like a never ending song

“And what has Alicent lost?” you argue, sharper than you intended. Your head whips hard to the side in time to find Ormund flinching beneath the bite of your words — a small flicker at the edges of his eyes; a brief lowering of his brows. 

You soften with a sigh a moment later and remind yourself that Ormund lost something too, even if the loss was not pulled from his body to claim it. 

“Forgive me, I… I only meant that… The Queen has four living children. And she carried each one with grace— There is no part of her that could possibly understand how I feel… And I wouldn’t wish it upon her besides.”

Ormund exhales through his nose and takes a step closer, boots scuffing the cobbles. “Then at least let me tell them that you are unwell—”

“No,” you dismiss with a shake of your stubborn head, eyes shutting briefly when the corset tightens again. “I refuse to be spoken of like some frail, ailing thing while the King sups at our table.”

Your gaze is wet with unshed tears when they open again, snapping to Ormund’s pale ones with a glimmering determination. “I am the Lady Hightower,” you tell him, brows raised and eyes firm. “So I will greet them standing. On my own feet. In my own home.”

Ormund’s chest, still heavy with grief, blooms with a distant sort of pride at your words. Perhaps because a part of him had long understood that you did not always dream of being the Lady Hightower. Your marriage was made of meetings and ledgers and alliances rather than any actual tenderness, as was true in most great marriages in Westeros. He knows, had you had it your way, you would’ve wed that gardener’s boy you grew up with — who you attempted to bring with you to Oldtown upon your betrothal, along with many of your household’s servants.

Ormund had the brawny, olive-skinned boy sent away within a fortnight — the moment he understood what kind of feelings the peasant boy had for you, and you for him. It was perhaps the first mad thing he ever did for you and, by Ormund’s later admission, the first time he realized that he might love you truly. (Though he had not thought it mad at the time, or love until many moons later, when he was struck with the sudden realization that the thought of Oldtown with you in it would be entirely unbearable.)

“Then we shall go,” Ormund nods in acquiescence as he plants himself just ahead of you. His gaze fixes into a sterner look a second later, as he tilts his chin to his chest and ducks into your eyeline. “But know I am not happy about this.”

“And yet Oldtown will remain standing anyway,” you joke in a softer coo. “I have faith that we’ll survive one of your unhappy mornings, my lord.”

The walk from your chambers to the gates of Oldtown is not long, but you feel every stone beneath your slippers as if the journey were some great pilgrimage across the whole of Westeros. 

You brace Ormund’s strong arm with both your hands, fingers curling into the fine wool of his coat hard enough to blanche your knuckles. He slows his long stride to match your smaller, more careful one without a word shared between you — a wall of green and muscles at your side, shielding you from the curious eyes of courtiers wondering why their lord and lady moved so slowly. So close.

It’s the first time you’ve tasted fresh air in three days. The breeze smells of the sea from the harbor and fish from the markets — mixing with the sweet citrus of the orange and lemon trees blooming in the gardens. Their white petals scatter like snow along the pale stone with every gust off the bay. You breathe in deeply through your nose, trying hopelessly to clear away the metallic tang of your own blood stubbornly clinging to the inside of your nostrils.

“His Grace, Viserys of House Targaryen,” the herald calls as the royal party files in on fine horses and gilded carriages, black banners snapping in the wind. “First of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men.”

Viserys is the first to exit when the caravan finally stills. He descends the steps a knight places down for him, portlier than you remember from your last journey to King’s Landing, some years before your marriage. His kind face has started to wither from fatigue and age alike. The crown seems heavier upon his head, though perhaps it’s only from where his silver hair has started to thin at the scalp.

Alicent follows out just behind him. She wears a black dress with drooping sleeves and a veil to cover her long auburn curls, fit for a funeral procession. A knight of white armor and long black hair helps her descend the steps as she cradles a small, dark bundle squirming in protest in her arms.

You sink into a curtsy. A white-hot pain swells from the pit of your stomach to the top of your spine — a lightning strike that burns for minutes after. You grip Ormund’s arm until your fingers tremble, though the polite smile on your face remains when you rise again.

“Ormund,” Viserys greets with an easy smile. He clasps your husband’s free arm with a genuine affection while his tired eyes drift along the white stone towers of the city. “My… Oldtown is just as fair as I remember it.”

“I agree, Your Grace, though I confess I am far more partial,” Ormund responds with a dry humor and a knightly smile. “I hear the view improves the longer one is forced to stare at it.”

Viserys laughs while, beside him, Alicent tries and fails to summon her own. Her elegant features are worn from the weeks of travel, many of which you imagine were spent balancing the fussing weight concealed against her chest just now.

“And my lady…” Viserys inclines his silver head towards you, studying your face with a pair of kind eyes. “You look well.”

You feel, in a word, like death dressed in Hightower green. You feel hollowed out and stitched together again, the farthest thing from well. But you nod once and thank the King all the same, profoundly grateful when your voice doesn’t shake.

“Truly. Marriage suits you both well,” Viserys nods. “Though, I admit, I’d hope Daeron might have had a cousin or two near enough in age to grow up beside him here. Once he’s old enough for such things, of course.”

Ormund tenses beside you. 

His arm feels very suddenly like holding onto stone. His pale eyes turn glacial in a flicker; a withheld grief that he forces himself to swallow down the second it rises like bile in his throat. You say nothing at all. You just keep smiling and pray to whatever god will hear you that you do not weep in front of the King and all his men.

“But there’s still time— You’ll have one of your own before long, I’m sure of it,” the older man continues, possessing no notion of what had happened behind these walls hardly two days past. If he notices anything amiss, he does not dwell on it, and turns instead to Alicent. “Go on. Let them see the boy.”

Alicent’s arms tighten instinctively around the bundle in her grasp and inhales sharply through her nose. It had been her own decision that Daeron be sent to her family’s ancestral home. Her last child was not quite six months when she counseled her King to send him to ward, far from the chaos of King’s Landing. But she finds herself suddenly plagued by the harsh realization that this will be the last time she will hold this baby as he is now. The next time she’s like to lay eyes on him again, he’ll be an unrecognizable young boy, and not nearly the small thing fussing against her collarbone now.

“He hasn't slept," Alicent warns as she steps closer. Her green eyes are warm and weary when they flit to you. “He didn’t take well to the carriage. Or the ship. He’s cried the whole way from Blackwater, I think. Poor thing…”

“I’m sure we can manage a crying babe, my Queen,” Ormund says gently, though there’s a distant aching in his voice disguised as good humor that only you could recognize. “I grew up with Gwayne, if you remember. I’m more than acquainted with wailing boys by now.”

Alicent musters a small smile and closes the distance between you to settle her son in your arms. 

He’s warm — that’s the first thing you notice — he’s a small furnace swaddled in Targaryen black. He stirs briefly at the transfer from one chest to another, round face screwing tight in the prelude to a wail. Your heart clenches to brace yourself for that sound. It never comes.

The babe turns his face into the curve of your throat and settles into stillness with one small fist curled into the fabric of your gown. The tiny sound he makes isn’t a cry, but it isn’t quite a coo either. He sleeps, finally, in your arms — not even two days after you held your daughter between them, who had never awoken at all.

Ormund’s wide hand settles at the small of your back. Even in its steadiness, you feel the subtle tremor of his fingers against your spine. His throat tightens with the sudden urge to cry at the sight — of you, still frail and yet so bravely composed, cradling another woman’s child after laying your own to rest in the sept. He swallows through the hands of grief strangling his throat and feels a warmer feeling settling in its wake.

“Well…” Viserys hums, watching the baby sleep against you with a proud look in his weathered eyes. “It seems the boy’s found his corner of Oldtown already— Isn’t that lovely, Alicent?”

The woman nods, though shock still etches slightly in her pale features and behind the dark green of her eyes. “Of course, Your Grace,” she says and clears her throat, blinking back her tears with a queen’s practiced grace. “Thank you both for taking him.”

“He'll want for nothing here," Ormund swears with a firm nod. “You have my word. We'll raise him as if he were our own trueborn son.”

You pull the blanket gently back to peer at the sleeping baby swaddled within it. He’s practically all cheeks, with his mother’s mouth and nose. 

You had been certain, two days past, that your life had surely ended with your daughter’s. That there would be nothing more to life than a hollow, vacant silence. But now, there is warmth — and a babe’s slow breath fanning along your collarbone. 

You do not yet have a name for the foreign feeling swelling inside of you. It’s not joy, not yet, but it isn’t grief either. Or, at least, not only grief. And for now, that would have to be enough.

127 A.C. / Training Yard

The sound of clashing steel finds you before the sight of it does. The ring and scrape of blade on blade carries across the bustling courtyard, where you’ve gone to look for a young prince who was, as Maester Yorrick informed you with a palpable impatience, nearly an hour late for his lessons. You find the boy exactly where you imagined he would be — sword-training with his uncle, who has since stripped down to a pale tunic now darkened with sweat from the exercise.

Daeron, now thirteen years of age, is all knees and elbows from a sudden growth spurt that had taken him seemingly overnight. He presses a defensive attack upon his uncle with all the fierceness of a knight, but with the gracelessness of a teenage boy. Even you could tell from where you stood that his swing had no hope of landing. Ormund turns the blow aside with a lazy flick of his wrist, no more troublesome than swatting a fly from the air.

“Awful,” you hear the man scold from afar. When Daeron grits his teeth and presses forward once more, Ormund steps back and lets the boy’s momentum carry him a half stride too far. His blade misses his mark by inches. “Gods, that’s even worse—”

Daeron lunges a third time, fuelled now by a boyish rage that twists his freckled features. Ormund steps inside the overextended reach, hooks a boot around the boy’s ankle, and trips him onto the dirt with his blunted blade pressed to his ribs. Daeron hits the ground with a thud, red-faced and breathing heavy. His long auburn tendrils cling to his sweaty temple when he whips his head to glare up at his uncle.

“Dead,” Ormund proclaims from where he stands over the boy, flat but not totally unkind. He raises his brows and tilts his chin to his chest. “If this were a real sword, I’d have had your head before the thought to swing finished forming in that head of yours.”

Daeron twists himself upward and shoves the faux blade away with a boyish scowl. “You always say that,” he grumbles, refusing the hand Ormund extends to help him up. He rises to full height on his own and swipes dirt from his pale palms.

“Yes. I always say it because it's always true. You're thinking with your temper again— I can see it in your shoulders before you’ve even moved,” the older man lectures as he turns on the heel of his boot and walks off a few paces. “Again. And this time, think before you swing. Not after—” 

“I think that’s enough for this morning,” you call to them as you step further into the yard, dress skirts rushing around your ankles in the summer breeze. “Maester Yorrick has been waiting all morning. And his patience, unlike yours, my lord, has its limits.”

Daeron nods once, shoulders sagging with an absent relief. “Yes, ma’am—”

“Give us a few more minutes,” Ormund dismisses simultaneously. “He’s close to getting his footwork right. I can feel it.”

You flash the man a look — one slight lift of your brow, one flicker of dullness behind the eyes. Years of marriage have honed that wordless look to a firm edge, one which finds Ormund like a blade. He nods in concession with a heavy exhale through his nose.

“You heard her, boy. Go on,” Ormund says, jerking his chin toward the tower and extending his hand out for the practice sword.

Daeron obeys without question. He passes the dull blade over and crosses the yard to you. You see the sweat and dirt streaked across his freckled face the closer he gets. “Come here to me,” you sigh and catch his round chin between your thumb and forefinger when he plants himself ahead of you. You swipe the filth from his cheeks with the hem of your sleeve like you’ve done since he was small enough to fit in one arm.

“I’m not a child anymore, you know," Daeron reminds you with a childish grimace as he suffers your motherly affections. “I’m a squire now.”

“Oh, a squire, are you?” you croon in response with an obvious air of sarcasm. You smooth wild auburn hair from his temples before pressing a chaste kiss to his hairline. “Go on now— before Maester Yorrick decides to make you study your histories until sundown.” 

Daeron nods and ducks past you towards the tower stair, though you catch the corner of his pink mouth twitching upward into a grin before he’s turned away. You watch him leave with an attentive stare as Ormund discards the training swords at their posts. He approaches you in long, slow strides, allowing you to see the mark that training has left upon him — the way the sweat dampens his dark curls and the collar of his tunic, making the fabric stick to his broad shoulders and toned chest. 

He smells of sweet wine, musky bathing oils, and salty sweat when he towers just before you. He tips his chin to his chest and raises his brows to his hairline, pale eyes glimmering with an expectant look.

“…Well?” 

You blink up at him with a feigned innocence. “Well, what?”

“My kiss,” he answers with a shrug like it’s obvious, like he were a man coming to collect his debts. “You gave the boy his, and I’ve spent half the morning training him— I should think that I’ve earned at least that much.” 

“Oh, really?” you squint. “After you told the boy he’s like to lose his head?”

“I told him the truth,” Ormund argues with an unrepentant laugh and takes a slow step closer to you. “Is the truth unkind merely because it stings a little going down?” 

His hands splay along your waist, wide and warm along the edges of your corset. It takes everything in you not to cave for him right there, in the full view of the crowded courtyard. You cross your arms over your chest instead. “If you keep being so hard on him, he’ll grow to hate sword training altogether—”

“May be. But he will go on alive a good deal longer for having learned it the hard way now— instead of on a real field, with real steel, without me there to guide him.” Ormund ducks his head to catch your eye, pale gaze glimmering in time the pink smile tugging at his lips. “Surely you are not truly cross with me, my love…” he croons quietly.

You shrug with a raised chin, unwilling to concede so easily. “Perhaps I am.”

“Well, then, it’s hardly my doing,” he chuckles, a sound far warmer than the silver-gold sunshine sprawling over the courtyard. The pads of his thumbs smooth over your ribs in an absentminded affection. “You've gone so soft on the boy that you can scarcely bear to watch him lose a practice bout, without petting his hair over it after."

“Well, someone in this household has to be soft with him," you argue lightly, more teasing now than truly cross. Your slipper scrapes the dirt as you take a short step closer to him. What little distance remained between you closes now in an instant; each rise and fall of his chest brushes your folded arms. “You spend your mornings convincing the poor boy the world means to kill him, and I spend my nights convincing him that he could rule the world entire if he wished... Perhaps he’ll come out well-balanced for it, in the end.”

“Assuming one of us doesn’t kill the other over the method first,” Ormund quips.

“Precisely,” you nod.

“Well, I think it’s a fine system,” the man agrees gravely, drawing you an impossible inch closer by the hands still on your waist. His breath fans warm across your jaw as he leans in closer, still smelling of the mint leaves he’d chewed after breakfast. “And one I certainly intend to go on employing indefinitely… If my wife forgives me long enough to let me kiss her.”

His low voice glitters somewhere in the center of your chest. Your eyes narrow despite the small smile curling hopelessly at your mouth. “I don’t think I’ve yet decided,” you lilt.

“Well, I have,” he croons quietly, and does not wait for your retort before leaning down to press his lips against yours.

His broad nose flattens into the side of yours under the weight of his kiss, a slow and languid thing — as natural as the white waves ebbing and flowing against the pale stone tower of Oldtown. Your hands twist in his pale tunic billowing in the sea breeze, dissolving into the man like salt in water. 

There is nothing you would not forgive this man for, you think distantly to yourself. There is no madness he could not lead you toward, not if he kisses you like this the entire way there.

130 A.C. /  Ormund’s Solar

The raven arrives like all the rest — unceremoniously, on a sunless grey morning, from the trembling hands of the weathered maester. You tend to your needlework by the crackling hearth, burning low to fight off the morning chill blowing in from the sea, while Daeron reads in the opposite chair with one leg slung over the arm of it — both of you still waking with the early morning.

Across the room, Ormund sits at his desk and breaks the seal with a dull crack. Your gaze drifts to the man as he unrolls the letter, parchment whispering beneath his ringed fingers. You watch his pale eyes flit across the words once, and his brows lower in confusion a moment later. He shifts in his seat and reads it again, slower this time. His spine straightens with a soldier’s subconscious instinct as he draws a deep breath in and forgets to let it go. 

The quiet feels loud as it swells within the solar. The popping fire startles you briefly, as you get lost in Ormund’s wordless dread. You feel his silent panic as if it were your own. You rise from your seat and lay your needlework on the cushion behind you, careful not to trouble Daeron’s reading as you stroll to the man’s side.

“Ormund?” you call quietly to him. “Ormund— What does it say?”

He says nothing in response; he just lifts his ringed hand and passes you the parchment curled between his middle and forefinger. His eyes remained fixed on a negligible chip in the cobblestone wall across the room as you pluck the paper from his hand. His silence is not convincing; his silence, as you’ve learned in years of marriage, is far more frightening than any voice he could raise.  

Your eyes dart over the scrawled ink thrice over, just as he had, because your mind refuses to process the words on the first two passes.

“By the time this reaches you, the city has already fallen. Rhaenyra Targaryen holds King’s Landing and names herself Queen upon the Iron Throne. She has taken the Queen Dowager prisoner, as well as the King’s wife and last living heir. Send word of your household’s safety. Guard the boy.” 

The letters blur and steady and blur again, swimming before your eyes. Your blood runs cold while the glowing hearth simultaneously fills the room with a near-unbearable heat. As your breaths come faster and shallower to you, you hear a small voice call from behind you.

“Is something wrong?” Daeron wonders aloud as he glances up from the heavy novel in his lap. His auburn brows knit low over his green eyes, casting a faint shadow over his freckled cheeks, which are slowly starting to lose the softness of boyhood.

“Go on to your chambers, Daeron,” you tell him in a voice strangely steady compared to how shaken you feel. “It’s time to break your fast. I’ll have the servants fetch it for you.” 

“I’m not hungry,” the boy insists as he rises slowly from his chair, setting his book aside and walking slowly from the hearth. His eyes dart back and forth between your profile and Ormund’s when both of you refuse to look at him. His shoulders straighten with a strangling tension. “What’s happened? What does it say—?”

“Daeron,” Ormund snaps, voice cutting through the quiet room like a blade. His eyes are similarly sharp when they snap finally to the boy’s pleading once. “Listen to your mother, boy. Go.”

Mother, he says. The word lingers and hangs in the air for a long moment. Even in his newfound worry, Ormund’s eyes still flicker with a startled awareness at how easily the slip-up had escaped him, though there is little time to dwell on it now. 

Daeron's pink mouth parts with some half-formed protest at the ready. Whatever words he could conjure up on such short notice turn to dust on his tongue at the look his uncle gives him, chiseled features hardening into an unfeeling sort of look. Daeron exhales a held breath, gathers his book from his seat, and heads for the door without further argument.

Ormund’s knowing voice follows him out: “And don’t stand outside the door eavesdropping, either. Straight to your chambers. I'll know if you've stopped on the stair."

Only when the door shuts behind the boy with a soft click do your teary eyes lift from the parchment in your trembling hands. You say nothing for a long moment. The muffled sounds of the bustling castle fill the silence — the sounds of an oblivious world still living, though it feels a little like yours has stopped.

“I know," Ormund says before you’ve spoken, before you’ve needed to speak. “I know.”

“Okay,” you nod once. “So what are you going to do?”

He huffs a not-quite laugh. “I’ve only just found out about this. As have you,” he answers, a little sharper than he means to. “I’ll need a moment to think about the problem before you ask me to solve it, my love.” 

“A moment is no longer a luxury we have,” you argue, voice rising despite yourself and wavering on every syllable with a palpable fear. “Rhaenyra has dragons, Ormund— she has Daemon and three new bastard riders sworn to her besides. She does not need a moment to bring any of them to our door.”

Your dress skirt spins around your ankles when you turn suddenly in place. Ormund’s pale eyes follow your form as you storm back towards the hearth, ranting the whole way there.

“She will come for him, Ormund— not if, when. She will stop at nothing to silence any claim that challenges her own,” you continue, voice cracking under the weight of your unshed tears. “Daeron is a threat to her! Simply by breathing, he is a threat to her, and she will not leave him idling here out of some… familial courtesy for some half-brother she’s never met.”

The flame crackles quietly when you toss the letter into it. The wax seal blackens and weeps; the ink turns slowly to ash. You’d hoped that destroying those words might, in turn, settle the uneasy feeling they’ve brought you; but to no avail.

“I know that,” Ormund nods with a jaw clenched tight, ringed fingers curling into fists over his thighs beneath the desk. 

“Then think!” Your shout bounces off the cobbled walls as you turn to face him once more. His face blurs behind the burning tears clouding your vision. The swelling emotion thickens your voice as you yell to him, half-wild with a preemptive grief. “I have already buried children who never got to draw breath— I will not bury another who has drawn fifteen years of them under this roof! Do not let them take him, Ormund— I don't care what it costs. Do not let them our boy!”

Ormund’s chair scrapes the cobbles as he rises slowly to full height. He crosses the solar in slow, silent strides. Your glassy eyes stay locked with his as he nears. You peer stubbornly up at him from beneath your lashes, clumped with unshed tears; but you do not protest when his palms smooth over the outsides of your elbows to pull you into his arms. 

You melt hopelessly against his chest, fisting the back of his doublet in both hands, and trembling slowly as you choke down a sob. Ormund’s wide hands smooth along your back and feels his chest tighten with a striking, familiar ache. He thought once there was no worse sound in the world than hearing your weeping over a lost child; but he knows, now, that there is something equally as troubling: your weeping over a child you fear you’re about to lose and feeling like there is no time yet to stop it.

“I will not let anyone take him,” Ormunds promises evenly, with a distance that suggests he’s already assembling a plan in the depths of his mind. His arms curl tighter, pressing you harder against him. “I swear it to you. By the gods, they will not have our son.”

You pull back from him, just far enough to search his steady gaze with your wearier one. “But how?” you press weakly, more of a demand than a real question.

Ormund ponders for a long moment. The shadow of his adam’s apple rises and falls in his throat as he swallows. And when he speaks again, the words fall from his tongue flat and even, as if he were testing each one the moment they left his mouth.

“No one at court has laid eyes on the boy since he was a babe in arms…” he answers lowly, brows lifting to his hairline. “Alicent hasn’t seen him in years… There is no one outside these walls who would know what he looks like… So if they come— when they come… I suppose Rhaenryra would presume any silver-haired boy as Viserys’ heir.”

Your brows furrow as confusion twists slowly across your face.

“We’d only need enough lye and patience,” Ormund continues with a shrug. “And a boy willing enough to answer to a name that isn’t his, and to go with Rhaenyra, should her dragons come calling.”

You tense within his hold as the words run through you like ice-cold water. “You mean to… to send a different child in his place?”

“Yes,” Ormund answers instantly and without apology. “It isn’t a kind plan, I know. And I won’t pretend that someone else’s son won’t have to suffer for it, if it comes to pass, but… You did not ask me for a kind plan.”

You grieve the heat of his hands when he lifts them from your back, just to smooth his gently calloused palms over your jaw a moment later. He rubs the rough pads of his thumbs along your burning cheeks. You melt into his touch of warm velvet and peer up at him with teary eyes. Ormund’s gaze softens around the edges as his mouth lifts into a sad sort of smile.

“You asked me not to let them take our boy,” he continues lowly. “And however cruel it may be… this is but the only coin I have to buy that promise with.”

You know that a part of you should be horrified. You know what he is describing is a monstrous thing — an innocent boy’s whole life offered as a shield for another’s. You search deep within yourself to find that terror, but cannot seem to locate it. Instead, you find relief, like a crack of sunlight peeking through storm clouds — the very hint of a promise that your family was not long in the dying just yet.

“Do it,” you hear yourself say, shaking your head between his hands. “Whatever it costs… Whoever it costs… Do it.”

Ormund nods with a deep inhale through his nose, leaning forward to press his mouth to your hairline — to seal his promise with a kiss.

130 A.C. / Tumbleton Sept

Rhaenyra's dragonriders come for Daeron not nearly a fortnight into the army's march. Ormund sends the son of a merchant in his place — a boy of the right age and the right pale coloring, plucked quietly from Oldtown and dressed in borrowed finery before anyone thought to look twice. “Be brave, young prince," Ormund had said to the blanch-haired boy, only for show, though what he really meant was: “I will have your family hanged if you do not play your part.”

Ormund knelt before Daemon Targaryen and swore his fealty to the Queen, but marched on for Tumbleton the second the dragons took flight, all the shame. 

The chaos follows them there, too.

Daeron attempts to seek a momentary refuge in the foreign castle’s candlelit sept. A cramped chamber made of brown stone and hazy smoke from the flickering candles, where Tessarion grumbles in protest of captivity. The lack of sunlight has dulled her fluorescent blue scales, and has made her ill-tempered due to the lack of exercise. Daeron alone she allows close, pressing her great head into the boy’s small neck, and momentarily forgetting about the heavy chains around her throat when he pets her stony scales. 

Ormund finds him there. Ormund has a way of finding him anywhere. It is a gift and a curse, perhaps — comforting when Daeron was small and frightened of the dark; but less so now, when Daeron’s every attempt at solitude is interrupted by his uncle, constantly watching him as if he were a traitor to be surveilled and not his kin.

“I have warned you against indulging in affections for the best,” Ormund says as he approaches. The man cradles the boy's freckled cheeks in his wide, calloused palms despite Tessarion's low growl of warning.“You are a good boy,” he says, and in the very same breath, without losing the tender smile on his face: “You have a taint in your blood,” and “You must be king.”

Ormund makes less and less sense to him these days — the throes of war, Daeron supposes, though a part of him is frightened that it began long before that. 

Sometimes he thinks Ormund only makes sense when you’re near enough to translate his tangled, wild emotions back into something grounded and real. You’ve always had a way of gentling the man; usually with nothing more than a steady hand along his wrist to calm whatever storm had been moving within him. 

Daeron has seen you do it a hundred times over without ever quite understanding how. But he prays now for your swift return from the city, so that you might do it again — so that you might soften whatever unfamiliar thing has taken root in his uncle when he commands his soldiers to drag in the peasant man from earlier that afternoon. The one who broke Ser Garrick’s nose defending against his own wife’s assault; an act any decent lord would have called simple justice. 

Ormund draws his sword from its sheath at his hip. The hiss of the steel leaving the leather fills the small stone sept, loud enough to echo off the old walls that have likely seen a great many prayers and, Daeron suspects, not so very many murders. The older man turns the blade and offers the embellished hilt to the boy, pale eyes hardening when he hesitates.

“We have risked much and more to raise you up,” Ormund says, strong features twisting into something resembling offense. “Surely, you do not wish to disappoint us now.”

Us. Daeron is pulled into his uncle’s orbit at that single syllable alone; the unbearable thought of failing the only two people in this world who have ever troubled themselves to love him — one standing before him with a blade held out like a peace offering, and the other somewhere in the depths of the dark city but still steady on his mind all the same.

Daeron lays his palms out flat before his brain has fully comprehended the motion. He prays Ormund doesn’t notice how they tremble when he rests the sword upon them — the weight of the blade cold and heavy upon his fingers.

Daeron’s hands tremble around the ornate leather hilt of Ormund’s sword. His misty eyes find the prisoner kneeling just before him on the cold stone — bloodied and chained for a crime any noble man in Westeros would surely commit with honor — before glancing slowly to where his uncle looms behind him. Candlelight flickers in shades of orange-gold upon the man’s chiseled features, pooling a deep black in the hollows of his eyes.

“What would Mother think of this?” Daeron hears himself ask, voice cracking under the weight of the tears burning hot in the backs of his eyes. 

It is his last and most desperate attempt to reach for his uncle, just as he has seen you do, and to pull him back from the dangerous ledge he stands upon. But he knows the man has already made up his mind; and he knows that there is no version of him that walks out of this sept without spilling blood.

Ormund’s face softens slightly, though there is little tenderness in what he asks of the boy now. “Alicent would understand,” he coos in a gentle voice. “War asks difficult things of every great house—”

“I didn’t—” Daeron swallows hard, smaller now than moments before. “I did not mean the Lady Alicent…” 

Realization flashes across Ormund’s face — a visible recognition of exactly which woman the boy had meant, and has always meant every time the word slipped accidentally from his mouth and was never corrected for it after. Daeron was not yours by blood, but he was yours in every other way that matters. The small, warm weight of him stopped crying the moment he was placed into your arms fifteen years ago, and never truly stopped being yours since.

Still, Ormund does not soften for it. If anything, something in him hardens further as he takes a slow step closer to the boy.

“Your mother would be proud,” he answers, brows lowered as if the answer was the plainest thing in the world. “Don’t you see? Any strike against this army is a strike against her, against everything she’s built to keep you safe… Any man who raises his fist against our men raises it, in the end, against her… And do you not want to protect her, just as she has spent every day protecting you?”

Daeron swallows hard. The weight of Ormund’s words feels heavy in his throat, heavier than the blade in his hands as his trembling fingers tighten around its hilt. His teary green eyes linger on the steel, flickering shades of gold in the candlelight. 

“No, please, I beg you,” the battered prisoner rasps, dried blood matting at his curls from whatever rough handling had brought him here. “I have a family, my lord. Please—”

Daeron’s eyes lift to find the man’s pleading gaze and linger upon him for a long while. He sees your face in the very back of his mind, the only real mother he’s ever truly known, and hears Ormund’s disappointed voice layered over it as he draws the heavy blade back. 

Then he strikes. 

The cut is not clean. The blade lodges at an off angle in the man’s corded neck and sticks somewhere deep between flesh and bone. The man’s pained shout comes out wet and gargled, bouncing off the cobbled walls and in the depths of Daeron’s mind. 

The boy’s body flinches from what his own hand has done as bright crimson blood spouts from the gaping wound and splatters along the old stone. 

His face crumples as he removes the blade. It takes a world of strength in his thin arms to wrench it out again. A quiet whimper sounds in his throat when the blade drags against bone and stumbles backward when the man’s limp body collapses at his feet with a dull smack. Dark blood spreads slowly across the stone in a widening, glistening pool that catches the candlelight like moonlight on the bay.

Daeron looks down at the crimson dripping off the steel blade. He does not notice his uncle’s approach until his broader hands are gently guiding the sword from his fingers — fingers that no longer feel like his own. 

Ormund wipes the steel clean against the dead man's tunic, one side and then the other, with the methodical care of a man cleaning a hunting knife after a kill. He sheaths the blade back into its hilt and closes the remaining distance between him and the boy.

When Daeron’s mind finally returns to his body — ears still ringing, vision still hazy — his wide eyes snap to his uncle’s face and sees a quiet pride swimming in his features once more. It’s as comforting as it is horrifying. And when Ormund's strong arms wrap around the boy’s shoulders and draw him close to his chest, that feels like a dizzying concoction of the two even more so.

“I am proud of you, boy…” Ormund tells him as he leans in close, pressing his mouth to the boy’s hair in a near-kiss, though he whispers to him instead:  “Do not tell your mother of this. Understood?"

Daeron does not answer, though Ormund does not ask him for one now.

130 A.C.  /  Tumbleton Castle

You return to the castle late in the evening, weary down to your bones from the long day. 

You had gone into town with what coin and grain the army could spare, and found Lady Kat there among the frightened smallfolk, tending to the smith's wife, whose arm still sat bound in a rough splint. The woman's round face was kind, but you knew that no amount of offered bread or soft words could cure what comfort had been taken from her.

“Do you know where my husband is?” she had asked you before you left, with something desperate in her voice that made you wish you had a better answer than the only truthful one you could give.

“I’m sorry. I do not know," you told her, smiling in what sympathy you could muster, honest in your ignorance if nothing else.

The question sits strangely in your chest on the ride back to the castle, though you struggle to place exactly why.

Dinner is already laid out by the time you arrive. The long table is embellished with more food than Tumbleton's starving smallfolk have likely seen since the war began. The notion sits heavy in your stomach before you’ve even entered the dining hall, where Ormund rises from his seat to greet you. 

His warmth is striking, a shade too bright for the late hour. He presses a jeweled chalice of ale into your hand with a tender grin and a pair of soft eyes, asking after the wife and the town's wounded with an attentiveness he doesn’t usually spare for such small domestic accounts.

“Sit,” he tells you with one wide hand along the small of your back to urge you the short distance to the table. “You've had a long day, my love. Eat something before it goes cold."

Confusion floods your face at the emptiness beside your usual seat. “Where's Daeron? He hasn’t missed out on lemon cakes since he was old enough to chew them.”

“He's not feeling well. Best to let him rest,” Ormund answers with a polite smile as he pours himself a goblet of wine. His soft eyes flit between you and the glugging flagon. “Sit with me, love. I’m sure you’re half-starved yourself."

He sits down in his cushioned seat at the head of the long table and gestures for you to take yours. You remain stubbornly in place, because you know him far too well for anything else. Years of marriage have taught you every register of his voice; every flicker behind his eyes; every twitch in his features. And this one, all warm and careful and slightly too eager, is one you’d learned to trust least of all.

“What have you done?” you deadpan.

Ormund scoffs a breathless laugh, bouncing his broad shoulders in a shrug. “Why do you insist I’ve done something?” 

“Because I can hear it in your voice.”

Ormund huffs again, though it’s more of a sound of surprise than true laughter this time. “Well, I assure you, dear wife, I have done nothing at all.”

“Is that what will Daeron tell me?” you press. “When I go to his chambers and ask him myself?"

“He will tell you that I'm an excellent uncle and an even better husband," Ormund quips with his elbows propped on the table and his pointer fingers steepled together. “And also that you ought to sit down and eat your supper with your poor husband, before you go making a production out of a boy's upset stomach.”

You leave despite his words, led purely by the intuition swirling in your stomach that drags you directly to Daeron’s chamber door. You knock once and receive no answer — when the silence holds on the third try, you let yourself in and find the boy alone in his room, curled small on the edge of his bed in a way that strikes you deep in the chest; a reminder of that swaddled babe curled against your chest fifteen years past.

He does not look up when you enter, nor when you lower yourself gingerly onto the edge of the mattress beside him without a word. His shoulders shake in small, tight increments as he struggles to choke down his own sobs. He drags each breath in through his nose and holds it for a beat too long until it shudders out of him again.

He freezes when you lay a gentle hand on his shoulder, going rigid against whatever emotion he’s trying not to shake loose.

“What's happened, my love?" you coo to him, gentling your voice the way you might for a much younger child. “Tell me."

He shakes his auburn head against the pillow and sniffles to himself. “He told me I couldn't…"

“Who? Ormund?”  you press and feel a preemptive anger kindling hot in your chest before you’ve even heard the whole of it. “Well… Your uncle tells me a great many things that I’ve long since learned to ignore. So I imagine he can spare us the indulgence of a secret or two.”

After another shaky breath, Daeron pushes himself up from the mattress. He snivels wetly and wipes his flushed cheeks with the back of one hand. You smooth down his wild flaming tendrils until he finds the words to speak.

“The blacksmith…” he wavers. “The one who struck Ser Garrick this morning…”

Your stomach swirls with a sick feeling when he trails off. Your blood runs cold with a fear of what he might say next. You think instantly of the woman with the kind face and the splinted arm, asking so gently if you knew where her husband had run off to. You have to remind yourself to breathe again as you ask, “What of him?”

“Ormund made me…” Daeron’s breath catches in his throat with a horror reignited in the pit of his chest. “He said any strike against the army was a strike against the crown. Against me. Against you.” He forces each word out through unshed tears and feels half-furious at himself when his voice shatters. “He told me it would be a king’s justice. That it— that it would make you proud.”

The boy’s eyes lift to yours then, glassy and green and rimmed red. They dart back and forth over your face, searching for an ounce of comfort within it.

“Are you?” he asks in a voice barely above a whisper. “Proud of me, I mean.”

You nod until the words have climbed through the fear swelling in your throat.

“Of course I am,” you answer breathlessly, but with no hesitation at all despite the dread searing in your chest. “I have been proud of you since the day I met you. Nothing you could do— Nothing of what your uncle made you do could change that. And you did it, I have no doubt, because some part of you believed it would keep our family safe. Protecting the people you love, even when doing so costs so much, is no easy feat, my love. I know this better than you might think…” 

Your mind drifts to the pale-haired boy — the merchant’s son who was brown of hair before you found him. The boy who was borrowed and dressed up in a prince’s wardrobe and sent off to whatever fate Rhaenyra’s justice had in store for him. The boy who is very likely chained or worse for a crime that was never truly his, simply because you and Ormund decided his captivity was a fair trade for Daeron’s freedom.

Daeron watches your eyes well with tears of your own, and his freckled face crumples further at the thought of hurting you further. “I did not mean to make you sad…" he mutters with a wet gaze that flits between yours.

“You haven't," you tell him firmly, though your voice remains steady. You gather the boy into your arms and press your cheek against his hair, feeling his tear-stained cheeks wet the skin of your chest. “I’m not sad, my love. I promise. I only love you. That's all….”

You sit with him for a long while after that — until his breathing steadies and his shoulders lose their edge. Only then do you rise, with one last kiss to his forehead, and leave him to whatever uneasy slumber he can manage after what the long day had done to him.

You run into Ormund on your way down the long corridor. His broad form towers in the narrow passageway as his wide hands splay before him in confusion. “What’s taken you so long? Your dinner’s already gone cold.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Your shoulder scrapes along his arm as you shove by him with little affection. Ormund huffs and falls easily into step with you on his much longer legs. The two of you move through the stony corridors in a silent tension that grows with every step you take, torchlight guttering along the damp walls as you pass them. The words of an argument well in your throat the whole way to your chambers and refuse to break free until the door has shut finally behind you.

“I cannot believe you!” you shout, features twisted in anger. “How dare you tell my son to lie to me! After everything—"

Ormund shakes his head. “I only told him to spare you a grief that serves no purpose—"

“You told him to kill a man, Ormund! A smith. A husband.” The words come out through a jaw clenched tight. Your eyes glitter in the flickering candlelight with every one that spills from your mouth, hands gesticulating wildly at your sides. “I stood in that town not an hour ago and told his wife I didn't know where he was. And I didn't know, because you hadn't thought to tell me you hadn’t let him go at all! And now I have to carry that too, on top of everything else because you've decided I didn’t need to be troubled with it—”

“It’s war!” Ormund shouts, voice ringing through the cobbled walls. His handsome features harden instantly as he stares you down with emotionless pale eyes. His long fingers curl into fists before relaxing once more in a repeated cycle intended to calm him. “I will not apologize for teaching that boy what war requires of men who mean to survive it. For now, it’s only Ser Garrick’s broken nose, but we will have far worse than that done to us before this war is through. If Daeron doesn’t learn that now, he’s as good as dead—”

“He’s sixteen—”

“He’s the King's last trueborn son, with any righteous claim to the throne!” Ormund thunders over your teary retort, approaching you with long strides. “He is the rider of a dragon that is the only thing standing between this army and total ruin— What don’t you understand about that?”

Ormund towers over you at once. His firm hands close hard around your arms, keeping you close and unmoving before him. He ducks his head to your height, eyes darting wildly between yours.

“Do you think I enjoyed putting that sword in his hand?” he continues, quieter now. “Do you think I've slept easy a single night since we left Oldtown, knowing what I'm shaping him into— why I have to?”

You swallow hard through a tight throat, peering up at him through the tears clouding your vision. “I think you’ve decided his suffering is a fair price for war,” you waver. “And I think you decided that without asking me.”

“Yes,” Ormund nods without reservation. “I have decided a great many things without asking you first— I did not ask you first when I decided to blanch that stranger’s hair and send him off in Daeron’s place, did I? And yet you still thanked me for it with your words and body when it kept our boy breathing.”

His words tear right through your chest. You shake your head in protest of them even though you know that he’s right — that you are no better than Ormund even in his madness; that you would do worse and more for Daeron if the war called for it, if you were brave enough to do it. 

“Did I complain, all those years, when grief after grief left this house without an heir of its own blood?” Ormund goes on, quieter now but no less harsh, as his features twist in a stifled sort of anguish. “Did I complain when courtiers wondered in whispers why a man would stay wed to a wife that could not give him an heir?” 

You flinch at his words like you can feel them physically, tearing you from the inside out, though his long fingers caging you force you to stomach them.

“I never complained. Because I love you and because I understood it was no fault of your own,” Ormund continues. “So I have earned, I think, the right to make one hard choice without you looking at me as though I’ve become some monster for it.”

Anger pricks your skin beneath your heavy gown like needles.

It is not the unfairness of the blow of his words that sends you reeling, but rather the sheer astonishment at how low he has stooped in his fury — in his grief. It is, perhaps, the cruelest thing he’s ever said to you; made crueler still for how plainly he does not seem to recognize his own cruelty at all.

“Say that again,” you tell him in an emotionless monotone. “Say it plainly, exactly how you mean it— that you think I am some monster—”

“I didn’t mean…” Ormund huffs and hangs his head, tense shoulders dropping as the lingering anger slips from his skin like rain. “I am not saying this to be cruel— Gods know, I’d sooner cut out my own tongue before I meant any cruelty to you.”

His pale eyes are wet and soft again when they lift to meet yours. His hands loosen their grip on your arms as they lift to cradle your cheeks, softly calloused and warm like velvet along your blazing skin.

“Daeron is the only child either of us has been permitted to keep,” the man continues, softer now. “He is not merely a boy I love, though gods know I do, but he is the only proof that we were ever meant to be parents at all… After everything this life took from us in the trying… Do you understand what I’m telling you?"

“So what?” you press, voice breaking. “The only way he gets to stay ours is if he survives long enough to sit a throne? Is that the only way to remove the taint from his blood— that’s what you called it, right?”

Ormund softens further in the face of your anger.

“Without Aemond, without Vhagar, this army has no dragon to answer to whatever Rhaenyra sends against us next… But Daeron has Tessarion, and Daeron has a claim that half this army would follow into the fire itself,” he coos gently to you, as if anything louder might break you entirely. His thumbs smooth gently along your cheekbones, wiping away a tear that clings stubbornly to the burning skin there. “The war is coming here, my love. It is not a thing we can shield him from any longer. He is our only hope of surviving what is coming, and every bit his birthright to lead it."

“Surely…” you trail off in disbelief, wild eyes searching his bluer ones. “Surely you do not mean to make our child fight in this war."

“It is the will of the gods,” Ormund croons as if it were that simple.

Something in you knows, as each word spills from his mouth, that this is not a man reasoning clearly. You can hear it in the smoothness of his voice and in each too-quick answer on his tongue. And yet, you want more than anything for him to be right. You want it so badly it frightens you — for the gods to will this war’s end, for Ormund’s victory, for your son’s survival. 

You don’t realize you’re crying until Ormund draws you fully into his chest with one wide hand along your back and another cradling the back of your head. Tears fall from your lashes and wet the front of his emerald doublet.

“Listen to me…” he mutters into your hair. “If he sits that throne, no one in this realm could ever call him anything but ours. He is Viserys’s heir, yes, but he became a Hightower the moment you held him— and if he rules, no man will ever again whisper that he is not truly yours. He will restore ancient order to the throne. That is how we keep him.”

You shake your head in protest as you lean back from him again, just far enough to peer up at him with tear-heavy eyes. “Just bring him back to me,” you plead fiercely to him. “When this battle is done, I don't care what it costs you to manage it. Bring him back—”

“I will," Ormund nods with the same iron certainty that has carried you through every hard year of your marriage. “I swear it to you. I’ll bring him home—”

“And you,” you remind with a stern finger jabbed into the center of his chest. “You come back to me, too— I have buried enough of what I love in this life, Ormund. I will not bury another. You come back to me. Both of you.”

He nods and leans down to press his forehead against yours. Each of his heaving exhales through his nose fans warm across your chin.

“I will,” he breathes against you, thumbs sweeping again along your cheekbone. He shifts against you to brush the smallest of kisses to the bridge of your nose — so gentle that it makes you feel like crying. Your hands curl hard around his wrist to keep him close. “The gods owe us a debt. And we will see it repaid in full before this war is through, I promise you.”

You cling to the certainty in his voice the way a drowning woman clings to driftwood; the way a starving woman clings to the memory of her last full meal — you cling to him the way a grieving woman clings to the gods themselves.

His pale eyes follow the line of your throat until it disappears into the collar of your gown, dipping low enough for him to see the shadow of your breasts just before you rise to full height above him. You hold the draping sleeve with your free hand and shake your other free from the warm water clinging to your skin.

“Lay out my tiles for me, will you?”

Daeron smiles from his spot on the cushioned chaise by the hearth. The rays of morning light streaming in through the narrow windows catch in his auburn hair, turning them to flames of orange. “As long as you promise not to cheat this time,” the boy jokes drily, already sorting the carved bone tiles on the low table just ahead of him. 

“Winning is not cheating, little prince,” you quip with an arched brow, crossing the distance to join him by the fire. “There is a difference—”

“And you’d do well not to accuse the lady of cheating again,” Ormund cuts in without glancing up from his parchment and quill. “It isn’t polite.”

“Yes, uncle,” Daeron nods once with the smile long gone from his face, suddenly as solemn as a septon.

You glance at Ormund over your shoulder, eyes sparkling with amusement. “It was only in jest, my lord. The little prince meant no harm, I’m sure—”

A sharp knock sounds at the door before you’ve settled by the hearth; three sharp raps in a brisk and dutiful rhythm. “Come,” Ormund calls out, still half-lost in his correspondences. The old oak door groans open a second later. A steward announces from the doorway: “My Lord. Lord and Lady Footly, requesting audience.”

Ormund’s jaw grinds with a preemptive annoyance, though he sets his letters aside on the bathing tray as the lords of Tumbleton enter — Lord Footly first, narrow-shouldered and twitching with the particular anxiety of a man about to recite a complaint his wife had sent him in to tell. Lady Footly comes a pace behind, spine straighter than a spear-shaft beneath her heavy yellow dress. She sneers when her eyes find yours, narrow features twisting at the sight of you in her home, which by any right or blood should never be yours.

“My lord,” Lord Footly begins, voice thinner than paper as he wrings his hands together. Sweat beads on his long forehead, rolling down from his woolen chaperon. “We come regarding our lodging situation. Your men have taken the hall, the granary, all but one of our guest chambers—”

“Yes,” Ormund huffs with a slow nod, growing quickly weary in his patience. “I’ve heard that you are unhappy with your lodging.”

“’Tis only that we are very fond of our ancestral home—”

“You are sleeping in our bedchamber,” Lady Footly interjects, far harsher than her husband by a mile. Her gaze cuts towards you then, like a drawn sword. “And your priestess— or whatever lie you’ve taken to calling her— has filled my mother’s chambers with her… things. Her vials, her herbs, her— poisons. And I will not have my family sleep beneath the same roof as some witch.” 

Her words suck all the air out of the room, or seem to, rather. The humidity rising from the scalding bath feels borderline suffocating in an instant. The sounds of trickling water fill the heavy silence as Ormund rises from the bath without a word. 

Silken rivulets cascade down his muscular form — from his broad shoulders, to his chest, and down his lean stomach — where a line of coarse brunette hair leads to his cock, hanging heavy and limp at his left thigh.

He stands in the center of the tub, dripping and undressed, too angry to care about his own modesty. Lord and Lady Footly fight to avert their gazes without appearing weak.

“That… witch,” Ormund spits through a clenched jaw, as if the word itself were some grave insult. “Is not a guest in this house you are simply meant to tolerate, my lady.” 

Water pools on the cold cobblestone at his bare feet when he steps out of the tub, unbothered by his own nakedness, and refusing to look away from either of them. 

“She is under my protection, as I am under hers— and there is no line I can find between an insult to her and an insult to me. And I would remind you both that I have executed men for lesser treasons than what’s just uttered in this room,” he continues in a low, melodic voice, reaching for the towel hanging beside the tub and smoothing the rough nettles over his glistening skin. “So consider it a mercy that I choose to remember that you are only frightened, and not that you are traitors— That’s why you bent the knee to Rhaenyra, was it not? Because you were scared?”

The silence that follows feels like a thing with teeth, gnawing desperately at the ankles.

“My lord, we meant no—”

“I understand the situation is… less than ideal. For us all, no doubt,” Ormund interjects, though a lighter air has returned to him now. “I assure you that I will keep my men on their best behavior… So long as you remain on yours.” He goes cold again, dismissive in an instant. “See them back to their new chambers, will you, nephew?”

Dareon rises at once, dutiful and only slightly fearful. He escorts them back to their rooms despite the quiet “don’t” that Lady Footly spits at the young prince when he attempts to lead her by the arm. The woman does not glance at you again on her way out, which you see as its own kind of quiet concession.

Your slippers pad along the cobbles as you walk back towards the bath. You pluck the robe from its hook and drape the silken, emerald fabric over Ormund’s broad shoulders, walking in front of him to draw it closed over his chest. His eyes follow your hands the whole while. His chest heaves the remnants of his rage. 

He clears his throat, words softer now, “I apologize, my lady—”

“Have you done something, my lord?”

“She shouldn’t have spoken that way— not of you, not ever,” he stammers. His Adam’s apple bobs in his long throat as he swallows. His fingers twitch anxiously at his side. “Perhaps I ought to punish her. Cut her tongue from her mouth and then geld her husband for allowing his wife to say such things.”

“You were gracious to them, Ormund, as you have always been,” you coo with a tender smile, smoothing the robe flat over his damp collarbone. You think you can feel the thunder of his racing pulse beneath your palm; the heartbeat of a warhorse after a charge. “You said it yourself— they are only frightened. Most people are, of the things they do not understand. It costs her nothing to sneer at me from her doorway. But it will cost her a great deal more to watch the prophecy prove itself true, and to know that she mocked it to my face.”

He eases a little at that, broad shoulders loosening beneath his robe. His breath catches a moment later when your hands dip between your bodies to tie the waist of his robe. His chest tightens, strangled by a heat he can feel crawling up his neck and into his jaw when he feels his cock twitching — with all the helplessness of a teenage boy only just learning the touch of a woman, utterly reeling by the proximity of your hands alone.

You glance down at his lap, and then back up at him, mouth curling with a poorly concealed amusement. “Shall I have some cubes from the icehouse sent up for your bath, my lord?” you wonder with a feigned sincerity. “For your… situation?”

Ormund glows as red as the flame of the Oldtown hightower. “…No,” he chokes out before clearing his throat. “No, my lady. I— I believe I'll manage.”

The solar, which had once belonged to Lady Footly’s mother, now smells of crushed anise and tea leaves — of willow bark, tallow, and smoky embers from a crackling fire. Jars and vials line the shelves where needlework once sat; the glass catches the low firelight in shades of crimson, emerald green, and ocean blue. A pestle sits half-buried in scarlet powder on the worktable, and just beside it, a small iron pot bubbles over burning coals. The steam climbs in slow silver ribbons towards the rafters.

You flit between the two — pot and pestle, stirring and milling — with an ease that suggests you’ve done this a thousand times before, and would likely do it a thousand times again. A knock comes at the door as you crush a handful of spice into the boiling water. The sound is much too gentle to belong to a knight’s hand.

“Come in, Prince Daeron,” you call into the quiet.

The door eases open a moment later. The boy slips in with his head bowed, half in respect and half in his own innate shyness. “How did you know it was me?” he wonders aloud, brows lowered in a boyish look of confusion.

“Well, that is sort of my specialty, is it not?” you hum with a smile and a lazy shrug. “I make potions, and I know things.”

“Is that what you’re making now?” the boy asks, nodding his head to the boiling pot you stand in front of. “Potions?”

“This— is only tea.” You scoop your pointer finger into the simmering liquid without flinching, testing the bittersweetness on your tongue. “It’s ginger and willow bark. For the peasant’s wife whose arm was broken by Ser Garrick. It’s meant to help with the pain. But this…” You trail off and walk to the opposite end of the worktable for the bowl and pestle. You grind the scarlet bits into a finer powder with a few expert turns of your wrist. “This is for the Lady Kat. The woman he attacked. Or tried to.”

“…Is she a lady?” Daeron presses and inches further.

“Well, her husband is a dragonrider for Rhaenyra, so she might as well be,” you sigh, swiping your palms together to rid them of the last of the powder. “He’s surely a knight now, no doubt— or a slave, depending on how you look at it…”

Daeron leans over the other side of the table, peering down into the bowl of foreign grains with a childlike curiosity.

“Best not to get too close, little prince,” you tell him, firm but not unkind. “This could knock even the strongest of knights on his back, should he breathe too deeply of it. I'll have it bagged and sent to Lady Kat at once— so she need never fear another Ser Garrick crossing her threshold again."

Daeron nods slowly to himself in admiration. He knew long before Tumbleton that you were both the strangest and kindest person he’d ever met. His uncle was kind, too, in his own way — but he had a temper that could change quickly and with very little warning. You were gentler than that, strong without having to raise your voice to proclaim it. The kind of gentle that makes tea and poison to protect peasant women you’d never met before, as if it were something you took to by instinct alone.

You notice a pensive sort of look etching in his rounded features before he’s said another word. “Is something troubling you, little prince?” you ask him, wiping your hands off on a cloth as you round the table towards him. 

“I watched,” Daeron starts quietly, emerald eyes dropping to the cobbles. “Ser Garrick’s punishment, I mean— my uncle had him gelded for what he did, and he wanted me there for it. I didn’t want to watch it but… I couldn’t look away, in the end.” 

“Well, that’s only natural,” you assure him. The casual air in your voice eases the furrow from his brow. “Not being able to look away, I mean. Morbid curiosity is stitched into all of us— witnessing that sort of harm is often the only way we can safely face our own fears. Of death, or injury, or misfortune… You're not bad for watching it, Daeron. You're only human."

“What if I couldn’t do the same? If I were in my uncle’s place?” he presses then, voice smaller now. “Would that make me bad?” 

He says the words as if they’d been sitting on his tongue for some time — words he would not dare ask his uncle, whose love for him was absolute, but came with an edge even still. There are no edges to measure with you, he finds, so he speaks freely when the two of you are alone accordingly. You know this, too; so you take the boy’s round face in your palms and tilt it gently upwards.

“You could do the same,” you tell him, with a mother’s firm warmth, though you were not one yourself. “Not the gelding, perhaps, but the choosing. Because you are good, little prince— and sometimes goodness means refusing to let cruelty go unpunished. The gods do not ask us to enjoy it; only to be capable of it, when the hour comes."

Daeron's round eyes dart between both of yours, searching in your gaze the way children search in their parents’ — for permission, for certainty, for a safe place to land. “So you’re saying that… the hour will come for me someday?”

“It comes for every prince who lives long enough," you nod, brushing the pad of your thumb along his freckled cheekbone. “But not today. Today you are only meant to watch. And remember. And grow into a man who can someday bear it."

Daeron’s mouth parts to respond. 

The door slams open before he can. 

Ormund storms through the threshold like a sky of dark-black storm clouds blowing in — shoulders rigid, jaw tight, eyes glassy with a withheld fury. A folded letter is crushed beneath the firm grip of his left hand, while his right opens and closes in a fidgeting fist.

You feel Daeron tense beneath your palms accordingly.

“Best leave now, little prince," you murmur to him. 

The boy nods and slips free of the room’s growing tension, casting one anxious glance at his uncle before shutting the heavy door behind him.

You watch from your worktable as Ormund crosses the expansive room in long, swift strides. A growl builds low in his throat before breaking finally free as he hurls the crumpled letter at the wall. “Useless craven!” His shout rings through the room. He swipes his forearm across the table in the same breath — a vase, a candle dish, an inkpot, and miscellaneous slips of parchment, all shatter against the cobbles in a bright, violent cascade.

“Coward— Cunt!”  He unsheathes his sword from its hilt. The scrape of the steel hisses loudly in the quiet room. He drives the blade into the edge of the great oak desk until the wood splinters from the grain. He bellows through each blow. “Cunt! Cunt! Cuuunt!” 

You watch wordlessly from afar, letting the storm pass on its own. Ormund’s chest heaves beneath with each wavering breath he fights to take through his nose. His sword hangs limp in his trembling hand. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back, struggling to ground himself again. 

You say nothing as you walk to his side, lingering at his shoulder and grazing your knuckles along the warm tendon of his neck — from his jaw to his collar and back again. You can feel his pulse hammering beneath the burning skin. Ormund exhales evenly through his nose, leaning instinctively into your featherlight touch. 

Only when his breaths come easier to him do you ask, “What’s happened, my lord?”

It takes him a long moment to find the words, longer to find the evenness in his voice. “My cousin has sent word from Harrenhal…” he says finally, slightly hoarse from his yelling, and sheathes his sword with a steadier hand. “It seems Daeron’s brother, Aemond, will not be joining us after all.”

“So Gwayne is coming in his stead?” you press lightly, splaying your fingers along the back of his neck, where his dark-auburn curls coil at the nape of it. “I’m sure Daeron will be glad to hear it, at least.”

“Yes. My cousin. Who I’d wager has never held a blade with intent in his life,” Ormund nods with a humorless laugh, though a palpable rage simmers behind the smile he gives. “We’re meant to rely on him for protection, in place of the biggest dragon known to man.” 

You can feel the fury radiating off of him still, like heat waves glimmering off a flame. The raging coils tight beneath his skin; you can feel it humming like a plucked bowstring under your fingertips. You know this feeling in him well — you’ve tasted it before, took doses of his rage like medicine. Tonight it was a wellspring, sweet and plentiful and begging for somewhere to go.

“Give it to me,” you blurt suddenly.

Ormund blinks down at you, brows lowered in confusion, chest still rising too fast.

“Give it to me. All of it," you repeat, firmer this time. Your hand slips from his neck, down his taut shoulders, and over his chest. Your palm rests flat over his quilted doublet, over the furious drum of his heart. “Your anger. Give it to me. Let me take it from you— make something stronger out of it.”

Your fingers curl in his collar, drawing him closer towards you. You peer up at him from beneath your lashes, and he finds something dark swimming in your pleading gaze.

“Take it out on me,” you beg him, desperate in a way he hasn’t seen you before. “I can take it. I was made to take it."

Ormund watches with a lidded gaze as you plant yourself on the table ahead of him, right over the splintered gouge where his sword had shattered the wood. You lift your velvet dress skirts without once breaking his eye, unbothered by the wreckage of his previous outburst surrounding you. When the fabric is bunched high at your thighs, you spread them for him and rest back on your palms.

Ormund’s fingers twitch at his side in distant disbelief at your offering — at the sight of you laid open before him — at you. You watch the hesitation crumble his features; the way his adam’s apple bobs in his throat; the way his hands curl and uncurl into unsure fists.

The softness slips from your face all at once.

“Why are you holding back?” you ask, voice now stripped of everything gentle it carried moments ago. You tilt your head to your shoulder, studying him with a surgical precision — wondering which part of him to cut open first. Each word leaves your mouth like a sharp-edged blade tracing along the skin. “I know you hate that you couldn’t stop it— Your own knights, turning on the smallfolk you swore to protect.”

Ormund’s brows lower in confusion. “…What?”

“You watched them snap Ser Garrick’s arm and then strip him of his clothes to geld him for his sin,” you continue. “And you felt nothing but relief that it was done. That for one moment, you were in control of something… Say it.”

Ormund’s jaw clenches tight. He shakes his head to himself, mouth twitching. “Stop.” 

“And all of it for naught…” you shrug, rising onto your palms. “Because you have no Aemond, no Vhagar— Nothing more than your cousin’s scraps. And now you must pretend like your plan isn’t unraveling by the second. Say it.”

A mixture of offense and fury twist across his face; one entirely indistinguishable from the other. His squinted eyes dart between yours, searching for the trickery in your gaze — for the mercy.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks, voice cracking like a boy’s instead of a knight’s.

“Daeron is your only hope now— your only defense against Rhaenyra, should her dragons come— and you cannot stand it,” you press, leaning forward still, moving your body in a slow and deliberate provocation. “You raised that boy, and still some part of you hates him. Every time he speaks, you hear his father’s voice living inside him, and you want so desperately to beat him for it. Beat all that kindness out of him until he’s just flesh you can control—”

“Stop it!” 

The shout tears suddenly from his throat. His hand shoots out before reasoning can catch it ringed fingers close firmly around your throat with a primal sort of instinct. He can feel you, even now, flitting through his every thought like pages of a book. It terrifies him more than any battlefield ever has.

“—It’s why you’ve got that man in chains down there, isn’t it?” you continue through what little breath remains, smiling when Ormund’s features twist in shock at how you could know such a thing. “You want Daeron to be the one to kill him. You want to ruin that gentle boy just as much as prove to yourself that he’s more yours than Targaryen—”

“Enough,” Ormund spits through gritted teeth.

You smile wider when his fingers clench tighter around your throat, testing the give of you there. He finds none. You lift your hands and curl them around his wrist instead — neither pushing nor pulling him away, just holding him there.

“There it is,” you choke out with all the pride a woman who’s just gotten precisely what she asked for — a kitten to milk. “All that hatred. All of it. Give it to me.”

Something dark flashes across his face like lightning. He draws you in by the hand wrapped around your throat before you can blink, kissing you like he means to swallow you whole. It’s all tongue and teeth and spit — his nose smushes into the side of yours as he licks into your mouth with a ruthless abandon. The pad of his tongue feels like velvet against yours, tasting of bitter ale and sweet oranges.

You sigh hard through your nose at the distant burning in your throat from where his fingers hold you in an unrelenting grip — no longer choking you now, but making your head go heavy with a dizzy sort of feeling. You vaguely feel him shift before you, as he works his swordbelt off with his free hand to push his trousers down to his scruffy thighs. 

You don’t see his cock before he pierces you with it, and there is no gentleness in him when he splits you open, though you ask him for none. A pained noise sounds in your throat at the distant burning feeling when he enters you with little warning; a rush of breath mixed with a whimper that makes Ormund falter for a moment.

You shake your head, stern again, when you catch the hesitation that threatens to return to him. “Don’t stop,” you command.

Ormund fights his every instinct to be gentle with you when he urges you flat against the oak table with the hand around your neck. His other grips the back of your thigh to keep you spread open for him as he thrusts hard enough into you to make the desk scrape against the hard stone beneath you, adding to the symphony of sin — to the sound of skin clapping against skin, to the wet sounds of him piercing you, and to the strangled grunts from the back of his throat as he chases his orgasm.

“Yes…” you sigh in contentment as the coarse thatch of hair above his cock rubs mercilessly against your clit. You hold him by the wrist to keep him close and praise him in breathless rambles. “Give it to me, my lord— I can take it— I was made for this, made for you—”

The words spill from your mouth with a calculated provocation, like you know all the right things to say to make him tick. Ormund can hear the lazy smile in your voice as you continue to babble; his chiseled features crumble under the weight of his pleasure, eyes squeezing shut in time with the pressure building in his taut stomach.

“You’re close… I can feel it,” you say between whimpered breaths, head tipping back against the table. Your grip on his wrist tightens. Your thighs tremble around either side of his waist as your own pleasure crescendos. “I want it— I want to make you feel good, my lord— I want to feel you leaking out of me—

“Fuck!” Ormund groans as he tenses suddenly above you. The sound turns into a quiet whimper when his cock begins to jerk violently within your unforgiving confines. “F-Fuck—”

His bruised hold on you loosens when he doubles suddenly on top of you. He braces himself on your hips instead, gripping you tightly there to keep you in place while he spits ropes of cum inside you. Your cunt pulses around him, threatening to suckle him in further. 

He buries his pathetic whines in your neck and trembles through every wave of his orgasm, while your hips buck with the start of yours. You moan in his ear, fingers twisting in his wild curls — spurred on by the pressure on your sensitive clit, and by his warm seed blooming slowly inside of you.

“There it is…” you coo to him as you come down, feeling his tense body slowly relax on top of yours. “There you go, my lord… Yes… Let me have it…”

It takes Ormund a few moments more to sober from his pleasure. Dread settles like steel in his veins a second later; he smears his mouth over your throat, kissing you where his fingers had once dug into the delicate skin. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs against your pulse. “I’m sorry, my love—”

You shake your head, still catching your breath. “You did nothing wrong, my lord.”

“I hurt you,” he chokes out, half-muffled.

“I wanted it,” you remind him, urging him off of your neck with your hands in his hair. His face is flushed pink and screwed with a mixture of pleasure and regret. Your lips curl into a slow smile up at him. “I wanted to make you feel good. You deserve to feel good.”

His chest swells with a foreign emotion that makes him suddenly feel like crying. He presses a searing kiss to your mouth instead. “Thank you,” he mutters against you. “Thank you…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Lannisters of Casterly Rock?"

“Words: A Lannister always pays his debts—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How does my nephew’s lessons fare?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so you lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A laugh leaves him then, warm with amusement.

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

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

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

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

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

You think the words are meant to comfort you. 

They do not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was a child then—”

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

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

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

“My lord—"

“Read."

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

“Aloud,” Ormund presses at your silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stand frozen before him for several long moments thereafter. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His words make you nauseous. 

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

You let him cum in your mouth instead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’ve tried,” you confess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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