GoT safeplace

The first—a proper Stark grey in worsted wool, the one your father likes on you—lasts a single hour. The weight that comforts you in Winterfell feels here like a punishment. You peel it off with clenched teeth, skin stinging where the cloth has dragged. The second, a southern silk in deep blue, slides over your shoulders like water and then, traitor that it is, refuses to hold any shape. Every step makes it cling and whisper and cling again. You feel your own sweat beading beneath it, running in fine, infuriating tracks down your sides.

The third is a compromise. A light white muslin gown that one of the queen’s ladies had pressed on you with a fond, pitying look and a “You’ll die in all that wool, my lady.” It’s indecent by northern standards, thin and fine and barely there. You add a light surcoat in Stark blue over it to soothe your conscience, but even that feels like armour in this weather. The muslin clings the instant you step into the corridor, damp at the back of your knees, your lower spine.

You crave cold the way starving men crave meat.

You drift from room to room the way the heat drifts after you. The small solar off your chambers, where the windows catch what pathetic breeze there is? Hot. The shaded gallery overlooking the training yard, where you once thought King’s Landing almost bearable? Hotter. The sept, with its cool-tiled floor and promise of marble? Stifling, the air thick with incense that seems to coat your lungs.

Your skin feels too tight. Your bones too close together. Every sound rasps. Laughter in the distance, the rolling cadences of some herald’s voice, the clatter of armour. Your own pulse in your ears. You can’t draw a full breath without feeling like the sun has already been there first.

By the time the bells toll midday, there’s a fragile, glassy edge to everything.

You snap—quietly—at a maid for fumbling your cup. You flinch away from your own guards when they shift too close behind you. You stand by the narrow window-slit in your chamber, stare out at Blackwater Bay crouching dull and brazen under the sky, and think, absurdly, of the crypts at Winterfell. Of cool stone and still air and shadows that smell of old dust and older promises. Of the breath of the earth itself under your feet—slow, steady, indifferent to heat and court and Targaryen tempers and this endless, endless summer.

You were raised to bear discomfort. To ride in blizzards, to stand in drafty halls till your toes go numb, to sleep in armour if need be. You have prided yourself on it. But this… this is something different. This is a thousand tiny needles pricking under your skin. This is wool wrapped tight around your thoughts until every breath feels like it might be your last, purely out of spite. The walls feel close, and the sky feels far, you told Baelor once, thinking only of metaphor. Today, the walls feel close in a very simple, very physical way. As if the whole Red Keep is leaning in.

Something in you bends with it. Just a little.

You strip the blue surcoat off your shoulders, leaving only the thin white muslin, and let the discarded garment fall over the back of a chair. It slides down, too heavy, and puddles on the floor. You leave it there; the sight of it makes you want to scream. Your guards straighten when you step out into the corridor. Even they look wilted. Sweat shines dark along the edges of their gorgets; one has taken the liberty of unstringing his collar a fraction, the linen beneath damp.

“My lady,” one ventures. “Shall I fetch—”

“No.” Your voice comes out sharper than you intend. You force your shoulders to loosen. “No. I just… need air.”

“You won’t find any up here,” the other says ruefully before he remembers who he’s talking to. He snaps his mouth shut, eyes widening.

He’s right, though.

Not up. Down.

You have been learning the bones of the Red Keep the way other girls learn stitches. The obvious paths first. Throne room, yards, gates. Then the quieter ways. The side galleries. Service stairs tucked behind tapestries. Once, you found an old, disused guardroom by accident and lingered there just to feel what it was like to be under so much stone, the air cool and still on your skin.

You think of that now—of thick walls that the sun hasn’t molested, of floors that remember night.

“I’ll be in the lower galleries,” you say. “You can follow if you like. Or you can find yourselves a flagon of cool ale and thank the old gods I didn’t drag you into the yard in full mail.”

“My lady—” the older begins, frowning.

“Choose quickly,” you cut in, already turning away. “Before I decide the only way to cool off is to throw a Targaryen prince into the cistern and see if he floats.”

That startles a short, incredulous huff of laughter out of the younger guard. The older looks scandalised and resigned in equal measure. They fall in half a pace behind you anyway, because they are Stark men and stubbornness is contagious.

You take the servants’ stairs, the ones that coil inside the walls themselves. Each turn feels fractionally less bright, less raw. The torches here are fewer, spaced wider along the curving stone. The air changes by degrees, enough that the difference feels like mercy. The smell of hot dust and bodies thins, giving way to cool stone and the faint, wet tang of the cisterns below. By the time you reach the lower level, the light has changed. It’s not the hard white of the courtyard or throne room anymore but the softened, filtered glow of torches reflecting off damp walls. Your skin still feels too hot, but at least the air isn’t trying quite so aggressively to sear your lungs.

You dismiss your guards at the last turning.

“There are men posted at the main cistern,” you tell them, keeping your tone even. “And half the kitchens down here. I’ll hardly be alone.”

They exchange a look. The older opens his mouth. You pin him with a stare that has cowed riverlords twice his age.

“Stay at the stairs,” you tell them. “If I scream, come running. Otherwise, enjoy the blessed lack of sun on your armour.”

Reluctance wars with obedience. Obedience wins.

They take up a position where the corridor becomes a stair, clanking softly into place. You leave them there and follow the cooler draft, the sound of dripping water, the hollow echo of space.

The cistern is a long, vaulted hall of arches and shadow, the ceiling low enough that even you feel the weight of it. Pillars rise out of black water, thick and damp, banded with mineral stains where the level has risen and fallen over the years. Channels cut into the floor carry ladles and buckets of water away toward the kitchens and bathhouses. The air here is still and cool, heavy with the smell of stone and old, clean damp.

It feels, for the first time all day, like you can breathe.

You find a niche between two massive pillars, where a flight of shallow steps leads from the walkway down to the water’s lip. The stone at your back is moist and cool; when you press your palms flat against it, you can feel the deep, slow heart of the hill beneath your fingers. You slide down until you’re sitting with your knees drawn up, skirt pooling around you in a damp-edged cloud. There is a pitcher and dipper left on a nearby shelf, forgotten by some kitchen-boy too harried to remember his tools. You reach for it with fingers that tremble more than you’d like to admit. The clay is cool. Blessedly, wonderfully cool.

You pour carefully. The water is dark as iron in the dim light, but it sings over the clay lip with such a sweet, clean sound you could almost weep.

You wet your wrists first, because you remember some long-ago maester muttering about pulse points and cooling the blood. The shock drags a soft sound from you—half sigh, half strangled sob. You tip the dipper again, let a thin stream trickle over the inside of your elbow, the bend of your knee where the muslin has clung and rubbed all morning. Little runnels carve through the dust on your skin, the sweat. Each drop feels like a small absolution.

You hesitate only a heartbeat before lifting the dipper higher.

The first splash along your throat is almost painful. The second, lower, over the shallow dip at the base of your neck, sends a shudder through you that has nothing to do with cold and everything to do with contrast. Heat and water. Parched and quenched.

The muslin of your gown darkens where the water soaks it. Fine cloth goes nearly translucent when wet, clinging more stubbornly to the line of your collarbone, the curve of your shoulders, the shape of your ribs. If you were in the great hall, you’d die before allowing it. Here, under the earth, with no one but stone and water and your own fraying temper, you do not care.

You’re on the verge of something. You can feel it.

Not just a storm of temper, though that hums under your skin. Not just tears, though your eyes burn, irritated and dry from too much light, too much heat, too much everything. Something else. A crack running down through all the duty and composure and careful northern distance you’ve wrapped around yourself since you arrived. As if the long summer has found a seam in you and is prying with slow, ruthless fingers.

You lean your head back against the pillar. Close your eyes.

You see, as you always do when it is quiet enough, the godswood pool at Winterfell, black and still and cold as old iron. You imagine, just for a moment, slipping under, letting the water close over you, all noise and heat washed away. When you breathe in, the air smells not of incense or tallow or too many bodies but of damp earth, old leaves, wolf and wet stone.

Your jaw clenches. Your fingers tighten hard around the dipper. You are so tired of pretending that this city sits easily on your shoulders. So tired of the sun pressing, pressing, pressing. Your hand shakes. Water spills, runs down your wrist, your forearm, dripping from your elbow in frantic little beads. You suck in a breath that scrapes at the back of your throat—

And feel, before you hear, that you are not alone.

It’s the faintest disruption in the air. A shift of weight on the stone. A breath that isn’t yours, drawn in and held.

Your eyes snap open.

He stands at the top of the shallow steps, half in shadow, half in the fainter torchlight from the walkway.

Baelor.

For a heartbeat, he looks less like a crown prince and more like a man who has wandered into the wrong part of a dream.

The heat of the day has not spared him. Stripped of courtly layers, he looks almost younger, more dangerous. His shirt is linen, light and loose at the throat, darkened in a wide V where sweat has soaked through at his chest. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, exposing forearms corded with old, familiar muscle, dusted with dark hair. There’s a faint dampness at his temples, threads of silver catching what light there is. He has left the Hand’s pin behind; there’s no emblazoned surcoat, no jewelled dragon snarling from his chest.

Without all that, the sheer physicality of him hits harder. Broad shoulders. Long legs braced on the stone. The line of his powerful throat, the hollow at its base currently working around a swallow that looks almost as if it hurts.

His eyes are on you.

On your damp, clinging gown. On the water beading along your collarbone. On the way you’re half-collapsed against the pillar, muslin plastered to the long line of your body, hair coming loose from its pins in messy, damp strands.

You think—wildly—that he looks as if he’s just been struck.

“Your Highness,” you manage.

Your voice sounds wrecked, roughened by heat and the small, private noises you have been making as cold water met overheated skin. You hear every shred of rawness in it. So does he. His fingers flex at his sides, a tiny, betraying movement.

“Lady Stark.” He says your title like he’s reminding himself of it. His voice is lower than usual, hoarser, as if the heat has burned through his practised court tones along with everything else. “I—”

He breaks off. You can see him sort, in real time, through at least three different sentences. Prince. Hand. Man.

“In the habit,” he tries again after a fraction, “of bathing fully clothed in the royal cisterns?”

It’s an attempt at levity. It lands crooked between you. There’s an edge in it. Not mockery. Something closer to disbelief.

You glance down at yourself. At your soaked front, muslin clinging like a second skin from throat to midriff, the faint outline of your stays underneath. Heat that has nothing to do with the air surges up your neck and into your face.

“Oh, good,” you say faintly. “We’ve reached the part of the day where I die of shame. I was wondering when that would arrive.”

The corner of his mouth twitches—helpless, startled, as if the reflex to be amused by you is stronger than whatever else is currently choking him. His fingers flex again. Baelor takes the last few steps down toward you, slow, careful, like he’s approaching a skittish animal or the edge of a cliff.

“I didn’t mean— I was looking for the master of cisterns.” His gaze flits briefly to the black water, to the forgotten dipper in your tight-knuckled hand, then back to your face. “The steward swore we were losing half our supply to some cracked channel. I… was not expecting to find you instead.”

“You and me both.” The pillar is cool at your back. Your skin feels feverish where your wet gown clings. “If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t plan on collapsing in a heap underground dressed like a drowned chicken. It just… happened.”

He stops a pace away. Close enough that you can see the pulse beating, steady and a little fast, at the side of his throat.

“You look far from collapsed,” he says quietly.

You don’t. You look undone. There’s a difference. He sees it. You see him see it.

He has seen you composed in council, answering the king without flinching. He has seen you on his arm in the great hall, under a hundred eyes, your back straight and your expression carved in good northern stone. He has heard you speak in the courtyard with your spine resting against cool pillars and your words cutting quietly to the bone.

He has not seen you like this.

Muslin plastered to your skin, hair damp and rebellious, eyes hot and a little wild. Breathing too shallow. The careful Stark mask stripped away by a foe no sword can cut—just relentless, suffocating heat.

For a moment, neither of you speaks.

The cistern’s distant drip-counting fills the silence. A drop hits the surface of the water somewhere out in the dark with a soft plop that echoes like a heartbeat.

Then Baelor moves. Not away. Not back. Forward, into your orbit, as if he’s been caught by some gravity he hadn’t realised was there until now.

He reaches for the pitcher.

His hand closes over yours for a heartbeat around the clay handle—cooler than you expected, calloused, sure. The contact is a jolt straight up your arm. You don’t know if he feels it too until you see the way his jaw tightens, the quick flare of his nostrils as he pulls in a breath.

“Allow me,” he says.

There is a note in his voice you haven’t heard before. Not command, though he could command half the realm with those same syllables; not princely politeness, either. Something stripped down past both. Bare.

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

The words are quiet, but they land heavily between you.

He eases the pitcher out of your fingers with deliberate care, as if he’s afraid you’ll bolt or shatter if he moves too fast. He kneels—kneels, and the sight goes clean through you—on the step below you, linen pulling taut over his strong thighs, the damp edges of his cuffs dark against his forearms. The crown prince of the Seven Kingdoms, hand of the king, lowering himself to your feet in a pool of deep, cool shadow.

You stare at him, a little stunned.

“Is this…” your voice scrapes, “…part of your inspection, too, Your Highness? ‘Have the cisterns cracked? Are the wolves melting?’”

That pulls the faintest huff of amusement from him, ghost of a smile. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes, but it softens something there.

“Consider it… an act of selfishness,” he murmurs, eyes fixed now on the water as he pours. “The realm would never forgive me if I let the heir of Winterfell simply… evaporate.”

“You’re very concerned about my state of matter.” Your words wobble only a little. “First turnips, now this.”

Baelor glances up at that, and this time the smile does reach his eyes, a flicker of heat in both the pale and dark irises.

“I find,” he says, almost conversationally, “that I am very concerned with your state, my lady.”

The honesty in it knocks the breath out of you more efficiently than the heat ever could. Baelor doesn’t give either of you time to dwell on it. He sets the pitcher down, dips his broad hand into the water, and brings it up cupped and dripping.

“Give me your hands,” he says.

It’s more request than order. It still lands like the latter. You swallow and do as he says, lifting your hands from where they’ve curled in your lap. His fingers close around your wrists—not tight, but firm enough that you feel the steady strength in them, the quiet, absolute control there. You have seen him hold a spear with those hands, seen the calluses and the scars that map out years of obedience to duty. Now that same grip cradles your hands in place while cold water trails over your pulse.

Baelor drags his wet palm along the delicate knob of bone at the inner wrist, over the cords of tendon and vein, up into the hollow where hand meets forearm. Slowly. Thoroughly. As if he has all the time in the world and no intention of wasting a single heartbeat.

The cold bites. Your fingers twitch.

“Breathe,” he urges softly. “In. Out. Slowly.”

You realise, dimly, that you’ve been holding your breath since he knelt. You obey, because it’s easier than not. The air, still cool by comparison, fills your lungs. Your ribs hitch once and settle around it. He repeats the process on the other hand. Each pass of his palm seems to draw some of the frantic heat from you, siphoning it off into the chilly water on his skin.

“Maesters say,” he offers lightly, as if this is merely conversation, as if he is not kneeling between your knees with his hands on your body, “that cooling the blood at the wrists and throat helps in this sort of weather.”

“Yes, well,” you manage, “maesters also think lemon cakes are a good breakfast. Their judgment is suspect.”

Baelor huffs something like a laugh. You feel it where his fingers rest on your skin more than you hear it.

“Lift your chin,” he says.

You hesitate. He waits. Slowly, you tilt your head back against the pillar, exposing the arch of your throat. The air moves over damp skin; the difference is infinitesimal and immense. You feel raw. Offered. As if every inch of you is suddenly a question you are too hot and too tired to tuck away.

Baelor gazes, just for a heartbeat.

You see his gaze track the line of your neck, the hollow at its base. You see the muscle in his jaw jump, the way his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. The way his hand, hovering for a moment above your skin, flexes like he’s having to remind it of what, precisely, it’s allowed to do.

Then he presses his palm to your throat.

His skin is damp and cool; his fingers span from just under your jaw to the edge of your collarbone. The contrast is vicious. You make a sound you don’t recognise, somewhere between a gasp and a whine, teeth catching on your lower lip.

“Sorry,” he says at once.

“Don’t you dare,” you breathe. “Stop.”

Something dark and bright flares in his eyes at that. The hand at your throat stills, then moves with exquisite care, sliding down a fraction, spreading the chill along the tendons, the fragile barrel of your windpipe, the beat of your pulse.

“Better?” he questions quietly.

You nod, because words feel unreliable. His thumb rests just to the side of your artery, not pressing, just feeling. You are acutely, painfully aware of how fast your heart is pounding under that patient touch. His other hand finds the edge of your damp hair, where it sticks in curling strands to the back of your neck. He cups water and smooths it along the nape, fingertips grazing over the fine hairs there. The sensation sends a shiver down your spine that has nothing to do with temperature.

“You were right,” you murmur, because for some reason this seems important to say. “The walls are shouting. I can’t… hear my thoughts over them.”

He remembers that conversation. You can tell by the flicker of recognition in his gaze, by the way his mouth softens, pulling the severity from its line.

“Then we shall let the stone do some of the shouting for you,” he says. “You can be quiet for once.”

You snort, which turns into a half-hysterical laugh because everything is too close to the edge.

“My father would be thrilled,” you shoot back. “I think he’s been praying for that miracle since I learned to talk.”

Baelor’s eyes crease faintly at the corners.

“I doubt that very much,” he replies. “The North knows the value of a voice that doesn’t flinch.” His thumb moves, a bare sweep against your pulse. “I’ve been… grateful for it.”

There’s that word again. Grateful. As if your existence in his overheated, overburdened orbit is some kind of relief he didn’t expect to find. He doesn’t say the rest of it aloud. He doesn’t have to. You see it in the way Baelor’s gaze roams, just once, more freely than he usually allows himself: over the damp line of your cheek where a stray droplet has escaped, down the column of your throat, across the way the wet muslin clings to your sternum. It’s not a hungry look, not exactly. It’s… startled. Reverent. As if some part of him, long starved, is aware that it has, quite without warning, been sat down in front of a feast.

“This is foolish,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

“The heat?” you ask. Your lips feel slow around the words.

“Among other things.”

He draws his hand away from your throat, leaving a cold imprint behind that throbs with the echo of his touch. For a moment, you think he’s going to stand, put a safe, polite distance between you, cloak himself back in Hand and heir and duty. 

Instead, he dips his hand back into the pitcher, then reaches lower.

Your breath stalls.

He hesitates for the first time, fingers hovering near your bare ankle where your muslin has hiked up when you slid down the pillar. Your slippers have long since been toed off; your feet are pressed flat to the cool stone step, toes curling reflexively against it.

“May I?” he asks.

The question is ridiculously formal for what he’s actually asking: whether he can touch a part of you no one has any business thinking about, let alone a crown prince on his knees in a cistern.

You should say no.

You should remember all the reasons this is wrong. That you are here as your father’s heir, a piece on the board. That he is the king’s eldest son, his father’s finest work, the one who has been taught since boyhood that duty comes before desire, every time. That the heat is making you foolish.

You don’t.

“Yes,” you hear yourself say. The word comes out rough. “Please.”

His eyes darken at that. There is something almost feral in the way his fingers curl, as if that single syllable has loosed a chain he’s been winding tight around himself for years. Baelor cups your heel in his palm, large hand swallowing the fragile bones easily, and draws it gently forward until your calf rests along his thigh, the sole of your foot braced against his hip. It is a scandalous intimacy, one that would make the court scream itself hoarse if they saw it. Here, under stone and shadow and water, it feels like the only thing in the world that makes sense.

He runs his wet fingers along the arch of your foot, over the sensitive skin there, then up over your ankle bone, tracing the delicate joint slowly, firmly. Cold water tracks his path. You shudder helplessly, fingers digging into the stone at your sides.

“Sorry,” he says again, though he doesn’t stop.

“You keep saying that,” you grit out. “And yet.”

“And yet,” he echoes softly.

Baelor slides his hand higher, skimming over the curve of your calf, spreading chill along overheated skin. Your knee falls a fraction more open, not entirely of your own volition. His gaze flickers there for a heartbeat, then back to your face, as if he’s reminding himself that he’s here to tend, not to take.

He swallows. You see his throat work, the small clench of muscle in his jaw.

“This summer,” he says quietly, as if talking will keep him steady, “has the smallfolk muttering that it will last into my grandchildren’s time. That Maekar will grow old under the same sun that saw him born.”

“Optimistic of them to assume you’ll let him live that long,” you say through your teeth, because humour is the only blade you have left to hold. “You looked ready to throttle him last night over supper.”

The flash in his gaze at the mention of his brother is brief and complicated—fondness knotted with exasperation and something else entirely when he glances up at you.

“I wouldn’t throttle him,” Baelor says. “There are more… creative ways to make a younger brother suffer.”

“Like arranging his betrothals for him?” you mutter.

His hand tightens, just a fraction, midway up your calf. Both of you feel it.

“That,” he says, voice suddenly very flat beneath the surface, “would be cruel.”

The word hangs there, shaded by more meaning than the stale, hot air should be able to carry. He exhales, slow. His fingers move again, gentler. You feel him wrestle whatever storm that thought brought with it back down, tamping it into the same deep place where he keeps everything else that doesn’t serve his father’s peace.

“This summer,” he continues, almost as if he hadn’t paused, “has laid the whole city bare. Every crack. Every fault. You see what can’t endure once the comforts are stripped away.”

“And what endures?” you wonder. Your voice is steadier now, the cold burrowing in enough to ease some of the fever.

His gaze finds yours, holds therefor too long.

“You,” he says simply.

It shouldn’t be a declaration. It feels like one.

“This place gnaws at you,” he goes on, tone still low, steady. “It shouts when you need silence. It presses when you need space. And yet here you are, down in its bones, spine against its stone, refusing to be moved.”

“You found me half-melted and swearing at a pitcher,” you point out. “That’s not exactly heroic.”

“Stones crack from heat,” he says. “You bend. There’s a difference.” His thumb makes one last pass along the inside of your ankle, right over the pounding little vein there. “If the gods had meant you for crypts, they would have left you in the snow. They sent you here instead. To my halls. To my—”

Baelor cuts himself off, jaw snapping shut on whatever word had been fighting its way out. His nostrils flare. His hand stills on your skin, fingers pressed white-knuckled to your calf.

You hear the unspoken syllable anyway, loud as if he’d shouted it.

To my side.

To me.

Something in your chest lurches, ugly and glorious all at once.

“Baelor,” you say, and it’s the first time you’ve used his name aloud without title, without the soft cloak of “my Lord Prince” you once offered as a compromise. The sound of it in your mouth feels different down here, bare as your throat under his hand. 

He flinches, just a fraction. The movement is small, but you feel it through the contact of his palm on your skin, the way his shoulders shift.

“That’s irregular,” he says. The words are roughened; the joke doesn’t quite land.

“Nearly everything worth doing is,” you echo him back his own phrase before you can stop yourself.

At that, something gives way behind his eyes.

You see it. The moment he stops fighting quite so hard against the shape of what he wants. The moment some deep, stubborn part of him, forged in fire and duty, in Blackfyre blood and the weight of a realm, simply… accepts a truth that’s been stalking the edges of his mind since you first walked at his side through that roaring, suffocating hall.

This. You.

Damp and furious and half-undone, back pressed to the bones of his ancestors’ fortress, breath stuttering under his hands. Not anything any careful, sensible prince would have gone out looking for. How wonderful, he thinks—wildly, helplessly—that he hadn’t had to. That you were sent to his front door under the safe name of alliance, and he has still managed to trip over the one person who looks at him and sees a man before a crown, who curses his court and still lets him cup cold water to her throat.

His fingers flex on your calf.

Your own hand moves without permission.

You reach down and catch his wet wrist, your smaller fingers wrapping just above the bone. His skin is cooler than yours, but not by much now; some of your heat has leached into him, as his steadiness has leached into you. Slowly, you draw his hand upward, over your knee, back to the solid, pulsing line of your throat.

Baelor’s breath leaves him in a rough exhale when his palm meets that spot again.

“You said I was on the brink of evaporating.” Your words are soft, but they don’t wobble. “That the realm would never forgive you if you let me. So don’t let go.”

It’s an outrageous thing to say to a man who has spent his entire life being asked to do nothing but let go—of his wants, his comforts, his sleep, any small, selfish yearning that doesn’t serve seven kingdoms.

He doesn’t.

Baelor’s hand cradles your throat more fully this time, thumb resting in the hollow under your jaw, fingers spread along the sides. Not choking. Just… holding. Feeling. Claiming, in a way that no one in the hall above would ever understand, because there is no politeness in it, no calculation. Only this: the quiet, feral decision not to step back. His eyes search your face like he’s afraid he’s misunderstood, that any second now you’ll come to your senses and flinch away.

You don’t.

You lean into his touch, just enough that your jaw settles more firmly against his palm. Your lips part on a shiver of a breath. Your eyes are fever-bright, pupils wide in the dim.

“Careful, Your Highness,” you whisper. “People will say you’re staring.”

“Let them,” he answers, and this time there’s no courtly smoothness left at all. Just a low, dangerous certainty.

Baelor looks at you like a man who has been lost in the desert for years and has finally staggered into shade and water. His thumb swipes once, very gently, along the edge of your lower lip where a drop of water has gathered without either of you noticing. The touch is so light it might as well be imagined, but your whole body clenches around it like a fist.

He is inches away from you. Inches from disaster. From salvation. From something that would alter the shape of both your lives more than any war.

His gaze drops, inevitably, to your mouth. You feel, very clearly, the moment his control frays.

It’s in the way his hand tightens just slightly at your throat, the way his shoulders hunch as if against a blow, the way his own lips part, breath ghosting hot across your face. You don’t move. You could. You could tilt your chin that last, lethal angle up. You could close the distance and let whatever this is devour you both.

You don’t.

Not because you don’t want to. Gods, you want. The want that has been building under your ribs since that first quiet walk through the hall rears up now, a wolf made of hunger and heat and the memory of his careful hand at your waist. You don’t move because you feel, under your palm on his wrist, the way his pulse stutters and then steadies, the way he pulls, from somewhere deep, a last, fraying length of restraint.

Baelor exhales slowly. His eyes close for a heartbeat. When they open again, they are still dark, still burning, but something has resettled behind them. Not denial. Not dismissal. A decision. To want, and to live with wanting, and not—yet—destroy the world that hangs on his shoulders for the sake of one kiss in a cistern.

“Lady Stark,” he says, and the title sounds, in this moment, less like distance and more like a vow.

His hand eases from your throat, one finger at a time, as if prying himself loose from something that has grown around him of its own accord. The air rushes in, hot and heavy, but you can still feel the ghost of his touch, a cold brand over the frantic beat in your neck.

He presses his wet palm briefly to your brow, like a benediction, smoothing a few limp strands of hair away. When he draws back, the air feels emptier than it has any right to.

“I’ll have more water brought down,” he says promptly. The prince is creeping back into his posture, into his words, but the man hasn’t gone; you can hear him under every syllable. “And someone will find fans and ice, if there’s any to spare from my father’s solar. You’ll stay down here until the worst of the heat has burned itself out.”

“Ordering me about, Your Highness?” you rasp, because if you don’t say something sharp your throat will close on everything else.

“Indulge me,” he returns quietly, repeating the words he once used when he asked to see you safely to your chambers. “Consider it a selfish request, again. I find I… prefer you solid.”

You huff a sound that’s very nearly a laugh. It comes out shaky. He looks at you as if the sound is a treasure he intends to count later, somewhere quiet, where no one can take it from him. Baelor stands at last, movements slower than they need to be, as if his joints have to remember how stairs work now that they’ve learned how kneeling feels. For a moment, his hand hovers as if he might reach to steady you as you shift, then he seems to think better of it and curls his fingers into a fist at his side.

“I should go,” he says. “If my father notices the Hand has disappeared, he’ll assume I’ve been assassinated and call a council. You don’t wish to be responsible for that noise.”

“You say that as if I’m not half-tempted,” you mutter.

The smile that flashes across his face at that is quick and almost boyish, shattering the last of the oppressive weight between you for one brief, glorious breath.

“No more talking,” you add, closing your eyes again and letting your head rest back against the stone. “Go. Before I drag you into the water just to see if it shuts you up.”

He laughs. Properly. The sound rolls through the cistern, low and disbelieving.

“As my lady commands,” he says.

His footsteps retreat up the stairs, each soft thud a small wrench in your chest. At the top, he pauses. You don’t open your eyes; you feel him looking back all the same.

“Try,” Baelor speaks into the dark, “not to dream too kindly of our heat.”

Your lips quirk. “I shall do my best,” you murmur. “Though I make no promises about the ice.”

He makes a strangled sound that might be another laugh, might be something else entirely, and then he’s gone, leaving only the cool stone at your back, the ache of his fingerprints along your throat and calf, and the knowledge, sudden and enormous, that whatever lay between duty and desire in both your lives has just shifted.

Morning at Ashford had already turned noisy by the time you saw the tourney grounds, and that was from half a mile out, before the banners were clear and before the dust settled enough to show one lord’s colors from another. Sound carried first. Hammer on iron. Horses blowing in their tack. Men shouting over one another as if volume itself were rank. The whole place throbbed with the kind of excitement that made southern crowds look half-drunk before noon, all bright cloth and wagers and gossip moving faster than truth. Your brother rode ahead at an easy pace, long-backed and unbothered, gray cloak thrown over one shoulder, as though arriving unannounced at one of the realm’s great gatherings with a northern escort behind him was an ordinary thing done every week. Donnor Stark had always possessed that gift. He could make insolence look like practicality. You rode just behind and to his left, gloved hands quiet on the reins, your own wolf-pelt mantle tied close against the wind that still felt honest this far south only in the early hours. By midday the sun would come out and the Reach would pretend winter was a rumor. For now, the air still bit enough to keep men awake. It suited you.

The local outriders spotted your party before the first outer campfires did, and the first reaction was exactly what Donnor had predicted the night before by the river when he told you, with that flat amusement of his, that no one at Ashford would know what to do with a Stark arrival this late and without warning. They did not charge, and they did not greet. They stared, then split, then rode hard in opposite directions to fetch men with better cloaks and more authority. By the time your escort reached the road where merchant wagons had begun to clog the way, there were already Ashford men attempting to clear space, shouting apologies to one side and orders to the other, while a sweating steward in green and gold rode up with two household knights and looked first at Donnor’s direwolf sigil, then at your faces, then back at the sigil as if it might explain why the North had chosen this morning to drop itself in his lap. “Ser,” he began, and then stopped, realizing a heartbeat too late that he did not know which titles to use and was trying not to offend anyone important. Donnor watched him struggle for a moment longer than kindness required. You kept your expression still and let the man suffer properly for his uncertainty. It was educational.

“Donnor Stark,” your brother said at last, saving him without softness. “Son of Lord Beron Stark. This is my sister, Y/N Stark.” He gave your name, clear and unhurried. “We’ve come to attend the tourney.”

The steward blinked. “Attend,” he repeated, as if the word itself might be reworked into something more manageable. “My lord, had we known, Lord Ashford would have prepared rooms, proper welcome, accommodations for your men, stabling, seating in the viewing galleries, a place in the feast arrangements, and the heralds would have been informed. There are lists, you understand? Schedules. Places assigned.”

“That sounds like a problem,” you said, before Donnor could answer, and the man’s eyes flicked to you fast enough to show he had not expected the daughter to speak first, much less in that tone. “Good thing Lord Ashford has so many people to solve it.”

Donnor’s mouth moved at one corner. Not a smile, exactly. Close enough.

The steward swallowed, then made a valiant attempt at dignity. “If you would wait here, my lady, my lord. I will send word at once.”

“We will ride on at a walk,” Donnor said. “If we stop entirely, your road will choke. Send whomever you like to meet us.”

The steward opened his mouth to object, looked at the line of northern riders behind you, looked at the merchant carts stacking up in both directions, and saw reason. “Yes, my lord. Yes. A walk, then.” He wheeled his horse and spurred away, already shouting for boys and runners and anyone with legs.

By the time the outer pavilions gave way to the broader lane leading toward Lord Ashford’s principal camp and the royal enclosures beyond, rumor had outrun you. People stared openly. Smallfolk paused with baskets under their arms and turned to watch. Hedge knights in mismatched plate stopped buckling greaves and stood half-armored in the mud. A pair of young squires nearly collided because both were looking at your escort instead of where they were going. You heard the word Stark pass through the crowd in pieces, muttered and then repeated louder, gathering embellishments as it traveled. Some looked disappointed when they counted only one daughter and one son instead of a whole grim host from winter tales. Others looked relieved. One old woman by a pie stall crossed herself in the Seven’s fashion when your horse passed, which would have been offensive if it had not been so plainly ridiculous. You looked back at her once, and she nearly dropped her ladle.

“Try not to start a war before breakfast,” Donnor said under his breath, not looking at you.

“You brought me.”

“I did. Against my better judgment.”

“That is new. Usually you have none.”

That got you the sound of a laugh from one of your sworn men behind you, quickly stifled when Donnor glanced back.

Near the large striped pavilions of House Ashford, the confusion thickened into ceremony. Men had been summoned in haste and dressed in rank before sense. You saw household officers still fastening belts, a septon holding his robes up from the mud and panting from the walk, herald boys with ink on their fingers, and Lord Ashford himself coming out beneath his pavilion awning with the face of a man trying to decide whether this was honor or catastrophe. He was not alone. Another mounted figure stood near him in dark armor worked with the three-headed dragon, helm removed, pale haired, expression already worn thin by the morning. You knew him before anyone named him. Prince Maekar Targaryen looked exactly like the stories that came north after wars and councils and royal quarrels. Hard face. Harder eyes. Built like a man who expected every room to become a fight if he was forced to stand in it long enough. He was younger than Lord Beron and older than your brother, and carried himself with the harsh impatience of someone used to command and accustomed to being obeyed before he finished speaking. The first thing he did when he saw your banner was narrow his eyes. The second was look at the length of your escort and calculate, plainly, how much rearranging your arrival would cost him.

Lord Ashford stepped forward with admirable speed. “Ser Donnor Stark,” he called. “Lady Y/N Stark. Ashford welcomes you.” He said it grandly enough that onlookers might almost miss the strain in it. “Had we but known to expect such honored guests, we would have sent riders farther north to meet you.”

Donnor dismounted in one smooth motion and bowed as much as courtesy required, no more. You followed, handing your reins to a northern retainer before anyone southern thought to take them. Mud clung to your boots and the hem of your dark riding skirt. You did not apologize for bringing the North’s weather in with you. “Lord Ashford,” Donnor said. “We thank you for your welcome. Our road changed twice on the way, and we chose not to trouble your household with uncertain messages.”

A neat lie. You had both chosen exactly this because Donnor wanted to see what men revealed when they were not prepared.

Lord Ashford nodded like a man accepting a knife politely. “The road is ever uncertain. We are honored regardless.” He turned, performing the part of host even while his stewards swarmed in the background trying to count beds and place guards. “Allow me. Prince Maekar Targaryen.”

Maekar’s gaze went to Donnor first, measured him, and found him manageable. Then it moved to you and stayed there a fraction longer than courtesy would explain. You met it without lowering your head. If he expected immediate softness because he was a prince, he did not find it. If he expected northern awe, he should have ridden farther north.

“My prince,” Donnor said.

You inclined your head. “Prince Maekar.”

There was a pause, not long but noticeable, because most girls in silk at tourneys smiled when they greeted Targaryens and you did not smile at all.

“Lady Stark,” he said. His voice was low and roughened by impatience, but not careless. “Ashford grows more crowded by the hour. Bringing a northern escort into the middle of it without notice is bold.”

“It was crowded before we arrived,” you replied. “We only made it interesting.”

Lord Ashford made a soft choking sound that he disguised as a cough. One of his household knights stared very hard at the ground. Donnor looked at a tent rope and did not help anyone.

Maekar’s expression did not soften, but something changed in it, something like surprise forced quickly into discipline. “Interesting,” he repeated. “That is one word for the work now required.”

“If your men are competent, it will pass quickly,” you said. “If they are not, your morning was going poorly before us.”

Lord Ashford shut his eyes for one heartbeat, perhaps in prayer.

It would have been easy for Maekar to answer with rank. Many men did when crossed in public. He could have cut you down with one sentence and forced Lord Ashford to laugh along with him. Instead he stared at you for another moment, then gave a short exhale that might have been annoyance and might have been reluctant amusement. “My lord Ashford,” he said without taking his eyes from you, “have chambers prepared in the inner guest row, not the outer camps. The Stark escort can be quartered near the eastern lists where there is room to stable their horses without blocking the merchant lanes. Double the pickets there tonight. Half the camp will come looking for a glimpse by supper.”

Lord Ashford looked visibly relieved to be receiving orders from someone else. “At once, Your Grace.”

“And send word to the heralds that House Stark is in attendance. If there are petitions for entries or challenges altered because of this, I want them sorted before noon, not screamed at me during the jousts.”

That last line was for the gathered stewards, and they scattered with the speed of men fleeing a storm front.

You should have let it end there. Instead, because his tone invited resistance and because the whole morning had sour your temper into something bright, you said, “Do your jousters alter their courage depending on who watches?”

Maekar turned his head slightly. “Some men alter everything for an audience, my lady. Courage most of all.”

“Then perhaps they should stay home.”

Donnor finally intervened before Lord Ashford died where he stood. “My sister has ridden too long and eaten too little. She bites when hungry.” He looked to Maekar with bland courtesy that was not an apology. “You have our thanks for the arrangements, my prince.”

Maekar gave Donnor a look that said he heard exactly what had not been said. “I have sons,” he replied. “I know the difference between hunger and temperament.”

At that, one of the younger Targaryen boys lingering behind the prince, slim and bald with watchful eyes too serious for his years, looked briefly delighted before schooling his face. You recognized him a breath later from whispered reports and court talk, the youngest, called Egg by those who forgot themselves. Another royal son stood farther back near the retainers, handsome in a polished way, with a cup in hand and a look of mild discomfort at all practical matters. Daeron, you guessed. No sign yet of Aerion, which likely meant the gods were granting Ashford one mercy at a time.

Maekar gestured once toward the inner lanes. “Get your people settled. If you intend to remain for the opening events, the galleries will need reseating. Lord Ashford’s daughters and half the Reach ladies are about to learn the cost of late arrivals.”

You tilted your head. “They may survive it.”

His eyes narrowed again. “That depends which of them you sit beside.”

Donnor let out an actual laugh then, low and brief. “We will do our best not to ruin the whole tourney before midday.”

“See that you don’t,” Maekar said, and rode off before politeness could force another exchange, calling for a captain as he went. Men moved around him in quick adjustments, and you watched the camp re-form under his voice, paths opening, instructions relayed, confusion beaten into shape. He was harsh, yes. Too quick to command, likely quicker to anger. But he was efficient in a way that could not be faked, and the entire lane breathed easier once he took hold of it. That irritated you more than it should have.

The guest row assigned to you and Donnor sat close enough to the royal encampment to be an honor and far enough not to be intimacy. Lord Ashford had done well, or Maekar had chosen for him. The pavilions were sturdy, lined properly, and placed on slightly higher ground where last night’s rain had not turned everything to soup. Servants hurried in with fresh water, braziers, and apologies for delays that no one in your party had asked for. Southern hospitality, you had learned by twelve, often came wrapped in explanations. In the North, people simply did the thing and saved their breath. Donnor endured the bustle for ten minutes, then escaped under the pretense of checking the horse-lines, which was a real task and also an obvious one. You let him go. Inside your pavilion, your maid unpacked gowns better suited to a court than a tourney field, muttering over the mud on your hems, while you stood at the opening and watched Ashford wake itself fully. The banners stirred. Trumpets sounded once from the lists. Somewhere to the west a crowd roared at a practice pass or a brawl, and a flock of birds lifted from the trees all at once.

By noon, word of your arrival had spread so far and warped so much that a lady from a minor Reach house, seated two rows below you in the viewing gallery, told another in a stage whisper that Lord Beron Stark had sent you south to inspect potential husbands among the princes and choose one before the tourney ended. The second lady gasped like this was both scandal and scripture. You kept your face composed and looked ahead at the field while your maid nearly choked trying not to laugh. Donnor, seated on your other side in a dark wool doublet that made him look more northern than the weather itself, leaned closer without moving his gaze from the lists.

“If you choose one, at least choose rich,” he murmured.

“If I choose one, I will send him north in winter and see if he survives first.”

“That would rule out half the south.”

“Good.”

He grunted approval. “Practical.”

The opening passes began in a blast of color and noise. Knights thundered down the lists in painted armor while the crowd shouted names and wagers, the impact of lance on shield carrying up through the wooden gallery into your bones. Ashford was all pageantry from a distance, but close enough you could smell horse sweat, splintered ash wood, trampled grass, spilled ale, and too many bodies packed together under the sun. It felt alive in a way the North’s austerity rarely did, and yet something in it struck you as thin. The Reach dressed violence prettier than the North did, but the core of it remained the same. Men rode hard to knock one another from saddles while women watched and calculated lineage, alliances, and future funerals.

You noticed Maekar three times before he noticed you noticing him. Once near the royal rail, speaking sternly to a marshal who had misread a challenge order. Once in the shade behind the seating where a squire was fastening a piece of his vambrace and receiving a lecture severe enough to make the boy red to the ears. Once at the edge of the barrier when one of his sons came off the field after a pass, Maekar’s hand on the horse’s bridle, saying something too low to hear. There was no wasted motion in him. Even standing still, he looked like a man using force to remain there.

When Lord Ashford himself came to your row later, flushed and smiling too hard, to ask whether your seating and service were satisfactory, you gave him a truthful answer out of sheer pity for the day he was having. “It is well arranged,” you said. “Better than some places that had warning.”

His relief was so immediate it bordered on comic. “You are generous, my lady.”

“No,” Donnor said, taking the wine cup from a passing servant. “She is observant.”

Lord Ashford blinked, then laughed because he was not sure what else to do.

The small chaos of your arrival did not end with seating. By afternoon, two hedge knights petitioned to shift their entry order so they might ride earlier “before the royal galleries empty,” which the heralds resented and Maekar refused. Three local ladies argued over which of them would host you for a supper visit, though none had yet spoken to you. A septa sent a polite inquiry asking whether you required northern devotions or special observances, as if the old gods needed transport arranged. One drunk lesser lord attempted to introduce himself to Donnor with a long speech about his grandsire’s service in some campaign against raiders beyond the Neck and was quietly corrected on every third detail before he reached the end of it. Through all of it, your name moved through Ashford like a spark in dry grass, and wherever it went Maekar seemed to find more work waiting.

You saw him again toward evening when the light turned gold and long across the tourney field and people began drifting toward the feast tents. You had stepped away from your assigned company for a breath of air near the horse-lines, preferring the smell of leather and hay to perfume and gossip, when voices carried around the corner of a supply pavilion. Maekar’s voice first, clipped and cold. “I said no. Not tomorrow either. If he cannot hold his place in the lists without throwing a tantrum, he can sit and watch men who can.” Another voice answered, younger and hot with resentment, too muffled to catch words. You knew enough from tone to guess a son. Aerion, perhaps. Then Maekar again, lower this time and more dangerous for it. “You mistake me for your mother if you think noise changes my answer.” There was silence after that, and the sound of someone striding away fast.

You stepped back before they came into view, but Maekar rounded the pavilion first and stopped when he saw you, one hand still on his sword belt, anger not yet gone from his face. For a moment neither of you spoke. The evening light caught in his pale hair and showed the strain at the corners of his eyes. He looked less like a prince in that instant and more like a man carrying too many quarrels, all of them his whether he had asked for them or not.

“My lady,” he said at last, the title rough but controlled. “You appear wherever my day worsens.”

You folded your hands behind your back. “If that is true, your day was poor before dawn.”

His mouth almost moved. “And if I say your arrival has doubled the camp’s disorder?”

“I would say your camp was built to bend around princes, not guests.”

“That sounds like criticism.”

“It is.”

He looked at you for a long moment, and you felt again that strange heat of temper meeting temper, not soft, not polite, something that sharpened rather than soothed. Men in the North often mistook a woman’s directness for invitation or challenge and lunged stupidly at one or the other. Maekar did neither. He simply stood there and took your measure with that hard, assessing stare, as if deciding whether you were a nuisance, an ally, or a future problem. You were not sure which answer would have pleased him most.

“Ashford will talk of nothing but House Stark tonight,” he said.

“Then they will have a break from talking of themselves.”

That earned it. A short, unwilling sound, half laugh and half breath. He shook his head once, as if irritated by his own reaction. “Your brother warned me you bite.”

“My brother says many things when he wants to seem wiser than he is.”

“He succeeds often.”

“Do not tell him that.”

“Why not?”

“He will become unbearable.”

Maekar looked past you then toward the horse-lines, where your northern men were checking girths and rubbing down mounts while southern stable boys watched with cautious fascination. “Your escort keeps good order,” he said. “No trouble. No swaggering. I expected more from men riding under a direwolf.”

“You expected southern stories.” You glanced toward his camp in turn. “I could say the same of princes.”

His eyes came back to yours. “And yet here we are. Both disappointed.”

“Not entirely,” you said before thinking better of it.

The words sat between you. Not flirtation. Not surrender. Something more dangerous because it was truer.

A squire came running then, young and breathless. “Your Grace, Prince Baelor asks for you at the feast pavilion. The marshals are disputing the pairings for tomorrow and Ser Duncan the Tall is involved somehow.”

“Of course he is,” Maekar muttered, the expression on his face turning briefly into something so purely exasperated it nearly made you smile. He looked back to you once. “Try not to unsettle any more of Ashford before supper, Lady Stark.”

“No promises, my prince.”

“I noticed.”

He went with the squire, striding into the dusk and torchlight as the camp shifted around him once again. You watched him until the crowd took him from sight, then turned back toward your own quarters where your maid would already be waiting with a gown and a list of ladies you were expected to tolerate. Behind you, the tourney grounds roared into evening. Trumpets sounded for the feast. Somewhere children laughed. Somewhere men argued over coin and honor and who had cheated whom by a horse length. The smell of roast meat began to spread through the camp, rich and thick and impossible to ignore.

Donnor found you halfway back and fell into step beside you without preamble, as he always did when he wanted the truth before servants could clutter it. “Well,” he said. “Did the dragon bite?”

You adjusted your gloves and kept your gaze ahead. “He growls more than he bites.”

Donnor snorted. “That means he likes you.”

“You sound very sure for a man who has spoken to him twice.”

“I know men who are angry because they are fools. I know men who are angry because they enjoy it. He is neither. He is angry because the world keeps handing him things to hold together while other people call it arrogance.”

You looked at your brother, mildly surprised.

Donnor shrugged. “I can read. Just slower than you.”

“And what does your careful reading say of me?”

He glanced sideways, eyes pale in the dying light. “That you arrived at Ashford hoping to be bored and found something else.” Before you could answer, he added, “Do not look offended. I did too.”

The feast horns sounded again, closer now, and servants hurried past carrying trays and lanterns. Ahead, the royal pavilions glowed through the dusk like embers banked behind silk. Somewhere in that light Maekar Targaryen was already back at work, quarreling with marshals, sons, lords, and fate itself, and Ashford spun around him as if it had no choice. You should have gone south, watched the jousts, and returned north with a story or two and nothing changed. That had likely been the sensible version of this journey.

Instead, as you stepped into the lantern-lit lane and the camp turned to watch the Stark daughter pass, you felt the first unmistakable tug of a different kind of trouble beginning, the sort that did not announce itself with trumpets or banners, only with one hard look held too long and answered in kind.

Ashford had become interesting after all.

The next day opened hotter, louder, and somehow less interesting than the first, which felt like a trick the South played on itself whenever too many men put on polished steel and called it glory. By midmorning Ashford was already thick with dust and heat, the lists churned to a pale brown track by hooves, boot soles, dropped lances, and boys running messages from one side of the grounds to the other with faces red and shirts sticking to their backs. The crowd loved it. They always loved the beginning best, when every knight still had his teeth, every squire still believed his master would win, and every drunk with a purse full of borrowed coin thought he had seen the shape of the day clearly enough to wager on it. Trumpets blew. Heralds strained their voices into the wind. Ladies in summer silks pretended not to flinch at splintering ash wood. Men shouted as if they themselves had ridden the passes. You sat through the first hour because you were expected to, through the second because Donnor was due to ride, and halfway into the third because stubbornness is a family trait and you did not care to let the Reach think a Stark daughter wilted in sun and noise. None of that changed the fact that by then you were bored enough to imagine setting half the painted pavilions on fire just to see who ran first.

Prince Baelor’s gift, if gift was the right word for a hurried courtesy dressed as ceremony, was a place in the royal stand itself, above the common galleries and close enough to the central rail that you could hear the marshals arguing when they thought they were speaking privately. It had come at breakfast in the form of a polite messenger, then a personal appearance from Baelor not long after, all warmth, tact, and the kind of practiced grace that made men forgive him for being right before they even understood he was correcting them. He had apologized on Lord Ashford’s behalf and on his own, though neither apology had been truly required, and said House Stark should not be treated as an afterthought at a gathering where half the realm had come to prove its worth. He spoke to Donnor as one soldier to another and to you with careful respect that did not slide into flattery. It was easy to see why people trusted him. It was even easier to see why his presence steadied a place like Ashford when everything else was running on vanity and wine.

“Think of it as a shield against Lord Ashford’s daughters,” Donnor had murmured after Baelor departed, fastening his gloves with his teeth while your maid adjusted your sleeve. “If you sit below, they will peck you clean by noon.”

“You are only saying that because you plan to abandon me and play at being a southron knight.”

“I plan to ride. There is a difference.”

“You mean you plan to throw men into the dirt in front of all these people and pretend you do not enjoy it.”

His grin had been brief and wolfish. “That too.”

So by the time the sun rose high enough to flatten shadows and make every polished surface glint, you were seated in the royal stand among people who watched themselves as closely as they watched the field. Baelor came and went as duty pulled him, pausing often enough to check whether you had water, shade, or patience left. Prince Daeron drifted in once, complained about the heat, asked whether all northern food tasted of salt and smoke, and wandered off before you could answer properly. A few ladies tried polite conversation and gave it up when they found you neither rude enough to gossip about nor pliant enough to patronize. All of it was manageable. All of it might even have passed quietly if Prince Maekar had chosen another rail, another row, another corner of the stand from which to observe the lists and supervise the endless little failures of men who called themselves capable.

He did not. He came up the steps shortly before Donnor’s first pass, carrying his helm under one arm and irritation as naturally as another man carried a cloak. The morning had already worked on him. You could see it in the set of his shoulders and in the line of his mouth, in the way squires straightened before he spoke and marshals began explaining things before he had asked. He spoke to Baelor first, low and direct, both of them looking toward the field where two lesser knights were disputing a broken lance point as if honor lived in splinters. Then Baelor glanced toward you, said something you could not hear, and Maekar turned. You watched recognition move across his face, followed by something like resigned disbelief.

“My lady Stark,” he said as he stepped into the shade of the stand. “I should have guessed the morning would improve for no one.”

You looked down at the lists, where a herald was calling names no one in the upper benches cared about. “If your morning depends on where I sit, your troubles are larger than I thought.”

The lady seated on your left pretended to adjust her fan and failed to hide how closely she was listening.

Maekar set his helm down on the bench across from you and remained standing. “Baelor tells me you were granted this place to make amends for yesterday’s confusion.”

“Prince Baelor has manners.”

“Baelor has a weakness for smoothing over other people’s errors.”

“And you have a weakness for announcing yours.”

His eyes narrowed, but not with surprise this time. There was a familiarity in it now, as if he had already begun expecting resistance from you and found his temper leaning toward it the way steel takes a whetstone. “If this is gratitude, the North teaches a strange version of it.”

“Gratitude was spoken at breakfast. You missed it.”

The lady with the fan stopped pretending entirely. Two young squires at the rear of the stand had gone perfectly still. Even one of the stewards carrying watered wine slowed his steps without seeming to.

Maekar glanced toward the field, where trumpets sounded for the next pair, then back to you. “I warned you yesterday not to unsettle Ashford before supper. It appears I was late by half a day.”

You rested an elbow lightly on the carved rail and looked at him as if considering a horse you were not sure deserved purchase. “Do you command everything in sight, my prince, or only what answers back?”

“Only what is likely to cause trouble.”

“Then I pity your household.”

The steward with the wine nearly dropped the tray. The lady on your left made a sound that might have been a cough if she had not been smiling behind the fan.

Before Maekar could answer, the crowd below surged into a roar as Donnor entered the lists under Stark colors loaned hastily by Ashford men who still had not fully accepted that the North was truly here. He rode as he did everything else, spare and controlled, no extra flourish, no playing to the stands, no pointless salutes. Men around you leaned forward at once. A murmur moved through the upper benches. The Stark. The Stark son. Someone behind you whispered that he looked too calm. Someone else whispered that calm was exactly what worried them. Maekar turned to the field on instinct, the argument interrupted but not ended, and you used those few breaths to watch your brother lower his lance and settle into the line opposite a Reach knight whose armor had more enamel than sense.

“He rides well,” Maekar said, eyes still on the lists.

That was not praise freely given, which made it worth more. “He rides as he lives. Quietly until he decides not to.”

“You speak as if that should comfort me.”

“It should concern the man across from him.”

The signal dropped. Horses lunged. Lances came down. The impact cracked loud enough to rattle the rail under your hands. Donnor’s lance struck square and clean, driving the Reach knight sideways out of the saddle so fast the man seemed to vanish in his own plume of dust before the crowd fully understood what had happened. Then the roar came, bigger than before, half delight and half outrage from bettors who had backed the wrong color. Donnor circled once, not raising his arms, not grinning, only turning his horse with the same unbothered precision he had shown on the road. Men loved a peacock. Crowds feared composure. You felt both reactions spread at once.

To your irritation, Maekar gave a brief nod that looked almost satisfied. “Your brother may yet save Ashford from a dull afternoon.”

“He usually ruins dull afternoons, yes.”

At that, Baelor returned to the stand in time to catch the tail end of the exchange and the sight of Donnor’s unhorsed opponent being dragged upright by squires. “Well done,” he said, and it was unclear whether he meant Donnor’s pass or the fact that the royal stand had not yet erupted around the two of you. He took the seat beside Maekar and lowered his voice just enough to suggest diplomacy. “I hope Ashford is treating you better today, my lady.”

“Ashford is trying very hard,” you said. “Your brother less so.”

Baelor closed his eyes for a heartbeat, the expression of a man who had expected exactly this and was still disappointed to be right. “Maekar,” he said without looking at him, “the day is long. Must you fight all your battles before noon?”

Maekar’s gaze never left your face. “I am not fighting. I am being corrected by a northern guest in front of half the court.”

“You make it sound like an accident,” you said.

Baelor made a sound that might have been a laugh if he had not strangled it quickly for the sake of decorum. “I see we are all committed to peace.”

The next hour settled into a rhythm that looked orderly from below and felt like kindling from where you sat. Donnor advanced through his next bout and took his victory with the same spare competence, which fed the crowd’s interest and Lord Ashford’s anxiety in equal measure. Men in the lower benches turned and pointed toward the royal stand each time your brother’s name was called, as if checking whether the Starks approved the spectacle they were altering simply by being present. Maekar remained near, drawn away by duties and returning as if pulled back by unfinished business. Every time he came back the air around the stand tightened. It was absurd. You knew it was absurd. You had spoken to him only a handful of times, and yet each exchange felt less like meeting and more like resuming.

At one point a herald misannounced Donnor’s lineage, naming your grandsire instead of Lord Beron, and before you could say anything Maekar had already barked for the correction to be made. The herald blanched and fumbled through a revised announcement while the crowd jeered for the delay. You looked at Maekar in profile, at the hard concentration in him, and said quietly, “You need not police every word spoken in this place.”

“If I do not, fools make errors and call them small,” he said. “Then by evening those small errors have become insult, challenge, and blood in a ditch.”

“You think very far ahead for a man accused of temper.”

He turned to you. “Temper and foresight are not enemies.”

“No,” you said. “Only unpleasant companions.”

The edge of his mouth moved then, the nearest thing to amusement you had seen him allow in daylight, and the lady with the fan on your left finally rose under some invented excuse and removed herself entirely, perhaps deciding she did not care to be struck by lightning if the gods took an interest.

The minor chaos came, as such things do, from something stupid. It was a little after Donnor’s third pass, when the heat had made everyone drowsier and meaner, and a Reach lordling in the row behind made the mistake of speaking to his companion as if you were deaf. “The wolf girl has Prince Maekar snapping at air like a kennel hound,” he whispered, not quietly enough. “If she stays till supper, he’ll challenge the sun.”

You turned at once. Maekar turned faster.

“What did you say?” Maekar asked, and all the warmth left the stand in a single breath.

The lordling, who had expected amusement and found judgment, reddened under his curls. “I meant no insult, Your Grace. Only a jest.”

“A poor one,” Maekar said.

“I have heard worse,” you cut in, because the last thing Ashford needed was a prince gutting a fool over a mutter in the stands. “Mostly from better men.”

The lordling looked relieved for one heartbeat, then uncertain again when Maekar did not step back. Baelor, who had returned at exactly the wrong moment, inserted himself with the smoothness of long practice. “Then let us all be grateful this morning has produced neither blood nor poetry,” he said. “Sit down, my lord, before you make your jest memorable for all the wrong reasons.”

A few nervous laughs broke the tension. The lordling obeyed at once. The moment passed publicly, but not cleanly. You felt Maekar’s anger still there, not because of the insult itself, but because you had ended it before he chose how. It sat in him like a hand still closed.

“You did not need to do that,” he said once the noise below swallowed the interruption.

“Neither did you.”

“He spoke of you as if you were part of the entertainment.”

“I am in the royal stand at a tourney. At the moment, I am.”

His eyes flashed. “Do you enjoy making light of everything?”

“Do you enjoy treating every slight as treason?”

“It is not treason to expect basic respect.”

“It is not respect if it has to be beaten out of every fool with a title.”

“Sometimes that is exactly what it is.”

Baelor stood very still between you, looked toward the field with excessive concentration, and said to no one in particular, “I may go inspect the horse lines. It seems peaceful there.”

“Coward,” Maekar muttered.

“Survivor,” Baelor replied, and left before either of you could pull him back into it.

After that the words came quicker, lower, and harsher, the stand around you pretending not to listen while listening to every line. It was no longer about Ashford’s arrangements, or heralds, or bored Reach boys making stupid remarks. It widened, as arguments with the wrong person often do. North and South. Duty and pride. Whether order was built by force or earned by fairness. Whether men who spent their lives preparing for insult became stronger or merely lonelier. Maekar spoke like a man who had seen too many consequences to romanticize restraint. You answered like someone who had no patience for men who mistook harshness for strength. Neither of you yielded because neither of you was truly arguing only the point in front of you. There were fathers in it. Houses in it. Long winters and king’s roads and the different ways people learned to survive under names larger than themselves.

By the time Donnor’s final bout of the day was announced, your temper had gone from hot to cold, which was always the more dangerous stage. He won again, this time after a harder pass that split his lance and sent both horses skidding before he recovered first. The crowd thundered for him. Men were shouting Stark now with the same greed they had used for other names at dawn, because crowds loved novelty almost as much as victory. You stood for the formal acknowledgment of his win, watched him raise his visor just enough for the stands to see his face, and felt the entire day turn to noise around you. Maekar said something then, something about Donnor’s riding and what place he might make for himself if he were southron, and the line landed wrong, not because it was insult exactly, but because it carried that familiar assumption that everything worth measuring happened under southern eyes.

You looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw the prince, the commander, the father, the man carrying order on his back like armor, and all at once you did not want another word inside a stand full of listeners who would pick through each one by supper.

“I have had enough of this,” you said, already rising.

Maekar’s head snapped toward you. “Enough of what?”

“Being observed while I speak.” You turned, gathering your skirts before they could snag on the bench. “Argue with someone who enjoys crowds.”

“This is not finished.”

“Then be faster next time.”

You walked out of the royal stand with half the row staring after you and the other half pretending they had not noticed anything at all. Behind you the lists roared again for another pair, trumpets blaring over the din, but your pulse was louder for several steps. The heat outside the shade struck like an open oven. Servants scattered out of your path. Somewhere a herald called for men to clear a lane for the next joust. You kept walking, down the rear steps, past the side pavilions, past a knot of ladies discussing Donnor’s chances with indecent enthusiasm, until the tourney sounds blurred into one thick wall and the horse-lines opened ahead.

Your mare lifted her head the moment she saw you, ears pricking. One of your men moved to ask a question, saw your face, and wisely asked none. “Saddle,” you said. “Now.”

He did it without hesitation, tightening girth and checking the bit while you stripped off rings that would bite your fingers on the reins and handed them to your maid, who had hurried after you with alarm written plainly across her face. “My lady, if Lord Donnor asks where you have gone…”

“Tell him I rode to remember what silence sounds like.”

That much, at least, was true.

You were mounted and out through the east side of the camp in less than five minutes, taking the service track first and then a narrow lane between hedges that dropped toward the tree line beyond Ashford’s outer fields. Behind you the tourney carried on in color and shouting and dust, shrinking with each length of road. Ahead, the woods gathered in green shadow, cooler under oak and beech where the light came through in broken pieces and the ground smelled of leaf mold, damp roots, and old rain. You let the mare stretch into a canter once the path widened, wind pulling at your hair where pins had already begun to loosen. The anger in you did not vanish. It shifted, spread out, became something harder to name once the crowd was gone and no one was there to witness the shape of it. You replayed the stand in fragments. His voice. Your own. The way he had looked when the fool behind you spoke. The way he had gone still when you stood to leave, as if departure itself were a challenge more offensive than any argument.

You should have expected he would follow. You knew men like him too well not to. Still, the sound of another horse coming hard along the lane behind you sent a fresh spark through your chest before you turned in the saddle and saw him.

Maekar rode without escort, without banner, helm gone, hair wild. He handled his horse like he handled everything else, with complete command and no wasted movement, cutting distance fast with the kind of relentless pace that asked the animal for obedience and got it. When he saw you glance back, he urged the horse harder.

You almost laughed from sheer disbelief. “Gods save me,” you muttered, and kicked your mare on.

The path dipped, curved, narrowed between trees. Branches flashed past your shoulders. Birds broke from the brush ahead in a burst of wings. You knew enough not to drive the mare blindly through roots and hidden stone just to prove a point, but you did not slow much. Behind you came the rhythm of Maekar’s pursuit, closer now, then farther as the trail turned, then close again. He called once, your name carrying through the trees. You did not answer. He called again, louder this time, not a plea, not even a command, but something in between, the sound of a man angry enough to forget what tone he should use.

The lane opened suddenly near a shallow stream crossed by an old cart track. You took the left fork without thinking and cursed a breath later when it proved narrower and softer underfoot. The mare checked herself, sensing bad ground. That cost you. Maekar came up on your right in three long strides of his horse, cutting across the better line, and before you could push through, he angled his mount directly in front of yours.

Both horses reared half a hand from the collision of momentum and restraint. Your mare tossed her head and danced sideways, snorting, until you hauled her down and planted her again. Maekar’s horse held, stamping once, foam at the bit. For a moment all you heard was breathing. Yours. His. The animals’. Leaves moving overhead. Water running somewhere below the bank.

“Have you lost your mind?” you snapped.

Maekar was breathing hard, more from temper than effort, one hand tight on the reins. “You left in the middle of a sentence.”

“You chased me out of a tourney to finish an argument?”

“You rode off like I had insulted your whole House.”

You stared at him, incredulous. “You followed me into the woods because I stood up before you were done speaking?”

“Yes.”

The answer came so plainly that it stunned a laugh out of you before you could stop it, one short disbelieving sound in the green quiet. Maekar’s face changed at that, anger cracking just enough to show what sat beneath it, not humiliation, not wounded pride exactly, but frustration at losing hold of something he had not intended to care about and now cared about too much.

“You are impossible,” you said.

He looked at you as if he had been holding the same thought for hours. “You provoke every man in your path and then act surprised when one refuses to step aside.”

“I did not ask you to follow.”

“No. You expected me to remain in that stand and swallow it.”

“I expected a prince to remember he was a prince and not a furious boy.”

At that his jaw tightened. “You know nothing of what I remember every hour of the day.”

“And you know nothing of what I left to come here and sit among silk-wrapped hens while men decide whether my brother is a novelty or a threat.”

He leaned forward slightly in the saddle, eyes fixed on yours. “Then tell me.”

The words hit harder than they should have. The path, the trees, the heat, the chase, all of it seemed to narrow at once around that look and that voice. Tell me. Not order. Not mockery. Not the careful distance of titles. Something direct and raw enough that for one strange second the argument changed shape in your hands and became dangerous in a different way.

“You do not get to demand truth because you ran me down on a forest track,” you said, quieter now.

“I am not demanding.” His expression said he knew exactly how false that sounded. He corrected himself. “I am asking before you ride off again and spend the rest of the day pretending none of this matters.”

You held his gaze. “And if I say it does not?”

“I will know you are lying.”

The wind moved through the trees and brought the scent of horses, wet earth, and the faint metal tang of dried sweat from the lists still clinging to both of you. A lock of hair had come loose across your cheek. You pushed it back with a gloved hand, suddenly aware of everything, the closeness of the horses, the narrowness of the track, the fact that he had come alone, the fact that you had not truly tried to lose him once you heard who it was.

“My brother is winning your tourney,” you said after a long moment. “Half these lords already look at him like a disruption with a wolf sigil. The other half look at me as if I rode south to be displayed, weighed, and bargained over between courses at supper. I am tired of being looked at and told it is honor.”

Maekar’s face did not soften. He was not a man made for softening. But something in him steadied. “That,” he said, “is not a thing I would tell you.”

“No. You would tell me to endure it and use it.”

“Yes.”

You gave him a hard look. “There. You see? Impossible.”

He almost smiled, and this time it was unmistakable, brief and rough and entirely unsuited to the prince men watched from a distance. “I did not say I was easy company.”

“That is the first honest thing you have said all day.”

He shifted his horse half a step closer, enough that your mare flicked an ear toward him but did not pull away. “You left because I spoke of your brother as if the South were a measure he ought to care about.”

“Yes.”

“I was not measuring him by the South.” He watched you, choosing words with visible effort. “I was saying men here will remember what he did today, and that matters whether we like it or not.”

You studied him. “You are poor at saying what you mean when you are angry.”

“I am poor at many things when I am angry.”

“I noticed.”

Silence fell then, not empty this time. The stream moved under the bank with a soft constant rush. Somewhere farther off a woodpecker struck a trunk in patient, stupid rhythm. Maekar’s horse lowered its head slightly, the worst of the chase done. Yours shifted weight, waiting on your hands.

“You should go back,” you said, though without any force in it. “If you are gone too long, Ashford will assume I murdered a prince in the woods and hid the body badly.”

Maekar’s eyes stayed on yours. “Would they be wrong?”

“Depends how the argument ended.”

“It is not ended.”

“No.” Your pulse had changed again, slower and heavier now, each beat too clear. “It is not.”

He moved first, not suddenly, not like a man seizing something, but with the same deliberate certainty he had shown in everything since he rode into your path. He swung down from his horse in one clean motion, boots hitting the damp earth with a muted thud, and stepped close enough to your mare that she tossed her head once in protest before settling when his hand found the bridle near the bit. He looked up at you from there, one hand on your horse, the other loose at his side, the distance between you no longer respectable and no longer possible to ignore.

“You should tell me to move,” he said.

“You should not need telling.”

“And yet.”

You stared down at him, at the hard line of his face, the heat still in him, the restraint over it, the infuriating honesty of the way he stood there as if the chase and the argument and the whole absurd day had driven him to one point he had no intention of stepping back from. For one heartbeat you considered turning the mare and forcing him aside. For another, saying something cruel enough to break the moment cleanly. Instead you slid from the saddle before prudence could regain its footing, landed close enough that your skirt brushed his boot, and looked up into a silence that felt louder than the tourney ever had.

“If this is your way of winning arguments,” you said, voice low, “I begin to understand why your household looks exhausted.”

His hand tightened on the bridle. “If this is your way of losing them, the North is stranger than I was told.”

You should have answered. You should have stepped back. You did neither. The air between you had gone thin. His gaze dropped to your mouth, then returned to your eyes as if asking one last question he did not intend to say aloud. When you did not move away, he reached up, rough fingers brushing your jaw with a care that startled you more than the pursuit had, and kissed you like the argument had simply changed language. Not gentle. Not careless either. Heat and temper and restraint broken exactly once and all at once.

Knights move through the heat in gleaming mail and sweat-damp gambesons, swords flashing like splinters of sun. The metallic clash of steel on steel rings sharp and bright, underscored by the grunt of effort, the thud of blunted blows against shields. Squires scurry round them like harried crows—fetching water, dragging straw-stuffed dummies back upright after they’ve been knocked off their posts, tripping over their own oversized boots and earning curses for their trouble.

The smell is thick: hot metal, trampled sand, old leather, the sour edge of men working hard under an unforgiving sky. Now and then, a faint breeze stirs, carrying up a ghost of the sea from beyond the walls. Salt tries and mostly fails to cut through the city’s stew of smoke and sweat.

With the stone pleasantly cool at your spine and that rare breath of air threading through your hair, King’s Landing almost feels bearable.

Almost.

“Lady Stark.”

You hear him before you see him—his voice first, low and even, pitched with the unshowy assurance of someone long used to being heard without needing to raise it. Then the soft rustle of good fabric, the small, controlled jingle of a sword against its fittings. You turn towards the sound. 

Crown Prince Baelor stands a few paces away, framed by the archway that leads in from the garden path. The greenery behind him—orange trees in great glazed pots, dark leaves glossy with heat—throws his figure into sharper relief.

He looks different in daylight.

His dark hair is pulled back from his face, and the style bares the strong line of his throat and the cut of his jaw—and, when the light hits right, the first few threads of silver at his temples, fine as cobwebs catching the sun. There’s the start of scruff along his jaw, not neglect so much as the inevitable shadow of a long day that started too early. He wears a light surcoat dyed a deep, dry red, the colour of old wine or a dragon banner left too long in the sun, hanging open over an undyed linen shirt gone a little darker where it clings to his skin. No rubies are burning on his fingers, no embroidered dragons roaring from his chest.

He doesn’t seem to need them.

The dragon is in the way the space has already rearranged itself around him without anyone quite noticing—guards straightening at the arch, a squire nearly dropping a practice sword when he realises who’s in the doorway, heads turning like flowers seeking the sun. It’s in the little ripples of movement going outward through the courtyard, men dipping half-bows, conversation bending around his presence.

Up close, there are other details you didn’t have time to notice in the press of the hall: the faint lines at the corners of his eyes, etched by squinting into southern light and too many sleepless councils; the way his shoulders carry their breadth with an unconscious care, as if he is perpetually remembering not to loom.

“Your Highness,” you say, dipping into a curtsey that’s more inclination than performance—Stark-sparse, just enough to be unimpeachably proper. “I hope I haven’t stolen your vantage. It’s a good one.”

“On the contrary.” His mouth curves at one corner. Up close, you notice the slight unevenness of his lower lip, as if it’s been split more than once and healed a little imperfectly, same as the small crook of his strong nose. “I was hoping to share it.”

Movement flickers at the edge of your vision: ladies in pale summer silks drifting, not quite casually, into the opposite colonnade; a knot of younger lords materialising as if they’ve just remembered they adore the sound of swords. They settle themselves in pockets of shade with studied nonchalance, each one wearing the particular brand of indifference that only exists when someone is desperate to look like they’re not staring.

The whispers rise almost at once, small and sharp as midges over a summer marsh.

“—crown prince—”

“—wolf girl from the North—”

“—led her out of the hall last night, I swear it—”

You keep your gaze on Baelor and pretend you don’t hear a thing.

“If that’s the case,” you say dryly, “I fear I must disappoint half the court, Your Highness. They were very nearly convinced you were going to push me into the yard and have me spar a Kingsguard for your amusement.”

He huffs a quiet sound that might be a laugh, the corner of his mouth deepening. “I’ve given them no such impression.”

“You rescued me from a crush of bodies and whisked me away through a side gallery no one else seemed to notice,” you remind him. “I’m told that’s practically a love song, down here.”

One dark brow lifts the barest fraction. “And what is it in the North?” he asks.

“Mildly suspicious.”

The laugh that breaks out of him then is low and caught off guard, like thunder nudging into the open air by a sudden gust. You feel it more than hear it, a vibration in the warm air between you.

Across the courtyard, the watching cluster tightens its focus. Heads lean a little closer. Fans twitch. Fire and ice, dragon and wolf—the realm’s favourite story, being spun again in the angle of his shoulders as he inclines closer and the simple, stubborn fact that you do not step back.

Baelor crosses the last of the distance to the balustrade and takes up a place beside you. He leaves a courteous hand’s-breadth between your bodies, but the heat coming off him is a tangible thing, like standing near a sun-warmed wall. He doesn’t reach for you, but he sets his hands on the stone rail, fingers splayed. You notice his hands in spite of yourself: broad palms, long fingers, calluses roughing the pads where a sword hilt has bitten over the years. A faint white scar runs diagonally across the back of his right hand, disappearing under his cuff.

“You disappeared early from the feast after our… practical rescue,” he says lightly, eyes on the yard below. “I hope you weren’t plagued by too many questions.”

“Only from my father,” you say. “And those were about wine imports and garrison numbers.”

“Not about princes leading you out of crowded halls?” The corner of his mouth curves, but his gaze remains outward, as if he doesn’t entirely trust himself to look at you and keep the tone easy.

“I told him you were being courteous,” you say. “He seemed satisfied. Possibly offended you’d beaten him to it.”

That pulls a ghost of a smile to his lips again, small but undeniably pleased. The faint lines at the corners of his eyes crinkle. Below, two knights meet with a clash that sends sparks jumping, swords ringing. One overextends, nearly stumbles; the other pulls the blow, turning it into a more graceful disarm than it might have been. A squire jogs round with a waterskin, face red, hair plastered to his brow.

“So,” you say after a moment, watching the bout, “was there some royal matter you wished to discuss, Your Highness? Or did you hunt me down merely to ensure I had not been trampled under your court’s feet overnight?”

“I like to think of it as a… welfare inspection,” Baelor replies. “I’ve had a sudden influx of reports about wolves roaming my halls. It seemed wise to confirm no one had been bitten.”

You glance at him sidelong. In profile, you can see the faint silver at his temple more clearly, the strong line of his nose, the rough shadow on his jaw.

“If they had been,” you say lightly, “you’d know. They’d stop fawning and start telling you the truth.”

He turns his head enough to look at you properly, the movement unhurried. Up close, his eyes are warmer than you’d thought under all that control—dark, yes, but with lighter amber threads when the light catches them.

“You don’t think they tell me the truth now?” he asks.

“I think,” you say, keeping your tone mild, “they tell you the truth they believe you want to hear. And I think you are too polite to tell them how tedious that is.”

For a heartbeat, he goes absolutely still. Even his fingers on the stone seem to pause. Then his breath leaves him in a soft sound you might, in another man, call relief.

“You waste no words, do you, Lady Stark?”

“There’s very little point in them, down here,” you explain. “No one lets them finish a sentence before they’ve already twisted them into something else.”

“And yet,” he murmurs, “here you are, finishing yours.”

You lift one shoulder, a small, helpless shrug. “I’ve always been stubborn. A Stark trait, or so I’m told.”

“And sharp,” Baelor says quietly. “Your father has a blade of good steel in you.”

There is respect in it, not flattery. It lands more deeply than anything any lord has said to you since you arrived, all tired attempts to flatter your “stormy northern beauty.”

You clear your throat and look back at the yard, suddenly acutely aware of the warmth of him beside you, of the way his gaze lingers for an extra beat on your face before returning to the drills below. One of the younger knights misjudges a turn and goes down hard in a spray of sand. His opponent offers a hand, hauls him up by the bracer; they fall back into guard as if nothing happened.

“You train with them?” you ask, nodding toward the yard.

“Most mornings,” he says. “When the council allows it. Or when I decide the council does not.”

“Is that why you insisted on walking me back last night?” Your mouth says before you can think better of it. “You were stretching your legs after sitting too long?”

He glances over, caught off guard, and the quick flash of genuine amusement in his eyes feels like sunlight breaking through the clouds.

“It seemed the least I could do,” he retorts. “After manhandling you like a sack of turnips.”

“You’ve clearly never carried turnips,” you rebuke.

This time, Baelor’s laughter comes quicker. It lines his shoulders in a looser shape, knocking something off his posture that was always on guard.

“I confess,” he says, “my rural experience is limited.”

“I’ll send you a crate from Winterfell,” you offer solemnly. “So you can practice. It would be a terrible scandal if the realm discovered their crown prince could not lift root vegetables.”

He turns toward you more fully now, one elbow hooked on the balustrade, body angling in your direction. The smile tugging at his mouth is tugging at something in you, too.

“You threaten me with agricultural training, my lady?” he wonders idly. “That’s a bold tactic with a man who commands the royal kitchens.”

“I have survived northern winters,” you reply promptly. “You cannot frighten me with cooks.”

That does it.

The laugh that bursts out of him is bright and startled, not the controlled, modest chuckle of a prince rewarding a jest. His head tips back slightly; his throat bares; the sound spills into the hot air and startles a couple of sparrows from the eaves ahead. You see at least three courtiers across the way, physically stop mid-sentence, and stare. You wonder, abruptly, how often anyone hears him laugh like that, if ever. You can’t help it; your own mouth curves, slow and genuine, the kind of smile that belongs more by a Winterfell hearth than in a southern courtyard under dragon banners.

When he looks back at you, still grinning, something in him shifts.

You see it in stages. The amusement remains at the corners of Baelor’s mouth, in the faint crinkling at the edges of his eyes, but it slows. Deepens. His gaze begins to move with a different quality—not the quick, sweeping scan of a man cataloguing a room, but the steadier attention of someone tracing a line they’ve just realised might matter. He looks as if he’s memorising you in pieces: the hard set of your eyes, the line of your nose, the stubborn tilt of your chin. The little crease that always forms between your brows when you’re thinking too hard. 

The smile on his face gentles, the way a sword tip sinks into earth instead of flesh. For a heartbeat, the weight of his regard is almost too much to bear. Not because it is heavy. Because it is steady, as if something in him that has been braced in every moment—against expectation, against failure, against the next demand of court or war—has, for this one small patch of shade in this one overheated city, quietly decided it can stop clenching.

You feel it in the way his shoulders ease, in the subtle uncurling of his fingers where they rest against the stone. In the way his breath leaves him slower, less controlled.

The world tilts a little. The clang of swords, the barked orders, the low mutter of court gossip, and the relentless glare of sun on red stone recede all at once. 

“Gods,” he says, almost under his breath, as if the words have slipped out unexamined. “You really aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

You blink once. “Should I be?”

He studies your face in silence, dark brows drawn together slightly, as if searching for something written somewhere you can’t see.

“Most people are,” he says at last. “Or they are afraid of what I represent. The crown. The dragons. The line of kings.”

“You’re a man,” you say simply, a little too bluntly, perhaps. “Men bleed. Men err. Men die. I was raised on stories of winter, Your Highness. Of things that do not die so easily. After that, it’s hard to be frightened of someone just because he sits in a prettier chair.”

The corner of his mouth lifts again, helpless, but the look in his eyes is not amused. It’s… something else, deeper, wondering. 

“Prettier chair,” he repeats under his breath. “You’ve a talent for cutting matters down to the bone, my lady.”

“It’s colder up there,” you say. “We don’t have time to wrap them in ribbons.”

He exhales a breath that’s half-laugh, half something else, but his gaze doesn’t leave your face. You feel that look like a hand laid gently along your cheek, warm and careful and a little bewildered. On the far side of the courtyard, you can almost sense the court’s curiosity sharpening into something more pointed. Dragon and wolf, shoulder to shoulder, heads inclined. The heir of Aegon’s line and the heir of Winterfell, talking in low voices like two people instead of two sigils.

“Tell me something,” Baelor says suddenly.

You tilt your head. “That sounds suspiciously like a command.”

“A request,” he corrects, mouth quirking. “Though if you like, I can have the heralds announce it first. I’m told their voices carry wonderfully in this courtyard.”

“Spare me,” you say, this time smiling, too. “Very well. Ask.”

“If,” he says slowly, tasting the words, “the North were not bound by oaths. If there were no expectation that your house must send its heirs south, must attend court, must trade wolf for dragon in this dance we all pretend is voluntary—would you still have come?”

The question catches at you, hooks into a place you keep carefully out of reach. The honest answer rises, cold and clear, before you can school it into politeness that would be expected at court.

“No,” you tell him honestly. “I would have stayed where the air bites and people say what they mean.”

Baelor doesn’t flinch. He lets it land, lets it settle in whatever place inside him keeps tally of such things.

“But,” you add, because hard truths are not the same as unkindness, and your father taught you the honour in oaths, “if duty brought me anywhere, I’m… not yet sorry it brought me here.”

His gaze drops to your mouth for a fraction of a second, then lifts again, the movement so quick you might have imagined it.

“Not yet,” he echoes quietly.

“Winter is long,” you say, trying for lightness, for play. “I reserve the right to change my mind when your sun has baked me dry.”

A small, rumbling laugh escapes Baelor once more, and with it that telltale loosening along his shoulders, as if some invisible weight has shifted minutely again. It’s becoming disturbingly addictive to pry these breaks in his orderly demeanour.  

“You would find ways to keep your own weather,” he says. “I suspect you already have.”

“You think me so formidable, Your Highness?” you jest.

“I think,” Baelor says, the words coming slower now, “that you are the first person in this castle who looks at me and sees a man before a crown. And that is… rarer than you might imagine.”

You look at him then, really look, past the heat shimmer and the red stone and the stories wrapping themselves around him like smoke. You see the lines set into his face by years of being firstborn, the one who must always be example, shield, sword. You see the faint shadows under his eyes that speak of long nights bent over maps and messages, of Blackfyre names still being counted in his sleep. You see, beneath all that, a stubborn glint of something quieter. Not dragonfire. But instead, a flicker of exhaustion, and even deeper than it, something stubborn and kind that refuses to be worn away.

A man, you think. Not a myth, or a heir, or a monster. A man who has been treated like a symbol so long he’s surprised to find anyone still remembers his humanity.

“Men make better allies than myths,” you tell him, a touch softer. “Myths expect worship. Men can be spoken to.”

“And what do you intend to speak to me about, Lady Stark?” he asks, head tilting slightly, mouth fighting another smile.

“Turnips,” you say promptly, fighting to keep a straight expression. “And the scandalous lack of training your arms have in regard to them.”

Baelor’s head tips back again; laughter spills out of him, bright and full. A Kingsguard at the doorway tries and fails to keep his expression neutral. One of the ladies across the courtyard lifts a fan to hide her open-mouthed stare. Then the laughter softens, thinning into a breath as he looks back at you. There’s a look on his face now you haven’t seen before—caught somewhere between delight and something older, more heedful. As if he is aware that this, whatever this is between you, is dangerous, and cannot quite bring himself to care in this moment.

If the court is busy stitching a story of fire and ice around the two of you—dragon and wolf in the same patch of shadow, speaking as if you’ve known each other an age—let them, you think. They will spin tales regardless. They always do. Here, above the baking sand and under the relentless southern sun, with Baelor’s smile turned unguardedly toward you and some tight band behind his eyes finally easing, it feels less like simply existing without expectation for once. 

You shift a little, resting your forearms on the balustrade beside his. The stone is warm beneath your sleeves. Your hands don’t touch, but they lie so close that if either of you moved the width of a finger, skin would meet skin.

“We should start with the kitchens,” you prompt, keeping your face very straight. “If I am to tutor the future king of the Seven Kingdoms in proper agricultural respect, I’ll need allies among the bakers at the very least.”

“An alliance between crown and kitchen,” Baelor muses, eyes still on you. “The realm will tremble.”

“The realm will eat better,” you retort mildly.

He looks at you again, then—really looks, as if this is another angle he means to learn by heart. That softened, almost curious not-smile touches his mouth, pulling at one corner more than the other. The silver at his temple catches the light like frost in dark hair.

“I find,” he says quietly, almost as if confessing to himself rather than to you, “that I am very much looking forward to it.”

—

Your father calls your name the way northerners sound winter is coming—flat as stone, certain as sunrise, with a dry edge that almost hides the warmth under it.

“Daughter.”

His voice cuts clean through the hum of the Red Keep. You glance up from the window-seat. From here, high in one of the guest towers, you can see a thumb of Blackwater Bay between the huddle of red roofs and the outer wall, the water hammered copper by the sinking sun. Smoke hangs over the city like a low ceiling. Cookfires and tanneries and whatever else King’s Landing chooses to breathe.

“Father.”

Barthogan Stark fills the doorway the way he fills any hall: formidable simply by existing in the space. He doesn’t loom, yet he doesn’t need to. Broad shoulders, long shadow, the kind of stillness that makes lesser men remember they have spines and straighten them. His hair has gone iron-grey at the temples, the rest dragged back and knotted with northern practicality. No southern curls, no scented oil, no jewelled clasps. His beard is shot through with white and trimmed short, more for convenience than vanity. He wears plain wool in Stark grey, thick and good, the fur at his collar a dull, honest brown. The only concession to court is the silver direwolf at his shoulder.

He surveys the chamber once, taking in the carved bed, the painted screens showing dragons in flight over a city that shall never again see them. His mouth flattens when his gaze catches on the lion embroidered into the chair nearest him, its golden paw resting smugly on scarlet. One of many little details paying tribute to different noble houses of Westeros, you imagine, as is expected of guest quarters. 

“Nothing good,” he mutters, as if to himself, “ever comes of Starks going south.”

You almost smile. 

“You agreed to it,” you remind him. “The king’s invitation.”

“Aye.” He steps inside, the floor whispering under his weight. “Daeron’s ravens were very polite.” He shuts the door with a firm hand; the corridor noise—clatter of armour, a shouted order, a burst of laughter—dims to a muffled blur. “The realm needs to see its lords sitting at the same table again. Needs to remember we’re one kingdom, not five dozen petty grievances.”

“After Blackfyre,” you say quietly.

“Aye,” he says again, heavier this time. “After Blackfyre.”

For a moment, the room seems to carry the echo of another battlefield entirely—ash in the air, banners torn, the sound of steel on steel. You weren’t there, of course; you were too young and precious to be allowed anywhere near fighting, but your father was. The way his jaw sets at the reminder of the rebellion is telling enough.

He shakes it off like snow from his shoulders.

“The king has invited us to dine with the royal family,” he says more briskly. “His steward’s just left. We’re expected at the solar in an hour.”

Not the cavern of the great hall, then, with its echoing vaults and a hundred eyes. Something smaller. More private. More dangerous, in its way.

“Just us?” you ask.

“Just us.” He comes further in, his boots thudding softly against the rushes. “The king, the queen, his sons.”

He ticks them off in that dry, matter-of-fact way of his. “Baelor is the king’s heir and Hand besides. Of course, he’ll be there. Then there’s Aerys, books and prayers. Rhaegel, gods know what goes on behind those eyes. Maekar, all iron edges and iron opinions.”

His gaze flicks to you, sharp as a hawk’s despite the lines of tiredness at the corners. “And the North,” he adds. “In the shape of a grumpy old wolf and his pup.”

“I am not a pup,” you say automatically.

That earns you the barest twitch of his mouth. “You’ll always be my pup,” he shoots back gruffly. “Even when you’re sitting in Winterfell’s high seat and arguing with greybeards twice your age.”

You tip your chin up. “I don’t argue with them. I correct them, Father.”

“Ha.” The sound is low, almost a cough, but you know it for a laugh. “That you do.”

He crosses to the chair opposite the window and lowers himself into it with the care of a man whose knees are beginning to complain on cold mornings. The Lannister lion embroidery squashes indignantly under Stark weight. He notices, and for a heartbeat, his hand settles over the lion as if weighing it, then dismisses it entirely.

You hesitate, fingers worrying at the edge of your sleeve.

“Are you… displeased, Father?” The words come out before you can stop them. “About the Hand.”

His gaze sharpens. “Baelor?”

It’s an old habit between you, that steady look. He taught it to you himself: never drop your eyes if you want men to listen and respect you.

“A Hand who happened to find me in a crowded hall and insisted on escorting me to my chambers,” you clarify, keeping your tone mild. “The court hasn’t decided yet whether that makes him chivalrous or compromised.”

Barthogan snorts, a sound like a rockslide starting. “The court hasn’t decided if the sun rises in the east,” he says. “They’d hold council on which way piss should fall if it meant three more hours of gossip.”

“You heard, then,” you say.

“I hear more than these southerners think.” His big hands settle on the carved arms of the chair, fingers like old roots. “They forget the North has ears, even this far from snow.”

You pick at a loose thread on your skirt. It’s the same deep blue as the pools in the godswood at home, but here under southern light it looks almost black.

“Are you very cautious?” you ask, then force yourself to be more explicit. “About him? Or about what people will make of it?”

“Both,” he replies without ceremony. His eyes drift to the narrow slit of the window, to the thin wedge of bay and sky. “Daeron Targaryen is a clever man. Too clever, some would say.” A weighty pause. “He mended a realm his father almost shattered. The Blackfyre banners are ash, but there’s still smoke in men’s hearts.”

You can smell smoke now that he’s said it. Faint but ever-present, threaded through the city’s stink of fish and waste and too many bodies packed too close.

“He needs the realm to see the North at his table,” Barthogan goes on. “Needs them to look at you and think, ah, there sits the future of Winterfell, and she smiles at dragonkind without baring her teeth.”

Your laugh is more of a huff. “You sent the wrong daughter, then.”

“I only have the one,” he says dryly. “Seven spared me the trouble of spares.”

He shifts, the chair creaking under his weight. The sound is oddly comforting; furniture in Winterfell complains the same way.

“He needs unity,” Barthogan says. “He needs the lords who stayed loyal in the Rebellion to feel seen. He needs the sons and grandsons of traitors to see there’s a place for them if they behave. And he needs the North not to sit up there in the snow, brooding, while the rest of the realm stews.”

“And we need…?” you prompt.

He looks back at you, and there it is—that fierce, quiet affection, the thing that makes men mutter that Lord Barthogan is colder than ice until they see the way his hand settles on your shoulder when he thinks no one’s looking.

“We need them to remember there is a future for the North,” he explains. “We need them to know your name and your face and that you aren’t some half-wild rumour of a she-wolf in furs gnawing bones in a godswood.”

You wrinkle your nose. “That sounds more interesting than embroidery and small talk.”

“Interesting gets Starks killed when they go south,” he grumbles. “And I’ve buried enough.”

He doesn’t have to say it again. It’s etched into the furrows around his mouth.

“But,” he adds after a moment, quieter, “the realm doesn’t stay mended if the North hides in its snow and sulks. So here we are. Wolves in a dragon’s den. You, my pup, at the king’s own table. Let them look. Let them see what waits in the cold when the snows come again.”

Something tightens in your chest, half pride, half dread.

“It didn’t feel like a ploy,” you say after a moment, thinking of Baelor’s hand at your waist. The steady weight of it, the way he’d guided you through the press like you were something precious, not something in the way or to be played. “When he helped me. In the hall.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Barthogan says. “By all accounts, Baelor is his father’s finest work. And also the man he least wishes to spend.” His eyes narrow. “He’ll not throw his heir about like a copper. That doesn’t mean there aren’t games on the board you can’t see yet.”

You thread your fingers in your lap. “You think I’m a piece.”

“I think you’re heir to Winterfell,” your father replies. “Which means you’re a piece whether either of us likes it or not. The question is whose hand moves you.”

You stare down at your own hands, knotted against the dark wool of your skirts. Fingers chapped from northern winters, the faint scars of old knife-work and forbidden training.

“And if I move myself?” you ask.

For the first time since he entered, your father’s mouth breaks properly, teeth flashing in a rare, sharp grin. It makes him look suddenly younger, like the man you’ve only heard about in old stories of duels and battles.

“Then I’ll be very proud,” he tells you frankly. “And worried sick, no doubt.”

A small laugh escapes you, the tightness easing just a fraction. Outside, a gull shrieks somewhere near the bay. The wind slides weakly through the window-slit, warm and sour compared to the bright bite of home. Even the air here feels crowded and wrong.

“Listen to them,” your father says, jerking his chin at the window, at the muffled roar of King’s Landing. Sounds rush in: distant hawker’s cries, the grind of cart wheels on cobble, the clank of gate-chains. “Learn what songs they sing when they think no one’s listening, but don’t let the noise drown you. You’re a Stark. There’s steel in you, girl. Remember that when you sit at that table.”

There’s a beat of quiet. The fire in the small hearth pops, resin spitting from a log of southern pine.

“Do you trust him, Father?” you ask softly. “Baelor. Do you think he’ll make a fair king one day?”

Your father sits with it for a long moment, eyes on you and through you and somewhere beyond the wall behind your head.

“I trust,” he says at last, “that he loves this realm. I trust that he feels the weight of it before he sleeps and after he wakes. I trust that he’s been taught, since before he could walk, that duty comes before desire, every time.”

Something twists under your ribs at that, sharp and inexplicable.

“That sounds lonely.”

“It is,” Barthogan agrees without so much as a blink. “Lonely men sometimes make the best kings.”

“Why?”

“Because they know what it costs,” he says, exhaling tiredly. “To use people as shields against their own emptiness. And because if they’re not careful, they forget they’re men at all and start thinking they’re gods that happen to walk and talk among us.”

You think of Baelor in the courtyard, shoulders unhooked for a moment, that quiet laugh shaking loose like stones in a thaw.

“He didn’t look like he’d forgotten,” you murmur.

“Good,” your father grunts, hauling himself to his feet with a soft noise that might be a curse at his knee. “Then perhaps the realm will be blessed with another good king.”

He crosses to you and, without ceremony, sets that big, scarred hand on the top of your head. His fingers find the place where your hair parts, callused thumb resting briefly against the line of your brow. It’s awkward and too gentle for a man who’s broken noses with those hands. It still makes your throat close up.

“Wash your face, pup,” he orders gruffly. “Change that gown. You look like you’ve been dragged behind a cart.”

“I look fine,” you protest weakly, but lean into his touch all the same.

“Fine is not what we’re doing tonight,” he states solemnly. “We’re showing a dragon king the face of the North five winters from now. Make sure it’s one they remember.”

—

The king’s solar is smaller than you expect.

Not small—this is still the Red Keep, where nothing important is ever truly small—but after the echoing cavern of the great hall, the space feels almost intimate. The ceiling is lower, the arched windows narrower, crawling with tracery that casts lacework shadows on the floor as the last light slants in.

Tapestries in deep, wine-dark reds and old gold soften the stone walls: scenes of Aegon’s Conquest, dragons arcing across skies the wrong colour, a river of armoured men burning. Between them hang narrower banners bearing the three-headed dragon, its black threads drinking the firelight. The smell hits you as soon as you step through the door—roast capon and garlic and sweet onions, the fatty comfort of lamb, cinnamon in the wine. Beneath it lurks the fainter scent of parchment, ink, and beeswax polish: a lived-in room, not just a showpiece.

A long polished table runs down the centre, set with silver that catches the candle-glow and throws it back in softer, warmer sparks. The board is well-laden but not absurd: no peacocks in their feathers, no absurd sugar castles. Bowls of olives, fresh bread still steaming, platters of simple, well-cooked food. A family meal dressed in royal clothes.

Daeron II Targaryen sits at the head, crown resting lightly in his hair. The lines on his face are not the purpled veins of excess you’ve seen on lesser lords; they’re the grooves of thought and worry, more laughter than intemperance. His eyes are sharp, weighing. He looks less like a dragon out of a song and more like a man who has spent too many nights bent over maps by candlelight.

Beside him sits the queen, composed and watchful, her hand resting on the table near his, not quite touching. Her gaze tracks each person who enters with quiet attention.

His sons flank him, four men cut from the same bone-deep heritage and yet startlingly different.

Baelor stands behind his chair when you arrive, speaking low to a maester you recognise from the council as Yandel, with his chain glinting dullly in the firelight. Baelor straightens at the herald’s call—“Lord Barthogan Stark of Winterfell, and his daughter and heir, Lady Stark”—and for a heartbeat, you see something flicker over his face.

Not surprise, but the opposite of it. The tiny easing of a man who has been waiting for something and sees it at last.

To Daeron’s right sits Aerys, narrow-shouldered and pale, his fingers ink-stained even at supper, eyes shadowed by too many hours in the library. To the king’s left, Rhaegel, dreamy and distracted, his gaze skimming the tapestries as if they’re half real. At the end, Maekar looks carved from one of Winterfell’s very own buttresses—solid, blunt, his jaw as square as his opinions, if the rumour is to be believed.

Heat from the hearth pricks your cheeks as you and your father move forward over the thick carpets. The dragon banners on the wall stir faintly in a draft.

Baelor inclines his head to your father first, the Hand acknowledging the Warden of the North. Then his gaze slides to you, and the room draws in at the edges, colours dulling, sounds dimming.

“Lady Stark.” The title sits warm in his mouth, as if he’s been turning it over in his mind. “You honour us.”

“Your Grace. Your Majesties. My princes.” You drop into your curtsey, the weight of your new gown—deep Stark grey brushed with white along the sleeves, silver thread catching the light like frost—pulling at your shoulders. “The honour is ours.”

Daeron rises enough to clasp Barthogan’s forearm in greeting. Up close, the king smells faintly of ink and cloves.

“Lord Stark,” he greets warmly. “I trust the southern sun hasn’t melted you entirely yet.”

Your father’s mouth gives a brief, reluctant twitch. “I still remember what snow looks like, Your Grace. Though Gods be good, your city’s heat is doing its damnedest to cook it out of me.”

“There are some in my court,” Daeron says wryly, “who would pay good gold to see winter softened. I am not one of them.”

Polite words follow about your stay so far, the state of the roads, and how the wolves of Winterfell have fared in this long summer. You answer when Daeron or the queen address you, careful and measured, letting your father absorb most of the conversation. All the while, that strange humming tension runs under everything. You can feel it the way you’d feel the air before a thunderstorm back home. The heaviness, the prickle along the skin that foretells something.

It lives in the way Daeron’s gaze keeps flicking, almost unconsciously, to Baelor when talk brushes the subject of the Dornish marches. In the quick, sideways glance Aerys and Maekar trade when Daeron mentions “old wounds” and “new loyalties”, and everyone hears Blackfyre without him saying it.

In the way Baelor speaks little but weighs every word as if testing its weight. You’ve seen storms building over the Wolfswood: clouds stacking, sky lowering, the world holding its breath. This feels like that. The Rebellion may be over, but the air still remembers. 

By courtesy, they seat Baelor at the king’s right hand, and you further down that side, closer than custom might strictly demand but close enough that you can hear Baelor’s soft answers without straining, far enough that no one can accuse you of hovering at his elbow.

Your father takes a place opposite you, where he can see everything and miss nothing.

The chairs are high-backed, with cushions stuffed with goose feathers rather than straw. You sit and feel the faint, unfamiliar give, the softness where Winterfell would offer solid oak. Wet wool, cold stone, pine-smoke, those are the scents you carry in your bones. Here it’s spiced wine, slow-burning wood, the waxy sweetness of candles.

Wine pours for everyone in attendance—rich red, catching glints of firelight. When the cup reaches you, your fingers brush the cool curve of silver. You glance up by chance and meet Baelor’s gaze.

For the space of a heartbeat, neither of you looks away.

“So, Lady Stark,” Daeron speaks, once the first platters have been diminished and the room has settled into the quieter hum of eating and low talk. “Tell me—what does Winterfell make of my court?”

You feel the weight of every eye in the room. You choose your words with care, tasting each one before you let it go.

“That it is… lively, Your Grace,” you say at last. “And that for all my father’s tales, I have yet to see a dragon.”

A polite ripple of laughter moves around the table, shoulders easing. Even Aerys’s pinched mouth curves, just a fraction. Daeron’s lips twist, a warmth bleeding into his face.

“May you never have to,” he reassures smoothly. “Men who call dragons often live to regret it.”

“Or not live,” Maekar puts in, his voice like gravel. The jest has teeth. The queen’s hand tightens around her cup until the knuckles whiten.

Rhaegel gives a small, breathy laugh that doesn’t feel quite attached to the present conversation.

Baelor’s gaze flicks to his youngest brother, steady, unreadable, then back to his father. “My brothers complain,” he says, tone mild, “that I speak too much of levies and musters and not enough of the dragons. They prefer the parts of our history where things burn.”

“We prefer the parts that aren’t ledger-books,” Maekar mutters. “Not everyone finds grain tallies riveting.”

Baelor’s mouth curves, just a little. “Riveting, no. Necessary, yes. The realm is held together with more bread than fire.”

“And what does Lady Stark think?” Daeron wonders, turning that keen gaze back to you. “Are we dull?”

You are acutely aware of Baelor listening now, though he doesn’t look at you directly. His fingers toy with the stem of his cup, turning it a fraction this way, that way, as if testing some inner balance.

“I think,” you articulate slowly, “if your court were dull, Your Grace, your ravens would fly more slowly. And my father’s hair would be much less grey.”

Barthogan lets out a harrumph that’s halfway to a smothered laugh. Daeron’s eyes warm again, casting an appreciative look toward your father.

“She has your tongue,” he says to your father. “And your nerve.”

“Her mother’s, more like,” Barthogan mutters. “But aye. The North doesn’t breed cowards.”

“No,” the king says softly, thoughtfully. “It most certainly does not.”

You allow yourself the smallest breath of relief. When you dare glance toward Baelor, you find his eyes already on you. He isn’t smiling, not quite. But something flickers there—approval, certainly, and something softer, like the first thaw of ice around a stone.

It feels, absurdly, like passing a test you never meant to take.

The meal unwinds as the sky outside darkens from copper to bruised purple. The princes speak, and when Baelor does, the others listen, including the king and even your father. When the talk turns to some small border quarrel in the riverlands, Daeron asks his heir’s opinion, which you find interesting.

Baelor sets his cup down, fingers briefly stilled.

“A lord on one bank,” he says, “and his cousin on the other. The river changed its course, and the land between doesn’t know which way to belong anymore.”

You can picture it as he speaks: a brown river shouldering its way sideways, eating into one field, abandoning another. Men standing on either shore, shouting their claims across the water.

“And what would you do?” Daeron questions curiously.

“Split the disputed land into thirds,” Baelor answers, with no hesitation. “The river is the realm’s. The fields go to the farmers who actually till them. And the Lord Who Thought He Could Cheat His Family,” his mouth tightens slightly on the title, “pays a fine heavy enough to remind him I am watching.”

Daeron’s brows lift. “You would fine him.”

“I would remind him,” Baelor says simply, “that I remember who bled for which banner, and that peace is a gift he should not pick apart like a scab.”

The room goes just a touch quieter. You can feel the history under Baelor’s words, all that Blackfyre blood not quite washed away by time and rain. Across the table, your father’s hand curls around his knife, thumb running once along the flat of the blade as if grounding himself.

Storm, you think again. Coiled above the roof, waiting for someone to call the lightning down.

Later, when the heavier dishes have been cleared and the talk has lightened into stories and small jokes, the tension in the room eases, but doesn’t vanish entirely. Aerys peppers you with surprisingly precise questions about snowfall patterns and the thickness of Winterfell’s walls; Rhaegel asks, dreamily, whether the aurora is truly like veils of silk in the sky or whether that’s just a poet’s fancy. Maekar wants to know how many spears you can put in the field come spring if the snows are light.

The queen listens more than she speaks. When she does offer a word, it always seems to be the one that smooths an edge or nudges the talk away from an old hurt. 

Baelor watches. And, now and then, when the noise crests and breaks and leaves small pockets of quiet, he watches you. You feel that strange energy again—storm and steel, duty and something heavier—beating under the table like a second heart. It lives in the spaces between words: in the way Daeron’s fingers rest on the stem of his cup as if it were a quill or a sword; in the brief, brittle silences whenever Blackfyre is almost mentioned and then swallowed whole by politeness. You can feel it in the timber of Baelor’s voice when he answers his father, something taut threaded through every measured syllable.

By the time the king finally rises, your skin feels a size too small.

Chairs scrape back over carpet and stone. Servants spill into the solar like water breaching a dam. Silver dishes get whisked away, the ghost of roasted garlic, lemon and fat lamb trailing in their wake. The candles are trimmed, wicks pinched and coaxed, the light flaring briefly brighter before settling into a warmer glow.

Beyond the arch at the far end of the solar, the adjacent hall waits already half-prepared. You can see it in glimpses as the door is propped and held: fresh rushes being strewn in loose, fragrant armfuls across the floor, the sharp green smell of crushed herbs rising as they’re trodden down. Torches are being lit one by one along the walls, the flames catching on polished shields and the gilt edges of carved dragons.

A small company of musicians takes their place on a low dais against the far wall—three men and a woman, instruments dark with use. A harp is plucked once, twice, a thin silver sound; a fiddle finds the melody, bow drawing out a note that starts soft as breath. A pair of wooden pipes joins in, turning the air bright. The music starts as background, polite and low, then swells as more bodies press into the space, as the private dinner uncoils into something larger, looser.

Wine flows again—richer, sweeter now—ruby-dark in crystal cups. Laughter lifts and tangles with the music. A low swell of conversation gathers in the rafters, words rising and falling like distant surf.

The king and queen drift outward, their children fanning with them into the broader hall as courtiers and lesser lords are admitted. The scent of the room changes as people pour in: more perfume, more sweat, the powdery sweetness of southern ladies’ hair, the faint sourness of too much wine on too many tongues. Heat builds, thickening the air.

You and your father stand to one side by a carved pillar, the stone cool against your back. From here you can see the whole room. The press of colours and banners, the flicker of torchlight across jewels, the first cautious pairs moving onto the cleared space at the centre of the hall.

Barthogan is a solid weight at your shoulder. His hands clasp loosely behind his back, but you can see the tension in the set of his jaw, in the way his gaze tracks everything—doors, exits, whose hand lingers too long on whose arm.

“Remember,” he says under his breath, not looking at you, “southerners dance with their feet and their tongues both. Mind where you step.”

You huff a quiet, nervous sound that might be a laugh.

A lord from the Reach peels away from the edge of the crowd and approaches, cloak in green and gold, the brooch at his shoulder wrought into an elaborate rose that looks like it might draw blood if you touched the wrong petal. He smells faintly of crushed grass and some light floral oil that doesn’t quite cover the wine on his breath.

He bows with easy, practised grace, the movement just shy of theatrical.

“Lady Stark,” he says, voice smooth as good olive oil. “Would you grant me the honour of this dance?”

You feel the weight of your father’s attention without needing to look. When you do glance up, Barthogan gives the smallest of nods, an almost imperceptible lowering of his eyelids. Politic not to refuse the first offered hand. The musicians have slipped into a tune with a strong, steady rhythm. Easy enough to follow, easy enough to lose yourself in.

“Of course, my lord,” you say.

His hand is warm and slightly damp through the fine kid of your glove when his fingers close around yours. He leads you onto the floor with the confidence of a man who’s been doing this since he could walk, cloak fanning behind him like a captured piece of summer.

His steps are correct—precise, even—but his grip is a shade too tight, as if he’s worried you’ll bolt. His smile shows perhaps a fraction too many teeth. The hall’s light glances off the gold thread in his sleeves and the signet on his thumb, making little flashes as you turn. As the dance's pattern unfolds, you become acutely aware of how exposed you are. Your skirts swish around your ankles, the weight of wool and lighter southern silks layered together. The brushed wool of your Stark-grey bodice traps the heat; you can feel a bead of sweat creep traitorously between your shoulder blades.

Your partner’s gaze keeps dropping, snagging at the hollow where your throat disappears into your high northern neckline, as if he thinks he might conjure bare skin by will alone. It makes your teeth itch inside your mouth.

And it isn’t just him.

You can feel the room watching. The way conversations falter for half a breath when you cross some line of sight; the way fans pause mid-flutter; the way two young knights at the edge of the crowd cut off their argument to follow your movement with barely concealed interest.

By the room.

By the court.

By—

You turn, skirts flaring with the motion. For a moment, the world spins, banners blurring, candlelight smearing into bright streaks. When it steadies again, your eyes snag on a familiar shape at the edge of the hall.

Baelor.

He’s half in shadow near one of the great stone pillars, where the torchlight doesn’t quite reach. One shoulder is braced against the carved dragon curling up the column, cup cradled forgotten in his hand. The wine inside has hardly been touched. The light from the nearest candelabrum catches on him in pieces—the high plane of his cheekbone, the strong line of his jaw, the severe, striking slope of his nose. The rest of his face is in soft shadow, but you don’t need more than the direction of his gaze to know where his attention is.

Not on his father, who is listening to Aerys with a patient, weary expression. Not on the shifting kaleidoscope of dancers and colours.

On you.

Directly. Fixed. As steady and unblinking as a wolf watching from the tree line.

Your step stutters. It isn’t much. A tiny falter, half a heartbeat laid wrong, but you feel it all the way up your spine. Your partner does, too; his fingers tighten reflexively on yours.

“Lady Stark?” he prompts, brow creasing.

“Forgive me,” you say quickly, pulling a smile onto your mouth like armour. “I was counting too far ahead. The music changed.”

It hasn’t. But it sounds different now, sharp and bright and far too loud in your ears.

The Reach lord huffs a relieved little laugh. “My fault entirely, I’m sure. You were moving beautifully.”

You force yourself back into the pattern—step, turn, cross—muscles remembering what your mind feels suddenly too scattered to hold. But now you are horribly aware, with every movement, of that gaze tracking you. When you move down the set, you feel it between your shoulder blades, a heat-and-weight sensation like standing too close to a hearth. When the pattern brings you round again to face his side of the room, you catch it full-on. Dark eyes, intent and unwavering, meet yours for a fraction of a turn before you get spun away.

It’s like walking past an open oven door, again and again. That brief lick of heat, followed by the shock of ordinary air.

The set changes; the music shifts into a quicker reel. Couples break apart, reform, partners trading down the line. Hands catch and release; silk whispers against wool. You move with the others, letting muscle memory do the work. Take this hand, step into that space, pivot, and offer your palm to the next waiting partner. The floor is now a mosaic of colour, cloaks and skirts flaring. The fresh rushes underfoot are already bruised and torn, releasing little bursts of crushed mint and dried lavender with each step, mingling with the smell of hot wax and wine.

You find yourself being carried nearer and nearer to the pillar where Baelor stands. Not by choice. By the inexorable pull of the pattern, that great, intricate machine of bodies and steps and tradition. One lordling misjudges his turn behind you, blundering with more enthusiasm than grace. To avoid being ploughed into, Baelor shifts—half a pace forward, off his pillar.

The dance swings you past.

The brush of shoulders is almost nothing. The briefest graze. Cloth against cloth. His doublet’s fine, close-woven wool, your own thicker Stark grey. The hard line of something solid beneath.

Almost nothing.

When his shoulder touches yours, it feels like someone has pulled a stopper out of your spine.

Heat shoots through you, a bright, electric shiver that seems to light up every carefully arranged bone and muscle from neck to heel. Awareness flares outward in a rush—of your own body, of the way your arm hangs, the angle of your head, the sudden, stunning proximity of his. The music drops away to a distant hum. The laughing voices, the scuff of shoes on rushes, the rustle of dresses, all of it goes muffled, as if someone has thrown a thick blanket over the world.

There is only the solid, warm press of Baelor’s shoulder against yours, the faint yielding give of it as he realises the collision and eases back at once, that tiny intake of breath you feel more than hear. The brief flare of his scent in your nose: clean linen, iron, a hint of the spiced soap the royal household favours.

You don’t dare look at him.

You fix your eyes dead ahead on the next figure in the pattern, on the open hand waiting for yours, on the bright smear of a red cloak, the glint of a pin. You step, you turn, you cross. Because if you stop now, you will draw every eye in the room, and you are not sure you can bear even one more.

But you feel it. Behind you, Baelor goes very, very still.

You don’t have to see him to know. Some part of you, some new nervous system running under your skin, registers it as clearly as if you’d turned. The way he locks in place, the way the space he occupies changes shape now that you’ve touched it.

As if the sudden lack of contact has shocked him just as much.

By the time the set winds down, your pulse is a wild drum in your throat, in your wrists, fluttering at the base of your skull. Your breath feels slightly wrong in your chest; too fast, too shallow for the measured pace of the dance. 

The last passes are done. The musicians let the final notes spill out and fade; the dancers dip and separate with little bows and curtseys, laughter riding high on the end of the tune.

“Thank you, my lady,” the Reach lord says, bowing over your hand, the rose at his shoulder bobbing solemnly. “You dance beautifully. The North must be drear indeed if they hide such grace in all that snow.”

“That’s the trouble with snow,” you reply coolly, withdrawing your fingers before his grip can linger. “It hides a great many things.”

His brows lift, caught between amusement and uncertainty. You don’t stay long enough to see which wins.

You step back off the floor, the world tilting for a moment as the movement around you shifts from ordered pattern to loose drift. Your intention is simple: return to your father’s side, where the stone is cool and the air slightly easier to breathe; find a cup of watered wine and some corner where the torches don’t burn so hot.

Instead, you almost walk into a different sort of wall.

Baelor is there.

He stands in front of you, closer than you expect, close enough that you have to tip your head back to meet his eyes. The pillar behind him throws a slice of shadow across one side of his face, but the candlelight from a nearby sconce has caught in his hair, turning a few strands at his temple to copper against the dark.

For a moment, neither of you says anything.

Up close, you can see the small disruptions in his usual composure. The looser strands of hair, the faint flush along his cheekbones, a warm undertone deepening his sun-browned skin. Sweat shines subtly at the edge of his hairline, though his collar sits straight and immaculate. His eyes are steady, but there’s something in them that wasn’t there at supper. A new tension, a different kind of heat.

“Your Highness.” Your voice sounds strange to your own ears, too thin in your throat. “Forgive me. I didn’t see—”

“My Lord Tyrell,” Baelor says, as if you haven’t spoken at all.

You blink.

He turns his head just enough to address your former partner, who has not actually moved far, hovering within earshot like a bee near spilt honey. Baelor’s tone is impeccably courteous, each word clear and cool enough to cut with.

“Thank you for claiming the first dance with Lady Stark,” he says. “It would be remiss of me, however, not to claim one myself.”

The Reach lord freezes. You can almost hear the quick skitter of his thoughts: crown prince, northern heir, political tides. His gaze jumps between the two of you, measuring distances you can’t see.

“Of course, Your Grace,” he says at last, bowing himself out with commendable speed. “I wouldn’t dream of standing between a dragon and a wolf.”

“Quite,” Baelor says.

The single word is mild, but something in it makes the small hairs on the back of your neck stir.

When his attention returns to you, it feels like a touch. His gaze is steadier now, the flicker from the pillar tempered, banked—but underneath it you can feel something fierce moving, slow and molten, like rock heated just short of glowing.

“May I?” he asks.

It is only proper, you tell yourself, faintly. The crown prince dancing with the heir of Winterfell. A gesture of favour, of unity after rebellion. One more visible thread in the tapestry of a mended realm.

Perfectly sensible.

Your spine still hums from that brief shoulder contact, as if some hidden storm is trying to find its way back onto your horizon. 

“You may, Your Highness.”

His hand finds your waist.

Not as it had in the corridor. That was swift and practical, protective, cutting through a crush to bring you out the other side. This is slower, far more deliberate. Baelor’s palm settles at the narrow curve of you, altogether aware of what that contact means, here, under a hundred watching eyes and listening mouths. His fingers spread, the warmth of his skin seeping through the layers of cloth, anchoring you more surely than your own feet on the rush-strewn floor.

His other hand takes yours. His grip is firm, as if telling your bones: here, with me.

The musicians strike up a fresh tune, this one a fraction slower, more measured, the kind that leaves space for conversation and scandal both.

You step in.

He leads well. Of course he does. Baelor does most things well when anyone might be watching; you are beginning to suspect he does them better when they are. His movements are precise without being stiff, guiding rather than dragging. When he turns you, it feels less like being steered and more like being shown where the space is—here, step here, there is room for you here with me.

“Lord Tyrell seemed reluctant to let you go,” he says lightly as you sweep through the first turn. “I hope I haven’t offended him.”

“I doubt he’ll hold a grudge.” Your mouth feels dry, but your tongue finds the words anyway. “There’s only so angry a man can be at a prince who saves him from standing on my feet.”

“You were perfect,” Baelor says, a little too quickly.

You blink up at him.

His jaw flexes, as if he’s annoyed at himself. “Your footwork,” he clarifies smoothly. “Impeccable.”

A laugh slips out of you before you can stop it, soft and surprised. It feels like something tension-struck suddenly cracking, letting air in.

“Careful, Your Highness,” you joke lightly. “People will say you notice my feet.”

“I notice many things,” he says, and there’s an edge under the words that makes heat curl low in your stomach. “Most of which I keep to myself.”

“Such as?” you ask, the question out and hanging between you before prudence can tug it back.

His gaze drops.

It’s not the kind of lingering, obvious rake you could slice apart with a single sharp northern remark. It’s smaller than that, and somehow far worse for it. One heartbeat, he’s looking at your eyes, the next, his attention flicks down, snagging on your mouth.

It catches there.

You feel the change in him; tiny shifts, all internal. The way his hand at your waist tightens infinitesimally. The way the air around you seems to thicken. The way his focus sharpens, narrowing as if the world has reduced itself to the shape and movement of your lips forming whatever word you were about to say.

The rest of the hall blurs at the edges. The rise and fall of the music scoops out the space around you and settles inside your ribs. You’re aware, distantly, of a lady’s high laugh somewhere to your left, of the clink of a cup against a platter, but it all feels far away.

Then, as if he realises precisely what he’s doing, Baelor drags his gaze back up.

You can almost see the muscle of his will working—the way he hauls that impulse up short, reins it back. His fingers tighten fractionally around yours; his hand at your waist flexes like he’s reminding himself of the line between what he wants and what he’s allowed.

You should say something. Tease him, maybe. Break the tension before it pulls too taut.

Instead, what comes out is a slightly breathless, “Such as?”

He swallows.

“Such as,” he says, voice a shade lower now, pitched for you and you alone, “the fact that you look far more at ease standing at the edge of a room than at its centre. And yet you walk into its heart whenever duty asks it of you.”

“That’s hardly a secret.”

You mean for it to be dry, dismissive, but it comes out soft. Your own voice betrays you, wobbling just a little on the first word.

“It is to those who only see the second part.” He sweeps over the planes of your face, searching. “They think courage is never being afraid. They don’t understand that it’s walking forward when you are.”

You blink, thrown off-balance in a way that has nothing to do with the dance.

“I am not afraid.”

Baelor scrutinises you for a long moment as he turns you neatly through a tighter figure, steps never faltering. In his gaze, you see again that look from the night before in the gallery. The softening, the unhooking of some inner brace inside him. As if, with you, he allows himself one breath where he is not entirely prince, entirely Hand, entirely duty.

“No,” he says quietly. “You aren’t. Not of the things they expect, at least.”

“And what do they expect?” you ask.

“Dragons,” he says at once. “Kings. Crowds. The press of eyes.”

His hand at your waist shifts slightly as the pattern brings you closer, your bodies aligning for a few steps before the dance draws you apart again.

“And what am I afraid of, then?” 

You mean it as a challenge, but it doesn’t quite land that way. There’s too much naked curiosity under it. Baelor considers you as he would a difficult piece on a cyvasse board, head tilted just enough that you see the thoughtful crease between his brows.

“Perhaps,” he murmurs at last, “of being turned into a story you didn’t write.”

Your breath catches.

The music swells at that exact moment, as if someone has tugged the thread of your pulse into the harp strings. Your foot almost misses the beat; he feels it and adjusts without thinking, a subtle shift of weight that supports your misstep and smooths it into the pattern so perfectly no one watching would ever know.

“Am I wrong?” he hedges softly.

“No,” you reply, because there’s no point lying to someone who has just laid you open so neatly.

“I know something of that fear,” Baelor admits gently. “The songs they would write about me. The titles they already have waiting for me. Baelor this, Baelor that.” His mouth twists, a flash of bitterness quickly caged. “Sometimes I wonder if there will be anything left of the man when they’re done crowning him.”

The pressure of his hand at your waist feels suddenly less like a claim and more like someone holding on to keep from being swept away.

“Then perhaps,” you begin slowly, feeling for the words as you might feel for a foothold on ice, “we should write our own stories.”

It is a reckless thing to say. In this hall, in this city, under these banners, wolf and dragon talking of writing their own tales. It’s the sort of thought that gives bards verses and kings headaches. But Baelor’s eyes catch on yours, brightening for an instant with something dangerously like recognition. Like agreement. Like hunger.

“What kind of story?” he wonders, still that soft cadence to his words.

“A better one.” It sounds childishly simple. It feels like putting your hand into a dark hole without knowing what’s inside. “One where you’re not just a pointy chair. One where I’m not just a convenient piece on your father’s board.”

“And who are you in that story?” he presses, the words barely clearing his lips, almost lost under the bow’s stroke on the fiddle.

You hold his gaze.

“Myself,” you tell him. “And that will have to be enough.”

Baelor’s hand tightens at your waist, not enough to hurt, just enough to make you acutely aware of the shape and reality of his palm, his fingers. As if confirming that you are, in fact, there—solid and warm and not some imagined thing conjured in a lonely mind. Something in his expression shifts again. That softening, yes, but there’s something almost pained in it now. As if he’s been very thirsty for a very long time, and only just now realised what it is he’s been missing.

“It is.” The words sound pulled out of some deep, stubborn place in him. They feel heavy in the air between you. “More than enough.”

The dance carries you in a slow turn around the hall.

You’re aware, dimly, like noticing the weather through a thick wall, of the court watching. The prickle of glances on the back of your neck, on your bared hands, on the line of his palm at your waist. But inside the small circle of Baelor’s arms, the noise is muted.

There is only the steadiness of his lead, the reliable give and take of the steps, the heat of his body a breath away. The weight of his gaze when it betrays him and drops to your mouth again—quick, involuntary—and jerks back up like he’s furious with himself for slipping.

You let yourself smile, just a little, because suddenly you are not afraid of that fury. Not when it isn’t aimed at you.

“Careful, Your Highness,” you breathe once more. “People will say you’re staring.”

“Let them.”

There’s a quiet intensity under it that makes your pulse falter, then race to catch up.

“They’ve said worse,” he adds after a breath.

The music builds toward its final turn, the fiddle climbing, the pipes weaving around it. Baelor spins you out, your skirts flaring, the world momentarily a blur of colour and light at the end of your arm. Then Baelor draws you back in. Closer than the pattern strictly demands. For one suspended instant, your bodies align from chest to knee. You feel the solid line of him, the way his ribs expand with his breath, the heat rolling off him in waves that have nothing to do with the torches.

Your free hand lifts halfway, fingers curling like they want to catch at his shoulder, at the edge of his collar, just to steady yourself.

His breath ghosts warm across your cheek, stirring a stray strand of hair at your temple.

Ice and fire, you think, a little wildly. People always say one must melt for the other to live. Perhaps they’ve never stood this close and felt how both can burn.

The last note hangs, quivering, then falls away.

Baelor releases you with exquisite care, as if he’s setting something fragile down. He steps back just enough to be proper again, distance flicked back into place like a cloak. He bows over your hand. His hair slips forward a little as he does, catching the candlelight. For a second, you think he might bring your knuckles to his mouth.

He doesn’t.

You’re not sure if the lurch in your stomach is relief or disappointment.

“Thank you for the dance, Lady Stark,” he says, voice level again, the prince neatly settled back over the man. “It seems the North has taught you more than how to survive wolves.”

You incline your head, hoping no one can see the way your pulse is hammering at your throat. “And the South,” you manage, “has taught you more than how to burn things.”

His mouth curves again, seemingly helpless against your words. It’s quick, almost secret, there and gone before anyone who isn’t watching him as closely as you are could be sure it was ever there. 

Dragon and wolf, turning together under the eyes of a kingdom that has only just finished bleeding from its last great story.

Inside your chest, something that has always braced for the cold—for snow and stone and the long, patient waiting of northern winters—feels, for the first time, the dizzy, terrifying possibility of choosing the flame instead.

You shouldn’t have been there. Not truly.

Your family had intended to attend the tourney while you continued on your journey toward Oldtown with your brother. A gathering of armored men smashing into one another for sport held little appeal for you. The thunder of hooves, the splinter of lances, the roaring bloodlust of the crowd, it all felt like a crude, nihilistic ritual masquerading as honor. A childish proving of manhood, you thought, one that left bodies broken and pride shattered in equal measure.

Still, you lingered.

You told yourself it was only because the crowds had grown too thick for easy escape. That the heat pressed down upon you like a hand at your back. That the cries of the hawkers and the braying of trumpets made it impossible to slip away unnoticed.

To the glint of silver and gold across the yard. Maester Yormwell.

His chain gleamed beneath the sun as he moved near the prince’s pavilion, and the sight rooted you to the spot. You had hoped, foolishly, perhaps, to cross his path, to ask a question, to confirm a theory that had plagued your thoughts for months. The risk of trouble seemed a small price for even a few stolen words. So you lingered at the gate, half-hidden behind a pillar of sun-warmed stone, watching.

“Sister, are you sure you do not want to watch?” The question came from somewhere behind you, faint and distracted. You barely heard it.

Then the trumpet screamed.

The sudden blare split the air, sharp and violent, followed instantly by a rolling thunder of cheers from the stands. The crowd surged to its feet as lances shattered and hooves churned the dust into choking clouds. A roar of triumph and disappointment crashed together, echoing off the high stone walls.

You flinched.

Your fingers tightened around the rough edge of the gate, already turning to slip away when the noise shifted, changed, twisting into shouts of alarm.

The gates burst open.

Men spilled into the yard, voices raised, panic threading through their words. At their center, two squires and a knight half-dragged, half-carried Ser Duncan the Tall. His armor was bent inward, his great body slack and unmoving between them, blood streaking down the grooves of his breastplate and dripping into the dust below. One of his arms hung at an unnatural angle, and his head lolled against the shoulder of the boy struggling to support him.

Your breath caught painfully in your chest.

Behind him came Baelor Breakspear. Not carried. Walking. But only just.

The prince moved under his own power, though each step looked borrowed, stolen from some dwindling reserve of will. His great helm was crushed inward at the back, warped like soft clay struck by a hammer. Blood seeped from beneath its rim, running in thin, dark lines down his neck and staining the pale gold of his cloak. His shoulders sagged, his gait unsteady, yet he did not allow himself to fall.

“Ser Raymun,” Baelor said softly, his voice distant, hollow. “My helm, if you would be so kind.”

“At once, Your Grace,” Raymun answered, already reaching for the straps. His hands trembled. “The visor’s…gods…the visor’s cracked.”

“My fingers feel…” Baelor murmured. “My fingers feel like wood. And cold too. I feel like ice.”

A chill went through you as you tensed, mouth twitching as you inched forward.

“Goodman Pate. A hand. The helm, it’s crushed down the back, Your Grace.” Raymun began fumbling with the fastenings.

“No...wait!” The word tore from your throat before you could stop it.

Every head turned. “If you remove it now,” you said, forcing breath into your lungs, forcing steadiness into your voice, “you will kill him.”For a heartbeat, the yard seemed to still and for a moment you thought a Kingsguard might appear and throw you in the dungeon.

The narrow slits of Baelor’s visor turned toward you. Though you could not see his eyes, you felt their weight all the same, keen and searching.

“What madness is this?” a knight snapped. “Stand aside, woman, and let the prince be tended.”

“Please,” you said, stepping forward. “Just look.”

Raymun hesitated, then carefully slid his hand beneath the warped metal at the back of the helm. When he drew his hand away, it was slick and red, a soft, broken sound escaped him. Blood welled steadily from beneath the crushed steel, oozing in thick rivulets that crept down Baelor’s neck and soaked into his collar.

“The back of his skull is crushed,” you said quietly. “The helm is holding the fragments in place. If you remove it, the pressure will vanish, and his brain will swell. He will bleed out in moments.”

A ripple of horror passed through those gathered.

“If it must be removed,” you went on, “it must be cut away, piece by piece. And a setting paste applied at once.”

Baelor swayed and before anyone could react, his knees buckled.

Dunk, though barely conscious himself, lurched forward, catching the prince by instinct alone. Other knights rushed in, and together they lowered Baelor to the ground.

“Lay him flat,” you ordered, already kneeling beside him, bracing your hands either side of him “Do not let him turn his head. Not even a finger’s breadth.” You cradled his skull carefully between your palms, holding him still as his breath rasped faintly behind the steel.

“Send for the maester,” you said. “Now.”

Someone was already running.

xxxxx

Maester Yormwell arrived in a flurry of robes and clinking chains. He was an old man, bent slightly with age, his hair thin and white, his eyes sharp as whetted steel. He knelt beside Baelor, gaze flicking swiftly over the blood, the crushed helm, the careful way you supported the prince’s head.

“Who put the cloth beneath his neck?” he demanded.

“My lady did,” one of the knights answered. “She told us not to remove the helm.”

Yormwell studied you intently. “A sensible head,” he murmured. “And a steady one. My lady, you have medical experience.”

“I…” You hesitated. “I have studied, Maester. Read what texts I could find.”

“Then that is more experience than any man crowding this yard,” he said briskly. “Come. You will assist me.”

xxxxxxxxxxxx

The helm was cut away slowly, each piece peeled back with agonizing care. Beneath it, the damage was grave: bone visibly depressed, flesh swollen and torn, blood pooling in the hollow at the base of Baelor’s skull. Several men turned aside, pale and shaking. Yormwell cleaned the wound, gently easing fragments into alignment, his expression growing darker with each moment.

“The skull will not hold,” he muttered. “The bone is too unstable. Any movement…”

Your eyes looked over the bloody mess, the lifeless body breathing lowly, “A setting paste. Build a shell, like a plaster cast. Let it harden and hold the fracture steady. They do that in the free cities, don’t they?’’

He looked at you sharply. ‘’How would you know that, girl’’

“In Maester Baomon stories. In the Free Cities,” you added, “they use it for shattered limbs and broken skulls. It will stop the shifting and prevent further damage. Once the bone heals, it will fall away.”

Silence hung between you as the Maester's cool blue eyes bore into you before he nodded. “It may work,” he said. “Gods help us...it may.”

The paste was mixed and applied, layer by careful layer, forming a rigid shell across the crushed portion of Baelor’s skull. When it finally dried, the bleeding had slowed to a sluggish trickle, and the prince’s breathing had steadied into a faint but regular rhythm.

Yormwell leaned back, exhaustion lining his face. “You may have saved the life of the Prince of Dragonstone, my lady.”

And only then did your hands begin to tremble.

xxxxxxx

Maester Yormwell found Prince Maekar alone in the great hall of Ashford, long after the feast had dissolved into distant echoes. The banners still stirred faintly in the draft from the high windows, but the music and laughter had faded into nothing more than a dull, hollow murmur beyond the stone. The torches burned low, their flames guttering and wavering, throwing long shadows across the floor.

Maekar stood near the hearth, unmoving, his broad shoulders hunched forward as though the weight of the castle itself pressed upon him. His helm lay abandoned at his feet. One gauntlet still clung to his hand, smeared dark with drying blood, and he had not noticed. His stare was fixed on the dying embers, yet his eyes were far away, trapped in the moment of impact, the sickening crack of steel against steel, the way Baelor’s body had crumpled.

He had not moved in hours. Days. He had slept little and still wore the under layer of armor from the tourney.

“Your Grace.”

Maekar turned sharply, as if struck. His eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with exhaustion and terror. “Well?” His voice cracked like a whip. “Is my brother alive?”

“He yet breathes,” Yormwell said carefully. “And for that, we must thank the gods.”

Maekar exhaled, a shuddering sound that seemed to tear itself from his chest. His shoulders sagged for a heartbeat before rigid discipline forced them square once more.

“And the wound?” he demanded. “Tell me the truth.”

Yormwell did not soften it. “A crushing blow to the back of the skull. The shape of the fracture, the angle of collapse… there is no doubt. It was delivered by a mace.”

Maekar swallowed. His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked almost boyishly lost. “Most likely mine,” he said hoarsely.

“Yes.”The word landed like a death knell.

Maekar closed his eyes. His breath stuttered once, then again. When he finally spoke, his voice was stripped bare, emptied of rank and pride alike.

“I could have killed him. If not for you.”

“No,” Yormwell said firmly. “It was not me that saved him.”

Maekar’s eyes snapped open. Raw desperation burned in them. “Speak not in riddles. If not you, then who?”

Yormwell hesitated, weighing the moment. “A girl.”

Maekar blinked. “A… girl?”

“A young woman of noble birth,” the maester clarified. “Sharp-minded. Learned. Brave.”

Maekar stared at him, disbelief warring with fragile hope.

“She stopped them from removing the helm,” Yormwell continued. “Recognized at once that the pressure was keeping the shattered bone from shifting further. She devised a setting cast to stabilize the fracture, an idea I would not have considered in such haste. For three days she has not left his side. She has slept little, eaten less. She has cooled his fever, cleaned his wounds, steadied his breath.”

Yormwell paused, allowing the weight of it to settle.

“Without her, Your Grace…”

He did not finish. Maekar’s hands curled into fists so tight his knuckles blanched. His breath trembled, caught somewhere between fury and fear.

“I mean to tell you, Your Grace, that she alone saved him.”

Silence swallowed the hall. The fire popped softly. Somewhere, a banner stirred. At last, Maekar let out a rough breath, something between a laugh and a sob. “Gods,” he murmured. “And here I thought myself a warrior.”

He straightened, grief hardening into resolve, as though purpose were the only thing that could keep him standing. “I would meet this girl,” he said. “The one who undid my blow.”

“You shall,” Yormwell replied. “But first, you must let her finish saving him.”

Maekar nodded once, sharply, “See that she is given anything she asks,” he said. “Gold, chambers, guards, silence. The realm owes her a debt.’’

Yormwell inclined his head. “She asks for none of it. Only time.” Maekar turned back toward the hearth, eyes distant once more, but now threaded with fragile hope.

“Then give her all the time in the realm,” he said quietly.

Xxxx

You were seated beside Baelor’s cot when his lashes finally fluttered. For a moment, his gaze wandered, unfocused, lost in shadow and haze. Then his eyes found you. Soft recognition bloomed.

“…an angel?” he murmured faintly.

You startled, nearly dropping the cloth in your hands.

“The Mother has sent me a beautiful savior,” he whispered. “I must be dead.”

You laughed breathlessly, tears stinging your eyes. “You are very much alive, Your Grace.”

His lips curved, weak but genuine.“Then I am blessed to be alive by your side..”

Heat rushed into your cheeks, and you turned your face away, suddenly fascinated by the bowl of water at your side. Before you could answer, hurried footsteps approached. Your brother slipped inside the tent, eyes darting to the prince before fixing sternly on you.

“There you are,” he hissed. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

Your heart sank.

“We are already days behind,” he went on. “Father and Mother are furious, they kow we have not yet made it to the next inn.'''

“I can’t leave him,” you whispered. “Not yet. He’s still weak.”

He scoffed. “Weak? Look around. Every great house in the realm has sent their finest maesters. He does not need a book-learned girl playing medicine.”

“That’s not fair…”

“You may be clever,” he snapped, “but you are not a maester. You are not sworn. You are not trained. You are a daughter who was meant to obey her family and follow the path laid before her…I’m sorry sister but if mother and father hear of this…”

You swallowed hard. “Please,” you said softly. “Just a little longer. Until he is stronger. I beg you.”

Baelor's eyes tried to stay focused, to listen but his head hurt too much and his eyes were so heavy, a faint sound escaping him. Then his eyes slid closed once more.

xxxxx

Baelor drifted in and out of consciousness for days after, suspended in a grey, shifting fog. Sleep never fully claimed him, nor did waking. There was only the slow, endless rise and fall of breath, the distant echo of voices, the constant throb behind his eyes that pulsed with each heartbeat.

Sometimes he thought he was still on the tourney field,  the roar of the crowd swelling in his ears, the blinding flash of sun on steel, the jolt of impact. Other times, he was a child again, racing barefoot through the halls of the Red Keep, Maekar’s laughter chasing him down the corridors.

And threaded through it all was you.

Each time his eyes fluttered open, unfocused and glassy, his lips would part around a single, fragile request. 

For you.

At first, the Maester dismissed it as fever-dreaming, the broken mutterings of a man half-lost to pain and blood. They shifted in their robes with uneasy glances, waiting for the words to fade into nonsense. But they did not. Again and again, the same question. The same breathless urgency. The same searching gaze, scanning the shadows of the chamber.

“He asks for the girl,” one murmured, low and uncertain.

“Again?”

“Yes. Every time.”

They began to watch more closely after that. Worried there was some strange enchant placed over him, but Maester Yomwell dismissed them with a harsh bark as he stood vigil over his prince.

When Baelor fever spiked, his voice would weaken, barely more than a whisper, yet the question remained, dragged from parched lips as if it were the only anchor keeping him tethered to the living world. When the pain wracked his body and his breath hitched, it was for you he reached, his fingers twitching against the sheets in a futile, searching grasp but there was no hand to be found.

xxxxx

When Baelor finally woke fully, the world felt heavy, slow, and dim. Light filtered through the canvas of the tent in soft, shifting patterns, too bright and yet not bright enough, as though his eyes could not quite decide how to see again. Every breath felt thick in his chest, as though the air itself had weight. His body lay leaden and unresponsive beneath layers of blankets, each limb aching with a deep, grinding soreness that went beyond muscle and bone.

It hurt to move.That, at least, reassured him. Pain meant life. His thoughts came slowly, like swimmers breaking the surface after being held underwater too long. Sounds arrived first, the distant clink of metal, the low murmur of voices, the soft hiss of boiling water. Then sensation: the tight pull of bandages at the back of his skull, the faint itch beneath them, the dull pressure that never quite faded.

He breathed. He waited. And at last, he opened his eyes.He expected to see you.

For weeks, in fevered dreams and fractured waking moments, your face had been the one constant. Your quiet voice, your steady hands, the faint scent of herbs clinging to your sleeves. You had been the anchor that tethered him to the world of the living.

But you were not there.

Instead, Prince Maekar knelt beside the bed.

For a moment, Baelor did not recognize him. His brother looked older,far older than memory allowed. The hard lines of his face had deepened, etched by guilt and sleepless nights. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and a heaviness in the way he carried himself, as though the weight of unseen burdens pressed constantly upon his shoulders.

“Brother,” Baelor murmured.

The word scraped weakly from his throat. Maekar stiffened, then surged forward, kneeling at once beside the bed.

“You are awake,” he breathed, disbelief and relief tangling in his voice. “Gods…”

“I am,” Baelor said faintly.

Maekar swallowed hard. “I am sorry,” he said. “I struck too hard. I forgot myself. I nearly killed you.” The words trembled as they left him, stripped bare of pride and rank.

Baelor frowned weakly, shifting slightly against the pillows. Pain flared instantly, sharp and punishing, and he hissed before mastering himself. “You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “You were trying to reach your boy. It was an accident. A tourney blow. Such things happen.”

“I should never have swung so fiercely.”

Baelor lifted a trembling hand, fingers brushing Maekar’s sleeve in a faint, grounding touch. “You are not to blame,” he murmured. “I rode onto the field knowingly. I chose to stand before you.”

Maekar closed his eyes. “Even half-broken, you remain more gallant than I deserve,” he said hoarsely. “But I will make amends. This I swear.”

Baelor studied his brother’s face, though his vision was cloudy, he could see the  raw fear and guilt beneath the armor of duty. “If you are to make amends,” he said quietly, “there is something I would ask of you.”

“Anything.”

“Bring her to me.”

Maekar blinked. “Who?”

“The woman from the field,” Baelor said. “The one who saved me, if she is real...” Baelor went on faintly, urgency threading through his weakness. “...and was not some fever-dream. Or blessing from the gods. If I must lie here broken for months, then I would have her near. I think her presence would heal me faster than all the potions in the Seven Kingdoms.”

Maekar hesitated. “She is not here, brother.”

Baelor’s chest tightened. ‘’Where then?

“Vanihshed to the winds. We searched,” Maekar continued. “High and low. But she disappeared. There were reports of her leaving through the west gate with a boy, shortly after you stabilized.”

Baelor winced, memory stirring, forcing its way to his mind.

“Her brother,” he murmured. “Yes. I remember him. He demanded she leave...” His brow creased, frustration tightening his features. “I cannot quite recall why… but he scolded her. For playing at being a Maester…I think.”

A bitter huff escaped Maekar. “She fared better than half the chained fuckers we gathered afterward.”

Baelor managed a faint, crooked smile. “Mercy, brother. I have not recovered enough to withstand your humor.”  He stilled suddenly, breath shallow, eyes slipping shut.

Maekar tensed, fear flashing sharp and bright. Then Baelor spoke again, softer. “Her name,” he murmured. “Knowing her name might soothe me as I recover. Before I am strong enough to search for her myself.”

Maekar shook his head slowly. “We do not know it. In the chaos, no one thought to ask.”

“No one? My saviour is nameless?”

“You were quite broken, Baelor. By the time you were stable…” He sighed. “But we know she is of noble birth at least, no commoner would know what she did...”

Baelor closed his eyes. “Then a search will give me purpose,” he said. “Something to focus on through the many moons of recovery to come. While you take your turn as Hand of the King, I will task myself with finding the elusive maiden who defied knights and saved a prince.” He opened his eyes again, resolving burning quietly within them.  “I will find her.”

Maekar inclined his head.“You have my help,” he said solemnly. “On my honor.”

Going for sort of Cinderella vibes with this fic with some besoted/devoted Baelor. I was going for a one shot but I loved my idea too much so a two/three parter...Maybe....

I had to... I tried to resist but I was too weak. Daddy Targeryn won! But I will say I still think I am a Lyonal Lover at heart...anyway thoughts?

Btw I know not medically accutrate but a girl is desperate to save him!