~わくわく~

GUEST CHAMBERS, THE RED KEEP. YEAR 208 AC — HOUR BEFORE DAWN

The night was restless and unkind; sleep had fled you long before the sky began to pale in the east. You stood at your window while all King's Landing lay drowned beneath its shroud of mist, a sullen grey haze that crept along every street and rooftop and rendered the towers and hovels into formless shadows.

Yet through that murk your gaze found one unmistakable figure, a black cloak strung with golden chains that caught what little light there was; skin paler than the finest pearl of the sea; Ghazdor, your father’s most trusted informant; the coward and shrew who had sold his own birthplace of Meereen to your lord father to keep his own neck whole, wandering the Red Keep at an hour when honest men still dreamed.

Curiosity and panic stirred fiercely within you, beckoning you to gather your cloak about and steel from your chamber with silent tread. And so you did, turning the latch with meticulous patience, coaxing the wood shut without so much as a whisper of complaint. But when you spun back around your face came within a breath of a pair of dark brown eyes that fixed upon you with the weary scrutiny of a man who had rightly beheld the entire chronicle of your life's most regrettable decisions and found each successive entry a deeper offense against the sanctity of his soul..

"In the name of the Fourteen Flames, Lan, must you insist on putting a strain in my bladder?" Your palm flattened against your sternum, pressing hard against a heart that hammered so mercilessly.

"I shall cease the moment you honour your word and stop stealing off to wander strange places without me." His voice carried the flat certainty of a man who had made this argument many times before.

Your only reply was a low grunt and a glare sharp that had meant to draw blood from the very veins in his elongated throat.

"I can account for myself perfectly well this time."

“Oh? Then do enlighten me.”

“My father schemes toward some purpose, and I mean to learn what it may be before…”

"Before the realm is imperilled and the innocent are made to suffer a fate they never earned." Lan finished the sentence for you with the ease of long rehearsal, and you regarded him with an expression caught somewhere between affront and reluctant amusement.

"I mean it in earnest this time."

"As you mean it every other time."

"And have I ever once been proven wrong?"

Lan drew a breath and released it in a sigh of surrender, the fight draining visibly from his broad shoulders.

"And where, precisely, are we bound at so ungodly an hour?"

Satisfaction settled warm in your chest at his capitulation.

"I caught sight of Ghazdor moving about the Red Keep."

“At this hour?”

"Precisely so, which is exactly why we must follow him."

So together you crept through torchlit corridors, keeping close to shadow, and watched from behind corners as Ghazdor glided ahead… until suddenly there came ragged groaning from just beyond, a sound that sent alarm straight through your breast.

Both your heads turned toward the sound, and there upon a stone bench sprawled a dishevelled figure, half-conscious and slumped like a discarded thing, the disorder of pale gold hair alone enough to name him at once.

You crossed to him with a mingling of urgency and care, lowering yourself onto the cold bench beside the place where his head lolled. Your features contorted as the reek of soured wine and cloying oils climbed into your nostrils, thick enough to smother every gentler scent in the corridor. His pallid, slackened face confirmed what the smell already announced— he was drunk, and grievously so —and when he sneezed you recoiled in open revulsion, only for his hands to shoot upward and fasten around your legs before you could withdraw.

"Surely I have passed into the afterlife to be graced by the maiden herself," he murmured, eyelids labouring against the weight of his exhaustion, and then he slipped under once more, this time collapsing fully across your lap. His head shifted against your thighs as a slurred remark escaped him. "Not so soft as I had hoped."

Lan was already reaching down to prise prince away from you.

"Daeron." You gave his head an awkward prod with your fingertips, and received nothing in return.

“Lan… carry him indoors somewhere warm and dry. Lest he succumb to some pestilence if he lingers out here, and by every appearance he has lain in this cold the whole night through."

"And why, exactly, must we trouble ourselves with the aid of this creature?"

"Because he is a prince, and more to the point, we cannot afford a corpse during our visit, whether by our hand or by his own foolishness."

Your sworn protector arched a single brow, cast a long and unimpressed survey over the crumpled prince now gathered against his chest, and relented with visible reluctance.

"Take him inside."

"I will not abandon you to your own devices, least of all in a place we scarcely know and not while that rat prowls these halls."

From beyond the outer walls came the muffled clamour of hooves striking earth, the whinny of horses drawn up short and reined to a halt somewhere near the gates.

"Go now, and quickly, and permit me to remind you that this is hardly the first occasion I have managed such matters and proven myself entirely capable. I shall not stray far, you have my word on it. I mean to keep near the gates, for Ghazdor appears to be steering himself in that very direction."

Lan exhaled through his nose, holding your gaze for a suspended moment, then turned with Daeron draped across shoulder, the two of you parting ways down the branching corridor.

THE GATES OF THE RED KEEP

Your suspicions had proved sound, as suspicions born of a father's silences so often did. Ghazdor came through the postern gate with the graceful ease, his gait slow, his hands folded neatly behind his back, and the knot of guards loitering at the threshold made any approach by the entrance a fool's errand. So you skirted the perimeter instead, keeping to the base of the ramparts, slippers whispering over dew-slick stone, until you discovered a neglected stretch of wall where no torch burned and no sentry lingered, a place secluded enough to grant you a vantage over the stone.

Your own smallness undid you at once. The wall stood taller than you had judged from below, and there was nothing in your nightshift nor ypur cloak nor your thin bedchamber slippers that offered any purchase against the rough grey stone. You hauled yourself up by your fingertips, teeth set, the muscles of your arms trembling like a plucked harpstring, and won a single broken glimpse— Ghazdor and a stranger cloaked beside him —before your grip failed you and you slid back down the wall, the stone scraping your palms raw. So wholly had the effort swallowed you that you never marked how the hood had slipped from your head, nor that a young man had come to stand at your back, watching you struggle with unmistakable fascination.

Only when he cleared his throat did you become aware of his presence.

He was comely in a way that was difficult to look past, keen of feature, his jaw cut firm and clean, no older than you were yourself. His lashes were long and brown above a pale face dusted with freckles. He held himself with faultless posture despite the sorry condition of his dark hair, which fell in disordered strands with several patches clotted in fresh mud. You blinked at him, and he regarded you in turn with a small, courteous smile.

"Quick, boy, hoist me up." The errand had swallowed all your courtesy in an instant; the words coming out a hiss. Whatever pleasant thing his mouth had been doing died at the bluntness of the command, though you never turned to see it, too busy clawing at the ledge above. "Make haste. You are squandering precious time."

"Are you always so discourteous?" A thread of irritation wound through his voice, yet his body drew nearer to you all the same, for reasons he himself could not have named.

"I would not need to be, were you not so maddeningly slow." You did not deign to look at him, merely groping blindly for his shoulder, your searching hands landing now upon his cheek, now upon his hair, and earning a thoroughly aggrieved look that, once more, escaped your notice.

"What in the seven hells are you doing?" he asked, even as he obliged you, closing both hands about your waist and lifting you up as though you weighed no more than a sack of down. You gave no thought to the strength it took, for Ghazdor had come into view at last, deep in some quiet exchange with the hooded man. Of the stranger you could make out nothing, so well did the hood keep its secrets; only a small jewel that swung from one gloved hand. A bracelet, by the look of it, an emerald set in worked gold.

"Gracious, boy, do you ever bathe?" you remarked, wiping a smear of grime from his hair onto the hem of your cloak the moment your fingers met a slick dampness.

"I suffered a small misfortune with my palfrey this morrow, upon my arrival. I was summoned urgently back to King's Landing on account of some beautiful Valyrian princess, lately come by ship from Essos, graceful and gently mannered. I dearly pray you are not the one they speak of."

"I could not say who they mean. The description hardly suits me," you murmured, giving neither his words nor your own the least of your attention.

"Aye. That much is plain," he grunted.

The cloaked figure shifted, and you strained to reposition yourself for a clearer view, which unsettled your helper's footing and set his feet scraping against the loose stones underfoot.

"Be still. You are making a dreadful racket," you whispered sharply.

"It is gravel. And you are doing me no favors."

That, at the last, turned your face to his.

"Did you just name me fat?"

"No. I am imploring you to cease wriggling about."

You returned your faintly indignant gaze to the figure below.

"You have yet to tell me what any of this is in aid of," he pressed, and, distracted as you were by the exchange unfolding beyond the wall, you answered him without ceremony.

"I must uncover my Lord Father's intentions before he weds me off to one prince or another, most likely the heir to the heir. This is the only chance I shall have to wander free before they hand me over to the wretched rites of dutiful courtship."

At your admission the young man fell quieter.

"I had heard as much. You've no wish for it?"

"I harbor not the slightest inclination toward such an arrangement with the prince."

"Well, I daresay the prince shares your indifference," he replied, a subtle wound audible beneath the words.

"How fortunate," you breathed, genuine relief warming your tone, and it was precisely that unguarded gladness at the prospect of the heir to the heir's disinterest that so bewildered him, accustomed as he was to the favor of every woman in Westeros. The sting of it settled fully and he released you without warning.

"How fortunate indeed," he echoed, his voice climbing, displeasure plain across his features. "It would seem they were exceedingly liberal with their praise of the Princess." The remark carried a bite.

You stared, wholly at a loss for the turn in his humor. "Why did you set me down? And what is that meant to mean?" You began, offended, and fell silent at the tramp of armored feet drawing near.

"I cannot believe—" he attempted.

"Hush now, someone approaches. Quickly, feign that you are a prince, or a lord, or some such," you urged, nudging him.

He fixed you with a single incredulous look before a pair of guards rounded the corner and came upon the two of you.

"Good morrow, soldiers. There is no trouble to be found here. It is merely I — a prince —," he offered you a sidelong glance before facing them again and continuing in a bearing so refined and gracious that it struck an odd chord of familiarity within you, "- taking a princess about the keep for a morning stroll. You may withdraw. We would have our privacy."

"As you command, My Prince." They bowed, and went.

When he turned back, he found you regarding him with open astonishment and undisguised admiration.

"By the gods. They truly believed it."

"Believed what?"

"Your performance. It was truly abysmal, and still they swallowed it whole. This realm stands in graver peril than I had feared."

Your candor left him so thoroughly stunned that he shut his eyes and loosed a soft, disbelieving laugh.

From the edge of your vision, however, you caught sight of Ghazdor once more and hastened to conceal yourself behind the young man, tucking into the lean height of him, pressing to his back as you watched the furtive schemer melt away down the corridors.

A long breath of relief left you, and you straightened at last, smoothing the front of your garments. It was then, as your companion turned, that he marked you wore nothing beneath the cloak save a thin nightshift under, and alarm flickered across his face, a faint flush climbing his cheeks as his gaze went casting about for anywhere in the world to settle but upon you.

"I must beg pardon for my earlier rudeness," you said, your manner softening into the gentleness that came more naturally to you, a warmth he had plainly not anticipated.

"I was in great haste. Had my Lord Father discovered me, all my labor would have come to nothing. Might you find it in your heart to forgive me?" Your features eased into so guileless an expression that he could not help but yield to it, drawn in against his better judgment.

"You have my thanks, um—" your pause roused him from his reverie, and he stammered out an awkward reply.

"....L-Lancel. Of the House C-celtigar..."

"Lancel. I am Y/N of House Belaerys." You extended your hand, and a smile came after it. He took it to place a soft kiss upon your hands but you stop him.

"Ah- it's not clean." You laugh embarrassingly. He nods.

"I shall repay this kindness, and you may rest easy, for I will see that no harm finds you. I must take my leave now, before my sworn sword delivers me another lecture on the sanctity of a promise." The two of you exchanged a parting smile before you turned to go.

"Princess, is there any way I might be of service to you again?"

"Another time, perhaps. For now, you sorely need a bath." Your eyes traveled the length of his mud-spattered attire. He followed your gaze, and a sheepish smile crept across his gentle features before he inclined himself into a bow.

"Until then, I shall await it."

THE GREAT HALL, THE RED KEEP. — FORENOON

Once you had changed into proper dress and endured a fitting reprimand from Lan, the pair of you made your way to the great hall to break your fast. You had come late, and the sole occupant awaiting you was a restless little Aegon, swinging his legs where he perched with careful decorum upon a chair far too large for him, working his way through his meal.

He was more than pleased at the sight of you.

And he had questions. He had, it seemed, a granary's worth of them, gathered and hoarded through some sleepless night and now spilled out all at once.

Whether you had mended from your illness. Whether it was true you had come from Valyria itself. What manner of place that was. How bitterly he mourned that he had never once crossed the narrow sea, though he had begged his father Maekar to carry him along to the Free Cities when the negotiations were struck, begged him a dozen times and been refused a dozen more. At one point you found yourself half doubting he was a child at all, so eloquently did he express himself.

You began to fear his questions might never reach their end, until his enthusiasm overtook him and a morsel of food lodged in his throat, drawing a light cough from the boy.

Khek. Khek. You laughed, softly, a hand at his small back patting it and bade him finish his food before you drowned in his curiosity. You would answer all the rest, you promised. Every one.

Such earnest curiosity in one so young endeared him to you greatly. He acquiesced, and the table settled into the quiet clink and scrape of a meal.

"Is it true, then? You are to wed Prince Valarr?" he asked, swallowing his final bite with some effort.

"Prince Valarr?"

"Baelor's son. My eldest cousin. The heir to the heir. The King, His Majesty, and Prince Baelor discussed it earlier. His Majesty, your father, put forward Prince Baelor himself, seeing as he is without a wife, but my uncle, now that my cousin has returned this very morrow, urged that Valarr would make you the finer match."

"Is that so? No one saw fit to inform me."

"You needn't trouble over it." The boy leaned in, confiding. "My cousin's every bit as honorable as my uncle. And a good deal better than my brothers."

"How wonderful." The remark came out rather more perfunctory than you had meant it to, for any matter touching upon your betrothal roused scant interest in you, a fact even Lan perceived by the way you gave more of your attention to your food and to the view beyond the window than to the conversation itself.

"Why is it you sit here all alone?" you asked, steering the boy off the scent.

"Prince Baelor bade me wait and ask whether you'd have need of a maester, since my morrow was left free. I was meant to squire for my brother Daeron." He wrinkled his nose. "But he's a shit knight and drank himself senseless last night."

The crudeness of it caught both you and Lan off guard, and each of you sputtered faintly over your food.

"Aegon," you gasped, once a swallow of water had cleared the offending particle from your throat.

"I'm sorry." His head dipped, his little shoulders climbing toward his ears against a scolding that never came. "But it's the truth."

At the very edge of your sight you caught the slight curve tugging at your protector's mouth.

"Do not encourage him," you said.

Lan lifted his cup and drank, though you knew well enough the gesture owed nothing to thirst and everything to shield the amusement he could barely keep in check.

"A boy of your years ought not to speak so, Aegon."

"Yes, my lady."

After a moment, satisfied that no anger awaited him, he resumed his relentless pursuit of answers.

"Are you a knight?" he asked, wheeling suddenly toward Lan, whom you had invited to share the table beside you.

"After a fashion. We hold no such titles in Essos, little prince. I am no more than her sworn protector."

"You must be terribly skilled to serve as her highness's sole guard. I am told His Majesty's Lord Commander has arrived as well. Are you the greater swordsman of the two?"

"I fear not." A soft smile went with the words, courtly as any Lan owned. "His Majesty's commander is the finest blade I've crossed steel with in all of Essos."

You loosed a small, unlady-like snort at the remark.

The boy who had only moments ago insisted you might dispense with formality and simply call him Egg— a name hung upon him by an elder brother absent from King's Landing, spirited away by their grandsire to labor toward a maester's chain— pressed on relentlessly, interrogating your protector with the tireless appetite of a child who had discovered a subject far more interesting than his lessons.

Lan answered each question with measured patience, and it was precisely because your attention had drifted from their exchange that you nearly missed the figure emerging from the mouth of the eastern corridor below. Your father stood in the pale wash of morning light, one hand lifted in that familiar economy of gesture reserved for men he commanded, and Ghazdor bent low before him to receive his instruction.

You fixed upon them so entirely that you failed to notice the conversation between Lan and the prince had guttered into silence, nor that both had turned to trace the invisible line your gaze carved through the stone.

Wherever Ghazdor appeared, misfortune trailed close behind him, and you had learned this truth through years spent at your father's elbow, cataloguing the order of his movements through observation he had never once invited. He would never confide his designs to you, for he held two immovable convictions: first, that a woman had not the wit to see anything of consequence done; and second, that even were you somehow capable, you would betray him the instant his back was turned.

"Egg, Lan and I must take our leave at once," you announced, rising to your feet as you watched the two men below diverge along separate passages. Lan was standing before you had finished the sentence.

"And where, precisely, are we bound?"

"I need you to shadow my father." The rest you told him with a deliberate cast of your eyes toward the vanishing figure of Ghazdor.

"I intend to follow Ghazdor myself."

"Princess—"

"Lan. I will be perfectly safe. I beg you, go now, or we shall both grieve this hesitation before the day is out."

He lingered still, his jaw set against the instruction, and only when the young prince stepped forward did the worry etched across his brow begin to soften.

"I'll go with her." You both turned upon the child, who had plainly drunk down every word of the quarrel. "I know this Keep better than any man within its walls, and should trouble find us, the ones who make it shall answer to my lord father, or to my uncle Baelor." He drew himself up to match the boast, shoulders squared, chin lifted in a way that dared you to say him nay. At last Lan's eyes found yours, and he gave a single grudging nod before he strode off.

"Meet us in the royal gardens once it's done."

He inclined his head.

"Be careful, Lan."

He answered only with a lazy sweep of his hand, and never once looked back as he rounded the corner and was gone.

"Are you ready?" you asked, and held your open palm out to the boy.

Egg gave a resolute nod and slid his small cold fingers into yours.

CORRIDORS OF THE RED KEEP. — FORENOON

The little Prince proved every inch as good as his word. He guided you through paths and neglected corridors so cunningly chosen that your father's informant never once suspected a pair of eyes tracked his passage.

While Egg pressed ahead with the confidence of a boy who had roamed these servants' arteries a hundred times over, you took care to glance behind at frequent intervals, ensuring no third party dogged your heels and it was upon one such backward glance that you collided full-force with something, or rather someone, the flesh of your brow stinging sharply from the impact. You lifted a hand to soothe the ache, and when you raised your eyes you found yourself arrested by a pair of the most alluring eyes you had ever beheld: one cerulean and luminous, the other a warm and earthen brown.

"Lancel?" you breathed.

Bathed now and stripped of the previous morn's grime, he stood revealed as remarkably handsome, a solitary thread of silver woven through the dark brown of his hair at one temple, his jaw carved with a severity that verged on the sculptural. Those uneven eyes woke in you an odd flicker of recognition even as they held you half-captive.

Egg, sensing the sudden shift in the air between you, wheeled about and drew a startled breath.

"My Pri—" He arrested himself the instant he caught the widening of Lancel's eyes and the barely perceptible shake of the older youth's head, a warning that the word must remain unspoken.

"What are you—"

You clapped a hand across the man's mouth before he could finish, pressing an index finger to your own lips in command of silence. Egg, recalling the errand that had set you both wandering, crept toward the nearest archway and peered beyond it, and the disappointment blooming across his young face told you the truth before his tongue did.

"He is gone, Princess." His brows drew together in unmistakable dismay.

You hurried to his side and looked for yourself, unwilling to credit it, yet the corridor beyond stretched empty in every direction, and you both permitted the weight of the loss to settle heavily across your shoulders.

"This is your doing, that we have lost him," you chided Lancel, though gently.

"My doing?" He blinked at you, thoroughly bewildered. "Lost whom? What business drags the pair of you down here? None but the servants have cause to walk these passages."

"By the gods, Lancel, could you be any less dense."

"Lancel?" Egg echoed, his confusion mounting as his gaze darted between the two of you.

The peculiar look that passed between the boy and the older youth aroused a suspision in you. "Are you already acquainted with one another?"

You watched Lancel's mismatched eyes drift slowly to meet Egg's, and Egg return the silent regard, both of them holding their tongues until the young prince abruptly seized upon an answer.

"Yes. He is my squire."

"Aye," Lancel affirmed with an awkward incline.

"Curious. I had understood you to be squiring for your elder brother, Egg."

"So I am, but my lord father saw fit to grant me a squire besides."

"Ah." You spared Lancel another lingering appraisal, taking in the fine cut of the simple black doublet that clothed him.

"He is gone, Princess, what should we do now?" Egg interjected, and something in the boy's tone betrayed his eagerness to steer the conversation into calmer waters.

" I do not know. I suppose we must await Lan's return."

"Who is this Lan?" Lancel inquired, his brow creasing anew.

"Her sworn sword."

"Her actual sworn sword?"

"Yes."

Your own brows knit once more at the strange, clipped current running beneath their exchange, yet in the end you merely exhaled. "I propose we withdraw to the gardens and wait for whatever Lan may bring us."

"Aye." Egg loosed a matching sigh, then lifted his head with an air of exaggerated hauteur. "Lancel, fetch the Princess and myself some water. This matter is no concern of yours."

You could not be certain you had not imagined it, but a faint twitch tugged at the corner of the squire's eye.

"It is hardly a taxing walk from here, My Prince," Lancel returned, straining pointedly upon the final word. "Perhaps you might fetch it yourself and so temper that body of yours, as your Lord Father has ever wished."

"You are as poor a squire as my brother is with a sword."

"And you give voice to your grievances with all the color of Prince Maekar," Lancel remarked dry as the Dornish summer dust.

"Enough, the both of you."

The little princeling's chin dropped toward his chest.

"Egg, tell me plainly can he be trusted?"

The boy raised his eyes to meet Lancel's, and whatever passed within that steady, uneven gaze seemed to instruct him toward a single answer he was allowed. "Yes, I trust him."

"Very well, then. Let us make for the gardens. Lead on, if you please."

"At once, Princess."

THE ROYAL GARDENS, THE RED KEEP. — AFTERNOON

"Prince Baelor was the firstborn, Prince Maekar sprang out last" ♫♪♫

The gardens spread before you in true splendor, flowers and grass alike basking and surrendering to a sun whose rays set the pale gravel of the walkways alight. The heat troubled you not in the slightest, for this so-called swelter was no worse than a cool draught of cider held against the merciless desert glare of Essos. Roses began to hang heavy and overblown along the arbors, and their sweetness came thick on the still air, mixing with the green wet smell of turned earth beneath it.

"Daemon was the bastard, so they kicked his bastard — Grass is green in summer, green grass I adore" ♫♪♫

As the three of you wound your way beneath the flowering trellis, the tedium of unbroken silence proved too great a burden for young Egg, who took to humming an exceedingly bawdy little nursery rhyme whose lyrics might have been penned by a company of drunkards slumped across a tavern floor, an offense that earned him a light cuff to the shoulder from his squire.

"But grass is red all over, when you kill a rebel hor— Ow." The boy nursed the injured limb against his arm, his features collapsing into a wounded scowl that soured the whole of his small face at the sting delivered upon him.

"A squire ought never raise a hand against his prince," Egg protested, indignation trembling beneath the complaint.

"And a Prince ought never warble such filthy verses in open air," Lancel returned without the faintest trace of contrition.

"It is a hymn to commemorate our- my father and my uncle's triumph in the Blackfyre Rebellion," the boy corrected, straightening his shoulders with an authority that sat strangely upon someone so early in years.

"I am aware, but an undignified song no less"

"The Blackfyre Rebellion?"

At your befuddledment the pair exchanged a glance before resolving to enlighten you, the three of you drifting toward the shade of the nearest pavilion where the marble columns offered respite from the strengthening sun and the gravel gave way underfoot to cool worn stone.

There they unfolded the unfortunate chronicle of the sorry king, their great-grandsire, who had legitimized in the final delirium of his deathbed, an act of misguided mercy that fractured the realm and plunged the Targaryens into yet another war among their own blood.

One among those baseborn sons, whose name escapes your recollection even now, had proclaimed himself the rightful heir and gathered beneath his banner a host of houses across Westeros, all of them ardent for the 'Black Dragon's' cause. Those who wagered their fortunes on the pretender came to ruin most complete once the crown wrenched back its titles and its throne. The conflict lay quiet for the present hour.

Quiet, you thought, is seldom the same as finished.

"Might I inquire after something that may bear no relation to this matter?"

Both of them turned their attention fully upon you.

"Do three black castles arrayed upon a field of orange stir any recognition in either of you?"

The question drew their brows together in unison, each countenance sinking into deliberation, the little prince's lips pressing themselves into a severe line while his squire's mouth pursed thoughtfully toward one cheek.

"Ah, House Peake," Lancel offered at length. "Once one of the most powerful noble houses of the Reach that lent its swords to the pretenders. Their castles were stripped after the loss of the rebellion."

Something in your chest folded and dropped, for it lent an unwelcome weight of truth, a confirmation, to the vision that had stalked your sleep for many nights, binding it fast to the very ground on which you now stood. The young boy with hollow sockets—

"And might I ask further what occupied the two of you earlier this morrow? Does that concern touch upon this same affair?" Lancel asked.

Egg lifted his shoulders in a shrug and before words could take shape upon your tongue, the figure of Lan resolved out of the far glare, carving a purposeful path across the sun-bleached gravel toward the pavilion.

"Lan!" You rose in haste to close the space between you, the other two trailing at your heels. "We lost Ghazdor entirely."

His gaze skimmed your two companions and caught upon Lancel, the newest of them, a breath longer than the rest before it settled at last on your face.

Tolvys drakaro pelro...

"Nevermind that. There is a young boy brought to trial, and His Majesty commands your presence. I suspect this is a spectacle you would wish to witness with your own eyes." A paleness had overtaken his expression, the look of a man who had gazed upon something departed from the world, and from that alone the certainty of the whole matter crystallized within you.

In a wave of dragonfire...

"A young boy...... Of House Peake?"

...zālilaks

...all will be burned

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A/N: Sorry about the late update. I hadn't been feeling well physically and I was not in a good place mentally. Also my tics went haywire, so it was quite difficult to focus and edit the chapters. But rest assured, I'm better now. So here it is. I hope you guys have a good day and enjoy~

CORRIDORS OF THE RED KEEP. YEAR: 130 AC — MIDNIGHT

You sit upon the cold stone with his hand hanging open before you, and you weigh the taking of it against the older wisdom that tells you to refuse, and then the echo of boot-heels striking flagstone cuts the deliberation clean in half and you seize his palm before another breath has passed. His eyes turn toward the sound. The courteous curve of his mouth thins to something watchful. In one unbroken motion he draws you to your feet, pinches out the lamp between two fingers, sets the smoking vessel into a recess of the wall, and pulls you through a low door into a storeroom given over to brooms and buckets and folded linens. He does it all with such quiet ease that a person might swear he had done the like a hundred times before, were the very notion not so preposterous for a Lord of the Faith or any man alive.

The room is a close and airless box, and it is made worse by the height of him and the width of his shoulders, which leave scarce a hand's breadth between the two of you. His body lies along the length of yours, and neither of you dares stir, for a careless movement might send a pail clattering or set a shelf to rattling and betray you both to the men beyond the timber. The heat of him runs against the cold that had gnawed at you in the corridor, and through the sheer, wretched nightshift Aemond had chosen, you feel the flat of his chest beneath the leather of his doublet. His forearms are braced upon the wall to either side of your head, bearing his whole weight above you, while your own hand rests in graceless uncertainty upon his sternum for the simple reason that there exists nowhere else on this earth to put it.

The footfalls come nearer. The low mutter of talk swells behind the boards. Ormund lifts one hand from the wall and lays it across your mouth, his palm broad enough to cover half your face, the gloved tips of his fingers against the soft skin below your ear.

"I don't trust that dragon-bred bitch," one of the guards says through the wood. "Not for a heartbeat."

"Aye. A blasphemer to the marrow." The second man's voice is thick with scorn. "Were Prince Aemond not so taken with her, she'd be feeding crows by now."

"And rightly so. Her, and them bastard nephews of hers besides."

Your fingers close and fist themselves in his doublet and you feel the pressure of his hand increase against your lips, his gaze fixed upon you in wordless admonition, forbidding any reckless outburst that would undo you both.

The boots pass on. The coarse talk thins to a whisper and dies away down the hall. Only then does he take his hand from your mouth. You let your eyes fall shut, and the grief comes up in you fresh and unhealed, and you set your brow against his chest and weep without a sound. He does not move. He means to complain of the grime and the mold-thick air, and then a loosened strand of your hair drifts against him and the smell of it stops the words in his throat.

His eyes slide close in unguarded pleasure as he draws in the delicate mingling of scented oil, citrus and skin, that faint brightness, so unlike the overwrought perfumes worn by the noblewomen of Westeros, and he finds himself lowering his chin to rest atop the crown of your head, savoring you while you shudder through your sorrow.

It is some while later that you come to yourself enough to know you have been sobbing into the front of a stranger's garment.

"My Lord, forgive me." You reach for the hem of your shift to blot the dampness you have left upon him.

"There is nothing here to forgive." He catches your wrist and guides it to the wall beside your temple. "No shame attends a maiden who mourns her loss." A warmth comes into his face, and he leans the nearer for it.

The mildness of his regard carries something beneath it that turns your face away, and he answers by lifting his other hand and turning your chin back to him.

"It is unbecoming for a lady to look away while she is addressed," he corrects, and the gentle line of his mouth widens by a fraction.

"My apologies, My Lord." The heat climbs into your cheeks as the impropriety of it presses upon your awareness. He appears wholly untroubled by it, for he holds you there in that closeness a while longer, and the instant you catch his eye tracing the length of your form and returning slowly upward, a flutter of alarm rises in your breast.

"Have-have the men gone? Is it safe now to step out?"

He holds the look a moment more, then lets go your arms and pulls the door wide, and the two of you come out into the corridor.

"These are perilous hours for any lady abroad and unattended," he says, brushing the dust from his hands and his clothing, "and more perilous still for one whose name is spoken as yours is spoken. What business drives you down these passages alone?"

You cannot summon the courage to meet his gaze.

"I wished only to see my nephew. He is but seven years of age and utterly alone. I cannot bear to think of the terror that holds him at this hour."

"If you go on in such recklessness, you shall never set eyes on him at all. Your half-brother has not the strength to guard you from every quarter. There are men enough who still want your head, in payment for what your dragon made of their kin."

"Then why should you wish to help me? I am what they name me. A heathen. A blasphemer against the Seven."

"No." There is no doubt in his word. "I behold no blasphemer before me." He advances a single step, and the cold of the corridor seems to draw closer for it, though the heat comes off him all the same. "I behold a soul gone astray. You are stained by the sins of your forebears, and yet a day came when you saw your own flaws, your own defilement, and the Seven showed you mercy for it. I understand it plainly now. They have called me to lead you back into the arms of the Faith, for you have wandered, corrupted by your elders, turned aside from the very purpose you were made for."

"My purpose?"

He stops within a breath of you and peels the glove from one hand.

"To show the realm that even the savagery of your line may be washed clean by devotion. To live a life of virtue, and stand a testament to every other creature that carries that cursed blood." He lifts the bared hand and draws his fingertips in a slow line down your cheek. "You are my calling. This whole war has carried me to this hour. You were fated to be delivered here, before me, that I might purify you once and for all, for it is the will of the Seven and no other."

The tenderness in his face sits so unwavering, marries grotesquely with the meaning of his words that a cold current threads down your spine, and you grope for some means of escape that will not give offense.

"I must go. My betrothed will—"

"Brother," he interjects.

"Hm?"

"Your half-brother." A measured warmth comes back into his mouth as he lowers the hand and works the glove over his fingers once more. "He is no betrothed of yours. The holy texts forbid the joining of those who share one blood." You mark the small tightening along his jaw and the purse of his lips as he says it, and you are near certain it has nothing to do with the fit of his glove.

"Yes, my lord. My-my brother. I shall return to my chambers." You dip into a shallow bow and give ground a step.

"I shall see to it that the Queen Dowager arranges you lodging more fitting." The smile is wider now.

"Th-thank you, my lord. You are most gracious."

"It is my sacred duty, My Lady." He bows to you.

You incline your head and turn away, not failing to dismiss the sensation of his gaze crawling along the shape of your body as you withdraw down the passage.

AEMOND'S CHAMBER, RED KEEP. — MIDNIGHT

By some grace of fortune you gain the chambers scarce a few breaths before Aemond returns, and you burrow beneath the heavy furs of the great bed and draw their warmth up over you. A handful of heartbeats later the door swings inward upon its iron hinges, your King crosses the threshold, and you perceive at once from the tightness of his stride and the set of his shoulders that his temper has soured. Long experience has taught you that nothing wholesome follows in the wake of his black moods, so you rise toward him despite the ache in your body pleading with you to remain in the heat you had only just found.

"Aemond, what has happened?" You extend your hand toward him, but he sweeps it aside and resumes his agitated pacing across the flagstones, quick and short of stride. A portion of you very nearly softens into a smile, for the sight recalls the boy he once was; it would seem that though his body has been remade entirely, yet the old temper walked the floor the same as ever.

"Aemond. Speak to me." It is as though the same memory has surfaced within him, for at the sound of the particular gentleness you always reserved for his troubled hours he finally goes still and comes to you. He stops close, and you lift a hand to trace the ruined skin along his cheek.

"What has happened?"

"They mean to take you from me," he says, raising his own hand to press yours firmly against his face and hold it there.

"Who does?"

"Lord Ormund. My mother. My grandsire."

Your thoughts drift back to what the Hightower Lord had murmured in the black of that storeroom— purify you —and you press the shiver down before it can show.

"You are the king now, are you not? You are in no wise bound to bend beneath their designs and their schemings." Your thumb strokes slow across the seamed and knotted flesh of his cheek, and his arms answer by folding round you and drawing you close against him.

Though every part of your circumstance unsettles you, this is the safer refuge, for you have long known the truth that Helaena had spoken aloud: he has always handled you with care, and though tales of his savage outbursts and cruelty reach you even from the mouths of his own kin, you have never once suffered them, because he has never been able to bring himself to turn that face upon you. You know Aemond, his ferocity and his frailties alike, and you know precisely how to guide him through both. Ormund, for his part, remains a cipher to you and nothing more. A name affixed to the ancient seat of Hightower, and a reputation for zealous and unbending fealty to the Seven.

"Mm. You're cold," he murmurs.

"Yes. You chose this gown for me."

A short breath of a laugh comes out of him.

"And yet you look ravishing in it," he says lower still, his voice descending into some warmer register as he watches the tremor pass through you, a pleased satisfaction settling into his features.

You observe the slow descent of his violet eye down the length of your body, and he closes the distance, tilting his head and setting his lips upon yours once more. This time he is unhurried, careful and coaxing. You raise your hands into the narrow space between your bodies with the intention of easing him back, and instead your own flesh commits its quiet treason, aching after the warmth you had renounced only minutes before, and Aemond's body offers precisely the heat you now desperately crave. In one smooth gesture he shrugs free of his upper garment, and you catch a fleeting glimpse of the hardened muscle of his chest, and the recognition of how thoroughly he has grown into a man raises a subtle flush across your face before you can school it, and then he has already drawn you back against him, one hand splayed at the small of your back, the other sliding upward to cradle the nape of your neck and angle your head so that he might deepen the kiss.

When at last his tongue slips past your lips into the warmth it has been seeking, he hums with a low and unmistakable contentment, tasting you at last after all the years he spent yearning and dreaming of nothing else beside. You lift your hands once again to his chest as your conscience wages its losing campaign against your body, but your fingers meet the fine ridges of muscle and the smooth heat of bare skin, and the whole of you yields the moment his tongue coaxes yours into surrender, your eyes fluttering helplessly closed.

In the place of the refusal you had meant to give voice to, a soft sigh spills out of you instead, and you feel the effect of it upon him at once, for his movements grow the more insistent as his feet begin to shift you both across the floor, his hand hauling your hips flush against his own. With a gentle pressure of his fingers beneath your chin he turns your face aside, that he may bury his mouth beneath one edge of your jaw and lavish his attentions upon the bared and trembling line of your throat.

"Aah—" A strangled little cry breaks from you where you had meant to give only a gasp, and it draws a satisfied groan up from somewhere deep within his chest; and as an unfamiliar heat begins to bloom low in your own belly, you rouse yourself abruptly from the stupor into which his mouth and his hands have so skillfully lulled you, and flatten both your palms against his chest to shove him back. In the very effort of it the arrow wound flares viciously through your side, and you yelp aloud, and Aemond halts every movement of his body in a single instant and pulls away to search your face.

"Have I hurt you?" he says, and every last trace of hunger drains out of his gaze as the concern comes flooding anew across his sharp features.

"No, no. I—"

"Forgive me. I should not to have." His eye travels down to the bandaging bound about the wound at your shoulder. Relief seeps slow through you as the fevered warmth begins to ebb from your skin, leaving you stranded there in an awkward stillness, loathing yourself the while for that which you had felt only moments gone; and you clear your throat in a clumsy bid to turn the whole of the exchange aside.

"It's all right, Aemond. Can we simply rest now? I am rather tired."

His brow remains furrowed still with worry, and he nods, slow and reluctant both, before he guides you toward the bed the two of you are made to share.

"Of course," he says, as he helps to ease you down upon it.

Something in the whole look of him— so wholly consumed with his care for you, and laced through yet with the lingering residue of his earlier vexation— loosens something tight and long-clenched within your chest, and without ever meaning to, you open your arms to him in invitation, offering to hold him as you have held him through every one of his troubled hours since the days of his boyhood.

This time, however, a small and quiet warmth touches the corner of his mouth, and he reaches instead for one of your hands and presses his lips to the back of it.

"Daor," he whispers. No.

"No?" You tilt your head in genuine bewilderment. He releases your hand and you watch him circle to your uninjured side and slide beneath the furs.

"I wish to hold you," he says, and then he waits upon your consent. You nod, slowly, and he gathers you into his embrace, and it is only then, with your cheek laid against him, that you feel the tension bleed out of his muscles as he lets go his breath in one long exhalation.

"I am sorry for all that has befallen you. Truly I am. You have endured far more than ever I have. Do not strain to keep it locked away within you, there is no need to be strong this night. Let it go. Let me be the one to hold you, this once. You are safe with me and I will guard you. I will not let them take you from me," he says, and with those words the tears your grief breaks free of you, and you press your face into his chest. He curls one arm with painstaking care about your shoulders to draw you the nearer, and reaches with the other to pull the heavy furs higher over the both of you.

It is somewhere within the low murmur of his voice soothing you, the tender rhythm of his hand moving slow across your back, the old familiar scent of him, and the steady cadence of his heart beating beneath your ear, that you slip away at last into sleep.

AEMOND'S CHAMBER, RED KEEP. — EARLY HOURS OF THE MORN

You woke to find the two of you settled once more in the same arrangement that had shamed you the night before. For a long moment you did no more than lie still and watch your half-brother's chest rise and fall, deep in sleep, before conscience wrenched you upright with the reminder that the same blood ran in his veins as ran in yours. And a revulsion at your own weakness rose sour and hot at the back of your throat.

With a care that came near to reverence you drew yourself free of the circle of his arms, and when he stirred at the absence of your warmth, his brow furrowing toward waking, you pressed a pillow into the hollow your body had left. By whatever small mercy the gods still granted, his sleeping form took the substitution for truth and sank once more into stillness, his arm gathering the cushion close as his breath drew long and even again as he mumbled your name.

The memory came before your mind had fully opened, unwelcomed, arriving on the pale gold light that crept across the coverlet. You remembered the weight of Aemond's hand at the small of your back, the slow and easy manner in which he had touched you, and the ease with which your own flesh had yielded to him. Worst of all, and least forgivable, you remembered the moment your gaze had found the bareness of his chest and lingered there, finding it, however briefly, pleasing to look upon ,and the shame of it settled in your breast and would not be dislodged.

You had not knelt within a sept in many a moon, and it seemed to you now that so long a neglect must account for the turmoil that clouded your judgement. It seemed too that Lord Ormund had spoken nearer the truth than you cared to grant him. That you had strayed, in your idleness, from the disciplines that had once governed your every waking hour.

Unable to abide the way your body had answered your half-brother, you rose from the bed with all the care your unsteady limbs allowed and dressed yourself in the plain green gown that Aemond had bidden the ladies bring, its cloth unadorned and humble, fit for a morning given to penance. Then you crossed the chamber and drew the doors apart, with a caution that spoke plainly of your unease.

The guards had been posted nearer than you had hoped, two of them planted in the corridor beyond, and they turned upon you the instant the doors gave way.

"Has the king granted My Lady permission to depart?" the first of them asked.

"He has not, for His Grace yet sleeps and has not stirred," you answered evenly, "yet I wish only to go to the sept and offer my prayers."

"Forgive me, My Lady, but I am charged not to permit it. There are those within these walls who would gladly have your head upon a spike, and King Aemond has bound us strictly to the keeping of your safety."

"I shall be swift, and at so early an hour there is scarce a living soul awake to trouble me."

"I cannot allow it, my lady."

You were reaching after some gentler word that might yet soften the man where firmness had failed, when a smooth and unhurried voice came into the passage at your back.

"Perhaps I might have the honor of accompanying the lady, seeing as I am bound for the sept myself, to make my morning prayers before the day's labors claim me."

"Lord Ormund." The guards bowed the moment they marked who addressed them. "The king has given us his orders, My Lord, and we dare not—"

"I am a warrior of some seasoning, as any man who holds a sword in Westeros will gladly attest, and I should think no harm likely to come to the lady while she walks under my protection." He took a single measured stride, and his considerable height rose over the guard until the man's shoulders seemed to draw inward beneath it. "Unless, of course, you would sooner wake the weary king and compel His Grace to rise and escort his own sister to her prayers with his own two hands."

The guard's resistance withered before the prospect.

"Very well, My Lord."

Ormund offered you his hand, and you laid your own within it, and the walk to the sept passed without trouble, quiet and easy, softened here and there by the trilling of songbirds that greeted the early light.

The air carried the cool scent of dew on old stone, and beneath it, faint but plain, the tallow and the myrrh that seeped outward from the holy chambers ahead.

THE GREAT SEPT, KING'S LANDING. — DAWN

At the Great Sept the two of you knelt together, you before the Mother and he before the Father, and the candlelight trembled across the seven altars, the smoke of incense hung thick and sweet upon the still and windless air.

"And for whom does the Lady pray this morning?" he asked, his voice gentler than was its custom, the accustomed conceit for once gone from his face.

"For my sister, that she might find the strength to endure the tidings that have lately come to her, and I beg the Mother to grant her comfort in her grief. And for myself I ask only mercy, and nothing more."

"Mercy?"

"I have not been myself of late. My thoughts have grown clouded with..." The words died on your tongue and would go no further than shame allowed.

"You are a good girl," Ormund told you, "and you must not condemn yourself for the temptations that others have laid before your feet. I have seen with what strength you strive against them. The Father looks upon such struggle and weighs it with a fair and even hand, and the Mother extends her mercy to any maiden who fights for the keeping of her virtue."

You gave him a small smile of thanks, and in the next breath the measured tread of a man's boots rang across the marble at your back.

"The guards were good enough to tell me I should find you here."

"Aemond."

"Ñuhys raqiros." He smiled as the word passed his lips. My beloved.

"I had been given to understand that those of Valyrian blood do not bow before our gods." Ormund speaks from the distance.

"I confess I may have said as much in some careless and unguarded moment, though I should like to trust that the gods have the grace to overlook so trivial an offense." Aemond knelt at your side, and he set himself squarely between you and Lord Ormund, and he let his fingers trail the length of your hair before he settled. You raised your eyes and returned his smile, and across from him the courteous cast of Ormund's face curdled into a distaste that he only barely mastered and hid away.

The three of you knelt together in a silence grown so uncomfortable that the hiss and sputter of the candles seemed to offer commentary upon it. From time to time Aemond turned his gaze toward you to judge whether your devotions had reached their end, and when at last they had, he rose before you might rise yourself, that he alone should have the giving of his hand to help you to your feet. Together you took your leave, bidding farewell to the smiling Lord, whose composure had by then wholly reassembled itself upon his face.

THE RED KEEP, KING'S LANDING. — FORENOON TO AFTERNOON

After the morning bath, Aemond bade the servants carry food to your chambers while he took himself off to another sitting of the council, so that you saw little of him through the forenoon. You chose to remain within the chambers, your heart heavy with worry for your nephew held under lock and key, and heavier still with the grief you carried for Jacaerys.

Come the hour of the midday meal, Helaena sought you out and beckoned you join her at a small repast in the little garden that lay enclosed at the heart of the Keep, her small daughter at her side, and the gentle company of them lifted your mood by some measure. By the time the noon had surrendered itself to a lowering sun, a servant came and fetched you away.

On the walk toward Aemond's chambers you resolved to be resolute, for you desired above all things to look upon your own nephew Viserys with your very eyes. As you stepped within and drew the door closed at your back, you found Aemond newly risen, half dressed from his bath, his silver-gold hair yet damp where it clung to his neck and shoulders as he drew a cloth across the breadth of his chest. At the sight of you he let the cloth fall from his fingers, and in an instant he had crossed the distance and drawn you close against him. You caught the fragrance of the oils worked into his skin, and his hands upon you soothed you at once, though you thrust the comfort of it from your mind and hardened yourself into stubbornness.

"I wish to see Viserys."

"There is no need of that."

"What?" you asked, half confused, and you felt the anger begin its slow, steady climb within.

"I have sent him away aboard a Lyseni merchant ship. Your sister, or else our uncle Daemon, shall retrieve the boy from there."

You knew not whether you ought to believe him.

"How am I to know you do not lie to me?"

"I have given you my word." He drew you flush against him. "Have I ever once lied to you?"

Were it not for the long history of his blunt and open honesty to you, you should never have granted him belief, and yet the war had eaten slowly and steadily away at the trust you had once placed so freely in your own blood, and he could see plainly. He pressed his brow to yours until the tips of your noses touched, and there was no place left for you to look save into his face.

You searched his eye and found there no trace of deceit nor any shadow of ill intent, but only a pure and undisguised admiration, soft at first and then grown more intent with the passing of the moments, and the vexing warmth stirred low within your belly once again while your heart quickened against your ribs. Your hands upon his chest began to move of their own accord, tracing the hardened planes of him and the smooth heat of his skin.

It was the low hum of him that vibrated up through the flats of your fingers that woke you at last to the knowledge of what you did. You drew back sharply and set yourself to rights. His hands moved to gather you back to him and halted at three sharp taps upon the wooden door, and a voice beyond it spoke.

"Milady, the Queen Dowager has sent me to draw the bath early. Lord Ormund and Prince Daeron shall depart at first light, and so the supper is to be served the sooner this evening."

You cleared your throat and bade her enter, keeping your gaze turned well away from Aemond's, and at the last he relented, and took himself to fetch a linen shirt, and passed out through the door.

"See that the water runs hotter today," you whisphered low to the maid.

"Yes, milady."

The heat of the bath had loosened you more than you looked for, yet when supper came the old disquiet found you again, curled low in your belly.

Aemond sat at the head of the table. Otto Hightower took the foot. On Otto's left were Jaehaera and then Helaena; on his right sat Daeron, the youngest of Alicent's sons, and beyond him his mother, and beyond her, you. Lord Ormund had been given the place between you and Aemond, his frame so towering that it seemed a deliberate arrangement, contrived to obscure Aemond's view of you and of the appearance that night. Aemond did not trouble to hide his displeasure at it.

The meal began light. Then Otto brought forth word of the Baratheons. Lord Borros had agreed to give his daughter to Aemond, and to lend his swords to the cause.

Relief came to you first at the news, and hard upon its heels came dread, for you had seen the look that crossed Aemond's face. A third thing came also, quieter than the other two, and you did not wish to name it, yet it was undeniably present, and it quickened your pulse and left your hands cold and unsteady.

So still had the chamber grown that the only speech seemed to pass between knife and plate, and now and again the deliberate setting-down of a cup.

Otto pressed on, glad and eager, speaking of the Lady Floris, one of the Four Storms, of the day appointed for her coming, of the ceremony, and at the last of the bedding. On that count you were glad for him, glad that a highborn lady would take the place you dreaded, that the role might yet be spared you. What you could not abide was the small needling thing that pricked at you each time the old man said the word bedding, a thing that turned first to guilt and then to anger at how your heart reacted. Your fingers gave a twitch before you drew your hand into your lap to worry at it there.

It was a habit you had taken from Alicent, though you did it far less than she, only when you were set against yourself. Aemond marked it while he feigned adjusting his chair.

A nervous Alicent sat at your side, her worries justified as the tension in Aemond's features suggested he might at any moment rise to utter something ill-considered, or overturn his goblet across the fine wood of the table. Every head was now bent to the food, save Ormund's. The lord was enjoying his portion.

"You look very beautiful this evening, my lady," he said, apropos of nothing, and Aemond's head turned toward him. The lord was looking, no, admiring you openly.

Alicent's eyes went wide. She knew the cast that had settled over her second son.

"Be assured, My Lady. Westeros has no shortage of formidable lords, and for a woman of such grace and beauty it would be no hard thing to find a worthy suitor—"

A fist came down upon the table. It startled every soul there, save the Lord who had drawn it out of him. Not one woman at the board, nor Daeron, dared raise their eyes.

"A toast," said Aemond. "To my dear cousin, Lord Ormund. For his wisdom, his generosity, and for answering our call to aid."

Ormund lifted his cup and bowed his head, meeting the eyes of each one at the table in turn. The rest raised their cups after him and drank in silence. Aemond drained his own without once loosing his stare from the Lord, and Ormund wore the satisfied look of a man newly proclaimed sovereign of the Seven Kingdoms.

When the toast was done, Aemond rose and went off in a temper. Alicent made to follow, but you settled a hand upon her arm to hold her back.

"I shall go."

She looked at you with a troubled brow.

"He will listen to me." She could not gainsay it, for it was true. And being so bent upon the calming of Alicent, you did not mark the small way Lord Ormund shifted in his seat.

You rose and followed the way Aemond had gone. It brought you to a balcony nearby, above the whole of King's Landing, the darkness already engulfed the city. He stood with both hands spread upon the carved balustrade, the salt of the evening air stirring the pale length of his Targaryen hair.

"You will not be wedded to another," he said, not turning, for he had known you by your step. "I have no mind to marry her." He turned to you then, and reached a hand to your cheek. "Not when I have given my heart to you."

You stepped back.

"You cannot. You need the Baratheons, and the swords they bring. I know my sister, and I know the allies she commands. Your host, joined even to the whole strength of Oldtown, will not hold against them and her dragons. If you mean to win—"

"Do you remember the day I lost my eye? The day Lucerys took it from me?"

You fell silent at the name. Something soft and sharp turned in your chest, and your gaze went anywhere but to him.

"When they put their questions to me after? It was you alone who held my hand when I was frightened. Not my father. Not my mother. You. Always you." His hand rose once more, thumb following the line of your jaw while his other hand went seeking yours. "When Aegon mocked me with the Pink Dread, it was you who held my hand, you who berated him so fiercely that he had not the stomach to speak of it again the coming morrow. " He came a step nearer. His one violet eye held fast upon your own.

"I trained for you. I studied for you. I did all of it so that our father might one day name me a worthy suitor, so that your hand might be mine to hold, for all the years of our lives."

Slowly he raised your hand, his eyes never leaving yours, but before his lips could touch your fingers you drew them free and gave another ground a pace.

"Skorī syt gaomagon ao rāelagon dëñy’ynngrys yôûr'shëlfrys?" He came on. Why do you keep denying yourself?

"Nyke gaomagon daor gīmigon aōha indigon," I do not know your meaning, you said, and shook your head, though your frozen hands and the tremor in your voice gave the lie to it.

"I can see it in you." He drove you back against a pillar.

"Whatever you think you see, you are mistaken, Aemond." You fought to hold the words level.

"Mm." He let a smile rise. "You have spent years in the learning of me, as I have spent them learning you, and I always know when you are distressed. When you lie to yourself." He bowed his head and let it hang the space of a breath or two, then lifted it and turned full toward you, and drew a slow breath as he did. "You were jealous this night," he said, easy as you please, and every trace of the fury of moments before was gone from his face. "When my grandsire spoke of the arrangements. The bedding ceremony."

Your face drew tight with affront.

"I was not jealous," you said, though the word cracked faintly at the end, and his small smile widened at the sound of it.

"You were, sister, and you will not talk me out of it," he murmured, scarce above a whisper. He closed the last of the distance between you, and you hated yourself for the racing of your heart, for the way your eyes could not stay upon him.

"Why do you pull yourself from me, when you know well that you want me?"

"I do not feel for you what you feel for me!" You had meant it for a defense, a wall, or a thing to remind yourself of, but he did not fall back before it. He gave no sign he believed a word of it, and in the deepest part of you, neither did you.

"Your body betrays you. I first saw it that night, when we danced, when Jacaerys and Helaena danced beside us. The way your sweet eyes could not rest upon me. The way you trembled when I held you. You have labored to deny it ever since, to deny how your flesh answers my touch." His breath fell warm across your skin. You swallowed hard and closed your eyes as he leaned in, and you felt a single finger drift along your arm. "You hunger for me as fiercely as I hunger for you."

"Aemond—"

The moment Alicent's voice came to you, relief ran loose through your limbs, and you turned at once to her scandalized face.

"Mother," said Aemond with a slow turn, and the irritation came back into his voice.

"It grows late. Your brother rides upon the morrow. Would you not sooner spend more time—"

"I wish to go with him," you blurted. "With him, and with Lord Ormund."

The words turned both mother and son toward you, each struck still where they stood. Alicent found her tongue the sooner.

"Good." She nodded slowly, and cast a quick glance at her son, who had not moved beside you. "Good. I shall speak with Lord Ormund, and we will make arrangements—" The fear eased from her face, and a smile had near come to it when her son cut across her.

"You will not speak with him. She will not pass from my sight." He caught your arm and pulled you to walk with him, and the pain of his grip ran up through the limb.

"Aemond—" Alicent hastened forward and set to prying at his fingers, while you hissed and twisted against the hold.

"Aemond, you are hurting her!" Alicent cried at the last, and the words broke through to him. He turned and saw the fear writ plain across your face, and he let you go at once. That he had harmed you cut him. Yet the anger held, for you denied him still, and you had chosen to leave him in the very hour he had, at last, found the means to keep you close.

He only walked away, his shoulders drawn tight with fury while you rubbed at your wrist and watched.

Alicent saw it, and she took you gently by the sides of your arms, careful of the reddening welt his hand had left. You turned into her and folded yourself against her. She startled at the first touch of it, then softened, then secretly overjoyed that you had reached for her once again, and she held you, striving to master the tears that pressed at her own eyes so that she might remain strong for your sake.

"I will speak with Lord Ormund," she said, and patted your back.

"I miss home. I miss all of them. I miss Jace, I miss Viserys, Joffrey, and Aegon (Aegon III)," you wept. "I only wish that all of it might be as once it was, before any of this."

It was true. You had wanted it all to go back, to the way things had been before, when the days were simpler and no sword had been sharpened against one another. Back when your half-brother was only your half-brother, and the thing you felt after you both grew older was easier to contain.

She gave you no answer, for the old grief and guilt seized her chest and stole the words from her.

"May I be given chambers of my own?" you sobbed through the tears.

"Of course, my dearest. Lord Ormund asked it of me earlier in the day." She drew you deeper into her arms and closed her eyes, wishing with a quiet ache that she had turned from her ruinous course far sooner, holding you close while you wept against her shoulder.

And she had not lied. The chamber they had made ready for you smelled of fresh rushes and lye soap, and the linens had been turned down and smoothed until no wrinkle marred them. Aemond did not come to you that night. Whatever anger still festered beneath his stillness kept him behind his own doors, and you were left to the low murmur of Alicent's voice as she moved among the serving girls, directing the packing with the careful precision.

"These gowns must be pressed and cleaned to perfection," she told them, lifting a sleeve of muted grey wool and turning it to the candlelight to study the weave. "Lord Ormund holds a particular disdain for..."

Her words dwindled to a hum you no longer marked, for your mind had gone at last to your elder sister and the grief that must have come down upon her. She had learned that her firstborn, the crown prince, was dead, and that her younger sister had vanished with neither trace nor word. The ache of it swelled beneath your ribs until you could not bear it, and the tears you had held so carefully spilled over unbidden, quiet at the first and then wretched.

Alicent heard. She stilled at once, a blue gown slipping from her fingers back into the open chest, and she turned toward you with an expression of such sudden tenderness that it undid you further.

"Leave us," she commanded the girls, her tone brooking no delay. "All of you. Go."

They fled the room in a rustle of skirts and bowed heads, and Alicent crossed to you and gathered you against her bossom. She held you through the worst of it, her palm moving in slow circles across your back, murmuring comfort, the wordless sounds a mother makes to a frightened child. She remained until your weeping thinned to spent breaths, and only when sleep had taken you did she draw back from the chamber and pull the door soft shut behind her.

THE RED KEEP, OUTER GATES. — DAWN

The clatter of hooves and the groan of carriage wheels turning across the yard dragged you from sleep as the first grey light crept along the walls. You bathed and dressed with the ladies to help you, their hands quick and cold at your laces, and then they led you down through the winding corridors to the gates, where the household had gathered for your leaving.

Otto Hightower stood apart, speaking low with Lord Ormund, the two of them stiff and formal in the pale morning. Alicent waited near the mounting block with Helaena beside her, and little Jaehaera clung to her mother's skirts while they both spoke with Daeron. When Helaena saw you, she hurried forward with her daughter trailing behind.

"I wish you safe upon your journey, Sister" she said, her voice soft and uneven, her eyes drifting to Jaehaera even as she spoke to you. "We will pray for you, each of us."

You smiled at her and kissed her upon each cheek, then knelt before the child so that your eyes met hers. A sorrow came upon you at the sight of the little girl, for you had not been given more hours to know her, this quiet creature who wore her mother's beauty and her mother's shyness in equal measure.

"Be a strong girl for me," you told her, "and mind your mother well while I am gone."

Jaehaera nodded and gave you a small embrace, her arms locking round your neck.

"Precious girl," you murmured, and you patted her head, and she giggled at the touch.

"So you meant it, then." The voice behind you came low and rough at its edges. Helaena did not wait for what would follow. She stepped forward to take up Jaehaera, and embraced you once more the moment you had risen, and then she gathered her daughter and drew her away toward the others.

You turned. Aemond stood restored to himself, his silver hair combed straight and severe, the leather patch settled precise over his ruined socket, every trace of the night's disorder scrubbed clean away.

"We could have one of our own, you know," he said, and the softness beneath his stillness betrayed him though his face did not move. "I know how deeply you have always wanted a child." He crossed the space between you with a single deliberate step. "You do not have to go."

You reached for his hands, and he seized them at once, gripping them with a fierceness that contradicted the quiet slackening of his shoulders at the contact.

"Aemond," you said, and held his gaze. "It will be only for a little while."

He bowed his head and lifted your joined hands to his mouth and pressed his lips to your knuckles.

"I will wait for you," he swore against your skin. "And when you come back to me, I will take you to wife."

You nodded, and could shape no reply that would not crack, and he bent to claim your mouth in a kiss so gentle it seemed he meant to keep the moment whole, untouched by the world beyond it. That was denied him as a voice broke across the space at your back.

"My lady, I trust you have all your belongings made ready?"

You drew away from Aemond and turned to find Lord Ormund in his armour, the Hightower sigil graven proud at its center, the tower and its crowning flame catching the thin light.

"I have, My Lord," you answered.

"Very good. Your carriage stands prepared. You may make yourself ready."

"Thank you, My Lord."

You returned to Aemond and pressed one last kiss to his cheek before you released his hands, and you felt the reluctance in his grip, the faint resistance you were made to overcome before his fingers loosed from yours at the last.

"Take heart, Your Grace," Ormund said, and there was something possessive threaded through his courtesy. "By the time I have finished with her, you shall trouble yourself with these worries no longer. She will come to understand precisely to whom she belongs. Daeron, bring my horse nearer."

The boy obeyed at once and led the animal forward without a word of objection.

Aemond drew a slow breath and gave nothing back, though his weight shifted from one foot to the other while the two of them watched you go toward the carriage, and Alicent moved to meet you before you reached it.

She cleared her throat, and you turned to her.

"Is everything arranged as it should be?" she asked, and there was a tremor in the asking.

"You arranged my belongings yourself," you reminded her.

"Oh. Yes, of course, so I did—" She faltered, and you stepped into her and put your arms about her, and she held you with a sudden strength.

"Lord Ormund will care for you well. I trust that he will," she said, and her hand passed over your back in unsteady strokes. "You will be better there than here." She let a long moment pass before she found the rest of it. "I am sorry." She bit back a sob. "For all of it."

You drew back without a word and kissed her upon the cheek.

"Right, then." She brushed hurriedly past at the tears she had failed to hold. "Go on now."

You gave her one last smile and climbed into the waiting carriage, and she returned it with a gloss standing in her eyes.

HIGHTOWER CASTLE, OLD TOWN. — NIGHTFALL

The road to Oldtown ran on for days together, the country unrolling in fields and forests and river crossings, and full dark had fallen by the time the towers rose against the star-strewn sky. Ormund swung down from his palfrey and watched while you thanked the man who had driven your carriage, and when the fellow bent to kiss your hand in parting, Ormund came forward and stayed the gesture before it was done.

"Ah, there is no need for that," he said smoothly.

The man let go of your hand at once.

"Thank you, good ser." Ormund took your hand in the driver's stead and led you within.

The castle bore no likeness to the Red Keep. Where King's Landing had felt close and grimed with old smoke, this place was luminous and ordered, every corridor swept and every surface aglow beneath the sconces. Daeron met you both at the arch of the entrance and hastened to help strip Ormund of his armour the moment they had crossed inside, his young fingers quick at the buckles.

"I trust your journey proved not too wearisome?" Ormund asked, turning his practiced smile upon you.

"It was bearable, my Lord."

He nodded, and when the last of the plate had been lifted from his shoulders he let his eyes travel over you from head to foot and back again to your face, taking his slow and measured time about it. Then he began to circle you.

"I am certain you know well what the holy texts have set down," he said.

You watched, his gaze keeping to its slow passage across your body. To one side stood young Daeron, stiff and unmoving, his eyes fixed upon the floor and refusing to rise.

"A maiden must guard herself against temptation, and above all against the appetites of men. She must cultivate discernment, for men are burdened with lust and their intentions run ill."

"Are you not a man yourself, Lord Ormund?" You had meant the words for a jest, to lighten the mood after so long a road.

But the chamber fell into a silence so absolute it seemed to press against the ears. The servants who had been about their tasks froze where they stood. Daeron's eye flew wide at the boldness of it. You marked the sudden rigidness gathered all about you and cast a glance around the room, and it settled at the last upon the boy, whose gaze had grown enormous now and bored into you while he shook his head in small, frantic, desperate motions of warning.

You brought your eyes back to Ormund, who had halted his pacing. The smile upon his face had gone dry and brittle, drained of every warmth, and it was in that precise moment that the weight of your own words came down upon you.

"My lord—"

"Prepare a bath for the lady." His voice kept its courtesy, and yet even the dullest ear could not have missed the strain that tightened it, nor the swell of volume beneath the calm. "And a cup of tea. She has endured a long journey."

You opened your mouth to offer another apology, but Daeron remained there at the edge of your sight, his face frozen in silent entreaty, his head giving the smallest shake of warning. You pressed your lips together and held your tongue.

"Take her," Lord Ormund commanded, and the ladies came forward to guide you from the hall, your nerves strung taut beneath your skin.

The bathing chamber they brought you to drove every care from you the instant you passed within. The air hung with a light fragrance, layered and rich, the scent of oils and crushed herbs rising from a bath larger by far than any you had known before. Steam still clung to the water in lazy curls, and near at hand incense burned atop a table carved beautifully from dark wood, the smoke threading through the warmth and mingling with the perfume of the bath. The knots wound through your shoulders and spine began to loosen and give way to the calming richness of it all.

You waited for the ladies to begin unlacing your gown, but they startled you, withdrawing almost at once after one of them had pressed a cup of brewed herbal tea into your hands. They offered no word to explain it, only hasty curtsies before they fled the chamber and drew the door shut behind them.

Your confusion lasted but a moment. The door opened again to admit Lord Ormund, clad in nothing save a dark green robe, his pleasant smile restored to his face. Young Daeron followed close at his heels, his gaze fixed stubbornly upon the floor still.

"The servants prove themselves efficient, it would seem," Ormund remarked, and he lifted his arms, and to your profound shock Daeron stepped forward and drew the robe from his shoulders. Your head whipped to the side on the instant, and Ormund marked the trembling that seized your fingers about the cup.

"My lord, I do apologize," you managed, your voice catching. "I believe the servants made an error and brought me to the wrong chamber."

Your eyes darted to his for the briefest fraction of a breath, and you found him wholly untroubled by his nakedness, standing bare and unashamed, as though nothing untoward had passed between you.

"M-my Lord..?" you tried again, and the word stuttered from your lips.

He raised one hand, and Daeron placed a familiar leather-bound book into his palm, its surface polished to a gleam and stamped with the seven-pointed star. With that, Daeron departed in silence and drew the door shut behind him. You swallowed hard and turned your gaze toward the floor at the edge of the bath, but Ormund's fingers found your chin and lifted it until you had no choice but to meet his eyes.

"Drink your tea, my dear."

You obeyed the moment his touch withdrew, and drained the cup in hurried swallows while he began to pace the chamber.

"You have remained too long upon Dragonstone," he said, his tone unhurried, his manner near conversational. "Your mind has been tainted by the practices of your ancestors, and that is the very reason I have brought you here. Though tragedy delivered you into my hands, the Seven marked your past devotion and stretched out their mercy."

He paused and put out his hand for the empty cup. You surrendered it with trembling fingers.

"I have seen the manner in which you struggle against yourself," he went on, and he set the cup aside with care, "around your... brother—" He spat the word, and it seemed to foul his tongue in the saying. "You fight to free yourself of the taint carried in your blood, and I have been sent by the Seven as their messenger. The Father has taken note of your faithfulness, and he has sent me to judge you and to cleanse you of what pollutes you."

He stepped into the bath and lowered himself into the water, and opened the holy text across his lap.

"It would please me to hear you recite the twelve virtues of a maiden."

The memory of Daeron's stricken face rose before you, and for all the courtesy threaded through Ormund's voice and the practiced charm settled upon his own, something in the very air of the chamber woke every instinct that governed survival. Obedience was the only safe course left to you.

"Truthfulness," you began, drawing upon the verses you had learned in childhood, and you spoke them with as much precision as you could summon. When you faltered and lost portions of the text, he made you begin again from the start until you delivered it whole, and only then did he suffer you to move on to the verse that followed.

You had come halfway through the recitation when a subtle warmth began to bloom across your chest, and the strangeness of it made you pause. Ormund noticed at once.

"Good. Continue," he commanded, and tilted his chin upward in expectation.

You cleared your throat and took it up again while his attention returned to the page, tracking your accuracy with meticulous care. As the minutes gathered one upon another, the warmth turned to something more insistent and spread beneath your skin with mounting urgency.

"Discernment," you recited, and fought to hold your focus. "Judge not by pleasing words nor handsome countenance alone. Look instead upon a man's character, for virtue is revealed by his—"

The sight of your half-bare brother came unbidden, startling and vivid before your mind's eye, and the words died in your throat.

"I was not aware that I bade you cease," Ormund said, and did not lift his gaze from the page.

You swallowed hard and forced yourself onward.

"Purity. Love only that which is righteous before the Seven—" The heat began its slow migration downward through you, and your skin grew keen to every touch. Even the lightest drag of your gown against your forearms summoned back the memory of Aemond's fingers trailing over you, and these recollections you found ever harder to banish.

"Turn away," Ormund prompted, and his eyes rose from the book to watch you with plain amusement.

"T-turn away from e-every affection that corrupts-s innocence," you managed, though even to stand still had become a labour. Each breath you drew came thicker and heavier than the last while the heat kept up its steady descent, kindling every vein it touched along the way.

The remembrance of Aemond's tongue coaxing your own surfaced, and the answering heat that flooded your core came upon you with such force that your knees buckled and you sank to the floor. Your breath came ragged and torn while your mind grew fogged and clouded, and a sudden ravenous hunger woke within you that you could neither name nor understand.

"For the Father," Ormund intoned, and you were so wholly drowned beneath the heat and the desperate yearning of it that you never marked the splash of water as he rose from the bath.

"T-the the F-Father," you tried to go on, and clenched your eyes shut against the flood of improper images surging through you, and every one of them held Aemond, in shapes your waking mind would never have conjured.

"Withdraws His light from such immorality," Ormund finished, and set the book aside. He put out his hand toward you, and whether your dazed senses played you false or no, you could no longer find the smile that had adorned his face only moments before. Something ominous and calculating dwelt in his eyes instead as he drew you up onto your feet, and his fingers set to work at the laces of your bodice. Each time his skin met yours a shiver passed through you, and he marked it with evident satisfaction.

Though your garments fell away piece by piece, you knew no chill upon your bared flesh, only the relentless burning that consumed you from within. He guided you toward the bath with steady hands, and his grip upon you was proprietary and absolute.

Lord Ormund descended into the sunken bath with the slow authority of a man who had never once been made to wait, and the water climbed the polished cedar to break against the rim with a sharp resonant slap. He put out his hand toward you in silence, the fingers spread in command, bidding you take your place before him and you did so.

"Come to me now." The words came from close above you and behind your ear, pitched so low the sound seemed to gather in his ribs and pass through them into your back.

"Recline against me fully." You gave way to the pull of the water and let yourself sink backward into the waiting bulk of him.

He was built to the measure of a warrior in the fullness of his strength. Standing, he stood a head above you and more; here, both of you sunk to the chest in steaming water, his shoulders curved forward to enclose you on either side, broad enough to shut out the lamplight and candles. When he gathered you back against his torso, the coarse wet expanse of his clean chest brushed along the entire length of your vertebrae, from nape to the small of your back. The sound that broke from your throat was thin and sharp, born not of any hurt but of the enormity of it, the sheer sensation of flesh set against flesh with nothing between.

His palm came down upon your uninjured shoulder, heavy as a mailed gauntlet, warmed clean through by the bath. Great hands, these, thickened with the calluses that decades of sword-grip and rein-leather had worn into a soldier's palms. He set to work the muscle beneath his fingers with methodical pressure, the thumbs pressing hard circles into the knotted cords at the base of your neck, the rest of his fingers reaching forward until they very nearly met above your collarbones. The force of it began as pain, and the pain thinned into something near to ease. Your head fell forward of its own accord, and a soft broken breath slipped past your lips before you had the wit to hold it back.

"The Father in his infinite wisdom judges those who carry impurity within the flesh," he said, and every syllable rolled forth in the flat measured chant a septon uses at his prayers. "All who harbor rot and sinful stirring shall be brought low, that they may after be lifted up to grace amongst the Seven. So is the law set down in the sacred texts." His hands forsook your shoulders and slid forward across the high ridges of your collarbones, and then descended, and took the full weight of your breasts into his palms.

Your spine arched from his chest, and the water surged against the wooden rim in restless waves. He molded his palms about the soft flesh with a slowness that took its time in the weighing and the measuring of them, and then he drew the roughened pads of his thumbs across your nipples in languid purposeful passes. Each stir of the disturbed water rasped against your quickened skin, and your body gave you up to him at once, the peaks of your breasts drawing tight into hard aching points that had naught to do with cold. The herb-steeped tea had made a torch of every stroke; each touch struck sparks that spilled down through your belly and gathered in throbbing heat between your thighs, and your hips gave one helpless thrust beneath the surface.

"There. It manifests plainly." His murmur carried approval and a darker satisfaction both, and he compressed the stiffened peaks between thumb and forefinger, the pressure firm but never cruel, rolling each tender point with a patient exactness. "You feel it keenly, that. This is the corruption in your flesh made manifest to the hand."

"S-s-stop this, m-my Lordd—" Even to your own ears the protest came out threadbare and worn thin, for your thighs had already parted beneath the water's cover, and your back still bowed to press you closer against the wiry rasp of his chest, that abrasion upon your shoulder blades yielding its own shadowed sweetness.

One maintained its place at your breast, still turning the nipple in slow rotations. The other flattened to your sternum and began its descent, gliding over the quick flutter of your belly, across the small clench of muscle that leapt there, down into the crease where thigh joined hip. There he stayed his hand and made you wait upon the promise of it. Then his fingers parted the intimate flesh between your legs with an unhurried certainty and confidence.

A soft cry broke from you and rang off the wet stone as both your hands seized the wooden rim in a desperate grip. His middle finger traced the whole length of your entrance with a slowness that near unmade you, gathering the wet proof of your wanting that even the bath could not wash away, before it circled the swollen knot of nerves at the crown. Your whole body went rigid with the suddenness of it. He held you fast with the arm braced across your chest, pinning you against the greater mass of him while that thick finger drew tight lazy circles round the most tender point of you.

"Confess your sins before the Father." His breath came hot against your temple. "Speak them aloud, that they may be witnessed and their burden halved in the telling." His finger slid lower, set itself at your entrance, and pressed within to the second knuckle in one smooth intrusion. Your breath drew in sharp and your head fell back upon his shoulder at the dull ache of the invasion, though the coiling pleasure in your core swallowed the discomfort near as fast as it came. "Tell me who it is that haunts your waking hours and fouls your prayers."

Your inner walls clenched about the intruding presence, and a keening sound escaped your keeping as your hips ground forward onto his hand.

"I have—" You sought to hold your tongue, but his skilled handling had loosed every guard you kept, even as the tea had loosed your will, and the confession spilled forth before shame silence you. "I have thought of him. Many times. His hand upon me, his mouth to mine. Forgive me the weakness, My Lord—"

"Speak his name plainly." He worked a second finger into you, stretching you wider, and set to shallow thrusts, and one of your hands flew to seize his forearm in a useless bid to stay him. The thick pads of his fingertips dragged along the ridged front wall of you while his thumb took up the labor his finger had abandoned, pressing quick and exact circles against your most sensitive flesh. You would not yield that last shame though the heat of it scorched through you, and he did not cease his sanctimonious labor for so much as a breath. "Name him now, girl, or I withdraw my hand and leave you to burn."

"Prince Aemond. M-my half-brother—" The words came broken and beaten out of you.

A low rumble of satisfaction moved through his chest and passed straight into your back. "There. The truth bared at the last. The savage lust with all its pretense stripped away. 'And the impure shall confess their darkness upon sanctified water before the Father's judgment,'" he intoned, his breath hot and even at your ear, "'and the Mother in her mercy shall not turn her face from her plea.'"

Every word you tried to shape came apart into fractured sound upon his working fingers. The pleasure rose with a terrible swiftness, the herb doubling and trebling it until your heels scrabbled against the wooden rim for purchase and your hand shot back to clutch at his heavy forearms, nails clawling and carving little crescents into the toned muscle. Water spilled over the edge in slapping waves, one upon another. His fingers drove deeper and harder, scissoring apart to stretch you wider, opening you with a deliberate care, and the heel of his palm bore down without mercy on the swollen flesh while the sudden sight of your half-brother stripped bare rose up behind your eyes.

"Please, I beg you—" The words came out of you as sobs, and the tears of an overwhelmed pleasure stood hot and bright. "P-p-please, My Lord, cleanse me of this corruption, draw it out from my spirit, I beg of you—"

He stilled, all at once, without warning. Both hands went dead in their works, the one cupping your breast frozen where it lay, the two fingers seated to their full depth within you held utterly motionless, his thumb halted just short of the pearl that pulsed and ached for it. A wail of denial tore out of you at the sudden desertion, your hips bucking uselessly against a hand that gave you nothing but cruel stillness.

"Who shall be your purifier before the Seven?" Lord Ormund asked, and tempered steel had crept now into the low velvet of his voice. "Name the one you wish to cleanse you, girl. Plainly."

"Y-you, My Lord—" It cracked out of your throat at once, desperate. You turned your head and set your open mouth to the wet stubble of his jaw. "You, Lord Ormund. You alone. None but you has the right to cleanse me... P-please. I-I am begging you—"

The rumble in his chest turned to something near a growl, a low sound of self satisfaction, and his teeth found the delicate shell of your ear.

"So shall I give you mercy." His fingers drove back into you with a renewed force, all pretense of gentleness cast off, thrusting deep and quick, the wet obscene sound of it lost beneath the violent slosh of the bath and your own climbing moans and cries. His thumb pressed flush to your most sensitive point and worked it in tight relentless turns. The arm across your chest hauled you back against the furnace heat of him, leaving you no room to resist, his palm crushing your breast flat, and his voice never once let its holy chant fall silent, laying the sacred words against your throat with the weight of a hand set to your windpipe.

"Mercy shall be granted unto the penitent who surrenders whole. Give up your corruption into my keeping. Deliver it unto me this very hour—"

Your peak struck, and the whole chamber seemed to tilt upon its axis. A sharp cry tore from you as your inner walls clamped and fluttered in rhythmic spasm about his thrusting fingers, your spine drawn taut into a hard arch, your thighs snapping shut about his wrist and shuddering. He strained against the urge of his own flesh to spend from the mere witnessing of your undoing, his jaw clenched hard enough to set the muscle leaping and the tendons standing proud in his neck as he fought himself for mastery.

He did not cease though your finish was upon you. He worked you through each pulsing wave, the thumb keeping its circling pressure, the fingers curling and dragging to draw every aftershock out of you one at a time, until your voice thinned to broken fractured moans and your body went slack and boneless within the great cradle of his arms.

The steam hung and settled toward a stillness. Your chest heaved against the bar of his forearm in quick and desperate breaths. Lord Ormund's fingers drew out of you with a torturous slowness, trailing your wetness up across your belly, and he set his mouth to the crown of your damp hair and gathered you closer against his chest.

As the overwhelming heat of it began its slow retreat, the tears spilled hot down your cheeks, and you turned to press your face to his bare chest and wept. For all the fear that coiled in you, a relief moved through you when the intruding sight of your brother at last dissolved and was gone from the depths of your mind. He kept his hold through the whole of your collapse, one hand tracing light idle patterns upon your skin in something that wore the shape of comfort, keeping you shut within the compass of his arms.

"You have done beautifully, and with a most commendable obedience." His voice came low and sated against your hair. "Your sins are cleansed and drawn out from your corrupted flesh." His hand smoothed once more down the curve of your spine and came to rest at the small of your back.

"For now."

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A/N: Thank you and I love you all so much for the likes, sweet comments, reblogs, follows, and you too, silent readers ❤️.

Iōdēs, Vermithor! Dive, Vermithor!

Jace! Jace!

Vermithor sōvēs! Vermithor, fly!

THE RED KEEP, KING'S LANDING. YEAR 130 AC — FORENOON

The chamber stank of hot wax and old parchment. Light came slanting through the narrow window to lay pale bars across the writing table, and there Alicent Hightower pressed her signet into the cooling black of the seal. Helaena stood beside her and watched the green wax pucker and set, her fingers worrying at the edge of one sleeve. When she spoke her voice was soft, and it was certain.

"You are frightened." She did not make a question of it. She had read it already, in the tightness of her mother's jaw.

Before the Queen Dowager could answer, the door flew wide with a crack of timber upon stone. A servant spilled into the room half-doubled and gasping, his tunic gone dark with sweat at the collar. Both women startled. Alicent's hand jerked, and a smear of wax streaked across the corner of the letter.

"My Lady!" the man wheezed. One palm braced hard against the doorframe.

"What is it?" Alicent demanded. Her brows lifted in equal measure of alarm and displeasure, that she should be so rudely disturbed.

"They have taken one of the Blacks. King Aemond is with her. He has carried her to his own chambers." The words came tumbling between labored breaths, each of them a struggle to seize air enough to speak.

Helaena's gaze went to her mother, bewilderment softening her face. "Her?" she echoed.

"Into his chambers?" Alicent's brow knit. Mother and daughter traded a single wary glance, then turned back to the man crumpling in the doorway.

"The rider of Vermithor, My Lady."

Both women's eyes went wide in the same breath, understanding bloomed cold and immediate. One last look passed from one to the other, and then they were moving, brushing past the servant in such haste that the letter to Lord Ormund — bidding him halt his ride to King's Landing — lay forgotten upon the table.

By the time they came to the far corridor they found Grand Maester Orwyle drawing the chamber door shut with a slow and careful hand. He caught sight of them, inclined his head in silent deference, and went on his way without a word. The two women slipped within, and what greeted them stole the breath from Alicent's throat.

The young king sat upon the edge of the bed, his lean frame reclined at ease, one hand moving in slow and tender circles across your brow. You lay unmoving beneath his touch. Your face was slack with deep unknowing, and you showed no least intent of waking. The messenger, then, had not spun lies to earn his keep. Alicent felt the horror climb in her chest, and Helaena's hand flew to her own mouth.

"Some men of the Triarchy found her in the waters," Aemond said. His voice was pitched scarce above a whisper, that he might not wake you.

"Is she alright?" Helaena stepped toward the bedside, drawn by concern, but her mother's arm shot across her waist and pressed her still.

"A few small hurts, save the one to her left shoulder." Aemond traced the linen bandage there with a gentleness that seemed near to reverent, and you stirred, wincing faintly at the pressure. "An arrow pierced her clean through, though the maester swears it shall knit well enough in time. Orwyle has given her a generous draught of the milk of the poppy, to blunt the worst of it."

Helaena, unconvinced, sought her mother's eyes. Alicent held her daughter's gaze and gave the smallest nod, tipping her head toward the door. Helaena hesitated, her fingers curling, and then she withdrew and pulled the heavy door closed behind her with plain reluctance.

"And her dragon?" Alicent asked, once they were alone.

"I am told the beast escaped." Aemond let out his breath, his single violet eye never once leaving your face. "She has always prized every soul above her own life, that one. It matters little. I need not fly to Harrenhal now. Rhaenyra has lost one of her greatest riders and her largest dragon, and with the Hightower host soon to join us, the advantage falls to us."

"No." Alicent's voice went hard. "That is not near enough. Rhaenyra commands more dragons than we do."

"And yet we hold two of the largest beasts ever to weather a war beside our forebears," Aemond answered, in no haste at all. "Her dragons are untried and half-grown, save only our uncle Daemon's mount."

Alicent crossed her arms. Her voice thinned with disbelief. "And what makes you believe she would ever raise her arms for the Greens? Her own sister names herself heir to the Iron Throne, and there she lies, broken and unfit to lift so much as a spoon."

"She can lift a good deal more than that. Whatever frailness others read in her, she has ever carried an iron will beneath it." Aemond's mouth curved as he studied the slow rise and fall of your breathing. "She will heal. And when she wakes and heals, she shall stand beside me as my queen."

"Queen?" The word left Alicent as though it had scalded her tongue.

"I mean to wed her, mother."

"Have you lost every scrap of sense the gods gave you?" Alicent hissed, stepping nearer, her hands atremble with the fury she fought to keep behind her teeth. "Have you forgotten your crimes against her kin? The very hour she opens her eyes, she will slit your throat, or beg to have hers opened, before ever she bends the knee to a Green."

"Then we shall furnish her a reason to stand with us."

"A reason?" Alicent laughed, low and brittle. "And what reason could we hold that might bend a heart so wounded as hers?"

Aemond turned to face his mother. A slow smile spread across his sharp features, cold and certain and terrible to behold.

"They have taken Viserys as well."

The breath went out of Alicent entire. She stood stricken and speechless, her lips parting around words that would not come, her fingers pressing white against the fabric of her green skirts.

"Summon the council, Mother. Our plans have shifted beneath our feet, and for once the change favors us." Aemond turned back to you, and his voice dropped once more to that private hush. "The gods have chosen their side, and it is ours."

Alicent's footsteps receded down the corridor, and when the silence had swallowed them whole, Aemond took up his slow caress across your face once more, and sank down into the old memory.

You had been older than him by no more than a handful of summers, and yet in his boyhood you had been the whole of his refuge. He remembered the days when his mother and father turned their faces toward Aegon and left him standing in the cold margins of their notice. You alone had gathered him close and made him feel as though he mattered. You who had never once laughed to see him stand dragonless among kin who sneered. You who had knelt before him after the loss of his eye, and held his hand while the maesters cleaned the ruined socket, and told him he was handsome still, that one day he would rise and astonish every soul who had ever reckoned him small. That good things came to those who waited.

You had never truly grasped how much you had meant to him, how many times you had soothed and shielded and tended him and asked nothing in return. Now, he thought, the debt would come round.

When the realm had split into Black and Green, your choice had broken something in his chest that had never mended. He had lain awake through whole nights weighing whether he ought to set aside his brother's claim and follow you instead. He had written to you throughout the war, and not once had you answered. Of course you had not. Not after what he had done to Luke. His spies had carried back word of your grief, and it had gutted him to hear it. He had never meant to wound you. He had never wanted your pain. He let his eye trace every line of your sleeping face, drinking down all the years he had been denied, filling himself with the plain fact of your presence at the last.

AEMOND'S CHAMBER, RED KEEP. A FEW NIGHTS PAST —FORENOON

Somewhere in the drowning space between the poppy's dark and the waking world, you felt something coarse and warm pressed with unhurried tenderness against your lips.

When the blackness began to thin and drift apart, the shape of a chamber rose slowly about you. Walls washed in low golden light. The smell of candles and the faint iron tang of your own healing wound.

Your eyes swam across the dim room and caught upon a figure rising hesitantly from the shadows in the far corner. Your pulse quickened, and memory came surging back in jagged pieces. Viserys taken. Jacaerys diving too near the ramparts to reach him. Vermax torn from the sky by bolts.

You pushed to sit upright, straining to put distance between yourself and the shape drawing near, when a bright lance of pain shot up from your left shoulder into the base of your skull. A hiss slid through your teeth, and you fell back against the pillows.

"You mustn't move," the figure said quickly. "The maesters warned that you must lie still."

The voice, to your flooding relief, belonged to a woman. A voice sweet and warm, and so familiar that you had not known how long you had ached to hear it.

"Helaena?" Your own voice came out cracked and trembling.

"Y/N." Your half sister moved from the shadow into the reaching sunlight, her silver-gold hair taking up the pale glow as she hurried to your side. She braced her hands beneath your good arm and eased you upright, and only when you had steadied did the two of you fold into one another, holding on with a desperate strength.

"Oh, how I have missed you," Helaena breathed into your good shoulder.

"And I you, sister." She pressed her cheek nearer, and you flinched despite yourself, the movement jarring the arrow wound.

"Sorry." She drew back at once, and you gave her a thin and weary smile.

"Do not fret over it." You let your gaze travel the strange room. "Where am I?"

"In King's Landing. Within the Red Keep."

"I remember so little of what happened."

"They say you dismounted your dragon mid air to chase after Jacaerys in the waters." Helaena's hands settled over yours.

You gripped her fingers, your eyes stinging as the memory clawed its way back to the surface.

"Is he alive?" you pressed, searching her gentle face, and the low bow of her head told you all you dreaded before her mouth ever moved.

"I do not know."

"And Vermax?"

She shook her head slowly. "I was told only that Vermithor took to the air and fled, and that you were taken. Aemond had you brought here, to his own chambers, to mend."

"Of course he did." His letters rose again in your mind, one after another, each more desperate than the last, declaring a devotion you had never been able to return. Custom held that Valyrian blood must wed Valyrian blood, and yet after your mother's death you had passed your girlhood in the keeping of Alicent and her father Otto Hightower, raised beneath the Faith and all its teachings, and somewhere across those years you had turned away from the old ways of your forebears. You could summon within yourself no longing for your half brother that answered the ferocity of his own.

Choosing to set the grim matters aside a moment, you wiped your eyes with the back of your wrist and folded Helaena's soft hands in yours once more. She had grown so much in your absence, and the knowing that you had left her behind pained every corner of your heart. You had been an elder sister to her since she was small, and you had never forgotten the sight of her weeping the day you fled the capital.

"And you? Are you well? Your children. I heard you had been blessed with children."

"Jaehaera. She thrives, thank the gods." Helaena's voice faltered. "But my son —"

"I was told. I am so terribly sorry."

"That is no fault of yours," she said quietly. "You need not carry it."

"Helaena, I —" But before you could pour out how terribly you had yearned to look on her again, the chamber door was shouldered open without so much as a knock, and an armored guard filled the frame.

"We were ordered to bring the captive before the council."

"You will not take her." Helaena rose at once and set herself before you, planting her body between you and the intruder. "She must rest. The maesters have said as much."

"Lord Ormund Hightower has come within the hour, and the small council is summoned. They will decide the fate of the traitor. These are the King's own orders."

"She is no traitor." Helaena lifted her chin, though you marked the faint quiver running through her shoulders. "She is my sister, she is wounded, and she requires rest. I am the Queen —"

You watched her hold herself tall against her own nature, straining to be the strongest thing in the room for your sake, and it moved you so deeply that your throat closed about the sight. You slid your hand into hers, then braced your uninjured arm against the mattress and pushed yourself upright. Helaena spun at once to catch and steady you.

"Helaena. It is alright. I shall go."

"Are you certain?" she asked, the worry drawing tight across her brow.

"You have grown so well, and I am prouder of you than I have words to say. But I must go." You tucked a loose strand of silver-gold hair back from her eyes and pressed a soft kiss to her cheek, and she returned it with a mournful smile. As your fingers slipped from hers, the guard closed the iron manacles about your wrists.

"You mustn't —" she began.

"Helaena. I will be fine." You held her gaze until she gave a small, unwilling nod and let your hands go at the last, and she stood there watching, grief carved plain across her face, as the guards turned you toward the door and led you out into the corridor beyond.

THE SMALL COUNCIL, THE RED KEEP. — AFTERNOON

The guard brought you down the corridor, and the iron at your wrists sang against the stone with every dragging step, the sound doubling and going hollow against the vaults overhead. You had lost the count of days since these halls had been yours, since the smell of them— cold ash and the slow rot of tapestries hung too long untended— had meant home. The tall doors of the council chamber groaned inward, and you were delivered into a room already turned your way, every face lifted, every voice stilled, the whole assembly seated about the long table with the patience of men who had waited an age for the sight of your ruin.

Alicent saw you first. She rose to her feet, the chair legs scraping backward, and she crossed the floor to you with her skirts still settling about her ankles.

"Unchain her, this instant." The command carried a mother's authority, and it suffered no delay. Her hands came to your face, quick and gentle both, cupping your jaw, turning it to the light, hunting for hurt, for fever, for any wound she might yet soothe.

The war had made enemies of the two of you, and still the tenderness had not died out of her. She had kept you as the younger sister the gods had denied her, and after your own mother went into the ground beneath the sept, you had folded yourself into Alicent's shadow and followed her.

"My Queen, you forget yourself." The voice came from behind her shoulder, honeyed and cultured, in no haste at all. "She is our enemy, and you would do well to remember it. She stood among those who bore arms most fiercely against your son's rightful claim."

The man who spoke wore velvet the green of pine boughs, his doublet panelled with supple leather that traced a chest and shoulders. Light brown curls lay ordered against a hard, defined jaw, and he sat his chair with the ease of a man who had never once doubted his welcome, spine straight, chin lifted. At his words the Queen Dowager's hands wavered, and by slow degrees she drew them from your cheeks.

"Step aside, Alicent, and take your seat," Otto Hightower said from the head of the table. "We have matters at hand."

Alicent gave you one downcast, shamed glance and withdrew to her chair, and you were left to look upon the chamber. They sat straight to a man, composed and correct, and near the middle of the assembly, at Otto's very elbow, you found the figure you had spent months refusing to name— the hand behind every letter that had crossed enemy lines to reach you. His single eye had fixed on you the moment you crossed the threshold, and it had not let you go since. Long hair, silver gold, lay combed against the hard planes of his face, and the leather patch sat where it always did, hiding what Luke had gifted him.

Then the absence struck you, and something cold and molten turned over in your belly.

"Where is he?" You lurched a stride forward. "What have you done with Viserys and Jace?" The guards moved to seize you, and one closed his gauntlet on your wounded arm, and a sharp cry came through your teeth as the pain flared white. Aemond marked it— the wince, the buckle of your knees.

"Leave her," he said, and the guards let go at once.

"Where is Aegon? Where are my nephews?"

"Jacaerys was reported slain," Otto answered, unruffled, "at the Battle of the Gullet. Shot down by archers of the Triarchy's ships." He rose as he spoke, his chair shrieking backward across the flags, and started his slow approach.

The horror came into you whole and cold, and your legs gave beneath the weight of it, and you sank to your knees upon the stone. The tears gathered slow at first, brimming, trembling, and then they broke and ran hot down your face. Something in the grief of it turned Alicent's face away entirely, for she could not look upon what her house had made of you. You had never wanted any part of it—not the war, not the fire, none of it. You had been a mild and yielding girl, near kin in temper to her own Helaena, dreaming of nothing but the weightless drift above the clouds on a dragon's back. And Alicent's own hand had forced the choosing on you, cleaving you between the sister of your blood and the sister you had found in her.

The council watched while you buried your face in your palms and wept in a way that split the air of the room. Alicent tore at the tender skin beside her nails and swallowed down the tears crowding her own throat, and even Aemond turned his face aside. As Otto closed the last of the distance, your grief hardened all at once into something with an edge, and your hand shot for the dagger at his belt, and you drew it free with a swiftness that startled even you. You drove him back against the table and set the blade to the pale flesh of his throat. His hair fanned across the polished wood beneath him, and both his palms came up in surrender.

"Where is Aegon?" you demanded.

The whole council seized. Some rose halfway from their seats, caught between sitting and standing; others gained their feet; and the guards held their distance with their hands curled at their sword hilts, every man of them still, lest any motion undo you.

"Where is Aegon? He will answer for what he has done, and you will answer for conspiring against my family and my sister."

"How brazen of you to set steel to a servant of the King" Otto grated.

"Aegon is no king. He is a thief in a crown, and you are the who engineered it."

"My brother has fled." Aemond's voice cut across the chamber for the first time. "I am king now."

"King?" The word tangled in your confusion, but your grip on the dagger did not move.

"Just so. His whereabouts elude us, and his intentions with them." His tone stayed easy, near to conversation.

You turned your eyes back to Otto, his hands still lifted in supplication. "Where is Viserys?" you pressed, and the edge kissed nearer to his pulse.

"Sagon sȳzorys, hāedar." Aemond had gone over to High Valyrian, be calm, sister, the old tongue sealing his words from every unlettered ear at the table. "Zirȳ lív’ethva, se zirȳ issa ünn’hárhmëdā. Mazilībagon ilagon se egros, lo ao would gaomagon zirȳla sīr. Kostan sagon hen gaomagon naejot ao." He lives, and he is unharmed. Set down the blade, if you would keep him so. I can be of use to you.

He rose from his chair by slow degrees, and every eye in the room left you to follow him. "Give me the dagger."

You shook your head at the mention of the nephew you had lost, and the tears gathered again, blurring the chamber to smears of green and torchlight.

"Y/N, kostilus." Please. He put out his hand, palm open and empty between you. "Bisa iksis daor qilōni iksā." This is not who you are.

With a reluctance that dragged at every muscle, you laid the blade into his waiting palm, and the whole terrible weight of the morning came down on you at once. You pitched backwards, and he caught you before you struck the floor, though not before he had set the dagger deliberately upon the table, well beyond your reach. You wept against his chest, and he stroked your hair with a patience that unsettled the watching lords.

Otto drew a long breath once you had freed him, and the Grand Maester rose to his side to look him over for hurt; he waved the man off with a curt nod, took up his dagger again, and returned to his chair. Across the room, Ormund Hightower settled back to watch with something near to boredom, his eyes wandering the walls.

"The council has resolved that you be imprisoned for your crimes," Otto began, smoothing his sleeve as though the last minutes had never come to pass. "Some among us urged the block instead, for your dragon set aflame a great many of our men."

"My crimes?" You lifted your head from Aemond's shoulder. "I sought only to restore the rightful heir to her throne, precisely as my father decreed." Your eyes went about the assembly, and not a lord among them found his tongue. "Do you imagine I wished to burn those people alive? Do you imagine I wished to be sundered between my own blood and the family that reared me? I was given no choice in it. I was made to watch everyone I loved perish. I was made to stand before one of the deadliest warborn dragons yet living and beg it to take me, that I might guard my family in a war I neither began nor wanted. A war that you crafted. I never craved a moment of this, and you know it! You, Lord Otto, and you above all, Alicent! And still it is my crime we speak of?"

The tears cut fresh channels down your cheeks as you spoke. Alicent bowed her head under the weight of her shame, and even Otto Hightower found his practiced eloquence gone from him. Silence threaded through the grief that filled the chamber, and Aemond drew you back against him and held you there.

A moment on, Otto took it up again, his voice gentled to something near to human. "The king has entreated us for your mercy. He would spare your life" he paused "were you to consent to be his queen."

At the words, Alicent watched Ormund, a devout servant of the Seven, shift in his seat and roll his eyes in open revulsion, for the marriage of siblings stood condemned by the holy texts, and he loathed the practice beyond all the many trespasses of the dragonlords he named, in the privacy of his own counsel, incestuous savage foreigners.

"Be my queen, and reign at my side," Aemond murmured against your hair, "exactly as we were always meant to."

You thrust yourself out of his arms, and for the briefest instant the hurt flickered across his one eye.

"I am your sister," you said, sharp with offense. At that, Ormund turned toward you, faintly surprised.

"Mm. I fail to see the obstacle," Aemond answered, laboring to gather his composure again, though the first thread of anger had begun to fray his measured tone.

"It is an abomination before the gods to do such a thing."

Ormund's head came fully round to you now, his eyes tracing your figure on the floor and the true revulsion written across your face.

"We are Valyrians," Aemond returned. "We do not bend the knee to their gods. Aegon the Conqueror united the Seven Kingdoms with his sister-wives at his side, and we shall do no less."

"You killed Luke—"

"Which, as I have told you a hundred times over, was a grievous accident."

"I would be forsaking my sister's claim to the throne."

"A woman has no place upon that throne."

"Then neither have I any place as your wife."

You saw it in his face before he said another word, the moment his patience reached its last measure. Yet he did not loose his temper, for he never let himself such an indulgence before you. He rose to his feet with a deliberate slowness and poise, and the warmth that had earlier filled his eye drained away entirely.

"Then I shall have no recourse but to take Helaena as my queen in your stead, and the council shall determine what becomes of Viserys."

Your eyes flew wide as the full shape of the words settled into you. Here was a snare laid with exquisite care, a threat sheathed in courtesy, and you knew it, and the whole council knew it. He knew you, knew the depth of your love for Helaena, knew how fiercely you guarded the innocent, how tenderly you held your nephew, and he had turned the very gentleness he prized in you into the instrument of your undoing.

"Guards, escort her to the barracks," Aemond said, serene once more.

Alicent came near out of her chair at the words, but your voice arrested her mid-motion, striking her through with shock and guilt in equal measure. Even Ormund leaned forward, wholly taken now

"I will do it."

Aemond turned his head a fraction toward you, and you watched the anger recede from him as a small, near-imperceptible smile of triumph settled on his mouth.

"I will marry you. I will take up arms beside the Greens. But you will spare Viserys. I will trade my own life for his, provided only that you return him safe and unharmed to my sister, and that Helaena remains free."

Alicent picked at her fingers without cease, warring against the guilt and sorrow that clenched about her chest, and Ormund, seated beside her, marked every twitch of it.

"Ñuha jorrāelagon, nyke ao shifang." My love, I knew you would come to understand. Aemond crossed to you, his hand outstretched, and you took it as he drew you to your feet.

"Convey my betrothed to her chambers. She has need of a great deal of rest." With his fingertips he brushed the damp, frayed strands from your cheek, then pressed a kiss to the crown of your head. Your hands curled to tight fists at your sides, and though the gesture escaped Aemond entirely, Ormund did not miss it, and found himself unexpectedly intrigued.

As you were led from the chamber, the council settled anew, and Aemond reclaimed his seat at its head.

"I propose the marriage be held upon the morrow," he announced, and every face at the table turned to him in bewilderment, every face save Ormund's, which wore its disgust behind only the thinnest veil.

"The morrow?" Otto repeated.

"It would be most imprudent to stage wedding festivities while your people bleed upon the field, your grace," Ormund said.

"This is precisely the hour for it. Turn their gaze. Give them the sight of Black and Green joined, and the hope of peace with it."

Ormund scoffed openly.

"We cannot yet be certain she is a trustworthy ally, let alone a queen worth the crowning," the Lord of Hightower returned.

"Lord Ormund speaks sense," Alicent put in. "A wedding at this juncture would be gravely ill-timed, above all with our resources running so thin."

"Perhaps a modest feast instead," Otto added, "a celebration of our present advantage. The Blacks have lost one of their most formidable riders, and their largest dragon has once more vanished from the reckoning. Cause enough for the pouring of wine."

Aemond watched the assembly incline their heads, one after another.

"Mm," he allowed through his lips, and he pushed himself from his chair and strode from the chamber without another word.

Ormund turned a knowing smile upon Otto Hightower, and with that the council drew to its close.

AEMOND'S CHAMBER AND THE GREAT HALL, RED KEEP. — EVENING

The guards brought you to Aemond's chambers, and none who watched thought it strange, for a prince who had wanted you across the long years of the war was not a man to trust a locked door and a stretch of corridor to keep you. They left you at the door and spoke no word, and the oaken door settled into its frame with a low and final groan. When you were alone, with no lord left to defy and no eyes left to mark you, you folded yourself down upon the coverlet, drew your knees close, and wept. The weeping ran its course until it thinned to a shallow breathing, and the breathing gave way to a sleep that took you under.

You woke to hands upon you and voices hushed against your ear. Lady's maids had come while you slept, and they roused you with the carefully. There was to be a banquet, they told you, held to honor your return to the green cause, and Aemond had made it known that he wished you seated among the gathered houses.

They drew a bath scented with rose oil and hot enough to redden the skin, and after they dressed you with the reverence of women handling a thing borrowed and dear. You abhorred it.The gown was Myrish silk the deep color of a forest at dusk, threaded with pale gold at the bodice, and at your throat they hung jewels that took the candlelight and cast it back in broken green. When they led you before the looking glass a stranger looked out at you, for the war had worn you down to boiled leather and riding velvet, to boots scuffed grey with ash and gloves stiffened by rein and buckle, and the highborn lady in the glass was one you had not worn in many seasons.

The feast was no feast at all. However beautiful you sat beneath the great iron chandeliers, however grandly Otto Hightower had named your return to the faith and the cause, you gathered naught for your trouble but appraising stares and the sidelong doubt of lords who had not forgotten which banners you had ridden beneath a fortnight past.

The Great Hall stank of spilled Arbor gold and roasted boar fat, of wax guttering low and the sour press of too many bodies beneath cold stone, and the noise of it beat at you from every side, the chatter and the clatter of trenchers and a lute that struggled to be heard above them. Aemond did not once leave your side. His hand lay at the small of your back, or laced through your fingers, or lifted to press his mouth against your knuckles, and each of these you suffered stiffly, and your unease did not escape the notice of a certain Lord seated further down the board.

"You have changed," you murmured, leaning toward him where the two of you sat at the high table above the murmuring houses.

"I am a man grown now," Aemond said, and lifted your hand again to graze his lips across your fingers, "and one whose heart belongs to you and to no other." You would not give him your eyes.

"You will see Viserys returned to my sister. She has lost two sons and a sister both. She will not survive the loss of a third."

"Of course, my love. You have my word upon it." He bent nearer, his single violet eye dropping to the bare nape of your neck, and set his mouth against the skin there, and you drew back before he could taste it. Your gaze lifted instead and struck upon the Lord of the Hightower himself, who had been watching the pair of you, and chiefly you, with something bright and unhurried and faintly amused behind his face. You dropped your eyes to the rushes on the floor. Aemond felt the small retreat of you and went still, then straightened and took up his composed seat once more, and said naught.

You let your gaze wander the length of the hall and found Helaena among the throng.

"Aemond."

He turned at the sound of his name.

"Might I have your leave to go to Helaena?"

His eye followed the line of yours to his sister, who stood near a tapestried column not far off. He nodded and did not speak, nursing yet the small mortification of your rebuff. As you rose he caught you by the arm and set his lips close against your ear.

"Do not be long."

You pressed a swift kiss to his cheek, and he hummed low in his throat and let you go, though his eye tracked you across the floor even as the lords beside him bent to claim his ear.

He did not mark that Ormund, a goblet of Dornish red cradled in his hand, had also watched you the whole of the evening. Nor did he mark the Lord rising from his place and slipping, unhurried, from the table.

"Helaena." You came to her quickly, and when she saw you her face opened into a smile of such plain warmth that the tightness in your chest loosened for the first time in days.

"I trust you are well, sister," she asked, her voice soft, and you nodded.

The two of you fell into the easy rhythm of women mending stolen years between them, and it was the first true pleasure you had let yourself since your arrival within these walls.

"He has a tenderness for you, you know," Helaena said, her eyes drifting toward her brother across the crowded floor. "He treats no other living soul the way he treats you. Not even Mother. I have never once seen him care for anyone so fiercely."

You looked down. "I find it hard to forgive him what he has done."

"He meant to fly to you. When your grief was deepest he wished to go. Grandsire named it reckless folly and forbade him."

"And yet he did what he did all the same. And more," you said, turning from the wound of it. "He sits upon my sister's throne. Rhaenyra has the truer claim."

"Mayhaps," Helaena offered gently, "you might yet change his mind."

"My Queen. My Princess." A voice unfurled into the space between you, and you both turned to its owner. "I hope I do not intrude upon your evening."

You looked to Helaena, uncertain who the man might be, though you had marked him once, seated at Alicent's side in the council chamber.

"Lord Ormund Hightower," Helaena said, and dipped into a courteous bow, and you did the same.

He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders in a way his fitted doublet of deep green velvet and leather did nothing to hide, and perhaps nine-and-thirty years of age. His eyes were fawn colored, and they held a steadiness that unsettled more than any glare. He wore the fading brown of a man long under an Oldtown sun, and there was an unhurried economy in the way he moved. He turned the whole of those eyes upon you.

"Would you grant me a dance, Princess?" He put out his palm a charming smile in place.

Only then did you hear that the music in the hall had turned, the lute now joined by a soft-throated fiddle to carry a slow measure. You looked to Helaena, and she gave you a small nod, and so you laid your hand into his, larger than yours, and warmer.

"My lord, I fear I cannot give you a proper dance," you confessed as he led you toward the floor. "I was wounded during the—"

"I was told," he broke in smoothly, the smile never leaving his mouth. "It shall not trouble me at all."

You nodded. The injury made an awkward negotiation of your limbs. Both his hands came to rest at your waist, one of yours upon the breadth of his shoulder, and the injured arm settled against his forearm as he swayed you, slow, through the measure. You stole a glance toward Aemond and saw both hands close hard about the arm of his chair, the knuckles gone bone-white beneath the skin, though his face held a perfect stillness. You swallowed, the motion plain at your throat, before a well-pleased Ormund drew back your eyes.

"You are unlike the others," he said.

"My lord?"

"The Targaryens."

"Ah." A rueful smile touched your lips. "When my mother passed, Lord Otto and Qeen Dowager Alicent took me into their keeping. I spent the greater part of my girlhood at her side, kneeling with her at the sept, reciting the Seven-Pointed Star until I knew the verses in my sleep." You lowered your eyes, warmth climbing your cheeks, and the old memories rose sweet and unbidden, and a soft nostalgia settled over your face that Ormund did not miss.

"At one time I dreamed of taking vows as a septa," you said, and lightly laughed at the absurdity.

You looked for him to laugh with you, but when you raised your head he watched you still with that same smile, though something behind his eyes had turned into a shape you could not name. You let the silence take command of the talk. Under the weight of his eyes the heat rose again to your face, and you fought to master it, though he gave you no gesture to ease it. He let several long turns of the measure pass before he spoke again.

"Do you believe them to keep their word?"

You lifted your gaze to his.

"Yes. Aemond has sworn to release Viserys."

"So readily as that?" His brows arched a fraction. "The very folk who spent long years plotting the ruin of your house?"

"What is it you reach toward, My lord?"

"Mayhaps I can assisst you."

You looked at him in confusion, and he held that assured, proprietary smile.

"If you would see your nephew truly kept safe," he went on, "will you take what I offer?"

"And why should a Hightower trouble himself to help me? Am I not the one this whole banquet was set to question?"

"Because I see promise in you. You have your flaws yet, under the proper guidance—" He lifted one hand from your waist and, with two fingers beneath your chin, tilted your face up toward his own. Your heart struck hard against your ribs, and he seemed to feel the very tremor of it, for the smile widened a fraction and he leaned nearer. Your knees gave beneath you, and he caught you before you fell, one strong arm sweeping around your back to draw you flush against the warmth of his chest.

"M-my lor—"

"Lord Ormund." The voice that cut the moment was calm and cold. You turned and found Aemond standing near, his single eye fixed upon the man who held you yet against him. There was violence promised in the look, and Ormund appeared not the least bit cowed by it.

"Your Grace," Ormund said, and laughed, and let you go by degrees, his eyes lingering only long enough to see you had found your feet. Aemond put out a hand toward you, his eye never once leaving the Hightower. You took it swiftly, for the years at his side had taught you every register of him, and you knew the particular quiet that meant he stood one breath from breaking, however smooth the surface.

At the last, with a slow roll of his eye, Aemond turned to you and pressed his lips to the back of your hand. "It has been a long evening. Shall we withdraw to our chambers, beloved?"

"Yes, Your Grace." You nodded, and he drew you back into the shelter of his arm.

" Lord Ormund, If you will excuse me and my betrothed, we mean to retire," Aemond said, and turned to lead you off. But Ormund's voice halted him.

"If I am not mistaken, Your Grace, the two of you have yet to wed."

"I fail to see the purpose of your words."

"It is a sin before the gods to share a chamber before the marriage is made."

"I do not think it falls within any lord's province to concern himself with what his King and his future Queen do behind their own doors." The annoyance ran sharp beneath your half-brother's measured tone.

"Of course. Forgive my presumption." Ormund's voice never changed, light and genial to the last.

Aemond led you away across the hall, and as you went you cast one final glance back toward the Lord of the Hightower, who dipped his head toward you in a slow and deliberate courtesy, that smile fixed flawless upon his mouth, his irises following you the whole of the way to the door.

AEMOND'S CHAMBERS, RED KEEP. — EVENING

The moment the two of you passed beneath the lintel, the distance between you widened without a word spoken, each of you drawing off toward opposite corners to shed the heavy trappings of the feast.

Your fingers worried at the laces along your ribs. You had turned your spine deliberately toward him, yet you felt the weight of his one eye upon the bared line of your shoulders all the same, marking the descent of the cloth, the curve of your back, the pooling of silk at your feet.

Upon the coverlet lay a nightshift of Lyseni silk, a translucent veil of pale fabric in the candlelight. You drew it over your head, and the stuff clung close, offering no modesty, only a shimmering suggestion of the body beneath, too insubstantial for your comfort. It was then that his warmth came up at your back, unbidden and unhurried.

When you turned to face him, Aemond caged your waist within his arms and drew you flush against him, his scarred face bending down until his breath moved against your cheek.

"We are not yet wed, Aemond. This is not right."

"No," he allowed, and there was no repentance in it, the word coming rasp and stripped of his customary poise. "Yet I struggle to restrain myself when you stand within my reach." He tightened his hold until the crest of your breasts pressed to the hard muscle of his chest, and the heat of him bled through the thin silk.

He reached up and unfastened the leather patch and let it fall to the floorboards. The sight of the scar beneath drew your hand upward before you had thought to lift it, and you traced its contours with the lightest touch of your fingers. His eyelid sank shut. He held still under your hand, drinking in the sensation.

"You once loved sapphires," he murmured, low and rough. "You always claimed the stone brought me back to your mind."

"Does it still hurt?" you asked, your voice scarce more than a breath. He shook his head, slow, and you let your hand fall away, and his eye opened once more and fixed upon you.

"I wrote to you," he confessed. He leaned closer, until his brow rested against your own, his fingers drawing idle circles at the small of your back until gooseflesh rose beneath them.

"You stood with the usurpers."

"I stood with my brother."

"You killed Luke."

"I am sorry." The word broke somewhere in his throat. "I am truly and wholly sorry. I never meant it, never wished to wound you. I would have given anything for a different end."

"Aemond." The truth in it undid something you had guarded long, and the whole weight of the years came down upon you at once— the war, the dead, the seasons apart— and he heard the fracture in your voice, the small tremor that betrayed you.

"Shhh." He raised your chin upon the crook of a finger. "You told me once, sister, that all good things come to those who wait." His finger traveled down the curve of your jaw, his gaze following after until it settled upon the parting of your lips. "And I have waited for you a long while."

He closed the space and set his mouth to yours. Your body yielded, whether from weariness, or the hollow grief that had scoured you empty, or the plain truth that surrender asked less of you than defiance while you stood so wholly unmade, stripped of your nephews and held within the walls of your enemies. He hummed against your mouth, well pleased.

Then one hand loosed its hold and dragged down the length of your arm, and both palms coasted low to settle upon the flare of your hips and hold them fast. His warmth came through the thin silk, and he worked his mouth against yours with mounting insistence, until you felt him gone rigid against your belly, and you shoved him back.

"This is wrong, Aemond. I cannot—"

"Shhh, let go, my love." He gentled the words with a maddening tenderness. "Let me care for you. Let me love you." He bent again to take your mouth, harsher now, forcing past the seam of your lips, and when you tried to voice your protest only a thin whimper came free. He groaned at the sound, low and pleased. Your eyes clenched shut, and your hands, useless at your sides, seized the forearms that pinned your hips.

The chamber door swung inward with neither knock nor warning. You tore yourself from Aemond's grasp and met the startled stare of Alicent, who cast her eyes swiftly to the floor as an old shame gathered upon her face.

"Aemond, I must speak with you."

"Speak, then, Mother," he answered, his hands finding your waist again and pulling you back against him, his eye lingering upon you without shame and full of hunger.

"In private."

"I have no wish to lose further hours from my betrothed." He tipped his head toward you.

"Go, Aemond. I will wait.."

You leaned toward him in reluctance and pressed your lips to his, and he returned it at once with a fervor beyond your own, while Alicent, unable to bear the strain plain upon your face, kept her gaze fixed upon the dark windows. When at last he drew back, a contented curve shaped his mouth.

"Mmm. I shall not be long, my love," he murmured.

You gave a small nod. He loosed his hold by slow degrees and went out at his mother's side, granting you one last glance across his shoulder as the door swung shut behind him.

The instant the latch settled, you crossed the room on silent feet and set your ear to the grain of the wood, straining after the fading tread of their steps. You waited through several heartbeats, then began a frantic search of the chamber for a cloak, though nothing of the sort presented itself among the furnishings.

Beyond another door the conversation unfolded. "Why have you summoned me?" Aemond demanded, an edge of vexation in it. "Lord Ormund has put a proposition before me."

Within the chamber, you abandoned your fruitless search the moment you grasped that this was your one chance to seek out Viserys. You slipped through the door and out into the passage, and regret took you almost at once as the cold knifed through the thin silk that clung to you, yet you would not permit yourself to turn back. The thought of your young nephew left alone in some forgotten cell drove you onward against every protest of your shivering flesh.

"What further concession does the man require?" The very name curdled his temper. "He does not trust the presence of a black behind our walls." "She has declared her allegiance before the council and before the assembled houses of the realm," Aemond returned, his eye rolling toward the vaulted ceiling. "Her elder sister is Rhaenyra Targaryen, and Daemon is her uncle besides. The moment they learn she yet lives, they will come down upon King's Landing astride thier new dragons, and we will have no answer to give them." "Vermithor has not been sighted." "And when the beast comes back to its rider, will she hold true to us? We butchered her nephews. We drove her to open war. We cast her people from the walls of their own keep. Do you imagine she will take up our cause with a glad heart? She is soft of temper and mild of manner, aye, but the girl is no fool."

Your eyes swept the corridor in every direction, sharpened by fear to catch the least movement, until the tread of paired footfalls, the chime of armor, and the low rumble of men's voices rang against the stones ahead, a single torch flickering into view at the far end of the hall.

A vexed breath escaped Aemond. "There is word as well that Rhaena was seen in the company of Sheepstealer. Tessarion and Vhagar alone cannot hope to stand against the whole strength of Rhaenyra's dragons, and Lord Ormund has no stomach for a war his own allies will not fully commit to. He requires assurance." "And how does he mean to secure it?"

Panic sent you down an unfamiliar passage, your bare feet slapping against frigid flagstones slick with the damp of the deep foundations. You ran headlong until you struck something firm— not hard enough to bruise, yet solid enough to knock the breath from you and set you down upon your backside. The figure lifted the small lantern he carried, and the wavering flame drew the green-dyed leather and dark velvet of his doublet out of the gloom.

"He wishes to guide her, as he guided my brother Gwayne, who grew to be a knight of great honor and fought without wavering for the Greens. As he shaped Daeron, who would lay down his own life for us without a moment's pause, young as he is." "He wishes to take my betrothed from me." "Only for a season. Let her go with him. He has given his word to make of her a lady worthy of the Greens— dependable, above all suspicion.

An eye considered you from above, arrogant and heavy-lidded, bright with amusement.

"And where might the lady be fleeing at so unseemly an hour, dressed in such" his gaze traveled slow down your figure as he crouched low before you "ungodly coverings."

He swung the lantern idle between two fingers and extended a gloved hand down toward your trembling form.

"He has promised to fashion her into a fit and proper wife."

"Lord Ormund." you whisper.

NEXT>

THE ROYAL GARDENS, RED KEEP. YEAR: 209 AC — AFTERNOON

"He should be there, beneath the pavilion." The boy gave up his second brother's whereabouts with small hands knotted about his cat, the sodden thing still trembling in its swaddle.

When you rose from your crouch the cloth at your collar slid loose, and a sliver of your ruby necklace surfaced into the daylight, one bead of crimson set against your throat. His gaze caught upon it for half a breath before Lan drew him back by the shoulder, and to the child's credit he held his tongue, only pressing his lips thin and letting himself be turned aside.

Before you could go, Lan's fingers closed hard about your forearm.

"Be careful," he said, low, the words heavy with a thing he would not put a name to.

You bent your head, and at that promise he loosed his hold and let you walk away.

Patience you had learned across long years lived beneath the twin shadows of your Lord Father and your Lady Mother, years in which your father had made of you a lure to draw the eyes of despicable lords and princes to his table. You knew the working of a room's unseen strings, knew how to take your fury and swallow it whole.

Yet two wrongs had ever slipped that discipline and roused in you a temper you could scarce master: the theft of your cake, and cruelty done to the weak and the innocent by men who held power and no conscience to bind it. The boy's brother had done the latter, and so you crossed the garden with purpose, resolved to teach him a lesson he would not soon forget.

King, Prince, or Lord, it was all the same to you; such a man was unworthy of the air in his lungs, and you meant to tell him so. Should he show his sorrow you would grant him the grace of penance, for even your father, who was cold as any winter, had never once stooped so low as to harm a helpless beast.

The gardens begged to be admired, their beds of blood-red roses and pale lilies stirring beneath a sky washed clean of every cloud, but the anger churning in you left no room for such admiration.

"You." The word came off your tongue sharp enough to draw blood, and you fixed it upon the figure sprawled in idle ruin beneath the nearest pavilion, a man draped along the bench with the boneless ease of one half gone from the waking world. He wore the same black-and-red doublet as the little one, though the gold of his hair gave you pause. You put the confusion from your mind and crossed the last of the distance in a single rush, taking him before he could gather himself, straddling his hips and laying your forearm across the column of his throat. He raised both hands between you, palms open in a lazy surrender.

"Oh? At this hour? How delightfully brazen of you." His voice came unhurried and faintly amused, untroubled by the arm crushing his windpipe. "Though I fear my Lord Father walks the Keep somewhere close, and he would be sore displeased to find us at such.... ungodly work. Still, I commend your daring. Later, perhaps, once we have found some decent wine and a quieter corner."

You looked down at him, revulsion and a grudging bewilderment warring across your face.

"I am a chambermaid."

"I fail to see the trouble in it." He let his head loll against the wood. "Tell me, do you happen to know where they have hidden the wine?"

"Why in the world would I know that?"

"Are you not a servant of this house?"

The question was so plain and obvious that it broke the wind from your sails. Your gaze slid away in the awkwardness of it before you caught yourself and bore down the harder, pressing his shoulders flat to the bench.

"Do not turn the words. You cast your brother's cat down the well, did you not?"

"I did what?" His golden brows drew together in true confusion. "And why would I do such a wickedness to a creature? I'd not raise my hand to the thing had it spilled a cup of aged Arbor gold." He looked about the garden, honestly at a loss, then all at once closed the space between you, a hand curling at your waist to draw you nearer. "But that is hardly what stirs my interest. What I would dearly like to know is whether you are truly a chambermaid at all. Your thighs and your hands are far too supple for the labor."

Your breath caught the moment his fingers traced the swell of your upper thigh, and only then did the full indecency of the thing find you, and only then did you truly see him. He was handsome in a way that vexed you, his features soft and slow, long pale lashes about eyes of a deep violet, each one darkened beneath by a crescent of weariness. His fair hair fell loose and disordered around his face and took the noon light and threw it back with an insolent brilliance.

"And… jasmine?" He leaned in until his mouth all but brushed the skin below your ear, and he breathed the scent of you.

You threw yourself off him before his nose could give your disguise away, though it was less the fear of it that moved you than the sudden, unwelcome heat that climbed into your face, a thing you resolved on the instant to hate. Offense and disgust and a shaming flush of embarrassment knotted together in your breast. You had opened your mouth for some retort when laughter carried across the gardens from off in the distance. The pale-gold prince turned his head to follow the line of your stare.

"Ah. There, I think, would be your true culprit." He rolled his gaze back to your face without haste.

Beyond your pavilion stood another, and beneath it lounged a man crowned with hair of short platinum, far nearer in likeness to the boy who had led you here. He was set at his ease upon an ornate chair with a company of noble ladies arranged about him, one perched upon either armrest, some draped behind, the rest gathered close, and his hands moved over them as a man's hands move over things he owns, a wrist here, a shoulder there.

"I am Daeron... or Prince Daeron," the pale-gold prince offered, but the words drifted into the air unheard. Your eyes had fixed upon the dagger sheathed at his hip. You drew it free in a single motion and turned toward the man who so idly entertained his flock of women.

"Whoa— have you lost your wits entirely?"

"My father told me long ago that I was born without them," you bit out, quickening your stride, Daeron scrambling up to trail behind you.

"Would you hold Caraxes for me, My Lord? It shall be but a moment." Aegon had pressed the cat into Lan's arms before the man could shape a refusal. He bolted, but Lan caught a fistful of his doublet.

"And where, precisely, do you imagine you are going, little Lord?"

"You must let me go, My Lord. I must fetch my Lord Father. The servant girl will come to ruin if I do not."

"I will go to her. She is mine to answer for."

"You cannot." The boy strained against the grip, urgency sharpening his young voice. "Should you set yourself between them, your house will lose all favor. Aerion will see it done."

"Aerion?"

"My brother. I am Aegon Targaryen, son of Prince Maekar. To lay a hand upon a prince of the realm is to call down ruin upon your whole line, and knowing my brother, he will chase that ruin to its last copper."

Lan's eyes widened as the shape of the thing came clear to him.

"Please, my lord. I sent her toward my brother Daeron, but I cannot say how long he will hold her before she marks that he is not the one she hunts. We have little time."

"You lied to her of his whereabouts."

"I had no other choice."

Dread settled over Lan, cold and entire. To step in now would lay your name bare, would unstitch the whole careful lie before your father and drag your house into the very scandal you had labored to keep it clear of. So he opened his hand and let Aegon go, for in that moment the child was the only deliverance you had.

THE ROYAL GARDENS, RED KEEP. — AFTERNOON

"You!" You bore down upon the pavilion with fury quickening every step, the dagger tucked from sight against the small of your back, Daeron closely behind.

"…and so I put the lot of them to the sword…" Prince Aerion let his tale falter, dragging his attention with plain reluctance from the beautiful women arrayed about him to settle it upon you. His eyes traveled the length of your servant's garb and kindled with amusement, his legs stayed splayed wide across the chair.

"I was not aware I had summoned a jester for entertainment." His fingers grazed the upper thigh of one of the ladies, and she loosed a bright giggle at his touch while the rest measured you with smirks and open contempt.

"You require none," you answered, "seeing there sits one already enough to entertain the whole company."

He went still. The amusement drained from his face by degrees.

"Ah— if you will pardon us—" Daeron ventured.

"Brother." Aerion's voice cut across him without so much as a glance. "Tell me why you have brought one of your…" His gaze crawled over you once more, slow and deliberate. "…whores into my company. A chambermaid, no less? I have watched a great many disappointing things issue from you, but this sinks beneath even your low measure."

"The girl is a new maid, unused still to the ways of the castle. We shall take our leave at once—" Daeron spoke on your behalf, though neither you nor his brother spared his words the smallest heed. His hand crept toward the dagger hidden behind you, but you elbowed him off.

"Coward," you spat at Aerion.

His face shifted then, his head lifting sharp at the insult.

"Does the creature truly presume to address a Prince with such insolence?" One of the ladies, a daughter of some house whose sigil escaped you, gave voice to her outrage, her powdered cheeks flushing beneath the paint.

"Oh, does he required ladies to shield his honor as well?" you mocked.

"Silence." Aerion's tone dropped into a threatening calm. "You impudent whore. You dare scatter your nonsense before me."

"Nonsense? I speak nothing but the truth. I behold no prince here— only a cockless jester who preys upon the innocent and the defenseless for the plain reason that he owns neither the skill nor the courage to face a proper foe upon fair ground."

Daeron's eyes stretched wide, sure you had lost your wits entire to speak so boldly to his younger brother, a man known through all the realm for his cruelty and his ungovernable temper.

"What is your business here," Aerion said, all pretense of amusement snuffed out now, his hands closing about the arms of the chair.

"You are the one who flung your brother's cat down the well, are you not?" you said, each word honed to an edge.

"A trifling nuisance, nothing more. The Lady Tyrell suffers grievously in the presence of cats. I sought only to preserve her comfort." He reached to cradle the woman's chin in his fingers.

"How very kind of you, my Prince." She stretched to stroke his cheek in turn.

You scoffed.

"Besides," Aerion went on, "I am a Prince. Every living thing within these walls exists for my torment, should I wish it, and you would be wise to hold that close. Brother, do relieve me of this fool." The lady beside his armrest loosed a delicate sneeze into her sleeve. "She offends the eye, and her presence worsens the Lady Tyrell's affliction. See that she is disciplined proper in the barracks. I cannot abide the sight of a loathsome wench."

"Then I imagine you had best be rid of your whole company."

The ladies drew back, scandalized, and turned their glares full upon you. Aerion rose from his seat, anger tightening every line of him.

"You trespass upon my ground, insult me and my ladies both—"

"Insult you? Your company manages that well enough without any help from me."

"I will have your head for your insolence, and for your failure to bend when you stand before a dragon." He advanced upon you at a measured, deliberate pace. Daeron moved to catch your arm; you thrust him aside.

"A dragon?" You laugh. "Do not sully the name of Valyria's great beasts. Dragons are magnificent creatures, brimful of honor."

"You question my honor?" Aerion's hand dropped toward his dagger.

"No. I deny that it exists at all, and a man void of honor is unworthy of the breath he squanders." You were quicker, with Daeron's dagger already drawn and set its point to the soft flesh of his throat, the sun catching bright along the steel.

"Guards," Aerion snapped, though the command splintered upon the second syllable.

Ser Roland and Ser Donnel, two sworn men of the Kingsguard, came at the summons, white cloaks stirring, the smell of oiled leather and warm mail arriving with them. Daeron loosed a long, weary sigh.

"By all means," you said. "Arrest me. Explain to the whole of the garrison that a chambermaid frightened the 'great dragon' witless. I have no doubt they will make songs of it— the noble Targaryen prince who hurled cats down wells to torment his own younger brother, all to soothe the itch of a lady with no breeding, and who could not so much as manage one chambermaid without calling upon his Kingsguard to save him."

"I summon my Kingsguard for an unruly maid who has forgotten her place and set a blade to the throat of a prince of the realm. Or pray, enlighten me— for what purpose do you carry that dagger?"

"Well, I arrived intending to sever your ballsacks and cast them to the starving hounds, but it seems you have none to spare."

Ser Roland let slip a snort, wrestling and failing to master his laughter, while Ser Donnel turned his face aside, jaw clenched against the mirth that near overtook him at the sight of his prince bested by a woman of the servant class.

"What a disgrace you are," you pressed on. "Blessed with the Targaryen name yet given none of the family's true wit or nobility. What a pity that your sole redeeming graces amount to your Valyrian blood and the cut of your cheekbones— neither of which you had any hand in the earning."

"You fancy yourself brave, skulking behind that disguise. You imagine yourself a clever girl." His hand shot out and knotted in your tunic. "But you are not half so clever as you suppose." He hauled you upward, and fear did lance through you— though not the fear he believed he had roused. He held you a hand's breadth above the ground, and one careless motion would loosen the coverings that bound your head, your mouth, your nose, and lay your true face bare. Still, some stubborn ember within you refused to yield to a being so vile he would torment a creature that could not defend itself.

"Braver and cleverer than you, at the very least," you managed. "Though I grant that is no towering feat."

Daeron's eyes went wide, and for the first time in longer than he could recall, something other than the promise of wine had seized hold of his interest.

"Guards, if you would be so gracious as to escort me now, I suspect the cells will furnish finer company than another moment spent talking with this imbecile."

The two Kingsguard dipped their heads, smiles pressed thin against their discipline. But Aerion would not release you.

"I will make a spectacle of you, for your indecency and your contempt toward your prince."

He reached to tear away your coverings— and a firm hand clamped about his wrist. For the first time in the whole of his life, Aerion found himself met with a grave and unflinching stare drawn from those deep violet eyes. Astonishment loosened his features, for Daeron, his elder brother, the one the court dismissed as the drunken, had never in living memory regarded anything with the smallest gravity. Until this moment. The grip held fast, and before either brother could shape a single word, a gentle yet commanding voice unfurled across the garden.

"That is enough."

The words crossed the pavilion carrying a weight the softness of them had no right to hold, and the effect came at once. The two princes let go of one another and drew their spines straight, and the Kingsguard who had lingered a pace behind stiffened into the disciplined stillness their white cloaks demanded of them. It bewildered you, that a voice so unhurried and so low might bend so many bodies to its purpose without ever climbing toward a shout. When you lifted your gaze to seek its source you found a man of considerable height and seasoned build, his black hair threaded through with silver at the temples, his beard clipped with that same fastidious care. Your eyes moved before your discretion could rein them, and they caught upon the pin fastened over his right breast — the badge of the Hand of the King — and you dropped your stare to the gravel at once.

"That is her," he said, gesturing toward you with a single free hand while the other cradled the rescued cat against his ribs. The animal's fur was still dark and matted with well-water. The Kingsguard held their posture without a flicker.

"Your lord father has surely told you both of the banquet that begins within the hour. I trust you will see yourselves made presentable before then." Daeron and Aerion bowed their heads in obedience, and the arrogance that had lately animated their faces dissolved into something almost boyish, two princelings caught at their mischief and made to answer for it. For one fleeting breath, faintly amusing to behold, that was all the pair of them were.

Yet Aerion, being the creature he was, spared you a parting look before he withdrew, a look that promised the afternoon would neither be forgotten nor forgiven. His company of ladies followed. Daeron leaned near from the opposite side and lowered his voice to a murmur meant for your ears alone.

"I should like very much to enjoy your company again." When you turned to meet him he offered you a slow wink, then followed his brother across the stones and away.

Only when the pair had gone did the Hand address you.

"Come nearer, girl. There is nothing here to fear." No menace inhabited the words, and the want of it unsettled you more than any threat could have done. The tone was gentle, generous even, and still authority had not abandoned it, a marriage of qualities you had scarcely encountered in all your years of hiding beneath a servant's veil. The soft crush of his boots turning upon the gravel drew you from your hesitation, and you obeyed, closing the distance swiftly while you kept your eyes upon the ground, where the cloth across your face concealed what it was fashioned to conceal.

"Ser Donal, take young Aegon to the servants that he might be made ready," the Hand instructed. One of the older knights, his features weathered yet handsome still beneath the graying stubble, dipped his head and moved toward the boy.

"Aegon, go along with him."

"But, Uncle—"

The Hand gave him only a look, mild and unhurried, a warning delivered without a single raised syllable, and the boy understood it entirely. He bent at the waist.

"Yes, Your Grace." Aegon granted you one last mournful glance across his shoulder before he went, an expression so laden with contrition that it seemed to bear an apology meant for no one but yourself. Then the two of them passed beneath the archway and were swallowed by the palace.

"You are the one who fetched my nephew's pet from the well, then?" A warmth settled across his mouth as he regarded you.

You inclined your head. "I am, Your Grace."

"I am Prince Baelor Targaryen, Hand of King. You ought to count yourself fortunate my nephew found me when he did. Had he not, the afternoon might have ended a good deal less kindly. The last man to raise his hand against royal blood was made to forfeit the hand that gave the offense."

"I did not strike him," you answered.

"You laid a blade to his throat." His gaze drifted to the dagger still curled within your fingers. You did not look at him, yet you felt the observation land, and your grip tightened while you eased the steel a fraction behind your hip.

"He tormented a helpless creature for no cause beyond the wounding of his younger brother," you told him.

Baelor let slip a quiet laugh, unforced and true.

"And I have no doubt you left him disinclined to attempt such cruelty again." There was a levity woven through the words so unaccountable that you raised your face at last. He was handsome, an easy and unguarded smile resting upon his features while he studied you. You cast your eyes back to the earth in an instant. Then the recollection struck you— that you had spoken back, and freely, to the Hand of the King — and alarm seized you by the throat.

"Forgive me, your grace, for failing to master my own tongue." You began to lower yourself to bend the knee, but his arm came forward and caught you beneath the elbow, arresting the motion before your knee could find the stone.

"No harm has been done. Rise."

The kindness of it unnerved you, and you righted your half-bent posture with an awkwardness you could not disguise.

"It is I who ought to thank you. I love my brother well, and I have long admired his gifts in a great many pursuits, yet you accomplished in a single afternoon what years of his labor could not. You disciplined his children."

Astonishment held you fast. In place of demanding your head for laying steel against his kin, he bade you keep your apology. In place of condemning you to punishment for forgetting your station, he had weighed your words, and heard them, and answered them with laughter and easy jest, a generosity so foreign to the highborn that a doubt crept through you whether this man truly wore the mantle of the Hand at all.

"Trouble yourself no further. I shall see that Aerion offers you no harm and abandons whatever slander he means to sow in your name. Return to your chambers now; the banquet will not wait long." He paused, then turned toward the knight who stood a short pace to his left. "Ser Roland, be so good as to escort the princess to her chambers."

Your eyes went wide and your head turned toward him with a haste you regretted the moment the difference in your heights forced your chin upward. Before any question could shape itself upon your lips he brought his attention back to you, the welcoming smile undimmed.

"Your speech betrayed you. No chambermaid alive owns the wit to outmaneuver a prince with such eloquence, nor the nerve to press a blade to the blood of the dragon, unless she carries that blood within her own veins."

"How much did you hear?" The question left you scarcely above a whisper, warmth climbing steadily into your cheeks.

"Enough to be impressed."

The color deepened across your face, shame and disbelief tangled together, that your concealment had failed, that he had overheard your every graceless remark, and that he had chosen, against all custom, to let it pass without rebuke. You wished, with a fervor near to prayer, that the flagstones might part and carry you out of the moment entire.

"You need not fear. I shall carry none of this to your father."

You raised your eyes to him, relief loosening the tightness that had gathered beneath your breastbone, made lighter still by the plain proof that he had taken no true offense.

"Thank you, your grace."

He smiled and gave a single nod. "I will see you at supper." Then he tilted his head toward the knight in a gesture of quiet command. You laid your hand slowly against the broad muscle of Ser Roland's forearm and let him lead you toward the palace, the wet-cat smell fading at your back as the shadow of the archway closed over you.

The gardens gave way to a corridor of pale stone where the last of the daylight slanted amber through the narrow windows and the air went cool, faintly sweet with beeswax and the smoke of torches not yet lit.

"You are a peculiar one, Princess," Ser Roland said as he matched his long stride to your smaller steps. "Have you so little care for your own life?"

"Whatever do you mean by that?"

"Prince Aerion has a certain reputation." His voice dropped and grew rough at the edges. "The pretty ones in this keep always do."

"Then they are no different from the ones I knew in Valyria. He would make my father a fitting son." The words came out on a low grunt of distaste.

"You would do well to guard yourself against any further entanglement with the princes. It is Prince Maekar or Prince Baelor who most often proves able to pull a body free of such trouble, and neither of them will always be at hand."

"Well, Ser Roland, should he contrive to hurl another cat down that well, I can make you no promises whatsoever."

A quiet, honest laugh rolled out of him. "Here is your chamber."

"My thanks, Ser."

"The pleasure is all mine, princess. I shall look for you at the feast." He bent over your hand and pressed a warm, deliberate kiss to your knuckles, the stubble of his jaw grazing your skin— while from the far end of the corridor, unmarked by you, a pair of lilac eyes tracked every measured movement out of the concealing dark.

GUEST CHAMBER, THE RED KEEP — EVENING

When your bath had been drawn and finished, the Tyroshi women dressed you in the old Valyrian gown your father had bidden them fashion, though every layer of it whispered of an extravagance you found ill-suited to the night. They hung jewels upon you enough to bow the neck of a lesser woman, weaving them through your braided hair, fastening them at your throat, sliding them along your arms and over the delicate bones of your hands until you gleamed with the whole of your father's ambition.

When one of the maids reached to unclasp the ruby resting against your collarbone, your hand shot up and caught her wrist before her fingers could close upon the stone.

"That stays," you said, and the gentleness you gave so freely to servants and handmaids fled your voice entirely, and in its place came a gravity that startled the girl into stillness. She nodded quickly. Only then did you let her go.

"It is strange," you murmured, your fingertips returning to the necklace, tracing the cool facets of it where it lay against your skin. "Sometimes I feel she has never truly left us." Your gaze drifted, and something in your chest drew tight. "I miss her. I would give a great deal to have her beside me tonight." You turned to look at Lan. He lowered his eyes and gave you the smallest, most tender curve of a smile.

"She would have been proud of the woman you have become," he said, and crossed the chamber toward you with his hand held out.

BANQUET HALLS, THE RED KEEP— EVENING

The feast had begun already by the time you came down. The great hall stood swollen with lords and ladies of every consequence, their finery catching the light of a hundred candles while a scattering of instruments murmured soft from a corner. The evening had not yet been opened in earnest; only the royal house had been announced and seated at their tables, and all who waited did so upon the arrival and the address of your father, before the true revels might begin.

"His Imperial Majesty, Zhaeselmon of the House Belaerys, First of His Name, Emperor of New Valyria, Blood of the Old Empire, Keeper of the Flame, and Protector of the Freehold."

The whole of the hall rose to its feet, and a plain tension settled across the shoulders of the elder princes at the mere recitation of those titles. Your father came forth tall and formidably made, his frame commanding the space above every other man in the chamber, and more than a few nobles turned their eyes toward the floor in something near to dread, for he was a man whose very presence gave off a menace that needed no words to make itself understood.

He was arrayed in exquisite robes bearing the colors of your house, crimson and gold, his platinum hair falling in an effortless sheen across the cloth, and he crossed to King Daeron II and clasped the older monarch's hand. The difference between them was considerable, your father's height dwarfing the aged King who greeted him. They traded their pleasantries with a practiced warmth, and King Daeron II gestured for your father to take the seat beside his own.

The gathered guests sank once more into their chairs, and the talk resumed its comfortable hum, laughter drifting between the tables while near everyone seemed content to make merry of the night. The young princes were the sole exception.

Aegon fidgeted without end at the pin upon his chest, the grandson Daeron summoned a servant to fill his cup with wine, and Aerion had slouched down into his seat with one elbow propped upon the table and his chin sunk sullen against his palm.

Then Aegon gasped aloud, and every head in the hall turned to follow the boy's astonished stare toward the great entrance.

"Her Imperial Highness, Princess (y/n) of the House Belaerys, Crown Princess of New Valyria and Lady of the Fourteen Flames."

As you entered, the whole of the chamber fell beneath your presence. Even the musicians let their instruments go still, and the low murmur of the crowd thinned away to a hush. The Valyrians of the ancient Freehold had long been famed for a beauty that struck the eye as something scarcely of the mortal world, and this was the single gift your mother had ever left you, the one advantage even your father could not deny you, one he wielded without shame to unsettle and to lure his rivals. The guests parted before you as Lan guided you toward the high table upon its raised dais at the far end of the hall.

Aerion, who had been drowning his boredom in the slow turning of the wine within his cup, lifted his head and forgot the cup entirely. His elder brother Daeron froze with the golden rim scarce brushing his lips, the wine abandoned mid-sip, and had Maekar seen the sight he would have marveled at it, though he too found himself thoroughly caught, for the spectacle of a Valyrian woman arrayed in the full splendor of her ancestral dress was a rarity few in that hall had ever beheld. Even Baelor found he had been holding a breath he had never meant to draw.

You felt the shift in the room, and your heart set to a slow, insistent quickening beneath the weight of the silence and the countless eyes fixed upon you, yet your years of discipline held you. You gathered yourself as Lan let go your hand at the foot of the dais, and you sank into a graceful curtsy.

"My King, My Queen, My Emperor," you offered in High Valyrian, addressing King Daeron II, Queen Myriah, and your father each in turn. The king and queen seemed truly delighted, while your father stayed impassive, granting you only that practiced hollow smile and shallow nod you had grown so wearily to know.

"She is as striking as the old tales of Valyria promised," the King remarked, and you answered him with a courteous smile, your eyes lowered to the floor as custom demanded until your father should grant you leave to lift them.

"The gods have surely blessed the House of Belaerys," Queen Myriah added, her smile warm and unaffected.

"Truly, her has even commanded the silence of our very music," King Daeron observed, the jest carrying a gentle reproach that sent the musicians scrambling to take up their playing again the moment they marked their lapse.

"She takes after her late mother," your father supplied, lacing the words with a counterfeit pride that only you had the intimacy to catch.

The compliments settled upon you and left no mark, for you had endured a whole lifetime of them.

"And how many years does she carry?" Queen Myriah asked.

"She has seen only twenty," your father answered.

"The very age of my eldest, Valarr," Baelor said. "It grieves me that he could not attend us tonight. He sends his warmest regards."

"The heir to the heir," your father remarked, his interest sharpening. "Where might he be, if I am permitted the question?"

"Contesting a tourney in the Reach," Baelor replied.

"A warrior, then." For the first time since he came, your father seemed truly and unguardedly pleased.

"Indeed, my Lord. He returns upon the morrow," Baelor told him.

"A suitable match for my daughter," your father declared with a delighted laugh.

"It is an honor beyond measure to have been welcomed to such an occasion by the good and honorable King Daeron Targaryen, and by his lovely and gracious wife, the beloved Queen Myriah Martell," you offered, your poise flawless and your smile perfectly rehearsed, guiding the talk gently away from the matter your father had seized upon.

The king and queen traded a pleased glance between them.

"It is we who are pleased, to hold our own blood within these walls," the king answered, and you caught the faint, unbidden twitch of your father's finger against the table.

Your attention was drawn away when Prince Baelor rose and offered you his hand with an easy, charming smile.

"Princess. If I may."

You bowed your head and accepted, and he guided you past the young princes, who hastily mended their slouching postures as you passed, toward the seats held by the princesses. He set you between a young girl you would later come to know as Princess Rhae and her older brother, Aegon Targaryen, whose eyes clung to you without the faintest attempt at discretion. You swallowed and held your composure while his gaze darted from your face to the shape of Lan in his black-and-gold armor, standing at a respectful distance among the Kingsguard. His eyes went, too, to the ruby resting atop your chest. You suspected that if the boy had not already known who you were, he surely knew it now, for his eyes had gone so wide that you felt half a mind to reach over and coax them back into their proper place.

Straight across from you, to your considerable dismay, sat the insufferable creature you now prayed to all Fourteen Flames would fail to know you, and beside him lounged his elder brother, who watched you across the rim of his cup with a knowing smirk that curdled something in the pit of your belly. Your instincts told you plain that he had already found the truth of you, yet your training held firm, and your polite face never faltered.

The feast pressed on, and every soul at the table was lost in talk save you. You spoke as sparingly as courtesy would allow, wary that Aerion might catch the familiar cadence of your voice. Your father conversed with ease alongside the king, the queen, and Baelor as course upon course of food and wine was carried out, yet you touched none of the wine, and ate only, and with deliberate care.

Baelor marked it, and leaned toward you with a genuine concern.

"Does the wine not suit your palate, Princess? Shall I have another vintage brought for you?"

You turned to him and answered with a quiet grace.

"No, your grace, and I would not give offense. The fault lies not with the wine but with me. It has never agreed with my constitution."

He smiled and summoned a servant with a lift of his hand.

"Bring the Princess water, or cider, whichever can be found."

"There is truly no need, Your Grace," you protested softly, but he only gave you another smile and a reply gentled with warmth.

"Spare yourself the courtesy. It is a rare gift to sit in the company of our own blood, and rarer still when that blood comes as lovely as this. I promise you the servants shall not begrudge the trouble."

The sincerity in his voice left you without words, while beside him Maekar let out a grunt of open disgust and rolled his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling.

The whole of the meal wore on beneath a strain you could not shake, for Aerion held his stare upon you without pause and without the least effort to hide the boldness of it. The look he gave you now was not the one he had worn in the gardens. It burned as fierce, yet beneath the fire lay something you knew with an unwelcome clarity, a blend of appetite and want that no woman raised in a court could mistake. You could not decide whether to feel relief that he had failed to know in you the very creature who had insulted him and made a mockery of him before laughing witnesses, or revulsion that a man so cruel should look upon you with desire. You swallowed hard against the bile that threatened to climb your throat, and forced it down.

At your side his younger brother went on studying you with an unabashed fascination, until the moment the sweets were carried out. You marked that Aegon had already finished his portion, and his eyes drifted, almost shy, toward yours. You answered with a smile and slid your untouched plate toward him.

"Would you care to have mine? I find myself quite full," you whispered to the boy, and at last he smiled in turn, murmured his thanks, and took it eagerly.

Aerion, who had missed none of the exchange, understood at once that you had given up the sweet only because women were prone to tenderness toward children, and he seized upon the opening to speak.

"You may have mine, Princess. Lemon cakes are among the most celebrated confections in all of Westeros. It would be a genuine shame were you to leave these halls without ever tasting one." He signaled a servant with a lazy flick of his fingers and passed his own plate along, that it might be set down before you.

The gesture, you could tell, ran against his nature, for you caught the reactions of both Maekar and Baelor at his sudden generosity, and each of them seemed faintly appalled by it.

"Thank you—" you began in your own voice, then caught yourself and dropped, hasty and awkward, into a lower register, unwilling to betray yourself. "—my prince."

Aegon looked up at you in open confusion at the strange shift in your tone, a smear of lemon cake yet upon his lip, and you could feel, somewhere at the back of your skull, the certainty that Lan's brows had climbed toward his hairline in silent, merciless judgment.

You had no wish to eat the sweet the fool had set before you, for to taste it would be accept his courting, and you would sooner have gone to your grave. The plate sat where he had pushed it, the honeyed thing sweating upon the silver, and the smell of it rose warm. It was then you marked the young princess beside you, a small girl with a round and gentle face, staring at the plate with a want she was too young to hide. Her own portion was gone, only a smear of it left upon her fingers, and you saw in that hungry look the way to serve two ends with a single stroke.

"Would you like some as well?" you asked in that same clumsy, lowered voice, and from his post along the wall Lan gathered every scrap of his discipline to keep the laughter from his throat.

The strangeness of your voice gave the child a moment's pause, yet the sweet was the greater force, and she nodded, bright and eager, and drew the plate to herself before Aerion could think to protest. He rolled his eyes and slid lower in his chair, sullen as a scolded squire, and you caught the whole of it from the corner of your sight even as you held your smile warm upon the little princess.

Maekar did not fail to see the kindness you had done his youngest daughter, Rhae, nor the way the girl bloomed beneath it, glad and wholly charmed. Something stirred in his chest that he could not put a name to, and being a man who mistrusted what he could not name, he called it a passing discomfort of the heart and no more. He cleared his throat and shifted upon the bench, and the movement earned him a brief look from his brother Baelor.

The music quickened, the pipes and the high strings sliding into a livelier measure, and up and down the length of the hall lords and ladies rose from their places in great number to take the floor, and the rustle of silk and the ring of laughter swelled until the very rushes seemed to shiver with it.

Before Aerion could shape a word, or draw your notice with some fresh provocation, his uncle Baelor rose from his seat and crossed to you in a handful of long strides.

"Might I have this dance, Princess?" he asked, a smile touched with true warmth resting upon his mouth as he offered you his hand — a broad hand, and strong, that swallowed yours whole when you laid it within his palm.

Though he remained a stranger to you still, there was something in Baelor's presence that quieted the drumming of your nerves while he led you out upon the floor. The hall smelled of roast boar and spilled wine and the tallow smoke of a hundred candles, and beneath it all the faint sweetness of the rushes strewn across the stone.

"Your Grace, I am unschooled in the dances of Westeros," you admitted, your voice low, as he drew you into your place.

"There is no need to fret over it," he assured you, gentle. "Follow my steps, and I shall teach you the rest."

He guided you through each turn with an easy confidence and a lightness of hand you had not looked for in a man of his years.

"And how do you find King's Landing thus far?" he asked, once your feet had found their rhythm together upon the polished stone.

"It differs greatly from Essos," you answered, after a moment given to the weighing of it. "Yet I find it well enough to my liking. If for nothing else, then for its forgiving weather."

Baelor smiled at that, and nodded, thoughtful, before he pressed on.

"And have our servants used you kindly?"

"They have shown me nothing but courtesy," you told him, and the words were true.

"Should any trouble ever come to you, you have only to bring it to me directly."

"You are most generous to offer such protection."

He turned you with practiced ease, then returned your hand to his shoulder once more.

"You learn quickly," Baelor observed, and there was approval in it.

You hesitated before you gave voice to the question that had lingered at the back of your thoughts since first the man had spoken.

"I pray this gives no offense — yet are you truly of Valyria?"

Baelor grinned.

"Do my Dornish features betray me so readily as that?"

"No… it is not that." Your brow drew together while the words failed you a moment. "It is only… you seem unlike others of our blood."

He regarded the contemplation in your face with plain amusement.

"I would hope that proves a thing worth being."

You colored faintly.

"It is. A very good thing indeed." Your head came up too sharply, and the suddenness of it seemed to startle him. "You are kind. Gentler, and more given to understanding, than most Valyrians I have known."

He inclined his head with grace.

"You flatter me past my deserving, though I strive always to do what best serves the realm."

Across the hall Aerion brooded over his cup, and Aegon's gaze flitted between his brother and yourself, restless and afraid.

"You look radiant this evening," Baelor told you, soft. "My eldest son would be enthralled by you, were he here to see it."

"I pray he proves as gentle of heart as his father."

Baelor laughed under his breath.

"I would hope I have managed to instill some measure of goodness in the boy, though rumor holds he is even handsomer than his father ever was."

You smiled at the play in his voice.

"A feat most difficult to—"

But something caught your eye in the midst of the words. A blur of orange, darting across the far corner of your sight, and the horror of it lanced through every limb before a numbness came behind and seized hold of you entire. Your legs failed beneath a sudden weakness. Your hands went cold, and all the strength drained out of them.

You fell against Baelor, and he caught you a bare few inches above the floor, drawing you tight against the breadth of his chest.

Maekar straightened sharply through the growing confusion, concern hard upon his face, while others looked on with mounting unease. Even Aerion rose abruptly from his chair, and beside him Daeron, whose features bore the dawning of a recognition, and a fear, familiar to him alone through some history you did not share. The look that lay upon your own face was one he had seen before.

"Princess?" Baelor asked, gentle still. "What troubles you?"

You clung tight about his arm, and your voice trembled now.

"We must leave."

"We?"

His mismatched eyes searched yours, keen for the answer, and the concern in them deepened. He called out for the maesters straightaway and gave a sign to a servant near at hand, yet already he knew that whatever gripped you ran deeper than any common sickness.

"There is no need for that. My daughter has endured a long and wearing journey," your father declared, coming up from his chair, his voice unfurling across the hall with an authority that stilled the murmurs to nothing. "You will forgive her. She is spent and must retire for the night. Lan, escort the princess to her chambers."

"Forgive me, Your Grace," you insisted, weak, while your gaze raked the crowd in desperation, hunting Lan's steadying presence somewhere amid the disorder that unfurled about the hall.

Lan came at once, shouldering through the gathering press of bodies to reach you. The whole of the hall had bent its attention upon the spectacle now, and even King Daeron and Queen Myriah had risen from their high seats to watch with open unease.

Hushed whispers ran through the assembly as Lan took your arm and guided you toward the doors, and none watched your going so closely as Baelor, whose eyes followed you until the crowd closed and swallowed the sight of you whole.

When you had gained the safety of your chambers and been lowered to sit upon the edge of the bed, Lan moved to fetch you water, but you caught his arm and held him, your grip so fierce that it sharpened his fear. He laid his own hand over yours to steady it, and found your fingers still cold beneath his palm.

"Lan, we must leave this place," you said.

"Tell me what troubles you," he answered, and knelt before you.

Tears gathered along the rims of your eyes, and he cupped your face within his hands.

"This place. We were never meant to set foot within it."

"What do you mean by that?" he pressed, his gaze searching yours.

"My dreams, Lan." Your whisper barely carried. "The Dragon dreams. The sigil. The towers of the three castles standing upon a field of orange. It is here. In this place. I saw it."

His heart dropped, and you felt the shock pass through him as his own hands turned cold against your cheeks.

"If we remain here, something monstrous will befall this kingdom," you said, and your voice cracked beneath the weight of it. "My father... He means to burn this kingdom to ash.

THE GARDENS, RED KEEP. YEAR: 209 AC — AFTERNOON

"He should be there, beneath the pavilion." The boy gave up his second brother's whereabouts with small hands knotted about his cat, the sodden thing still trembling in its swaddle.

When you rose from your crouch the cloth at your collar slid loose, and a sliver of your ruby necklace surfaced into the daylight, one bead of crimson set against your throat. His gaze caught upon it for half a breath before Lan drew him back by the shoulder, and to the child's credit he held his tongue, only pressing his lips thin and letting himself be turned aside.

Before you could go, Lan's fingers closed hard about your forearm.

"Be careful," he said, low, the words heavy with a thing he would not put a name to.

You bent your head, and at that promise he loosed his hold and let you walk away.

Patience you had learned across long years lived beneath the twin shadows of your Lord Father and your Lady Mother, years in which your father had made of you a lure to draw the eyes of despicable lords and princes to his table. You knew the working of a room's unseen strings, knew how to take your fury and swallow it whole.

Yet two wrongs had ever slipped that discipline and roused in you a temper you could scarce master: the theft of your cake, and cruelty done to the weak and the innocent by men who held power and no conscience to bind it. The boy's brother had done the latter, and so you crossed the garden with purpose, resolved to teach him a lesson he would not soon forget.

King, Prince, or Lord, it was all the same to you; such a man was unworthy of the air in his lungs, and you meant to tell him so. Should he show his sorrow you would grant him the grace of penance, for even your father, who was cold as any winter, had never once stooped so low as to harm a helpless beast.

The gardens begged to be admired, their beds of blood-red roses and pale lilies stirring beneath a sky washed clean of every cloud, but the anger churning in you left no room for such admiration.

"You." The word came off your tongue sharp enough to draw blood, and you fixed it upon the figure sprawled in idle ruin beneath the nearest pavilion, a man draped along the bench with the boneless ease of one half gone from the waking world. He wore the same black-and-red doublet as the little one, though the gold of his hair gave you pause. You put the confusion from your mind and crossed the last of the distance in a single rush, taking him before he could gather himself, straddling his hips and laying your forearm across the column of his throat. He raised both hands between you, palms open in a lazy surrender.

"Oh? At this hour? How delightfully brazen of you." His voice came unhurried and faintly amused, untroubled by the arm crushing his windpipe. "Though I fear my Lord Father walks the Keep somewhere close, and he would be sore displeased to find us at such.... ungodly work. Still, I commend your daring. Later, perhaps, once we have found some decent wine and a quieter corner."

You looked down at him, revulsion and a grudging bewilderment warring across your face.

"I am a chambermaid."

"I fail to see the trouble in it." He let his head loll against the wood. "Tell me, do you happen to know where they have hidden the wine?"

"Why in the world would I know that?"

"Are you not a servant of this house?"

The question was so plain and obvious that it broke the wind from your sails. Your gaze slid away in the awkwardness of it before you caught yourself and bore down the harder, pressing his shoulders flat to the bench.

"Do not turn the words. You cast your brother's cat down the well, did you not?"

"I did what?" His golden brows drew together in true confusion. "And why would I do such a wickedness to a creature? I'd not raise my hand to the thing had it spilled a cup of aged Arbor gold." He looked about the garden, honestly at a loss, then all at once closed the space between you, a hand curling at your waist to draw you nearer. "But that is hardly what stirs my interest. What I would dearly like to know is whether you are truly a chambermaid at all. Your thighs and your hands are far too supple for the labor."

Your breath caught the moment his fingers traced the swell of your upper thigh, and only then did the full indecency of the thing find you, and only then did you truly see him. He was handsome in a way that vexed you, his features soft and slow, long pale lashes about eyes of a deep violet, each one darkened beneath by a crescent of weariness. His fair hair fell loose and disordered around his face and took the noon light and threw it back with an insolent brilliance.

"And… jasmine?" He leaned in until his mouth all but brushed the skin below your ear, and he breathed the scent of you.

You threw yourself off him before his nose could give your disguise away, though it was less the fear of it that moved you than the sudden, unwelcome heat that climbed into your face, a thing you resolved on the instant to hate. Offense and disgust and a shaming flush of embarrassment knotted together in your breast. You had opened your mouth for some retort when laughter carried across the gardens from off in the distance. The pale-gold prince turned his head to follow the line of your stare.

"Ah. There, I think, would be your true culprit." He rolled his gaze back to your face without haste.

Beyond your pavilion stood another, and beneath it lounged a man crowned with hair of short platinum, far nearer in likeness to the boy who had led you here. He was set at his ease upon an ornate chair with a company of noble ladies arranged about him, one perched upon either armrest, some draped behind, the rest gathered close, and his hands moved over them as a man's hands move over things he owns, a wrist here, a shoulder there.

"I am Daeron... or Prince Daeron," the pale-gold prince offered, but the words drifted into the air unheard. Your eyes had fixed upon the dagger sheathed at his hip. You drew it free in a single motion and turned toward the man who so idly entertained his flock of women.

"Whoa— have you lost your wits entirely?"

"My father told me long ago that I was born without them," you bit out, quickening your stride, Daeron scrambling up to trail behind you.

"Would you hold Caraxes for me, My Lord? It shall be but a moment." Aegon had pressed the cat into Lan's arms before the man could shape a refusal. He bolted, but Lan caught a fistful of his doublet.

"And where, precisely, do you imagine you are going, little Lord?"

"You must let me go, My Lord. I must fetch my Lord Father. The servant girl will come to ruin if I do not."

"I will go to her. She is mine to answer for."

"You cannot." The boy strained against the grip, urgency sharpening his young voice. "Should you set yourself between them, your house will lose all favor. Aerion will see it done."

"Aerion?"

"My brother. I am Aegon Targaryen, son of Prince Maekar. To lay a hand upon a prince of the realm is to call down ruin upon your whole line, and knowing my brother, he will chase that ruin to its last copper."

Lan's eyes widened as the shape of the thing came clear to him.

"Please, my lord. I sent her toward my brother Daeron, but I cannot say how long he will hold her before she marks that he is not the one she hunts. We have little time."

"You lied to her of his whereabouts."

"I had no other choice."

Dread settled over Lan, cold and entire. To step in now would lay your name bare, would unstitch the whole careful lie before your father and drag your house into the very scandal you had labored to keep it clear of. So he opened his hand and let Aegon go, for in that moment the child was the only deliverance you had.

THE GARDENS, RED KEEP. — AFTERNOON

"You!" You bore down upon the pavilion with fury quickening every step, the dagger tucked from sight against the small of your back, Daeron closely behind.

"…and so I put the lot of them to the sword…" Prince Aerion let his tale falter, dragging his attention with plain reluctance from the beautiful women arrayed about him to settle it upon you. His eyes traveled the length of your servant's garb and kindled with amusement, his legs stayed splayed wide across the chair.

"I was not aware I had summoned a jester for entertainment." His fingers grazed the upper thigh of one of the ladies, and she loosed a bright giggle at his touch while the rest measured you with smirks and open contempt.

"You require none," you answered, "seeing there sits one already enough to entertain the whole company."

He went still. The amusement drained from his face by degrees.

"Ah— if you will pardon us—" Daeron ventured.

"Brother." Aerion's voice cut across him without so much as a glance. "Tell me why you have brought one of your…" His gaze crawled over you once more, slow and deliberate. "…whores into my company. A chambermaid, no less? I have watched a great many disappointing things issue from you, but this sinks beneath even your low measure."

"The girl is a new maid, unused still to the ways of the castle. We shall take our leave at once—" Daeron spoke on your behalf, though neither you nor his brother spared his words the smallest heed. His hand crept toward the dagger hidden behind you, but you elbowed him off.

"Coward," you spat at Aerion.

His face shifted then, his head lifting sharp at the insult.

"Does the creature truly presume to address a Prince with such insolence?" One of the ladies, a daughter of some house whose sigil escaped you, gave voice to her outrage, her powdered cheeks flushing beneath the paint.

"Oh, does he required ladies to shield his honor as well?" you mocked.

"Silence." Aerion's tone dropped into a threatening calm. "You impudent whore. You dare scatter your nonsense before me."

"Nonsense? I speak nothing but the truth. I behold no prince here— only a cockless jester who preys upon the innocent and the defenseless for the plain reason that he owns neither the skill nor the courage to face a proper foe upon fair ground."

Daeron's eyes stretched wide, sure you had lost your wits entire to speak so boldly to his younger brother, a man known through all the realm for his cruelty and his ungovernable temper.

"What is your business here," Aerion said, all pretense of amusement snuffed out now, his hands closing about the arms of the chair.

"You are the one who flung your brother's cat down the well, are you not?" you said, each word honed to an edge.

"A trifling nuisance, nothing more. The Lady Tyrell suffers grievously in the presence of cats. I sought only to preserve her comfort." He reached to cradle the woman's chin in his fingers.

"How very kind of you, my Prince." She stretched to stroke his cheek in turn.

You scoffed.

"Besides," Aerion went on, "I am a Prince. Every living thing within these walls exists for my torment, should I wish it, and you would be wise to hold that close. Brother, do relieve me of this fool." The lady beside his armrest loosed a delicate sneeze into her sleeve. "She offends the eye, and her presence worsens the Lady Tyrell's affliction. See that she is disciplined proper in the barracks. I cannot abide the sight of a loathsome wench."

"Then I imagine you had best be rid of your whole company."

The ladies drew back, scandalized, and turned their glares full upon you. Aerion rose from his seat, anger tightening every line of him.

"You trespass upon my ground, insult me and my ladies both—"

"Insult you? Your company manages that well enough without any help from me."

"I will have your head for your insolence, and for your failure to bend when you stand before a dragon." He advanced upon you at a measured, deliberate pace. Daeron moved to catch your arm; you thrust him aside.

"A dragon?" You laugh. "Do not sully the name of Valyria's great beasts. Dragons are magnificent creatures, brimful of honor."

"You question my honor?" Aerion's hand dropped toward his dagger.

"No. I deny that it exists at all, and a man void of honor is unworthy of the breath he squanders." You were quicker, with Daeron's dagger already drawn and set its point to the soft flesh of his throat, the sun catching bright along the steel.

"Guards," Aerion snapped, though the command splintered upon the second syllable.

Ser Roland and Ser Donnel, two sworn men of the Kingsguard, came at the summons, white cloaks stirring, the smell of oiled leather and warm mail arriving with them. Daeron loosed a long, weary sigh.

"By all means," you said. "Arrest me. Explain to the whole of the garrison that a chambermaid frightened the 'great dragon' witless. I have no doubt they will make songs of it— the noble Targaryen prince who hurled cats down wells to torment his own younger brother, all to soothe the itch of a lady with no breeding, and who could not so much as manage one chambermaid without calling upon his Kingsguard to save him."

"I summon my Kingsguard for an unruly maid who has forgotten her place and set a blade to the throat of a prince of the realm. Or pray, enlighten me— for what purpose do you carry that dagger?"

"Well, I arrived intending to sever your ballsacks and cast them to the starving hounds, but it seems you have none to spare."

Ser Roland let slip a snort, wrestling and failing to master his laughter, while Ser Donnel turned his face aside, jaw clenched against the mirth that near overtook him at the sight of his prince bested by a woman of the servant class.

"What a disgrace you are," you pressed on. "Blessed with the Targaryen name yet given none of the family's true wit or nobility. What a pity that your sole redeeming graces amount to your Valyrian blood and the cut of your cheekbones— neither of which you had any hand in the earning."

"You fancy yourself brave, skulking behind that disguise. You imagine yourself a clever girl." His hand shot out and knotted in your tunic. "But you are not half so clever as you suppose." He hauled you upward, and fear did lance through you— though not the fear he believed he had roused. He held you a hand's breadth above the ground, and one careless motion would loosen the coverings that bound your head, your mouth, your nose, and lay your true face bare. Still, some stubborn ember within you refused to yield to a being so vile he would torment a creature that could not defend itself.

"Braver and cleverer than you, at the very least," you managed. "Though I grant that is no towering feat."

Daeron's eyes went wide, and for the first time in longer than he could recall, something other than the promise of wine had seized hold of his interest.

"Guards, if you would be so gracious as to escort me now, I suspect the cells will furnish finer company than another moment spent talking with this imbecile."

The two Kingsguard dipped their heads, smiles pressed thin against their discipline. But Aerion would not release you.

"I will make a spectacle of you, for your indecency and your contempt toward your prince."

He reached to tear away your coverings— and a firm hand clamped about his wrist. For the first time in the whole of his life, Aerion found himself met with a grave and unflinching stare drawn from those deep violet eyes. Astonishment loosened his features, for Daeron, his elder brother, the one the court dismissed as the drunken, had never in living memory regarded anything with the smallest gravity. Until this moment. The grip held fast, and before either brother could shape a single word, a loud and commanding voice unfurled across the garden.

"What the fuck is going on here? Cease this foolery at once!"

He stood beneath the archway of climbing vines, an old man whose platinum beard had been combed into strict and soldierly order, whose hair lay smoothed against his skull with never a strand in rebellion. Beside him waited the boy you had met beside the well that afternoon. The child lifted one hand and leveled a finger at you, square and certain, and with the other arm he cradled a bedraggled cat against the front of his tunic.

"That is her," Aegon said. There was no malice in the words. Only the artless honesty of the very young.

The white knights of the Kingsguard drew themselves up along the flagstones, their pale cloaks settling into rigid columns, even the ladies stood still and both princes surrendered their grips upon you, though they did so with a plain and sulking reluctance. You spent the moment straightening the collar Aerion had crushed in his fist, and you were careful to keep your face lowered as you did it. You knew the man who watched you now. The height of him, the deliberate ordering of that beard— they belonged to the very Lord your father had spoken with beneath the colonnade only hours past. Prince Maekar Targaryen.

"Make yourselves ready for the feast this evening," Maekar told his sons, each word laid down flat and heavy with the weariness of a father long accustomed to being disappointed, "and waste no more of the daylight amusing yourselves with the servants of this keep."

Daeron and Aerion traded a look that carried a weight of meaning between them. Aerion rolled his eyes toward the leafy canopy and turned upon his heel to go first, his company in tail, though he spared you a parting glare that promised the matter between you was not yet finished. Daeron bent toward you instead, and lowered his voice to a murmur that carried the sweet-sour breath of spiced wine. "I would welcome your company again. Gladly."

You turned to look at him. He gave you a slow wink, and then he was gone, striding off after his brother.

"Come, girl."

You obeyed the summons at once, yet you kept your eyes fixed hard upon the raked gravel of the path, where the cloth drawn across your features still guarded what little remained of your secret.

"Ser Donnel. Take my son to the servants, that they might make him presentable." One of the older Kingsguard, a man whose years had stolen nothing from a certain rugged handsomeness, dipped his head and started toward the child. "Aegon. Go with him."

"But—"

Maekar's pale eyes widened at the temerity of a son who had not leapt to his bidding the instant it left his lips. Aegon understood the whole of that silent warning in the space of a single heartbeat, and folded himself into a bow.

"Yes, Father." He threw you one last sorrowful glance across his shoulder, a look that seemed to beg your pardon and yours alone, before he and the knight vanished together into the shadowed mouth of the keep.

"You are the one who fetched my son's pet from the well?" Maekar subjected you to a long and searching look, though there was far less severity in it than the scorn he had turned upon the princes.

You bowed your head. "My sworn— I am, my Lord."

At last he let out a slow breath, and something in the set of his shoulders loosened with it.

"I owe you an apology on behalf of my sons. They are an ungovernable brood."

"The apology is mine to make, my Lord. My own conduct was scarcely more becoming."

He hummed low in his throat, and it was neither agreement nor argument.

"You would be wise to return to your chambers now. The feast begins before long." A pause, and then the blade of it. "Ser Roland. Take the princess to her rooms."

Your eyes flew wide and your head snapped toward him, a movement you regretted the moment you had made it, for the great difference in your heights left a sting to your neck. Before you could shape a single question, the corner of Maekar's mouth gave a faint tug upward, the quiet pleasure of a man well satisfied with his own eyes.

"I glimpsed no more than the hem of your sworn sword's cloak before he took himself from sight. The Lord young Aegon spoke of was no man familiar within the Keep, and yet he bore a peculiar likeness to the swordsman I marked loitering upon the docks. It is unfitting that a lady of your birth should go about wrapped in a beggar's rags. Be off with you." He said all of it in an even, unhurried voice that betrayed nothing at all.

You cursed Lan beneath your breath, silent and heartfelt.

"My Lady." Ser Roland folded into a courteous bow and offered you his arm. Only now did you mark how carefully groomed the man was, and how truly pleasing his face— a jaw shadowed with a soldier's stubble, dark hair swept back from a broad brow, the faint scent of fragrant oil and clean leather rising off him as he drew near. You settled your fingers into the crook of that thick arm, slow, and with care.

Before he could lead you off, your back already turning upon Maekar, you spoke to the prince one last time. "I thank you, Your Grace."

He turned his head a fraction, enough that he might see you sidelong, and lifted one white brow above a frown.

"For your intervention," you said. "Had you not come when you did, the matter would surely have grown worse with that insufferable dolt."

Maekar's left eye gave a sharp twitch. "He is my son," he said through his teeth, his jaw drawn tight enough to strain the cords of his neck.

"Oh." You turned your gaze forward once more and gave him your answer with such earnest, unvarnished gravity that it disarmed him wholly. "Then I am most sincerely sorry for you."

There was such plain honesty threaded through your pity that Ser Roland smothered a laugh by some means he could not afterward account for, while Prince Maekar was left so thoroughly bewildered that he was made to turn and look after you— only to find you already retreating down the path beneath the knight's steady guidance.

The gardens gave way to a corridor of pale stone where the last of the daylight slanted amber through the narrow windows and the air went cool, faintly sweet with beeswax and the smoke of torches not yet lit.

"You are a peculiar one, Princess," Ser Roland said as he matched his long stride to your smaller steps. "Have you so little care for your own life?"

"Whatever do you mean by that?"

"Prince Aerion has a certain reputation." His voice dropped and grew rough at the edges. "The pretty ones in this keep always do."

"Then they are no different from the ones I knew in Valyria. He would make my father a fitting son." The words came out on a low grunt of distaste.

"You would do well to guard yourself against any further entanglement with the princes. It is Prince Maekar or Prince Baelor who most often proves able to pull a body free of such trouble, and neither of them will always be at hand."

"Well, Ser Roland, should he contrive to hurl another cat down that well, I can make you no promises whatsoever."

A quiet, honest laugh rolled out of him. "Here is your chamber."

"My thanks, Ser."

"The pleasure is all mine, princess. I shall look for you at the feast." He bent over your hand and pressed a warm, deliberate kiss to your knuckles, the stubble of his jaw grazing your skin— while from the far end of the corridor, unmarked by you, a pair of lilac eyes tracked every measured movement out of the concealing dark.

GUEST CHAMBER, THE RED KEEP — EVENING

When your bath had been drawn and finished, the Tyroshi women dressed you in the old Valyrian gown your father had bidden them fashion, though every layer of it whispered of an extravagance you found ill-suited to the night. They hung jewels upon you enough to bow the neck of a lesser woman, weaving them through your braided hair, fastening them at your throat, sliding them along your arms and over the delicate bones of your hands until you gleamed with the whole of your father's ambition.

When one of the maids reached to unclasp the ruby resting against your collarbone, your hand shot up and caught her wrist before her fingers could close upon the stone.

"That stays," you said, and the gentleness you gave so freely to servants and handmaids fled your voice entirely, and in its place came a gravity that startled the girl into stillness. She nodded quickly. Only then did you let her go.

"It is strange," you murmured, your fingertips returning to the necklace, tracing the cool facets of it where it lay against your skin. "Sometimes I feel she has never truly left us." Your gaze drifted, and something in your chest drew tight. "I miss her. I would give a great deal to have her beside me tonight." You turned to look at Lan. He lowered his eyes and gave you the smallest, most tender curve of a smile.

"She would have been proud of the woman you have become," he said, and crossed the chamber toward you with his hand held out.

BANQUET HALLS, THE RED KEEP— EVENING

The feast had begun already by the time you came down. The great hall stood swollen with lords and ladies of every consequence, their finery catching the light of a hundred candles while a scattering of instruments murmured soft from a corner. The evening had not yet been opened in earnest; only the royal house had been announced and seated at their tables, and all who waited did so upon the arrival and the address of your father, before the true revels might begin.

"His Imperial Majesty, Zhaeselmon of the House Belaerys, First of His Name, Emperor of New Valyria, Blood of the Old Empire, Keeper of the Flame, and Protector of the Freehold."

The whole of the hall rose to its feet, and a plain tension settled across the shoulders of the elder princes at the mere recitation of those titles. Your father came forth tall and formidably made, his frame commanding the space above every other man in the chamber, and more than a few nobles turned their eyes toward the floor in something near to dread, for he was a man whose very presence gave off a menace that needed no words to make itself understood.

He was arrayed in exquisite robes bearing the colors of your house, crimson and gold, his platinum hair falling in an effortless sheen across the cloth, and he crossed to King Daeron II and clasped the older monarch's hand. The difference between them was considerable, your father's height dwarfing the aged King who greeted him. They traded their pleasantries with a practiced warmth, and King Daeron II gestured for your father to take the seat beside his own.

The gathered guests sank once more into their chairs, and the talk resumed its comfortable hum, laughter drifting between the tables while near everyone seemed content to make merry of the night. The young princes were the sole exception.

Aegon fidgeted without end at the pin upon his chest, the grandson Daeron summoned a servant to fill his cup with wine, and Aerion had slouched down into his seat with one elbow propped upon the table and his chin sunk sullen against his palm.

Then Aegon gasped aloud, and every head in the hall turned to follow the boy's astonished stare toward the great entrance.

"Her Imperial Highness, Princess (y/n) of the House Belaerys, Crown Princess of New Valyria and Lady of the Fourteen Flames."

As you entered, the whole of the chamber fell beneath your presence. Even the musicians let their instruments go still, and the low murmur of the crowd thinned away to a hush. The Valyrians of the ancient Freehold had long been famed for a beauty that struck the eye as something scarcely of the mortal world, and this was the single gift your mother had ever left you, the one advantage even your father could not deny you, one he wielded without shame to unsettle and to lure his rivals. The guests parted before you as Lan guided you toward the high table upon its raised dais at the far end of the hall.

Aerion, who had been drowning his boredom in the slow turning of the wine within his cup, lifted his head and forgot the cup entirely. His elder brother Daeron froze with the golden rim scarce brushing his lips, the wine abandoned mid-sip, and had Maekar seen the sight he would have marveled at it, though he too found himself thoroughly caught, for the spectacle of a Valyrian woman arrayed in the full splendor of her ancestral dress was a rarity few in that hall had ever beheld. Even Baelor found he had been holding a breath he had never meant to draw.

You felt the shift in the room, and your heart set to a slow, insistent quickening beneath the weight of the silence and the countless eyes fixed upon you, yet your years of discipline held you. You gathered yourself as Lan let go your hand at the foot of the dais, and you sank into a graceful curtsy.

"My King, My Queen, My Emperor," you offered in High Valyrian, addressing King Daeron II, Queen Myriah, and your father each in turn. The king and queen seemed truly delighted, while your father stayed impassive, granting you only that practiced hollow smile and shallow nod you had grown so wearily to know.

"She is as striking as the old tales of Valyria promised," the King remarked, and you answered him with a courteous smile, your eyes lowered to the floor as custom demanded until your father should grant you leave to lift them.

"The gods have surely blessed the House of Belaerys," Queen Myriah added, her smile warm and unaffected.

"Truly, her has even commanded the silence of our very music," King Daeron observed, the jest carrying a gentle reproach that sent the musicians scrambling to take up their playing again the moment they marked their lapse.

"She takes after her late mother," your father supplied, lacing the words with a counterfeit pride that only you had the intimacy to catch.

The compliments settled upon you and left no mark, for you had endured a whole lifetime of them.

"And how many years does she carry?" Queen Myriah asked.

"She has seen only twenty," your father answered.

"The very age of my eldest, Valarr," Baelor said. "It grieves me that he could not attend us tonight. He sends his warmest regards."

"The heir to the heir," your father remarked, his interest sharpening. "Where might he be, if I am permitted the question?"

"Contesting a tourney in the Reach," Baelor replied.

"A warrior, then." For the first time since he came, your father seemed truly and unguardedly pleased.

"Indeed, my Lord. He returns upon the morrow," Baelor told him.

"A suitable match for my daughter," your father declared with a delighted laugh.

"It is an honor beyond measure to have been welcomed to such an occasion by the good and honorable King Daeron Targaryen, and by his lovely and gracious wife, the beloved Queen Myriah Martell," you offered, your poise flawless and your smile perfectly rehearsed, guiding the talk gently away from the matter your father had seized upon.

The king and queen traded a pleased glance between them.

"It is we who are pleased, to hold our own blood within these walls," the king answered, and you caught the faint, unbidden twitch of your father's finger against the table.

Your attention was drawn away when Prince Baelor rose and offered you his hand with an easy, charming smile.

"Princess. If I may."

You bowed your head and accepted, and he guided you past the young princes, who hastily mended their slouching postures as you passed, toward the seats held by the princesses. He set you between a young girl you would later come to know as Princess Rhae and her older brother, Aegon Targaryen, whose eyes clung to you without the faintest attempt at discretion. You swallowed and held your composure while his gaze darted from your face to the shape of Lan in his black-and-gold armor, standing at a respectful distance among the Kingsguard. His eyes went, too, to the ruby resting atop your chest. You suspected that if the boy had not already known who you were, he surely knew it now, for his eyes had gone so wide that you felt half a mind to reach over and coax them back into their proper place.

Straight across from you, to your considerable dismay, sat the insufferable creature you now prayed to all Fourteen Flames would fail to know you, and beside him lounged his elder brother, who watched you across the rim of his cup with a knowing smirk that curdled something in the pit of your belly. Your instincts told you plain that he had already found the truth of you, yet your training held firm, and your polite face never faltered.

The feast pressed on, and every soul at the table was lost in talk save you. You spoke as sparingly as courtesy would allow, wary that Aerion might catch the familiar cadence of your voice. Your father conversed with ease alongside the king, the queen, and Baelor as course upon course of food and wine was carried out, yet you touched none of the wine, and ate only, and with deliberate care.

Baelor marked it, and leaned toward you with a genuine concern.

"Does the wine not suit your palate, Princess? Shall I have another vintage brought for you?"

You turned to him and answered with a quiet grace.

"No, your grace, and I would not give offense. The fault lies not with the wine but with me. It has never agreed with my constitution."

He smiled and summoned a servant with a lift of his hand.

"Bring the Princess water, or cider, whichever can be found."

"There is truly no need, Your Grace," you protested softly, but he only gave you another smile and a reply gentled with warmth.

"Spare yourself the courtesy. It is a rare gift to sit in the company of our own blood, and rarer still when that blood comes as lovely as this. I promise you the servants shall not begrudge the trouble."

The sincerity in his voice left you without words, while beside him Maekar let out a grunt of open disgust and rolled his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling.

The whole of the meal wore on beneath a strain you could not shake, for Aerion held his stare upon you without pause and without the least effort to hide the boldness of it. The look he gave you now was not the one he had worn in the gardens. It burned as fierce, yet beneath the fire lay something you knew with an unwelcome clarity, a blend of appetite and want that no woman raised in a court could mistake. You could not decide whether to feel relief that he had failed to know in you the very creature who had insulted him and made a mockery of him before laughing witnesses, or revulsion that a man so cruel should look upon you with desire. You swallowed hard against the bile that threatened to climb your throat, and forced it down.

At your side his younger brother went on studying you with an unabashed fascination, until the moment the sweets were carried out. You marked that Aegon had already finished his portion, and his eyes drifted, almost shy, toward yours. You answered with a smile and slid your untouched plate toward him.

"Would you care to have mine? I find myself quite full," you whispered to the boy, and at last he smiled in turn, murmured his thanks, and took it eagerly.

Aerion, who had missed none of the exchange, understood at once that you had given up the sweet only because women were prone to tenderness toward children, and he seized upon the opening to speak.

"You may have mine, Princess. Lemon cakes are among the most celebrated confections in all of Westeros. It would be a genuine shame were you to leave these halls without ever tasting one." He signaled a servant with a lazy flick of his fingers and passed his own plate along, that it might be set down before you.

The gesture, you could tell, ran against his nature, for you caught the reactions of both Maekar and Baelor at his sudden generosity, and each of them seemed faintly appalled by it.

"Thank you—" you began in your own voice, then caught yourself and dropped, hasty and awkward, into a lower register, unwilling to betray yourself. "—my prince."

Aegon looked up at you in open confusion at the strange shift in your tone, a smear of lemon cake yet upon his lip, and you could feel, somewhere at the back of your skull, the certainty that Lan's brows had climbed toward his hairline in silent, merciless judgment.

You had no wish to eat the sweet the fool had set before you, for to taste it would be accept his courting, and you would sooner have gone to your grave. The plate sat where he had pushed it, the honeyed thing sweating upon the silver, and the smell of it rose warm. It was then you marked the young princess beside you, a small girl with a round and gentle face, staring at the plate with a want she was too young to hide. Her own portion was gone, only a smear of it left upon her fingers, and you saw in that hungry look the way to serve two ends with a single stroke.

"Would you like some as well?" you asked in that same clumsy, lowered voice, and from his post along the wall Lan gathered every scrap of his discipline to keep the laughter from his throat.

The strangeness of your voice gave the child a moment's pause, yet the sweet was the greater force, and she nodded, bright and eager, and drew the plate to herself before Aerion could think to protest. He rolled his eyes and slid lower in his chair, sullen as a scolded squire, and you caught the whole of it from the corner of your sight even as you held your smile warm upon the little princess.

Maekar did not fail to see the kindness you had done his youngest daughter, Rhae, nor the way the girl bloomed beneath it, glad and wholly charmed. Something stirred in his chest that he could not put a name to, and being a man who mistrusted what he could not name, he called it a passing discomfort of the heart and no more. He cleared his throat and shifted upon the bench, and the movement earned him a brief look from his brother Baelor.

The music quickened, the pipes and the high strings sliding into a livelier measure, and up and down the length of the hall lords and ladies rose from their places in great number to take the floor, and the rustle of silk and the ring of laughter swelled until the very rushes seemed to shiver with it.

Before Aerion could set so much as a word upon his tongue, Daeron came up from his seat and put out his hand toward you.

"Might I have the honor of this dance, Princess?"

A small tide of fear rose in you, yet you bowed your head and laid your fingers within his, and the jewels upon your hands gave a faint and delicate chime as you reached. You wanted nothing half so much as to be gone from the snare that had closed about you, and beneath that wanting crouched a quieter dread, for you had begun to doubt how long you might hold the strange low pitch you had forced into your voice.

Daeron led you onto the floor, and from his bench Maekar watched with a plain astonishment to find his son, sober the whole night through, turning his hands to something other than his wonted appetite for wine and for women.

Daeron bowed before the measure took the both of you.

"My prince, I am a stranger to the dances of your… culture," you whispered against the shell of his ear as he drew you nearer, and the warm smell of him came to you.

He turned his face to yours and smiled at the thread of uncertainty running through your words.

"Then it is a fortune that I have a talent for it. Follow where I lead." He stepped into the rhythm of the pipes, and drew your bodies into a gentle sway, and several minutes unspooled before the measure of it settled into your limbs.

"You learn quickly," Daeron said.

"I was told I had an excellent teacher this afternoon," you answered.

"A teacher whose dagger you have not yet seen fit to return."

You went still all at once, and the sudden death of your movement broke the thing between you and sent you stumbling, though his arm was there before you fell. His hand came to rest dangerously low upon the curve of your waist, and with an easy strength he pulled you back against him and folded the misstep into the dance, as smooth as if he had meant for it from the first.

"You look divine tonight, and yet," he murmured, "I cannot help myself but to yearn for your rags, scolding my brother to within an inch of his pride. There was something to the sight of it. Alluring."

Warmth climbed unbidden into your face, and you were glad he chose that moment to spin you outward, so that the shift in your expression went unseen. When he gathered you home again he bent his head, and his breath was warm against your throat.

"How did you come to know?" you found the courage to ask.

"Jasmine," he said, and his voice dropped low. "No chambermaid living could buy a scent so fine. And the lilac in your eyes — that is a Valyrian thing." His gaze slid downward, and his hand shifted a fraction against your waist. "And your skin is far too soft for a woman who has known honest labor." And he spun you once more.

Across the hall Aerion brooded above his goblet, sunk low in his chair with his mouth curled sour, and near him young Aegon stole glances at his elder brother and seemed to shrink smaller with each one.

You had meant to give some clever answer, yet something at the ragged edge of your sight caught hold of you and would not let go. A small blur of orange crossed the hall, low along the flagstones, and the effect of it upon you was swift and without mercy. Horror closed about your limbs and drained them of all warmth, the strength went out of your legs, your hands turned to ice, and your balance forsook you utterly, so that you fell — and Daeron caught you a scant few inches above the floor, one knee bent beneath the sudden weight of you.

Baelor and Maekar marked the disturbance and came up sharp in their seats. The color had fled your face so wholly that the prince who held you grew plain to see in his alarm. Aerion saw it too and pushed himself up from his chair, some impulse he did not understand driving him to your aid, but his father crossed the ground before him.

"Princess?" Daeron said, and there was a knowing beneath the word, for he had seen this pallor and this trembling before, and he knew too well the thing they foretold.

Your fingers closed hard about his forearm, and your head shook against him in a mute refusal. Maekar reached your side in a rush, dread cutting deep into his face, for the fear had taken him that his eldest son had done you some grievous wrong.

"What have you done to her?" he demanded, his voice rough, his eyes moving over your bloodless face.

"I have done nothing," Daeron answered, indignation and worry warring in his voice.

"We must leave," you said of a sudden, and your voice shook upon each word.

"We?" Maekar echoed, lost.

You turned to the confusion carved into his face and the alarm plain upon Daeron's.

"I must leave," you managed, shaking your head, your gaze casting about the hall for Lan.

"My daughter has endured a long and wearing journey," your father declared, coming up from his chair, his voice unfurling across the hall with an authority that stilled the murmurs to nothing. "You will forgive her. She is spent and must retire for the night. Lan, escort the princess to her chambers."

Lan came at once, shouldering through the gathering press of bodies to reach you. The whole of the hall had bent its attention upon the spectacle now, and even King Daeron and Queen Myriah had risen from their high seats to watch with open unease.

Hushed whispers ran through the assembly as Lan took your arm and guided you toward the doors, and none watched your going so closely as young Aegon, whose eyes followed you until the crowd closed and swallowed the sight of you whole.

When you had gained the safety of your chambers and been lowered to sit upon the edge of the bed, Lan moved to fetch you water, but you caught his arm and held him, your grip so fierce that it sharpened his fear. He laid his own hand over yours to steady it, and found your fingers still cold beneath his palm.

"Lan, we must leave this place," you said.

"Tell me what troubles you," he answered, and knelt before you.

Tears gathered along the rims of your eyes, and he cupped your face within his hands.

"This place. We were never meant to set foot within it."

"What do you mean by that?" he pressed, his gaze searching yours.

"My dreams, Lan." Your whisper barely carried. "The Dragon dreams. The sigil. The towers of the three castles standing upon a field of orange. It is here. In this place. I saw it."

His heart dropped, and you felt the shock pass through him as his own hands turned cold against your cheeks.

"If we remain here, something monstrous will befall this kingdom," you said, and your voice cracked beneath the weight of it. "My father... He means to burn this kingdom to ash.

THE GARDENS, RED KEEP. YEAR: 209 AC — AFTERNOON

"He should be there, beneath the pavilion." The boy gave up his second brother's whereabouts with small hands knotted about his cat, the sodden thing still trembling in its swaddle.

When you rose from your crouch the cloth at your collar slid loose, and a sliver of your ruby necklace surfaced into the daylight, one bead of crimson set against your throat. His gaze caught upon it for half a breath before Lan drew him back by the shoulder, and to the child's credit he held his tongue, only pressing his lips thin and letting himself be turned aside.

Before you could go, Lan's fingers closed hard about your forearm.

"Be careful," he said, low, the words heavy with a thing he would not put a name to.

You bent your head, and at that promise he loosed his hold and let you walk away.

Patience you had learned across long years lived beneath the twin shadows of your Lord Father and your Lady Mother, years in which your father had made of you a lure to draw the eyes of despicable lords and princes to his table. You knew the working of a room's unseen strings, knew how to take your fury and swallow it whole.

Yet two wrongs had ever slipped that discipline and roused in you a temper you could scarce master: the theft of your cake, and cruelty done to the weak and the innocent by men who held power and no conscience to bind it. The boy's brother had done the latter, and so you crossed the garden with purpose, resolved to teach him a lesson he would not soon forget.

King, Prince, or Lord, it was all the same to you; such a man was unworthy of the air in his lungs, and you meant to tell him so. Should he show his sorrow you would grant him the grace of penance, for even your father, who was cold as any winter, had never once stooped so low as to harm a helpless beast.

The gardens begged to be admired, their beds of blood-red roses and pale lilies stirring beneath a sky washed clean of every cloud, but the anger churning in you left no room for such admiration.

"You." The word came off your tongue sharp enough to draw blood, and you fixed it upon the figure sprawled in idle ruin beneath the nearest pavilion, a man draped along the bench with the boneless ease of one half gone from the waking world. He wore the same black-and-red doublet as the little one, though the gold of his hair gave you pause. You put the confusion from your mind and crossed the last of the distance in a single rush, taking him before he could gather himself, straddling his hips and laying your forearm across the column of his throat. He raised both hands between you, palms open in a lazy surrender.

"Oh? At this hour? How delightfully brazen of you." His voice came unhurried and faintly amused, untroubled by the arm crushing his windpipe. "Though I fear my Lord Father walks the Keep somewhere close, and he would be sore displeased to find us at such.... ungodly work. Still, I commend your daring. Later, perhaps, once we have found some decent wine and a quieter corner."

You looked down at him, revulsion and a grudging bewilderment warring across your face.

"I am a chambermaid."

"I fail to see the trouble in it." He let his head loll against the wood. "Tell me, do you happen to know where they have hidden the wine?"

"Why in the world would I know that?"

"Are you not a servant of this house?"

The question was so plain and obvious that it broke the wind from your sails. Your gaze slid away in the awkwardness of it before you caught yourself and bore down the harder, pressing his shoulders flat to the bench.

"Do not turn the words. You cast your brother's cat down the well, did you not?"

"I did what?" His golden brows drew together in true confusion. "And why would I do such a wickedness to a creature? I'd not raise my hand to the thing had it spilled a cup of aged Arbor gold." He looked about the garden, honestly at a loss, then all at once closed the space between you, a hand curling at your waist to draw you nearer. "But that is hardly what stirs my interest. What I would dearly like to know is whether you are truly a chambermaid at all. Your thighs and your hands are far too supple for the labor."

Your breath caught the moment his fingers traced the swell of your upper thigh, and only then did the full indecency of the thing find you, and only then did you truly see him. He was handsome in a way that vexed you, his features soft and slow, long pale lashes about eyes of a deep violet, each one darkened beneath by a crescent of weariness. His fair hair fell loose and disordered around his face and took the noon light and threw it back with an insolent brilliance.

"And… jasmine?" He leaned in until his mouth all but brushed the skin below your ear, and he breathed the scent of you.

You threw yourself off him before his nose could give your disguise away, though it was less the fear of it that moved you than the sudden, unwelcome heat that climbed into your face, a thing you resolved on the instant to hate. Offense and disgust and a shaming flush of embarrassment knotted together in your breast. You had opened your mouth for some retort when laughter carried across the gardens from off in the distance. The pale-gold prince turned his head to follow the line of your stare.

"Ah. There, I think, would be your true culprit." He rolled his gaze back to your face without haste.

Beyond your pavilion stood another, and beneath it lounged a man crowned with hair of short platinum, far nearer in likeness to the boy who had led you here. He was set at his ease upon an ornate chair with a company of noble ladies arranged about him, one perched upon either armrest, some draped behind, the rest gathered close, and his hands moved over them as a man's hands move over things he owns, a wrist here, a shoulder there.

"I am Daeron... or Prince Daeron," the pale-gold prince offered, but the words drifted into the air unheard. Your eyes had fixed upon the dagger sheathed at his hip. You drew it free in a single motion and turned toward the man who so idly entertained his flock of women.

"Whoa— have you lost your wits entirely?"

"My father told me long ago that I was born without them," you bit out, quickening your stride, Daeron scrambling up to trail behind you.

"Would you hold Caraxes for me, My Lord? It shall be but a moment." Aegon had pressed the cat into Lan's arms before the man could shape a refusal. He bolted, but Lan caught a fistful of his doublet.

"And where, precisely, do you imagine you are going, little Lord?"

"You must let me go, My Lord. I must fetch my Lord Father. The servant girl will come to ruin if I do not."

"I will go to her. She is mine to answer for."

"You cannot." The boy strained against the grip, urgency sharpening his young voice. "Should you set yourself between them, your house will lose all favor. Aerion will see it done."

"Aerion?"

"My brother. I am Aegon Targaryen, son of Prince Maekar. To lay a hand upon a prince of the realm is to call down ruin upon your whole line, and knowing my brother, he will chase that ruin to its last copper."

Lan's eyes widened as the shape of the thing came clear to him.

"Please, my lord. I sent her toward my brother Daeron, but I cannot say how long he will hold her before she marks that he is not the one she hunts. We have little time."

"You lied to her of his whereabouts."

"I had no other choice."

Dread settled over Lan, cold and entire. To step in now would lay your name bare, would unstitch the whole careful lie before your father and drag your house into the very scandal you had labored to keep it clear of. So he opened his hand and let Aegon go, for in that moment the child was the only deliverance you had.

THE GARDENS, RED KEEP. — AFTERNOON

"You!" You bore down upon the pavilion with fury quickening every step, the dagger tucked from sight against the small of your back, Daeron closely behind.

"…and so I put the lot of them to the sword…" Prince Aerion let his tale falter, dragging his attention with plain reluctance from the beautiful women arrayed about him to settle it upon you. His eyes traveled the length of your servant's garb and kindled with amusement, his legs stayed splayed wide across the chair.

"I was not aware I had summoned a jester for entertainment." His fingers grazed the upper thigh of one of the ladies, and she loosed a bright giggle at his touch while the rest measured you with smirks and open contempt.

"You require none," you answered, "seeing there sits one already enough to entertain the whole company."

He went still. The amusement drained from his face by degrees.

"Ah— if you will pardon us—" Daeron ventured.

"Brother." Aerion's voice cut across him without so much as a glance. "Tell me why you have brought one of your…" His gaze crawled over you once more, slow and deliberate. "…whores into my company. A chambermaid, no less? I have watched a great many disappointing things issue from you, but this sinks beneath even your low measure."

"The girl is a new maid, unused still to the ways of the castle. We shall take our leave at once—" Daeron spoke on your behalf, though neither you nor his brother spared his words the smallest heed. His hand crept toward the dagger hidden behind you, but you elbowed him off.

"Coward," you spat at Aerion.

His face shifted then, his head lifting sharp at the insult.

"Does the creature truly presume to address a Prince with such insolence?" One of the ladies, a daughter of some house whose sigil escaped you, gave voice to her outrage, her powdered cheeks flushing beneath the paint.

"Oh, does he required ladies to shield his honor as well?" you mocked.

"Silence." Aerion's tone dropped into a threatening calm. "You impudent whore. You dare scatter your nonsense before me."

"Nonsense? I speak nothing but the truth. I behold no prince here— only a cockless jester who preys upon the innocent and the defenseless for the plain reason that he owns neither the skill nor the courage to face a proper foe upon fair ground."

Daeron's eyes stretched wide, sure you had lost your wits entire to speak so boldly to his younger brother, a man known through all the realm for his cruelty and his ungovernable temper.

"What is your business here," Aerion said, all pretense of amusement snuffed out now, his hands closing about the arms of the chair.

"You are the one who flung your brother's cat down the well, are you not?" you said, each word honed to an edge.

"A trifling nuisance, nothing more. The Lady Tyrell suffers grievously in the presence of cats. I sought only to preserve her comfort." He reached to cradle the woman's chin in his fingers.

"How very kind of you, my Prince." She stretched to stroke his cheek in turn.

You scoffed.

"Besides," Aerion went on, "I am a Prince. Every living thing within these walls exists for my torment, should I wish it, and you would be wise to hold that close. Brother, do relieve me of this fool." The lady beside his armrest loosed a delicate sneeze into her sleeve. "She offends the eye, and her presence worsens the Lady Tyrell's affliction. See that she is disciplined proper in the barracks. I cannot abide the sight of a loathsome wench."

"Then I imagine you had best be rid of your whole company."

The ladies drew back, scandalized, and turned their glares full upon you. Aerion rose from his seat, anger tightening every line of him.

"You trespass upon my ground, insult me and my ladies both—"

"Insult you? Your company manages that well enough without any help from me."

"I will have your head for your insolence, and for your failure to bend when you stand before a dragon." He advanced upon you at a measured, deliberate pace. Daeron moved to catch your arm; you thrust him aside.

"A dragon?" You laugh. "Do not sully the name of Valyria's great beasts. Dragons are magnificent creatures, brimful of honor."

"You question my honor?" Aerion's hand dropped toward his dagger.

"No. I deny that it exists at all, and a man void of honor is unworthy of the breath he squanders." You were quicker, with Daeron's dagger already drawn and set its point to the soft flesh of his throat, the sun catching bright along the steel.

"Guards," Aerion snapped, though the command splintered upon the second syllable.

Ser Roland and Ser Donnel, two sworn men of the Kingsguard, came at the summons, white cloaks stirring, the smell of oiled leather and warm mail arriving with them. Daeron loosed a long, weary sigh.

"By all means," you said. "Arrest me. Explain to the whole of the garrison that a chambermaid frightened the 'great dragon' witless. I have no doubt they will make songs of it— the noble Targaryen prince who hurled cats down wells to torment his own younger brother, all to soothe the itch of a lady with no breeding, and who could not so much as manage one chambermaid without calling upon his Kingsguard to save him."

"I summon my Kingsguard for an unruly maid who has forgotten her place and set a blade to the throat of a prince of the realm. Or pray, enlighten me— for what purpose do you carry that dagger?"

"Well, I arrived intending to sever your ballsacks and cast them to the starving hounds, but it seems you have none to spare."

Ser Roland let slip a snort, wrestling and failing to master his laughter, while Ser Donnel turned his face aside, jaw clenched against the mirth that near overtook him at the sight of his prince bested by a woman of the servant class.

"What a disgrace you are," you pressed on. "Blessed with the Targaryen name yet given none of the family's true wit or nobility. What a pity that your sole redeeming graces amount to your Valyrian blood and the cut of your cheekbones— neither of which you had any hand in the earning."

"You fancy yourself brave, skulking behind that disguise. You imagine yourself a clever girl." His hand shot out and knotted in your tunic. "But you are not half so clever as you suppose." He hauled you upward, and fear did lance through you— though not the fear he believed he had roused. He held you a hand's breadth above the ground, and one careless motion would loosen the coverings that bound your head, your mouth, your nose, and lay your true face bare. Still, some stubborn ember within you refused to yield to a being so vile he would torment a creature that could not defend itself.

"Braver and cleverer than you, at the very least," you managed. "Though I grant that is no towering feat."

Daeron's eyes went wide, and for the first time in longer than he could recall, something other than the promise of wine had seized hold of his interest.

"Guards, if you would be so gracious as to escort me now, I suspect the cells will furnish finer company than another moment spent talking with this imbecile."

The two Kingsguard dipped their heads, smiles pressed thin against their discipline. But Aerion would not release you.

"I will make a spectacle of you, for your indecency and your contempt toward your prince."

He reached to tear away your coverings— and a firm hand clamped about his wrist. For the first time in the whole of his life, Aerion found himself met with a grave and unflinching stare drawn from those deep violet eyes. Astonishment loosened his features, for Daeron, his elder brother, the one the court dismissed as the drunken, had never in living memory regarded anything with the smallest gravity. Until this moment. The grip held fast, and before either brother could shape a single word, a loud and commanding voice unfurled across the garden.

"What the fuck is going on here? Cease this foolery at once!"

He stood beneath the archway of climbing vines, an old man whose platinum beard had been combed into strict and soldierly order, whose hair lay smoothed against his skull with never a strand in rebellion. Beside him waited the boy you had met beside the well that afternoon. The child lifted one hand and leveled a finger at you, square and certain, and with the other arm he cradled a bedraggled cat against the front of his tunic.

"That is her," Aegon said. There was no malice in the words. Only the artless honesty of the very young.

The white knights of the Kingsguard drew themselves up along the flagstones, their pale cloaks settling into rigid columns, even the ladies stood still and both princes surrendered their grips upon you, though they did so with a plain and sulking reluctance. You spent the moment straightening the collar Aerion had crushed in his fist, and you were careful to keep your face lowered as you did it. You knew the man who watched you now. The height of him, the deliberate ordering of that beard— they belonged to the very Lord your father had spoken with beneath the colonnade only hours past. Prince Maekar Targaryen.

"Make yourselves ready for the feast this evening," Maekar told his sons, each word laid down flat and heavy with the weariness of a father long accustomed to being disappointed, "and waste no more of the daylight amusing yourselves with the servants of this keep."

Daeron and Aerion traded a look that carried a weight of meaning between them. Aerion rolled his eyes toward the leafy canopy and turned upon his heel to go first, his company in tail, though he spared you a parting glare that promised the matter between you was not yet finished. Daeron bent toward you instead, and lowered his voice to a murmur that carried the sweet-sour breath of spiced wine. "I would welcome your company again. Gladly."

You turned to look at him. He gave you a slow wink, and then he was gone, striding off after his brother.

"Come, girl."

You obeyed the summons at once, yet you kept your eyes fixed hard upon the raked gravel of the path, where the cloth drawn across your features still guarded what little remained of your secret.

"Ser Donnel. Take my son to the servants, that they might make him presentable." One of the older Kingsguard, a man whose years had stolen nothing from a certain rugged handsomeness, dipped his head and started toward the child. "Aegon. Go with him."

"But—"

Maekar's pale eyes widened at the temerity of a son who had not leapt to his bidding the instant it left his lips. Aegon understood the whole of that silent warning in the space of a single heartbeat, and folded himself into a bow.

"Yes, Father." He threw you one last sorrowful glance across his shoulder, a look that seemed to beg your pardon and yours alone, before he and the knight vanished together into the shadowed mouth of the keep.

"You are the one who fetched my son's pet from the well?" Maekar subjected you to a long and searching look, though there was far less severity in it than the scorn he had turned upon the princes.

You bowed your head. "My sworn— I am, my Lord."

At last he let out a slow breath, and something in the set of his shoulders loosened with it.

"I owe you an apology on behalf of my sons. They are an ungovernable brood."

"The apology is mine to make, my Lord. My own conduct was scarcely more becoming."

He hummed low in his throat, and it was neither agreement nor argument.

"You would be wise to return to your chambers now. The feast begins before long." A pause, and then the blade of it. "Ser Roland. Take the princess to her rooms."

Your eyes flew wide and your head snapped toward him, a movement you regretted the moment you had made it, for the great difference in your heights left a sting to your neck. Before you could shape a single question, the corner of Maekar's mouth gave a faint tug upward, the quiet pleasure of a man well satisfied with his own eyes.

"I glimpsed no more than the hem of your sworn sword's cloak before he took himself from sight. The Lord young Aegon spoke of was no man familiar within the Keep, and yet he bore a peculiar likeness to the swordsman I marked loitering upon the docks. It is unfitting that a lady of your birth should go about wrapped in a beggar's rags. Be off with you." He said all of it in an even, unhurried voice that betrayed nothing at all.

You cursed Lan beneath your breath, silent and heartfelt.

"My Lady." Ser Roland folded into a courteous bow and offered you his arm. Only now did you mark how carefully groomed the man was, and how truly pleasing his face— a jaw shadowed with a soldier's stubble, dark hair swept back from a broad brow, the faint scent of fragrant oil and clean leather rising off him as he drew near. You settled your fingers into the crook of that thick arm, slow, and with care.

Before he could lead you off, your back already turning upon Maekar, you spoke to the prince one last time. "I thank you, Your Grace."

He turned his head a fraction, enough that he might see you sidelong, and lifted one white brow above a frown.

"For your intervention," you said. "Had you not come when you did, the matter would surely have grown worse with that insufferable dolt."

Maekar's left eye gave a sharp twitch. "He is my son," he said through his teeth, his jaw drawn tight enough to strain the cords of his neck.

"Oh." You turned your gaze forward once more and gave him your answer with such earnest, unvarnished gravity that it disarmed him wholly. "Then I am most sincerely sorry for you."

There was such plain honesty threaded through your pity that Ser Roland smothered a laugh by some means he could not afterward account for, while Prince Maekar was left so thoroughly bewildered that he was made to turn and look after you— only to find you already retreating down the path beneath the knight's steady guidance.

The gardens gave way to a corridor of pale stone where the last of the daylight slanted amber through the narrow windows and the air went cool, faintly sweet with beeswax and the smoke of torches not yet lit.

"You are a peculiar one, Princess," Ser Roland said as he matched his long stride to your smaller steps. "Have you so little care for your own life?"

"Whatever do you mean by that?"

"Prince Aerion has a certain reputation." His voice dropped and grew rough at the edges. "The pretty ones in this keep always do."

"Then they are no different from the ones I knew in Valyria. He would make my father a fitting son." The words came out on a low grunt of distaste.

"You would do well to guard yourself against any further entanglement with the princes. It is Prince Maekar or Prince Baelor who most often proves able to pull a body free of such trouble, and neither of them will always be at hand."

"Well, Ser Roland, should he contrive to hurl another cat down that well, I can make you no promises whatsoever."

A quiet, honest laugh rolled out of him. "Here is your chamber."

"My thanks, Ser."

"The pleasure is all mine, princess. I shall look for you at the feast." He bent over your hand and pressed a warm, deliberate kiss to your knuckles, the stubble of his jaw grazing your skin— while from the far end of the corridor, unmarked by you, a pair of lilac eyes tracked every measured movement out of the concealing dark.

GUEST CHAMBER, THE RED KEEP — EVENING

When your bath had been drawn and finished, the Tyroshi women dressed you in the old Valyrian gown your father had bidden them fashion, though every layer of it whispered of an extravagance you found ill-suited to the night. They hung jewels upon you enough to bow the neck of a lesser woman, weaving them through your braided hair, fastening them at your throat, sliding them along your arms and over the delicate bones of your hands until you gleamed with the whole of your father's ambition.

When one of the maids reached to unclasp the ruby resting against your collarbone, your hand shot up and caught her wrist before her fingers could close upon the stone.

"That stays," you said, and the gentleness you gave so freely to servants and handmaids fled your voice entirely, and in its place came a gravity that startled the girl into stillness. She nodded quickly. Only then did you let her go.

"It is strange," you murmured, your fingertips returning to the necklace, tracing the cool facets of it where it lay against your skin. "Sometimes I feel she has never truly left us." Your gaze drifted, and something in your chest drew tight. "I miss her. I would give a great deal to have her beside me tonight." You turned to look at Lan. He lowered his eyes and gave you the smallest, most tender curve of a smile.

"She would have been proud of the woman you have become," he said, and crossed the chamber toward you with his hand held out.

BANQUET HALLS, THE RED KEEP— EVENING

The feast had begun already by the time you came down. The great hall stood swollen with lords and ladies of every consequence, their finery catching the light of a hundred candles while a scattering of instruments murmured soft from a corner. The evening had not yet been opened in earnest; only the royal house had been announced and seated at their tables, and all who waited did so upon the arrival and the address of your father, before the true revels might begin.

"His Imperial Majesty, Zhaeselmon of the House Belaerys, First of His Name, Emperor of New Valyria, Blood of the Old Empire, Keeper of the Flame, and Protector of the Freehold."

The whole of the hall rose to its feet, and a plain tension settled across the shoulders of the elder princes at the mere recitation of those titles. Your father came forth tall and formidably made, his frame commanding the space above every other man in the chamber, and more than a few nobles turned their eyes toward the floor in something near to dread, for he was a man whose very presence gave off a menace that needed no words to make itself understood.

He was arrayed in exquisite robes bearing the colors of your house, crimson and gold, his platinum hair falling in an effortless sheen across the cloth, and he crossed to King Daeron II and clasped the older monarch's hand. The difference between them was considerable, your father's height dwarfing the aged King who greeted him. They traded their pleasantries with a practiced warmth, and King Daeron II gestured for your father to take the seat beside his own.

The gathered guests sank once more into their chairs, and the talk resumed its comfortable hum, laughter drifting between the tables while near everyone seemed content to make merry of the night. The young princes were the sole exception.

Aegon fidgeted without end at the pin upon his chest, the grandson Daeron summoned a servant to fill his cup with wine, and Aerion had slouched down into his seat with one elbow propped upon the table and his chin sunk sullen against his palm.

Then Aegon gasped aloud, and every head in the hall turned to follow the boy's astonished stare toward the great entrance.

"Her Imperial Highness, Princess (y/n) of the House Belaerys, Crown Princess of New Valyria and Lady of the Fourteen Flames."

As you entered, the whole of the chamber fell beneath your presence. Even the musicians let their instruments go still, and the low murmur of the crowd thinned away to a hush. The Valyrians of the ancient Freehold had long been famed for a beauty that struck the eye as something scarcely of the mortal world, and this was the single gift your mother had ever left you, the one advantage even your father could not deny you, one he wielded without shame to unsettle and to lure his rivals. The guests parted before you as Lan guided you toward the high table upon its raised dais at the far end of the hall.

Aerion, who had been drowning his boredom in the slow turning of the wine within his cup, lifted his head and forgot the cup entirely. His elder brother Daeron froze with the golden rim scarce brushing his lips, the wine abandoned mid-sip, and had Maekar seen the sight he would have marveled at it, though he too found himself thoroughly caught, for the spectacle of a Valyrian woman arrayed in the full splendor of her ancestral dress was a rarity few in that hall had ever beheld. Even Baelor found he had been holding a breath he had never meant to draw.

You felt the shift in the room, and your heart set to a slow, insistent quickening beneath the weight of the silence and the countless eyes fixed upon you, yet your years of discipline held you. You gathered yourself as Lan let go your hand at the foot of the dais, and you sank into a graceful curtsy.

"My King, My Queen, My Emperor," you offered in High Valyrian, addressing King Daeron II, Queen Myriah, and your father each in turn. The king and queen seemed truly delighted, while your father stayed impassive, granting you only that practiced hollow smile and shallow nod you had grown so wearily to know.

"She is as striking as the old tales of Valyria promised," the King remarked, and you answered him with a courteous smile, your eyes lowered to the floor as custom demanded until your father should grant you leave to lift them.

"The gods have surely blessed the House of Belaerys," Queen Myriah added, her smile warm and unaffected.

"Truly, her has even commanded the silence of our very music," King Daeron observed, the jest carrying a gentle reproach that sent the musicians scrambling to take up their playing again the moment they marked their lapse.

"She takes after her late mother," your father supplied, lacing the words with a counterfeit pride that only you had the intimacy to catch.

The compliments settled upon you and left no mark, for you had endured a whole lifetime of them.

"And how many years does she carry?" Queen Myriah asked.

"She has seen only twenty," your father answered.

"The very age of my eldest, Valarr," Baelor said. "It grieves me that he could not attend us tonight. He sends his warmest regards."

"The heir to the heir," your father remarked, his interest sharpening. "Where might he be, if I am permitted the question?"

"Contesting a tourney in the Reach," Baelor replied.

"A warrior, then." For the first time since he came, your father seemed truly and unguardedly pleased.

"Indeed, my Lord. He returns upon the morrow," Baelor told him.

"A suitable match for my daughter," your father declared with a delighted laugh.

"It is an honor beyond measure to have been welcomed to such an occasion by the good and honorable King Daeron Targaryen, and by his lovely and gracious wife, the beloved Queen Myriah Martell," you offered, your poise flawless and your smile perfectly rehearsed, guiding the talk gently away from the matter your father had seized upon.

The king and queen traded a pleased glance between them.

"It is we who are pleased, to hold our own blood within these walls," the king answered, and you caught the faint, unbidden twitch of your father's finger against the table.

Your attention was drawn away when Prince Baelor rose and offered you his hand with an easy, charming smile.

"Princess. If I may."

You bowed your head and accepted, and he guided you past the young princes, who hastily mended their slouching postures as you passed, toward the seats held by the princesses. He set you between a young girl you would later come to know as Princess Rhae and her older brother, Aegon Targaryen, whose eyes clung to you without the faintest attempt at discretion. You swallowed and held your composure while his gaze darted from your face to the shape of Lan in his black-and-gold armor, standing at a respectful distance among the Kingsguard. His eyes went, too, to the ruby resting atop your chest. You suspected that if the boy had not already known who you were, he surely knew it now, for his eyes had gone so wide that you felt half a mind to reach over and coax them back into their proper place.

Straight across from you, to your considerable dismay, sat the insufferable creature you now prayed to all Fourteen Flames would fail to know you, and beside him lounged his elder brother, who watched you across the rim of his cup with a knowing smirk that curdled something in the pit of your belly. Your instincts told you plain that he had already found the truth of you, yet your training held firm, and your polite face never faltered.

The feast pressed on, and every soul at the table was lost in talk save you. You spoke as sparingly as courtesy would allow, wary that Aerion might catch the familiar cadence of your voice. Your father conversed with ease alongside the king, the queen, and Baelor as course upon course of food and wine was carried out, yet you touched none of the wine, and ate only, and with deliberate care.

Baelor marked it, and leaned toward you with a genuine concern.

"Does the wine not suit your palate, Princess? Shall I have another vintage brought for you?"

You turned to him and answered with a quiet grace.

"No, your grace, and I would not give offense. The fault lies not with the wine but with me. It has never agreed with my constitution."

He smiled and summoned a servant with a lift of his hand.

"Bring the Princess water, or cider, whichever can be found."

"There is truly no need, Your Grace," you protested softly, but he only gave you another smile and a reply gentled with warmth.

"Spare yourself the courtesy. It is a rare gift to sit in the company of our own blood, and rarer still when that blood comes as lovely as this. I promise you the servants shall not begrudge the trouble."

The sincerity in his voice left you without words, while beside him Maekar let out a grunt of open disgust and rolled his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling.

The whole of the meal wore on beneath a strain you could not shake, for Aerion held his stare upon you without pause and without the least effort to hide the boldness of it. The look he gave you now was not the one he had worn in the gardens. It burned as fierce, yet beneath the fire lay something you knew with an unwelcome clarity, a blend of appetite and want that no woman raised in a court could mistake. You could not decide whether to feel relief that he had failed to know in you the very creature who had insulted him and made a mockery of him before laughing witnesses, or revulsion that a man so cruel should look upon you with desire. You swallowed hard against the bile that threatened to climb your throat, and forced it down.

At your side his younger brother went on studying you with an unabashed fascination, until the moment the sweets were carried out. You marked that Aegon had already finished his portion, and his eyes drifted, almost shy, toward yours. You answered with a smile and slid your untouched plate toward him.

"Would you care to have mine? I find myself quite full," you whispered to the boy, and at last he smiled in turn, murmured his thanks, and took it eagerly.

Aerion, who had missed none of the exchange, understood at once that you had given up the sweet only because women were prone to tenderness toward children, and he seized upon the opening to speak.

"You may have mine, Princess. Lemon cakes are among the most celebrated confections in all of Westeros. It would be a genuine shame were you to leave these halls without ever tasting one." He signaled a servant with a lazy flick of his fingers and passed his own plate along, that it might be set down before you.

The gesture, you could tell, ran against his nature, for you caught the reactions of both Maekar and Baelor at his sudden generosity, and each of them seemed faintly appalled by it.

"Thank you—" you began in your own voice, then caught yourself and dropped, hasty and awkward, into a lower register, unwilling to betray yourself. "—my prince."

Aegon looked up at you in open confusion at the strange shift in your tone, a smear of lemon cake yet upon his lip, and you could feel, somewhere at the back of your skull, the certainty that Lan's brows had climbed toward his hairline in silent, merciless judgment.

You had no wish to eat the sweet the fool had set before you, for to taste it would be accept his courting, and you would sooner have gone to your grave. The plate sat where he had pushed it, the honeyed thing sweating upon the silver, and the smell of it rose warm. It was then you marked the young princess beside you, a small girl with a round and gentle face, staring at the plate with a want she was too young to hide. Her own portion was gone, only a smear of it left upon her fingers, and you saw in that hungry look the way to serve two ends with a single stroke.

"Would you like some as well?" you asked in that same clumsy, lowered voice, and from his post along the wall Lan gathered every scrap of his discipline to keep the laughter from his throat.

The strangeness of your voice gave the child a moment's pause, yet the sweet was the greater force, and she nodded, bright and eager, and drew the plate to herself before Aerion could think to protest. He rolled his eyes and slid lower in his chair, sullen as a scolded squire, and you caught the whole of it from the corner of your sight even as you held your smile warm upon the little princess.

Maekar did not fail to see the kindness you had done his youngest daughter, Rhae, nor the way the girl bloomed beneath it, glad and wholly charmed. Something stirred in his chest that he could not put a name to, and being a man who mistrusted what he could not name, he called it a passing discomfort of the heart and no more. He cleared his throat and shifted upon the bench, and the movement earned him a brief look from his brother Baelor.

The music quickened, the pipes and the high strings sliding into a livelier measure, and up and down the length of the hall lords and ladies rose from their places in great number to take the floor, and the rustle of silk and the ring of laughter swelled until the very rushes seemed to shiver with it.

You lifted your gaze from the ruin of your plate and found the whole hall astir. By slow degrees the long tables emptied, lords and their ladies rising to their feet in a rustle of silk and a scrape of chairs against the flagstones. Couples arranged themselves along the cleared floor, hands finding waists and shoulders, faces composing into that practiced pleasure the highborn wore as readily as they wore their jewels. A small smile tugged at the corner of your mouth, half-charmed by the whole gilded absurdity of it.

Then a hand appeared before you, palm turned up in expectation, and the smile withered on your lips. It was a fine hand, you would grant it that much. Long-fingered, the nails clean and pale. It was also a hand you could very happily have parted from its owner with the little silver dessert knife that lay beside your plate, and you spent a pleasant half-heartbeat imagining precisely that before you looked up the length of the offered arm to the man attached to it.

Prince Aerion had done something with his hair since the afternoon. The short silver strands that had hung about his brow in the garden were combed back now, neat and orderly, bright with the candlelight. His eyes were the pale violet of dragonblood, and they were fixed upon you from above with the lazy certainty of a man who had never once in his life been refused a thing he wanted. He was beautiful, infuriatingly so, and you had learned that very afternoon how little a handsome face was worth once you knew the rot behind it. He did not speak. He held the hand out and waited, as though your acceptance had been expected.

Down the table young Aegon watched with his knuckles pale about his goblet, torn plainly between anticipation and dread, a boy who had seen too many of his brother's amusements to hope this one would end gently.

You wanted to open your mouth and refuse him. You wanted it fiercely, the wanting dry and hard in your throat. But refusal was no luxury afforded a foreign princess seated among her father's hosts on the night meant to bind two houses of old Valyria, and so, with all the reluctance you could smother beneath courtesy, you laid your hand into his.

He said nothing at all as he led you out among the dancers who had already surrendered themselves to the rhythm. When his other hand settled at the small of your waist, lower than allowed, you drew a slow breath through your nose and held it until the boiling in your blood had cooled to a simmer.

"Can you dance?" he asked.

You shook your head.

"Then I will lead you."

And so you followed, and to your considerable annoyance he was very good at it. Light on his feet, sure in his turns, spinning you outward with an easy grace before drawing you back in against him, always a fraction tighter than you had any wish to be. For a while the two of you moved through the same measured figures in silence, and you had begun to hope the silence might hold, when he spoiled it.

"Do not be shy, girl. I would never harm so pretty a creature as yourself."

You very nearly let a scoff loose at that, the memory of the afternoon rising sharp behind your teeth.

"I confess I am seldom impressed by the ladies of this court," he went on, warming to the sound of his own generosity. "One is forced to make merry with such common blood, night after night. And yet here I find myself dancing with my own kin, a daughter of the dragon." He paused to lift the hand he held and press a dry kiss to your knuckles. You turned your face away, and a small, triumphant curl came to his mouth, for he took your averted eyes for the fluster of a bashful maiden. The truth was that you had turned aside because you feared the contents of the feast might climb back up your throat and christen his fine doublet.

"You are beautiful tonight," he murmured. "Might I have a look at your face? Might I hear your voice? You must not hide from me."

He stopped the dance and lifted his fingers to your chin, and he regretted the touch almost the instant your eyes rose to meet his. The glint there was small, no more than a flicker, yet it carried behind it every ounce of restraint you were spending not to open his throat where he stood. He drew back a half-step, startled.

"You..." he hissed.

You were quicker. Your hand went to his waist and pulled him in, your other hand locking his fast, so that the two of you remained joined and swaying as though nothing whatever had passed between you.

"Ah, ah, ah, Princeling," you said, in the sweetest tone you owned. "You would not wish to draw our fathers' eyes upon us, not on this lovely night of reunion between the two ancient houses of Valyria. Would you?"

He shoved your hand from his waist and hauled you in harder, meaning to hurt you, and in that he succeeded, for the buckle of his belt bit into your belly. But you did well in hiding the discomfort.

"You wish to play a game with me, then."

"No. In truth I wish nothing whatever to do with you, but duty binds us both to this floor. Smile. Our fathers are watching."

Aerion lifted his gaze, and so they were. Though his father Maekar was turned toward some lord beside him at the high table, seemingly deep in talk, the Prince's attention rested squarely upon the pair of you.

"You are pathetic, you know," Aerion said. "You have the grace of a pig."

"I only thought to match your measure. I would hate to shame you before all your ladies and the good knights of the Kingsguard once more."

"I had been told foreign princesses were meant to be diplomatic."

"Spin me."

He spun you.

"We are."

"You have insulted me and threatened to kill me."

"And what will you do about it? Run weeping to your grandsire before all his guests? Stand and declare that the heir to Valyria came under his pavillion dressed as a chambermaid and tried to slit your throat, and all because you flung your brother's cat down a well?" You let the words settle. "I confess I cannot say whose name that tale would blacken the faster, yours or mine."

He scoffed.

"If it is a challenge you crave, Princess, I will give you one gladly." He dipped you low and swept you upright again, close enough now that your faces hung a bare few inches apart.

Down the floor Prince Daeron watched the both of you over the rim of his wine cup, his mouth quirked with a quiet and thoroughly warmed amusement, while beside him his younger brother Aegon looked near to being sick with fright. Off to the side Lan stood composed as ever, save that his hand had drifted, slow and small, to rest upon the crossguard of his sword.

"I would have you know one thing, My Lady," Aerion breathed against your cheek. "The dragon ought not lose."

You had meant to give some clever answer, yet something at the ragged edge of your sight caught hold of you and would not let go. A small blur of orange crossed the hall, low along the flagstones, and the effect of it upon you was swift and without mercy. Horror closed about your limbs and drained them of all warmth, the strength went out of your legs, your hands turned to ice, and your balance forsook you utterly, but Aerion, to his credit, was quick. His arms shot out and caught you, dragging you upright and holding you there by main strength alone, the two of you frozen in a stance graceless and stiff, your body pressed hard to his.

At the high table Prince Daeron rose slowly from his seat. He meant to come to you, yet he checked himself midway, for he had caught the look upon your face and knew it far too well.

Maekar saw the commotion and came at once, striding down from the dais in real fear that his son had done some injury to their guest's own daughter, while the rest of the table looked on in a swell of confusion and concern, heads turning all along the board. Your face had gone so bloodless that even the malice drained out of the Prince who held you, and something near to worry took its place in those violet eyes.

"We must leave," you said of a sudden, and your voice shook upon each word.

"We?" Aerion echoed, lost. You turned to the confusion and alarm carved into his face.

"You idiot," Maekar spat at his son, seizing your slumping frame and shouldering Aerion aside. "What have you done?" he demanded through clenched teeth. Baelor arrived a pace behind, his old eyes moving over the scene, weighing it.

"I did nothing," Aerion protested.

"Aerion. Send for the maesters," Baelor commanded, and the prince gave a curt nod and half-turned to obey.

Then a voice cut clean across the hall, and every head in the room turned toward it.

"I must leave," you managed, shaking your head, your gaze casting about the hall for Lan.

"My daughter has endured a long and wearing journey," your father declared, coming up from his chair, his voice unfurling across the hall with an authority that stilled the murmurs to nothing. "You will forgive her. She is spent and must retire for the night. Lan, escort the princess to her chambers."

Lan came at once, shouldering through the gathering press of bodies to reach you. The whole of the hall had bent its attention upon the spectacle now, and even King Daeron and Queen Myriah had risen from their high seats to watch with open unease.

Hushed whispers ran through the assembly as Lan took your arm and guided you toward the doors, and none watched your going so closely as young Aegon, whose eyes followed you until the crowd closed and swallowed the sight of you whole.

When you had gained the safety of your chambers and been lowered to sit upon the edge of the bed, Lan moved to fetch you water, but you caught his arm and held him, your grip so fierce that it sharpened his fear. He laid his own hand over yours to steady it, and found your fingers still cold beneath his palm.

"Lan, we must leave this place," you said.

"Tell me what troubles you," he answered, and knelt before you.

Tears gathered along the rims of your eyes, and he cupped your face within his hands.

"This place. We were never meant to set foot within it."

"What do you mean by that?" he pressed, his gaze searching yours.

"My dreams, Lan." Your whisper barely carried. "The Dragon dreams. The sigil. The towers of the three castles standing upon a field of orange. It is here. In this place. I saw it."

His heart dropped, and you felt the shock pass through him as his own hands turned cold against your cheeks.

"If we remain here, something monstrous will befall this kingdom," you said, and your voice cracked beneath the weight of it. "My father... He means to burn this kingdom to ash.