wrap me in your skin and bones

Monty arrives from the buffet and drops his metal tray on the table loud enough to startle you. You are yanked back into the present, bleak and diminishing, only six days until the Games.

“You good?” he asks you as he sits down. His plates are piled high with exotic sandwiches from the midday lunch spread: lobster rolls, tuna melts, grilled pimento cheeses, pastrami on ryes, Cubans, capreses, muffulettas, cheesesteaks, Reubens. His tall glass is full of pineapple juice, good for reducing inflammation, people keep insisting. You haven’t noticed. Your muscles still ache from a morning in the gymnasium, getting lapped by Brookie and Roosevelt on the obstacle course, getting bruised in hand-to-hand combat with the trainers as Aemond frowns from his bench and makes his pitch-black notes.

You look around the table, curious, slightly bashful. “Have you guys ever liked someone so much you can’t stop thinking about them?”

“Yeah,” Monty says morosely.

“Yeah,” Pluto agrees, then starts coughing until his chest rattles. “Sorry,” he says. “Coal dust.” Almost everyone else at the table—Brookie, Isla, Monty, you—gives him a sympathetic glance. He has the height and the muscles to go far in the arena, but not the lungs. Roosevelt smirks to himself as he sips his pineapple juice, beads of condensation snaking down the glass. Then he resumes gnawing on his beef jerky.

“Aww, you have a crush,” Isla says, beaming at you. This is a pleasant distraction from the impending carnage.

“No, I mean, I’ve had crushes before. But I didn’t think about them, like…all the time.”

Isla chuckles, nibbling on some bizarre yellow fruit called a pawpaw. “Then it wasn’t a real crush.”

“Who’s the guy?” Brookie asks.

“It’s me,” Roosevelt jokes.

Isla says: “She only likes humans.”

“Guys, come on, you know who it is.” Monty flicks his thumb towards where Aemond is lurking by the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, grim scarred face, mint green suit with faint seashells stitched into the jacket with silvery thread. He is talking to Mags and Beetee, low voices, kind conspiracies, trying to figure out how to make these kids forget they’re about to be butchered, beaten, baked, broken, bound, burned, bullet-ridden. What a way to spend two weeks each year.

And that’s the reward for winning the Games. You get to paint your hands with blood all over again, you get to become yet another lethal instrument of the machine, a gear that turns, a hammer that smashes.

You haven’t been alone with Aemond since he came to you in the pod. You can feel the blood in your face beginning to scald; you redirect your attention to your sandwich, a perplexing invention called a tuna melt, flakes of fish made rich and creamy somehow, sharp cheddar, buttery toast. It’s good, and your appetite is awake like a shark’s, primal, bottomless.

Isla, Monty, and Pluto stare at Aemond and then glance at each other uneasily. It’s scandalous. “Is that even allowed?” Brookie says. Her blonde hair is arranged in two small, tight buns. The District 1 sweatsuits are maroon with gold trim.

Isla shrugs. “Who knows. It probably doesn’t happen that often.”

“If it makes for a better show, they’ll tolerate it,” Roosevelt says, still gazing at Aemond, chewing meditatively on his strip of beef jerky, his sneakers up on the table. He flips his shaggy red hair off his forehead, his dark eyes glinting, watchful, cunning. “It won’t matter in a week anyway.”

When the Games have begun. When I’m dead.

There is an awkward pause as people try to think of what to say next. At other cafeteria tables, tributes are eating with their own factions. The girls from Districts 7, 8, and 9—Oakellen, Calico, and Gotha—are taking turns braiding each other’s hair into styles that remind you of Misty’s knot tying. Kista and Tendo from District 3 are playing a game that involves sorting and re-sorting cherry pits into small piles. Hawk, Saratoga, and Commodore are getting some kind of pep talk from Jackline Humboldt; he makes stabbing motions with a fork, and they nod along attentively. The littlest kids—Babylon from District 5, Marble from District 10, and Jet from District 12—are grimacing as they try to pick all the red pepper pieces out of their grilled pimento cheeses. Jet is a waifish rough-and-tumble girl who looks like Pluto in miniature, not just a passing resemblance but the exact same brown hair, the same almond-shaped eyes, the same ailing complexion. Roosevelt seems to catch what you’re thinking. He mouths to you: Inbreeding.

“You know, Sara doesn’t even want to be here,” Brookie says, meaning Saratoga from District 2: short dark curls, ponytail, a black sweatsuit just like Roosevelt’s. She is presently asking Jack a question at their table across the cafeteria.

You are surprised. “Isn’t she a Career?”

“Yeah, but she’s only sixteen. Her name got picked and some other girl was supposed to volunteer and go instead this year, but she chickened out at the last second and now Sara is stuck in the Games. She’s trying not to let on so the sponsors don’t abandon her, but she’s terrified.”

“Damn,” Monty says soberly. Roosevelt just smiles, still chewing on his beef jerky.

Not even all the tributes from the Career Districts want to fight, you think dismally. Hawk only volunteered so the Capitol will get him new kidneys if he wins. Sara didn’t volunteer at all. And I never would have, not in a million years.

But once, a decade ago, Aemond volunteered when he was only fifteen.

Why?

“How do you know all that?” Isla asks Brookie.

“Sara’s mentor told my mentor. Sherman is a drunk, he yaps too much.”

“He’s useless,” Roosevelt agrees.

Isla and Monty share an anxious look. Maybe their mentor drinks a lot too; it seems to be a common affliction. Maybe whoever wins this year—Commodore, if the odds remain as they are now, or Roosevelt, or Brookie—will learn to do the same, and burn out the memories and the guilt with clear scorching poison, and try to scrub the blood from their palms until they realize it’s red all the way down, and if you keep up you’ll just find yourself scouring bones.

“Well I guess Sara’s smarter than I thought,” Pluto says. “Only an idiot would sign up for this.” Then he laughs when Brookie hurls a fatty pink piece of pastrami at him, which makes him start coughing again.

“My mom cried when I volunteered,” Roosevelt says.

Brookie wrinkles her nose, like this is a weakness, a humiliation. “Really?”

“She knew I was in training to be a Career, obviously, but she never thought I’d actually go through with it. She was screaming and begging for me to take it back, as if that was an option. Once you volunteer, there’s no rescinding it.”

“Wish I had a choice in the matter,” Monty murmurs, swigging his pineapple juice. Briefly, Isla rests her head on his shoulder, and he smiles.

Roosevelt starts whistling a song, the one about a train called The City of New Orleans, chugging across the land as the red sun sets and the rail lines rust away. You exclaim: “You guys have that song in District 2?!”

“We have it in 12 too,” Pluto says.

“And 11,” Isla adds. “My grandma taught it to me. We sing it if we’re still out in the fields when dusk falls.” Then she amends, soft and wistful: “We used to, I mean.”

“That’s wild,” Brookie marvels. “My sister sings it to get her twins to sleep.”

“What’s New Orleans, anyway?” you say. “Does anyone know?”

“It’s a place, but it doesn’t really exist,” Roosevelt says. “It’s made up, like Atlantis or Detroit.”

“No, it’s real,” Monty says.

“Yeah right.”

“Seriously. It’s in District 11. Or it would be, I guess it’s underwater now. But every once in a while someone digs up an old green road sign and it’ll say fifty miles to New Orleans, or a hundred miles to New Orleans, or whatever.”

“Huh.” Roosevelt is gnawing on his beef jerky thoughtfully. “Montgomery is a place too, isn’t it?”

Monty nods. “It was important, but no one can remember why.”

Roosevelt turns to Pluto. “Is Pluto a place?”

“No, not that I’m aware of.”

“So your parents just hated you?”

Pluto chuckles placidly. “A lot of guys are named Pluto where I come from. Not sure what it means, though.”

“He’s the god of the dead,” Aemond says, and everyone startles and whirls to see that he’s standing behind you, his arms still crossed over his chest, his silver hair braided, his sapphire glinting under the harsh artificial light, the eye he has left steely. Tributes are ogling from other tables. No one speaks, so Aemond elaborates: “Pluto was the caretaker of souls and lived in the underworld. Coal miners work long hours down in the darkness and the dust. It’s not difficult to see where the association might have originated.”

Pluto gazes up at him, still thunderstruck. “Right,” he says eventually.

“God of the dead,” Roosevelt snickers. “Big shoes to fill, Pluto my man.”

Pluto titters nervously and coughs into his elbow. They all wait for Aemond to leave: another district’s mentor, an ill-wisher, a killer, a threat. But he doesn’t. He looks down at your plate, as if to make sure you’re eating. He is pleased to observe the toast crumbs that litter the white bone china. You smile up at him, and Aemond—although he doesn’t seem to have intended to—thaws a bit and smiles back.

“I’m…going to go get another pawpaw,” Isla says, rising from her chair.

“Yeah, totally, me too,” Brookie says as she hurries after her. Pluto and Monty mutter some pretexts and escape as well. Now only you and Roosevelt are left, and he shows no signs of retreat. He still has his shoes up on the table; he has at last finished his leathery strip of beef jerky and is licking his fingertips as he ponders Aemond. Aemond glares at him. Roosevelt blows him a kiss.

“Everything’s fine,” you assure Aemond.

Still, he doesn’t leave for a while, and when he finally does he does he stalks to the wall and glowers at Roosevelt from there. The mentor from District 10, Kerry, tries to strike up a conversation and Aemond ignores her. From the buffet, Isla, Brookie, Monty, and Pluto peer over at him like skittish deer, wondering whether it’s safe to return to the table.

“It’s not fair, you know,” Roosevelt says, although he doesn’t sound serious. “My mentor doesn’t want to fuck me, so he won’t try as hard.”

You hide your face behind a gulp of pineapple juice. “We haven’t done anything.”

“Of course you haven’t. Aemond is cold, and weird, and inanimate. Can you imagine him out of a suit? I bet he has another one on underneath. And another one after that.”

He’s more corporeal than you’d imagine, you think, recalling his red phone and feeling sick. “Do you remember his Games?”

“Definitely. You don’t?”

Vague echoing recollections: panes of glass, rippling blue light. “Most people in District 4 try to ignore the broadcasts as much as we can. If I saw anything from his year, I’ve since forgotten it.”

“The arena was incredible,” Roosevelt says, hushed, reverent. “They’ve been playing reruns of it on the news here, it was one of the best Games ever. They made this huge aquarium, maybe ten stories tall, with a walkway that spiraled down to the ground. So tributes claimed different parts of the path and then tried to defend their territory. But every once in a while a section of the floor would drop out from under a kid’s feet and they’d get dunked in a tank. Sometimes it was just sea turtles or fish, and they’d be able to claw their way back up onto the main walkway. But then in other tanks there were sharks or electric eels or barracudas. Once a floor panel fell away, it was never replaced, so the livable space gradually got smaller and smaller, with tributes scrapping over the islands. By the end of the Games, the tanks were so full of blood that the water was red instead of blue.”

You picture it, even though you don’t want to: Aemond at fifteen and bathed in scarlet light, dripping with saltwater, tacky with blood, stalking and savage.

Roosevelt plucks his butter knife off the table and starts twirling it absentmindedly. He’s a little slower than you are with a blade, you notice; but he’s quicker everywhere else. How could I kill him? How could I want to? “Aemond was a good swimmer, so that helped.”

“What weapon did he use?”

“He had a spear, but he ended up losing it in a shark tank. It sank to the bottom and he couldn’t get it back. He snapped a spine off a lionfish, and that’s what he used to stab that girl Sapphire to death.”

You flinch, a palpable and mortifying weakness. Why can’t I go home?

Roosevelt grins; it stretches slowly across his face until it is broad and toothy. “He wanted to live. That’s a big part of what makes someone a victor. You can’t cling to honor or decency. You can’t get tired, you can’t get soft. You have to want to live more than you want anything else.”

You watch him as he spins the butter knife: between his fingers, over his knuckles, back into his palm. “Roosevelt, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“What?”

“That means go ahead. Ask your question.”

“Why did you volunteer?”

You expect him to laugh or to smirk, but he does neither. Instead he puts down the butter knife and glances to the buffet to make sure your friends are still at a distance. “Promise you won’t tell anybody?”

“Sure,” you say, puzzled.

He sighs and looks at you, dark eyes, constellations of freckles. “I like guys.”

At first you don’t know what he means. “Okay…?”

Roosevelt smiles. “No, I like guys the way you like guys.”

“Oh.” You stare at him, abruptly grateful that for all your hardships, that isn’t one of them.

“I mean, I like girls too. But I like guys more.”

“I get it,” you say, keeping your voice low so no one will overhear.

“Do you have people like me in District 4?”

“A few. They can’t get married or live together, but as long as they’re discrete they usually get left alone.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“No, it isn’t, I guess.”

“In District 2…we’re a military district, you know? We make weapons, we train Peacekeepers, we have more Careers than all the rest of Panem put together. There’s a very specific expectation of what it means to be a man, and if you deviate from that, there’s nothing for you there. But it’s different in the Capitol.” His dark eyes are suddenly alight, not with mischief or subterfuge but something so much worse: hope. “Nobody cares about who you sleep with or who you love. There are people like me who are generals and architects and Gamemakers and stylists and advisors to President Snow, even. I could have stayed where I was, but I’d be settling for only ever experiencing a tiny sliver of what the world has to offer. When I win, I can do anything.”

That’s not true, you think with despair. The Capitol won’t give you many choices. No victor has ever truly won. But what’s the point in telling him that now? It’s not as if he can go back and un-volunteer. And you don’t want to hurt him. You have no stomach at all for hurting people, which is inauspicious given the circumstances.

“I do miss my mom, though,” Roosevelt says, gazing down at the table, and for a second you think he might actually cry. Then he rakes his red hair back with his fingers and is dauntless again. “But I’ll see her soon. During my Victory Tour.”

“If you don’t want anyone to know why you volunteered, why did you tell me?”

“I figured you wouldn’t judge. And I don’t really expect you to last that long. No offense.”

“None taken. I think a lot of people agree.”

“I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this. You seem nice, you seem normal. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Thanks.” What is it like to have that sort of confidence? What is it like to look at these other kids and know in your bones that you can kill them? “Do you really think you’re going to win?”

“Process of elimination,” Roosevelt says brightly, then begins pointing around the cafeteria. “Hawk has bum kidneys. Sara is petrified. Brookie is good, but not as good as she thinks she is. You know your way around a knife, but you can’t fight, and as much as he’d like to Aemond can’t fix that in the next six days. I just had to figure out what to do about that monster from your district.”

You steal a glimpse of him: broad shoulders, shorn flaxen hair, bent across his table to listen closely to Jack’s lethal counsel. His royal blue sweatsuit matches yours, but you can’t call yourself teammates. You rarely speak at all. “How are you going to beat Commodore?”

“I’m going to let the arena kill him,” Roosevelt says. “He’s slow, but I can’t risk getting close. If he ever got a grip on me, he could break my arm or my leg or my neck, and then I’d be out of luck. But whatever the Gamemakers have cooked up will have traps. Weather, wildlife, terrain. He’s a big stupid ogre, I’ll just stay out of his way until he gets sucked into quicksand or skewered on pikes. Commodore-kebab.” He cackles, but you don’t get the reference.

“No one has any idea what the arena could be this year?”

“Oh, I’m sure there are some hints floating around. But I haven’t heard them. Anybody with an inkling knows that if the Capitol catches them sharing it, they’ll never do any talking again. If they get to live at all, they’ll be an Avox, tongue cut out and spending the rest of their life scrubbing floors and toilets.”

One of the trainers comes into the cafeteria and blows a whistle, and it’s time to go back to the gymnasium for the afternoon session. You expect Aemond to direct you to one of the stations like he usually does, throwing axes, turning potatoes into batteries, starting fires, making shelters, lifting weights, swinging swords. But he leads you to a treadmill instead.

“Because you’ve given up on me learning how to do anything else?”

“So that when the time comes, you can run,” he says, and then goes to take notes from his usual metal bench.

When the work for the day is done, Charm arrives to fetch Commodore. She’s made an appointment for him with his Prep Team, she insists he needs his skin exfoliated and moisturized again, that the arid climate here doesn’t agree with him. Charm is wearing a short red dress covered in tassels that resemble the tentacles of a sea anemone and crimson heels to match. Her earrings are fishhooks, and from each hangs a live bloodworm, wriggling and writhing, raining blood drops down onto her collarbones until tiny red lagoons form in the dips there. Charm and Commodore depart while you’re still saying goodbye to your friends, leaving you and Aemond to take the elevator back up to your suite alone.

In the metallic box that rises swiftly, Aemond stands as far away from you as he can. He gazes straight ahead at the closed doors as you keep glancing over at him, his hands in his suit pockets, his face stoic. You think of what he did for you yesterday—unexpected, unasked for, spectacular, selfless—and you can’t stop, even if he’s not touching you now, even if he won’t even look at you, even if the only sound is the mechanical hum of the elevator.

Are we really never going to talk about it? you think, deflated, dejected. Did I do something wrong? Did I repulse him, does he regret it?

Suddenly, Aemond reaches out and hits the red Emergency Stop! button on the panel, and the elevator lurches to a halt. Your eyes skate across Aemond’s left hand. A faint bruise still inks his ring finger, blood trapped by the pressure of your teeth. Now you’re remembering what it felt like, and your face and throat are ablaze beneath paper-thin skin, and your muscles are shifting as if he’s already offered to do it again, but that’s not what he does. “You can figure it out for yourself from now on, I assume,” Aemond says.

“You knew exactly what to do.”

“It’s a skill I’ve had to learn.” He taps his suit jacket, where you know there is a hidden pocket sewn into the lining for his red phone.

You are instantly nauseous, you sink like an anchor. “Now I feel terrible.”

“No, I didn’t mean...” At last, Aemond looks at you, and now his eye is not icy but kind, and familiar, and wanting to be understood. “I did that for you because I wanted to. It didn’t feel forced. It’s the only time I’ve ever had the luxury of choosing what would happen next.”

“That’s a relief,” you say softly, still wondering if you can touch him, if he would let you take his hand or if he would pull away, if it was only a gift or an act of mercy, or if it was a desire too.

“You said you’d never experienced it before, and I thought I could help.”

“Thank you, Aemond.”

“I’m sorry there’s not much I can do about the rest.”

Never getting married, never having children, never having… “That’s alright. I don’t think I’m ready for the…the whole thing.” It seems pretty impossible to fathom, actually; it’s not something you’ve been anywhere close to. You recall pushing in tampons before swimming and tentative probing in the dark of night, neither of which were ever even remotely pleasurable. Would it be different with a man? Depends on the man, probably, you think gloomily. If you live to find out, you won’t get to choose. “I really appreciate your…thoughtfulness.”

“I did it because I wanted to,” Aemond says again.

You peek at his left hand, no ring except for the bruise you left on him. He notices and hides both hands in his pockets once more. “Aemond, you aren’t married, are you?”

“No.”

“No girlfriend or anything?”

“I don’t think it’s easy for someone like me to maintain a genuine relationship. Who could love me and sit at home knowing I’m fucking other people? Who could be kind and gentle and understand what I did in the arena, what I do every single year when the Games come back around again?”

“It does sound difficult,” you admit feebly. You twist the knife that hangs from your neck, skim the whirls of your fingerprints over the silver sheath Aemond had made. He’s always helping me. Is that because it’s his job, or because he cares more than a mentor should?

“Some victors have families of their own. Mags does, Beetee does, and they do a decent job of keeping that part of their lives separate from the Games. It’s different for me.”

Because the Capitol wants him in a different way. The way they wanted Sirena, the way they already want me.

Aemond pivots. “Have you ever butchered a goliath grouper before?”

You raise your eyebrows. They’re enormous, they’re beasts. They’re like the dinosaurs kids in District 12 don’t learn about. “Once, a long time ago. Not alone. I helped Daddy.”

“Could you do it by yourself now?”

“I think so.” You reconsider. “Yes, I could do it. If you want me to.”

“Great. I’m going to get you one for your private training session where the Gamemakers will assign you a score. I want you to break down the carcass as fast as you can.” He smacks the Emergency Stop! button and the elevator resumes its ascent.

“Okay. I will.”

“And throw in a little something extra too.”

“Like what?”

“I trust you,” Aemond says. “You have good instincts.”

At first you don’t know what he means. What have you done so far besides prove hopeless at combat and wrath? You’ve smiled and waved to the crowds, you’ve blown kisses, you’ve sparkled when they were watching. But maybe that’s what the Capitol wants most from you.

So two days later, you are expecting it when you enter the gymnasium to find an eight-hundred pound goliath grouper suspended on a hook. As the Gamemakers observe from behind glass, you unsheathe your blade and cut with inborn speed, with innate surety. You dismantle the beast that’s bigger than a man: trimming the fins, gutting the cavity, following the lines of the ribs and the spine to slice away neat fillets until only the head and the skeleton remain, and then you decapitate the creature, sawing between the vertebrae until the bones clatter to the floor and the discorporate head gawps lifelessly, the hook impaled through its lower jaw.

Aemond has already drawn halfmoons of silver glitter beneath your eyes as you were coming down in the elevator. You remember Charm’s bloodworms and the gloss of crimson on her skin, and you wet your fingers with the grouper’s gore and paint your mouth with it, eyes that shine, lips that bleed.

Still clutching the mother of pearl handle of your knife, you flash a smile, blow a red kiss, sweep a low bow to the Gamemakers. They stand from their seats and applaud.

Charm is dressed for comfort, or at least as comfortable as she ever gets. She is curled up on the couch beside Commodore, her short golden hair secured in a silk scarf patterned with frothy turquoise waves, her dainty feet tucked into matching slippers. She is wearing a very fuzzy housecoat and her face slathered with a thick layer of transluscent green gel that smells like mint. In her lap is a large bowl of popcorn and little multicolored chocolate candies called Mars Morsels.

“Here, sea monster,” Charm says, and tosses a black Mars Morsel at Commodore. He catches it in his mouth and she claps in delight.

You and Aemond are on the other side of the couch, very quiet, very rigid, trying not to touch each other. You tell yourself not to think about him as you breathe his cologne and feel his warmth creeping towards you through the darkness, the only luminance coming from the television screen. Aemond accidentally relaxes for a moment and his knee bumps into yours; he promptly snatches it away and lights himself a cigarette with his cylindrical crystal lighter.

“Aemond, stop,” Charm scolds him, waving the smoke away with a hand that shimmers with rings. “You’ll give me wrinkles.”

The new hour arrives, and coverage on the television shifts from weather to the announcement of the training scores. All four of you sit up straighter, gazing into the pixelated glow. There is a panel arranged around a semicircular table: Caesar Flickerman, the host of the Games, and two victors to act as commentators, a very glamorous middle-aged woman from District 1 named Ruby Cervelt and the notorious Jackline Humboldt from District 4. Commodore perks up when he sees Jack; Aemond only frowns. He puts out his cigarette in an ashtray built into the armrest of the couch.

Caesar is making brief introductory small talk with his colleagues. “With only four days left until the 47th Hunger Games officially begin, do you think we’re getting a feel for this particular group of tributes?”

“Oh, it’s a great group, a great group!” Ruby trills with a frozen, plastic smile.

Jack grins, white teeth, flat reptilian eyes. “Yeah Caesar, you know, every year there are different personalities and a different chemistry, but I think this is shaping up to be a really interesting Games. We have some obvious favorites, but I think there will be more than a few surprises too.”

“Yes, absolutely,” Ruby coos banally. “You’re so right, Jack.”

“Is she drugged or what?” Charm says to Aemond.

He murmurs back: “You’d know.”

Caesar chuckles, holding a sealed red envelope aloft. “Speaking of surprises, should we see if there are any tonight?” Both Jack and Ruby cheer as he dramatically rips open the envelope. “We’ll go in numerical order as always, beginning with District 1.”

“And ladies first!” Ruby says.

“Yes, of course, we aren’t barbarians, are we? Ladies must always go first.” More laughter from the panel. You think morosely: If it had been ladies first on Reaping Day in District 4, I wouldn’t be here. Some other girl would have volunteered, and she wouldn’t have known she’d be traveling to the Capitol with Commodore until it was too late. “And our exceptionally lovely lady from District 1 this year is Brookite Barker…”

Each tribute is scored by the Gamemakers on a scale of 1 to 12, in honor of the number of districts that serve the Capitol. The only way to get a 1 is to be just north of a corpse. The only way to get a 12 is to be perfect. Functionally, an 11 is considered the highest score one can aspire to, and it is rarely bestowed upon a tribute, sometimes less than once per year. A lofty score can help attract sponsors, but it can also put a target on your back; if other tributes and their mentors think you’re the one to beat, they’ll often conspire to take you out of the running before turning against each other.

Brookie receives a score of 9, which you know she’ll be annoyed about. Ruby waxes on at great length about how beautiful Brookie is, and at last Caesar manages to corral her back on track. Hawk gets a 7, you assume because although he’s a Career, the Gamemakers know about the fact that his genetically condemned kidneys could decide to quit at any minute. Jack speaks highly of him and says he’s a nice guy.

But nice doesn’t win the Games, you think, watching the screen. Wanting to live does. Wanting to live more than being a good person, or being truthful, or being in possession of your own future and body and soul.

Next up is District 2. Sara gets an 8. Roosevelt gets a 10. Brookie is fuming for sure.

The girl from District 3, Kista, receives a score of 6. Tendo gets a 5. Jack cautions the audience not to overlook the technological prowess of District 3 tributes, and reminds them that Beetee won the 34th Games not so long ago.

Now it’s your turn, and there is a brief diversion as Caesar makes a comment about how brightly you sparkled during the Tribute Parade and the party hosted at Aemond’s house of glass. Ruby oohs and aahs as a few clips are shown. Jack just smiles tightly; if he has a favorite this year, it must be Commodore. Then Caesar reads your score from the Gamemakers: a 7.

Aemond exhales in relief; only now do you realize he’d been holding his breath. “That’s fine,” he tells you. “Top half. We can make it work.”

Charm agrees as she chomps on popcorn: “Not low enough to be hopeless, not high enough to attract negative attention. Well done.”

Caesar Flickerman continues: “And for the male tribute from District 4, Commodore, we have…oh my, what a development, the strapping lad Commodore has scored an 11!”

Charm yelps with joy and leaps up from the couch. “Fantastic! Incredible! Wonderful job, you whale shark of a boy!”

“Congratulations, Commodore,” Aemond says, but it sounds hollow.

Charm asks Aemond: “When was the last time District 4 had an 11?!”

“I don’t know.” He’s staring vacantly at the television screen, blue-white light on his scarred face, reflections strobing in his sapphire. “Not my year.”

“No, everyone underestimated you, didn’t they?” Charm grins. “And Jack only got a 10.”

On the screen, the aforementioned Jack is saying: “Now Caesar, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I must confess that this Commodore is a truly singular specimen. I’ve spent a lot of time training with him over the past week, and I think he’s the best tribute we’ve seen in years from any district. I think he’s more impressive than Aemond ever was. I think he might even have a brighter future than me.”

Beside you, Aemond makes a noise, halfway between a scoff and a sigh.

“You think you’re better than Jack?” Commodore says, glaring at Aemond from across the length of the couch. “You’re both victors, you’ve both killed people.”

Charm pats his arm, a mild reprimand. “Commodore, please—”

“I never enjoyed it,” Aemond says.

“What does it matter?” Commodore’s dark, deep-set eyes shine with clandestine intelligence, with needle-sharp betrayal. “If he can help me win, why would I care what his motivations are or if he’s a good person? Do you think I have the luxury of the moral high ground? I know you’d like to see me lying dead in that arena in four days, but I don’t plan to go out that way.”

Aemond stands and says to you: “Tell me about the rest of the scores tomorrow.” Then he crosses the ocean of shadows to his bedroom and slams the door as he disappears inside.

“You had to do that?” Charm says to Commodore, exasperated. “He’s been fair to you. He still has the power to help you. Don’t rattle him, he’s stressed enough!” She groans and then goes after Aemond, muttering about scores and arenas. She vanishes into the bedroom too and you can hear them talking in there, muffled voices, Aemond forceful and Charm accommodating.

You and Commodore watch the television in awkward silence. The rest of the scores are announced, with few noteworthy revelations. No one else gets above a 7 except Isla, who receives an 8, and you wonder what talents she’s been hiding. The lowest score goes to little Babylon from District 5, only twelve years old. You hope he’s not watching right now. You hope his mentor and escort are keeping him distracted, and he will sleep easily tonight, and he will dream of home, and he will wake believing it is possible to return there.

“Commodore,” you say softly, not knowing if he’ll answer. “Why did you volunteer?”

He stares straight ahead at the television and doesn’t speak for so long that you assume he never will. Then he looks at you and says: “I’ve always been big. I’ve always been ugly. People have always assumed that because I’m quiet, I’m stupid. I figured that if I’m going to be a freak anyway, I should have something to show for it. I can take the place of some other District 4 boy who would have gotten slaughtered in the arena. And I can have a life where people appreciate what I am.”

Oh God, you think, horrified, heartbroken. None of them know what winning really means.

“I don’t hate you or anything,” Commodore says. “I don’t really know you. I just…only one of us can win, right? And a lot of these other tributes…I could kill them if I had to, I think. But you’re from home. It just seems wrong. It seems like something people from our district would have a hard time forgiving. So when I keep my distance, that’s why.”

“I completely understand. No worries.”

Commodore offers you his hand, like you’re making a deal. When you shake it, he’s gentle, but your flesh and bones are eclipsed by his.

There are three days left until the Games.

The revelry is spiking like a fever here in the Capitol, and one last party is being held before the death march to the final hours: physical inspections to ensure all tributes are in the best possible condition, rest to make them fresh for the massacre in the arena, televised interviews with Caesar Flickerman.

When the car stops in front of President Snow’s mansion—rambling and white and surrounded by an extravagant garden illuminated by fairy lights, cold and colorless like stars—Charm and Commodore get out first. You stay in your seat thinking of home, your family, your house, your boat, your shoreline that you can never revisit. You reflexively twirl the knife that hangs from your throat by a long silver chain.

Aemond notices and says: “Are you doing that on purpose?”

You jolt back to reality and your hand goes still. “What? No, I’m just nervous.”

“Well don’t stop.” He gives you a smile and then climbs out of the car. You follow, out of the metal cage, into cool night air and clamoring crowds of Capitol elites with their faces powered white like ghosts, their claws long and polished, their hair arranged in impractical designs and dyed impossible colors.

You are immediately encircled by journalists, photographers, bright-eyed manic party guests. You beam and wave, because you need them to love you so they won’t let you get butchered in the arena. You are wearing a black ballgown, voluminous and difficult to walk in. Your exposed skin—blessedly, not too exposed tonight—is misted with silver glitter, your neck, your shoulders, your collarbones, your arms. The last step is always the same: Aemond draws glistening semicircles under your eyes with his thumbs, and you could do it yourself but you like that he does it. It makes you feel like you aren’t alone in this. It reminds you that to survive here, you must camouflage who you truly are and keep it secret, sacred.

“Oh, look how you sparkle!” a woman is sighing romantically, and then she reaches out to touch you, to scratch at the shimmering metallic flecks on your shoulder to see if she can dislodge them. You try to keep smiling as you flee from her. Through the crowd, you can see Commodore being manhandled as well, his colossal arms pinched and squeezed. He wears a roomy suit patterned with sequined orcas. Charm is beside him attempting to divert the assailants; she is dressed like a sea urchin, long dark spines stabbing in every direction, false eyelashes like black daggers.

“Aren’t you lovely?” grinning men keep saying as you try to pass by them, fumbling with the skirt of your gown and your high heels, always smiling, always sparkling. “Aren’t you lovely? Aren’t you lovely?”

Then you catch them hissing to each other: “The fruit is already ripe, no need to wait for this one.”

“There’s just something about a District 4 girl, I don’t know if it’s the sun or the ocean air or what…”

“Isn’t she perfect? Dangerous enough to keep things interesting. Fragile enough to still be a damsel in distress.”

“Always smiling like that and blowing kisses, she’s a total tease.”

“Every time they show her on the tv, I get hard as a fucking rock…”

You think to yourself as loudly as possible as you stumble across the cobblestones and towards the grand entranceway: They aren’t looking at me. They’re looking at the sparkles. They don’t know me, they can’t see me, they can’t touch me—

Except that they can, and people are raking their fingernails through your hair, and laughing as they try to scour the glitter from your skin, and grabbing your waist, and even though you know you can’t you’re about to break your composure when Aemond finds you in the tumultuous sea and replaces their hungry hands, presses a palm into the small of your back, smiles and nods diplomatically to the hoard as he gradually leads you away.

Aemond takes you not up the front steps into the mansion but across the yard towards the garden, and by the halfway point your lungs and heart are beginning to slow from a frenzy to a murmur. Sprinklers are watering the lawn, fine mist and kaleidoscopic fogbows, light in dark places. Aemond is wearing a black suit, simple but precisely tailored. Half of his moonshine hair is pulled back from his face while the rest flows freely; his sapphire glints under the twinkle lights.

A woman in a magenta dress approaches, and Aemond stops and removes his hand from you. You stand there on the lush damp grass, mystified, as the woman cups his face and strokes his scar, her clawlike pink fingernails lustrous.

She grins and says: “I remember watching you get this.”

Aemond’s voice is like you’ve never heard it before, purring and servile. “It was worth it, if it led me to you.”

“Call me.”

“I will. I’ve wanted to. I’ve been so busy, you know, this time of year…”

Now the woman turns to you, no jealousy, only curiosity…and maybe a dash of pity too. “You really want to save this one.”

“She’s too kind,” Aemond says, and he sounds like himself again. He sounds like he’s telling the truth. “She shouldn’t be here. Still eligible for the Games by less than twenty-four hours, terrible luck. It feels intolerably cruel.”

“I can help.”

“I knew you would. You’re a saint.”

She chuckles, genuine fondness glowing in her eyes. “Oh, Aemond. You and your saints and your gods and your ruins.” Then she sashays away and into the mansion, pausing twice to glance back at Aemond before she is gone, and each time he waves. But as soon as she’s out of sight his whole demeanor changes, his shoulders collapse and his face falls, and he trudges onwards until you reach a towering marble fountain at the edge of the garden.

Aemond sits on the rim and lights a cigarette, smoke drifting skyward to vanish into the indigo and the stars. You join him, and it’s hard to see the plants that surround you in the darkness, thorny knots of roses and vast unfurled orchids. You gaze up at the statue in the center of the fountain, a naked man wielding a trident and encircled by horses.

“Who is that?” you ask.

“Neptune. The god of the sea.”

“How many gods are there?”

He smiles tiredly. “Depends on who you ask, I guess.”

You don’t want to know. You have to know. “Aemond, what happens if I win?”

“Right afterwards?” he says, taking a drag. “They’ll take a few days to scrub you clean and treat any injuries, let you eat, let you sleep. They’ll put you under constant surveillance to make sure you don’t do anything to damage the merchandise. Then there will be an auction.”

“What?” You gape at him, certain you’ve misheard. “An auction? People bidding on me?”

Aemond gazes down into the dark rippling water, unable to look at you. “Just for the first time. You aren’t involved, it takes place over the phone and brokers handle it. You just show up once it’s over.”

“Once someone has paid to sleep with me.”

Softly, like it pains him: “Yes.”

“And…this person…are they…?” The very first time? With some stranger, with someone like those men who paw and leer? “Will they be gentle?”

Aemond flicks ashes away and says nothing.

“Aemond?”

He hesitates. “There’s an adage. ‘Victor’s blood.’ The sort of men who participate in those auctions, they say that, and there’s…a measure of pride associated with it.”

“Blood, like, my blood?” That can’t be right. At some point, the nightmare has to end. “They’re going to try to hurt me on purpose so they can tell people they made a killer bleed?”

Aemond nods, still not looking at you, rubbing his scarred forehead as embers burn at the end of his cigarette. “But it’s only the first time. Then you’re given a red phone like mine, and you settle into a routine, and it gets a little easier.”

“And these men who buy me…will I have to have their children?”

“You might. If you conceive, then yes.”

“Do you have children?”

He flinches, exhales a low moan. “Why would you want to talk about this?”

“Because I thought you wanted me to know what winning means, I thought we didn’t have any secrets, so I’m just trying to understand!”

“Yes, I have children,” Aemond confesses, like extracting a molar with deep gory roots.

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen them playing at parks and walking to school, little kids who look like me, and I’ve recognized their mothers, and I…”

You start sobbing, not just from misery, not just from fear, but from the inescapable horror of everything here, even worse than people think it is, even worse than you could have imagined, and there is no other world for you, you have to make the best of this one, but what is the best you can hope for? To die swiftly and painlessly in the arena? To survive to be bought and violated and forced to train tributes to torture each other year after year?

“Don’t,” Aemond whispers, and turns your face so he can whisk your tears away. “You can’t let them see you upset.”

“I’m sorry,” you sob, unable to stop.

“You’re going to fuck up your makeup.”

“I’m sorry,” you repeat helplessly.

“I would do anything to change the way all of this works,” Aemond says, and his words are desperate, and his pale blue eye is begging you to forgive him for something he didn’t do. “But I can’t. I can’t change the Games, and I can’t change what happens afterwards. But I swear that I will stay with you through all of it, and I will help you as much as I can. I know you want to live. I want you to live too. So please let me help, and don’t forget how badly you wanted a chance to survive when I met you.”

“Okay,” you whimper. “Can we go to your house?”

“What?”

“I just want to go there for a while. Someplace quiet. Someplace safe.” Someplace that’s yours.

“We can go there,” Aemond says, a bit bewildered. “But we have to talk to the people here first, alright?”

“Alright.”

Aemond offers you his cigarette, and at first you don’t understand why. He smiles. “Give it a try. Can’t hurt at this point.”

He’s just trying to distract you, but it works. You grab the cigarette, burned nearly all the way down, and take an uncertain drag with a shaking hand. It’s awful, dark and bitter, and you cough and gasp for air, but it makes you start laughing. Aemond laughs too.

“You looked very cool there for about two seconds,” he says.

You toss the end of the cigarette into the churning water of the fountain. “How the hell do you smoke those?”

“You get used to it.” He stands and holds out a hand, his left, still discolored by the bruise on his ring finger. “You can get used to just about anything.” You take his hand and walk with him into the mansion.

Aemond stays with you like a shadow, and now the party guests don’t touch you quite so much, and they don’t just comment on the training score you received from the Gamemakers or the knife swinging at your breastbone or how brightly you sparkle. They also keep saying how good you and Aemond look together, and like wolves their eyes gleam and their incisors drip with saliva, men fantasizing about taking you from him, women scheming to drag him away from you, journalists scribbling notes and cameras flashing. You see the other tributes enduring their own trials—Brookie suffering the caresses of old men, Roosevelt being commanded to do tricks like an animal—but it isn’t so bad for them, because they believe that once they win the Games they’ll be free.

When you and Aemond get in a car to leave, he gives the driver an address that isn’t the Tribute Center where you’ve been living since you arrived in the Capitol, every day full of new hopes and new terrors. His house is just as you remember it, empty and echoing, transparent walls; only the bathrooms and bedrooms have misted glass so they can’t be so easily spied into.

Is that to discourage people from touching him? you think as you wander from room to room, clicking along in your heels, going slowly so you won’t trip on your gown. Aemond follows you, his hands in his suit pockets, not entirely sure what you’re doing here. His strange skinny dogs pad alongside him. So guests won’t try to undress him in the kitchen or the dining room or in front of his case of treasures?

You enter a room that is bare except for a single pink couch. You settle into the cushions as the dogs gaze up at you, long solemn faces and scrutinizing eyes. “Sit with me,” you say.

Aemond does, mystified but intrigued. He’s close enough that he’s touching the voluminous skirt of your black gown.

“Why are your dogs so weird looking?”

He laughs, and you think: Why couldn’t we have met in District 4? “They’re Salukis, they’re one of the oldest dog breeds in the world.”

“Did they live in Ancient Egypt?” you say, remembering what he told you about mummies and pharaohs and pyramids.

“They very well might have, yes.”

“Tell me more about this place Ancient Egypt.”

So he does, but you don’t listen as much as you watch him, the way he smiles like the Games don’t exist, the way his eye is blue like the desert sky, or the Nile River, or turquoise mined from the Sinai Peninsula. Why did we have to meet here? Why must we both be trapped in our own tombs?

“Aemond, why did you volunteer?”

“You’ll know soon. You’ll meet him.”

Him? “I’ll meet who?”

But Aemond doesn’t respond. He pets one of his skeletal dogs instead, scratching the silky fur of its ears. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

You look around the sparse room, the barren house. “You could make this homey, you know.”

Aemond smiles, just a phantom of one. “What would you do with it?”

“Well…my sister Misty ties sailing knots, and she arranges them into all these marvelous shapes. Dolphins, manta rays, sea horses, lobsters. So I’d hang some on the walls. Misty makes rugs too, you could use a few of those. And we could get vases and fill them with seashells from District 4, and make windchimes for the front porch and the backyard. And we could go fishing on Daddy’s boat and keep our best catches, sailfish and sharks, have them preserved and mounted. And I would go to the market, or…whatever you have here in the Capitol.”

“A Megamart. You’d love it, a hundred different kinds of fish.”

“Right. I’d try out all sorts of recipes and I’d learn what your favorites are. And we’d have dinner together every night, just like my family does. And when you had to leave…” When the red phone rings, and you have to answer. “I’d never ask about where you’d been. I’d just tell you, whenever you came back, that I’m glad you’re home.”

Aemond shakes his head, and his eye is slick and horrorstruck as the mirage shines so vividly and then dissolves away, and his voice is only a whisper. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

You cross the empty air to him, drape your arms around his neck, and as you fold into his chest he catches you, thunderous heartbeat, careful hands. “Aemond, do you want me to win because I’m from your district?”

“No.”

“Or because I remind you of Sirena?”

“No.”

“I guess we should go back to the Tribute Center soon.”

The familiar bustle of the city begins to take over as soon as you reach its outskirts: merchants pull their wagons aside at the first sight of Hightower banners cresting the hills, mothers gather their children away from the roadside, and men bow their heads in polite deference as mounted knights pass in orderly columns, white towers embroidered upon deep green snapping lazily in the wind. 

No one moves to flee or cry out in warning—the smallfolk have quickly adjusted to the growing tensions of war, have learned to recognize an army as it arrives, even without haste or celebration. 

You ride near the front beside Daeron, where a prince ought to be seen—something he’ll grow used to with time, though he has changed considerably from the little boy you’d escorted from King’s Landing all those years ago. The softness of childhood has grown into long limbs and broadening shoulders, his face still unmistakably Alicent’s. 

Oldtown has polished him in quiet ways, you’d made that much certain. He sits his horse as easily as his dragon now and speaks only when he has something worth saying, carrying himself with the effortless courtesy that seems bred into the stones of the great beacon of Oldtown itself. 

He’s no longer a child. 

That realization still catches you off guard, even after all the time you’ve spent beside him. 

Somewhere overhead comes the distant cry of Tessarion, shrill and sharp. You cannot see her yet through the scattered clouds, but every so often sunlight catches the sweep of cobalt wings overhead before she disappears again, circling lazily above the marching host. 

Daeron follows your gaze for only a moment, smiling to himself before looking to the road again. 

“She’s growing impatient.”

“She has good reason to after so much time spent traveling,” you answer, adjusting your grip on the leather reins in your hand. “I imagine her rider shares the sentiment.”

His laugh is quiet, but it’s answer enough. 

There’s always been some comfort in how easily conversation comes with him—before leaving court, you’d almost forgotten that a royal child could laugh without looking over their shoulder first. 

For a while, the only sounds are hooves striking packed earth, the steady creak of wagons somewhere farther back within Ormund’s column, and the distant calls of outriders moving between ranks. Ahead, the city proper begins to rise from the haze as buildings press more closely together, knitting into winding streets and crowded alleyways. 

Beyond them, the towers of the Red Keep climb above the landscape like fingers reaching toward the sky. 

Home, you think automatically, even as your heart aches at the unfamiliarity of it all. 

The note that Alicent’s raven had brought a few days earlier rests tucked safely inside your saddlebag, though by now you’ve memorized every line. 

Aegon is gone, Larys Strong with him. Aemond rules now in his brother’s stead. 

You had read it once in disbelief the moment it had arrived when you’d stopped to make camp, then again by lamplight after supper, again the following morning, and once more before departing. Perhaps a part of you believed that the repetition alone might coax some different meaning from the ink, but it never had. 

Days spent riding have done little to quiet your imagination. If anything, the silence and the endless beating of hooves have fed it. 

You find yourself remembering Aemond as the little boy who had once preferred the palace libraries to the training yards whenever he thought no one was watching, who insisted on sitting impossibly straight even while reading—as though slouching might somehow diminish him. He had always been solemn and studious, serious beyond his years, forever trying to convince the world that he needed nothing from anyone. 

After the harrowing events at Driftmark, you remember how he’d reached for you the first time the maester had come to change his bandages, how you’d smoothed his hair back from his brow. He had gone strangely still beneath the touch and had watched you all the while with his remaining eye. You remember, too, finding him alone a few days later, not quite crying; his jaw had been clenched so tightly that you wondered whether his teeth might crack beneath the strain. 

“I am fine,” he had insisted before you’d spoken a single word. Hardly ten years old and already, he had mistaken endurance for strength. 

Beside you, Daeron breaks the silence, making you jolt slightly against the saddle. 

“Do you think mother has changed much?” You glance toward him but he keeps his attention ahead, though uncertainty lingers in his voice as he continues. “It’s been such a long time, I just—I wonder…”

“I imagine she’ll be quite shocked with how tall you’ve grown,” you say, smiling easily at the thought of your beloved sister, at having her close once more. 

A beat passes between the two of you. A bird calls out, probably a gull from the bay. Your horse snorts. 

For a fleeting moment, all of this feels impossibly easy. 

“And… and Aemond?” he says quietly, giving voice to the question both of you have been circling since Alicent’s letter reached you. “Do you think he’ll be glad to see us?”

You hold his gaze only briefly before looking back toward the city, back toward those impossibly high towers as you try to picture him somewhere inside—a man you no longer know. 

“He’ll be glad of Tessarion,” you say at last, feeling Daeron’s gaze as it lingers on you. He knows well enough not to challenge your answer, and you know he’s smart enough to pick up on everything you choose not to say. 

Sighing, you shift slightly atop your horse, trying to ignore the way your pulse kicks up as you draw closer to the castle gates. In a bid to keep your thoughts from spiraling further, you attempt to focus on the city—on crowded market stalls and fishermen unloading the morning’s catch, on the bells of the Sept ringing as they signal the time, on the sails of distant ships bobbing in the Blackwater. 

Still, you cannot help but notice that there are more Gold Cloaks than you remember, more guards posted atop the battlements, and more eyes lifting instinctively toward the sky as Tessarion’s shadow passes overhead. 

The gates open, the sound carrying across the yard as heavy timbers groan against ancient hinges. 

I am home, you think again, though the word fits no better than it did the first time. 

Stablehands hurry forward to take reins from weary riders, servants weave between carts laden with supplies from Oldtown, and somewhere across the inner courtyard a steward begins directing men toward quarters prepared days before your arrival. The Hightower banners that had fluttered so proudly along the road are lowered one by one, no longer needed now that you’ve reached your destination. 

You’ve scarcely swung yourself down from your horse before familiar voices begin calling Daeron’s name. Guards who had only known him as a small boy bid him welcome with respectful bows, various attendants offer polite curtsies, and it strikes you then just how long he’s been gone. 

Just then, a movement at the top of the stone steps draws your eye—Alicent. For one impossible heartbeat, you see her as the dutiful older sister you had left behind years ago, looking as she always had. 

Then reality catches up. 

Time has been no kinder to her than it is to anyone else, but it seems to have landed differently upon your sister. She is still beautiful in the same ways she always was—wide eyes, shining coppery hair, a warm smile—though grief has carved itself into the corners of her mouth and left shadows beneath her eyes. Green remains her color, as ever, yet even that familiar emerald shade seems muted against the invisible weight she carries. 

Daeron reaches her first and hardly has time to draw air into his lungs before Alicent gathers him into her arms; he returns the embrace without hesitation, one hand settling securely between her shoulders. 

“Gods, you’re nearly a man grown,” the words leave her in a shuddered exhale, something caught between a laugh and a sob. 

“Mother,” he says so quietly you nearly miss it in all the commotion, as if the word is foreign on his tongue. “I missed you.”

One hand rises to cup his cheek like she’s reassuring herself he’s truly here, standing before her—that he is flesh and blood rather than another son slipping beyond her reach. Her thumb brushes once across his skin as she studies his face with an impossibly wide smile, pride clear on her features for the first time in longer than she would care to admit. 

“You haven’t the faintest idea,” she starts, shaking her head, “how much I’ve missed you.”

A moment later, their embrace loosens and her shoulders straighten, a quiet propriety settling over her once more as she turns to you. 

Whatever restraint she’d attempted to force upon herself dies in an instant.

She crosses the remaining distance between you without ceremony, wrapping both arms around you with a quiet, shaky exhale that she quickly buries against your shoulder. You hold her just as tightly, huffing out a laugh as the familiar scent of her washes over you—sweet and delicate and all her own. 

For a few seconds, everything seems to fall away. There is no court, no war, no throne—only the two of you, standing exactly as you had countless times before the world grew so much larger than either of you had ever wished it to be. 

When she pulls back, her composure has returned, but only just. 

“I missed you,” she says softly, that familiar wry smile on her lips—as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. 

“As I have missed you, sister.”

Something fragile flickers across her face before disappearing almost as quickly as it came as she wrings her hands, scanning the courtyard. 

“We shouldn’t remain here.”

You nod, knowing there will be time later for conversations and niceties and attempts to bridge the years between you. 

Ladies-in-waiting fall into step behind you as the three of you make your way deeper into the castle. The once-familiar corridors seem narrower than you remember, crowded now with messengers carrying sealed letters, guards changing posts, and whispering maids—all of whom fall abruptly silent as you pass by. 

Everything is exactly how you’d left it, truly, and yet it feels as if the stone walls themselves are holding their breath, waiting for the other shoe to fall. 

“Aegon left three days before your arrival,” Alicent says at last, keeping her voice low enough that only you and Daeron can hear. “Larys Strong departed with him. No one knows where.” 

You had known as much from her raven but hearing the words spoken aloud somehow makes them feel real—less like a rumor and more like a loss. 

“And Aemond assumed control immediately?” You question, earning a silent nod in reply, her lips pressed tightly together. “So everyone simply…” you pause, searching for the right word, “...accepts it?”

“They accept necessity,” she answers without hesitation, looking over her shoulder before glancing back toward you. “We do not have the luxury of time.” 

She says no more than that, but she doesn’t need to. You understand well enough what remains unspoken—King’s Landing is being held together by routine and the looming uncertainty of Rhaenyra’s inevitable arrival. 

Silence stretches between you for several paces before you break it, unable to tamp down the cautious curiosity within you. 

“And what of Aemond?”

“You will see him soon enough.”

There’s something in the way she says it—the quiet resignation of someone who, despite every attempt to the contrary, has found that the only way out is through. 

The corridors begin to widen as you get closer to the Great Hall, its heavy wooden doors lying ahead, standing open beneath banners bearing the three-headed dragon. Voices drift faintly from within, bleeding through the space in hushed murmurs. 

“He should still be here,” Alicent says, stiffly looking between you and Daeron. “Come.”

Your feet move before your mind can protest. Despite all the many hours you’ve had to imagine this meeting, now that it has arrived, you discover that you were never truly prepared for it at all. 

Inside, the throne room is more somber than you remember it being, stripped of the usual pomp and circumstance that comes with a public court. Any petitioners or noblemen that were here have departed, leaving behind only a handful of men gathered near the foot of the Iron Throne; Maester Orwyle stands with several rolled parchments tucked beneath one arm while Lord Wylde speaks in measured tones, giving the last of some report from what you can make out. 

Contrary to what you’d feared, there are no raised voices; instead, there’s an eerie calm. 

You can’t seem to decide which is worse. 

Despite its placidity, there’s still a carefulness that lingers in the air—a deliberate weighing of every word. These men are long accustomed to kings and councils but even they seem to measure themselves warily. 

Slowly, your gaze rises to the throne itself, to where Aemond sits bareheaded, absent of the rubied crown that Aegon had worn. It had departed the city with him, leaving behind only the Iron Throne itself and the man who now occupies it. Somehow, the missing symbol of legitimacy fails to diminish him; if anything, it makes him appear sharper. 

He has no need for the authority of Valyrian steel when he believes he possesses enough of his own. 

One hand rests lightly against the arm of the throne as he listens to the men before him with a sharp gaze. Your mind whirls as you try to reconcile the image before you with the boy you’d once known—there is nothing boyish left in him now. Even from across the hall, he carries himself with an absolute certainty that hadn’t been there before. 

“How many men remain posted at the River Gate?”

“Two hundred, Your Grace.”

“And how many have seen battle?”

“Perhaps…” Lord Wylde hesitates briefly, “only half?”

Aemond nods once, head tilting to the side just slightly as he lets out a thoughtful hum. 

“Then replace the rest.”

“Your Grace,” Wylde begins carefully, “we are already strapped for—”

“Do you think an army of untested boys capable of defending the city from the threats Rhaenyra brings, my lord?” His tone is soft, though laced with a hardness that makes it clear this is a question he does not want answered. “See that it is done.” 

“As you command.”

He is good at this, the thought comes to you unbidden, almost painfully. The solemn little boy who had spent entire afternoons with his nose buried in dusty tomes, who had longed to be taken seriously—to no longer be a mere second son—appears to have gotten what he had so desperately wanted. 

Silence settles again as Lord Wylde turns and takes his leave, pausing only to offer the three of you a polite bow, followed by Maester Orwyle who does the same. Their footsteps echo softly across the cavernous hall until the doors are pulled closed behind them. 

It’s only then that Aemond’s gaze lands on you. 

For a second, hardly a second, something perilously close to relief shifts over his face before vanishing so completely that you wonder if you’re inventing mercies where none exist. 

You share an impossibly heavy glance with Alicent as he stands from the throne and saunters down the sword-lined steps, his hands clasped behind his back while he makes his way over to the three of you. He’s grown tall in your absence, formidable with broad shoulders and a restrained strength. There’s a surety in him now that had been missing before, the relaxed confidence of a man who knows his capabilities very, very well. 

“You have returned,” he murmurs, coming to a stop before you. There’s no warmth in his tone, no familiarity. He offers nothing else—not your name, not aunt, not even a question of your travels or your health. 

“So I have,” you say in return, bowing your head politely, if only to give yourself something to do. 

He studies you for only a second longer before drifting to Daeron at your side. You can see him shift in your periphery, practically thrumming with a confused excitement—was he missed? Was he not? Where is the ease of family?

“Your dragon will be of good use to us,” Aemond says. “I trust you have been trained well?”

Daeron inclines his head with the same courtesy he has shown every step of the journey from Oldtown, though you don’t miss the way he seems to deflate a little as his shoulders lose their sharpness. 

“Yes,” he answers with a nod, looking at Alicent as she places a hand on his shoulder. “I am glad to be of service.”

“Mm,” Aemond hums, giving a single nod, no sign that he has spent years apart from the brother standing before him. 

Despite yourself, you search his face anyway, looking for a trace of the boy who had once followed you through halls asking questions far too large for his age. 

Yet, you find only the king. 

Beside you, Alicent exhales softly, smoothing a hand over her skirts. 

“We should leave you to your work,” she says to him, each word too tight—too formal. “Besides,” she continues, turning her attention to you and her youngest son, “I must show you both to your chambers.” 

As you take your leave, following closely behind Daeron as the three of you make your way out of the Great Hall, you can feel his stare on your back. 

The following day, afternoon sunlight spills so warmly through the Keep’s gardens that it’s easy to momentarily forget how precarious everything is, how the entire realm seems poised on a knife’s edge. 

The fountains bubble softly into still pools, birds chirp as they flit from tree to tree, and roses climb sun-warmed stone. You watch as a butterfly dances between flowers, suddenly struck by the fact that it knows nothing of dragons, nor kings, nor the weight of crowns. 

That is why you’ve always tended to seek solace here—nature has always possessed the enviable habit of simply carrying on. 

For a while, neither you nor your sister says anything as you walk side-by-side, the gravel pathway crunching underfoot. A gentle wind wafts over you, rustling the neatly pruned hedges, and you take a second to glance over at her. 

Alicent’s hands are folded neatly before her in an attempt to hide her bloodied cuticles—a nervous habit she never quite outgrew. 

“I’m sure you’re glad for the breeze the bay brings in,” she says after a time, a faint smile touching the corners of her lips, “given how humid Oldtown can be.”

“Definitely,” you nod, taking a second to look up at the winding branches of a particularly old chestnut tree. “The air there could be stifling at times.”

Conversation comes easier after that, the two of you quickly filling the silence. You speak of the journey here, of Ormund’s tendency to be a spendthrift, of Daeron’s understated confidence and how naturally he has seemed to grow into himself. Alicent listens more than she speaks, asking after small details that you’d never thought to include in the many letters you had sent her over the years. 

Does he still forget to eat when he’s learning a new song on his lute?

Does he still insist on rising at dawn?

Does he still not take well to compliments?

Each answer earns a small smile from her or a breathy laugh or quick quip, though none of it quite erases the shadows beneath her eyes. Still, it’s enough to give you a glimpse of the sister you’d known as a child. 

The longer the two of you walk and talk, the more you find yourself speaking of Oldtown itself. You each share childhood memories of watching merchant ships dock in the harbor and of evenings spent beneath the glow of the great beacon. Both of you seem to long for those quiet days that, at the time, had felt unbearably ordinary, though now they seem more like an untouchable luxury. 

Still, the longer you talk, the more it feels as if each of you is carefully side-stepping the one glaring thing that weighs most heavily on your mind, as if neither of you wishes to arrive at it and break whatever sweet spell you’re under. 

Eventually, it becomes unavoidable. 

“He will not hear me,” she says at last as she slows beside one of the fountains, watching sunlight scatter across its rippling surface. You don’t need to ask who she means, you both know well enough. “I have tried as his counsel, as his mother,” she continues quietly; a faint, humorless smile crosses her lips, “none of them reached him.”

“What is it you wished for him to hear?”

Sighing, she doesn’t answer immediately. Her brows furrow as she resumes walking, her skirts whispering softly over the pathway. 

“I—I want peace,” she says simply before stopping again, so suddenly that you whip around to face her. She’s not looking at you, not at first. Instead, she’s gazing at the ground as if wishing it would swallow her whole, teeth worrying at her bottom lip.

“Sister, has something—”

“I went to Dragonstone,” she whispers, so faintly that for a moment, you’re sure you must have misheard her. She must see it as a million questions immediately flood your mind, each more incredulous than the last, because she quickly continues. “I didn’t go because—because I believed Rhaenyra would simply forgive me,” the words pour from her, “nor because I imagined she had suddenly forgotten all that has transpired between our families, I just…”

She lowers her eyes, wringing her hands. 

“I had to know that she might still choose not to burn the realm,” her words are almost sheepish, like a child confessing an inane fear, “that she too had considered… negotiations, a way through this without—without—”

She needn’t give it voice. 

For several moments, you say nothing, instead blinking up at the sun overhead, like it may provide you with some great wisdom. Shock flows through you, a steady thrum in your veins, but beneath that an understanding begins to rise. You know your sister and for all her many faults, you have never known her to be rash nor willfully careless. 

Peace no longer promises triumph, perhaps it never did—you’d seen your brother-in-law make that mistake many times over the course of his long reign. But it may promise fewer widows, fewer orphans left to the streets, fewer graves dug into damp earth. 

Of course she’d had to try, you think, absentmindedly fiddling with a loose thread at the hem of one sleeve, that is still something worth seeking.

“Aegon could be… managed,” you say quietly. Alicent sighs beside you, her eyes closing as she gives a single nod. 

“Yes.”

“Aemond cannot.”

“No,” she whispers, the word landing heavily between you, “and that is what frightens me.”

Her voice wavers, causing you to instinctively reach toward her. Stepping closer, you wind your hands around hers, jaw set against the sudden tightness at the back of your throat as her gaze finally finds yours. The tiredness there makes your heart ache. 

“If Aemond remains in the capital, Rhaenyra will come eventually, she’ll have no choice,” she says lowly, leaning closer to you, “but Daemon holds Harrenhal, alongside Caraxes, several dragonseeds, and a growing army.” Your pulse grows louder as she speaks, an incessant drum in your ear. “Vhagar is mighty, but she is one dragon.”

She pauses, looking toward the Red Keep as it towers above the gardens. 

“And one rider,” she finishes, her eyes flicking to yours. 

The finality in her gaze, along with the million words she cannot say, make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. 

“If Aemond were to ride for the Riverlands…” you start, your eyes remaining fixed on hers, “he may not return.”

“Yes.”

“And—and if he stays?”

“Then the war will come here,” she nods, tensing for an instant, “and thousands will die.”

Your teeth sink into your bottom lip as the implication of her words hangs over the two of you, heavy with the weight of an impossible choice. You know better than to argue with her, knowing that what she says is true. “I need you to speak with him.”

“Me?” you balk, jolting a pace back from her as if you’d been burnt. 

“He will not hear me.”

“Sister—”

“He was so fond of you as a child,” she implores, desperation bleeding into the edges of her voice. “You may still be able to—”

“The man I saw yesterday,” you cut her off, shaking your head, “did not look like someone waiting to be persuaded.”

“No—no, I suppose not.” 

The simplicity of her answer causes a frustrated huff to spill from you as you pace about the small alcove the two of you have found yourselves in, the sunlight on your skin suddenly stifling. 

“He isn’t the boy I left behind,” you manage, the words tight in your throat. 

“I know,” she says, reaching out to steady you in the same way you had done for her only moments ago, “but he is still my son.”

The grief in her voice nearly undoes you, like she’s mourned him before he’s even left—like she’s done it a dozen times before now. 

You think of the throne room the day before, of the man sitting where Viserys once had, who now seems little more than a stranger to you, and of Daeron’s face after being dismissed as little more than another dragon rider. 

Most of all, you remember the split-second of relief that had flickered across Aemond’s face before it had vanished. 

Staring off at a hazy point in the distance, you’re unable to decide which frightens you more—that the boy you had loved is truly gone, or that a small part of him still remains beneath everything that time has forced him to become. 

You draw a slow breath, looking out across the gardens where branches continue to sway in the afternoon breeze, utterly indifferent to the burden resting upon your shoulders. The backs of your eyes sting as you let them flutter shut for a moment, willing your breaths to steady. 

“I—I will speak with him.”

She nods and squeezes your hand, though neither of you speak again as you make your way back toward the castle. Nothing has changed, not really. Birds still sing and flowers still bloom and butterflies still dance between them, yet everything feels colder than it had only an hour before. 

The task before you feels impossible—how are you supposed to reach someone when you’re no longer certain any part of them still exists?

In the few hours since you’ve spoken to your sister, night has settled heavily over the castle. Your steps echo in the quiet corridor as you make your way to Aemond's—to the king’s—chambers, alone in hallways that are usually filled with guards, servants, and the occasional messenger. Torchlight pools across the old stones, stretching in long shadows that sway and flicker with every draft that slips in through the narrow slit windows. 

You approach the chambers that had belonged to Aegon only days ago. One of the guards posted outside nods his head as you come to a stop, announcing your arrival while opening the doors for you. 

A fire burns in the hearth, throwing amber light across the tapestried walls. According to Alicent, he had altered many things already. She spoke of orders to servants to stock the shelves with various old tomes, to move in his personal belongings, and to rid the place of emptied wine flagons. 

Even still, the room itself seems to remember Aegon, as if frozen in the transition between owners.

Aemond occupies a chair before the fire, one leg stretched before him as a forgotten book rests atop his other thigh. He looks up as the doors thud closed once more, leaving the two of you alone. 

“Mother sent you,” he murmurs, not bothering to question it. 

“She did,” you answer, stepping further into the room. That earns you the faintest tilt of his head as something like interest passes across his face. 

“Mm,” he hums, “at least you do not insult me with denial.”

“I see no purpose in lying to you, Aemond.”

“How novel,” he says through a dry huff of laughter. His gaze moves over you with a calm precision that makes your spine straighten despite yourself. “Though I suppose you were always cleverer than that.”

His words catch somewhere you didn’t expect, the faint familiarity in them making the absence of any tenderness all the more jarring. You remember, absurdly, a solemn little boy leaning over a library table as he asked whether intelligence or courage mattered more. 

You had told him that you supposed it merely depended on who survived long enough to use either. 

That same little boy isn’t the one looking back at you now. 

“You remember enough to flatter me, nephew.”

“I remember a great many things,” he says, calm but pointed. 

Neither of you speaks as you move to stand more in front of him, your back warmed by the fire as you watch the light of it move over the hard lines of his face, catching in the pale fall of his hair and the sapphire set where his left eye should be. He looks more human here than he had on the throne, away from all those swords and watching eyes. 

He’s handsome like this, the thought comes unbidden. Perhaps this would be easier if age had been less kind to him. 

“You may sit,” he says at last, gesturing toward a matching chair that sits beside him. 

“I prefer to stand,” you say, remaining where you are as if rooted to the spot. He studies you for a long while, tracking the slow shift of your hips before returning, almost reluctantly, to your face.

“As you wish.”

The silence that follows is unnerving—he appears to have no desire to fill it and, as the seconds wear on, you begin to wonder if it is a test of some kind. For what, you cannot yet say. Perhaps he’s waiting to see if you’ll begin, if you’ll falter when you do, whether you have come as a messenger, an aunt, a spy, or something less easily named. 

Finally, you can take it no longer. 

“My prince—”

His gaze lifts immediately to that, sharp and insistent. 

“My king,” you correct, internally berating yourself for giving him any sort of upper hand. 

Aemond tilts his head slightly, satisfaction kept so tightly leashed that anyone else may not have noticed it at all. “You found the word eventually.”

“I apologize,” you say, shifting your weight from foot to foot while you inhale shakily. “I am—I am finding many things difficult tonight.”

“I imagine you are,” he answers too quickly, too smoothly, like he’d already anticipated the conversation before you had even entered the room. You’re reminded of the way he’d simply listened in the throne room the day before: patient and scrutinizing, allowing men space enough to reveal their hand. 

“The castle talks,” you try, though he gives you nothing in return. 

“It always has.”

“This is different—”

“No,” he replies, leaning back in his chair as if he hasn’t a care in the world. “There are always whispers but it is merely the idle chatter of smallfolk, nothing more.”

“Aegon is gone—” 

“I am aware, yes.”

“Then you must also be aware of what that looks like,” you say, the words coming more sharply than you intend, “of what it implies.”

At that, his expression shifts by a fraction, cooling faintly as if you’d veered off of whatever script he has in his head. “It looks like the realm is being governed in my brother’s absence,” he mutters.”

“Aemond, it looks like uncertainty—”

“Necessity.”

“To those inside these walls, perhaps,” you say, forcing yourself to remain calm despite the way your pulse hums beneath your skin. “But outside? To the city? To any of Rhaenyra’s supporters waiting for any fracture that they might widen into a wound?”

He watches you for a long moment, the firelight throwing half of his face into shadow. 

“You sound like my mother,” he sighs, dismissive. 

Your throat works as you swallow thickly, your hands tightening into fists at your sides before you catch yourself and will them to relax. 

“I have spent many years away from this court and even I can still see it plainly,” you start, your voice low enough to draw his attention once more. “Let me speak the words everyone else here is too frightened to say.”

That gives him pause, you see it in the way a muscle jumps in his cheek, in the way his shoulders tense and his fingers tighten around the arm of his chair. 

“The servants speak. Soon the city will, then the realm. It will get back to Rhaenyra and she will use it as a weapon in her hand before you ever have the chance to drum up a counterattack,” you say quickly, not wanting to give him a chance to cut you off. “You are not daft, Aemond. Surely you know this to be true.”

“The city will believe whatever it is commanded to believe.”

“No,” you shake your head, brows slightly raised. “It will believe whatever best explains its fear, which is precisely why you cannot remain here.” 

The words hang between you before he gives a dry, humorless laugh. Disappointment flashes across his face, as if he’d hoped you had come for a reason other than to parrot his mother’s words at him. 

“So,” he sighs, nodding once to himself, “this is why you came.”

“Daemon sits at Harrenhal gathering men beneath Rhaenyra’s banners while you remain behind these walls waiting for the war to arrive at your doorstep,” you press on, unwilling to surrender any ground you may have been granted. His eye follows you immediately, dropping only for a heartbeat before lifting again as though nothing had happened. “Every day he’s left unchallenged, another river lord bends the knee and more men join his host.”

Aemond’s expression betrays nothing as you continue, though you don’t miss the way his lips press together in annoyance. 

“This war hinges on the Riverlands,” you say, determined to get the words out. “You know that as well as anyone.”

“And so my aunt would have me abandon my capital.”

“I would have you seize this initiative before it is too late.”

“And leave the city leaderless while my dearest brother remains missing?” His eye narrows, the corners of his lips twitching into an incredulous smirk. 

“You have a council,” you try. “And Prince Daeron, and your mother—”

“My mother is a fool,” he interrupts, “a snake with two tongues, so poisoned by Rhaenyra that she cannot see Harrenhal for what it is—a trap.”

Inhaling a shuddered breath, you bite at your bottom lip, swallowing thickly. 

“Daemon wants you to hesitate,” you counter, “by remaining here, you’re merely obliging him.”

For the first time since you entered, he doesn’t appear to have anything to say in return. His lips tighten as he glances around the dim chambers, blinking while his chest rises and falls unsteadily. You think of Alicent in the gardens, hiding her bloodied cuticles beneath folded hands, of the grief in her voice. You think of Daeron deflating by inches beneath the weight of his brother’s cool assessment. 

You think of the boy after Driftmark, choking on the pain he would rather swallow than share. 

He scoffs, the sound almost like a laugh, if there were any warmth to it. “You have been in Oldtown too long, aunt,” he says sharply, “surrounded by maesters that flatter themselves to believe that wars are won upon maps rather than by the men who fight them.”

“And you have been here too long if you believe this city would not fall were Rhaenyra forced to challenge you head on.”

He falters once more, glancing about the room for a split second before his expression hardens once more.

“I have Vhagar,” he starts with an easy confidence, shrugging his shoulders just slightly as if any counter to her mere presence means nothing at all, “and Tessarion, the city watch, scores of soldiers—”

“You hear yourself, don’t you?” You murmur before you can stop yourself, mouth shutting tightly as Aemond goes quiet, his stare cutting as he glares at you. Even as your pulse seems to falter in your chest, you cannot help but feel a small thrill shoot down your spine as irritation flashes plainly over his face—the first true sign of any weakness he may have left. 

“You think me ambitious,” he mutters after a tense moment, his voice slightly softer than it had been before. 

“I think you are too intelligent not to understand how this ends.”

He huffs, annoyed, and shakes his head incredulously. The harshness you’d managed to strip away before climbs back into his angular features and when he speaks next, it’s with the same condescension one would use to scold a small child. 

“Aegon abandoned the throne, he fled,” he starts, each word slow and measured. “He was never a man, not as he should’ve been,” he continues, his voice carrying an edge sharp enough to cut. “He remained a boy who drank too much and hid behind skirts because no one expected him to become anyone worth following.”

The more he speaks, the clearer you see why your sister fears him so—his viciousness rarely begins with invention, each word carries a truth to it that he’s learned to observe and sharpen until it becomes useful to him. 

“And you?” you ask, determined not to falter further—to see this through. “You’re sure you want it?”

His eye narrows. “The throne?”

“The burden of it,” you murmur, tilting your head just slightly as you regard him. “The very same that crushed your brother under its weight and led Viserys to become what little he became.”

For an instant, it’s as if the room tightens around the question, tensing like the air itself is waiting for a blow. 

Aemond rises then, unhurriedly, as if he’s simply grown bored of sitting rather than because you’ve struck anything near vulnerable. It strikes you once more how tall he’s become, formidable and fearsome enough to make good on the threats he utters. Whatever softness remained in him from childhood has been cleanly carved away, replaced with discipline and war. 

“I want victory,” he answers, taking a few measured steps toward you. 

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No,” he concedes, pursing his lips, “but it is the only answer that matters.”

“Or it’s the answer men give when the truth is less flattering.”

His head tilts at that as he comes to a stop before you, hands clasped behind his back. The firelight dancing over his face makes the sapphire in his eye socket glimmer, beautiful and infinitely dangerous all at once. 

“And what truth do you imagine you’ve uncovered, aunt?”

A small voice in the back of your mind bids you to stop—anyone wiser most likely would—but you tamp it down, throat working as you swallow against the nervous tightness at the back of it. Alicent had not sent you here to be wise, not entirely. 

“You deal in cruelty,” you start slowly, watching him as closely as he watches you, “because you are scared—terrified of seeming weak.”

The silence that follows is immediate and absolute, like all the air has been pulled from the room. 

“Careful,” he mutters lowly from between clenched teeth, the word venomous enough to have your hair standing on end. 

“But you’re not weak, you never were,” you press on, using the split second of surprise that crosses his face to step forward just enough to rest a hand lightly on his shoulder, ignoring the wanting shiver that moves through you at the contact. “You have the makings of a great king—a better king than Aegon could’ve been, you said as much yourself.”

His lips part, but no sound comes out. For a terrifying instant, he seems caught between pulling away entirely and giving in. Then his lilac eye darts to your lips, so quickly you wonder if you imagined it as your heart seizes in your chest.

The gesture strikes something buried deep in your memory of a boy scarcely older than eleven blushing scarlet when one of Aegon’s lordling friends had laughingly declared that he would make some maiden very happy one day. He had looked at you then with exactly the same startled intensity before fleeing from the room altogether. 

“I know you, Aemond,” you say softly, pressing half a step closer. Your hand shifts, moving from his shoulder to his chest, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing beneath your fingertips.

“You have been away half of my life, you cannot—”

His eye flickers downward, following the movement of your hand where it rests against his chest. It’s such an ordinary thing—so quiet, so simple—that for one instant, you see him as he once was: no taller than your neckline, questioning you about whether it was better to be strong or kind. The illusion is gone almost as quickly as it comes, swallowed beneath the hard line of his jaw as his gaze meets yours once more. 

“And still, I know you,” you murmur, victory within your sights, “I loved you—”

For the briefest of instances, he goes completely still before you. Every part of him seems to lock up, as if the words struck a part of his mind that cannot make sense of them. His lilac eye glistens, and your lungs tighten, and—

His hand is around your throat, not crushing but firm enough to silence you.

“Loved me?” he echoes, his voice dangerously soft as he leans in close enough that you can feel his breath ghost over your lips. “Is this how you show it? By coming to whisper pretty words? By lecturing me about being some frightened boy?” His fingers tighten just slightly, enough to make your next inhale a struggle.

“Tell me,” he growls, “do I look like a boy to you now?” His thumb presses harder against the hollow of your throat, his eye blazing with something dangerously close to satisfaction as he studies the way your pulse flutters beneath his touch. 

Your throat works beneath this palm as you eke out a feeble, half-formed whimper, your hands scrambling for purchase against his forearm. Knees weakening, you shake your head as much as his grip will allow, not daring to take your eyes off of his. A strange pins and needles feeling begins to grow beneath your skin as the edges of your vision blur, and then darken. 

Blessedly, he loosens his grip just enough to allow you to suck in a lungful of air—gasping, heaving, and spluttering. 

You had been so close only moments ago, you had seen the cracks in him. Perhaps, a small, desperate part of you thinks, if I give him this—

“I was—I was merely trying to counsel you—”

The moment your feeble protests reach his ears, Aemond’s patience shatters. A derisive scoff escapes him as he drags you toward the chair he’d occupied earlier, his grip on your shoulder unrelenting. The chair groans faintly as he shoves you over its arm, your body bent at the waist beneath his hands while your breaths come in ragged, uneven gasps. Your fingers dig into the material of it as you brace yourself, nearly forced onto your tip-toes. 

His voice, when he speaks, is a blade pressed to you—cold and unyielding. 

“Counsel?” He sneers, leaning over you, his weight pinning you in place. “You mistake your place, aunt. You are not my advisor, not my equal.” His hand finds the back of your neck, fingers tightening just enough to have you stilling beneath him. “I will not tolerate deception, no matter how prettily you dress it up.”

You pant, whining as the arm of the chair digs into your waist, though you don’t dare move, even as your cheek is pressed against the seat cushion. You nearly jolt as he presses more firmly against you, eyes widening as the hard line of his arousal becomes more and more prominent. 

“A-Aemond, please, just—just stop and think,” you try, knowing well that that’s a bygone notion. His hips move against you and, shamefully, a shiver rolls down your spine—a mixture of anxiety and something far more treacherous. “I wasn’t—wasn’t trying to—”

“You thought yourself clever, didn’t you?” he murmurs, his free hand tracing the curve of your hip with mocking gentleness. “Coming here to question me, to control me, as though I would simply bow my head and thank you for the wisdom.” His fingers dig more harshly into your skin, hard enough to bruise. “You were wrong.”

Your cheeks flush somehow further with each word he utters, his touch like fire on your skin. Even as your head spins, you desperately try to think back to your reason for coming to him at all—Alicent, Daeron, the city itself.

“I—I shouldn’t have pushed you,” you say, voice trembling. “I have never been your—your enemy, Aemond,” you pant, shaking your head as best you can as you attempt to look over your shoulder, to catch his gaze. “I only want what’s best—”

He lets out a low, dark chuckle as he presses a hand over your mouth, silencing any protests you have left. His fingers flex slightly, savoring the warmth of your lips beneath his palm, the way your breath hitches in surprise. He leans down, his voice a whisper against your ear, low with intent. 

“You still think of me as a child,” he says, his free hand bundling the silk of your gown against your skin as he drags your skirts higher and higher with a deliberate slowness, baring your skin to him. “As though I’m little more than some thoughtless brute, such as Aegon.”

Whimpering beneath his palm, it settles over you—for the first time all evening—how woefully unprepared you were to come here, to face him. 

You squeeze your eyes shut as your skin warms as a traitorous pang of desire rises within you when his palm trails up the back of your thigh, possessive and firm but laced with an impossible reverence that steals what little air remains in your lungs. 

“They gave you away to Oldtown,” he mutters so softly you wonder if he realizes he’s spoken at all, “when you should’ve been mine.”

Settling on the curve of your backside, his fingers press against the soft flesh there and a satisfied hum escapes him as firelight catches the arousal between your thighs—proof that your body knows its place even if your tongue struggles to obey. 

“All that talk, and yet so quick to yield,” he murmurs, dragging his fingers through the slick heat of you, his voice dripping with cruel amusement. His fingers slide deeper, teasing at your entrance but not yet granting the sweet relief of filling you—not yet. “Tell me, which part of you should I believe? Your sweet words, or your traitorous body?”

Your body seems to move of its own accord as you squirm, chasing the press of his fingers as much as your position will allow. A muffled whine spills from you as your walls spasm around nothing, instinct driving you. 

He withdraws his hand abruptly, leaving you empty and shuddering, before replacing it with the one over your mouth, smearing your own wetness against your lips and cheeks. 

“You shame yourself for this, don’t you?” he murmurs, shifting just enough to free his cock from his trousers, his length already hard and heavy against your thigh, making your skin prickle with apprehension. He groans as he drags his tip through your slick folds, teasing but not giving in quite yet. “How long has it been since someone’s had you properly, sweet aunt? Since you’ve been reminded of your place?”

Panting, you press back against him as he taunts you, need threaded through each movement. 

His palm presses harder against your lips as he pushes inside with a single, brutal thrust, filling you in one smooth motion. A sharp, satisfied exhale escapes him at the feel of you—tight, wet, his. His free hand rests at your hip, gripping tightly as he holds you in place. 

“Mmph!” you mewl, squirming as your feet falter against the stone floor, knees weakening at the stretch of him. Your vision blurs, eyes nearly rolling to the back of your head. 

“This is how you should be—how you should’ve always been,” he hisses, his voice rough with arousal and something darker—something dangerously possessive. “By my side, as my queen—not hidden away beneath duty.” He pulls back only to snap his hips forward again, forcing a choked gasp from behind his hand.

Nodding, something you’ll tell yourself later was merely a bid to appease him, all you can do is claw at the cushions while he takes.

His pace is unforgiving, each thrust deeper than the last, each one punctuated by the quiet slap of skin against skin. He keeps his hand over your lips, reveling in the sound of your muffled cries, in the way your body clenches around him, in the way you yield—finally, finally—to his will. 

Aemond’s breath comes harsh and hot against your ear as he fucks into you, slowing his strokes to deliberate rolls of his hips while he savors you. His fingers dig into your hip, nails biting against your skin, marking you as his. The sound of your faint pleas only spurs him on, his voice coming as a dark whisper against your back. 

“You thought to counsel me—to command me—when all you truly wanted was this,” he growls, dragging his hand between your legs and moving the pad of his thumb over your clit in rough, punishing circles. His thrusts grow sharper, his cock dragging against your walls in a way that makes your thighs tremble. “To be mine,” he grunts, “just as you always should’ve been.”

His free hand remains firm over your mouth, silencing any retort you might have—not that you could form one, not with the way he’s moving against you, nor with the way pleasure coils tight and desperate in your belly.

“I will win this war for you,” he promises, teeth grazing the curve of your shoulder. “I will mount Daemon’s head on a spike and lay it at your feet, I will throw a feast in your honor, and you will never forget who it was that brought you victory.” His fingers press harder against your clit, his pace unrelenting. “And when it’s done, I will have you in the Sept as my bride,” he murmurs through rough pants. “I will right their wrongs, I swear it to you.”

One of your arms comes up and grabs tightly at his forearm, not to pull him away so much as desperately holding to him, trying to anchor yourself as your eyes squeeze shut. You have no doubt he means what he says, that every promise may as well be sealed with blood. That alone is enough to send a horrible thrill through you as you nod, your mewls silenced by his hand. 

His hips grind against you, causing you to jolt in his hold as pleasure shoots down your spine like lightning. You nearly go limp in his grasp as you hurdle over the edge, sobbing beneath his palm as your release crashes into you like waves against the shore. Your cunt clamps around his length in a harsh rhythm, pulling a deep, satisfied groan from him. 

He savors the way your body ripples against him, convulsing as he continues tormenting your sensitive bud with slow circles, drawing out your climax ruthlessly until you’re twitching beneath him, oversensitive and trembling. 

“There you are,” he pants, voice ragged with barely restrained need as he nips at your shoulder. He growls while he grinds against you, savoring the way your cunt milks him desperately. “You have fought every battle the same way,” he breathes, thrusts growing erratic as his own release builds, “surrendering inch by—Gods—by inch.”

It’s only when he feels his climax cresting that he lifts his hand from your mouth, his fingers smeared with your spit. He pants as he buries himself to the hilt one last time, spilling inside you with a low, possessive snarl. 

He holds you there for a long moment as he pants, his chest heaving against your back while the world slowly seems to right itself once more. 

You slump against the chair as he straightens up with a sigh, pulling himself from you with a quiet groan. A shudder goes through you as a thin trickle of his spend slips down your inner thigh, warm against your skin while you try to steady the frantic rhythm of your heart, listening as he tucks himself back into his trousers. 

Your joints protest as you rise, fingers trembling slightly while you take the time to smooth out the rumpled silk of your gown back into some sort of order. No amount of careful hands will erase the evidence of the night, nor the ache that settles deep within your bones. You can hear him moving about the space behind you, though you don’t look toward him, not yet. 

Instead, you busy yourself with fastening what can be fastened, with straightening out your hair and bodice, grateful for anything that delays whatever words must surely come next. 

When, at last, you gather the courage to face him, you find him standing with one hand raised and resting lightly on the mantel, his back half turned to you. Firelight throws restless shadows over the sharp planes of his face as he stares into the embers, his expression foreign to you. 

You open your mouth, though you’re not entirely sure what to say. How are you meant to return to the Riverlands or politics or Alicent or anything at all after that?

“I will go,” his words are so quiet that for one bewildered second, you wonder whether you imagined them. He doesn’t turn to face you. “I will ride for Harrenhal.”

You simply stand there, your hand still resting against the fastening of your gown as you search his rigid profile for a clue as to what tipped the scale, only to find none. The silence stretches as you wait for him to speak further, perhaps of triumph or mockery, or another cruel lesson delivered in that same measured tone. You had imagined that, if he yielded at all, it would come only after another battle of words. That he would force you to defend every point, every strategy, every warning you had brought on Alicent’s behalf. 

Instead, the words come almost carelessly, spoken into the dim quiet of the chambers as though he’d made the decision long before you’d even walked through the door. 

“Why—”

“I’ll summon the council before dawn,” he continues, glancing toward you just enough for the fire to catch the sapphire in his eye. 

The distance between the quiet, dutiful boy you had once known and the man standing before you now has never felt wider, nor more perilous. 

Aemond inclines his head once—a dismissal. 

Nodding, you make your way toward the chamber door, unable to shake the cold chill of uncertainty that follows you. 

You find your sister upon the western battlements just after dawn as the sun begins to rise over the waters of the bay, staining the sky in muted shades of lavender and gold. She hardly acknowledges your presence as you come to stand beside her and for several minutes, neither of you speaks. 

Her hair drifts lazily about her shoulders with the breeze, while the skirt of your dressing gown stirs about your ankles. 

“What did you say to him?” she asks eventually, her eyes never leaving the broad fields beyond the city walls. 

You think back to the night before, back to the tense conversation that had transpired between you and your nephew—if you could even call it that. You think of his hands on your skin and of the fire dying low in the hearth, of his hand upon the mantel while he stared into the ashes, as if the answer had been waiting for him there all along. 

“Enough, I suppose,” you answer quietly, your brows furrowed. 

Alicent closes her eyes beside you, not bothering to question you further. 

Movement begins to ripple across a distant field; at first, it’s difficult to distinguish one cluster of men from another. Soldiers scatter outward with practiced haste while dragonkeepers weave between them. 

Then, she moves. 

Vhagar rises slowly, so immense that, for one breathless moment, she resembles another hill unfolding itself from the landscape. Bronze scales catch the first rays of the sun, each ancient movement carrying the certainty of something that has outlived kingdom upon kingdom, and may outlive countless more. 

Even from a distance, you imagine you can feel her weight settling through the ground beneath your feet. 

Your chest lurches at the knowledge that he’s there, saddled to her great back—the boy who once wandered after you through shadowy halls, who had once asked whether good men ever made good kings. 

Vhagar spreads her wings, the first beats of them sending dust spiraling across the fields before she lifts from the earth and climbs steadily to the north, becoming smaller and smaller with each passing second. 

Beside you, Alicent watches until they have become little more than a dark shape against the morning light. When she speaks, her voice is little more than a mote of dust carried in the wind. 

“Have we done the right thing?”

The question hangs between you, unanswered, a nearly tangible thing. 

How could you have done anything otherwise? If he had remained, the city may have burned, thousands may have perished. And, yet, as he goes…

Your gaze follows the shrinking silhouette until even Vhagar’s impossibly large wings disappear into the pale morning haze, the rider on her back no more than a pinprick against the clouds.