The Time War

It wasn't supposed to happen like this.

You hadn't meant to discover the hole in the wall—a gap where the stone had crumbled between your chambers and his. It was small, barely the width of your  index and middle fingers, hidden behind the carved wooden screen that stood in the corner of your room. You'd only found it when you'd moved the screen aside to retrieve a dropped pearl earring, and there it was, a sliver of forbidden sight directly into the heir's private quarters.

You stared at it for a moment longer, crouched onto the floor with the pearl still in your palm.

Rotted mortar, you thought. Old stone. The Red Keep is falling apart in places no one bothers to look.

The right thing would have been to call for the servants, have it sealed with fresh mortar. To forget you'd ever seen it, like a proper lady would. 

That first night, however, curiosity won. Just a glance, you kept telling yourself. Just to see if it truly looked into Jacaerys's room or if your eyes had deceived you in the dim candlelight.

They hadn't, and your breath caught in your throat as soon as your eye found the gap. His bed was perfectly visible—the heavy posts of dark wood, the deep crimson coverlet embroidered with the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen. And there, tangled in those sheets, was your cousin.

Worst of all, he wasn't alone.

Turn away. The thought flickered through your mind even as you stayed perfectly still, silver hair spilling over your shoulder and onto the floor in waves as you leaned closer. Your heart hammered against your ribs. You knew what the right choice was. You simply weren't making it.

The woman beneath him was dark-haired, flushed, with her mouth open as Jacaerys pounded into her from behind, and you realized with a strange twist in your stomach that this was far from his first time. The rumors that swirled through the Red Keep were true, then. The Crown Prince, for all his duties and noble bearing in the daylight hours, was as much a creature of appetite as any Targaryen before him.

You, on the other hand, had never even been kissed. Never been touched. Good noble ladies waited for their wedding night, and common fucking was for the common whores—thank you for that wisdom, cousin Aemond.

His hand fisted in her dark hair, pulling her head back as he drove into her cunt with a rhythm that was almost borderline brutal. The sound of skin meeting skin echoed off the stone walls, punctuated by her breathy moans and his low groans of pleasure. You could see the sheen of sweat on his shoulders, the flex of muscle beneath his skin as he gripped her hips hard enough to leave bruises.

"Fuck," he growled, and the vulgarity of it—hearing such words from the lips of the Crown Prince—sent a forbidden thrill down your spine. "You take me so well."

The woman whimpered something you couldn't quite hear, and Jacaerys laughed—dark and satisfied. He leaned forward, pressing her face into the pillows as he changed his angle, and her muffled cry of pleasure made heat pool low in your belly.

Your hand had somehow found its way to your throat, fingers pressed against your racing pulse. This was wrong, so utterly wrong. You sat here, watching your cousin rut like a beast in heat, and worse—far worse—your body was responding to it. Your thighs pressed together on their own accord, seeking friction you had no right to want.

Leave. Now.

You started to pull back from the gap, but then Jacaerys pulled out suddenly, flipping the girl onto her back with easy strength, and you caught a glimpse of him fully—his flushed cock, hard and completely shameless. He spread her thighs wide and thrusted back into her cunt in with one smooth stroke, and a gasp tore from your throat before you could stop it.

Your hand flew to your mouth, palm clamping hard over your lips. The pearl earring—forgotten, still clutched in your other hand—slipped from your fingers and hit the stone floor with a soft clink that sounded deafening in the quiet of your chamber.

You froze, heart hammering, terrified the sound had somehow carried through the wall.

But Jacaerys didn't pause, didn't look toward the gap. He was too focused on the woman beneath him, and you—gods help you—you couldn't look away.

"Look at me," he commanded, and something in his voice—the authority, the certainty, the  want—made your breath catch. The woman's eyes snapped to his face. "Good girl," he murmured, and thrust deeper.

The words sent heat flooding through you, pooling low into your belly. You felt it between your thighs—a pulse, an ache, something you had no name for. Your hand was still clamped over your mouth, but you couldn't move, couldn't think, could barely breathe—

The sharp knock at your chamber door made you jerk back from the wall as though it burned you.

"My lady?" came Lysa's voice, muffled through the heavy oak. "We've come to prepare you for supper."

You stumbled back from the screen. Your hand pressed against your cheek—Seven Hells, you were boiling. "A moment," you called out, breathless, hating how your voice wavered in the otherwise silent room.

You smoothed your skirts with trembling hands and tried to compose yourself before crossing to open the door. Your three ladies-in-waiting filed in—Lysa, Maryse, and young Elaena, their arms full of silks and jewelry boxes. They were good girls, all of them. You'd chosen them yourself—daughters of minor houses who actually seemed to like you rather than seeing you as a political opportunity. The last thing you needed were the usual vultures, daughters of great lords who'd spend more time reporting back to their mothers than actually being useful.

"You look flushed, my lady," Maryse observed you with immediate concern, setting down the silks onto the dressing table. "Are you well?"

"Quite well," you lied, settling into the chair before your mirror. Your reflection was damning, your silver hair mussed, falling loose from where you'd been pressed against the wall. Your cheeks were flushed, pupils blown wide and dark, emphasizing the violet haze. You looked exactly like what you were, a woman who'd been watching something she had no business seeing. "The fire was burning too hot. I've only just opened the window."

Lysa moved to begin unpinning your hair, her fingers gentle, yet ever so clever, as they worked. "I see my lady. The cook's boy told me the funniest story today," she began, and you felt yourself relax into the familiar rhythm of their chatter.

This was safe. This was normal. Unlike whatever madness had possessed you just moments ago.

Elaena brought forward the gown, it was a beautiful collection of pale red silk that caught the candlelight like dawn breaking over the Narrow Sea. The bodice was fitted, the neckline modest but elegant, with delicate embroidery along the sleeves that fell into drapes. It was a gown befitting a princess of dragon blood, though you sometimes forgot that's what you were.

As your ladies worked, Lysa plaiting your hair into an intricate crown of braids, Maryse threading deep crimson rubies on fine silver chains to weave through the silver, Elaena carefully lacing you into your gown—your mind wandered despite your best efforts.

You could still see it. The flex of Jacaerys's shoulders, the way his head had fallen back in pleasure. The sound of his voice, rough with need and desire. 

Seven hells. 

"Tilt your head, my lady," Lysa murmured, and you obeyed, watching in the mirror as she secured the final braid with a dragon brooch of white gold and rubies, its eyes tiny chips of garnet that seemed to glow due to the candlelight.

Your hair fell in a waterfall of silver down your back, nearly to your calves, the braids creating an ornate crown that framed your face. The rubies caught the light like drops of blood, and for a moment you understood why men wrote songs about Targaryen women. More specifically, why their chantee’s were filled with tales of you.

"Beautiful," Maryse breathed, stepping back to admire their work.

You were beautiful. You knew this, had always known it—it was simply a fact, like knowing the sky was blue or fire was hot. But beauty felt like a strange, useless disease when your mind was still full of images it shouldn't hold.

When your thoughts were consumed by your cousin, the heir to the Iron Throne, and the way he'd looked lost in pleasure with a woman who wasn't you.

The private dining hall was already warm and loud when you arrived, filled with the low hum of conversation and the clatter of serving plates. This was your favorite meal of the week. no courtiers to impress, no performers to sit through, no need to smile politely while some lord droned on about his son and why he’s worthy of your hand. Just family. The table could have seated fifty people easily, but tonight it was just the twelve of you, which somehow made the hall feel bigger and emptier at the same time.

Rhaenyra sat at the head in a gown of black and red, her crown set aside for the evening, silver hair braided simply. Daemon lounged beside her, looking more like a dangerous cat than a prince consort. Down the table, Alicent sat with her children scattered among Rhaenyra's, Aegon laughing at something Jace had said, Helaena showing Baela her embroidery. A year ago, they'd been on the brink of war. Now they broke bread together like it had never happened.

"There she is," Aegon called out as you entered, already half in his cups despite the early hour. "Our lovely cousin, late as always."

"I'm not late," you replied, taking your usual seat between Helaena and Baela. "You're simply too eager for the wine, Aegon."

Aegon clutched his chest in mock offense while Helaena reached for your hand beneath the table, giving it a gentle squeeze. She said nothing—she rarely did in company—but her smile was soft and genuine. You squeezed back, wishing she'd been born your sister instead of your cousin. She understood silence, understood that sometimes you just needed to exist quietly in a world that never managed to simply shut the fuck up.

"You look beautiful tonight," Helaena murmured, so quietly only you could hear. Her green eyes—so unlike the rest of the Targaryens—studied your face with an intensity that only she had. "Red suits you. Like fire. Like blood."

Before you could respond, the servants began bringing out the first course, and your attention was pulled elsewhere. You reached for your wine, grateful for something to do with your hands, and that's when you saw Jacaerys sat across the table and down two seats, between Luke and Joffrey. He was dressed formally in a black doublet with red embroidery, his dark hair still damp as though he'd bathed recently. He looked every inch the Crown Prince—composed, attentive, laughing at something Luke said.

He looked nothing like the man you'd seen less than an hour ago, flushed and shameless, fucking a woman whose name he probably didn't know. Or didn't care to remember. 

Your cheeks heated at the memory, and you quickly looked down at your plate.

Gods, were you that much of a prude?

"How was your afternoon, my dear?" Rhaenyra suddenly asked you, her voice carrying easily down the table. She'd always been kind to you, treating you more as a daughter than a niece. Your father's sister, mourning the brother she'd lost, had perhaps seen something of him in you.

"Quiet, Your Grace," you managed, hoping your voice sounded normal. "I spent most of it reading in my chambers."

"Always with your books," Daemon observed with amusement. "You're worse than the damn Maesters."

The conversation flowed easily after that—talk of the day's small council meeting, Aegon's latest exploit (falling asleep during a petitioner's complaint), Helaena's new collection of butterflies. You participated when required, but part of your attention kept sliding back to Jacaerys despite your best efforts.

He caught you looking, which was more embarrassing than usual. His eyes narrowed, and for one horrible second you were certain he knew. Knew what you'd seen. Knew you'd watched. Your stomach dropped and you bit your lip hard enough to taste copper and looked away. When you risked another glance, he was already talking to Luke again, the moment forgotten.

It wasn't until the second course that Rhaenyra cleared her throat in that way that meant an announcement was coming. The table quieted immediately, all eyes turning to their queen.

"I've been thinking," she began, glancing at Jacaerys with obvious affection, "that our heir is now two and twenty. More than old enough to take a wife."

Across the table, Jacaerys kept his expression perfectly neutral and composed. But you saw his jaw tighten, saw the way his hand clenched briefly around his fork before he forced himself to relax.

"It's time we began seeking suitable matches," Rhaenyra continued. "I've already received inquiries from several great houses—the Arryns, the Starks, even a letter from the Triarchy expressing interest in an alliance."

"The Triarchy?" Daemon barked a laugh. "What would they offer, a wife who smells of spices, counts coins and wouldn't know what to do with a cock if you handed it to her with instructions?"

"They offered three ships of gold and exclusive trading rights," Rhaenyra replied dryly. "Which is more than most houses can promise."

"I won't marry for ships," Jacaerys said quietly, and something in his tone made you look at him once more. His expression was still composed, but there was a hardness around his eyes. 

"You'll marry where it serves the realm," Rhaenyra said, though not unkindly. "As I did. As all rulers must."

"You married for love the second time," Jace pointed out.

"The second time, yes." Rhaenyra smiled at Daemon. "But first I did my duty. And you will do yours."

The tension at the table was palpable. Alicent looked uncomfortable, her hands folded tightly in her lap. Aegon was watching the exchange with barely concealed glee—always happy when someone else was being pressed into marriage talk instead of him.

"We'll host a series of feasts," Rhaenyra continued, her tone allowing no argument. "Let the eligible ladies of the realm come to court. Let Jacaerys meet them, dance with them. Surely among them there will be someone suitable."

"How many feasts?" Luke asked, grimacing. "I hate feasts."

"As many as it takes," Rhaenyra replied. "We'll begin preparations the following morrow."

Your stomach dropped. Feast after feast, watching Jacaerys dance with simpering ladies who would fall over themselves for the chance to be queen. Watching him smile that charming smile, knowing what you now knew—that he was skilled at pleasing women, that he knew exactly how to make them fall at his feet.

"How exciting," Baela said beside you, though her tone suggested she found it anything but. "More opportunities to wear uncomfortable gowns and make pleasant conversation with people who hate us."

"They don't all hate us," you murmured, though your heart wasn't in the defense.

Across the table, Jacaerys stared at his wine cup like it might provide him with answers. You almost felt bad for him. If anyone at this table had no chance of marrying for love, it was him. Not that he seemed particularly interested in finding one person to settle down with, but still, your point stood.

"Well then," Aegon raised his cup. "To Jace's upcoming nuptials. May his future wife have the patience of a saint and the deafness of a stone."

Despite the tension, several people laughed, and Rhaenyra shook her head with exasperated fondness. "Perhaps we should have music," she suggested, gesturing to the musicians who always waited in the shadows during these intimate suppers. "Clear some space. Let us remember we're still young enough to enjoy ourselves."

"An excellent idea," Daemon agreed, already rising. He offered his hand to Rhaenyra with a theatrical bow that made her laugh.

The servants quickly moved the table back, creating a space for dancing as the musicians struck up a lively tune. It was informal, nothing like the rigid court dances you'd endure at the upcoming feasts—this was just family, moving together without judgment or ceremony.

Luke grabbed Rhaena's hand first, spinning her into the space with more enthusiasm than grace. She laughed, steadying him when he nearly tripped over his own feet. Joffrey tried to convince Helaena to dance, but she demurred with a gentle shake of her head, content to watch from her seat.

"Dance with me," Baela demanded, pulling you up before you could protest. "Before one of the boys asks and proceeds to step on our feet."

You let yourself be drawn into the movement, falling into the familiar pattern. Baela was a good dancer—all the Targaryen children were taught from youth that grace in the ballroom was as important as grace on dragonback. You switched partners as the song changed, first with Aegon, who was surprisingly light on his feet despite the wine, then with Luke, who apologized three times for nearly stepping on your hem, which you found adorable.

"You're doing fine," you assured him with a smile, and he grinned back, boyish and sweet.

When that dance ended, you found yourself passed to Jacaerys.

Your breath caught as his hand found yours, the other settling at your waist. His palm was large and warm against your back, steadying you. You could smell him now, clean linen and spice. Could see his eyes up close, brown with flecks of amber in the firelight. Could see, really see, how stupidly beautiful he was.

"Having fun?" he asked as he led you through the steps, his tone pleasantly neutral and polite. The exact same way he'd speak to any cousin at a family gathering.

"Yes," you managed, hoping your voice sounded normal. "It's nice, having everyone together like this."

"Mm," he agreed, spinning you smoothly. "Rarer than it should be. Though I suppose it'll be even rarer once I'm shackled to some lord's daughter who'll expect me to sit through needlepoint demonstrations."

He was trying to make it sound like a joke, but it came out flat. Like he'd already accepted this was happening and hated every second of it.

"Maybe you'll find someone you actually like," you offered, though the words tasted bitter on your tongue.

A laugh, short and bitter. "Maybe. Though I doubt the great houses are sending their daughters for love matches. They want a crown, not a husband."

"Then perhaps you should look for someone who wants neither," you said before you could stop yourself.

Jacaerys raised an eyebrow, something that might have been interest flickering across his face. "And where would I find such a creature? They seem to be in short supply."

Before you could respond—before you could make an even greater fool of yourself—the song ended. Jace released you with a small bow, perfectly proper, and turned to offer his hand to Rhaena for the next dance.

You stepped back, your heart still racing for reasons that had nothing to do with the exertion of dancing. He'd been so normal. So completely indifferent. There was no awareness in his eyes, no sign that he saw you as anything other than his cousin, someone to dance with at family gatherings and exchange pleasantries with at supper. Which was as it should be. You should be relieved and instead, you felt something uncomfortably close to disappointment.

"You look troubled," Helaena's soft voice came from beside you. She'd moved so quietly you hadn't noticed her approach. "Like a bird that's flown into a window."

You turned to her, finding those strange green eyes studying you. "I'm fine," you said automatically.

"The spider watches from the corner," Helaena murmured, her gaze distant in that way it sometimes got after one of her vision spells. "But the spider doesn't know it's caught in a web of its own making."

"Helaena—"

But she'd already drifted away, drawn by something only she could see, leaving you standing at the edge of the dancing with her cryptic words echoing in your mind.

The spider watches from the corner. Seven hells, your poor, dear, earnest cousin knows you’re a pervert. 

You watched Jacaerys spin Rhaena through the steps, laughing at something she said. Watched him dance with Baela next, then with his mother, the perfect dutiful son. He never once looked your way again and you told yourself that was exactly what you wanted.

The dancing continued for another hour before Rhaenyra finally called an end to the evening. "Early council meeting tomorrow," she announced with apologetic warmth. "And I need at least some sleep if I'm to endure Tyland Lannister's complaints about the damned grain tariffs."

The group began to disperse—Aegon stumbling slightly as Aemond steadied him with the patience only a brother could have, Luke and Joffrey arguing about something as they headed toward their chambers. You walked back to your chambers with Helaena and Baela, their soft conversation a comfortable buffer against your own churning thoughts. When you finally reached your door, you bid them goodnight and slipped inside, leaning back against the heavy oak with a shaky exhale.

Your ladies had been by earlier, the room was tidy, the fire banked low, your nightgown laid out across the bed. Everything was peaceful and ordinary. Your gaze immediately drifted, unbidden, to the corner where the carved screen stood.

You shouldn't. You absolutely shouldn't. But your feet carried you forward anyway, your hands moving the screen aside with trembling, eager, perverted fingers.

Empty. Fuck. 

His room was dark save for a single candle burning on the bedside table. The crimson coverlet was smooth and undisturbed. The heavy curtains drawn back from the windows to let in the moonlight. No Jacaerys. No woman writhing beneath him. Nothing but silence and shadows.

You sat back on your heels, a strange mix of relief and something else—something you refused to name as disappointment—settling in your chest.

Where was he? 

It was late, well past the hour when most of the castle had retired. Perhaps he'd gone to the Street of Silk, unwilling to bring his entertainment into the Red Keep on a night when the family had gathered. Perhaps he was in someone else's bed entirely, some lady's maid or kitchen girl who'd caught his eye.

Perhaps he was being discreet, something he clearly hadn't bothered earlier today. The thought dissipated as quickly as it came, no, maybe he was being discreet. Thoughtful, even. Of course, he'd been perfectly discreet earlier too, it was your fault for being a creep. 

You pressed your palm against the cold stone, staring at that empty bed as though it might offer answers. The image from earlier was still burned into your mind—the flex of his shoulders, the sound of his voice rough with pleasure, the casual way he'd commanded that woman's body like he owned it.

Your cousin. The heir to the Iron Throne. The boy you'd grown up with, who used to let you win at cyvasse when you were children, who'd shown you how to skip stones across the fountain and laughed when you both got yelled at for it.

When the fuck had he turned into that? When had he learned to move like that, to take someone apart with his hands like it was easy?

And why, by all the Seven, couldn't you stop fucking thinking about it?

You pushed away from the wall, suddenly furious with yourself. This was madness. Dangerous, stupid madness that could only end in humiliation or worse. You needed to forget what you'd seen. Needed to seal that hole in the wall and pretend it had never existed.

Starting tomorrow. You'd call the servants first thing in the morning and have it filled with mortar. Tonight, tonight, though,  you would sleep, and you would not dream of your cousin's hands, or his voice, or the way he'd looked so beautiful while lost in pleasure.

You climbed into bed still wearing your red silk gown, too tired to call your ladies back to unlace you. The rubies in your hair pressed uncomfortably against the pillow until you pulled them free with impatient fingers, letting your silver hair spill loose around you.

Sleep was slow to come. When it finally did, you dreamed of dragons and fire, of flying on Cannibal's back while something nameless chased you through the clouds. And in the dream, when you finally turned to face it, it had Jacaerys's eyes.

You did not look through the hole the following morning.

The temptation was there—gods, it was there, a constant itch beneath your skin as your ladies dressed you. But you kept your eyes firmly away from that corner, focusing instead on the monotonous task of standing still while they laced you into your gown.

It was white today, or perhaps the palest blue, the color seemed to shift in the light like a sort of moonstone. The bodice was scaled like dragon armor, each piece of fabric layered and stitched to create the illusion of protection. Gold chains draped across your shoulders and down your bare arms, cold against your skin. More chains hung from your waist, swaying gently when you moved. The sleeves were sheer and flowing, doing little to ward off the morning chill.

"You look like a goddess," Elaena breathed as she stepped back to admire their work.

"I look like I'm about to freeze to death, thank you very much," you replied, though without any real complaint. 

Your hair was left mostly loose today, falling in silver waves down your back, with only two small braids pulled back from your face and secured with a dragon clasp of white gold. It was simple and appropriate for a small council meeting where you needed to be taken seriously.

The walk to the council chamber was embedded into your brain, your slippered feet silent on the cold stone floors. Guards nodded as you passed, servants stepped aside with murmured greetings. You were known throughout the Red Keep as kind, perhaps too kind for a Targaryen. You stopped to ask the head cook about her daughter's fever, remembered the name of the stable boy's new puppy hound, listened when the washerwomen complained about the state of the linens.

Your father had been like that, or so Rhaenyra told you. Loved by the smallfolk, remembered fondly even years after his death. You hoped it was true. You hoped you carried something of him beyond just his silver hair and violet eyes.

The council chamber was already half-full when you arrived. Lord Corlys sat at Rhaenyra's right hand, his age showing more each moon but his mind still sharp as any of the younger council members. Daemon lounged in his seat with typical irreverence, picking at his nails with a dagger. Grand Maester Gerardys shuffled through papers, and several other lords whose names you'd long since memorized filled out the remaining seats.

Rhaenys was there too, your mentor in all things draconic and strategic. She caught your eye as you entered and gave you a subtle nod of approval. She'd been instrumental in convincing Rhaenyra to let you train, to let you learn the ways of war despite your aunt's maternal protests.

"Good morrow, niece," Rhaenyra greeted you warmly as you took your seat. "I trust you slept well?"

"Well enough, Your Grace," you replied, ignoring the knowing look Daemon shot you. He always seemed to know when someone was lying, the bastard.

You'd earned your place at this table through years of study—history, law, trade routes, military strategy. While other noble daughters learned needlework and song, you'd buried yourself in the library, devouring every tome you could find. Knowledge was power, and you'd wanted to be useful. Wanted to matter beyond being another pretty Targaryen to marry off for alliances.

And then there was Cannibal. Your sweet baby boy, Cannibal. 

You'd claimed him at two and ten, a feat that had shocked the entire realm. The wild dragon, the one who'd killed and eaten other dragons, who'd never been ridden—you'd walked up to him on Dragonstone's smoking beaches and simply asked. And he'd lowered his massive black head and let you climb onto his back.

The bond between you was unlike anything the Dragonkeepers had seen. You could feel him, always, a presence at the back of your mind, dark and fierce and free. Sometimes you knew his thoughts, or at least his intentions. When he wanted to hunt. When he wanted to fly far from the castle and its confining walls. When he missed you, though he'd never admit it, that damned proud creature.

He was out there now, somewhere over the Bay of Blackwater or perhaps the Kingswood. You could feel him, distantly, content in his solitude.

Vhagar was different—ancient, massive, slow with age but no less deadly. Aemond insisted he had full control of her, but you'd seen the truth when you flew near them. Vhagar tolerated Aemond. She hadn't fully accepted him, not the way Cannibal had accepted you. It would take years, perhaps decades, before that bond truly solidified.

If Aemond lived that long. Vhagar was known for her temper.

And Cannibal—Cannibal was larger still. Nearly the size of Balerion the Black Dread himself, or so the Dragonkeepers whispered when they thought you couldn't hear. Black as a night sky with none of the stars, with eyes like green flame and teeth as long as swords. He'd never accept the Dragonpit even if he could fit, which he couldn't. He roosted where he pleased, in sea caves along the coast, in the ruins of old Valyrian outposts, anywhere that gave him space and freedom and solitude.

"Shall we begin?" Rhaenyra's voice pulled you from your thoughts. She waited until everyone had settled, then gestured for Grand Maester Gerardys to start with the day's business.

The first hour was tedious, grain shipments from the Reach, trade disputes with the Free Cities, a complaint from House Royce about border incursions from mountain clans. You paid attention, offered your thoughts when asked, but your mind kept drifting.

Don't think about it. Don't think about him.

"There is one more matter," Rhaenyra said as the meeting drew toward its close. She looked around the table, her gaze lingering on you for a moment before moving on. "I've decided that Jacaerys should begin attending these meetings regularly. Starting the following morrow, he'll be joining us."

A few eyebrows raised, but no one protested. It made sense, he was two and twenty, the acknowledged heir, soon to be married. He needed to understand the workings of the realm he would one day rule. 

"Will he be given a formal position?" Lord Corlys asked, ever practical, ever scheming. 

"Not immediately," Rhaenyra replied. "Let him observe first. Learn our ways, then we'll see where his talents might be best utilized."

Daemon snorted. "His talents are best utilized in the training yard and the—"

"Daemon," Rhaenyra cut him off with a warning look, though her lips twitched with suppressed amusement.

You felt your cheeks heat and kept your eyes fixed firmly on the table. In a week’s time Jacaerys would be here, sitting in one of these chairs, probably directly across from you. You'd have to see him regularly, maintain professional courtesy, pretend you hadn't watched him fuck a woman senseless.

Gods have mercy.

"Any objections?" Rhaenyra asked, looking around the table.

Silence. What could anyone say? He was the heir and none of you were about to tell the Queen that her son wasn't allowed in the Small Council. That seemed like a great way to lose your head.

"Good. Then we're finished for today." She stood, and everyone else rose with her. "Same time in three days. Try not to let the realm burn down before then."

The council members began to file out, but Rhaenys caught your arm as you moved to leave.

"Walk with me," she said, and it wasn't really a request.

You followed her out into the corridor, down a side passage that led into the city and the Dragonpit. She said nothing for a long moment, just walked with that regal bearing she'd never quite lost, even after being passed over for the throne.

"You seem distracted," she finally said.

"I'm fine."

"You're lying." She stopped, turning to face you with those sharp eyes that missed nothing. "What's wrong?"

For a wild moment, you considered telling her. I accidentally discovered a hole in my wall that looks into Jacaerys's chambers, and now I can't stop thinking about what I saw, and I think I'm losing my mind.

Instead, you said, "I'm just tired. The dancing went rather late last night."

Rhaenys studied you for a long moment, clearly unconvinced, but eventually she nodded. "Very well. But if something is bothering you—truly bothering you—you know you can come to me."

"I know," you said softly. "Thank you."

She squeezed your shoulder once, then continued down the corridor, leaving you alone with your thoughts and the distant sound of dragons roaring in their pit.

You stood there for a moment, staring at nothing, and wondered how in seven hells you were going to survive sitting across from Jacaerys in council meetings. Wondered if he'd look at you the same way he'd looked at you while dancing—politely indifferent, completely unaware of the effect he had.

Wondered if that was better or worse than the alternative.

You found yourself wandering toward the kitchens, drawn by the familiar sounds of clattering pots and raised voices. The rest of the castle felt too quiet after council meetings, too full of people watching their words. The kitchens were honest, they were steaming hot, loud and smelling like fresh bread and meat.

"My lady!" Jessamyn looked up from the massive hearth, her round face flushed from the heat. She'd been head cook for as long as you could remember, ruling her domain with an iron ladle and a sharp tongue. "What brings you down here? Shouldn't you be off doing princess things?"

"Princess things are dreadfully boring," you replied, stealing a piece of candied lemon from a nearby tray. "I'd much rather be here."

"Oi, those are for tonight's supper!" But Jessamyn was smiling, swatting at you halfheartedly with her wooden spoon.

The kitchen staff had long since grown accustomed to your presence. You'd been sneaking down here since you were a child, preferring the warmth and chatter to the formality of the upper floors. Here, no one cared that you were a Targaryen. Here, you were just the girl who always burned her tongue on the stew and asked too many questions about how to make proper gravy.

"How's Mara's fever?" you asked, hopping up onto a cleared section of the work table.

"Broke this morning, thank the gods." Jessamyn's expression softened. "That tea you brought from the Maester helped, I think."

"Good. I'm glad." You watched as two scullery maids argued over the proper way to pluck a chicken, their debate growing increasingly heated. "Should you be concerned about that?"

"They'll sort it out," Jessamyn said dismissively. "Or they'll stab each other with the bloody kitchen knives, and I'll have two fewer girls making my life a misery. Either way."

"You staying for midday meal?" one of the kitchen boys asked hopefully. "We're making that venison stew you like."

"Can't today. I'm going to the Dragonpit."

"Your beast finally coming back?" Jessamyn asked, pulling a tray of bread from the oven. "Haven't seen him in what, near a fortnight?"

"Twelve days," you confirmed. Cannibal preferred his freedom, and you'd never been one to cage him. He came when he wanted, and you would not have it  any other way. "He's out past Blackwater Bay somewhere. I can feel him."

"Feel him," one of the maids muttered. "Still sounds like madness to me, my lady."

"It is madness," you agreed cheerfully. "But it's a very useful madness."

You stayed a while longer, listening to the kitchen gossip, who was bedding whom, which lordling had insulted which servant, the general consensus that the upcoming feasts were going to be a right fucking nightmare to prepare for. Apparently, Rhaenyra had requested swan for one of them, and Jessamyn was already composing angry speeches about the impracticality of cooking swan.

"Tough as old leather and mean as sin," she complained, gesturing violently with her ladle. "But does Her Grace care? No. She wants swan because it's elegant. I'll give her elegant—I'll serve it so tough she'll break a tooth on it."

"I'll speak to her," you offered. "Suggest something else."

"You're a good girl," Jessamyn said, patting your cheek with a flour-dusted hand. "Too good for this lot of pompous cunts, if you ask me."

Eventually, you took your leave, stealing one more piece of candied lemon on your way out just to hear Jessamyn's exasperated shout behind you.

The walk to the Dragonpit took you through the city streets, and you pulled your cloak up to hide your distinctive hair. The smallfolk knew you by sight anyway—you came this way often enough—but it was easier not to draw any attention. A few people nodded as you passed, and you nodded back, trying not to think about how different you were from most nobles who never set foot outside the Red Keep's walls without a full escort of gold cloaks.

The Dragonpit loomed ahead, ancient and crumbling in places despite the best efforts to maintain it. The Dragonkeepers bowed as you approached, their respect tinged with something like awe. They still spoke in hushed tones about the day you'd claimed Cannibal, about the wild dragon who'd finally accepted a rider.

You came here even though your dragon never would. Cannibal was too large. He'd never fit through the Dragonpit's entrance even if he wanted to, which he decidedly did not.  But you came anyway, to see the other dragons, to speak with the Dragonkeepers who understood what it meant to be bonded to such creatures.

"My lady," the eldest keeper greeted you. "Still no sign of your beast?"

"He's hunting in the Kingswood," you replied, moving past them into the cavernous space. 

Some of the other dragons were here, Vermax in his usual corner, Arrax further back, Syrax sunning herself near the entrance where the light streamed in. They all shifted as you entered, great scaled heads turning, sensing you the way dragons always sensed Targaryen blood.

But none of them called to you the way Cannibal did. None of them were yours.

You could feel him now, distant but present in your mind. He was flying over the Kingswood, hunting deer or perhaps wild boar. Satisfied. He sent you an impression—not words, but feeling—of wind and height and the joy of the chase.

Umbās lenton, ñuha riña, you thought at him in High Valyrian, not knowing if he could truly hear your thoughts the way you felt his intentions. Māzigon lo jorrāelagon. 

Stay free, my boy. Come if needed.

You stood there in the Dragonpit for a while, watching the other dragons, feeling the heat of their breath and the weight of their ancient eyes. Vhagar wasn't here either—she was too massive, kept in the fields outside the city where she had room to spread her wings without crushing half the buildings in King's Landing. But even Vhagar was smaller than Cannibal. 

"He burns green, doesn't he?" one of the younger keepers asked, approaching cautiously. "Your Cannibal. Green flame."

"Yes," you confirmed. "Like poison made fire."

The keeper shuddered slightly. "I've never seen anything like it. Most dragons burn orange or red, sometimes gold. But green and his size. Seven hells, my lady, he's near as big as Balerion was."

"Bigger, perhaps," you said softly. "He's still growing."

The thought should have terrified you. Instead, it filled you with something like pride.

Supper that evening was a grander affair than the intimate family meal from the night before. The great hall was filled with lords and ladies of the court, the high table crowded with Targaryens and their most favored bannermen. Musicians played from the gallery, servants moved between the tables with platters of roasted boar and honeyed duck, and the wine flowed freely.

You sat between Baela and one of the Velaryon cousins whose name you could never quite remember, making polite conversation and trying not to let your gaze wander too obviously across the hall.

Jacaerys, much to your surprise, wasn't there.

His seat at the high table sat empty, and when you'd asked Rhaenyra about it as casually as you could manage, she'd simply said he was indisposed. Daemon had smirked into his wine cup at that, and you'd felt your cheeks burn.

Indisposed. Right, your arse.

The meal dragged on, course after course, toast after toast, Lord Whoever droning on about trade agreements until you wanted to scream. You smiled and nodded and said the right things, all while your mind churned with thoughts you had no business thinking.

Where was he? Out in the city again, finding another willing woman to warm his bed? Or perhaps he'd brought someone here, to his chambers, and simply hadn't wanted to risk being seen at supper with the smell of sex still clinging to him.

Gods, you needed to stop. This needed to stop, permanently, and immediately. 

By the time Rhaenyra finally dismissed the court for the evening, you were wound tight as a crossbow string. You said your goodnights to Baela and Helaena, declined Aegon's slurred offer to continue drinking in his chambers, and practically fled back to your own rooms.

Your ladies had already been by, the fire was lit, your sleeping shift laid out. You should call them back to help you out of your gown. Should prepare for bed like a sensible person and get some actual sleep before tomorrow's duties.

Instead, you found yourself moving toward the corner where the carved screen stood.

Don't, you told yourself firmly. Don't be a fool.

But your hands were already pushing the screen aside, your knees hitting the cold stone floor as you pressed your eye to the gap.

Empty. Again. Damn, damn, damn.

The room was dark save for moonlight streaming through the windows. The bed undisturbed, the coverlet smooth. No candles lit, no sign of life. You sat back, frustration coiling in your chest. Where in the seven hells was he?

You should go to bed. Should stop this madness before it consumed you entirely. But instead, you paced. Back and forth across your chamber like a caged animal, your silk skirts swishing against the floor. Every few minutes you'd stop, kneel down, check the hole again.

Still empty.

This was pathetic. You were pathetic. Waiting like some lovesick girl for a glimpse of a man who didn't even know you existed beyond being his cousin at family suppers.

He danced with you, a small voice whispered in your mind. He smiled at you.

He smiled at everyone. That was what princes did. And once again, you checked.

Empty.

"Fuck," you muttered under your breath, pressing your forehead against the cool stone. This was going to drive you mad. You needed to seal this hole, needed to forget you'd ever found it, needed to—

The door to his chamber opened and you froze, eye pressed to the gap, heart suddenly hammering.

Jacaerys entered first, and he wasn't alone. Your throat tightened, and for a split second, you told yourself to look away, to be decent for once. Instead, you pressed harder against the gap, like that might somehow get you closer.

The woman who followed him through the door was decidedly not a servant or a whore from the Street of Silk. Her gown was fine silk, deep green with gold embroidery at the sleeves. This was expensive, well-made, the kind only highborn ladies wore. Her dark hair was pinned up elaborately, though a few strands had come loose, and when she laughed at something Jace said, the sound was refined. 

You recognized her after a moment—Lady Cassandra Baratheon, one of Lord Borros's daughters. She'd been at court for the past month, ostensibly to foster closer ties between Storm's End and the crown.

Apparently, she'd been fostering ties of a different sort.

"Wine?" Jace asked, moving to the table where a pitcher sat waiting.

"Please," Cassandra replied, and there was an ease between them that spoke of familiarity. This wasn't their first time together. Not even close.

Something hot and ugly twisted in your chest. Jealousy, perhaps, though you had no right to it.

Jace poured two cups, handed her one, and they stood there for a moment just talking. You couldn't hear the words through the stone, but you could see the way Cassandra touched his arm, fingers trailing down from shoulder to elbow with the intimacy of someone who'd done it before. The way Jace leaned in closer, his head tilted as he listened to whatever she was saying, a small smile playing at his lips.

And then he kissed her, and you inhaled sharply, pulse suddenly pounding everywhere, your throat, your wrists, between your legs.

It started slow—almost tender, really. His hand came up to cup her face, thumb stroking along the line of her jaw as their mouths moved together in a way that suggested they'd learned each other's rhythms. Cassandra made a soft sound, stepping into him, and her fingers tangled in his dark hair, tugging slightly.

Pervert, pervert, pervert.  

Your eye stayed pressed to the gap in the stone. Your hand, seemingly of its own accord, had drifted to press against your stomach, just above where heat was beginning to pool low and insistent. 

Jace backed her toward the bed, still kissing her, his hands starting to work at the laces of her gown. She helped him, both of them fumbling slightly in their eagerness despite clearly having done this dance before. You watched as layer after layer of silk fell away and onto the floor, first was the overdress, then the underdress, then the stays—until she stood in just her shift, the thin fabric clinging to curves that made your throat go dry.

"Gods, you're beautiful," Jace murmured and you could read the words on his lips even if you couldn't quite hear them through the stone.

Cassandra smiled, reaching for the fastenings of his doublet. "You say that to all of them, my grace."

Your jaw clenched. So you were right. There were others. Many others, probably.

"I mean it with you," Jace said, and you wanted to scream at Cassandra not to believe him, that those were just pretty words he knew how to wield. 

But Cassandra seemed to believe him, or at least didn't care if it was true. She pushed his doublet off his shoulders, her hands running over his chest, fingernails scraping lightly over skin, and Jace groaned—a sound you felt echo between your own thighs. He pulled her shift over her head in one smooth motion, and then she was naked before him.

She was beautiful, that you could admit that even through the haze of jealousy burning in your chest. Full breasts, a narrow waist flaring into hips that Jace's hands immediately claimed, skin like cream in the candlelight. Dark hair spilled down her back as Jace turned her around, pressing kisses down her spine, and you watched his mouth trace the path of her vertebrae one by one.

"Jace," she breathed, arching back against him, pressing her bare arse against where you could see he was already hard beneath his breeches.

Your own breathing had gone shallow. Your hand pressed harder against your stomach, wanting to move lower but not quite daring. Not yet.

Jace took his time with her. His hands mapped every curve, every dip and swell of her body. He cupped her breasts, thumbs circling her nipples until they peaked and she gasped. Kissed the side of her neck, teeth scraping against the tendon there in a way that made her shiver. Slid one hand down her stomach, between her thighs, and even from here you could see how she bucked against his touch.

"Please," Cassandra whimpered, and the desperate edge to her voice made your breath catch.

"Patience," Jace murmured against her skin, but there was dark amusement in his tone. He was enjoying this—enjoying making her wait, making her beg.

When he finally guided her onto the bed, she went willingly, eagerly, spreading herself out on the crimson coverlet like an offering. Her thighs fell open without prompting, shameless in her want, and you could see the glistening evidence of her arousal even from your hidden vantage point.

Jace shed the rest of his clothes—unlacing his breeches with quick movements—and your mouth went dry at the sight of him. You'd seen him before, that first night, but somehow this felt different. More intimate. You could see every line of muscle in his stomach, the dark hair trailing down from his navel, the thick length of his cock jutting proudly from his hips as he climbed onto the bed.

Your hand finally, finally, slipped beneath the waistband of your smallclothes.

Jace settled between Cassandra's thighs, bracing himself above her on his forearms, and for a moment they just looked at each other. Then he pushed his cock deep inside her—slow, so agonizingly slow—and Cassandra's head fell back with a moan that you felt echo through your own body.

“Your grace—-hhhhh,” she moaned.

Your fingers found the wet heat between your legs, already slick and aching. You bit your lip hard to keep from making a sound.

"Fuck," Jace groaned, his hips rolling in a steady, measured rhythm. "You feel perfect. So tight and wet for me."

"Harder," Cassandra gasped, her nails raking down his back hard enough to leave red marks. "Please, your grace, I need—"

He gave her exactly what she wanted.

The gentleness evaporated like morning mist, replaced by something raw and almost brutal. Jace pulled nearly all the way out before slamming his cock back into her, and Cassandra cried out—pleasure and pain mixing in her voice in a way that made your fingers circle faster over your clit. His hand fisted in her hair, yanking her head back to expose the long line of her throat, and his teeth found the skin there, biting down just hard enough to make her gasp.

"Is this what you wanted?" Jace growled, his voice low and dangerous in a way you'd never heard before. Not gentle, princely Jace. This was something darker. "This what you've been thinking about all through supper? Sitting there with your father, making polite conversation, while all you could think about was having my cock inside you?"

"Yes," Cassandra sobbed, her body arching to meet each brutal thrust. The obscenity of the words, the rawness of it, sent liquid heat flooding through you. "Gods, yes, don't stop—please don't stop—"

Your fingers worked faster, your other hand coming up to muffle any sounds threatening to escape your throat. You could feel your own wetness coating your fingers, could feel the tension building low in your belly as you watched Jace fuck Cassandra with single-minded intensity.

"Greedy little thing," Jace muttered, but there was dark satisfaction in his tone. His free hand moved between their bodies, and you knew exactly what he was doing when Cassandra suddenly cried out sharply, her whole body going rigid. He was circling her clit with his thumb while he pounded into her, giving her pleasure from two directions at once, and the thought of it—the thought of him doing that to you—made your legs tremble.

"Jace, I'm going to—oh gods, I'm going to come—"

"That's it," he encouraged, his voice rough and strained. "Come on my cock. Let me feel you, sweetling."

She shattered. Her whole body convulsed, back arching off the bed, mouth open in a silent scream before the sound finally tore from her throat—his name, over and over, like a prayer. You could see the way her cunt clenched around him, could see the exact moment the pleasure crested and broke over her.

Your own fingers moved desperately, chasing the same release, imagining it was Jace's hand between your thighs, Jace's cock filling you, Jace's voice in your ear telling you how good you felt. But Jace didn't stop. He kept fucking Cassandra through her peak, relentless, using her body to chase his own pleasure as she whimpered and clutched at the sheets beneath her. Her sensitivity must have been overwhelming, but he showed no mercy, just kept driving into her with brutalness. 

He was so undeniably good at this, at fucking whores, noble ladies, at driving his cock into their cunts and making them squeal beneath him from the pleasure.

"Too much," she gasped, but her hips were still rising to meet his, her body betraying her words. "Y-your grace, it's—fuck—it's too much—"

"You can take it," he said, and there was something almost cruel in his certainty. "You always take it so well for me."

His rhythm grew erratic, desperate. You could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenched, the muscles in his arse flexing with each thrust. He was close—so close—

Your own pleasure was building, that familiar tightening, that pressure mounting—

Jace pulled out suddenly, wrapping his hand around himself and stroking once, twice, before he came with a groan that sounded almost pained. His seed spilled across Cassandra's stomach in thick ropes, marking her, claiming her, and the sight of it—the raw, animalistic possession of it—sent you tumbling over the edge.

You bit down on your palm hard enough to taste blood, muffling the sound threatening to tear from your throat as pleasure crashed through you in waves. Your fingers didn't stop, working you through it, drawing it out until you were shaking and oversensitive and barely able to see through the haze.

When you finally came back to yourself, gasping and trembling, Jace was cleaning Cassandra with gentle touches that seemed almost absurd after the brutality of moments before. She was boneless against the pillows, looking thoroughly debauched, her hair a tangled mess and her skin flushed pink.

"Stay," Jace said quietly, pulling her against his chest.

"I shouldn't," Cassandra murmured, but she was already nestling into him, her head tucked beneath his chin. "If someone finds out—"

"Let them find out. I don't care."

You wanted to laugh at the lie of it. Of course he cared. He just didn't care enough not to fuck her. Within minutes, Cassandra's breathing had evened out into sleep, her body going lax in his arms. Jace stared at the ceiling for a long while, his expression unreadable in the dim light. One hand stroked absently through her hair, gentle in a way that made your chest ache.

Then he turned his head slightly—and for one heart-stopping moment, his gaze seemed to land exactly where you knelt. Directly at the wall. Directly at your hiding place.

But that was impossible. He couldn't see you through solid stone. Couldn't know you were there, hand still between your thighs, lips swollen from biting back your moans, watching him like some desperate, pathetic creature.

You jerked back from the hole anyway, your heart hammering wildly against your ribs. Your whole body was trembling—from the release, from the fear of discovery, from shame so acute it felt like it might choke you. You'd just brought yourself to peak while watching your cousin fuck another woman. While imagining it was you in that bed, you he was whispering filth to, you he was making come apart on his cock.

This was sick. Wrong. You were sick and wrong and yet, deep down, you knew, with terrible certainty, that you'd be back tomorrow night. And the night after that. Until this madness either consumed you or destroyed you entirely.

You barely slept that night.

Every time you closed your eyes, you saw him, his shoulders, his body, his thick cock, the way his hand had fisted in Cassandra's hair, the rough timber of his voice as he'd commanded her to come. And beneath it all, the shameful memory of your own hand between your thighs, chasing pleasure you had no right to feel.

When dawn finally broke, you were grateful for it.

Your ladies dressed you in silence, perhaps sensing your foul mood. The gown today was the palest blush pink. The bodice was fitted with embroidered silver thread in delicate patterns that caught the morning sun. The neckline dipped low, modest enough for court but still flattering, drawing the eye. Long flowing sleeves of sheer silk hung from your shoulders, gossamer-thin, moving like water with each gesture. The skirts were layers upon layers of the same pale silk, creating an almost dreamlike effect as you walked, the fabric seeming to float around you.

The walk to the council chamber felt longer than usual. You nodded to the guards, smiled at passing servants, and tried not to think about the fact that Jacaerys would be here today. His first small council meeting. Sitting across from you for hours while you pretended you hadn't watched him fuck Lady Baratheon into the mattress last night.

Gods give you strength.

The council chamber was already filling when you arrived. "Good morrow, niece," Rhaenyra greeted you warmly as you took your seat.

"Your Grace." You settled into your chair, arranging your skirts, trying not to look at the empty seat that would soon be occupied.

Others filtered in quick waves, Lord Bartimos Celtigar, Master of Coin; Ser Steffon Darklyn, Commander of the City Watch; a handful of other lords whose presence was required. The table filled, voices murmuring in low conversation.

Then the door opened again, and Jacaerys entered.

He looked... gods, he looked perfect. Rested and put-together in a way that seemed deeply unfair given what you knew he'd been doing until late into the night. His doublet was his usual black with red embroidery, his dark hair neatly combed, and when he smiled at his mother, it was warm and genuine and completely utterly unbothered.

"Apologies for my lateness," he said, taking the empty seat directly across from you.

Of course. Of course he'd be directly in your line of sight.

His eyes met yours for a brief moment—polite, pleasant, utterly indifferent—before moving on. No recognition. No awareness that anything was amiss. He had no idea what you'd witnessed. No idea that you'd spent the night with your hand between your thighs, imagining it was you in Cassandra Baratheon's place.

"Let us begin," Rhaenyra said once everyone had settled. She gestured to Grand Maester Gerardys. "The reports from the North, if you would."

Gerardys cleared his throat and began reading, something about increased wildling activity beyond the Wall, requests from the Night's Watch for additional men and supplies. You forced yourself to pay attention, to nod at the appropriate moments, to look anywhere except at Jacaerys.

It was going to be a very long meeting. The discussion moved from the North to the Stepstones, where Daemon's efforts to hold the islands remained precarious at best. Then to trade disputes with Pentos, grain shortages in the Reach, and a particularly tedious debate about tax collection methods that made you want to throw yourself from the nearest window.

Jacaerys contributed thoughtfully when asked, his observations intelligent and well-reasoned. He'd been well-trained for this, you realized. Rhaenyra had made sure her heir would be ready to rule, ready to navigate the complexities of statecraft. Of the Realm. 

Ready to be the perfect prince while fucking half the women in King's Landing in his spare time.

"There is another matter," Rhaenys said, her voice cutting through your spiraling thoughts. She was looking at you, and there was something in her expression that made your stomach clench. "The matter of our dragons and their war-readiness."

The table went quiet.

"The realm is at peace," Lord Corlys pointed out carefully.

"For now," Rhaenys replied. "But peace is a fragile thing, as we all learned during the—" she paused, choosing her words carefully, "—recent troubles. We cannot afford to be complacent."

"What are you suggesting?" Rhaenyra asked, though her tone suggested she already knew.

"That we ensure our dragons are battle-ready. That we train them for war, even if we pray that war never comes." Rhaenys turned her sharp gaze fully on you. "Cannibal, in particular, has never been tested in true combat. He's large, powerful, but wild and untested."

Your jaw tightened. "Cannibal doesn't need testing. He's—"

"A wild dragon who's only known freedom," Rhaenys interrupted, not unkindly. "I'm not questioning your bond with him, child. I'm suggesting that bond needs to be forged stronger and that will only come through discipline."

"You want me to train him for war," you said flatly.

"I want you to prepare him for the possibility of war." Rhaenys leaned forward slightly. "With drills and formation flying with the other dragons. Learning to respond to commands in the chaos of battle. These things take time and practice."

You wanted to argue. Wanted to say that Cannibal would never tolerate such constraints, that he'd sooner eat the other dragons than fly in formation with them. That forcing him into drills and formations would break something fundamental in the bond between you, the trust that came from respecting his need for freedom.

"I don't think it's a good idea," you said carefully. "Cannibal isn't like the other dragons. He's larger, older in his ways. Trying to force him into formations could be potentially dangerous."

"Dangerous for whom?" Daemon asked, sounding genuinely curious rather than mocking. "For you, or for the other dragons?"

"Both," you admitted. "Cannibal doesn't play well with others. He never has. That's why he lived alone on Dragonstone for so long, why he—" you stopped yourself before saying ate the other dragons, because that seemed impolitic in the moment. "Why he prefers solitude."

"All the more reason to socialize him now," Rhaenys countered. "Before we're in the middle of a battle and he decides another dragon looks appetizing."

A few uncomfortable chuckles around the table. It wasn't really a joke, not one you found particularly funny. 

"What about Vhagar?" you asked, grasping for any argument. "She's larger, older. Is Aemond expected to fly formation drills with her?"

"Vhagar is already battle-tested," Rhaenys replied. "She fought in Aegon's Conquest, in the wars since. She knows what's expected. Cannibal has only ever known hunting sheep and being left alone."

It stung because it was true. For all his size and power, Cannibal had never been to war. Had never been asked to do anything more demanding than fly when you called and let you sit astride him while he soared through the clouds.

"What does Her Grace think?" you asked, turning to Rhaenyra. Let the Queen make this decision, let it not be your choice to potentially damage the one pure thing in your life.

Rhaenyra studied you for a long moment, her expression deep in thought. "I think Rhaenys makes valid points. But I also trust your judgment when it comes to your dragon. If you truly believe this would be harmful rather than helpful, I'll take that into consideration."

It was a careful, political answer. She was giving you an out, but also making it clear that refusing would require solid justification, not just childish objection. 

"I'll think about it," you said finally. "Perhaps we could start small. Test his tolerance before committing to full formation drills."

"A reasonable compromise," Rhaenys agreed, though she didn't look entirely satisfied. "We'll begin in a week's time. Simple exercises first."

The knot in your stomach tightened, but you nodded anyway.

"What about Vermax?" Daemon asked, his gaze sliding to Jacaerys with lazy interest. "The heir's dragon should certainly be included in this training."

"Vermax and I train regularly," Jace said, and there was the slightest edge of defensiveness in his tone.

"In the training yard, yes," Rhaenys replied. "But have you ever taken him into simulated combat? Flown him through fire and smoke? Tested his response time when startled?"

Jace's jaw tightened. "No."

"Then you'll join us as well," Rhaenys said, brooking no argument. "All dragonriders of fighting age. Baela, Rhaena, Aegon if we can pry him away from his cups long enough."

"Then it's settled," Rhaenyra said, her tone making it clear the discussion was closed. "Rhaenys will oversee the training regimen. All dragonriders are expected to participate." Her eyes found yours. "Including you, niece. I know Cannibal prefers his solitude, but this is necessary."

You bit back a dozen more arguments and simply nodded. "As you command, Your Grace."

The meeting dragged on for another hour, more reports, more discussions, more decisions that needed to be made. Through it all, you were acutely aware of Jacaerys sitting across from you. The way he listened intently when others spoke. The way his fingers drummed absently against the table when he was thinking. The way he looked so effortlessly princely while you sat there trying not to remember the sound of his voice, rough with pleasure, commanding Cassandra to come for him.

Finally, finally, Rhaenyra called an end to it. "Same time in three days. Try not to let anything catch fire before then."

You stood quickly, eager to escape before—

"Walk with me?" Rhaenys said, appearing at your elbow.

Of course because the gods clearly thought you hadn't suffered enough today. You fell into step beside her, following her out of the council chamber and down a side corridor. She said nothing for a long moment, just walked with that regal bearing she'd never lost, even after being passed over for the throne.

"You seem troubled," she finally said.

"I don't think Cannibal will take well to this training. I'm worried it will damage our bond."

Rhaenys studied you for a long moment, clearly unconvinced that was the whole truth. "He'll adjust. The bond between you is strong enough to weather some discomfort."

"It's not just discomfort. He's not like the other dragons. He's—"

"Wild. Yes, I know. But wildness can be channeled, shaped, without breaking it entirely." She squeezed your shoulder gently. "Trust me, and more importantly, trust him. Trust that your bond is stronger than a few training exercises. He did choose you, at the end of the day."

You nodded, not trusting yourself to speak.

"Now," Rhaenys said, her tone shifting to something lighter, "I believe Helaena was looking for you earlier. Something about her insects?"

Right. Helaena. Safe, sweet Helaena who wouldn't ask probing questions about why you looked like you hadn't slept properly in days.

"Thank you," you said quietly. "For everything, Aunt."

Rhaenys smiled, though there was something sad in it. "Go. Spend time with your cousin. The gods know there are precious few people in this world who'll love us without wanting something in return."

You found Helaena in her chambers, which were somehow both cluttered and organized in a way only she could manage. Jars and terrariums covered every surface, each containing some specimen or another, there were butterflies, beetles, spiders, things you couldn't even name. It was entirely Helaena. 

"You came," Helaena said, looking up from where she was carefully transferring a large iridescent beetle from one container to another. Her silver-gold hair was loose around her shoulders, and she wore a simple gown of pale green that brought out the unusual color of her eyes. "I wasn't sure you would."

"Of course I came." You settled onto the cushioned bench beside her workspace, careful not to disturb anything. The layers of your pink gown pooled around you like flower petals. "What have you found, dear cousin?"

Helaena's face lit up in that rare, genuine smile she reserved for the things she truly loved. "A stag beetle. Look at his mandibles, aren't they magnificent?"

You looked. The beetle was indeed impressive, its horn-like mandibles nearly as long as its body, gleaming black with hints of deep purple when the light hit them right. "Beautiful," you agreed, and meant it.

For the next hour, Helaena showed you her collection, explaining in her soft, sometimes disjointed way about each specimen's habits and characteristics. You listened, grateful for the distraction, for the simplicity of her enthusiasm. Here, there were no council meetings or dragon training or inappropriate thoughts about cousins. 

"Lord Cregan Stark sent me a letter," Helaena said suddenly, interrupting her own explanation about moth wing patterns.

You blinked. "Did he?"

"Yes. He's coming to court for the feasts. The ones for Jace." She was studying a moth wing with intense focus, not meeting your eyes. "He asked if he might call on me. To discuss insects."

Something in her tone made you pause. "Ah, I see, insects."

"He's interested in the wildlife of the North. The creatures that survive the cold. The ice spiders." Helaena finally looked up, and there was something almost vulnerable in her green eyes. "Do you think that's really why he wants to call on me?"

Oh. Oh.

Cregan Stark was young, newly Lord of Winterfell after his father's passing two years past. By all accounts he was honorable, strong, kind, everything a northern lord should be. And if he was expressing interest in Helaena...

"I think," you said carefully, "that Lord Cregan would be very fortunate if you agreed to speak with him. About insects or anything else, dear cousin."

Helaena's cheeks flushed pink. "He's very kind in his letters. Patient and he doesn't mind when I ramble about things most people find boring. He even sent me a preserved ice spider specimen from beyond the Wall. Said he thought I might like to study it."

Your heart softened. A man who would hunt down rare specimens for Helaena's collection was a man worth considering. "That's incredibly thoughtful, Hel."

"Mother says I should consider marriage eventually. That I can't hide in my chambers with my insects forever." Helaena's voice was quiet, tinged with something like resignation. "But most lords look at me like I'm mad. Like I'm something to be pitied or fixed."

"Then they're fools," you said firmly. "You're brilliant, Helaena. Anyone with half a brain can see that."

"Lord Cregan doesn't look at me like that. At least, not in his letters." She turned back to her moths, a small smile playing at her lips. "He asks questions. Real questions about my observations and theories. He doesn't just humor me."

"Will you see him when he arrives?"

"I... I believe I might." She looked back down at her specimens, fingers gentle as she adjusted a butterfly's position in its case. "It's strange. I never thought—I mean, I never imagined someone might actually want to court me. Not really."

"You're a princess of the blood," you pointed out. "Half the lords in Westeros would trip over themselves for the chance."

"They'd trip over themselves for the crown and the alliance," Helaena corrected softly. "Not for me. But Lord Cregan, he talks to me like I'm a person. Not a prize to be won or a madwoman to be managed."

You reached over and squeezed her hand. "Then I hope he lives up to his letters. And if he doesn't, I'll feed him to Cannibal."

Helaena laughed, a rare, bright sound that made you smile despite everything. "The wolf meets the spider in the dark. The spider weaves while the wolf watches. But which one catches which?"

Another one of her strange pronouncements. You'd long since given up trying to decipher them.

"What about you?" Helaena asked, suddenly aware of her surroundings again. "Will you dance with any lords at the feasts?"

Your stomach dropped. You'd almost managed to forget about the upcoming feasts, the parade of eligible ladies who would be throwing themselves at Jacaerys while you watched from the sidelines.

"I doubt it," you said lightly. "You know I prefer the edges of the room to the center of attention."

"The spider watches from the corner," Helaena murmured again, and something in her tone made you look up sharply. "But the spider doesn't know it's caught in a web of its own making."

Helaena suddenly moved on, returning her attention to her beetles, humming softly to herself. Leaving you to wonder if she'd just made an innocent observation or if she somehow knew exactly what you'd been doing in the dark corners of your chambers.

You stayed with Helaena until the sun began to set, letting her soft voice and gentle presence soothe the jagged edges of your thoughts. Here, at least, things made sense. Here, you could almost forget the madness consuming you.

Almost.

When you finally took your leave, pressing a kiss to the top of her silver head, she caught your hand.

"Be careful," she said quietly. "Webs are sticky things. Hard to escape once you're caught."

You had no answer for that. The walk back to your chambers was quiet, most of the castle beginning to prepare for the evening meal. When you reached your door, you found your ladies already waiting.

"We've prepared a bath, my lady," Lysa said with a smile. "Thought you might want to wash before supper."

Gods, yes. Perhaps hot water and lavender oil could wash away the tension coiled tight in your shoulders, the restless energy that had plagued you all day.

"Thank you," you said, letting them usher you inside.

The tub had been set up near the fire, steam rising from the water in lazy curls. Your ladies helped you out of the elaborate pink gown, unlacing the bodice and lifting the layers of silk away until you stood in just your shift. Then that too was removed, and you stepped into the blessed heat of the bath with a sigh.

"We'll be just outside if you need anything, my lady," Maryse said. "Call when you're ready to dress for supper."

You nodded, already sinking deeper into the water, letting it cover you up to your shoulders. The heat seeped into your muscles, and for the first time all day, you felt some of the tension begin to ease.

You closed your eyes, breathing in the scent of lavender, trying to empty your mind of everything, council meetings, dragon training, Helaena's cryptic warnings, and most especially the memory of brown eyes and dark hair and hands that knew exactly how to make a woman fall apart.

Stop, you told yourself firmly. Just stop.

For a few blessed minutes, you succeeded. The water, the warmth, the quiet—it was almost peaceful.

Then something moved at the edge of your vision. You opened your eyes and looked toward the rim of the tub. A spider. But not just any spider, this thing was massive, easily the size of your palm, with thick hairy legs and a body that seemed to pulse as it crept along the wooden edge of the tub. Moving toward you.

The scream tore from your throat before you could stop it, pure, primal terror that echoed off the stone walls.

You shot to your feet, water sloshing over the sides of the tub, your whole body shaking as you tried to scramble away from the creature. But the tub was slippery, your feet finding no purchase, and you nearly fell before catching yourself on the edge.

"My lady!" You heard Lysa's voice, muffled through the door, and then—

The door burst open, but it wasn't your ladies who came through first.

It was Jacaerys. He must have been passing in the corridor, must have heard your scream and thought, what? That you were being murdered? Attacked? He rushed in with his hand on his sword hilt, eyes wild, clearly ready to face down whatever threat had made you scream like that.

And then he froze. Because you were standing there, in the middle of the tub, completely and utterly naked. Water streaming down your body, your silver hair plastered to your back and shoulders, every inch of you exposed in the firelight.

For one endless, horrifying moment, neither of you moved.

His eyes went wide, his mouth falling open slightly as his gaze traveled down and then snapped back up to your face. You could see the exact moment his brain caught up with what he was seeing, the way his cheeks flushed, the way his throat worked as he swallowed.

"I—" he started, his voice rough. "I heard you scream, I thought—"

"SPIDER!" you shrieked, pointing at the creature that was still making its way around the rim of the tub, seemingly unconcerned with the chaos it had caused. "There's a massive fucking spider, Jace!"

Jace's gaze followed your pointing finger, and you watched him take in the admittedly impressive specimen currently terrorizing you.

"That's, yes, that's a spider," he said, somewhat stupidly.

"I KNOW IT'S A SPIDER!" you yelled, still frozen in place, acutely aware that you were naked and he was staring and your ladies were probably right behind him in the corridor and this was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to you.

Your ladies burst in then, Lysa and Maryse and Elaena, their faces panicked, clearly thinking you were dying. They took in the scene, you, naked in the tub. Jacaerys, standing there looking like he'd been struck by lightning. The spider, innocently crawling.

"My lady!" Lysa gasped, immediately grabbing a linen cloth and rushing forward to wrap it around you.

But the damage was done. Jacaerys had seen everything. Every curve, every inch of skin, every part of you that should have remained hidden beneath layers of silk and propriety. 

Damn the Gods. Damn you, this is your punishment for being a pervert. 

"I'll just—" Jace stammered, backing toward the door, his face now bright red. "I'll—the spider—sorry—I thought—"

He practically fled, the door slamming shut behind him. You stood there, wrapped in the linen cloth, shaking for entirely different reasons now.

"Oh gods," you breathed. "Oh gods, he saw me. He saw—"

"It's all right, my lady," Maryse said soothingly, though she looked rather scandalized herself. "It was an accident. He heard you scream and thought you were in danger."

"I AM in danger!" you gestured wildly at the spider, which had now made it halfway around the tub. "That thing is massive!"

"It's just a spider, my lady," Elaena said gently, moving toward it with a cloth. Within moments she'd captured it and was carrying it toward the window. "See? Harmless."

Harmless. Right. Unlike the memory now burned into both your and Jacaerys's minds of you standing bare-arsed naked in a bathtub while he stared at you like a man who'd forgotten how to breathe.

"We need to get you dressed," Lysa said firmly, already moving to pull out clothes. "Supper will be starting soon."

"I can't go to supper," you said, your voice rising. "I can't face him after—after he just saw me naked."

"You have to go to supper, my lady," Maryse said, not unkindly. "If you don't, everyone will wonder why. And rumors will start."

Worse rumors than "the princess screamed bloody murder over a spider and her cousin saw her naked"? You doubted it. But she was right. You had to go. Had to face him. Had to somehow sit through an entire meal pretending that nothing had happened while knowing that Jacaerys now knew exactly what you looked like without clothes. While knowing that you'd seen the look in his eyes—surprise, yes, but also something else. Something heated that had flashed across his face before embarrassment took over.

"Fuck," you muttered under your breath.

"Language, my lady," Lysa chided gently, but she was already helping you out of the tub.

This was going to be the longest supper of your entire life.

The great hall was already filled with lords and ladies when you arrived, late enough that most people were already seated. The musicians were playing something lively from the gallery, servants moved between tables with wine and platters of food, and the general hum of conversation and laughter filled the space.

You wanted to sink through the floor and disappear.

Somehow you made it to your seat at the high table without tripping over your own feet, a minor miracle considering how unsteady you felt. You'd been dressed in a gown of deep purple silk, your ladies working quickly to make you presentable. Your hair was still slightly damp at the ends, but they'd managed to braid it back in a way that hid the worst of it.

Baela was already seated beside you, laughing at something Rhaena had said. On your other side, Helaena was staring at her plate with that distant expression she sometimes got. And across the table Jacaerys sat beside Lady Cassandra Baratheon.

He was leaning toward her, saying something that made her laugh, that refined, ladylike laugh you'd heard through the stone wall. His hand rested on the table close to hers, not quite touching but near enough to be intimate. He looked perfectly composed, perfectly at ease, like he hadn't just seen his cousin naked less than an hour ago.

You grabbed your wine cup and drank deeply.

"You have no idea," you muttered into your cup.

The meal began, course after course of roasted meats and honeyed vegetables and fresh bread. You pushed food around your plate, barely tasting anything, hyperaware of every movement Jace made across the table. The way he smiled at Cassandra. The way she touched his arm when she spoke. The easy familiarity between them that spoke of more than one night together. 

"All right, what's wrong?" Baela asked finally, setting down her fork and turning to face you properly. "You've been sulking since you sat down. Did something happen at council?"

"No," you said quickly. Too quickly.

Baela's eyes narrowed. "Then what?"

You glanced around, making sure no one else was listening. Then you leaned closer and whispered, "Jace saw me naked."

For a moment, Baela just stared at you. Then she burst out laughing—loud enough that several people turned to look.

"Shut up, this is not funny!" you hissed, your face burning with shame. 

"It's a little funny," Baela managed between gasps. "How in the seven hells did that happen?"

You covered your face with your hands, mortified beyond measure. "There was a spider. A huge one. He was in my bath and then I screamed and he must have been in the corridor and he came running in thinking I was being murdered or something and I was just—standing there—completely bare-arsed—hh"

Baela was practically crying with laughter now, her hand pressed to her stomach. "A spider," she wheezed. "You're telling me the mighty dragonrider who claimed Cannibal, who sits on the small council, screamed loud enough to bring the heir running because of a spider?"

"It was a very large spider," you said defensively, though your own lips were twitching despite your mortification.

“And, so, he saw everything?"  Her voice went low and suggestive, bringing a finger to her mouth and biting the tip of it as her lips curved into a smirk.

"Everything," you confirmed miserably. "Full frontal view. Nothing left to imagination."

"Oh gods," Baela wiped at her eyes. "And what did he do?"

"Stood there like a fish for about three seconds, went bright red, stammered something about the spider, and then fled like the castle was on fire."

"That's amazing," Baela said, still grinning. "That's the best thing I've heard all week."

"I'm glad my humiliation amuses you," you said sourly, but you couldn't quite hold onto your irritation. It was sort of funny, in a horrifying, want-to-die sort of way.

"Look at the bright side," Baela said, taking a sip of her wine. "Now you know he's definitely seen you naked. That's more than most ladies can say about the heir before marriage."

You kicked her under the table.

"Ow! I'm just saying—"

"Well don't," you muttered, risking a glance across the table.

Jace was still deep in conversation with Cassandra, his attention completely focused on her. He hadn't looked your way once since you'd sat down. Was probably trying very hard not to look at you, considering what he'd seen.

Your stomach twisted, he'd seen you naked—completely, utterly exposed—and less than an hour later he was here, flirting with the woman he'd been fucking just the night before. Like it meant nothing. Like you meant nothing. Which of course you didn't. You were his cousin, a political piece on the board, same as everyone else.

The fact that you'd watched him through a hole in the wall, that you'd brought yourself to come while imagining his hands on you instead of Cassandra—that was your problem. Your shame to carry, your degenerate shame.

"You're doing it again," Baela said quietly.

"Doing what?"

"Looking like you want to kill someone, dear cousin." She followed your gaze across the table. "Ah. Lady Cassandra."

"You know she's not the only one, right?"

You blinked. "What?"

"Jace." Baela kept her voice low, casual, as she cut into her meat. "He's got quite the appetite, from what I hear. Half the ladies at court have warmed his bed at some point or another."

Your stomach twisted even though you already knew this. Had seen it.

"Why are you telling me this?"

Baela shrugged, a wicked grin playing at her lips. "Just saying, if you ever wanted to... you know. Sample the goods before he's shackled to some boring highborn wife, now's your chance. He's not particularly discriminating."

You nearly choked on your wine. "Baela!"

"What? I'm just saying.” She leaned closer, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "I'm told he's very talented, Lady Cassandra certainly seems satisfied."

"I am not having this conversation with you," you hissed, your face burning.

"Your loss." Baela sat back with a laugh. "Though honestly, I don't blame you for looking. He's annoyingly pretty for someone with such common blood. Those brown eyes, that hair, he’s very brooding hero of a song, isn't he?"

"You're drunk, Baela."

"I'm tipsy," she corrected, "and you're deflecting."

"I'm not interested in Jace," you said firmly. "Not like that anyways."

It wasn't entirely a lie. You weren't interested in romancing with Jace. You didn't want his love or his devotion or whatever pretty words he whispered to the hoards of women in his bed. You just wanted, gods, you didn't even know what you wanted. To stop thinking about him, probably, most likely. And certainly to stop seeing his fucking gorgeous face every time you closed your eyes.

"Whatever you say," Baela said breezily, clearly not believing you but willing to drop it. "I'm just saying, the man's going to be married off soon. If you wanted a taste, the window's closing."

You rolled your eyes so hard it hurt. "You're impossible."

The conversation moved on, Rhaena leaned over to tell you both about some drama involving a lady-in-waiting and a stableboy, and you forced yourself to laugh, despite your gaze kept drifting across the table.

You didn't look through the hole that night.

It took every ounce of willpower you possessed, but you left that carved screen exactly where it was and climbed into bed fully clothed, too exhausted to even call your ladies back to help you undress properly. Sleep came fitfully, plagued by dreams of brown eyes and smirks and the memory of standing naked in a bathtub while your cousin stared.

When you woke, sunlight was streaming through your windows and someone was pounding on your door.

"My lady!" Lysa's voice, urgent and harried. "You need to wake! The lords are arriving and you're expected in the courtyard within the hour!"

Right. The festivities. The celebration of Jacaerys coming of age, of finding him a suitable bride. A full day of feasting and tournaments and watching eligible ladies parade themselves in front of the heir to the throne. Wonderful, just wonderful. Despite yourself, you managed to drag yourself out of bed and let your ladies descend upon you like a flock of determined birds. They stripped away yesterday's rumpled gown, scrubbed you with rose-scented soap, and set about the elaborate process of making you presentable as they did every morning. 

The gown they'd chosen was magnificent, it was a midnight blue silk that seemed to shimmer between black and deepest sapphire depending on how the light hit it. But you shook your head.

"No. The white one with the gold and red."

Your ladies exchanged glances but didn't argue. They brought out the dress you'd requested, white as fresh snow, with gold embroidery that traced patterns of dragons and flames across the bodice and down the flowing sleeves. Red accents caught the light like drops of blood, rubies sewn into the neckline and waist. The skirts were layers upon layers of silk and gossamer that moved like water, the train long enough to pool behind you like a bride. 

It was a statement, really, like Alicent’s green gowns. A reminder of who you were, a Targaryen, a dragon rider, not someone to be overlooked even as every other woman at court tried to catch the heir's eye. Your hair was left mostly down, falling in silver waves to your calves, with elaborate braids woven through and secured with gold and ruby pins shaped like dragon claws. By the time they finished, you looked like something out of a song. 

You barely heard the compliments ringing from your ladies tongues. You were already moving toward the door, trying to steel yourself for whatever fresh hell today would bring.

The courtyard was flooded when you arrived. Banners from a dozen different houses snapped in the morning breeze, there was Stark, Tully, Arryn, Lannister, more. Lords and their retinues filing in through the gates, their daughters dressed in their finest, all of them here for the same purpose.

To win the favor of the Crown Prince.

You spotted Cregan Stark immediately—he was hard to miss, tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair and grey eyes that seemed to take in everything. He was a gorgeous man, and currently  he was speaking with Rhaenyra, his manner respectful but not obsequious. A good sign, if Helaena was genuinely considering him. But it wasn't Cregan who made you pause. It was the way every male head in the courtyard seemed to turn as you descended the steps.

Lords, knights, visiting dignitaries, they all looked. Some with open admiration, others with more subtle interest, but they looked. You were used to attention, had grown up beautiful and aware of it, but this felt different. Or perhaps you were just more aware of it now, after everything.

"Seven hells," you heard someone mutter—one of the Tully boys, you thought. "Is that—"

You kept your chin high and your expression serene as you made your way through the crowd. Lords bowed as you passed, their sons stared, and you pretended not to notice any of it. Rhaenyra stood on the dais with Daemon beside her, already holding court. Jacaerys was there too, looking infuriatingly well-rested in black and red, his attention on whatever Lord Corlys was saying to him.

"Cousin," Aegon appeared at your elbow. "You're causing quite the stir. I think Lord Tyrell's son just walked into a pillar because he was too busy staring at you."

"Good," you said flatly.

Aegon laughed. "That's the spirit. Make them all suffer, my dear cousin. "

"Come," Aegon said, tugging at your elbow. "We're expected to stand there and look pretty while Father's old bannermen parade their daughters like prize mares. Should be entertaining enough."

You let him guide you to where the rest of the family was gathering. Rhaenyra sat in the place of honor with Daemon beside her, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. Helaena was tucked between Baela and Rhaena, already looking overwhelmed by the crowd. And Jacaerys stood at the center of it all, the sun around which this entire day revolved.

"How many do you think there are?" Aegon asked, settling in beside you with his cup. "I'm counting at least fifteen eligible ladies, and those are just the ones I can see from here."

"Shouldn't you be paying attention?" you asked. "You're supposed to be looking for a wife too."

"Gods, don't remind me." He took a long drink. "Mother's been at me for months about it. Apparently being six and twenty and unmarried is some sort of tragedy."

"Is it not?"

"It's called having standards," Aegon replied airily. "Low ones, admittedly, but standards nonetheless."

Rhaenyra stood, and the courtyard quieted. "Lords and ladies," she began, her voice carrying across the space. "We are honored by your presence here today as we celebrate my son and heir, Prince Jacaerys, and his coming of age. Many of you have traveled far to be here, and we welcome you all to King's Landing."

Polite applause. Jace smiled that princely smile, gracious and warm.

"Today marks the beginning of festivities that will last the fortnight," Rhaenyra continued. "Tournaments, feasts, and celebrations in honor of the Crown Prince. And perhaps, by the end, we will have even more to celebrate."

Meaning a betrothal. 

"But first," Rhaenyra gestured to where several young ladies stood with their fathers, all of them dressed in their finest, "we have been honored by requests from several noble houses to present their daughters to the Prince. We welcome them now."

"Here we go," Aegon muttered. "The parade of the desperate."

"Aegon," you hissed.

"What? I'm not wrong."

The first girl stepped forward, a Lannister, judging by her crimson gown and golden hair. She was beautiful in that polished, perfect way. You’re certain her Father, and all the other lords of Casterly Rock  told her she was destined for greatness. She curtsied deeply before Jace, her father presenting her with all the pomp and circumstance House Lannister could muster.

"Lady Cerelle Lannister," the herald announced. "Daughter of Lord Jason Lannister of Casterly Rock."

Jace took her hand and kissed it, saying something that made her blush and smile. You watched him be charming, watched him perform the role of interested suitor with practiced ease.

"She's pretty," Aegon observed. "Bit too much like looking in a mirror for my taste, all that gold hair and self-rightesnous."

"She seems nice enough."

"Nice and boring are often companions," Aegon replied. "Trust me, I know from experience."

The next girl was from House Tyrell, tall and willowy with dark curls and a nervous smile. Then a Tully girl with auburn hair and freckles. Then another, and another. Each one more beautiful than the last, each one curtsying and smiling and trying desperately to be memorable.

"This is torture," Aegon said after the sixth introduction. "How is Jace keeping that smile on his face? I'd have run screaming by now."

"It's called duty, you idiot."

"It's called martyrdom." He drained his cup and gestured for a servant to refill it. "You know what the problem is? They're all the same. Pretty, accomplished, perfectly trained to be queens. Where's the personality? The fire?"

"You want fire, marry a dragon rider," you said absently, watching as yet another lady—this one from the Stormlands—was presented to Jace.

"Excellent idea. Marry me."

You turned to look at him, startled. "What?"

"Marry me," Aegon repeated, gesturing expansively with his cup. "You're a dragon rider, you're beautiful, you already know all my worst qualities so there'd be no nasty surprises. We could get drunk together and ignore all our duties. It'd be perfect."

"You're not serious."

"I'm never serious. But the offer stands." He took another drink. "If all else fails, if the realm goes to shit and we're all desperate—you and me. We could do much worse."

You studied him for a moment. Aegon was handsome, you could admit that. Pretty in the way Targaryens often were, with his silver hair and sharp features. The drinking was a problem, and the complete lack of ambition, but he was kind in his way. Honest, at least, which was more than most lords could claim.

"If all goes to hell," you said slowly, "and we're both desperate and alone. I suppose I could do worse than you."

"High praise," Aegon said with a grin. "I'm touched. Truly."

"Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late. I'm already planning our wedding. We'll serve nothing but wine, scandalize the Faith, and let our dragons eat anyone who complains."

Despite everything, you laughed. It felt good, like releasing some of the pressure that had been building in your chest since yesterday. Then, another lady was presented, a Manderly girl from White Harbor, plump and pink-cheeked and clearly terrified. Jace was gentle with her, you noticed. He was patient and kind.

"He's good at this," you said quietly.

"He's had practice," Aegon replied, and there was something almost bitter in his tone. "Perfect Jace. Perfect heir. Does everything right, fucks everything that moves, and somehow still manages to look like a hero from a song."

"Jealous?"

"Absoloutely." Aegon studied his cousin across the courtyard. "I love Jace, don't get me wrong. But he's playing a game he doesn't even realize he's in. All these ladies throwing themselves at him, and he thinks it's because he's charming. Because they like him."

"That's not why?"

"They like his crown," Aegon said flatly. "They like the idea of being queen. Jace himself? He's just the pretty vessel holding the thing they actually want."

You said nothing, watching as Jace smiled at the Manderly girl, made her laugh despite her nervousness. Was Aegon right? Did all these women only want the crown?  Did you? No. You wanted—gods, you didn't even know what you wanted. But it wasn't his crown. It was him. The way he moved, the way he sounded, the way he looked when he was lost in pleasure. That had nothing to do with thrones or politics.

Which somehow made it worse.

"Lady Floris Baratheon," the herald announced, and your attention snapped back to the courtyard.

Another Baratheon girl, younger than Cassandra but with the same dark hair and sharp features. She curtsied beautifully, and Jace took her hand with the same courteous attention he'd given all the others.

"How many fucking Baratheon daughters are there?" Aegon muttered. "Lord Borros must spend half his time just keeping track of them all."

"Four, I think."

"Four. And they're all here trying to land the heir. Ambitious bastard, isn't he?"

You watched Floris smile up at Jace, watched him be charming and attentive. Was Cassandra here somewhere, watching this? Did she care that the man who'd been in her bed two nights ago was now entertaining her younger sister?

Did Jace care?

"This is going to be a very long fortnight," you said.

"Agreed." Aegon raised his cup in a mock toast. "To surviving it with our dignity intact."

"I'll drink to that."

He grinned and passed you his cup. You took it and drank deeply, letting the wine burn down your throat. It was going to be a very, very long fortnight indeed.

Several torturous hours later, you and Aegon were both well into your cups and had devolved into something resembling badly behaved children.

"I'm sorry," Aegon wheezed, barely containing his laughter, "but did that last one actually curtsy to his horse first before approaching Jace?"

"She did," you confirmed, your own shoulders shaking with suppressed giggles. "She absolutely did. I saw it, cousin."

"Maybe she thought the horse was the heir. Can't blame her—Vermax has better hair than Jace does."

You snorted wine through your nose, which only made Aegon laugh harder.

"You two are being disgraceful," Baela hissed from your other side, though her lips were twitching. "Show some decorum."

"Decorum is for people who aren't dying of boredom," Aegon replied, reaching for another cup from a passing servant. "We're performing a public service, really. Someone has to make this bearable."

"By getting drunk before noon?"

"Exactly. See? She understands."

You were about to respond when movement at the courtyard entrance caught your eye. Another arrival, late enough that most of the formal presentations had concluded. But this wasn't some minor lord with a daughter to parade. This was someone who commanded attention simply by existing.

He was tall—taller even than Cregan Stark—with broad shoulders and the kind of build that came from actually using a sword rather than just wearing one for decoration. Dark hair, though not as dark as Jace's, fell to his shoulders in waves that somehow looked artfully disheveled rather than unkempt. And his face—

"Oh no," Aegon said, following your gaze. "Oh, that's not fair."

"Who is that?" you asked, unable to look away.

"Trouble," Aegon replied. "That's Lord Dalton Greyjoy. The Red Kraken himself."

The Red Kraken. You'd heard stories, of course. The young Lord of the Iron Islands, who'd claimed his seat at six and ten after his father's death and had spent the years since becoming a legend. A reaver, a warrior, and by all accounts, devastatingly effective at both. He was dressed simply compared to the other lords—dark leather and salt-stained cloth rather than silk and velvet—but he wore it like armor. Like he had nothing to prove. Salt-and-pepper scruff covered his jaw, and when he smiled at something Daemon said, you caught a glimpse of white teeth.

"He's supposed to be in the Iron Islands," Aegon muttered. "What's he doing here?"

"The same thing everyone else is doing here," Baela said dryly. "Paying homage to the Crown Prince."

But Dalton Greyjoy wasn't looking at Jacaerys.

He was looking at you. His eyes—grey-green like storm-tossed seas—found yours across the crowded courtyard, and he didn't look away. Didn't pretend he hadn't been staring. Just held your gaze with the kind of bold confidence that should have been offensive but somehow wasn't.

Then he smiled. Slow and deliberate and knowing, like you'd shared some private joke.

"Oh, dear cousin, he's definitely trouble," Aegon said. "Look at him. Looking at you like—well, like Jace looks at literally every woman who crosses his path."

"Shut up," you muttered, but you didn't look away from Dalton.

"The Red Kraken," Baela mused. "Now that's interesting. He doesn't usually come to court. Prefers his islands and his ships from what I hear."

"And his salt wives," Aegon added. "Rumor has it he's got three. Or is it four now? I lose count."

"Salt wives aren't real wives," you said absently, still holding Dalton's gaze.

"Try telling him that."

Dalton was moving through the crowd now, making his way toward the dais where Rhaenyra sat. Lords parted for him—whether out of respect or wariness, you couldn't tell. Maybe both. There was something dangerous about him, something wild that expensive clothes and courtly manners couldn't quite hide. He knelt before Rhaenyra with surprising grace for someone so large. You couldn't hear what he said, but whatever it was made Daemon laugh, actually laugh, which was rare enough to be noteworthy.

Then Dalton stood, turned, and those storm-grey eyes found yours again. And the huge bastard, well, he started walking toward you.

"Oh shit," Aegon said gleefully. "Oh this is going to be good."

"If you say one embarrassing thing—" you started.

"Would I do that?"

"Yes. Regularly, you arse."

Dalton Greyjoy stopped in front of you, and up close he was even more imposing. Taller, broader, with the kind of presence that made the air feel heavier. 

"My lady," he said, and his voice was rough, like he'd spent too many years shouting orders over storm winds. "Lord Dalton Greyjoy, at your service."

He didn't kneel. Didn't bow. Just stood there looking at you like you were the only person in the entire courtyard.

"Lord Greyjoy," you managed, trying to remember how to be polite while several cups of wine deep. "Welcome to King's Landing."

"Is it?" He glanced around at the crowd, at the elaborate decorations, at the general excess of it all. "Seems like a lot of trouble for a party."

"It's a celebration, my lord," you corrected.

"Of the Crown Prince coming of age. Yes, I heard." His lips quirked. "Eight and ten years to grow up. We do it much faster in the Iron Islands."

"Everything's faster in the Iron Islands," Aegon interjected cheerfully. "Living, dying, marrying your cousin, certainly fucking your cousin."

"Aegon," you hissed.

But Dalton just laughed. "Your cousin speaks truth, if not tact. We're a practical people."

"Practical," Aegon repeated. "Is that what we're calling it?"

"Among other things." Dalton's attention returned to you, and the intensity of it made your breath catch. "I've heard stories about you, Princess. The girl who claimed Cannibal."

"They're just stories."

"Are they?" He leaned in slightly, lowering his voice. "I heard you walked up to him and asked him nicely. That he bowed his head and let you climb on his back like a trained horse."

"More or less," you admitted.

"Terrifying or impressive. I haven't decided which, my lady."

"Can't it be both?"

That smile again, sharp and interested, like a predator seeking its prey. "I suppose it can. I like that."

There was something in the way he looked at you—direct and unashamed—that felt different from the courtiers with their careful glances and veiled intentions. Dalton Greyjoy looked at you like he knew exactly what he wanted and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

"Are you here for the tournaments, my lord?" you asked, trying to steer the conversation to safer ground.

"Among other things." He straightened, hands clasped behind his back in a posture that should have looked casual but somehow seemed coiled, ready. "I'm here to see what all the fuss is about. The perfect prince, the eligible ladies, the great game of marriage and alliance." His eyes glinted. "And to see if the Dragon Princess lives up to her reputation."

"And does she?"

"I'll let you know," he said, and it sounded like a promise. "May I have the honor of your company at the feast tonight, my lady?"

Before you could answer, Aegon cut in. "She'd be delighted. Wouldn't you, cousin?"

You shot him a look that promised murder, but Dalton was already bowing, actually bowing this time, though it looked faintly mocking. "Until tonight, then."

He walked away, and you could feel his absence like a physical weight. You were certainly going to kill Aegon, kill him and feed him to Cannibal. 

"Well," Aegon said into the silence. "That was something."

"I hate you."

"No you don't. I just got you a dinner companion who isn't boring. You should be thanking me."

You should probably be worried, you thought. Dalton Greyjoy had a reputation that made even Daemon look respectable by comparison. But, nonetheless, instead you felt intrigued.

Which was probably dangerous. Definitely dangerous. But after days of watching Jace parade around with other women, of feeling invisible and foolish and consumed by wanting something you couldn't have. Maybe dangerous was exactly what you needed.

The remainder of the day had been a blur of increasingly bold lords and their sons trying to catch your attention. You'd smiled politely through it all, deflected propositions both subtle and explicit, and tried not to drink so much that you'd embarrass yourself at tonight's feast.

You'd failed at that last part.

The great hall had been transformed for the evening, there were now thousands of candles which casted everything in warm golden light, musicians played from the gallery, and long tables groaned under the weight of roasted meats and exotic fruits and wine from across the known world. The air smelled of smoke and spices and the musk of too many sweaty bodies pressed close together. You'd kept the white gown from earlier, the gold and red embroidery catching the candlelight as you moved. Your ladies had refreshed your hair, re-pinning the braids and adding fresh ruby clips, but otherwise you looked much the same as you had that morning.

Which apparently was more than enough, judging by the way heads turned as you entered. Dalton Greyjoy was already there, lounging at one of the lower tables with a cup in his hand and that same confidence he'd worn earlier. He saw you immediately—like he'd been watching the door—and stood.

"Princess," he said as you approached. "Come, sit. I've claimed the best seat in the hall."

"Have you?"

"Good view of the wine." He gestured to the seat beside him. "And now a better one."

You sat, aware of how he took up space without apology, all broad shoulders and long limbs sprawled in a way that suggested he'd never learned courtly posture and didn't particularly care to either. A servant poured wine, and Dalton took his cup, drinking deeply before setting it down with more force than necessary. "Seven hells, that's good. Better than the piss we brew on Pyke."

"I'm sure."

"You've never been to the Iron Islands." It wasn't a question.

"No."

"Good. It's a miserable place. Cold, wet, smells like dead fish and shit." He grinned. "But it's mine."

There was something about the way he said it, simple pride, no need to justify or explain. Just fact that sprung a buzz in your chest. 

"You're far from home," you observed.

"Aye. Your aunt summoned, so I came." He reached for a piece of bread, tearing it apart with his hands. "Hadn't planned on it, but then I heard about the festivities. The Crown Prince coming of age, all the pretty ladies competing for him." His eyes slid to you as he brought the bread to his mouth, tongue darting out to catch a crumb at the corner of his lips. He raised an eyebrow. "Thought it might be entertaining."

"And is it?"

"Getting better." He popped the bread in his mouth, still watching you while he chewed. "Tell me something. That dragon of yours—Cannibal. Is it true he ate three dragons on Dragonstone before you claimed him?"

You reached for your wine. "Two that I know of for certain. Possibly three."

"Fuck me." But he sounded impressed rather than horrified. "And you just walked up to him?"

"More or less." You took a sip, watching him over the rim of your cup.

"You're either the bravest woman in the Seven Kingdoms or the maddest." He leaned back in his chair, arms crossing over his chest as he studied you."Probably both."

"Most people say it was foolish."

"Most people are cowards."  He picked up his wine again, draining half the cup in one go. "I respect it. Taking what you want, consequences be damned. That's how you survive in this world."

The food kept coming—course after course. Servants appeared with platters of roasted duck, honeyed figs, spiced lamb. Dalton ate like a man who wasn't sure when his next meal would be, unbothered by the elaborate presentation. You picked at your own plate, more interested in the conversation than the food.

"You fight in the tournaments tomorrow?" you asked.

"Planning on it. Need to work off some of this." He gestured at the feast. "Can't spend all day drinking and eating without swinging a sword eventually. I'll go soft."

You doubted that. There was nothing soft about Dalton Greyjoy. You let your eyes drag over him, shoulders, arms, the way he took up space.

"Who do you think will win?" you asked. "The tourney, I mean."

"Not me," he said with a shrug. "I'm a better sailor than jouster. Give me a deck that's moving under my feet and I'm deadly. Put me on a horse in full plate and I'm just another idiot hoping not to fall off." He paused. "Your cousin, probably. The pretty one. Jacaerys."

Your jaw tightened slightly. "Jace is skilled."

"Aye, I've heard. Trained by the best, naturally." There was something in his tone—not quite mocking, but close. "Born with every advantage. Dragon, crown, looks that make ladies go weak. Must be nice."

"It has its challenges."

"I'm sure." He didn't sound particularly sympathetic. "Still. I'd take his challenges over mine any day."

A commotion near the high table drew your attention. Jace was standing, Lady Cassandra Baratheon beside him, her hand on his arm as they moved toward the dancing. You watched them go, watched her lean in to say something that made him smile, and your stomach dropped. Your hands curled into fists in your lap. 

"There's a look I know," Dalton said quietly.

You turned back to find him studying you, those storm-grey eyes too sharp. He was leaning back in his chair now, one arm draped over the back of it, completely relaxed.

"What look?"

"The one that says you want to set something on fire but you're too well-bred to do it." He tilted his head, watching you like a hawk. "What's he done to earn that?"

"Nothing. I don't—"

"Right." He drained his cup in one swallow and stood, extending his hand across the table. "Come on then."

"Where?"

"To dance. You're sitting here stewing and it's making me uncomfortable." He wiggled his fingers impatiently.

"I'm not—"

"You are." He stepped closer, hand still out. "And if I have to watch you watch him dance with that Baratheon girl for one more second, I'm going to start breaking things." His fingers curled slightly, beckoning. "Dance with me, Princess. Give the court something else to gossip about."

You shouldn't. You really, truly shouldn't.

You took his hand.

He pulled you up—quick enough that you stumbled slightly—and steadied you with a hand at your elbow before leading you onto the floor. Other couples were already moving, swirling past in a blur of silk and jewels. His hand settled at your waist, lower than was strictly proper, fingers spread wide against your back and he pulled you into the rhythm without missing a beat.

He moved with surprising grace for someone who'd just claimed to be better on a ship than a dance floor.

"You lied," you said, looking up at him. "You're good at this."

"I said I'm better on a ship. Didn't say I was shit at dancing." He spun you, sudden enough that you stumbled into his chest. His hand tightened on your waist, steadying you. "My mother made sure all her sons could dance. Said it was the one civilized thing we'd learn."

"Was she right?"

"Aye. Rest of it's all fighting and fucking and sailing." He said it casually, leading you back into the steps. "Not much call for poetry and courtly manners on Pyke."

You shouldn't have laughed, but you did, it was sharp and genuine, the sound surprising you. Something about his bluntness cut through all the careful political bullshit you'd been drowning in for days.

"That scandalize you?" he asked, grinning down at you. His teeth were very white against his tanned skin.

"No."

"Good. I'd hate to waste time pretending to be something I'm not." His thumb pressed against your waist, and you felt it through the silk. "Life's too fucking short for that."

The music swelled around you, violins rising. He pulled you closer, definitely too close now, close enough that you could feel the heat of him through your dress, definitely crossing into improper territory. But you didn't pull away. Just let him guide you through the steps, let yourself focus on the pressure of his hand, the solid weight of his shoulder under your palm. Anything other than Jace and Cassandra somewhere else on this floor.

"Better?" Dalton asked, voice low enough that only you could hear it over the music.

"What?"

"You stopped looking like you wanted to commit murder.” His eyes crinkled at the corners. “I'm taking that as progress."

"I never—"

"You did." He spun you again, pulled you back in. The smile on his face had an edge to it now. "Whatever he did, whoever he is, he's not worth it, Princess."

You wanted to argue. Wanted to defend something you couldn't even name, couldn't admit to yourself. But Dalton's hand was warm and steady against your waist, his grey eyes fixed on yours like you were the only person in the room, and for just a moment, just this one dance, you let yourself pretend. That you weren't obsessed with your cousin. That you hadn't spent the last three nights watching him fuck other women through a crack in the wall. That you were just a woman dancing with a man who looked at her like she mattered.

The song ended far too soon.

Dalton stepped back, but his hand stayed at your waist, lingering, his fingers flexing once against your ribs before he let go. "Thank you for the dance, Princess."

"Thank you for asking." Your skin felt cold where his hand had been.

"I'll be fighting tomorrow. In the melee, not the joust, I told you, I'm shit on horseback." That grin again, cocky and so sure of himself.  "Come watch me get my ass kicked by men in fancy armor."

"I might."

"You will." He said it like it was already decided, so much so, that you almost believed him. Then he bowed, properly this time, deep and formal, and walked away, disappearing back into the crowd.

You stood there for a moment, heart still racing from the dance, or maybe from the way Dalton had looked at you, all that damned confidence and heat and completely unbothered by the surrounding propriety. Your skin still tingled where his hand had been, that deliberate pressure at your waist.

He was handsome. You could admit that, at least to yourself. Rough around the edges in a way that was completely unlike the polished princes and lords you'd grown up around. Dangerous-looking. The kind of man your mother would warn you about. The kind you apparently couldn't stop thinking about for entirely different reasons than you should.

You pressed your fingers to your waist briefly, then dropped your hand. This was stupid. You were being stupid about two different men now, which seemed like an achievement in poor judgment.

When you finally turned to head back to your seat, you found Aegon waiting, leaning against a pillar with that knowing smirk plastered across his face.

"Well," he drawled, pushing off the pillar to stand beside you. "That was something."

"It was a dance."

"That wasn't just a dance." Aegon took a long drink from his cup, eyes gleaming with amusement. "That was him fucking you with your clothes on."

Heat flooded your face. "You're drunk."

"I'm always drunk. Doesn't make me wrong." He gestured with his cup, sloshing wine dangerously close to the rim, toward where Dalton had disappeared into the crowd. "Be careful with that one. He's not like these simpering southern lords. He takes what he wants."

"I'm not."

"I know. I'm just saying." Aegon leaned in closer, lowering his voice even though no one was near enough to hear. "The Red Kraken's got a reputation, and certainly not the fun kind like mine."

You looked back toward where Jace was still dancing with Cassandra, her head thrown back laughing at something he'd said.

"Maybe I need a reputation," you muttered.

Aegon raised his cup. "Now that's the spirit."

"Come on," Aegon said, tugging at your sleeve like a child. "Let's get out of here before someone tries to make us be social again."

"Where are we going?"

"Does it matter?" He was already pulling you toward the edge of the hall.

It didn't, not really. The hall was too hot, too crowded, the air thick with wine and perfume and the cloying smell of too many bodies pressed together. Too many people pretending to be things they weren't. You let Aegon pull you through a side door, the sudden quiet of the corridor making your ears ring.

Down one hallway, then another. Your footsteps echoed off stone. Up a winding staircase, too narrow and steep, the kind that hadn't been used in years. You recognized it dimly as leading to one of the old watchtowers, the ones that overlooked the bay.

"Aegon, we're going to break our necks," you said as he stumbled on a step, catching himself against the wall.

"Good." He kept climbing. "Better than dying of boredom down there."

The tower room at the top was small and forgotten. Dust motes floated in the moonlight streaming through narrow windows. There were  a few old weapons which hung on the walls, all rusted, decorative, and completely useless. The windows looked out over King's Landing, the city spread below like a carpet of flickering lights.

The sounds of the feast were distant here, muffled by layers of stone and height. You could barely hear the music anymore. Just the wind, and the sound of your own breathing still coming fast from the climb.

Aegon collapsed onto a bench beneath one of the windows, wine cup still in hand, sprawling back against the stone. You leaned against the opposite wall, pressing your shoulders into the cool stone. The breeze coming through the window felt good against your flushed skin, cutting through the wine-warm haze in your head.

"This is better," Aegon declared, gesturing broadly with his cup. "Much better. No one up here but us and the ghosts."

"Are there ghosts?"

"Probably." He took another drink, throat working. "Old tower like this? Someone definitely died here. Hopefully doing something more interesting than attending a feast."

You laughed, the sound strange and too loud in the small space, bouncing off stone. Your head was spinning pleasantly, everything soft and blurred at the edges. The wine had settled warm in your stomach, making your limbs feel loose and heavy. You slid down the wall until you were sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, your dress pooling around you. The stone was cold against your back even through the silk.

"You danced well with the Kraken," Aegon said after a moment.  His eyes were on you now, sharper than they should be considering how much he'd drunk. "He looked like he wanted to eat you."

"He looked like he wanted to dance."

"Same thing, with that one." Aegon tilted his head, studying you. His usual smirk had faded into something more serious. Almost sober. "Do you like him?"

"I barely know him." You picked at a loose thread on your dress.

"That's not what I asked."

You considered it, head tilted back against the stone. Did you like Dalton Greyjoy? He was attractive, certainly. Bold. Honest in a way that cut through all the bullshit.

"I don't know," you said finally. "Maybe. Does it matter?"

"Suppose not." Aegon was quiet for a moment, swirling the wine in his cup, watching the liquid catch the moonlight in wave-like ripples. Then, without looking at you: "Can I kiss you?"

You blinked, certain you'd misheard. "What?"

"Can I kiss you?" He did look at you now, and there was something almost vulnerable in his expression beneath the wine-flush. "I want to kiss someone. And you're here. And you're pretty. And you won't make it mean something it doesn't."

You should say no. Should laugh it off, make a joke, change the subject. This was Aegon—your cousin, your friend, the perpetually drunk prince who took nothing seriously.

But your head was spinning and your chest still ached from watching Jace with Cassandra, and Dalton's words kept echoing in your mind—life's too fucking short.

"Fuck it," you said, the words coming out steadier than you felt.

"Is that a yes?"

"It's a fuck it." You pushed yourself up slightly, meeting his eyes.

Aegon set his cup down on the bench and stood. He wasn't quite steady on his feet, swaying slightly as he crossed the small space to where you sat against the wall.

You had to tilt your head back to look up at him as he stopped in front of you, close enough that you could smell the wine on his breath, the faint scent of whatever oil he used in his hair. Up close like this, you could see everything. The wine-flush high on his cheekbones, the slightly glazed look in his purple eyes—Targaryen eyes, the same shade as your own. The way his chest rose and fell, breathing faster than the short walk across the room warranted.

He was handsome. The thought came to you clearly, like you were seeing him for the first time. When he wasn't making an ass of himself, when he wasn't performing for the court or drowning in his cups, when you actually looked at him, Aegon was undeniably, unfairly handsome.

"You're sure?" he asked, and his voice had gone quieter. Careful. Like he was giving you one last chance to back out, to laugh this off and pretend it never happened.

Your heart was pounding. "Stop asking and just—"

He dropped to his knees in front of you.

The movement brought him to your level, purple eyes locked on yours. His hand came up, hesitant at first, then surer, cupping your jaw. His thumb brushed across your cheekbone, and you realized you were holding your breath.

Then he kissed you.

It was nothing like you'd imagined kissing would be. Not that you'd spent much time imagining it, or maybe you had, late at night, alone in your bed, but those fantasies had been vague and shapeless. This was real. This was Aegon's mouth on yours, warm and wine-sweet and surprisingly gentle. His other hand found your waist, steadying himself, or maybe steadying you.

For a moment, you froze. Didn't know what to do with your hands, with your mouth, with any of it. Then something in you gave way. Your hands came up to grip his shoulders, solid, real, there and you kissed him back.

Aegon kissed like he did everything else, without any restraint, without second thoughts, just pure unfiltered fucking want. His mouth was hot against yours, tasting like wine and something hungrier, and his hands cupped your face like you were something precious he was afraid of breaking. He pressed closer, and you made a sound, and his tongue swept into your mouth.

Oh.

Your hands gripped shoulders because you needed something to hold onto, needed to ground yourself before you floated away entirely. He was solid under your grip, all lean muscle and warmth, so much warmer than you'd expected. When he tilted his head to deepen the kiss, to take more, something low in your belly clenched hard enough to hurt. 

This was wrong. This was Aegon. Your cousin. Your friend who you'd watched get drunk at a hundred feasts, who you'd laughed with and plotted with and shared secrets with. Who you'd never, not once, not ever, thought of like this.

But his mouth was moving against yours with a desperate kind of hunger, and his hands had slid from your face down to your waist, fingers digging in as he pulled you closer, pulled you against him. And your body was a traitor. Heat was pooling between your thighs, your breath coming in short gasps, your fingers twisting in the fabric of his doublet like you needed him closer, needed more.

One of his hands moved lower, gripping your hip, and you gasped into his mouth. He swallowed the sound, kissed you harder, like he wanted to crawl inside you.

When he finally pulled back, breaking the kiss to breathe, forehead pressed against yours, you were both panting. His eyes were dark, pupils blown wide, and his lips were red and swollen.

"Well," Aegon said, his voice rougher than usual. "That was—"

You blinked at him, trying to catch your breath. His breath warm against your lips. His hand came up to cup your cheek, thumb tracing along your jaw in a way that made your knees weak. 

"I'd like to do that again," he murmured, and there was something in his voice, something hungry and real beneath the usual bravado.

Your heart was pounding. His thumb was still moving against your skin, slow and deliberate, and you could feel the heat of him everywhere he touched. He was everywhere at once, and for the first time in your life you weren't looking at your cousin Aegon, you were staring at someone with pure, unfiltered want.

"Yes," you breathed.

He kissed you again—harder this time, more certain. His hand tightened on your waist, yanking you fully against him, and you could feel everything. The hard planes of his chest, the lean muscle of his thighs, and—gods—the unmistakable ridge of his cock pressed against your hip through layers of silk and leather.

You gasped into his mouth, and he swallowed the sound, tongue sliding hot and slick against yours. His hips rolled forward, slow, deliberate and the pressure of him grinding against you sent heat shooting straight between your legs.

Your knees actually went weak. If he wasn't holding you up, you'd have collapsed.

Your hands found his hair—silver silk between your fingers—and you pulled. Hard. He groaned, deep and guttural, and ground against you harder in response. You could feel yourself getting wet, the slick heat gathering between your thighs, soaking through your smallclothes. The knowledge that he was hard, that you'd made him hard, made you clench around nothing.

"Fuck," Aegon panted against your mouth before his lips dragged to your jaw, your throat. His hand slid down from your waist to your ass, gripping hard, pulling you tighter against him. "Fuck, you taste so good. Smell good. Feel so fucking good."

He thrust his hips forward again, the thick length of him dragging against your belly, and you both made sounds that were almost pained. 

You should stop this. Should push him away before this went too far. This was Aegon, your cousin, your friend who you'd grown up with—

His teeth scraped the sensitive spot below your ear and you whimpered. Actually whimpered like something desperate and needy, your hips rolling forward to meet his next thrust without your permission.

"That's it," he breathed against your skin, doing it again, sucking a mark into your throat that you'd have to hide tomorrow. His hand on your ass squeezed, angling you so when he ground forward again, the pressure hit directly against your aching cunt. "Gods, feel what you do to me? Feel how hard I am for you?"

"Aegon," you started, voice breaking, but you couldn't finish because he was kissing you again, deeper, filthier, his tongue fucking into your mouth while one hand fisted in your hair, pulling your head back to expose your throat and the other kept your hips pinned against his.

He found a rhythm now, rolling his hips against yours in steady, deliberate thrusts that had you panting into his mouth. Each movement dragged the hard length of his cock against you, the friction even through all the layers making you want to scream, want to hike up your skirts and feel him properly, skin to skin, want things you'd never let yourself want before.

You rolled your hips back, meeting him, matching his rhythm, and he groaned like you'd hurt him.

"Fuck, yes," he panted. "Just like that. Gods, you're so, I can feel how wet you are even through—"

He thrust harder, and you felt it, the heat of him, the thick ridge of his cock grinding directly against your clit through the soaked silk between your legs. The sensation made white spots burst behind your eyelids.

This wasn't gentle. Wasn't sweet or romantic or any of the things you'd imagined in your naive fantasies. This was pure animal want, raw and desperate and hungry. Fueled by too much wine and too many things neither of you wanted to think about. His body moving against yours like he wanted to crawl inside you, like he couldn't get close enough even though you were pressed together so tightly you could barely breathe.

Your hand slid down from his hair to his chest, feeling his heart hammering beneath your palm, then lower, reaching between your bodies toward the hard heat of him—

He caught your wrist. Held it. Both of you froze, breathing hard, hips still pressed flush together.

When you finally broke apart, gasping, flushed, his hair completely destroyed from your hands and your lips kiss-swollen and red, Aegon let out a shaky laugh against your neck.

"Gods," he breathed, forehead pressed to your shoulder. You could still feel him hard against your hip, could feel the answering wetness between your own legs. "We're idiots."

"Probably," you managed, your voice coming out hoarse. Wrecked.

"Definitely." But he wasn't pulling away. His hands were still on you, his body still pressed close, and you could feel him, still hard, maybe harder, against your hip. The evidence of what you'd just done. What you'd almost done. "This is a terrible idea."

"The worst."

"We should stop."

"We should." But your fingers were still twisted in his doublet.

His hand flexed on your hip, thumb pressing into the bone. "One more?"

You pulled him down by his hair and kissed him again. This time there was no hesitation. There was no pretense of this being innocent or simple. Just heat and hunger and his hands sliding down to grip your ass through your skirts, hauling you against him so hard you felt the breath leave your lungs.

You could feel the thick, insistent pressure of his cock grinding against your belly. He rolled his hips, slow and filthy, and you whimpered into his mouth. You wanted release.

"Fuck," he groaned against your lips. "You're going to kill me."

Your back hit the wall—you didn't even remember moving—and suddenly he had leverage. His thigh pushed between yours, spreading your legs, and when he ground forward this time the friction was devastating. The hard muscle of his thigh pressed directly against your cunt through the layers of silk, and you were so wet you knew he could feel it, knew the fabric had to be soaked through.

"Oh gods," you gasped, head falling back against the stone.

Aegon's mouth was on your neck immediately, sucking hard enough to mark, teeth scraping. His hands gripped your ass, pulling you down harder onto his thigh, helping you grind against him.

"That's it," he panted against your throat, moving his leg in rhythm with your desperate rolling hips. "Fuck, you're so wet. I can feel you through everything. Can feel how much you want this."

You should care about the bruises he was leaving. Should worry about questions and propriety and what this meant. You didn't care at all. You just needed more, more, and more.

"Aegon," you gasped, and his name coming out of your mouth broken and desperate seemed to undo something in him.

He kissed you again, dirty and deep and filthy, all tongue and teeth, while his hips pressed forward, grinding his cock against your hip in time with how you were riding his thigh. One hand fisted in your hair, pulling your head back so he could kiss you deeper, the other still gripping your arse and guiding your movements.

"Could fuck you right here," he groaned into your mouth, hips thrusting harder. "Pull up these skirts, sink into you against this wall. You'd let me, wouldn't you? You're so fucking wet you'd take me easy."

The image, Aegon inside you, filling you, fucking you against cold, dirty stone, made you moan and grind down harder. You were drowning in sensation, the taste of wine on his tongue, the heat of his body burning through the fabric, the devastating pressure between your legs, the thick hardness of him grinding against your hip.

"Yes," you heard yourself gasp. "Yes, Seven Hells."

Reality as sudden as a wave crashing against rock, rippled back through you.

What the fuck were you two doing? What were you saying?

You must have tensed because Aegon pulled back, really pulled back this time, stepping away and putting actual space between your bodies. The loss of contact left you cold and aching. You were both wrecked. His lips were swollen and red, his hair completely destroyed, his pupils blown so wide his eyes looked black. There was a wet spot on his thigh from you. You could see the obvious bulge straining against his breeches.

You probably looked worse. Your lips tender and kiss-bitten, your smallclothes absolutely ruined.

"Yes. Back. To the feast." He ran both hands through his hair, dragging it back from his face, somehow making it look even more fucked. "Where we've been having perfectly appropriate cousin conversations."

"Very appropriate."

"The most appropriate." But he was looking at you like he wanted to shove you back against that wall and finish what you'd started. His eyes dragged down your body, lingering on your swollen lips, the marks on your neck, the wrinkled silk of your dress, before snapping back up. "Fuck, your hair's a complete disaster."

"So is yours."

"I'm always a mess. You're supposed to be the put-together one." He reached out, fingers trembling slightly as he tried to tuck a few loose strands back into place. The touch was gentle now, almost tender, so different from five minutes ago when he'd been fisting his hand in it and pulling. "There. Almost presentable."

You caught his wrist, held it. His pulse was still racing under your fingers. "Aegon, please."

"Don't." He pulled away, stepped back entirely, hands dropping to his sides and curling into fists like he didn't trust himself not to reach for you again. "Don't make it something. It was just—we're drunk. That's all."

"Right. Drunk."

"Very drunk." He looked around, spotted his abandoned wine cup on the bench, picked it up and stared at it like he'd forgotten what it was for. Then set it back down. "We should go. Before I do something even stupider."

"Like what?"

His eyes met yours, and they were still dark. Still wanting. His gaze dropped to your mouth. "Don't ask questions you don't want answered, cousin."

Your breath caught. Heat pooled low in your belly again, that ache between your legs flaring back to life.

He saw it on your face—saw the want there—and made a pained sound. "Gods, don't look at me like that. We need to leave. Now."

"Okay," you managed.

"Okay." But he didn't move. Just stood there, chest rising and falling too fast, hands still clenched at his sides.

Finally, with visible effort, he offered you his arm, the gesture exaggerated and courtly in a way that didn't quite hide how badly his hand was shaking. "Come on. Let's go back before someone sends a search party and finds us looking like we've been—" He stopped and swallowed hard. "Just. Let's go."

You took his arm, fingers wrapping around his forearm, and you could feel the tension in him. The muscles were tight, coiled, like he was holding himself back. Together you made your way back down the winding stairs. The descent was precarious,  both of you still drunk, still unsteady, but now for different reasons. Your legs felt weak. You could feel the slickness between your thighs with every step, a constant reminder of how close you'd come to, god, fucking your cousin. The cousin that was right there, is still right there. 

You stumbled on a step and Aegon caught you, arm wrapping around your waist to steady you. The touch lasted a second too long. His fingers pressed into your hip,  right where he'd gripped you before and you both froze.

"Careful," he said roughly, then let go like you'd burned him.

"Are we going to be weird about this?" you asked as you reached the bottom, voices from the feast growing louder.

"Are you?"

"No."

"Then neither am I." He squeezed your hand where it rested on his arm, the pressure firm and grounding. "It was just kissing. Doesn't have to mean anything."

"Doesn't have to mean anything," you repeated.

Liar, something whispered in the back of your mind. You could still feel him hard against you. Could still hear him saying he wanted to fuck you against the wall. Could still taste wine on your tongue. But when you made it back through the side door, slipping into the edges of the feast and immediately caught sight of Jace across the hall, still with Cassandra, his head bent close to hers as she whispered something in his ear, and you felt that familiar twist of want and jealousy knife through your chest.

And beneath it, something new. Something confusing.

The memory of Aegon's mouth on yours. His hands on your body, gripping and pulling and claiming. The way he'd made you forget everything else, forget Jace, forget propriety, forget your own name, for those few desperate moments.

And worse of all, the way you'd liked it.

You slipped away from Aegon as soon as you entered the hall, murmuring something about needing the privy. In truth, you needed a moment. Needed to look at yourself, assess the damage. Your chambers weren't far. You practically ran there, heart still pounding, skin still flushed.

Your ladies were waiting, they'd been dismissed earlier but Lysa had stayed, dozing in a chair by the fire. She jolted awake when you burst in.

"My lady! Are you—" Her eyes went wide, taking in your disheveled hair, your swollen lips, the very obvious marks blooming purple on your throat. "Oh."

"I need—" You gestured helplessly at your neck. "Can you please?"

"Of course." But she was grinning as she hurried to mix a paste, calling for Maryse and Elaena.

They appeared quickly, and the moment they saw you, the reaction was immediate.

"Ohhhhh," Maryse breathed, eyes sparkling with delight.

"My lady!" Elaena giggled, pressing her hands to her mouth.

"Don't," you warned, but you could feel yourself flushing deeper.

"Was he handsome?" Lysa asked, dabbing the paste carefully on your neck to lighten the marks. It wouldn't hide them completely, but it would help.

"I'm not discussing this."

"Ohhhhh, he was," Maryse decided, starting to fix your hair with deft fingers. "Look how red she is."

"Was it romantic?" Elaena asked dreamily, adjusting your dress, smoothing the wrinkles.

"It was—" You stopped. What could you even say? "It was nothing. Too much wine."

All three of them made knowing sounds, soft "mmhmms" and "of courses" that said they didn't believe you for a second.

The rest of the night blurred together in a haze of wine and music and laughter. You danced with Aemond, too stiff and proper, unlike his brother, but surprisingly skilled. He didn't speak much, just guided you through the steps like an ever-so-graceful swan, his one good eye tracking everything in the hall like he was cataloging threats.

"You're drunk," he observed.

"Very."

"Good. You're less insufferable when you're drunk.”

"You're a delight as always, cousin."

His lips twitched, the closest thing to a smile you'd ever seen from him. "Enjoy your evening, Princess."

Then Daemon cut in, stealing you mid-step with the kind of casual arrogance only he could manage.

"Having fun?" he asked, spinning you perhaps a bit too fast.

"Trying to."

"That Greyjoy boy's been watching you all night." Daemon's grin was sharp. "Wondering if he's going to do something stupid."

"Aren't we all doing something stupid tonight?"

"Fair point." He laughed, and for a moment you could see why Rhaenyra loved him despite everything. "Don't get yourself killed, niece. Your aunt would be very put out."

"I'll do my best."

Even Rhaenyra danced with you—a slower song, her hands gentle as she guided you through it.

"You look happy," she said softly. "That's good. I worry about you sometimes."

"I'm fine, Your Grace."

"Rhaenyra," she corrected. "When it's just us, I'm Rhaenyra. Your aunt who loves you."

The wine made your eyes sting. "I love you too."

She pressed a kiss to your forehead. "Go enjoy yourself. You're young. These nights don't come often enough."

So you did. You drank more wine, letting the warmth of it blur the edges of everything. Danced with lords whose names you didn't remember and didn't care to learn. Laughed at Aegon's increasingly ridiculous jokes, though you were careful not to stand too close to him, careful not to let your eyes linger.

Every time you saw him across the hall, you remembered. His mouth on yours. His hands gripping your ass. The way he'd ground against you like he couldn't help himself. The things he'd said, could fuck you right here, that still made heat pool between your legs when you thought about them.

And every time you saw Jace, still orbiting Cassandra Baratheon like she was the sun and he was caught in her gravity, you felt that sick twist of jealousy. But now it was complicated by guilt. By confusion. You'd dry-humped Aegon in a tower. You'd been ready to let him fuck you against a wall. And part of you had liked it. Had liked the way he looked at you like you were something he desperately wanted. Had liked feeling wanted, period.

But you still couldn't stop watching Jace. Couldn't stop wondering what his hands would feel like instead of Aegon's. Couldn't stop thinking about the hole in your wall and the things you'd seen through it.

You were a mess. A complete disaster of a person. So you drank more. Let yourself forget, just for a few hours, about holes in walls and wanting things you couldn't have and the fact that you'd apparently developed an extremely inconvenient attraction to not one but two of your cousins.

By the time you decided to retire, the hall was spinning pleasantly and your feet ached from dancing. You waved off your ladies, they were enjoying themselves too, giggling with guards and flirting with servants and made your way through the corridors alone.

The castle was a maze at the best of times. Drunk, it was nearly impossible.

You climbed stairs, turned down hallways, all of it familiar but also somehow wrong. Your chambers should be here? No, maybe down this corridor. Or was it the other way?

Finally, you found a door that looked right. The wood was the same, the handle in the same place. Close enough. You pushed it open, stumbled inside, and didn't bother with candles. The room was dark and quiet. Just kicked off your slippers, fumbled with the laces of your gown until they loosened enough to breathe, and collapsed onto the bed.

The sheets smelled clean. Felt soft. Maybe a bit different than usual but your wine-soaked brain didn't care enough to question it. Good enough, you didn’t give a god’s damn.

You were asleep before your head fully hit the pillow.

Jacaerys was tired, wine-warm, and ready for bed when he finally escaped the feast.

Cassandra had wanted him to stay longer, had made that very clear with the way her hand kept finding his arm, the lingering touches, the invitations in her eyes that he'd politely ignored. He'd begged off with excuses about an early morning. The tournaments started tomorrow, and he needed at least a few hours of sleep before climbing into armor and trying not to get killed in front of the entire court.

He climbed the stairs to his chambers, his thoughts already on collapsing into bed. Maybe he'd been too indulgent tonight. Too much wine, too much dancing, too much of Cassandra's cloying perfume that now clung to his clothes and made his head ache.

He pushed open his door, stepped inside, and froze.

Someone was in his bed.

His hand went to the dagger at his belt, pure instinct, trained response, his body tensing as his eyes fought to adjust to the darkness. The figure was small, curled on their side facing away from him. Too small to be a real threat. Too still.

Then he saw the hair. Silver. Spilling across his pillows, catching what little light came through the window. Long and unbound, the way he'd never seen it during the day when it was always properly pinned and braided.

His heart stopped. Started again, too fast.

It was you.

"What the—" The words died in his throat. He stood there, hand still on his dagger, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

You were in his bed. His bed. Fast asleep from the look of it, your breathing deep and even, completely unaware of his presence. Jace's eyes adjusted further, and he could make out more details now. Your slippers discarded on the floor near the foot of the bed. Your gown was unlaced and loose around your body.

Very loose. His breath caught as his gaze traced the line of your form. You'd clearly tried to unlace the gown yourself, drunk fingers fumbling with the ties, getting it open enough to breathe easier before collapsing into bed. But you'd only managed to loosen it, not remove it, and now the fabric had shifted in your sleep.

The neckline had slipped down your shoulder. Lower. Low enough that he could see—

Jace's mouth went dry. Your breast. Half of it bare, skin luminous in the moonlight, the curve of it visible where the silk had fallen away. If you shifted even slightly, if the fabric slipped just a bit more… stop, stop right fucking  now. 

He looked away quickly, heat flooding his face, his chest, lower. His heart was hammering now.

Don't look. Don't be that person. She's asleep. She's drunk. She doesn't even know where she is.

But his eyes were drawn back like a lodestone to true north.

Your leg had escaped the tangle of silk too. One bare leg stretched out across his sheets, the gown rucked up to mid-thigh, higher on the side where you'd rolled slightly forward in sleep. Smooth skin, the elegant line of your calf, the curve of your knee. If he looked, and gods help him, he was looking, he could see almost to your hip where the fabric had bunched.

He could see the shadow between your thighs. Jace's cock stirred in his breeches, and he felt shame burn through him immediately after.

Stop. Stop looking at her like this.

But he couldn't move. Couldn't look away. You were sprawled across his bed like some kind of vision, your lips were parted slightly, your breathing deep and peaceful. You looked nothing like the proper, put-together princess he saw every day. Nothing like his cousin who barely spoke to him, who avoided his eyes at dinner, who seemed to go out of her way not to be alone with him.

You looked undone and vulnerable. Beautiful in a way that made his chest ache and his blood run hot.

He took a step closer without meaning to. Then another. Until he was standing beside the bed, looking down at you.

This close, he could see more. The gentle rise and fall of your chest, your bare chest, your nipple was just barely hidden by a fold of silk, the fabric draped across it so precariously that each breath threatened to expose you completely.

Jace's hands clenched into fists at his sides. His breathing had gone shallow.

What was wrong with him? This was you. His cousin. A princess. A woman who clearly had no idea where she was or what she looked like right now. And he was standing here staring at you like some kind of pervert, getting hard while you slept completely unaware.

He needed to—he should—

Wake you. Get you back to your chambers. Cover you with a blanket at the very least. Do something other than stand here like an idiot with his cock half-hard and his mind conjuring images of what it would be like to slip into that bed beside you, to pull you against him, to—

No.

He forced himself to step back. To look away. To think like a rational person instead of a man who'd drunk too much wine and found a beautiful woman in his bed. You shifted in your sleep, making a small sound and rolled slightly onto your back.

The movement made everything worse. The gown slipped further. Your breast was fully exposed now, pale and perfect in the moonlight. He could see your nipple, could see the way it had hardened slightly in the cool air of the room. The silk had ridden up higher on your leg too, and now he could see the dark shadow at the apex of your thighs. Gods.

Were you even wearing anything under that gown?

Jace turned away sharply, pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes like he could scrub the image from his mind. His cock was fully hard now, straining against his breeches, and he felt like the worst kind of person. You were drunk. Asleep. Completely vulnerable. And here he was getting hard looking at you, thinking thoughts he had absolutely no right to think.

He needed to cover you. That was the first thing. Before he did anything else—before he even tried to figure out what to do about this situation—he needed to make you decent.

Jace grabbed the blanket from the foot of the bed, hands shaking slightly, and carefully, so carefully, draped it over you. He tried not to look. Tried not to let his eyes linger on all that bare skin before the fabric covered it.

He failed. The image was burned into his mind now. Your breast. Your leg. The shadow between your thighs. The way you looked spread out in his bed like some kind of offering.

Stop it. She's your cousin. She's drunk. This is wrong.

But his body didn't care about wrong. His body only knew that you were here, barely clothed, looking like every fantasy he'd never let himself have. And you had been a fantasy. He could admit that now, alone in the dark with you unconscious and unaware. He'd noticed you. Had tried not to, had told himself it was inappropriate, but he'd noticed. The way you moved. The rare times you smiled. The intelligence in your eyes during council meetings when you thought no one was watching you listen.

He'd just never let himself think about it. About you. Not like that. Now he couldn't think about anything else.

Jace ran both hands through his hair, gripping it hard enough to hurt, trying to ground himself. Trying to think. Okay, good. You were covered now. That was good. Next step was to figure out what the fuck to do.

He should wake you. Should get you back to your own chambers before anyone found out you'd spent the night here. Before servants came in the morning and saw you in his bed. The scandal alone would destroy you. Would destroy any chance you had at a good marriage, would ruin your reputation entirely.

He couldn't let that happen. But waking you meant... what exactly? Touching you? Shaking your shoulder? Explaining that you'd drunkenly stumbled into the wrong room and passed out half-naked in your cousin's bed?

Gods, you'd be mortified.

Maybe it was better to just let you sleep. You were clearly exhausted, clearly drunk enough that you'd mistaken his chambers for yours. In the morning, when you woke, he could pretend he'd just arrived. Could act surprised to find you there. Give you a chance to slip out quietly, save you the embarrassment of a confrontation.

Yes. That was better. Kinder. It had nothing to do with wanting to keep you here a little longer. Nothing to do with the selfish, possessive part of him that liked seeing you in his bed, wrapped in his blankets, surrounded by his scent.

Liar, something whispered in the back of his mind.

Jace ignored it. He'd sleep somewhere else. The chairs by the fire, maybe. Or, there, is eyes landed on the small couch in the corner near the window. It looked deeply uncomfortable, probably meant for sitting and reading rather than sleeping, but it would have to do. He couldn't exactly climb into bed next to you. That would be, well, he didn't let himself finish that thought.

Decision made, he moved quietly toward the corner, trying not to make any noise that might wake you. He'd need to grab a blanket from the chest at the foot of the bed, maybe a pillow. 

Something caught his eye. A small gap in the wall near the floor in the corner. He'd never noticed it before, why would he? It was just a shadow among shadows, easy to miss. But now, looking directly at it, he could see it clearly.

A hole. Small, where the mortar had crumbled away between the stones. Jace frowned, crouching down to examine it. Old damage. The kind of thing that happened in castles this ancient, centuries of settling stone.

He should probably mention it to someone. Get it sealed up. Curious, he leaned closer, peering through the narrow gap to see where it led.

His breath caught. It was a room. Your room.

He could see the edge of a bed with a distinctive purple coverlet—the same one he'd seen when he'd accidentally walked in on you in your bath. A dressing table with jewelry scattered across its surface, glinting in the moonlight. Books stacked on a side table. A carved wooden screen positioned in the corner, partially obscuring his view but not completely.

The hole looked directly into your private chambers.

Jace sat back slowly, his heart starting to pound for entirely different reasons now.

This gap in the wall—it went straight through to your room. A perfect line of sight from his corner to yours. Which meant theoretically, someone could look through it. Could see into your private space. Watch you dress, sleep, bathe, lord knows what else.

His jaw clenched hard, a surge of protective anger rising in his chest. Had some servant discovered this? Some guard with ill intentions? The thought of someone watching you while you were vulnerable, unaware, made his blood run hot.

But then again you'd never mentioned it. Never complained about feeling watched or unsafe. Never called for anyone to repair the wall. Which meant either you didn't know about it.

Or you did know, and you'd chosen not to say anything.

Jace turned slowly to look at you, sleeping peacefully in his bed, utterly unaware of his racing thoughts.

The hole was low in his corner. Easy to miss unless you were looking for it, unless you happened to be right here in this spot. But on your side you'd have that screen. Would have moved it at some point, maybe looking for something, and found the gap.

Would have realized where it led. His heart was pounding now, thoughts spiraling.

No. That was insane. You wouldn't. You barely looked at him most days, avoided him at meals, seemed to go out of your way not to be alone with him. But you'd also been acting strange lately. He'd noticed it, couldn't help but notice. The way you flushed when he was near. How you avoided his eyes, like looking at him directly was too much.

And this morning. Gods, this morning when he'd walked in on you in your bath. You'd screamed, yes, but there had been something else in your expression. Something beyond just shock. You'd looked almost guilty, almost. At the time he'd thought he was imagining it. Had assumed you were just mortified at being seen naked. But what if it was more than that?

What if you'd been watching him through this hole, and suddenly he'd burst into your room, and you'd realized how close he was to discovering your secret?

Jace's breath came faster. He thought back over the past few days. The way you'd been flushed at dinner after he'd brought that woman back to his chambers. The way you couldn't meet his eyes the next morning. How you'd seemed distracted, distant, like your mind was somewhere else entirely.

Had you been watching him fuck her? The thought should have made him angry. Should have felt like a violation, an invasion of his privacy.

Instead, heat shot straight to his groin.

His cock, which had softened slightly while he'd been trying to figure out the logistics of where to sleep, was suddenly achingly hard again. He pressed the heel of his hand against his cock through his breeches, trying to will it down, but it was useless. The image was in his head now and wouldn't leave.

You. On the other side of that wall. Eye pressed to the gap. Watching him with some nameless woman, watching him fuck her, watching every thrust and hearing every sound.

Getting wet while you watched.

Fuck. Because you would have, wouldn't you? If you'd been watching—and gods, everything pointed to you watching—you wouldn't have kept coming back to that hole unless it was doing something for you. Unless seeing him like that, uninhibited and raw, was turning you on.

His proper, untouchable cousin. Getting yourself off while spying on him through a crack in the wall. Jace's hand tightened involuntarily on his cock and he had to bite back a groan.

He looked at you again, sleeping peacefully in his bed, completely unaware that he'd figured it out. That he knew. How many times? How many times had you watched him?

That first woman, the dark-haired serving girl. Had you seen that? Seen him bend her over the bed, seen the way he'd made her moan? And the one after. The minor lady whose name he'd already forgotten. Had you watched him spread her legs and bury his face between her thighs?

Gods, had you touched yourself while you watched? Slipped your hand beneath your nightgown, fingers finding your clit while you watched him make other women come? His cock throbbed and he had to close his eyes, had to breathe through the wave of lust that crashed over him.

This was wrong. He shouldn't be thinking about you like this. Shouldn't be getting hard imagining you watching him, wanting him, touching yourself to the sight of him with other women.

But he couldn't stop. Because if you had been watching—and everything in him said you had been—what did that mean?

It meant you wanted him. Maybe didn't want to want him, maybe fought against it, but you did. Why else would you keep going back to that hole? Why else would you watch him fuck other women if not because you wished it was you?

The thought made him harder, made pre-cum leak from the tip of his cock, dampening his smallclothes. He tried to remember the past few nights, tried to think through the wine-haze of who he'd brought back and when.

 He'd also been with Cassandra. Right here in this room, in this bed where you were sleeping now.

Had you watched that? His breath came out shaky. He'd been showing off tonight, he could admit that now. Cassandra had been impressed by his title, his dragon, the crown he'd someday wear. She'd made that clear. And maybe he'd wanted to impress her in other ways too. Had made it last longer than usual, had made sure she came twice before he'd let himself finish.

Had you been on the other side of that wall, watching him with her? Watching him kiss her, touch her, spread her legs in this very bed? Watching while your heart twisted with jealousy?

The idea shouldn't thrill him as much as it did.

Jace pressed his palm hard against his cock, trying to calm down, trying to think past the lust fogging his brain. His hand came away damp, he was leaking badly now, his cock throbbing with need.

Stop. Get yourself under control.

He forced himself to breathe. Slow, deep breaths. Forced himself to look away from you sleeping in his bed, tangled in his sheets, still half-exposed despite the blanket he'd draped over you.

This was insane. He was standing here hard as iron, thinking about his cousin watching him fuck other women, getting off on the idea of you wanting him. He needed to calm down. Needed to think rationally about what this meant and what, if anything, he was going to do about it.

Jace forced himself to turn away from you entirely. Grabbed the blanket he'd originally intended to use and moved to the couch in the corner, as far from the bed as he could get in the confines of his own chambers. He stretched out on the too-small surface, the blanket pulled up to his chin, and willed his body to calm down. Willed his cock to soften. Tried to think about anything other than you watching him through that hole.

It didn't work.

Every time he closed his eyes, his mind conjured images. You with your eye pressed to the gap. Your hand sliding beneath your nightgown. Your lips parting as you watched him fuck someone else, wishing it was you. His cock throbbed, still achingly hard, and he shifted uncomfortably on the couch.

This was impossible. He couldn't sleep like this. Couldn't lie here all night with his cock straining against his breeches and you barely ten feet away, half-naked in his bed. He sat up, running both hands through his hair in frustration.

He needed to leave. Needed to get out of this room before he did something monumentally stupid. Like climb into that bed with you. Like wake you up and ask if you'd been watching. Like find out what sounds you'd make if he gave you something real to watch.

Fuck.

Jace stood, moving as quietly as possible, and grabbed his cloak from where it hung by the door. The Street of Silk would still be busy at this hour. He could find someone, anyone, to take the edge off. To fuck this desperate need out of his system so he could think clearly.

He paused at the door, looking back at you one more time. You'd shifted again in your sleep, the blanket slipping down to your waist. Your silver hair spilled across his pillows like you belonged there.

Tomorrow. He'd deal with all of this tomorrow. Would help you back to your chambers, act like the perfect gentleman. Would decide what, if anything, to do about that hole in the wall.

But tonight, he needed to leave before he lost what little control he had left. Jace slipped out into the corridor, closing the door softly behind him, and headed for the castle gates.

Rhaenyra replies warily: “We will ensure that the Triarchy is ready to sail, and then we will march on King’s Landing.”

Daemon scoffs. Outside somewhere, his gore-red dragon shrieks, a shrill reptilian clicking that makes the castle walls shake. “They’d better be ready. The Usurper has my daughter Rhaena, and only the gods know what he’s done to her.”

The archer—because all those of his profession must have sharp eyes—observes that the nobles and servants of House Hogg bow low to Rhaenyra, but their gazes are also shifting and watchful. They are false friends, and she knows it. They will serve her the finest provisions they’ve squirreled away for winter and then, once her dragons have flown south and her Northmen have marched towards Vhagar’s waiting ever-hungry jaws, they will send out ravens warning the Usurper that the Bitch Queen is approaching.

“Vhagar is slow,” Daemon says. “She always has been. She will be slower now than ever. I know, I’ve seen her through the winters she spent with Laena.” At the mention of this name, Rhaenyra flinches. “Her titan bones ache and her flesh thickens. She is slow to rouse and even slower to take flight. Aemond is young, so he won’t know this. But he has wasted too much time.”

“She is still fearsome,” Rhaenyra answers, low and distant. “She will always be the greatest threat to us.”

“Caraxes is still swift and vicious. I will keep Aemond distracted, I will make him chase me, and when the opportunity presents itself I will burn him to death in his own saddle. You, Jace, and Baela will torch the Red Keep and the city. There are no innocents there. They are all traitors to the crown, best to start fresh. Less mouths to feed through the winter. We will attack by land and sky. The Triarchy will attack by sea, launching scorpion bolts and unimpeded by the Ironborn. The Usurper and Daeron’s puny dragon will be overwhelmed. And this war will be over.”

“Yes,” Rhaenyra says, little more than a whisper.

They’d like to believe they have chosen the timing and the circumstances, but the truth is that things are very bad. Jace and Baela’s efforts to block trade in the Reach were impeded by the Greens’ arrangement with Dorne. The Riverlands houses allied with the Usurper have—whether out of genuine devotion to him or fear of Vhagar’s wrath—buried their winter provisions in secret caches rather than feed Cregan Stark’s wolves and the rest of the Black soldiers. Even houses loyal to Rhaenyra have begun to murmur in the shadows: Does the queen expect us to fight for her until we starve away in our boots and our armor? If the Usurper is so incapable, why does the capital love him? If we are meant to be ruled by a woman, why can’t she win?

“Jace?” Rhaenyra says, her pale eyes brightening when she notices he’s entered the room. He and Baela arrived only days ago, along with their remaining forces from the Reach. Even when there are no battles, their numbers dwindle: sickness, weakness, desertion. Then she looks to the archer. “Who is this?”

“He’s been fighting for us since the war began, he is a steadfast supporter of our cause. And he is very good with a bow. The gods gave him a gift.”

Rhaenyra says to the archer, a bit uncertainly, still not understanding why he has been brought to her: “We are very grateful for your service, my lord. Which house do you hail from?”

“House Grimm of Greyshield, Your Grace,” the archer replies with a sincere bow.

“Ah, in the Reach.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Very far west, in the Sunset Sea. At the mercy of the Ironborn, I fear.”

“We have warred with them for generations. My brother Gabriel and the rest of his crew were murdered by the Red Kraken and his sister when they sailed south to King’s Landing.”

Rhaenyra shakes her head; genuine sorrow shimmers in her strange foreign eyes. She knows what it is like to lose people she loves. She may yet lose even more of them. “Only a monster would embolden the reavers. You have my word that under my rule, the Ironborn will be brought to heel. If need be, my dragons will convince them, just like when my forefather the Conqueror flew to the Iron Islands on Balerion the Black Dread.”

“Yes, yes, very good,” Daemon says irritably to the archer. Rhaenyra glares at him. “It’s a singular pleasure to make your acquaintance. Anything else?”

Prince Jacaerys says: “The Triarchy is famed for their archers. He should be with them, on a ship right at the front.” The prince, it strikes the archer suddenly, looks more like a king than anyone else in this room. It’s not his face or his hair. It’s not his parentage. It’s the steadiness in his voice, the moderation in his judgment. He does not have the enchantment of a Targaryen, but perhaps that is a fair trade. He doesn’t have the madness of one either. Prince Jacaerys takes one of the arrows from the archer’s full quiver. “These arrowheads were made with Valyrian steel. They can pierce almost any armor, we’ve tried them. This archer put an arrow through the Usurper’s hand at Tumbleton. If he can get that close again, maybe he can kill him.”

“Where on earth did you get Valyrian steel?” Daemon demands.

“The Usurper’s dagger,” Jace says. “He lost it, we found it. The smiths at Horn Hill, the seat of the loyal House Tarly, were familiar with Valyrian steel and knew how to reforge it.”

The Rogue Prince is furious. “You took my brother’s dagger, you took an heirloom of my house, and you had it cut into pieces and given to some nobody from nowhere—?!”

“Daemon,” Rhaenyra says, not yet convinced but listening, and her husband groans. He stares at the archer, seething; one can imagine steam smoking from his nostrils and fire blazing up through his throat. Daemon sent the girl Nettles away into the labyrinth of the Vale, the archer has heard through soldiers’ gossip; not to protect her from combat, as the girl was keen to keep fighting even without her dragon, but to assuage Rhaenyra’s mistrust. The queen and her consort must be united while the carnage paints their walls bloody. Both of their lives hang in the balance.

“This war will not be won by heirlooms or prophesies,” Prince Jacaerys says calmly. “It will be won by skill, and strategy, and the love of the people we are to rule over. One dagger does us little good if the Usurper is on dragonback. But a quiver of arrows in the right person’s hands can claim the Iron Throne.”

The queen looks at Daemon. He sighs and relents; on his belt, he still wears the dagger he took from the Greyjoy bitch, a murderess without mercy. And beside the archer, Prince Jacaerys smiles beneath curls inked by the old, dark blood of the First Men.

In the darkness, in the firelight, Maester Orwyle brings Mother’s letter. You scream when you read it, and then you sink into the chair by the hearth like a drowning man through water, gazing at the gold-blood flames but not seeing them, seeing instead the hemorrhage from Dalton’s slit throat, Nightfall’s white moonstone pommel slathered red, a small lone ship sailing west to the Lonely Light at the edge of the world, your baby cradled in Mother’s weathered unbeautiful arms, she who lost so many children but has been blessed by the Drowned God with another.

Mother wrote that Dalton gave my son the Celtigars’ horn. He believed that the prince was meant to have it. More than himself, more than me.

Aegon tries to console you, but you can’t respond. He tries to hold you, but your body is stone and the letter is still crumpled in your hands. So he kneels on the floor and rests his head in your lap and tells you how sorry he is, and when your fingers come to life again they tangle in the silver threads of his hair, and you know that even if Dalton is gone, you aren’t alone.

He taught me to sail, he taught me to kill, he taught me about the Drowned God. He decided I would marry Aegon.

“It wasn’t a glorious death,” you say at last.

Aegon scoffs bitterly, his head still in your lap. “Does such a thing exist?”

“Oh, absolutely. To die protecting the people and places you love, to die with a purpose, to die victoriously. But to be murdered in his sleep by his own salt wife…” Your voice breaks. I’ll have her tortured to death. I’ll have her keelhauled until her skin hangs in ropes like red eels. “There is no glory in it. It achieves nothing. In fact, it imperils us.”

“I didn’t think anyone could kill him,” Aegon says softly.

“I hope they put his body in the sea.”

Aegon takes your hand—you can feel the scar tissue from where the archer’s arrow pierced his flesh at Tumbleton—and kisses your palm.

“Now there will be a kingsmoot,” you say. “There could even be a civil war. There is no clear heir, Dalton had many salt wives and at least a dozen young sons. One family must prevail somehow. The others won’t defer to the Harlaws so easily, noblemen of many houses have the chance to act as regents until their boy comes of age. Goodbrother, Merlyn, Drumm.”

“The fleet will stay here until the battle is won, won’t they?”

I hope so. They have to. “I’ll go out and speak to them in the morning.”

“You’re certain the baby will be safe?”

“Mother set sail with him as soon as she learned of Dalton’s murder. The crew are men who have known and loved her and Father for decades, they are devoted, they are capable. And our son is of no consequence to the Ironborns’ squabbling. He is a Targaryen, not a Greyjoy. He and Mother might have reached the Lonely Light already. The Ironborn there are strange and secretive, but very loyal.” And they understand the kind of magic that comes from the sea.

“I can’t think about him being so far away,” Aegon says, embers and flames reflected in the wet blue gleam of his eyes. “Way out there in the middle of the ocean? Surrounded by riptides and storms?”

“He’s with his own kind. He’s with the Drowned God.”

“What do you think his gift will be?”

You smile in the firelight. On Aegon’s nightstand, the green pearl glows, an inferno flickering on lightless depths. “I don’t know. I don’t even know my own gift.”

Aegon raises his head and touches your face, his hand gentle, his thumbprint sweeping away the tears that glitter on your cheeks. “Not archery?”

“No. I’m not that good.”

“Not giving birth to twenty of my children on the beach, thereby horrifying Mother and Floris?”

Impossibly, you laugh, still crying. “I suppose we’ll find out eventually.” You are thinking of Dalton again, scrabbling over rocks together, eating oysters fresh from the surf, being entombed by Mother’s arms when she told stories late into the night. She did not leave you to maids and wet nurses. You were her treasures, the same as gold or glass or steel reaved from land dwellers. You were the only ones that lived. “Dalton always forgave me for having too much mercy.”

Now Aegon is solemn, and still, and thoughtful. He says, studying you like a sketch he’ll never quite get right: “I think the Drowned God knew you’d need to be merciful to love me.”

And in the silt of your bones, in the currents of your blood, you know that’s true.

A storm is blowing in off Blackwater Bay when you go down to the dock at dawn, cold damp gales full of stray raindrops, a hidden grey sun. Your black leather boots thud against wood, your right hand rests on the hilt of the dagger Aegon had made for you, your white tunic—held shut by gold buttons embossed with tiny krakens—flaps like sails in the wind.

Rollo Pyke has already given the crew the order to raise the anchor, and the vessel is unleashed from its mooring; you have to run to leap from the wooden planks and catch the rope netting, heave yourself upwards, scramble onto the foredeck. Rollo is there, a large and stoic man like Dalton never was, not particularly surprised to see you. His arms are a patchwork of peculiar white blotches like the markings of a spotted whale, as some Ironborn from the Lonely Light are known to have. My baby is with your people, you think hazily. Will they know about the Celtigars’ horn? Will they know about krakens?

“What are you doing?” you ask as the crew rushes all around you, letting down sails and rolling barrels to be tucked away somewhere safe for the journey.

“Going home.”

“You can’t,” you say, thunderstruck, horrified. “The battle is still ahead of us. The Triarchy is coming, Rhaenyra’s dragons are coming.”

“The Red Kraken made the alliance with the Usurper,” Rollo says as savage wind wails. “And it died with him. No king should be bound to the will of the one who came before, and the same is true for the Lord of the Iron Islands. You know that.”

“But if you leave now, you will condemn us. You will allow the Triarchy to sail into the bay unimpeded. Vhagar cannot be everywhere.” And now she’s slower than she’s ever been before. “We cannot defend King’s Landing by both land and sea.”

“This city is not our home,” Rollo Pyke says. Once he was a bastard from the edge of the world, and then he wore enough callouses and scars into his skin to rise to a position of great honor as Lord Dalton Greyjoy’s first mate, and now he is the interim leader of the fleet until a new lord is chosen: through a kingsmoot, through negotiation, through blood. And the crown will take no part in it. “Our home is across Westeros in the Sunset Sea, and it is without a man to lead it. Our ships are not under the command of any Targaryen or any king. They are under the command of the one who sits the Seastone Chair. We must choose a new lord, and then he will decide.”

“But it will be too late for us here,” you object, you plead. “The battle will already be over.”

“The fleet isn’t pledged to you,” Rollo says, not cruel but only honest, as the Ironborn are supposed to be with each other. “It was pledged to your brother. And he’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t think Rhaenyra will come for you if she wins? She will want vengeance, she will burn the Iron Islands–”

“She will have many traitors waiting in line to be burned, if she is the victor. She is welcome to knock on our door with whatever men and dragons she has left, as winter freezes the ports and sickens her beasts, and we will deal with her. She is no Aegon the Conqueror. She is just a woman.”

“Rollo, please…”

He nods to the dock, shrinking behind you as the ship glides east. “I hope you’re prepared to swim back. I’d start now, before we take you even farther from your land dweller castles and your sweet wine and your boar and your venison.”

You look at the crew as they begin to steer the ship out into the bay, choppy waves breaking against the hull, murderous gusts in the sails. The men are somber-faced and slick-eyed; they mourn for the Red Kraken, and there is no weakness in that. He’s with the Drowned God, and there is no return from His halls that turn the dark depths to gold. He promised them triumph or a glorious death, and now he can give them neither.

Aegon could die. Floris and Aemond and all the others could die. My son could die.

Abruptly, like lightning splitting the sky, you whirl to Rollo and thrust both palms against his broad chest. He blinks at you, startled. “What are you so afraid of?” you hiss, you seethe, and the crew is listening. “What did we sail south for if not to war and to reave and to kill? You don’t want to slay dragonriders? You don’t want to strip the Bitch Queen’s body and take her foreign heirlooms? No true Ironborn would run from a fight brewing on the horizon. No true Ironborn would wish to be anywhere on earth besides here, on their ships, with their axes and their swords, ready to join the Drowned God in the depths. Don’t stay for the Red Kraken’s alliance. Stay for his dream of blood and gold and glory. You are a gifted man, Rollo. The Drowned God blessed you for a reason. Lead the fleet to victory, and then return home as heroes. You will kill dragons. You will kill the Valyrians who ride them, the descendants of the Conqueror. And I will be here with you, because I am an Ironborn too. And we don’t flee from storms. We sail into them.”

Some of the crew are raising their hands to clap, some of them whistle, a shrill sound like the screams of gulls. Rollo glances at them and then returns his eyes to you. They are the color of steel, cold and menacing, built to bite into flesh. Out in the mist, the other Ironborn vessels wait to follow the flagship out of the harbor, east to the gaping mouth of Blackwater Bay, south to skirt around the Cape of Wrath and Dorne until they meet the Sunset Sea. Their hulls bob on rough chop.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” you say, grinning, or perhaps it’s more like you’re baring your teeth, the storm in your eyes and rain on your face. “It’s triumph or a glorious death.”

Now the men are howling, and so is the wind, the ocean thrashing beneath a sky made of ghosts. Rollo Pyke looks back to King’s Landing, then out over the bay, and finally to his crew. They shout that they would be proud to fight if he commands them to, and that they are willing to sacrifice one more moon before they see their families again, hold their children and their wives, bleed to ensure the transition of power on the Iron Islands favors the houses of their choosing.

Rollo gives the signal to come about, and his men bellow and beat their chests. “For the Drowned God,” he says. “And for the Red Kraken.” Then he sails you back to shore.

Where the dock meets the sand, you find Aemond, evidently on his way to confront the Ironborn. He is resting one hand on Blackfyre’s hilt. He halts when he sees you coming out of the fog. “They’re staying, aren’t they?”

“They are,” you assure him.

“Because we need their ships.”

“The fleet will remain in the bay until the battle is won, Aemond.”

“Good.”

“And I will fight with them.”

His scarred brow furrows. You think of his blind eye and remember, randomly, how the large mud-colored dragon Sheepstealer was killed. The smallfolk blinded him with crossbows and scorpion bolts, Floris once told you. “Because they’ve insisted upon it?”

“Because it’s where I belong.” Because the Drowned God is here, and He’s calling to me from the maelstroms and the riptides.

Aemond sighs, thawing with relief, still staring out over the water with the dark flecks of ships reflected in his eye, his hair secured in a long silver braid that hangs over one shoulder. You remember watching Alys weave the glimmering strands together during dinners and games of cards or dice. “I’d expect nothing less from a beast.”

“Aegon can’t know.”

“I won’t tell him.”

“He thinks I’ve agreed to stay under the Red Keep in the tunnels with the rest of the women.”

Aemond’s gaze returns to you, amused. “He must know you never would.”

“Yes, but he worries.”

“Helaena bled to death in her rooms. You would have perished in the same place, if not for my Alys. He must think that my wives are well protected, but his are condemned.”

Is that true? You consider Aemond for a while, then offer him a vague off-kilter smile. “No Ironborn hopes to die in bed.”

Aemond chuckles, bows his head slightly, tells you of the battle preparations as you walk back to the Red Keep together.

You find Floris in her rooms, sewing a large square blanket that she and Alicent have been working on for weeks. Floris holds it up so you can see. “It’s for the children to play on together,” she says, beaming. She shows you one side, and then the other. “The front has a dragon for Alerys—green, of course—and then on the back there’s a big scary kraken for Baby Aegon!”

You laugh. Floris is so proud of her efforts that you hesitate to point out the error. “Krakens have ten legs, not eight.”

“No!” she gasps, distraught. She frowns down at the kraken, which glares back with sinister golden eyes. “Where on earth will I fit them in?”

“Don’t worry. He won’t be able to count for a long while yet. You have plenty of time to make him another blanket someday.”

Floris smiles. “I do, don’t I?”

“I’m glad you and Alicent have found an activity to enjoy together.”

“She’s happier now. She’s easier to talk to.”

“Mother sews beautifully,” you say softly, missing her very much. “When the war is over and we’ve rebuilt here, we will send for her. Before the ports freeze, before winter entraps her at the Lonely Light for a year or more. Then she will bring the prince home to us, and you will get to meet her at last. I think you’ll like her. She’s an Ironborn, but she’s a lady too.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Floris replies, resuming her stitching. “I’ve always wanted a real mother.”

The next morning, when you cross through the River Gate to hunt in the Kingswood—smallfolk children following you with their homemade bows and shushing each other so the wildlife won’t be scared off—the grass snaps beneath your boots. The frost has arrived, and so too will Rhaenyra with her dragons and her Northmen. You emerge from the forest with a myriad of squirrels and rabbits, fattened for winter, and drop them on doorsteps. The children scamper home with their own prizes like wolves with prey clenched in their teeth, like a pod of spotted whales stalking seals, misfortunate creatures handed off to mothers to be skinned and butchered.

A man opens his blue door and asks with a grin as you pass by: “Where are you going, Your Grace?”

“To help win the war for you,” you answer, and he guffaws. “The king will be in the sky, and I will be in the bay.”

“And the Bitch Queen will be in the seven hells,” the man says, then picks up the rabbit you’ve left him and retreats back inside to resume the work that must be done: shuttering windows, sharpening knives.

At night, you find Aegon at his writing desk, scratching out black-ink shapes over and over again, his shoulders slumped and his face grim in the firelight. You pour a goblet of red wine and bring it to him with the same words he used on the night he finally claimed you as his wife: “Here. Calms the nerves.”

He looks up at you, smiles, wraps his arms around your waist and rests his head against the softness of your belly and does not let go for a long time.

At the Lonely Light at the edge of the world, the priests and maesters are deciphering the ancient etchings on the horn once hoarded by the Celtigars amongst their treasure.

At Harrenhal, in the green and the mist, Alys and her baby—not legitimate under the law, but a royal child nonetheless—are safely hidden away, protected by the legends of ghosts that keep the Black forces far from their castle walls.

At the Eyrie in the Vale, Rhaenyra’s two young sons with Daemon are already snowed in for the winter, the roads impassable, their lives spared from assassins and the Valyrian magic in their blood unspilled.

At Storm’s End, Jaehaera plays with tiny butterflies her father once carved for her out of wood, and she waits—although she can’t recall his face—for him to bring her home again.

On Pyke in the Iron Islands, Lord Gabriel of House Grimm is alive and well, although his brother the archer does not know this. He takes pride in the garden he tends; he is better at horticulture than anyone else he’s met in his new grey, rocky home. He is falling in love with an Ironborn woman. He is falling in love with the sea. And sometimes he thinks of the queen whose mercy convinced the Red Kraken to spare his life years ago, and he feels something like gratitude.

On Dragonstone, unclaimed dragons are retreating into their warm volcanic lairs to wait out the frost: the Cannibal, Grey Ghost, Silverwing, Vermithor, and if the prophesies of priests are true your son will never ride any of them, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a beast of his own.

And here in King’s Landing, the first snow of the season begins to fall, light and soundless, little more than flurries. The snowflakes melt into the pieces of parchment that Rhaenyra sent in the night, dropped by her fastest dragon, Moondancer. Daeron had wanted to go after her on Tessarion, but Criston stopped him; he must not be lured into a trap.

Rhaenyra implores the smallfolk of the capital, who flock to the few among them who can read to relay the message: The Usurper endangers your families by refusing to fly out from the city to wage his wicked war. Instead he brings it to your doorsteps. Renounce him, and open the gates for my Northmen. Turn your crossbows and your blades towards the Greens. If you aid me, you will live. If you burn, it is the Usurper’s doing, not mine.

But the smallfolk are not swayed. They’ve rebelled against the Bitch Queen once already; why will she not surrender? She could flee to Essos, she could try to negotiate for asylum, she could admit to herself at last that King Viserys never wanted his brother Daemon anywhere near the Iron Throne. He chose Aegon. And Aegon is worthy.

Now you find Aegon—not a myth but a man, your husband, your king, and you’ve never wanted anyone else—in the castle courtyard wearing black armor, and while people are rushing in every direction and Aemond is already mounting Vhagar down on the beach, he is standing on the gravel as the snow blows around him and melts into his silver hair. He is looking for someone.

“Your Grace, we must go now,” Criston is telling him. “The Triarchy ships have been spotted...”

Then Aegon sees you walking with the other women towards the Tower of the Hand, and he smiles. He comes to embrace you, perhaps to say something, but before he can begin you drop to your knees to bow to him, lower than you ever have before, and the courtiers and guards stop in their tracks to stare. Aegon’s companions Reyne, Estermont, and Waters watch uneasily. You take both of Aegon’s hands and kiss the steel that shields his knuckles, and he shakes his head and asks: “What’s this?”

You gaze up into his blue eyes, the color of a summer ocean, as pebbles bite through your trousers. You have your dagger at your waist, your bow thrown over one shoulder...for just in case, Aegon believes. “I hope I won’t disappoint you.”

“You couldn’t.” He lifts you, whisks a snowflake from your eyelashes with the leather of his glove, kisses you swiftly like he knows he’ll get another chance soon. “Now go to the skull.”

Aegon and Criston and the other men depart to burn and to bleed. You hurry inside the Tower of the Hand with the noncombatants: Floris, Alicent, maids and ladies alike, Maester Orwyle, the blinded Sir Tyland Lannister, the crippled Lord Larys Strong, the bound hostages Rhaena Targaryen and Addam of Hull. But as the others descend the gloomy staircase to pray in the shadow of Balerion’s skull, you stay in the ghost-grey daylight.

“What are you waiting for?” Floris says, tugging at your hand. Beauty is tucked under her other arm, eyes ever-gaping, too-large tongue lolling. “We must take shelter. The castle could be burned.” Then she realizes why you aren’t following and begins to weep. “No, you must stay here where it’s safe, you must—!”

“Nowhere in the city will be safe if we lose.”

“You promised the king, you promised me, please come with us—”

“Floris, you belong down there with the others. Keep their spirits up, pray with Alicent, help care for the wounded if anyone gets hurt. But I belong on an Ironborn ship.”

“You’re scaring me.”

You smile, showing your teeth, your eyes full of cold fire like moonshine. “This is who I am.”

She sobs but relents, throwing her free arm around you, holding you tightly and kissing your forehead. Beauty wheezes and whines, licking the tears from Floris’ cheeks. Then Floris whirls away and flees down into the tunnels, into the dust and the spiderwebs and the shadows and the torchlight, and when you can no longer hear the echoes of her footsteps pattering you shut the door to the staircase, lock it, and sprint for the dock.

The gulls have abandoned the city. The dark waves are rough with chop as the snow falls silently into them. The sky is grey and hazy, the wind bitterly cold, visibility poor. You can see a vague gargantuan shadow circling high over the bay: Aemond on Vhagar, patrolling for Caraxes. Meanwhile, Rollo’s ship is waiting for you; they have already raised the anchor and the narrow gangway, but that’s no obstacle. You always climb up the rope netting anyway, just like Dalton used to. Just like he taught you.

I’m going to slaughter land dwellers for you today, you think, hoping he can hear you. I’m going to send many to the Drowned God. I’m going to paint the bay bloody. And I’m going to kill Rhaenyra.

“You’re here,” Rollo Pyke of the Lonely Light at the edge of the world notes when your boots hit the foredeck. He has an axe gripped in one fist, a hammer in the other. He’s not surprised to see you, but his voice might have some approval in it. He uses his hammer to point to your armor, already laid out on a barrel of rum tied to the base of the mast.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” No one helps you don your armor. You throw on the clinking chainmail and then the leather overtop, tightening the straps until it fits you like the shell of a crab, knowing you will not molt it until the battle is won.

“I heard the Bitch Queen tried to order the smallfolk to let her wolves into the city.”

“It didn’t work.”

Rollo smiles. “What is dead may never die.”

“What is dead may never die.”

Then the captain tells his crew as they navigate out into the bay, the rest of the fleet following, phantoms in the mist, silhouettes and shadows: “Starboard,” because he remembers you shoot best from that side.

You hear the screeching of dragons, and you turn back to King’s Landing. A small lightning-quick beast, Moondancer or Vermax, is soaring past the Red Keep with Tessarion in pursuit. The invader breathes fire down onto the castle ramparts, burning the archers stationed there. Launched scorpion bolts sail harmlessly past it; the dragon is too small of a target, too fast, too agile.

Just outside the city walls, the Northmen are clashing swords with your armies, men from the Crownlands, the Stormlands, the Reach, the Westerlands. Aegon and Sunfyre must be there, because you cannot see him. Rhaenyra and Syrax could be over land as well, providing protection to Cregan Stark’s wolves, evading Aegon, distracting him.

But where is Caraxes?

You nock an arrow, pacing along the bulwark, peering into the fog as snow falls into your eyes, melts into the black leather of your gloves. Then—like Aegon materialized out of the gloom of the tunnels when he would meet you by Balerion’s skull—the Triarchy’s ships begin to appear through the overcast veil. The waves thrash against the hull, making the ship pitch and list. You don’t mind. Your boots follow the currents instinctively. You were born to be here. The sails are made of the black and gold banners of House Greyjoy.

The cloud-covered colossus that is Vhagar roars—she quakes the planks and the masts, she sends quivers through the surf—and swoops low to meet the Triarchy. They outnumber the Ironborn vessels three to one, perhaps even five to one, but that is no matter; each Ironborn man is worth ten of any ordinary sailors, and they are not afraid to meet the Drowned God. We Do Not Sow, your house proclaims, but you’ve been planting seeds of horror for centuries before the conquest, and you’ll be doing it long after the Targaryens and their dragons are dust. The ocean is eternal. The sea is a battlefield, and a feast, and a cradle, and a grave.

Vhagar emerges from the thick bleak sky and bears down on the Triarchy ships...and then like a red comet, like a crimson meteor, Daemon and Caraxes come screaming out of the mist and shoot past Vhagar towards the Iron Fleet.

Rollo is booming commands, and the ship banks so steeply you have to grab the bulwark to keep from tumbling overboard. Your vessel narrowly escape as Caraxes opens his jaws and rains fire down on the Ironborn just behind you, and you can hear them shrieking, and you can smell them cooking in their armor until they leap overboard to end their agony and join the Drowned God in the depths. Vhagar burns a handful of Triarchy ships then turns to follow Caraxes, but she is slow, so slow.

“Starboard, starboard!” Rollo is barking at the men as your ship careens into the path of an enemy vessel, and you turn just in time to coast alongside it. Your arrows find the two men up in the crow’s nest, two swordsmen on the deck, an archer taking aim at you. The Ironborn cast their grappling hooks and drag the men from the Free Cities into their gullet like a spotted whale swallowing a seal. There is terror in their voices as they shout commands in a language you can’t understand. You go over first, like Dalton would have if he was here. Rollo and the others follow. You put an arrow through an eye, an arrow through a throat; you draw your dagger and paint it red with the lifeblood of some traitor whose name you will never know, an enemy, a land dweller, and the Drowned God drinks the corpses you send Him like a man dying of thirst.

You feel the impact craters against your spine and your shoulders. You are riddled with arrows, you wear spines like a lionfish, but none of them pierce the chainmail beneath your light leather armor. When you grin, there’s other people’s blood on your teeth. When you open your mouth, you laugh. Your veins are full of saltwater currents, and your bones are the sunken wreckage of ships, and the Drowned God is here with you—and so is Dalton, and Father, and the Grey King, and Mother’s dead babies, and the daughter that was buried in this bay—and the barrier that exists between this world and the next, like plunging from open air into water, ceases to exist. All the world is an ocean, drowned and doomed, and what is dead may never die.

You glance back at the city. Caraxes races Vhagar to the Red Keep and wins; the serpentine, gore-red dragon spirals around the castle and assails it, melting stone, shattering glass. Flames explode through Maegor’s Holdfast, and you think: Our banners are burning, and our beds, and the menagerie of creatures Aegon once carved for Helaena, and the kraken and oyster he carved for me, and the gowns Mother spent years sewing, and the Drowned God’s pearl.

“Again!” Rollo Pyke is howling, because another Triarchy ship is approaching, seeking to ram through the captured vessel and split the hull and send the Ironborn sinking into the cold dark tides, but they’ve never seen a rogue wave. Rollo is swinging his hammer, crushing bones and excavating teeth from jaws. His crew is gutting the Triarchy men with blades and hacking off their limbs with axes. All across the bay, this is happening, the Ironborn wearing blood and the Triarchy shedding it, and you can hear weak faithless sailors begging their captains to flee and abandon Rhaenyra: Where is the Dragon Queen? Has she forsaken us? The Ironborn are beating their armored chests and screaming. They are chanting Dalton’s name: The Red Kraken, the Red Kraken!

You are loosing arrows in a mindless, instinctive barrage, and so you don’t realize Caraxes is back until you feel the heat of the ships he’s burning. Embers glow in the air, smoke joins the mist to cloud your vision. Rollo is urging his crew onwards; to evade the flames, you must continue to the next ship, and then the next, and then the next. Your dagger is in your hand; you slit throats, wrists, bellies. You blind eyes and widen mouths, and when blood coats your skin you wear it proudly.

Where is Vhagar??

She’s here, but always a few moments too late. Caraxes abruptly contorts and dives at Vhagar, snaps his narrow reptilian jaws at the saddle, barely misses biting Aemond in half. Vhagar flies after Caraxes, but she cannot catch him, and this is Daemon’s design. The Ironborn scorpion bolts cannot pierce the Blood Wyrm. The city is burning. Moondancer is a silvery flash like a mirror, always just ahead of Tessarion; when the Blue Queen weaves to intercept her, Vermax arrives to defend his mate, biting at Tessarion’s thin wings and small, breakable claws. The Triarchy launches scorpion bolts that stab into Vhagar’s gut. They cannot kill her, but they can slow her down, and these vanishing seconds Aemond cannot afford.

But Syrax can’t outmatch Sunfyre. Can she?

The Bitch Queen’s dragon hurtles around the Red Keep and bolts out over the bay, Sunfyre chasing her. Syrax ducks beneath Caraxes and Sunfyre nearly flies into the Blood Wyrm’s waiting, needlelike fangs. When Sunfyre banks steeply to carry Aegon back towards the city, Caraxes lunges after him like a viper. Vhagar is burning Triarchy ships, but she has to stop to go after Caraxes again, to protect Aegon, to safeguard the king. The Ironborn ships are aiming their scorpions at Syrax; the Bitch Queen flies low to burn them. Planks char, hulls breach, sails turn to ash. The vessel you and Rollo’s crew occupy is hit near the stern. Water pours in below deck. Your boots adjust effortlessly as the ship begins to sink; smoke fills the air and singes in your eyes.

You stand on the foredeck and thrust your dagger between your teeth, tasting blood, tasting vengeance. You nock your last arrow and stalk the Bitch Queen like a spotted whale, a wolf of the sea, a killer, a reaver who leaves nothing in their wake. You can see a long braid of silver hair, but she is bent over the saddle and wearing heavy armor. You can’t find her face. You can’t kill her. You need another target. You lower your aim to her dragon and—as if Syrax is a gull, a sparrow, a man up in a ship’s crow’s nest—you let the fletching whisper between your fingers.

Your arrow hits the dragon in the eye, half-blinding her. Syrax shrieks like a woman and twists and rolls through the ashen air, Rhaenyra holding on desperately, wrenched one way and then the other. And as you watch, an Ironborn scorpion bolt bursts through Syrax’s chest, guts her, opens her, spills her entrails into the waves.

The Bitch Queen’s dragon, dying rapidly, drops into the sea and whimpers there in a shrill, futile whistle. The water turns red. The Drowned God is feasting. A crew of Ironborn drag Rhaenyra from the bay and, as she screams and begs for her life, they rip off her rings and her armor, and then they cut off pieces of her silver hair to take home as keepsakes, and then they cut her throat and bathe themselves in her blood, her salt, her copper, her strange foreign magic. You grin beneath eyes that glow with the reflections of dragonfire. You drop your bow, your quiver empty, and take your dagger in your hand again. Rollo is giving the order to abandon ship.

An arrow comes from nowhere and hits you in the chest, kicks the air from your lungs, throws you down onto the deck. Your dagger clatters away. You go skittering across the listing wood, your gloved fingers clawing, your boots struggling for purchase.

I’m not weak. I’m not weak.

And no arrows can stop you. You push yourself up on your palms and try to stand, but you crumple like rigging when a mast is snapped, pulverized, eviscerated. Your lungs feel vast and barren. Your vision is dark around the edges, like twilight turning to ink. You crawl across the deck to reach for your dagger, but your hand can’t close around it.

What...?

Rollo Pyke is rushing by you, and—although Ironborn do not usually aid each other in combat—he stops to help you up. He extends a hand to you...and then something crosses his face, a shadow, a recognition, and he turns away and is gone.

A priest is sitting in the firelight: You will mourn many children, but your bloodline will be eternal.

You look at the arrow, and blood is coursing down the shaft, and you realize that this one has not snagged in the leather or the chainmail. It has struck you in the flesh, in the soul.

Do you understand?

You gaze across the burning wreckage and the heat distortion that blurs the air, and on the foredeck of a Triarchy ship you see the silhouette of an archer nocking another arrow. Then Vhagar is here, unhinging her jaws like a snake, and the archer’s vessel explodes into splinters of wood and bone. Aemond is peering down from the saddle, trying to see what’s happened to you.

I have to be alright, you think. I have to hold my baby again.

You try once more to stand, but you can’t feel your boots, your ankles, your knees, your thighs that Aegon once coaxed open, your dreams of him melding into reality, your fantasies proven so miserably wrong and then so true. Your ship is sinking. You collapse against the listing deck and do not rise again.

The priest is saying: It will rule not just the Sunset Sea, but all those of Westeros. I see bubbles rising from the depths. I see ships snapped in two and pulled under.

What had you said when you blew the Celtigars’ horn and no krakens ascended from the depths? I’m of the sea, but I have no magic.

And Aegon had replied, smiling: I have magic, but I’m not of the sea.

“The baby is both,” you whisper as you stare up into the mist-and-smoke sky, as snowflakes fall into your eyes. Those who inhabit the Lonely Light will know that, and Aegon Ironborn will not be a king of fire and blood, but sea and storms. And one day when he’s old enough, and he has proven himself worthy...he will sound the horn and he will be answered.

Dalton once asked you, the day before you left the Iron Islands and never returned: Are you afraid?

Caraxes fills the sky as Daemon tries to find Rhaenyra, but it’s too late. Vhagar’s fangs close around the Blood Wyrm’s long sinuous throat. Caraxes battles fiercely, clawing Vhagar’s underbelly to scarlet ribbons, revealing her organs and ribs as if she is a keelhauled man; and Vhagar will die, but first she will crush his vertebrae and choke the life from his lungs.

What’s there to be afraid of? It’s triumph or a glorious death.

No: it’s both.

You look to the Red Keep. On the smoldering castle ramparts, two tiny figures—Jace and Baela, you think—have their hands in the air in surrender. Moondancer is still circling the capital, now listless and untethered from her rider, but Tessarion is devouring Vermax’s corpse. Vhagar flies Caraxes, now limp and boneless, farther out into the bay and discards him there, and the Blood Wyrm and his rider plummet into the depths, stirring up a tidal wave that is only a ripple by the time it reaches you. Then Vhagar, hemorrhaging and ruined, manages to retreat to the beach before crumpling there in the sand so Aemond will not be drowned.

The ocean is very loud in the shells of your ears. The light is fading. There is a glimmer overhead, pink and gold. There is a splash as Sunfyre lands in the surf, and then Aegon yanks off his heavy armor and crawls to you, onto the ship that is maimed and sinking, onto the deck that is now listing steeply, and you can feel seawater nipping at your fingertips before Aegon drags you to higher ground.

“No, no, no,” he’s moaning, touching your face, watching the blood spread across the deck and tinge the water, sapphires to rubies, and the snow is falling heavily now. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

I’ve never belonged anywhere more than I belong here. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

“We’ll get Alys, I’ll fetch her from Harrenhal, she’ll be able to help you—”

“No.” Your hand settles where the arrow pierces your skin and muscles and ribs. It’s too late, even if the witch was right here waiting with a jar to fill with blood and seawater. “The heart has to be whole.”

“I let this happen.”

The priest is telling Mother: The baby will die. There’s nothing you’ve done wrong. It has to happen this way. “Nothing could have stopped me.”

“You should have married another man.”

“I’ve never wanted anyone else.”

He sobs and holds you, his silver hair brushing your cheeks, and you think of candlelight and his bed and Balerion’s skull. Snow is falling, and ships are burning, and men are dying; but in a future so near you can almost grasp it with your numb, trembling hands, everything has been set right, and the Seven Kingdoms all bow to the same king.

“Aegon—”

“No.”

“Aegon, put me in the sea.”

He rests his forehead against yours and shuts his eyes as if he can make this go away, a nightmare to wake up from, a mirage that vanishes. And then he nods and says: “What is dead may never die.”

“What is dead may never die.”

He kisses your lips, but he can’t taste you, only the salt and copper and warmth of your blood, and the red is there on his face when he pulls away, and then—because you need him to, but also because he believes—as the water washes over the deck, Aegon lifts you in his arms, and the ocean rises up to meet you, to cradle you, to entomb you, and when he lets go you sink, like an anchor, like a stone, down, down, down. The frigid blue turns to black, and your lungs burn, and there is a catastrophic pressure in your chest, and for a moment you are afraid. You reach for the surface, a different lifetime, a different world.

I can’t go yet. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I believe.

IN EVERY KINGDOM, the crown demands a price, and sometimes, the cost is the very heart that beats beneath the velvet and steel.

The dust motes in the quiet library of Summerhall danced in the weak afternoon light, illuminated by a sliver of sun piercing the high, arched windows. Egg had only come to the chambers searching for Aemon. The older boy was supposed to be reviewing his maester’s translations, but the room was empty. 

Aemon’s heavy footfalls had echoed down the hall just as Egg slipped inside, and in his haste to avoid being scolded for snooping, Egg had bumped heavily against a tall, precarious stack of leather-bound tomes. With a deafening crash, dozens of books cascaded across the marble floor. 

Egg winced, rubbing his shoulder as he dropped to his knees to right the mess. Most of the volumes were dry histories of the Seven Kingdoms, but one dark, leather-bound journal had slid far beneath the heavy oak desk. It was warped with age, the leather worn thin at the edges, as if it had been handled often and then not at all for a very long time. Egg reached out, dusting off the cover, and opened it out of pure curiosity.

Egg’s thumb traced the edge of the leather-bound tome before he turned the cover. The handwriting inside was undeniably his father’s. Messier. Uneven. As though the words were written in haste, or in youth. 

On the very first page, a bold title was inscribed: The Adventures of Maekar, Y/N, and Dyanna. Below it, in a distinctly different ink and a rushed, heavier hand, was an additional note: and Baelor. Frowning, Egg turned the page. The breath caught in his throat.

It was a delicate charcoal drawing of a woman. She did not have the pale hair or the striking violet eyes of his late mother, Dyanna Dayne. Her features were softer, her hair dark, and a faint, knowing smile was captured in the strokes of the charcoal. Not stylized. Not arranged like the portraits that hung in the halls. There was no attempt to make her look grander than she was, no careful positioning of hands or jewels or posture. She was simply . . . there. 

The name scrawled beneath the portrait was simply Y/N.

Her hair fell loose over her shoulders, dark and unbound. One strand had been sketched twice, as if the hand that drew it had hesitated before settling. Her mouth curved faintly, not quite a smile, but something close enough to it. 

Egg stared at the page, his thumb tracing the graphite. He had never known his father possessed the gentle, deft hand required for such a portrait.

As he stared at the delicate charcoal strokes, Egg’s mind drifted to the very moment his father’s hand had rested upon this parchment. 

The afternoon heat in the Red Keep’s old gardens was tempered only by the thick, ancient vines that wove through the stone trellis above, casting long, shifting shadows across the marble benches. They were six and ten then, hovering on the precipice of adulthood but still largely naive to the heavy, unyielding realities of the realm. For a few stolen hours, the politics of the court, the looming threat of the Blackfyres, and the arranged marriages of great houses felt a world away.

In the shaded alcove, Maekar sat with a piece of willow charcoal pinched between his rough fingers, leaving a trail of dark soot across his knuckles. Across from him sat Y/N, completely unaware of the intensity in his gaze.

He recalled every detail of the light: the way the golden sun of King’s Landing caught the rich, dark strands of her hair, catching the edges and turning the dark brown into an amber halo that framed her features. She had turned to him, her face lighting up with genuine amusement as she shared a quiet, breathless jest about Dyanna Dayne. Dyanna had spent the morning walking with her head down, looking terribly solemn after being politely but firmly dismissed by one of the Baratheon boys, a family known for their dark, tempestuous looks. Y/N had giggled into her hand, noting with a playful glint in her eyes that Dyanna seemed to have a distinct, unchanging preference for dark-haired men.

When the jest gave way to her full, free laughter, the sound seemed to resonate through the shaded alcove. Maekar had found himself completely unable to look away. He stopped breathing for a moment, his hand trembling against the rough, heavy tooth of the parchment. In that exact heartbeat, the prince was overwhelmed by a strange and melancholic realization: he was capturing the only part of her he would ever truly possess. The crown and his father's expectations would ensure that she belonged to someone else, but on this small square of paper, she was his.

He began the sketch with her cheeks, letting the charcoal soften and shade the roundness that gave her face its gentle, unassuming warmth. He traced the smooth dip of her chin, capturing the soft, slightly round lines that separated her features from the sharp, severe angles typical of other women. Every stroke was a secret declaration. In the silence of the garden, Maekar poured all the words he was never allowed to speak into the fragile graphite, preserving the young woman before the realm broke them both.

Egg continued to flip through the pages, his eyes widening as the truth of it settled in slowly, unwillingly. The diary was not only ink and confession, but it was a memory made visible. Y/N alone, drawn with a patience that felt almost careful. Y/N laughing, head tilted slightly as though caught mid-sound. Y/N looking away, as if she had always known she was being watched.

And then—

The group.

At first, only three.

Maekar, younger then. Dyanna beside him, composed even in ink, her posture always steadier than the world around her. And Y/N between them in some drawings, or just slightly ahead in others, as if she never quite belonged to standing still. The alcove appeared often in the background. Stone arches, half-shadowed light, the same place where time seemed to hesitate before moving on.

Egg’s fingers paused over one page.

There, his father had written in a neat line beneath a sketch of the three of them sitting too close together on worn stone steps:

“We were not yet what they wanted us to be.”

Further on, the drawings changed.

A fourth figure appeared.

Baelor.

He was always drawn differently—less composed, more open, as if even ink struggled to keep him within the frame. In one sketch, he leaned over Maekar’s shoulder, reading something off-page. In another, he stood between Dyanna and Y/N, laughing at something none of them would later remember clearly enough to repeat.

Egg traced the edge of one sketch where all four of them stood together in the alcove.

“Do you remember this?” Baelor’s voice echoed faintly from the past, as if caught between pages rather than time.

“You tripped over your own words,” Y/N had said in the drawing’s memory, though Egg could almost hear her now, amused rather than unkind.

“I did not,” Baelor had replied immediately.

“You absolutely did,” Dyanna’s voice had cut in, calm as ever.

Maekar—drawn slightly apart, watching rather than joining, had only said, quietly, “He always does when he is trying to sound clever.”

“And yet you never stop listening,” Y/N had answered, turning toward him in the sketch with that familiar expression, half challenge, half something softer she never said aloud.

The ink on that page was heavier around Maekar’s figure, as though he had pressed harder when drawing it without realizing.

Egg turned the page again.

The group changed slowly over time. Not in number at first, but in distance. The alcove remained, but the spaces between them widened in ways the drawings did not explain, only recorded.

Baelor appeared less often. Y/N lingered longer in the margins. Dyanna remained steady in every frame, even when the others did not. And Maekar—

Maekar was always there.

Even when he was not.

Egg stopped for a long moment on one final sketch: all of them together again, but not quite aligned. As if the moment itself had been drawn while already slipping away. No one in it was looking at the same thing.

And beneath it, in his father’s handwriting, smaller than before, almost careful enough to be forgotten, were the words:

“We thought it would last because we had not yet learned what endings look like.”

Then, the drawings stopped, replaced by pages of dense text. They were letters. Hundreds of them. Letters written in his father’s hand, addressed to Y/N, filled with confessions and longing. But they had never been sent. Egg read the margin of the first entry:

“Y/N,You told me to write instead of speaking, if I could not say it plainly. I do not know if this is better. There is no one here to interrupt, no one to correct me, and yet I find I hesitate more with ink than I ever did with words.”

It had been spring—the kind that came with more rain than warmth, the stones weree damp, the air heavy with it. The corridors smelled faintly of wet stone and something green just beginning to return.

He had not meant to run, and yet he did.

The alcove was already occupied when he reached it.

“You’re late,” Y/N said, glancing at him from where she leaned against the narrow curve of the wall, her voice even, as if she had been waiting long enough to expect him.

“I was not meant to come at all,” Maekar answered, still catching his breath, rain clinging to the dark strands of his hair and dampening the shoulders of his doublet.

“That has never stopped you before.” 

He did not return the remark. For a moment, he only stood there, hands half-curled at his sides, as though unsure what to do with them now that he had arrived.

“What is it?” she asked, more softly this time, straightening just a little, her attention settling fully on him.

“Nothing.” The word came too quickly.

“That is a lie.” Y/N did not move closer, but her eyes lingered on him, patient in a way that suggested she had no intention of letting it pass.

Maekar let out a breath, quieter now, his shoulders lowering slightly. “I came to ask you something.”

“Then ask.” 

“You will answer plainly?” he said, his voice steadier, though there was still something held back beneath it.

“When do I not?” 

“When it suits you not to.” 

“Then I will answer as plainly as I please.” She shifted her weight against the stone, unbothered, as if the terms had already been decided.

Maekar looked at her then, properly, as though measuring whether that would be enough.

It was not.

But he asked anyway.

“How,” he began, slower now, choosing the words rather than letting them come, “does one tell someone that he loves them?”

The question settled between them, simple in its shape, heavier in its meaning.

Y/N did not laugh. She did not look surprised. Instead, she watched him, more carefully now, as if measuring not the question, but the reason for it.

“Is this for you,” she asked, “or for some poor girl who has not yet realized her misfortune?” Her tone was light, but her gaze lingered, searching.

Maekar frowned faintly. “You said you would answer plainly.” His eyes flicked to hers, expectant, though guarded.

“I am,” she replied, unhurried. “I am asking plainly.”

“It is a question,” he said after a moment, his voice flattening slightly. “Answer it.”

“You could tell her.” She said it simply, as though it required no further thought.

Maekar exhaled, the sound sharper than before. “If it were that simple, I would not be asking.” His hand flexed slightly at his side, betraying a hint of impatience.

“Then it is not simple,” she said. “Which means you will say it wrong.” Her tone remained calm, almost matter-of-fact.

“That is not helpful.” 

“It is true.” 

He looked away then, toward the narrow opening where rain fell in a thin, steady line beyond the stone. For a moment, he said nothing.

“I would not say it wrong,” he said at last, quieter now, though there was a stubbornness to it.

“You would,” she replied without hesitation, the faintest trace of amusement returning. “You would make it sound like a command. Or a warning.” Her fingers brushed idly against the edge of the stone beside her, as though the observation came easily.

“I would not.” His gaze returned to her, sharper now.

“You would,” she repeated, almost gently. “You would stand too straight, and speak as though you expected something in return.” 

“I would expect nothing.” The words came firmer, though not entirely convincing.

“That would not be how it sounded.” 

A pause followed.

He glanced back at her, something sharper in his expression now. “Then how should it sound?”

Y/N leaned back a little more fully against the stone, her posture loosening.

“Not like anything at all,” she said. “Not something rehearsed. Not something you have turned over in your mind until it has no life left in it.”

“And what does that leave?” 

She looked back at him.

“Write it.” The answer came simply.

Maekar frowned slightly. “Write it.” He repeated it as if testing the weight of it.

“Yes.” Y/N nodded once, small and certain.

“That is your answer?” His brow furrowed, unconvinced.

“It is the only one you might manage without ruining it.” There was no mockery in it but only a quiet honesty.

He studied her a moment longer. “And then?” he asked.

“And then,” she said, “you do nothing with it.”

Maekar stilled. “Nothing.” The word came slower now.

“You write it,” Y/N repeated, “and you keep it. You do not send it. You do not speak it. You let it remain what it is.”

“That is not telling her.” 

“No,” she agreed. “It is not.” 

“Then what use is it?” His voice dropped, quieter now, the question no longer argumentative.

Y/N held his gaze.

“It is for you,” she said. “Not for her.” 

A longer silence followed.

“And if that is not enough?” he asked, after a moment, the words quieter still.

Y/N’s expression shifted, though only slightly.

“Then you were never meant to tell her at all.”

The rain filled the silence that followed.

Maekar looked at her for a long moment, as if trying to find something in her face that had not been there before.

He did not.

“Very well,” he said at last, the words measured, as though settling something within himself.

Y/N’s mouth curved faintly, though it did not reach her eyes. “Very well,” she echoed.

And that had been the beginning of it.

The lines stretched longer than the ones before, filling more of the page, the ink pressed firm as though each word had been considered before it was allowed to remain.

“You said it would make it easier—that I would think before I spoke. You were right. I think too much now, and say nothing at all.  

There was a faint smudge beneath the last line, as though the ink had not been given time to dry before the page was turned—or as though a hand had lingered there longer than it should have.

It is a strange thing, to be so certain of something and yet have no place to put it. I find it follows me regardless. In the yard, in the hall, even at the table where I am expected to listen and not speak unless spoken to. I hear my own thoughts louder than any man’s voice. You speak as though it is simple—to set it aside, to let it remain unspoken, to trust that it will not grow into something unmanageable. I do not think you understand what you have asked of me.

A line had been started beneath it, then struck through so harshly the parchment bore the mark.

Another line followed, written cleaner, though no less heavy.

Or perhaps you understand it better than I do.

There was more space now, as if he had paused longer before continuing.

I tried, today, to speak as I always have. It felt wrong. Every word I did not mean sounded louder than those I did. You spoke to me as though nothing had changed. I answered you the same. I do not know which of us lied better.

The ink lightened toward the end, the pressure easing, though the hand remained steady.

If this is easier, as you say, then I will endure it. But I think you have mistaken silence for peace.”

The ink ended there, but the space it left did not.

What followed in the pages after was not immediate, no new entry, no hurried continuation. Only a stretch of blank parchment, as though even writing had its limits, and he had reached them. But the story did not end with the letter. It only quieted. They went on as they always had.

There were mornings in the yard where the air still held the damp of the night before, where steel rang against steel and men shouted over one another, and she would stand just beyond it, half in shadow, watching without seeming to. She never stayed long. Long enough to be noticed, never long enough to be questioned. Maekar learned, without meaning to, the exact moment she would turn away—just before the noise grew too loud, just before the sun climbed too high.

At the table, nothing changed. She sat where she was meant to, spoke when spoken to, and listened the rest of the time. There was no strain in it, no sign of anything misplaced. If anything, she seemed more at ease than most—unbothered by the weight of names and expectations that pressed on everyone else. She would glance at him sometimes, briefly, the same way she always had. Not lingering. Not avoiding.

It was that sameness that unsettled him.

The alcove did not belong to them anymore, though no one had claimed it. It remained as it had always been—narrow, half-forgotten, the light never quite reaching it. He passed it often enough to know when she had been there. A shift in the dust, a mark along the stone where someone had leaned too long. Once, he found a loose thread caught against the edge, dark against the pale wall. He did not touch it.

There were days when they spoke.

Nothing of consequence. Small things. Observations that required no answer. It would have been easy, for anyone watching, to believe nothing had changed at all. They did not stand too close. They did not lower their voices. There was no urgency in it, no need to linger.

Once, in the corridor, she paused a fraction longer than she should have, as if she meant to say something and thought better of it. He noticed only because he had already begun to move past her. By the time he turned, she was gone.

Another time, it rained again, steady and without wind. He found himself at the alcove without recalling the path that had brought him there. She was not. He stayed anyway, longer than made sense, longer than he would have admitted. The stone was cold beneath his hand. The sound of the rain filled the space too easily.

He did not go back the next day.

Or the day after that.

But he thought of it. 

Egg’s fingers shifted slightly against the edge of the page.

"You were right, Y/N. I must carry the duty of a prince, and you must carry the duty of your house. If I love what I am forbidden to love, I must do so silently. I will not send these. I will keep them within my own heart, as you asked."

The correspondence spanned years, chronicling a quiet, aching love that neither dared to speak aloud.

The entries continued, not in neat order, but in fragments—moments caught and kept.

“Y/N, Dyanna says you laugh too easily. Baelor says you do not laugh enough. I have decided they are both wrong. You laugh when you wish to, and not when it is expected. I think that is why they notice it at all.”

Another page.

“Y/N, you stood by the window today and said nothing for nearly an hour. I thought you angry. When I asked, you told me you were only thinking. I do not know which unsettles me more—that I could not tell the difference, or that I wanted to.”

Another.

“Y/N, they have begun to speak of marriages more often now. It is no longer spoken of as something distant. Names are mentioned, then dismissed, then returned to again as though the choice might settle itself if left alone long enough.

The writing grew tighter toward the bottom.

Yours has not been spoken yet. I find I listen for it regardless.”

After that, the hand loosened again, though not entirely. The ink was lighter, as if written at a different hour, or with less certainty

“Y/N, you told me not to come to you again. You said it would only make it harder, that there was no sense in making something difficult worse by indulging it. You spoke as though it were already decided, as though we had only to accept it and be done.

The line that followed was written slower.

I did not argue. I should have.”

You came to me tonight.

The ink there had bled faintly into the parchment, as though the quill had lingered too long.

You asked me to take you away. You did not speak of where, or how, or what would follow. Only that we would go, and that it would be enough.

There was a long space beneath it.

Long enough that Aegon could almost feel the hesitation that had lived there.

I told you no.

The next line came harder.

I told you to stay. I told you it was not ours to choose, that there were things greater than what we wanted, that it would not end as you thought it would. You did not argue. That was worse.

The diary did not move cleanly from one day to the next after that.

The pages grew uneven—entries breaking off, resuming later in a different hand, as though written at odd hours or in moments stolen between obligations. Ink smudged where it should have dried clean. Words pressed too hard into the parchment, then faded where the hand must have faltered.

They had met there, though neither had meant to. Or perhaps they had. It was difficult to tell, even in the way he wrote it.

She had been the one to speak first. She had not circled the matter, had not softened it into something easier to refuse. She had asked him plainly, and when he did not answer, she had asked again, until there was no space left between the question and the answer he would not give.

There were lines in the margins, written smaller, tighter—admissions he had not allowed into the body of the entry.

I would have gone. I thought of it. I nearly said yes.

The ink there had been smeared, as though his hand had passed over it before it dried.

But the entry itself remained unchanged.

He had turned her away.

They had met at the alcove, though neither had meant to.

He had gone there because there had been nowhere else to stand. Because the keep had begun to feel smaller with each passing hour, every corridor leading him back to the same thought. And she had been there already.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

The corridor was dim, the torchlight thinning, leaving the alcove half in shadow. It seemed smaller than it had been before. Or perhaps there was simply no room left for anything unspoken.

“You meant it,” she said.

“I did.”

She searched his face, as though something might still be undone if she looked long enough.

“You cannot,” she said.

“I can.”

“You will not.”

He did not answer that. The silence stretched.

“Then this is how it ends,” she said.

“It does not end.”

“It does,” she replied. “You have made certain of it.”

Maekar exhaled slowly. “Y/N—”

“Do not,” she said, not sharply, but with enough weight to stop him. “Do not make it something else. It is simple enough as it is.”

“It is not simple.”

“It is,” she insisted. “You have chosen. That is all there is to it.”

He did not deny it.

The quiet that followed was not empty. It held everything neither of them would say.

“You asked me once what you should do,” she said, softer now.

“I remember.”

“I told you to write it,” she went on. “I thought that would be the end of it.”

“It was not.”

“No.” Y/N let out a breath, faint, almost soundless. “It was not.”

She looked at him then, properly.

“Come with me,” she said.

No urgency. No desperation. Only certainty.

“We can leave before morning.”

But Maekar did not move.

“It will not matter where,” she continued. “Only that we are not here.”

“It will matter,” he said.

“It will not.”

“It will follow us.”

“Let it.”

He shook his head once. “You do not know what you are asking.”

“I do.” Her gaze did not waver. “I am asking you to choose.”

The words settled between them. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, nothing had changed.

“I have,” he said.

Y/N went still.

“And this is it,” she said.

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Say it again.”

“Y/N—”

“Say it.”

He held her gaze.

“You will marry him.”

The words did not echo.

Y/N nodded once.

“Very well.”

She did not argue.

That had been the worst of it.

He left her there.

He had told himself, before he turned, that he would not look back. Not once. Not even at the end. The corridor stretched longer than he remembered. Each step came measured, counted without meaning to.

One.

Two.

Three.

He kept his gaze forward, fixed on nothing.

Thirty.

Forty.

Fifty.

The sound of his own steps followed him too closely, as though the silence refused to leave him.

Seventy.

Eighty.

Ninety.

He did not slow.

He did not slow.

One hundred.

One hundred and ten.

One hundred and twenty.

The distance should have meant something by then.

It did not.

One hundred and thirty.

One hundred and forty.

One hundred and forty-three. That was what it took to reach his chambers.

It should have been easy.

It was not.

He pushed the door open. The room was dark, untouched. For a moment, he stood there, as though the distance he had put between them might settle into something final. Then the air shifted. The window stood open.

The night had come in with it; cool, quiet.

And there—

She was still there. At the alcove. Exactly where he had left her.

As though those one hundred and three steps had meant nothing at all.

The next line in the diary had been written with such force the ink had nearly torn through the page.

I should have gone back.

One moon later, Maekar was betrothed to Dyanna Dayne. There were no entries after that. For a time, Egg could only stare at the empty pages that followed, his fingers resting at the edge as though something more might reveal itself if he waited long enough. Nothing did. The parchment remained clean, untouched—too clean. It unsettled him more than anything written before.

What had passed in the day of Y/N’s wedding, and the days that came after?

Nothing.

Or nothing his father had allowed himself to keep.

It did not make sense. Maekar had written everything—things better left unsaid, things no one was meant to read. He had not spared himself in ink. And yet here, at the very moment where something should have remained, there was only absence.

As if he had chosen not to remember.

Or worse— as if he had not trusted himself to.

Egg turned the page.

And there it was.

Three moons after the wedding—three moons into what remained of their lives—the First Blackfyre Rebellion began. The entry resumed without preamble, as though nothing had been lost between one page and the next.

Maekar and Baelor were summoned to lead the royal troops.

Y/N, A month has passed since they bound me to another name. It was done as such things are—spoken before witnesses, sealed in duty, and left without room for refusal. I have kept my place in it as I was expected to. I have done all that was required of me. There is nothing in it that is mine. War came as it always does—announced first in whispers, then in certainty. Baelor and I were summoned to lead the king’s forces. There was no delay. There never is, when the realm demands it. I did not think of you then as I should have. Or perhaps I did, and chose not to name it. They told us after. You had been taken in the confusion—caught where the fighting had turned without warning. No one could say how long you had been held, only that you had not been where they believed you would be. By the time word reached us, it was already too late to prevent it. We were told there would be a rescue. That it would be handled. I believed them. That is my failing as much as any other. When they found you, it was not as they had intended.

There is a faint break in the ink there, as though the quill had been lifted and set down again with care.

An arrow, They said it cleanly, as though that made it something easier to bear. As though the manner of it mattered. I was not there. I was not there to see it. I was not there to stop it. I was not there to do anything at all.

The next lines were written more evenly, but pressed harder into the page.

It should have ended there. It did not. The crown required something from it. Something to hold the lords in place, something to quiet the questions that follow any loss not properly explained. They found it in your name. A scapegoat, they called it—though not in those words. They said it was necessary. They said it would preserve the realm. They said many things that sound like reason when spoken aloud. Your brother had written to the enemy. That much was true. The letters were found. They were placed before men who had already decided what they meant. And you—

There is another pause in the line, longer this time.

You had kept them. You had said nothing. Not to protect yourself, but him. It did not matter. They named you traitor before the day had ended. Your house was stripped of its standing. Your name was spoken once more only to condemn it. What remained was erased with a care I have not seen given to anything else.

The writing steadies, though something in it feels colder now.

They did not return you to your home. They did not grant you the rites of your house. No stone bears your name. No place was marked for you. It was decided you would not be remembered in any way that could be spoken of again. As if that were a thing they could decide.

The final lines are written cleanly, without hesitation.

You were made into something lesser so that the realm might remain whole. Baelor did not speak against it. I did not stop it. This is what we chose.

He did not wait to be announced. Baelor’s tent was lit within, the canvas walls shifting faintly with the wind. Voices had only just quieted when Maekar pushed through, the flap snapping shut behind him with more force than needed.

Baelor did not look up at once. He stood over the table, one hand braced against it, the other resting near the maps spread wide. Only when the silence stretched did he lift his gaze.

“You should have sent word,” Baelor said, his voice even, as though nothing in the world had changed.

Maekar did not move further in. “Is it true?”

Baelor’s expression did not shift. “You will have to be more specific.”

“Y/N.” The name came sharper than he intended. “What they are saying of her.”

A pause. Brief. Measured.

“It is what has been decided,” Baelor said.

“That is not what I asked.” Maekar took a step forward now, the lamplight catching the edge of his expression. “Is it true?”

Baelor studied him a moment longer than necessary. “Her brother corresponded with the enemy. Letters were found.”

“And she?” Maekar pressed.

“She kept them.”

“That is not treason.”

“It is enough.”

“For whom?” The words came quicker now. “For the men who need a story to tell? For the lords who would rather believe it than question what happened?”

“For the realm,” Baelor said, the answer immediate, as though it had already been spoken too many times. Maekar let out a short breath, something close to disbelief. “You believe that.”

“I do not need to believe it,” Baelor replied. “I need to accept it.”

“She was your wife.” The words landed heavier than the rest.

Baelor’s gaze did not waver. “She was.”

“And this is all you have to say of it.”

“What would you have me say?” Baelor’s tone did not rise, but there was something firmer beneath it now. “That the crown is wrong? That the lords are fools? That the war should wait while we argue over what cannot be changed?”

“It can be changed.”

“No,” Baelor said, quieter now. “It cannot.”

Maekar shook his head once, more sharply than before. “You have not even tried.”

“I have done what is required of me.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It is the only thing that matters.”

A silence followed. Not empty—just thin, stretched too tight.

“She did not betray you,” Maekar said, slower now, each word measured. “You know that.”

Baelor’s hand shifted slightly against the table, though his expression remained composed. “It does not matter what I know.”

“It should.”

“It does not.”

Maekar stared at him, as though something might break if he looked long enough.

“She protected her brother,” he said. “That is all she did.”

“And that is enough,” Baelor answered, the words echoing his earlier tone, though quieter now. “For them,” Maekar said. “Not for you.”

Baelor did not respond.

“That was your wife,” Maekar went on, his voice lowering, though the weight of it did not lessen. “Your name. Your honor. And you would let them strip it from her as though she were nothing.”

Baelor’s gaze hardened, just slightly. “I would preserve what remains.”

“At her expense.”

“At the realm’s necessity.”

Maekar let out a breath, slower this time. “You would sacrifice her.”

Baelor did not hesitate.

“Yes.”

The word settled heavily between them.

Maekar’s jaw tightened. “For the realm.”

“For the realm,” Baelor repeated.

A faint, humorless breath escaped Maekar then. “Of course.”

Another silence.

Shorter this time.

“And you?” Baelor asked, his voice quieter now, though no less steady. “What would you have done?”

Maekar did not answer at once.

When he did, it came without hesitation.

“I would have chosen her.”

“They brought her back.”

The words left Maekar before he could stop them. They did not sound like his own—too hollow, too measured, as though someone else had spoken through him. Baelor stood beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly aligned, though there was distance in it all the same.

“They did,” Baelor said.

Maekar kept his gaze forward. He did not look, not at the covered form, not at the men who stood too quietly around it. He knew if he did, something in him would give, and he could not afford that. Not here.

“And you stood there,” he said.

“I did what was required.”

Required. The word settled wrong.

Maekar felt his jaw tighten, though his expression did not shift. “You knew,” he said, quieter now, but no less sharp. “You knew all along.”

Baelor did not answer. He did not need to.

Maekar let out a slow breath, his hand curling slightly at his side. “You knew what she was to me.”

Still nothing.

“And still—nothing,” he finished.

“She was my wife,” Baelor said at last.

Maekar almost turned at that. Almost.

Instead, his gaze remained fixed ahead, his voice lowering. “And yet you said nothing when they named her traitor.”

“It would have changed nothing.”

“You do not know that.”

“I do.” Baelor’s voice did not rise. “The decision had already been made.”

Maekar’s lips pressed into a thin line. That was the worst of it—not the certainty, but the acceptance.

“You did not even try.”

Baelor shifted slightly beside him, the movement small but deliberate. “The kingdom was at war. The lords needed something to hold to.”

Maekar let out a quiet breath that held no humor. “So you gave them her.”

“I preserved the realm.”

The words were steady. Practiced.

Maekar closed his eyes for a brief moment, the image pressing in regardless—her standing where he had left her, unmoving, as though she had been waiting for something that would never come.

“At her expense,” he said.

“At necessity.”

Silence followed.

Not the kind that passed, but the kind that settled.

Maekar’s gaze dropped, just slightly, to where the ground met his boots. For a moment, he said nothing. When he spoke again, his voice had changed—not louder, not softer, but they were  stripped of anything unnecessary.

“I would have chosen her.”

He did not know why he said it. Perhaps because it was the only thing left that had not been taken from him.

Beside him, Baelor did not react.

“I know,” he said.

Maekar let out a slow breath. Of course he did.

“And you would choose the realm.”

“Yes.”

There it was.

Simple. Clean. Final.

Maekar nodded once, more to himself than to Baelor. Something in him settled with it, not acceptance, not peace. 

“Of course you would.”

Another pause.

“They will have you wed again,” Maekar said, his voice flattening, as though the words no longer held weight.

“They already have.”

Egg did not turn the page at once.

There was something between the entries, something that did not sit like the rest of the writing. The ink was uneven, not from haste, but from restraint, as though every stroke had been forced.  It began again in the same hand, but it no longer carried the same control.

Y/N, I said I would not write again. I said your name would not reach this page again, not even in ink, not even when no one is meant to read it but myself. And yet I have nothing else left that does not feel like a betrayal.

They speak of Dyanna Dayne as though she is already something settled. As though I am already someone who belongs elsewhere. I listen to them agree on my life as if I am not inside it. And I say nothing, because there is nothing left in me that knows how to interrupt it.

There was a break then—long, uneven pressure where the quill had pressed too hard into the parchment.

I tried to draw you today. I do not know why I thought I could still do it. I have not seen you in so long that I had begun to believe I would not forget. But I did.

Your face is no longer something I can hold in my mind without losing it halfway through. I begin to draw the outline, and then I stop. Not because I do not remember you, but because I cannot decide what part of you comes first. Your eyes, or your mouth, or the way you used to look at me as if I had already said too much before I spoke.

I tried to remember your voice. Which was worse. It slips away before I can hold it properly. I can recall that you spoke, that you said my name in a way that made it feel like something different than it is now. But I cannot hear it anymore.

The writing grew smaller toward the bottom of the page, as though the hand had begun to tire, or lose something essential in the act of continuing.

I have begun to fear that if I stop writing, there will be nothing left of you that I can still reach. And if I keep writing, I will only prove that you are already gone in every way that matters.

Y/N, If you can still hear anything of this, if anything of you remains where I cannot follow—come back. Not as you were meant to be. Not as they would allow you to be. Just come back.

Y/N, it is done. Dyanna Dayne. I have said her name enough times now that it no longer feels like it belongs to someone else. That unsettles me more than I can explain.

Today, my son was born. They told me I was meant to feel something immediate. Relief. Joy.  But I did not know what I felt. I held him because I was expected to. Because Dyanna could not. Because the room was full of eyes. He is called Daeron.

Aerion was born today. They placed him in my arms, and I found there was nothing in me that knew what it was supposed to feel like at first. Only the weight of him, small, real, and inconveniently alive in a way that demanded attention I could not fully give. I am aware, even as I write this, that I should not be writing to you at all. You are gone. That is not something I forget, even when I try to speak to you as though you might still be somewhere that words can reach. And I am not who I was when I last wrote your name without consequence. I have a wife now. I have children. I have a life that continues whether I stand inside it or not. And still—when I am alone with ink and silence—I find myself returning here, to something that no longer exists, as if it might answer me if I say it carefully enough.

Y/N, I do not know what it is I am meant to name this anymore. I have tried to reduce it into something simpler, something that fits within the boundaries of what I am allowed to feel. It does not obey me. For a time, I thought I understood it. I thought there was only you, and that everything else was what had been placed over you like a covering I never consented to wear. That is not entirely true. Dyanna is kind. She does not ask more of me than I can give. She has built a life beside me that does not demand I bleed for it to remain standing. I have come to respect her. I have come to care for her in ways that feel . . .  honest. And that is where it becomes difficult to speak clearly. Because I thought love was meant to erase everything else. I thought it would leave no room for contradiction. But I find that I can sit beside her and not wish to leave. I find that I can listen to her and not feel as though I am betraying something by doing so. And still—when I write your name, it does not feel like memory. It feels like interruption. Like something unfinished has stepped back into the room without permission. I do not know what it means that both of these things exist in me at once. I do not know what it means that I do not want to lose either of them. I am beginning to suspect that I have spent too long believing love is meant to be singular, when all I have ever been is divided. If that is a failing, I do not yet know how to correct it. And if it is not… then I do not know what I am supposed to do with it.

The final entry in the journal was written the night Daella was born, when Dyanna had nearly died in childbirth. 

Today, I looked at the child and realized I had built a life out of duty, yet I have lived as a ghost. I lived as though I were never truly part of it.  Y/N, my beautiful Y/N . . .  you are gone. Not fading. Not distant. Gone. I will burn these pages tonight. I will not keep what remains of you in ink any longer, nor allow myself the comfort of returning where I no longer belong. There is nothing left to build from what we were. Dyanna is my wife. My children are here. My life has already moved forward without waiting for me to follow. And so I will close this chapter as it must be closed, completely, without remainder. And I will not open it again.

There was a long smear beneath it, where the ink had dragged across the parchment. As though the hand had stayed there long after the words had ended. And after that— Nothing.

Egg sat back, exhaling a breath he felt he had been holding for hours. A shadow fell over the doorway, and he looked up to see his father standing there, a stern frown on his face. His eyes fell to the open journal in the boy’s hands. For a long, agonizing moment, neither man spoke. The air felt heavy with the weight of the past. Then, Maekar walked slowly toward his son, looking down at the portrait of Y/N. A tear, stark and unbidden, traced a line down the prince’s weathered cheek.

"I remember," Egg whispered softly, looking up at his father. "I remember when you tried to burn this, long ago. Mother found you, didn't she? She took it from the flames and put it back on your study desk."

Maekar did not answer at once. His gaze stayed fixed on the journal, though it no longer felt like he was seeing the page itself. It was somewhere behind it. Somewhere further back.

For a moment, he was not standing in the present at all.

He was in a room lit by firelight, too bright and too close, the air sharp with smoke and regret. The parchment had already begun to curl at the edges, blackening where flame touched ink. He had held it too tightly, as though grip alone could decide what would be lost.

“I am telling you to stop,” Dyanna’s voice had said. Not raised. But just final in a way that did not leave room for argument.

“You do not understand,” he had answered, though even then it had sounded hollow.

“I understand more than you think,” she said.

He had not looked at her. Not at first. Only at the fire. Only at what he was trying to end before it could outlive him.

“This should not remain,” he said. His hand tightened around the pages. “It is nothing but memory.”

“So is everything you are afraid to name,” she said quietly.

That made him still.

The fire snapped once, louder in the silence that followed.

Dyanna reached for him, not the flames, not the journal—but him. Her hand closed over his wrist, steadying rather than stopping. “You do not burn this because it is meaningless,” she said. “You burn it because it is not.”

His breath caught, shallow.

A moment passed where neither of them moved.

Then she spoke again, softer this time. “A prince is entitled to his memories,” she said. “Even the ones that break him.”

A beat.

“Put it back.”

He had wanted to argue. He had wanted to become something simpler than what he was. But there was nothing simple in her voice, only the quiet insistence of someone who would not turn love into permission for destruction.

“It does not make me any less your wife,” she added. The journal lay closed now, where the meeting of cover and page.  Maekar’s hand rested on it for a moment longer than necessary, as though confirming it was still real, still here, still not gone.

Then Dyanna spoke—softly, from the doorway, already turning to leave him to it, granting him the silence she always seemed to understand better than anyone else.

And when Maekar did not look up as Dyanna left, he only stared at the journal—at her portrait—filled with the heavy realization that he would always be back right where he started, and always right where she had left him.

you started with the herbs.

a bundle of sage went to the top shelf — farther from extra moisture and foreign hands.

next to it — neatly tied stems of mint, a little lower, so it was easier to take in a hurry.

you placed the chamomile into a small clay jar, sorting the flowers with your fingers — by habit, almost not looking.

the smells slowly filled the room: warm, bitter, fresh.

at the edge of the table — clean, folded white cloths. you ran your hand over them, checking the softness, and set a few aside — for the first examination.

taking out your travel bag made of soft worn leather, which was your kit, you started to gather a set for the first visit to the prince.

in your memory came up the voice of your mentor, an old apothecary — the man who taught you to change a compress before speaking.

he said that in the capital one of the crown princes was sick.

“the order came from prince baelor himself.”

you heard from men nearby that prince baelor was in your lands a few weeks earlier — something about dealings with lands.

it must have been then that he heard about you.

you were not a big fan of the praise your small people spoke about you — words that no one left your hands untreated, that your methods were different from traditional ones and because of that your hands were covered in gold.

usually they said this to criticize the system of the citadel, which trained maesters so they would serve royal families, ignoring ordinary people who needed help more because of hard labor.

but you did not complain. your main goal was to heal people, to breathe life into them and you managed it.

then it felt like an honor, but when the castle met you here with silence and a maekar full of despair, who said that the maesters were powerless, and one of them died after catching this fever — you understood that it was more serious than you thought.

“my son… is specific. the illness made his temper even more… unpredictable,” he said, pressing his lips, and there were already notes of no hope in his voice.

“my prince, i will do everything in my power. but if the great minds of the citadel stepped back before this sickness, i cannot give empty promises. the rest will stay with the seven.”

day 3. 208 AC.

the morning started with a sharp knock on the door. a young servant, out of breath, said that the prince had woken up.

you headed toward the unfamiliar chambers, your healer’s kit thrown over your shoulder, and the soft lilac hem of your dress gently rustling with every step.

usually you braided your hair so it would not get in the way or fall into the herbs, but now you only quickly gathered it into a bun with a bone pin, feeling how a few stubborn strands were already slipping free from the weak hold.

when you reached the heavy doors of the royal chambers, the knights immediately stepped aside, making you softly smile back at them.

when the doors opened, they revealed a stifling room and prince baelor standing by the bed.

“my lord.” you lowered your head in a light bow.

“lady mullendore,” baelor said quietly, giving a small nod.

but before you could straighten, the silence was cut by a mocking, contemptuous laugh that made you turn your head and meet the direct gaze of aerion targaryen.

he looked exhausted, but even illness had not broken his arrogance.

his broad chest was bare and shining with fever sweat, the blanket had slipped down to his hips, and his skin was so pale it looked almost transparent.

he stared at you through heavy half-lowered eyelids, his eyes red, showing his condition.

you noticed the scars on his face that had not fully healed after — as you assumed — another showy tournament.

“my prince.”

“you think…” he started, but broke off, coughing, then continued in a rough voice. “you think that if men who spent years studying in the citadel under strict supervision and have half a lifetime of experience could not cure me… then some common girl can?”

he turned his gaze to the man beside him, and a weak, poisonous smile played on his lips. “i did not think you and father were this desperate, uncle.”

prince baelor only pressed his lips tighter. “behave properly, kid,” he said shortly, and then, throwing you an apologetic look, nodded and left.

you slowly walked to the table by the window where the light fell on your tools and began to carefully lay out the vials.

“admit it.” a mocking voice came from behind. “they sent you here so my cock would not rot off?”

then he pushed himself up and sat, leaning against the headboard. “if that is the case, we are starting this rather wrong.”

you did not answer, flipping through the pages of your personal journal where symptoms and recipes of rare ointments were written in small handwriting.

“i am here to rid you of this terrible fever, my prince,” you said softly.

aerion let out a quiet laugh and slowly ran a hand through his damp hair, pushing it off his forehead. his gaze grew heavier.

“the last man who came here with the same goal is now six feet under in the sept of summerhall.”

you did not answer him.

instead, you took a small bowl of cool water and walked to his bed. your steps were almost silent. when you reached out to touch his forehead, aerion jerked back as if you were about to strike him with a dagger.

“you think you have the right to touch a dragon?” he said, frowning. his skin was so hot you could feel it even without touching him.

“i must examine you, my prince,” you replied calmly, not looking away.

“leave.”

you raised your eyes, watching his tense face. he was exhausted, his hair stuck to his temples, and his breathing was uneven and heavy.

he looked like death could come for him any moment.

“are you going to disobey a prince?”

you hesitated for a second, carefully studying his condition — the trembling in his hands, the unnatural flush on his cheeks. fighting him now, while he was at his peak of irritation, was pointless.

so you quietly nodded and headed for the door.

however, you did not pack your things. your satchel stayed open on the table by the window, leaving vials and notes visible.

the last thing you felt was his piercing gaze following you all the way to the doors.

day 4. 208 AC.

you did not have to part from him for long, because the very next night you were in his chambers again, the chamomile oil in your hands turning warm as you mixed it with nut oil.

aerion’s condition had worsened quickly and under the watchful, heavy gaze of maekar and his barely audible breaths, aerion had to give in.

but even now, when the illness drained the strength out of him, he did not miss a chance to make a poisonous comment about every one of your movements.

you remembered how the very first time your fingers finally touched his forehead, his body had tensed and his eyes had shut tight.

he did not look like someone who was often touched.

now he sat, helplessly leaned back against the tall headboard, his eyes constantly following you.

maybe the awareness of possible death had made him accept everything and fall silent. or almost silent.

you walked up to him, carrying the tray, and set it down on the bedside table. a thick, calming smell spread through the air.

pouring the chamomile and nut oil mixture into your palms, you slowly rubbed them together, warming them with your skin.

aerion raised an eyebrow, and on his pale face a familiar smirk appeared. “if you want to touch my cock that badly, you only had to ask.”

that made you softly smile, but you did not answer. instead you came closer and sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping slightly under your weight, and for a moment the distance between you shrank to a few inches.

you raised your hand over his skin but froze halfway, lifting your gaze to him.

a silent question.

aerion looked into your eyes for a long moment, then slightly tilted his head.

you lowered your gaze and gently touched his neck, and in the same second you heard his sharp, broken inhale.

his body tensed and his jaw clenched hard. the skin was horribly hot, almost burning.

aerion’s eyes slowly closed. you could feel under your palms how his frantic pulse slowly began to calm down.

your hands moved down to his shoulders, gently massaging them, then went lower to his chest, carefully avoiding the area of his heart.

you clearly remembered your teacher’s instructions: only pure chamomile could be applied to the heart area, and nut oil in a mixture could cause unnecessary irritation.

aerion stayed silent, but his head tilted back slightly and his eyes stayed closed.

after you made sure he had relaxed, and his skin had cooled enough not to disturb his sleep, you stood up to lightly run oil over his forehead.

when you combed his damp hair back to clear his forehead, his eyes slowly opened and locked onto your face, first following your strands that had already fallen out of a hastily made braid in the middle of the night, lingering longer than they should on your lips, then moving up to your eyes.

that night, aerion targaryen did not have nightmares for the first time since the illness began.

day 9. 208 AC.

“i will have you beheaded if you try to poison me.”

aerion lay on his side, still weak, but his skin no longer felt like a burning furnace, and he had gained enough strength at least to lazily prop his head up on his hand and watch you.

you smiled lightly without even turning to him. “you repeat that every morning, my prince.”

your hands were familiar and steady as they mixed a brew of sage and yarrow, carefully measuring every drop of the solution. “if i truly wished you dead, i would have been sensible enough not to choose such an obvious and foolish way.”

aerion raised an eyebrow, and in his eyes, still hazy from fever, a playful smirk flickered.

“so you admit you had thought of killing me?”

you only shook your head slightly, reaching for the honey pot on the upper shelf, making your dress softly rustle as you stretched up for it.

“i am afraid that is not quite what i said, my prince,” you said and turned to him. “but if you are so insistently seeking an encounter with death, then who am i to oppose your will?”

he did not laugh, but you saw the corner of his mouth lift. in his gaze, heavy and drowsy, real amusement suddenly surfaced.

you walked toward him, scooping a little of the brew with a wooden spoon as you went, to check the temperature and ensure the right bitterness.

you gave a short nod to yourself, then handed the bowl to the prince and immediately returned to the table.

aerion predictably grimaced — few people drank such herbs with pleasure. he drained the cup in a couple of gulps and coughed loudly, trying to get rid of the aftertaste.

“disgusting,” he exhaled, frowning. “i would rather die sooner if this is the only way to stop drinking this shit.”

he was about to hand the empty cup back to you, but you returned just in time. with one hand you took the cup, and with the other you offered him a spoon, making him frown.

“what is this?”

“it will take away the bitterness, my prince.”

he looked at you and gave a short laugh. “do you think i am a child?”

“not only children sometimes want something sweet,” you replied, not looking away.

aerion snatched the spoon from your hand. he paused, studying the amber honey, in the very center of which a ripe blackberry sat like a small ornament.

“dragons do not need to be bribed with berries,” he muttered, still trying to sound displeased.

you only shrugged and went back to your shelves.

however, when you glanced back at the bed a minute later, the spoon was already empty.

day 21. 208 AC.

the night knock on the door was so sharp that you jolted up in bed, barely understanding what was happening.

when a breathless knight at the door said that the prince was urgently calling for you, you did not even have time to get ready.

you were only in a nightgown — made of soft fabric, reaching your ankles, with simple sleeves. your hair, which you had not managed to tie up as usual, fell loose over your shoulders.

you quickly threw a thick outer dress-cloak over it and went out.

when you entered aerion’s chambers, you froze at the threshold. he was not lying in bed or half-sitting against the headboard as usual. he was standing.

the prince stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard and fast. his bare chest shone with sweat, and wet strands of hair stuck to his face.

aerion’s eyes found you immediately — he held your gaze for a second, then sharply shifted to the knight standing behind you.

“out."

the knight did not argue: he gave a short nod and quickly left, leaving you alone in the room.

you rubbed your eyes sleepily and slowly walked toward him. “is something troubling you, my prince?” you asked softly.

aerion stayed silent at first, looking at you, his jaw tightly clenched and his shoulders tense. “i saw a nightmare.”

you approached him carefully, like a wounded animal, not making any sudden movements.

"good,” you said gently once you were very close. “but you should not be getting out of bed in this condition.”

he gave a short laugh, but there was no trace of his usual amusement in it. “i did not call you here to repeat obvious things,” he said, but he did not move even as you stopped right in front of him.

you reached out and touched his forehead, making him close his eyes and exhale heavily, leaning into your touch.

you moved your hand lower and touched his neck with the back of your fingers. “temperature is normal, these must be transitional symptoms. the illness is leaving, the body is just still resisting.”

“i have not had nightmares since the day you came here,” he said, opening his eyes slightly. “since you started rubbing your overly sweet oils into me and forcing me to drink solutions that taste like horse shit.”

you stood so close that you could feel the heat coming off his skin. a thick, heavy smell hit you — the air of a suffocating room, bitter herbs, his sweat, his scent.

“i can cal—” you started, but he sharply shook his head, cutting you off mid-sentence.

“just...” aerion stopped, then nodded toward his bed. “sit there. in case… i get worse.”

you understood that refusing a prince was impossible, and there was more of a hidden request than an order in his voice now, so you quietly nodded and sat on the very edge of the bed, choosing the side opposite him.

but you did not expect what happened next. aerion slowly walked to the bed, and instead of just lying down beside you, he lowered himself onto the blankets and carefully placed his head directly on your lap.

“my prince…”

“just stay like that,” he cut you off without opening his eyes.

several minutes passed in complete silence. gradually you began to relax, feeling the weight of his head and the way his tension slowly faded.

at first hesitantly, barely touching, you ran your hand through his long silver hair, hearing a quiet, almost pleased exhale in return.

once you were sure he was relaxing, you slowly combed through the cool strands, letting them slip between your fingers.

he was already on the edge of sleep when you heard his barely audible whisper.

“when we are alone, you can call me aerion.”

day 37. 208 AC.

“thank you very much, ser. i would not have managed without your help,” you said softly.

you lingered by the doors, speaking with ser garret. the young knight had offered to help you carry the heavy buckets of water, and you were grateful to him.

the man opposite you broke into a wide smile, clearly pleased with the attention. “oh, think nothing of it! come to me anytime. it would be a sin not to help such a beautiful lady as you.”

when you finally entered the chambers, aerion was already sitting, leaned back against the headboard. his jaw was clenched so tightly the muscles in his cheeks kept shifting.

“you were long.”

you, not suspecting anything, calmly went to your table, checking the shelves with tinctures. “i was speaking with ser garret,” you answered, moving as usual to check his body temperature. this had already become routine for you.

the white-haired man gave a short, sharp laugh. “i see.”

when you came closer, he suddenly called the name of the recent knight, his voice sounding so steady and commanding that no one would guess this was the same man who had recently been unable to open his eyes.

you frowned, not understanding why he needed the guard, but the door already swung open and the knight froze at the threshold.

aerion did not even look at garret. “how lucky we are today,” he drawled, and before you could react, he sharply pulled your arm.

you gasped in surprise, losing your balance, and in the next second you were sitting on his lap, sideways against his chest.

“it seems today is exactly the day you should carefully rub my body with oils,” his voice was low and slow.

“my prince, there is no need for that anymore, your body is already…” you started, trying to pull away.

“i think i know better what my body needs.”

his face was so close to yours that you could feel his hot breath on your skin.

then he took your hands and deliberately, slowly placed them on his neck — where you always started the massage.

“my prince…”

“aerion,” he corrected without looking away from you.

you awkwardly turned your head and saw ser garret. the poor man stood there, not knowing where to look, looking like he wanted the ground to swallow him whole. you looked back at the prince.

“aerion,” you repeated quietly and uncertainly.

he lifted his brow in victory, and playful, sharp sparks danced in his eyes.

“you may leave, ser garret. we have… much to do,” he said, never breaking eye contact with you.

gods, it sounded so wrong.

but the moment you tried to stand, aerion’s hands closed around your waist, pulling you even closer.

“he will tell the whole castle about this,” you said, pressing your hands against his shoulders. “they will get a completely wrong idea of what is happening here.”

aerion only gave a lazy smirk. “what a pity.”

since that day, neither ser garret nor any other knight in the castle dared even speak to you again.

day 53. 208 AC.

this was the hardest moment — the final wave of fever.

you knew it was a sign that the illness was leaving, burning out the last traces of sickness from his body. that was why you did not leave his side for even a moment, practically living in his chambers.

all day and through the endless night you stayed beside him. you gave him brews, changed compresses every two hours, and barely closed your eyes. aerion would either sink into unconsciousness or briefly come back to himself, and every time his gaze would land on you.

near dawn, when you moved to the table again to change the water once more, you heard a strange sound.

turning around, you saw him thrashing in the bed. his hand was desperately searching over the sheets, as if looking for your hand. his eyes were half open, and his lips were moving in a whisper, almost like a prayer, shaped as your name.

you quickly went to him, removed the hot cloth from his forehead, and placed a new, cool compress. the moment your fingers touched his skin, his hand immediately caught yours.

he tightly squeezed your hand, pressed his cheek against it, and went still at once, falling back asleep — this time calm and deep.

day 77. 208 AC.

aerion had recovered enough to already be describing in full detail how exactly he would humiliate the next knight at a tournament. you only smiled softly and reminded him that it was still too early for him to ride a horse.

“first of all, i am on my feet thanks to the valyrian gods,” he declared, and then, after a slight pause, added. “well… maybe your methods sped things up a little.”

you laughed lightly, but aerion suddenly went quiet. he saw you slowly and carefully packing your things from the shelves, placing vials into your travel bag, and he frowned, asking if you were going to replace the medicines.

you looked at him with a soft smile.

“tomorrow another healer will come. she will watch over your recov— ”

“what?”

“i am leaving, my prince. my work is done.”

he stared at you as if you had said he did not have valyrian blood. it seemed he had not even considered that you could leave.

“i could fall ill at any moment. the sickness could return. i am not even fully healed yet.”

“you were just boasting about riding in a tournament,” you reminded him.

“i lied. i am not taking part in any tournament.”

“aerion, i did what i was brought here to do. now a royal healer will take care of you,” you said quietly, exhaling.

“i do not need a royal healer,” he snapped, his voice firm. “you are doing fine. stay here, i will make you the head of them.”

but you shook your head, continuing to pack your things.

“my people are waiting for me on my land. i will always serve the smallfolk first. that is what makes me different from the maesters of the citadel.”

“you did not cure me completely. i need time. and that woman… i will send her to your lands instead of you,” he said, swallowing hard.

then he stepped closer, taking hold of your hand. “those who need treatment will come here. any member of my family could catch this sickness, and only your herbs work on it. you cannot leave.”

he stood so close that his breath burned your skin, and his eyes did not leave yours.

“you will not leave,” he whispered, almost ordering.

you looked at him, studying the face that had become too familiar to you over these days. you had just opened your mouth to argue when he suddenly pulled you toward him and his lips crashed into yours.

you gasped in surprise, but the sound was swallowed by his mouth.

it was not a gentle kiss. it was a hungry, desperate surge — as if he had been holding himself back for weeks and finally snapped. aerion let out a low groan right into your lips, turning his head to deepen the kiss, demanding a response. and you responded, pressing your palms against his hot chest, feeling his tongue insistently explore your mouth.

that night he did not let you go, which was so surprising, because he had never openly shown you his weaknesses. when you lay in the dim light of his huge bed, he held you close.

“say you will not leave,” he quietly demanded.

you stayed silent for a long moment, listening to the beat of his heart under your ear.

“i will not leave,” you finally whispered.

aerion exhaled heavily, his body noticeably relaxing. he buried his chin in your hair, pulling you even closer.

day 78. 208 AC.

and just like that, you were gone before the first dawn.

MASTERLISTS

aerion 𖾕𖾝꙼ᩚ𛲕𖾟 akotsk

“You fainted, Your Grace,” he says.

You shake your head. “Ironborn women don’t do that.” You try to stand and your knees buckle; Floris screams again. “I’m fine,” you tell her from where you kneel, but suddenly you are very, very warm, and the blue sky keeps trading places with the sapphire waves of the sea. Your eyes dart to Orwyle, panicked. What’s happening to me?

“We will help you back to your rooms, Your Grace,” he assures you, and you feel a bit better. He takes one arm and Floris the other, and slowly they accompany you across the sand and up the winding stone staircase, and although your ankles tremble you do not let your boots slip on the steps. The maids and servants follow in a frenzy, muttering amongst themselves, wondering if you have caught some malignancy from the smallfolk, saying all those raw oysters have finally done you in.

When you are delivered to your bed, you are mystified to discover that—for the first time in as long as you can remember—you only want to stay there even though the day is still young, to sink into the soft feather mattress and abandon your bow, your blades, the sea. Floris is trying to talk to you, but you clutch your pillow and your eyelids dip shut and some amount of time passes. When you swim back up through the opaque currents of gravity, you have an audience stationed around your bed like archers atop castle ramparts: Floris clutching Beauty to her chest, Aemond frowning, Alicent tugging nervously at a gold seven-pointed star that hangs from her throat, Maester Orwyle setting an array of small ceramic jars on your nightstand.

“It wasn’t the oysters,” you say; it comes out like a yawn. “I’ve been eating them all my life. I’m not ill, I’m just tired.” So, so, so tired. And maybe this is what a hero’s death feels like: floating down into something intoxicatingly serene, painless, effortless, no worries left for the mortal world.

“Your Grace,” Orwyle says quietly, as if not to jolt you too harshly from the haze. “Have you bled since you and the king consummated your marriage?”

“No.” But it hasn’t been so long, has it? Long enough, perhaps. You try to recall the last time moon blood brought you cramps and clots; and you haven’t felt any portents of it returning again either. Alicent turns to whisper to Floris. Now Aemond is glowering.

You look to Orwyle, stunned. Could it be true? He says, showing you his soft, benign hands: “Might I briefly examine your belly?”

“Of course.”

Your trousers and tunic, the subject of much controversy, prove convenient. Orwyle unfastens several gold buttons—each embellished with a kraken—and settles his palms on your belly, where he gently presses, taps, kneads. Then he picks up one of the jars on your nightstand. “Your Grace, would you be willing to identify this scent?”

You nod, perplexed, and then as soon as he lifts off the lid you recoil. “It’s awful! What is that?! It smells like garlic, but stronger. Much stronger. Metallic and pungent.” Like blood, like death.

The maester smiles. “I believe you are with child.”

“Oh!” Alicent cries from the foot of the bed, ecstatic. “What heartening news, what a blessing from the Mother!”

Aemond storms out of the room and Floris watches him go, fearful, clutching Beauty as the creature’s eyes bulge and her tongue lolls. He wanted the marriage consummated—the Greyjoy alliance secure, the Greens’ naval advantage unquestionable—but to watch Aegon beget yet another child while Aemond remains without one, lesser, emasculated, perhaps even sterile...

Alicent sighs and pats Floris’ shoulder encouragingly. “He will come around, my darling. His envy will abate, and he will see this for the gift it is. Aegon having an heir makes us all safer.” Then Alicent comes to you and takes both of your hands, beaming like the sun, grey streaks like moonlight in her rust-red hair. For the very first time, she doesn’t seem to be wishing that you were a Caswell or a Costayne or some other ordinary noblewoman, a flower from the Reach, a purring lap cat from the Westerlands. “And we will take the very best care of you. There will be no more grisly excursions to pull an octopus from the sea or riddle a Kingswood deer with arrows. You will stay here and rest, and we will ensure you have every comfort, and when your child is born you will know incomparable joy.”

Floris looks down at the floor, once again reminded that her womb is empty. Beauty whimpers and licks at her fingers, heavy and glittering with rings that keep multiplying.

“A child is a purpose,” Alicent tells you, hushed now as if it is a secret. She sits down on the bed and touches your cheek, tries to see you as a daughter. You are as unfamiliar to her as her silver-haired dragons, forever knowable, everlastingly frustrating. But you are her family now too. “I was always full of doubts as a girl. I lost my mother, my father was disgraced and sent away, my best friend became an enemy to me, I lied under the old king as he rotted and showed preference for Rhaenyra and did what husbands do to their wives, something so close and yet so distant. The only thing I was sure of was that Aegon belonged to me—perhaps he was the only thing that ever truly would—and that I would forsake all other promises to protect him. And I felt the same way about Helaena when she was born, and Aemond, and Daeron.”

Floris glances uneasily at Alicent; surely there is some undertone of treason in the dowager queen’s words. Maester Orwyle fiddles with his tiny ceramic jars and pretends not to be listening.

Alicent watches you, her vast eyes shimmering, dark mirrors of Aegon’s, just as sad, just as fierce. You think of Mother’s youth spent locked away in the Tower of the Glimmering, learning to scrub and sweat, perfecting her needlework, and when her marriage was arranged at last she committed herself indomitably to the life the Drowned God had given her. “I wish you could meet my mother,” you say to Alicent. “She is no warrior, and she makes beautiful embroidery. She is an excellent woman by any measure. You would enjoy each other’s company, I think.”

Alicent smiles. “One day. If the gods will it. When the war is won and we celebrate your child’s first nameday, perhaps.” She rises and leaves, presumably to inform Otto and Sir Criston.

You tell Maester Orwyle: “I must write to the Red Kraken. Will you take my letter to the rookery later, once I’ve managed to free myself from this bed?”

He bows. “I will return this afternoon, Your Grace.” He gathers up his jars, chains rattling, the sleeves of his grey robe whispering against the nightstand. “And I will bring teas and oils known to soothe the discomforts of pregnancy.”

“I’m too comfortable at the moment, that’s the trouble.”

He chuckles and departs. You can hear his low, ever-calm voice murmuring beyond the threshold.

“The king is pacing around in the hallway,” Floris tells you. And of course he is; he will not set foot in this room, painted with blood and hissing with ghosts. “Would you like me to deliver a message?”

“No, I’ll go out to see him.”

Floris is concerned. “You should rest.”

“We should not succumb to our weaknesses. We should rise above them.”

She rolls her eyes. “Being a squid sounds miserable.” Nonetheless, she yanks back the blankets so you won’t tangle your feet in them and tries to help you out of bed until you shake your head and she relents. “Don’t go tripping down any staircases. You’re the useful wife, we can’t make do without you.”

Now you do not push her away but catch her hand as she reaches anxiously for her sapphire pendant and squeeze it, sympathetic, repentant. “I’m very sorry, Floris.”

“I am not covetous of you giving birth to children, from what I understand it is even messier than conceiving them. But I would enjoy raising some, I think. And I’d like to be able to stop worrying about Aemond getting rid of me somehow. I believe he’d do it, and if he didn’t kill me first, my father would beat me to death for shaming him and ruining this alliance.”

Floris doesn’t appear to be joking, although sometimes it’s hard to tell with her. “Aemond could never put you aside. You are his lawful wife, and you are safe here. We would not tolerate Aemond being cruel to you.” Alicent wants a normal daughter-in-law. Otto wants the Baratheon army.

She smiles wearily. “Go on and see your king. I’m sure he’ll be pleased. You can plot which grotesque colossus you will bequeath to your offspring, a dragon or a kraken.”

Aegon is the only person in the hall when you arrive, his dagger at his waist and his moonshine hair hanging in waves, wearing dark green like a serpent or a crocodile. Alicent or Orwyle must have told him already, because he says, looking a little uncertain, a little afraid: “Well done, wife.”

“You did most of the work, as you enjoy reminding people.”

“But you bear the risk.” His gaze drops to your belly, suddenly of so much interest to everyone. He begins, tentatively, to reach for you. “May I?”

You laugh. “It’s only just started. You won’t notice any difference.”

“I’ve never felt it before.”

Is that possible? Three children, and he’s never touched an expecting woman’s belly? You move your own hands out of the way and he lays his palm against the softness just above the cradle of your hips, gentle, curious, somber. A horrible thought strikes you.“Will we have to send them someplace far away, like Jaehaera?” Like poor dead discorporate Maelor?

Aegon shrugs, his blue gaze vacant. “They die if I send them away. They die if I keep them here. How could I know what the right answer is?”

“What is dead may never die. You will see them again. And this one will live.”

“You have such faith in your monstrous Drowned God.”

“I was sent here for a reason.” You hear the firelit priest telling Mother: You will mourn many children, but your bloodline will be eternal. Do you understand? “I suppose there is no more need for you to call me to your bed at night.”

“No,” Aegon agrees. “But if I called you anyway, would you come?”

“I can’t say I have much of an appetite for lust at the moment.”

“Just to sleep then.”

“Yes. I would come.”

“Good,” he says simply, and leaves. You watch him walk to the opposite end of the corridor and hurry down the grand staircase, and then he is out of sight, and you are alone with the shadows and the ill-tempered shaggy cats that pad nimbly around Maegor’s Holdfast gutting rats.

You return to your bedchamber and Floris takes Beauty down to the gardens, and as you resist the temptation to crawl back beneath the blanket—a losing battle—you do a slow meandering lap around the room. You admire the wooden figurines Aegon carved for Helaena, insects and arachnids frozen in petrified time. You squint as you peek through the curtains to see the beach drenched in blinding sunlight, swift Ironborn ships patrolling the waves. You pull aside one of the massive green tapestries to find what was once a secret passage, but no longer: a doorway bricked up, an entrance barred against assassins.

You are pondering the green pearl you keep hidden in one of the dead queen’s jewelry boxes: Perhaps I’ll give it to Aegon when our child is born. Perhaps I’ll give it to him the next time he returns home victorious from battle. Perhaps I’ll give it to him when he says he loves me.

Someone shrieks from downstairs, and you think: Why are people always screaming here?

You swipe your dagger from the driftwood trunk where you keep it and race to the staircase, but what you see below is no threat. Dalton is grinning up at you, Nightfall drawn, long dark hair dripping seawater. The horn that once belonged to the Celtigars hangs from his shoulder by its leather strap. Maids and servants are hysterically fleeing from him; guards clutch their swords and approach him doubtfully. He didn’t wait for permission. He is not here by invitation. He is here because he believes no one can stop him. Aegon strides into the room—summoned by the screams—then freezes when he spots the Red Kraken, looks up to see you at the top of the staircase, waves away the guards. They appear grateful as they scatter. Floris arrives and yelps in alarm, as if instead of your brother she has discovered a bear or wolf or shadowcat loose in Maegor’s Holdfast.

“Dalton!” you shout, thrilled. You tuck your dagger into your belt and rush down to him. You slip on a step and laugh as you catch yourself on the banister. At the foot of the staircase Dalton grabs you without hesitation, without propriety, his right hand crushing your belly. “Will you stop?” you say, smiling. “Why do people keep doing that? There’s no change yet!”

“You’re firmer here, I can feel it.” He kisses you on the mouth, rough stubble, salted lips. Aegon and Floris grimace and recoil. “Mother will be elated.”

“She already has an abundance of grandchildren, thanks to your efforts.”

Dalton smirks and shrugs, and you know what he means: Not real ones. Dalton does not bring his salt wives or children to the castle on Pyke. He is not particularly close with any of them, and so Mother isn’t either. He tilts up your chin and skates his calloused thumbprint across the wave crest of your cheek, admiring you, thanking the Drowned God for you. Now you are everything a good woman must be. You glance over at Aegon, and he is not just repulsed and mystified. His oceanic eyes glisten with a forbidden envy; no Targaryen has ever touched him with this sort of tenderness, not in as long as he can remember. No one has demonstrated love this unmistakable and unashamed. Dalton murmurs: “You are forever the pearl in the oyster of my life.”

“I’ve missed you.” No one else here is like us.

“Come walk with me,” he says and turns away, expecting you to follow. As he passes by Aegon, Dalton bows his head slightly. “Dragon tamer,” he greets him. Aegon nods back, still bewildered. Floris gapes at Dalton: his hungry grey eyes and unkept hair, the moonstone pommel of his blade. From the shadows, maids and servants chatter, marveling at their essential, bestial ally.

On the beach, the froth of the surf roils up over the sand and the sun is still hot and golden as it sets, paining your eyes. Gulls spiral and squawk, the breeze blows, Ironborn ships traverse the bay from afar. You recall the listing of a deck beneath your boots, the mist of sea spray, the creaks of rigging. You can’t believe you’ve gone so long without these things; you ache for them every minute you’re awake, and oftentimes in your dreams as well. From the Dragonpit, Dreamfyre is shrieking again, murderous and mournful.

“Where is the One-Eyed Prince?” Dalton says as he walks backwards, swinging Nightfall, sparring with invisible foes. “The man who rides Vhagar?”

“He and Criston left to take Maidenpool in the Riverlands.”

“That’s on the coast, isn’t it? Overlooking the Bay of Crabs. We could have reaved there.”

“You’re needed here to protect the city, just like Aegon and Sunfyre. The Velaryon fleet is still out there in the Narrow Sea, waiting for the opportune moment.”

Dalton is displeased, and always impatient. He frowns at his own reflection in Nightfall’s long, Valyrian steel blade.

You point to the horn Aegon took from the Celtigars. “No krakens yet?”

“I haven’t killed enough enemies,” Dalton says, as if he’s given it lengthy consideration. “I haven’t proven myself worthy. That’s why the Drowned God hasn’t blessed me, it’s the only reason I can think of. But one day I will have slit enough throats, spilled enough guts, sent enough sacrifices into the sea...and when I blow the horn, I will be answered.”

You study him, wondering: Has he changed? Is he more ruthless than he was before? More reckless, more restless? Or maybe you’re just softer, weaker.

“You remember what the priest said when we were children?” he continues.

“I do.”

“He saw bubbles rising from the depths, he saw ships snapped in two. What else could that mean?” Dalton sheaths his sword. “You should come to sea with us. It would be good for you. You wrote that you’ve felt unwell. It’s because your child craves the ocean, and exertion, and violence, the same as any true Ironborn. You could accompany us the next time there is a skirmish, when we are sent to hammer down rebellions on Driftmark or Massey’s Hook. I’ll have armor made for you.”

“I don’t wear armor.”

“Not while killing pitiful men on cargo ships. But against trained soldiers? You must wear it. It will be light, I promise. You’ll still be able to move freely.”

You feel yourself tugging on your leather gloves, hear the whisper of an arrow’s fletching between your fingers. There is the flicker of something, kindling eager to catch fire. “I wish I could, but the king doesn’t want me to leave the Red Keep. And I’m trying to be a good wife.”

“He thinks he doesn’t want you to, but he married an Ironborn for a reason. We’re not like the rest of them, and we aren’t supposed to be.” Dalton sits down on the sand and you join him, appreciative for the rest. Now your only living brother looks at you closely. “What is he like as a husband?”

Terrible. Wonderful. A curse, a conqueror. “Have you ever been in love?”

Dalton cackles. “The Usurper has been treating you well.”

“It’s not like it was with Father and Mother,” you say, troubled. “It’s strange. All day we ignore each other, or we argue and we glare, and then every night he sends for me. Sometimes he’s not even awake when I get there. I think he just doesn’t want to be alone.”

“But when he is awake?” Dalton presses, leering.

You know what he’s asking. “It’s almost like fighting. But it’s good. He won’t touch me unless I want him to.” You remember how Aegon showed you the Celtigars’ horn first; you remember how he called you a pearl when he didn’t know you were listening. “He can be so thoughtful sometimes, and then he forgets me again.”

Dalton shrugs, perhaps disappointed that you aren’t divulging more details. “Well, you’re not one of his whores, and you’re not his dead sister either. Perhaps he doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“Perhaps,” you say distractedly, watching Ironborn ships glide on the horizon, dark shadows against firelight dusk.

“I don’t love women the way I love the sea, or the feel of Nightfall in my hand, or the heat of a man’s blood after I’ve spilled it. I don’t love my children that way either.”

You settle a palm on your belly, unremarkable and yet full of promise. “I love this one.”

He smiles. “Do you? Already?”

“I think it’s a girl though.”

He sighs, a minor disappointment. “Well, she will be fearsome like you, and you can pray for a boy next time. It should come soon enough.”

“Of course.”

“To conceive in the first moon of trying is a great blessing from the Drowned God. He must want you here.” Then Dalton grins, teasing, showing his strong crooked teeth. “Perhaps fertility is your gift, and you will give Aegon more children than any consort ever has before. You will put Good Queen Alysanne and her thirteen blonde brats to shame.”

“I’m afraid I’ll never be sure what my gift is.”

“You’ll know it before the end,” Dalton says, and you rest your head on his shoulder as the tide rises to cover your boots.

Now your belly is beginning to show, and you aren’t feeling quite so drained; instead you grow full like a net heavy with fish, and you try not to wish that you were on a ship with Dalton and Rollo Pyke and the other Ironborn, useful and lethal, close to the sea, close to the Drowned God.

You are at dinner with Aegon, Floris, Alicent, and Otto, and the Hand of the King is saying: “The fighting in the Riverlands and the Reach is affecting harvests. Men are kept away from their farms, and fields and orchards have been pillaged or burned. There will be food shortages. The ability of trade vessels to travel in and out of Blackwater Bay is imperative, but the Sea Snake must know that. He will attempt a blockade when he feels the time is right.”

“The Ironborn will massacre them,” Aegon says with confidence.

“Unless a dragon escorts the Velaryons. Even a small beast like Vermax or Moondancer can do great damage to ships, particularly at night when it’s difficult for scorpion bolts to find their targets.”

“So I’ll burn the Sea Snake’s ships,” Aegon says, elbows on the table, gnawing on an apple. “Simple enough.”

Otto smiles, tight and long-suffering, as if struggling to keep his patience. “I fear he may try to lure you away from the capital for his own designs, leaving it unguarded.”

“Alright then. Aemond can burn his ships.”

“Aemond cannot travel so far from the Riverlands without effectively abandoning our hard-won advantages there. And he seems...much attached to Harrenhal.” Aemond had returned to King’s Landing after taking Maidenpool for just long enough to attempt to impregnate Floris, then flew to join Criston’s forces when they marched on Harrenhal. Daemon and Caraxes vacated the castle shortly before they arrived, headed east towards the Vale. Aemond has not left Harrenhal since, despite nearby traitors being ripe for subjugation: House Smallwood of Acorn Hall, House Darry, House Lychester, House Vance of Wayfarer’s Rest, House Piper of Pinkmaiden.

Aegon’s brow furrows. “Why?”

Otto shakes his head; he doesn’t know.

The king’s eyes flick to Alicent. “Have we asked Criston why?”

She answers: “His letters have been brief and only on the subject of logistics.”

“Surely the castle is not so appealing, it’s a mound of haunted rubble. Its only value is its location.”

“Curious that Daemon would surrender it so easily,” Otto muses.

Aegon shrugs. “He fears Vhagar. As anyone should.”

“And yet he is known to be rash and cunning. He rarely runs from a fight.”

With the point of your knife, you poke at the slab of bleeding venison on your plate, surrounded by strange southern produce: a salad of spinach and sweetgrass and orange slivers, a tapenade of olives. Nauseated, you put down your cutlery. You rest your hands on your belly instead. Your gown is soft grey velvet, flowing sleeves and stitched with black starfish. Mother made it, and when you wear her needlework she doesn’t seem so far away, across the continent, across the sea.

Otto is saying: “In any case, Aemond will need to be more flexible. The Lannister army won a battle at the Red Fork, but they suffered heavy losses and will not cross farther into the Riverlands without a dragon escort. They fear reprisal from one of Rhaenyra’s beasts. And who can blame them? I too would have no desire to be roasted alive in my armor.”

Aegon turns to Floris, grinning. “Floris, lovely, would you describe Aemond as flexible?”

She smirks shyly. “Not especially.” Beauty is sitting in Aemond’s chair and Floris is feeding her morsels of meat and sweet potatoes.

“Where is Rhaenyra, anyway?” Aegon asks as he chomps on a turkey leg, brown crackling skin slick with grease. “Still cowering in the Vale with her bastards and her infants? What an inspiring image she cuts. No wonder she’s losing this war.”

“It’s difficult to know for sure. She doesn’t stay anyplace for long. I understand that Vermax and Moondancer have been spotted near Quiet Isle, Saltpans, and Widow’s Ford,” Otto says. “It stands to reason that Rhaenyra is nearby.”

“She’s retreating.”

“Well, she’s waiting for the Northmen, probably. And considering her options. She and Daemon have been quarreling, apparently he’s taken up with a servant girl or something.”

Aegon snorts. “Perfect.”

“Aemond must be careful,” Alicent cautions. “Vhagar is formidable, but she is aged, and she is flesh and blood the same as any dragon. They are not immune to illness or injury.”

Otto nods as he slices through his venison. “A scorpion bolt took down Meraxes.”

“Vhagar is bigger now than Meraxes ever was,” Aegon says. Then he sees that you aren’t eating and is concerned. “Are you ill?” He touches your face to feel for fever and you are startled; he almost never touches you unless you’re alone together.

“She doesn’t like land animals, haven’t you noticed?” Floris says. “She never eats them. She just picks at the meat to be polite.”

Aegon looks around the table irritably. “Why is there nothing here for the queen to eat?”

A nervous young servant carrying a pitcher of wine inquires: “What would you like me to bring, Your Grace?”

“Go find a salmon or something!”

The servant bows and scurries from the dining room. Aegon smiles at you and rests a palm on your belly; you smile back. As the servant leaves, Lord Larys Strong enters.

Alicent sighs. “Lord Larys, what a pleasure.”

“I do apologize for the intrusion.” He stands with both hands on the handle of his cane, inset with a firefly made of gold. He glances meaningfully at the remaining servants and the guards gleaming in their armor. “But there are...timely matters that bear discussion.”

There is a lull as Alicent and Otto exchange an alarmed look, and then Otto commands the servants and guards: “Leave.”

They obey and Alicent gestures to Aemond’s chair. “Please, Lord Larys, join us.”

Floris places Beauty in her lap, where the dog whines until she is consoled with another piece of sweet potato. Larys bows to both you and Aegon and then takes a seat, fidgeting with his robes, plucking several red grapes from a nearby platter of fruit. “It is my great regret to bring you worrisome news this evening, but some very interesting whispers have found their way to me from the foothills of the Vale, and I did not think it would be wise to delay in informing you.”

“What’s happened?” Alicent asks, gripping the seven-pointed star at her throat. She is frightened but not frantic; if Aemond was wounded or dead, Larys would not be eating grapes.

“It seems...that the dragon Seasmoke has been claimed by a rider.”

There is a long pause. Otto replies flatly, still absorbing it: “By who?”

“By a young bastard of Corlys Velaryon. Addam of Hull, he is called. He has joined Rhaenyra’s cause.”

“We can do that?” Aegon says to his grandsire. “We can dig up Valyrian bastards and put them on dragonback?”

Otto shoots him a quick, frustrated glare. “This is very serious.”

“Apparently it was Jacaerys Velaryon’s idea,” Larys says with a raised eyebrow.

Alicent swigs her wine. “Bastards riding dragons. Of course he would think of it.”

“Seasmoke has experienced battle,” Otto says. “He saw combat in the War for the Stepstones.”

Aegon scoffs. “But this bastard hasn’t! I have, Aemond and Daeron have!”

“Daeron is needed in the Reach, you are needed here. Aemond cannot be everywhere at once, and Vhagar is slow. I don’t believe Caraxes could seize the capital alone, Vermax and Moondancer are small and inexperienced, Syrax is not well-suited for battle...” The horror dawns in Otto’s green eyes. “But Caraxes and Seasmoke together...”

“What of the other beasts?” Alicent says, terrified. “The unclaimed dragons on Dragonstone?”

“Seven hells, what about Vermithor? Can you imagine if they got the Bronze Fury?”

Now Aegon is roused, his spine straight, his eyes focused. “Send some of the Ironborn ships to patrol Dragonstone. They will report as to whether any of the other dragons are missing and kill anybody who approaches the island.”

“That’s an unenviable task,” Floris says, petting Beauty as the dog’s pink tongue droops from its mouth. “Trekking around a volcanic rock hoping the dragons don’t incinerate you.”

“Fortunately, the Ironborn don’t mind dying.” Otto counts beasts on his fingers: “Vermithor, Grey Ghost, Silverwing, the Cannibal...”

“The Cannibal!” Alicent gasps, clutching her seven-pointed star until her knuckles turn white.

“We have a dragon here,” Otto realizes. “Large and ferocious and in need of a rider.”

Alicent looks at him, dazed. “Dreamfyre?”

“Could we find someone to bond with her? She could help the king guard the city, even with an inexperienced rider she would be a powerful deterrent to our enemies. Her size alone would make her lethal to Seasmoke and a threat to Caraxes.”

Aegon is stunned, then draws his dagger and twirls it, peers into the silvery blade, begins etching something into the table. Floris seems to debate objecting to his destruction and decides against it. “Is this really possible?”

Otto ruminates on the prospect. “If the bastard is Corlys Velaryon’s son, that makes him a half-brother to Seasmoke’s former rider, Laenor. Perhaps the dragon sought a close relative. We don’t have one of those, Viserys sired no illegitimate children. The only Targaryen bastards in the city would be very distantly related to you. It might be too attenuated an inheritance, the magic too diluted.”

“If I may interject,” Larys says in his subtle, servile way. “It appears to my inexpert judgment that there is nothing to lose by trying.”

Aegon frowns, scratching shapes into the wood of the table. “Unless we give a dragon to someone we cannot trust.”

“Why would they turn against us?” you say, and Aegon gazes at you thoughtfully. “If we raise a person from nothing and welcome them into this dynasty? What does anybody crave besides glory, family, purpose, power?”

“We could try to find a rider Dreamfyre would favor, someone like Helaena,” Otto says, and both Alicent and Aegon flinch. When they hear her name they smell blood, see a shock of silver hair painted red.

Aegon thumps the point of his blade against the table. After a while he says softly: “Both of Dreamfyre’s riders have been women, gentle and fond of animals.”

“And mothers,” Otto murmurs.

Alicent bursts out: “You wish to give my daughter’s dragon to a stranger?”

Otto shakes his head. “Alicent, this is to defend King’s Landing—”

“It’s grotesque,” she hisses. “It’s an abomination.”

“We must do the very best we can with our present circumstances, we cannot afford the luxury of sentimentality. Does the Warrior not wish us to be brave in battle, does the Smith not reward ingenuity?”

“Does the Mother stop loving her children when they die?”

“You would give that murderous bitch Rhaenyra an advantage over us?!”

Alicent is weeping. “To treat a creature that gave Helaena such joy and solace like a tool to be used and passed along, like a sword or a shovel or a pair of boots...”

Aegon stares icily at Otto. “What have any of us ever been to him but tools?”

Otto turns to the king, hurt and fury glinting in his eyes. “Do not mistake my pragmatism for lack of affection, boy.”

“I don’t believe you’re capable of affection.”

“My love for Helaena was far greater than yours! How often did you dance with her or walk with her in the gardens, or inquire about her insects, or play with her children, your children?!”

“As if you mourned her! You were sending off ravens to the Reach and the Westerlands and the Iron Islands when the bodies of my wife and son were still smoldering on the pyre!”

“To protect the family I have left!” Otto roars back. “To safeguard you, and your mother, and Aemond and Daeron and Maelor and Jaehaera! The war does not stop when one of us dies, and I will keep writing my letters and plotting my countermeasures as long as our cause still has breath in its lungs, as long as any one of us survives!”

The table falls quiet and wordless: Aegon hostilely marring the wood with his dagger, Larys and Floris endeavoring to be invisible, Alicent sniffling into a handkerchief embroidered with Sir Criston Cole’s initials, Beauty ogling with her protruding onyx-dark eyes.

When Otto continues, his voice is soft and sorrowful. “Is your Greyjoy wife not to your liking? Is the heir she carries not an asset to our faction and a patch to the wound in your soul? If I have done wrong, it was not in the hours following the murders of Helaena and Jaehaerys. It was over two decades ago when I believed that marrying your mother to King Viserys would ensure the prosperity of our family and the protection of the realm. I was wrong, but I cannot go back and change it. I can only press onward. And finding a rider for Dreamfyre will help us win, and so I must do it.”

“We should consult with Aemond,” Alicent says.

Aegon nods grudgingly. “Allow him a fortnight to respond, then we will proceed with or without him.”

“I’ll send a raven now,” Otto agrees, and rises from the table. As he leaves, you think you see the shine of tears on his cheeks. You look down to where Aegon has been carving something into the wood, and what you find there is a ship being tossed on rough waves.

At night he sends for you like he always does, and when you arrive he is still awake, gazing up at the canopy of emerald and gold with his fingers laced behind his head. When you climb into bed he crosses the white sea of the sheets to reach you, drapes an arm across your hips, rests his head on the modest swell of your belly, perhaps imagines the future that waits inside.

You say, afraid to disappoint him, afraid he will hate you again: “What if this one is a girl?”

Aegon looks up at you. “You think it is?”

“I can’t picture a son for some reason. Only a daughter.”

“Then we will cherish her. I won’t make the same mistakes I did before.” He smiles. “And we will have an excuse to try vehemently for the next one.”

“I don’t think you need an excuse.”

He chuckles. “Aemond likes to stay inside Harrenhal. I prefer to be somewhere else, warmer and far less roomy.” But he doesn’t try to take off your white cotton shift. He is drowsy; he closes his eyes and lays his head on your belly again.

You thread your fingers through his silver hair, your skull full of hushed clandestine questions: Will you let me help you? Can you understand I’m not like other noblewomen? Do you mind that I smell like seawater now and not perfumes or lotions or oils? Why do you still call for me each night? Why did you send the whores back to their brothels? Do you think you could love me someday? And you ask none of them.

You wait until you see Aegon flying on Sunfyre high above the Red Keep, and then you put down your cards. You and Floris are in the gardens, trickling fountains and blazing sun and arbors thick with red roses, grape vines, honeysuckle, ivy. Bumblebees drone and birds chirp. From a distance, you can hear waves breaking against rocks and the shrill squeals of gulls.

“Where are you going?” Floris says.

“To be useful.” To overcome weakness.

“No.”

“I’ll return before too long.”

“No,” Floris pleads again.

You grin. “See you at dinner.”

“Rhaenyra and Daemon could have sent assassins into the city. You don’t fear them?!”

“If they found an assassin who’s killed more men than I have, I’d consider it.”

She sighs, reshuffling the cards. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling more like yourself again.”

At the gate, the guards let you out because they’ve all heard stories of what the Red Kraken does to his enemies: throat cutting, keelhauling, feeding them to sharks or spotted whales, throwing them overboard to sink down to the seafloor, grim offerings to his grisly god. In the streets of King’s Landing, the people come out to greet and gawk at you. Men ask to admire your weapons: your bow, your oyster knife, your dagger you paid the iron price for. Women touch your belly to wish you the deliverance of a healthy heir, to pray that some of your good fortune will prove catching and bless them with a child as well. Swarms of filthy-faced orphans thank you for sending them squirrels and chipmunks and birds from the Godswood. They ask if you have magic. Can you cast spells? Can you see through the eyes of dolphins or whales?

“No, but people say some Ironborn from the Lonely Light can,” you reply, smiling, and then you gnash your teeth like a spotted whale and they run off, screaming and giggling.

You find the same blue door where you and Floris left the piebald stag before. You knock and the man who lives there answers, is shocked to discover you, bows deeply. “Perhaps you can help me, good sir,” you say. “In exchange for the enduring appreciation of the crown and more deer dropped on your doorstep in the future.”

“Anything, Your Grace.”

“I seek someone who resembles my husband. Who shares...a certain family likeness.”

The man hesitates; is it blasphemous to speak of such things?

“The Targaryens have resided here for over a hundred years,” you say diplomatically. “It is inevitable that some of their strange foreign attributes have trickled down.”

The man admits: “There are a few such people to my knowledge here in the city.”

“Can you think of a young woman? Perhaps a mother?”

He considers this for a moment. “I know a baker.”

“Take me to her.”

He leads you through narrow, crooked cobblestone streets, and smallfolk appear in doorways and peer down from their windows. You hear them whispering: It’s the Greyjoy queen again. She’s always dressed like a man. She’s always carrying weapons. But she is merciful to us. And she will give the king fearsome heirs, won’t she?

At the bakery, the man bows once more and leaves you to your business, knowing it is sensitive in nature. Inside the small storefront you find baskets half-full of bread and biscuits and pastries. A woman with her hair in a thick braid is humming as she lifts a fresh loaf out of the oven with a long wooden peel. In the back of the shop, you glimpse a man dragging around massive burlap sacks of flour. Up in the loft, you can hear children playing.

The woman turns and sees you standing in the threshold, an archer in leather gloves and boots, trousers, a tunic held shut by golden buttons embossed with krakens. She gasps and drops the peel, gaping at you, mesmerized and horrified. Why would you be here? She collects herself and bows. “Your Grace,” she manages, voice trembling.

“What is your name?” you ask, wasting no time. The Ironborn are not particularly conversational.

“Rosella, Your Grace.”

“Who is your father?”

She startles; fear flashes in her grey-blue eyes. She is in her thirties, plump and pretty, a straight regal nose like Aemond’s, a certain luminous quality to her skin. Her hair is darker than Aegon’s, more sandy than white, more faded, but there are strands of silver that glimmer when the sunlight hits them. “I never knew him.”

She thinks you might be hunting down Targaryen bastards for a nefarious purpose: to eliminate Aegon’s rivals, to sacrifice them in a watery heathen ritual. “You have nothing to fear from me. Only to gain. And there will be rewards for your children as well.”

Rosella wipes flour from her palms onto her apron. Eventually, she answers. “My mother said Prince Aemon—son of King Jaehaerys the Wise, father of Rhaenys the Queen Who Never Was—loved her in their youth. We were always taken care of, money was sent, medicines and gifts appeared at the proper moments. I have memories of a man visiting us, very tall, very handsome. But he hid his hair under a dark hood. He would read books to me. Many smallfolk can’t read, my husband couldn’t when I met him. But I taught him how.”

“These visits ended when you were still young, I presume?”

Soberly, she nods. “Perhaps out of respect for his wife, Jocelyn Baratheon, a dark-haired beauty. When people mentioned her, my mother would get quiet and sad. Then the prince was killed on Tarth by pirates before I fully understood, before I was married myself and learned all that goes on between men and women. It’s a regret of mine. I wish I could have known him better.”

“Forgive me, my knowledge of the Targaryens is still somewhat limited. Did Prince Aemon ride a dragon?”

“Caraxes. The Blood Wyrm.”

You study Rosella again, trying to decide if she is much like Helaena. It’s difficult to compare her to someone you’ve never met, a phantom, a ghost, a ricochet. “Do you have any magic?”

She blinks, puzzled. “What, Your Grace?”

“Do you see visions or cast spells?” You recall how Aegon put out the candles on the altar beneath Balerion’s skull and was not burned. “Does fire not harm you?”

“I never seem to burn myself on the bread oven. I don’t know why. Every other baker I’ve ever met has scars up and down their arms.”

“Come with me.”

Rosella glances nervously back at her husband, her children. “Why?”

“When the queen asks something of you, the only answer is yes.” Then you go out to the street to wait for her, and within a minute or two she does, her skin still dusted with flour and murmurs of bladelike silver gleaming from her hair.

You walk with her to the Dragonpit, and by the time you get there Rosella is winded and perspiring and turning pink from the sun, but you feel better than you have in months, blood rushing, blades on your belt. You remember Dalton’s words and realize he might be right: It’s because your child craves the ocean, and exertion, and violence, the same as any true Ironborn.

Aegon has just returned on Sunfyre, and he emerges from the shadows of the subterranean abyss yanking off his leather gloves and raking his fingers through his hair, his cape billowing behind him. In the dim light like late dusk, torches are burning. Aegon’s boots jolt to a halt when he spots you. “What are you doing here?”

“I found someone who Dreamfyre might like.”

He is furious. “You went into the city again?”

“She is gentle. She is a mother. And she has magic.”

Now Aegon’s attention shifts to Rosella, and he gazes at her for a long time, and you think you see more than just curiosity and wonder in his eyes. There is recognition. He beckons her to follow him into the darkness, into the nest of snarls and smoke.

“I can’t go down there,” she says, shaking all over. “I’m not worthy. I’ll be killed, I’ll be eaten.”

“I’m going to tell you what my people say when we face childbirth or combat or treacherous travel,” you tell Rosella, who stares at you with wide, petrified eyes the same frosty blue color as Aemond’s. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s triumph or a glorious death.”

She does not seem consoled. From within the depths of the Dragonpit, Dreamfyre looses a long, low, mournful cry. The air smells like ash and fire and blood; outside, the ocean growls.

“Follow me,” Aegon says to Rosella. “Your king commands it.”