small. The frog’s mouth is parted in a smile, and its body is speckled with a few white dots, like someone added a final touch just before placing it on the shelf.

Before your brain can dive into the connection, she explains, “It’s from a sacred place I visited! Said to bring good luck and scare evil spirits away,” she adds, leaning forward with a wink.

After she leaves, you place the frog on the windowsill. Its small, cheerful figure looks serene, fitting into the interior effortlessly. In the mirror, you catch your gaze and the conspicuous questions. A blessing or a warning?

The light purple dress hugs your curves perfectly. The silk showcases you with the kind of grace that makes you pause, stunned by your own reflection.

Sunset light spills across the room, gilding everything in soft amber. Funny, this small, unremarkable apartment that once felt like a stopgap now glows with the warmth of something earned. Something lived in. It’s still small, yes. But now, it feels like you. Like home.

You spin, just like you used to as a child, your hem fluttering in the golden light. Back then, moments like this made you believe you were a princess, and your story could only end one way: happily ever after.

Life had… other plans. For every problem resolved, another one waits in the wings, and not every battle ends with you victorious.

You’ve made up your mind. It’s time to win the battle with Cregan. No meeting. That book is closed and put aside into the depths of your mental library. The bitter truth has finally come into focus: even if you got back together, things wouldn’t be the same.

You don’t owe him a message, or an explanation. Not even a line. He’ll figure it out.

And nothing, nothing, can stop you from going out for a light stroll in this beautiful dress, grabbing takeout from anywhere but that café he called “our place.” It was always his favorite, never really yours.

The inner sense of triumph settles into your chest, and for the first time, in what seems forever, it feels like you’re doing things right.

Suddenly, a sound. The phone is ringing. You glance at the screen.

Unknown number.

The vibration ripples through your hand, intensifying the anxiety within you. Your mind is like a beehive, each thought a stinging bee ready to attack no one but you. Could it be Cregan? A new number, a new tactic to reel you in?

You pick it up. You don’t speak right away. Neither do they. The silence on the other end is eerily still. You hear them breathing, waiting for you to make the first step, or rather, say the first word.

“…Hello?” Your voice is low, hoarse with hesitation.

No answer. Instead, something rustles. A faint sound like fabric brushing too close to a microphone. Your own “hello” comes back to you, faintly distorted, half a second later.

Your thumb hovers over “end call,” every instinct screaming to press it. You see the duration of the call, seconds ticking by, and with them, the silence. This isn’t Cregan. It’s not even close. And yet… something about the way the line hums, the strange rasp of their breath, pulls you in. You feel like your ears are pressed against the very mouth of something living, and if you’re patient enough, it’ll pour its secrets into your ear.

Then—

“Finally.” The voice bursts through the line so abruptly you jolt, your fingers fumbling as the phone nearly crashes to the floor. “I feared you’d never pick up!”

The reproachful tone in the feminine voice gives you a flashback to your lousy boss from a year ago.

“We close in 35 minutes. This is your last chance to pick it up.”

You blink. Pick up what?

“Hello? Miss, are you there?”

“Yes. Um—who is this?”

“LOTUS.”

“Who?”

“Dry cleaning service.” Her exhale is sharp. She’s clearly someone counting down the minutes before she can leave. “You’d better hurry.”

“It must be some sort of mistake…”

“Are you Miss Y/N?”

“…Yes.”

“Then no mistake. The item’s paid for. Urgent cleaning. Ready today.”

“I—I never gave anything in.” 

“We’ll be closed all weekend,” she stretches out her words, creating an image of a teenage girl, bored to death with her part-time shift. “You’d better hurry.”

“Check the number again,” you say, sharper than intended.

That’s definitely a prank, you think, ready to pull the phone away and switch it off. Then it comes again. A low, thin buzzing sound, not quite static. Like another line clicking in. Another listener. Your pulse quickens.

“It’s your errand,” a different voice rasps, a mechanical one, as though the words are being pulled through a walkie-talkie.

Your heart skips a beat. “What did you say?”

Breathing again. Not just heard. Felt warm against your skin. Like the line between the call and your room has blurred.

The static cuts off.

“It’s your errand.” The reply is firmer, and definitely human this time. “Are we clear now?”

The silence is shorter this time. Like a self-preservation instinct tells you to act on your best behavior.

“…Yes.”

You only have time to use the bathroom before you’re slipping into your Converse. Great. You look like a prom queen who ran away the last second. Your hands are shaking as you reach for your keys, they fall on the floor with a clatter, as if yelling, “hurry up!”

17:43. Thirteen minutes left. You’ve never been to this place. It’s impossible. “Shit.”

To your surprise, the GPS says it’s a 10-minute walk, which doubles your odds. But apparently, navigating a map while shaking with nerves isn’t your forte. Right in the middle of a pedestrian crossing, you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction and spin around.

Brake screeches. A car stops inches from you, close enough to see the Mercedes emblem.

“ARE YOU FUCKING DUMB?”

“Sorry!” You jog back, dragging your embarrassment with you.

The navigation arrow keeps switching directions like it’s toying with you. But then you see it—the sign: LOTUS. A simple black sign in white letters, tucked between a pharmacy and a pet store.

You rush inside, like a robber who decides to commit the crime at the last minute.

The manager shakes his head at you, his gaze revealing doubts about whether you can be trusted with whatever you're supposed to pick up.

Eventually, he hands you the suit. You assume it’s the one, judging by the black garment bag. You have no idea how to carry it. It’s heavier than expected, and definitely meant for someone much taller. You try lifting your arm to keep the garment bag from dragging on the pavement, but its weight pulls you down as your muscles quickly burn. You wonder if carrying a dead body would be easier.

The address attached to the suit cover tells you nothing. But AEMOND TARGARYEN, in capital letters, does.

Cars rush past, horns blaring at slow pedestrians and mindless drivers. Yet, amidst the noise, one thought rises louder than everything else: There’s no way three weeks have passed since the previous errand. What the hell is going on?

The taxi crawls through the gridlocked street so slowly, you start thinking you’d have made it faster on foot. The road is a graveyard of idling engines and quarreling drivers, each urging the others to move faster, stuck in a city that refuses to move.

The suit lies next to you, sagging and folded in a way that would probably make the dry cleaner flinch. You’ve violated the “carry upright” instruction in every imaginable way. He’ll know. Of course, he will. Do demons know how to iron?

The label taunts you. Not just the address, but the name.

Aemond Targaryen.

Isn’t that what Alys called him back then? Before you fell into the fog of nothingness. You were pretty sure it was his powers pulling you away from the conversation.

Something about this situation doesn’t feel right. All your feelings, thoughts, doubts, and concerns related to Aemond, the idea of what you could tell him, the desire to talk, it feels like it’s not going to be met halfway.

Vhagar. And now… you glance down at the garment bag again.

If he wanted an explanation or to talk, he would’ve already dropped by. No, what he’s after doesn’t seem like reconciliation, but rather what you asked for. Errands. Nothing more than that. To satisfy his pet, and now to fetch dry cleaning.

The sky is overcast when the taxi finally pulls up to the curb. A skyscraper looms in front of you. The glass-faced building already has a few lit-up windows, its rooftop disappearing into the clouds above. You squint upward, trying to count the windows. Impossible in such weather.

People come and go through the revolving doors, engrossed in their usual routine. But you hover on the pavement, feet nailed to the ground. That light, confident feeling blooming in your chest from earlier, the pride, the closure, has withered.

The mind-blowing sex might have been enough to blur your judgment, making you cultivate a false hope. But it was silly to assume it’d be the same for a demon. All your well-thought-out explanations to reconcile with him now disperse into the air. You need those. Aemond doesn't.

You shove yourself into the revolving door before you let yourself change your mind. It spins, and your heart races with it. You emerge into the lobby, blinking as though you’ve stepped through a portal. Another world.

The marble floor shimmers beneath your feet, reflecting the gilded glow from above, making it feel like you’re walking on water. Chandeliers are shaped like twisted vines; some coil into ouroboros loops—symbols of endless cycles. Even the air here seems burnished, gold-laced, as if you’ve wandered into a sacred place where nothing imperfect can survive.

You glance toward the guards as you cross the threshold, adjusting your grip on the suit. At this point, you’re not even sure you could come up with an adequate explanation of why you’re here. They're statues dressed up like men, carved in black and gray and glued to the entryway. Sphinx-like. You’re not sure they even breathe.

Each step toward the reception desk feels heavier than the last. The floor mirrors your hesitation, every reserved Converse-clad footfall echoing into a soft thud against the marble. Are they real? You wonder, scanning the rows of tall orange-hued trees by the main path, each one in a massive pot that likely cost more than your rent.

You don’t notice the moment you straighten the suit in your arms again, careful to hold it upright. The setting itself urges you to be perfect, like everything else in here. The ache in your bicep spreads, a quiet throb, but your face is composed like never before.

Congratulations. You wanted an errand. You got it.

“Um, hello…” you murmur as you near the desk, your words small against the vastness around you. The rich pink peonies glance your way, polite, graceful, as if they’re here to greet you most exquisitely.

The receptionist doesn’t move. Her gaze is fused to the screen, her fingers dancing in perfect tempo. For a moment, you’re unsure if you spoke at all.

“Elevators are to your left, miss,” she replies without looking up. Her French-tipped nails tap in a rhythm so precise you wonder if she once played piano. 

You glance toward the elevator. The number above it glows 1. Waiting. Inviting. Something about this place pulls at you, soft and glittering. Like a mermaid song. Sailors know better than to follow it.

“I—I don’t need the elevator.”

You drag your gaze back to her, shifting the suit to your other hand. Not the numb one. The fabric sticks to your palm. You're ready to curse the universe for this day. Because, of course, when your ex shows up and arranges the meeting, nothing goes well.

She finally looks up. Her hazel eyes skim your face, calculating, as if reading your entire history in one breath. Then her gaze softens. Sympathy, maybe. Though you utterly hope you don’t look half as bad as you feel. Her features are so symmetrical that it unsettles you.

“How can I help you then?”

“This is for apartment… 1099.” You squint at the label, though you repeated the number a dozen times in the taxi. You could probably say it if someone shook you awake in the middle of the night.

She types swiftly, clearly has been in this job a while, then says, “Aemond Targaryen.” It’s not a question, yet you nod cautiously.

Hearing his name aloud rattles something loose in your chest. You feel it behind you, a flicker of shadow just past your shoulder, but when you glance, there’s nothing. Only marble.

The building is too quiet. There should be so many residents, and yet it’s only you. You swallow, trying to keep your worries at bay.

“Do I leave it here?” you ask, trying not to sound rushed.

Her eyes narrow with a hint of suspicion. “Why not go up and give it to the owner?”

The question takes you aback, like you’re a cat caught up on the owner’s dining table. A soft ding sounds from the elevator, as if it, too, thinks it’s time.

“I—I can’t.”

She raises a brow, her nails tapping lightly against the table. A musician, for sure.

“Aren’t you the delivery?”

“No, I’m not,” you reply, biting your inner cheek. Once, you thought making a pact with a demon meant freedom from suffering. Turns out it’s just double hell.

“Well,” she shrugs, slipping seamlessly back into her customer-service smile, “there’s no note from Mr. Targaryen authorizing any delivery.”

“And?” you ask, gaping at her blankly.

The air thickens around you, faintly perfumed, like someone must’ve lit a candle somewhere nearby.

Her gaze locks onto yours, like this is some kind of contest, a challenge. Let’s see who blinks first. Before the silence turns any more awkward, she speaks. “I’m not allowed to accept it.”

There’s no mockery or cruelty in her tone. If anything, she sounds like someone who’s memorized protocol down to the footnotes. But it doesn’t help.

You feel yourself fraying. The pressure in your arm finally wins. The suit dips, grazing the pristine floor.

Your eyes snag on the neat little nametag pinned to her crisp blouse.

Floris.

“Excuse me—um—Floris, but I can’t and I won’t go to his apartment.”

You see her lips part in an attempt to object, but you act first, placing the suit firmly on the reception desk. Floris’ eyes widen, as if you’ve disrupted a sacred cathedral. You narrowly miss a slim porcelain vase, pale and trembling like it resents the disturbance, too.

“Miss, you can’t leave it here!” Floris snaps, halfway out of her chair now. To your strange relief, she looks human after all. She’s certainly not someone who chases rule-breakers. Still… if it came down to it, sneakers beat heels.

“Too bad,” you mutter, already turning away. You cradle your aching elbow like it’s a wound from the battle you’ve just won. “Guess Mr. Targaryen will have to bring his ass downstairs himself.”

You don’t wait to hear her outburst. The Sphinxes guarding the door stay still.

Good.

You can feel the tiny raindrops in the air, not quite a rain, more like a damp breath on your skin that carries the notes of relief. The droplets gather on your hair strands too, as if the weather is trying to calm the rage within you.

You take deep inhales and exhales, trying to return to your senses. The building is right behind you, but it doesn’t hold such power over you anymore.

The plan to take a taxi flops the moment you realize your phone has died. It was exactly 7 p.m. when it switched off. Maybe it’s for the better. No one will reach out to you this evening anyway. Though you doubt Cregan would be texting, “Where are you?” His ego wouldn’t let him do that.

People pass you in different directions. You close your eyes, imagining there’s no one but you. But it’s not that easy, not when a familiar voice sends goosebumps across your skin.

“Figured you wouldn’t drop by.”

Aemond’s voice is like a gentle kiss pressed against your cheek.

He’s right beside you, standing as if he’s always been there. Head tilted back, eyes lifted to the sky like he, too, is trying to make sense of the weather. Not a footstep. Not a sound. Just there. Classic demon style.

His outfit is simple— jeans, a black t-shirt. Something like a snake chain glints in the light, half-hidden under the fabric. He could never pass for a casual passerby. Not with that regal posture, quiet confidence, those never-blinking eyes, like he can’t afford to miss a second of life.

“Just like you,” you retort, trying to calm your silly, racing heart, which beats in hectic excitement.

Something in the air shifts, the way it always does when he’s near. Like someone drapes an invisible coat over your shoulders on a chilly day.

A low, velvety hum follows, almost a purr. He turns to face you, and when your eyes meet, it’s like those excruciating weeks of distance wash away.

Your anger simmers down, like sand slipping through fingers. You want to clench your fists to hold onto it, but you can’t. Not when he’s looking at you like that. Like it’s the first time.

His expression is unreadable. At first, almost bored. But then something shifts, a faint warmth seeps into that sapphire cold. Like staring at a blurred face in a crowd, only to recognize, a moment later, that it’s the dearest person in the world.

You’ll never understand how looking at someone can stir so much. Feelings bloom in your chest, drowning out reason, swallowing up words. The script you mentally rehearsed, the beeping of cars, the noise of the street…they all dull around him.

Suddenly, there’s a thought. Words spill out before you mull them over. Before you assess whether they align with your carefully crafted plan.

“Why didn’t you come?” It’s reproachful. Raw. Telling far more about your feelings than you’d like.

There’s not even a flicker of surprise on his face. It makes you wonder if the same question has been haunting him.

“I’m nothing but a name away.”

One day, you’ll reflect on that line — the aching beauty of it, the absolute devotion it implies. Yet today, the simplicity makes you frown. You feel like a child asking a huge, existential question, only to be met with an unoriginal adult response. 

Would you ever understand how it’s possible to want someone so much and still want to run?

His face stays neutral, the enviable calm of someone who’s either figured everything out, or is wise enough to never try.

I want to tell you so much, I don’t know where the first sentence starts and the last one ends.

A crease forms between his brows, faint but visible in the wash of headlights from the street. You might’ve missed it in daylight. A hint that he struggles to understand you just as much as you struggle to understand yourself.

At one point, it feels like someone turned up the heat. Your cheeks grow warm under his gaze. It’s too much. Now you understand why the waiter was so nervous in the café last time.

You haven’t practiced blinking—you want to say aloud, but given the time and circumstances separating you, you opt for a question instead.

“Are you trying to burn a hole in me?” you ask, folding your arms, fully aware of how defensive the posture is.

He tilts his head slightly, and now, somehow, he looks even more curious than before.

“Why would you say that?”

“God, not literally,” you mutter, shifting your weight. The idea of explaining figurative language to a demon is… oddly résumé-worthy. “It’s just… a phrase.”

“That’s a strange one.”

“Not really.” You shrug, pushing away the part of you that’s also wondering why anyone would come up with it. “Feels fitting for moments like this.”

He hums as if deep in thought, but his look carries a trace of disbelief. Does he think you’re mocking him?

Then his lips curl into the ghost of a smile. A loud tell that the menace is coming.

Before you can mentally prepare, he’s already a step ahead. And a step closer. His gaze, as hypnotic as ever, freezes you in place as he towers over you.

“Am I not allowed to admire you?”

Your lips part slightly, stunned by the casual audacity. By the proximity. By the way his eyes shamelessly track your mouth. Your strict no-kissing policy is now hanging by a thread.

His chest lifts with a deep breath, like he’s trying to stay in control, to hold on to the remnants of self-restraint.

First, he ghosts you. Then sends you on literal dry-cleaning errands. Now he’s shamelessly flirting?

Thoughts collide inside you like moths against a lit-up window at night.

“Goodbye, Aemond,” you say, turning sharply. Your sneakers squeak faintly against the wet sidewalk. Each step is an echo of your thundering pulse. You dodge a man in a business coat, slip around a couple tangled in PDA, heart hammering as if you’re outpacing sirens.

Don’t turn around. Don’t turn around. A silent mantra. Doomed to be interrupted.

“Would you like to take a taxi?”

Of course, he’s right behind you. His voice cuts through the traffic noise.

You glance sideways, he’s barely trying. One of his strides for every four of yours. For him, this is a stroll. For you, a sprint.

“I’ll walk,” you mutter. Then correct yourself mentally. Sprint.

“Good choice.”

The way he says it stirs a memory: that same shade of praise in his voice as that night. Of all times for that image to flash: you’re on all fours, panting under him, his eyes devouring you in the mirror. This is peak appropriate.

The pressure against your chest is incredible, as if the flashback knocks all the air out of your lungs. Getting hit by a car doesn’t sound like such a terrible alternative right now. Instead, you nearly miss a step and almost collide with a garbage bin, but his hand catches your wrist, pulling you closer in a smooth, automatic gesture, like he saw it coming all along.

You only cast him a look, as if to say: I’m still angry. But his gaze is fixed on the path ahead.

A new tactic?

Neon sighs. Laughter. Siren.

You mentally name each sound, each sight, just to drown out the noise inside your head. To calm the feelings in your chest.

You pass a kiosk, where the mingling scent of greasy meat and fried onions curls around you. The combination is far from appealing, but your stomach tightens. Right. You skipped dinner.

“You don’t have to walk with me, you know?” You say it without turning. God knows what might be in his eyes.

He stays silent a bit longer than usual, as if your question deserves careful consideration before being answered.

“I thought you’d want to compensate for my absence,” he finally says, slipping behind you and brushing past a woman steering a baby stroller.

A cluster of people waiting at the traffic light clogs the path ahead, funneling you both into a narrow gap, pinned by his presence. He stands close behind you, his taller frame pressing warmth against your upper back. You swear you can feel its steady rise and fall.

You lift your gaze. Yep, he’s that close.

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” Your brow furrows.

“You pointed it out,” he says, leaning closer. You can practically feel his breath against your ear. A familiar scent, forest after rain and cigarettes, engulfs you. Soothing, grounding, even amidst the smog and street food.

“Minutes ago,” he adds, clarifying.

“That was just an observation. Not… an invitation.” You bite the tip of your tongue.

“Mmm.”

You shoot him a sharp look. He clearly interprets it in his own way. If only you could peel that smugness off him and kick its ass.

You resume walking, only to pause at the corner, hesitating.

Were you meant to pass the bakery? No? Then this way is—

“Left,” he says, effortlessly correcting your course, or rather, prying into your thoughts. “Unless you’ve changed apartments.”

You curse under your breath, but Aemond is already heading in the right direction, unbothered, clearly enjoying the walk. At one point, you understand those poor kids who throw toys at their parent’s back.

“The night wandering random neighborhoods, or a walk with me?” he calls back, now walking backward, so elegantly it’s like he’s on a catwalk. The playful smirk decorates his bow lips, his hands tucked casually into the pockets of his dark jeans. Yes, the audience would drool over him. “Your choice.”

You check your phone. The screen stays black when you press the button. Just your reflection stares back—a lost puppy.

“Why do you even bother?” you ask, catching up. Your breath is uneven, of course, he didn’t slow down to wait for you. Half a step separates you, but the pavement narrows, the crowd surges, and you bump into him lightly. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t even glance back. Still, you can’t shake the feeling that something else is on his mind, something he’s carefully keeping you shut out of.

“Weren’t you the one who wanted my ass downstairs?” he replies, amusement blooming across his face, easing your suspicions. Of course, he’d been nearby, listening in.

You click your tongue. “I knew you relished my suffering.”

“On that, we disagree,” his voice dips, just like it always does in the most intimate moments. “Your pleasure tastes better on my tongue.”

The double meaning hits like a sucker punch. Your breath catches.

One thing is certain now: you could never play by the rules you’ve set. The “just an errand” clause only works when he’s not around. His presence short-circuits your logic. When a match meets gasoline, fire is inevitable.

“The errand’s earlier than three weeks,” you say, a weak attempt to change the subject. To regain control.

“Is it?”

You glance at him, trying to gauge the sincerity of the question. His face is unreadable. Just a glint in his eyes, unrelenting, like a storm. Could a demon lose track of time?

“Aha,” you mutter, shifting closer as a noisy group of teenagers passes. Your hands brush. And for a moment, his broad palm turns outward in a silent, warm, irresistible invitation.

A gesture? Or a trick of your mind?

You can’t tell what’s real anymore, what’s conjured by your fantasies.

You cross your arms over your chest, pulling back like a scaredy-cat. The cringe flares through you, but not Aemond. He’s poised. Only his fingers twitch slightly, an unconscious attempt to reach for something already gone.

The stairwell smells of stone and old paint, slightly damp. Too narrow for two to walk side by side. His footsteps echo behind you. Gods, you can feel his warmth, draping over your back like delicate lace.

You don’t ask what he wants. You wouldn’t be surprised if he vanished the moment the door clicks open.

But a small part of you hopes he doesn’t.  Maybe, just maybe, he harbors unresolved matters, too.  Maybe now’s the time to confront them.  To dot all the I’s.

Aemond slips past you, a fleeting brush, like a cat too proud to ask for pets. Ironic, you think, as the key clinks against the shelf. This might be the first time he’s truly entered through the door.

He pauses at the threshold of the living room. One shoulder leans into the doorframe, gaze slicing through the dark like it’s searching for something already known. You flick on the hallway lamp. The dim glow spills outward, casting fractured shadows like veins across the walls.

You toe off your shoes slowly, almost hesitantly, as if trying to win some time before the inevitable. Your stomach tightens unpleasantly, your whole body anticipating the conversation. Do you launch into your rehearsed speech? Or hold your ground, demanding answers?

Why is it so cold?

Steam rises from your parted lips. Before the words can leave your mouth, a sound registers from the living room.

Once. Twice.

A scrape. A rustle. Muffled. Something faintly reminiscent of the noise on that line.

You stand beside Aemond, frowning toward the dark. The forest-dark has seeped in through the windows, swallowing everything.

Again, a rustle.

A bird?

You go still. That animal stillness, the kind that comes when your brain is calculating: fight or freeze. Your hand inches closer to Aemond's, seeking protection.

Something’s wrong. You glance at Aemond.. Whatever’s waiting in the dark doesn’t seem to faze him, and probably poses no threat to you.

“Go ahead,” he says, chin tilting toward the switch. His voice is calm. Too calm. Not smug, not mocking, just… off. Almost like the very first night you met.

You hesitate, fingers hovering over the flicker like you’re about to touch a hot stove.

Flick.

You close your eyes. The light is too bright, or maybe this is just one of the ways you try to protect yourself from whatever is in there.

But nothing prepares you for it.

You cover your mouth with a hand, but the gasp escapes anyway.

In the center of the room sits a man, bound to your chair. His head lolls forward, swaying slightly, like a broken pendulum trying to remember how time moves. His eyes, still clouded, scan the room in jittery bursts, as if everything blurs and flows.

Then his gaze snags on yours.

Cregan.

The man you used to love.

You’re the catalyst, the final wake-up call that makes his eyes widen in horror. The plot twist in a nightmare he never imagined you’d be part of.

Chains wrap around his chest, arms, and legs, metal gleaming as he jerks against them in a futile attempt to break free. His protests die in his throat, stifled by the gag; his screams reduced to the muffled bellowing of a wounded animal calling to a pack that’s already left it behind.

There are moments in everyone’s life when the body moves faster than the mind. When instinct overrides thought. When there's no time to read the room, only to act.

“Oh gods, Cregan!”

Adrenaline kicks into your system like a punch. You drop to your knees before him, tugging at the chains. The metallic rustle fills the room, clinking sounds too cheerful, like a parrot that won’t shut up during a funeral.

The knots are savage. The locks, iron-heavy. A collar, thick and tight, clasps around his throat like a leash.

Sweat drenches his skin. His dark hair clings to his forehead in damp strands. His chest heaves with sharp, rasped breaths like he’s just run a marathon. You haven’t seen him in almost six months, and in all that time, he’d always been composed.

The calmness is now washed away.

“Aemond!” you cry. “Help me!”

You yank at a lock, knuckles whitening. A chain jerks taut with a creak, and Cregan groans behind the gag, flinching. One wrist is bleeding beneath the metal, the skin broken. You’re only making it worse.

Sweat, iron, and now blood fill your nose, sharp and acidic. And under it all, a sour rot: fear.

“Shit, hold on,” you whisper, trying to swallow the nausea rising in your throat. “We’ll get you out, okay? We’ll fix it, just—”

You reach out for the gag. Your hand freezes midair. Inches from Cregan’s mouth.

At first, it feels like invisible needles prick your skin. But then... nothing. Your arm goes numb. Paralyzed. You stare at your fingers, willing them to move, but they don’t. It’s as if your brain has forgotten how to perform the simplest command. Nothing comes but a reluctant twitch.

Cregan’s eyes go wide, darting past you over your shoulder, toward Aemond. He shakes his head in tight, panicked jerks, humming a warning you can’t understand. But the desperation is unmistakable, like he’s just realized something you haven’t.

When your arm finally responds, it recoils violently, curling into your chest. Your skin is cold. If you didn’t know better, you might think you’d plunged your limb into a bucket of ice water.

What the hell...?

You rise slowly, turning to face the only explanation possible.

Aemond hasn’t shifted from the doorway, but his posture has changed, no longer relaxed. Arms folded. Muscles drawn taut beneath black fabric. His lips pressed into a flat, unforgiving line, like he’s enduring the scene that revolts him.

“This isn’t funny.” You barely recognize your own voice, your hand still clutched to your chest.

“Why not?” His gaze drifts lazily between you and Cregan. “You and your long-lost love. A touching reunion.” There’s not an undertone of sincerity, more like he’s studying two insects trapped beneath a glass.

Your mind stutters, fails to form questions; every possibility is too grotesque to voice. The world’s logic breaks down. You clench your fists until your nails bite into your skin. If it’s a dream, panic will wake you up. Your skin prickles, but the vision doesn’t break.

“Aemond, did you—”

He tilts his head, a serpentine movement, without a blink. He patiently waits for you to voice the question he already knows, he can hear it ringing in your mind.

“Did you do this?” You ask, nodding toward Cregan.

A muffled cry bursts through the gag. Cregan thrashes in the chair, chains clattering like bones. He answers for Aemond, panic and fury pouring from him in wordless rage.

A nervous laugh bubbles up from your chest as you press your hand against your forehead. Only now do you notice Cregan’s wearing your favorite t-shirt. He clearly thought you’d meet. Sadly, the circumstances are different.

“This is insane,” you mutter, scanning the room, hoping to find confirmation of your suspicion. This can’t be real. Your shoes, your coat, the dresses. The teddy bear lies on its side, its back turned to the chaos, like it can’t bear to watch.

“Unclasp those.” You point at the chains. Aemond is painfully still.

“Now,” you add louder, but the word comes out desperate.

Cregan strains against the bindings, chair legs screeching across the floor. Futile. If he keeps this up, he’ll tip and split his skull open.

“Cregan, don’t.” You reach for his shoulder in a soothing gesture.

And Aemond...

There it is. That smile.

Not wide. Not obvious. You’ve known him too long not to see it. Just a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth, savoring the moment, feeding off the suffering.

It ignites something in you. A rush of anger, impossible to ignore.

Before you can even process it, you’re at his side, grabbing his forearm with every ounce of strength you can muster, tugging him toward you. You can’t stand him standing there, motionless, detached, like a theatre spectator or a twisted statue crafted solely to haunt you in sleep and waking life.

“Why are you doing this?”

He looks down at your hand. Small, thin wrist, too weak to make a difference. Then his eyes lift to yours, and for the first time, you feel it. A look that makes you recoil, a look that speaks louder than words.

Pathetic.

Your hand falls limp by your side, still burning with the warmth of his skin, a mark you can’t rub off.

You trace the familiar facial features that have become so dear to your heart. The twitch of his lips, a movement he might have learned from another human once, or maybe something wholly his own. You’ve come to understand that it means something, some flicker of emotion within him. And now, more than ever, you ache to know what it means.

“Aemond…”

Your voice trembles with every memory, every warm feeling you ever had for him. Does he remember the teddy bear? The pineapple pizza argument? The sleepless nights? This room is filled with fragments of you, and now pieces of your heart are scattered across the floor beneath you as you appeal for his mercy, while he remains silent.

But his face betrays nothing. It’s as though the Aemond you once knew is no longer there but sealed behind walls, leaving only a stranger in his place. Aemond, who could once read your thoughts, can’t even see the pain written in capital letters all over your face.

He straightens, taking a step toward you. His thumb gently nudges your chin, guiding your gaze to his. The touch is soft. Yet it hurts.

“Don’t you know, my little dove?”

Your chest tightens. That name, said in that voice, soft, slightly hoarse. You hadn’t realized how much you missed it until now. You lean into his touch, giving in, instinctively. Foolishly.

Only to be met by the cold, controlled realm of his reign.

“I’m doing it for you.”

For me?

Your lashes flutter. Tears fall, uninvited, like rain from a sky that didn’t mean to cry. They land on his hand. Aemond stares at the droplets, inspecting them like they’re something foreign, something wrong. The touch you leaned into, sought comfort in, recoils. His hand jerks back, and his face shifts, not with compassion, but with something else: unease, or is it aversion? Like your tears burn him.

He doesn’t wipe them away. Instead, he shakes his hand with a quick, dismissive flick. As though your pain is something to be rid of, something filthy.

Aemond brushes past you without so much as a glance, as if you’re no longer worth his attention. His shoulder grazes your hand. The contact is fleeting, yet it stings.

You’ve never been in control. That’s a statement.

Cregan abandons his futile struggle the moment Aemond approaches. Whether it’s fear, or some inhuman force pulsing off Aemond’s very skin, he goes still. Not a twitch. Not a word. Only a sharp, ragged breath betrays that he’s still here.

“I don’t understand,” you whisper, your throat burning, as though you’ve just swallowed glass.

Aemond reaches for the chains. One touch, and the metal groans. The links uncoil, loosening like a serpent unwrapping itself from its prey, just enough to let Cregan draw breath. He leans back, spine pressed hard to the chair, as if trying to retreat into it. He doesn’t know what Aemond is. But he knows it’s not something human.

“We wouldn’t want him to choke, would we?” Aemond could sing a lullaby in that voice.

He begins to pace behind the chair, hands clasped neatly at his back, as if measuring the room from the mirror to the far wall. Each step stretches Cregan’s agony, each step a cruel echo of the final moments before a judge pronounces the sentence. A judge who takes his time, savoring the weight of the punishment.

For mercy shall not be found here.

He halts behind the chair, sudden as a stopped clock. The time has come. His long fingers, once delicately tracing the curve of your waist, the softness of your thighs, now clutch the top rail like a weapon.

His shadow swallows Cregan whole, dark, unnatural. A reminder that whoever stands before you is something other.

You take a deep breath, only to inhale more dread. You search for words, for an explanation, for this madness to end. With every passing second, your headache grows, as if ivy is coiling inside your skull, its thorns piercing deeper.

“That’s who you wanted, isn’t it?”

Aemond’s voice cuts through the haze in your mind, meaningless. His mouth pulls tight at the sight of your blank stare, a flicker of distaste crossing his face as his gaze drops to Cregan, like he can’t quite believe that this trembling figure is the man you could have sold your soul for.

“Before we made the deal, you wanted him.”

“But—” you move forward, just a step, and the world tilts. The floor lurches, or maybe it’s just your mind fracturing. Yes, you wanted Cregan. But why would Aemond do this? Why now?

“You said I had to choose,” you manage, grasping at the fading thread of reason.

Aemond shrugs.

“I’ve changed my mind.”

His answers are simple, quick, businesslike. Let’s get it done. Nothing in his posture or voice suggests he might be bluffing, or telling the truth. Yet if all feels like a meticulously staged performance, like everything around you is designed to make you believe this twisted story is real. Or is it not?

Aemond stands there, perfectly still. An unyielding, unnatural force. A grace that feels too perfect for this world. Someone who stands above all that is mortal, all that is petty and fragile.

How can someone so beautiful be so lethal?

“He’ll be yours. Just say it.”

Demon speaks in a sweet, luring voice that could make one follow him straight into hell.

“Why?” A question, no more than a whisper.

The silence stretches out like a field of scorched flowers.

But your entire body trembles, the delicate fabric of your dress offering no shield against his relentless presence.

Just give me the truth. Please.

You’re not sure if he hears you, but then there’s the faintest glimmer that something softer stirs within him. A spark, warm, familiar. Aemond’s gaze dips for a brief moment, and a subtle spasm tugs at his features, as though your pleas have become crows in his mind—loud, shrill, their croaks mocking: See. See what you have done.

His fingers rise to his temple, brushing it like he might scare them off. In that instant, you feel the crushing weight of your headache ease, as if part of your agony has passed to him. Like a crack in the dam letting the river flow, leaving you momentarily lighter.

But the shadow of softness is fleeting, dissipating before you can grasp it. Like a hangman remembering the gallows. His sapphire eyes darken, as though the sea is being smothered by ice, the depths concealed, sealed beneath a frozen surface.

Ice that would shatter your bones.

Ice that would leave blood in the snow.

No one survives winter like that.

“All those excruciating feelings of yours…” The confession, or rather a verdict, is announced, cold, detached. There’s no hint of sympathy, no trace of remorse. “I’m fed up with them. With you. I don’t want to feel your longing anymore.”

Longing.

That bitter ache that has filled your days, your nights, these endless, hollow weeks. It wasn’t just a feeling. It was like radiation dust, clinging to your insides, poisoning you with every breath. It burned through your lungs, lodged in your bones, dulled every dream, and infected every thought with a hopeless ache. A torture, without him. 

Hell. 

You feel like you’re drowning in it, and all you want is to pull him back into the warmth, share it with him.

But Aemond? He wants nothing of it. He wants you out of his veins.

The next blow lands with brutal finality, before you can even form a word, a protest, a plea. He can’t afford you taking the reins, can’t risk you disrupting the plan he’s so meticulously crafted.

“I figured Cregan should suffice.”

His words come out flat. Matter-of-fact.

Everything clicks into place. Aemond has twisted it all, misinterpreted your longing in the most cruel, distorted way possible. Like in a math equation, he’s taken your numbers out of it, replacing them with his own.

You might be the one who sentenced both of you to this end. But he... he’s the one here to pull the guillotine.

“You… you made him contact me?”

Aemond laughs, but it’s no longer the laugh of a god, or a devil. It’s the laugh of a madman. A wild creature handed matches in a world soaked with gasoline.

You glance at Cregan, a silent plea in your eyes, but his gaze offers nothing, only regret.

“Oh, the bastard wanted it,” Aemond spits, his teeth grinding. Fingers, or something sharper, dig into the chair’s back. The wood creaks beneath his grip. It might be the chair that will break now or Cregan’s neck.

Tears blur your vision again, but this time they sting as they streak down your cheeks. This time, no one is there to catch them.

Cregan’s interest and sincerity you fell for was just a… performance. A trick. Curated by Aemond.

Whether you’d said yes or no, it didn’t matter.

Cregan was always going to end up here. A twisted early birthday present, rewrapped in chains. Not a man with agency. A trick to fill in the blank in Aemond’s story. The story he’s made for you.

Aemond doesn’t see your heartbreak. He chooses not to.

He leans down beside Cregan, as though he could tear his throat apart with his teeth.

“Didn’t you want it, Cregan?”

Cregan has thought about you. The warmth of your body. The softness of your touch. You’ve crossed his mind more than he’ll ever admit.

Whatever Cregan thinks about you no longer matters to you. But it matters to Aemond. It feeds his rage, urging him deeper into his cruelty.

“You can nod.” Aemond, a thoughtful prompter, encourages Cregan to nod frantically, his eyes flicking to you without meeting your gaze.

The pulse hammers in the side of Cregan’s neck, the veins taut with pressure, as if they might burst. If Aemond doesn’t kill him, fear will.

“He just needed a… push.” Aemond wrinkles his nose, as though the thought, or Cregan’s smell, repulses him.

He pulls back again, retreating to your writing table like a beast caged too long. His fingers brush the edge of your work, trailing across the pages, over your hurried handwriting. As if looking for something to anchor him.

What feels like a nightmare to you, to Cregan, isn’t even half the hell Aemond could unleash. This is restraint.

“You’re… disgusting,” you breathe out, but no phrase can match your fury. Your grief. Your despair.

Aemond doesn’t flinch, much to your disdain. His eyes remain on the paper in his hand, scanning the outline of the world you built. The one he wasn’t meant to be part of.

But he is.

With Cregan, the words hardly became sentences. But Aemond…Aemond makes the stories bloom. He’s a long-awaited spring in a land punished by harsh, eternal winter. The thaw that ruins and renews all at once.

“And yet… I was the one who came when no one else listened.” 

He lets the paper fall back onto the table. The flutter is loud, as if the words are breaking down against the wooden surface, their meaning scattered all over the floor.

Cregan glances at you, his expression muddled with confusion. He’s probably started wondering if you’re the reason for this menace. But explaining anything to him is the last thing on your agenda.

“It was a mistake.” The weight of your words is softened by the hurt.

Aemond chuckles, and the room darkens as if in response, shadows listening to their master.

“I’m willing to give him to you on a silver platter. There’ll be no other suggestion,” he coaxes. But there’s something under it, a thin thread of weariness in his gaze.

You look at Cregan. He probably has no clue what’s going on. The meaning of your conversation must be totally lost on him.

And if Aemond untied him, would he even stay of his own free will? Would you want him to stay?

Back then… if you had chosen Cregan over your writing, would this still have ended in ruin? Would it still hurt this much?

You wipe your cheeks, hiding away the remnants of hurt. The gesture is clumsy, trembling. At such points, you disdain being nothing but a human.

“I don’t want it this way.”

Demon or not, he won’t write your story for you.

Something flickers in Aemond’s gaze.

Confusion. Real. Rare. He reads people like maps, but not now.  Or maybe he never did. Maybe his ability to see into a human mind only gave him control, not the understanding of their complexities.

“Alright,” he snaps, his composure fraying at the edges.

He moves toward you, each of his steps stealing the light, his shadow swallowing it whole.

“Then fucking stop this torture,” he growls, his words laced with poison, but deeper, underneath, you feel it. Despair. His earlier words echo in your mind: “The stronger the bond, the more influenced a demon is.” And, as if to prove your suspicion, he adds, “Stop sending this ache through our bond.”

One step, and your back hits the wall. Another step, and there’s no distance between you. He’s close enough for you to see the tremor at his jaw. He’s a fire ready to consume everything in his path.

It shouldn’t matter to him at all what you feel. But if it does…

Your hands press to his chest, not to push him away, but to steady yourself. You rise onto your toes, eyes locking with his, because his eyes have never lied to you.

“Ache or not, why do you care?”

Aemond stiffens, as if you’ve become Medusa and he’s been foolish enough to meet your gaze.

For this question alone, for the implication within it, he could kill you.

His eyes hollow out. Become black wells.

The abyss, staring back.

Hell, burned to ash.

Why do I care?

The question he’s been asking himself ever since your last meeting. To care had never been part of his design. A function he’d never had. Until you came.

At first, it was just a glitch. A symptom, mild and unassuming, which he chose to overlook. Then it turned into a disease. It grew within him, cell by cell, day by day, until it was too late.

He feeds off the emotions of others. That’s the bargain. That’s the way. But your yearning? It poisons him. It robs him of strength and satisfaction, like suddenly all other emotions dull, rot.

He blames you for it all. This weakness, this feeling, couldn’t possibly be his.

You gave it roots. Planted something unnamed inside him, a feeling that made itself at home. And he knows nothing about such things. Every ounce of knowledge he’s gathered from humanity feels useless, because there’s the shocking truth: humans don’t truly understand it either. They give it names: love, affection, devotion, and a million others. But no one truly holds power over it.

He figures out quite soon that to let the feeling live, he’d have to kill his essence so this virus could thrive in his body.

To let the feeling die, he’d have to smother you with his own hands.

But as long as there’s a deal, nothing can tear you both apart. Nothing can tear you out of his system. Not even this outrageous, disgusting ache.

So he goes for a deal that brings him even more disdain. The only way to set himself free. So he shoves Cregan into your arms to shut up the gnawing ache in your chest. Perhaps his own would shut up for good, too.

For he is a demon. Bound. Chained to the human he can’t shake. To you. Your tears are forever imprinted on his hand. Salt etched into skin. And he’ll cherish it.

But worst of all, you’re the human who longs for someone else.

You are the flower that blooms again each morning, greeting him with colour and scent, after he spent the night before uprooting you.

You are his mirror. And what he sees in you… it sickens him. Because when your ache mirrors his own, he can’t think, can’t breathe.

You are his mirror, and he is yours.

The truth, the one you've kept locked away, buried beneath ache and denial, trembles on the tip of your tongue. You could still bury it for good. Let you both be free.

But instead, you choose to do the bravest thing: to admit it.

To yourself first.

And then, finally, to Aemond. Rage and betrayal be damned.

Cregan’s muffled sounds falter into quiet as you speak:

“It’s not him that I long for.”

Aemond flinches, pain flashing across his face like a wound reopened, as if you just dragged a dagger across his eye. Whatever story he’s written in his head, whatever twisted logic he's used to justify this torment, you’ve just shattered it. And still, you see it clearly now: he wants to be wrong.

“Don’t mess with me.” He speaks low and regal, a king giving his final warning before condemning a traitor to death.

“I wish I were.” The bile tastes sour, but you swallow it.

There’s no flicker of belief in his eyes. Just that stubborn, blind confidence. Because that way it would be easier. He’s made his mind, he’s set the course, and now, you’re the compass that refuses to point the way he demands.

“Shall I remind you of the words you spoke before?”

You shake your head. “I remember them… but it’s not that simple.”

He scoffs, bitter in a way you’ve never heard before, and you fear he might disappear, vanish into the air.

“Everything was simple before you.”

You’re a liability. That’s what he means. You bite your lip until it bleeds. If Aemond resembles anything right now, it’s a blade cutting everything that comes close.

But you’ve never been wise when it comes to him.

So you take a step forward.

“You know I’m telling the truth,” you murmur.

“I know that I’m drowning in you,” he hisses, tempest building in his gaze.

He’s thunder.

You’re sunlight.

And somehow, you both exist in the same sky.

“Come here,” you whisper, your hands twitching at your sides, aching to touch him, yet trembling with the fear of being rejected.

He doesn’t move. One breath. Two.

His fists clench at his sides like he’s holding himself back from moving an inch closer. There’s a war inside him, making him waver. The only thing he knows is how to destroy, to tease apart, to peel away. No one’s ever offered him something this fragile, this gentle. No one’s ever offered him something he can’t tear apart. He doesn’t know how to step into forbidden territory, how to be without ruining it all. He craves and fears that craving.

He leans in, just barely, so subtle it might not even look like a shift. But you catch it, leaning toward him, meeting him halfway, slowly, carefully. Like this moment is the most brittle thing you both hold. His tall back curves, folding toward you like a warrior about to surrender to a goddess.

You both hover there, unsure, two beings on the verge of a kiss neither knows how to shape. You tilt your heads, adjusting subtly, afraid to misalign the fragile geometry of closeness.

A kiss, another forbidden territory, aches painfully in your chest.

At last, his forehead presses to yours. A simple gesture. Yet it feels like the right thing in the world.

His skin is warm. Yours is cold. A perfect, soothing contrast.

He needs you to soothe the fire that’s always threatening to burn him to ash.

You need him to finally give you the warmth you’ve been denied.

Aemond can’t go to the rooftop anymore. Not since Alys. It used to be a sanctuary, a place to breathe, to observe the world from a distance. But now it’s lost its magic. Just a trembling structure beneath the wind. Even the cityscape has dulled, no longer impressive.

Now, in this quiet between you, where breath follows breath, the stillness feels sacred, like a beggar stepping into a cathedral and seeing a god he once refused.

The sense of comfort Aemond sought in stone and solitude, he finally finds in you.

His breathing slows, falling into rhythm with yours. A quiet, synchronized dance. He forgets the cigarettes in his pocket. The purpose of the pact slips away. So does the belief that he was never meant to feel.

Even Cregan's presence fades, barely a shadow now.

“We can figure this out… together.” The words are meant just for him, the most courageous and vulnerable confession you’d say to no one else.

“What if it’s a mistake?” He echoes your fear, your own words, softened by his voice. He looks at you like you hold all the answers in the world, and maybe that terrifies him more than anything else.

You hesitate.

Once, you said forever. And then… you buried it.

You can’t offer consolation. Lie, and you both know will know about it.

So you give him the only thing you both can stand on: the truth.

“Some mistakes…” you say, eyes meeting his, they’re your favorite color again. “Some mistakes are worth it.”

And in this sacred space, where neither of you moves, it feels like the world has stopped asking him to be a demon.

Just this once.

Just for you.