chᢉ𐭩rry.

You stared at the screen for a few seconds. You were wide awake, and you definitely didn’t have the energy to start on your own work.

You giggled at your own message before hitting send.

YOU: I sold it oops

The reply came before you could even exit the app.

UNKNOWN: stop fucking around man im not in the mood

YOU: I dont think this is the right number lol

A minute passed with the typing bubbles flickering on and off a couple times.

UNKNOWN: the fuck

YOU: If ur stuck on his class just check the 2022 archive

There was no response after that. You eventually drifted off to sleep, figuring that was the end of a weird interaction.

Four days passed, and you completely forgot about the random text until friday when you received a notification from the same number.

UNKNOWN: it worked

You blinked at the message, trying to remember who it even was.

YOU: Yeah

UNKNOWN: howd you know about that

YOU: I saw his desktop open with that site and took my chances

UNKNOWN: youre actually not michael?

YOU: No im pretty sure im not a guy

You thought the conversation would end there, but about ten minutes later, you got another text.

UNKNOWN: any other shortcuts u know about

YOU: Maybe

Over the next two weeks, the texts became a weird regular thing. It wasn’t a constant back and forth, but it turned into a daily routine.

You’d get a text in the middle of the afternoon about whatever, or you’d send a quick message about random things in your life.

You didn’t know each other. There was no pressure. You didn't have to put on a performance to try to impress whoever it was you were talking to.

UNKNOWN: what were u saying

UNKNOWN: just got to the gym

YOU: Tf didnt you just leave ur room

UNKNOWN: yeah

YOU: Is the gym right next to ur house or smth

UNKNOWN: the gyms downstairs

YOU: Oh you live in an apartment??

UNKNOWN: no

UNKNOWN: i have a gym in my house dumbass

YOU: Oh!!!!!

YOU: Different tax bracket

UNKNOWN: funny

You found yourself looking forward to those short, blunt messages. He was definitely arrogant, but he was always honest and that pulled you in.

By the third week, the conversations started stretching later into the night. You’d be lying in bed, messaging your friends, and a text would pop up at 1 AM.

👻: why the fuck are you awake

YOU: Im readingg

YOU: why are YOU awake

👻: driving

YOU: Ur gonna die

YOU: Get off ur phone

👻: You sound like my dad

👻: He’s the reason im driving

YOU: Shit is he at the hospital??

👻: no im clearing my head

YOU: Oh

YOU: You okay?

👻: family dinner was so fucking annoying

👻: just micromanaging my schedule like im some kid

YOU: I feel that, my parents keep controlling my life its so stupid

👻: exactly its pathetic

👻: honestly its weird talking to you

You: Ok whyd i catch a stray hello

👻: no i mean its off talking to someone who isnt trying to get something out of me

YOU: idek who u are so theres nothing to get

👻: keep it that way

Then during one morning, you walked into the lecture hall for Professor Davis’s class.

The room was already buzzing with students and you took your usual seat next to Tanselle who was busy drawing sketches on her paper.

“Did you finish the reading he gave last week?” Tanselle asked, not looking up from her page.

“Barely,” you muttered, pulling your laptop out of your bag. “I read like two pages.”

Down in the fourth row, right near the aisle, Aerion Targaryen was slouched back in his seat. He had his dark leather jacket slung over the back of his chair and was surrounded by his usual crowd.

One of them said something, and Aerion let out a short laugh. The guy looked around the group with triumph all over his face, proud that he managed to impress Aerion.

Just then, your professor began talking and it didn't take long for you to lose focus.

Bored out of your mind as Professor Davis started droning on about the text you guys were supposed to read, you pulled your phone out under the desk.

YOU: Im bored entertain me

You hit send.

You kept your eyes on your screen, but then out of habit, your gaze drifted back down toward the front of the room.

Down in row four, you watched Aerion reach into his pocket. He pulled out his phone, a small smirk tugging on the corner of his lip.

His jaw set as he read something, and his thumbs immediately typed out a fast response before he shoved the phone face down on his desk.

Your phone vibrated in your palm.

👻: go entertain yourself

Your breath hitched. You stared at the screen, your heart doing a weird thud against your ribs.

No way, you thought. The lecture hall is massive. At least forty people were on their phones. It’s a coincidence.

Your fingers hovered over the keyboard. You needed to be absolutely sure. You typed out a reply, keeping your eyes glued directly on the back of his silver head.

YOU: Ok unkind

YOU: So ur actually paying attention to class?

The exact moment your text delivered, you watched as Aerion’s head tilted down. He picked his phone back up, scoffing under his breath. His thumbs moved around the screen, typing quickly.

Buzz.

👻: no im looking at my phone because a dumbass is texting me

A cold wave of panic hit you.

Your eyes darted from the screen to the back of his leather jacket. Your mind was short-circuiting, trying to connect the dots.

Aerion Targaryen.

Aerion Targaryen who had a reputation for being, well, himself— was the exact same person who had been texting you until midnight.

You spent the remaining minutes of that lecture staring into the wall. Every time Aerion shifted, your eyes snapped straight to him.

When the bell finally rang, the sudden noise of chairs scraping against the floor made you jump.

“Thank god,” Tanselle muttered, slamming her notebook shut. “You coming to the library?”

“I don’t think so,” you replied after a beat, shoving your things into your bag.

At the front, Aerion was already walking. One of the guys threw an arm over his shoulder and Aerion swatted him off with a grin.

He didn’t look back once. He had absolutely no idea.

For the next three days, every time your phone buzzed, your stomach did a flip. You knew exactly who was on the other side of the screen now, while he remained clueless.

During a late saturday night, you were eating with your friends when your screen lit up.

👻: this movies terrible

👻: why would you recommend this

You stared at the text. Knowing it was Aerion, reading the texts felt completely surreal.

YOU: Ok my bad ill just die

YOU: Its good tho idk what ur on

👻: its not

You: Lol turn it off then

👻: im already an hour in

👻: wouldnt wanna hurt your feelings

YOU: Aww how sweet

YOU: Stubborn bitch…

You bit your lip as you sent the second message. No one would dare to call him that in person, it was thrilling.

👻: lmao

👻: what are you doing anyway

YOU: Eating cheesecake

YOU: Wait have u done the assignment due next week

👻: nah im dreading the partner assignment on monday

👻: if i get paired with one of the idiots im doing it alone

You swallowed hard, grabbing your glass to drink the strain away.

YOU: Maybe youll get someone decent

👻: doubt it

You closed your phone and pressed it onto your chest. He was so different in real life.

When monday came, the room was silenced as Professor Davis tapped his microphone, turning on the massive projector behind him.

“Alright, I’ve randomized the pairings for the research,” he announced. “Check the board, find your partner, and spend the rest of the period discussing with them.”

Your eyes scanned the list, stopping as you found your name near the center column.

Your lungs locked up.

Aerion Targaryen was written right next to it.

“Oh, jeez,” Tanselle said, looking at you with worry. “You got Aerion… Good luck babe.”

Down in row four, Aerion didn’t even bother looking back to find his partner. He simply opened his laptop, ignoring the rest of the room while his friends started moving around. He clearly expected whoever his partner was to come to him.

You took in a deep breath, grabbing your bag.

Walking down the steps felt like walking a plank. As you got closer to his seat, a couple of his friends looked up at you. One of them nudged the guy next to him to clear a seat for you, leaving an empty chair next to Aerion.

You gave them a light smile before sliding into the seat, setting your laptop on the desk. Up close, he smelled like expensive cologne and musk.

“You’re my partner?” he asked, his voice a careless drawl. He still didn’t look at you, opening a blank document.

“Yeah.” You kept your voice as even as possible.

“Type in your email,” he said, turning the laptop just an inch so you could see the screen. “I’ll do the body and everything else. You do the outline and introduction.”

You blinked at him, the contrast hitting you like a physical punch. No jokes, no banter, no casualty.

You were aware he had a reputation for being a ‘womanizer.’ So why was he so cold to you?

“Okay,” you mumbled as you awkwardly reached out to type in your email.

He didn’t say another word to you for the rest of the hour. You sat right next to him, occasionally looking at the side of his sharp profile, realizing this was the same guy who had texted you about the miserable movie you recommended to him just two nights ago.

By 10 PM that same day, you were sitting on your bed, staring at the shared Google Docs. He had already finished his sections before you did.

Your phone buzzed on your blanket.

👻: just wrapped up that history project early so i dont have to deal with it later

You read his message, a sour feeling building up in your chest. You picked it up, your expression hardening.

YOU: Lucky, im still doing mine

You lied.

👻: thats sad

Chewing on your inner cheek, your thumbs moved before you could stop.

YOU: Hows ur partner

The typing bubbles appeared immediately.

👻: its some girl in my section i didnt pay attention

👻: she didnt mess anything up, shes whatever

She’s whatever.

Your eyes fixed on his message until they blurred. You had spent weeks listening to him, laughing at his texts, sharing personal concerns to each other—and yet in real life, you were just a boring, insignificant whatever to him.

The irritation flared up. You tossed your laptop onto your bedside table and sat back against the headboard of your bed.

YOU: Cool

A minute passed without a response.

👻: just cool?

YOU: Yeah

👻: youre acting weird

You left the text on read. Not like it mattered, his read receipts were off. Throwing the phone somewhere in your bed, you didn’t reply.

For the next few days, you struggled returning to how you normally were.

He didn’t text you the next morning but eventually did at night, and you left it unreplied for two hours before sending a short answer.

👻: you alive?

YOU: Yes

👻: ok whats wrong then

YOU: Nothing

👻: ???

YOU: What

👻: fine

It felt petty, but each time you looked at your phone, you remembered him sitting right next to you and not even glancing your away. You felt stupid, but his words hurt too.

If you were just a blank space to him in person, you figured it would be better if you were that way on every platform.

By the end of the week, the silence between your texts was heavy. He didn’t text you back after the last chat, and you definitely weren’t going to break first.

You were sitting in class when Tanselle walked in, settling in the chair beside you.

Professor Davis cleared his throat before speaking. “Alright, before we start today’s lecture, I’ve set up a group thread for the upcoming peer reviews. Click on the link and make sure you’re in it by the end of the day.”

You opened your phone to join the chat, then automatically shoved the phone back into your bag. You had no intention of participating.

The period of the lecture ended with a few minutes remaining and your phone started vibrating nonstop.

You tried to ignore it, but the constant noise was getting frustrating. You reached into your bag and pulled it out, looking to mute the group.

A new message popped up at the bottom of the chat. A classmate tagged your number directly because you hadn’t put your name on the sheet yet.

Too annoyed with the whole class to care, you swiped the app and locked your screen.

Then, your eyes subconsciously drifted toward Aerion. You watched as he pulled his phone out.

He was scrolling through the mass text thread when suddenly, he froze.

His head tilted slightly. Narrowing his eyes, he looked at the only text tagging a number. The number he’d been texting every day.

Up front, the classmate who had sent the message lost his patience. He turned around, looking up at where you and Tanselle were sitting.

The guy called out your name, his voice turning multiple heads in the quiet room. “I just tagged your number in the group, you need to upload your topic.”

The sound of your name echoed through the lecture.

Aerion’s head snapped up.

He didn’t look at the guy talking to you. His eyes darted straight up until they locked dead onto you.

The usual expression on his face dropped away. His eyes searched your entire face, his brows drawing in closer.

He saw the phone in your hand before going back to your face.

It clicked.

You stilled under his gaze, the blood rushing loud in your ears.

Beside you, Tanselle nudged your shoulder. “Babe. Babe? He’s talking to you?”

“Yeah,” you managed to choke out. Your fingers felt like wood as you uploaded the topic into the sheet. “Done. It’s in there.”

The classmate muttered a quick thanks and turned back around.

But Aerion didn’t.

He stayed shifted in his seat, his body turned toward your row. One of his friends said something, laughing and clapping him on the shoulder, but Aerion blindly shrugged the guy’s hands off without looking at him. His dark gaze remained on you.

You looked down at your screen, pretending to type, but you could feel the weight of his stare.

A quick glance back down confirmed it. He was staring at you like he was seeing you for the first time, his mind putting the pieces together.

Some girl in my section, she’s whatever. He finally understood why you had iced him.

When the bell rang, you instantly stood up, already packing your bag.

“Why are you in such a rush?” Tanselle asked, shaking her head with confusion.

You gave her a tight smile. “I just need to get back.”

You wanted to wait out the crowd, hoping he’d leave first, but Aerion was already standing by the row exit.

He leaned his back against the desk, ignoring his friends as they stood confused as to why he was still there.

Panic flared in your chest. You didn’t think this through properly.

Without thinking, you threw yourself into the small crowd shuffling through the other exit at the top of the hall.

You basically sprinted across the stone of the parking lot, your keys already clutched in your hand. Unlocking the car, you threw your bag into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

You slumped on the headrest, gripping the steering wheel as you finally let out a breath.

Then, your phone lit up with two notifications.

There were two missed calls and above them another notification popped up. It was a text.

Because the Backrooms aren't empty. You learn that fast. There are sounds in the deeper hallways, wet dragging things, clicking, something that might be breathing if breathing sounded like it was coming from a throat that was never designed for air.

The first time you hear it (really hear it, close, too close) you freeze, and Better Bobby is already moving. He steps in front of you. Puts his body between you and the sound without hesitation, without even breaking his sentence, one arm reaching back to keep you behind him. His hand finds your wrist and holds it. Firm. Certain.

"Stay behind me, baby. I got you."

And he does. He always does.

He knows which hallways to avoid, which doors not to open, what corners to take wide. He navigates this place like it's his, and maybe it is, and you try not to think about what that means.

When something skitters in the walls at night (at what passes for night, when he dims the lights in whatever room he's chosen and curls around you like a barricade) he doesn't flinch. Just pulls you closer, mouth against your temple, murmuring you're okay, I'm here, nothing's getting past me. And nothing does.

Real Bobby wouldn't even stay for a night shift.

That thought makes your chest hurt every time. You try to push it away but Better Bobby's already noticed the expression on your face. He notices everything, because he's always watching you with that soft, focused attention that reminds you of how real Bobby used to be behind the camera. Seeing things before they happen. Anticipating you.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Liar." But he says it gently. Kisses your forehead. Doesn't push.

And you start asking questions. Carefully at first, then less so.

How did you get here?

"Same way you did, baby. Found a way in."

But when? How long have you been here?

"Long enough to know how to keep you safe. Isn't that what matters?"

That's not an answer.

"Sure it is." That smile. The one that used to make your chest ache when real Bobby aimed it at you across a room. "You're just not hearing what you want to hear. Ask me something else."

What are you?

"Bobby."

You're not Bobby.

"I'm Better Bobby." He says it like it's obvious, like you're being a little slow, and there's even a flash of that real-Bobby sharpness in it, that dry teasing edge, and it's so perfectly him that it makes your throat close. "I'm the one who stays, baby. That's all you need to know."

But where did you come from?

"Where did you come from? Where does anyone come from?" He tilts his head at you the way real Bobby does (did) when you said something he found cute. "You're going in circles, you know that?"

And you are. That's the thing. Every question leads back to the same place: I'm here, I love you, stay. It's a closed loop. A hallway that turns and turns yet looks different at every corner but deposits you right back where you started, standing in front of Better Bobby while he smiles at you like you're the whole world.

The architecture of this place and the architecture of his answers are the same. Endless. Repeating. Warm enough that you stop noticing you're already lost.

Because he does love you. Or whatever he does, it's close enough that it feels the same in the dark when he's holding you and the things in the walls are quiet, his heartbeat steady under your ear. It feels like love. It fits in all the spaces where love used to be. And he never gets tired of you. Never rolls over with his back to you. Never sighs when you walk into the room like your presence is a weight he didn't ask to carry.

He carries you willingly. Happily. Endlessly.

And somewhere above you, somewhere beyond the yellow and the hum, real Bobby is probably just now noticing your side of the bed is cold. Probably just now checking his pager. Probably frowning, not out of worry but out of inconvenience. Because your absence is a disruption to his routine and not a hole in his chest. Or is it?

Better Bobby presses his lips to your hair. "You're thinking about him again."

You don't answer.

"He's not coming for you." It's not cruel, the way he says it. It's gentle. It's the gentlest thing anyone's said to you in months. "You know that, right? Baby, look at him. You know he's not coming."

You can hear him step closer, feel the sudden bent in the atmosphere. “What are you doing?”

“Exploring.” You bite your tongue. “Not that it is any of your business.”

“Anything my good-sister does is my business.” His words, heard separately, would sound sweet. Would sound kind and gentleman-like. But there is the matter of his voice—it is sharp and cutting like a silken blade.

“What are you doing here?”

“Following you,” he says, and there’s a danger in his tone. Something flickering, burning like spice. It tastes of treason.

“Did Valarr send you?” you ask, knowing very well that Aerion is the last person your betrothed would send to look for you. Yet, you wanted to say his name. You wanted the reminder—that you are bound to Valarr Targaryen. And anything that comes out of his cousin’s mouth should regard this fact very carefully.

“My cousin does not even know you are gone.”

Your heart pricks, and you feel foolish. The sentence is intended to hurt you, to disquiet you. Yet the knowledge does not make it better.

“I was… exploring,” you say slowly, still not turning, “I wanted a moment alone.”

“Alone from the good prince?” he says cruelly. 

“Alone from all the noise.”

“Ah, because there is enough noise inside your head.”

You shiver. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Look at me.”

The command comes sudden and stark. His cursed voice slithers inside your skin, like a bad word, a malediction. You feel your blood warm as you turn back, unable to disobey. 

Aerion Brightflame stands, leaning against the other pillar of the alleyway. His head is tilted, violet eyes boring into you. And even in the dark, the silver in his head shines. The red from his chainmail shirt sends blisters of spark on his face. The moonlight always does inexplicable things to his complexion. That Valyrian paleness, the light eyes, that sharpness in his face are cut from marble—from something ancient that hasn’t been replicated in another creature quite so alluringly. When you first saw him, you thought he was the most beautiful person alive.

You tell yourself that it was because you were promised to him.

“I know what you mean. I know what you want. Because you were betrothed to me first.”

His words, accusations, burn your skin. “Aerion—”

“Before you betrayed me and went to him.”

“That’s a vile accusation.”

“Vile, is it?” He comes closer, and you still yourself, you don’t back away because you don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how he affects you still. “Am I vile? Is that why you ran away to precious, golden Valarr?”

“I went to Valarr because I love him.”

He chuckles, it is a dangerous, joyless sound. “You did not love me, then?”

“No,” you lie.

His eyes flash cold. He steps closer and closer until you feel yourself step back, just to delay the gap between you. You feel your heart skid to a stop when your back meets with the stone of the alleyway. You will yourself to stare at him with force. With some of the fire everyone keeps telling you is inside you too.

Aerion reaches his hand to smooth the rough hair fluttering over your forehead. You stay still, not even breathing as he leans down, down, down until his pale nose touches your throat. 

He sniffs, predatory, insane. “You smell the same—cardamon, vanilla. Valarr likes that, does he?”

“Yes,” you hiss out, turning your face.

Aerion’s hand comes to touch your throat, his thumb brushes over your pulse point at the junction of your jaw. “But there’s something else, too. Something my good cousin cannot even fathom.”

“Aerion—let me go…” you breathe out.

“Blood,” he says, and you can feel his tongue lap out, for a fraction of a second. Tasting you. “That tangy, metallic taste of it. Something forbidden. Something rotten.”

You scoff in anger, pushing him back on instinct. “You are unbelievable.”

He leans back, undeterred, as if your hands weigh nothing. “He cannot smell that. He cannot smell you.”

You say nothing. There is nothing to say. Because whatever argument he has concocted inside his maggot-infested head is fallacy. Is nothing. You wish you never loved Aerion, never laughed at his cruel jokes, never touched his hand, never ran with him in the nooks of the Red Keep hiding from everyone else. You wish you never let him kiss you, pressed agaisnt his chest, his hands roaming everywhere in your body before settling on your face. 

You still wake up in sweat at night, feeling his tongue drinking you in—claiming you, maiming you.

“You cut off the finger of Lord Redwyn,” you say, surprised to find your voice calm despite the tremor in your heart.

“He brushed his hand against your skin.”

You shake your head in disbelief. “It was a dance.”

He laughs, and the sound echoes off the stone with razor-sharp intensity. “I do not like sharing…”

“That is insanity—”

“... and they have given you to someone I cannot fight. Cannot kill.”

“This is treason.”

“All my life Valarr was the one I pitied,” he hisses, clutching your wrist so hard it sends a stab of pain through your skin. “The good one, that docile lamb, the one those boring septons praised. He never had the courage to look inside his head, never had the courage to feel the dragon in his blood—a waste of an heir. I thought.” His grip tightens. But you stay still. “Yet he got the only thing I ever wanted without even trying.”

“I am not a thing you can possess,” you bite back, tilting your head to challenge him. “I am a woman and I would not have someone who deemed me any less.”

“Oh you are not a woman,” he hisses. “You are my doom.” The violet of his iris is burning bright, burning through you. “I tried to soften myself for you. I stopped cursing for you. I turned away from brawls whenever I wanted to pick up my knife and slit someone’s throat, I let that demon Egg maim my hand and did nothing. I let those meandering maesters give me potions for sleeping when I wanted to bash their heads and burn their useless hands. I wanted to appear sane for you. And yet the one time I slipped, you left me and went to bed with my dear, green cousin. The only one who I cannot touch. You are a witch, a temptress, a vile seductress. You say I could not possess you? You possess me.”

You want to be mad at him, want to pull him apart with your bare hands. And yet, the pain in his poisonous speech touches a deep, dark part of you. The one that was betrothed to him, the one that thought you could tame him.

“You scared me,” you whisper. “I realised I couldn’t change you.”

He stares at you, his eyes turning softer. For a quirt, forgiving moment, you think you see him again, the way you saw him first time. You were fresh off your ship and your feet barely touched the squalor of King’s Landing. He was there, standing by the royal carriage, head tilted at you in palpable surprise. As if he did not expect you. 

The months after, you saw him, again and again. He was willful, he was cruel. He was forever cursed with the blood of the dragon. You thought you saw inside him, that supple, rotten core of his heart. The seeds of madness swon so deep he could not extricate it without damaging himself. You thought you saw him softer, too. Yet. The lines blurred. More often than not. His softness becomes his cruely. His words become his blade. His kiss at once romantic and bruising.

“I wonder if you could… love me,” he says, there is a tender pang hanging there at the end of it. “Because you seemed the only one who could.”

The word—that cursed word—shakes you. Reverberate inside your head like a coin. Even in this momnet of damning clarity, you cannot tell him the whole truth. You did. “I wanted to love you good. I tried to.”

“And you failed,” he says, and the words are curiously flat. “And you left. Like everyone else.”

You chest pricks, it bleeds. Because that is the truth. You failed, like everyone else—everyone before you. People see him and they touch him and then they leave him in his own little prison. People see the curse and the pain and they decide that he is not worth the trouble. That his malice is both the question and the answer. And he stays there, wallowing in his own darkness, wondering what is wrong with him. Alone.

Without quite thinking what you are doing, you reach out your hand, the one he hasn’t gripped in anger, to touch his hair. It is soft, smooth, silken. It feels like a boy’s hair, it feels dangerously malleable. He feels ruinously malleable at the mouth of the darkened alley.

His breath hitches. There is an almost imperceptible shift in his expression. Almost not there. But you see it, and you feel your heart break clean in two. Because despite everything, the betrayal and the humiliation, Aerion Targaryen still loves you. 

“Why are you lurking the shadows?” he asks.

“I do not know,” you reply truthfully.

“I do. It is because the darkness calls you, too. It is because you liked when you were the only one who could chain me. Because the thought of a suitable life with a doting husband scares you almost as much as the opposite scares you. You want a gentle prince? Or do you want one who burns for you?”

Your voice is lower than a whisper. “You’d burn anyway.”

“I still love you.”

And you love him, too. But not enough to spend the rest of your life trying to soften his blows, trying to save him from ruining himself and others. Valarr, when he found you crying in the royal garden, scratching your wrist where Lord Redwyn had touched—you thought it was the reason of it all, you were the reason of all the violence— knelt in front of you. He touched your hand and soothed the brun of the scratch. You decided to love him, for the moment. And then, you decided to love him forever.

The man in front of you is staring at you in utter infatuation. You look at him and realise that you have never known your heart, not fully. You do not know how much you can bear. Your hand is still in his hair, and you lean in to press a chaste kiss to his cheek. You whisper that you are sorry. That someone brave enough to tame his mind would come. That his heart will not burn. That he will find reason, just not through you.

“They’re sending me off to Lys,” he says. “That far enough for you?”

“I never asked for that.”

“Your betrothed did.”

Surprise hits you with a blunt force. Your breath hitches. When Aerion notices it, he chuckles.

“So he did not tell you.”

“I am sure he plans to.”

“When, I wonder? My ships leaves on the morrow.” He leans in again, resting his mouth on your neck. You feel your knees buckles, without a will of their own. You almost fall over before his hands bracket your waist.

“Aerion.” His name on your lips is both a plea and a warning.

“I know you love him,” his words drench your skin. “Just pretend for a minute. Pretend you are mine.”

You nod, haze covering your senses. You find your hands reaching up to catch his neck, hold him in place. He is right, you love Valarr, and this is only pretend. You have been called a mad child enough in your life to avoid all intensities. You do not want the burn of Aerion’s fire, do not want his passion, do not want to feel the graze of his teeth marking his territory on your skin. You don’t want his madness or his desires because you know he’d ruin you. So you only pretend, you allow yourself to pretend as he holds you, as you pull him close for one last time.

When his teeth close around your skin, it is surprisingly tender. You whimper as he bites you, marks you, ruins you. The night wind flutters your clothes, the smell of the dark alleway is intoxicating, ruinous. But you stay there, you stay his for this moment.

Because for one, strange and sparking moment, it feels disastrously like true love.

-------++++++-------

aerion is my doomed noodle, my cursed bunny :)

When Queen Dowager Myriah began to miss Dorne in earnest, the whole Red Keep felt it.

It came upon her in the mornings first, when the sea wind off Blackwater Bay blew damp and chill through the carved stone screens of Maegor’s Holdfast, and she would sit wrapped in saffron silk with her hands held out over a brazier as if the coals might remember a kinder sun. Then it came at supper, when she picked at river trout and barley and sighed for blood oranges split open with a dagger, for peppers fried in oil, for figs so ripe they stained the fingers.

Sometimes it took her when the court musicians played for her. They would pluck their harps and scrape their fiddles, and the Queen Dowager would close her eyes and say, in a voice tired enough to make old men look away, “It is not the music. It is only noise. Bring me a Dornishman with a lute, and then I shall tell you if you play.”

King’s Landing laughed at much and remembered little, but it remembered that Myriah Martell had once been a princess beneath a hotter sky. In the first years she had been beautiful in the way a bright blade is beautiful. Age gentled nothing essential in her. It only made her quiet. A quiet Queen Dowager was a dangerous thing. People lowered their voices around her without knowing why.

In the ninth year after her husband’s death, she sent for you.

Your mother kissed your brow at Sunspear and called you a comfort sent to the capital in her stead. Your brothers argued over which of them ought to accompany you and who ought to kill whichever lordling first made you cry. Your grandmother muttered that the capital was a nest of rats in velvet. But Queen Dowager Myriah had written in her own hand, and when the Queen Dowager of the realm asked for blood, blood went.

So they wrapped you in soft orange silk and pearls from the Greenblood, set you in a litter beneath a canopy to keep off the sun, and carried you from the only world you had known.

You were eight years old when you first saw the Red Keep, all red stone and black shadow, crouched above the city like some old beast with its paws dug into the hill. The air smelled wrong. King’s Landing had no clean heat to it. It smelled of smoke, salt, horse piss, fish, and people packed so close together that the city seemed to sweat.

You shrank behind your Septa Elia’s skirts when they led you through the outer yards. Men shouted. Wheels shrieked against stone. Armor flashed. Somewhere high above, gulls screamed like angry women.

And then a boy’s voice said, “That cannot be her.”

You looked up.

He was all dark-hair and solemn mismatched purple and brown eyes, standing in the sunlight with one hand on the pommel of a practice sword. He was older than you by some years, long-limbed already, though youth had not yet left his face. There was a bruise darkening one cheekbone and a rent in his sleeve. Even then he carried himself as if people stepped aside for him as naturally as water flows downhill.

Prince Valarr Targaryen. The first time you saw him, he looked at you as if disappointed that the living thing before him did not match the tale.

Queen Dowager Myriah, seated beneath a shaded gallery, snorted softly. “And what were you expecting, grandson? A full-grown lady with golden cups for breasts and a train of singers at her heels?”

Valarr went red beneath the bruise. “I was not.”

“No?” Your great-aunt crooked a finger at you. “Come here, my sweet summer child.”

You came, though the prince was still staring.

Queen Dowager Myriah took your chin and turned your face toward the light. “There. Do you see her now? Your father’s cousin’s daughter. Brought all the way from Sunspear because I grew weary of all your pale northern faces.”

He looked. His expression changed.

You never forgot that change.

One instant he was a prince annoyed at being made to wait in the yard. The next he was a boy quite struck dumb by what he had found where he had expected a child. Later, when you were older, women would say that men first looked at beauty as if it were a gift, and only after that as if it were a thing they might take. Prince Valarr did not look at you that second way then. Not yet. He only looked as if some part of him had shifted in its place.

Your great-aunt laughed beneath her breath. “Well?”

Prince Valarr came forward with all the grave importance of eleven. “She looks like a water lily.”

You blinked at him.

“A what?” said Queen Dowager Myriah.

“A water lily.” He said it stubbornly now, because children once challenged will sooner bite than retreat. “One of the white ones in the pools. Only prettier.”

Queen Dowager Myriah’s gaze flicked from him to you and back again, and something old and knowing stirred in her eyes. “Does she?”

You ought to have curtsied. Septa Elia had hissed it into your ear all the way from Dorne. Instead you said, because children in Dorne were not bred to still their tongues as carefully as those at court, “You look as if someone struck you.”

The bruise on his face had gone almost black at the edges. One corner of his mouth twitched.

“He did,” said Queen Dowager Myriah dryly. “Your cousin Aerion. Valarr believed himself faster. He was wrong.”

Prince Valarr lifted his chin. “I knocked him down first.”

You considered that with all the fierce seriousness of eight. Then you fished in the folds of your sleeve for the sugared orange peel you had been saving and held it out to him. “For the bruise.”

The prince of Dragonstone stared at the small sticky curl in your palm as if no one had ever offered him anything so ridiculous in all his life.

Then he took it.

That was how it began.

//

After that, Prince Valarr was everywhere.

He came to the Queen Dowager’s quarter under one pretext and another; to ask Queen Dowager Myriah about Dornish spear-work, to return a book he had not borrowed, to complain of his tutors, to escape his mother’s ladies, to sit and listen while old men played cyvasse with the Queen Dowager and pretended not to be losing. If Queen Dowager Myriah was amused, she would hide it badly.

“Again?” she would say when he arrived.

“I am fond of your company, grandmother.”

“You are fond of pestering my household.”

“I can be fond of both things.”

He always had something for you. A carved horse from the toy market, though one of its legs was slightly crooked. A ribbon the color of pomegranate seeds. A smooth black shell he had found beside the river and cleaned with his own sleeve. Once, a white lily from the pool in the godswood gardens, its stem wrapped in wet cloth so it would not droop before he reached you.

“For the water lily,” he said, holding it out.

You took it as carefully as if it had been made of glass.

He watched your face as you smiled, and the looking on his own face made Queen Dowager Myriah say, in a voice like silk drawn over steel, “Careful, prince. Such names become dangerous if spoken too often.”

Prince Valarr looked at her. “How can a flower be dangerous?”

“Flowers are never dangerous,” said Queen Dowager Myriah. “Only the promises men make when handing them over.”

He was too young then to understand, and perhaps too proud ever to admit confusion. He only glanced at you again, stubborn and bright. “I make none I do not mean.”

Queen Dowager Myriah drank her wine and said no more.

//

You grew in the Red Keep the way a greenhouse flower might, protected from harsh weather by other people’s hands. Your great-aunt kept you close. Septa Elia watched you like a hawk. Men-at-arms escorted you to lessons, to the gardens, to the Queen Dowager’s private sept. You did not ride wild across the sands as your brothers did. You did not run the roofs at dusk with a knife in your teeth the way the Sand girls were said to do. In King’s Landing you learned other things; how to sit still for hours while needlewomen fitted gowns to your changing body, how to dance the stately court dances, how to hear insults hidden inside flattery and answer with a smile sharp enough to draw blood.

But some softness survived the city.

Prince Valarr saw to that.

He taught you the secret ways through the Red Keep no septa knew, the postern stairs that turned twice and opened behind old tapestries, the place where the wall over the sea had crumbled just enough that a slim child might squeeze through and sit with her feet dangling over the drop while the gulls wheeled below. He let you touch the warm velvet nose of a young dragon-horse mare though the stablemaster had forbidden it. He brought you to the rookery once to watch the ravens fed, and laughed when one hopped up on your wrist and stole the fig from your hand.

“You are too gentle,” he told you.

“You are too proud,” you told him back.

He grinned. “So? I am a prince.”

“And I am a princess.”

“A little one.”

“So are you. You are only a little prince.”

That sent him lunging for you. You fled shrieking through the rookery while ravens beat their wings above your heads. When he caught you at last in the turn of a stair, both of you breathless and laughing, his hands circled your waist. It should have been nothing, only a boy’s game. But even then his hold was strangely sure, as if your shape belonged there. His laughter faded first. You looked up and found him looking down.

For an instant neither of you moved.

Then Septa Elia called your name from the yard below, furious as judgment, and Prince Valarr let you go so quickly it was almost a shove.

“Go on,” he muttered.

You ran, though you looked back twice before the stairs turned.

That night Queen Dowager Myriah brushed your hair with a silver brush and asked, lightly, “And what mischief did my prince lead you into today?”

You, half asleep already beneath the brush’s rhythm, told her about the ravens and the fig and the chase up the stairs.

Queen Dowager Myriah’s hand slowed.

When she spoke again her voice was very quiet. “You must take care with my grandson, my summer child.”

“He would never hurt me.”

Your great-aunt set the brush aside. In the polished bronze mirror you could see her face behind yours, lined and beautiful still, hard with the kind of tenderness that had lived too long beside power.

“Men rarely mean to do the worst hurts,” she said. “That is what makes them so dangerous.”

You did not understand her then.

If you had, perhaps some part of you would have hardened in time.

But children who are cherished too carefully grow up believing love can be trusted. It is a costly belief.

//

By the time you flowered into girlhood, the court had begun to speak.

Not loudly, not where kings or queens might hear, but in alcoves and behind painted fans and along the edges of feast halls where ladies sat with their cups and measured other people’s futures. Prince Valarr and the Dornish princess. The Queen Dowager’s lovely dornish niece and the heir’s son. What prettier match could the realm desire, people asked, as if pretty things had ever once guided kings. Dorne would smile on it. The Queen Dowager would bless it. And everyone knew how the prince looked at her.

You heard it first from a serving girl pinning your sleeve.

“He will wed you one day,” she blurted, unable to keep such sweetness behind her teeth.

Septa Elia sent her away, white with fury.

But the words had gone in.

You watched Prince Valarr after that with new eyes.

He had grown handsome in a way that made older women looked twice and younger girls clumsy with their hands. He was tall now, his shoulders broader, his face losing the last softness of childhood. Purple and brown eyes beneath dark lashes; a mouth made for pride and cruelty, though you had known it gentled by laughter. When he came from the yard damp with sweat and sun, stripped to linen and leather, the kitchen maids forgot their work. When he wore black velvet at court, lords twice his age watched him and thought of crowns.

Yet with you he could still become the boy on the stairs.

He mocked your singing and then sat silent when you truly sang. He stole slices of pear from your plate and complained that Dornish cooks drowned everything in spice, only to take second helpings when your great-aunt served peppered lamb. He brought you stories from his lessons and listened, half smiling, while you read to him from old Rhoynish romances.

When you pricked your finger on a needle once and hissed, he took your hand without asking and pressed your fingertip to his lips to stop the bead of blood.

The two young serving girls by the washstand froze with a folded length of linen between them, each staring openly before remembering themselves and dropping their eyes. One of the older slave women, who had been pouring wine for the Queen Dowager, halted with the flagon suspended in midair, red wine trembling at the lip but not falling. Near the carved screen, a pair of eunuch attendants went motionless as statues, their careful court faces emptied of all expression save for that flicker—brief, dangerous, human—of astonishment. Even the old nurse who had been sorting sewing silks in the corner stopped with thread wound round her fingers, her mouth parting as if she had witnessed an obscenity or a prayer.

No one spoke.

No one dared.

But you felt their seeing as sharply as if every gaze had laid a hand upon your skin.

You could not breathe.

His mouth against your finger was no more than the briefest touch, a princely courtesy if named aloud, but it did not feel courteous. It felt intimate in a way that made your pulse falter. There was nothing mocking in it, nothing careless. He held your hand as though it mattered to him. As though the tiny wound had struck him too. As though he had forgotten every eye watching in the room and remembered only you.

That was the most dangerous part.

Not that he touched you.

That he touched you like a man who had wanted to do so for longer than he ought.

You could not breathe.

Prince Valarr seemed not to notice what he had done until he looked up and found your face.

For one ruinous instant, he was no prince at all. Not the heir, not the polished darling of the court, not the boy trained from infancy never to reveal more than he chose. He was only Valarr—young, unguarded, and caught bare before you, with your blood at his mouth and something like hunger in his eyes.

Then, as if waking, he saw the room.

Saw the stillness of the servants. Saw the bowed heads that had been too slow in bowing. Saw the older slave woman standing with the wine as if she had turned to carved salt. Saw the heat rising in your face. Saw what he had made plain without meaning to.

For the first time in your life, the prince was speechless.

Color climbed his throat.

Then Queen Dowager Myriah spoke from her chair by the window, where she had plainly seen everything and enjoyed it far too much.

“If you mean to court my niece, grandson,” she said, with murderous sweetness, “do try to do it where old women may nap in peace.”

He straightened as if she had struck him. “I was not—”

“Weren’t you?” Queen Dowager Myriah’s eyes were wicked over the rim of her cup. “Then perhaps I am losing my sight with age. I thought I saw a boy worshipping.”

You fled the room in shame and delight so sharp they were almost pain.

That night, under embroidered coverlets, you pressed your still-throbbing fingertip to your lips and smiled into the dark.

You were foolish enough to think that such things meant one thing only.

Perhaps they did, at first.

The trouble with young princes is not that they feel nothing. It is that they feel too much and mistake hunger for love, pride for devotion, possession for tenderness. And because the world opens for them wherever they put a hand, they seldom learn the difference until something precious has already broken.

//

Prince Valarr grew older. So did the court around him.

The king began to bring him into councils. Lords watched him more carefully. Ladies smiled longer. Songs were sung with his name worked cleverly into the refrain. And with every year, the women who looked at him looked at you too, measuring, tallying, wondering.

At fourteen, you were all softness still, though beauty had sharpened you. Your hair fell heavy as dark honey. Your eyes had the sleepy depth of the Greenblood at dusk. Men said you were as fair as the water lily of Sunspear, and women said it more often, which meant the words had begun to stick. You did not yet know how to use beauty as armor. You wore it like innocence wears white; without knowing how quickly it stains.

At sixteen, Valarr kissed you for the first time.

Not on the lips.

You had been in the Queen Dowager’s gardens at twilight, the two of you walking among the lemon trees where lanterns had just been lit. Court music drifted from the hall beyond, and the air was sweet with crushed mint and orange blossom. You had told him that a lord from the Reach had asked the Queen Dowager’s leave to send you poems.

Prince Valarr stopped walking.

“Who?”

“Lord Rowan’s second son.” You tried for lightness. “He writes very poorly. In one verse my eyes changed color thrice.”

“I shall have his hand cut off.”

You laughed, because that was what he always said when men admired you too openly. But there was something strange in him that night, some bright hard thing beneath the jest.

“You cannot cut off every hand in the Seven Kingdoms.”

“No,” he said. “Only the ones that reach.”

The lemon leaves whispered above you. Somewhere beyond them people laughed. You looked at him and found no smile at all.

“Valarr,” you said softly.

He took a step nearer. “Did you like the poem?”

“It was dreadful.”

“But you smiled when you spoke of it.”

“I smile at dreadful things often in this city.”

“You smiled at him.”

You had. Only once. Court taught girls to smile before it taught them anything else.

He reached up as if to move a strand of hair from your face, then hesitated. The hesitation shook you more than boldness would have. Prince Valarr never hesitated. Not with swords, not with horses, not with argument.

“Do you know,” he said, very low, “what it does to me when other men look at you?”

The garden seemed suddenly too close, all perfume and heat.

Your throat felt dry. “No.”

He made a sound that might have been a laugh, if laughter could bleed. Then he bent and pressed his mouth to your brow.

Nothing more. Only that.

Yet the touch lingered like a brand. His lips were warm. His hand came to rest, careful and fierce, at the side of your throat, his thumb just beneath your ear where your pulse ran wild. He breathed once against your skin, as if the nearness of you itself had made him unsteady.

“When you come of age,” he said, not quite against your forehead and not quite to the air, “there will be no poems.”

You looked up into his face. “What will there be?”

His gaze dropped to your mouth and held there long enough that your knees weakened.

“Something truer.”

Then he stepped back.

You ought to have asked what he meant. You ought to have demanded plain words, the sort men cannot wriggle free of after the fact. Instead you went to bed floating on the memory of his mouth against your skin and the dark promise in his voice.

When you come of age.

What could that mean, save what everyone already believed?

You were innocent enough to call it love and wise enough only in your body, which knew that something had changed forever.

After that, your heart lived in expectation.

Every feast, every hunt, every nameday, every council where great men gathered and women whispered of betrothals and alliances—you waited for the turn. For the moment some king, some queen, the Queen Dowager would speak what had long been growing between you. You waited when Prince Valarr brought you rubies from a merchant ship and fastened the chain himself at your throat. You waited when he stood behind your chair at supper and poured your wine before his own. You waited when he danced with you at midsummer so long that musicians grew tired and had to change instruments. You waited because he looked at you as if you were already his.

And because you were loved too carefully, no one taught you how men might still break what they think belongs to them.

//

She came to court in the autumn.

Lady Serenei of Lys arrived on a ship with purple sails and a wake of stories longer than the gangplank. She was the widowed daughter of a merchant prince, or the cast-off mistress of an archon, or a cousin to the Rogares through some branch perfumed and rotten as old fruit. The truth changed with the mouth that told it. What stayed constant was this; she was beautiful in the way flame is beautiful.

Not innocent. Not sweet. Not the sort of beauty poets lay lilies beside.

Serenei was older than you by some years, though not so many that she seemed a woman from another age. Her hair shone pale as beaten gold with Lysene silver in it. Her eyes were dark blue, her mouth full and knowing. She wore gowns cut lower than King’s Landing approved and moved as if clothes had never once in her life taught her shame. She laughed with her head tilted back, showing her throat. Men leaned nearer when she spoke and farther still when she was silent, trying to coax the next word from her lips.

Women hated her at once.

Men called that hatred envy, because men find envy flattering where they would find intelligence insulting.

You saw her first in the throne room, all blue silk and pearls, kneeling before the king with a petition regarding some customs dispute involving her late husband’s ships. You were beside the Queen Dowager, half hidden in the shadow of her chair. Serenei spoke in the Common Tongue with a soft Lysene lilt that turned even accountings into seduction.

King Baelor smiled more than the matter warranted.

Prince Matarys laughed aloud at something she said.

Prince Valarr did not laugh. He only watched.

You felt it before you understood it. His stillness. The sharpened attention in him. The same slight change that had come over him once, years before, when Queen Dowager Myriah turned your face to the light and made him look.

Only now you were old enough to know what it meant.

Your stomach dropped.

Queen Dowager Myriah, who had spent half a lifetime reading men who believed themselves unreadable, tapped her finger once against the arm of her chair.

“Ah,” she murmured.

You made yourself ask, “Ah what?”

“Trouble.”

“From her?”

Queen Dowager Myriah did not take her eyes from Prince Valarr. “No. From him.”

You wanted to say she was mistaken. Prince Valarr had looked at many women. Men always looked. He was a prince and handsome and seventeen besides. It meant nothing. Less than nothing. He would glance, and the court would sigh, and tomorrow he would be in the gardens asking why you had not finished the tale of Nymeria.

But the court did not sigh and move on.

It watched.

Serenei remained after her petition was heard. Then after the feast. Then after three more suppers and an evening of music in the queen’s quarters. She was invited hawking with the royal party. She sat beside the king’s nieces at a mummer’s show and wore green velvet that made half the hall forget the players’ lines. She danced with Prince Matarys, then with Lord Redwyne’s heir, then with Prince Valarr.

When Prince Valarr’s hand settled at her waist, something hot and sharp slid between your ribs.

You told yourself it was only surprise. She was very lovely. He was a prince. Princes danced.

Then Serenei laughed up at him under the candlelight, and Prince Valarr bent his head to hear her better, and the look on his face was not courtly boredom or pleasant obligation or anything else you had trained yourself to endure.

It was interest.

No, worse. Delight.

He looked entertained. Alive. Slightly dangerous in the way men become when a woman has made them feel older, bolder, more worshipped than they were five moments before.

You stood so still that your maid had to murmur your name twice before you heard.

“Princess?”

You smiled because all girls at court learned early that smiles are cheaper than screams. “Yes?”

“The Queen Dowager asked if you are unwell.”

You turned. Queen Dowager Myriah’s eyes were on you, dark and exacting.

“I am well,” you said.

You were not. You were only beginning to learn the shape of a new kind of pain.

That night Prince Valarr did come to the Queen Dowager’s quarters, but not for you.

He came flushed from dancing and wine, careless with happiness, and stood at Queen Dowager Myriah’s fire asking if she remembered the old Lysene banking wars. Had she ever met the Rogares? Was it true Lys prized wit above birth? Had she heard that Lady Serenei’s first husband had bought her a summer palace with walls made of green-veined marble?

You sat silent with your embroidery in your lap and watched him talk of another woman.

It was not the facts that hurt. It was the shine in him. The eagerness. The absence of caution. Men do not speak so when they are guarding themselves.

Queen Dowager Myriah, wise enough to hear the bruise forming beneath your stillness, answered coolly. “Lys prizes pleasure above all and calls the rest wit to make itself feel noble.”

Valarr smiled. “You mislike her.”

“I mislike nothing so much as a fire in dry weather.”

He laughed, took your unfinished embroidery from your lap without asking, and studied the tangled silk threads. “This is a flower?”

“A lily,” you said.

He looked at the half-made shape, then at you. “It needs more work.”

You thought, ‘So do I’, but only bent to retrieve it from his hand.

His fingers held the cloth a moment longer than they must. “Will you walk tomorrow?”

“In the gardens?”

“By the river.”

Your heart, traitorous and hopeful even then, stirred. “If my great-aunt allows it.”

Queen Dowager Myriah said, “I allow nothing so easily as my own boredom. Take her. And remember, grandson—rivers carry away all kinds of things. Even princes who think themselves too grand to drown.”

Prince Valarr only laughed again.

The next day he did not come.

A messenger brought apologies; Prince Valarr had been detained at arms practice, then in council, then by the king. By evening everyone knew he had ridden out with Lady Serenei to see a shipment of glass lamps newly arrived from Lys.

You sat by the window until the candles guttered and told yourself you had no right to feel betrayed.

It was only a ride.

It was only a missed walk.

It was only that something once so constant had failed to arrive where your foolish heart had expected it.

When he came two days later full of stories about colored flame in glass bowls and a singer Serenei had sworn was famous in the Free Cities, you answered politely enough that he frowned.

“What ails you?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing makes you look so cast down?”

You smoothed the fold of your sleeve. “Should something ail me?”

He stared. Prince Valarr had always understood you too quickly. That was part of the cruelty of what came after; you could never tell yourself he had not known.

He lowered himself into the chair opposite yours. “You are cold.”

“How can I be, my prince? I am Dornish. The city makes ice of me.”

“That is not it.”

“No?”

“No.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, dark hair falling loose over one brow. “You are angry.”

It would have been easy then. Easy enough to say, ‘You were to walk with me’. Easy enough to say, ‘You looked for me once and do not anymore’. Easy enough, perhaps, to say the thing crouched behind all the rest; who is she to take from me what I thought had long been mine?

But no woman at court survived by naming her wounds too plainly, and no innocent girl wished to look ridiculous before the man who had caused them.

So you smiled. “Then perhaps I am.”

“At what?”

“At being forgotten.”

Prince Valarr’s face changed. “I did not forget you.”

“No?” You lifted one shoulder. “Then I was set aside. Is that better?”

His jaw tightened. “You know it is not.”

“Do I?”

The question sat between you.

He was too proud to answer honestly. You were too hurt to help him.

At last he rose. “You are being unfair.”

You could not help it. The laugh came out thin. “A prince lecturing a girl on fairness. That is sweet.”

He looked at you as if he wanted to seize your wrists. For a moment you thought he might. Instead he said, clipped and cold, “Princess, I had thought you are above pouting.”

The words struck harder because they were so mild.

You sat very straight. “And I had thought myself remembered.”

He left without bowing.

Only after the door shut did your hands begin to shake.

From the chair by the hearth, Queen Dowager Myriah said, “There. He has drawn first blood.”

You pressed your nails into your palms. “He did not mean—”

“Do not defend him to me.” Her voice cut. “I have known dragon princes since before he was born. They are never so dangerous as when they are certain a thing will wait for them.”

You looked at her helplessly. “Am I a thing?”

Her face softened, which was worse somehow. “To you, no. To him…” She exhaled through her nose. “Perhaps not. But men may still break what they love if they think it cannot leave.”

//

The winter feasts began, and with them came the slow bright torture of being young and graceful and forced always into the same room as the woman who had made a prince forget his own hands.

Lady Serenei was not cruel to you.

Serenei was charming.

She called you sweet princess in that low warm voice and admired your gowns and asked after Dorne as if the sands and palaces there were places from a song she had long hoped to hear completed. Once she touched the ruby at your throat—the one Prince Valarr had given you two years before—and smiled.

“A gift?”

“Yes.”

“From someone who knows your coloring very well.”

You could not think what to say. It was Prince Valarr who answered, coming up just then with a cup in hand.

“I chose it.”

Serenei turned her face to him, all velvet amusement. “Did you? Then you have an eye for beauty, my prince.”

His smile at her was quick and unguarded. “I am discovering I do.”

The room seemed to tilt.

Serenei’s fingers fell away from your ruby. She did not miss the way your breath caught. Women like her missed nothing. Her gaze moved once between your face and Prince Valarr’s and away again, smooth as silk over a blade.

“Then perhaps,” she said, “you are becoming wise.”

Valarr answered, “Only perhaps?”

They laughed together.

That night, in the privacy of your chamber, you took off the ruby necklace and put it away.

You did not wear it again.

Court went on. It always does. That is one of its ugliest talents.

//

Prince Valarr hunted with Serenei. He played cyvasse with her till midnight. He escorted her through galleries lit with a thousand candles, bent his head to her whispers, smiled at her from across crowded halls with that quick private curve of mouth you had thought yours to know best. Rumors spread like spilled wine. Lady Serenei had bewitched the prince. Lady Serenei meant to secure a marriage. Lady Serenei meant only to amuse herself. Lady Serenei had a talent for making boys think themselves men.

You tried not to listen. You listened to every word.

And because the gods are cruel, because they love symmetry in the suffering of young hearts, Prince Valarr began at the same time to grow jealous of the men around you.

If a lord’s son danced with you, Prince Valarr appeared before the second song ended. If a knight praised your singing, Prince Valarr laughed too coldly and asked whether the man was deaf as well as lustful. If flowers came to your chamber from some hopeful fool, Prince Valarr found them and had them sent to the Queen Dowager’s kitchens for garnishing trout.

“You cannot do that,” you said when you learned of it.

“I can.”

“They were not yours.”

His eyes flashed. “No?”

The word landed between you both like a slap. You went still. He seemed to hear himself only after he had spoken. Something dark and raw crossed his face.

“Do not look at me so, princess.” He said.

“How should I look at you, my prince?”

“As if I have offended you.”

You stared. “Have you not?”

He moved a pace nearer, then another. There was winter in him and fever besides. “You smile at any man who throws a flower.”

“I smile because court demands it.”

“You smiled at Ser Daeron Dayne longer than court demanded.”

You laughed then, a sound edged enough to cut. “And you count the beats? Is that how dearly idle you have grown?”

His nostrils flared. “I saw him touch your hand.”

“And I saw Lady Serenei touch much more than that, but I had the grace not to make a scene.”

His face went white, then hard.

For one mad instant you thought he might strike the wall beside your head or crush the flowers in his fist or seize you and do something reckless enough to satisfy the rage in his throat. Instead he said, in a voice gone frighteningly calm, “You are not Serenei.”

There are blows that bruise flesh and blows that bruise pride. The latter linger longer.

“No,” you said, and your own voice surprised you with how small it sounded. “I am not.”

You moved to go around him. He caught your wrist.

His hand was hot. Yours felt nothing but coldness.

“I did not mean—”

“What did you mean?” You looked down at his fingers. “Release me.”

He let go at once, as if burned.

The silence afterward was terrible.

At last you said, not looking at him, “You need not fear, my prince. I have no wish to resemble your lady.”

She was not his lady. You both knew that. Yet the title stung him.

“Do not call her that.”

“Then what shall I call her? The woman you choose before the court?”

Color rose in his face. “You speak as though—”

“As though what?” Your heart was beating so hard you could barely hear yourself. “As though I had some claim? I know very well I do not.”

Something naked flashed through his eyes then, so swift you almost thought it imagined. Hurt, perhaps. Or guilt. Or some uglier likeness to love.

But Prince Valarr had always been strongest where he ought most to have yielded. Instead of softening, he hardened.

“You are being childish.”

The word split you open.

Childish.

As if all those years had been nothing but a fond prince indulging a little girl’s fancy. As if the brow-kiss in the lemon grove, the lilies, the promises half-spoken and never denied, the possessive tenderness, the look in his eyes when other men stared—all of it had belonged to your imagination alone.

He saw your face and knew at once he had gone too far.

You could tell because for the first time in your life Prince Valarr looked afraid.

“Listen to me,” he began.

But the dignity of women is a strange stubborn thing. It may survive where tenderness does not.

You curtsied to him with all the grace Queen Dowager Myriah’s stern ladies had ever beaten into your spine.

“As you command, my prince.”

Then you walked away before he could see that the world had blurred.

//

For three days you did not weep.

You sat with your great-aunt. You listened to music. You read in the afternoons. You smiled when spoken to and answered when required. The court remarked that the Dornish princess had grown quieter, which is interesting only because quiet women are harder to read and therefore more amusing to speculate about.

On the fourth day, Serenei came to the Queen Dowager’s quarters alone.

Queen Dowager Myriah received her by the fire with perfect courtesy and left you both beneath the pretense of a headache, though not before giving Serenei a look so dry it might have turned wine back to grapes. When the door shut, Serenei turned to you.

She had come in dark blue samite with silver threading, severe by her standards. Even so, there was something about her that made every room she entered feel softer and more dangerous.

“You do not like me,” she said.

You had expected many openings. Not honesty.

“It would be discourteous to say so.”

“Discourtesy has never yet killed me.” She smiled a little. “Though I admit it has often improved my day.”

You folded your hands in your lap. “What do you want of me, my lady?”

Serenei watched you for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed. Less playful. More woman to woman.

“Something I should not be kind enough to give.”

You said nothing.

She moved to the window and touched the carved stone screen with one finger. “You were raised too carefully.”

The words stung because they were true, and because they came from a stranger.

“I do not think Lady Serenei came to discuss my upbringing.”

“No.” She looked back. “I came because your prince bores me.”

You stared at her.

“My prince?”

She laughed softly. “There. That hurt you, so it must be true.” Her gaze went almost pitying, which you could not bear. “He wants me because I am a mirror that flatters him. Men often do when they are young. I let him feel bold. Older. Desired. He thinks that means he wants me.”

“And do you?”

“Want him?” She shrugged one lovely bare shoulder. “He is beautiful. He is vain enough to be amusing and proud enough to be difficult. There are worse toys.”

Toys.

The room seemed to tighten around your lungs.

Serenei saw it and, to her credit, did not soften the word.

“I thought at first he was merely another prince with a warm mouth and too much confidence. Then I saw the way he watched doors when you had not yet entered a room. The way he listened for your laugh even while I was speaking. The way his face changed when some other man stood too near you.” Her mouth curved, but there was no real mirth in it. “It is a tiresome thing, to flirt with one person while another haunts the blood beneath his skin.”

You could hear your own heartbeat. “Why tell me this?”

“Because I dislike being mistaken for a victor when I have only interrupted a child’s dream.”

“I am not a child.”

“No.” Serenei’s eyes traveled over your face with a frankness almost tender. “That is the misfortune.”

She turned away from the window.

“If he wanted me truly,” she said, “I might keep him a while. I am not noble enough to refuse a prince merely because it would wound another woman. But he does not want me truly. He wants what I let him feel when he has forgotten himself. It is not the same thing. And soon enough, if he has any sense at all, he will learn where his ruin lies.”

You rose to your feet, trembling. “You speak as if this is some game.”

Serenei’s expression flickered. “For men like him, at first, it often is.”

“And for women?”

“For women,” she said, “it is usually misfortune.”

When she had gone, you stood in the empty chamber for a long while without moving.

Part of you wanted to hate her. Another part, more frightened, wanted to believe her.

But belief would have required hope, and hope by then had become a blade you no longer knew how to touch safely.

//

That evening Prince Valarr came to the gardens where you sat alone beneath a bare pear tree.

The sky was iron-grey. Wind moved through the branches with the sound of distant skirts. He looked as if he had not slept. There were hollows beneath his eyes and something unresolved in the set of his mouth, as though pride and urgency had fought there all day and neither had won cleanly.

“You have avoided me.”

You kept your gaze on the pond. The winter lilies were gone. Only black water remained. “Have I?”

“Yes.”

“And yet you found me.”

He came to stand beside the bench. “Do not do this.”

At that you looked up. “Do what?”

“Speak as if I am a stranger.”

“Aren’t you?”

His jaw worked. “No.”

It was the wrong answer and the only one he had.

You rose because sitting beneath him felt too much like yielding. “Then tell me what I am to you.”

The question froze him.

You had never asked it so plainly. Perhaps because you had always thought you would not need to.

Prince Valarr looked at you, and in his face you saw every dear and terrible thing you had loved; the pride, the heat, the possessive tenderness, the quickness to jealousy, the inborn expectation that the world would wait while he chose among its gifts. You saw too that he knew the truth and did not know how to speak it without giving away more of himself than he had meant to.

“You know,” he said at last.

“No,” you whispered. “I do not. I knew a boy who brought me lilies and told me there would be something truer when I came of age. I knew a prince who could not bear other men’s eyes on me. I knew someone who made me think—” Your voice broke. You swallowed hard. “But perhaps I was childish after all.”

He took a step toward you. “Do not say that.”

“Why not? You did.”

“I was angry.”

“You are often angry.”

“With cause.”

The laugh escaped before you could stop it, sharp as broken glass. “And I? Have I none?”

He stared at you. For one moment, all the arrogance dropped away and he was only a young man who had blundered into the wreckage of something precious.

“I do not know how to answer you,” he said.

There it was. Not denial. Not cruelty. Something perhaps even worse.

The truth, or part of it.

You looked at him until your eyes stung.

Then you said, “That is answer enough.”

You brushed past him. He caught your sleeve, not hard, but with desperation in it now.

“Listen to me.”

“I have listened all my life.”

He moved in front of you, forcing you to stop. “You think because I have taken pleasure in another woman—”

The words themselves were a knife.

You flinched.

Prince Valarr saw and stopped short, horror flashing across his face at what he had laid bare.

“Gods,” he muttered. “I did not mean it thus.”

“Then how did you mean it?”

His hand lifted and fell helplessly. “I do not know.”

That, more than anything, truly hurt you.

Not that he had desired someone else. Men did. Princes most of all. Even you, cloistered and protected, knew that much of the world. It was that he had not known himself. Had not known the value of what he held while he reached elsewhere for heat and vanity and proof of his own power.

You stepped back. “Then learn, my prince. Only do it away from me.”

He said your name.

You did not stop.

Behind you, the wind troubled the dark water where the lilies would bloom again in spring, indifferent to the hearts they had once been compared to.

//

The thing about heartbreak is that it makes every rumor monstrous.

Before Serenei, if someone had said Prince Valarr had kissed a woman in a gallery or laid his head in some widow’s lap while she sang, it would have embarrassed you faintly and drifted by. Princes were princes. The court was rotten. Such things were weather.

After Serenei, every whisper was a raven pecking at your ribs.

He had walked her to her chambers after midnight.

He had wagered against Lord Darklyn over a strip of Volantene silk she admired.

He had torn a singer’s ballad in half because it likened Serenei’s eyes to sapphires rather than the Summer Sea.

He had laughed when Serenei spilled wine on his hand and bent to lick it away before half the hall.

That last one was false. Perhaps. You heard it from three different mouths, which at court meant only that the lie pleased people too much not to repeat.

Then came the masque.

The king had ordered it for the turn of the year, a great glittering thing with dancers from Braavos, torches in the yard, masks of beaten gold and feathers, mulled wine flowing from painted casks. Women wore pearls in their hair and little enough else. Men wore velvet and arrogance. The Red Keep glittered like a dragon’s hoard.

Queen Dowager Myriah made you wear pale gold and ivory, with tiny seed pearls sewn along the sleeves so they caught the light when you moved. “If men are to be fools tonight,” she said, “let them at least be struck blind while doing it.”

You smiled because she wished it, though your heart had felt hollow for days.

Valarr, masked in black and silver, found you before the first dance and stood too close.

“You are beautiful,” he said.

You lowered your eyes because if you met his then, you feared your composure might split. “You need not tell me so. Half the hall has already done it.”

“I am not half the hall.”

No, you thought. You are only the one whose voice still matters when it should not.

He held out his hand. “Dance with me.”

Across the room Serenei leaned against a pillar in dark blue silk that clung like water, a silver mask lifted carelessly to her hair. She was watching you both.

“I think,” you said, “you are engaged elsewhere.”

His mouth hardened. “Must we do this always?”

“Do what?”

“Speak as if every word between us hides a knife.”

You looked up then. “Does it not?”

For a heartbeat you thought he might say something reckless and true.

Instead Prince Matarys crashed into him laughing, already half drunk, and dragged him away to witness some foolery involving a Braavosi acrobat and a frightened spaniel dressed in ribbons. The moment broke.

Later, Lord Daeron Dayne asked you to dance.

He was beautiful in the way Daynes often were, all dusk-dark elegance and pale eyes bright as morning steel. In another life, had you met him beside the Greenblood or at some wedding in Sunspear, you might have liked him. That night you liked only that he made no false promises and did not look at other women over your shoulder.

“You are very grave for a girl dressed like dawn,” he murmured as you turned through the steps.

“I am thinking wicked thoughts.”

“About me? I am honored.”

“About princes.”

Daeron’s mouth twitched. “Ah. Then I am safer than I hoped.”

From across the hall, you felt Valarr’s gaze hit like thrown heat.

You should have stepped away after one dance.

Instead, you stayed for two.

Perhaps you wanted to hurt him. Perhaps you wanted proof that he could be hurt. Perhaps some part of you was still young enough to believe jealousy could wring love from a man who had forgotten to name it.

When the second dance ended, Prince Valarr was waiting at the edge of the floor.

“My lord Dayne,” he said with perfect courtesy that fooled no one.

Lord Dayne bowed. “My prince.”

“That will be all.”

It was not phrased as a request. Lord Dayne’s brow lifted, but he stepped back. He was no fool.

Prince Valarr took your hand and led you from the hall.

You should have resisted. His grip was not rough, but it was iron with fury. Yet some older instinct in you still answered him too quickly. You went with him through a side door onto a balcony above the sea.

The night air cut cold and clean after the heat within. Torches burned below in the yard. Music drifted out muffled through the carved stone.

Prince Valarr let go only when the door shut behind you.

“What were you doing?”

You stared. “Dancing.”

“With him.”

“Yes.”

His laugh had no mirth in it. “Do not play stupid.”

Something in you rose then, something exhausted and wounded and tired of being made answerable to a man who gave no account of himself.

“And you?” You asked. “What were you doing with Lady Serenei all these months?”

His face tightened. “This is different.”

“Of course it is. When princes wound, it is sport. When childish girls try not to drown, it is insolence.”

He took a step closer. “I did not say that.”

“You need not. Everything in this city says it for you.”

“I saw the way he touched you.”

“And I have seen much worse.”

The color struck his cheekbones. “You provoke me.”

“Oh, I should be sorry.” Your voice shook and only grew sharper for it. “Have I interrupted your pleasure?”

His hands closed into fists.

“For seven hells,” he said, “must you speak of her?”

“Why? Are you ashamed now?”

The door behind him opened then, just enough to spill a ribbon of gold light across the stone.

Serenei stood there.

For one suspended instant, all three of you were still.

Then Serenei’s gaze flicked from your face to Prince Valarr’s and settled into something weary and almost cruelly amused.

“I see,” she said softly.

Prince Valarr turned half toward her. “Serenei—”

“You need not explain.” She smiled, and this time the smile was for you. There was no triumph in it. That somehow made it far worse. “Good evening, princess.”

You wanted the floor to open.

Wanted the sea to rise and take you.

Wanted, most humiliatingly, for Prince Valarr to say something that would put you before her in any way that could be borne.

He said nothing.

Only stood there, trapped by pride and the knowledge of his own guilt and the catastrophic timing of the gods.

Serenei inclined her head and withdrew, shutting the door softly behind her.

The silence she left behind was unbearable.

You looked at Valarr. At the prince who had taught you, through years and lilies and touches too tender to be brotherly, to believe your heart had a place in his hands. At the young man who had then offered those same hands elsewhere and seemed surprised to find you bleeding.

“What a fool I have been,” you said.

He caught your arm as you turned.

“Do not go.”

The plea in it stopped you more surely than force would have.

Slowly, you looked down at his hand on your sleeve. Then back at his face.

“Why?” you asked.

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came.

Not because there was nothing to say. Because all the things true enough to matter required an honesty he had not yet become brave enough for.

Your vision blurred.

You removed his hand from your arm finger by finger.

“I think,” you whispered, “that I hate you.”

His face changed as if you had struck him.

It was a lie, of course. That was the cruelest part. You did not hate him. You still loved him so much that every breath felt like treason against your own dignity. But love denied a language often borrows hate’s sharper tongue.

You left him on the balcony with the sea below and the masque raging on behind the door, and that was the night something ended.

//

The letter from Dorne arrived three days later.

Your eldest brother wrote that your mother missed you sorely; that Sunspear had grown too quiet without your singing in the evenings; that great-aunt Myriah had stolen you long enough and ought not grudge the blood of Dorne its own. The words were light, but beneath them you heard the truth: they had heard enough. Rumors traveled south as swiftly as trade ships, and Dorne loved fiercely where its daughters were concerned.

Queen Dowager Myriah read the letter in silence and handed it back.

“Well?” she asked.

You held the parchment in a hand that would not quite steady. “If I say I want to go, will you think me cowardly?”

“No.” Queen Dowager Myriah’s face gave little away. “I will think you wise.”

That almost made you cry.

You sat very still beside the brazier. Outside, rain whispered against the lattice. “I thought I would marry here.”

Your great-aunt’s expression softened, though sorrow sharpened it too. “I know.”

“I thought everyone knew.”

“Everyone did. That was the trouble.” She leaned back in her chair, old gold rings glinting on the fingers folded in her lap. “A thing spoken of too often begins to feel inevitable, and men raised among crowns are especially prone to mistaking their desires for certainties. He believed you would be here whenever he chose to turn and find you. So, he let himself be distracted. He wanted to feel his youth in his own hands and another woman’s mouth, and he told himself the deeper thing could wait.”

You swallowed. “Did he love me?”

Queen Dowager Myriah looked at you for a long time.

“Yes,” she said at last. “In the way boys become men by hurting what they most cannot bear to lose.”

The answer did not comfort.

Perhaps because it sounded too much like doom.

“And now?”

“Now he will learn true loss.”

You turned the letter over once, twice. “If I go, I may never come back.”

“Perhaps.” Queen Dowager Myriah’s voice was gentle. “But if you stay, you may become a ghost in your own life.”

With that, the decision was made.

You would return to Dorne.

The arrangements were made quietly, which in a court means not quietly at all. Within a day the queen was sighing over how the Queen Dowager’s poor little niece had grown homesick for the suns of the south. By evening, ladies were already pitying your fragility and wondering if the prince would miss so pretty a toy. Men grew thoughtful in that way men do when they sense a story turning and wish to place their wagers before the last card falls.

Prince Valarr learned of it from someone else.

He came to you in the Queen Dowager’s private sept just before dusk, finding you alone before a bank of candles.

For a moment he only stood in the doorway, breathless from haste. He had come without cloak or ceremony, hair wind-tossed, boots muddied. A prince stripped to urgency.

“You are leaving.”

The candles trembled before the Mother’s face.

You kept your gaze on the flames. “Yes.”

“When?”

“Three days.”

“No.”

The word echoed softly off stone.

You turned then. “No?”

“No.” He crossed the little sept in four strides. “You cannot.”

The absurdity of it nearly made you laugh. Even at the end, some part of him still believed command might mend what carelessness had broken.

“Cannot?” you repeated. “And why is that?”

His face was pale with something fiercer than anger. “Because I forbid it.”

“You forget yourself, my prince.” You looked at him steadily. “I am a princess of Dorne. You cannot command me. Just speak frankly and say what this is. You do not want me because you choose me, Valarr. You want me because you cannot bear not to have me.”

His name on your lips struck him silent.

Then he said, lower, “You speak as if those are different.”

“They are.”

His eyes searched your face with a kind of desperate concentration, as if the right look might still change this. “Come with me.”

“To where?”

“Anywhere.” He reached for your hand. “Out. Away from this cursed place. I need to speak where walls do not listen.”

You let him take your hand because you had wanted those fingers around yours for so long that refusal felt like tearing skin from bone. He led you out through a side passage to the old bridge over the dry moat, where the evening wind smelled of rain and sea and smoke from the city below.

There he turned on you all at once, the force of him barely contained.

“I was wrong.”

The words should have satisfied. Instead, they only made you tired.

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes briefly, as if the simplicity of your agreement pained him. “Do not mock me.”

“I am not.” You folded your arms against the chill. “I am only no longer willing to lie for your comfort.”

He looked at you then, properly looked, and whatever he saw in your face made his own alter.

The fury left it. The pride too, a little. What remained was younger and far more dangerous because it was unguarded.

“I thought…” He stopped. Began again. “When Serenei came, everything with her was easy. She laughed, and I felt clever. She looked, and I felt older. She touched me and wanted nothing from me that I did not already know how to give.”

The wind snapped at his hair.

You stood very still because every word was salt in an open wound.

“With you,” he said, “I never knew what I was.”

You almost smiled. It came out nearer pain. “A prince, perhaps.”

“No.” His voice roughened. “Not that. When I was with you I forgot it. And because I forgot it, I…” He gave a bitter huff of breath. “I thought I could go and be someone simpler for a while. Someone less… exposed.”

The honesty of it shocked you more than any lie could have.

“You chose her because she made you feel strong.”

“I chose her because with her I did not fear.”

“And with me?”

He stared at you as if the question itself were the wound. “With you I feared everything.”

That should have been enough. It should have justified years. It should have called all your love back from where it had crawled to die.

Instead tears stung your eyes.

“Do you hear yourself?” you whispered. “You feared loving me, so you taught me to love you and then made me watch while you were love elsewhere.”

His face flinched as if struck.

“I did not know—”

“No. You did not know. That is the misery of it. A cruel man I might have hated. A faithless one I could have forgotten. But you…” Your breath shook. “You are only a prince. Only a boy taught from birth that anything worth having will wait while you turn your head.”

He took a step toward you.

You stepped back.

That hurt him. You saw it.

“I am not asking you to wait now,” he said.

“No? Then what are you asking?”

His mouth opened. Shut. The wind keened faintly through the bridge arch below.

At last he said the truth, though too late and too raw and not at all in the shape a woman might safely trust.

“I am asking you not to leave me.”

The words ran through you like grief.

Not ‘I love you’.

Not ‘Stay’, and ‘I will make you my wife before gods and men’.

Not even ‘Forgive me’.

Only the naked plea of a young man who had not understood what he was losing until it had begun to go.

You closed your eyes.

When you opened them again, the city beyond seemed very far away.

“I have already been left,” you said.

He made a sound, low and broken.

Then he crossed the distance between you and caught your face in both hands.

The touch was reverent enough to ruin you.

“You are unforgiving,” he murmured.

“You made me so.”

His thumbs trembled at your jaw. He looked at your mouth as if dying of thirst. For one terrible, suspended heartbeat, you thought: If he kisses me now, I will stay. I will despise myself and stay.

Perhaps he thought the same.

Because he bent toward you, then stopped with only breath between your lips.

“Stay,” he said.

Instead you whispered, “You never ask when it matters.”

Something fierce and stricken flashed through him.

Then he kissed you.

It was not gentle. It was not ungentle either. It was the kiss of years gone wrong all at once—childhood tenderness, jealousy, grief, hunger, apology, possession, longing so old it had roots. His mouth shook on yours at first, then steadied, then deepened as if he meant to drink all the silence you had both let grow between you. His hand slid into your hair. The other came to your waist. You clutched his shoulders because the world had become too narrow to stand in unaided.

There was salt on your lips. Perhaps tears. Perhaps sea wind. Perhaps both.

When he lifted his head, you were both breathing hard.

His forehead rested against yours. “Do not go.”

It would have been so easy then. Easier than honor. Easier than pride. Easier than living with the empty ache of having loved him and left.

You put your hand against his chest and felt his heart pound beneath your palm like something trapped.

Then you pushed him away.

“No,” you said.

He stared as if he had never in his life been denied and did not know how to survive it.

You stepped back before he could catch you again.

“If I stay now,” you said, and your voice was shaking but did not break, “I will become the sort of woman who takes scraps and mistake them for feast. I will wait while you grow into the man you ought already to be. I will let your wanting undo me because it is easier than asking for the whole of you.” You swallowed. “I love you too much to become that woman.”

His face went still.

It was the stillness of a prince receiving a wound before witnesses and refusing to bleed where anyone could see. But you were not anyone. You saw.

“You love me,” he said, so quietly the wind nearly stole it.

You gave him the one honesty left.

“Yes.”

For an instant all the world seemed to hang on what he might say next.

He closed his eyes.

When they opened again, there was something like devastation in them, deep and young and terrible.

Then he nodded once.

“Go, then,” he said.

The words were proud. The voice beneath them was not.

You turned because if you did not, you would run back into his arms and ruin yourself completely.

You got as far as the archway before he spoke again.

“When the lilies bloom in the Water Garden,” he said, “will you think of me?”

You did not turn around.

“Yes,” you said.

Then you left.

//

At the harbor three mornings later, the sky was the color of old pewter.

Queen Dowager Myriah embraced you longer than she had allowed herself any right to. Against your ear she murmured, “Do not let southern mercy make you foolish if he follows.”

You drew back in surprise. “Will he?”

Queen Dowager Myriah’s mouth thinned. “Gods help us all, I think he may.”

Septa Elia wept openly. Your maids sniffled and clutched bundles. Men carried your chests up the gangplank beneath a drizzle that darkened cloaks and made the harbor ropes smell of wet hemp and tar.

Prince Valarr did not come.

You had told yourself he would not. A prince does not bare hurt twice. Not where sailors and guards and queens’ women might whisper of it. Even so, each time the crowd shifted on the quay your heart betrayed you with one last leap.

He did not come.

When the ship finally cast off, you stood at the stern beneath a dark cloak and watched the Red Keep rise above the city like a fresh bruise against the sky. Rain freckled the river. The harbor bells tolled once, then again.

You did not cry.

Not until the walls had shrunk enough to look unreal.

Then, hidden by the hood and the weather, you wept quietly into the salt wind while the ship turned south.

//

Dorne smelled of sun when you returned.

Even in winter the air there held warmth inside it, the promise of heat. The stones of Sunspear glowed honey-gold by day and ember-red by dusk. The sea was bluer, the fruit sweeter, the shadows kinder. Your brothers rode out to meet you before your litter reached the gates, and your mother held you so fiercely you laughed and sobbed at once with your face buried against her shoulder.

Everyone welcomed you home.

No one asked at first why you had come back with that new stillness in you.

That mercy lasted only a little while. Dorne was loving, not blind.

You walked the Water Gardens in the evenings and saw your own reflection in the pools; lovelier than when you had gone to King’s Landing, perhaps, but changed. There was a gravity in your face now that had not lived there before. The maids whispered that the capital had turned the princess into a woman. Your mother said nothing, only watched you from time to time with eyes too wise to push where grief had not yet scarred over.

Letters came from King’s Landing.

Not from Prince Valarr at first. Those began later, and only after other people’s tidings had already wounded you.

A lady at court wrote to ask after your health and mentioned in passing that Lady Serenei had departed for Pentos on some merchant matter, leaving half the city talking and Prince Valarr in a temper so black even the king had remarked upon it. Another letter said the prince had bloodied a man in the yard for repeating some jest about Lysene perfumes. Another claimed he had refused every woman presented to him that winter and spent too long staring south from the sea wall.

You should not have hoarded such scraps.

You did.

At last, a raven came bearing his own seal.

You held the letter for an hour before breaking it.

Inside, the writing was brief and blotted once, as if his hand had pressed too hard.

The pools in the godswood have flowered. I thought you should know the lilies came early this year.

Nothing more.

No apology. No plea. No falsehood.

You read the line until the ink blurred.

Then you folded the letter and hid it beneath your pillow like a girl of twelve.

After that, they came rarely but steadily. A page on a tournament won and made tasteless because some Reach boy had praised your hair. A line about a singer from Lys whose voice made him think unexpectedly of a song you had once half-sung and forgotten. A note from Dragonstone describing sea mist and black stone and ending only with, ‘There are no flowers here worth naming after you’.

You never answered.

Yet you kept every letter.

Suitors came to Dorne, as they always would for a princess grown more beautiful with sorrow.

A Dayne cousin. A Yronwood grandson. A widowed lord with kind eyes and daughters old enough to pour your wine. You smiled and sent them away. Politely at first. Then less so. Your brothers approved. Your mother worried. The old women in the Water Gardens began to mutter that perhaps your years in the capital had turned your heart cold.

If only they knew.

There were nights when you lay awake beneath carved cedar screens and felt that bridge again beneath your feet, the wind in your hair, Prince Valarr’s hands on your face as if he had finally realized too late that you were mortal and could leave him.

There were worse nights still when you imagined him with other women and despised yourself for imagining it.

Love, once made helpless, often curdles into obsession to save itself from dying of shame. You thought of him when you braided your hair. When white lilies opened on the water. When some court singer’s note broke sweetly into grief. When men stood too close and you turned your head because none of them smelled of cold stone and leather and the first rain over Blackwater.

Once, in spring, a trader newly come from King’s Landing bowed low before you in your mother’s hall and said, not knowing what he touched, “The prince asked after whether Sunspear’s lilies bloom larger than those in the Red Keep pools.”

Your wine tasted of copper after that.

“Did he?” you said.

The trader nodded eagerly, delighted by gossip he thought harmless. “He spoke of them as if they were women, Your Grace. I had not known princes kept botany so dear.”

You smiled with all the sweetness Dorne taught its daughters. “Princes keep many strange devotions.”

That night you took out every letter he had sent and read them by lamplight until dawn.

By then you knew the truth of it, and the knowing brought you no peace.

He had loved you.

Not cleanly. Not wisely. Not soon enough. But truly, in that fierce proud ruinous way men like Prince Valarr did everything once the thing had got past their armor and into the blood.

And because he had loved you badly before he had learned to love you well, both of you were condemned to carry it like a wound no maester could sew.

//

In King’s Landing, they said Prince Valarr changed after the Dornish princess left.

He smiled less. He hunted harder. Men who crossed him in the yard found no mercy in him. Women found, to their annoyance, that he had grown more beautiful in grief and ten times less tractable. King Baelor spoke of marriages and Valarr listened with his jaw set like stone. Serenei returned once for a fortnight and departed again after a private quarrel that ended with the smashing of a wine cup and the prince not seen at court for two days.

“Does he still speak of her?” someone asked Serenei before she boarded.

She had laughed. “Speak? No. Men like him are never so doomed as when they fall silent.”

In Sunspear, you learned these things slowly, by letter and rumor and the glances of men who brought news from court. Each tale should have fed bitterness. Instead, they fed something uglier and more alive. The knowledge that you had not imagined him. That he had not simply played at tenderness until some brighter toy appeared.

That he, too, was caught now in the old net he had once torn without seeing.

Mutual suffering is not the same as healing. It is only a crueler form of intimacy.

A year passed. Then another.

On the second anniversary of your return, the Water Gardens bloomed white with lilies.

You went there at dusk alone.

The water held the last gold of the sun. Children’s laughter drifted faintly from farther pools where noble babes splashed under nursemaids’ watchful eyes. The scent of orange trees and warm stone rose around you. You knelt at the edge of the pool and touched one open lily with two fingers.

Its petals were cool as skin just before dawn.

You thought of the first flower he had ever brought you wrapped in wet cloth. Of a boy with a bruise on his cheek and sugared orange peel sticky on his fingers. Of a prince on a bridge, breaking and too proud to fall to pieces where you might see.

Behind you, footsteps sounded on stone.

Your heart lurched so violently it hurt.

You turned.

It was only your great-aunt’s old steward, grown stouter since leaving King’s Landing, bearing a sealed letter on a silver tray. He bowed low.

“From the capital, princess.”

Your fingers shook as you took it.

The seal was Prince Valarr’s.

You should have waited. You should have brought it back unopened to your chamber like a dignified woman of rank and read it by lamp with a composed face.

Instead, you broke the seal there beside the pool.

Inside was one sheet only.

I dreamed of Dorne last night though I have never seen it through your eyes. There were white flowers on still water and you standing beyond them in orange silk. I called for you and you looked at me as if I were already a ghost. I woke hating the dawn.

Below that, after a pause you could almost see, he had written:

If I came south, would you send me away?

The evening seemed suddenly too bright.

You read the line again. Again.

A dragonfly skimmed the pool. Somewhere behind the palms, a child shrieked with laughter and was hushed.

At length you folded the letter.

You did not answer that night.

Perhaps because you did not know whether you hoped the answer was yes or no.

Perhaps because some old injured part of you wanted him to suffer uncertainty as you had.

Perhaps because, even now, even after years and letters and the shaping ache of mutual longing, you knew that wanting was not yet enough. Not unless it had ripened into something braver than hunger and more faithful than regret.

The next morning you went again to the pool.

A single white lily had drifted free of its stem in the night and floated near the edge, turning slowly on the water.

You lifted it out.

Its petals lay against your palm like a memory too delicate to survive the heat.

Far away to the capital, where the Red Keep crouched above its smoke and salt and all the ghosts of your girlhood, a prince waited beneath another sky and called your name by no voice but his own heart. And far in the south, beneath the sun of Dorne, you stood with a flower in your hand and understood at last that some loves were never granted the mercy of being simple.

They did not end.

They did not heal.

They ripened into obsession, into prayer, into the sort of longing that taught itself to live on distance and jealousy and the ache of almost.

You closed your fingers carefully around the lily.

After, when you’re both breathing hard and disheveled, he traces the bite mark with his thumb, and the touch is so gentle it makes your chest ache, careful and tender. His forehead drops to your shoulder and he just breathes you in for a long moment, his hand sliding from your throat to cup the back of your neck, thumb stroking the soft skin there.

“I missed you,” he says into your collarbone, so quiet you almost don’t hear it. Not “I want you” or “I need you” but “I missed you,” like you’re a person and not just an obsession.

Your hand comes up to his hair, fingers threading through it, and you hold him there against you while your heart breaks a little.

“Yeah,” you whisper back. “Me too.”

Then he pulls away and the moment shatters, and he’s back to smirking at you in the dark.

“Bet your study group doesn’t know you like it this rough.”

“Fuck you.”

“Just did. Doesn’t seem to have improved your vocabulary any.”

You shove him, hard, and he lets you because he’s already won by having you and you both know it. But his fingers tangle with yours as you shove, just for a second—a brief squeeze that feels like a secret, like he wants to tug you to him and keep you there but can’t without destroying you so he lets you go.

The way he texts is designed to make you insane. He’ll go silent for weeks (radio silence, no contact, like you don’t exist) and then at 2 AM on a random Tuesday your phone will light up with: “saw someone who looked like you today. wasn’t though. she was smiling.” Or: “your professor’s a pretentious asshole btw” (because you mentioned him once, months ago, in passing). Or just: “you up?” which you KNOW is a booty call but also isn’t because when you say yes he’ll drive the five hours just to sit in your dorm room at 4 AM eating shitty vending machine food and not touching you at all, just existing in the same space like he needed to confirm you’re real. You hate that it works and you hate that you always text back.

There’s this one night during sophomore year when you’re drowning (midterms and applications and the weight of everyone’s expectations pressing down until you can’t breathe) and you text him in the middle of the night: “can’t sleep.” That’s all. Just two words. He shows up at the 24-hour diner near campus hours later, his truck idling in the parking lot when you arrive, and you both end up in a corner booth with terrible coffee and pie neither of you eat.

You don’t talk about why you texted. Don’t talk about why he came. Just sit there in silence while some trucker plays the same Johnny Cash song three times on the jukebox, and his foot is hooked around your ankle under the table, not pulling, not demanding, just… there. Tethering you, keeping you from floating away.

“You’re doing that thing again,” he says finally, and his voice is soft, none of the usual vicious edge.

“What thing?”

“Trying to be perfect.” His hand slides across the table, palm up, an offering. “It’s gonna kill you, princess.”

You stare at his hand for a long moment—scarred knuckles, motor oil under the nails, the little burn mark on his thumb from a cigarette—and then you put your hand in his. His fingers close around yours, grip too tight because he can’t hold anything without trying to crack it, but he just holds on while you fall apart quietly in a diner booth at 4 AM.

You sit there until the sun comes up, hands locked together across sticky Formica, and when he finally drives away you realise he never once tried to kiss you. Never made it about sex or wanting or any of the usual shit. He just showed up because you asked him to, sat with you while you broke, and held your hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It’s the gentlest he’s ever been with you, and somehow it hurts more than any of the violence could.

The summer you come home after freshman year everyone in town knows within forty-eight hours. Small towns are like that, someone saw your car at your parents’ house, told someone else, and suddenly the whole gossip chain is buzzing with “the Stark girl’s back.”

You run into him at the grocery store on day three, both of you in the cereal aisle at 11 PM because neither of you can sleep and shopping at weird hours means not running into people except you ran into each other. He looks older. Harder. There’s a new scar on his knuckles and shadows under his eyes and when he sees you he goes still, like an animal deciding whether to bolt or attack.

“Stark.”

“Targaryen.”

The cereal aisle suddenly feels too small, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and you’re both just standing there with your stupid shopping baskets full of frozen dinners and beer, and finally he says: “You cut your hair.”

You did. Just a few inches, but he noticed, and you HATE that he noticed.

“You got a new scar.”

“Yeah.” Pause. “You seeing anyone?”

It’s not casual the way he asks it; it’s sharp, possessive, dangerous.

“That’s none of your business.”

“So yes.” He steps closer and you can smell him now—cigarettes and motor oil and summer sweat—and your traitorous body responds, pulse kicking, skin flushing. He sees it, the bastard, and his mouth curves into something cruel.

“So fuck off.”

His smile is all edges. “That’s not an answer.”

You want to lie. Want to tell him about the guy from your economics class who took you to dinner twice and kissed you goodnight like a gentleman, the kind of guy your parents would approve of, the kind of future you’re supposed to want.

Instead you say: “Are you?”

“Would it matter if I was?”

“No.” Another lie, and you both know it. He steps even closer (too close for the cereal aisle, too close for public—) and his hand comes up to your jaw, thumb pressing just under your chin to force your head up. Not gentle, never fully gentle with him, but not mean either. Just… claiming.

“Liar,” he says very quietly, and you can feel his breath on your lips. “You’re still such a fucking liar.”

Your hand shoots out and grabs his wrist—matching his grip, thumb to his pulse, feeling it hammer under your fingers just as fast as yours—and you lean in until your mouths are almost touching.

“And you’re still white trash who can’t let go of shit that doesn’t belong to you.”

For a second you think he’s going to kiss you. Or hit you. The line between the two has always been razor-thin with him. Instead he laughs, low and vicious, and steps back. But not before his thumb strokes once across your jaw—gentle, deliberate, almost mocking, a parting gift.

“Yeah. Guess some things don’t change.”

The game you play is called “who can hurt who worse” and neither of you ever wins. You bring your college boyfriend home for Christmas sophomore year specifically because you know Aerion will hear about it, will see you at the town bar wearing some other guy’s jacket, and when he does the look on his face is worth every miserable minute you spent pretending to be in love with someone safe. He retaliates by fucking the local girl everyone knows had a crush on you in high school, makes sure you hear about it through the grapevine, makes sure she posts photos. You get drunk and make out with his cousin at a party. He slashes your ex-boyfriend’s tires (allegedly, no proof, but you KNOW). It’s psychological warfare masquerading as moving on, and the worst part is you’re both good at it, both vicious enough to land real hits, both fucked up enough to keep playing.

The night it almost ends you’re both 21, you’re home for winter break, and you run into each other at the bar (the only real bar in town, the one where everyone goes because there’s nowhere else) and you’re drunk and he’s drunk and you end up screaming at each other in the parking lot in December cold, your breath fogging between you.

“You’re a fucking coward,” you spit at him, and he laughs, wild and too bitter.

“Yeah? And what’s that make you, princess? At least I’m honest about what I am.”

“Honest? You’ve been circling me for four years like a vulture.”

“And you keep LETTING me. You know why?” He crowds into your space, backing you against someone’s truck, and his eyes are fever-bright and furious. “Because you’re just as fucked up as I am. You just hide it better.”

“Fuck you.”

“You have. Multiple times. Hasn’t fixed either of us yet.”

You slap him. Hard enough that his head snaps to the side, hard enough that your palm stings. For a second you think he’s going to hit back—he’s got that look, that barely-leashed violence that’s always simmering under his skin—but instead he grabs your wrist, slams it back against the metal above your head, and holds it there.

His other hand comes up to your throat. Not squeezing, just there, his t resting against your pulse.

“I’m in love with you,” he says, and his voice is almost gentle which makes it worse, makes it cut deeper. “I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen years old and I hate it. I hate you for it. I hate that you’re the only thing I want and the one thing I can’t have and I’m TIRED of pretending I’m not.”

Your free hand fists in his jacket, pulling him closer even as you try to push him away. Your heart is hammering against your ribs so hard he must be able to feel it under his thumb.

“You can’t just—you don’t get to SAY that—”

“Why not?” His hand tightens fractionally on your wrist, his hips press against yours pinning you completely, and his eyes are wild. “What’s the worst that happens? You leave again? You’re already gone. You’ve been gone for years. I’m just finally admitting I’ve been chasing a ghost.”

You kiss him. Or he kisses you. Doesn’t matter who moves first because it’s inevitable, has been since that first night at the bonfire, and his hand stays on your throat while you kiss, feeling every gasp and whimper, and you fuck in his truck in the bar parking lot with the windows fogging and your coat bunched under you and your foreheads pressing into each other hard enough to hurt.

After, when you’re both still shaking, still breathing too hard, he pulls you against his chest and wraps both arms around you like he’s trying to keep you from dissolving. His face is buried in your hair and you can feel him breathing you in.

You stay like that for a long time, just holding each other in the truck while the windows fog and the bar empties out, and when you finally pull apart and go back inside you don’t talk about it, just straighten your clothes and pretend it never happened.

The truth neither of you will say is that you’re addicted to each other in the worst way. He’s the first person you text when something good happens and the first person you want to hurt when something goes wrong.

You’re the only thing in his life that feels real, that cuts through the numbness and the boredom and the slow death of watching his whole family rot in place. When you’re apart you compare everyone to him and they all come up lacking (too soft, too safe, too BORING) and when you’re together you fight like animals and fuck like you’re trying to prove something and it’s never enough, never fixes anything, just leaves you both more raw and desperate to be something neither of you can find your way to.

You graduate college and move to the city and you swear THIS time it’s over, this time you’re done, but six months later you’re texting him that you need him and he’s driving six hours just to show up at your apartment and the second you open the door he’s on you, hand in your hair yanking your head back, ravenous mouth on your throat, and you’re scrabbling at his jacket trying to get it off while simultaneously trying to shove him away.

“Missed me?” he breathes against your skin, and his teeth scrape your pulse point.

“Fuck you.”

“That’s the plan.”

He walks you backwards until your spine hits the wall, his hand still fisted in your hair keeping your head tilted exactly how he wants it, and his other hand is already under your shirt, fingers digging into your ribs gentle and mean both.

“You drunk?”

“Not enough.” You bite his jaw, hard, and feel him groan. “You?”

“Stone sober. Drove six hours thinking about this.”

“Pathetic.”

“Yeah.” His hand slides from your ribs to your throat, thumb pressing under your jaw. “We both are.”

You pin him against the wall this time, reverse your positions with a vicious twist, and he lets you because he likes it when you’re mean, likes the proof that you want him enough to fight for it. Your hand replaces his on his throat—smaller, but you know exactly how much pressure makes his eyes go dark—and you can feel his pulse racing under your palm.

“You can’t keep doing this,” you tell him, but your hand is already working his belt open.

“Then tell me to leave.” His hands are on your hips now, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. “Go ahead. Tell me you don’t want this.”

You kiss him instead, bruising, and he tastes like cheap coffee and cigarettes, and when you pull back his lip is bleeding from where your teeth caught it.

“I fucking hate you,” you whisper and it sounds like I love you.

“I know.” He licks the blood from his lip, eyes never leaving yours. “Hate me later. Right now I need you to—” Love me.

You bring him to your bed this time (the first time he’s been in your actual apartment, in your actual life) and afterwards he lies there in your expensive sheets looking around at your IKEA furniture and your framed degree and your whole carefully constructed adult life. His hand is still on you, fingers tracing the bite marks he left on your shoulder, the bruises blooming on your hips, cataloguing the damage.

Then his touch slows, goes gentler. His thumb strokes across a bruise, and he shifts closer, tucking you against his chest with his chin resting on top of your head.

“This isn’t you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know you better than anyone.” And the worst part is he’s right.

The cycle never really ends. You try to date other people—good people, stable people, people who don’t make you feel like you’re constantly on the edge of something catastrophic—and it works for a while, weeks or months where you almost convince yourself you’re over it, you’re FINE, you’ve moved on. But then you’ll smell cigarette smoke on someone’s jacket or hear a particular laugh or see platinum blonde hair across a crowded room and everything comes rushing back.

And he’s no better: still in the same town, still at the same garage, still stuck in the same life he was always stuck in except now he knows EXACTLY what he’s missing because he’s had you and lost you a dozen times over.

When you go home for holidays you don’t tell him you’re coming but somehow you always end up in the same places (the gas station at midnight, the diner at midnight, the parking lot behind the old factory) and every time you tell yourself it’s the last time and every time you’re lying. You’ll be thirty and still doing this. Forty. Fifty. Two people who can’t be together and can’t stay apart, bound by something that’s equal parts love and hate and the simple devastating fact that no one else will ever KNOW you the way you know each other, ugly and mean and desperate and real in the worst way. That’s the corruption, in the end. Not that he made you worse but that he made you honest, and now anything less feels like suffocating.

What you never tell anyone is that the sex isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is that he KNOWS you. Really knows you. Knows you’re mean when you’re scared, knows you pick fights when you’re feeling cornered, knows you check your phone obsessively when you’re anxious, knows the exact tone of voice that means you’re about to cry even though you’d rather die than admit it. The worst part is lying in his truck at 1 AM eating gas station candy and talking about nothing (your shitty professor, his shitty boss, the weird weather, anything but the feelings) and feeling more yourself than you ever do in your actual life.

The worst part is that he’s seen you at your ugliest (drunk-crying over your mother’s expectations, mean-spirited and vicious after a bad day, bratty and manipulative when you want attention) and he’s still there, still looking at you like you’re the only real thing in his world. The worst part is knowing that no matter who you marry, who you build a life with, some part of you will always be seventeen in a dying town, watching a beautiful dangerous boy across a bonfire and knowing, KNOWING, that this is the person who will ruin you for anyone else and choose him anyway.