Mine Alone

You'd been here the better part of an hour. Long enough that the sun had shifted and left you half in the shade of a cedar that smelled like dry rot. Long enough that a beetle had investigated your left boot twice and found it wanting. Long enough that you'd started, against your better judgment, to feel a little sorry for yourself.

Arthur had laughed when you'd volunteered for this one.

You sure you don't want me to come along? he'd said, that corner of his mouth doing the thing it did when he was trying not to grin. Case you get lonely out there on the road.

I'll manage, you'd told him. Go bother someone else, Morgan.

He'd laughed properly then and gone back to his horse, and you'd ridden out here feeling perfectly confident, and now you were lying in the dirt with a beetle circling your boot and the sun going long in the sky, wondering if today was going to be a loss.

Then you heard hoofbeats.

Not fast. Not slow, either. A steady, unhurried pace that said the rider wasn't worried about where they were going or what they'd find when they got there. You let your eyes fall half shut. Arranged your face into something appropriately pained. Pressed your hand flat against your side the way a person would if they'd taken a bad fall and weren't sure yet how bad. And started to hiss in pain. Oh, the theatrics of it all.

The hoofbeats slowed.

Good, you thought. Curious.

They slowed further. Stopped altogether, some twenty feet up the road. A horse — a nice one, dark and well-fed and tacked properly — stood at the edge of the trail. Its rider sat very still.

You gave a soft groan with the hissing. Sold it just enough. Not too much.

A beat of silence. Then the rider dismounted.

He was tall. That was the first thing you registered as he crossed the road toward you — taller than he'd looked on the horse, which was saying something — and he moved with the careful deliberateness of a man accustomed to approaching things that might be dangerous. Not cautious exactly. Something more composed than that. He lowered himself to one knee in the dirt beside you and you kept your eyes mostly closed, tracking him through your lashes, and he didn't say anything at first. Just looked. Assessing.

You gave it three seconds and then opened your eyes. The world did something strange.

He was close. That was the first coherent thought — closer than you'd expected, close enough that you could see the specific texture of his beard, dark shot through with silver, close enough to see the lines at the corners of his eyes that said he was somewhere north of forty and had spent a good portion of those years outdoors, judging by the tone of his skin. His jaw was sharp underneath the beard. His coat was good quality, dusty from the road but well-made, and his hands were resting on his knee. They were the hands of a man who had seen his fair share of work, broad across the knuckles but still with a certain elegance to them, the digits themselves somewhat slender but sturdy.

He was looking at you with focused concern, the kind of look worn by someone assessing a situation before committing to it.

And then you saw his eyes. Right eye blue. Left eye brown.

You felt it land somewhere below your sternum, that specific wrongness of a detail that didn't fit any category you already had — something your brain wanted to keep looking at, needed to resolve, couldn't. Deep ocean blue on one side and warm turned-earth brown on the other, watching you with an expression of careful attention, and you were staring, you realized. You were staring directly at a stranger's face from a distance of less than two feet, and your mind had gone somewhere it was not supposed to go.

He had, that was part of the problem, a very good face.

Not young. The kind of face that had been somewhere, that had accumulated itself over time into something that held your attention without demanding it, and at this distance you could see the grey threaded through the dark of his hair, salt and pepper at his temples, and the particular stillness of a man who was not in the habit of fidgeting, and your body had registered all of this in the span of about two seconds and was now doing something deeply inconvenient about it.

You have a job, said the professional part of your brain.

The rest of you was still looking at his eyes.

"Can you hear me?" he asked.

Not from here. The accent knocked against your ear like something from another world entirely. His accent was rounded and precise, the vowels clipped and unhurried in the same breath, and up close it was even more disorienting because his voice was low and sweet, and he was near enough that you felt as much as heard it.

"Yes," you managed.

Get it together.

"Can you tell me where you're hurt?" He was scanning you with that careful attention, not touching, just looking. His hands stayed on his knee. Patient. "Did you fall?"

"My horse spooked." You'd rehearsed this on the ride out, the words came easy. "Threw me. My side —" You let your voice tighten. "I don't know if something's broken."

He nodded once, slowly, the way a person did when they were deciding whether they believed you.

Careful, you thought. This one is careful.

"There's a town about four miles east," he said. "I can take you there. Or ride for a doctor if you're not able —"

"I just need a moment." You shifted, just a little, wincing for the theater of it. "Caught my breath. Wasn't expecting —" A pause. A good one. "Thank you for stopping. Most people don't."

Something moved through his expression at that. Brief and complicated and gone.

"I’m afraid I am not most people," he said, with an inflection you couldn't quite name.

Well, you thought.

He leaned in to help you sit up.

That was the thing that did it — that last halving of distance, the warmth of him suddenly closer, the shadow of his jaw at the edge of your vision, close enough now that you registered the smell of him, leather and horses and something else underneath, something you didn't have a word for and your mind went sideways trying to find one. His hand came up to brace your arm and it was a careful touch, deliberate, and you felt it through your sleeve and your body responded to it the way a compass needle responded to north, involuntary and immediate, and for one half-second you forgot entirely what you were supposed to be doing.

Then your hand found the grip of your revolver.

The motion was reflex — old habit, older than the distraction, deeper than whatever your body had decided it wanted — and you pressed the barrel gently but firmly against his ribs before the thought was fully formed.

He went very still.

Not startled. Not panicked. The kind of still that came from training or experience or both, where the body understood the threat and chose, deliberately, to wait. You felt the stillness of him, the way it moved through him like something settling. And then, slowly, he turned his head and looked at you.

The mismatched eyes were very close. Unreadable. Not angry, not afraid — something more measured than either, and you found it more unsettling than anger would have been, because anger you knew how to handle. This you weren't sure about. This was a man taking stock of the situation and not liking his odds and simply deciding, quietly, to remain calm about it.

"Oh," he said. Soft. Almost conversational.

His lips rounded and your heart did something it had no business doing.

"Oh," you said back with a smile. "Your wallet," you indicated. "And anything else you've got worth taking. Nice and slow, please. I'd hate for this to get complicated."

He looked at you for a moment longer, that assessing, unhurried look, and then he reached slowly into his coat.

"Left hand," you said.

"Yes." He did. No argument. His wallet was thick, which was satisfying, and when you took it from his fingers, he made no move to resist. "You're very good at this," he said. It didn't sound like flattery. It sounded like an observation from a man recalibrating.

"I've had practice." You kept the gun level. "The ring too."

He paused. Something shifted across his face — too fast for you to name — and then he removed the signet ring from his left hand and held it out between two fingers. Silver, heavy. A crest on it you didn't recognize, some winged beast that had eroded through generations. You almost felt bad for taking what you correctly guessed was an heirloom. Almost.

"Anything else in those saddlebags worth bothering with?"

"Some food," he said. "Tools. Nothing of significant value."

"I'll take your word for it." You normally wouldn't — you never did — but you had what you'd come for, and the longer this went on the more variables there were.

You rose to your feet slowly, keeping the gun on him, stepping back. He remained where he was, still on one knee in the dirt, watching you with that expression you couldn't look away from.

"You were never hurt," he said.

"Clever of you." Another step back. "A little late, though."

"Yes." The faintest thing moved through his voice. Not amusement exactly. Something adjacent to it, patient and wry and almost — almost — warm. "Quite late I’d say."

He was still looking at you. You had been looking at him since the moment you'd opened your eyes and found his, and you were beginning to understand that you had a problem, which was that something in your chest had made a decision without consulting you, and that decision was going to be very inconvenient going forward.

You put two fingers to your lips and whistled — loud and carrying, the way you'd taught Ghost to hear you across half a mile of open country.

The answer came from the treeline to the south. Hoofbeats, and then Ghost came through the cedars at a trot, tossing his big grey head, ears up and forward, and slowed without being asked to fall in beside you. His warm muzzle found your shoulder for half a second, that familiar greeting.

The man in the dirt watched this. Something in his expression shifted — something brief that might have been appreciation — before he put it away.

"Good horse," he said.

"The best." You set your foot in the stirrup. "Don't feel too bad about yours. I ain’t taking him." You settled in the saddle and looked down at him, and he was looking up at you, and the light was going gold and low and it caught the silver in his hair and the particular quality of his attention, and your chest did that inconvenient thing again. "Just because I'm a nice girl," you said, and heard yourself, and nearly smiled. "Nothing personal."

"Of course not." A beat. "May I ask your name?"

"You may ask," you said. “Doesn’t mean I’m going to give it, though.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Almost.

You urged Ghost to the poor man’s horse and cracked your palm against his rear. You watched from your saddle as the animal, startled forward and began galloping away from the scene with an anguished neigh. You directed one last look at your new acquittance and grinned at him.

“Be careful out there,” you said putting your pistol back in your holster. “You might get robbed.” You winked at the man — after all, you were never going to see the poor bastard again — and spurred Ghost into galloping.

You put a mile between yourself and the road before you let Ghost settle to a walk, and by then the sky was going orange at the edges and the wallet sat heavy in your saddlebag and the signet ring was in your vest pocket, the raised crest pressing into your chest.

You were still thinking about his eyes.

That was the part you couldn't shake. It was honestly irritating. You had done this particular job many times, you had robbed many people, and you had never spent the ride home thinking about any of them. You always thought about the take. About the gang. About whether Dutch would nod at you the slow approving way he nodded at Arthur when Arthur did something well.

You were not thinking about any of that.

You were thinking about the way he'd gone still when you'd pressed the gun to his ribs — not rigid the way most people went, electric with fear, but calm, that immediate and total calm, as though he'd been somewhere considerably worse than this and had learned what to do with himself there.

You were thinking about the warmth of him when he'd leaned in close. The specific, unavoidable warmth of another person at that distance, the way your body had registered it before your mind had caught up. You were thinking about his voice, and about the way the corner of his mouth had moved when you'd told him he could ask your name.

He hadn't given you his, either.

You noticed this now, too late to do anything about it. You'd deflected his question and it hadn't occurred to you to ask in return, because you'd been too busy cataloguing his face and trying to pretend you weren't, and now you had a ring with a crest you didn't recognize and a stranger's face that was going to stay with you longer than it had any right to.

It doesn't matter, you told yourself. You'll never see him again.

The road stretched ahead of you in the fading light. Ghost walked on steady and unbothered, and you sat the saddle and watched the treeline darken and tried to make yourself believe it.

You weren’t very successful at that.

The horse came back, eventually.

They usually did — Baelor had known this, had stood at the side of the road and waited with the specific patience of a man who had decided that panic was not useful, and after perhaps twenty minutes he heard hoofbeats coming back the way they'd gone, and his dark gelding rounded the bend with his reins trailing and his ears flat with residual embarrassment.

"There," Baelor said, and caught the reins, and ran a hand down the gelding's neck until the ears came up again. "There," he allowed himself an apologetic smile.

He stood for a moment with his hand on the horse's neck and looked at the road.

Empty. In both directions, nothing but dust and the long shadow of the cedars and the last of the light going amber over the hills. The sound of her horse was long gone. She'd moved fast. She'd wanted the distance.

He looked down at his hands.

Empty wallet. No ring. The ring was going to be a problem when he told Maekar, and he was going to have to tell Maekar, and Maekar was going to be extremely unpleasant about it because Maekar was always extremely unpleasant about things that Baelor had allowed to happen, and this qualified.

He stood in the road in the long evening light and found that he was not thinking about the ring.

He was thinking about a girl who had been lying in the dirt and hadn't been hurt at all. Who had looked at him — directly, without flinching, from a distance close enough that he had been aware of every breath — and had not looked away first. He was thinking about the way she'd held the gun on him, level and unhurried, the same calm competence he might have admired in another context and could not stop admiring now despite every reason not to. He was thinking about the whistle that had brought a grey stallion out of the trees like a conjuring trick, and the ease with which she'd risen to the saddle, and the fact that she'd looked at him — winked at him — one last time before she'd gone.

He was thinking about the line of her mouth when she'd told him she wasn’t telling her name.

He gathered the reins and stepped up into the saddle and pointed the gelding east, toward town, toward Maekar and the conversation he was already dreading. The road was empty. The cedars were going dark. Four miles was four miles, and he still had them ahead of him.

Better like this instead of walking, he thought. He had to content himself with the little things.

He didn't know her name. He didn't know who she rode with, what she looked like on a wanted poster, whether there was a poster at all. He knew almost nothing about her except the particular quality of her attention, and the fact that she'd left his horse, and the sound of her voice when she'd said nothing personal in a tone that had suggested, to him, that she hadn't entirely meant it.

He was a patient man. It was, in this territory, one of the more useful things to be. He’d find her, eventually.

He touched his heels to the gelding's side. He was almost smiling.

Valentine in fair season smelled like manure, fry bread, and trouble, which made it feel more or less like home.

The main stretch had been given over to pens and stalls since morning — cattle lowing in long rows, horses circling their enclosures with their ears pinned, the kind of organized chaos that drew every rancher and drifter and idler within forty miles and made the town's one decent saloon impossible to get near until well after dark.

You'd been here three hours already. You'd eaten something on a stick that you hadn't been able to identify and hadn't asked about, and Arthur had stolen half of it without asking, and you were currently watching a man try to sell a one-eyed mule to another man who clearly already knew the mule was one-eyed but was pretending he didn't for the sake of the negotiation.

"You could take that mule," Arthur said, from beside you.

"I don't want that mule."

"I'm just saying. Fast hands, nobody's looking —"

"Arthur."

"Dutch'd probably like a mule."

"Dutch would hate a mule." You watched the negotiation reach some kind of critical juncture, both men gesturing at the mule's bad eye. "Dutch has opinions about mules."

"Dutch has opinions about everything."

"Including mules. The answer's no."

Arthur made a sound that was not quite agreement and ate the last piece of the thing on the stick. You let him. Twenty years of this and you'd learned to pick your battles, and the thing on the stick was not a battle worth having.

You'd come into Valentine because the gang needed supplies and Dutch had wanted eyes on the town. New faces meant new money flowing in for the fair, which meant new opportunities if you looked at it right. Arthur had come because where he went, you generally went too. Or, more accurately, where you went, he generally always followed. After two decades neither of you had bothered to work out which version was truer anymore. You simply arrived places together the way weather arrived, without much deliberate planning.

He was watching the crowd the way he always did in public: easy on the surface, clocking everything underneath. You did the same. It was a habit so old it had stopped feeling like a habit and started feeling like breathing.

"There's a contest," you pointed out.

Arthur followed your gaze to the far pen, where a small crowd had gathered around a corral. Inside it, a horse was trying to remove the fence from the ground.

He was a blue roan, or had been once, now mostly mud and fury, quarters bunched and neck bowed and hooves finding the rails with a regularity that suggested personal grievance rather than panic. Stocky. Deep-chested. The kind of horse that had opinions about being a horse and expressed them at volume.

A man at the gate was shouting something about prize money.

"No," Arthur said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You've got your face on."

"I have one face."

"You've got the face you make before you do something I'm gonna have to watch and pretend I'm not worried about." He looked at you sideways. "That one."

You looked at the roan. The roan was currently spinning in a tight circle for no apparent reason, which was either a sign of high spirits or a behavioural problem, and either way it was spectacular to watch. Your hands had started doing that thing they did, that low restless pull in the palms that meant your body had already made a decision your mouth hadn't caught up to yet.

"Prize money," you said and shrugged.

"How much?"

You looked at the man by the gate.

"Enough," you said. You had him.

Arthur exhaled through his nose, long and slow, the particular exhale of a man who had been through this before and knew exactly how it ended. "You sure about that horse?"

"No," you said cheerfully.

"Great." He crossed his arms. "Great, that's real reassuring, thank you."

"I'll be fine."

"You always say that."

"And I'm always fine."

"You're always mostly fine," he said, "which is a different thing and you know it."

You were already moving toward the gate.

The man running the contest had a waxed mustache and the energy of someone who had underestimated how many people would actually try this, which meant he asked you approximately two questions before taking your entry fee and waving you toward the corral with the expression of a man washing his hands of the outcome.

Arthur stationed himself at the rail.

"If you get thrown," he said, "I'm gonna laugh first and then check if you're alive."

"That's the correct order of operations," you agreed, and climbed the fence.

The roan was at the far end of the corral, sides heaving, watching you with the specific expression of a horse that had already made up its mind. Not scared. Calculating. There was a difference and you'd learned it young — a scared horse was dangerous in a particular way, reactive, all instinct. This one was something else. This one was thinking about it.

"Alright," you said quietly, dropping off the fence into the dust. "Alright, let's have a look at you."

The crowd noise muted itself at the edge of your attention the way it always did. Fair sounds, cattle sounds, the low roar of people watching something they expected to go badly. You let it blur to background and walked easy, shoulders loose, no direction in particular. Not toward the horse. Not away. Just present in the space, the way had taught yourself before Dutch had corrected you about it and really taught you.

The roan watched you. You watched him back. He had a good eye, dark and rimmed with white at the edge, the kind of eye that meant he was reading you the same way you were reading him. His ears moved — forward, sideways, forward again. Working it out.

You kept walking. Easy circles. Letting him track you without pressure. He snorted once, loud enough to get a reaction from the crowd, and you didn't react, and he noted that you didn't react, and something in his posture shifted a fraction.

"There," you said, to no one in particular.

Three minutes of this. Maybe four. Long enough that the crowd noise shifted from anticipatory to confused, because this was not what they'd been watching the previous riders do, and none of the previous riders were still on their feet, which you'd noted from the rail. The roan's ears settled forward and stayed there, which was not a concession but was an opening, and you angled toward him slowly on a curve and he stood.

You put your hand on his neck. He trembled. Held.

"Good," you whispered.

It took another few minutes after that. patient, slow, the old language of weight and breath and stillness, before you had the loose rope over him and his feet settled under him properly, and by then the crowd had gone quiet in a way that was different from before. Attentive rather than anticipatory.

Arthur, at the rail, had his hat pulled down and was watching through the gap with the expression he used when he was trying not to look impressed.

You took a breath and swung up. The roan exploded.

There was no other word for it. One moment standing, the next a full-body detonation, hindquarters driving up and forward in a buck that took you airborne for a moment and then slammed you back down, and you grabbed mane instead of reins and stayed low and let him have the first three because there was no point fighting the initial wave, you just had to survive it. Dust and noise and the crowd erupting and the roan screaming his displeasure at the sky, and you stayed on him, stayed centered, shifted your weight into each movement and found the rhythm underneath the chaos the way you found rhythms in everything, because everything had one if you waited long enough.

He came down from the fourth buck at an angle. You were ready for it.

You sat him through the fifth, and the sixth, and somewhere around the seventh something changed. The bucks went flatter, shorter, the energy converting from fury into something more like argument, and you moved with him and he felt you move with him and by the tenth he was just running, flat out around the corral with his neck low and his ears back, burning it off.

You let him run. The crowd was very loud. You didn't hear most of it.

You were breathing with the horse, feeling the point when the run started to cost him more than it was worth, when the argument left him and something else came in — not surrender, not quite, but a kind of provisional truce, which was all you'd ever wanted. When he slowed to a canter you followed it. Trot, you followed it. Walk, you sat him quiet and easy and he blew out a long breath through his nose and shook his head once, and you put your hand flat on his neck and felt the sweat-heat of him and the settling of his heartbeat under your palm.

Arthur's voice, from the rail, said something that was probably profane and was definitely fond, and you looked over at him and he had his hat pushed back and was grinning the grin that he saved for things he was going to deny being moved by later, and you grinned back, because twenty years and some things didn't need words.

You became aware, then, of the rest of the crowd. The noise of it, the press of faces at the rail. You'd tuned it out and now it came back in. Cheering, some of it, the particular appreciation of people who'd expected to watch something go wrong and had instead watched something go right. You sat up straighter and looked out at the ring of faces without really seeing them.

And then you saw one, and the world did something it had done once before, on a road outside of town three months ago. It tilted.

The fair had been Maekar's idea, which meant Baelor was already predisposed to find it mildly irritating. It was a curious dynamic: most of the things that Baelor proposed annoyed Maekar from the start, and most of the things that Maekar proposed ended up annoying Baelor. That had been their dynamic since they could remember. For the last three months, however, their roles had somehow reversed, and Baelor usually found himself ridden of patience when it came to the simplest of tasks.

If Baelor had to be fair, which he was most of the times, this was not a bad idea. Valentine in fair season drew exactly the kind of crowd that made information easy to gather: loose tongues, loose wallets, the particular loosening of caution that came when people felt like they were somewhere festive and therefore safe. It was sensible. Baelor had agreed to it for sensible reasons and had spent the better part of the morning walking among cattle pens and livestock stalls feeling sensibly productive about the whole enterprise.

It was the company that wore on him.

"Maybe we could find a replacement for that ring," Maekar said, noticing how his brother fidgeted with the naked digit on his left hand. “At least until we find that girl.”

"Don't," Baelor simply said.

"I'm only saying —"

"You've been saying it for three months."

"You have to admit it’s funny." Maekar fell into step beside him with the loose, unhurried stride that meant he was in good humor, which was always slightly worse than when he wasn't, because good humor in Maekar generally meant someone else's expense. He was a bulky man, his brother, unmovable both in a physical and conversational way. He possessed of the specific patience of someone who had found a good thread and intended to pull it until it unraveled completely. "A girl, Baelor. She took the ring off your hand."

"She was a professional."

"She was a girl."

"The two are not mutually exclusive." Baelor kept his eyes on the crowd ahead, cataloguing. A man near the cattle pen who was watching the exits more than the livestock. A pair of riders who'd come in together and separated immediately, which was either habit or coordination. "She knew what she was doing. She'd done it before. The approach, the position on the road, the horse waiting — that was rehearsed."

"And yet you couldn’t put two and two together."

Baelor looked at Maekar with the flatness of a man who had accepted a particular reality and declined to be embarrassed by it anymore and decided not to elaborate further.

Maekar smiled. It was not a comfortable smile. It was the smile of a younger brother who had found something he intended to preserve indefinitely, like a specimen in a jar. "You know what I think?"

"I don’t want to hear what you think."

"I think she was pretty," Maekar ignored his older brother.

Baelor said nothing.

"I think," Maekar continued, with the unhurried pleasure of someone delivering a speech they'd been composing for some time, "that she was very pretty, and that you were so busy looking at her that she had your wallet and your ring and was halfway gone before your brain caught up with the situation, and that this is both the most entertaining thing that's ever happened to you and completely consistent with your character, and—"

"There's a man by the grain stall who's been watching us for the last ten minutes," Baelor said. "Left side. Brown coat."

Maekar didn't look. He had learned, over the years, to receive information like this without moving his eyes, which was one of the genuinely useful things about him. "Saw him. Not a threat. He's watching the red-haired woman two stalls over." A pause. "She was pretty, though. Wasn't she."

"Maekar."

"Just say yes and I'll leave it alone."

"You'll never leave it alone."

"Fair enough," Maekar agreed pleasantly. "But I'll leave it alone today if you just—"

The crowd noise shifted.

Not dramatically. Just a change in quality — a swell from one direction, the particular roar that meant something was happening that was worth watching, the kind of spontaneous attention that moved through a crowd like weather. Both of them turned toward it by reflex, the old habit that made a sound like that mean threat before it meant anything else and then calibrated when they saw the direction: the far corral, where something was clearly going very wrong or very right, and the crowd around the rail had doubled in the last thirty seconds.

"Come on then," Maekar said.

They found a gap in the crowd at the rail without much difficulty. People shifted for Maekar without knowing why they were doing it, something about the particular quality of his presence that suggested space was advisable. Baelor looked at the corral and saw the horse first.

Blue roan. Sixteen hands at least, and furious. Not the blind fury of a panicked animal but something more deliberate, more personal, the kind of fury that had decided to become an inherent trait. He was in the middle of the corral demonstrating this to anyone who cared to watch, and most of the crowd was watching with the particular enjoyment of people who expected to see something go badly.

Then he registered the rider.

She was moving with the horse in a way that should not have been possible, given what the horse was doing. Each buck was an argument, and she was answering it not with force but with something more like conversation. Her weight shifted before the movement rather than after it. Her hands were low and quiet on the mane. She was not fighting him. She was not even, exactly, staying on. She was something more active than that, more deliberate. She was listening to him with her whole body and responding in kind, and the combination of it was something that bypassed ordinary watching and went somewhere else entirely.

"Hm," said Maekar, which from Maekar was considerable.

The horse came down from a buck at an angle and the girl moved into it like she'd seen it coming, and the crowd lurched forward at the rail with a collective noise that was half alarm and half something rawer than that.

"She's good," Maekar said.

Baelor didn't say anything.

He was watching the way her back moved. The line of her spine through the turns, the way her hips followed the horse's motion without resistance, the specific quality of ease in her body that came not from relaxation but from absolute knowledge — of the horse, of herself, of the exact nature of the conversation she was having with eight hundred pounds of fury. She knew what she was doing, Baelor thought. This was a woman who had been doing this — or some version of it — for most of her life, and it showed in every line of her, and Baelor watched it with the unsettling awareness that he had stopped breathing at some point in the last thirty seconds.

"That takes courage," Maekar said. "Or stupidity."

"Courage," Baelor said, without thinking. Maekar glanced at him.

The horse ran, now — not bucking, just running, flat and low around the corral, burning the argument out of himself — and the girl sat him with her neck long and her chin up and her hair loose from whatever she'd had it in, and the crowd was very loud, and Baelor watched the line of her jaw as she turned with the horse and felt something shift in his chest.

The horse slowed. Canter, trot, walk. The girl brought her hand to his neck and the horse blew out, a long shuddering breath, and the crowd broke open.

She looked up. Up at the crowd, at the noise of it, a quick sweep, and Baelor saw her face clearly for the first time in three months, and his chest did something it had done once before, on a road outside of town, crouching in the dirt.

It dropped.

"Maekar," he said.

"What."

"The girl." He couldn't look away from her. She was scanning the crowd, not seeing him yet, that same quick professional sweep he remembered from the road. "That’s her."

Maekar turned to look at him properly for the first time since they'd arrived at the rail. "Her?"

"From the road. Three months ago." A pause. The words felt strange in his mouth, not quite adequate to what he meant.

Silence. He felt Maekar go very still beside him, in the way Maekar went still when something had genuinely surprised him, which was rare enough to be notable.

"That," Maekar said, slowly, "is the girl who robbed you."

"Yes."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"Well," Maekar said. Something had changed in his voice, the teasing edge of it replaced with something more considered, more careful. He looked back at the corral. At her. "I owe you an apology."

Baelor said nothing.

"She is very pretty," Maekar said.

"Maekar."

"And clearly dangerous." A pause. "Which you failed to mention."

"I mentioned she was professional."

"Professional is not the same thing as—" Maekar stopped. Looked at his brother. Looked back at the corral. His expression, when Baelor glanced at him, had shifted into something more serious, more measuring. "Baelor."

"I’m watching her."

"I know you are. That's what I'm—" He stopped again. Then, more quietly, "You're staring."

Baelor made himself look away. He looked at the cattle pens. At the grain stall. At the man in the brown coat who had, it turned out, successfully introduced himself to the red-haired woman and was now in significantly better spirits about it.

He looked back at the corral. She was still there.

"She's connected to someone," he said, because thinking about it practically was better than thinking about it the other way. "She's not operating alone. The setup on the road was too well-organized. Someone's running her." He kept his voice level. Professional. "If she's here in Valentine, her people aren't far."

Maekar was quiet for a moment. "And you want to find them."

"It's our job to find them."

"Of course it is." A pause. Maekar's voice was careful now, the teasing entirely gone, which was in some ways worse. "Aas I’m sure it’s nothing personal, right?" Baelor blinked at Maekar’s words, an echo with another’s voice. He said nothing. "Or the fact that you haven't looked away from her for longer than about four seconds since you recognized her."

"We should find out who she's with," Baelor ignored his brother’s comments yet again. "Carefully. Without being seen."

Maekar looked at him for a long moment.

"Right," he said. "Carefully." He looked back at the corral, where the girl was still sitting the roan, one hand flat on his neck, the crowd beginning to disperse around her. "Although," he added, "given your track record with this particular woman, I'm not certain carefully is entirely up to you."

Baelor did not answer this, because there was no answer that would have improved his position.

He watched her sit easy in the saddle, the horse quiet under her now, and felt the specific weight of three months of a road and an empty hand and the corner of a mouth he'd been carrying around without meaning to, and thought that Maekar was, irritatingly, not entirely wrong.

The prize money was better than expected, which was the first good thing.

The man with the waxed mustache handed it over with the expression of someone who had not anticipated having to actually pay out, and you took it from him with a smile that was pleasant enough to be unreadable and tucked it into your coat before he could think of a reason to renegotiate. The roan was already being led away by a handler, ears still pinned but feet moving quiet, and you watched him go with a feeling that was close to fondness. Good horse. Difficult, but good. The best ones usually were.

Arthur was waiting at the gate.

"Not bad," he said.

"Not bad?"

"For someone who had no idea what that horse was gonna do."

"I had some idea."

"You had none," he finally declared, and you didn’t reply because it wasn’t entirely false.

He fell into step beside you as you came through the gate, and you could feel him looking at you with that sideways look that meant he was doing the thing where he checked you over for damage without wanting to appear like he was checking you over for damage. You'd learned to let him. It cost nothing and it mattered to him.

"Couple of those bucks looked bad," he mentioned.

"They weren't."

"The fourth one —"

"Wasn't as bad as it looked." You rolled your shoulder experimentally. Twinge, nothing more. "I'm fine, Arthur."

"Yeah." He pulled his hat down. "You're always fine."

"And I always am."

He made the sound. The exhale. You'd been hearing that exhale for the better part of two decades and it still made something in you settle, the specific comfort of a person who knew you well enough to be exasperated by you. He reached over and pushed your shoulder lightly with two fingers, which was as close as Arthur Morgan got to a hug in public, and you knocked your arm against his in return.

"Money's good," you said. "Dutch'll be pleased."

"Dutch is never pleased."

"Dutch'll be less displeased. Close enough."

Arthur almost smiled. Then: "You eat anything else? Besides that thing on the stick?"

"You mean the thing you half ate?” you laughed and earned a slight flush on his cheeks. “Yeah, the thing on the stick was enough.”

"It really wasn't."

"Arthur," you stopped walking. He stopped a half-step later and turned to look at you, and you kept your voice easy and your eyes moving over the crowd behind him, tracking. Casual. Nothing to see. "I saw someone."

He read your face the way he always did, fast and complete. "Trouble?"

"Maybe. I don't know yet," you started walking again, slower, taking the long way around the edge of the fair toward the main stretch. "You remember a few months back. When I did the road job outside of town."

Arthur was quiet for a second. Then, "The one you kept the ring from?" A pause. You could hear him working to keep his voice even. "The one you wouldn't stop talking about his eyes?"

You punched his arm. It was like punching a barn wall. He didn't move, just made a small sound that was technically a grunt but was mostly a laugh, and you shook out your hand and kept walking.

"I wasn't talking about his eyes."

"You mentioned his eyes."

"Once."

"Three times."

"Arthur —"

"The mismatched ones." He was grinning now, you could hear it without looking. "Blue and brown, very striking, never seen anything like —"

"I will leave you here," you said. "I will walk away and leave you standing in the middle of Valentine fair and feel nothing."

"No you won't."

"No," you agreed, "I won't. But I want you to know I considered it."

He laughed, properly this time, the low easy laugh that he kept for the two of you, for camp when things were good, for moments like this when the world was briefly uncomplicated. You let yourself have two seconds of it and then reeled yourself back in.

"He's here," you said. "At the fair. I saw him at the rail when I came off the horse." You glanced over your shoulder without making it look like a glance. The crowd was thick and noisy and unhelpful. "He wasn't alone. There's another man with him. Big, bigger than you, white hair and beard. Gruff. The kind of face that's been broken at least twice and didn't learn anything from it."

Arthur absorbed this. "You think they're Pinkertons?"

"I don't know. Don't feel like Pinkertons to me," you turned it over as you walked, the way you'd been turning it over since that road three months ago. The quality of him, that calm. The ring with the crest. The coat that wasn't from here. "They're not from around here, either of them. The one I robbed — he's English. Educated. The other one I'd guess the same."

"English Pinkertons."

"I said I don't know. Could be private contractors. Could be law. Could be something else," you paused. "Whatever they are, they're not ranch hands at a county fair."

Arthur nodded, slow, chewing on it. "And the one you —"

"Don't."

"— robbed," he finished, with innocence so performative it was almost admirable. "He recognize you?"

"I don't know yet," you did know, actually. You'd seen his face when you'd looked out at the crowd from the horse — had seen the specific quality of stillness that crossed it, the same stillness you remembered from the road, and something else underneath it that you were not going to think about right now. "But I'd bet on it."

Arthur was quiet for a moment, doing that thing where he turned information over and looked at it from all sides before he said anything. It was one of the things you'd always trusted about him. He didn't react, he considered. "What do you want to do?"

"Keep our heads." You stopped at the edge of the main street, the saloon visible half a block up, warm light already spilling from its windows in the late afternoon. "Eyes out for both of them. Don't approach, don't make it obvious you're watching." You looked at Arthur and found him already watching you with that steady, considering expression. "The big one — white hair, you'll know him when you see him — you could probably take him in a fight if it came to that."

Arthur looked mildly offended by probably.

"He's got that look," you said, which was both a concession and a peace offering. "The kind of man who knows what he's doing with his fists. Dutch would hate him." You considered. "You'd probably get along fine, other circumstances. Buy each other a drink, argue about something, be friends by the end of it."

"Wonderful," Arthur said dryly. "Love when that happens."

"Different world." You looked back up the street. "Right now, watch him. Watch both of them. Don't let them see you watching."

"And you?"

You were already moving toward the saloon. "I'm going to have a drink and look like someone who has nothing to hide."

"You have plenty to hide."

"That's why it's called looking like." You glanced back at him over your shoulder. "Give me twenty minutes."

Arthur's expression did the thing it sometimes did, the thing where everything he wanted to say and had decided not to say passed across his face in about half a second. He settled on: "Be careful."

"Always."

"Mostly."

You turned back toward the saloon and didn't answer, because he was right and you both knew it.

The Valentine saloon was doing good business for the hour.

Fair crowds had been filtering in since mid-afternoon, and the bar was lined three deep with ranchers and drifters and men who'd come for the livestock and stayed for the whiskey, which was the natural order of things. You found a spot at the far end of the bar, back to the wall, sightline to the door, and ordered something that came in a glass without further specification, and settled in to look like a woman with nowhere particular to be.

You were good at this. You'd been doing it since you were young enough that Dutch had had to convince barkeeps you were old enough to be inside, and even then you'd understood the particular performance of ordinary: how to hold your glass, how to let your eyes move without appearing to move, how to be present in a room without declaring yourself.

The whiskey was bad, which was fine. You weren't here for the whiskey.

You were here because you knew, with a certainty that lived somewhere below conscious reasoning and didn't feel like guessing, that he was going to follow you.

Not out of threat. Not because he'd decided what to do with the information yet — you didn't think he had, he'd looked too unsettled for a man executing a plan. But because he had recognized you and the recognition had done something to him that he wasn't finished with yet, and a man like that, patient and careful and carrying something for three months without putting it down, was not going to let you walk into a saloon and disappear when he'd only just found you again.

You turned your glass on the bar. He'd held your gaze on that road. Even with the gun in his ribs, he'd held your gaze.

You took a sip of the bad whiskey and watched the door and waited. He came through the door eleven minutes after you did.

You knew because you'd been counting, not deliberately, just the way your mind ran numbers when it had nothing else to do with itself, and when the door opened and the specific quality of the light changed you felt it before you looked up. The saloon had filled a little in those eleven minutes — two more men at the bar, a card game starting up in the corner, the barkeep engaged in an argument with someone about the price of something — and the noise level had risen enough that the door opening barely registered on anyone else.

You looked up anyway.

He was taller than you remembered, which was strange because you remembered him as tall. Then again, you never allowed him to even stand up that one time. You noticed his coat was brushed and his beard was slightly longer, but still well kept. He stood just inside the doorway doing what you'd done when you'd come in, which was take the room apart and put it back together in the span of about five seconds. Not looking for threats exactly. Looking for information.

His companion was not with him.

Good. You let yourself register that quietly. Outside, then, or around the corner, which meant Arthur could manage him if the evening went sideways. Good. That was one variable simplified.

He was scanning the room. You watched him do it without giving him anything to find, just another body at the bar with a glass and nowhere to be, and when his eyes moved to your end of the bar you let them land. Didn't look away. Didn't adjust your expression. Just held it and let him find you the way you'd known he would, the way you'd counted eleven minutes toward.

He stilled.

Even across a half-full saloon you could see it — that particular quality of stillness you'd felt from two feet away on a dirt road, the whole body settling into a different kind of attention. He looked at you for a long moment, and you looked back, and the noise of the room went somewhere distant.

Then he started walking toward you. You turned to the barkeep and held up two fingers.

By the time he reached your end of the bar, there were two glasses of whiskey on the wood. You picked one up and held it out without looking at him, because you'd heard his footsteps and you knew exactly where he was, and the looking-without-looking was its own kind of statement.

He stopped at your side.

You turned and looked up at him and smiled — not the smile you used for marks, not the smile you used for Dutch or for strangers whose intentions you were still mapping. A genuine one, which surprised you a little even as you did it. "Tastes like shit," you said, "but I think I owe you for the last time."

He looked at the glass. Looked at you. Something moved through his mismatched eyes — that deep blue and warm brown, close enough again that you felt the specific impact of them — and he took the glass from your hand with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who had decided to find this situation acceptable.

He didn't drink yet. Just held it.

"Am I going to get your name this time?" he asked. His voice was the same as you remembered, low and velvety and precisely accented, and it landed in your chest the same way it had on the road, which was irritating and also not something you could do anything about.

"That depends," you turned back to the bar, rested your forearm on the wood, looked at him sideways. "Are you going to get me in trouble?"

"You robbed me," he said. There was no heat in it. Just the fact, stated plainly, with something underneath it that was almost amused. "And you're now asking for no consequences?" A pause. "Bold."

"Am I pretty enough to get out of here unharmed?"

He didn't answer. He raised the glass and took a slow sip, and looked at you over the rim of it, and the look was very steady and very level and said approximately nothing useful, which was its own kind of answer and not an unpleasant one. He lowered the glass.

"Baelor Targaryen," he said. Like he'd decided something. Like he was placing a card on the table and watching to see what you'd do with it. "Now tell me yours so we can be even, little thief."

The name settled into you. You turned it over. Targaryen wasn't a name from around here — wasn't a name from anywhere you could immediately place, which fit, because nothing about him fit anywhere you could immediately place. You held his gaze and thought about what you knew, which was: not Pinkerton, the Pinkertons had a particular smell about them, something officious and watchful in the wrong way, and he didn't have it. Not local law, obviously. Not a rancher or a drifter or anything that fit the ordinary categories.

Which left things that were less comfortable to consider.

"Humor me," you said. "What's the price on my head?"

Something moved through his eyes. Brief, there and gone — not surprise exactly, more like recognition, the specific look of a man who'd just had a suspicion confirmed. He was quiet for a moment, long enough for you to notice that the card game in the corner got loud about something and settled again.

"None that I've been told yet," he simply said.

The yet was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and you both knew it, and neither of you addressed it, and you laughed — genuine, short, the kind that came up before you decided to let it — and watched him absorb it. He blinked, just once, something shifting in his expression that he almost caught before it landed. Almost.

"So you're telling me," you said, when the laugh had settled, "that this is entirely personal?" You let your head tilt slightly. Watched him. "My, my. Didn't know I still had that effect."

The corner of his mouth moved.

You'd been thinking about that corner of his mouth, on and off, for three months. You were not going to admit this to anyone, including yourself, beyond the bare acknowledgment that it was happening.

"You have a considerable effect," he said, which was not the deflection you'd half-expected, and the directness of it landed somewhere in the center of your chest and stayed there.

He was looking at you with that full, unhurried attention — the same attention he'd given you on the road, the same attention he'd clearly given everything he'd decided was worth looking at — and the room was loud and warm and smelled like bad whiskey and sawdust and you were acutely, inconveniently aware of how close he was standing. Close enough that his arm was almost against yours on the bar. Close enough that when he turned to set his glass down you felt the shift of the air.

"Baelor Targaryen," you said, trying the name again. Letting him hear you try it. "That's not a name from around here."

"No," he agreed.

"Not a name from anywhere I know."

"Also true."

"English," you said.

"Is that a question?"

"Observation." You picked up your own glass. "You've got the accent."

"You've got one too," he said. "American. Frontier." The way he said it wasn't unkind, just precise, cataloguing in return. "You didn't grow up in a town."

You looked at him.

"No," you said, the smile renewed at your lips. "I didn't."

He nodded, once, the way he'd nodded on the road — slow, considering, filing it somewhere. His glass was almost empty. Yours was getting there. Around you the saloon moved and breathed and paid you no attention whatsoever, which was exactly how you needed it, and you were sitting in the middle of it with a bounty hunter who had three months of reasons to turn you in and was instead standing close enough that you could feel the warmth of him and asking you about your name.

"Well then," you said. You set your glass down and looked at him, and let him look back, and held the space between you at exactly the distance it was, not closing it and not widening it. "Seeing as you've given me yours."

You told him your name. He said it back, once, quiet, like he was testing the weight of it. Like he'd been waiting for it for three months and wanted to make sure it fit. It did something to you, your own name in that accent. You were going to think about that later, privately, and be most definitely annoyed about it.

"Now we’re even," he said.

"Even," you repeated. "Though I'm keeping the ring."

Something in his expression shifted into something that was, unmistakably, despite everything — warm. He probably figured that, by the, you would have already sold it.

"I expected nothing less," he said.

The second glass went down easier than the first, which was either a sign that the whiskey was improving or that you'd stopped noticing it, and by the third you had stopped noticing quite a few things.

The card game in the corner. The barkeep's ongoing grievances. The general noise of the room, which had thickened as the evening came on and the fair crowd filtered in looking for somewhere to put the rest of their day.

You had stopped noticing all of it.

What you had not stopped noticing was Baelor Targaryen, who was standing perhaps four inches closer than he'd been at the start of the first glass and showed no signs of correcting this, which you found you had no interest in correcting either. At some point the conversation had stopped being a careful exchange of information and had become something else — easier, warmer, the kind of talk that happened when two people discovered they were, against the available evidence, enjoying each other. He asked questions that were precise without being interrogating. You answered them in the same currency, specific enough to be interesting, vague enough to be safe.

You were good at this. You'd always been good at this. You were finding, with him, however, that you were working slightly harder at it than usual.

"The man you came in with," Baelor said, during a pause that had been comfortable enough not to need filling. "The one who was watching you ride. Is he your man?"

You laughed before you could stop it. Not at all performed, just the genuine, immediate laugh of someone who had been presented with an image their brain rejected on instinct. Arthur Morgan, your man. Arthur, who had once spent forty-five minutes helping you get a raccoon out of your tent and had never once let you forget it. Arthur, who called you troublesome the way other people said beloved.

"More like a dumb brother," you said. "We grew up together. More or less." You picked up your glass and looked at him sideways. "Why. You jealous?"

He didn't miss a beat.

"Just didn't seem like your type," he said, smooth and even, like the question hadn't been asked at all.

You blinked.

"You know what my type is," you said. It wasn't quite a question.

"By the eyes you've been giving me since the first time on that road," he paused, just for a beat, just long enough, "I'd bet money on myself."

The floor did something minor and structural. You kept your expression where it was through an act of will that you felt was frankly admirable, and held his gaze, and after a moment you smiled at him slowly.

"Is that right," you said.

"That's right."

You turned to face him a little more fully, which closed the four inches to something closer to two, and looked up at him with your elbow on the bar. "Do you even know how to handle a pistol, English boy?" You let your voice sit easy, let the tease live in it. "Girls from these lands aren't easily managed."

"Seems to me," he said, and his voice had dropped just slightly, just enough, "like you'd know exactly how to handle one. Am I correct?"

There it was. Said with perfect composure, with that precise and unhurried attention he brought to everything, and the room was warm and the whiskey was in your blood and he was close enough that you could see the grey in his beard and the specific quality of what was in his mismatched eyes, and you felt the heat of it move through you like the swallow of something stronger than what was in your glass.

You held his gaze.

"Been known to," you admitted.

The corner of his mouth, that same corner, rose again.

"I thought as much," he said.

The conversation slid after that, the way conversations did when both people had decided something without saying it — not lurching, not awkward, but with the easy momentum of water finding a channel it had been looking for. He said something about the roan, about the way you'd moved with him, and what he said was technically about the horse and was not about the horse at all, and you answered him in kind, and the space between you stayed at its two inches and neither of you moved to change it, because the two inches was its own kind of conversation.

Outside, somewhere, Arthur would be watching Maekar, something you suspected was reciprocated. Dutch would be in camp waiting for the money you'd won, and the Van der Linde gang existed and had needs and operated on a schedule that did not account for saloons and Englishmen and three glasses of bad whiskey.

You were aware of none of this.

You were aware of the warmth of him at that distance. The way his voice moved through the noise of the room. The specific, patient quality of his attention, which had not wavered since he'd walked through the door, which had not wavered on the road three months ago, and which was beginning to make you feel — in a way that was inconvenient and also not unwelcome — like the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"You know what your problem is," you said eventually.

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"City men." You turned your glass on the bar. "All of you. All talk and no action." You looked at him. "You're telling me all these pretty things and in truth you wouldn't dare to do any of them."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the quiet of a man who'd been caught out. The quiet of a man who was deciding how to spend something he'd been saving.

"Want to bet," he said, his voice was level and low and the mismatched eyes were very steady on yours "little thief?"

"Depends on the stakes."

"My ring," he said. "The one currently in your possession." His eyes didn't move from yours. "Here are the terms. I take you upstairs, find a room, and I fuck you until you're begging me not to stop." A pause, measured and unhurried. "If you beg first, the ring comes back to me. Where it belongs."

"And if I don't?" you managed your treacherous breath not to hitch.

"Then you keep it." The corner of his mouth moved upwards. "Which won't happen."

The heat moved through you fast and total, the way heat did when it had been building toward something for three months and two conversations and a number of glasses of bad whiskey, and you felt it in your throat and your chest and lower than that, and you held his gaze through all of it and did not let a single thing show on your face beyond the slow, deliberate smile that you brought up from somewhere that knew exactly what it was doing.

"Bet you I'll be the one to make you beg instead," you said. "And I'll keep that ring either way."

The corner of his mouth moved. All the way, this time.

"Then we have a deal," said Baelor, and held out his hand.

You shook it. His grip was warm and unhurried, and he held it for exactly one second longer than a handshake required, his thumb pressing briefly against the inside of your wrist, and you felt your pulse against it and hoped — without much conviction — that he hadn't.

By the look in his eyes, he had.

The room you got from the barkeep was small and the lock was stiff and Baelor got it on the second try, which you noted because it meant his hands were steadier than yours, which was irritating and also motivating.

He hit you with a teasing ladies first and you entered the room. The door had barely closed before you turned to face him in the dark. Not quite dark — a window facing the street let in enough of the evening to see by, the warm spill of lantern light from below cutting across the floor, and in it you could see his face, the particular quality of his attention, the way he was looking at you like he'd been looking at you since the road and had simply been waiting for permission to do something about it.

You grabbed his lapels and pulled him down.

The kiss was not gentle. It wasn't what either of you had been building for the past hour. It was immediate and hard and his mouth opened against yours with a low sound that you felt in your sternum, and his hands found your waist and then your jaw, tilting your head where he wanted it, and you bit his lower lip in response to that because you were not going to be tilted anywhere without making your opinion known.

He made a sound against your mouth. Good, you thought, distantly. File that away.

His hands moved to your coat and you were already working his, and between you it was more efficient than romantic, pulling and shrugging, coats dropping somewhere behind you both, and then his hands were at your shirt and yours were at his and the buttons of his went faster because your fingers were steadier than his now, a fact you were choosing to be pleased about. You got his shirt open and pushed it off his shoulders and put your hands flat on his chest and felt him — warm skin, the shift of muscle, the specific texture of chest hair going grey at the center — and pulled back from the kiss long enough to look.

He was looking at you too.

"Your turn," you said.

His fingers moved to your shirt with that same unhurried precision, working each button from the bottom up, and the deliberateness of it was worse than if he'd been hurried because it meant he was thinking, still thinking, still entirely in possession of himself, and you were going to do something about that. He got your shirt open and pushed it off and his eyes moved over you in the low light the way his attention always moved — complete, specific, giving nothing away — and then he reached out and traced the line of your collarbone with two fingers, light enough to feel like a question.

You reached up and pulled him back down by the back of his neck.

This kiss had teeth in it. Yours, first — his lower lip again, harder, and he exhaled sharp through his nose and the hands on your waist tightened and pulled you in, and that was more like it, that was the thing underneath the composure, and you filed that away too alongside the first sound and the tightening grip. His mouth moved to your jaw and then your throat and you tipped your head back and felt his beard drag against your skin and the specific shock of that, rough and warm and slower than you'd expected.

"Baelor," you said. Not a plea. Just his name, placed there deliberately, because you wanted to hear how he responded to it.

He responded by finding a place below your ear and doing something with his mouth that made your knees recalibrate their purpose.

His hands were at the fastening of your trousers. Yours were at his, and you got there first — got him open and pushed the fabric down and wrapped your hand around him and felt him breathe in, sharp and held, his forehead dropping to your temple.

"Talking about handling guns," you said quietly and chuckled.

"You —" he started, his voice a bit more exasperated by your tease, but you could sense the breathed laugh in it.

He recovered in about two seconds, which was genuinely impressive and also meant you had more work to do. His hand slid inside your waistband, and you were already wet and when his fingers found that he made a sound — low, not quite controlled, the first crack in the composure — and stroked through once, slowly, as though confirming a hypothesis.

"I thought as much," he said, against your temple, which would have been unbearable from anyone else and was unbearable from him in a way you found you didn't want to stop.

You stroked him once in return and he shuddered against you. "Likewise, wolfer."

The remaining clothes came off with more cooperation and less dignity than the coats had, boots pulled off and dropped and trousers pushed down and kicked free, and you ended up on the bed with him over you and his mouth already moving down your throat to your collarbone, your sternum, and you watched him go with your hand in his salt-and-pepper hair, the silver of it between your fingers, his beard dragging a line of heat down your skin wherever his mouth led.

He looked up at you once, from your ribs, just once. You raised an eyebrow, was he really asking for your goddamn permission now?  The corner of his mouth moved, acknowledged, and he kept going.

He was thorough. That was the thing you hadn't anticipated, though you should have — it was there in everything about him, the patience, the specific attention, the way he didn't skip anything — and when he settled between your thighs and looked at you for precisely one second before lowering his head you had time to think oh and then he was working his tongue through you in a slow flat stroke and you stopped thinking particularly clearly after that.

He learned you the way you suspected he learned everything else — methodically, tracking response, adjusting. Flat strokes first, broad and slow, mapping. Then focused, circling your clit with the specific, unhurried precision of a man who had filed your first sound and intended to replicate it. You felt the deliberateness of it, the way nothing he was doing was accidental, and it was maddening and extraordinary in equal measure.

You pushed your hips up. He pressed them back down. Both hands, flat on your hip bones, holding you where he'd put you with a ease that sent heat straight up your spine.

"Don't," he said, against you, and the vibration of the word was its own thing entirely. “I want you to stay still for me.”

"Then do something worth staying still for," you bit down on the sound that tried to come out.

A pause. A breath against your skin that cost him a bit of his remaining composure, you could tell. Then he worked his tongue directly over your clit in slow, tight circles and slid two fingers inside you at the same time, curling on the press in, and the sound you made was not what you'd intended.

He made a sound of his own, low and private, against your skin. The fingers worked in a steady rhythm — in, the curl, a drag on the withdrawal that found something — and his mouth stayed focused and relentless and you had your hand twisted in his hair and your head back and the ceiling of a Valentine saloon room above you and—

"Baelor—," you almost cried out.

"I know," he said. Against you. Eyes up, watching your face as it twisted in pleasure. "Come for me, let me drink you up."

The orgasm unwound from somewhere deep — his fingers curling on the withdrawal at exactly the moment his tongue pressed flat — and your hand gripped his hair and your other hand found the headboard and you came with his name broken somewhere in the middle of it, his hands holding your hips steady through all of it, feeling every second of it, not letting you move away from his mouth until you were finished.

He pressed one last kiss to the inside of your thigh. Then he started to move up. You stopped him with a hand flat on his chest.

He looked at you. "Lie down," you said.

Something moved through his expression — surprise, and then something warmer than surprise, and then he lay back and you moved over him and looked down at his face in the low light. His jaw. The grey in his beard. The mismatched eyes watching you with that full attention that was already slightly more undone than it had been ten minutes ago, which was satisfying and also not enough.

You wanted more undone. You wanted the composure in pieces on the floor with the coats.

You ran your tongue up his throat, feeling him swallow, and bit the hinge of his jaw. He made a sound that was entirely private and not quite controlled and his hands came up to grip your hips.

"You're going to —" he started.

"Yes," you said, and moved down his body.

He was warm in your hand, heavy, and when you ran your tongue up the length of him his head went back against the pillow. You watched him do it. Watched the column of his throat work. Watched his hands find the sheets.

You took him into your mouth slowly, thick head first, tasting the bead of arousal and swirling your tongue to its saltiness. You took your time the way he'd taken his, and felt him breathe in through his teeth.

"Fuck," he said, which was the first genuinely unguarded thing he'd said since he'd walked into the saloon, and you filed it at the top of the list alongside the grip and the jaw-sound and the first crack over your hip bones.

You worked him with the same attention he'd given you — learning first, then focused, your hand at the base and your mouth taking him deeper by degrees until you felt him hit the back of your throat. The sound he made then was not a word. You held it, a beat, two, and felt him tremble — actually tremble, the whole body, hands still in the sheets because he was holding himself back from gripping your hair, you could see the effort of it in the tendons of his forearms — and then you pulled back slowly and did it again.

"God —" and the sentence didn't finish.

You pulled back and looked up at him, his cock in your hand, your chin tilted up, and said with a smile, "You were saying something about making me beg, I believe."

He looked down at you. His chest was heaving. His jaw was tight. His eyes were blown dark and the composure was fractured all along the edges and he was the most beautiful thing you'd seen in recent memory. You were so keeping that ring.

"Fucking come here," he said. Quiet. Absolute. The voice still controlled, just barely, which meant he'd decided to stop spending effort on sentences and put it somewhere else. "Now."

You teased him one last time by taking him into your mouth, to the back of your throat, slow as you could stand, and felt him make a sound that was not a word at all. Then you came up his body.

"Since you asked so nicely," you said with a smile.

You swung your leg over him and settled your knees on either side of his hips and looked down at his face, and his hands came to rest on your thighs, and you reached down and wrapped your hand around him and felt him twitch in your grip.

"You liked how I moved on that horse, didn’t you," you said. An affirmation more than a question. "How about feeling it yourself."

You sank down on him.

Inch by inch, slow, taking your time with it because the time was warranted — he was bigger than you'd expected, girthier, and the stretch of it was— You lost the thread of whatever you'd been about to think, the thought dissolving into white at the edges of your vision as you worked your way down and down and the fullness of it built past what you'd prepared yourself for and kept building. You heard yourself make a sound. Couldn't have told yourself what kind.

Baelor's hands on your thighs had gone rigid.

"Fuck," he said, again, this time through gritted teeth. “Fuck you feel so good.”

You bottomed out.

Sat there, fully seated, and took three breaths. Felt him everywhere — the deep internal pressure of it, the specific fullness that made your thoughts go simple and white-edged, and you circled your hips without pulling back, just a slow roll, feeling the shift of him inside you, reaching something deep that made your toes curl against the sheets.

His jaw had gone tight. His hands flexed on your thighs.

You angled yourself back, just slightly, shifting your weight more on his thighs, and looked down — and laughed, short and breathless, because you could see him. The faint ridge of his cock pressing against the lower plane of your stomach from the inside, visible even in the low light, and the sight of it sent a wave of heat so acute through you that your laugh collapsed into something lower.

"Look at that," you managed.

His eyes were tracking the same thing you were, and the look on his face was the most undone you'd seen it yet — jaw tight, eyes dark, a quality of focused restraint that was costing him something visible.

"Feel good?" you asked and wiggle slightly.

“Want me to show you how good it feels?” he cantered his hips upwards once, in a hard thrust that you didn’t expect, and it tore what was almost a growl from your own throat. “That good.”

You rolled your hips again, slower this time, and watched his face do several things in quick succession.

Then you started to move. Up and down, finding the pace, and your first full stroke dragged a sound out of you that you didn't try to suppress because suppressing things was for when you needed to maintain a position, and you didn't need to maintain anything right now except the rhythm.

He felt extraordinary. There was no more precise word for it. Baelor filled you on every downstroke completely and the drag on the upstroke found things that made the white come back at the edges, and you set your hands flat on his chest and moved and let yourself have it.

Baelor made a sound low in his throat. Then another.

His hips rolled up to meet you — slower this time, tentative at first, finding the rhythm, and then harder when he felt how you responded to it, how your breath caught on each upward drive. His hands moved from your thighs to your hips and gripped, guiding rather than directing, moving with your body rather than against it, and the combination of his upward roll and your downstroke had you seeing spots.

"Fuck," you said, eyes closing momentarily.

“Keep your eyes open,” one of his hands came to rest around your neck, his thumb tracing your jawline. “You are so beautiful.”

"Is that the best you've got, English?" You chuckled and rolled your hips on a downstroke just to feel him curse. He did. Under his breath, in a voice that was no longer trying very hard to be composed, a word you hadn't heard him use before that sounded considerably better in that accent. "There it is," you said, and did it again.

"You —" His grip on your hips tightened to the edge of bruising. "You are —"

"Finish the sentence."

"Impossible," he managed. "You are completely —"

"Impossible, that's not very nice —"

"Impossibly good," he said, and the word good came out wrecked, and you felt it somewhere below your ribs. “You are a fucking vision.”

You leaned down and kissed him, open-mouthed and slow, and felt his hands spread across your lower back pulling you in, and you bit at his throat on the way to his ear, felt the shudder move through him at that, the way his hips stuttered and then drove up harder. You dragged your teeth along his jaw.

"Say some more of those pretty words," you said, against his ear.

"You're going to ruin me." Low, close to your ear, and the way he said it — not like a complaint, not like a warning, like a thing he'd already accepted and was simply stating — moved through you like the whiskey had, warm and total. "You have been ruining me since that road."

"Good," you breathed.

"This is not —" His hips drove up and your breath left you entirely for a second. "This is not good. This is a catastrophe."

You laughed, and the laugh became a moan halfway through because his hand had found your clit and was pressing in slow circles, and the combination of his cock filling you on every stroke and his thumb working you had the white coming back fast and insistent.

"Baelor —"

"I know," he said. The same thing he'd said earlier, against your skin. Low and certain. "I know you're close. Don't."

"Don't?"

"Not yet," his voice had dropped to something barely above a murmur, controlled and direct. "Not until I say so."

You bit his shoulder. He made the sound. The private, unguarded jaw-sound, the one from the beginning, and his hips drove up hard and his thumb pressed and you made a noise that was absolutely undignified and didn't care at all.

"You —" you started.

"Hold on," he said, and his arms wrapped around you.

The world turned over.

You hit the mattress with him above you and barely had time to register the shift before his hands were at the backs of your thighs, pushing your legs up. The new angle drove him deeper than before and you made a sound you had no name for and grabbed the headboard because you needed something to hold onto.

Your legs went over his shoulders. He looked down at you, chest heaving, that fractured composure all over his face, and he looked like something magnificent, and then he pulled back and drove into you and all higher thought concluded.

The pace he set was not forgiving. It was hard and it was deep. The kind of pace that had a point to make, and what it was saying was unmistakably I had you close and I wasn't done yet — each stroke to the hilt, the angle hitting something that made your hands go white on the headboard, and the sounds you were making had stopped being strategic about three strokes in.

"Still feel like city men are all talk?" he said. Rough-voiced, barely controlled, sweat at his temple, and the fact that he could form a sentence at all was genuinely offensive.

"Ask me —" you managed, and lost the thread on a particularly brutal stroke. "Ask me when you're done."

"Mm." He pressed your legs higher and the angle shifted and you stopped being able to argue about anything. "How about now?"

"Baelor —"

"There's my answer," he said, and the composure cracked properly — a rough, low laugh that dissolved immediately into something that wasn't a laugh, his forehead dropping to your knee, hips driving harder, and the headboard had made your knuckles white and you were not begging, you were not going to beg, you were going to win this bet if it took every last thing you had —

"Tell me," he said, against your knee. "Tell me you want it."

"I —" Your back arched. "I'm not —"

"Not begging," he said. "I know. Just tell me you want it."

"You know I want it, you insufferable —"

"Tell me anyway."

"I want — fuck — I want to come," you said, and it came out wrecked, came out like something true, and he made a sound of his own at that — low and enormous and private, muffled against your calf — and drove in deep and stayed there a moment, grinding, and you came apart.

Your hand gripped the headboard so hard you felt it in your wrist, the other one came to the back of Baelor’s neck and pulled him down to you. His name broke in the middle somewhere. His hand went to join yours at the headboard, his other one pressed flat to your stomach, over the place where you could feel him, and the pressure of it was — there were no words for the pressure of it. He kept moving, slower now, working you through it, his breathing ragged against your skin.

"That's it," he said, rough and low. "God, your legs are shaking so much," the hand that was on your middle started to caress up and down your thigh, and he finally released them from his shoulders where they had been the entire time. They came around his waist, pulling him closer to you.

He didn't stop moving. Slower, longer strokes, drawing it out, his forehead dropping to yours, and you could hear what it was costing him in his breathing — ragged, effortful, the composure entirely gone now and nothing in its place but this.

You put your hands in his hair.

"Come on then," you whispered against his ear and nipped his lobe. "Come undone for me."

He made a sound against your temple that had no language in it.

His hips drove deep and stuttered and drove again, deeper still. He came with his face pressed into your hair and your name in his mouth, just your name, once, like he'd been saving it, and the shudder of it moved through him and into you and you held him through it with your hands in his salt-and-pepper hair and felt his whole body go heavy.

For a moment neither of you said anything.

The Valentine saloon carried on below you. Someone would still be playing a bad hand of cards. The world outside the room existed, with its gangs and its bounty hunters and its prices on heads and its complications, and in a little while you were going to have to go back to it.

Not yet.

"Well," you said, when your breathing had mostly returned, your nails scrapping softly at Baelor’s nape. "I didn't beg."

He lifted his head and looked at you.

"No," he agreed. A pause. The mismatched eyes, close enough to see clearly, finding yours in the low light. "You didn't."

"Didn't hear you beg either," you said. He was quiet for a moment. "So the ring stays with me."

"The ring," he said, slowly, "stays with you." His thumb traced the line of your jaw, once, unhurried. "I find I'm not particularly troubled by that."

You looked at him. He looked back at you, and in his eyes you could see a storm taking place.

Outside, the last of the fair was winding down, and somewhere in the street below you, a man who didn't know your name was watching a door, and Arthur Morgan was watching him, and the whole complicated apparatus of your life was waiting right where you'd left it.

You pressed your thumb over the place on his left hand where the ring wasn't, only the remnant mark of years.

"Baelor Targaryen," you tried his name again in your lips.

"Mhm?" he murmured against your neck.

"You're going to be a problem."

The corner of his mouth lifted at your skin. All the way, unhurried, warm. He pressed a soft, tender kiss.

"Undoubtedly," he said.

You didn't mean to fall asleep.

That was the first thought — not quite a thought, more the particular quality of consciousness returning, slow and warm, the awareness of weight and warmth and the specific arrangement of limbs that meant you were not where you usually woke up. His arm was across your waist. Your back was against his chest. Your legs were tangled with his in a way that would have required negotiation to undo, and his breathing was deep and even against the back of your neck and somewhere in the room a candle had burned itself out.

You lay there for three seconds and then you remembered Arthur. You looked at the window.

Pitch dark. Not late-evening dark, not the dark of a town still half-awake — the specific, absolute dark of somewhere past midnight, the kind that meant the saloon below had quieted and the street was empty and whatever remained of the Valentine fair had gone to bed.

Fuck, you thought, with feeling.

You turned slightly, trying not to wake the man that was beside you. Baelor slept on, undisturbed. His face, in profile against the pillow, had a quality you hadn't seen on it while he was awake — complete ease, the watchful attention entirely absent, just the lines of him at rest, the grey in his beard catching what little light came through the window. He looked, you thought, before you could stop yourself, like someone you could get used to waking up next to.

You filed that thought under problems for another time and started extracting yourself carefully.

It took the better part of five minutes. He was heavy and warm and every time you moved an inch something else was still connected — your ankle under his calf, your shoulder under his arm, the way his hand had found yours at some point in the night and hadn't let go, which was a detail you were categorically not thinking about. You eased each point of contact free with the patience you'd learned on long watches and stealthy exits from places you shouldn't have been, and when you finally got your feet on the floor and turned to look at him, he hadn't moved.

Still breathing. Still easy. One arm now extended across the space where you'd been, palm up, as though waiting.

You caught yourself smiling dumbly at the scene. What the actual fuck, you scolded yourself and shook your head in disbelief. You looked away and found your clothes. Dressed in the dark, quiet and practiced — shirt first, then trousers, then boots pulled on with care for the floorboards. Your coat last. You checked your pockets by feel. Wallet, ammunition, the small folding knife you kept for emergencies.

The ring.

You turned it over in your fingers, feeling the raised crest of it, the familiar weight of something you'd been carrying for three months in the pocket closest to your chest.

You looked at Baelor.

He was going to wake up and find the bed empty and know you'd gone, and that was fine, that was expected, that was the only sensible ending to the evening. You were an outlaw with a price on your head, and he was a bounty hunter in a town where people knew your face, and you had a gang to get back to and a man outside who'd been waiting in an alley since sundown.

You set the ring on the nightstand.

Then you looked around the room until you found what you needed — a scrap of paper, folded inside his coat pocket, blank on one side, and the stub of a pencil on the windowsill that someone had left behind. You wrote quickly, in the dark, by feel more than sight, and folded the paper once and set it under the ring where he'd find it in the morning. You looked at him one more time.

Baelor Targaryen, you thought, the way you’d said his name before — like you were testing the weight of it again. Then you picked up your hat and went to the door.

The saloon was dim and almost empty, just the barkeep asleep at his own bar and two men in the corner who didn't look up. You went through the door and out into the street and nearly walked directly into a wall.

Not a wall, a chest. Broad, solid, immovable. You bounced off it and looked up and found white hair and beard and a pair of eyes that were, given the hour, remarkably alert. He looked down at you with an expression that was working its way from surprise toward something considerably more pointed, his mouth already opening.

"Don't," you said, pleasantly, a single finger raised in warning. He closed his mouth. "Ask him yourself." You stepped around him and walked up the street without looking back.

Arthur was in the alley across the road.

Of course he was. He had his shoulder against the wall and his hat down and a cigarette burning low between his fingers, and when you came around the corner he looked up and looked at you and looked at the sky and back at you.

"Goddamn," he said. "Took you long enough." A pause, timed with the precision of a man who had been saving it. "Hope he was at least a decent fuck."

You punched his arm without previous warning.

He laughed — the big laugh, the one he couldn't help, the one that came from somewhere genuine — and didn't move an inch, because he was Arthur and you'd been punching that arm for twenty years and it had never accomplished anything.

"Shut the fuck up, Morgan," you said.

He looked at your face. You felt him look at it, the quick, complete read he did of you that had never required words, and whatever he found there made the laugh soften into something warmer and quieter.

He handed you the cigarette. You took it and walked with him to where the horses were tied, Ghost turning to find you in the dark with his ears up and his muzzle at your shoulder, and you pressed your forehead to the side of his face for a moment and let the familiar smell of him settle something in your chest.

Arthur swung up onto his horse and looked down at you.

"We riding?" he asked.

"We're riding," you said settling on you saddle, a familiar tenderness between your thighs that had nothing to do with the saddle itself and everything to do with the man quietly sleeping where you’d left him.

You didn't talk about it on the way back. You didn't need to. Arthur had read your face and filed what he'd found there and that was enough for now. The night was cool and the road was clear and the stars were out over the hills, and you rode side by side through the dark the way you'd been riding since you were young enough that Dutch had put you on horses too big for you and told you to figure it out.

You kept your eyes on the road. Somewhere behind you, in a room above a Valentine saloon, a man with mismatched eyes was sleeping with his arm across the empty half of a bed.

You rode on.

He woke to grey light and an empty bed.

He'd known before he opened his eyes — the quality of the warmth was different, the weight of the room, and when he turned his head the other half of the bed was cool and held nothing but the impression of someone who had been careful leaving. He lay there for a moment and looked at the ceiling and felt something move through his chest that was neither surprise nor its opposite but something quieter and less nameable than either.

He'd expected this. She was, above all things, practical. She had a life that did not include waking up next to bounty hunters in saloon rooms, and she'd exited it the same way she'd exited everything else — clean, quiet, and on her own terms.

He sat up and reached for his clothes.

He dressed methodically, the way he did everything — shirt first, then the rest, the familiar sequence of it giving his hands something to do while his mind was elsewhere. The room was ordinary in the morning light. Their glasses still on the nightstand. His coat on the floor where it had ended up. The window showing a Valentine street going about its early business, unhurried and indifferent.

He was buttoning his cuffs when something on the nightstand caught the light. He looked at it. He looked at it for a long moment. Then he crossed to it and picked up his ring.

"Unbelievable," he said, to the empty room.

There was paper under it. He unfolded it carefully, the handwriting inside quick and slanted, done in the dark by someone who wrote with confidence regardless:

Seems you didn't have the chance to get me in cuffs, wolfer, so out of the kindness of my heart I'm giving you another chance.

P.D. Keep the ring. Next time you see me you can have a proper gesture and gift it to me yourself.

Below that, in the same quick hand: a date and an address in Saint Denis.

Baelor read it twice.

He turned the ring over in his fingers, the raised crest of it catching the grey morning light, three months and two meetings and one extraordinary night of weight in the metal. She'd carried it all that time. She'd left it here not because she'd lost the bet — neither of them had, and both of them knew it — but because she'd chosen to. Because it was, in its way, an answer to a question neither of them had asked out loud yet.

Next time you see me. Not if.

He folded the paper and put it in his breast pocket. Then he reached for his coat and went downstairs.

The saloon was quiet at this hour, just the barkeep moving chairs and a thin grey light coming through the windows. Maekar was at a table near the door with two cups of coffee and the expression of a man who had been awake for some time and had formed opinions about it.

He looked up when Baelor came down the stairs.

"Your little thief got past me in quite a hurry last night," he said. No preamble. He pushed one of the cups across the table. "Didn't strike me for one who scared up easily."

"She doesn't scare easily." Baelor pulled out the chair and sat. "She's practical."

"Mm." Maekar considered this. "At least you got your ring back."

Baelor looked down at his left hand. The ring was back where it belonged, the familiar weight of it already settling into habit. "Yes," he said. "I did."

Maekar's eyes moved over his brother’s face with that quick, complete attention that had always been slightly uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of. A beat of silence. Then, with the specific lightness of a man placing something down carefully, "Seems to me she might have stolen something else."

Baelor picked up the cup.

"Don't," he simply said. A brotherly warning.

"I'm only observing."

"You're never only observing."

Maekar smiled and said nothing further, which was almost worse. He wrapped both hands around his cup and looked at the middle distance with the air of a man exercising considerable restraint, and Baelor drank his coffee and did not reach for the paper in his breast pocket, and the fire crackled in the grate, and the morning went on.

The note stayed where it was.

He was not going to tell Maekar about the note. He knew, with the certainty of too many years of brotherhood to count, that telling Maekar about the note was a thing he would never hear the end of.

He turned the ring on his finger instead. Slowly. Thinking about Saint Denis, about the weeks between now and then, about a woman who had written that note in the dark without hesitation and had known — had known with the same certainty she'd brought to everything, the road, the corral, the saloon, all of it — that he would come.

She'd known before he had. That was, he thought, entirely consistent with her character.

"You're quiet," Maekar commented.

"I'm often quiet."

"You're differently quiet." A pause. "You have a look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have the look," Maekar said, with the precision of someone who had been cataloguing his brother's expressions since childhood and had long since indexed them all, "of a man who has already decided something and is waiting for a polite interval before he says so."

Baelor set down his cup. He said nothing further.

Outside, Valentine was fully awake now, the street moving with early morning purpose, the fair well and truly over. The roads out of town would be clear. There were contracts to chase and work to do and any number of practical reasons to point himself somewhere other than Saint Denis.

He thought about the note again. He thought about the way she'd looked down at him from the saddle of that crazed roan, chin up, easy in the seat, and how the crowd had been very loud and he hadn't heard any of it.

He slipped the ring off his finger, turned it once in the light, and put it back on.

"We should ride today," finally said.

Maekar nodded, unsurprised. "Where to?"

Baelor reached for his coat.

"South," he said.

Maekar looked at him for a moment. Said nothing. Then he pushed back his chair and stood, and that was that — no further questions, no commentary, just the particular efficiency of a man who had read the situation and accepted the direction of travel, which was the most useful thing about Maekar when he chose to be useful.

They left money on the table and walked out into the morning.

Baelor turned his collar up against the early chill and thought about a date on a piece of paper and the quiet certainty, already settled somewhere below his ribs, that she'd known he would come from the moment she'd picked up the pencil.

He found he didn't mind being known that well. Not by her.

A.N.: i think it's safe to say that this was left at a open enough ending to think about the possibilities of a second part... specially if i keep replaying RDR2 and getting ideas in my brain... What did you think? Comments are very much appreciated, and as always, thank you for reading me <3

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The smoke grey velvet is heavier than it looks. As the maid fastens the intricate laces at your back, the weight of the fabric settles over your shoulders, the emerald green flames of House Hightower embroidered meticulously along the bodice and the sleeves.

"You look absolutely radiant, my lady," the maid gushes, smoothing the heavy skirts with a bright, oblivious smile. "The entire city rejoices for you."

You do not smile back. Beneath the heavy folds of velvet, your trembling fingers seek out the hidden pocket sewn into your skirt. You find the small, coarse fabric of your lavender sachet. You press your thumb against it, squeezing the dried flowers until the faint, grounding scent of your home bleeds through the heavy wool. Breathe, you tell yourself. Just breathe.

The doors to the Starry Sept are enormous. When they are pushed open, the roar of the chanting choir and a suffocating wall of thick, burning incense hit you instantly, entirely swallowing the gentle lavender you cling to. Hundreds of lords, ladies, and knights fill the ancient pews, their eyes burning into you as you begin the long, agonizing walk down the aisle.

Then, through the sea of unfamiliar faces, you see them.

Your father. Your family. You had not even been permitted to speak with them since their arrival in Oldtown, Lord Ormund’s stewards had kept you isolated in your chambers, claiming the strictest need for maidenly prayer and preparation. Now, seeing them standing in the front pews, a fresh wave of nausea hits you.

They are draped in fine, brand-new silks, undoubtedly bought with the staggering dowry Ormund must have poured into your family's empty coffers. Your father is beaming, practically weeping with joy. He looks at you like you are the greatest triumph of his life. They only see the gold, the prestige, and the magnificent man the Lord of Oldtown is.

A painful knot of doubt twists in your chest. You remember the desperate, sorrowful way Ormund had apologized to you the morning after he terrified you, his voice thick with emotion as he confessed his shame and called you his only solid ground. What if you were entirely wrong? What if the cowering servant girl in the corridor and the bruising grip on your waist were just the tragic missteps of an exhausted, grieving man, just as he claimed?

Lord Ormund Hightower stands before the Septon, the absolute picture of pious devotion. He wears a pristine doublet of green, his hands clasped in front of him. As you approach the altar, he turns to you, and a warm, perfect smile spreads across his handsome face. A soft murmur ripples through the gathered nobility, a collective swoon at the devoted, tragic lord finally stepping out of his mourning to find happiness again with his pretty, young bride.

You reach the altar. The Septon drones on and on, his words dissolving into a meaningless hum in your ears.

Ormund steps forward to remove the thin maiden’s cloak from your shoulders. He steps too close. Just a fraction of an inch past what is proper, invading your space before the hundreds witnesses who see nothing but a loving groom.

The heavy, overpowering scent of crushed clove and citrus oil envelops you, slicing right through the thick incense of the Sept. Your breath hitches. As he lifts the heavy Hightower cloak to drape it over your shoulders, his warm, calloused knuckles deliberately brush against the bare skin of your collarbone. It is but a ghost of the terrifying, possessive grip he had on you in his office, but it is done with such a delicate way that you feel entirely unmoored.

"My beautiful bride," Ormund murmurs, his rich voice pitched so low that only you can hear it beneath the choir's chanting.

Every instinct in your body screams at you to shrink away from the suffocating heat radiating from his large frame. But another, softer voice remembers the gentle father who sat in the sunlit nursery and asked you about your favourite old ballads of the Reach.

You force your chin up. You look directly into his eyes, searching for the man who terrified you in the dark. But looking back at you is nothing but a devoted lord. You don't know which version of him is real. The terrifying whiplash of it all leaves you paralyzed.

Unable to trust him, but unable to trust your own fears either, you swallow the knot of panic in your throat. You force on your face a small nervous smile.

"My Lord," you whisper back, your voice steady despite the violent, confused hammering of your heart against your ribs.

A flicker of surprise, followed instantly by something dangerously pleased, flashes in Ormund's pale eyes. He lingers for just a second longer than necessary, breathing in the lavender clinging to your skin, before he turns back to the Septon.

The transition from the Starry Sept to the Great Hall is a blur of cheering crowds and suffocating heat. At the high table, you sit rigidly beside your new husband. The feast is a deafening roar of laughter and clashing goblets.

The air is thick with the smell of roasting boar, spilled wine, and the heavy, sour sweat of hundreds of drunken lords and knights. Beside you, Lord Ormund sits perfectly upright. He is the picture of a generous host. But sitting this close, you can feel the rigid, dangerous tension coiled in his large frame. His jaw tightens every time a drunken lord laughs too loudly. He continuously brings his silk handkerchief to his nose, masking his absolute disdain for the stench of the crowd beneath a veneer of polite nobility.

You scan the lower tables, catching a glimpse of your father deep in his cups, laughing boisterously with men who wouldn't have looked twice at him a month ago.

"My lady."

You startle slightly. Lord Ormund has turned his head to converse with a wealthy merchant from the Arbor, and Ser Gwayne Hightower has seamlessly slipped into the empty space behind your chair. He offers a charming smile, but when he leans down to fill your goblet, his eyes are sharp and filled with concern.

"You look pale," Gwayne murmurs, his facade dropping the moment Ormund’s back is fully turned. "More like a hostage than a bride. Has my cousin… frightened you in some way?"

Your heart leaps into your throat. You look at Gwayne’s kind face, desperately wanting to whisper the truth, to tell him about the cowering servant girl in the corridor, the bruising grip in the solar, the terrifying changes in his cousin's moods. But out of the corner of your eye, you see Ormund shift. He is still nodding at the merchant, but his posture has stiffened. He is listening.

A cold realization washes over you, that if you tell Gwayne the truth, Ormund’s wrath might fall on him now.

"I am perfectly well, Ser Gwayne," you lie, forcing a timid, bashful giggle in your voice. "I am simply overwhelmed. The betrothal was sudden, and your family’s keep is so grand... I am just exhausted."

Gwayne studies your face. His eyes drop briefly to your hands, which are gripping the heavy smoke grey velvet of your skirts so tightly your knuckles are white. He clearly doesn't believe you. But before he can press further, Ormund turns back, his pale eyes pinning Gwayne in place.

"Cousin," Ormund says, his voice smooth, yet carrying an undeniable edge of ice-cold tension. "See to the Tyrells at the lower tables. Their cups seem empty."

Gwayne bows with his lips tight and takes his leave. You watch him go, feeling a crushing wave of loneliness. You look down the table and catch the eye of Prince Daeron. The silver-haired boy is not drinking, nor is he smiling. He looks at you with a deep, helpless sorrow, his violet eyes completely stripped of the bright humor you shared in the library. He knows. He must know.

As the hour grows late, the feast devolves into a rowdy, drunken frenzy.

Suddenly, a heavy fist slams against a wooden table. "To the bedding!" a lord shouts, his voice slurred with wine. The cry is instantly taken up by a dozen others. "The bedding!"

Men begin to stand, their faces flushed and leering as they look toward the high table. As the closest lords takes a step toward the high table, you shrink back.

The tradition seems unavoidable, dozens of drunken men tearing at your gown, carrying you through the halls. Pure panic flares in your chest. You cannot let them touch you. You cannot be dragged into the dark by these men.

Without thinking, you lean into the only solid, unmoving thing in the room. You press your trembling shoulder against Ormund’s arm, your fingers desperately twisting into his velvet sleeve.

"My lord... please," you whisper, your voice cracking with fear. You squeeze your eyes shut against the noise.

Ormund looks down at you. The tight disgust in his eye’s forms into something protective or possessive. He takes in your delicate, trembling frame, shrinking away from the foul-smelling crowd and instinctively seeking refuge in him. It feeds his arrogance.

He stands. He does not shout, but he raises a single hand. The absolute authority of the Lord of Oldtown silences the Great Hall in a matter of seconds.

"There will be no bedding ceremony tonight," Ormund declares, his voice cutting through the thick, sour air like a blade. "My wife is far too delicate for such crude handling. I will escort her to our chambers myself."

A few drunken lords look as though they might protest, but one cold look from Ormund sends them shrinking back into their seats.

He turns to you, offering his arm with the perfect grace of a chivalrous knight. You take it, your legs feeling weak with a dizzying rush of relief. He saved you from them.

The heavy oak doors of his private chambers close with a definitive, echoing thud, cutting off the distant roar of the feast. The sudden, silence is suffocating you.

Lord Ormund’s bedchamber is massive and pristine. Dark mahogany paneled walls are draped with heavy, meticulously woven tapestries depicting the Seven. A colossal four-poster bed dominates the center of the room, draped in dark furs and emerald silks. A roaring fire burns in the hearth, the logs soaked in the scent of citrus oil to banish any trace of the city's stench.

Ormund releases your arm and crosses the room toward a silver flagon on a side table. He seems perfectly at ease, shedding his heavy outer doublet with a quiet sigh of relief.

"You are safe now, my lady," he murmurs, his voice a smooth, comforting rumble as he pours two jeweled goblets of wine. He turns to you with a warm, indulgent smile, clearly expecting you to fall into his arms in gratitude. "No filthy, drunken hands will ever touch you. The night is ours alone."

He holds out a goblet. You take it with trembling fingers, desperate to put distance between you. Instead of drinking, you take a slow step backward, putting a heavy oak chair between his imposing frame and your own.

"Thank you, my lord," you whisper, your eyes darting frantically around the room, to fill the suffocating silence. "The... the tapestries are magnificent. Are they from the Starry Sept?" You take another small step away, tracing the carved wood of the chair.

Ormund pauses. A small tightening in his jaw is the only sign that your distance displeases him. He takes a slow sip of his wine, his pale eyes tracking your movements.

"They were commissioned by my grandfather," Ormund replies, his tone still perfectly polite, though the warmth has dimmed just a fraction. "But they pale in comparison to you tonight. Come, sit by the fire. You are trembling."

He gestures to a plush settee near the hearth. Every instinct in your body tells you to stay exactly where you are.

"I... I am only worried about little Bethany," you blurt out, your grip tightening around the stem of the goblet. "The noise from the feast was so loud. Perhaps I should go to the nursery, just to ensure she hasn't woken..."

The indulgent smile on Ormund's face grows noticeably stiffer. He sets his jeweled goblet down on the table with a soft clink. He takes a slow, measured step toward you.

"Bethany is fast asleep in the opposite wing," Ormund says, his voice losing its soft rumble and taking on an edge. "She cannot hear the feast, and she is well attended by her nurses. You need not concern yourself with the nursery tonight. Your place is here."

His large frame suddenly somehow taking up more space in the room. He holds out his hand. "Come here, my sweet. Let me help you out of this heavy gown."

Your breath hitches. You grip the heavy smoke grey velvet of your skirts, the very fabric you had clutched so tightly at the feast.

"A maid," you blurt out, your voice shaking as you take another step backward, your spine softly hitting the heavy wooden post of the bed. "I should call for a maid to undo the laces, my lord. It is a tedious task, with so many knots. It is not proper for a Lord of your standing to do a servant's work..."

Ormund’s hand slowly drops to his side. The gracious smile finally slips from his face, leaving behind a blank, utterly unreadable mask. The silence in the room grows thick and stifling.

"I am not a man who concerns himself with the tediousness of a task when the reward is my own wife," he says. His voice has lost its rich warmth and is now a low and flat.

He steps forward, closing the remaining distance between you in two long, deliberate strides. The overwhelming scent of crushed clove and citrus oil swallows you whole. You press your spine harder against the heavy wooden post of the bed, but there is nowhere left to retreat.

He doesn't reach for your gown. Instead, his large hand wraps over yours. With a gentle but unyielding grip, he pries the jeweled goblet from your fingers. He doesn't even look at it as he reaches to the side, setting it down on a nearby chest with a dull thud.

Before you can even take a breath, both of his hands come up to frame your face.

His palms are searing hot against your cold skin. His long fingers slide past your jaw, tangling slightly in your hair, while his thumbs begin to stroke the apples of your cheeks. The gesture is a chilling mimicry of tenderness, but the grip is firm. If you tried to turn your head, you wouldn't be able to move an inch.

"Do you not understand the weight of the favor I just granted you downstairs?" he asks softly, leaning in until the overwhelming scent of citrus oil completely envelops you. "When you pressed your trembling shoulder against my arm and begged for my protection, I silenced a hall of drunken, sweating fools for you. I spared you the indignity of their foul hands tearing at your clothes. I saved you from being pawed at and carried through the corridors like some common whore."

His thumbs drag heavily across your cheekbones, in slow rhythm meant to subdue you.

"I shielded you from tradition and their stench," Ormund continues, his tone perfectly level, though the utter lack of patience vibrates beneath every word. "And yet, you pull away," he chastises almost softly, his tone dripping with disappointment, like a holy man scolding a foolish, ignorant child. "The Seven command that a wife must find her highest purpose in her lord husband's comfort. Your duties do not lie in hiding away in the nursery, nor in cowering behind excuses…I only ask what every husband is owed."

He tilts your head up just a fraction more, his imposing frame trapping you completely against the bedpost.

The suffocating weight of his words, coupled with the overwhelming scent of crushed clove and citrus oil, presses down on you until you feel you might shatter. His thumbs, still dragging heavily across your cheekbones, offering no comfort, only a terrifying reminder of your helplessness.

If you pull away now, he will snap, just like at that servant girl or like when he cornered you a few nights ago. You can feel it in every fibre of your being with absolute certainty.

"I am not ungrateful, my lord," you whisper. Your voice trembling. "I swear it by the Seven. I know the great favor you did me... I know my duties."

Ormund's eyes narrow slightly, searching your face for any trace of defiance.

"I am only... nervous," you breathe out, forcing yourself to maintain eye contact even as your stomach twists. "It is my wedding night. I am far from my home, and... and it is all so new to me."

To prove your submission, you force your body to move. It takes every ounce of your willpower to slowly, you lift your shaking hands and place them flat against the broad, solid expanse of his chest. Your fingers clutching his shirt in a grip that you hope look like desperate desire to his arrogant eyes.

You push yourself up onto your toes. Squeezing your eyes shut as you press your lips against his. Your mouth is stiff and cold against the heat of his. A tiny, involuntary whimper vibrates in the back of your throat, born of fear, though you pray he misinterprets it. You kiss him clumsily, trying to offer the willingness he just demanded of you.

A dark, satisfied hum vibrates deep within his chest. The hands framing your face slide back, his fingers tangling forcefully into your hair to tilt your head further back. He takes over the kiss entirely, his mouth slanting hard over yours, swallowing your gasp as he presses his full, crushing weight against you.

Ormund’s mouth claims yours with a hunger that steals the air from your lungs, his tongue sweeping past your lips as his body presses you firmly against the carved bedpost. The heavy velvet of your gown bunches between you, his heat radiating through the layers. One of his hands stays tangled in your hair, the other mapping the curve of your waist with possession.

A low, guttural sound rumbles in his chest as he breaks the kiss only to trail his lips along your jaw, then lower, breathing deeply against the delicate skin of your throat, making you tremble.

 He pulls back just enough to look at you with want. “Easy, my sweet,” he murmurs, voice low and coaxing. "I will take care of you. "

His fingers work the laces of your gown with practiced care, letting the smoke-grey velvet slide from your shoulders slowly. Cool air touches your skin, but his hands follow at once, warm and steady, soothing almost. You try to twist away, but he only chuckles softly and lifts you effortlessly onto the edge of the massive bed.

The furs and emerald silks swallow you as he follows, his larger frame covering yours.

He kisses you again, slower this time, while his free hand works the rest of your gown down your body. The fabric pools on the floor. Then comes the thin shift beneath, and soon you are bare beneath him, shivering despite the fire’s warmth. His own clothing follows in impatient motions until the hard, heated length of his body presses fully against yours, now skin to skin, the coarse hair on his chest rasping against your breasts, his arousal heavy and insistent against your thigh.

When he parts your legs and pushes inside you for the first time, the stretch is sudden and overwhelming. A sharp gasp escapes you, turning into a pained cry as your body resists the intrusion.

"Ormund …please, slow down, " you whimper, hands pushing weakly at his chest. "It hurts… you’re hurting me"

He stills, buried only partly within you, though the effort it takes is visible in the tight line of his jaw. His breath is hot against your neck as he lowers his head, burying his face there and drawing in a deep, shuddering inhale of your lavender scent. The clean, delicate smell seems to ground him for a moment.

"Shh, breathe, Sweetness, " he whispers against your skin, voice thick with restraint. His hips remain still, though you can feel the tension thrumming through his big frame. "I know it aches. You are so small, so pure… but you were made for this. For me. " One large hand strokes your side in slow, soothing passes, thumb brushing the underside of your breast. "Relax for me. Let your body accept what the Seven have ordained. "

He kisses your throat softly, then your collarbone, murmuring praises and half-prayers as he waits for you to soften beneath him. The manipulative warmth in his voice wraps around your fear, coaxing, guiding, promising safety even as his size and weight keep you pinned. Then when your breathing evens slightly he presses forward again, inch by careful inch, until he is fully sheathed. A low groan vibrates against your neck as he breathes you in once more, lavender filling his lungs.

For a time, he moves slowly, in long, measured strokes that still burn but no longer tear. He watches your face closely, adjusting when you wince, murmuring, "That’s it… good girl. You take me so well. " His hands hold you tenderly, thumbs stroking your cheeks, even as his own control begins to fray.

But the longer he stays buried in your heat, surrounded by your scent and the tight grip of your body, the more his restraint crumbles. His thrusts grow deeper, harder, driven by mounting selfishness. His face remains pressed to your neck, inhaling you greedily with every breath.

One of his hands slides between your bodies. His fingers find the sensitive bundle of nerves at the between of your thighs. He circles it gently at first, then with more purpose, not stopping the drag of his cock inside you. The dual sensation is overwhelming, and the burning fullness paired with sparks of pleasure make your breath hitch and your thighs tremble around his hips.

"Feel that sweet girl? " He murmurs against your throat, voice low with manipulative warmth. "Let it happen. Do not fight the gift I give you. Your lord husband will take care of you…"

His fingers move faster, perfectly in time with the deepening roll of his hips, while his mouth latches onto the sensitive spot beneath your ear, sucking. The combination is too much. Your body tightens around him, the coil in your belly winding impossibly tighter until it snaps.

Your climax crashes over you without mercy. A sharp, startled cry tears from your throat as waves of intense pleasure rip through you, quieting the pain for a few seconds, your inner walls clenching around his thick length. Your back arches hard off the furs, fingers digging into his shoulders as your vision blurs with tears from the overwhelming sensation.

Your orgasm seems to snap the final thread of his control. The moment your spasms begin to ease, something in him snaps. The coaxing lord vanishes beneath raw, selfish need. His hips draw back and slam forward harder, burying himself to the hilt with a guttural sound. He no longer holds back. Each thrust is powerful and demanding, the heavy four-poster bed creaking beneath the force as he chases his own release with single-minded intensity, ignoring your pleas to slow down.

His face remains buried in your neck, mouth open against your lavender-scented skin as he breathes you in. One arm slide beneath your hips, tilting you up so he can drive even deeper, while his other hand grips your thigh hard enough to bruise. The punishing strokes leave you gasping and trembling in the aftermath of your own peak.

You whimper, when the pain is too overwhelming. "My lord… it’s too much…"

He doesn’t stop. His rhythm grows erratic, desperate. With a final, crushing thrust and a low, broken moan muffled against your neck, Ormund finds his own release. His cock pulses deep inside you as he spills himself in thick, hot spurts, hips grinding against yours as if he could fuse the two of you together. He stays buried deep even as he softens, his large body suffocating on top of yours.

The heavy furs and emerald silks feel smothering when you finally wake. Crisp morning light filters through the tall, narrow windows of the chamber, painting the dark mahogany panels in soft gold. Your body aches in ways you have never known, deep, intimate soreness between your thighs, bruised fingerprints on your hips and thighs, the tender pull of muscles that had been stretched and claimed thoroughly. Every small shift sends an aching reminder of his weight and heat.

A soft rustle of heavy wool draws your terrified gaze. Lord Ormund is already awake. He stands near the tall arched window, fully dressed in a new pristine doublet. One hand rest casually behind his back, while the other lifts his silk handkerchief to his nose. The morning light spills across his handsome features, painting the absolute picture of a righteous, devoted lord.

He turns at the slight sound of your stirring. The dark, ravenous man who pinned you to the mattress is entirely gone.

"Good morning," he says, his voice a smooth rumble that still carries the authority of the night before.

He crosses the massive bedchamber and sits on the edge of the mattress. You go rigid, but one of his large, calloused hand cups the side of your face, his thumb stroking your cheek.

"You did good last night," Ormund murmurs, studing you with open, arrogant approval. "So warm and tight for your husband..."

His gaze drifts lazily over your body where the dark furs have slipped, taking in the bruises he left on your skin. There is not a single ounce of regret in his expression. Instead, there is only a deep, satisfied possessiveness, as though the soreness you feel is natural.

"It is only right that you feel me still," he continues calmly caressing your cheek, "You will find this easier in time."

The carriage ride leaves your bones aching, but as soon as the colossal shadow of the Hightower falls over you, all your exhaustion is replaced by an overwhelming dizzying anxiety.

You step out onto the ancient cobblestones of Oldtown, the salty sea breeze immediately clinging to your skin. Above you, the tower stretches so high it seems as though it pierces the heavens, a monument to a family whose wealth and piety are unmatched in Westeros. You pull your cloak tighter around your shoulders, clutching the small lavender sachet hidden in your pocket. It is one of the few comforts from home you brought.

Your father’s parting words still echo in your ears: “You are eighteen now. A woman grown. Serve Lord Ormund’s daughter well, keep your head down, and pray that the Maiden smiles upon you enough to catch the eye of a wealthy knight or noble.”

You are a lesser noble, born to a house with a proud name and beautiful lavender fields but empty coffers. You are here under the guise of an honour; to be a companion and caretaker for Lord Ormund’s toddler daughter, a child tragically left without a mother, since birth. But you and most likely everyone else knows, that you are here to secure a good marriage, completely at the mercy of the Hightower’s hospitality.

A stiff-lipped steward leads you through the winding, cavernous halls and never-ending stairs. The sheer opulence of the keep is suffocating, tapestries woven with gold thread, braziers burning with expensive incense, and statues of the Seven watching your every step with unblinking stone eyes.

You are escorted into a grand, sunlit solar to await the Lord of the house.

The heavy oak doors open, and Ser Gwayne Hightower steps in first. He offers you a warm, handsome smile. "Welcome to the Hightower, my lady. I trust the journey wasn't too punishing?"

Before you can offer your curtsy and reply, the air in the room suddenly grows heavy.

You smell him before you see him. The overwhelming, but soft scent of crushed clove, and citrus oil sweeps into the room, overpowering the gentle warmth of the solar.

The guards at the door snap to attention and Lord Ormund Hightower steps over the threshold.

He is a striking, formidable man, a decade and a half your senior, wearing a pristine doublet of dark grey and forest green. In his left hand, he holds a silk handkerchief pressed lightly beneath his nose, his eyes narrowed in a faint display of distaste, as if the very air of the world outside his tower offends him.

"Cousin," Ormund says, his voice rich and confident. He barely looks at Gwayne. His pale, calculating eyes are fixed entirely on you.

You drop into a deep, immediate curtsy. "My Lord. Thank you for your gracious hospitality."

Ormund steps closer. You keep your eyes trained on the stone floor, but you can feel his imposing height looming over you. He stops just a fraction of an inch too close. You tense, waiting for him to speak, but instead, you hear the softest intake of breath. You stay frozen, extremely aware of the clean, soothing scent of lavender and rainwater clinging to your own skin, praying he doesn't find it offensive, but slowly, Ormund lowers the handkerchief from his face.

"You are a welcome sight," Ormund finally says, as he takes a step back. "And a welcome presence. My household has been... bereft of gentle graces since my wife's passing."

He smiles, a perfectly gracious, lordly expression that soothes your nerves. He gestures to the shadows near the door, and a boy steps forward.

"This is my ward, Daeron," Ormund says, his tone shifting instantly from soft to sharp, expectant.

You look at the boy and your breath catches. It was Prince Daeron Targaryen almost your age, with silver hair and violet eyes. But despite his royal blood, his posture is rigid, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. He looks at Ormund with a need for approval, before turning his gaze to you. In his eyes, you see the exact same anxiety you feel twisting in your own stomach.

"It is a pleasure, my lady," Daeron says, his voice polite but strained.

Gwayne steps forward then. "She must be exhausted. The nursery has been prepared, and I am sure little Lady Bethany will be thrilled to have a new companion,”

"Of course," Ormund murmurs, his eyes dragging over your face one last time. "See that you settle in well." He turns mid-sentence and sweeps from the solar, taking the heavy scent of cloves with him. The moment the doors click shut, the suffocating pressure in the room vanishes. Daeron's shoulders slump in relief, and Gwayne lets out a quiet breath, offering you a sympathetic smile before guiding you away to your new quarters.

The next few weeks slip into a quiet, unexpectedly gentle routine. The nursery quickly becomes your sanctuary. Little Lady Bethany is a sweet, lovely child who latches onto you almost immediately, burying her face in your skirts and finding comfort in the soft scent of lavender you bring.

Every afternoon, the heavy oak door opens to welcome the Lord of Oldtown, and every time, you prepare yourself for the imposing, arrogant man you met on your first day. Instead, you are met with the picture of a devoted, grieving father.

He sits in the plush chair by the window, lifting little Bethany onto his lap with a startling gentleness. While she plays with his signet ring, Ormund talks to you, he asks about the songs you hum to his daughter, which leads to long, surprisingly deep conversations about the old ballads of the Reach and the histories of the First Men.

During these visits, you often notice him closing his eyes and taking deep breaths. But in truth you think nothing of it. The nursery always smells of clean linen and the lavender oil you dab on your wrists and neck. To you, it simply seems that the heavy burden of lordship exhausts him, and he finds peace in the innocent, sweet-smelling quiet of his daughter’s room. You begin to admire him, seeing a gracious, intelligent man who deeply loves his family beneath his imposing exterior.

Daeron also makes a habit of slipping through the door, when Ormund is occupied with duties of his court. Without his guardian’s looming shadow, Daeron is entirely different, he is quick-witted, kind and funny. Your friendship with him blossoms effortlessly.

You sneak down to the kitchens to steal warm lemon cakes and spend hours wandering the library, stifling giggles as Daeron dramatically recites terribly written poetry he finds in the dusty archives. Ser Gwayne often catches you both in your mischief. Instead of reprimanding you, the handsome knight always covers for you two, offering a quick wink or even distracting the guards so you and Daeron can make an escape to the gardens.

For the first time since arriving, you begin to believe you might actually be happy here and the anxiety that you felt on your arrival has almost completely melted away. Until one night on your fourth week you were walking down one of the grand corridors, carrying a mended cloak for Bethany, when you heard footsteps.

Lord Ormund is walking ahead of you, deep in conversation with a steward. From a side passage, a young, nervous servant girl hurries out. She is carrying a heavy basin of hot water mixed with strong, pungent pine oil and vinegar for scrubbing the floors. In her haste, she trips. The basin clatters loudly against the stone, and the hot, sour-smelling liquid splashes directly onto the hem of Lord Ormund’s velvet cloak.

Ormund stops. The silence that falls over the corridor is freezing. The steward immediately takes three steps back.

"Forgive me, my lord!" the girl sobs, immediately dropping to her knees in the puddle, her hands shaking violently. "Mercy, please, I tripped…"

You freeze a dozen paces away, hidden in the shadow of a stone pillar. Ormund looks down at the weeping girl. His handsome face contorts into something monstrous. His eyes darken and his lips pull back in a sneer of pure, unadulterated disgust. He kicks the bucket at the girl cowering on the floor, who lets out a pained sob when it hits her.

"You ignorant, clumsy little rat," Ormund hisses. His voice is cold, it carries a venom so potent it makes your stomach turn. He steps closer to the cowering girl, looming over her. "I will have you stripped and thrown into the harbor to wash the stink from your skin…"

You take a tiny, involuntary step backward. Your shoe scuffs softly against the stone.

Ormund’s head snaps up. His pale eyes lock onto you in the shadows.

For a terrifying heartbeat, you see the monster looking right at you. Then, as if a switch has been flipped, the cold fury vanishes. His features smooth out into a picture of polite grace. The vicious lord disappears, replaced instantly by the gracious, smiling patriarch.

"Ah, my lady," Ormund says smoothly, stepping neatly around the trembling, sobbing servant without a downward glance. He pulls his clove-scented handkerchief from his pocket, dabbing at his nose with practiced elegance before offering you a warm smile. "Minor clumsiness. Nothing to fret over. Come, walk with me away from this dampness. The air here has grown terribly foul."

You take his offered arm, your hand still trembling slightly. For days after the incident, you cannot shake the image of the weeping servant girl and the monstrous, flat look in Lord Ormund's eyes. It haunts you. Yet, every time you see him in the nursery or the great hall, he is the very picture of grace. He asks after your health with genuine warmth, and he listens to your thoughts with rapt attention. He is so perfectly gracious, so attentive, that you begin to doubt your own memory. Perhaps you misunderstood the situation. Perhaps the overwhelming stress of ruling such a massive city and lordship had simply caused a momentary lapse in his otherwise noble composure.

You try to push the lingering unease away and focus on the real reason your father sent you to Oldtown. During the evening feasts, you make polite conversation with a few eligible knights. One of them, a charming third son from house Rowan, even asks you for a dance and promises to call upon you the next day in the gardens. But the next morning, he never arrives. When you see him across the courtyard later that week, he averts his eyes, and quickly turns in the opposite direction. He is not the only one. Any suitor who shows even a flicker of genuine interest in you soon finds an excuse to keep their distance.

You assume it is simply your lack of a substantial dowry, but the isolation soon begins to spread into your daily routine.

Your joyful afternoons with Daeron are suddenly cut short. Just as you are settling under a tree in the gardens, a steward will appear, bowing deeply. “Forgive the intrusion, my Prince, but Lord Ormund has ordered an urgent review of your High Valyrian translations.” Gwayne, too, finds himself unexpectedly burdened. Whenever the knight stops by the nursery to share a joke and a lemon cake, a guard inevitably arrives to summon him to the armory or dispatch him on a patrol of the city gates.

You never suspect that Ormund is orchestrating it. How could you? He is the Lord of Oldtown, his mind is occupied with trade routes and the Faith, not the social calendar of his daughter's companion.

Yet, as the keep seems to empty around you, you increasingly find yourself alone with him.

It begins with small gestures that leave your head spinning. You tell yourself you are simply unused to the customs of such a big court. He is a powerful lord and you are a lesser noble in his care. It is only natural he checks on you.

One afternoon you are sitting on the rug, humming softly as you braid little Bethany’s hair. You know Lord Ormund has entered the room, but you are so focused on the child that you do not look up at him until he is kneeling right beside you.

"She loves you dearly," he says, his deep voice vibrating in the quiet room.

You look up, startling slightly. A loose strand of your hair falls across your face. Ormund lifts his hand. His knuckles are warm and slightly calloused as they graze your cheek, gently tucking the stray lock of hair behind your ear. His fingers linger against the shell of your ear for the briefest heartbeat before falling away. His eyes are dark, focused entirely on your face. But when your breath hitches in panic, he merely smiles, a soft, paternal smile and turns his attention back to his daughter. The warmth of the touch remains long after his hand has withdrawn. You felt foolish for the way your heart had begun to race.  

You were in your chambers, brushing out your hair and preparing for sleep one night, when a sharp, heavy knock rattles your door. A guard stands in the dimly lit corridor, his face unreadable. "Lord Ormund requires your presence in his office, my lady."

Your stomach twists into a tight, cold knot. It is far too late for a proper visit, and inappropriate for an unwed maiden to be summoned to a lordly office at this hour. But you have absolutely no power to refuse the Lord of Oldtown. You pull a modest woolen shawl over your thin nightgown and follow the guard through the dark, echoing halls.

When the heavy oak doors of the solar close behind you, the silence of the room is suffocating. Ormund is pacing behind his massive carved desk. The usually pristine lord looks unraveled. His dark velvet doublet is unclasped at the throat, his brown hair is slightly disheveled. Scattered across the desk are crumpled pieces of parchment bearing the broken wax seals of the Tyrells.

"Fools," Ormund mutters, his voice a low, dangerous rumble that vibrates in the quiet room. He doesn't even look at you as you stand frozen near the door. "Surrounded by ignorant, grasping fools who cannot see past their own miserable, petty ambitions." Then he finally looks at you with hard eyes and takes you in. "Pour me a drink," he orders, gesturing tightly toward a silver flagon and jeweled goblet resting on a side table in the darkest corner of the solar. "The Arbor Red. And be quick about it. My patience has been thoroughly bled dry tonight by fools."

You swallow hard, keeping your head down as you cross the room. You can feel the crushing weight of his stare tracking your every movement. You reach the table, your fingers shaking as you lift the heavy silver flagon. The red wine sloshes slightly, threatening to spill over the rim of the goblet. You are so focused on keeping your hands steady that you don't hear him move.

You don't hear his footsteps on the carpet. You only realize he is there when the overwhelming heat of his large frame radiates against your back.

You freeze, the flagon suspended mid-air.

Ormund steps flush against you, entirely eradicating the distance between you. His chest presses heavily against your spine, solid and immoveable. You are trapped between the edge of the table and him. Your breath catches in your throat, a quiet, terrified sound, but you are too paralyzed by the sheer power imbalance to pull away.

Slowly, deliberately, Ormund lowers his head. You feel the faint scratch of his jaw brush against the shell of your ear. He buries his face in the curve of your neck, his nose pressing into your hair.

He takes a long, shuddering intake of breath, inhaling the clean, soothing scent of the lavender oil on your skin. His broad chest expands against your back. As he breathes you in, the rigid, tension in his body seems to melt away, leaving behind something far heavier.

"My lord…" your voice comes out as a breathless, panicked whisper.

"Hush," he commands softly. "They suffocate me with their stench," Ormund murmurs, his lips brushing right against your fluttering pulse point as he speaks.

He lets out a low, rough sigh that vibrates against your collarbone. "Seven hells," he murmurs, his voice stripped of all its polish reduced to a dark rumble. "You are the only clean thing in this rotting, foul-smelling city."

You try to shrink away, to slide out from between him and the table, but the moment you move, his large palms grip your waist with bruising, possessive force, halting your escape instantly. He easily holds you in place with just his hands on your hips, dragging you backward until your lower half is pulled flush against him. You can feel every hard line of his body pressing into yours.

His right hand slowly releases your waist, sliding upward. His long fingers drag possessively over your stomach, the searing heat of his palm burning through your thin nightgown. His hand moves higher, spreading wide as his thumb deliberately brushes against the soft underside of your breast.

"Lord Ormund, please," you plead, your voice shaking. "This isn't proper."

His hand tightens slightly and he turns his head, pressing an open-mouthed, wet kiss against the column of your neck.

Panic finally shatters your paralysis. With a sudden, desperate surge of strength, you twist your body to the side. Your arm strikes the silver flagon of Arbor Red you had just poured. It tips over with a deafening crash, sending a wave of wine splashing across the polished oak table and down the front of Ormund’s doublet.

Ormund flinches, his grip loosening for just a fraction of a second, but it is enough and you rip yourself away from his warmth. You do not look back to see his reaction. You run.

You do not sleep that night. You sit on the edge of your bed, shivering in your thin nightgown, watching the moonlight slowly turn to the grey light of dawn.

As soon as the sun breaks over the horizon, you drag your worn leather trunk from beneath the bed. You are leaving. You will face your father’s wrath and return to the beautiful lavender fields of your home. It does not matter that your family has empty coffers, you cannot stay in the shadow of this tower a moment longer.

A sharp knock at the door makes you freeze.

"My lady?" It is the cheerful, airy voice of a senior handmaiden.

You hesitate, your heart hammering against your ribs. You slowly pull the door open to reveal not just the maiden, but a steward and a household guard. In the maiden's arms is a breathtaking gown of smoke grey velvet, intricately embroidered with the emerald green flames of House Hightower.

"What is this?" you ask, your voice hoarse and broken.

"A gift from the Lord of Oldtown, my lady!" the handmaiden beams, entirely oblivious to your horrified face. "And my deepest congratulations! The entire keep is celebrating."

The floor seems to tilt beneath your feet. "Celebrating?"

"Lord Ormund announced it at the break of dawn. His mourning is over. He has sent his swiftest raven to your lord father and already spoken to the Septon." The steward steps forward, bowing deeply. "You are to be wed before the moon turns."

The breath leaves your lungs. He bypassed you entirely. As the absolute authority in the Reach, where the Tyrells aren’t concerned, his word is law. Your impoverished father will surely accept a massive dowry and from the Lord of Oldtown no less, who he holds in such high regards. You are utterly trapped.

Before the maiden can step into the room to dress you. The familiar scent of crushed clove and citrus sweeps through the corridor.

Ormund steps into the doorway. The servants immediately bow and scatter like frightened mice, leaving you alone with him.

He is perfectly composed. The monster from last night is completely gone, replaced by the immaculate, gracious lord you have come to know in the sunlit nursery. His hands are clasped loosely behind his back, making him appear open, unthreatening. 

His eyes sweep over your terrified frame, taking in your trembling hands and the worn leather trunk dragged halfway across the floor. A look of sorrow crosses his handsome features.

"My lady," Ormund murmurs, his voice rich and soft. He does not approach you. He purposefully leaves a wide, respectful distance between you. "Did I frighten you so terribly?"

You swallow hard, unable to find your voice.

Ormund sighs, a heavy, weary sound, and lowers his head. "I came to offer my most sincere apologies. When I woke this morning the shame I felt was devastating." He looks up, his eyes meeting yours with such vulnerability that it knocks the breath from your lungs. "The letters from Highgarden, the endless demands of the Faith... the crushing weight of this lordship had utterly broken my spirit. I poured cup after cup of the Arbor Red until my senses were clouded.."

He takes a single, slow step forward. You stiffen, but he immediately stops, raising a hand in a calming gesture.

"I meant you no disrespect. I swear it by the Seven," he says, his voice thick with what sounds like genuine emotion. "You must understand, you have been such a comfort to me since you arrived. You quiet the noise in this keep. Last night... I was a drowning man, and you were the only solid ground. I allowed my desperation to overwhelm my manners. I was a fool to let my affections frighten you."

You stare at him. The sincerity in his voice makes the room spin. Affections? Last night, his large palms had gripped your waist with such force. He had backed you against a table, his voice completely stripped of its polish. But looking at him now, a powerful lord humbling himself before a girl of a noble house of no real consequence, speaking of his burdens with such openness, and a terrible seed of doubt begins to take root in your mind.

Was he truly trying to hurt you? Or was he simply a lonely, exhausted man who had momentarily lost control of his heart?

"I realized this morning that my actions had compromised your honour, and my own," Ormund continues smoothly, his tone shifting into one of noble resolve. "And I could not bear the thought of you fleeing Oldtown in fear, returning to a life of hardship when I could offer you everything. I wished to show you that I do not view you as a fleeting comfort."

He offers you a small smile. "You will never have to worry about your family’s empty coffers again."

Ormund bows deeply to you, the absolute picture of chivalry and grace, before turning and sweeping from the room.

He should be dead.

The last thing he remembered with any coherence was the sky, a sky choked with smoke and screaming. Beneath that memory lay only fractured images that swam behind his closed eyelids, fragments of chaos that refused to assemble into anything whole.

Vermax.

The name pierced through the darkness like a blade. His dragon. His beautiful, loyal Vermax, who had hatched from an egg placed in his cradle when he was nothing more than a squalling babe with a tuft of dark hair that already marked him as different from his silver-haired mother. Vermax had shrieked as the grappling hooks tore into his wings, as the Triarchy ships surrounded them, as the sea rose up to swallow them both.

Jace’s chest seized, he remembered the impact. He remembered the bone-shattering crash as Vermax slammed into the churning waters of the Gullet, and he remembered the dragon’s terrified, agonized roar. That sound had carried more than pain. It had carried something that felt like betrayal, as if Vermax could not understand why the sky had abandoned them. The cold of the sea had been absolute, salt water flooding his mouth, his throat, his lungs.

He had surfaced somehow. He had gasped and choked and reached for something, a piece of wreckage or a shattered mast, though the memory refused to sharpen. The waves had tossed him like a child’s toy. Through the spray and the smoke, the first bolt had taken him in the shoulder. The second had buried itself in his side, just beneath the ribs. The third was a blank space in his memory, a sensation his mind had simply refused to record.

What remained was the feeling that followed. A slow, spreading numbness. The way his limbs had stopped obeying him. The way the sky had tilted and spun, grey and gold and red bleeding together like watercolors on parchment. His last conscious thought had not been of his mother, nor of his brothers, nor of duty or the Iron Throne or the war that was tearing the realm apart. It had been of Vermax.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

—

He woke to the glow of candlelight, the light came from dozens of candles, the air smelled of salt and something else, something green and living. Herbs, perhaps, or flowers. It was an earthy smell, a growing smell, utterly unlike the smoke and blood and terror that had filled his nostrils before the darkness took him.

Jace tried to move, and his body screamed in protest. Every muscle, every joint, every inch of skin felt like an open wound packed with burning coals. Pain lanced through his shoulder, his side, his ribs. He sucked in a sharp breath through clenched teeth, and even that small motion sent fire racing down his spine.

“You shouldn’t move.”

The voice was soft and female, carrying an accent he had never heard before. The vowels were rounder than he was used to, the cadence lilting and unfamiliar, Jace turned his head slowly, every vertebra in his neck protesting, and saw you.

You were kneeling beside the bed, on a cushion of deep blue silk, and you were looking at him with an expression of such open relief that Jace forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

You were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the powdered faces and elaborate hairstyles of court ladies. You wore no jewelry, no rings, no gems at your throat. Your dress, if it could even be called that, was unlike anything he had ever seen, layers of fabric in pale ivory and soft gold that had been draped rather than tailored. The cut left your arms bare, and the neckline was wide and flowing. It was clothing from a warmer world entirely, bearing no resemblance to the heavy velvets and structured bodices of Westeros.

“You’re awake,” you said, and your smile was like dawn breaking over still water. “I was beginning to fear you wouldn’t open your eyes again.”

Jace opened his mouth to speak, all that came out was a dry, rasping croak. His throat felt as though it had been scoured raw.

You reached for a clay cup beside you, glazed deep blue, and lifted it to his lips with a careful hand. “Drink. Slowly. You’ve been without water for a long time.”

The water was cool and impossibly clean. It slid down his throat like mercy. He drank until you pulled the cup gently away, your expression soft but firm.

“I said slowly. Your body has been through a great ordeal.” Jace sagged back against the furs, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Even drinking had exhausted him. He could feel the heat radiating from his own skin, a fever burning beneath the surface. “Where…” His voice was barely a whisper, cracked and ruined. “Where am I?”

You set the cup aside. “My home. I found you on the shore.”

He tried to form another question, but his thoughts were slipping away from him like water through fingers. The shore. The battle. The arrows.

“Your body was full of arrows,” you said quietly, as if you had followed the path of his scattered thoughts. “You looked dead. I do not know how you survived.” A pause. “But I am glad you did.”

Jace stared at you, his vision blurring and sharpening in turns. The candles made halos around your silhouette. The cave walls curved around you both like cupped hands. He lay in a bed of soft furs with clean linen bandages wrapped around his chest and shoulder. The space around him was strange, a blend of cave stone and polished wood and silk cushions.

He tried to focus on you again, on your strange dress and your unfamiliar accent and the way you looked at him without the calculating gaze of a courtier. Your expression held only simple, unguarded relief.

“You…” he started, but the words crumbled before he could shape them. He was so tired. The heat in his blood was growing worse, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool air of the cave.

“Shh.” You leaned closer and pressed a cool cloth to his brow. Your touch was impossibly gentle. “You have a fever. The arrows were laced with something, I think. A poison, or something like it. It will take time to burn it out.”

Jace’s eyes fluttered. The cool cloth was a mercy, and your hand was steady against his skin.

“Where is this island?” he managed, the question barely a whisper. “How far from the battle…”

You shook your head, a small and quiet movement. “This is my island. That is all that matters now. You are here, and you are safe.” Your hand brushed the dark, sweat-soaked curls back from his forehead. “You are my guest. I will take care of you.”

He should have questioned you. He should have demanded to know where he was, who you were, how any of this was possible. He was a prince, raised on suspicion, trained to trust no one. But the fever was burning through him, and you were so calm, so steady, and your hands were so gentle, and he was so gods-damned tired.

“Rest,” you murmured. “You are not strong enough to stay awake. But you will be. In time.”

Jace’s eyes closed against his will. The darkness pulled at him, soft and warm. The last thing he felt was the cool cloth on his forehead and the gentle weight of your hand smoothing his hair back from his face.

“Sleep, Jace,” you whispered.

—

The days blurred together like watercolors left in the rain, Jace measured time by the changing quality of light that filtered through the cave's entrance, a distant glow that brightened and dimmed in a rhythm he slowly came to recognize. Morning, afternoon, evening, night. The cycle repeated itself over and over. He could not see the sky from his bed, only the rough stone ceiling and the flickering candles and, whenever he turned his head, the soft silhouette of you moving through the chamber.

You were always there, that was the first thing he truly understood once the fever broke and his mind began to piece itself back together. You were always there. When he woke gasping from nightmares of Vermax screaming, the arrows striking, the water closing over his head, you were beside him with your cool hand on his forehead and your voice murmuring words he could not quite catch but that soothed him anyway. When the pain in his wounds flared hot and unbearable, you were there with the medicine, spooning bitter liquid past his cracked lips and following it with cool water to wash away the taste. When the fever spiked and he thrashed in the furs, soaked in sweat and half-delirious, you were there with cloths dipped in cold water, pressing them to his chest, his neck, his brow.

He did not know how you slept. He did not know when you ate. He only knew that every time he opened his eyes, you were somewhere nearby, kneeling beside his bed or mixing herbs at the stone table or simply sitting on your silk cushion with your hands folded in your lap, watching the candles burn.

“You don’t have to stay,” he rasped one night, though it might have been day for all he could tell the difference. His voice was still weak and still cracked, but it no longer hurt to speak. “You must have other things to do.”

You looked up from the bowl you were mixing, and your lips curved into that soft, patient smile he was beginning to recognize. “I have nothing more important than keeping you alive, Jace. That is a full-time occupation, it seems.”

He wanted to argue, but exhaustion pulled him back under before he could form the words, the fever broke on what might have been the fifth day, or the sixth, or the seventh. He had lost count.

He woke drenched in sweat, his hair plastered to his forehead and the furs kicked to the foot of the bed, but his head was clear. For the first time since he had opened his eyes in this cave, his thoughts were not swimming in a haze of heat and pain. He could feel the wounds in his shoulder and side, still tender and still healing, but they no longer burned with the sharp, insistent fire of infection.

He was alive. He was going to stay alive, and that meant he had to get back.

His mother. His brothers. The war. Every day he spent lying in this bed was another day the Blacks fought without him, another day his family believed him dead, another day the Greens advanced their stolen throne. He had to get stronger. He had to return to Westeros.

“Your thoughts are very loud.” Jace turned his head. You were sitting on your cushion beside the bed, a piece of fabric in your hands and a needle moving in small, precise stitches. He had no idea how long you had been there. He had not even noticed you.

“My thoughts?” he repeated, his voice hoarse but steadier than before.

“You are frowning at the ceiling as though it has offended you.” You did not look up from your sewing, but there was a hint of amusement in your voice. “I assume you are planning your escape.”

Jace blinked. “I was not planning an escape. I was only thinking about how to leave.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is absolutely not the same thing.” Now you did look up, one eyebrow raised, and Jace felt his face warm. He had walked directly into that.

“You want to go back,” you said, and your voice was quieter now, the teasing edge softened into something more serious. “It is natural. You have people waiting for you. A family. A war, perhaps, judging by the state of you when I found you.” You returned your attention to your stitching. “I understand.”

He was quiet for a moment, watching your hands move. The fabric you were working on was pale blue, the stitches neat and even. You were making him more bandages, he realized.

“Yes,” he admitted finally. “I have to go back. My family needs me. They probably think I am dead.”

“Then we will work to make you strong enough to leave.” You bit off the thread with your teeth, smooth and practiced. “But you cannot rush it. The wounds are healing well, but if you push too hard, too fast, you will undo all my hard work. And I have worked very hard, Jace.”

There was something almost stern in your tone, and despite himself, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch upward. “I would not dream of undoing your hard work.”

“Good.” You set the sewing aside and rose to your feet, your gossamer skirts rustling softly against the stone floor. “You have been lying in that bed for days. I think it is time you tried to sit up properly. Do you think you can manage it?”

Jace took a breath. His shoulder throbbed. His side ached. But the fever was gone, and his head was clear, and he was so gods-damned tired of lying flat on his back.

“Yes,” he said. “I think I can.” It was harder than he had expected.

His muscles had atrophied during the days of fever and stillness. His arms shook when he pushed himself up, and the wound in his side pulled sharply, and by the time he was sitting upright against the carved headboard, he was breathing hard and sweating again. But he was sitting. He was upright. He was looking at the cave from a new angle, and it was strange and wonderful and disorienting all at once.

“There,” you said, and you were smiling now, truly smiling, something brighter than the gentle curve of lips he had grown used to. “That was not so terrible, was it?”

“Terrible,” Jace managed, still catching his breath. “Absolutely terrible.”

“But you did it.”

He looked at you, at the way the candlelight caught the strange color of your eyes, and he found himself almost smiling back. “I did it.”

—

The days that followed fell into a pattern, you would help him sit up in the mornings, propping him against the headboard with pillows and furs. You would change his bandages, your fingers quick and efficient, your touch never lingering longer than necessary but never cold or impersonal either. You would bring him food, strange fruits he had never tasted before, sweet and tangy, and a porridge made from some grain he did not recognize, and fresh water that tasted cleaner than anything he had ever drunk in his life.

And you would talk about small things, the weather on the island, the herbs you used in your medicines, the fish you caught in the tidal pools below the cliffs. You had a dry, quiet sense of humor that surprised him, and a way of tilting your head when you were thinking that he found himself watching for.

In return, he told you things about himself. He was still a prince, still trained in caution, and so he held back the details that mattered most. But he told you about Dragonstone, about the volcanic rock and the sea winds and the dragons that wheeled in the sky. He told you about his brothers, careful to speak of them in the present tense even though Luke was-even though Luke had become something he could not yet say aloud.

He told you other things instead. That he missed the sea. That he had never been good at dancing. That his mother had taught him to read when he was four years old, and he had been so proud that he had carried the book around for a week straight, showing it to anyone who would look.

You laughed at that, a real laugh, bright and surprised, as if you had not expected him to say something so ordinary. “A week?”

“I was very proud of myself.”

“I can imagine. A little prince with his book, demanding that everyone admire his genius.”

“I did not demand. I simply made strong suggestions.”

“That is the same thing.”

“It is absolutely not the same thing, and I will not have my diplomatic skills insulted.”

You laughed again, and Jace realized with a jolt of surprise that he liked making you laugh. It was a good sound, your laugh, unstudied and unguarded, the sound of someone who spent too much time alone and had forgotten to be self-conscious about joy.

You were his only companion. His caretaker. His only visitor.

He had not seen another person even once in all the days he had been lying in this bed. No one came to the cave. No one called your name from outside. No one brought supplies or messages or news. It was only you, always you, appearing and disappearing through the winding passages of the cave system with the quiet confidence of someone who knew every stone by heart.

He had not asked about other people. It felt rude, somehow, when you were taking care of him and feeding him and changing his bandages and sitting beside him through the long, fevered nights. To ask about the absence of others would have sounded like an accusation, as though your company were insufficient, as though he had grown bored of you.

So he did not ask, but the question sat in the back of his mind, growing heavier with each passing day.

—

The day he walked for the first time was the day everything began to shift.

It was morning, the pale silver light filtering through the distant cave entrance, and you had just finished changing his bandages. The wounds were healing well, the flesh knitting together into angry red scars that would fade to white in time. You told him he would have a collection of them, a constellation across his shoulder and ribs. He said he would wear them with pride. You called him ridiculous.

“Today,” you announced, rising to your feet and brushing off your skirts, “you are going to walk.”

Jace looked up at you. “Walk.”

“Yes. Walk. Put one foot in front of the other. I assume you knew how to do it before you arrived here.”

“I knew how to walk.”

“Then today you will remember.”

It was harder than sitting up. It was harder than anything he had done since waking in this cave. His legs felt as though they belonged to someone else, weak and unsteady, the muscles wasted from days of lying still. You had to help him, your arm around his back and his arm across your shoulders, bearing some of his weight even though he tried very hard not to let you. You were smaller than him and slighter, and he was terrified of crushing you.

“You will not crush me,” you said, as if reading his thoughts. “I am stronger than I look. Stop trying to hold yourself up with pride alone and lean on me.”

He leaned on you, by the time he had taken five steps across the chamber, his legs were shaking and sweat was dripping down his face. But he had walked. Five steps. Then ten. Then, a few days later, he crossed the entire chamber without help, his hand braced against the wall and his breath coming hard and fast.

And the day after that, you smiled at him and said, “I think it is time you saw the sun.”

The cave system was a maze, Jace knew, that your home was larger than the single chamber where he had been lying. He had seen you disappear down passages and emerge from different directions, had caught glimpses of other rooms, a kitchen carved into the rock, a storage chamber lined with jars and barrels, a space where water trickled down the wall into a natural basin. But he had not grasped the full scale of it until you led him through it yourself.

The passages twisted and turned, branching off into side tunnels and dead ends. Some were narrow, barely wide enough for a single person to squeeze through. Others opened into wide chambers with high ceilings, lit by candles placed in alcoves and by thin shafts of daylight that pierced down through cracks in the rock. The walls were rough in some places and smooth in others, worn down by time and water and the patient labor of whoever had carved this place.

“Did you build all this?” Jace asked, his voice echoing strangely in the stone corridors. He was walking slowly, one hand on the wall for balance, but he was walking.

You glanced back at him. “The caves were here long before me. I only furnished them.”

“You furnished them very well,” he muttered, stepping around a carved wooden chest that would not have looked out of place in a merchant’s manse.

“I had time.”

That was all you said, as if it explained everything. As if it explained anything at all.

The light grew brighter as you walked, the grey-silver of filtered daylight giving way to a warm golden glow. Jace could smell the outside now, salt air and flowers and something green and growing. His heart beat faster. He had been underground for so long that he had almost forgotten what the sky looked like.

Then you stepped through the cave entrance, and he followed you, and the world opened up around him.

It was beautiful, there was no other word for it, no word that could possibly capture what Jace saw as he stood at the mouth of the cave, blinking in the sudden brightness, his eyes struggling to adjust after so many days of candlelight and shadow.

The island spread out before him like something from a dream, the cliffs where the cave was carved dropped down to a shoreline of white sand that gleamed in the morning sun. Beyond the beach, the water was the most extraordinary shade of blue he had ever seen, turquoise at the shore, deepening to sapphire further out, clear and calm and glittering with reflected light. The sky was vast and cloudless, a pale, soft blue that seemed to go on forever.

But it was the island itself that stole his breath, flowers grew everywhere, wild, sprawling, abundant blooms that cascaded down the cliffs and carpeted the meadows in explosions of color. He saw flowers in shades he had never encountered before, deep violet, vivid orange, a blue so pale it was almost silver. Trees heavy with fruit he did not recognize bent over natural pathways, their branches laden with something golden and round, something dark and pear-shaped, something that resembled a pomegranate but was the color of honey.

The air was warm and sweet, thick with the scent of blossoms and salt and damp earth. Birds sang somewhere in the distance, strange, melodic calls that were not quite like any birdsong he knew. A waterfall tumbled down the cliff face to his left, a thin silver ribbon that caught the light and threw rainbows into the air.

Jace stood there, swaying slightly on his still-weak legs, and he could not speak.

“I know,” you said quietly, standing beside him. “It is a great deal, after so long underground.”

“I have never seen anything like this.”

“It is home.” Your voice was matter of fact, but there was something softer underneath it, something almost sad. “Come. There is a place to sit not far from here. You should not stand for too long yet.”

He let you lead him to a flat outcropping of rock cushioned with moss and ferns, and he sat down heavily, still staring out at the impossible landscape. The flowers swayed in the breeze. The waterfall sang its endless song. The sea glittered and danced.

And there was no one here, the realization crept up on him slowly, settling over his shoulders like a cold cloak. He looked out at the island, the meadows, the fruit trees, the white sand beach, the cliffs, and he saw no houses and no fishing boats pulled up on the shore. He saw no paths worn by the tread of many feet and no smoke rising from chimneys. He heard no voices calling in the distance. He saw no sign of human life at all.

Only the flowers. The birds. The waterfall. The sea.

And you.

—

He did not say anything at first, you helped him walk a little further each day, down to the edge of the meadow where the strange golden fruit grew on low, sprawling trees, up to a ridge that overlooked the eastern shore where the water was even bluer and the sky even wider. You showed him the tidal pools, teeming with tiny creatures he had never seen, brightly colored shells that moved on dozens of legs, star-shaped animals that clung to the rocks, fish that darted and flashed like living jewels.

And everywhere you went, you were the only person, he saw no footprints but yours, he saw no structures but the cave. The only signs of cultivation were a small vegetable garden tucked into a sheltered hollow behind the cliffs, neat rows of plants he recognized, mostly herbs and some kind of root vegetable, and further back, half-hidden by a grove of flowering trees, a low stone wall enclosing a patch of churned earth.

He heard the pigs before he saw them, a grunting, snuffling chorus rose and fell, punctuated by the occasional indignant squeal. Jace followed the sound, moving carefully along a narrow path between two rock formations, and emerged into a clearing where at least two dozen pigs were milling about in a large stone enclosure. They were fat and healthy, their coats glossy, their ears flopping. Piglets tumbled over each other in the dirt while larger sows dozed in the shade of the trees.

And you were in the middle of them, you were scattering something from a woven basket, scraps of fruit rinds and vegetable peels and some kind of grain, and the pigs crowded around you like old friends. You were speaking to them in a low, affectionate murmur, and your hands moved among them with the ease of long familiarity.

You looked up and saw him standing at the edge of the enclosure. Your expression shifted, just slightly. Something guarded, something wary, flickered behind your eyes before you smoothed it away.

“You found my pigs,” you said, Jace leaned against the stone wall, catching his breath. The walk had been longer than he had realized, and his side was aching. “You have a lot of pigs.”

“They keep me company.” You tossed another handful of scraps into the enclosure, and a particularly large sow shouldered her way forward to claim it. “And they are useful. The meat, the fat, the leather. Nothing goes to waste.”

He watched you for a moment. The pigs jostled around your legs, grunting and snuffling, and you moved among them without the slightest hesitation, like a shepherdess, like someone who had been doing this for years.

“Where are the other people?” he asked.

Your hands stilled on the basket. You did not look up.

“What other people?”

“The villagers. The farmers. Whoever else lives here.” Jace gestured vaguely at the enclosure, at the pigs, at the island beyond. “You said this was your island. But someone has to help you with all of this.”

He trailed off. You were looking at him now, and your expression was strange, as though you had been expecting this question and dreading it in equal measure.

“There are no other people, Jace,” you said quietly.

He stared at you. “What do you mean, there are no other people?”

“I mean it is only me.” You set the basket down on the stone wall. Your hands, now empty, folded together in front of you. “There is no village. There are no farmers. There are no fishermen or shepherds or traders. There is only me, and the pigs, and the birds, and the fish in the sea. That is all.”

The words refused to make sense. Jace shook his head, a short, sharp movement. “That cannot be right. You cannot live here alone. How do you survive? How do you get supplies? There has to be someone else, a trader who comes by ship, a neighboring island, something.”

“There is no one else.” Your voice was calm and steady, but there was something raw underneath it now. “No ships come here. No traders. No neighbors. The island is hidden. It does not appear on any map. No one knows it exists.”

“That is impossible.”

“It is simply true.”

Jace pushed himself off the stone wall, ignoring the protest of his healing wounds. His heart was beating too fast. His thoughts were spinning. “How did you get here, then? How do you live? You cannot simply be alone on an island forever.”

“I did not say I chose it.”

The words stopped him cold, you were still standing in the middle of the pig enclosure, surrounded by grunting, oblivious animals. Your strange dress fluttered in the breeze, the pale fabric catching the sunlight. Your face was composed, but your eyes were dark with something old and heavy and carefully buried.

“My brother sent me here,” you said. “As punishment.”

Jace opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Punishment for what?”

“For disobeying him.” Your voice was flat now, reciting facts rather than feelings. “I did something he could not forgive. And instead of killing me, he sent me here. He had the means to do it, the ships, the men, the knowledge of this place. He left me with supplies and seeds and animals and told me I would never leave.”

“You have been here ever since,” Jace said slowly.

“I have been here ever since.”

“How long?”

You looked away, out over the blue water, and for a moment you were utterly still. “A long time.”

Jace’s mind was racing, scrambling to fit the pieces together. A brother with enough power to exile someone to a hidden island. Ships and men and the means to keep the place secret. A lord powerful enough to make his sister disappear without anyone asking questions.

“Who is your brother?” he asked.

Your jaw tightened. “A lord. That is all you need to know.”

“A lord of what? Where? What house?”

“It does not matter.” Your voice sharpened, just slightly, the first hint of steel he had ever heard from you. “What matters is that he is powerful enough to do this. Powerful enough that if I try to leave, if I find a way off this island and set foot on the mainland, I will be found and I will be brought back, and the consequences will be worse than exile.”

Jace stared at you, you were alone. Completely, utterly alone. You had been alone for what might have been months or years or decades. You had built a life in a cave, furnished it with silk and polished wood, grown a garden and raised pigs and taught yourself to heal. And no one had come for you. No one had visited. No one had even known you were here.

Until a dying dragon prince washed up on your shore.

“I am sorry,” he said, and the words felt pathetically inadequate. “I did not know.”

“How could you have known?” You picked up the basket again, your movements brisk and practical, as if you were eager to change the subject. “You were unconscious when you arrived. It is not as if I introduced myself and gave you a tour. Welcome to my prison, please enjoy the flowers.”

“It is not a prison.” You looked at him, and your smile was tired and sad and strangely kind. “It is a very beautiful prison. But it is a prison nonetheless.” You turned and walked away, the basket tucked under your arm, the pigs trailing after you like a strange, grunting entourage. Jace watched you go, your bare shoulders and your flowing dress and the way you moved through the meadow as if you had memorized every inch of it.

And he understood, suddenly, why you had never hesitated to save him. Why you had sat beside his bed for days on end. Why you had laughed at his stupid jokes and argued with him about the proper way to brew medicinal tea.

You were lonely.

Jace stood at the edge of the pig enclosure, the sun warm on his face and the sea glittering in the distance, and he thought about his mother and his brothers and the war and the throne.

He had to go back. He had to, but as he watched you disappear into the grove of flowering trees, your figure growing smaller and smaller against the impossible beauty of the island, he realized that leaving might be harder than he had thought.

—

In the days following your revelation—it is just me, there is no one else—Jace threw himself into the work of recovery with a ferocity that surprised even him. He woke early, before the light through the cave entrance had shifted from silver to gold, and he pushed his body harder than was probably wise. He walked the island's paths until his legs stopped shaking. He climbed the low cliffs until his arms stopped burning. He ate everything you put in front of him, slept when you told him to sleep, and bit back every complaint when you made him drink your bitter medicines.

"Someone is motivated," you remarked one morning, watching him pace the length of the chamber. He had been doing laps—back and forth, back and forth—testing the strength of his newly healed legs. The scars on his shoulder and side had faded to pink, then to white, and the pain was a distant memory now, only flaring when he moved too quickly or twisted the wrong way.

"I have to get home," he said, not breaking stride. "My mother needs me. My brothers need me. Every day I spend here is another day they think I'm dead."

You nodded, your expression unreadable. "Then we had better build you a boat."

The boat took shape slowly, you showed him a grove of trees on the eastern side of the island, tall and straight, their wood pale and close-grained, ideal for shipbuilding. You had an axe, kept sharp and well-oiled in one of the storage chambers, and you handed it to him without ceremony.

"I will help where I can," you said, "but I am not a shipwright. You will have to figure out most of it yourself."

Jace had never built a boat before. He had sailed on dozens of them but knowing how to sail and knowing how to build were two very different things. He felled the first tree through trial and error, the axe handle blistering his palms, the sweat dripping into his eyes. By the time the trunk crashed to the ground, he was exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure.

"Not bad," you said from where you sat on a nearby rock, a pile of mending in your lap. You had been watching him work for the better part of an hour, offering no advice but plenty of company. "For a prince who has never done a day's labor in his life."

"I've done labor."

"Name one example."

He opened his mouth and swung the axe into the fallen trunk with more force than necessary. "I trained with swords. That's labor."

"Swords are not labor. Swords are play for princes."

"Then what do you call this?" He gestured at the tree, the axe, his blistered hands.

You smiled, that slow, warm smile that was becoming as familiar to him as the sunrise. "I call it a good start."

The days passed, Jace shaped the wood as best he could, stripping branches and hewing planks with tools you provided from the depths of the cave. Some of them were strange—shaped for hands slightly different from his own, their handles worn smooth by use that was not his. He didn't ask where they came from. He was learning that there were questions you would answer and questions you would not, and the line between them was invisible until he crossed it.

But you were always there, always nearby.

He had grown accustomed to the rhythm of your presence, the rustle of your strange, flowing dresses, the soft pad of your bare feet on stone, the quiet humming you did when you worked. You brought him water when the sun grew hot. You checked his scars every evening, your fingers against his skin, pronouncing him healed and healing well. You sat with him while he ate, and you talked about nothing and everything, and your laugh was the brightest sound on an island full of bright sounds.

"I should be further along by now," he said one evening, staring at the skeleton of the boat with frustration. The hull was taking shape, but slowly—too slowly. At this rate, it would be months before it was seaworthy.

"You are one person building a boat by hand," you pointed out. You were sitting cross-legged on a flat rock, sorting through a basket of herbs. The setting sun caught the planes of your face, the curve of your bare shoulders, the way your dress draped across your lap in soft folds. "I think you are allowed to take your time."

"I don't have time." He ran a hand through his hair—longer now, curling past his ears, in desperate need of a trim. "My mother—she needs me. The war—"

He stopped.

The war.

What war?

The thought slipped through his mind like water through fingers, there and gone before he could catch it. There was a war. Of course there was a war. He was fighting in it. Or he had been fighting in it. That was why he had been in the Gullet, why Vermax had—

Vermax.

His chest tightened. He remembered the dragon's scream. He remembered the water closing over his head. He remembered the arrows.

But what was the war about?

"The war," he repeated, more quietly now. "I have to get back to the war."

You looked up from your herbs, and your expression was gentle. Unreadable. "You will. When the boat is ready, you will."

"Right." He nodded, the motion jerky. "Right. The boat."

He picked up the axe and got back to work.

—

One afternoon you were down by the shore, sitting in the shade of a flowering tree while Jace worked on the boat's hull. "Brothers," he said, sanding down a rough edge of wood. "Three of them. Well—two full brothers. Two half-brothers. That's four. No, wait." He frowned. "Joffrey and... and the little ones. Aegon and..."

He stopped, the name wouldn't come.

"Viserys," you said quietly.

"Viserys. Right. Viserys." He shook his head, laughing at himself. "I don't know why I couldn't remember that. He's the youngest. Named after my grandfather."

You said nothing. You only watched him with those shifting sea-glass eyes, and your fingers were very still on the mending in your lap.

"And Luke," Jace continued, the name coming easier now. "Lucerys. He's the second one. He's..."

Dead.

The word surfaced from somewhere deep, cold and sharp as a blade. But it didn't hurt the way it should have. It was distant. Muffled. Like a scream heard through a closed door.

"He's what?" you asked.

Jace blinked. "He's... he's at Dragonstone. With our mother. Waiting for me to come home."

You nodded slowly. "I am sure he misses you."

"He probably thinks I'm dead." Jace turned back to the boat, running his hand along the smooth wood. "I have to get back soon. Before he does something stupid. He's always doing stupid things, Luke. He's impulsive. Reckless. He doesn't think before he acts."

Luke is dead. Luke was torn apart by Vhagar above Storm's End. You weren't there. You didn't protect him.

But the voice was fading. Growing quieter. Harder to hear over the sound of the waves and the breeze and your soft, steady breathing.

—

The boat took longer than it should have, some days Jace worked on it from sunrise to sunset, his hands raw and calloused, his back aching, his mind fixed on the singular goal of getting home. But other days—more and more days, as the weeks wore on—he found himself... distracted.

The waterfall, for one thing.

It tumbled down the cliff face on the western side of the island, a silver ribbon that caught the sunlight and scattered it into rainbows. The pool at its base was deep and clear and shockingly cold, fed by some underground spring that kept it cool even in the heat of the afternoon. Jace had discovered it on one of his exploratory walks, and he had been drawn back to it again and again.

You came with him sometimes. You would sit on the rocks at the edge of the pool, your feet dangling in the water, your dress hiked up to your knees. You would tilt your face toward the sun and close your eyes, and Jace would find himself watching you instead of the waterfall.

"Are you going to swim or are you going to stare?" you asked one day, not opening your eyes.

"I wasn't staring."

"You were staring."

"I was... appreciating the scenery."

You opened one eye. "The scenery."

"The waterfall," he said, gesturing vaguely. "It's very nice."

You laughed—that bright, unguarded laugh that he had come to love—and he felt something warm bloom in his chest. Something that had nothing to do with the sun.

"Come on, then," you said, and before he could react, you slid off the rock and into the water with a splash that sent droplets arcing through the air like diamonds.

Jace stared at you. You surfaced a moment later, your hair plastered to your head, your dress clinging to your skin, the wet fabric rendered nearly transparent. The water lapped at your collarbones, and you were laughing again, and you looked—

You looked beautiful.

He had known you were beautiful from the moment he opened his eyes in the candlelit cave. But there was something different about you now. Something that had shifted, the curves of your face seemed softer. The color of your eyes seemed deeper. The way you moved—the way you laughed—the way you looked at him—it all seemed more vivid. More precious.

"Are you coming in or not?" you called, treading water in the center of the pool.

Jace pulled his shirt over his head and dove in after you, the water was cold and clean and wonderful. They splashed each other like children, chasing each other around the pool, ducking under the waterfall and emerging gasping and laughing. Jace couldn't remember the last time he had laughed like this—freely, openly, without the weight of duty pressing down on his shoulders.

Your dress clung to you like a second skin, the wet fabric outlining every curve of your body. Jace tried very hard not to notice. He failed. "You're staring again," you said, but your voice was different now. Quieter. Almost shy.

"Sorry." He wasn't sorry.

—

"I was betrothed," he said one evening.

You were sitting on the rocks overlooking the western sea, watching the sun sink toward the horizon in a blaze of orange and pink. Jace sat beside you, close enough that he could feel the warmth of your arm near his. The boat sat half-finished on the beach below, forgotten for the day.

"Was?" you asked.

"Am. I am betrothed." He frowned. "I think. We were supposed to marry before... before I left."

"Before the battle."

"Before the battle, yes." He stared out at the sunset, trying to conjure her face. His betrothed. She was a Targaryen, he was sure of that. Silver hair. Purple eyes. A dragon. But her name—her name wouldn't come. "She's my cousin, I think. Or my step-sister. Both, actually. It's complicated."

"What is her name?"

Jace opened his mouth. The name wasn't there.

"I can't remember," he said, and the admission felt strange. Not frightening—it should have been frightening—but strange. Like discovering a pocket in a familiar coat that he had never noticed before. "I know her face. She's... she's fierce. Brave. She has a dragon. A small one, I think. Or maybe it's large. I can't..."

He trailed off.

You were quiet for a moment. Then, very softly: "Do you love her?"

"Love?" He considered the question. "I don't know. She's family. She's duty. She's... she's what I'm supposed to do, but i care for her, a lot."

"That is not the same as love."

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

He didn't say anything else. Neither did you. But your arm was warm against his, and the sunset was beautiful, and when he finally walked you back to the cave, his hand found the small of your back without thinking, and you leaned into the touch instead of pulling away.

—

He forgot about the betrothed entirely by morning.

—

The days grew warmer. Or perhaps they didn't—perhaps it was only that Jace had stopped paying attention to the passage of time. The boat sat on the beach, half-finished, and he told himself he would work on it tomorrow. Tomorrow came and went, and he spent it with you instead—walking the island paths, gathering fruit from the strange golden trees, sitting by the waterfall and talking about nothing.

What are you doing? a voice whispered in the back of his mind. You have to go home. Your mother needs you.

But what did his mother need him for? There was something—something important—something about a throne, a war, a betrayal. But the details were foggy now, blurred like ink left out in the rain.

He remembered her face. Her silver hair. Her voice saying his name, but the rest was slipping away, piece by piece, day by day, and the more he forgot, the more he noticed you.

The way you moved through the meadow, your skirts brushing the wildflowers. The way you hummed when you cooked, some melody he had never heard before but that felt familiar anyway. The way you looked at him sometimes, quick glances from beneath your lashes, as if you were checking to make sure he was still there. Still real. Still alive.

The way your hand felt in his when he helped you over a rocky patch of ground.

The way your laugh echoed off the cliffs and came back to them multiplied, a chorus of joy.

The way your eyes caught the light of the setting sun and held it, like they were made of something more than flesh.

He loved you.

He loved the sound of your voice and the curve of your smile and the gentle patience with which you had nursed him back from the edge of death. He loved your dry humor and your quiet strength and the way you never pressed him for answers he didn't have. He loved the life you had built here, alone on an island that should not exist, and he loved that you had let him into it.

He loved you.

And the more he loved you, the less he remembered.

—

The morning was hot and still, Jace had woken early, as he always did now, but instead of reaching for the axe or walking down to the beach where the half-finished boat sat waiting, he had gone straight to the waterfall.

The pool was cool and clear, fed by the endless rush of water that tumbled down the cliff face in a silver curtain. He shed his clothes on the rocks, just the loose linen breeches you had sewn for him from fabric found somewhere in the depths of the cave, and dove in without hesitation. The cold shock of the water stole his breath and cleared his head, chasing away the last cobwebs of sleep.

He floated on his back, staring up at the pale blue sky, watching the birds wheel overhead. His dark hair fanned out in the water around him. The scars on his shoulder and side had faded to thin white lines, barely visible now. He was stronger than he had ever been, his muscles hardened by weeks of manual labor, his skin tanned golden by the sun.

He should have been thinking about the boat, about going home, about his mother and his brothers and the war.

He was thinking about you. Your laugh, your smile, the way your eyes caught the light. The way your hand felt in his. The way you looked at him sometimes, soft and searching, with something unspoken hovering just behind your lips. He had kissed you before, small kisses, brief and chaste, a press of his lips to your forehead when you fell asleep beside him, a brush of his mouth against your knuckles when you handed him a cup of water. But he had not kissed you properly. He had not kissed you the way he wanted to, the way he had been imagining for weeks, the way that left no doubt about what he felt.

He was thinking about that when he heard your footsteps on the rocks above. "You started without me."

Jace turned in the water, treading easily, and looked up at you. You were standing at the edge of the pool, barefoot on the smooth stone, wearing your dress of pale purple gossamer that drifted around your ankles in the faint breeze. The sun caught the planes of your face and the curve of your neck and the dip of your collarbones, and the sight of you struck him silent for a moment.

"Someone has to," he called back, forcing his voice into something approaching normal. "You sleep too late."

"I was gathering herbs. Some of us have work to do."

"Swimming is work. It builds character."

You laughed, that bright, warm sound that he had come to treasure more than anything else on this island. "Is that what you are doing? Building character?"

"Come in and find out."

You hesitated for just a moment. Your eyes met his across the water, and something flickered in your expression, something tentative and questioning, as if you were making a decision and waiting to see if he would notice.

Then you reached up and untied the clasps at your shoulders.

The dress fell and Jace stopped breathing.

You stood above him in nothing but the sunlight, bare to the sky and the water and his gaze. The curves of your body were soft and smooth, your skin glowing in the morning light. Your breasts were full and round and tight in the open air. Your waist dipped inward in a graceful curve before flaring out to the swell of your hips.

You were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

"Are you coming in or not?" he asked, his voice rougher than he intended.

You smiled, then you dove into the water in one clean, graceful arc, slicing through the surface with barely a splash.

You surfaced inches from him, the water lapped at your collarbones, but beneath the surface he could see the pale shape of your body, distorted by the ripples, impossibly close. Droplets clung to your lashes. Your hair floated around you like ink spilled in water. Your lips were parted and slightly wet, and you were looking at him with those shifting sea-glass eyes, and Jace forgot how to think.

"The water is nice," you said, and your voice was teasing and light, but there was a tremor underneath it.

"Nice," he repeated. He could not stop staring at your mouth.

"Very refreshing."

"I had not noticed."

"No?"

"No."

His hand found your waist beneath the water. Your skin was cool and slick and impossibly soft. You did not pull away. You drifted closer, your bare legs brushing against his, and the contact sent a jolt through him like lightning striking water. He could feel the heat of your core through the cool water, a promise of the warmth waiting for him, and his cock stirred against the confines of his breeches.

"Jace," you whispered.

That was all. Just his name, but the way you said it, breathless and aching and full of want, broke something open inside him.

He kissed you, his mouth strong against yours. His hand tightened on your waist, pulling you flush against him. His other hand came up to cup the back of your head, fingers tangling in your hair. You made a small, desperate sound against his lips and kissed him back just as fiercely, your arms winding around his neck, your bare breasts pressing against the hard plane of his chest.

You were bare beneath his hands, there was nothing between his palms and your skin but water. He could feel every curve of you against the hard muscle of his own. His thumbs traced the ridges of your middle, and you shivered, and he swallowed the sound you made. His hands slid lower, cupping the full curve of your arse, kneading the firm flesh, pulling your hips against his so you could feel the rigid length of him pressing against your belly through the wet linen of his breeches.

"Jace," you gasped against his mouth. "Jace, I—"

"Tell me to stop." His voice was wrecked, barely recognizable. "Tell me to stop and I will stop."

"Do not stop." Your fingers dug into his shoulders, nails biting into his sun-warmed skin. "Please do not stop."

He kissed you again, deeper this time, slower. His tongue traced the seam of your lips, and you opened for him with a shuddering breath. The taste of you, sweet and clean and faintly herbal from the medicines you were always brewing, flooded his senses. He explored your mouth thoroughly, learning the texture of your tongue, the ridge of your teeth, the softness of your inner cheeks. You moaned into his mouth and sucked on his tongue, and the sensation went straight to his groin. He could feel your heart pounding against his chest, or perhaps that was his own heart, hammering so hard he thought it might crack his ribs.

Your legs wrapped around his waist beneath the water. The movement was instinctive and natural, and it brought your hips flush against his, the heat of your sex pressing against the hard ridge of his cock through his breeches. He groaned against your mouth, low and rough, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of your thighs. You were so warm. Even in the cool water, the core of you radiated a heat that he could feel through the fabric separating them.

He walked you backward through the pool, still kissing you, still holding you, until your back met the smooth stone of the cliff wall. The waterfall rushed beside them, a curtain of silver sound. He kissed the hollow of your throat, feeling your pulse flutter against his lips. He traced the delicate line of your collarbone with his tongue, tasting the clean, mineral tang of the spring water on your skin. He let his mouth drift lower, over the swell of your breast, and when his lips closed around one tight, pebbled nipple, you gasped and arched against him, your fingers fisting in his hair.

He lavished attention on your breasts, suckling first one and then the other, his tongue circling the tight buds, his teeth grazing them with just enough pressure to make you moan. Your breasts were perfect in his hands, full and soft, fitting his palms as though they had been made for him. He kneaded them gently, thumbs brushing over the wet peaks, watching your face contort with pleasure. Your head had fallen back against the stone, your lips parted, your eyes squeezed shut. The sight of you like this, bare and wanting and completely surrendered to his mouth, made his cock throb painfully against his breeches.

"I have wanted this," he breathed against your skin, his voice ragged. "Gods, I have wanted this for so long."

"Then do not wait any longer."

He lifted his head and looked at you. Your eyes were dark with want, your lips swollen from his kisses, your chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow breaths. The water lapped at your breasts, revealing and hiding, and he could feel every inch of you pressed against him, every curve, every soft place, every point of contact where your body met his.

"Are you sure?" he asked. He needed to hear it. He needed to know.

In answer, you cupped his face in your hands and pulled him down to you. "I have never been more sure of anything in my life."

He kissed you again, soft and sweet this time, a promise and a question all at once. Then his hand slid down your body beneath the water, tracing the curve of your waist, the swell of your hip, the sensitive skin of your inner thigh. Your legs tightened around his waist, and he felt you tremble against him. His fingers found the heat of you, warm and slick even in the cool water, and he traced the folds of your sex with a feather-light touch. You gasped and bucked against his hand. He explored you slowly, learning the shape of you, the soft outer lips, the slick inner petals, the hard pearl of your pleasure at the apex. When he circled that sensitive nub with his thumb, you cried out, a sound half-lost in the rush of the waterfall. He swallowed it with his mouth, kissing you through it, his touch gentle and searching and patient. He slid one finger inside you, feeling the tight, wet heat of your body grip him, and you moaned against his lips. He added a second finger, stretching you gently, his thumb still circling your sensitive peak, and you writhed against his hand, your inner walls clenching around his fingers.

"Please," you whispered, the word broken and beautiful. "Please, Jace. I need you inside me."

He withdrew his fingers, and you made a small sound of protest that he silenced with a kiss. He reached down and freed himself from his breeches, his cock springing out, hard and thick and aching. The head was dark with need, a bead of moisture already forming at the tip. You glanced down through the clear water and your eyes widened at the sight of him, long and rigid, curving slightly upward toward his belly.

"You are so beautiful," he murmured, positioning himself at your entrance. He rubbed the head of his cock against your slick folds, coating himself in your wetness, teasing you both with the promise of what was to come. "I want to watch your face when I enter you. I want to see what I do to you."

Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels pressing into the small of his back. "Then do it. I want to feel you."

He pushed into you slowly, so slowly, inch by agonizing inch. The water made everything liquid and easy, but he wanted to savor this, the way your eyes fluttered closed, the way your mouth fell open, the way your body welcomed him. You were so tight and so warm and so perfect around him. He could feel every ridge and fold of your inner walls as they gripped him and fluttered and stretched to accommodate his size. Your heat enveloped him, searing even through the cool water, and he had to stop and breathe when he was fully sheathed, his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding back.

"Look at me," he murmured. "Please. Look at me."

Your eyes opened. They were dark and shining, full of something that looked very much like love. "You feel incredible," you breathed. "I am so full."

He began to move, he withdrew almost completely, feeling the drag of your body against every inch of his length, and then pushed back in with a slow, deep thrust that made you both gasp. The sensation was overwhelming, the tight clutch of your body, the heat, the way your inner muscles rippled around him. He set a steady rhythm, each stroke deliberate and full, sliding into you to the hilt and then pulling back until only the head remained inside you. The water splashed gently around them, ripples spreading outward in concentric circles with every movement. Your legs tightened around his waist, your heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him deeper with every thrust. Your hands slid down his spine, tracing the ridges of muscle that flexed with every movement. You were making soft, breathless sounds, gasps and moans and fragments of his name, and he caught each one with his mouth, kissing you, drinking you down like wine.

"You feel incredible," he groaned against your lips. "So tight. So perfect. I could stay inside you forever."

"So do you," you gasped, your words barely coherent, slurred with pleasure. "Harder, Jace. Please."

He did not need to be asked twice. His pace quickened, his hips slamming against yours with increasing force. The sound of their coupling echoed off the cliff walls, wet and rhythmic, the slap of skin against skin beneath the water. Your breasts bounced with every thrust, and he watched them, mesmerized by the way they moved, the way the water lapped at the peaks. He bent his head and captured one nipple in his mouth again, sucking hard, grazing it with his teeth, and you cried out sharply, your inner walls clenching around him.

He shifted his angle slightly, tilting his hips, and on the next thrust you cried out sharply, your head falling back against the stone, your whole body arching against his. He had found the right spot, that sensitive place deep inside you, and he drove into it again and again, watching your face contort with pleasure. Your brow furrowed and your lips parted and your eyes lost focus, and you were babbling now, a stream of broken words, his name and pleas for more and incoherent praise.

"There," you gasped. "Right there. Do not stop. Please do not stop."

He did not stop. He could not have stopped if the world was ending. There was nothing but you, your body, your voice, your hands on his skin. He felt your inner walls begin to flutter around him, the first warning signs of your approaching climax, and he moved his hand between your bodies, finding the slick, sensitive pearl of you beneath the water. He pressed his thumb against it in tight, circling strokes, matching the rhythm of his thrusts.

"That is it," he murmured against your ear, his voice low and rough. "Let go. I want to feel you come apart around me."

Your climax took you by surprise. He felt it building, the way your breath quickened, the way your nails bit into his shoulders, the way your body tightened around him until he could barely move. And then you shattered, crying out his name, your head thrown back, your whole body arching and shuddering against his. He felt the rhythmic pulsing of your release gripping his cock, your inner walls milking him in waves, and he watched your face contort with pleasure, your mouth open, your eyes squeezed shut, your cheeks flushed dark. The sight of you, bare and beautiful and completely undone, was enough to push him over the edge. He drove into you one final time, burying himself to the hilt, and let go. His release surged through him in hot, pulsing waves, spilling deep inside you, and he groaned your name against the curve of your neck, his body shaking with the force of his climax.

For a long moment, neither of you moved, your breathing slowed, your chest rising and falling against his. Your fingers traced lazy patterns on the back of his neck. He remained inside you, still half-hard, reluctant to separate from the warmth of your body. He could feel his seed and your slickness mingled together, warm and wet around him, and the sensation was so intimate, so perfect, that he never wanted to move again.

"Jace," you whispered, and your voice was hoarse and sweet and utterly content.

He lifted his head and looked at you. Your cheeks were flushed. Your lips were red and swollen. Your hair was a wild tangle around your shoulders. Your eyes were soft and hazy with satisfaction. You had never looked more beautiful.

"I love you," he said.

The words came out before he could stop them, before he even realized he was thinking them. But once they were spoken, he knew they were true. He loved you. He loved you so completely and so absolutely that he could barely remember what his life had been before you. You were everything. You were the sun and the sea and the stars. You were the only thing that mattered.

Your eyes widened. "I love you too," you said. "I have loved you since the moment you opened your eyes."

He kissed you again, softly this time, tenderly, a kiss that tasted of water and salt and promises. And then he held you, your body still wrapped around his, the waterfall cool against his back, the sun warm on his face.

They did not leave the pool for a long time. When they finally climbed out, their skin pruned and their limbs heavy with satisfaction, they did not bother to dress. Jace carried you to a patch of soft grass beneath the flowering trees, and he laid you down among the fallen petals, pink and white and gold. He knelt between your spread thighs and looked down at you, at your bare body glistening with water droplets, at the place where his seed was already beginning to leak from your swollen folds, and he felt himself harden again at the sight.

He made love to you again, slower this time, sweeter. He kissed his way down your body, his mouth tracing the hollow of your throat, the swell of your breasts, the plane of your stomach. He paused to dip his tongue into your navel, making you squirm, and then continued lower, pressing kisses to your hip bones, the sensitive crease where your thighs met your body. When he reached the junction of your thighs, he settled between them and looked up at you. Your scent was intoxicating, musky and sweet and mixed with the salt of his own release. He could see the evidence of their earlier coupling, the glistening slickness that coated your folds, and the sight made him groan with want.

He tasted you properly for the first time. His tongue parted your folds, tracing a slow path from your entrance to the peak of your pleasure. The taste of you combined with the taste of him was earthy and raw and utterly intoxicating. You cried out and fisted your hands in the grass, your hips rising to meet his mouth. He took his time, learning what you liked, alternating between broad, flat strokes of his tongue and focused, circling attention to your sensitive peak. He slid two fingers inside you as he sucked on that tight bundle of nerves, curling them forward to press against that sensitive spot on your inner wall, and you came apart against his mouth, your thighs trembling around his head, your voice breaking on his name, your body gushing wetness that he lapped up eagerly.

After that, they walked back to the cave hand in hand, bare and unashamed, their clothes forgotten on the rocks by the waterfall. The sun had climbed higher in the sky, and the island was alive with birdsong and the scent of flowers. Jace kept his hand on the small of your back as you walked, unable to stop touching you, his thumb tracing small circles against your skin.

When you reached the bedchamber, the bed where he had first woken, the furs soft and the candles flickering on the walls, he took you again. This time you pushed him down onto his back and climbed on top of him, straddling his hips. You looked down at him and you reached between your bodies to guide him to your entrance. He watched his cock disappear inside you, inch by inch, watched the way your folds stretched to accommodate him, and the sight was almost enough to make him spend right there. You sank down until he was fully seated inside you, and you both moaned at the sensation.

You began to move, rolling your hips in a slow, sinuous rhythm. He watched you move above him, your breasts swaying with each roll of your hips, your stomach flexing, your head thrown back in pleasure. He reached up and cupped your breasts, rolling the tight peaks between his fingers, and you gasped and increased your pace. Your thighs flexed as you rose and fell, taking him deeper with every stroke. He guided you with his hands on your waist, helping you find a rhythm that made you both moan, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh of your hips.

"Look at you," he breathed, his voice full of wonder. "You are so beautiful riding my cock."

You leaned forward, bracing your hands on his chest, and the new angle made you gasp. He thrust up into you from below, meeting your movements, and the wet sound of your bodies joining filled the chamber. Your inner walls were fluttering around him again, your breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He moved one hand to where your bodies were joined and pressed his thumb against your sensitive peak, circling it in time with your movements. You cried out and shattered above him, your body clenching around him, your back arching. The sight of you, lost in pleasure, pushed him over the edge. He thrust up into you one final time and spilled his seed deep inside you, groaning your name, his hands gripping your hips hard enough to leave marks.

You collapsed against his chest, spent and trembling, and he wrapped his arms around you and held you close, still buried inside you. Your breath was warm against his neck. Your heart hammered against his chest. He could feel the thrum of your pulse where your bodies were still joined, and he never wanted to let you go.

You fell asleep like that, joined together, your body draped over his, and when you woke an hour later, the candles had burned lower and the light through the cave entrance had shifted to the gold of late afternoon. You stirred against him, and he felt himself harden again inside you, still buried in your warmth. You smiled sleepily and began to move your hips in a slow, lazy rhythm, and he rolled you onto your back and made love to you again, gentle and tender, whispering your name like a prayer.

After that day, they could not keep their hands off each other, it was as if a dam had broken. Every moment they were together, they were touching. His hand on the small of your back, your fingers tangled in his hair, his lips on your shoulder, your thigh pressed against his beneath the dinner table. The boat sat forgotten on the beach, the wood beginning to weather and grey in the salt air. The days blurred into a haze of sun and water and skin.

He took you in the meadow, surrounded by wildflowers, the grass tickling your bare skin as he moved inside you, your legs wrapped around his waist and your fingers digging into his back. The sun was warm on his shoulders and the scent of blossoms was thick in the air. He rolled onto his back, pulling you on top of him without breaking their connection, and you rode him among the flowers, your head thrown back, your breasts bouncing with every movement, the bright petals clinging to your damp skin.

You pulled him into the storage chamber one afternoon and pressed him against the cool stone wall. You sank to your knees before him on the worn stone floor, looking up at him and you freed him from his breeches with practiced hands. He was already hard, his cock springing out, the tip glistening. You wrapped your hand around the base of him, feeling the weight and heat of him in your palm, and then you leaned forward and took him into your mouth.

He groaned and buried his fingers in your hair as your lips closed around him. You took him slowly, deliberately, your tongue tracing the ridge on the underside of his shaft, your cheeks hollowing as you sucked. You worked him with your mouth and your hand in tandem, your head bobbing in a steady rhythm, your tongue swirling around the sensitive head on every upstroke. He watched you move, mesmerized, watching his cock disappear between your lips again and again, feeling the wet heat of your mouth, the gentle scrape of your teeth. When you took him deeper, relaxing your throat to accommodate his length, he groaned your name and tightened his grip on your hair.

You pulled back, your lips slick and swollen, a strand of saliva connecting you to his tip. You looked up at him and smiled, a slow, wicked smile, and then you took him deep again, hollowing your cheeks, increasing your pace. Your hand cupped him gently, rolling him in your palm, and the dual sensation pushed him closer and closer to the edge. When he could not hold back any longer, he warned you, his voice ragged, but you only took him deeper, and he spilled into your mouth with a ragged cry of your name. You swallowed everything he gave you, your throat working around him, and you did not pull away until he was spent and trembling.

You looked up at him, your lips slick and swollen, a tiny bead of his release at the corner of your mouth that you caught with your tongue. The sight of you, kneeling before him, having taken everything he had to give, made his spent cock twitch with interest. He pulled you to your feet and kissed you deeply, tasting himself on your tongue, and then he spun you around and bent you over the stone table where you mixed your medicines.

He bunched your skirts around your waist, baring you to his gaze. Your folds were already slick and glistening, your arousal dripping down your inner thighs. He ran his hand over the curve of your backside, kneading the firm flesh, and then he positioned himself at your entrance. He entered you from behind in one smooth thrust, burying himself to the hilt, and you gasped and clutched at the worn stone surface. He set a hard, fast rhythm, one hand gripping your hip hard enough to leave fingerprints and the other braced on the table beside yours. The sound of his hips slamming against your backside filled the small chamber, wet and rhythmic, punctuated by your breathless gasps and his low groans.

"Is this what you wanted when you got on your knees for me?" he asked, his voice rough. "Did you want me to bend you over and fuck you until you screamed?"

"Yes," you gasped, pushing back against him. "Yes, I wanted this. I wanted you."

He reached around and found your sensitive peak with his fingers, rubbing tight circles in time with his thrusts. The angle was perfect, driving him deep, hitting that spot inside you with every stroke. Your gasps turned to cries, your cries turned to screams, and when you came, your body clenching around him so tightly that he could barely move, he followed a heartbeat later, groaning your name into the curve of your shoulder, spilling himself deep inside you.

He stayed inside you until he softened, his forehead resting against your shoulder blade, both of you breathing hard. Then he pulled out gently and turned you around, and he kissed you softly, tenderly, his hands cupping your face.

Every night, they fell asleep tangled together in his bed, their bed now, and every morning they woke the same way. Sometimes he would wake first and simply watch you sleep, the soft rise and fall of your chest, the way your lips curved into a faint smile as if you were dreaming of him. Sometimes you would wake first and trace the lines of his scars with your fingertips, until he stirred and rolled on top of you and the day began the way all their days began now, with your legs around his waist and your soft cries filling the candlelit chamber.

He could not get enough of you. He could not get enough of your taste or your scent or the sounds you made when you came apart in his arms. He could not get enough of the way your eyes fluttered closed when he kissed your neck, or the way your back arched when he ran his hands down your sides, or the way you whispered his name in the darkness, over and over, like an incantation. He learned every inch of your body, every sensitive spot, every place that made you gasp and every place that made you moan. He learned the rhythm you liked, slow and deep when you were tender, fast and hard when you were hungry. He learned how to read your body well enough to know which one you needed before you had to ask. He learned that you liked it when he talked to you while he moved inside you, telling you how beautiful you were, how much he loved you, how he wanted to stay buried in your warmth forever.

And every time he was inside you, every time you came apart in his arms, every time he lost himself in the heat and the pleasure and the overwhelming, consuming love he felt for you, something else slipped away.

In many ways, you were. You were his world now. You were everything.

And he was forgetting that there had ever been anything else.

—

The ship appeared on the horizon like a ghost from a life Jace had almost forgotten, he was down by the shore, skipping stones across the glass-flat water while you gathered shells further down the beach.

Then he saw it, a dark shape cut against the glare of the sun. At first he thought it was a cloud, or a trick of the light, or one of the strange birds that sometimes wheeled overhead. But the shape grew larger and sharper and resolved itself into masts and sails and a hull cutting through the water.

Jace's hand froze mid-throw. The stone dropped from his fingers and plunked into the shallows.

"Jace?" Your voice came from further down the beach, laced with concern. "What is it?"

"A ship."

The word felt strange in his mouth, foreign. He had not seen a ship in how long? Months? Years? He could not remember. Time had stopped meaning anything on this island.

He squinted against the sun, his heart beating faster. The ship was large, a warship by the look of it, three masts and a reinforced hull. As it drew closer, he could make out the banner snapping from the mainmast.

A seahorse. Silver on sea-green.

Velaryon.

The name hit him like a wave. His grandfather's house. His mother's allies. His family. The memories surged up from wherever they had been hiding, Dragonstone, Driftmark, the fleet, Lord Corlys, the war.

The war. He was fighting a war. His mother needed him. He had to go home.

"They are here for me," he breathed, and then he was running down the beach, waving his arms over his head, shouting at the top of his lungs. "Here! I am here!"

The soldiers came ashore in a longboat, six of them, their armor gleaming in the sun, the Velaryon seahorse embossed on their breastplates. They were grizzled men, seasoned fighters, and when they saw Jace standing on the beach, their faces broke into expressions of shock and relief and barely contained joy.

"Prince Jacaerys," the lead soldier breathed, dropping to one knee in the sand. "We thought you were dead. The Queen, your mother, she sent ships to every corner of the Narrow Sea. She never gave up hope."

Jace pulled the man to his feet, his hands shaking. "My mother. Is she well? Is the war still—"

"The war continues, my prince. The queen has taken Kings Landing. She will be overjoyed to see you. Everyone believed you had perished at the Gullet."

The Gullet. The arrows. Vermax screaming. The water closing over his head.

Jace shoved the memories aside. "I am alive," he said, and he was laughing now, giddy with relief and adrenaline. "I am alive, and I am coming home."

He turned to find you, you were standing a few paces back, your hands clasped in front of you, watching the soldiers with an expression he could not read. Your strange dress fluttered in the sea breeze, and your eyes were dark and unreadable.

"This is Y/N," Jace said, pulling you forward. You came reluctantly, your bare feet dragging in the sand. "She saved my life. She pulled me from the water and nursed me back to health. I would not be alive without her."

The lead soldier bowed to you, respectful. "The Queen will want to thank you personally, my lady. You have done the realm a great service."

You said nothing. You only nodded, a small, stiff movement.

Jace pulled you aside while the soldiers began unloading supplies from the longboat. His hands were still shaking. His heart was pounding. He felt more alive than he had in weeks, or months, or however long it had been.

"You are coming with me," he said, the words tumbling out in a rush. "I know what you told me about your brother and the exile. But I am a prince, and my mother is the Queen. Whatever power your brother holds, it is nothing compared to the Iron Throne. We can protect you."

Your eyes widened. "Jace..."

"I mean it." He took your hands in his, squeezing tight. "You saved my life. You have been alone here for so long, and I am not going to leave you behind. Come with me to Westeros. I will keep you safe. I swear it."

For a long moment, you only looked at him. Your sea-glass eyes searched his face, looking for something he did not recognize. It might have been doubt or hesitation or some reason to refuse, then you smiled.

"Yes," you said. "I will come with you."

Jace pulled you into his arms and held you tight, his face buried in your hair, breathing in the scent of you, salt and flowers and home. "We leave at dawn," he murmured. "Tomorrow, we leave at dawn."

That night, you cooked a feast, the soldiers were camped on the beach, their tents pitched in a neat row above the tide line. They had offered to share their rations, but you had insisted, telling them in that quiet, gracious way of yours that they were guests on your island and that you would feed them.

Jace helped you carry platters of food down to the beach. There was roasted pork, crackling and golden, seasoned with herbs from your garden. There were strange fruits sliced and arranged in intricate patterns. There was fresh bread baked in the stone oven at the back of the cave, still warm and fragrant. And there was wine, more wine than Jace had ever seen in the cave, deep red wine in clay amphorae, rich and dark and potent.

"Where did you get all this?" he asked, watching you fill cup after cup for the soldiers.

You smiled, your hands steady on the amphora. "I have been saving it. For a special occasion."

The feast was a joyous affair. The soldiers laughed and sang and told Jace stories of the war, battles won and lost, allies gained and betrayed, the endless, grinding struggle for the Iron Throne. He listened with half an ear, nodding in the right places, but his attention kept drifting to you.

You moved among the soldiers like a ghost, refilling cups, offering plates of food, your smile never wavering. The men thanked you with drunken enthusiasm, their faces flushed with wine and gratitude. Jace felt a swell of pride watching you, his savior, his love, soon to be his companion in Westeros, where he would shower you with every luxury you had been denied on this lonely island.

"To the Prince!" one of the soldiers bellowed, raising his cup. "To Prince Jacaerys, returned from the dead!"

"To the Prince!" the others roared.

Jace raised his own cup and drank deep. The wine was stronger than he expected, and it went to his head almost immediately. The stars above seemed to blur and swirl. The fire on the beach danced and flickered. Your hand found his under the table, and he squeezed it tight.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow, we go home

—

He woke to sunlight and the sound of birdsong, his head pounded. His mouth was dry and sour with the aftertaste of wine. He groaned and pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, trying to drive back the ache that throbbed behind them. How much had he drunk? He remembered the feast. He remembered the soldiers laughing, the wine flowing, your hand in his beneath the table. He remembered the fire on the beach and the stars wheeling overhead and the giddy, overwhelming relief of knowing that he was finally, finally going home.

The soldiers, Jace sat up so fast that the furs tangled around his legs and nearly sent him sprawling. The soldiers. The ship. They were leaving at dawn. He had to get up. He had to get dressed. He had to—

He stumbled out of the bed and through the winding passages of the cave, his bare feet slapping against the cold stone. The light grew brighter as he ran, golden and warm, and then he burst through the cave entrance and stopped dead at the edge of the cliff.

The beach was empty, his eyes swept the shoreline, back and forth, back and forth, searching for the tents and the longboat and the supply crates. He looked for the ship, the great Velaryon warship with its three masts and its silver seahorse banner, riding at anchor in the bay.

There was nothing there, the white sand stretched out below him, pristine and unmarked. The sea glittered in the morning sun, calm and blue and utterly empty all the way to the horizon. No ship. No sails. No sign that anyone had ever been here at all.

"What..." Jace's voice came out hoarse, cracked. He turned and ran down the path to the beach, his legs still unsteady, his heart pounding against his ribs. He reached the sand and walked through the place where the camp had been, his eyes scanning the ground for any trace of the soldiers. A footprint. A scrap of cloth. A ring of stones where the fire had burned. A spilled cup. Anything.

The sand was smooth and unblemished. The tide had come in during the night and erased whatever marks might have been left behind.

"Jace?" Your voice drifted down from the cliff above, calm and curious. "What are you doing?"

He looked up. You were standing at the mouth of the cave, barefoot, wrapped in one of your flowing dresses, your hair loose around your shoulders. The morning light caught the soft curves of your face and made your eyes gleam.

"The soldiers," Jace called up to you. "The ship. Where are they?"

You tilted your head, your brow furrowing slightly. "What soldiers?"

The question hit him like a physical blow. He stood there on the empty beach, staring up at you, waiting for you to laugh or smile or tell him it was a joke. You only looked back at him with mild, patient confusion.

"The soldiers," he repeated, his voice rising. "The Velaryon soldiers. Six of them. They came yesterday in a warship. They landed on the beach. We had a feast. You served them roast pork and wine. They were going to take us home this morning."

Your expression did not change. That small, puzzled frown remained, as though he were speaking a language you did not quite recognize.

"Jace," you said gently, "I think you must have dreamed it."

"I did not dream it." He was breathing hard now, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. "They were here. They said my mother sent them. You spoke to them. You—"

He stopped, you were walking down the path to the beach now, your bare feet moving sure and steady over the rocks. When you reached the sand, you came to stand beside him, and your hand rose to rest against his cheek.

"You had a great deal of wine last night," you said, your voice soft and soothing. "More than I have ever seen you drink. Sometimes wine can make dreams feel very real."

Jace shook his head, pulling away from your touch. "It was not a dream. They were here. They were real."

"Then where are they now?" You gestured at the empty beach, the empty sea, the empty horizon. "Where is the ship? Where are the footprints? Where is the fire? If six men camped on this beach last night, where is the evidence of it?"

The sand was smooth. The sea was empty. There was no smoke rising from the ashes of a campfire. There were no tent pegs driven into the earth. There was no ship, no longboat, no sign that anyone but the two of you had ever set foot on this island.

"I do not know," he said, and his voice sounded thin and uncertain even to his own ears. "I do not understand."

You stepped closer, and your hand found his cheek again, and this time he did not pull away. Your palm was cool against his flushed skin.

"You have been through so much," you murmured. "Your body is still healing. Your mind is still healing. Dreams and memories and wishes can all blur together. But you are here with me, and you are safe. That is what matters."

Jace stared down at the sand. His head was pounding. His thoughts were tangled, slipping over each other like stones in a landslide. He remembered the feast so clearly, the taste of the roast pork, the sound of the soldiers' laughter, the weight of your hand in his. He remembered the banner snapping in the wind, silver seahorse on sea-green. He remembered the lead soldier kneeling in the sand, the shock and relief on his weathered face.

But the beach was empty.

"Perhaps you are right," he said slowly, and the words felt like surrender. "Perhaps I dreamed it."

You smiled, and your smile was warm and gentle and full of something that might have been relief. "Come back inside. I will make you something to eat. You will feel better once you have eaten."

He let you lead him back up the path and into the cave. He let you sit him down at the stone table. He let you place a plate of fruit and fresh bread in front of him, and he ate without tasting it, his mind still chasing the fragments of the dream that had felt so real.

That was what you had called it. A dream. And perhaps you were right. Perhaps the longing for home had grown so strong that his mind had conjured a rescue where none existed. Perhaps the wine had done the rest, weaving the longing into something that felt like memory.

Perhaps.

He did not think about it for the rest of the day, it was not until late afternoon that he noticed the pigs, he was walking past the enclosure without any particular destination in mind, his feet carrying him along the familiar path, when he stopped and frowned.

The pigs had always been numerous, he had never bothered to count them exactly, but now, looking at the enclosure, he could see that there were more than there had been the day before. Many more.

The sows jostled and grunted. The piglets tumbled over each other in the dirt. They were fat, healthy animals with glossy coats and floppy ears, rooting in the churned earth of the enclosure, there were at least twice as many pigs as there had been the day before.

Jace stood at the stone wall and stared at them. The pigs stared back, their small dark eyes unblinking, he stood there for a long time.

—

Days later, Jace found the hole by accident, though later he would wonder whether anything on this island ever happened by accident at all. He had been exploring, something he did more and more often now, wandering the island's paths and cliffs and hidden coves as if searching for something he could not name. He had walked further than usual that afternoon, following a thin stream that wound through a cleft in the cliffs, its water cold and clear and tasting faintly of minerals when he cupped his hands to drink. The stream led him deeper into the interior than he had ever gone before, past stands of flowering trees whose blossoms released a sweet, drowsy perfume, past moss-covered boulders that loomed overhead like the shoulders of buried giants and that was when he saw it.

A dark opening in the rock face, half-hidden by a curtain of flowering vines that spilled down from the cliff above in cascades of white and purple. The vines were thick and tangled, but they did not quite conceal the gap behind them. An opening wide enough for a man to walk through without ducking his head.

He should not have gone in. He knew that, even as his feet carried him forward, even as his hands reached out to push the vines aside. A voice in the back of his mind, the voice that had once belonged to a prince trained in caution and suspicion, whispered that he should turn around and walk back to the sunlit meadow and forget he had ever seen this place. But that voice had grown very quiet in the months he had spent on this island, and something else had grown louder.

The darkness swallowed him whole. He stood motionless for a long moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust, one hand pressed flat against the cool stone of the wall. The passage sloped downward, the floor worn smooth by the passage of time or water or the tread of feet. He could not see more than a few feet ahead, but he could feel the space around him opening up, widening into something larger than a simple tunnel. The air was dry and still, the silence so complete that he could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears.

He walked deeper, the passage twisted once, then twice, then opened abruptly into a chamber so vast that Jace's footsteps echoed back to him from walls he could not see. Thin shafts of daylight pierced down through cracks in the ceiling high above, illuminating the space in pale, dusty columns that fell across the floor like the bars of a cage made of light and in those columns of light, Jace saw them.

Armor.

Dozens of sets, perhaps hundreds, arranged against the walls and stacked in corners and laid out on stone slabs that rose from the floor like altars. Breastplates and greaves and gauntlets and helms, their surfaces catching the thin light and throwing it back in dull gleams. Some were polished and gleaming, as if they had been cleaned and oiled with meticulous care. Others were rusted and crumbling, their edges flaking away into red-brown dust, their shapes barely recognizable beneath the corrosion of years or decades or centuries. Swords and axes and spears and maces, their blades dull with age and disuse, their hilts wrapped in leather that had rotted away to nothing.

And clothes, stacks and stacks of clothes, tunics and breeches and cloaks and boots and belts and gloves. They were piled against the walls in drifts that rose nearly to the ceiling, some of them neatly folded as if awaiting a return that would never come, others tossed carelessly into corners in tangled heaps of faded fabric. Some were new, the dyes still bright, the wool still soft, the linen still crisp and clean. Others were ancient and moth-eaten, their threads crumbling at the slightest touch, their colors bleached to ghostly echoes of what they had once been.

Jace stood in the center of the chamber and turned in a slow circle, his breath caught in his throat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a fist beating against a locked door. The scale of it was incomprehensible. There were so many. Too many. More than one person could ever need. More than a dozen people could ever need. More than a hundred people could ever need. This was not a collection. This was a graveyard for the belongings of the dead.

His eyes caught on a breastplate near his feet, and the world tilted sideways, it was newer than the others. Its metal still held a faint gleam beneath a thin layer of dust, and its leather straps were still supple, and on its chest, embossed in silver that caught the light like a blade, was the seahorse of House Velaryon.

He remembered the lead soldier kneeling in the sand, his weathered face breaking into shock and relief. He remembered the feast on the beach, the crackling fire, the roast pork and the wine and your hand in his beneath the table. He remembered waking to find the beach empty and the sea bare and you standing at the mouth of the cave with your head tilted and your brow furrowed, asking him what soldiers he meant, telling him it was only a dream, only a dream, nothing more than a dream.

The soldiers who had never been here. The soldiers he had only imagined. Their armor was lying at his feet.

He stumbled backward. His heel caught on a gauntlet and sent it skittering across the stone floor with a sound like a startled crab. The noise echoed through the chamber and died away into silence, and Jace stood there with his hands shaking and his mind blank with a terror so absolute that it felt almost like calm. He could not think. He could not breathe. He could not make sense of what he was seeing, and some part of him understood with terrible clarity that making sense of it would destroy everything he had built on this island. Every moment of peace. Every hour of love. Every whispered word in the darkness. All of it balanced on the edge of this pit, and if he looked down, if he truly looked, he would fall.

"What are you doing here?"

He spun around so fast that his boots skidded on the stone floor, his heart slammed against his ribs, once, twice, a frantic drumbeat of pure animal terror.. "Nothing. I was only looking, I wanted to understand—"

"You were only looking." You stepped out of the shadows and into the thin light that filtered down from the cracks in the ceiling, and the expression on your face made his stomach drop. The gentle warmth he had come to love was gone. The softness was gone. Your jaw was tight, the muscles corded beneath your skin, and your hands were clenched into fists at your sides, and your eyes were fixed on him with a glittering intensity that pinned him in place like a butterfly on a board. "At what, precisely? At the belongings of dead men? At the evidence of my sins? At the proof that I am not the gentle, lonely woman you thought you loved?"

Your hands unclenched and clenched again, the fingers curling and uncurling in a rhythm that seemed almost involuntary, as though you were strangling something invisible.

"I asked you a question, Jace." Your voice dropped, soft and dangerous. "What are you doing here?"

He should have been afraid. He was afraid. The hair on the back of his neck was standing up, and his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his throat, and every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to run. But something else rose up inside him too, some scrap of the prince he used to be, some stubborn remnant of the boy who had faced down enemies on the battlefield and never flinched. He straightened his spine and met your eyes and refused to look away.

"Why are they here?" he asked, gesturing at the armor that surrounded them. "All of these. Dozens of sets. Hundreds, maybe. The soldiers who came for me, their armor is here. The same breastplate, the same sigil. It wasn't a dream was it? What happened to them?"

You stared at him. A muscle in your jaw twitched.

"It does not matter."

"It matters to me."

"It does not matter, Jace." Your voice was rising now, cracking at the edges, splintering into something raw and desperate. "It should not matter, Jace. Those men are gone. Let them stay gone. Let the past stay buried. We were happy. We were so happy. Why could you not leave well enough alone?"

"Because I need to know the truth."

"The truth will not make you happy. The truth will not keep you warm at night. The truth will not hold you when you wake from nightmares and tell you that everything is going to be all right."

"The truth is the truth. I deserve to know it."

You laughed, it was sharp and bitter and jagged, the laugh of someone who had been hurt too many times to believe in fairness anymore. "You sound just like them. Every single one of them. They all wanted the truth. They all thought they deserved to know. And do you know what happened when they found it?"

Jace did not answer. He did not need to answer. The armors answered for him.

"What happened to the soldiers?" he asked instead. His voice was very quiet. "The ones who came for me. The ones whose armor is lying at my feet. What did you do to them?"

Your face crumpled, the coldness shattered and the fury crumbled and underneath it was something far older and far more terrifying, a grief so immense it had calcified into rage over centuries of solitude. The tears that spilled down your cheeks were real, hot and sudden and utterly convincing.

"Why do you want to leave me?" you screamed, the sound echoed off the stone walls and came back multiplied, a chorus of accusations that battered him from every direction. Your voice was raw and ragged, shredded at the edges, and the pain in it was so enormous that Jace felt his own heart clench in response. The anger that had been building in him, the righteous fury at being lied to, began to waver. How could he be angry at someone who was in so much pain? How could he accuse someone who was so clearly suffering?

"Why do you want to leave me?" you cried again, and your voice broke on the last word. "Why do they always leave? Every single one of them, they wash up on my shore and I save them and I nurse them back to health and I give them everything I have, everything I am, and they tell me they love me, they look me in the eyes and they swear they love me, and I believe them every time, every single time I believe them because I am so desperate to be loved by someone, anyone, and then they remember. They always remember. And they always leave. They always want to go home. Why am I never enough? Why am I never enough for anyone?"

The question hung in the air, raw and bleeding. Your chest was heaving. Your hands were shaking. You looked at him with those burning eyes, and Jace felt his resolve crumbling, you were not a monster, you were wounded, a woman who had been abandoned and betrayed so many times that she had forgotten how to trust. How could he blame you for what you had done?

"I love you," he said, and his voice was shaking but he meant it with every fiber of his being. "I love you. I do. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone."

"Then why do you want to leave me?" Your voice was small now, wounded, the fury draining away to reveal the vulnerability beneath. "If you love me, why isn't that enough? Why do you need to go back? Why can't you just stay here with me? Why do you need a mother and brothers and a war and a throne? Why can you not just stay here and be mine?"

"Because I have a family." He was pleading now, hating himself for the pain he was causing you. "Because I have a mother who needs me and brothers who are waiting for me. Because there is a war, a war I was fighting, a war I was supposed to win. Because I have a duty."

"A duty." You laughed, but it was a broken sound, a laugh that was really a sob. "Duty. Honor. Family. I have heard all of this before. Every single one of them said the same thing. They had to go back. They had responsibilities. They had people who needed them. And what about me? What about what I need? I needed them. I loved them. And they left me anyway. They all left me. Just like you will leave me."

"I don't want to leave you," Jace said, and the words felt inadequate, pathetic. "I want to go home, yes. I want to see my mother. I want to protect her from the enemies who would see her dead and her throne stolen. But I want to take you with me. I want you to meet her. I want to marry you properly, before the whole court, with a septon and a cloak and vows spoken in the light of the Seven. I want to make you my queen. When I sit the Iron Throne, you will sit beside me."

He reached for you, desperate to comfort you, to wipe the tears from your cheeks. You did not pull away, but you did not lean into his touch either.

"I do not care what you did to these men," he said, his voice low and fierce. "I do not care what you have done. I love you. I love you more than I have ever loved anything in my life. I just want you to come with me. Please. Come with me."

For a long moment, you were silent, then you shook your head. Slowly. Miserably. With the exhausted certainty of someone who had heard these same promises too many times to count.

"It is not true," you whispered. "They always say this. When my brother sends them here, they always tell me they love me. They always promise they will stay. They look at me with those earnest eyes and they swear they are different from the others, and I believe them. I always believe them. Because I want to believe. Because I want so desperately for it to be true. And then they remember who they were before, and everything changes."

You pulled your hands out of his grip and wrapped your arms around yourself, your shoulders hunching inward as though you were trying to make yourself smaller, harder to hurt. Jace felt a surge of protectiveness so strong it almost knocked the breath out of him. He wanted to hold you. He wanted to shield you from everything that had ever hurt you.

"They remember their old lives," you continued, your voice barely above a whisper, "and they tell me they will save me. They tell me they will break the curse and take me away from here and marry me in a real sept with real vows. They promise me everything I have ever wanted. And for a little while I let myself hope. I let myself believe that this time will be different. This time the love will be real."

Your voice caught on the last word, splintering into something that was almost a sob. Jace felt tears prick at the corners of his own eyes. Gods, how could anyone have done this to you? How could anyone have been so cruel?

"But they never mean it," you said. "They are only saying what they think I want to hear. They are only trying to placate me, to buy themselves time, to find a way to escape. And when they try to break the curse and they fail, when they realize their love is not strong enough, when they understand that they do not really love me at all, they run. They try to leave. And I—"

You stopped. Your hands were trembling violently now, the fingers twisting together in front of you.

"What do you do?" Jace asked, though he already knew the answer. He knew it, and it horrified him, and yet somehow he could not bring himself to judge you for it. You had been hurt. You had been betrayed. You had been left alone for so long that you had forgotten what it felt like to be held. How could anyone expect you to react with grace when another man tried to abandon you?

"I do not let them leave." Your voice was barely a whisper, so quiet he had to lean closer to hear it. "They do not get to leave. They do not get to go back to their families and forget about me while I rot here alone. They stay. They stay here with me. Forever."

"The pigs," Jace said.

"They are happier as pigs," Your voice took on a defensive edge, almost childlike in its insistence. "They do not remember their old lives. They do not feel the disappointment. They do not want to leave. They are content. They have food and shelter and each other. I take care of them. I take better care of them than anyone ever took care of me." Your eyes searched his face, looking for understanding, looking for absolution. "They are better off this way. I gave them peace. I gave them a life without pain. Do you know what my brother gave me? Do you know what it feels like to be left here, alone, for centuries, with nothing but the sound of the waves and the crying of the gulls and the knowledge that no one is ever coming for you?"

Jace's throat was dry. "Why did you not do it to me?"

"Because I thought you were different." Your voice was small now, so small it was almost swallowed by the shadows of the cave. "Because when I looked at you, when I held you through the fevers and listened to you talk about your home and your family, I thought—I hoped—that you might really love me." A tear slid down your cheek, and you did not wipe it away. "I thought you would stay."

The guilt hit Jace like a physical blow. You had hoped. You had let yourself hope, despite everything, despite centuries of betrayal and abandonment, and he was about to become just another name on the long list of people who had disappointed you. He was about to leave you, just like all the others. He was about to prove that your hope had been misplaced, that love was a lie, that no one would ever truly choose you.

"I am sorry," he said, and he meant it with every part of himself. "I am so sorry. I do not want to leave you. I want to stay. I want both things. I want to go home, but I want you to come with me. Can I not have both things?"

"No one ever wants both things." You pulled your hands away, and your expression was hardening again, the vulnerability sealing itself back behind walls of old resentment. "They want to leave. They always want to leave. As soon as they remember their old lives, they want to leave. And when they realize they cannot break the curse, they run. They all run. And I have to stop them because if I do not stop them they will leave me alone again, and I cannot be alone again, Jace, I cannot, I would rather die than be alone again—"

"What curse?" Jace cut through your spiraling words, his voice urgent. "You said they could not break the curse. What curse?"

"It does not matter," you said. Your voice was empty now, drained of all the fury and grief that had filled it moments before. "You are going to leave me too. You are going to try to break the curse, and you are going to fail, because no one has ever succeeded, and then you are going to run. Just like all the others."

"Tell me what the curse is. Please. Let me help you."

You stared at him for a long, long moment. The candles flickered in their alcoves, their flames guttering in a draft he could not feel. The armor gleamed dully in the shadows, the relics of a hundred men who had stood where he was standing now and made the same promises he was making. Somewhere far away, muffled by stone and distance, the pigs grunted in their enclosure. The men who had failed. The men whose love had not been strong enough.

"My brother exiled me here," you said finally. Your voice was flat now, reciting facts rather than feelings, as though you had told this story so many times that the words had lost all meaning. "Centuries ago. So long ago that the world I came from does not exist anymore, and when I disobeyed him, when I refused to do what he asked of me, he put a curse on this island as punishment. I cannot leave. No ship will carry me. No boat will bear my weight. If I try to swim, the sea itself will rise up and drag me back to shore. I am bound here, bound to this rock, until the curse is broken or the world ends."

"How do I break it?"

You looked at him, and your eyes were ancient and exhausted and utterly without hope. Jace felt his heart twist. You had been disappointed so many times. You did not believe he could do it.

"There is a cave," you said. "Behind the waterfall on the western cliff. There is a statue inside, a statue of me carved from black stone, wrapped in chains. I cannot enter the cave. It is spelled against me." Your hand rose unconsciously to your neck, as if feeling for the links of a collar that was not there. "If the statue is broken, the curse will be lifted. The chains will fall. I will be free."

"Then I will break it."

"It is not that simple." Your voice was quiet now, almost gentle, and there was something in it that felt like a warning, a kindness, an attempt to protect him from the disappointment you were certain was coming. "Only a man who knows my true nature can destroy the statue. Only a man who has seen what I am, what I have done, every monstrous thing I have committed in my long and miserable existence, and still loves me truly. Not charmed. Not tricked. Not fogged by the magic of this island. Real love. Clear-eyed love. Love that looks at the worst of me and does not flinch." You paused. "If his love is false, if it is only gratitude or loneliness or the lingering effects of my enchantments, the statue will not break. It will not even crack. And I will know. I will know that his love was a lie."

"I am not them," he said.

"You are. You are exactly like them."

"No." He stepped forward and took your face in his hands, his thumbs brushing the tears from your cheeks. "I am not them. I am going to break the curse. I am going to set you free. I am going to take you away from this island and give you the life you deserve. I swear it."

"You cannot promise that."

"I can. I am." He pressed his forehead against yours. "I love you. I know what you are. I know what you have done. And I love you anyway. I love you not despite the worst of you but because of it. Because the worst of you was born from pain, and I want to heal that pain. I want to be the one who finally proves to you that love is real. That you are worthy of it. That you have always been worthy of it."

You let out a sound that was half laugh and half sob. "You are a fool, Jacaerys Velaryon."

"Take me to the cave behind the waterfall," he said. "Let me prove it."

"Alright," you whispered, as if you had expected him to ask. "I will take you. But do not say I did not warn you."

You turned and walked out of the cave, and Jace followed you, his heart pounding and his mind clear and his love for you burning in his chest like a flame that no wind could extinguish. He was going to save you. He was going to be the one. He was going to prove that love was stronger than any curse, stronger than any magic, stronger than centuries of solitude and betrayal.

He had to be the one. The alternative was unthinkable.

—

The walk was silent, you led him along the familiar path, the meadow with its strange flowers swaying in the breeze, the grove of fruit trees with their golden bounty hanging heavy from the branches, the rocky outcropping that overlooked the western shore where the sea stretched out blue and endless and utterly indifferent to what was about to happen. The waterfall was roaring louder than usual, or perhaps it only seemed that way. Perhaps it was the blood pounding in his ears. Perhaps it was the weight of what he was about to do pressing down on him like a physical thing, a stone laid across his chest that made every breath feel shallow and insufficient.

You stopped at the edge of the pool, where the water churned white with the endless cascade. Your face was pale. Your hands were shaking at your sides, the fingers twisting together in that nervous gesture he had come to recognize, the one that always made him want to pull you into his arms and promise you that everything would be alright.

"There," you said, pointing, Jace squinted through the spray. Behind the curtain of falling water, barely visible through the silver torrent, was a dark opening in the rock face. A cave mouth, smaller than the one you lived in, half-hidden by the cascade. It looked like something that did not want to be found.

"I cannot enter," you said, and your voice was quiet, almost reverent. "The spell prevents me. The moment I step through the water, I am pushed back. It burns." You wrapped your arms around yourself, your fingers digging into the flesh of your upper arms. The gesture was meant to look vulnerable, meant to make him feel protective. It worked. "You have to go alone."

Jace nodded. He had expected this. Of course he had expected this. The hero always had to face the trial alone. That was how these stories went.

"I will come back," he said.

You did not answer. Your eyes were fixed on the waterfall, dark and terrified, and your lower lip trembled just slightly, just enough for him to notice.

"Hey." He touched your chin, turning your face toward him. Your skin was cold beneath his fingers. "I will come back. I promise."

"Everyone promises." Your voice was barely a whisper, and there was something in it that snagged at his heart like a fishhook. "Everyone who has ever stood on this shore has promised to come back."

"I am not everyone."

He kissed your lips and for just a moment he felt something move beneath the surface. A flicker. A pulse. Something that was not quite human. Then the moment passed, and you were just you again, fragile and frightened and looking at him with those sea-glass eyes that held all the sadness in the world.

He turned away before he could lose his nerve. He dove into the pool, and the water closed over his head like a fist.

The cold was shocking. It was more than cold. It was the absence of warmth, the absence of life, a cold that sank into his bones and wrapped around his heart and squeezed. He surfaced gasping, his breath torn from his lungs in a ragged gasp, and swam toward the waterfall with strong, desperate strokes. The roar grew louder as he approached, a wall of sound that pressed against his eardrums until he could hear nothing else. The spray blinded him, stinging his eyes, filling his mouth with the taste of minerals and stone. The current tried to push him back, tried to shove him away from the cave entrance as if the water itself did not want him to pass.

But he kept swimming. He had promised. He had promised he would come back, he reached the rock face and pulled himself up onto a narrow ledge, slick with moss and running water, his fingers scrabbling for purchase on the wet stone. The cave entrance yawned before him, dark and silent and somehow hungry, as if the darkness itself was waiting for him to step inside. He looked back once. You were still standing at the edge of the pool, a pale figure in a pale dress, your hands pressed to your mouth. You looked like a ghost. You looked like a memory of someone who had died a long time ago.

Then he turned and walked into the darkness.

—

The cave was small, smaller than he had expected. The passage was short, barely twenty paces, the walls rough and wet beneath his trailing fingers, the floor sloping downward into the heart of the rock. The roar of the waterfall faded behind him, muffled by the stone, until the only sound was the drip of water and the soft scuff of his bare feet on the rock and the steady, insistent pounding of his own heart.

The passage opened into a round chamber no larger than your bedchamber back in the main cave. The walls were smooth and wet, glistening with moisture, catching the light and throwing it back in a thousand tiny reflections. The only illumination came from somewhere above, a thin shaft of daylight that pierced through a crack in the rock and fell in a single golden beam onto the center of the chamber. It was like something out of a sept, that beam of light. It was like the light that fell on an altar, or a tomb, or a place where something sacred had been buried and forgotten.

And in the center of the chamber was the statue.

It was you, smooth and luminous, carved with such skill that it seemed almost alive. The surface of the stone had been polished to a soft gleam, catching the golden light and holding it, and the details were so fine that Jace could see the individual strands of hair. The statue knelt on a stone pedestal, its head bowed in an attitude of submission or prayer, its face frozen in an expression of such profound sorrow that Jace felt his chest tighten just looking at it. The eyes were closed. The lips were slightly parted, as if caught in the middle of a sigh. The shoulders were hunched forward, the spine curved, every line of the body speaking of exhaustion and despair and the weight of an eternity spent alone.

And the hands, the statue's hands were raised in front of its chest, palms facing each other, fingers slightly curled as if holding something invisible. And around those marble wrists, coiled so tightly they seemed to be part of the stone itself, were two snakes.

No. Not snakes. Bracelets. Golden bracelets, each one shaped like a serpent eating its own tail. But the serpents were not connected to each other. They were separate, independent, each one locked around a single wrist, each one devouring itself in an endless cycle of consumption and renewal. Their golden eyes gleamed in the shaft of daylight, bright and watchful and aware. Their scales were so finely detailed that Jace could count every one, each scale overlapping the next in perfect, reptilian precision. Their jaws were clamped tight around their own tails, and their bodies were wound around the marble wrists in coils that looked tight enough to bruise.

They were not chains. Not exactly. They were something worse. They were a trap that could not be escaped because there was nothing to break. The snakes held her wrists, and her wrists held the snakes, and neither could let go, and the whole thing was a perfect, closed loop of imprisonment that had no beginning and no end.

Jace stood in the darkness at the edge of the chamber, staring at the statue. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his throat, in his temples, in the tips of his fingers. His hands were slick with water and sweat. The marble figure knelt in its beam of light, motionless and patient, and the golden snakes watched him with their glittering eyes, and the silence was so complete that he could hear the blood rushing through his own veins.

He bent down and picked up a rock from the floor of the cave. It was heavy, sharp-edged, big enough to do damage. He turned it over in his hands, testing its weight, feeling the rough edges bite into his palm. Break the statue. Break the curse. Simple. You had told him what to do. You had told him it was simple.

He took a step toward the pedestal.

"Are you quite certain about this?"

Jace froze, the voice was male. Low and smooth and echoing, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. It bounced off the wet stone walls, slid through the darkness, coiled around him like smoke, like water, like something that had been waiting in the shadows for a very long time. It was not a human voice. It was too resonant for that, too layered, as if many voices were speaking at once in perfect, dissonant harmony.

"Who is there?" Jace demanded. His voice sounded too loud in the silence, too harsh, too frightened. He hated how frightened he sounded.

No answer. Just the dripping of water. The distant, muffled roar of the falls.

"You should think very carefully before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life. Which, I should warn you, may not be very long."

Jace spun around, the rock raised like a weapon. The chamber was empty. The passage behind him was empty. The shadows pressed against the walls, still and silent and utterly unoccupied.

"I said who is there?"

"A friend." The voice was almost gentle now, almost kind. It was the voice of a father speaking to a wayward son, a mentor guiding a confused student. "Someone who does not want to see you make a mistake you cannot undo. Someone who has watched this same scene play out more times than I can count, and who is very, very tired of seeing young men throw their lives away."

Jace's grip tightened on the rock. The edges cut into his palm, grounding him. "Show yourself."

"I cannot. I am not really here. I am just a voice in the dark. A warning. A kindness, if you will let me be." The voice paused, and when it spoke again, it was softer. Sadder. "I am the only person on this island who is actually trying to help you, Jacaerys."

"Don't listen to it," Jace muttered to himself. He turned back toward the statue. "It's just another part of the curse. It's trying to stop you. She said there would be things trying to stop you."

"Is that what she told you?" The voice sounded amused now, deeply and darkly amused. "That the curse is the villain? That she is the victim? How very convenient for her. How very convenient that she has a story that makes her the helpless damsel and everyone else the monster. She tells that story very well. She has had centuries of practice."

Jace ignored it. He stepped closer to the pedestal. The marble woman knelt in her beam of light, motionless and sorrowful. The golden snakes glinted.

"She is very beautiful, isn't she?" the voice continued, and now it was almost conversational, almost casual, as if they were two old friends discussing the weather. "Of course she is. She's had centuries to perfect the act. The dresses. The smiles. The way she looks at you like you are the only man in the world, like you are the answer to every prayer she has ever whispered into the darkness. It is all very convincing. It is meant to be. She has been refining it for longer than your entire bloodline has existed."

"You do not know anything about her."

"I know everything about her." The voice was sharper now, the amusement draining away to reveal something harder underneath. "I know what she is. I know what she has done. I know how many men have stood exactly where you are standing now, holding a rock just like that one, thinking they were going to be the one. The special one. The one whose love was strong enough." A pause, heavy with meaning. "Do you know how many of them succeeded?"

Jace did not answer.

"None. Not one. In all the centuries she has been trapped on this island, not a single man has broken that statue. Do you know why? Because it cannot be broken. It is a trap. It is the bait, and you are the fish, and you are swimming toward it with your mouth wide open."

"You are lying." Jace's voice was shaking now. He hated that it was shaking. "You are just another part of the curse. You are trying to stop me from freeing her."

"I am trying to stop you from destroying yourself." The voice was closer now, seeming to come from just behind his left shoulder. He spun around, but there was nothing there. Only shadows. Only the dripping of water. "Let me ask you something, Jacaerys. Can you remember your mother's name?"

He opened his mouth but nothing came out, the name was gone. It had been there a moment ago, he was sure of it. He could see her face, silver hair and sad eyes, could feel the shape of her in his memory. But the name, the name would not come.

"Your brothers," the voice continued, relentless and calm. "How many brothers do you have? What are their names?"

"I have brothers. I know I have brothers." His voice sounded desperate, even to his own ears. "Luke-Lucerys. And the others. The little ones."

"You are reciting words. You are not remembering. She has taken them from you, piece by piece, day by day. She has been stealing your memories since the moment you arrived. The food she feeds you. The wine she pours you. The herbs she puts in your medicine. They do not just heal your wounds. They erase you. They hollow you out. They make room for her."

Jace's mind was blank. Empty. There was nothing there but fog, thick and white and impenetrable, where his memories should have been.

"She has taken them from you," the voice said, and now it was almost gentle again, almost pitying. "Piece by piece. Day by day. Every moment you spend in her presence, she is stealing more of who you are. Your family. Your home. Your past. Your very self. And you call that love? You think that is what love looks like?"

"She saved my life."

"She kept you alive because she needed you. There is a difference. She needs a man to break the curse. She always needs a man to break the curse. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked. She lures them in with her beauty and her vulnerability and her sad, sad story, and she makes them love her, and then she sends them here to die. Because no one can break the curse. No one. The statue does not break. It has never broken. And when the man fails, when he realizes his love is not strong enough, she has her excuse. She was right all along. No one really loves her. So she turns them into pigs and waits for the next shipwreck, the next castaway, the next fool who will believe her lies."

He kept going "You think that is love?" The voice laughed, a soft and pitying laugh. "You think a woman who erases your past and steals your future and traps you on an island where you can never leave loves you? You think any of this is real?"

"I love her." Jace's voice cracked. "I know I love her. That is real. Whatever else she has done, my love for her is real."

"Oh, it feels real. I am sure it does. But do you know why it feels real?" The voice paused, letting the question hang in the darkness. "Because she makes it feel real. That is what she does. That is what the magic does. It wraps around your mind and makes you think you are feeling something true. But it is not true, Jacaerys. It is a trick. A trap. You have been ensnared since the moment you opened your eyes in that candlelit room and saw her kneeling beside your bed like a worried bride."

Jace's arm was lowering. The rock felt heavier now, so heavy he could barely hold it. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.

"She told me you would say things like this," he said, but his voice was weak. Uncertain. "She told me the curse would try to stop me. She warned me there would be voices."

"The curse is not stopping you. I am not the curse. I am the only thing standing between you and an eternity of rooting in the dirt with all the other men who believed her lies." The voice was right next to his ear now, so close he could feel the cold breath of it against his skin. "Do you want to know the real story, Jacaerys? Do you want to know who she really is?"

He did not answer. He did not want to know. He wanted to cover his ears and run back through the waterfall and hold you in his arms and forget this voice had ever spoken to him. But his feet would not move. His body would not obey him.

"She is not a victim," the voice whispered. "She is not a lonely woman trapped by a cruel brother. That is a story she invented centuries ago because it makes men feel protective. It makes them feel noble. It makes them want to save her. The truth is much simpler, and much uglier. She is a goddess, a thing that was worshipped before your ancestors crawled out of the mud. And she was imprisoned here not as punishment, but as containment. Because she is dangerous. Because she feeds on devotion the way a spider feeds on flies."

"You are lying."

"Am I? If you break that statue," the voice said, "she will be free. And the moment she is free, she will have no more use for you. Her love for you, such as it is, will vanish. It is not real love, Jacaerys. It is bait. It is a lure. It is the promise of everything you have ever wanted, dangled in front of you to make you do what she needs. And once you have done it, once you have served your purpose, she will discard you like all the others."

"Stop." Jace's voice cracked on the word.

"That is the part she did not tell you, is it not? She did not tell you that her love is conditional. She did not tell you that it lasts only as long as she is trapped. The moment she is free, the magic breaks both ways. The chains fall from her wrists, and her love for you falls with them."

"You are lying." Jace's voice was a raw whisper, barely audible over the distant roar of the waterfall. "You are the curse. You are trying to stop me from freeing her."

"She told every man before you the exact same story. Word for word. The cruel brother. The lonely exile. The curse that can only be broken by true love. She told it to the knight in rusted armor whose bones are rotting in that cave. She told it to the merchant captain whose shield is propped against the wall. And you are just the latest audience."

"Stop."

"She does not love you. She cannot love you. She is not capable of love. She is capable of hunger, and she calls it love because that is what makes men stay. But it is not love. It has never been love. It is just need. Just appetite. Just the endless, grinding loneliness of a creature that consumes everything it touches and is still never full."

Jace opened his eyes. The statue knelt in its beam of light. The golden snakes watched him with their glittering, knowing eyes. The marble face was frozen in its expression of eternal sorrow.

What if the voice was right?

What if none of it was real?

What if he broke the statue, and your love disappeared, and he spent the rest of his life chasing a ghost?

What if he was just the next fool in line?

"Go back," the voice whispered. "Go back to the beach. Build your boat. Leave this place while you still can. While you still remember enough of yourself to want to leave. She will try to stop you. She will cry and plead and tell you she loves you. But it will be a lie. It has always been a lie. Go back, Jacaerys. Go home. Save yourself."

—

You had been waiting for hours. You stood at the edge of the pool, your bare feet sinking into the damp sand, your eyes fixed on the curtain of falling water. The roar of the waterfall filled your ears until you could hear nothing else, but you were listening for something beneath the roar. A shout. A crash. The sound of stone breaking. The sound of a man drowning.

Anything. Please, anything.

Jace surfaced at the edge of the pool, gasping, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, his skin slick with water and gleaming in the sunlight. He pulled himself onto the sand, his chest heaving, his arms trembling with exhaustion, and for a moment he just knelt there on his hands and knees, catching his breath, water streaming from his body in rivulets. You just stared at him, searching his face for some sign of what had happened, some clue in the set of his jaw or the light in his eyes. Was the curse broken? Had he succeeded? Had he been the one, the only one, the man whose love was finally strong enough?

"I did it," he said, and his voice was warm and triumphant and full of a joy you had never heard from him before. "I broke the curse."

You stumbled forward, your legs barely supporting you, your hands reaching for him before your mind had fully registered what he had said. "You—you did? It is broken? I am free?"

"You are free." He rose to his feet, still smiling, and opened his arms to you. "You are free, Y/N. We can leave. Together. Just like I promised."

A sob tore from your throat, raw and jagged and utterly involuntary. You threw yourself into his arms, your body shaking, tears streaming down your face in hot, messy rivulets. He caught you and held you tight, his hands warm on your back, his lips pressing kisses to your hair, your temple, your cheek, his voice murmuring reassurances that you could barely hear over the pounding of your own heart.

"I love you," you gasped, the words tumbling out between sobs, unstoppable, irrepressible. "I love you, I love you, I love you—"

"I love you too." His voice was soft. Tender. Everything you had ever wanted to hear. "I told you I would save you. I told you I was different. I told you I was not like the others."

He kissed you, it was a deep kiss, a passionate kiss, the kind of kiss that spoke of relief and joy and a future finally within reach. You melted into him, your body pressing against his, your hands sliding up his chest, his shoulders, his neck, tangling in his wet hair. The waterfall roared behind you, but it sounded different now, less like a threat and more like applause. The sun was warm on your skin, warmer than it had ever been. You were free. You were finally, impossibly free. After centuries of solitude, centuries of hoping and losing and hoping again, someone had finally loved you enough.

You did not notice anything until you felt the cold metal snap shut against your skin, you tore away from him, stumbling backward, your hand flying to your wrist. Something was there. Something heavy and cold and horribly, sickeningly familiar. You looked down, and the world stopped.

A golden snake. Coiled around your forearm, its tail clamped in its own jaws, its scales gleaming in the sunlight with a wet, organic sheen. Its eyes were bright and watchful and alive. It was warm against your skin, warm like something that had a heartbeat, warm like something that was feeding.

Identical to the ones in the cave. Identical to the ones that had bound the statue for centuries, the statue that was supposed to be destroyed, the statue that he had told you he had broken.

But the statue was not destroyed. You knew that now with a cold, creeping certainty. He had not broken it. He had done something else. Something worse.

"What—" Your voice came out strangled, barely a whisper, the words catching in your throat like bones. "What is this?"

Jace was still standing by the water's edge. His smile was gone. His face had changed, shifted into something you did not recognize. The warmth in his eyes had drained away, replaced by something flat and cold and terribly, terribly calm. He looked at you the way a scholar might look at a pinned insect, curious and detached and utterly without feeling.

He raised his own arm.

The matching snake was coiled around his wrist. Twin to yours. Identical in every detail, from the curve of the scales to the glint of the golden eyes. Linked by nothing visible. Linked all the same. You could feel it, the connection between them, an invisible chain that stretched from your wrist to his and bound you together tighter than any iron ever could.

"I could not break the curse," he said. His voice was calm. Too calm. The voice of a man who had made a decision and was at peace with it. "The statue would not break. I struck it with the rock, and the rock shattered. I struck it with my fists, and my knuckles bled. I threw myself against it, and it did not even crack." He paused, his dark eyes fixed on yours, unblinking. "The voice, your brother, he told me the truth. He told me what you really are. He told me what you have done. He told me what you would do to me the moment you were free."

"No." You shook your head, backing away from him. Your wrist was burning where the snake touched your skin, a cold fire that spread up your arm and into your chest. "No, Jace, whatever he told you, it is a lie. It is always a lie. He is trying to trap you, he is trying to turn you against me—"

"Is it a lie?" He tilted his head, regarding you with that terrible calm. "He told me the curse made me love you. He told me you have been feeding on my devotion since the moment I opened my eyes. He told me you would leave me the instant you were free."

"That is not true!" You were screaming now, your voice raw and cracking. "I love you! I have never loved anyone the way I love you! You have to believe me!"

"Then why can I not remember my mother's name?" His voice cracked on the word mother, just slightly, and beneath the coldness you saw something flicker. Something wounded. Something that still hurt. "Why can I not remember my brothers' faces? Why did I wake up this morning and realize that I could not recall the sound of my father's voice, or the color of my brother's eyes, or the name of the dragon I rode into battle? You took everything from me. Everything I was. Everything I loved. You hollowed me out and filled me with yourself, and you expected me to believe it was love?"

"I did not mean to!" You were sobbing now, the tears hot and bitter on your cheeks. "I did not want to take your memories, i loved you so much i did not want you to leave me."

"You loved being loved." His voice was flat. Final. "There is a difference."

You stared at him. Your chest was heaving. Your wrist was throbbing, the golden snake pulsing against your skin like a second heartbeat. You could feel it now, the thing that bound you together. It was not just a chain. It was a tether. A leash.

"The statue forced you to have a physical body," Jace said, and his voice had shifted again, becoming almost conversational. Almost pleasant. "You are not mortal. You are not human something that was bound to this island and trapped in the stone. The chains kept you here. The statue kept you solid. Touchable. Real." He paused. "Without the statue, you would have no body. You would be nothing but mist and memory. Is that not what your brother wanted? To keep you contained? To keep you in a form that could touch and taste and take?"

You did not answer. You could not answer. Your throat had closed around the words.

"I could not break the curse," Jace said, and he took a step toward you, his bare feet silent on the sand. "I could not destroy the statue. But I could transfer it. I could take the chains off the stone and put them onto something else. Something living. Something that could carry them." He raised his arm again, showing you the snake coiled around his wrist, and his smile returned. It was not a kind smile. "You are not bound to the island anymore. You are bound to me."

The world tilted. The roar of the waterfall seemed to fade, replaced by a high, thin ringing in your ears. The sun was too bright. The sand was too soft. The golden snake was too warm against your skin.

"You—" Your voice would not work. "You did not—"

"I did." He was still calm. Still cold. Still looking at you with those eyes that used to be so full of love. "The voice told me it was the only way. The only way to make sure you could not leave me. The only way to make sure your love was real. The only way to be certain that when I woke up tomorrow, you would still be there, and the day after that, and the day after that."

"You trapped me."

He laughed. It was a soft laugh, a quiet laugh, but there was nothing warm in it. "I freed you. You can leave the island now. The chains that bound you to this rock are gone. You can walk onto a ship and sail away and see the world again. Is that not what you wanted? Is that not what you have been begging me for since the moment we met?"

"You bound me to you!"

"And you bound me to you first." His voice sharpened, the calm cracking for just a moment to reveal the fury underneath. "You made me love you. You made me forget my own mother's name. You drugged my food and whispered in my ear and wrapped yourself around my mind so tightly I could not tell where you ended and I began. You trapped me on this island long before I ever trapped you. The only difference is that my chains were made of kisses and lies, and yours are made of gold."

"I loved you!" The words tore from your throat, raw and ragged. "I loved you! Everything I did, I did because I loved you!"

"You made me forget my mother's name," he said again, and his voice was quieter now, almost sad. "Do you understand what that means? Do you understand what you took from me? She is out there somewhere, fighting a war, grieving a son she believes is dead, and I cannot remember her name. I cannot remember her face. I know I love her. I know I owe her everything. But when I try to picture her, there is nothing there. Just fog. Just you."

You opened your mouth, but no words came. What could you possibly say? What defense could you offer that would not sound hollow and selfish and monstrous?

"You stole my memories and drugged my food and lied to me for months," Jace continued, and now he was walking toward you, closing the distance between you with slow, deliberate steps. "You let me believe I was going home. You let me build a boat I was never going to finish. You let me dream of a future that did not exist. And when I found out the truth, when I confronted you in that cave full of dead men's armor, what did you do? Did you apologize? Did you offer to help me leave? No. You cried. You made yourself the victim. You told me how lonely you were, how sad you were, how much you had suffered. You made me comfort you. You made me feel guilty for discovering your lies."

He stopped in front of you, close enough that you could feel the heat of his body, close enough that you could see the pulse beating in his throat. "And I did feel guilty," he said. "I felt so guilty that I almost forgot what you had done. I almost let myself believe that you were the victim. That I was the one who had wronged you by wanting to go home. That is how good you are at this. That is how deep your hooks go."

"Please." Your voice was barely a whisper now. "Please, Jace, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I only wanted to be loved. I only wanted—"

"I know what you wanted." He reached up and touched your face, his fingers gentle against your tear-streaked cheek. The gesture was almost tender. Almost loving. It made your skin crawl. "You wanted someone to stay. You wanted someone to choose you. And now someone has. I have chosen you. I have chosen you over my family, over my throne, over my memories, over everything I ever was. I have given up my entire life to be with you. Are you not happy? Is this not what you wanted?"

"You have made me your prisoner."

"I have made you my equal." His thumb traced the curve of your cheekbone, wiping away a tear. "We are connected now. Bound together. What happens to one of us happens to the other. If you leave, I will feel it. If you try to run, I will know. And if you try to hurt me—" He shrugged. "The snakes will not let you. They protect what they hold. That is what the voice told me."

"The voice. He told you to do this?"

"He gave me a choice. Break the statue, free you, and watch you leave me the moment we set foot on the mainland. Or bind you to me, keep you close, and never wonder again whether your love was real." His smile returned, and it was the saddest smile you had ever seen. "It was not a difficult choice. I love you. I cannot lose you. So I made sure I would never have to."

You stared at him. The man you loved. The man who had just destroyed you. The man who had looked at your chains and decided to put them on himself rather than break them, because he could not bear the thought of you walking free.

"This is not love," you whispered. "This is possession."

"Is there a difference?" He tilted his head, his dark eyes glittering. "You tell me. You have been doing this for centuries. You tell me where love ends and possession begins. You tell me whether what you felt for me was really love, or just the desperate hunger of a lonely creature who needed someone, anyone, to fill the void. You tell me whether I am any different from you, or whether I am just the first man who was willing to sink to your level."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. The words would not come.

"Exactly," Jace said. "You cannot tell me. Because you do not know either. Because you have been confusing love and hunger for so long that you cannot tell them apart anymore. And now I am the same. You have made me the same." He leaned closer, his lips brushing your ear. "We are equals now. Partners. Two monsters bound together for eternity. Is that not romantic? Is that not what you always wanted? Someone who would never leave you, never abandon you, never choose anything over you?"

"You are insane," you breathed.

"I am what you made me." He pulled back and looked into your eyes, and his expression was unreadable. "You wanted me to stay. I am staying. You wanted me to love you. I love you. You wanted me to be different from the others. I am different. I am the one who did not run. I am the one who looked at the chains and chose to wear them. I am the one who gave up everything to be with you." He cupped your face in both hands, gentle and terrible and utterly inescapable. "Why are you not happy? If you really loved me, you would be happy. This is what you wanted. This is what you have been asking for since the moment we met. Someone who would stay. Someone who would choose you. Someone who would never leave."

He kissed your forehead, and his lips were warm, and the golden snake pulsed against your wrist like a second heart.

"I am going to build us a boat," he said. "A real one this time. One that can carry us both back to Westeros. And you are going to meet my mother, and I am going to take back my throne, and you are going to be my queen. Just like I promised. Just like we planned. The only difference is that now I know you will not leave me. Now I know your love is real. Because it has to be. Because you have no choice." He pulled back and smiled, and his smile was beautiful and broken and utterly terrifying. "You are free now, Y/N. Free from the island. Free from your brother's curse. Free from the statue and the chains and the centuries of solitude. You can go anywhere you want. You can do anything you want. The whole world is open to you." He took your hand, the one with the golden snake coiled around the wrist, and pressed it to his chest, over his heart. "As long as you never leave my side."

You looked down at the snake. At his hand holding yours. At the invisible chain that stretched between you, unbreakable and eternal.

"You are a monster," you whispered.

It is quite the thing to never truly know one's father.

There was a time, you believe, when your wide eyes knew him, the white hair and the violet eyes. Days when you were a babe and the comfort of a voice you heard in the womb carried, and you felt a familiarity to him, a warmth when he held you.

But these are all assumptions you make.

You’ve never truly known Viserys Targaryen. You know the stories told to you by your governess, and on the odd occasion your grandsire tended to you in the years he resided in Oldtown, you heard of his greatness from him too.

Even sitting here, under the dim candlelight of the tavern, listening to the sweet melody the bard strums on his lute, you try to paint a picture of him.

Generous. Oh, kind.

These words have been shared by many, and even as the man sings them, as if speaking them into existence, you can’t picture the man he sings of. The man who sired you. The man that sent you away when you couldn’t even crawl out of your own cradle.

A man you only saw twice when you were brought back to King’s Landing. A man that only left the confinement of his chambers once in the three years you’d been at court. Only on the return of his eldest daughter, only to protect her claim to the Iron Throne. A man you barely recognised, grey strings of hair coming out in patches on his head, blackened teeth and a face eaten by disease. He looked like a man already dead, clinging to the last grips of life, decaying before everyone’s eyes.

For a second, you tried to picture him younger, you as a babe in his arms and your tiny hand wrapped around one of his fingers. Even then, sitting across from you, the picture could not come to mind. The mere mutter of the word father brings a different image, a man with short mahogany hair, loose curls and deep blue eyes. A statue cloaked in green, a sharp jawline and lips pressed together in a thin line.

Ormund Hightower, a man you haven’t seen for five long years, is the man you’ve pictured for as long as you can remember. The shape of him, standing over you, so vivid in your mind you’re sure you could picture him sitting across from you now.

You wonder how he’s changed.

Have the grey strands taken root in his hair? Have the lines on his face drawn deeper over time? Would he look at you the same? Would he remember the girl that clung to his leg as a child, or the teenager that revelled in his approval of curt nods and brief words? Would he see the woman you have grown into?

You never thought you’d see him again; the night before you left him, he told you so. You’ve thought about it often, the fat tears stinging your eyes and falling across your cheek. The sobs you desperately tried to fight back as you gritted your teeth, ones that broke through your chest and left you quivering as you threw yourself at him behind the closed doors of his studies.

Unbecoming of a woman, you knew that, especially one that was well versed in your faith. You thought he might disapprove of the way you acted, shake his head and tell you so. Yet he didn’t; he let your hands find his shoulders, nails dig into the tunic, piercing into the skin underneath with no complaint. His arms wrapped around you, one hand placed firmly at your back, rubbing soothing circles into the small of your back.

We always knew this day was coming; he reminded you before pulling you away, placing his hands on your cheeks to hold you from him. This is your duty, where mine is here.

You wish you had told him how you wanted to say— wish that in that moment you begged him to let you reside here if just for a few more years. But you have always been destined to return to court, to marry into a noble family and draw new alliances for your family.

Yet in your five years away from home, away from the only family you’ve ever really known, a marriage never came to fruition. Offers came, many were discussed, and one proposal sat over your head for a year, but then came the death of the King, Viserys, and the placement of your eldest brother on the Iron Throne, and House of Arynn decidedly didn’t want to align themselves with usurpers. You’d never say it out loud, but you’d been happy, even if it was only prolonging the inevitable.

Wars bring bountiful amounts of marriages. But wars also bring death, and while you always knew that, you’d never been privy to the sight of it. Not until over a fortnight ago, when you’d been yanked from your bed in the night, forced to leave the confines of the Redkeep with one trusted guardsman with you.

Blood paved your way through the streets of King’s Landing, the Goldcloaks turning on the King’s Guard, shoving their swords deep into their backs. Even at the dead of the night, and on the brink of winter, it had been awfully hot, sweat beading on your head, and at every glance in a different direction you could see why: the glow of a fire bright from above, around almost every corner. The streets of flea-bottom had been a battle to get through, and if it hadn’t been for Ser Ronard protecting you with his very life, it may have been your body bleeding out on the cobblestones.

You dread what they could have done to you. Stripped you, beaten you, and molested your dead body.

They are animals, Ormund’s voice rang in your head and even now as you remember, you feel the ghost of his fingers as they brush your hair behind your ear. Nothing like our common folk.

Don’t they even deserve the mercy of the Gods? You’d asked him.

That is for the Gods to decide.

Ser Ronard clears his throat from beside you, pushing the bowl of stew towards you.

“Eat,” he commands.

You don’t look up, shaking your head.

“My Lord will have my head on a stick if I bring you to him thin as bones,” he grunts out, fingers reaching out for your chin but you flinch out of reach. He points to the bowl once more. “Eat.”

Your hand reaches out for the spoon, stirring the slodge in the bowl. It doesn’t smell right but the last few days you’ve managed to stomach worse just to fill the pit in your stomach.

“It’s not so—” Ser Ronnard twists his head to the window, eyes pinching as if to concentrate.

You don’t hear it at first but the hooves trotting against the ground come quickly. Fast and many.

“Up.” Ser Ronnard is yanking you up by your elbow before you can think, pulling you towards him and charging through the tables towards the back of the tavern.

But the way becomes easily blocked, the townspeople turning against you within an instant, and then you feel it, the hood of your cloak being torn down and your thick locks being lifted for all to see.

“It’s her,” someone points, shouting from beside you. “They are after her.”

These rats are fast but Ser Ronnard is faster, unsheathing his sword within a moment, the sliding of metal being heard like a ringing in your ears and then a slice, the man’s hand falls from your head and onto the wooden floorboard.

“Go.” He tells you, shoving you away and placing his body between you and them.

Them. Vermin. Traitors to the crown. Supporters of Rhaenyra the cruel.

The thoughts are all you can think as you run into the open night, ducking out of the way of light from torches and taking for the trees.

Days and nights spent dressed in beaten-down cloaks and hopping between one town to the other just to keep yourself hidden could all be for nothing. Rhaenyra’s men had been at every town, every tavern, every nook and cranny you had come across. You’d been glad for your dark rouge hair, the thickness of it making it easy to hide the tuft of silver. Easier to blend in with the common people, the rats that swarm these towns.

They support her. You’re not safe with any of them. Ormund had taught you that, had reminded you of the enemy in his many letters. She who shares your blood and your father’s face is not to be trusted.

There’s an evilness in your eldest sister, and your uncle, a taint in the blood. It runs in you as well, but lucky for you, Ormund has been there to protect you from it.

But he’s not here now. He’s nowhere to be seen in the dead of the night as you hide between the bushes. Nowhere to be heard as Rhaenyra’s men surround you and whistle for you to come out. Nowhere to be felt as one of them drags you by your ankle to get you out.

All you feel is the damp ground underneath you, mud taking its root under the your fingernails as you desperately try to scramble away and the man’s hands as they fight against your kicking legs.

He had been right, they’re all savages, every single last one of them. All awful beasts that do not care for the likeness of your blood, not the ones that bow to the false Queen Rhaenyra.

“You wretched—” You try to scream, but his foot catches your ankle, throwing you over onto your front without so much as a struggle.

You kick back, and with your nails digging into the soil you try to crawl forward. But he doesn’t let you, and you feel your feeble attempt be stopped as you feel his hands now on your back.

He’s on top of you, weight pressing you down into muck and you hear it, the tearing of your clothes from behind you, loud as he fumbles with his trousers to release himself.

“No,” you plead, tears lodged at the back of your throat. Your hand falls out in front again, dragging your heavy body slightly before you’re pulled back again. “No, please.”

Savages. Worse than you could have ever imagined.

He groans, not out of pleasure and for a second you’re not sure why, as he becomes still behind you. But then you feel it, blood dripping onto your back, and the weight of him being pulled off before his lifeless body is dropped by your side.

“Up.”

The voice doesn’t quite register; it takes a second before it is piercing through the ringing in your ear, and even then your body can’t quite familiarise itself with it. But your body recognises those hands pulling you up, and the feel of the wide shoulders as they encase you. You don’t relax; you can’t, but your arms fall around him, gripping him with a tightness that borders on suffocating.

“I’m here,” his voice soothes you, lips caressing the shell of your ear, his warmth breath against your skin making you shiver. “I’ve got you, my love.”

In your years growing up in Oldtown, you rarely went a fortnight without seeing Ormund. As the years passed and you grew older, he became a prominent figure in your life. The man raised you, alongside your uncle Gwayne, so it’s no surprise the man was always present in your day-to-day life.

But since your arrival at Tumbleton, Ormund has not visited you once.

You hear him, though- the echoes of his voice travelling through the empty halls, and his footsteps in the dead of the night when he paces outside your room. You know the stress he’s under; while you may never quite understand the strategies of war, you can understand the position he’s in. Daeron only holds a small dragon, barely grown, and you yourself have never bonded with a dragon. His final hope resides in your brother, but since his abrupt departure in King’s Landing, you don’t know where he resides or where he will go next.

Ormund and his men are alone.

It’s something you come to make clarity with as the maids tend to you in the bath. This luxury is not promised; tomorrow it could be taken from underneath you.

You hiss when one of the maids’ hands drags the cloth against your bruised hip, twisting your head to look at her. Plain clothes and face, no striking features that remind you of the maids back home. She could be a traitor, you think. A pretender.

You snatch the cloth from her hands but your hand stops for a second, eyes flickering between the other maids that surround you.

You go to bark but swallow, cowering like a beaten dog. “I can tend to myself,” you tell them in a meek voice.

“Of course, my princess.” They all mutter, bowing before clearing out of the room at once.

They stop before the door, bowing once again before scuttering out.

Ormund.

You notice him, dressed in dark green breeches and a pale white tunic, so thin you can see the defined muscles of his chest, all the way to the dark trail of hairs that travel down—

You twist your head away, eyes closing as shame takes over your body.

“My Lord, I—”

“Did he touch you?” Ormund questions, and when you turn around, he’s stood over you.

“My Lord—” you shake your head, shifting forward in the water as if bracing to get out. “I—I don’t—”

“ —Did he touch you?” Ormund’s hands are clenched by his side, fists drawn so tight that they are white. He bends down, falling to his knees and hands coming to grab onto the wooden tub. “That—“ he clenches his jaw, and spits out the next words through gritted teeth. “Did that beast touch you?”

“He didn’t—“ your words get lodged into your throat and you can feel the sob stuck in the back of your throat, clawing to make its way out as you bite it down. “I swear it.”

His eyes darken, the blue irises almost fading to black as you look at them. It brings you back.

Memories of the man before you making you bow before the Maiden for forgiveness, to the Mother for mercy on your own soul.

It’s not your fault, he’d tell you, but you need to pray for mercy to not end up like your savage ancestors.

You’d weep, knees digging into the stone floor of the sept, his hand pressed against your shoulder to keep you down.

The words try to break free from your throat now, to explain but tears flood your vision and panic takes over. He didn’t touch me, I swear it, you wish to scream but your voice makes no sound.

“Keep still.”

You do exactly that as his eyes keep you transfixed to the spot, his cold gaze not allowing you to move an inch as his hand reaches underneath the water. You feel it, his soft hand against your knee, slow at first as they part your legs before making their way up between your thighs.

Like a good girl, you take it, biting on the inside of your cheek and keeping your cries to sniffles. His fingertips feel larger than they look, running along your inner thigh as they make their way up and up—

You gasp, and his hand stop against you, cupping your mound with his palm against the top and fingers reaching against your hole. Even with how much you want to, you keep your legs open, fighting against the urge to close your thighs against his hand.

“This is where he would have touched you,” he tells you, through a heavy breath. His finger reaches down and the tip aligns itself with your hole as he continues, “This is where that savage would have taken—“ His eyes fall close, and he lets out a strangled breath, a moment, before the tip of his finger breaches your hole, forcing it open.

You try to keep still but your hips fall back, hands bracing against the sides of the tub as if to escape. But his hand comes against your shoulder, pressing firmly down to hold you in place.

“I need to be sure.” His finger deepens then moves side to side while you hiss and cry at the feel.

“It hurts,” you whimper, scrunching your eyes closed. “Please, he didn’t—“

His finger pulls back, sliding out of your walls as he hushes you, “It’s okay.”

It doesn’t feel okay. His hand rests against your thigh once more, and you can’t help but squeeze your thighs together, trying to force him out.

“You did good.”

—And yet you’re trembling in the warm water, unable to open your wet eyes. Your hands grip onto the edge of the tub still, not sure whether to jump out or to force yourself back under the water.

“Look at me,” he commands, and you feel his wet fingers grip your chin.

You do.

“You did so good.” He smiles, a small proud grin as he wipes the tears that fall against your cheek. “You understand why I had to do that?”

You nod. Unlike your ancestors, you will not be ruined by your own savage tendencies.

“I missed you,” he whispers, face inches from yours, breath fanning against your face.

So close you could kiss him.

Your body goes rigid at the thought.

It’s your blood, you remind yourself, you can control it.

“Didn’t you miss me?” His eyebrows draw together, and his lips twist into a frown.

“Yes,” you let out on a choked sob. “I missed you. I missed home.”

“And home is?” He asks, voice soft and melodic.

“Home is Oldtown. Home is with you,” you tell him.

His hand shifts, cupping your cheek and his forehead falls to rest against yours. He’s close, so close, you hear him as he inhales deeply, breathing in your scent. “That’s my girl.”

A fortnight has passed and still no word from Aemond, and no sight of Aegon.

Disappointments, you hear Ormund scream from the other side of the hall. Idiots, all of them.

You’re not making it any better, not that you can help it. But for the last few nights you’d fallen with a strange fever, sweats pulling you from your sleep and your body burning for no reason at all. Sometimes you have an appetite, and other times none at all. None of the maesters can be sure of the reasoning for it, prescribing you tea at every hour and hoping it will pass. The tea does nothing, and another brew sits cold on your bedside.

They’ve pleaded with Ormund to keep his distance. Told him they don’t want whatever ailment has taken over you to pass to him. Not in the midst of a war. Not when your lives are on the line.

Yet he visits often, not trusting the maids that tend to your bedside or the maesters that have been appointed by his own deceased father. Not to look after you.

Ormund sits now, slouched against his wooden chair, legs spread wide with you perched by his feet, a cushion underneath you for comfort. Rage radiates off him; you can feel it in the way his thighs tighten underneath your head, and you try your best to stop from moving around. But you are restless, mind fogged and skin littered with bumps across your body. You can’t help it, lulling your head to the side to look up at him again.

He sighs, a large breath through his nose and his thighs tighten once again.

“I thought you were trying to sleep?”

You look up at him through wet lashes, fluttering as if to keep them open. You want to sleep, your mind clouded with a tiredness you’ve never felt before but your body is restless and you shift against him to find some sort of comfort.

“Hmm?”

You whine, head rolling around again till your forehead is pressed against the inside of his thigh. “I can’t.”

“I should ask the maesters to brew some tea.” One of his hands falls to the back of your head, fingers combing through the strands, and the feel of the tips of his fingers scratching against your scalp causes you to shiver.

“No more tea,” you mumble against his breeches.

“You barely drank the last.”

You hear a scuffle on the other side of the room, maids following his command you imagine.

You lift your head again, and it takes a second for your vision to clear and for you to fully see him.

“Please,” You whine, but he doesn’t listen— he doesn’t look down.

You want his attention— no, you need his attention. You need him to look down at you, to acknowledge your pleads.

Your hands drag themselves up from his knees, fingers running along his thick muscles before wrapping around the tops of his thighs. His muscles tighten, harder than before and he finally looks down at you, nostrils flared and jaw clenched.

“Amused?”

Your hands slide down, releasing your grip and you lean back slightly, dropping your head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what took over me. I—”

His face relaxes and his head lulls back as he takes another languid breath. “You can’t help it.”

You hum, tilting your head to the side.

“I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”

You jump at the sound of the maid placing the tea pot down beside you, eyes falling to her as she pours a cup.

Ormund takes it from her, placing it out in front of you.

“Drink,” he commands, and the second you hesitate he presses the cup to your lips. “Drink.” The firm tone of his voice willing you to his command.

The heat of the tea is bearable, but still a tad too hot as it floods your mouth with its bitter taste. You imagine this is what dirt tastes like, but there's a hint of citrus that helps you swallow it down. You don’t want it, but he pours it into your mouth anyway, eyes glued to yours, eyebrows pinched together, telling you without words to obey him. You do, willing as much liquid as you can down before it comes too much, hot liquid burning your skin as it spills from the confines of your mouth.

He takes the cup away when you start to cough, pushing the cup back into the maid’s hand before giving her a curt nod to leave.

You try to push off him, giving yourself space as you choke on the last bits of liquid that have become trapped in your throat, but his hands come around your arms, keeping you locked in place.

“Breathe.”

You try, letting out a shaky breath, willing the tickle in your throat to dissipate. Eventually it does and you blink back the tears that have swarmed your waterline.

“Good girl,” he whispers, hands pulling you towards him. “Come.”

“I shouldn’t,” you tell him, but your body betrays you, crawling upwards until your head is resting against his shoulder and your legs are perched over his. “The maesters—” the words become muffled as you bury your head in the crevice of his neck. “ —you’ll get sick.”

“That’s my burden to bear.” His voice is soft, and his hand gentle as it falls against your thigh. “You are my burden.”

“Yes,” you answer him, not out of your own volition but a certain pull deep inside of you that speaks to him— that heeds his call.

His hand moves, trailing up your thigh and back down again, the material of your cotton gown following his slow movements. You hum, unbeknownst to you and another sound follows, a low rumble from the back of your throat you can’t place, but you know isn’t right.

“I’m sorry— I—” the next noise is louder, a desperate whimper and you feel a wave of heat flush over your body, dampening your skin.

Everything feels strange so suddenly. The material of your gown feels uncomfortable, almost scratching your skin every time you shift about. His hand— You’ve become deeply aware of Ormund’s hand pressed against you, heavier than before and almost soothing as it glides up the back of your thigh.

You want more, that you’re sure of, but you’re not sure of yourself or the words to ask for it.

What is it you want? These clothes off your body. His hand higher. His hand against your bare skin. Your thighs clamp together at that thought and you feel slick oozing from you as you rub your legs together.

He grasps the back of your hair, detaching you from his neck and forcing you to look up at him. His brows furrow together, but his expression is kinder than before. But it changes, eyes hardening and his muscles becoming stiff underneath you as his eyes trail down your body. Your chest rising and falling, your nipples pebbled underneath your gown, the way the material becomes almost transparent from your wet skin.

A part of you grasps, his darkened gaze and the way his mouth parts as you try to steady your rapid breathing.

Sinful girl, he must think, poisoned by your own blood.

“It’s exactly as I thought,” he states, eyes dragging themselves back up to your face.

“It’s my blood, isn’t it?” Just like your sister. Your elder brothers. Your ancestors. Ormund had been right all along. “Am I going to die?”

He pauses, his hand on your lower thigh tugs your skirts up, allowing the chill of the night air to touch your skin. It feels good, a sort of relief, but only temporary.

Your body freezes when the material reaches higher, lifting over your ankles, shins and then towards the middle of your thighs.

“I think I know a way to help you.” He swallows, and you watch as the bulge in his throat protrudes. “But—” his hand falls against your sweat-covered skin and you let out a small gasp, your skin burning under his touch. “—you need to understand.”

“Please,” you let out between a broken cry. “Please. Please. Please.” You repeat until the words jumble together.

The tip of his fingers slides beneath the material of your gown, and your hand darts out towards it. To stop it, or to push it away, you’re not entirely sure.

The air has shifted; you sense it completely now as you look up at Ormund. The man that raised you, that took care of you as his own, is touching you— his fingers drifting up to a place the septas taught you was for only your husband.

“Your blood craves its own,” he tells you, and you can’t quite understand what he speaks of “But if I’m right—” he bites down on his words, the tips of his fingers hovering up your thighs and over your stomach. “If I’m right, I can help you.”

How? You think to question him but the word doesn’t reach your lips. “Please,” is all you have him, the single word taking over your senses and your mind.

“Your blood…” his eyes widen, and his brows raise as he speaks. “…it wants its own.”

Your mind reels and his teachings ring in your head.

Incestuous savages.

It makes sense. Your body’s call for kin. Your brother and your sister married. Your elder sister and uncle. Even your father married his cousin.

Blood magic and curses, your ancestors have forsaken you.

Your eyes flutter up at him, tears flooding your vision at the thoughts. You can feel it, that very affliction that runs through your veins. Your senses are heightened and your body is burning for a touch of another.

“I may not have Targaryen blood,” he whispers, and his hand drops, landing on your breast, fingers splayed over it. “But you and I share the same blood. I think it could work.”

Your body freezes, his eyes falling to his finger as it moves flicking over your hardened nipple.

The man who raised you. A man you see is more akin to you than your own father, own mother, own brothers and sisters.

“You’re married,” you grit out through clenched teeth. Like that would make it any worse.

His hand shifts from your hair, wrapping around your neck before pulling you dangerously close. You could kiss him, or he could kiss you. As if sensing your thoughts his grip tightens and you find yourself wheezing for breath.

“Or—“ you gasp, hand reaching for his.

He looks down at you, lips frowning and jaw clenching once again into an almost pained expression. “I’d do this for you. Forsake my honour, for you.”

Fat tears slide down your cheeks in sheer horror but your body reacts in a different way, thighs clenching when his finger flicks over your nipple again.

“I could save you.”

He’s right. Every part of you reacts to him like some bitch in heat, craving his touch. Even if your teachings from the seven tell you different. They don’t understand this, they couldn’t possibly grasp the idea of this. Neither could you. It’s only here seeing the way your body trembles and bucks into his touch do you see how right he is.

You don’t want to die.

“Please save me,” you ask him only loud enough for him to hear.

“My girl.”

The words travel through you and you can’t help but shiver against him.

You close your eyes, bracing for the impact of his lips against yours at any moment but it doesn’t come. Only when your eyes open, do you feel his nose against your throat, inhaling your scent like he’s gasping for it.

His lips come after, grazing against your neck, just under your chin where his hand doesn’t cover and then upwards till they finally meet your lips.

It’s not at all how you expect it —but then again you never had much time to imagine much —he’s tender at first, his lips caressing yours, taking his time as he moves against your mouth. Open-mouthed pecks to the corner of your lips, and then your bottom lip until his lips meld into yours and you forget to breathe.

He pulls away, his hand sliding from your throat and his thumb finding your bottom lip, pulling it apart from the top.

“Let me help you.”

He dives forward this time, not so kind as his lips find yours for a second time. Your lips move, not with his but almost against him, intending to push him away. It doesn’t work and your lips part as you feel his teeth nipping at your skin— to speak, only for his tongue to shove against yours, forcing your words into a whine.

What would you have said anyway? No, don’t do this. A part of you still screams, your hand falling against his own as he gropes your breast. But then your thighs shift and you find yourself melting into his body.

Wouldn’t it be easier to forget. Wouldn’t it be safer to let him take care of you?

Ormund’s arm comes underneath you, hoisting you up and himself with you, never once allowing his lips to leave your own. It feels good— dangerously good as his saliva drips into your mouth and his tongue slides against yours. Is this how your ancestors felt the first time they lay with their own blood?

Your back hits silk sheets and cushions as Ormund places you down, breaking apart from you. You lift yourself, hazy eyes searching to find him, only to freeze when you see him undressing himself at the end of your bed.

You fall backwards, letting your eyes fall closed for a moment.

Better to not look. Better not to think.

You feel the weight of the bed dip by your feet, and your body moves on autopilot, heels digging in to push yourself further up the sheets. You’re stopped though, one hand finding your ankle yanking you right back down.

He tuts, and you feel the weight of him over you, crawling till he’s hovering directly above you. His hand lifts your skirt, throwing the material up until it’s bunched around your waist.

“Do you think I want to do this?” He questions, and you feel his breath against your face. “Hmm?”

You shake your head.

“Look at me when I’m speaking to you,” his voice stern as his forehead presses against your own. “Look at me.”

Your eyes open to a blackened gaze peering down at yours.

“Do you think I want to do this?”

“No,” you answer, tears clawing at the back of your throat. “You don’t want to do this.”

“I’m doing this to help you,” he whispers, lips pressing against yours again. “I’m doing this to save you.”

He lowers himself against you, and you realise how bare he is as you feel his harness against your inner thigh. You’re not sure how you pictured it, but the length of it against your thigh brings fear to your mind.

“Let’s get this off.”

You feel the gown being torn from your skin, and you find yourself lifting your body off the bed for him to pull it off your shoulders.

You don’t even have time to think before you’re being shoved down, lips finding your own and thighs being pried open. His body falls between your legs, hips pressing down against yours and you feel him there. Hard, thick and leaking.

But you also feel yourself. Slick covered thighs that fall around his hips and a drenched cunt that oozes with the feel of him sliding against it.

He was right, he’s always right.

Your hips buck up to him, and you can’t help the way your body reacts, your hole clenching around nothing as the tip of him catches your entrance. Your body wants this, it’s leaking all over him and when he pulls away, you let out a pathetic whimper.

“Hush,” he whispers against you, breaking his lips away from your own. “You’ll get what you desire.”

Then you feel it, his tip sliding against your folds with precision, slowly and then even slower over your sensitive nub. Your body reacts literally, mouth falling open into a whine or a moan, you’re not certain you can separate the two but it makes him smile. You feel it, lips widening against your cheek and it leaves you confused, opening your eyes to be sure it’s true.

Your lips fall open to speak, to question him but the words die on your tongue as he lines himself up against you before sliding in with one full thrust.

His lips fall open on yours, a sigh escaping him while a cry escapes you.

It hurts. Your walls feel like they’ve been forced open and the wetness does nothing to prepare you for him. Tears kiss your cheeks and your teeth grind against each other, forcing the sobs down.

He moves, dragging his dick out your walls before he’s shoving himself in.

“It hurts,” you let out through a choked sob, your whole body freezing underneath him. Your hands find his shoulders, pushing him back but his torso is like a stone wall that won’t let up —except from his hips that roll as he slowly slides in and out of you.

“Shhh.” His lips press into your cheek, then the corner of your parted lips. “It’ll feel better soon. I swear it.”

—So, you try to keep quiet, sucking in harsh breaths and letting out shaky sobs that have your body frozen against him. It hurts, and you feel like your walls are being torn open from the inside and he keeps going.

In. Out.

In and then out.

Your breathing steadies and your chest begins to settle. The pain is still there, but it’s faded and when his cock drags against your walls, you feel yourself tighten around him.

“See,” you hear his voice in your ear, and his lips follow, settling below and kissing the delicate skin there.

“It feels—”

“I know,” he replies, his voice different— grittier. “Told you didn’t I?” —and you hear it again, caught in a groan, coming from the back of his throat. “Making you feel better?”

You nod, a sick moan spilling from your lips is the only answer you can give. Slick is pouring out of you again, and you forget that it was ever painful to begin with and you also realise when he speaks once again, it does something to you, nipples becoming oddly more sensitive and cunt squeezing him.

It does something to him too, you feel it in the way he changes his pace, and his hands fall down to your hips to keep you glued to the bed. He’s only doing this for your own good, you remind yourself but the way his thrusts become faster has you thinking differently.

“Please,” you plead with him, legs falling around his hips, hooking behind them. “My Lord, plea—”

“Sire,” he snaps, teeth pressing against your skin. “Please, sire.”

His hand comes around your throat, and he presses his forehead against yours, lips parting.

“Please, what?”

“Please—” your words get caught as he delivers a nasty thrust against you.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Please, sire.”

You let the words out between a gasp, before he’s shoving your thighs down further, his cock reaching a point so deep inside you that you swear you can feel him in your stomach.

“Please,” you beg between strangled sobs. “Please, sire. Please. Please…”

“My good girl.”

Your walls tighten and you’re sure if your body could have its way it’d keep him there, his shaft stuck inside you, every ridge and vein imprinted into your very walls. You should feel ashamed at the thoughts, and maybe when you recover from your sickness you will, but right now all you want is to break underneath him.

—And some part of you does, a tension in your stomach snapping and a body-numbing feeling taking over you. Blood rushes to your head, and your vision becomes cloudy as you look up at him. You think you’re saying something, lips open and tongue moving. Maybe not even words, maybe a string of sounds that blur into one.

Then relief.

A relief washing over you that you haven't felt in days, all while his cock continues to rut into you with a vigour that borders on cruel.

It’s him giving you this relief, his cock spilling inside of you, letting out steady ropes of his seed until you’re full of him. It feels good and your restless body relaxes underneath him, taking everything he has to offer you. Every bit of him until your moans turn to gentle sighs and there’s nothing left for him to give.

“You feel better, don’t you.”

He doesn’t ask, he states it like he already knows like he can read the expression on your face. You wonder what you look like right now, hair tangled and face covered in a mix of dried tears and sweat.

You nod, and your eyes close for a second.

“Yes,” you answer him. “Better.”

And you think that’s it, the end of it.

But as the seconds pass you become acutely aware of how he’s still buried inside of you and how hips, even though they turned into an almost slow drag, haven't stopped moving for even a moment.

“We should keep going then,” he says, and his weight becomes heavier, more relaxed as it falls on top of you, trapping you completely underneath him. “Keep going till you’re cured.”

You open your mouth to speak, to protest—

“ —Till we are certain.” His hips shove into yours, rougher than before and you feel his seed drip out your walls and over his cock. “We want to be certain, don’t we?”

Your lips close, words you were about to say becoming a distant memory as you nod in agreement.

Because Ormund is right. He’s always right and your walls leaking out all over him proves it.

Better to be certain, then to wake up craving more.

tags: @sincerelybambii

You sat at the edge of the bed while the maids laced them, watching the leather bend at your ankle. You had spent your whole life with a tail that moved without instruction, and now you had two limbs that apparently needed buckling into place like cargo.

"They've swallowed my feet," you said.

The younger maid, flour still on her sleeve from some earlier errand, pressed her hand over her mouth.

"They're only boots, my lady."

"Only? They wear little houses. For feet."

That broke her. Her laugh came out in a short burst and caught on the others until three women were smiling at you the way people smile at a child insisting something obvious is a revelation. You didn't mind. You tapped your heels together.

Clack.

You did it again.

Clack.

You were still laughing at yourself when the door opened and every other thought in your head simply stopped.

"Jace!"

You forgot that walking was an unproven skill. Your whole body forgot with you. You slid off the bed, took one confident step, and discovered on the second that your knees had not been told what their job was.

The floor tilted but you grabbed the bedpost with both arms and your heart was still climbing your throat when warm hands closed over your shoulders.

"You have to stop greeting me like you're diving through the sea," Jace said, laughing, though there was real relief under it. "One day I truly won't reach you in time."

"I almost had it."

"You did not."

"I almost-“

"You managed one step."

You looked down at your feet, betrayed. "...I suppose it was."

A cough came from the doorway, deliberate and unhurried, and Jace's ears went red. He stepped back at once.

"Apologies, Mother."

Rhaenyra crossed the room and sat beside you rather than across from you, close enough that you could count the silver threading through her hair. She had very beautiful hair, you concluded in your mind.

"So," she said. "I have heard an extraordinary amount about you."

"Mostly from my son."

Jace groaned from the chair he'd retreated to.

"I should like to hear the rest from you."

You told her your home was wet, which made Jace laugh into his hand. You told her it was bigger than Dragonstone, palaces of coral catching light the way the boots did, only better. Your father was a king. Your mother a queen. Yes, you were truly a princess, and no, Jace had not believed you at first, which had been rude of him.

When she asked about whales your whole face changed. You stretched your arms as wide as they would go, then wider, because no gesture held how big they actually were, how their songs carried for miles the way nothing on land seemed to carry.

"They choose whether to let you ride them."

"And if they don't?"

"They swim away."

"More polite than dragons," Rhaenyra said with a fond smile on her face.

Then Rhaenyra was quiet a moment, watching you.

"And who inherits your father's throne? When the time comes?" She asked out of curiosity.

"My eldest sister. Thallia is Crown Princess."

"Your eldest sister."

"Yes."

"Not your eldest brother or the eldest son?"

You didn't understand the question. "Why would that matter?"

The room went quiet. Jace shifted in his chair. Something moved across Rhaenyra's face, surprise first, then something sadder underneath it, before she smoothed it away.

"It does not matter there," you said, still trying to follow her confusion, "if they are sons or daughters. Whichever child is eldest succeeds. My grandmother ruled, before my father. She still speaks at court more than anyone."

"Your grandmother ruled," Rhaenyra repeated, quiet, like she was hearing an old argument finally settled somewhere she hadn't expected to hear it settled.

"Is it different here?"

Jace went still. Neither of them answered right away.

"Your people," Rhaenyra finally said, with a small sad smile that was entirely genuine, "sound wiser than a great many people on land."

She didn't explain, and you didn't push, though you thought of that silence again much later, once you understood what it had cost her to sit that throne at all.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

It took three days before you could cross a room without Jace's hands hovering at your elbows.

"You expect me to balance," you said on the second morning, glaring at your feet, "on these?"

"They're your legs."

"They are deeply unreliable."

"You've had them two days."

"My tail never behaved this badly."

"Your tail had more practice."

You frowned, unable to argue with that. "...That is fair."

He held both hands out. You took them at once like you always did whenever he offered you something. His hands were warm. Yours stayed cool no matter how long he held them, and he'd mentioned it more than once, like some part of the sea had simply never left you.

"Now. One foot."

"Which one?"

"Either."

"They look the same."

"The left."

"...Which is left?"

Jace closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them there was something helpless and fond in his face.

"We're going to be here a while."

They were. But you learned each other in that time, small pieces at a time. That he bit the inside of his cheek when he was trying not to laugh at you. That he let you win small arguments you were plainly wrong about, because watching you defend a bad answer with total conviction entertained him more than being right did. He learned that you counted under your breath before anything difficult, a leftover habit from timing your breath against tide, and that you flinched at loud sudden noise, a wariness bred into you by years of avoiding surface storms.

By the third evening you managed the length of the corridor under your own power, swaying only slightly, and Jace applauded so hard two passing servants stopped in confusion.

"I did it."

"You did."

"I am a human."

"You are something close."

"I walked."

"You certainly did."

You considered the scale of your achievement. "I think I deserve something."

"And what would that be?"

"I wish to lie down."

He laughed. "You've walked ten minutes."

"It has been exhausting."

That night, once you'd thrown yourself across the bed and declared it the greatest invention humans had produced, once you'd rolled onto your stomach and back again simply because you could, he pulled the blankets over you with a care that sat strange and warm in your chest.

"You tuck people in?"

"So they stay warm."

"Humans think of everything," you murmured, already half asleep.

He smiled and brushed the hair from your face and didn't leave until your breathing had gone slow and even.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

By the fourth day you could walk well enough that Jace decided you should see something of the castle besides your own chambers.

He started small. A spoon was the first wonder, examined with total seriousness while he explained its purpose, and you declared it clever despite his insistence that it was just a spoon. Bread came next, and you fell in love with it instantly, closing your eyes at the first bite. He told you about flour and yeast and the long wait for it to rise, and you listened like he was describing some old and careful magic, which you supposed, in its way, he was.

By the third day of walking around Dragonstone with him he'd stopped correcting you when you called something a wonder, and started waiting for the question before you'd even asked it.

"Jace?"

"Yes?"

"Show me another wonder."

It was on one of these walks that the windows undid you.

You'd spent ten minutes with your palms flat against the glass overlooking Blackwater Bay, watching the water stretch toward a horizon you missed with an ache you hadn't expected.

"The sea," you said. "I can see all of it."

"It is a good view."

"It is outside."

"...Yes."

"And we are inside."

"Also yes."

You leaned closer, breath fogging the glass. "But I can still see it."

"That is rather the purpose of a window."

"A window." You turned the word over. He explained it let the light in. You hummed, thinking, and then your face lit with the particular certainty of someone who has just solved something.

"Oh!"

Before he could ask, you took two determined steps forward.

"You can simply swim through-"

THUNK!

You bounced back with a gasp, both hands to your forehead.

"The sea attacked me!"

For one long moment Jace tried not to laugh. He truly tried.

"I may have assumed you understood how windows worked."

"How was I to understand? In the sea, if I can see somewhere, I can go there!"

"Don't."

"I am trying very hard."

"You are laughing."

"I am absolutely not-"

He broke, doubling over, hand braced on the wall. You folded your arms with what dignity remained to a woman who had just walked into glass.

"I have been grievously injured."

"I'm sorry."

"You are not."

"No."

"You think this is funny."

"I think it may be the funniest thing I have ever seen."

You poked the glass, cautious.

"...It is rather clever."

"It is."

"It still hit me."

"It did."

"I dislike windows."

"I give it until tomorrow."

"...Perhaps."

He was right. By the next afternoon you were pressing your whole hand against every window in the eastern wing, delighted each time, as though the glass might have changed overnight.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Baela offered to take you to the dragons on the fifth morning, catching you in the courtyard where you'd been practicing your walk along the garden wall.

"I could take you to meet her, if you'd like."

You considered this seriously. You'd only seen dragons from a distance so far, huge shapes cutting the sky, and something about the size of them had unsettled you. But Baela's dragon was different, she said. Calmer, less prone to the temperament that ran through the rest of the family's mounts.

"Is she fierce?"

"Moondancer? No. Watchful. Careful. She doesn't like sudden things, but she isn't cruel about it. I think you two might understand each other."

"Not Vermax's kind of dragon, then. Jace said he was fierce." you said, remembering how Jace's voice always changed at that name, careful, like something held rather than spoken.

"No," Baela said gently. "Not like him."

Jace had duties that morning, some matter his mother needed him for, and though he lingered near the door too long, he trusted Baela enough to let you go without him.

Moondancer was resting in the lower yard, pale-scaled, wings folded loose. The moment your footsteps changed rhythm on the stone, her head came up and turned toward you, sharp and immediate.

You stopped walking.

She didn't blink. A low sound rose out of her chest, not quite a growl, and you took a step back on instinct.

"She doesn't know your scent," Baela said quietly, not moving closer herself. "You don't smell like anything she recognizes. Not Targaryen blood, not sea folk she's seen from the air. To her you're unexplained, and dragons are suspicious of what they can't place."

"She thinks I'm dangerous."

"She thinks you're unexplained. There's a difference, though I grant you it doesn't feel that way when she's looking at you like that."

Moondancer's head lowered, still fixed on you, and huffed through her nostrils hard enough to stir dust at your feet. You held still, unsure whether stillness was the right instinct.

Baela laid a hand against the dragon's jaw and murmured something too low to catch. Slowly the tension went out of the huge shoulders. The growl faded into something more like consideration, though her eyes never left you.

"It's alright," Baela said, to the dragon and to you both. "She isn't going to hurt you. She's deciding about you. Dragons take their time deciding. Come closer. Slowly."

You made yourself move, one step at a time, the way you'd learned to walk in the first place. Moondancer tracked you, and when you were close enough to feel the heat off her scales, she huffed again, softer, and lowered her head the rest of the way.

"Hold your hand out. Palm flat. Let her close the distance."

You did, arm unsteady. Nothing happened for a long moment. Then, slow, almost generous, she pressed her nose against your palm.

The breath went out of you all at once.

"There," Baela said, smiling now. "She's decided."

You laughed, giddy, and pressed your palm flatter against warm black scale.

"Hard."

"What did you expect?"

"Harder than whales."

"Probably." Baela was watching you with something soft in her face. "She was uncertain of you. I wanted you to see that, actually, rather than have her simply accept you the way she does family. Trust isn't automatic here. Not even from a dragon. Maybe especially not from a dragon."

You kept stroking slow lines along the scales while she went on.

"I think she likes me."

"I think she does too. That matters more than you know. She's careful who she warms to." She paused. "Moondancer is like that. If she's decided about you, she actually decided."

That evening you found Jace on the cliffside, watching the water the way he did when his thoughts got too heavy to carry indoors.

"I met Baela’s dragon today."

"So Baela took you."

You sat beside him. "Moondancer is very beautiful."

"She is."

"But." You chose your words carefully. "She is lonely."

His smile faded.

"The whales become lonely too. When they lose someone."

He said nothing for a long moment.

"Where I come from, nothing truly bonded is ever lost." You took his hand in both of yours. "Vermax is not lonely anymore. He waits."

"...Waits?"

"For you."

His breath caught. Neither of you spoke, the wind moving between you, the sea whispering against the rocks below. When he finally looked at you, something in his face had come loose.

He kissed you. Not because you were pretty, though you were. Because you'd given him something he hadn't known he was still looking for. Peace.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

The dancing was Jace's idea, and he seemed almost embarrassed to suggest it, which surprised you, given how easily he suggested most things.

"There's a dance," he said, over supper that same evening. "For an upcoming feast. Mother will expect everyone to know the steps. I thought, since you’re here for at least some of it, I should teach you."

"I know how to move," you said, faintly offended on behalf of every hour spent learning to walk.

"This is a different kind of moving."

He was right almost immediately.

He cleared a space in one of the smaller receiving rooms, empty but for a few chairs pushed to the wall, evening light slanting through the windows. There was no musician available, so he hummed the melody himself, which you found more charming than you let on.

"Your hand here." He guided your right hand to his shoulder and took your other hand, settling his palm at your waist with a care that made your breath catch slightly. "We move like this. Step, step, together. Simple."

It was not simple.

Your feet, still suspicious of every request, tangled within four steps. You stumbled into his chest and looked up at him with an exasperation reserved for your own body's many failures.

"This is worse than walking."

"It's the same as walking. With rhythm."

"I do not have rhythm. I have tide. They are not the same thing."

He laughed, tried again, counting softly under his breath. You managed six steps before your ankle rolled and you pitched sideways, and he caught you the way he always seemed braced to.

"Perhaps dancing simply isn't among my gifts."

"Or perhaps you're overthinking your feet." He studied you a moment. "Try this. Stand on my feet."

You stared at him. "That will hurt you."

"It won't."

"You are wearing boots. I am wearing boots. That is considerable weight for your feet."

"Y/N." He said your name the way he did when he wanted you to actually listen. "It won't hurt. I promise. Trust me."

You searched his face for any sign he was being polite about pain and found none.

"...If you yelp, I will feel terribly guilty."

"I won't yelp."

One hand braced hard against his shoulder, you stepped up onto the tops of his boots. He closed his arms around you at once, drawing you in until there was barely any distance left, your face suddenly much closer to his than it had been a moment before.

"There," he said quietly. "Now you don't have to worry about your feet. I'll do the moving. You just hold on."

"This feels like cheating."

"It is entirely cheating. I'd like to see you complain, though."

You didn't. You had nothing to say for a moment, caught between the closeness of him and the low light and the way his hand had settled at the small of your back.

He began to move, slow steps that carried both your weight easily. No stumbling, no tangled feet, just the rhythm of it, his voice counting soft against your hair.

"Step. Step. Together."

You lifted your face and found him already looking down at you rather than at his own feet.

"You're not counting anymore," you said.

"No," he admitted. "I suppose I'm not."

The light slid lower, turning the room the color of honey, and neither of you moved to light a lamp. When the tune he'd been humming trailed off, he kept moving, and so did you, until the only sound was the scuff of his boots against stone and the sea somewhere beyond the windows.

"I think," you said, cheek against his shoulder, "that I may enjoy dancing after all."

"High praise, from a woman who called it worse than walking ten minutes ago."

"I am allowed to change my mind."

"You are." His arms tightened. "I hope you do it often. Where I'm concerned."

You didn't answer that directly. You only pressed closer and let him carry you both through a few more slow turns before the light gave out.

It happened on the sixth evening, halfway through supper.

Your hand froze mid-motion. The goblet slipped and shattered somewhere distant, though you barely heard it over the violet light spreading beneath your skin, down your arms like ink through water.

"No." The word came out barely a whisper.

Jace was on his feet before anyone else drew breath. "No. Not yet. Please, not yet."

The hall went silent. Your legs vanished beneath scale as your tail struck the floor. You tried to speak, to tell him you were frightened too, that six days had never been enough, but your voice was simply gone.

He carried you to the beach himself. At the water's edge, still holding you, he asked the only question that mattered.

"Will I see you again?"

You shook your head. Small. Not no. Only, I don't know.

You kissed him, and he nodded when you pulled back.

"I'll wait."

He lowered you into the water. You swam out and turned back to see him still standing there, soaked to the knee, making no move to leave it.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Chaos met you long before the palace did.

Your eldest sister found you first, cutting through the current so fast she nearly knocked you sideways in his rush to reach you.

"She's alive! She's alive, she's home!"

Her shout carried through the water in the way sound traveled beneath the waves, and within moments the whole Coral Court seemed to be converging on you at once. Sisters. Servants. A pair of guards who abandoned their posts entirely. Someone had already raced ahead to announce your return before you'd even passed through the outer gates, so that by the time you reached the palace proper, half the kingdom had turned out to see you.

Your mother reached you first, pulling you into an embrace so fierce your ribs protested, her hands leaving your shoulders only to frame your face, searching frantically for wounds that weren't there.

"My little pearl. Are you hurt? Tell me you're not hurt."

"I'm not hurt, Mother. I promise."

"Where have you been? One whole weeks with no word, no message, nothing-"

"I know. I'm sorry. I'll explain everything, I promise, just-"

Then your father's voice cut through the crowd, and the whole hall went still.

"Enough."

He sat upon the throne of whalebone and pale coral, and though you'd braced yourself the whole swim home for his anger, the sight of his face still made something in your chest go cold. He did not look relieved. He looked like a man holding something very carefully in place.

"Approach."

You swam forward, chin lifted despite the tremor building low in your stomach.

"Where were you?"

"On land." You confessed.

The word landed like a stone dropped into still water, and you watched it ripple outward through the gathered court, whispers breaking out on every side.

"With a human prince."

The hall erupted. Your father's hand came down hard against the arm of his throne, and the noise died as quickly as it had risen.

"I forbade the surface."

"I know."

"I forbade contact with humans."

"I know, Father, but-"

"And yet you defied both."

"He would have drowned!" Your voice rose to match his now, frustration breaking through the fear. "I found him tangled in his dragon saddle, half unconscious, sinking. I couldn't just leave him there."

"You could have summoned aid. You could have brought him to shore and left him for his own people to find!"

"There was no time!"

“You could have not returned to him!”

“Father-“

"You could have been killed!" His voice cracked on the last word, splintering in a way you'd never once heard from him, and for the briefest moment you saw past the fury to something rawer underneath it. "Do you understand what it is to wait, not knowing whether your child is alive or dead? Do you have any idea-"

He stopped himself. Composed himself, visibly, the way you'd watched him do a hundred times before in court, folding whatever he was feeling back down into something more presentable.

"I forbid you from leaving the palace," he said, quieter now, final. "You will remain here until I say otherwise."

"Father- please-"

"That is my judgment. It is final."

You looked to your mother, hoping for some intervention, but she only shook her head slightly, a warning, not now, and let your siblings draw you gently away from the throne room before you could say anything further to make it worse.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

That night, once the excitement had settled and the palace had quieted, your sisters gathered in your chambers the way they used to when you were small, piled together on cushions of woven kelp and soft anemone fronds, and you finally let yourself talk.

"Tell us everything," Nerissa said, tucking her tail beneath her, eyes bright. "All of it. Don't leave anything out."

"Father will be furious if he hears you encouraging this," you warned.

"Father isn't here." Vaelira grinned. "Talk."

So you did.

You told them about the boots first, because it still made you laugh to think of it, how you'd sat there turning your foot in the lamplight like it belonged to someone else, convinced the leather had swallowed your feet whole. Lysene laughed so hard she had to cover her mouth. You told them about the windows, and Maerys shrieked with delight at the part where you walked directly into the glass, certain you could simply swim through it.

"You didn't."

"I absolutely did. It hurt a great deal. The sea does not warn you, on land, that it has learned to become invisible and solid at the same time."

"That is the single most embarrassing thing I have ever heard," Ceryna said, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes.

"It gets worse. He laughed at me. For a full minute."

"As he should have."

"You are all supposed to be on my side."

"We are on the side of a good story," Nerissa said, unrepentant, "and that is a very good story."

You told them about bread, too, the way flour and yeast and patient waiting turned into something so warm and soft it seemed like a kind of magic in itself. You told them the names of things you'd learned, spoon and doorway and staircase, savoring each word on your tongue like it still belonged to you a little.

"And the prince?" Lysene asked, quieter now, leaning forward. "Tell us about him."

You felt your face warm despite the cool water around you.

"His name is Jacaerys. Jace. He has dark hair and darker eyes, and he is patient in a way I did not expect a prince to be. He taught me to walk. He held my hands for hours while I fell, over and over, and he never once grew impatient with me, not truly, even when I fell for the tenth time in an afternoon."

"Is he handsome?"

"Lysene."

"It's a fair question."

"...Yes," you admitted, and your sisters dissolved into delighted laughter at the way you'd hesitated before saying it, as though the admission had cost you something. "He is handsome. And kind. He held onto me the very first night I nearly fell trying to greet him, and he has been catching me, in one way or another, ever since."

"You love him," Ceryna said. It wasn't a question either.

You were quiet a moment, turning the thought over the way you'd turned the boots over that first night, careful, curious, a little disbelieving of your own certainty.

"I do. I know it sounds impossible. I knew him such a short time."

"It doesn't sound impossible," Nerissa said gently. "It sounds like you."

"He danced with me," you added, softer now, remembering the low gold light of that room, his hand steady at your waist. "Even though I was terrible at it. He let me stand on his own feet so I wouldn't fall, and told me it wouldn't hurt him, and it didn't, and we just moved like that for the longest time, not really dancing at all really, just turning slowly together while the sun went down."

Your sisters had gone quiet, watching you with something soft in their faces, and Maerys reached out to squeeze your hand.

"Father won't understand any of that," she said. "Not yet. But I think it's beautiful."

"I think so too," you admitted. "I just don't know how to make him see it that way."

None of you had an answer for that, not that night, and so you let the conversation drift instead toward smaller things, the shape of human buildings, the strange taste of bread, the way land smelled entirely different from the sea, sharper somehow, full of things that weren't salt and current. Your sisters listened to every word like it was the most fascinating tale they'd ever been told, and for one evening, at least, the trouble waiting for you outside your chambers felt very far away.

It would not stay that way for long.

The pleading started perhaps two weeks later, once the first sting of the confinement had worn thin enough for you to believe, foolishly, that reasoning with your father might work where defiance hadn't.

You found him alone in his private study, a small chamber carved into coral shelving lined with old scrolls and treasures collected over decades of rule, and you gathered your courage before speaking.

"Father."

He looked up, surprised, though he schooled his expression quickly. "Y/N."

"I want to go back."

"No."

"You haven't even heard what I-"

"I know what you're going to ask, and the answer is no." He set down the scroll he'd been reading, giving you his full attention now, which felt somehow worse than being ignored. "You are not returning to the surface."

"I only want to see him. Once. To explain, to say goodbye properly if that's what it must be, but I can't simply vanish on him the way I-"

"He is a human prince, Y/N. His life is measured in decades. Yours is measured in centuries. Whatever this is, it can only ever end one way, and I would rather it end now, cleanly, than after you've given him more of yourself to lose."

"You don't know that."

"I know a great deal more of the world than you do, child, and I am telling you, as your father and as your king, that this ends here."

"That isn't fair."

"Fair has very little to do with keeping you alive."

You left the study with tears burning behind your eyes and did not try again for several days, though the wanting never once quieted, no matter how hard you tried to drown it in distraction.

It happened again nearly two months after you'd returned, this time in front of the whole family at supper, when you could no longer hold the question back.

"Please," you said, setting down your utensils, addressing your father directly across the long coral table. "It has been two months. He doesn't even know if I'm alive. Please, just let me send word, just one message, so he knows-"

"No."

"Father-"

"I said no." His tone had gone hard, final, and around the table your siblings had gone quiet, watching the exchange with the particular stillness of people who know a storm is building. "I will not hear this again."

"You can't just lock me away and pretend the outside world doesn't exist!"

"I can, and I will, if it keeps you safe."

"This isn't safety, this is a cage!"

The word landed harder than you'd meant it to. Your father's expression shuttered completely, and he rose from his seat without another word, leaving the table in a silence so complete you could hear the distant current moving through the coral outside.

Your mother reached for your hand under the table, and though she said nothing, you saw something shift behind her eyes, some old argument with herself finally beginning to tip.

That night your father had you moved to a smaller chamber, deeper within the palace, further from the outer currents that led toward open water, and though no one called it what it was, you understood well enough. It was no longer merely confinement.

It was a cage, exactly as you'd said, and you would spend the following months slowly, quietly, coming undone inside it.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

The weeks that followed blurred into something you would later struggle to remember clearly, the way a fever blurs the days around it.

At first it was only restlessness. You paced the smaller chamber they'd moved you to, drifted through what garden space remained accessible to you, tried to lose yourself in old routines that no longer felt like yours. Your sisters kept visiting, though less often now, their attempts at cheer growing thinner each time.

"Come with us," Lysene said one morning, tugging gently at your hand. "There's a festival in the eastern reef. Lanternfish, dancing, the whole court will be there."

"I don't feel like it."

"You never feel like it anymore."

"Lysene."

"I'm sorry. I only meant-" She stopped herself, studying your face with a worry she didn't quite know how to voice yet. "You used to love festivals."

"I still do," you said, though even you weren't sure it was true.

You went, in the end, because she asked twice more and because refusing felt like more effort than agreeing. You smiled when the lanternfish spiraled gold and slow overhead, laughed when your youngest brother challenged you to a race through the coral, even let him win, the way you always had, just to watch him grin.

But none of it reached anywhere past the surface of you. You could feel the difference yourself, distantly, like watching someone else wear your face.

It was your grandmother who said it aloud first, nearly six weeks in, catching your chin gently in one weathered hand and turning your face toward the light.

"Your scales have gone dull, child."

"They're fine, Grandmother."

"They are not fine. Look." She guided you toward the polished shell mirror in her chambers, and you made yourself look, really look, for the first time in longer than you cared to admit. The dawn pink you'd worn your whole life, vivid enough once that strangers had complimented your mother on it, had faded into something pale and grey, tired in a way scales weren't supposed to be able to look.

"Oh," you said, quietly.

"How long has it been like this?"

"I don't know. I hadn't noticed."

"That," your grandmother said, "is precisely the trouble."

You stopped visiting the sunken ship after that, the one you'd claimed as a child, still half full of bells and pearls and smooth glass stones gathered over years of careful searching. You simply couldn't summon the will to swim there anymore, and when your youngest brother asked why, you told him you were tired, which was true, though not in any way rest could fix.

Then, one grey morning in the communal gardens, surrounded by your family the way you always were when the reef gathered to sing at dawn, your voice caught.

It happened without warning. You opened your mouth for the second verse, the one you'd known since before you could properly speak, and the sound simply wasn't there. A dry, broken rasp came out instead, and then nothing at all.

The silence that followed felt enormous.

"Y/N?" Your mother's hand found your shoulder. "Sweetheart, are you alright?"

You tried again. Nothing came.

Panic rose fast and sharp in your chest, and you fled the gardens before anyone could stop you, swimming hard until your arms ached, until the pressure in your chest matched something closer to how you actually felt.

Your father began trying things after that, in the clumsy, well-meaning way of a man used to solving problems with resources rather than understanding.

"Look," he said one evening, entering your chambers with something cradled carefully in both hands. "The largest pearl ever recovered from the deep trenches. Divers spent three days retrieving it."

You turned it over once in your palm. It was, unmistakably, beautiful.

"It is beautiful," you said, and meant it, though the words came out flat.

He waited, watching your face for the old delight, the rush to add it immediately to your collection the way you always had as a child.

You held it back out to him instead. "I think Mother would like it."

Something shifted behind his eyes, though he said nothing, only took the pearl back and left quietly, and you didn't see the way he stood outside your door afterward for a long moment before finally swimming away.

He assigned you a guard next, a cheerful young merman named Cato who trailed you through the palace with determined good humor, filling silences with jokes and stories and an endless patience you almost resented him for. He meant well. You could see that clearly, even through the fog that had settled over everything. But no amount of company filled the specific shape of what was missing.

"You don't have to entertain me," you told him once, gently, when his stories had trailed off into concerned silence. "I know my father sent you."

"He's worried about you.”

"I know."

"So am I, honestly. You used to laugh at my jokes."

"They still are funny," you managed, and offered him something close to a real smile, though it cost you more than it should have.

By the second month, even that effort had become difficult to sustain, and your father's anger, which had burned hot and certain in the weeks after your return, began, slowly, to curdle into something else entirely. You caught him watching you sometimes from across a room, the particular way you watch something fragile you've already dropped once and are terrified of dropping again.

It was your grandmother who finally forced the reckoning, nearly ten weeks in, when she found your father alone in the throne room long after the rest of the court had dispersed.

"You've imprisoned her," she said, without preamble, settling into the water beside him with the unhurried authority of a woman who had ruled these waters for a hundred years and had long since stopped needing anyone's permission to speak plainly.

"I protected her."

"You protected your fear."

"Mother-"

"You forgot," she said, cutting through whatever defense he'd been building, "that she is not yours to keep. She was never yours to keep. Children are lent to us, not given, and we are meant to raise them strong enough to leave when the time comes, not build the walls higher every time they try."

"She could have died out there. She very nearly died in here instead, and I don't understand how, I did everything a father is supposed to do-"

"You did everything a king is supposed to do," she corrected, gently but without softening it. "Kings protect their kingdoms with walls and rules and punishments. Fathers protect their children by trusting them enough to let go." She reached for his hand, old and steady over his own. "I raised you better than this, my son. I know I did."

He was quiet a long moment, staring at nothing.

"I don't know how to fix it."

"You already do." Her grip tightened. "You simply do not wish to hear the answer, because you're afraid of what it will cost you."

"And if it costs me her, one day, to some human prince and a life I'll never see the shape of?"

"Then it costs you that," she said simply. "Better that, than losing her slowly, right here, while you watch and call it keeping her safe."

He said nothing else that night, but the following evening, restless and unable to settle, he went to check on you himself, something he'd avoided doing directly for weeks, unable to face what he might find.

He found you asleep, curled tightly on your side, both hands drawn up close to your chest around something small. Carefully, gently, he pried your fingers open.

A little bronze dragon pin sat in your palm. Unremarkable by any measure that mattered to a king's treasury. Worn nearly smooth along one edge from the endless small motion of your thumb tracing over it, night after night, for months.

He sat very still for a long time, looking at it, and understood, finally and completely, exactly what he had been doing to you.

He went to his mother again that same night, and together, in the deep archive chambers sunk beneath the palace where the oldest records of your people were kept, they searched for hours through scrolls layered thick with silt and age, looking for anything that might undo the damage he'd caused.

They found it near dawn. A spell older than either of them, older than the current reign, describing a bridge once common between land and sea, back when the two worlds had mingled more freely than either now remembered.

He came to you the following evening, alone. No guards. No crown, which you noticed immediately, because you had never once in your life seen your father without it.

"My little pearl."

You looked up at him from where you'd been sitting, too tired to summon much surprise at the visit.

He knelt. Actually knelt, lowering himself to meet your eyes, and you realized with a small shock that you had genuinely never seen him do this before, not once, not even when you were small enough that it would have made sense.

"I was wrong," he said. "About all of it."

"Father…"

"Let me finish. Please." His voice wavered slightly, and you fell quiet, watching him gather himself. "I thought if I kept you here, beneath the sea, close enough to watch over always, nothing could ever hurt you again. I told myself that was love. I have told myself that was love for two months, while I watched you disappear right in front of me, and I did not let myself understand what I was actually doing until I found this."

He held out his palm. The little bronze pin sat there, dull and worn.

You made a small broken sound and reached for it, closing your fingers around it the way you had every night since you'd smuggled it home.

"I did not realize," your father said quietly, "that I had become the very thing hurting you."

Tears slipped free before you could stop them.

"I should like to meet this prince," he continued, and something almost like humor moved beneath the exhaustion in his voice, fragile but real. "If a human boy has managed to steal the heart of my impossible daughter so thoroughly that she would rather waste away than live without the hope of him, then I suppose I owe it to both of you to at least know the man."

"You mean it?"

"I mean it." He reached out and brushed a strand of hair back from your face, the way he used to when you were small and frightened of nothing more serious than a passing shark. "Perhaps it is time the sea stopped hiding from the land. We have kept ourselves apart long enough, out of fear more than wisdom, and look what it has nearly cost us."

You threw your arms around his neck, sobbing now in earnest, and he held you the way he had when you were small enough to fit entirely against his chest, murmuring something soft against your hair that wasn't quite words at all, just comfort, just relief.

"You will always have the sea," he said eventually, pulling back enough to look at you properly. "Whatever happens with this prince of yours. That will never change."

"It is still my home," you managed, voice raw but steadier than it had been in weeks. "It will always be my home."

"I know." He smiled, sad and warm at once. "But home is not only a place, little pearl. Sometimes it is a person waiting for you. I think it is past time I let you go and find out for certain."

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

Two months had passed since Jace last watched you disappear beneath the waves, and the world above the water had reshaped itself entirely in that time.

Rhaenyra sat the Iron Throne now, the war ended not in the bloodletting everyone feared but in an uneasy peace bought at real cost. Otto Hightower and Aemond had paid for their treasons, along with Hugh Hammer, who'd gambled everything on a stolen dragon and lost it. Aegon lived, stripped of title, his family spared, a mercy that had cost Rhaenyra more than most people would ever know.

Vermithor, sensing something worthy in the grieving prince who'd lost his own dragon, had let Jace claim him.

Jace still mourned Vermax daily, in the quiet hours no one else saw. But he'd learned grief and moving forward weren't opposites, only companions that had to learn to walk the same road. Most evenings, once his duties to the crown were done, he flew out over the darkening water to the beaches of Dragonstone and waited, patient as tide, for some sign you'd return.

His patience was rewarded on an evening like any other, the sky gone violet and gold, when a head broke the surface past the rocks.

He lost his breath entirely.

He'd imagined this so many times over two months that he half suspected his own mind of conjuring it again. But you swam closer, smiling, unmistakably real, and he found himself running into the water without any memory of deciding to move, soaked to the waist by the time he reached you, and you threw your arms around his neck and kissed him before either of you managed a word.

Not that you could have managed one. Your voice had not come back to you, not fully, not since the night grief had stolen it, and even now, mermaid again and streaming water, you had nothing to offer him but the press of your forehead to his and the tears sliding down to mix with the salt already there.

He laughed anyway, disbelieving, hands framing your face like he needed to confirm with touch what his eyes were already telling him.

"You came back."

You nodded, fierce, and pressed another kiss to the corner of his mouth, and then turned slightly, one hand still fisted in his shirt, gesturing back toward open water.

Jace looked past your shoulder as several more heads broke the surface. Your father emerged first, followed by your eldest sister and two others, water streaming from pale hair as they waded toward the shallows.

Jace's arms tightened around you, some old instinct rising in him before he could think better of it. You felt it and pressed a hand flat against his chest, shaking your head, trying to tell him without words that it was alright, that this was meant to happen, that you had begged your father for this yourself.

Your father stopped a few feet away, close enough now that you could see the water still running off his shoulders, the trident held loose in one hand, its head catching the last of the light. He looked at Jace for a long moment without speaking, the kind of look that took its time, that missed nothing. Jace, to his credit, did not look away, though his hand found yours and held it.

"So," your father said at last. "This is the prince." Your father communicated through telepathy, an ability granted to him through the trident he possessed.

You wanted badly to say something, to introduce them properly the way you'd imagined doing a hundred times, and the wanting with no way to answer it sat sharp in your throat. You settled for looking between them, hand tight in Jace's, willing your face to say what your voice couldn't.

Jace understood well enough. "Prince Jacaerys Velaryon, Your Grace." He inclined his head, water still dripping from his sleeves.

Your father's eyes moved over him slowly, taking in the soaked clothes, the salt drying pale at his collar, the way he'd run into the sea without a moment's hesitation the instant you surfaced.

"You went into the water for her."

"I would have gone further, if she'd needed me to."

"Would you." It wasn't quite a question. Your father stepped closer, and you felt Jace's hand tighten slightly around yours, though he held his ground. "My mother tells me you searched for a way to hear her voice, once. That you spent your own coin, your own time, chasing old magic on the strength of nothing but a girl who couldn't promise you anything."

Jace glanced at you, surprised you'd told anyone that story at all, and something in his face softened before he answered.

"She saved my life and asked for no reward like most people would have. She told me she didn't know if she'd ever come back. I decided that was enough to wait for anyway."

"Two months." Said your father.

"Two months." Jace agreed.

Your father studied him a moment longer, and something in his expression eased, though not entirely. His gaze moved to you, and gentled further.

"She stopped singing, while she was away from you. Did you know that?"

Jace's gaze cut to you, alarmed. You looked down, unable to answer, unable even to explain, and his hand found yours again, gripping tighter.

"No," Jace said quietly. "I didn't."

"Her voice simply left her. Grief does that, to our kind, when it goes on too long unanswered." Your father's jaw tightened. "I nearly lost her to it. I want you to understand that plainly, before anything else is said here. Whatever this is between you, it very nearly cost me my daughter's life."

You tugged at Jace's sleeve, shaking your head, trying to soften it, but your father held up a hand, gentle, silencing the protest you couldn't voice anyway.

"I am not saying this to frighten you, or to shame her." His eyes stayed on Jace. "I am saying it because I need to know you understand the weight of what you're asking to hold. She is not a small thing to love carelessly. None of my daughters are. But she especially. She has never once in her life done anything by half measures, and I do not expect that to change simply because the person she's chosen happens to breathe air instead of water."

Jace was quiet a moment, and when he spoke his voice had steadied into something quite serious. "I don't intend to love her carelessly, Your Grace. I flew to that beach every evening for two months not knowing if it would ever mean anything. I'd have kept coming if it took two years."

"Fine words."

"They're not just words."

Something almost like the beginning of a smile moved at the corner of your father's mouth, though he suppressed it. He turned the trident slightly in his grip, and you recognized the old restless habit, the way he turned it when he was deciding something.

“This trident is older than the Fourteen Flames,” he said, changing course, though you suspected he’d already decided what he meant to say next long before he’d surfaced. “It has been carried by every ruler of the Coral Court since before Valyria first learned to bind dragons to its will. It holds old magic. Older than most remember exists at all. It is also, prince, the only reason I can stand here at all and speak words you can understand. My daughter cannot. Not above the water. Not since the grief took her voice.”

You nodded, small, and managed something that might have been the beginning of a rueful smile.

“You have it. Whatever you ask.”

“Swear that her happiness comes before your throne, before your dragons, before your own pride. Swear that if the day comes when she needs the sea and you keep her from it, I will have cause to come for you myself.”

“I swear it.”

“Swear that you will let her go, freely, whenever she wishes to return to us. That you will never make her choose between her family and yours.”

“I swear that too.” Jace’s voice didn’t waver. “She belongs to both worlds now. I have no interest in asking her to pick one.”

Your father held his gaze a moment longer, searching, the way he’d searched your face the night you returned home half drowned in grief. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed, finally, to find it.

“Good,” he said simply. “Then we understand each other.”

He turned to you, and the sternness went out of him all at once, replaced by something much softer.

“Are you certain, little pearl?”

You nodded, hard, both hands closing around his free one.

“Then step back from the water.”

You hesitated a moment, glancing at Jace, and he squeezed your hand once, a small silent reassurance, and you stepped out of the shallows onto dry sand.

Your father raised the trident, its head catching the dying light, and spoke words that belonged to no language you recognized, old and layered, syllables that seemed to hang in the air a moment longer than they should have. For a breath, nothing happened at all, and your heart climbed into your throat.

“Take another step,” your father said, watching you with quiet certainty. “It doesn’t finish until you’ve left the water fully.”

You did.

The change came like a held breath finally released, warmth spreading from your hips downward, and you looked down to see your tail unraveling into legs, solid and entirely your own. Your knees, still faintly unfamiliar even after everything, threatened to buckle, and Jace caught you at once, steadying you exactly the way he had that very first night.

You opened your mouth, and this time, for the first time in two months, sound actually came.

“Jace.”

Just his name. Small, rough, cracked at the edges from disuse. But it was your voice, entirely your own, and the sound of it seemed to undo him completely. He made a small broken noise against your hair, and held you tighter.

“Say it again.”

“Jace.” You laughed, half a sob, pressing your face into his shoulder. “Jace, Jace, Jace.”

“I could listen to that for the rest of my life.”

Your father watched the two of you with an expression that had gone entirely unguarded, pride and grief and relief tangled together, and when you finally lifted your head to look at him, eyes wet, he simply smiled.

“There she is,” he said quietly. “I’d nearly forgotten what your voice sounded like.” He sat on the land now.

“Father.” Just his title, and then you were crossing to him, arms around his neck, and he held you the way he had the night you’d come home, except this time there was no fear in it at all.

“Take care of her,” he said, over your shoulder, to Jace, though his eyes had gone soft. “She is the best of us, whether she believes it or not.”

“I know it,” Jace said. “I’ve known it since the first night she risked her life to save mine.”

Your father huffed something that was almost a laugh, and pulled back to look at you one last time.

“Come home when you wish it. The sea will always know how to find you.”

“I know, Father.” Your voice still rasped faintly, but it was steadying with every word, growing surer. “Thank you. For finding this. For coming.”

“And bring him with you, someday. I find I’d like to know him better. Perhaps I can find something that would help him breathe underwater.”

He stepped back into the shallows, your sister already turning to follow, waving you goodbye, the water closing gently around them as they slipped beneath the surface and were gone, leaving only the widening ripples where they’d been, and the sound of the tide, and Jace’s arms still steady around you on the sand, and your own voice, finally, fully your own again, murmuring his name once more just to hear it answer back.

┈┈・୨ ✦ ୧・┈┈

He'd come prepared this time. A simple dress, folded and waiting on the sand where he'd left it hours earlier in stubborn hope, and he helped you into it with carefully averted eyes while you filled the silence with questions about everything that had happened while you were gone.

"There's more," he said, once you were dressed, once your family had said their farewells and slipped back beneath the waves. "Something I want to show you."

He called for Vermithor, and even after everything you'd already seen on land, nothing prepared you for the sight of the old bronze dragon descending in a slow spiral and landing with a weight you felt travel up through your own new legs before he'd even fully settled.

You went very still, and without thinking, took a step toward him the way you had with Moondancer.

Jace's hand caught your arm.

"Wait."

You stopped. Vermithor's head turned toward you both, and unlike Moondancer's careful wariness, there was something sharper in his attention, a low warning already building in his chest. He'd bonded to Jace only weeks ago, in the middle of a war, out of grief and necessity rather than years of earned trust. He did not know you.

"He's still learning me," Jace said quietly, not taking his eyes off the dragon. "He isn't like Vermax was. Vermithor decides slowly, and he decides once."

"Then perhaps I shouldn't-"

"You should. Just let me go first."

He stepped forward alone, one hand raised, and said a single low word. "Lykiri."

Vermithor's rumble softened, though his eyes stayed on you over Jace's shoulder, unconvinced.

"Come here," Jace said, holding his other hand back without turning. "Slowly. Give me your hand."

You laced your fingers through his and let him draw you forward one step at a time, until you stood close enough to feel the heat off bronze scale even through the cooling air. Vermithor's head lowered, close enough now that your own reflection sat small in each huge eye, the growl in his chest settled into something watchful rather than open threat.

"Easy," Jace murmured, to the dragon and to you both. He guided your hand slowly, his fingers around yours the whole way, until your palm hovered just above scale. "He won't hurt you. I wouldn't let him near you if I thought otherwise. But let him do this on his terms."

Your hand touched down.

Vermithor let out a short rough grunt, his flank shifting under your palm, and for one held breath you were certain he'd pull away or worse. He didn't. He simply stayed, tolerating you, wary but not growling, the way an old careful animal accepts something it hasn't decided to like but has decided, for now, not to fear.

"There," Jace said, relief plain in his voice. "That's more than I expected. He didn't do that for my mother the first time."

"I don't think he's decided about me yet."

"No. But he didn't decide against you either. With him these days, that's worth quite a lot."

He helped you climb up first, settling you in front, then swung up behind you, his arms coming around you on both sides to reach the reins, so you sat with the whole open sky ahead and his chest solid at your back.

"Hold the strap there," he said, close to your ear. "And me, if you'd rather. I'm not going anywhere."

You gripped the leather with one hand and reached back to hold his arm with the other, and Vermithor's wings unfurled with a dry rushing sound, still grumbling faintly at the whole arrangement, but rising all the same.

The first beat of those wings sent a lurch through your stomach unlike anything the sea had ever given you, not even your fastest dives chasing whales through open water. The sand fell away fast. You gasped, fingers tightening on his arm, and he reached back to rest his hand briefly over yours.

"I have you. You won't fall."

You believed him completely.

Dragonstone spread out beneath you, towers and walls rendered small and careful, like something carved rather than built. You had walked those halls. You had fallen against those windows. You had learned to stand upright in those corridors, and now you were looking down at all of it from a height that made your chest ache with something too big for one word.

But it was the sea that undid you.

You had known the ocean your whole life from inside it, surrounded by it in every direction. You had never once seen its shape. From above, in the fading light, it stretched out silver and endless, catching the last of the sunset in broken streaks of gold, the swells rolling in patterns you'd never been able to see from beneath the surface. You could see all of it at once, the way it curved toward the horizon, the way moonlight was already gathering thin along its edges.

"It's so big," you said, voice cracking slightly, not from fear this time. "I lived inside it my whole life and I never knew it looked like this from above!"

Jace turned his head just enough to catch your face. Whatever he saw there softened something in his own.

"Is it what you imagined?"

"I never imagined it at all. I didn't know there was a shape to imagine."

Vermithor banked in a long unhurried turn, and you laughed, a bright startled sound half torn away by the wind, gripping tighter out of instinct rather than fear. Below, the water rippled where his shadow passed, as if the sea recognized something familiar overhead.

"There," Jace said, pointing down and to the left. "That's where you pulled me out from deaths door. The gullet."

"I am glad I did! The pretty prince! "

You swatted his arm, laughing, and he laughed with you, the sound scattered by the wind before it could land anywhere.

You flew a long while after that, following the coastline as the last color drained from the sky and stars came up one by one. You watched fishing boats far below, small lanterns swaying at their bows. You watched a pod of dolphins break the surface in a slow arc, and felt an old instinct pull at you even from this height, before it passed and left only wonder behind it.

"I used to watch birds," you said, cheek against his shoulder. "From below. I always wondered what the sea looked like to them."

"And now you know."

"Now I know." You tightened your arms around him, feeling his breathing steady beneath your hands, his warmth a fixed point against the huge cold openness of the sky. "I think I understand something now."

"What's that?"

"Why you waited on that beach every evening. Even when I couldn't tell you if I'd come back." You turned your face into the wind. "It's a little like flying, isn't it. Loving someone. You have to trust there's something holding you up even when you can't see it."

Jace was quiet a moment.

"I always saw you," he said. "Even when I didn't know if you'd come back. That was enough to keep watching the water for."

You pressed a kiss to his shoulder through the fabric of his coat, and he reached back once more to rest his hand over both of yours at the strap.

Vermithor began to drop lower, the lights of the Red Keep growing warmer ahead, torches lining the walls. The wind gentled as the open sky narrowed back down toward something more solid, more like a world you now, somehow, belonged to as much as the sea.

"Are you ready?" Jace asked, as the courtyard rose to meet you.

You thought of everything the sea had given you. Your family. The whales. The long patient songs that had shaped your whole life before this one. And you thought of boots, and windows, and bread, and a bronze pin worn smooth by your own thumb, and a boy who had waited on a beach for two months without once doubting you'd return.

"Yes," you said, and meant it entirely.

Vermithor's feet hit stone with a shudder that traveled up through your whole body, and Jace helped you down, hands steady at your waist, and for a moment you simply stood there together, catching your breath.

Above you, the last color faded from the horizon, and the sea, distant now but never out of reach, went on turning beneath the stars, patient and waiting, the way it always would.

At last, you had returned with the prince.

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The first gift Daemon Targaryen ever gave his daughter was not a doll.

It was a Valyrian steel dagger.

“You cannot give that to an infant,” Rhaenyra said, staring down at the silver-haired babe sleeping peacefully in her father’s arms.

Daemon looked at the weapon, then at his daughter.

“She will grow into it.”

“She cannot even hold up her own head.”

“All the more reason to begin preparing her.”

The dagger was confiscated.

The second gift was a tiny silver crown, custom-made to fit a head that had barely grown enough hair to hold it in place.

The third was an entire chest filled with gowns sewn from silk imported across the Narrow Sea.

The fourth was a pale mare from the Reach, purchased before you had even learned to walk.

By the time you were five, you owned more jewelry than most noblewomen acquired in a lifetime.

By the time you were seven, Daemon had commissioned a private library because you once mentioned that the Red Keep’s collection did not contain enough stories about the stars.

By the time you were ten, he had purchased an entire ship after you said you liked the carved seahorse on its prow.

“You are going to ruin her,” Rhaenyra warned him.

Daemon watched as you stood on the docks, delightedly waving to the sailors now assigned to your entirely unnecessary vessel.

“She is a princess.”

“She does not need a ship.”

“She liked it.”

“She liked the carving.”

“And now she has both.”

Rhaenyra sighed.

Daemon smiled.

There were few things in this world that Daemon Targaryen loved gently.

You had always been one of them.

You were his first daughter, born small and quiet, with a soft heart that seemed entirely at odds with the fire in your blood. Where Daemon met the world with sharpened steel and bared teeth, you greeted it with patient smiles and open hands.

You apologized when servants bumped into you.

You carried spiders outside rather than allowing guards to crush them.

You cried when a kitchen boy burned his hand and remained beside him until the maester arrived.

Daemon did not understand where such sweetness had come from.

He protected it viciously.

The only thing he had never been able to give you was a dragon.

An egg had been placed in your cradle, as tradition demanded.

It had never hatched.

A second was brought from Dragonstone when you were three.

It remained cold.

When you were old enough, Daemon walked with you through the caverns beneath the Dragonmont, searching for some sign that one of the unclaimed dragons might accept you.

None did.

You had said nothing as the keepers led you away.

You had held your head high through supper and smiled when your younger sisters spoke excitedly of flying.

Only after the castle had gone quiet did Daemon find you curled beside the stone hearth in your chambers, your face hidden against your knees.

He lowered himself beside you without speaking.

For a while, you both watched the flames.

“I am sorry,” you whispered eventually.

Daemon’s expression darkened.

“For what?”

“For disappointing you.”

The words were barely audible.

They wounded him more deeply than any blade ever had.

Daemon turned toward you.

“You have never disappointed me.”

“I am a Targaryen who cannot claim a dragon.”

“You are my daughter.”

You glanced at him through tear-damp lashes.

“That should make it worse.”

“It makes it irrelevant.”

“But everyone else—”

“Everyone else is not you.”

Your lower lip trembled.

Daemon reached out, wiping a tear from your cheek with his thumb.

“The dragons are old, stubborn creatures,” he said. “They are proud and temperamental, and most of them possess less sense than a drunken sellsword.”

Despite yourself, you gave a watery laugh.

“They have overlooked the greatest treasure in Westeros.”

“You do not mean that.”

“I have never meant anything more.”

He rose and extended his hand.

“Come.”

“Where are we going?”

“To show you that you are not without a dragon.”

It was well past midnight when Daemon led you onto the darkened fields beyond Dragonstone.

The wind coming off the sea pulled strands of silver hair across your face. You clutched your cloak around your shoulders and followed your father toward the enormous shape resting beneath the cliffs.

Caraxes raised his long head before you had taken more than a dozen steps.

The Blood Wyrm’s rumble moved through the earth beneath your slippers.

You stopped.

Daemon did not.

Caraxes had always known you.

When you were a babe, Daemon had carried you close enough for the dragon to breathe your scent. The dragonkeepers had protested until Caraxes lowered his head and gently pressed the warm end of his snout against your tiny blanket.

Your first word had not been father.

To Daemon’s everlasting offense, it had been something resembling Caraxes.

You had spent your childhood slipping the dragon pieces of roasted meat from your plate, brushing soot from his scales, and falling asleep beside his warm flank while Daemon trained nearby.

Caraxes had never been yours.

Yet he had always behaved as though you belonged to him.

That night, he moved toward you, his long neck curving until his enormous head rested in the grass at your feet.

You placed a trembling hand against his scales.

Caraxes released a low, crooning sound.

“He knows,” Daemon said.

“Knows what?”

“That you are upset.”

Your eyes filled again.

“I wish he had chosen me.”

Daemon stepped behind you, resting his hands on your shoulders.

“He did.”

You looked back at him.

“Not in the way dragons choose riders,” he continued. “But he has known you since the day you were born. He would burn armies for you.”

Caraxes huffed warm air across your skirts.

Daemon’s mouth curved.

“And apparently he would also like you to scratch beneath his jaw.”

You laughed and obeyed.

The Blood Wyrm’s eyes drifted half-closed with pleasure.

“Do you wish to fly?” Daemon asked.

You hesitated.

“Now?”

“The sky does not close at night.”

You looked from him to Caraxes.

“But I am not his rider.”

“No,” Daemon agreed. “You are mine.”

He lifted you into the saddle before climbing behind you.

Daemon wrapped one arm securely around your waist as Caraxes rose.

The first rush of wind stole the breath from your lungs.

Then Dragonstone disappeared beneath you.

The sea became a sheet of black glass, the moon scattering silver across its surface. The clouds opened around you, cool mist brushing your cheeks. Your father’s arm remained firm around your middle, his chest warm against your back.

Caraxes climbed higher.

You laughed.

The sound carried into the night.

Daemon lowered his head beside yours.

“Still believe you have no dragon?”

You rested your hands against the leather of the saddle and looked down at the world spread beneath you.

“No.”

After that, you flew with Daemon whenever he would allow it.

Which was often.

He took you across Blackwater Bay at sunrise, over the forests of the crownlands in autumn, and above the towers of King’s Landing when the streets below glittered with festival lanterns.

You sat before him as a child and behind him when you grew older, your arms wrapped securely around his waist.

Caraxes always seemed to know when you were coming.

He would lift his head before you appeared and release a pleased cry that echoed through the Dragonpit.

The dragonkeepers whispered that the Blood Wyrm was calmer when you were near.

He allowed you to touch his face, clean the smaller scales around his horns, and sleep against him during long summer afternoons.

Once, after a lord’s son mocked you for failing to claim a dragon, Caraxes snapped at the boy so fiercely that he fainted.

Daemon gave the dragon an entire sheep as a reward.

“You encouraged him,” Rhaenyra accused.

“I did nothing.”

“You told Caraxes, and I quote, ‘Well done.’”

“He showed restraint.”

“The boy wet himself.”

“I said restraint, not mercy.”

The court continued to pity the princess without a dragon.

You never understood why.

You had Caraxes.

You had your father.

And between them, no one in the Seven Kingdoms could have made you feel unprotected.

Then came Gwayne Hightower.

The betrothal was announced during a council meeting.

Daemon nearly overturned the table.

“A Hightower?”

King Viserys closed his eyes.

“It is a politically advantageous match.”

“It is an insult.”

“It will strengthen ties between our houses.”

“It will strengthen my desire to commit murder.”

“Daemon.”

“My daughter will not be handed to some green-cloaked peacock because Otto Hightower wishes to tighten his grip on the throne.”

Across the room, Otto’s expression hardened.

“This is not about my ambitions.”

“Everything you do is about your ambitions.”

“Father,” you said softly.

Daemon turned.

You sat near Rhaenyra, your hands folded neatly in your lap.

Unlike your father, you had not reacted with anger.

You looked nervous, certainly, but not afraid.

Daemon’s face softened by a degree.

“You do not have to marry him,” he said.

Viserys sighed.

“She has not even met him properly.”

“Then she is already better off.”

“Daemon,” Rhaenyra warned.

“What?”

“You are behaving like a child.”

“I am behaving like a father.”

“A deeply irrational father.”

“My daughter deserves better than a Hightower.”

Otto lifted his chin.

“My son is an anointed knight from an ancient and respected house.”

“He wears green.”

“Green is our house color.”

“Exactly.”

You pressed your lips together.

Daemon’s gaze snapped toward you.

“Are you laughing?”

“No.”

“You are.”

“I am not.”

Your shoulders shook.

The sight did nothing to improve his mood.

The first time Gwayne arrived at the Red Keep after the announcement, Daemon made him wait outside the council chamber for nearly an hour.

Entirely on purpose.

“He has been standing there since the bells,” you reminded him.

Daemon continued sharpening Dark Sister.

“Has he?”

“You know he has.”

“How unfortunate.”

“Father.”

“He should develop patience. Marriage requires a great deal of it.”

“Being married to me?”

“Being married beneath my supervision.”

When Gwayne was finally allowed inside, he entered with the composed expression of a man determined not to acknowledge that he had been deliberately insulted.

He was dressed in the deep green of his house, his auburn hair swept back from his face. He bowed first to you, then to Daemon.

“My princess.”

“Ser Gwayne.”

His eyes met yours.

For a brief moment, you forgot your father was glaring at him from three paces away.

Gwayne smiled.

It was not the polished smile of a courtier.

It was warm and slightly nervous.

You smiled back.

Daemon’s chair scraped sharply against the floor.

“So,” he said.

Gwayne looked at him.

“So?”

“You wish to marry my daughter.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

Gwayne glanced at you again.

Daemon noticed.

His scowl deepened.

“I have admired the princess for some time.”

“Admired what?”

“Her kindness.”

Daemon blinked.

It was not the answer he had expected.

Gwayne continued carefully.

“I have seen her visit the lower courtyards with food during winter. I watched her sit with an injured stable hand until a maester came. I have heard servants speak of her with genuine affection rather than obligation.”

You stared at him.

You had not known he had noticed any of those things.

“And you believe that qualifies you to marry her?” Daemon asked.

“No.”

“Good.”

“I believe loving her might.”

The room fell silent.

Daemon leaned back.

“You have met her twice.”

“Four times.”

“You were counting?”

“Yes.”

“That is unsettling.”

“I thought it was romantic,” you murmured.

“It was,” Rhaenyra said from the doorway.

Daemon glared at both of you.

“No one asked.”

The unfortunate truth was that Gwayne Hightower was very difficult to dislike.

Daemon tried.

He tried with admirable dedication.

He arranged early morning training sessions and struck Gwayne hard enough to leave bruises beneath his armor.

Gwayne returned the next morning.

Daemon spent an entire evening describing, in vivid detail, every terrible thing he would do if Gwayne caused you pain.

Gwayne listened patiently.

When Daemon finished, he asked whether the list had been arranged by likelihood or severity.

You laughed so suddenly that wine nearly came from your nose.

Daemon did not find it amusing.

Gwayne remembered the names of servants.

He thanked cooks.

He listened to Viserys discuss old Valyria for nearly two hours without once appearing bored.

He brought flowers for Rhaenyra and a book of Dornish poetry for Helaena.

He treated you with a gentle attention that never felt rehearsed.

When you spoke, he listened.

When you became quiet in crowded rooms, he did not demand that you entertain him. He simply stood beside you until you felt comfortable again.

He learned that you liked candied lemons but disliked lemon cakes.

He learned that you preferred silver jewelry to gold.

He discovered that you read when you could not sleep and began bringing you books from Oldtown.

Once, after hearing you mention that a ribbon on a market stall was pretty, he returned to purchase it.

“You did not need to do that,” you said as he tied the pale blue silk around your wrist.

“I know.”

“Then why did you?”

“Because you liked it.”

The answer sounded so much like something Daemon would say that you stared at him.

Gwayne’s brows rose.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

From the other side of the courtyard, Daemon watched with narrowed eyes.

Rhaenyra followed his gaze.

“You like him.”

“No.”

“You do.”

“I tolerate his continued existence.”

“He reminds you of yourself.”

Daemon looked offended.

“He does not.”

“He buys her unnecessary gifts because she looks pleased.”

“That proves nothing.”

“He threatened a lord last week for speaking poorly of her.”

“The lord deserved it.”

“And now he is standing beneath the sun holding a parasol because she mentioned being warm.”

Daemon turned back toward you.

Gwayne held the parasol in one hand and your basket of flowers in the other while you knelt beside a patch of lavender.

He looked perfectly content.

Daemon frowned.

“He is holding it incorrectly.”

“Of course.”

Your favorite visits were to the Dragonpit.

Gwayne was less enthusiastic.

It was not that he was a coward.

He simply possessed a sensible awareness that Caraxes was a fire-breathing creature large enough to swallow him whole.

Daemon took great pleasure in this.

The first time Gwayne accompanied you, Caraxes raised his head and fixed one enormous golden eye on the knight.

Gwayne stopped walking.

Daemon smiled.

“Something wrong?”

“Not at all.”

“You have gone pale.”

“It is warm.”

“It is never warm in here.”

You slipped your hand into Gwayne’s.

“He will not hurt you.”

Caraxes released a rumbling growl.

Gwayne watched a thin curl of smoke rise from his nostrils.

“That does not sound particularly reassuring.”

“He is only curious.”

“He appears hungry.”

“He has already eaten,” Daemon said.

Gwayne glanced at him.

Daemon smiled wider.

“Mostly.”

“Father,” you chided.

Caraxes lowered his head toward you.

You released Gwayne’s hand and approached without hesitation, pressing both palms against the dragon’s warm snout.

The Blood Wyrm crooned.

The terrible sound softened into something almost affectionate.

Gwayne’s fear momentarily gave way to wonder.

You stood before one of the largest and most dangerous creatures in Westeros, your silver hair catching the glow of the torches, your forehead resting gently against crimson scales.

Caraxes was careful with you.

Almost impossibly so.

“He loves her,” Gwayne said quietly.

Daemon’s smugness faded.

“Yes.”

“Did he ever try to bond with her?”

“No. His bond is mine.”

Gwayne nodded.

“But she is part of you.”

Daemon looked at him.

Caraxes shifted, curling his long neck around you protectively.

“So he considers her his,” Gwayne finished.

Daemon studied the knight for a moment.

“You understand dragons better than I expected.”

“My sister was fond of telling me that creatures often understand love more easily than men do.”

“Your sister is irritatingly correct.”

You turned.

“Gwayne, come closer.”

He hesitated.

Caraxes stared.

You held out your hand.

Gwayne had faced tourneys, battlefields, and your father’s interrogation.

Approaching Caraxes was somehow worse.

Still, he moved toward you.

Slowly.

Caraxes growled when he came within several feet.

Gwayne stopped.

You reached back and took his hand.

“He is protective.”

“So I have gathered.”

“He needs to know I trust you.”

“And how do we convince him of that?”

You guided Gwayne’s hand toward Caraxes’s snout.

“Try not to smell frightened,” Daemon advised.

Gwayne shot him a look.

“That is tremendously helpful.”

Your laughter seemed to settle the dragon.

Caraxes’s growl faded.

Gwayne’s palm finally touched one crimson scale.

The Blood Wyrm huffed warm air over him.

Gwayne’s cloak flew backward.

He remained standing.

After a moment, Caraxes pulled away without attempting to bite off any part of him.

You beamed.

“He likes you.”

“He tolerated me.”

“From Caraxes, that is practically a declaration of love.”

Daemon crossed his arms.

“He has poor judgment.”

Caraxes turned his head and knocked Daemon sideways with his snout.

Gwayne coughed into his fist to disguise his laughter.

You did not bother disguising yours.

A few weeks later, Gwayne watched you fly for the first time.

Daemon had invited him to observe.

Invite was perhaps the wrong word.

Daemon had informed him that if Gwayne intended to marry a Targaryen princess, he should witness what he was attempting to take away from Dragonstone.

The implication was clear.

You mounted Caraxes behind your father, wrapping your arms around Daemon’s waist.

Your gown had been replaced by riding leathers embroidered with silver thread. Your hair was braided away from your face, and excitement made your eyes shine.

Daemon looked over his shoulder.

“Ready?”

“Always.”

Caraxes launched himself from the cliff.

Gwayne’s heart stopped.

The dragon dropped toward the sea before his wings opened.

Your laughter reached the cliffs.

Gwayne stood frozen, watching Caraxes climb into the sky.

You looked small against him.

Small, but not afraid.

Daemon guided the dragon through the clouds, then turned back toward Dragonstone.

As Caraxes swept low above the cliffs, you stretched one arm into the wind.

You looked radiant.

Not like a princess who had been denied a dragon.

Like a woman who had never needed to own the sky to belong in it.

When Caraxes landed, Gwayne approached as you climbed down.

Daemon placed both hands around your waist and lowered you safely to the earth, though you were perfectly capable of dismounting alone.

Your cheeks were flushed from the wind.

“Well?” you asked Gwayne.

He stared at you.

“Well what?”

“What did you think?”

“I think I understand why poets struggle.”

You blinked.

Daemon groaned.

Gwayne stepped closer.

“There cannot possibly be words for how beautiful you looked.”

Your cheeks turned warmer.

Daemon moved between you.

“There are many words. None need to be spoken.”

“Father.”

“What?”

“You invited him.”

“I invited him to watch. Not to become unbearable.”

The days passed more quickly after that.

Your betrothal no longer felt like something arranged by kings and councils.

It felt like walks through the gardens.

It felt like Gwayne carrying books to your chambers because he had noticed you were tired.

It felt like quiet conversations beside the sea and his cloak around your shoulders when the wind turned cold.

It felt like his fingers brushing yours beneath the supper table.

It felt like laughter.

It felt, increasingly, like love.

One afternoon, Gwayne found you alone on a balcony overlooking Blackwater Bay.

Caraxes and Daemon were distant shapes in the sky.

You watched them until they disappeared behind the clouds.

“Do you ever wish he were yours?” Gwayne asked.

You knew immediately whom he meant.

“Caraxes?”

“Yes.”

You considered the question.

“When I was younger.”

“And now?”

You smiled.

“No.”

Gwayne leaned beside you.

“Why not?”

“Because loving something does not always mean possessing it.”

His gaze settled on your face.

You continued watching the sky.

“Caraxes belongs to my father. Their bond is something ancient and rare. I would never want to change it.”

“But you love him.”

“Very much.”

“And he loves you.”

“In his own terribly loud way.”

Gwayne smiled.

You turned toward him.

“Does it concern you?”

“What?”

“That I have no dragon.”

“No.”

“Your family may prefer—”

“My family is not marrying you.”

His answer came without hesitation.

Gwayne reached for your hand.

“You are kind when you have every reason to be proud. You are gentle in a family that has taught the world to fear its fire. You make servants smile when you enter a room, and children follow you through the halls because they know you will stop for them.”

Your eyes stung.

“You sit beside dragons without needing to command them,” he said. “You do not need one to prove who you are.”

You lowered your gaze.

Gwayne lifted your hand and pressed his lips to your knuckles.

“I would choose you if you had ten dragons.”

He kissed your hand again.

“I would choose you if you had none.”

Naturally, this was the precise moment Daemon landed in the courtyard below.

He looked up.

Saw Gwayne kissing your hand.

And shouted something in High Valyrian that made Caraxes roar.

The wedding was held on Dragonstone.

Daemon had initially insisted it take place nowhere else.

“If the Hightowers wish to attend, they know where to find us.”

Otto objected.

Daemon was delighted.

The ceremony was beautiful, though not small.

Nothing involving Daemon’s daughter could ever be small.

Silver banners moved in the sea wind. Thousands of white flowers covered the stone walkways. Musicians played from the balconies, and enough food had been prepared to feed half of King’s Landing.

“You said it would be intimate,” Rhaenyra remarked.

Daemon surveyed the crowded hall.

“It is.”

“There are six hundred guests.”

“I excluded several houses.”

You wore silver silk embroidered with pearls.

Your hair was arranged in Valyrian braids, the small crown Daemon had given you as a child resting upon your head after being remade to fit you.

Around your throat hung a ruby pendant in the shape of a dragon.

A gift from your father.

When Daemon came to escort you, he stopped in the doorway.

You smiled nervously.

“Is something wrong?”

He said nothing.

His eyes moved over your gown, your crown, your face.

For once, Daemon Targaryen appeared entirely without words.

“Father?”

“You look like your mother,” he said quietly.

Your expression softened.

Daemon approached and adjusted a strand of hair that did not need adjusting.

“I can still end this.”

You laughed.

“No.”

“I could.”

“I know.”

“One word, and Gwayne Hightower will never cross your path again.”

“Because you will send him away?”

Daemon looked toward the window.

“Something like that.”

You took his hand.

“I love him.”

His jaw tightened.

It was not anger.

Not truly.

Daemon had spent your whole life ensuring that you never had to reach for anything he could not give you.

Now you had found something beyond his keeping.

A life that would carry you away from him.

“I know,” he said.

“And he loves me.”

“I know that, too.”

“You admit it?”

“Do not make me repeat myself.”

You kissed his cheek.

Daemon closed his eyes.

For a moment, he held you as he had when you were little—one hand at the back of your head, the other wrapped tightly around you.

“You will always have a home here,” he murmured.

“I know.”

“If he displeases you, come back.”

“Father.”

“If his family displeases you, come back.”

“I will.”

“If Oldtown is too cold—”

“It is warmer than Dragonstone.”

“Then if it is too warm.”

You laughed against him.

Daemon sighed.

“Visit often.”

“I promise.”

When you entered the hall on your father’s arm, Gwayne forgot to breathe.

Daemon noticed.

“Hm.”

Rhaenyra stood nearby.

“What?”

“He looks frightened.”

“He looks in love.”

“Similar conditions.”

Gwayne’s eyes remained fixed on you as you approached.

He looked at you as though the hall had emptied.

As though the music had faded.

As though you were the only thing left in the world.

Daemon placed your hand in his.

He did not release it immediately.

Gwayne waited.

Daemon tightened his grip.

“Father,” you whispered.

“I am considering my options.”

Gwayne, to his credit, did not attempt to pull you away.

Finally, Daemon released your hand.

“If she cries,” he said under his breath, “Caraxes will find you.”

Gwayne nodded solemnly.

“I assumed as much.”

“If she is unhappy—”

“Father.”

“—Caraxes will find you.”

“You already said that.”

“It bears repeating.”

The vows were spoken.

The cloak was placed around your shoulders.

When Gwayne kissed you, the hall erupted in applause.

Daemon did not clap.

He was too busy staring at Gwayne with the expression of a man reconsidering the political consequences of murder.

At the feast, Gwayne barely left your side.

He brought you wine, though you had not asked.

He moved your chair away from the draft.

He remembered to place candied lemons on your plate.

Daemon watched all of it.

Rhaenyra leaned toward him.

“You approve.”

“I do not.”

“You cried during the vows.”

“There was smoke from the torches.”

“You were standing outside.”

“It traveled.”

“Of course.”

Late that evening, Gwayne found Daemon alone on the cliffs.

The sea spread dark beneath them.

Caraxes rested nearby, one golden eye half-open.

Gwayne approached cautiously.

“I wanted to thank you.”

Daemon did not turn.

“For threatening you?”

“For trusting me with her.”

“I do not trust you.”

“You allowed the marriage.”

“Viserys allowed the marriage.”

“You could have stopped it.”

Daemon glanced at him.

They both knew this was true.

Gwayne looked toward the open doors of the hall.

Inside, you were laughing with your sisters.

“I know you believe no one is worthy of her.”

“No one is.”

“I agree.”

That earned Gwayne his full attention.

“I cannot promise that she will never be sad,” Gwayne continued. “Or that our life will always be easy. But I can promise that she will never question whether she is loved.”

Daemon remained silent.

“I will listen when she speaks,” Gwayne said. “I will protect her without attempting to cage her. I will bring her home whenever she asks.”

“Home?”

“Here.”

Daemon’s expression shifted.

“And when she wishes to fly,” Gwayne added, looking toward Caraxes, “I will never ask her to remain on the ground for my comfort.”

The Blood Wyrm lifted his head.

Gwayne swallowed.

Daemon stepped closer.

“My daughter has spent much of her life believing there was something missing from her because no dragon chose her.”

“There is nothing missing from her.”

Daemon studied his face.

“No?”

Gwayne looked through the open doors.

You had noticed them now.

Your eyes found his across the distance.

You smiled.

Gwayne smiled back.

“She has always been the sun,” he said. “Dragons have simply been circling her.”

Daemon followed his gaze.

His daughter.

His little girl.

Still smiling.

Still safe.

Still loved.

“Take care of her,” Daemon said.

“With my life.”

“If she misses Dragonstone—”

“I will bring her.”

“If she wishes to stay for months—”

“I will wait.”

“If she asks for a dragon—”

“I will remind her that she already has one.”

Caraxes released a low rumble.

Gwayne glanced toward him.

“Two, perhaps.”

Daemon almost smiled.

Almost.

“Welcome to the family.”

Gwayne’s expression softened.

“Thank you.”

“I was speaking to Caraxes.”

The dragon huffed.

Gwayne laughed.

Daemon did not, but some of the sharpness left his face.

Behind them, your voice carried across the terrace.

“Gwayne!”

He turned immediately.

You stood beneath the torchlight, one hand holding your skirts.

“Come dance with me.”

Gwayne bowed to Daemon.

“Prince Daemon.”

“Hightower.”

Gwayne returned to you.

You took his hand and pulled him into the hall.

Daemon watched as Gwayne rested one hand at your waist.

You whispered something that made your husband laugh.

Caraxes lowered his head beside Daemon.

“She is happy,” Daemon murmured.

The Blood Wyrm crooned.

“Yes,” Daemon said. “I know.”

the end.

-----------------

Bonus Scene: An Unexpected Visitor

Your new home was a Hightower estate several hours beyond King’s Landing.

It was not Oldtown—not yet.

Gwayne had suggested spending your first year somewhere closer to Dragonstone so that the change would not feel quite so severe.

He pretended the decision had been practical.

You knew better.

The estate was beautiful.

The stone walls were covered in climbing roses. The gardens stretched toward a clear lake, and your chambers had been arranged with every comfort Gwayne knew you preferred.

He had filled one room with books.

He had ordered blue silk curtains because they reminded him of the ribbon he once tied around your wrist.

He had even instructed the kitchens to keep candied lemons prepared.

You loved your new home.

Still, there were mornings when you woke expecting to hear Caraxes outside.

On those mornings, Gwayne held you a little closer.

“You miss them,” he said one evening.

You sat together beneath a tree overlooking the lake, your head resting against his shoulder.

“A little.”

“Your father or the dragon?”

“Yes.”

Gwayne laughed.

“You know we can return whenever you wish.”

“We visited last week.”

“Then we will visit again.”

“My father will think you cannot survive without his supervision.”

“Your father already thinks that.”

You smiled.

Gwayne kissed the top of your head.

A deep roar shook the sky.

Every bird in the trees scattered at once.

You sat upright.

Gwayne went still.

Another roar followed.

It was long, sharp, and painfully familiar.

Your face brightened.

“No.”

Gwayne stared toward the horizon.

A red shape moved through the clouds.

“No,” he repeated.

You were already on your feet.

“Caraxes!”

The Blood Wyrm descended over the estate.

Servants screamed.

Guards scattered.

Horses broke free from their handlers and fled toward the fields.

Caraxes swept over the towers so low that several roof tiles tore loose beneath the force of his wings.

Gwayne stood frozen beside the tree.

“This cannot be happening.”

You ran toward the courtyard.

Caraxes landed in the center of the gardens, crushing a fountain and half of a carefully maintained hedge beneath his claws.

He lifted his head and released a triumphant cry.

You laughed.

“Caraxes!”

The dragon lowered himself the moment he saw you.

You reached him and threw your arms as far around his snout as you could manage.

Caraxes crooned so loudly that the windows trembled.

“You came to see me,” you whispered, scratching beneath his jaw.

His golden eyes drifted closed.

Gwayne approached with extreme caution.

Behind him, guards stood with weapons raised.

“Lower those,” he ordered.

One of the men stared at him.

“My lord, the dragon—”

“Belongs to my wife’s father.”

Caraxes opened one eye.

Gwayne corrected himself.

“And apparently also to my wife.”

The guards lowered their weapons.

Gwayne stopped beside you.

“Did your father send him?”

“I do not think so.”

“You think he escaped?”

Caraxes huffed.

The gust nearly knocked Gwayne backward.

You looked up at the dragon.

“Did you leave the Dragonpit without permission?”

Caraxes gave a rumbling sound.

Gwayne stared.

“Is he answering you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What did he say?”

“That he has no regrets.”

“You cannot possibly know that.”

Caraxes turned and demolished the remainder of the fountain with his tail.

Gwayne looked at the shattered marble.

“Never mind.”

A rider arrived less than an hour later.

He galloped into the courtyard on an exhausted horse, nearly falling from the saddle.

“My princess!”

You turned from where you sat against Caraxes’s foreleg.

The dragon had made himself comfortable in the destroyed gardens.

The messenger stumbled toward you.

“Prince Daemon sends word that Caraxes has escaped the Dragonpit.”

Gwayne looked at the enormous dragon occupying his courtyard.

“Yes,” he said. “We had gathered that.”

“The prince is on his way.”

Your eyes widened.

“My father is coming here?”

The messenger nodded breathlessly.

“He said—”

The pounding of another horse interrupted him.

Daemon entered the gates at speed.

He dismounted before the animal had fully stopped and strode into the courtyard.

His gaze moved from you, to Gwayne, to Caraxes, to the ruined fountain.

Daemon placed his hands on his hips.

“Caraxes.”

The dragon did not move.

“You disobedient beast.”

Caraxes closed his eyes.

“Do not pretend to be asleep.”

You covered your smile with your hand.

Daemon pointed toward the sky.

“Dragonstone. Now.”

Caraxes remained exactly where he was.

Gwayne looked between them.

“Does this happen often?”

“No,” Daemon snapped.

You raised a brow.

“Father.”

“Not often enough to be considered a pattern.”

“Caraxes escaped twice when I visited Driftmark.”

“An oversight.”

“And once when I stayed in King’s Landing.”

“Poorly secured chains.”

Gwayne stared at the dragon.

“He crossed half the crownlands because he missed her?”

Daemon looked offended.

“Obviously.”

Caraxes opened one eye and nudged you with his snout.

You laughed, placing both hands against his face.

“I missed you, too.”

The dragon purred.

Daemon sighed.

“You have spoiled him.”

“You gave him a sheep whenever he frightened someone who insulted me.”

“They deserved it.”

Gwayne rubbed a hand over his face.

“How do we convince him to leave?”

Daemon studied Caraxes.

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For her to tell him.”

You looked at the dragon.

Caraxes looked at you.

“I cannot ask him to leave immediately. He has only just arrived.”

Gwayne glanced at the ruined garden.

“Of course.”

“He can remain for supper.”

Gwayne stared at you.

“Your guest has destroyed our fountain.”

“He was excited.”

“He also crushed the roses.”

“They will grow back.”

Caraxes released a pleased trill.

Gwayne looked toward Daemon.

Daemon shrugged.

“She wants him to stay.”

“You are her father.”

“Yes.”

“Tell her this is unreasonable.”

Daemon’s expression became confused.

“Why would I do that?”

Gwayne closed his eyes.

By sunset, Caraxes had eaten three cows and fallen asleep across the western lawn.

Daemon remained for supper.

He criticized the wine, the chairs, the distance between your chambers and the nearest guard post, and the fact that Gwayne had not yet installed a dragon landing platform.

“We did not anticipate regular dragon visitors,” Gwayne said.

“You married my daughter.”

“I married a woman without a dragon.”

Daemon took a drink of wine.

“And yet.”

Outside, Caraxes rolled onto his side and flattened another row of hedges.

Gwayne watched through the window.

“I will have a platform constructed.”

You leaned over and kissed his cheek.

“Thank you.”

Gwayne’s irritation disappeared immediately.

Daemon noticed.

“Hm.”

After supper, you walked outside with Caraxes.

The dragon lowered himself so you could rest your forehead against his snout.

“I am happy here,” you assured him.

Caraxes rumbled.

“Gwayne takes good care of me.”

The dragon glanced toward your husband.

Gwayne stood several paces away, his hands clasped behind his back.

Caraxes exhaled a thin stream of smoke.

“I believe he is still deciding,” you said.

“I had hoped the wedding indicated his approval.”

“Caraxes is thorough.”

Daemon approached with your traveling cloak.

“Come.”

You turned.

“Where?”

“Caraxes will not leave without you.”

Gwayne’s brows rose.

Daemon draped the cloak around your shoulders.

“We will fly to Dragonstone. Hightower can follow tomorrow.”

Gwayne stepped forward.

“My wife is not leaving in the middle of the night.”

Daemon stared at him.

Gwayne stared back.

You looked between them.

Caraxes growled softly.

“No one is fighting,” you said.

Neither man moved.

You sighed.

“Gwayne may come with us.”

His face went pale.

Daemon smiled.

“Excellent idea.”

The three of you mounted Caraxes.

You sat before Daemon.

Gwayne sat behind him, holding the saddle with such force that his knuckles turned white.

“You may wish to hold on,” Daemon advised.

“I am holding on.”

“To something secure.”

“I am.”

Daemon looked down at Gwayne’s grip.

“That strap is decorative.”

Gwayne immediately wrapped both arms around Daemon’s waist.

You burst into laughter.

Daemon looked deeply offended.

“Remove your hands.”

“You told me to hold something secure.”

“Not me.”

Caraxes launched into the air.

Gwayne shouted.

You laughed harder.

The Blood Wyrm climbed toward the stars, carrying his rider, his beloved princess, and one deeply unfortunate Hightower across the darkened sky.

You looked back at Gwayne.

His eyes were tightly closed.

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“Is it not beautiful?”

“I have not looked.”

Daemon turned Caraxes sharply.

Gwayne’s arms tightened around him.

“If you strangle me,” Daemon shouted over the wind, “she will be widowed before reaching Dragonstone.”

“Fly straighter!”

“Caraxes dislikes straight lines.”

Caraxes roared in agreement.

You laughed until tears filled your eyes.

Below you, the world stretched silver beneath the moon.

Ahead, Dragonstone rose from the sea.

Your father’s arm was secure around you.

Your husband was clinging desperately behind him.

Caraxes flew happily beneath you.

Perhaps the court had been right.

You had never claimed a dragon of your own.

But as Caraxes carried you home through the clouds, you knew you had never truly needed to.

He had claimed you long ago.

"really," he nods and pays you no mind, he tries to take the goblet from your hand but your grip is tightened around it, the bone of your knuckles threatening to break through your skin. "give it here, stupid girl." he moans and you swing the rest of it down, thrusting the empty cup in his direction with an insane grin plastered on your face.

"what is so special about that boy anyways?" he huffs, eyes darting across the room to where your vision has frozen in place. "he's most likely still hung up when i unseated him from that horse of his long ago."

"it could also be our damn brother marrying his sister," you sigh, "that itself is," you pause, sickness filling your stomach, "loaded." there's silence between the two of you as you stand in the shadows, the beat of music looming over you and the party continues. daemon replaces your cup with one filled with water but you make no move to consume it; how could you when every cell in your body has stretched and expanded beyond normal to fit in thoughts of gwayne hightower.

"daemon," you whisper, "he's just so pretty." your slurred confession is almost pathetic and your brother breaks the intense staring competition to place a hand on your shoulder in awkward reassurance. "like a deer," and your eyes shine an alarming amount, streaks of moonlight glittering across your iris. god, you are a goner.

"not that pretty," he scoffs, "you are prettier."

"you say that because we share the same mother," you roll your eyes and nudge his shoulder. the compliment from him is born from his distaste of the hightowers and maybe a twinge of fondness for you as he ruffles your hair in return.

"true, but you do have such foul taste in men. of all possible sorts, a hightower?" his brows raise incredulously, "really, is there no other man in this realm?"

"no, not for me," you shake your head in a daze, everythings starting to appear fuzzier, softer but you can still make out the small smile painted across his pink lips so clearly. you wonder what itd be like to touch them up close, to feel them against your own, on your bare skin, on your sheets, just anywhere for you.

"oh no," he groans in desperation, "i beg you to find some sanity, even just a shred of it. no, in fact, find some dignity and if you truly must then bed him and be done with it," its mortifying in a sense for him to say this to you, his younger sister but you are in dire need of saving yourself before ypu melt entirely defenseless to this one-sided love.

"you cannot just bed a man like gwayne hightower!" you hiss quietly in annoyance, "look at him," your eyes dart to his direction once more, "no, it will not do. i must marry him," you declare and daemon snorts out, the cackle leaving his lips in a proud twist and he turns to you.

"you have gone mad, dear sister, truly mad," maybe not mad, but definitely drunk, he gathers. but you can't focus on him. not when you've caught the eye of the pretty red-head and you have never been so grateful to have such an annoying brother. you wave, fingers dancing in a slight tease and you watch as his brows knit together in a small scrunch. he then turns his attention back to the kingsguard as if it had never happened. as if he hadn't just knocked on your heart, entered and laid to rest before slicing you inside out.

oh.

"he definitely hates me," your lip wobbles with each word, eyes glassy with dejection and pure heartbreak. daemon looks at you horrified, unsure of what to do with you in this emotional and heightened state.

"come sister," he tries to usher you away from the table and in the direction of the hallway, "we can always let caraxes have her fun, hmm?"

"you'd hurt him?" your eyes widen comically and daemon can make out the heavy breaths heaving from your chest with great concern. oh god, he's just making things worse for himself.

"send me to the seven hells, no! no, of course not," he drawls, wrapping his arms around your shoulders and trying to keep you moving, "maybe just a little," he murmurs but you catch it and push off of him instantly.

"but i love him," you gasp, and daemon sighs. its like having a child, truly.

"love who?" comes the voice of alicent hightower and the two of you turn. daemon shakes his head at the sight of her brother making his way over and landing inches away from the two of you.

"you," you whisper to him and its a moment too soon before daemon can smother your lips with the heavy weight of his palm.

"me?" gwayne speaks with great confusion, he has no recollection of whats been said before thankfully but his sister sends you a knowing look, a mischievious glint in her eyes as she smiles. you've always thought of alicent as oddly sisterly. she's been kind to you when others have not, she's given you chances when others have paired you with your chaotic brother and some part of her wishes that the two of you couldve been greater friends despite the fate that had been forced upon her.

gwayne looks to his sister, hoping for some explanation and almost misses how you bite down on daemon's palm. the elder pulling back with a curse and a wince as you shoot him your most dazzling smile. its earth bending, soul shattering downright gorgeous the way you look in your black beaded gown; a princess of the night and defender of the realm that gwayne allows himself the mercy of letting his gaze linger longer than it needs to.

"hello, you," the excitement is gathered in your voice and gwayne's eyes narrow in. theres a softness in your shoulders, the relaxed state of your posture, the wind in your hair and the wildness in your features.

"are you drunk?" alicent beats him to the question and he inhales slowly, exhaling slower trying to gather restraint and patience. sober you he has been able to handle. he approaches you with nothing more than polite kindness. he knows the way your soul seeks him out in every room he walks, he knows you ask after him, how you wait at the gates anytime he is planned to return to kingslanding and hes very fond of you.

he also knows the family you come from. the cruelty, the power, the damn dragons that give you the ego boost to demand what you have and take what you must no matter the expense. he despises your brothers particularly and though he tries to be fair to you, he knows its easier to create the distance. to be noble gwayne and play his part in this deathly game.

but drunk you? the adrenaline rushing through your body and mind, no gwayne doesn't know how to handle drunk you when he just about keeps hold of his facade of barely tolerating sober you.

"unwell," daemon corrects her without a second glance, "she is unwell and i was just escorting the princess to her chambers, she is rather tired," daemon stresses, keenly aware of how you're minutes away from embarassing yourself and him by extension silly.

you hold up four fingers cheekily and scrunch your nose in delight, "four cups!" you cheer and alicent lets out a laugh.

"is that all?" she grins, taking in your amusement.

"is that all?" daemon scoffs, "anymore and you will find her at the bottom of the barrell," that instantly has you shaking your head in defiance.

"you will find me on the dance floor!" your eyes widen with pure joy and childish excitement, buzzing through each of your veins and you break free from daemon's hold in the direction of the main party again.

you probably make it two steps ahead before a certain knight blocks your path, "princess," his hand is held up, palm outwards, a silent request for yours to join him and you do. he brings your hand to his lips and the second he presses a soft fleeting kiss you are airborn. its only a greeting but you float, rising and lifting and lord can nothing bring you down. its a manifestation of your earlier thoughts and you are purely giddy.

"ser gwayne," you swoon and its the first of a teasing smile you're met with. youre sure hes reserved this just for you.

"oh fuck me," you brother moans, palms smacking against his face in pure embarrassment but gwayne ignores him entirely, his gaze fixed on solely you.

"are you well?" he murmurs just for your eyes, pure honesty and earnest and you somehow melt even more.

the air softens around you and you're not sure your knees are working, everything feels so light and like heaven. "i dunno," you are stunned, your response incomprehensible as you focus on the invisible print of where his lips have scorched your skin. he lets go of your hand and yours drops to your side. no force or willpower to hold it open, no you are molten.

"might i escort you back to your chambers? perhaps for some rest?" he's hopeful. he catches daemon's deathly stare from behind your back, boring holes straight into him and for a second he's nervous. however, he can sense the hesitation of daemon and the need to get you to safety in this state. youre unguarded and though gwayne would never let anything happen to you now or never, it seems wiser to let you sleep this state off. roaming drunk is not ladylike and he doubts you care too much of what the other noblefolk think, he for sure knows that you are out of control with your actions as you usually like to be and that? that unnerves him incredibly.

"i am perfectly able to do so," daemon cuts in but you pat your brother's chest, cutting off his sentence halfway with a mischievous grin.

"no, ser gwayne will," you order, you clap your hands in delight and press a lazy kiss to your brothers cheek and then one to alicent. "goodnight brother, goodnight alicent, i shall see you both in the morrow," you throw out your arm for gwayne to take and he chuckles at how overly confident you appear before him now. how miliseconds have hardly passed and you stand with great eagerness before him. its a downright straight ego boost and soar to his chest.

sober you is usually more refined, more subtle and reserved for only the right people. gwayne's not spent much time in kingslanding to meet your close aquaintance but theres some things he can gather from afar. like the way you hold yourself with a rare gentleness from a targaryen he's sure its because of you that halaena has grown to be so fond. you take pride in the way you dress and carry yourself, you are friendly with the animals. you tend to the gardens and so often he finds you in the company of the cooks. yet you are still strategic when helping stage coups and plan attacks, you listen attentively to the working folk and despite what you come from, gwayne is intrigued by who you've become.

you hold yourself looser now, slightly leaning into his side as he carries most of your weight. its evident in the slower steps he takes, the silence he finds himself in in an attempt to catch the slow rise and fall of your breaths. he wishes the two of you were so much more than your last names because all he can see is how perfect you fit at his side. he must do a terrible job at conveying it because you stop so abruptly that his body moves in great whiplash, attending to you immediately.

"is something the matter, your grace?" unlike you, he hasn't drank the slightest drop and is so acutely aware of his environment his senses have heightened. your stance surprises him as he takes you, your fists have balled at your sides with an impatience and theres hurt scrunched across all over your face. a sudden flush of dread works it way into his throat.

"yes, i think you detest me, ser gwayne hightower," and his stomach does somersaults with the way his name slips from your lips. he stutters, trying to catch his breath and mind from moving at a million miles per hour.

"detest? my, oh my, that is a strong accusation," he tries to land it in light-heartedness, the chances are you'll most likely not even remember this tomorrow but the betrayal lingering in the lines of your face has him inhaling slowly, choosing his next words carefully. he opts for a simple truth, "i do not hate you," he speaks plainly, brows jumping with each word.

"no?" you question, the bottom of your lip rests into a little pout and gwayne's eyes move like a laser, narrowing in on it.

"no," he confirms with a steadfast heart, "come," and he holds out his arm again, "let us continue."

"no," you refuse and gwayne wonders which of his sins must be in need of divine punishment right now for this to be happening. his hand drags across his face and tries to think of his next course of plans.

"okay," he shrugs, "what would you like to do?" and he watches how you light up with pure ecstasy. your arms raise in the air and he watches how you hurl your body in a poor attempt at a twirl. the drunken spin has your left foot landing wrong, catching onto the seams of your gown and you feel the world falling back.

the scream dies in your throat when youre surrounded by such intense heat. gwayne hightower is warm all over, his arms have caught you just in time, your head neatly tucked against his chest as his arms span the length of your back and waist. its almost intimate the way you can hear his heartbeat, it bounces and jumps and you'll play it as a soundtrack to your life if you could. you bring your own hands to rest onto his chest, the crisp velvet sliding against your skin as you look up.

it must be the biggest mistake of your life to look up because as soon as you do you're sucked straight in. its like the ocean has swallowed you whole, and in the midst of its vastness you can hear the quiet, you can feel the serenity and calmness hit you so gently.

"princess," his voice tries to pull you from its trance, and the throated rasp cuts you free.

"gwayne?" you whisper, and the rest of his features appear back into focus. the small freckles dancing along his skin almost disappear the way the moonlight streaks before him. the bridge of his nose, the way it slopes so perfectly, gwayne hightower must have been made and born of pure precision and patience.

you're not thinking and he's momentarily distracted by the way you've dropped his title, saving the way you've said his name into pure permanent memory. so you reach out, your cold index finger touch his nose and he freezes beneath your touch. your finger then drags, following the path of his nose and down to his lips, they pause on his bottom lip momentarily before continuing its course down to his chin and then the length of his neck. you can feel his adam's apple tense as he swallows under such intensity and then they rest teasingly on the junction where his two clavicles could meet. the small amount of skin escaped from his tunic and burned into memory.

"princess," he murmurs, trying to gather his footing and he's still holding you so tightly he's realised. "this is not proper," he manages to get out and a slow smile reaches your lips. you've done it, you've broken gwayne hightower and it has only took four cups of wine to do so.

"i wonder what five would get me," you want to touch his hair next, feel the copper strands beneath your fingers and tug on them, feel how they would be burrowed against your skin or what noises he would make if you pulled them right. you don't reach out though however, your hands travel lower to his abdomen, pushing yourself more upright and steady on your feet but gwayne tenses at the contact.

"sweetheart?" he breathes in confusion, he has no idea what you're on about or whats even happening but youre set alight. this is new. you love the way this one sounds, you want to brand it to your forehead and let the term of endearment be the only thing he's ever allowed to call you by. you stand on your own, centimetres from him and try to dust the nonexistenr fluff off your gown and even just moving has you slightly dizzy. you try to reach for a railing but gwayne's hands move quicker and he's steadying your weight once more.

"i don't think you should move so suddenly," he warns, "you need to rest, sleep this haze off."

"i'd like to dance," he watches as your face morphs into something so fierecly determined and for a second, he's almost scared. it doesn't last very long however because a boyish laugh quietly escapes his lips at the sight of you.

youve taken a step back and your eyes are closed, your swaying so slowly and way off beat for this to be considered a dance. you imagine your partner to be there, leaving the gap empty for a body as your hands play with the air, mumbling along to the faint tune you can hear but its all so unrhythmic that gwayne almost feels sorry for you. you're going to make yourself dizzy and sick, you'll probably fall into a bush soon and gwayne decides to put his title as protector into action.

"you are," he breathes, and he steps into the gaps, his hand at your waist and the other taking charge of your outstretched one. your palms are interlocked as he moves you to a more practised rhythm. gwayne may be a knight and soldier but hes a man of nobility, a member of the court and he'd be damned if he didn't how to dance.

"mad?" you offer, opening your eyes to steal a peek at him. its so natural how your bodies align together, fit and move as one. its fluid and light, you can hardly feel your feet on the ground.

but gwayne certainly can, you've stepped on his toes twice, lopsided and lazy footing that he finds endearing, "wonderful," he corrects you with a unguarded softness, "you are wonderful," and you swoon once more.

"keep your eyes open," he whispers and you obey, and when he spins you he does it at such an incredibly slow pace in fear of you falling and your nausea rising. you're having so much fun with him right now that you don't realise you've been dancing with the knight for the length of minutes; so long that he has walked or rather cleverly danced the two of you back to your chamber.

truth be told he doesn't actually know which is yours. he ends the dance with a final spin, before holding onto the two of your hands and kneeling into a bow. he presses a kiss to each of them, so gentle that when you shoot him another smile it goes straight to his head. hes unsure of how hes still alive right now, he swells with pride at having earned so many of them tonight they ought to declare him a champion.

"thank you ser gwayne," you mumble, your hand ready at the knob of your door.

"just gwayne," he smiles and the world tilts its axis. "and if you ever find yourself in need of a dance partner then i am at your service," he drawls and a giggle escapes your lips as you open the door then lean your head against the frame tiredly. you are exhausted and want nothing more to go to bed, you also just want to stare at gwayne all night long.

"even if your partner is barely tolerable," your voice is slurred not from the wine but the fatigue now and gwayne steps forward by an inch. but an inch is all you need to feel the sheer heat radiating from his body and heart again.

"i told you," he uses a finger to trace your cheek now so tenderly it shatters all the walls youve ever built in your heart and laid entry for gwayne and gwayne only, "you are wonderful."

"wonderful," you whisper and there's moons in your eyes again.

"goodnight, sweetheart," he pulls back, clearing his throat. he sees the gears in your head turning and a faint furrow in your brow but before he can even ask what is the matter, youve stepped forward in an ambush, wrapped your arms around him in a bone crushing hug.

and to finally finish him off and send him to heaven, you aim to kiss his cheek. its lazy, off target and lands in the corner of his mouth. before he can register whats happened youre off him in an instant and the door closes.

"w-what?" he whispers to the dead of the night, his fingers come find the place where your lips met his if you can even call it that and its slightly wet. he has half a mind to knock the door down, break it with his bare hands and steal a proper one. however, you are drunk. beyond so and you need to rest.

he could bring this up tomorrow to you but theres a strong possibility that youd either not remember or would be mortified at the memory and avoid him entirely. the latter would devastate him for centeries.

hes still standing at your door, burning holes inside of it that he doesn't know how much time passes. a young jaecarys passes by and stops.

"ser gwayne?" he calls out and the elder is undeterred, his gaze still stuck on where you had once been before him that he doesnt register the onyx curls before theyre completely blocking his view.

"yes?" the trance is broken.

"what are you doing here?" jace speaks, suspicion laced in his tone.

"dancing," he mumbles, "i was dancing," he nods to himself and then lets out one last longing exhale before making a move to the opposite direction. the distance between the two of you burns as it grows but gwayne forces himself to keep moving. and despite the man not having a single drop of alcohol tonight, gwayne feels the buzz in his blood.

"drunk," jace mutters and continues his footsteps.

yeah, he is.

Still, kindness, he thought, could make even an unwanted marriage bearable. Everything else could be learned in time.

The rumors, unfortunately, offered very little hope of that.

Some called the king's younger daughter gentle to the point of foolishness, while others claimed she possessed the wildness of Old Valyria itself. There were whispers that she disappeared from court for days at a time, that she drank wine before the sun had set, that she climbed rooftops with her ladies-in-waiting, wandered the city in disguise, and laughed whenever septas reminded her of her duties. Others dismissed her as odd, insisting she spoke more to ravens than noble lords and spent entire afternoons wandering the castle alone.

No two stories resembled one another. The only detail upon which everyone agreed was that she was... peculiar.

He had intended to reserve judgment until they met. That intention became rather difficult when she failed to appear at all. She did not stand beside her father during his arrival, nor his welcome feast.

His sister and King Viserys greeted him warmly enough upon his arrival, clasping his arm like an old friend and speaking at length about tournaments, knighthood, and the honor of joining their two houses before finally apologizing, almost absentmindedly, for his daughter's absence.

"The princess has been feeling unwell," the king said with a tired smile. "She has retired early."

It sounded innocent enough yet Gwayne did not miss the look and sighs exchanged between his father and sister. She looked toward the doors through which the princess ought to have entered, her disappointment obvious before she carefully concealed it behind practiced courtesy.

No one explained further. No one ever seemed to.

By the end of the feast, Gwayne found himself wondering less about the alliance and more about the girl herself.

Was she truly ill? Or had she simply refused to meet the man she was expected to marry?

-

By the time the castle realized you were gone, you had already vanished into the night.

It was hardly the first time.

The servants searched the places they always searched first, the library, the dragonpit where you often disappeared to sit with the hatchlings long after the keepers had retired, the godswood where you sometimes spent entire afternoons reading beneath the heart tree. Even your ladies-in-waiting were questioned, though they could offer little beyond nervous shrugs and uncertain smiles. They had grown accustomed to your disappearances years ago.

Tonight, however, was different as you had no intention of returning.

You sighed as you reached the wall at the far end of the gardens. For a moment you stood there and pondered about when your father announced your betrothal. Your first thought had been your dreams.

Fragments scattered across years of restless nights, all circling the same terrible feeling that settled deep within your chest whenever you imagined standing beside the man you had been promised to. You had seen cages and felt a sorrow unlike anything you had ever known.

Somewhere between those two moments lay a future you could neither understand nor prevent. And for the first time in your life, you did not wish to discover which vision came first.

So you did the only thing that had ever made sense whenever the dreams became too heavy and you left.

That single thought drowned out every other, beating steadily against your ribs as you gathered your skirts in one hand and planted your slipper against the ancient garden wall. Time seemed to press in from every side so you quickly pushed yourself upward, fingertips stretching desperately toward the thick oak branch that hung just beyond your reach. The bark brushed your fingers before slipping away again.

You frowned, it had seemed much lower when you were a child. Surely you had climbed trees twice this height without a second thought. Determined, you shifted your footing higher against the moss-covered stone, ignoring the way your slippers slipped against the wall.

Just a little farther...

"You appear to be losing your battle."

The voice behind you was warm, low, and entirely too amused.

You startled so violently that your foot slipped from the stone altogether. Landing rather less gracefully than you would have liked, you spun around, silver hair whipping over your shoulder as you searched the darkness for its owner.

A man stood several paces away beneath the shadow of an elm tree, the hood of a dark traveling cloak obscuring most of his face. Moonlight caught only the edge of his jaw and the outline of broad shoulders, leaving the rest hidden in darkness.

You did not recognize him nor did you particularly care to.

You were in far too much of a hurry.

"May I help you?" you asked, though the impatience in your voice made it abundantly clear you hoped he would do precisely the opposite.

"I was going to ask you the same thing," he replied pleasantly. "It seems you are the one in need of assistance."

His tone was infuriatingly calm as though finding a princess attempting to climb the garden wall in the middle of the night was an entirely ordinary occurrence.

"I am not," you answered briskly. "So you may leave."

You turned back toward the wall without waiting for his reply, already reaching for the branch once more. Behind you came the sound of unhurried footsteps.

"I will," he said. "But I confess, I am rather curious as to what you're doing."

You closed your eyes for the briefest moment. "I am not doing anything."

"You are trying to do something."

"I am not."

"You are."

A sigh escaped you. Not the graceful sort of sigh expected of a princess, but one born entirely of exasperation. You turned sharply, fixing the stranger with a look that had intimidated far older men than this.

"Who are you, anyway?" Stepping closer, you tried to make out his face beneath the hood, though the shadows remained stubbornly loyal to him, "Reveal yourself."

"I am simply a guest in the Keep."

The answer only irritated you further, "What an exceptionally mysterious guest." You dismissed him with a wave of your hand before turning back toward the wall yet again. "Well then, perhaps you can make yourself useful and lift me."

There was the briefest pause, "I'm sorry?"

You looked over your shoulder as though he were being intentionally difficult. "If you lift me onto the wall, I can manage the rest."

The corner of his mouth twitched beneath the hood. "I see."

"Come now," you urged, gesturing impatiently toward the branch. "Make haste."

His amusement seemed only to deepen. "Well, if I must assist you, I should ask why you intend to climb the wall."

You groaned dramatically. "If you must know..." Your fingers wrapped around the branch again as though the conversation itself inconvenienced you. "...I am leaving."

"Are you?"

"I am taking my dragon," you said matter-of-factly, testing whether the branch might support your weight, "and flying somewhere very far away. And do not trouble yourself with informing the King or my betrothed. I shall be long gone by the time either of them discovers it."

A beat passed.

"Ah." There was laughter hidden beneath the single syllable, "So your betrothed is the reason you're running."

You shrugged, "He is certainly one of them."

"And they won't notice you've disappeared?"

A small, incredulous laugh escaped you. "Well, of course they will," you looked toward the branch again, "Now, please. Enough questions."

You pointed toward the wall with all the authority expected of a princess issuing commands. "If you would simply lift me over the garden wall, I'll reach the dragonpit before anyone notices."

The stranger looked from you to the wall and back again then he sighed with theatrical regret. "I have absolutely no intention of helping you."

You stared incredulously, "I beg your pardon?" You whirled around fully, prepared to remind this remarkably stubborn man exactly who he was refusing. As you did, he reached up almost absentmindedly and pushed back the hood that had hidden his face.

Moonlight settled across familiar features and you instantly recognized the face you had seen in your sleep numerous times. Everything inside you seemed to stop.

"...It's you."

The irritation vanished from your voice so completely that it almost startled you. Gwayne watched the change with quiet fascination. Only moments ago, you had looked ready to order him dragged from the gardens for daring to delay your escape. Now you simply stood there, staring at him with an expression he could not begin to understand.

He smiled despite himself, "You know who I am?"

You didn't answer immediately. Instead, your eyes lingered on his face, searching it with unsettling intensity, as though comparing the man standing before you to someone only you could see.

When you finally spoke, your voice was scarcely louder than the breeze moving through the trees, "I've dreamt of you."

The words were so unexpected that Gwayne forgot entirely what he had meant to say. His smile faded into quiet confusion, "You've... what?"

You seemed almost surprised that the words had escaped you. Your gaze dropped to the ground before lifting once more, softer this time, almost hesitant. "I've dreamt of you."

Silence settled between them.

Gwayne had heard the stories. The king's second daughter was said to possess the old gift of dragon dreams. He had dismissed them as little more than another courtly tale but standing before you now, he found himself less certain.

You did not look mad.

Nor did you resemble the reckless drunk whispered about by servants and lords alike. He noticed there was no heavy scent of wine clinging to your breath, no unsteady sway in your posture, no careless laughter born from too many cups. If you had drunk anything at all, it had been little more than enough to soothe an anxious mind, and judging by the shadows beneath your eyes, even that had failed.

More than anything, you looked tired. Painfully so.

Not the sort of tired that followed a late feast or too much dancing, but the deep exhaustion of someone who had spent far too many nights fighting battles no one else could see.

His expression softened. "Am I so terrible in your dreams," he asked, a small smile returning to his lips, "that you've resorted to climbing garden walls in the middle of the night to escape marrying me?"

He had meant it lightly yet the smile disappeared from your face so quickly that he regretted it almost at once. Your fingers tightened in the folds of your skirts until the silk wrinkled beneath your grasp.

You said nothing.

For the first time since he'd found you, the lively, impatient princess who had argued with him over a wall simply... vanished. In her place stood a frightened young woman trying very hard not to let it show.

His amusement melted into concern, "...Princess?" He took a cautious step forward, "Are you all right?"

You instinctively stepped back.

"I only jest," he said quietly.

Your voice was barely audible, "I must go."

Before he could answer, you slipped past him, gathering your skirts as you hurried back toward the castle, silver hair disappearing into the darkness between the garden paths.

Gwayne remained where he was for several moments after you'd gone. He should have let you leave, instead, he found himself watching the empty path where you had vanished, turning over those four impossible words in his mind.

I've dreamt of you.

Whatever those dreams had shown you, they had filled your eyes not with hatred but with sadness. And though he scarcely knew you, something deep within him recoiled at the thought that he might one day become the cause of it. For reasons he could not explain, he left the gardens that night with only one quiet resolve settling in his heart.

An Inn In The Stormlands, Near Summerhall

The air would be thick in his lungs if there were any air at all, but there is only water, cold and patient, he is drowning, he has been drowning for so long that the memory of breathing has become a foreign language, something he once knew fluently and has since forgotten how to speak. He kicks against the weight pulling him down, and he reaches toward that distant light with fingers that stretch until the joints ache, but the surface retreats at the same pace as his reaching, always maintaining the same impossible distance.

His chest burns with a fire that the wine never produced, a raw and animal desperation that no amount of drink could ever imitate. Some distant part of him, a voice that has grown very small and very tired, thinks that it would be peaceful to simply let the drowning finish. To let it end.

Hands reach down through the water toward him, milky and soft, the hands of someone who has never hauled a rope or gripped a blade. They find his cheeks with an unearned tenderness and cup his jaw, and he is pulled upward with a strength that surprises him more than the drowning ever did.

He breaks the surface, he does not take a breath yet, because she is there, and she is the most terrible thing he has ever seen, her hair is the color of pale sand and winter wheat, near white, drifting around her face like kelp moving in a current. He thinks, with the absurd clarity that only drowning can provide, that he would gladly drown a hundred times over just to watch her hair move like that. Her eyes are grey, the grey of early morning fog, the grey of ash after a fire has burned itself out. She looks at him the way a mother might look at a feverish child, or the way the sea might look at a sailor it has decided not to claim after all.

Her lips meet his, and air floods into his lungs, but it is not air at all, it is her breath and her life and her sweetness passing into him like a sacrament. He has tasted wine from the Arbor and mead from the North and the foul, glorious swill they serve in the lowest dockside taverns of King’s Landing, but none of it has ever been this sweet. He could drink from her forever and still thirst for more.

He wants to thank her. He wants to ask her name. He wants to pull her down into the water with him so they can drown together, because dying beside her would be better than living with only the memory of her. He reaches for her, and the dream tears apart like wet parchment.

Daeron woke.

A hand was on his shoulder, “Up, my prince. Your father’s orders.” The voice belonged to a man shaped like an anvil, broad and hard and utterly without sympathy. He was one of the interchangeable armored shadows his father sent to collect him whenever he had been missing for too long. Daeron could not remember the man’s name. He could barely remember his own. His skull had become a cathedral of pain, vaulted and echoing, and somewhere in the choir loft a thousand tiny monks were hammering on a thousand tiny anvils of their own.