Lady Wura

Five moons came and went like a slow grinding tide, the library had been closed to you, its heavy oak doors locked with a key you were not permitted to hold. The sept was a place you no longer visited, though sometimes you found yourself in the antechamber, sitting on the cold stone bench with your hands folded in your lap, unable to cross the threshold into the sanctuary proper but unwilling to abandon it entirely.

Baelor had not approached you since that day. You saw him sometimes at court functions, standing among the other lords with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression placid. Sometimes you caught him watching you across the great hall during meals, his mismatched eyes meeting yours with perfect, unshakeable calm. He would incline his head politely, the picture of a courteous good-father, and you would incline your head in return because what else could you do? Scream until your throat bled? Point your finger and accuse the King's Hand of forcing himself upon you in front of the Stranger's altar? No one would believe you. No one. The words would die in the air the moment they left your lips, and you would be left standing in the wreckage of your own ruin with nothing but humiliation for your trouble.

But he had sent the moon tea, a servant had appeared at your chamber door the morning after. The liquid inside was bitter and dark, so bitter that your tongue curled against it, and you had drunk it all. Every last drop. You knelt on the cold stone floor with tears streaming down your face and your hands shaking so badly you nearly dropped the vial twice. You did not know if it would work. You did not know if it was already too late. The maester had told you once that moon tea was most effective within the first day, and Baelor had waited until morning to send the girl, and what if those hours had been enough? What if something had already taken root in the darkness of your body, some malignant seed that would grow into a living reminder of what he had done to you?

Five moons later, you were sick, a wave of nausea that rolled through your stomach at the smell of roasted meat drifting up from the kitchens. A sudden and violent aversion to the Dornish wine Valarr favored, the same wine you had drunk at your wedding feast without complaint. You dismissed it at first. Summer fevers were common, especially in the city, and the heat this year was brutal enough to lay low even the hardiest of men. But when you woke three mornings in a row with bile rising in your throat before you could even sit up, Lady Mariene had pressed her lips into a thin line and insisted on sending for the maester.

Now you sat on the edge of the bed in Valarr's chambers, your hands folded in your lap with your fingers laced so tightly together that your knuckles had gone white. Your heart pounded so hard you could feel it in your temples, in your throat, in the tips of your fingers. Maester Godwyn asked about your symptoms, he pressed on your belly with cool fingers, palpating gently, his brow furrowed in concentration. He listened to your heart, counted your pulse, checked the color of your eyes and tongue and then he straightened up with a small, satisfied nod that made your stomach drop through the floor.

"Congratulations, Your Grace," he said. "You are with child."

You stared at him. Your lips parted. With child. A baby. A tiny life growing inside you, formed from your body and Valarr's body, a fusion of bloodlines that had spent a generation trying to destroy each other.

"You are certain?" Your voice was barely a whisper, thin and reedy, a ghost of sound.

"The signs are unmistakable." Maester Godwyn began packing his instruments into his leather satchel with methodical precision, each tool disappearing into its designated pocket. "The nausea, the fatigue, the tenderness in your breasts. Your cycle has ceased, yes?" He did not wait for your confirmation. "I would estimate you are roughly three moons along. You should begin to show within the next few weeks. I will prepare a regimen of herbs to help with the sickness, and I recommend you avoid strenuous activity. No riding, no dancing, nothing that might put undue strain on your body."

Three moons. The calculation ran through your mind with cold, clinical clarity, a sum worked out on an abacus made of terror and relief. Five moons since the sept. Three moons pregnant. The moon tea had worked. Whatever Baelor had planted in you that day, if he had planted anything at all, it had been washed away before it could take root. This child was Valarr's. Only Valarr's. There was no other possibility, no lingering doubt to poison the joy of this moment, no shadow of the Stranger's altar lurking in the child's bloodline.

The relief that flooded through you was so intense it made your eyes sting and your hands shake. You pressed your palm to your stomach, your fingers splayed across the flat plane of your belly where the silk of your gown lay smooth and unwrinkled, and you felt something rise in your chest that was not quite joy and not quite sorrow but some tangled, complicated mixture of both.

You should have felt nothing but horror. You should have wept with despair at the thought of binding yourself to this family forever, of giving them an heir to continue their legacy of fire and blood. But instead, beneath the fear and the doubt and the exhaustion, you felt the strangest flutter of something that might have been hope. A fragile, tentative thing, barely strong enough to hold its own weight. This child would be yours. Yours in a way that nothing else in this castle was. Yours in a way that your body had not been since the day you arrived at the Red Keep. No matter what else happened, no matter what cruelties you endured at the hands of this family, this child would be innocent of all of it. This child would be loved.

By you, at least. You could not speak for its father.

"I will inform His Grace," Maester Godwyn was saying, his voice cutting through your spiraling thoughts. "He will want to know immediately, I am sure. The realm has been waiting for an heir."

You nodded. You did not trust yourself to speak. The words were still tangled in your throat, a knot of emotion you could not swallow down.

Valarr came to you an hour later, you heard his footsteps before the door opened, quick and almost urgent, a pace that did not match his usual measured stride. Then he was standing before you, framed by the dying light, and his mismatched eyes were bright with something you had never seen in them before.

"Maester Godwyn told me." His voice was strange. Controlled, but only barely. Like a man holding back a flood with nothing but his bare hands. "He said you are with child. That it is certain."

"It is certain." He stared at you. His hands hung at his sides, opening and closing in a rhythm that spoke of nervous energy barely contained. His jaw was tight. His shoulders were rigid beneath the black silk of his doublet. Every muscle in his body was coiled with an emotion he was clearly struggling to contain, something vast and overwhelming that threatened to break through the careful composure he wore like armor. You had seen him triumphant on the day of your wedding, when he had looked at you across the sept with satisfaction burning in his eyes. You had seen him possessive in the darkness of your bedchamber, his hands mapping your body like a conqueror surveying new territory. You had seen him wounded and vulnerable and hungry in the quiet moments when the masks slipped. But you had never seen him like this.

"A child," he said. The word came out hoarse, scraped raw, almost reverent. Like a prayer whispered in the darkness of a sept. "Our child."

"Yes."

He took a step toward you his hand lifted, reaching toward your stomach, and then it stopped. It hung there in the air between you, suspended, trembling slightly. It was the first time you had ever seen Valarr Targaryen unsure of himself. The first time he had ever seemed to question whether he had the right to touch you. The man who had taken everything from you without asking, who had claimed your body as his property and your future as his due, was standing before you with his hand frozen in midair like a boy asking permission for his first dance.

"May I?" he asked.

The question was so unexpected, so utterly unlike him, that you felt your throat tighten until you could barely breathe. The infamous prince who had never asked permission for anything in his life. He was asking. You nodded because you did not know what else to do, because the words were trapped somewhere behind the ache in your chest.

He knelt before you, sank to his knees on the cold stone floor like a supplicant before an altar, his dark hair falling forward to frame his face, and he pressed his hand to your belly. His palm was warm through the thin fabric of your gown, his fingers spread wide as if trying to encompass something far larger than the tiny life that slept beneath. His mismatched eyes, were fixed on the place where his hand rested. The expression on his face was one you had never seen before, he looked like a man who had just discovered something he had been searching for his entire life without knowing it.

"There is a child in there," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. "A child. Our child. A son, perhaps. Or a daughter. A little girl with your eyes." He looked up at you, and his eyes were wet. The mismatched irises glistened in the amber light, shimmering with moisture that he did not try to hide. The man who had stripped away your freedom piece by piece until you were nothing but a wife and a body and a vessel, was kneeling at your feet with tears in his eyes. "You have given me a child."

"I have done nothing," you said, and your own voice sounded distant to your ears, like someone speaking from very far away. "It simply happened."

"It did not simply happen." He rose to his feet, but his hand remained on your belly, anchored there like he could not bear to let go. His other hand came up to cup your face, his thumb brushing your cheekbone with that familiar, reverent tenderness that always made your heart twist in ways you did not want to examine. "You have done well. You have done so well."

You have done well. The words echoed in your mind, and something deep inside you recoiled from them. It was the same thing he had said to you in the gardens, after he had taken you on the stone bench among the honeysuckle and roses. The praise of a master to a well-trained hound. The approval of a man who saw you as a vessel, a body, a thing to be used and commended for its usefulness. The same words, the same tone, the same implicit ownership.

But there was something else in his voice now, something that had not been there in the gardens or in the sept or in any of the hundred places he had claimed you. Awe. Gratitude. Something that looked almost like love, or as close to love as a man like Valarr was capable of feeling. Something that might, under different circumstances, in a different life, have made your heart soften instead of clench.

"You are pleased?" you asked. The question felt foolish the moment it left your lips. The evidence of his pleasure was written across his face, shining in his eyes, trembling in his hands. But you needed to hear him say it. You needed confirmation that this was real, that this moment was happening, that the ground had truly shifted beneath your feet.

"Pleased." He let out a short, incredulous laugh that was more breath than sound. "Pleased does not begin to describe it. I am." He stopped. Swallowed hard. The muscles in his throat worked visibly. "I did not know I could feel this. I did not know I was capable of it. All my life I have wanted nothing, needed nothing, cared for nothing. And now." He shook his head, his thumb still tracing your cheekbone. "Now there is this. Now there is you. Now there is our child."

He leaned down and pressed his lips to your forehead. The kiss was gentle, almost chaste, nothing like the hungry, demanding kisses he usually gave you. It lingered longer than necessary, his lips warm against your skin, and when he pulled back his eyes were still glistening. His hand was still on your belly, his palm curved protectively over the life that slept beneath.

"Everything will be different now," he said. "I will make certain of it. You will want for nothing. The child will want for nothing. I will give you both everything. Everything I have, everything I am, everything I will ever be. I swear it on the old gods and the new, on my father's crown and my mother's blood. I swear it."

You looked at him, this strange and complicated and possessive man who had stolen your life and now knelt before you with tears streaming openly down his cheeks, he was looking at you like you had given him something he had never dared to hope for, something he had never believed he deserved.

"Thank you," you said. It was the only thing you could think of to say, the only words that felt safe enough to speak.

Valarr smiled. It was a small smile, almost shy, entirely unlike the knowing and predatory expression he usually wore like a second skin. For a heartbeat, he looked younger. Softer. More like a man and less like a prince.

"No," he said. "Thank you."

—

You had thought, perhaps naively, that the pregnancy would give you a reprieve, it was a reasonable assumption. Most husbands withdrew from their wives during pregnancy. Everyone knew this. It was simply the way of things, an accepted custom as old as the marriage bed itself. Some men retreated out of genuine concern for the child, afraid that their passions might harm the delicate life growing in the womb. Others were driven away by a sudden and prudish aversion to the changing body, the swelling belly and tender breasts and the slow transformation of wife into mother. The maesters recommended separate chambers in their dry, clinical tones, citing the health of the babe. The septas preached restraint from their prayer books, their thin lips pursed in disapproval at any hint of carnality during such a sacred time. Even the most attentive of lords, the ones who doted on their wives and brought them gifts and held their hands through the pains of labor, even they usually found themselves a discreet mistress to occupy their nights while their wives grew heavy with child. A servant with pretty eyes. A merchant's daughter from the city. Someone uncomplicated, someone unburdened by the weight of impending motherhood.

Valarr was not one of those husbands, if anything, the news of your pregnancy had inflamed something in him. The hunger that had driven him since your wedding night, the need to touch and claim and own, had not diminished with the proof of his conquest growing in your womb. It had grown alongside the child, feeding on the evidence of his seed taking root, becoming something voracious.

He touched you constantly now. His hands were always on you, always seeking, always claiming. A palm pressed flat against your belly at meals, in the corridors, during council meetings when you were permitted to sit beside him. His fingers tracing the small of your back as you walked through the gardens, a gesture that looked tender to observers but felt like a brand. His thumb stroking the curve of your hip while you stood at the window, watching the ships in the harbor, his body a warm and solid presence behind you. He spoke to the child at night, his lips pressed against the gentle swell of your stomach, his voice low and murmuring and full of a tenderness that made your chest ache with a confusion so deep you did not know how to name it. He whispered things to the babe that you could not quite hear, promises and secrets and endearments in the old Valyrian tongue that sounded like poetry and felt like chains.

He was gentler in some ways. More attentive. More solicitous of your comfort than he had ever been before. He asked after your health with genuine concern in his eyes. He ordered the kitchens to prepare only foods you could stomach, banishing the roasted meats whose smell made you retch. He had the servants bring extra pillows for your bed and lighter gowns for the oppressive summer heat and a dozen other small comforts that spoke of a consideration you had not expected from him.

But in bed, he was insatiable, the first night after the maester's announcement, you had expected him to let you sleep. You had been exhausted, wrung out by the emotions of the day, by the revelation of the child and the memory of the moon tea and the complicated tangle of relief and terror and strange, fragile hope that had taken root in your heart. You had climbed into bed with the grateful expectation of rest, your body sinking into the feather mattress with a sigh of pure physical relief.

He had not let you sleep. Instead, he had laid you down on the furs with a reverence that bordered on worship, his movements slower and more deliberate than they had ever been before. His hands mapped every inch of your body as if he were discovering it for the first time, his fingers tracing the contours of your shoulders and the curve of your waist and the swell of your hips with a focus that was almost devotional. He kissed the hollow of your throat where your pulse beat beneath the skin, the curve of your breast, and the soft and barely visible swell of your belly where his child was growing in the darkness of your womb. His lips lingered there, on that slight curve, pressing kiss after kiss to the skin that stretched over his heir. And then he had taken you with a slow and deep and devastating thoroughness that left you trembling and breathless and utterly and completely claimed, your fingers twisted in the furs and his name a broken whisper on your lips.

You had thought it was a celebration. A one time thing. An expression of his joy at the news, a physical manifestation of his happiness that would burn itself out once the initial excitement faded.

It was not a one time thing, the next night was the same. And the next. And the next after that, until the days blurred together in a haze of summer heat and his relentless, unquenchable desire. He could not keep his hands off you. He wanted you in the morning, when the light was pale and grey through the windows and the castle was still quiet, his body already hard and eager against your thigh when you woke. He wanted you in the afternoon, when the summer heat lay heavy on the castle and the servants had retreated to their quarters to escape the worst of it, when he would find you reading in the solar or sitting by the window and pull you into his lap with a hunger that never seemed to dim. He wanted you at night, after supper, before sleep, sometimes waking you from dreams with his mouth hot on your neck and his hands already pushing up your shift and his voice a dark and wanting murmur in your ear.

"I cannot get enough of you." His body moved against yours in the darkness, the rhythm deep and steady and possessive. His breath was hot and ragged against your ear, his chest pressed to your back or your breasts or your side depending on how he had positioned you that night. His hand found your belly, as it always did, his palm spreading wide over the growing curve. "You are carrying my child. My heir. Do you understand what that means? You are round with me. Full of me. Marked by me in ways no one can deny, no one can question, no one can ever take away."

His thrusts were deep and rhythmic, possessive without being cruel, hungry without being violent. His hand pressed against your belly as he moved, feeling the curve that grew more pronounced with each passing week.

You did not know how to respond to these declarations. Your fingers gripped his shoulders, nails biting into the muscle. Your breath came in short and desperate gasps that you could not control no matter how hard you tried. You hated that your body still wanted him. You hated that the pleasure still came, rushing through you like a tide, unstoppable and undeniable. You hated the way your hips rose to meet his, the way your legs wrapped around his waist, the way your mouth opened on sounds of need that you could not swallow back. But the pleasure came anyway. It always did.

And Valarr, watching your face with those mismatched eyes that missed nothing, saw it all. He saw your pleasure, the flush that spread across your cheeks and down your throat. He saw your surrender, the moment when your resistance crumbled and your body gave itself over to sensation. He saw the evidence of his possession written in every flutter of your lashes and every parting of your lips and every desperate, broken sound that escaped your throat.

"That is it," he breathed, his voice dark with satisfaction. "That is my girl. My perfect, beautiful girl. Taking me so well. Giving me everything."

He spilled inside you with a low groan, his body shuddering against yours with the force of his release. You felt the familiar warmth flooding your womb, the womb that already held his child, the womb that had already done its duty and needed nothing more from him. He stayed there for a long moment, still buried inside you, his forehead resting against yours and his breath coming in harsh, uneven pants. His hand remained on your belly, his thumb tracing small circles over the stretched skin.

"You cannot get mr more pregnant," you said quietly. The words came out before you could stop them, dry and almost sardonic, your voice still breathless from what he had done to you. "There is already a child in there. Growing bigger every day. Your seed has done its work. It has accomplished its purpose. There is nothing left for it to do."

Valarr laughed. It was a low and breathless sound, full of genuine amusement, rumbling through his chest and into yours. His eyes crinkled at the corners bright with mirth.

"I know," he said. "I know there is no purpose to it beyond the act itself. I know the child is already there, already growing, already real." He pressed a kiss to your forehead, soft and lingering. Then to the tip of your nose, a gesture so unexpectedly playful that it made something in your chest twist. Then to your lips, gentle and warm and tasting of salt. "But I cannot stop wanting you. I thought perhaps the desire would fade once you were with child. Once I had proof of our union, visible proof that everyone could see, proof that would grow and swell and eventually cry out in the night with a voice of its own. I thought that would be enough. I thought the hunger would finally be sated."

He pulled back to look at you, his mismatched eyes searching your face in the dim light of the dying candles. His expression was serious now, the amusement fading into something more vulnerable, something that looked almost like confusion at his own feelings.

"But it has not faded. It has grown. It grows every day, every time I look at you, every time I see the changes in your body and know that I did that. That I put that child inside you. That you are carrying a piece of me beneath your heart." His thumb traced your cheekbone, feather light. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. You were beautiful on our wedding day, when you hated me and did not bother to hide it. You were beautiful when I took you on the council table, when you arched beneath me and fought against your own pleasure. You were beautiful in the gardens, with the roses behind you and the sunlight in your hair. But now. Now you are carrying my child. Do you have any idea what that does to me? Do you have any idea how much I want you, how much I need you, how completely you have consumed every part of my mind and body?"

"I have some idea," you said, and your voice was flatter than you intended. He laughed again, that low and rumbling sound that you were beginning to recognize as genuine happiness. He rolled onto his back, pulling you against his side with a strength that was effortless and absolute. His arm wrapped around your shoulders, tucking you close against the warmth of his body. His other hand found your belly, as it always did now, resting there with a possessiveness that was both infuriating and strangely comforting. His palm was warm through your skin, and you could feel the slight curve of your womb pressing up against his fingers.

"Sleep," he said. "You need your rest. The maester said so. He was very specific about it. Plenty of rest, plenty of fluids, no strenuous activity." A pause. A smile you could hear in his voice even though you could not see his face. "I may have ignored the last part of his instructions."

"You are the one keeping me awake," you said. "Every night. Without fail."

"I know." He pressed a kiss to your hair, his lips lingering against the strands. "I will try to be more restrained. I will try to let you sleep. I will try to be the kind of husband who withdraws to his own chambers and leaves his pregnant wife in peace."

You did not believe him. You could hear the lie in his voice, the affectionate self-deprecation that masked a complete lack of intention to change his behavior.

He was not more restrained. The next night, he took you bent over the bed with your hands gripping the furs and your back arched and his name torn from your throat in a cry you could not suppress no matter how hard you bit your lip. The night after that, he pulled you into his lap while he sat in the chair by the fire, the flames casting dancing shadows across your intertwined bodies. His hands guided your hips as you moved above him, setting a rhythm that was slower than usual, gentler, accommodating the growing weight of your belly between you. His eyes never left your face. His hands never left your skin. His voice never stopped murmuring those soft and possessive endearments that you had learned to tune out and crave in equal measure.

And every night, when it was over, when he had spent himself inside you and your body was still trembling with the aftershocks of a pleasure you resented, he held you. His hand on your belly. His lips on your hair. His voice a low and steady murmur in the darkness, speaking words that were half promise and half threat and entirely Valarr.

Mine. Both of you. Mine. My wife. My child. My family. No one will ever take you from me. No one will ever touch what is mine. You belong to me, and I belong to you, and this child belongs to both of us, and nothing in this world or the next will ever change that.

—

The visits began in your seventh moon, at first, you thought nothing of them. Nobles came and went from the Red Keep as constantly as the tides in Blackwater Bay, an endless procession of ambition dressed in silks and velvets. Lords seeking favor with the King. Ladies attending the Queen in her solar, sipping sweet wine and exchanging gossip like currency. The castle was a perpetual parade of obeisance and hunger, and you had long since learned to ignore the shifting currents of courtiers that ebbed and flowed through its corridors like a river that never ran dry.

But then you began to notice a pattern, the lords who came to court were not alone. They brought their daughters. Young women, mostly, though a few were older, widowed or delayed in marriage by circumstance. Girls of six and ten, seven and ten, eight and ten. Fresh faced and slim waisted and dressed in the finest silks their houses could afford, gowns of pale blue and soft rose and spring green that made them look like flowers swaying in a summer breeze. They curtsied to the King with downcast eyes and rosy blushes, paid their respects to the Prince of Dragonstone with breathless voices and fluttering lashes, and then, inevitably, found their way into Valarr's path with a persistence that spoke of careful instruction.

Lady Marguerite of House Ashford. Lord Ashford's oldest daughter, a girl with hair like spun sunlight and eyes the color of cornflowers in bloom. She had smiled at Valarr over supper on her first night at court, her lashes dark against her cheeks, her voice honey sweet as she asked him about his work on the small council. She leaned toward him as she spoke, her body angled like an offering, and the neckline of her gown had been cut low enough to show the pale swell of her breasts.

Lady Rosamund of House Caswell. Tall and willowy, with hair the deep brown of polished walnut and a laugh that rang through the great hall like church bells on a feast day. She had a wit that was quick and sharp, a tongue that could match Valarr's own, and she had made him laugh during a garden stroll. You had been walking behind them with your ladies, your hand pressed to the aching small of your back, your swollen belly heavy before you like a millstone, and you had watched your husband's whole body relax into mirth at another woman's joke.

Lady Evelina of House Florent. Golden haired and rosy cheeked, with a laugh like silver chimes and a habit of touching Valarr's arm whenever she spoke to him. Her fingers would rest on his sleeve, light and lingering, a gesture of casual intimacy that made something hot and tight coil in your chest. She had brought him a gift on her third day at court. A book of Dornish poetry, bound in pale leather with gold leaf on the pages. The same volume you had seen in Baelor's library. The same verses Valarr had once read aloud to you in bed, his voice low and musical, your head resting on his chest as the words washed over you. She had presented it to him in the great hall, her cheeks pink with pleasure, and he had accepted it with a smile that made your stomach turn to ice.

They were throwing their daughters at him. All of them. Every lord with a maiden daughter and an eye for advancement was parading their girls before your husband like prize fillies at a horse fair, hoping he would take a fancy to one of them. Hoping he would sample the goods and find them to his liking. Hoping he would take a mistress.

And why would he not? Why would any man in his position resist such a parade of beauty and availability? You were pregnant now, heavy and tired and swollen beyond recognition. Your ankles had thickened until your shoes no longer fit, and you had been forced to wear loose slippers that made you feel like a peasant shuffling through the corridors. Your back ached with a deep and constant throb that no amount of pillows or warm baths could ease. You could not dance at feasts without growing short of breath. You could not walk through the gardens without stopping to rest on every bench you passed.

Men grew restless when their wives were with child. Men took mistresses. It was the way of the world, the way of marriage, the way of men like Valarr who had married for conquest rather than love and who had never pretended to be anything other than what they were.

You knew this. You had always known this. You had braced yourself for it during those first weeks after the maester's announcement, when Valarr's hunger had seemed bottomless and his desire for you had burned with a feverish intensity that left you exhausted and overwhelmed. You had told yourself that it would not last. That his obsession would cool once the novelty of your pregnancy wore off. That he would eventually grow tired of your swelling body and your constant fatigue and your inability to match his endless, exhausting passion.

But you had not expected it to hurt, you had not expected the way your chest would tighten when you watched Lady Marguerite lean toward him at supper, her golden hair spilling over her shoulder like a waterfall of silk, her blue eyes fixed on his face with an attention that bordered on worship. You had not expected the way your stomach would clench when Lady Rosamund made him laugh, her dark eyes sparkling with triumph, her hand lifting to touch her own throat in a gesture that drew his gaze to the elegant line of her neck. You had not expected the way your heart would stop and then start again, pounding too fast, when Lady Evelina touched his arm and he did not pull away.

He did not pull away. That was the detail your mind kept returning to, circling like a moth around a flame. He did not step back. He did not remove his arm from beneath her fingers. He did not give her the cold and cutting look that he was so capable of giving, the look that could freeze a man's blood in his veins and send lords twice his age stammering from his presence. Instead, he smiled at her. That same gentle and attentive smile he had once given you in the gardens, a lifetime ago, when you had been new to the castle and new to your marriage and still foolish enough to believe that there might be something salvageable in this union.

"He seems quite taken with the Florent girl," Lady Jeyne observed from her seat beside you. Her voice was light and conversational, utterly venomous, the voice of a woman who had spent decades at court learning exactly how to wound with words. "But then, His Grace has always appreciated beauty. And she is very beautiful, is she not? So slim. So graceful. That waist. Those wrists. She looks like a painting come to life. She makes pregnancy look rather unfortunate by comparison, does she not?"

You said nothing. Your fork was clenched in your hand, your knuckles white as bone, the tines pressed hard against the plate. You could feel the pressure of your grip in your wrist, in your forearm, in the tight clench of your jaw. On your other side, Lady Alia leaned in with a conspiratorial smile that showed too many teeth.

"I heard Lord Florent offered her as a companion for His Grace," she whispered, her breath warm and moist against your ear. "To ease his burdens during this difficult time. After all, a man has needs, and Her Grace is in no condition to." She paused delicately, her eyes dropping to your belly with an expression of exaggerated sympathy. The pause itself was an insult, the space she left for you to fill in the ugly words yourself. "Well. You understand. We all understand. It must be so hard for you, watching this happen when you cannot do anything about it. When you cannot be what he needs."

"The Florents have always been ambitious," Lady Mariene added quietly. Her voice was gentler than the others, which somehow made it worse. Pity was harder to bear than malice. "They will be looking for a place at court, a permanent position with access to power. A position as the Prince's acknowledged mistress would be quite the advantage. Their influence would grow considerably. They could rival even the great houses, with the Prince's ear and the Prince's bed."

"He will need someone to warm his sheets," Jeyne said, pressing the knife deeper with the casual air of someone commenting on the weather. "Sooner or later. You cannot expect him to remain celibate for months on end, surely. It is not in his nature. We all know what his nature is. We have all seen how he looks at you, how he touches you, how he cannot seem to keep his hands to himself. A man like that does not simply stop wanting because his wife's belly has grown too large for his liking. He finds other outlets. Other women who can give him what you cannot."

She paused, letting the words settle into the silence like stones dropping into still water. Then she smiled, her cold grey eyes glinting with satisfaction, and added, "And once the child comes, you will be occupied with nursing and rearing. You will have even less time for him. The wet nurses will handle the feeding, of course, but the child will need its mother. You will be exhausted. Drained. Uninterested in the kinds of activities that keep a husband faithful. It is only practical to find a suitable replacement now, before the birth, so that the transition is smooth. Someone who can keep him satisfied while you do your duty to his heir. Someone who can give him the pleasure and the attention and the beauty that you will no longer be able to provide."

The fracture in your chest spread. A web of cracks, splintering through your ribcage, reaching toward your heart with thin and searching fingers. You could feel it happening, the slow disintegration of something you had not even known you were holding together. You had thought you were prepared for this. You had thought you had armored yourself against the inevitable. But the armor was paper thin, and Jeyne's words were fire, and everything was burning.

You looked down the table at Valarr. He was still speaking with Lady Evelina. Her hand was still on his arm, her pale fingers resting against the dark silk of his sleeve. His head was tilted toward her, his expression attentive, his lips curved in that gentle and inviting smile that you had once believed was reserved for you. The candlelight caught the gold in her hair and the rose in her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes. She looked like a maiden from a song. She looked like everything you were not. She looked like the kind of woman a prince should have, the kind of woman a prince deserved, the kind of woman who had never been conquered in a war and married off as a spoil of victory.

He looked like a man who was interested. He looked like a man who was considering. He looked like a man who was already imagining what it would be like to have that golden hair spread across his pillows and that slim body pressed beneath his own.

He would not, you told yourself, and the voice in your head was desperate and thin and pathetic. He said he wanted only you. He said you were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He said you were his, both of you, you and the child, and that nothing would ever change that. He knelt at your feet with tears in his eyes. He pressed his hand to your belly and whispered to his heir in the darkness. He told you he could not get enough of you, that the desire had not faded, that it had grown, that it grew every day.

But men said many things. Men made promises and broke them. Men swore devotion on their knees and then found younger and slimmer and more beautiful women to fill their beds while their wives grew heavy with child and their bodies stretched into shapes that no longer pleased the eye. Valarr had never pretended to be anything other than what he was. A prince. A conqueror. A man who took what he wanted and answered to no one. Why would he limit himself to a swollen and exhausted wife when the realm was full of beautiful girls who would spread their legs for a chance at his favor?

You were a political tool who had served her purpose. You had given him an heir, or you would soon, and once the child was born, what use did he have for you? Your bloodline was a liability. Your family was destroyed. Your name was a curse that the realm had spent decades trying to erase. He had married you to end a war, and the war was ended, and now all that was left was the slow and humiliating process of being set aside while younger and prettier women took your place.

Your hand moved to your belly, cradling the swell of it beneath your palm. The child kicked, a sharp and insistent movement against your ribs, and you felt tears prick at the corners of your eyes. Yours, you thought, and the word was a lifeline, a rope thrown into the darkness, the only solid thing left in a world that was dissolving around you. At least this child is yours. At least they cannot take this from you. At least you will have something, someone, when everything else is gone.

—

That night, Valarr came to bed late, you were already lying down, your body curled on its side in the position the maester had recommended for sleep, your hands wrapped around your belly as if you could protect the child inside from the slow and creeping dread that had taken root in your heart and grown there like a poisonous vine. The room was dark except for the single candle burning on the bedside table, its flame guttering in the breeze from the open window. You had been lying there for hours, staring at the tapestry on the far wall, tracing the outlines of dragons and knights and maidens with your eyes because sleep would not come and your thoughts would not quiet.

The door opened. You heard his footsteps, soft on the stone floor. You heard the rustle of his clothing as he undressed, the soft thud of his boots being set aside, the whisper of silk as his doublet was draped over a chair. The mattress dipped as he climbed into bed beside you, and you felt the warmth of his body against your back, familiar and foreign all at once. His hand found your belly, as it always did. His palm was warm, his touch gentle, his fingers spreading wide over the taut curve of your womb. You felt him press a kiss to your shoulder, then to the curve of your neck. His lips were soft and unhurried, and his breath was warm against your skin.

"You are still awake," he murmured. "It is late. You should be sleeping."

"I was waiting for you."

"You should not wait. You need your rest. The maester was very specific." His hand moved in slow and soothing circles on your belly. "How is the little one tonight?"

"Active. I think he objects to the venison."

Valarr laughed softly, his breath stirring the hair at the nape of your neck. "He has good taste. The venison was overcooked." He settled against you, his body warm and solid at your back, his arm wrapped around your waist with that easy possessiveness that had once made you feel claimed and now made you feel like a possession being inventoried. He seemed content. He seemed happy. He seemed like a man who had no idea that his wife was slowly falling apart in his arms.

"Valarr?"

"Hm?" His voice was sleepy, comfortable, unconcerned.

The question had been sitting in your chest all evening, all week, all month. It had grown heavier with every smile he gave Lady Evelina, with every walk he took with Lady Marguerite, with every laugh Lady Rosamund pulled from his throat. It pressed against your ribs now like a living thing, demanding release.

"Why do you spend so much time with them?" The words came out before you could stop them. Controlled. But with a tremor underneath that you could not quite hide.

Valarr's hand paused on your belly. The silence stretched for a moment too long. "With whom?"

"The girls. The lords' daughters. Lady Evelina. Lady Marguerite. Lady Rosamund. All of them." You did not turn to look at him. You kept your eyes fixed on the tapestry, on the knight and the dragon and the maiden in her tower. "You walk with them. You ride with them. You sit with them at supper. You laugh at their jokes and accept their gifts and let them touch you. Everyone sees it. Everyone talks about it."

"Do they." His voice was flat. Not a question.

"You know they do. You know what the court is saying. You know what they are saying about me."

"What are they saying about you?" The question was too casual. Too careless. As if he genuinely did not know, or genuinely did not care.

"That I have been set aside," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word despite your best efforts. "That you are looking for a mistress. That you have already found one. Or two. Or three. That I am too fat and too tired and too useless to keep your attention, so you are finding it elsewhere. That it is only a matter of time before you make your choice and I am left alone in these chambers while you."

You stopped. Your throat had closed around the rest of the sentence. You could not say it. You could not speak the image into existence, the image of him in another woman's bed, his hands on another woman's body, his voice murmuring those same soft and possessive endearments into another woman's ear.

Valarr was quiet for a long moment. His hand was still on your belly, but it had stopped moving. It lay there, heavy and motionless. "You have been listening to gossip," he said finally. "From the viper pit of the court. From those ladies who whisper poison in your ear the moment my back is turned."

"It is not gossip when I see it with my own eyes. I saw you in the gardens with Lady Marguerite. You disappeared into the hedge maze together. I saw you give Lady Rosamund your handkerchief at the tiltyard. She wore it tied around her wrist like a trophy. I saw you at supper tonight with Lady Evelina. Her hand was on your arm for half the meal. You did not remove it. You never remove it."

"I am the Prince. I am the heir's heir. It is my duty to be courteous to the lords and ladies who visit this court. Their fathers are important bannermen. Their houses are ancient and powerful. Offending them would be politically foolish."

"Courteous." You let out a breath that was almost a laugh, hollow and bitter. "Is that what you call it? Courteous?"

"What would you call it?"

"I would call it entertaining them. I would call it encouraging them. I would call it letting them believe they have a chance." Valarr shifted behind you. His arm tightened around your waist, pulling you closer against him, but the gesture felt different now. Less tender. More proprietary. Like a man repositioning a piece on a game board.

"You are being ridiculous," he said.

"Am I?"

"Yes. You are pregnant and tired and your mind is inventing threats where none exist. The maester warned me this might happen. He said that women in your condition often become emotional. Irrational. Suspicious without cause."

The words hit you like a slap. Emotional. Irrational. Suspicious without cause. He was dismissing you. He was reducing your fears to nothing more than the hysterical ramblings of a pregnant woman, unworthy of serious consideration, unworthy of a real answer. Your hands tightened on your belly, your knuckles going white.

"Do not do that," you said, and your voice was sharper now. "Do not pretend this is nothing. Do not pretend I am imagining things. I have watched you with them. I have watched the way you smile at them, the way you lean toward them, the way you laugh at their jokes and accept their gifts. You gave Lady Rosamund your handkerchief, Valarr. Your handkerchief. With your dragons on it. That is not courtesy. That is a favor. Everyone knows what a favor means."

"I gave her a piece of cloth because she asked for it. She wanted something to tie back her hair while she rode. It meant nothing."

"Then why did she wear it on her wrist for the rest of the day? Why did she show it to every lady in the castle? Why did she tell them it was a gift from you?"

"I do not control what Lady Rosamund says or does. She is a foolish girl with foolish notions. That is not my responsibility."

"And Lady Evelina? The book she gave you? The way she touches you at every meal? Is that also nothing?"

Valarr exhaled, a long and controlled breath that sounded almost like a sigh. When he spoke again, his voice had changed. It was cooler now. More distant. The voice of a prince who was not accustomed to being questioned. "I am not having this conversation," he said. "It is late. You are tired. I am tired. We will discuss this in the morning if you still wish to, but I suspect you will feel differently once you have rested."

"No. We will discuss this now." You twisted in his arms, turning to face him for the first time since he had come to bed. His eyes met yours in the dim candlelight and they were guarded in a way you had not seen in months. "Why do you spend so much time with them? Why do you let them touch you? Why do you smile at them the way you used to smile at me?"

Valarr stared at you for a long moment. His expression was unreadable, his jaw tight, his eyes shuttered. When he finally spoke, his voice was cold and clipped and utterly dismissive. "You are being tedious."

The word hit you like a physical blow. Tedious. As if your fears were boring to him. As if your pain was an inconvenience. As if you were nothing more than a nagging wife whose concerns were not worth the breath it took to address them. "Tedious," you repeated. The word tasted like ash in your mouth.

"I have given you no reason to doubt me. I have told you repeatedly that you are my wife, that you are carrying my child, that there is no other woman who could take your place. If you choose not to believe me, that is your decision. But I will not spend my nights defending myself against accusations that have no basis in reality."

"Accusations." You pushed yourself up on one elbow, your belly heavy between you. "I have not accused you of anything. I have asked you a question. There is a difference."

"You have asked me the same question in a dozen different ways, and I have answered it in a dozen different ways, and none of my answers have satisfied you. I am beginning to think no answer would satisfy you. I am beginning to think you want to be unhappy. That you want to find fault. That you are looking for reasons to push me away."

"That is not true."

"Is it not?" His eyes were cold now, the warmth that had been there when he first came to bed completely extinguished. "You have been distant for weeks. Cold. Withdrawn. You barely speak to me at meals. You barely look at me when I enter the room. And now you accuse me of seeking comfort elsewhere, when you are the one who has been pulling away."

"Because I am afraid." The words tore out of you, raw and trembling. "Because I am pregnant and swollen and exhausted, and every day I watch beautiful girls throw themselves at my husband, and every day my ladies tell me it is only a matter of time before you choose one of them. And instead of reassuring me, instead of telling me I have nothing to fear, you tell me I am being tedious."

"I have told you repeatedly that you have nothing to fear. You simply refuse to listen."

"You told me with words. Words are easy. Words are wind. But your actions tell a different story. Your actions tell me that you enjoy their attention. That you seek it out. That you do nothing to discourage it."

Valarr sat up abruptly, the furs falling away from his chest. His expression was hard now, his jaw set, his mismatched eyes glittering with something that looked almost like anger. "I am done with this conversation," he said. "I am a Prince of Dragonstone. Your lord husband. I will not be interrogated in my own bed by my own wife over matters of court etiquette that she does not understand."

"I understand more than you think."

"You understand nothing." He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood, his back to you, his shoulders rigid. "You see a girl smile at me and you invent an affair. You see me accept a book and you imagine me in her bed. These are fantasies, Y/N. They exist only in your mind. And I will not waste my breath defending myself against phantoms."

"Then give me a reason not to believe them." Your voice broke on the last word. "Give me something real. Something I can hold onto. Something other than pretty words and empty promises."

Valarr turned back to look at you. For a moment, just a moment, something flickered in his eyes. Something that might have been guilt, or frustration, or something else entirely. Then it was gone, replaced by that cold and distant mask that he wore like armor. He crossed to the door without waiting for your response. His hand closed around the latch, and he paused for a moment with his back still turned.

"Sleep," he said. "You need your rest. I will not disturb you further tonight."

"Where are you going?"

He did not answer. The door opened and closed behind him with a soft click, and you were alone.

You stared at the closed door for a long time. The candle on the bedside table guttered and smoked, casting dancing shadows across the walls. The baby kicked inside you, a sharp and insistent movement, and you pressed both hands to your belly as if you could hold yourself together through sheer force of will.

Where are you going?

He had not answered. He had not even looked at you. He had simply walked out into the darkness of the castle, into the corridors where slim and beautiful girls slept in their guest chambers, girls who would welcome him with open arms and eager bodies and no tedious questions about where he had been.

Where are you going?

You did not sleep that night. You lay awake in the darkness, staring at the canopy above, counting the dragons embroidered in silver thread until your eyes blurred and the tears you had been holding back finally spilled over and ran down your cheeks and into your hair. The castle was silent around you, vast and indifferent, and somewhere in its depths your husband was walking through the shadows.

You did not know where he was going. You did not know whose door he might knock on, whose bed he might climb into, whose body he might use to forget the argument he had just had with his tedious and suspicious wife.

You only knew that he was gone. And the space beside you in the bed was cold.

—

Days had passed since the Prince had slept that one night away from his wife, the hour was late when Lady Alia slipped through the servant's passage, she had planned this carefully, or as carefully as a woman of her limited intelligence could manage. Three days of watching and noting the patterns of the Prince's household. When the servants came and went with their armfuls of linens and trays of half-eaten food. When the guards changed their watch, their armored boots echoing in the corridor as they traded places with the next shift. When the Blackfyre bitch took her evening bath in the small chamber adjacent to the Prince's bedchamber, the chamber that Alia had never been permitted to enter but had imagined a hundred times. The bath took an hour. Sometimes longer now that the whore's body was swollen with child and every movement was an effort, every step a labor, every breath a reminder of the parasite growing in her womb. An hour was more than enough. An hour was a gift, a window of opportunity that Alia intended to seize with both hands.

She had worn her finest shift. Silk so thin it was practically transparent, purchased from a Lyseni trader who had assured her it was the same fabric the pleasure houses of the Free Cities used for their most expensive courtesans. The neckline was cut low enough to show the swell of her breasts, the pale curve of them visible even in the dim light of the servant's passage. The hem rode high on her thighs, barely covering the tops of her legs, leaving little to the imagination. Her honey-colored hair was loose around her shoulders, brushed until it shone like spun gold, each strand gleaming in the candlelight. She had dabbed perfume behind her ears, at her wrists, in the hollow of her throat where the pulse beat warm beneath the skin. Rose oil, subtle and sweet, the kind of scent that made men lean closer without knowing why.

She looked beautiful. She knew she looked beautiful. She had been told so her entire life, by her mother and her father and her septa and every squire and knight and minor lord who had ever looked at her with hunger in his eyes. She was eight and ten years old, slim and graceful, with a face that had made half the squires in the Red Keep stumble over their own feet when she passed. Her skin was clear and unblemished. Her waist was narrow enough to span with two hands. Her breasts were small and pert and had never been swollen by pregnancy or sagged under the weight of a nursing child. She was everything the Prince's wife was not, everything she could never be again, and she was offering herself to him on a platter of silk and perfume.

The Prince would not refuse her. Why would he? His wife was a bloated cow, heavy with child, her ankles swollen to the size of tree trunks and her face round as the full moon and her body stretched beyond all recognition. Alia had seen her waddling through the corridors like a duck, one hand pressed to the small of her back, her belly preceding her like the prow of a ship. It was obscene. It was grotesque. No man wanted that. No man wanted a wife who could not please him, a wife who could not satisfy him, a wife who was too tired and too heavy and too occupied with the parasite in her womb to give her husband the attention he deserved. A man like Prince Valarr, a man of such obvious and voracious appetites, must be starving by now. Desperate. Practically aching for a woman who could give him what his wife could not.

And Alia had seen the way the Prince looked at the noble girls who came to court. He was interested in them. He smiled at them and laughed at their jokes and let them touch his arm at supper. He simply needed a push in the right direction, a nudge toward the inevitable, a woman bold enough to take what was being offered rather than waiting to be asked.

She would be that push. She would be the one to climb into his bed and give him what he had been denied for months, and when he had tasted her and enjoyed her and realized what he had been missing, he would set aside his fat and useless wife and keep Alia as his acknowledged mistress. Perhaps even more. Stranger things had happened. Targaryens had set aside wives before. Targaryens had taken new brides before. And if the Blackfyre whore died in childbirth, as so many women did, as Alia prayed nightly she would, then the Prince would need a new wife. Someone young and beautiful and fertile. Someone like Alia.

The dream was so vivid, so intoxicating, that she could almost taste it, she slipped into the Prince's bedchamber and closed the door silently behind her, her heart pounding in her chest with a mixture of fear and excitement. The fire burned low in the hearth, casting long shadows across the walls, the embers glowing red and gold in the darkness. The bed was huge and canopied, draped in Targaryen red and black, the furs turned down invitingly by the servants who had prepared the room for the night. She could smell him on the sheets. Sandalwood and smoke and something dark and masculine, something that made her stomach flutter with anticipation and her thighs press together involuntarily. Soon she would be wrapped in that scent. Soon she would be wrapped in him.

She shrugged off her shift and let it pool on the floor at her feet, a puddle of translucent silk that she stepped out of with the grace of a dancer. Then she climbed onto the bed, arranging herself among the pillows with practiced care. She had rehearsed this in her own chambers, in front of the small mirror that hung above her washbasin, trying different poses until she found the one that flattered her best. One arm above her head, her wrist bent delicately, her fingers curled against the pillow. Her hair spread across the silk in a golden fan, each strand catching the firelight. Her body angled to display her best features, the narrow waist and the flat stomach and the curve of her hips. She left the furs off entirely. She wanted him to see everything. Her small and pert breasts. The smooth plane of her stomach, unmarked by stretch marks or swelling. The golden hair between her thighs. She was a feast laid out for a starving man, and he would devour her.

She waited, the minutes passed with agonizing slowness. The fire crackled in the hearth, sending up occasional sparks that died before they reached the chimney. Somewhere in the adjoining chamber, she could hear the faint splash of water, the soft sigh of the Blackfyre lowering herself into the tub. The sound made Alia smile. Good. The cow was occupied. She would be soaking her bloated body for some time yet, trying to ease the aches and pains of her condition, never suspecting that her husband was about to receive a far more enticing offer.

The door opened. Prince Valarr stepped into the chamber, his attention fixed on a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was still dressed from the day's council meeting, his dark doublet unfastened at the collar to reveal the strong column of his throat, his boots dusty from the yard where he had been observing the new recruits. He did not look up immediately. He was frowning at something on the parchment, his mismatched eyes narrowed in concentration, his brow furrowed. He looked tired, Alia thought. Tired and frustrated and in desperate need of a woman to ease his burdens. She would be that woman.

"My prince."

Her voice was soft and breathy, the voice she had practiced for hours in front of her mirror, the voice that had made squires blush and stammer and drop their swords in the training yard. She stretched languidly on the bed, letting her legs part slightly, letting him see what she was offering. The firelight played across her bare skin, painting her in shades of gold and rose. She was a living flame, and he was a dragon. He would not be able to resist.

Valarr looked up, for a long moment, he simply stared. His expression did not change, except a slight surprise flickering across his features. No interest stirred in his mismatched eyes. No hint of the hunger Alia had expected, the hunger she had been counting on, the hunger that every man felt when he looked at her. He stared at her the way a man might stare at a dead rat that a cat had dragged in from the stables. The way a man might stare at something foul he had found on the bottom of his boot. The way a man might stare at an insect before crushing it under his heel.

"What," he said, and his voice was utterly flat, utterly cold, utterly devoid of anything Alia had hoped to hear, "is this?"

Alia's smile faltered. A thread of unease wound through her stomach, cold and tight. This was not the reaction she had anticipated. She had expected surprise, perhaps. She had expected hesitation, a moment of doubt, a flicker of conscience that she would have to soothe away with gentle words and softer touches. She had even prepared for the possibility that he might resist at first, that he might protest out of loyalty to his wretched wife, that she would have to work harder to persuade him. But she had not expected this. This blank and chilling lack of response, as if she were not a beautiful woman offering him her body but a minor inconvenience he had not asked for.

"I thought you might appreciate some company, my prince." She let her voice drop lower, more intimate, the voice of a woman sharing a secret in the darkness. She shifted on the bed, arching her back slightly, letting the firelight play across her bare breasts. Her nipples were hard in the cool air, and she knew he could see them. She wanted him to see them. "Your wife is occupied with her bath. She will be in there for another hour at least. And a man like you, a man of such strength and passion and hunger, should not have to spend his nights alone. It is not right. It is not natural. I am here to offer you comfort, my prince. Whatever comfort you desire. Whatever comfort you have been denied."

She let her hand drift down her own body as she spoke, tracing the curve of her breast, the flat of her stomach, the angle of her hip. It was a gesture she had practiced, a gesture designed to draw his eyes to the places she wanted him to look. She had been told by men far less powerful than the Prince that she was irresistible. Surely he would want her.

"Get out."

The words were flat. Cold. Utterly without warmth or hesitation or even the faintest trace of temptation. Valarr had not moved from the doorway. He had not taken a single step into the room. But something in his posture had changed, something that made Alia's blood run cold. His shoulders had squared like a soldier preparing for battle. His jaw had tightened until she could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin. His mismatched eyes were fixed on her with an expression that was not desire or interest or even flattered surprise. It was disgust. Pure and unfiltered and absolute disgust, the kind of disgust a man might feel upon discovering a nest of maggots in his supper. He was looking at her as if she were something filthy. Something contaminated. Something so far beneath him that he could barely stand to share the same air.

"My prince." Her voice cracked on the title. "Please, I only meant to offer you what you have been missing. What your wife cannot give you. What no woman in your condition should expect you to go without. I am here for you. I am willing. I want this. I want you."

"Get out of my bed." His voice was harder now, a blade beneath silk, a whip crack in the stillness of the room. "Get out of my bed, and get out of my chambers, and be grateful I do not have you dragged to the black cells beneath this castle and left there to rot until you forget what sunlight looks like."

Alia scrambled upright, her cheeks flushing with humiliation so intense it burned like a brand. Her hands were shaking as she grabbed for the sheet, pulling it up to cover her breasts, her shoulders, her body that had suddenly become a source of shame rather than pride. This was wrong. This was all wrong. He was supposed to want her. He was supposed to be tempted. He was supposed to look at her the way he looked at those noble girls at court, with attention and interest and that gentle smile that made women weak in the knees.

"Did you think I wanted you?" Valarr took a step into the room, and then another, and Alia shrank back against the pillows with a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a whimper. "Did you truly think that I would want you? That I would look at you and see anything other than a pathetic and desperate and grasping little whore who snuck into my chambers like a thief in the night?"

"But the noble girls," Alia stammered, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could stop them. "I saw the way you looked at them. I thought you were interested. I thought you wanted."

"I am polite to guests at my father's court because it is my duty as a prince. Because their fathers are bannermen and their houses are allies and insulting them would create political problems I have no desire to deal with. That is not interest. That is politics, you stupid and simpering fool. Did you truly think a few polite smiles at supper meant I would welcome any common whore who climbed into my bed? Did you think I was a dog who would mount anything that presented itself?" His lip curled, and the expression on his face was so contemptuous that Alia felt herself shrivel under it. "Are you that stupid, or are you simply that arrogant? Did you look in the mirror and convince yourself that a prince of the blood would throw away his honor and his wife and his unborn child for a chance to rut between your legs?"

Alia's face burned so hot she thought her skin might blister. Her eyes stung with tears, fat and humiliating, spilling down her cheeks and dripping onto the sheet she clutched to her chest. This was not how it was supposed to go. She was beautiful. She was desirable. She had been told so her entire life, by everyone she had ever met, and she had believed them. She had built her entire future on the foundation of her beauty, on the certainty that it would open doors and secure matches and lift her above the common rabble of ladies who populated the court. And now the Prince of Dragonstone was looking at her like she was a cockroach he had found in his soup.

"You are pathetic," Valarr said, and his voice dropped to a low and venomous murmur that was somehow worse than the shouting. "You come to my chambers while my wife, my pregnant wife, is bathing in the next room, carrying my child beneath her heart. You spread yourself across my sheets like a common whore in a dockside brothel. You offer me comfort as if you could ever compare to her, as if you could ever be worthy of touching the hem of her gown, as if you could ever be anything more than a cheap and tawdry imitation of a real woman."

He took another step closer, and Alia flinched so hard her back hit the headboard. The tears were streaming down her face now, ruining the careful arrangement of her hair, and her nose was running and her breath was coming in ragged and desperate gasps.

"Look at yourself," he said, and each word was a lash. "Just look at yourself. You are nothing. You are a collection of bones wrapped in skin, a hollow shell with nothing inside it but ambition and envy and the desperate need to matter. You think you are beautiful? You think that is enough? There are a thousand women in this city with pretty faces and willing bodies, and they are all as worthless as you are. Beauty is common. Beauty is cheap. Beauty is something any peasant girl can possess if she is young enough and clean enough. You have nothing else. No wit. No wisdom. No loyalty. No honor. Just a passably attractive face and a body you clearly think is a gift to mankind. It is not a gift. It is a cheap trinket, and I have no interest in cheap trinkets."

He leaned closer, his face inches from hers, and Alia could smell the wine on his breath and see the cold fire burning in his mismatched eyes. "My wife," he said, and his voice went soft and terrible, "is carrying my child. Her body is changing because she is doing something you will never do, something your selfish and shallow soul is not capable of. She is creating life. She is sacrificing her comfort and her health and her sleep and her very shape to bring my heir into this world. Every ache in her back, every swollen inch of her ankles, every stretch mark on her belly is a testament to her strength and her sacrifice and her worth. And you, you vile little creature, you dared to call her a cow. You dared to mock her. You dared to think you could replace her."

Alia's blood turned to ice. He knew. He knew what she had said, what she had whispered to Jeyne and Mariene in the solar, what she had murmured behind her fan while the Princess walked past with her heavy belly and her tired eyes. Someone had told him. Someone had carried her words to his ears, and now he was looking at her with murder in his eyes, and she was naked and alone and utterly defenseless.

"My prince, I never meant, it was only a joke, I did not think."

"You do not think. That is abundantly clear. You do not think at all." He straightened up, stepping back from the bed, and the distance he put between them was a mercy. Alia could breathe again, but the air felt thin and useless in her lungs.

"I will go," Alia whispered, scrambling toward the edge of the bed, her bare feet tangling in the sheets. "I will go now. I will leave the castle. I will go back to my father's house and never return."

"You will go. But not back to your father's house. You will go wherever I send you, and you will be grateful that I am allowing you to leave with your life." Valarr stepped aside, clearing the path to the door. "Get dressed. Get out of my chambers. And if you ever, ever, come near my wife again, if you ever speak to her or look at her or breathe in her direction, I will have you whipped through the streets of King's Landing until the flesh hangs from your bones in ribbons. I will make certain that every lord and lady in the Seven Kingdoms knows exactly what you are and what you tried to do. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Alia whispered, and her voice was so small and broken she barely recognized it. "Yes, my prince. I understand."

"Then get out."

She fled. She did not bother to put on her shift. She simply clutched it to her body and ran, barefoot and sobbing, through the servant's passage and back toward her own chambers. The guards in the corridor pretended not to see her. The servants pressed themselves against the walls, their faces carefully blank, their eyes fixed on the floor. No one stopped her. No one asked what had happened. No one wanted to be associated with the girl who had tried to seduce the Prince and failed so spectacularly.

And in the Prince's bedchamber, Valarr stood alone, staring at the rumpled sheets where another woman had lain, the disgust was still there, churning in his stomach like poison. He crossed to the bed and tore the sheets off with a violence that made the fabric rip, the sound of tearing silk loud in the quiet room. He threw them into the fire, watching the flames consume the evidence of her presence. The silk curled and blackened. The perfume burned with a sickly sweet smell. The memory of her body on his bed, her bare skin on his sheets, her greed and her ambition and her utter lack of shame, all of it turned to ash.

—

The morning sun streamed through the tall windows of the Prince's chambers, pale and golden and utterly indifferent to the tension that hung in the air like a held breath. Your ladies moved around you with the practiced efficiency of women who had done this a hundred times before, their hands quick and their faces carefully blank. The ritual of dressing was always the same. The unlacing of the nightshift, the damp cloth passed over your skin, the careful arrangement of the morning gown with its seams already straining against the swell of your belly.

Today, however, something was different. You felt it the moment Lady Alia entered the room, she was late. That was the first sign. Alia was never late. She was the youngest of your ladies, barely eight and ten, with honey-colored hair that fell in perfect ringlets around a face like a porcelain doll, and she had always taken her duties with a particular and pointed diligence. She was ambitious in her own small way, viciously and transparently ambitious, and her ambition manifested as punctuality. She was always on time. She was always perfectly dressed, perfectly coiffed, perfectly composed. She was always ready with a sweet smile and a poison-laced comment delivered in the most innocent of tones, the kind of comment that left no mark on the surface but burrowed deep into the skin and festered there.

But this morning, she was late, and when she finally swept through the door, her honey-colored hair pulled back too tightly from her face, her porcelain features pinched and sour, her blue eyes rimmed with red and swollen from a night spent weeping or raging or both, you knew that something had happened. Something significant. Something that had stripped away her careful composure and left this raw and seething creature in its place.

Lady Jeyne noticed it too. Of course she did. Jeyne noticed everything, she had made a career out of noticing things. Her gaze flickered to Alia as the younger woman crossed the room, and her thin lips curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes, a smile that spoke of anticipation rather than warmth.

"Lady Alia," Jeyne said, her voice light and conversational and utterly devoid of genuine feeling. "We were beginning to wonder if you had abandoned us. Her Grace has been waiting for her morning gown. The poor thing can barely stand for more than a few minutes without growing winded. She needs our assistance more than ever now that she is so very large and so very helpless."

"Forgive me." The word was clipped, bitten off at the end like a thread severed by teeth. Alia did not look at Jeyne. She did not look at Mariene, who had paused in her arrangement of your jewelry to watch the exchange with her usual quiet and vulture-like attention. She looked at you. Only at you, and her eyes, those pretty blue eyes that usually sparkled with mockery and malice, were burning with something that went far beyond her usual contempt. "I did not sleep well. I had a very trying night."

"How unfortunate," Jeyne murmured, her frost-colored eyes glittering with curiosity. "You do look rather peaked, my dear. Those dark circles do nothing for your complexion. Perhaps a tonic from the maester would help. Or perhaps a cold compress. You look almost as haggard as Her Grace, and she at least has the excuse of being great with child."

"Perhaps." Alia's voice was flat and hard, a voice that barely pretended to be civil. She reached for the laces of your nightshift, and her fingers were cold. Cold and rough and trembling with a suppressed fury that she did not seem to be trying very hard to suppress. She yanked at the ties, jerking the fabric loose with a violence that made you stumble forward a step, your hand flying to the bedpost to steady yourself before you could fall. The baby shifted inside you, startled by the sudden movement, and a wave of nausea rolled through your stomach.

"Careful," you said quietly. It was barely even a request. It was the same word you had spoken a hundred times before in this very room, to these very women, a small and automatic protest against the casual cruelties they inflicted on you day after day. You never expected it to work. It never did. But you said it anyway, because saying nothing felt like surrender, and you had surrendered too much already.

Alia's eyes snapped to yours in the mirror. Her lips curved into a smile that was nothing like her usual sweet and venomous expression. This smile was ugly. This smile was raw and jagged and full of something that looked almost like hatred in its purest and most undiluted form. It was the smile of a woman who had been wounded and was looking for someone to bleed in her place.

"Forgive me, Your Grace." The title dripped with contempt, each syllable a separate and carefully weighted insult. She moved closer, her cold fingers still gripping the loosened laces of your shift, her face hovering just behind your shoulder so that you could see her in the mirror, could see the hatred burning in her eyes. "I would not want to harm you. You are so very delicate in your condition. So fragile. So precious. We must treat you with the utmost care. We must wrap you in silk and carry you on a cushion and make sure nothing ever upsets you, because if something happened to the heir, what use would you be then? What possible value would you have if not for the parasite growing in your belly?"

The room went very still. Even Jeyne, who had heard and delivered a thousand veiled cruelties in her decades at court, raised an eyebrow at the naked hostility in Alia's voice. Mariene's hands had stopped moving over the jewelry entirely, her dark eyes fixed on the scene unfolding before her with the quiet intensity of a woman who knew she was witnessing something important and was determined not to miss a single detail.

"Alia," Mariene said, her voice soft and neutral, carefully modulated to give nothing away. "Perhaps you should let me attend to Her Grace's laces. You seem tired. Upset. It might be best if you took a moment to compose yourself."

"I am not tired." Alia's voice was sharp, almost shrill, cutting through the air like a blade. She moved around you in a slow circle, her fingers trailing across the fabric of your nightshift, her eyes never leaving your face. Her touch was light and mocking, the touch of someone examining a piece of livestock at market. "I am simply reflecting on the nature of worth. Of value. Of how some people have so very little of either, and yet manage to rise so far above their station through nothing more than a moderately attractive face and a convenient set of holes between their legs. It is remarkable, really. Inspiring, in a way. If a Blackfyre whore can become the Princess of Dragonstone simply by spreading her legs for the right man, what might the rest of us achieve if we were willing to debase ourselves so thoroughly?"

The words landed like a slap, stinging and hot against your skin. Your jaw tightened until your teeth ached. Your hands, still resting on your belly, curled into fists against the silk of your nightshift, the knuckles going white with the force of your grip. But you said nothing. You had learned, over seven long moons in this castle, that silence was your only weapon. Silence was your only protection. If you spoke, if you reacted, if you gave them anything at all, they would twist it and weaponize it and use it to flay you alive. They had done it before. They would do it again.

But Alia was not finished. She had barely begun. The fury that had been burning in her eyes since she walked through the door was spilling over now, pouring out of her in a torrent of venom that she had clearly been holding back for hours, for days, for perhaps her entire life.

"Some people," she continued, her voice rising with each word, gaining strength and volume and a kind of manic energy, "arrive at this castle with nothing. No name. No honor. No value beyond a traitor's bloodline and a body that happens to catch a prince's eye. A body that any dockside whore in Flea Bottom could match, and probably has more skill with besides. And yet they are given everything. A royal marriage. A place at court. Servants and gowns and jewels and the adoration of a man who should have known better than to sully himself with conquered flesh, with enemy flesh, with the daughter of the very house that tried to destroy his family. It is obscene. It is an insult to every woman of true and noble birth who has ever worked and waited and sacrificed for a fraction of what this Blackfyre slut was handed for nothing."

She stopped in front of you, her face inches from yours, her blue eyes blazing with a hatred so pure and so intense that it seemed to heat the air between you. Her breath was sour, stale from a sleepless night, and you could see the broken capillaries in her eyes, the traces of tears she had shed before coming to this room.

"While others," she said, and her voice dropped to a low and shaking whisper, "others who are loyal, who are worthy, who have served faithfully and done everything that was asked of them and more, are cast aside like garbage. Humiliated. Rejected. Told by the Prince himself that they are nothing, that they are worthless, that they cannot compare to the Blackfyre whore he married. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine being told, by a man you have admired and desired and dreamed of, that you are less than nothing compared to a traitor's daughter who got lucky on her back?"

You stared at her. Your heart was pounding in your chest, a slow and heavy drumbeat that you could feel in your throat, in your temples, in the tips of your fingers. The baby kicked, a sharp and startled movement high against your ribs, as if the child could sense the danger in the room. Your hands pressed harder against your belly, trying to soothe, trying to protect, trying to shield your child from the ugliness that was filling the room like smoke.

"Alia," Jeyne said, and this time there was a genuine note of warning in her voice. A line was being crossed, a boundary was being breached, and even Jeyne, who delighted in cruelty, could see that Alia was careening toward something dangerous. "That is quite enough. You are speaking to the Princess of Dragonstone, not some scullery maid you can berate without consequence."

"Is it enough?" Alia spun to face the older woman, her hands shaking at her sides, her whole body trembling with the force of her rage. "Is it nearly enough? Because I do not think it is a fraction of what needs to be said. I do not think it is a thousandth part of what this creature deserves to hear. Do you know what they say about her, Lady Jeyne? The servants? The courtiers? The noble girls who come to court hoping to catch the Prince's eye and rescue him from his Blackfyre mistake?" She turned back to you, her smile wide and ugly and triumphant, a smile that spoke of secrets and rumors and the kind of poison that could not be cured. "They say the Prince will tire of her within a moon of the birth. Not a year. A moon. Perhaps less. They say he only wanted an heir from her, a child with the blood of Old Valyria, the blood she carries in her traitor's veins through nothing more than a quirk of bastard lineage. And once the child comes, once she has served her purpose and pushed out his spawn, he will set her aside like a broken toy that has stopped being entertaining. He will find someone younger. Someone prettier. Someone whose body has not been ruined and stretched and destroyed by carrying his child. Someone who is not carrying the weight of her family's treason in every breath she takes and every word she speaks and every drop of blood in her veins."

Your hands were shaking now. You could feel the tremors running up your arms, into your shoulders, into the rigid column of your spine that was trying so hard to hold you upright. The cracks in your chest, the ones that had been spreading for weeks, spreading with every visit from a noble girl and every touch of a hand on your husband's arm and every whispered comment from your ladies, were creaking and groaning under the pressure. You felt like a dam about to break. You felt like a tower about to collapse. You felt like everything you had tried so hard to hold together was about to shatter into a thousand pieces.

"Perhaps he already has," Alia continued, stepping closer, her voice dropping to a low and intimate murmur that was somehow worse than her shouting. She was close enough now that you could count her eyelashes, could see the flecks of gold in her blue irises, could smell the stale wine on her breath from whatever she had drunk to fortify herself during the night. "Perhaps that is why he spends so much time with the Ashford girl. The Caswell girl. The Florent girl. Perhaps he is sampling the wares, comparing the merchandise, deciding which one he will take to his bed once the Blackfyre whore is no longer useful. Once she has given him what he wants, the heir, the bloodline, the proof of his conquest, and her body is ruined and stretched and ugly beyond repair. What man wants a wife like that? What man wants a woman whose belly hangs loose and whose breasts sag and whose body is covered in the marks of childbirth, when he could have a fresh young virgin with firm tits and a flat stomach and a name that does not make the realm whisper traitor every time she enters a room?"

She reached out and poked your belly with one sharp finger, her nail digging into the silk of your nightshift, pressing hard against the taut skin beneath. The baby jerked inside you, a violent and startled movement, and you stumbled back a step with a gasp that was equal parts pain and shock.

"Do you think he will even wait for the birth?" Alia asked, her voice bright and curious, as if she were inquiring about the weather. "Do you think he might already have one of them in his bed right now, while you lie alone in your chambers with your swollen ankles and your aching back and your useless, ruined body? Do you think he whispers the same things to Lady Evelina that he once whispered to you? Do you think he presses his hand to her flat stomach and tells her how beautiful she is, how perfect, how much he wants her? I would wager he does. I would wager he has already forgotten what you look like, forgotten what you feel like, forgotten that you exist at all except as the vessel that will deliver his heir and then be discarded like the garbage you are."

"Stop," you said. It was a plea. A desperate and ragged plea that tore itself from your throat before you could stop it, before you could swallow it down, before you could remember that showing weakness to these women was like bleeding in front of sharks. Your voice cracked on the single syllable, and you hated yourself for it. You hated the tremor in your hands and the burning in your eyes and the way your whole body was shaking with the effort of holding back the tears that were threatening to spill down your cheeks.

But Alia did not stop. She was too far gone now, too consumed by whatever rejection she had suffered the night before, too drunk on her own rage and humiliation to pull back from the edge. She leaned in close, her face inches from yours, her breath hot and sour against your skin, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost tender. Almost gentle. And infinitely more cruel for it.

"And the child," she whispered, and her lips curved into a smile that was soft and sweet and utterly monstrous. "That poor, unfortunate child growing in your belly. That half-Blackfyre abomination that you think will save you. What do you think will happen to it? Do you think the realm will accept a Blackfyre spawn as the heir to the Iron Throne? Do you think the King will suffer the blood of traitors to sit the seat of his ancestors? They will never let it inherit. Never. Not while there are true Targaryens living, not while there are lords with swords and honor and the will to defend the realm from bastard pretenders. The moment it draws breath, the whispers will begin. The plots. The daggers in the dark. They will smother it in the cradle and call it a mercy, and everyone will agree that it was for the best, that the realm was spared a civil war, that the Blackfyre taint was finally and forever washed clean from the bloodline."

She paused, letting the words sink in, letting them burrow deep into the soft and vulnerable places of your heart. Her smile widened. Her eyes sparkled with a malice that was almost joyful.

"And you," she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper so quiet you could barely hear it. "You will be sent back to whatever gutter you crawled out of. Back to Tyrosh, perhaps, if they are feeling generous. Back to the exile where your family has been rotting. Alone and broken and weeping over the corpse of your dead and worthless and traitor-spawned child. You will have nothing. No husband. No crown. No baby to love you. Just the memory of your failure and the knowledge that you were never anything more than a vessel, a broodmare, a Blackfyre whore who spread her legs for the prince and thought that made her something special. You will die alone and forgotten, and no one will mourn you. No one will even remember your name."

The brush was in your hand. One moment you were standing frozen before the mirror, your hands trembling at your sides, your vision blurring with rage and grief and moons of silent and suffocating endurance. The next moment, the heavy silver hairbrush was in your grip, the one with the dragon-shaped handle that Valarr had given you in the early weeks of your marriage, the one you had used every morning since, the one that had become as familiar to your hand as your own reflection. Your arm was swinging, and the brush was connecting with Alia's face with a sound like a branch snapping in a winter storm.

The impact shuddered up your arm, a satisfying and terrible jolt that you felt in your shoulder and your elbow and your wrist. Alia's head snapped to the side. Her hands flew to her face, her mouth opening in a scream of shock and pain, and blood, bright red and startlingly vivid against the pale cream of her skin, began to pour from her nose in a thick and pulsing stream.

But you did not stop. You could not stop. Something had broken inside you, some dam that had been holding back months of cruelty and mockery and silent and grinding despair, and now the flood was pouring out and you could no more stop it than you could stop the tide from rising or the sun from setting. You swung the brush again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

The silver handle cracked against Alia's cheekbone with a wet and sickening thud that echoed off the stone walls. It caught her across the temple, opening a gash that immediately began to weep blood into her honey-colored hair, staining the perfect ringlets a dark and ugly crimson. It slammed into her upraised arm, the one she had thrown up to protect her face, and you heard something snap, something that might have been bone or might have been the handle of the brush itself. You did not care. You kept swinging. You would have kept swinging until your arm fell off, until the brush disintegrated in your hand, until there was nothing left of Alia but a smear of blood and bone and honey-colored hair on the cold stone floor.

"You do not speak of my child." The words tore from your throat, raw and ragged and barely recognizable as your own voice. You were howling. You were screaming with a fury that had been building since the night of your wedding, since the first cold walk to Valarr's chambers, since the first time Jeyne had tightened your laces too hard and smiled at your discomfort and whispered something cruel in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. "You do not speak of my child. You do not look at my child. You do not breathe near my child, do you hear me? Do you hear me, you venomous little snake? You worthless and pathetic and ugly little creature? You will never speak of my child again. You will never think of my child again. You will never come near my child again, because I will kill you. I will kill you with my bare hands before I let you touch my baby."

Alia was on the floor now, curled into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head, her screams dissolving into wet and choking sobs that bubbled up through the blood pouring from her nose and mouth. The brush rose and fell, rose and fell, spattering blood across your gown and across the polished floor and across the mirror where you had watched yourself endure so many silent cruelties. Your reflection was a stranger. A wild-eyed and snarling creature with blood on her face and madness in her eyes and her silver-gold hair flying around her shoulders like a fury's mane. You did not recognize her. You did not want to recognize her. She was everything you had tried so hard not to become, everything they had been pushing you toward since the day you arrived at this cursed castle.

"You think you can threaten my child?" You were screaming now, screaming so loudly that your throat burned with it. "You think you can stand there and tell me they will smother my baby in the cradle and I will do nothing? I will kill you. I will kill you before I let you touch my child. I will kill anyone who tries to harm my child. I will burn this castle to the ground with everyone in it before I let anyone harm my child. Do you understand me? Do you understand me, you pathetic and worthless and evil little bitch?"

"Guards!" Jeyne was screaming, her composure finally and utterly shattered, her frost-colored eyes wide with something that might have been terror or might have been excitement. "Guards, help! She is killing her! The Princess has gone mad! She is killing Lady Alia!"

Mariene had flung open the door and was shouting into the corridor, her voice high and shrill and urgent. Footsteps thundered on the stone outside, heavy boots and the jangle of armor, and then hands were grabbing you, pulling you back, wrenching the bloody brush from your grip. You fought them. Gods, you fought them. You kicked and thrashed and clawed at their armor with your bare hands, your swollen belly heaving with the effort, the baby kicking furiously inside you as if joining the battle, as if fighting alongside its mother against the enemies that surrounded you.

"Let me go! Let me go, I will kill her, I will rip her apart, I will—"

"There are two of them in there," one of the guards was saying, his voice strained with the effort of restraining you without hurting you. "The babe and her both. Careful with the belly. Don't hurt the heir. Watch her feet, she's kicking, she's trying to—there, got her. Hold her still. Hold her still!"

"Get her out of here," Jeyne ordered, her voice cold and sharp and full of a satisfaction that she did not bother to hide. "Take her to her old chambers. The tower room at the end of the winding stair. Lock her in and post a guard at the door. She is a danger to herself and others. Someone fetch the maester for Lady Alia immediately, and someone else inform the Prince of what has happened. Tell him his wife has gone mad. Tell him she attacked an innocent lady of the court with a hairbrush and nearly beat her to death. Tell him everything."

They dragged you from the room. Your feet slipped on the bloody floor, skidding through the crimson smears that had splattered across the stone in wide and violent arcs. You caught one last glimpse of Alia, still curled on the floor, her face a mask of blood that obscured her features entirely, her honey-colored hair matted and dark with gore, her sobs rising into hysterical wails that echoed off the walls and followed you down the corridor like a curse.

The walk to your old chambers was a blur of stone walls and torchlight and the cold and shocked faces of servants who pressed themselves against the walls to let the guards pass. You were still struggling, still fighting, your breath coming in ragged gasps that were half sob and half scream. The guards did not speak to you. They did not look at you. They simply held your arms in their iron grips and marched you through the corridors with the grim efficiency of men who had done this before, who would do this again, who had long ago learned not to question the orders they were given. You were a prisoner being transported, not a princess being escorted. You were a criminal. A madwoman. A danger to herself and others.

Your old chambers. The tower room at the end of the winding stair. You recognized the door immediately, the iron bands and the heavy oak and the small and grated window set into the wood. This had been your prison for the first weeks of your marriage, the cold and barren room where you had been kept like a captive, you had hoped never to see it again. You had prayed to gods you did not believe in that you would never be forced to return to this place with its threadbare tapestries and its single narrow window and its bed that felt like stone beneath your body.

But here you were, the guards threw you inside. You stumbled forward, catching yourself on the edge of the bed, your swollen belly making the movement awkward and graceless and painful. Behind you, the door slammed shut with a boom that echoed through the cold stone chamber like the closing of a tomb. The bolt slid home with a sound like a death knell, a heavy and final thud that seemed to reverberate through your very bones and into the floor and into the walls and into every corner of your shattered soul.

And then there was silence, you stood in the center of the cold and empty room, your chest heaving, your breath coming in great and ragged gasps that burned in your throat and tore at your lungs. Alia's blood was on your gown. On your face. On your hands. Under your fingernails, dark and sticky and still warm. It was drying now, turning brown and crusted, pulling at your skin every time you moved your fingers. Your knuckles were bruised and swelling, the skin split across two of your fingers where you had struck Alia's teeth, and you could feel the dull throb of pain beginning to set in as the fury drained away and left nothing but exhaustion in its wake. Your hair had come loose from its careful arrangement, hanging in wild tangles around your shoulders, matted with sweat and blood and the sheer and blind rage that had consumed you so completely that you had forgotten who you were.

The baby kicked. A sharp and insistent movement, low in your belly, reassuring and terrifying all at once. Your child. Your child was still there, still alive, still fighting, still moving inside you with a vitality that made your eyes sting with tears. You pressed both hands to your stomach, feeling the flutter of tiny limbs beneath your palms, and something inside you broke. Not the dam this time. Something deeper. Something more essential. Something that had been holding you together through seven moons of misery and loneliness and fear, and that now crumbled into dust.

A sob rose in your throat. You choked it down with a sound that was half gasp and half whimper. Then another came, and another, and another, until you were weeping with your whole body, your shoulders shaking, your face crumpling, your legs giving way beneath you so that you sank onto the cold stone floor in a heap of ruined silk and drying blood and the shattered remnants of your dignity.

What had you done?

The question echoed through your mind like a bell tolling, over and over and over, each repetition louder and more terrible than the last. What had you done, what had you done, what had you done?

You had attacked one of your ladies. You had beaten her bloody with a hairbrush in front of witnesses, and now you were locked in your old chambers, waiting for judgment like a criminal awaiting execution. And you were a criminal. There was no denying it. You had assaulted a noblewoman, the daughter of a lord, a member of the royal household with family connections and political influence and a name that was not tainted by rebellion and treason. It did not matter what Alia had said. It did not matter that she had threatened your child and mocked your body and predicted your ruin with a smile on her pretty porcelain face. It did not matter that she had provoked you deliberately and cruelly and without mercy. None of that mattered. You were a Blackfyre. She was a lady of the Reach. Her word would carry more weight than yours. Her blood was worth more than yours. It always had been. It always would be.

They would punish you for this. Perhaps they would strip you of your title and send you to the Silent Sisters. Perhaps they would lock you in this tower room forever, leaving you to rot in the cold and the dark while your child was taken from you the moment it was born.

And Valarr. Gods, Valarr. What would he do when he heard what you had done? He had warned you, hadn't he? He had told you that you needed to control yourself, that you needed to be careful, that the court was full of people who wanted to see you fall. And you had failed him. You had failed him spectacularly and violently and publicly, and now he would have no choice but to condemn you. Perhaps he had been looking for an excuse all along. Perhaps the whispers had been true. Perhaps he only wanted an heir from you, and once the child was born, he intended to set you aside and take one of those slim and beautiful noble girls to his bed. Perhaps this would be the perfect opportunity. Perhaps he would use your violence against Alia as justification to cast you out, to declare you unfit, to separate you from your child and install Lady Evelina Florent in your place.

The thoughts spiraled through your mind, dark and desperate and utterly consuming, each one worse than the last. You pressed your hands harder against your belly, as if you could shield the child from the future that was rushing toward you both like a tidal wave. The baby kicked again, softer this time, a gentle flutter against your palm, and you felt fresh tears spill down your cheeks. Your child. Your innocent and helpless child, who had done nothing wrong, who had committed no crime except to grow in the womb of a Blackfyre mother. What would happen to your child when they came for you? Would they let you keep the baby until it was born, or would they tear it from your arms the moment it drew breath? Would they hand it to some wet nurse, some proper Targaryen lady who would raise it to forget its mother, to forget your face and your voice and the way you had held your hands over your belly and promised to protect it from the world? Would your child grow up believing that its mother was a madwoman, a violent and unstable creature who had been locked away for the safety of the realm?.

The grief that swelled in your chest was so vast and so overwhelming that you thought it might crush you. You wrapped your arms around your belly and bent forward until your forehead touched the cold stone floor, and you wept. You wept for your child, who might never know its mother. You wept for yourself, for the girl you had been before the war and the marriage and the slow and grinding destruction of everything you had ever been. You wept for the future that had been stolen from you, the future that you had tried so hard to build despite every obstacle, the future that now lay in ruins at your feet.

You did not know how long you stayed there, curled on the cold stone floor with your forehead pressed to the ground and your arms wrapped around your belly. The light through the single narrow window shifted as the sun moved across the sky, climbing the walls and sliding across the threadbare tapestries and fading from gold to grey to the deep amber of late afternoon. No one came. No one summoned you. No one brought you food or water or word of what was happening outside this cold and silent room. The door remained locked, the bolt secure, the silence absolute except for the distant crash of waves against the cliffs below the castle and the harsh and ragged sound of your own breathing.

You were alone. You were utterly and completely and terrifyingly alone. You were a Blackfyre in a castle full of Targaryens, a conquered enemy in the heart of the conqueror's power, and you had just given them the perfect excuse to destroy you.

The baby kicked again. Soft and steady and impossibly fragile, a tiny foot pressing against your palm like a promise, you held on to that feeling. It was all you had left. It was the only thing in the world that was still yours, the only thing they could not take from you, at least not yet. Not until the child was born. Not until they tore it from your arms and gave it to someone else and told you that you had never deserved to be a mother in the first place.

And you wept until there were no tears left, until your body was empty and hollow and numb, until the light outside the narrow window faded to black and the room was plunged into darkness.

No one came. No one would come. You were alone with your child and your fear and the cold and certain knowledge that you had destroyed everything, and there was no one in the world who would save you.

—

The door opened, you flinched at the sound, your body curling inward around your belly before your mind could catch up, your hands flying up to protect your face in a gesture that was primal and animal and utterly humiliating. A beaten dog cowering before the master's hand. That was what you had become. That was what they had made you. You had been sitting on the cold stone floor for hours, your back pressed against the hard edge of the bedframe, your knees drawn up as far as your swollen belly would allow which was not far at all anymore. The blood on your gown had dried to a stiff and crackling crust that flaked off in brown specks every time you shifted your weight. Your hair hung in matted ropes around your face, tangled with sweat and blood and the salt of dried tears. Your eyes were so swollen from weeping that the world had become a blurry smear of grey stone and fading light, your lashes stuck together in clumps, your cheeks raw and stinging. Your throat burned from the sobs you had been unable to fully suppress, the sobs that had torn their way out of you for what felt like hours until there was nothing left inside your chest but a hollow and echoing emptiness.

You had expected guards. You had been listening for their footsteps in the corridor, the heavy tread of armored boots on ancient stone, the jangle of swords in their scabbards. You had expected the cold and measured voice of the King's Justice, some grey and faceless man in grey and faceless robes, informing you that you were to be confined to your chambers until the birth after which your fate would be determined by men who had never seen you as anything more than a conquered enemy. You had expected Baelor. Gods, you had expected Baelor, his mismatched eyes gleaming with quiet satisfaction as he stood in the doorway and told you that he had warned you, that no one would protect you, that you should have accepted his offer when you had the chance, that this was the price of your defiance and your pride and your foolish belief that you could ever be anything more than a Blackfyre in a Targaryen castle.

You had not expected Valarr.

But it was Valarr who burst through the door, the heavy oak slamming against the stone wall with a crack that made you flinch and curl tighter around yourself. His dark hair was disheveled, hanging in wild strands around his face, and you realized with a shock that you had never seen him like this before, his doublet was half unlaced, the dark silk hanging open to reveal the white linen of his undershirt beneath. His boots were scuffed with dust as if he had been running through the servants' passages rather than the main corridors. His mismatched eyes were wild, darting around the cold and barren chamber with a frantic desperation that made him look almost feral, and when they found you huddled on the floor like a wounded animal, something in his face crumpled. Something broke. Something you had never seen before, not once in all the months of your marriage, not even when he had knelt at your feet with tears in his eyes and his hand on your belly.

"Y/N."

Your name. Just your name, he said your name like a prayer. He said your name like a man who had been drowning and had just caught sight of the shore. He said your name like you were the most precious thing in the world and he had been terrified, genuinely and desperately terrified, that he had lost you forever.

"Valarr." Your voice was a wreck, hoarse and cracked and barely audible, scraped raw by hours of weeping and screaming. You tried to say more but the words caught in your throat, tangled up with the sobs that were threatening to overwhelm you again. "Valarr, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to, I never wanted to hurt anyone. She was saying such terrible things, such awful things, and I couldn't stop myself, I couldn't control it, I just grabbed the brush and then there was blood everywhere and I couldn't stop hitting her, I couldn't stop, I couldn't—"

He crossed the room in three strides and dropped to his knees before you. The impact of his body hitting the stone floor was hard enough that you heard it, a dull and heavy thud that must have hurt, must have bruised his knees through the fabric of his breeches, but he did not seem to notice or care. His hands found your face immediately, cupping your cheeks with a gentleness that was almost shocking after the violence of his entrance. His palms were warm against your chilled skin, his fingers threading into the mess of your hair, and he tilted your head up so that he could look at you properly. His thumbs brushed across your cheekbones, slow and careful, smearing the dried blood that had splattered there during your attack on Alia. His mismatched eyes, one blue and one brown, both blazing with an intensity that stole the breath from your lungs, searched your face with frantic and desperate attention. He was looking for injuries. He was cataloguing every scratch and bruise and smear of blood, his gaze flickering from your swollen eyes to the cut on your lip where you had bitten yourself during the struggle to the purpling bruise on your jaw where one of the guards had grabbed you too hard.

"You're bleeding." His voice was rough and almost accusatory, as if your injuries were a personal affront, as if someone had dared to damage something that belonged to him and he was trying very hard not to explode with rage. His thumb traced the edge of the bruise on your jaw, feather-light and trembling. "There's blood all over you. All over your face. All over your gown. Where are you hurt? Where did she hurt you? Tell me where she hurt you. Tell me and I will—"

"It's not mine." The words came out between sobs, halting and broken, and you grabbed at his wrists with your own shaking hands. You needed him to understand. You needed him to know the truth before he heard it from someone else, before Jeyne's poison or Mariene's quiet lies reached his ears. "It's not my blood. It's hers. Lady Alia's. I hit her. I hit her with the silver brush, the one you gave me, the one with the dragon handle. I hit her and I kept hitting her and I didn't mean to, Valarr, I swear I didn't mean to. I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't want to become this. But she was saying such terrible things and I tried to stay silent, I tried so hard to endure it the way I always do, but she wouldn't stop and then she talked about the baby and I just—I just—"

"You hit her?"

The question was flat. Quiet. Utterly without inflection. He was still holding your face in his hands, still searching your eyes with that desperate intensity, but something in his expression had shifted. The frantic terror was still there, simmering beneath the surface, but beneath it something else was stirring.

"Please don't punish me." The plea tore from your throat before you could stop it, raw and desperate and utterly pathetic. Your hands clutched at his doublet, your fingers tangling in the dark silk, your bruised and swollen knuckles pressing against the hard plane of his chest. You were babbling now, the words pouring out of you in a torrent that you could not control, seven moons of silent endurance finally breaking free. "Please, Valarr, please don't punish me. I didn't mean to do it. I tried so hard to be good, I tried so hard to endure everything they said to me, every day, every single day for months. The things they whispered while they dressed me, the things they said about my body and my blood and my family. I never said anything back. I never complained. But she was talking about the baby, Valarr. Our baby. She said they would smother our child in the cradle and call it a mercy. She said our baby was a half-Blackfyre abomination and no one would ever accept it and the realm would be grateful when it was dead. She said you would set me aside and find someone prettier and younger and slimmer and I would be sent back to Tyrosh alone and I would never see our child again. And I tried to stay silent, I tried to be strong, but I couldn't. I couldn't listen to her talk about our baby like that. I couldn't let her threaten our child. So I hit her. I hit her and I kept hitting her and I don't remember how many times and now there's blood everywhere and I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, please don't punish me, please don't send me away, please don't take my baby—"

"Punish you?"

His voice cut through your rambling like a blade through silk, sharp and sudden and utterly final. You looked up at him, your vision blurry with fresh tears, your breath still hitching in your chest, and you saw that his expression had changed completely. The frantic desperation was still there, but it had been swallowed up by something else. His jaw was clenched so tightly that the muscle beneath the skin was jumping. His whole body was rigid with a fury that made the air around him seem to crackle and spark, a fury so vast and so consuming that it seemed to fill every corner of the cold stone chamber.

"I would never punish you." He said the words slowly and deliberately, as if he were explaining something very simple to a child, as if he needed you to understand this above all else. "I would never punish you for defending yourself. For defending our child. I would never punish you for fighting back against someone who threatened our baby." His thumbs brushed the tears from your cheeks, achingly gentle despite the rage that was visibly coursing through him like a storm.

Then he said, very quietly, "They said our child would be smothered in the cradle."

"She said, Lady Alia said that the realm would never accept a Blackfyre heir and they would—"

"I heard you." His thumb traced the line of your cheekbone, feather-light, and his voice softened. "I heard you, my love. I heard every word. And I want you to listen to me now. Can you do that? Can you look at me and listen?"

You nodded, your breath still hitching in your chest, your hands still clutching the silk of his doublet like it was the only solid thing in a world that had turned to water.

He shifted closer to you on the cold stone floor, his knees pressing against your thighs, his body curving around yours as if he wanted to shield you from every threat in the world. One hand remained on your face, cupping your cheek with a tenderness that made your heart ache. The other hand moved down, slowly, deliberately, and came to rest on the great swell of your belly where his child was growing. His palm was warm through the stiff and bloodied fabric of your gown, his fingers spreading wide as if he could encompass the entire world in that single touch. You felt the baby kick beneath his hand, a soft and fluttering movement, and something in his expression cracked open.

"No one will hurt our child." His voice was low and intense, full of a conviction that bordered on ferocity. His hand pressed more firmly against your belly, feeling the life that moved beneath. "No one will hurt you. Not the servants, not the courtiers, not those venomous snakes who called themselves your ladies in waiting. No one. Do you understand me, my love? Do you understand what I am telling you?" His grip on your face tightened slightly, not painfully, just enough to make sure you were looking at him, just enough to make sure you could not look away. "Our child is not an abomination. Our child is a Targaryen. Our child is my heir, and your heir, and the heir to the Iron Throne, and anyone who suggests otherwise, anyone who whispers a single word against our baby, will answer to me. Personally. Do you understand?"

"But the realm." Your voice cracked on the word. "The lords. The people. They hate my bloodline. They hate everything I come from. They will never accept—"

"The realm will accept our child because I will make them accept our child. Because my grandfather the King will make them accept our child. Because anyone who does not accept our child will learn very quickly what happens to those who defy House Targaryen." He leaned closer, his forehead nearly touching yours, his breath warm against your tear-stained lips. His mismatched eyes were so close you could see the flecks of gold in the blue one and the threads of amber in the brown. "I have spent my entire life being told I was not enough. Not Valyrian enough. Not Targaryen enough. I swore to myself, long before I ever met you, long before I ever knew you existed, that my children would never suffer what I suffered. My children would never doubt their place. My children would never be whispered about in dark corners. My children would know, from the moment they drew breath, that they were wanted and loved and protected."

His hand moved from your belly up to your chest, pressing flat against your sternum, right over your heart. You could feel the warmth of his palm through the ruined silk of your gown, could feel the steady pressure of his touch grounding you in the present moment.

"This child is mine," he said, and his voice was fierce and tender all at once. "This child is yours. This child is the future of House Targaryen. And I will burn this castle to the ground with everyone in it before I let anyone threaten that. Anyone. Do you hear me? Anyone."

A fresh sob rose in your throat, but this one was different from the ones that had come before. This one was born of something you had not felt in a very long time, something you had not let yourself feel because feeling it would have been too painful. Something that felt almost like being loved.

"Valarr," you whispered, and his name on your lips was a prayer and a plea and a surrender all at once.

"I am here." He pulled you against his chest in one swift and decisive movement, his arms wrapping around you with that familiar and possessive grip that you had come to know so well. One arm curved around your back, his hand pressing flat between your shoulder blades, holding you against him so tightly that you could feel every beat of his heart against your cheek. The other hand cradled the back of your head, his fingers threading through the tangled and matted mess of your hair, his thumb stroking the sensitive spot behind your ear. He pulled you closer still, impossibly close, until your swollen belly was pressed against his stomach and your face was buried in the hollow of his throat and you were surrounded by him completely. The scent of him, sandalwood and smoke and something dark and masculine, filled your lungs with every breath. The warmth of him seeped into your chilled and aching body. The steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear was the most comforting sound you had ever heard.

"I am here," he said again, his lips moving against your hair. "I am here, and I am not going anywhere. And neither are you. And neither is our child. You are mine, both of you, and I will never let anything happen to you. I will never let anyone hurt you again. I failed you. I failed you so badly, my love, and I am so sorry."

"Valarr." His name was the only word you could remember. The only word that mattered.

"I am sorry." His voice was hoarse now, cracking with an emotion he was barely holding back. His arms tightened around you until you could barely breathe, but you did not want him to let go. You never wanted him to let go. "I am sorry I did not see what they were doing to you. I am sorry I was so consumed with the council and the harbor proposal and the endless and petty frustrations of ruling that I did not notice my wife was being tortured by the very women who were supposed to serve her. I am sorry I let them near you. I am sorry I trusted them. I am sorry you suffered in silence for months because you thought I would not believe you, because you thought I would take their word over yours." He pulled back just enough to look at your face, and his mismatched eyes were wet with tears that spilled over and ran down his cheeks without shame. "I will always believe you. Do you understand? Always. You are my wife. You are the mother of my child. Your word is worth more to me than every lord and lady in this castle combined. And I will spend the rest of my life proving that to you if that is what it takes."

You buried your face in the hollow of his shoulder and wept. Not the wild and hysterical weeping of before, not the desperate and terrified sobs that had torn their way out of you on the cold stone floor. Something quieter. Something deeper. Something that felt almost like relief, like the release of a tension you had been holding for so long you had forgotten what it felt like to breathe without it.

"I am going to fix this," he murmured against your lips. "I am going to fix everything. I am going to find every person who ever whispered a cruel word to you, every servant who looked at you with contempt, every courtier who smiled at your discomfort, every lady who made you feel like you were less than what you are. And I am going to make them regret it. I am going to make them regret every moment of cruelty they inflicted on my wife."

"Valarr." You pulled back just enough to look at him, your hands still clutching the silk of his doublet. "What happened to my ladies?"

His expression flickered. Something dark passed through his mismatched eyes, something cold and hard and utterly without mercy. His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked like a different man entirely. A man capable of terrible things. A man who had been pushed too far. But when he spoke, his voice was gentle, and his hands were still gentle, and the kiss he pressed to your forehead was as soft as a benediction.

"You do not need to worry about them. You only need to worry about yourself. And our child."

He leaned down and pressed his lips to your belly, a long and lingering kiss through the stiff and bloodied fabric of your gown. The baby kicked beneath his mouth, and he smiled against the swell of your stomach. A real smile. The smile he kept only for you.

"Come," he said, rising to his feet and reaching down to take your hands. His fingers laced through yours, warm and solid and steady, he helped you walk toward the door, his body a warm and solid presence at your side, his arm steady around your waist. Your legs were shaky, your body exhausted from the pregnancy and the weeping and the sheer emotional devastation of the past few hours. But he did not rush you. He matched his pace to yours, slow and careful, pausing whenever you needed to catch your breath. When you stumbled on the threshold, he caught you easily, sweeping you up into his arms as if you weighed nothing at all despite the great swell of your belly.

"Valarr," you protested weakly. "I am too heavy. You will hurt yourself."

"You are carrying my child. You are not heavy. You are perfect." He pressed a kiss to your temple and began walking down the corridor with you cradled against his chest. "And I am never letting you go again."

You wrapped your arms around his neck and buried your face in the curve of his shoulder. The tears were still falling, silent and slow, but they were different tears now. He carried you through the corridors, and took you to a smaller and cozier bedchamber on the other side of the royal apartments, tucked away in a quiet corner where the noise of the castle could not reach. A roaring fire was already burning in the hearth, filling the room with warmth and golden light. Fresh linens had been laid on the bed, soft and white and inviting. A dozen candles flickered on the bedside table and the mantelpiece and the windowsill, casting dancing shadows across the walls. It smelled of lavender and cedar and something sweet you could not identify. It smelled like safety.

Maester Godwyn was waiting there, his leather satchel open on the table, his lined face creased with concern. He rose as Valarr carried you through the door and laid you gently on the bed, arranging the pillows behind your back with a tenderness that made your eyes sting with fresh tears.

"Your Grace," the maester said, his voice calm and measured. "Please, lie back. Rest. I need to examine you and the child to make sure everything is as it should be."

Valarr did not leave your side. He sat on the edge of the bed beside you, one hand holding yours, the other resting on your belly. He watched the maester's every movement with hawk-like intensity, his mismatched eyes tracking Godwyn's hands as they pressed gently on your stomach and listened to your heart and examined the bruises on your knuckles. When the maester's fingers brushed too close to the bruise on your jaw, Valarr made a low sound in his throat, something between a growl and a warning, and Godwyn quickly moved his hands elsewhere.

"The babe seems healthy," the maester said after a long and thorough examination. "The heartbeat is strong, the position is good. There is no sign of distress, which is remarkable given the events of the day. However." He fixed you with a stern look over the rims of his spectacles. "I would recommend complete bed rest for the next several days. The emotional strain has taken a toll on Her Grace's body, even if she does not feel it yet. Her humors are imbalanced. Her spirit has been wounded as much as her flesh. No stress. No excitement. No visitors except His Grace and those he personally approves."

"I will see to it personally," Valarr said. His voice left no room for argument, no possibility of negotiation. "No one enters this room without my permission. No one speaks to my wife without my permission. No one so much as looks at her without my permission."

The maester nodded, apparently satisfied with this arrangement. He packed his instruments into his leather satchel with methodical precision and left with a quiet murmur about returning in the morning to check on your progress. When the door closed behind him, the silence that settled over the room was soft and warm and full of the crackling of the fire.

Valarr turned to you. His hand was still holding yours, his thumb still tracing slow circles on the back of your hand. His mismatched eyes were tired, so tired, the shadows beneath them dark as bruises. But he was looking at you with an expression that made your heart clench inside your chest.

"You need to rest," he said quietly. "The maester said so. Bed rest. No stress. No excitement."

"I know." You tugged gently on his hand. "Will you stay with me?"

"Of course I will stay with you. I am not going anywhere." He lifted your hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to your bruised knuckles, one by one, his mouth soft and warm against your split and swollen skin. "I told you. You are stuck with me forever."

"Then lie down with me." Your voice was small and tired, but it was steadier than it had been all day. "Please. I do not want to be alone. I have been alone all day. I do not want to be alone anymore."

Something flickered in his mismatched eyes. Something soft and vulnerable and almost broken. He nodded, a quick and jerky movement, and then he was unlacing his boots and shrugging off his doublet and climbing onto the bed beside you. He arranged himself carefully, mindful of your belly and your bruises and your exhausted body, and then he pulled you against his chest with that familiar and possessive grip. His arm wrapped around your waist. His hand pressed flat against your belly. His lips found your forehead and lingered there, warm and soft and full of promises he did not need to speak aloud.

"I am sorry," he whispered against your skin. "I am so sorry I did not see what they were doing to you. I am sorry I let them hurt you for so long. I am sorry you thought you could not come to me, that you thought I would not believe you, that you thought I would ever choose anyone over you."

"Valarr."

"I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you. I will spend the rest of my life proving to you that you can trust me. That you can come to me with anything. That I will always be on your side."

You tilted your head up to look at him. His face was so close to yours that you could see every detail. The flecks of gold in his blue eye. The amber threads in his brown eye. The lines of exhaustion around his mouth. The faint stubble on his jaw, darker than his hair, rough against your fingertips when you reached up to touch his face.

"I believe you," you said quietly. And you did. For the first time in seven moons, you did.

He smiled. It was a small and tired smile, but it was real. The smile he kept only for you.

"Good," he said. "Now sleep. I will be right here. I will keep watch. No one will hurt you while I am here."

You closed your eyes and let yourself sink into the warmth of his body and the softness of the bed and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath your ear. His hand moved in slow and soothing circles on your belly, tracing patterns that might have been letters or might have been nothing at all. The baby kicked softly beneath his palm, a gentle flutter of movement, and you heard him exhale a breath that was almost a laugh.

"She is strong," he murmured. "Our daughter. She is a fighter, just like her mother."

"Daughter?" You opened one eye to look at him. "You think it is a girl?"

"I know it is a girl." His hand pressed more firmly against your belly, feeling the life that moved beneath. "I have known since the day the maester told me you were with child. A little girl with your silver hair and your violet eyes. A princess of the blood. The most beautiful child the Seven Kingdoms has ever seen."

"You cannot possibly know that."

"I can. I do." He pressed a kiss to your forehead. "Trust me. I am never wrong about these things."

You laughed, a soft and sleepy sound, and closed your eyes again. The fire crackled in the hearth. The candles flickered on the bedside table. And Valarr held you in the darkness, his hand on your belly and his lips on your hair and his voice a low and steady murmur in your ear, speaking words of love and protection and promise until you drifted into the first peaceful sleep you had known in weeks.

—

The study was quiet save for the crackle of the fire in the hearth and the soft and muffled sound of weeping. The hour was very late now, deep in the black and silent stretch of night when the castle slept and honest men were abed and only the wicked remained awake to do their wicked work.

Valarr Targaryen sat in the high-backed chair behind his desk, his fingers were steepled before him, the tips pressed together in a gesture of contemplation that might have looked almost prayerful if not for the cold and glittering light in his mismatched eyes. The fire had burned low in the hearth, the flames reduced to glowing embers that painted the room in shades of blood and shadow, and the darkness gathered in the corners like living things waiting to be summoned.

Before him, on the cold stone floor, three women knelt in chains. They were bound at the wrists and ankles with iron fetters that had left the skin beneath them raw and bleeding, and their fine gowns were rumpled and torn from where the guards had dragged them from their chambers without courtesy or explanation. Their carefully arranged hair had fallen in disarray around their pale and terrified faces, and their eyes were red and swollen from weeping that had gone on for hours now without respite.

Lady Alia was the worst of them. Her face was a ruin of purple and black, her nose swollen to twice its normal size and bent at an angle that suggested it had been broken in multiple places. Her left eye was so bruised she could barely open it, and what little she could see through the swollen slit must have been a nightmare of shadow and firelight and the cold and merciless face of the prince who sat in judgment before her. None of them dared to speak. The time for speaking had passed, and they knew it now, and the knowledge was a cold and heavy stone sitting in the pit of each of their stomachs.

Behind them, against the far wall, stood four men in the white armor of the Kingsguard. Their helmets had been removed, as had their swords, which lay in a neat pile on the floor near the door like offerings at an altar. They stood at attention with their hands clasped behind their backs and their faces carefully blank in the way that soldiers learned to make their faces blank when they were facing something terrible. But there was a tension in their postures, a rigidity and a tightness around the eyes and a faint sheen of sweat on their brows, that betrayed their fear. These were men who had served the royal family for years, decades in some cases, and they had never been summoned before a prince like this. Never been lined up like criminals awaiting judgment. Never been made to stand and listen while three noblewomen wept on the floor and begged for mercies that would not come.

Valarr let the silence stretch. He was good at silence, better than most, better than anyone except perhaps his father. He had learned it at Baelor's knee, watching the way a pause could be more intimidating than any threat, the way quiet could unnerve an enemy more effectively than shouting ever could. A man who shouted had lost control. A man who whispered, a man who waited, a man who let the silence do his work for him, that was a man who held all the power in the room. He watched the women sob until their throats grew raw. He watched the guards sweat until their white armor seemed to glow with moisture in the firelight. He let the fire pop and crackle and fill the room with its warm and deceptive light, and he waited, and he waited, and he waited.

Finally, he spoke. "Do you know why you are here?"

His voice was soft. Conversational. Almost pleasant, the voice of a man inquiring about the weather or the quality of the wine at supper. It was the voice he used at council meetings when he was about to dismantle someone's argument piece by piece, the voice he used when lords twice his age came before him with petitions they thought were clever and left with nothing but the shattered remnants of their pride. It was the voice he used when he was at his most dangerous, and every person in this room knew it.

Lady Jeyne raised her head. Her cold grey eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her weathered face pale as milk, but there was still a flicker of defiance in her expression, a stubborn and desperate refusal to accept the reality of her situation. Even now, even on her knees in chains, even after everything that had happened, she could not quite believe that this was real. That she, a lady of the Reach and a widow of a loyal lord and a woman who had served the royal household for years without complaint or censure, was being treated like a common criminal by the prince she had watched grow from a sullen boy into a dangerous man.

"Your Grace," she began, and her voice was trembling but still clinging to its usual veneer of deference, still trying to find the old pathways of manipulation that had served her so well for so long. "I am certain there has been some terrible misunderstanding. If Lady Alia said something to offend Her Grace, I assure you I had no knowledge of it until the moment it occurred. I have always served the Princess faithfully and without complaint. I have attended her since the day of her wedding. I have dressed her and bathed her and seen to her every need. If there has been some lapse in my duties, some failure of attention, I am certain it was unintentional and I am prepared to make whatever amends—"

"Faithfully."

Jeyne's mouth snapped shut.

Valarr repeated the word as if tasting it, as if it were a piece of meat that had gone slightly rotten and he was trying to decide whether to swallow or spit. His tongue lingered on the syllables, drawing them out, and his mismatched eyes never left Jeyne's face. "You have served her faithfully. That is the word you chose. Faithfully."

"Yes, Your Grace. I have always—"

"You pulled her laces too tight. Every morning for almost two years. You pulled her laces too tight."

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.

"Tight enough to leave bruises on her ribs," Valarr continued, and his voice was still soft and still conversational and still absolutely terrifying. "Tight enough to make it difficult for her to breathe. Tight enough that she winced every time she moved, every time she reached for something, every time she tried to take a deep breath. You did it on purpose. You wanted her to be uncomfortable. You wanted her to suffer in small ways, in deniable ways, in ways that could not be traced back to you by anyone who was not paying very close attention." He leaned forward in his chair, just slightly, and the firelight caught his mismatched eyes and made them gleam. "I pay very close attention, Lady Jeyne. I always have."

"I. Your Grace, I would never, I have no idea what you could possibly be referring to—"

"You called her a Blackfyre whore behind her back. You said it to the other ladies. You said it to the servants. You said it loudly enough that half the castle has heard it by now, loudly enough that it has become a common jest in the kitchens and the stables and the barracks. The Princess, the woman carrying my heir, the future Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and you reduced her to a punchline for stable boys and scullery maids." Valarr leaned forward another inch, and his voice dropped to a low and dangerous murmur. "Did you think I did not know?"

Jeyne's mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping for water on the deck of a ship. Her grey eyes were wide now, the defiance draining out of them and being replaced by something that looked very much like fear. Beside her, Lady Mariene had gone still, her dark eyes fixed on the floor with the intensity of a woman who was trying very hard to become invisible and failing. Lady Alia continued to sob, her shoulders heaving, her breath coming in short and panicked gasps that were growing more desperate by the moment.

"I knew," Valarr said, and his voice was almost gentle now, almost kind. "I knew everything. I knew about the cold baths and the colder stares. I knew about the gowns that were deliberately ill-fitting, the ones you ordered from the seamstress with measurements that were slightly wrong, slightly too small, slightly designed to make her feel ungainly and enormous and grotesque. I knew about the meals that arrived late and cold and unappetizing, the ones you personally intercepted from the kitchens and delayed until they were barely edible. I knew about the fire that was never stoked in her chambers, the one you told the servants to neglect because Her Grace preferred the cold, because Her Grace was accustomed to discomfort. I knew about every whispered insult and every cruel comment and every moment of quiet and systematic torture you inflicted on my wife since the beginning." He paused, and his lips curved into a smile that was not a smile at all. "The only reason you were permitted to continue was because it served my purposes."

The words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Jeyne's face went from pale to grey to a sickly and mottled white. Mariene's hands began to tremble so violently that her chains rattled against the stone floor. Even Alia's sobs faltered and died, her bruised and swollen face lifting in shock and confusion and the dawning of a horror so vast it seemed to swallow every other emotion in the room.

"Your purposes?" Jeyne whispered, and her voice was barely audible, barely a breath. "What do you mean, your purposes?"

"My wife was a woman who had been stripped of her family and her name and her future and given to me as a prize of war, a spoil of victory, a living symbol of my family's triumph over hers. She had no reason to trust me. No reason to love me. No reason to seek comfort in my arms. Why would she? I was her captor. I was her enemy. I was the man who had taken everything from her and given her nothing in return but a cold bed and a colder marriage." Valarr leaned back in his chair, his expression cool and calculating, a scholar examining a particularly interesting specimen. "But she needed someone. She was alone in a castle full of enemies, surrounded by people who hated her and feared her and wished her nothing but ill. She needed someone to turn to. Someone to protect her. Someone to hold her when the cruelty became too much to bear."

He smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a predator who had just finished explaining to his prey exactly how it had been hunted.

"You pushed her toward me. Every time you made her feel small and worthless and utterly and completely alone in a world that wanted her dead. You pushed her closer to the only person in this castle who showed her any kindness, any warmth, any hint of human decency." His mismatched eyes glittered in the firelight like chips of colored glass. "You were useful. Your cruelty was useful. Every barb you planted in her heart was a barb I could remove. Every wound you inflicted was a wound I could tend. Every tear you caused was a tear I could wipe away. You were the villains of her story, and I was the hero, and she fell into my arms night after night because I was the only safe harbor in a sea of enemies you created for me."

He paused and tilted his head, studying their faces with an expression of mild curiosity.

"I should thank you, really. Without your assistance, she might never have let me touch her. Might never have let me hold her. Might never have opened her heart enough to let me plant my child inside her. You helped me win my wife, Lady Jeyne. You and Lady Mariene and Lady Alia and all the other petty and vicious little women who thought they were hurting her when they were really helping me. I am in your debt."

Mariene made a small and choked sound, something between a gasp and a sob. Jeyne looked as if she had been struck across the face with a mailed fist. Alia had stopped crying entirely, her bruised and swollen face frozen in an expression of absolute and dawning horror.

"But tonight," Valarr continued, and his voice hardened, and the cold and calculated amusement drained out of it and left nothing but iron. "Tonight you forgot your place. You forgot that you were tools, useful tools but tools nonetheless, and you began to believe that you mattered. You began to believe that your petty vendettas and your small ambitions were more important than the health and safety of my wife and my unborn child. You threatened my child."

He rose from his chair. The movement was slow and deliberate and predatory, the movement of a wolf uncoiling from its crouch. He walked around the desk and stopped before the three kneeling women, looking down at them with an expression of utter and absolute contempt, the kind of contempt a man might feel for something he had found stuck to the bottom of his boot.

"You actually believed I would side with you. With three vicious and scheming and insignificant little women from insignificant little houses. Over my wife. Over the woman carrying my heir. Over the future of House Targaryen and everything I have worked for since the day I was born." He shook his head slowly, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "You are even stupider than I thought. And I thought you were very stupid indeed."

"Your Grace, please." Jeyne's voice cracked on the words, and the defiance was gone now, replaced by a desperation that was almost feral. "Please, we never meant any harm to the child. We never touched her. We only said words. Words are not crimes. Words are not treason. You cannot punish us for words."

"Words are not crimes." Valarr repeated the phrase as if he found it genuinely amusing. "Words are not crimes. That is what you are going with. That is your defense." He crouched down in front of her, bringing his face level with hers, and Jeyne recoiled as if she had been burned. "Let me explain something to you, Lady Jeyne, since you seem to be laboring under a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. Words are the most dangerous weapons in existence. Words start wars. Words topple dynasties. Words convince men to march into battle and women to drink poison and children to carry daggers into the beds of kings. Words are not crimes? Words are the root of every crime that has ever been committed. And your words, Lady Jeyne, your words and Lady Mariene's words and Lady Alia's words, have been poison dripping into my wife's ear for moons. Your words almost killed my child tonight. The maester himself told me that the distress you caused put both mother and babe at grave risk. So do not tell me that words are not crimes. Your words are treason, and you will answer for them with your lives."

He rose to his feet and turned away from them, walking toward the four Kingsguard standing against the wall. The men straightened as he approached, their faces carefully blank, their eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. But he could see the fear in them. He could smell it, sharp and acrid in the warm air of the study. They were right to be afraid.

"Ser Eddard of the Crossing," he said, stopping before the first man. The knight was young, barely five and twenty, with a boyish face that had not yet grown into the hard lines of middle age. "You have served the Kingsguard for three years. You swore a vow to protect the royal family with your life."

"Yes, Your Grace." Ser Eddard's voice was steady, but there was a tremor beneath it, a faint and fluttering thing that he could not quite suppress. "I swore that vow. I have tried to uphold it."

"Then explain to me why, when my wife, my pregnant wife, carrying the heir to the Iron Throne, was in distress and bleeding and terrified, you dragged her through the corridors like a common criminal and locked her in a cold tower room without a fire and without a maester and without a single servant to attend to her needs. Explain to me why you left her there for hours, alone and weeping and convinced that she was going to lose everything. Explain to me how that is upholding your vow."

Ser Eddard's jaw tightened. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple and disappeared into the collar of his white armor. "Your Grace, Lady Jeyne instructed us to remove the Princess from the room. She said the Princess had gone mad. She said the Princess had attacked Lady Alia without provocation and was a danger to everyone present. We believed we were acting to protect the other ladies from harm. We believed we were doing our duty."

"Lady Jeyne." Valarr's voice was flat and cold and utterly without mercy. "You took orders from Lady Jeyne. A minor lady in waiting with no authority and no rank and no power over the Kingsguard. A woman whose entire claim to importance is that she married a minor lord who died twenty years ago and left her with nothing but a widow's pension and a burning resentment of everyone who has more than she does. You took orders from her instead of using your own judgment to protect the Princess of the Blood."

"Your Grace, the Princess was covered in blood, she was screaming, she had struck Lady Alia repeatedly with a silver hairbrush. We believed she was a danger to the other ladies, to herself, perhaps even to her unborn child. We thought we were containing a dangerous situation."

"She was seven moons pregnant." Valarr's voice was low and cold and utterly without pity. "She was seven moons pregnant, and she weighed less than any of you in full armor, and she was armed with nothing but a hairbrush. A hairbrush, Ser Eddard. A silver handle and some bristles. And you believed she was a danger. You believed you needed to restrain her. You believed you needed to drag her, drag her across the stone floors and up a flight of stairs, and lock her away like a mad dog in a kennel."

Ser Eddard said nothing. His face had gone very pale, and the sweat was running freely down his temples now.

"Your duty was to protect her. Your duty was to die for her if necessary. Your duty was to throw yourself between her and any threat, no matter how small or how large, and defend her with your life. That is the vow you swore. That is the oath you took. And instead, you became the threat. You became the thing she needed protection from." Valarr stepped back, his gaze sweeping over the four men with utter and absolute contempt. "You are a disgrace to your white cloaks. All four of you. You are a disgrace to your vows and to the memory of every Kingsguard who came before you and to the institution that gave you purpose and honor and meaning. You failed my wife. You failed my child. You failed me. And you will answer for it."

He turned and walked back toward his desk. Behind him, the three women were still weeping, Alia's sobs having dissolved into a low and keening wail that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her chest. Jeyne was crying silently now, the tears tracking down her weathered cheeks and dripping onto the torn silk of her gown. Mariene had closed her eyes and was rocking back and forth slightly, her lips moving in a prayer that would not be answered.

Valarr stopped beside his chair and turned to face the room. His hand rested on the back of the chair, his fingers drumming lightly against the dark wood. The firelight cast long shadows across his face, emphasizing the sharp planes of his jaw and the hard line of his mouth and the cold and implacable fury in his mismatched eyes.

"I have spent the past several hours thinking about what to do with all of you," he said, and his voice was calm now, measured and deliberate, the voice of a man who had made his decisions and was merely explaining them for the record. "I considered the dungeons. The Black Cells beneath this castle, where traitors and murderers and the worst scum of the Seven Kingdoms are left to rot in darkness until they forget what sunlight looks like. I considered exile, sending you across the narrow sea to live out your days in poverty and obscurity and the knowledge that you will never see your homelands again. I considered execution, a quick and merciful death by the headsman's axe, which is frankly more than any of you deserve. I considered many things."

He paused, letting the silence stretch. The women had stopped weeping now, their faces lifted toward him in desperate and horrified anticipation. The guards stood rigid against the wall, their faces pale and sweating.

"Lady Alia spoke of my child being smothered in the cradle. She spoke of my wife being cast aside like garbage. She spoke of House Targaryen's heir as if it were an abomination to be destroyed, a mistake to be corrected, a stain to be washed clean from the bloodline." Valarr's voice was very quiet now, almost gentle. "There is only one punishment for threatening the life of a royal heir. Only one punishment for treason against the Crown. Only one punishment for conspiring to murder an unborn child of House Targaryen."

Alia's sobs turned into a scream. A high and piercing wail that echoed off the stone walls and made the torches flicker in their sconces. She threw herself forward, her bound hands reaching toward Valarr in desperate supplication, her bruised and swollen face twisted with a terror that was almost inhuman.

"No! No, please, Your Grace, please, I didn't mean it, I was angry, I was upset, I didn't know what I was saying, I was humiliated and I wanted to hurt someone and she was there and I said things I didn't mean, I swear I didn't mean them, I would never hurt a child, I would never hurt your child, please, please, please—"

"You knew exactly what you were saying." Valarr's voice was cold and utterly without pity. He looked down at her with an expression that bordered on disgust, the expression of a man who had found something foul and was trying to decide whether to crush it under his heel or simply walk away. "You meant every single word. You wanted to hurt her. You wanted to frighten her. You wanted to make her believe that her child would be murdered and she would be powerless to stop it. You wanted to see her break. You wanted to see her weep. You wanted to see her on her knees, begging for a mercy you had no intention of giving."

He crouched down in front of her, bringing his face level with hers, and Alia recoiled so violently that she nearly fell over.

"You are not sorry you said it. You are sorry you are being punished for it. There is a difference, Lady Alia, and I have been alive long enough to know it. You are not a good person who made a mistake. You are a cruel and petty and vicious little girl who finally went too far and got caught. And now you will face the consequences."

"Please. Please, I'll do anything. I'll leave the castle. I'll go back to the Reach. I'll join the Silent Sisters. I'll never speak to anyone again. I'll never leave my chambers. I'll never look at anyone. I'll do anything, anything at all, just please don't kill me. Please don't—"

"You will never speak to anyone again." Valarr rose to his feet and turned to the guards standing behind the women. His men. The men he had handpicked for their loyalty and their competence and their willingness to follow orders without question. "Take them to the Black Cells. All three of them. They will await trial for treason against the Crown, conspiracy to harm a royal heir, and attempted murder of an unborn child. The evidence is clear. The witnesses are numerous. The verdict is a foregone conclusion. They will be found guilty, and they will be executed, and their names will be struck from every record and their families will be informed that they died in disgrace."

"Attempted murder!" Jeyne's voice was shrill with disbelief, her composure finally and utterly shattered. She lunged forward against her chains, her grey eyes wild and desperate. "We never touched her child! We never laid a hand on her! We said words, nothing but words, and you cannot execute noblewomen for words, you cannot, the King will never allow it, the council will never allow it, our families will demand justice—"

"Your families will do nothing." Valarr's voice was iron. "Your families will be grateful that I am only executing you and not stripping them of their lands and titles for raising such treacherous and disloyal daughters. Your families will disown you and forget you ever existed. Your families are already composing the letters of apology they will send to me, begging for forgiveness and assuring me that they had no knowledge of your crimes." He smiled, and it was the coldest smile any of them had ever seen. "I know this because I have already sent riders to your families. The letters will arrive by morning. By the time the sun sets tomorrow, your own fathers will have condemned you."

Jeyne's face went slack with horror. Mariene let out a low and keening moan. Alia had stopped screaming and was now weeping silently, her whole body shaking with the force of her sobs.

The guards moved forward and hauled the women to their feet. Jeyne was shouting now, her voice rising into incoherent rage, curses and threats and desperate pleas all mingling together into a stream of noise that made no sense. Mariene was weeping silently, her face blank with shock, her body limp and unresisting in the guards' grip. Alia was still begging, her voice hoarse and cracked and barely audible, her bruised and swollen face turned toward Valarr with an expression of desperate and hopeless entreaty.

Valarr watched them go with an expression of utter indifference. When the door closed behind them and their screams faded into the distance, he turned to the four Kingsguard still standing against the wall.

"As for you."

Ser Eddard flinched. Ser Humfrey's jaw tightened. Ser Benedict met Valarr's eyes with the stoic acceptance of a man who had already made his peace with whatever was coming. Ser Ormund was trembling, his big hands shaking at his sides, his face pale and sweating.

"The four of you will be stripped of your white cloaks tonight. You will be dismissed from the Kingsguard in disgrace. Your names will be struck from the White Book and never spoken again in the presence of any member of the royal family. Your swords will be broken. Your spurs will be melted down. Your armor will be sold for scrap and the proceeds given to the poorest beggars in Flea Bottom, so that something useful might come of your worthless service."

He paused and turned to face Ser Ormund directly. The big man shrank back against the wall, his eyes wide with terror.

"Ser Ormund of the Blackwater. You put your hands on my wife. You left bruises on her arms. You dragged her through the corridors while she wept and begged you to stop. For that, the Wall is not enough. Exile is not enough. You will lose your sword hand before you leave this castle. The hand that touched her. The hand that bruised her. I will take it myself if necessary, or I will have the King's Justice do it, but that hand will not leave this room attached to your body."

Ser Ormund made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob. His face had gone grey, and his hands, his big and powerful hands, were shaking uncontrollably.

"Your Grace, please, I was only following orders, I never meant to harm her, I have served faithfully for fifteen years—"

"You served faithfully until the moment you decided that a lady-in-waiting's orders mattered more than your vow to protect the royal family. You served faithfully until the moment you put your hands on a pregnant princess and dragged her away from her chambers like a common criminal. Your faithful service ended the moment you became the threat you were sworn to defend against." Valarr's voice was cold and final. "Be grateful I am only taking your hand. There was a moment tonight, a long moment, when I considered taking your head."

Ser Ormund's legs gave out. He sank to his knees, his chains clanking against the stone floor, and his shoulders heaved with silent sobs. The other three guards stood frozen, their faces pale and sweating and utterly without hope.

"You will all be sent to the Wall. You will take the black and spend the rest of your lives freezing in the shadow of that great and terrible monument to the failures of men. You will stand guard against wildlings and worse, and you will do it without honor and without glory and without your names. You will be forgotten. You will be nothing. And every cold and miserable night you spend on that Wall, I want you to remember why you are there. I want you to remember my wife's face. I want you to remember the bruises on her arms and the tears on her cheeks. I want you to remember that you failed her, and that this is the price of your failure."

He stepped back and nodded to the loyal guards who remained.

"Take them away. Take Ser Ormund to the yard and have the King's Justice remove his hand. Bind the wound and send him to the Wall with the others. They leave tonight. I want them gone before dawn."

The guards moved forward. Ser Eddard went quietly, his face blank with shock. Ser Humfrey walked with the stiff and rigid posture of a man who was barely holding himself together. Ser Benedict paused at the door and turned back to look at Valarr with an expression that was almost respectful.

When the door closed behind them, the sound of his weeping still audible in the corridor beyond, Valarr stood alone in the study. The fire had burned down to nothing but embers, casting long and flickering shadows across the stone walls. The desk was littered with papers, his harbor proposal and his council notes and the mundane detritus of a prince's daily life. But he did not see any of it.

He saw his wife's face. Her tear streaked cheeks. Her bruised knuckles. Her trembling hands clutching at his doublet as she begged him not to punish her. As if she could ever do anything that would make him punish her. As if she did not know that she was the most precious thing in his world, the center around which everything else revolved, the only person who had ever made him feel something other than cold and calculated ambition.

He thought of the way she had curled against him in the bed, her swollen belly pressed against his stomach, her breath warm against his throat. He thought of the way she had whispered his name like a prayer. He thought of the way she had finally, finally stopped trembling after hours of terror and grief. He thought of the way she had trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms, her hand resting on her belly, their child safe inside her.

He had done that. He had made her feel safe. He had taken her terror and her grief and her desperate and consuming fear, and he had replaced them with warmth and comfort and the promise of protection. It was the most satisfying thing he had ever done, more satisfying than any victory in the council chamber or any political maneuvering or any of the thousand small triumphs that made up a prince's life.

He had protected her. He would always protect her. And anyone who threatened her would suffer the same fate as the women who were even now being dragged to the Black Cells and the guards who were being marched to the yard to face the King's Justice.

He crossed to the hearth and watched the embers glow, orange and red and gold. The white cloaks of the disgraced Kingsguard lay in a heap on the floor near the door, and he would burn them himself before the night was over. He would watch the white fabric blacken and curl and turn to ash, and he would imagine that each flame was consuming a little bit more of the people who had hurt his wife.

Mine, he thought. Both of them. Mine. My wife. My child. My family. And no one will ever hurt them again. No one will ever threaten them again. No one will ever make my wife weep or my child tremble or my family feel unsafe in the castle that is supposed to be their home.

He smiled into the dying fire. It was the smile of a dragon who had just reminded the world why dragons were feared, and somewhere in the castle, his wife was sleeping in a warm bed, her hand on her belly, their child safe inside her. And tomorrow, she would wake to a world that was a little bit cleaner. A little bit safer. A little bit more worthy of her.

He would make certain of it. He would spend the rest of his life making certain of it.

Yet tears were for holy men... and, folly though it sounded, Ormund Hightower was a husband before he was ever a penitent.

True or not, he still knelt at the altars of the Starry Sept whenever duty and time allowed. His prayers were measured and humble, his hands clasped just so, his voice carrying the proper weight of contrition. He lit candles to the Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone alike, made his offerings on holy days, and listened patiently whilst septons spoke of virtue, duty, and the burdens the gods laid upon noble men.

Yet for all his devotion, Ormund possessed another passion besides prayer : he had a nose for perfumes.

Not merely an appreciation, but a keen, almost indecent sense for them, the way a hound might scent blood in the dark.

He could name the oils in any lady's hair from three paces, pick apart the florals and the musks and the rare eastern extracts : the smokebark from Qohor, the jasmine of Myr, the crushed petals of the winter rose. And yours, he'd told you once on your wedding night, after he'd spent two hours just pressing his face to the hollow of your throat, breathing you in — yours was the only scent that ever made his cock ache.

In company, when you teased him for it — which part, my lord? which part of me smells sweetest? — he'd play the gallant. Your hair, he'd say, lifting a strand between his fingers, letting the candlelight catch it. Or your wrist. The ladies would coo, your sisters would blush, the old men would nod and call him a devoted husband and you a beloved wife.

But when the door closed.

When the servants had taken the wine cups and the rushes had been swept and the candles burned low in their holders, and you stood before the basin in nothing but your thin linen shift, washing the powder and the perfume of the Great Hall from your skin — then he would tell you the truth.

You asked again, and you always asked, in the intimate dark of your bedchamber when the fire had dwindled to embers and you could feel the weight of his gaze on your back like a hand. Which part, husband?

His mouth would find your neck, wet and hot, his tongue dragging salt and skin and the faint trace of rosewater you'd dabbed there.

Your cunt, he'd murmur against your pulse, teeth scraping. When I'm hungry. He'd pause, breathing you in. Your neck, when I want to leave a mark. Your tongue, when I want to taste how sinful you can be when the gods aren't watching.

He was a man obsessed with perfumes, your husband. But his favorite had always been yours, yes, that particular musk of you, the scent that lingered in the sheets when you'd risen, that clung to the pillows he'd press his face into while you were away at the sept or at market.

That night, he stood at the basin longer than usual.

He watched you through the rippled reflection in the water before he plunged his face in, scrubbing the day's dust and the Great Hall's smoke from his skin. The candlelight caught the water trickling down his bare chest, the dark hair that matted his sternum, the hard muscle of his shoulders. Your husband slept bare every night, had done since your wedding, claiming your linens were too soft for wool and that anyway, he liked the feel of your thighs against his skin.

But tonight he wasn't watching you wash. He was watching you pray.

You were on your knees at the foot of the bed, hands clasped before you, head bowed. The shift you wore was good linen, near translucent in the firelight, falling to your calves and hiding nothing. The outline of your body — the dip of your waist, the curve of your hips, the shape of your cunt pressed against your thighs — all of it visible, all of it offered.

Your lips moved in silent devotion. Seven blessings. Seven thanks. The prayer for a husband's safe return, the one for a fruitful womb, the one your mother had taught you for forgiving a man his sins.

He didn't deserve forgiveness tonight.

When you finished, you made the sign of the seven-pointed star and slipped beneath the furs, settling onto your side, back to him. You hummed — that soft, contented sound you made when the sheets were clean and the bed was warm and you could feel him climbing in behind you.

Goodnight, my lord, you murmured.

He pressed his chest to your back. Skin to linen. The heat of him, still damp from the basin, seeping through the thin fabric. His cock was already half-hard against the curve of your ass, and you didn't flinch.

Goodnight, my love.

His mouth found your neck. A kiss, soft at first, then wetter, slower, his teeth grazing the tendon that ran from your ear to your shoulder. His palm spread flat on your belly, fingers splayed, just resting.

You didn't move.

Instead you pushed back into him. A slow, deliberate arch of your spine, pushing your ass against his cock, your back bowing until your shoulders pressed his chest and your hips cradled him. Your eyes were still closed. A faint smirk touched your lips.

He groaned. The sound was rough, dragged from somewhere deep, and he bit your earlobe for it.

Minx.

His hand slipped, down from your belly, across the linen, gathering the hem of your shift and pulling it up your thighs. Slow. Deliberate. The fabric whispered against your skin, bunching around your hips, leaving you bare from the waist down.

His fingers found the thatch of dark hair between your legs. He touched it first — just touched, just felt the coarse curls against his calloused fingertips. Then he tugged. Gentle pulls, wrapping strands around his fingers, tugging just enough to make your hips shift, to make you press back against him harder.

Nothing, he breathed into your ear. No smallclothes. No shift beneath the shift. You came to bed bare for me.

You said nothing. Your hand reached back, found the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in the damp hair at his skull.

His fingers slid lower.

Through the hair, through the wet heat of you, parting the lips of your cunt with a slowness that bordered on cruel. He found your pearl — that tight, swollen nub hidden in its hood of flesh — and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger.

You gasped. A real sound, torn from you, your hips bucking into his hand.

He pressed his mouth to your ear, and he laughed — a low, dark sound that vibrated through his chest into your back.

Oh, the gods would weep to see you now, wife. So pious at the sept. So proper at the feast. And here, in the dark, you spread your legs for a finger and a whisper.

His thumb worked your pearl in slow circles, wet with your slick, while his middle finger traced the length of your slit. Up and down. Teasing the entrance, pressing just barely at the rim of you, then dragging back up to circle your pearl again.

You were soaked. Puffy and swollen and dripping for him, your slick coating his fingers, your thighs trembling where they pressed together around his hand.

He kept whispering.

You think the septon knows? When he gives you the seven blessings and you lower your eyes so demurely — you think he knows your cunt is this wet? That you knelt at the altar this morning with your thighs pressed tight to keep my seed from running down your leg?

Two fingers. He pushed them into you without warning, without prelude, just the sudden, slick slide of them burying to the knuckle in your heat.

You cried out. Not loud — bitten off, swallowed, your hand clapping over your own mouth as his fingers curled inside you.

His other hand clamped over yours, pulling it away, lacing his fingers through yours and pressing your palm flat to the mattress.

No, he said. I want to hear you.

He fucked you with his fingers. There was no other word for it — the wet, obscene squash of his hand moving between your thighs, the rhythm of it, the way he curled his fingers to find that spot inside you that made your vision white at the edges. Your hips moved with him, pushing back to meet every thrust, your mouth open against the pillow, your moans muffled into the feathers.

That's it. That's my wife. His voice was wrecked, ragged. You take my fingers so well, love. What will you take next?

The sound of it filled the quiet room. The wet slap of his hand, the rhythm of his breathing, the broken sounds you made beneath him. He fucked you with three fingers now, stretching you open, his thumb pressing hard on your pearl while his teeth found your shoulder and bit down — just enough to mark, just enough to make you gasp.

You taste like honey and sin, he murmured against the bite mark. And I am the hungriest man in the Reach.

The squash of his wet hand. The stutter of your breath. The way you whispered his name, broken and desperate, as he pushed you closer and closer to that edge.

Come for me, he said. Let the whole of the Hightower know what a sinful little wife I have.

And in the dark of your bedchamber, with the prayers still warm on your lips and his fingers buried deep inside you, you did.

He was not finished.

The thought came to you through the haze, through the aftershocks still pulsing through your thighs, through the wet sound of your own breathing as you lay there, limp and shattered, your cunt still clenching around nothing. You thought perhaps he would roll off, would press a kiss to your shoulder and settle against your back, would whisper some sweet nothing and fall asleep with his nose pressed to your hair.

But Ormund Hightower was not a man who took one meal and called himself fed.

He pulled his fingers from you slow — dragging along your inner walls, making you shudder at the loss. You heard him bring them to his mouth. Heard the wet and sinful sound of him sucking them clean, the low groan he made tasting you on his own skin.

Then he grabbed your hip and turned you.

The world spun, furs and linen and candlelight, and then you were on your back, your husband looming over you, his face dark with hunger. His dirty blonde hair hung damp across his brow, eyes black in the firelight, and mouth wet with you.

He kissed you. Oh, how he kissed you.

Not the chaste peck of a husband taking leave. Not the gentle press of a man being tender. This was a claiming — his tongue sliding into your mouth, thick and insistent, and you tasted yourself on him. Salty and musk and the copper of your own arousal. He kissed you until you couldn't breathe, until your chest heaved and your hands came up to push at his shoulders, and only then did he break it, mouths still close, breath mingling.

You taste even better on my tongue, he said. But I want your warmth.

He took off your shift, and then descended.

His mouth trailed down your chin, your throat, the hollow between your collarbones. He paused at your breasts — took a nipple between his teeth, bit just enough to make you arch, soothed it with his tongue while his hand found the other and pinched. Then lower. Over the soft swell of your belly, the jut of your hipbone, the place where your thighs began.

He settled between them.

Your hands found his hair before he'd even reached his destination — fingers tangling in the thick, dark curls, gripping hard. You bucked your hips toward his mouth, desperate, needy, the overstimulation from before still singing in your nerves.

He pinned you.

His hands clamped down on your hips, hard enough to bruise, pressing you flat into the mattress. You could not move, could not grind against his face, could not evenchase the friction you craved. You were held open, held still, held.

Patience, he murmured against your inner thigh. I'll have you when I'm ready.

His breath was hot on your cunt. You felt it — the warm exhalation against your soaked, swollen flesh — and your whole body trembled. You were raw from his fingers, sensitive to the point of pain, every nerve ending standing at attention and begging.

He licked you.

A single, long stroke, from the base of your slit to the tip of your pearl, his tongue flat and broad and wet. You cried out. Your hips strained against his grip, but he held you fast, and he did it again. And again. Each stroke slower than the last, savoring, tasting, groaning against your flesh until you felt the vibration through your whole body.

Gods, he breathed into you. I could die here. I would die happy, with your cunt on my tongue.

He ate you like a starving man.

His mouth devoured you — lips sucking your pearl, tongue fucking into your hole, his nose pressing against your clit with every movement. He groaned against you, the sound muffled by your flesh, and the vibration sent sparks up your spine. He pulled you impossibly closer, his hands gripping your hips and dragging you harder against his face, and you let him. You gave him everything. Your hands fisted in his hair, holding him there, and you rode his mouth with what little freedom he allowed you.

Ormund — His name came out broken, keening.

He answered by pressing his thumb to your pearl — hard, rubbing tight circles while his tongue speared into you, fucking you open, drinking everything you gave him.

You were close again too soon. Too fast. The pleasure was almost pain, the overstimulation building like a fever, and you tried to push his head away. You couldn't. Your hands pulled at his curls but he didn't stop, didn't slow, his thumb pressing harder, his tongue deeper.

Please — please, husband, I cannot —

He did not stop.

Your orgasm crashed over you like a wave, like a wall falling, like the whole of the Hightower crumbling to dust. You screamed. You saw white — a blinding, total whiteness that blotted out the room, the candles, the man between your thighs. Your cunt clenched and spasmed, flooding his mouth, and he groaned against you and kept licking, kept sucking, drawing it out until you were sobbing, until you were pushing at his shoulders with what little strength you had left.

Only then did he lift his head.

His face was slick with you. His chin gleamed in the candlelight, his lips wet, his eyes dark and satisfied. He did not wipe his mouth. He simply looked at you broken and panting beneath him, your thighs trembling, your cunt still fluttering) and he smiled.

But he was not finished.

Ormund reached to the bedside table. His hand moved with practiced ease, finding a small vial of cut crystal, the kind that usually held perfumes and rare oils. He uncorked it with his teeth.

And while your cunt still wept with your peak, he gathered it.

His fingers slid into you again — gentle this time, coaxing, milking your orgasm as it ebbed. You watched through half-lidded eyes as he held the vial beneath you, watched as your own wetness trickled down his fingers and into the crystal. Drop by drop. The vial filled with your slick, pale and thick in the candlelight, and he watched it with the same reverence he gave the seven-pointed star.

When the vial was full, he corked it. Set it back on the bedside table. Returned his gaze to you.

You opened your mouth — to tease him, perhaps. To ask if he meant to wear your scent to court tomorrow, or if he planned to anoint himself before the septon. You were used to his strange ways with perfume, his collections of oils and essences, his obsession with the way things smelled.

But before the words could form, he took you.

His breeches disappeared, and with a single, swift motion — his hand on your hip, the blunt head of his cock pressing at your entrance, and then he was inside you. All of him. In one stroke, burying to the hilt, filling you completely.

Your breath left you in a rush. Your back arched off the bed. His name was a prayer, a curse, a sob.

He began to move.

No more talking, he growled, his forehead pressed to yours, his hips driving into you with desperate, hungry strokes. No more games. I want to feel you come on my cock. I want to feel you milk me dry.

So he fucked you.

Crude as it sound, there was no other word. He fucked you with the same hunger he'd eaten you with, with the same devotion he prayed with, with the same obsession he collected his perfumes. His hips slammed into yours, the wet sound of your bodies meeting filled the room, and you wrapped your legs around his waist and held on.

Come for me, he demanded. Again. Now.

And you did. Because you could not help it. Because he owned every part of you, because your body answered his before your mind could catch up, because the sight of him above you (sweating, desperate, beautiful) undid something deep in your chest.

You shattered around him.

He followed a heartbeat later, his groan low and guttural, his hips stuttering as he emptied himself into you. Hot and thick, filling you, marking you from the inside.

He collapsed on top of you, his full weight pressing you into the mattress, his face buried in your neck. He breathed you in, a long, shuddering inhale, and you felt his lips press a kiss to your pulse.

You smell like sin, he murmured against your skin. Like heaven and sin and everything I should not want.

His hand found the vial on the bedside table. He held it up to the candlelight, watching your slick catch the glow.

And I want to keep every drop.

He settled behind you like a man coming home.

The shift of the furs, the creak of the bedframe, the warmth of his chest pressing against your back. His arm slid beneath your head, making a pillow of his bicep, and he pulled the covers up over both of you — silk and the heavy quilt your mother had stitched for your wedding. He tucked it beneath your chin with a tenderness that seemed impossible from the man who'd just fucked you into the mattress.

His mouth found your neck. Small kisses, pecks really, soft as moth wings, trailing from your ear down to your shoulder. You felt him smile against your skin.

You were still catching your breath. Still floating in that warm, liquid haze that followed his claiming, your limbs heavy, your cunt sore and satisfied, the ghost of his cock and fingers still stretching you. You felt his softening length pressed against the curve of your ass, wet and spent, and you pushed back into him instinctively.

His hand found your breast. It always did. Every night, without fail, whether he'd taken you or not, his palm would cup your flesh, his thumb would find your nipple, and he would hold you like that until sleep took him. You'd come to expect it, to need it, the weight of his hand a comfort you couldn't name.

But his other hand did not go to your waist.

It slipped lower. Over the curve of your hip, across the soft skin of your belly, down through the coarse hair between your thighs. You were too tired to open your eyes, too spent to question, but you felt his fingers find your entrance — slick and swollen and still leaking his seed.

He pushed inside you.

Two fingers. Slow and gentle, a soft intrusion that made you sigh rather than gasp. He buried them to the knuckle, and then he stilled.

To keep your scent on me by morning, he murmured against your hair. So I can take you with me when I rise.

You hummed. A sound of agreement, or surrender, or simple exhaustion. Your hand found his where it cupped your breast, and you held him there, your fingers intertwined with his.

You were already gone. Already drifting into that deep, dreamless sleep that only a well-fucked wife could find. Your breathing evened, your body relaxed fully against his, your cunt clenching occasionally around his fingers in reflexive, dreaming pulses.

The Maiden herself might blush to hear such thoughts, and even the Stranger would raise an eyebrow, if the tales were true. Yet what were gods and their judgments beside the comfort and joy your husband brought you? Let the septons mutter of sin. Let them wag their fingers and speak of virtue. The Seven might forgive you...