The maester read the terms of the arrangement over supper, as though he were reading a list of household accounts. Even now at the Red Keep, after quite the travel from your home, your father sat across from you with his hands folded on the table and his eyes fixed on the tablecloth, and you sat very still and still thought of nothing at all, because that was the only way to keep yourself from doing something foolish.

You had the urge, briefly and vividly, to stand up from the table and walk out the room and keep walking, out of the Red Keep entirely, out through the gates and down to the harbour and onto the first ship that was going somewhere your father hadn’t already arranged. But you knew better than that. They would drag you back before tide turned. They always found a way too.

“The betrothal will be formalized within this moon period,” the maester said, glancing up from his scroll to look at you with the mild apologetic expression of a man delivering weather. “The wedding is to follow swiftly after. Prince Baelor has agreed to it, so I do not see why it shouldn’t go forward without trouble.” 

Without trouble. As though trouble were something that lived in logistics. As though the trouble had nothing to do with you sitting in this room and being talked about like a parcel to be sent on.

Prince Baelor. You had heard the name your entire life. Everyone had. You grew up on the stories the way other children grew up on songs. Baelor Targaryen, who had held the line at Ashford when lesser men had broken and run. Baelor Targaryen, who had ridden through a burning village to pull three smallfolk children from a collapsed roof, and emerged the other side with his cloak in flames and not a word of complaint about it. Baelor Targaryen, who had put down the Blackfyre Rebellion with cool efficiency that men still talked about at feasts, their cups raised and their voices hushed with something that sat right at the border of reverence and fear. 

They called him Breakspear. They called him that because no one had ever broken him. 

You thought about that even after the maester excused himself and your father finally looked up from the tablecloth with the expression of a man who believed he was being generous. 

"You'll be a princess," he said. "You understand what that means."

"Yes," you said, and your voice had no happiness in it, no solace, nothing that could be mistaken for either of those things. "I understand."

He took that as agreement, because he always took silence and stillness as agreement, and perhaps that was your fault too.

You lay awake in the guest chambers they had assigned you, the ones you would occupy until the wedding made you someone’s wife, and you turned your father’s ambition over in your mind like stones you already knew the shape of. He wanted children from this union. Heirs who carried Tyrell blood and Targaryen blood. Not giving any mind that Baelor already had two sons by his first wife, the one who had died in her labours years ago, giving birth to Prince Baelor's youngest son. Your father made it clear to you that he wanted his blood in the line of succession. He wanted to be able to look at the Iron Throne one day, and say, somewhere in that, there is something of mine.

You did not want that. You did not want any of it. You did not want to be near the prince, did not want to give him heirs on top of the ones he already had, did not want to spend your life in service of an ambition that had never once asked what you wanted from your own. 

Two sons was enough for any man. 

That night, sleep did not find you. 

You saw him for the first time in the courtyard of the Red Keep, three days after your party had arrived. He was speaking to two knights in riding gear, his back half-turned to you, and your first thought was that he was taller than you had expected. Your second thought was that he looked like a man who had never in his life needed to raise his voice to make a room go quiet. 

He turned when your footsteps scraped the stone, and you caught the full measure of him at once. The grey decorating his beard in patches. The broad set of his shoulders, built for armour even in plain clothes. The mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue, that settled on you with an attention so direct it was almost physical.

"My lady of Highgarden," he said, and there was a small smile on his lips, something measured and polite, as he tilted his head slightly down to look at you.

"Your Grace," you answered, almost too quickly, and kept your eyes down for a beat longer than you needed to, studying the worn stone at your feet like it might offer you something useful.

He waited for you to look up. You got the sense he was patient at waiting. You got the sense he had waited out many things larger than this.

"You've come a long way," he said.

"Indeed," you said, because you had to say something. "The road was kind. We had good weather, by the gods' grace."

"Did you."

"Yes."

A silence settled between you that felt less like discomfort and more like he was simply observing you, cataloguing something at a pace you couldn't rush. You smoothed your skirts with both hands, a nervous habit, and hated yourself for it almost immediately.

"I hope you are pleasant with having to wed me," he said, pausing briefly, watching you twist your fingers together in front of you. "Are you?"

No. The word arrived in your mind before anything else did, clean and immediate. No, I am not pleased, I am frightened and resentful and I have not slept properly in two weeks and every story I have ever heard about you ends with someone not getting back up.

But you could not say any of that. Your father would have your tongue before the sentence was finished.

"Do not do that to your fingers, my lady," Baelor said, interrupting the spiral before it could swallow you whole. "You'll do harm to them."

You stopped instantly. The command was not unkind, but it was a command, and your body obeyed it before your mind had finished deciding whether to. The smile that had been on his face when he first turned was gone now, though the faint softness underneath it remained, held carefully in place.

"I'm starting to wonder if you aren't pleased with the match," he said, his voice entirely calm, the way deep water is calm. "You still haven't answered."

"I apologize, Your Grace." The words came out smooth and easy, rehearsed without meaning to be. "I am pleased. It is my duty to be, and if our union strengthens the bonds between our houses, then I am glad of it."

A lie. A very good one. You had been practicing variations of it for weeks.

He looked at you for a moment longer than felt comfortable, long enough that you wondered if he knew, long enough that you felt the specific heat of being studied by someone who was accustomed to reading situations accurately and quickly. Then he exhaled slowly through his nose and looked out across the courtyard, giving you the small mercy of his profile instead of his full attention.

"A diplomatic answer," he said.

"I've been told I give those."

"I don't doubt it." He glanced back at you, brief and measuring. "I've been told you paint."

The change of subject was abrupt enough to unsettle you, which you suspected might have been the point. "I do," you said carefully. "Sometimes."

"What do you paint?"

The question was so plain and without ceremony that it caught you off guard. You had been braced for something political, something that required a careful answer, and instead you got this. "Flowers, mostly. And the water. We have a lake at home, on the south side of the grounds. I've painted it perhaps a hundred times."

"And it still interests you?" Not sarcastically. Genuinely curious in the way of someone who finds focus in other people interesting rather than puzzling.

"Every season it looks different," you said. "Every hour of the day. I don't think I could exhaust it."

Something shifted in his expression then, small and real, the faint softening of a face that held itself deliberately composed as a matter of long habit.

"I have kept you long enough," he said, and inclined his head to you. "I'll see you at supper, my lady."

He walked past you back into the keep, and you stood in the empty courtyard with your hands still at your sides and tried to decide what you made of that, and found that you couldn't. The wind came through and lifted the loose edge of your sleeve, and somewhere above you a bird crossed the grey sky, and you stood there until the sound of his footsteps had faded entirely.

Then you went inside, and sat with your ladies, and smiled, and said nothing at all. Because that’s the order of the way things were here.

The feast was loud and long and you drank your wine too fast and smiled until your face ached. Baelor sat at the head of the table to your left in the same dark cloth he had been married in, the three-headed dragon embroidered at his chest, and you had been a wife now for approximately six hours and you could feel the full weight of it settling over you like armour you hadn't been measured for.

You had married a man who had killed people.

Not cruelly. Not without cause. But he had, and the stories were very clear on that, and they did not try to soften it, not even for the women who were being handed to him. He had done what needed doing and done it well and the realm had benefited and all of that was true and none of it made a difference to the part of you that was sitting at this feast watching the candlelight move across his hands and thinking about all the things those hands had done before they had touched your jaw this morning.

You did not know how much wine you had drunk. Enough. Not enough. Somewhere in between. You had lost count around the third cup and stopped caring around the fourth, and the noise of the feast pressed in from all sides, laughter and music and the scrape of chairs on stone, and somewhere in the middle of all of it you sat very still and rethought your entire life from the beginning. 

Merry found you eventually, your cousin with her pretty laugh and her gift for making any room feel smaller and warmer. She dropped into the seat beside you and took your hand under the table and squeezed once, and you squeezed back, and neither of you said anything about it.

"He keeps looking over," she said quietly into your ear, after a while.

"Does he?"

"He's been watching you all evening."

"He's probably worried I'll knock something over," you said. Merry laughed. Across the table Baelor said something low to the man beside him and did not look up from his cup, and you watched him for one unguarded moment before you looked away.

You watched him sometimes, after that, in the spaces between conversations. When he wasn't looking. You tried to read him the way you read the lake, the way you looked at a thing from different angles until it gave you something. He did not gesture when he spoke. He did not laugh loudly. He listened more than he talked, which among men of his station was genuinely unusual, and when he did speak the people around him leaned in without seeming to realize they were doing it. Like plants toward light. Like something involuntary.

What surprised you, later, was the bedding ceremony. Or rather, the absence of one.

Baelor had refused it. Quietly, without spectacle, in the way he seemed to do most things, and the court had no choice but to fold around his decision and pretend they had never expected otherwise. You heard it from Merry, who had heard it from one of the Kingsguard, and you stood there absorbing the information with a feeling you didn't immediately have a name for. Relief, you decided. It was relief. Strange and unexpected and slightly humiliating to feel so strongly, but there it was.

Even so, when the door to your new chambers clicked shut behind you both and you heard the latch catch, your chest tightened all the same.

The room was full of candles, dozens of them, casting everything in soft shifting gold. Someone had arranged fresh flowers near the window, roses among them, and turned down the bed with the kind of careful attention that made the whole thing feel more deliberate, more inevitable. You crossed to the window and stood with your arms folded loosely at your waist and looked out at the dark city below and tried to remember what breathing was supposed to feel like.

Then he said your name.

Not my lady. Your name, and it sat differently in his mouth that it did in anyone else’s. Lower, somehow. More considered. 

You turned from the window. He was watching you with that same quality he always had, the direct unhurried attention, but there was something else underneath it now. Something careful. Like a man approaching a problem he didn't want to make worse.

"You don't have to worry so much," he said, and moved to the table across the room, pouring wine with his back half-turned to you. His hands were steady. Of course they were. "We won't consummate it tonight."

The words landed and your stomach dropped, but not from relief. From something closer to dread, the specific crawling dread of a daughter who could already hear her father's voice somewhere in the back of her skull telling her she had failed before she had even begun. It had only been a couple hours of being a wife and you already failed short. You dropped your gaze to the floor. Your fingers found each other, and you started pulling at the skin around your knuckles without meaning to.

"Did I do something, my prince?" The words came out smaller than you intended. Quieter.

He set the goblet down. You heard him turn.

"You don't have to keep calling me that," he said. "We're married now."

"What would you prefer?"

"My name," he said. "Just my name."

You pulled in a slow breath. "Have I done something wrong, Baelor?"

His name in your mouth felt foreign and right at the same time, like a word in a language you had been studying a long time and had only just spoken aloud.

He crossed the room toward you, not quickly, not with any urgency, just steadily, and he stopped when he reached you and put two fingers under your chin and tilted your face up. His touch was warm. Dry. Unhurried.

You were not expecting the kiss he pressed to your forehead. Soft, brief, almost nothing, and yet it stayed on your skin after he pulled back, like the impression of something.

When you looked up at him your lips were parted and you had nothing to say.

"No," he said, simply. "You haven't done anything wrong." He searched your face for a moment, his mismatched eyes moving between yours. "I don't want my wife drunk and anxious the first time. I'd rather you come to it because you trust me enough. Not because the court expects it of you before morning."

A silence opened up between you. Outside, the city murmured on, indifferent.

"That could take a long time," you said, and you meant it lightly but it didn't come out quite that way.

"I know," he said. And then, without any particular weight to it, like a man stating a fact he had already made peace with: "I can wait."

You looked at him standing there in the candlelight, large and steady and entirely serious, and you thought about all the stories, all the things they said about him, the battles and the efficiency and the men who had not gotten back up, and you thought: none of them mentioned this part. None of them thought to.

In the weeks that followed, you learned that baelor woke before dawn, every morning, and could be found in the training yard before the light had fully come. You learned that he ate simply and without fuss and that feasts bored him, that he tolerated them because they were required and endured them the way another man might endure a long sea voyage.

 You were still frightened of him. Not in the way you had been that first night, with your arms crossed and your heart hammering. You didn’t know how he made you feel. 

Baelor noticed your distance, of course. How could he not. You were always in bed before he came to the chambers, feigning sleep or close enough to it that he never tested the difference. You declined his invitations to share supper with excuse after careful excuse, a headache, correspondence from home, fatigue from the afternoon. He accepted each one without comment, and somehow that was worse than if he had pressed you. You were grateful, most of all, that he had not yet commanded the marriage to be consummated. That was the thing you held onto.

You felt guilty about it sometimes. In small quiet moments, when you were honest with yourself. But guilt was a feeling you could set down and pick back up. Fear sat differently in the body.

Every other day there was a new rumour. Your ladies brought them to you the way birds bring things back to a nest, little bright pieces of nothing that accumulated into something. You had no choice but to sit and listen, just as you were doing now, in the small solar off the main hall where the afternoon light came in sideways and made everything look warmer than it was.

"He is a great man," said Elayne Hightower, in the tone of someone conveying information she believed you were too simple to already possess. She was one of the ladies assigned to you upon your arrival, and in the weeks since you had arrived at a quiet and absolute conclusion: you did not like her. Not even a little. She was the kind of woman who delivered cruelty with a smile and then looked confused when anyone minded. "A great man in every sense of the word, if you take my meaning."

She let the last words hang there and looked at you sideways, watching for a reaction.

You took a slow sip from your goblet and gave her nothing.

"Surely you've consummated the marriage by now," she said, leaning forward slightly, dropping her voice in the conspiratorial register of someone who wanted an audience but pretended otherwise. She set her goblet down on the table and smiled at you with all her teeth. "Do tell. How was it?"

The bluntness of it made your eyes go wide before you could stop them. "I do not wish to speak of such matters with you, Lady Hightower."

She rolled her eyes, the gesture practiced and a little bored. "No need to be so shy about it, princess. Virgins always get so delicate when someone brings it up. It's rather sweet, really." The word sweet landed the way a small blade lands, point first. The other ladies around you had gone very still, a few of them hiding their mouths behind their goblets. "It's nothing to be ashamed of, not knowing what you're about."

"Mind your tongue," you said, and you meant it to come out firm and it came out soft, which was worse.

She made a small sound with her teeth, a dismissive little tsk, and waved her hand as though you'd said something tedious. Then she tilted her head at you, her smile going thin and sharp at the edges.

"Well. If you won't share, I suppose I'll simply tell you how he spent the remainder of the evening. Once he was done with you, that is." She paused for effect. Let the silence do its work. "He came to me."

The room went very quiet.

You sat completely still. You were aware of every person in that room, every averted eye, every carefully controlled expression. You could hear the city outside the window. You could hear your own pulse.

You thought about the night of your wedding. Baelor helping you out of your dress without making anything of it. Baelor sitting with you until you had went into a dreamless sleep, after the many wines you had that evening. You had thought, lying there in the dark, that whatever he was, he was at least that. Decent. Trying.

But then. A man of his station and appetites, refused by his new wife night after night. It was not hard to imagine. It was, in fact, very easy to imagine, and you hated how easily the picture assembled itself.

You felt the anger arrive before you'd decided to feel it. It was different from the distant background dread you'd been carrying for weeks. This was sharp. Immediate. Something with edges.

Your brows pulled together without meaning them to.

"I can tell you the particulars if you like," Elayne said, pleasantly. "He talks you through it, I'll say that much. Very thorough. He did write me this morning, actually, to say he'd be visiting again soon." She glanced at the other ladies with a little lift of her chin, a performer acknowledging her audience. "I suppose things between you two haven't quite found their footing yet."

You stood up.

It happened before you had finished deciding to do it. One moment you were sitting and the next you were on your feet, and the room seemed to go even quieter somehow, the way rooms do when something shifts.

"That is my husband you are speaking of," you said. Your voice was very even. You were rather proud of how even it was, given that your hands were trembling slightly at your sides and you could feel the humiliation pressing up behind your eyes like water behind a dam. "Whatever the circumstance, whatever your history with him, you will not speak his name to me in this manner again. If you do, I will take the matter directly to His Grace the King. Do you understand me?"

Elayne looked up at you from her seat with that same thin smile, and said, "I've hurt you. I'm sorry for it, truly," in a voice that contained not one single grain of apology.

The lady beside her pressed her lips together to hide something that was almost certainly a smile.

You did not say another word. You turned and walked out of the room, and you did not wait for your knight to fall into step behind you. You walked until the corridor bent and the solar was out of sight, and then you stopped and pressed your back against the stone wall and breathed and looked at the ceiling and thought about absolutely nothing at all, which was very hard to do, and which you forced yourself to manage anyway.

You stayed there until you trusted your face again. Then you went back to your chambers and sat at your window and watched the world outside until the light faded, and you did not want to think about Elayne Hightower, and you certainly did not want to think about Baelor. 

You didn't hear the door open. Your eyes were distant, fixed on nothing in particular beyond the glass, and your meals had come and gone untouched all day, the chambermaids cycling in and out like tides, and you had let them. Appetite required a kind of presence you did not currently have.

Without meaning to you, as Baelor spoke your name, as you turned to face him you glared at him, a pouty look on your face. 

"Is it true?" The words left your mouth before you had decided to say them. You didn't know where the nerve came from. Only that the jealousy had been sitting in you all day like something swallowed wrong, and underneath it the thing you had been less willing to look at: that somewhere in the weeks of distance and avoidance and careful politeness, you had grown fond of him. Quietly. Without meaning to. You had been seeking him out even as you pulled away. Maybe that was why he had gone elsewhere. Maybe the fault was yours and you hated that thought most of all.

You hated her. You were certain of it now. 

Baelor looked confused. More than confused, actually. Surprised, in the specific way of a man who had learned not to expect much and was recalibrating in real time. You were always the one who waited to be spoken to first, who answered in half-sentences and agreeable nods. You speaking first, and like this, meant something was wrong. His brows drew together. "What's true, princess?" he said quietly, his eyes moving over your face.

"Do not make me say it." Your voice was unsteady and you resented it. "It hurts enough to think about. Let alone say it to your face."

He took a step toward you and you looked down and that was when he noticed your hands, your fingers picking at the skin around your nails the way they always did when you were trying not to cry.

"How many times," he said, and his voice was very calm, "have I told you to stop doing that."

"Do not act as though you care," you said, and your voice cracked on the last word and you hated yourself for it. You looked up at him. "Did you care when you went to Elayne Hightower on the night of our wedding? Did you think of me at all? People call you honourable. They say it like it is the truest thing about you."

Something moved across his face. Something small and quick. He pressed his lips together and the corner of his mouth shifted, barely, the suggestion of something that in any other moment might have been amusement.

"What is funny about this?" You stared at him. "Do you know what it felt like, sitting there while she told me in front of everyone. While they smiled behind their goblets and thought I couldn't see."

He closed the distance between you. "What did she say." Not a question. A quiet command.

"Vile things. Things I don't wish to repeat." Your voice broke properly then and you turned away and walked toward the window because you needed something to look at that wasn't his face. You could feel the tears and you refused them, crossing your arms over your chest.

You startled when his hands found your shoulders. His fingers gathered your hair and moved it aside, and then the scratch of his beard against the slope of your neck, the press of his lips there, warm and deliberate, and his hands settling at your waist, drawing you back against him. You let him, because you were tired and hurt and his hands were warm, and some part of you had been wanting something like this for weeks without knowing how to say so.

"Tell me what she said," he said against your hair.

You told him all of it. The smile on Elayne's face. The details she offered without being asked. The letter she claimed he had sent that very morning. Your voice stayed mostly level and only broke once, near the end. His hands did not move from your waist the entire time.

"She said you'd promised to see her this evening," you finished. "It was humiliating. I never want to see those women again. You have made me friendless in a court that was never mine to begin with."

You pulled away and turned to face him. He looked down at you with an expression so steady and intent it was almost hard to hold.

"Were they laughing," he said.

"Smiling. Murmuring. Close enough."

"Then why would you call them your friends."

You opened your mouth and closed it. He had a point and you hated that he had a point and you were not going to let it distract you. "That is beside the matter. You still haven't answered me." The next words came out low and laced with something that surprised even you. "Whether you truly found comfort between her legs on the night you wed me."

You lifted your chin at him. "If you promised to see her this evening, then go. I won't keep you."

He held your gaze for a long moment. And then, very quietly, "do you think I would do that to you."

You stared at him.

The question sat between you, very quiet, and he did not move while he waited for you to answer it. He just looked at you the way he always looked at things, with that patient undivided attention that had unnerved you from the beginning and unnerved you still, though differently now. Less like standing in the path of something and more like being seen.

"She said you did," you said finally. Your voice came out smaller than you wanted. "She said it very plainly."

"And you believed her."

It was not an accusation. It was not even a question, quite. 

"I didn't want to," you said. "I tried not to. But I sat in that room and I listened to her describe you and I thought about all the nights I've gone to bed before you came in, and all the suppers I've refused, and I thought—" You stopped. The words felt too honest. Too much of something you hadn't meant to say out loud.

"You thought what," he said.

"I thought that you would have every reason to." You lifted your eyes to his. "I have not been easy. I know that. I have not been what a wife is supposed to be to you and I have known it every day and done nothing about it because I was frightened, and I—" Your voice broke on the last word and you pressed your lips together hard and looked at the ceiling and refused to cry in front of him. Absolutely refused.

His hand came up and curved around your jaw, tilting your face back down toward his. His thumb moved once across your cheekbone, slow and deliberate, the way you might steady something fragile.

"Look at me," he said.

You did. You had no choice when he held your face like that.

"I have not touched Elayne Hightower," he said. "Not on our wedding night and not since. I’ve never done so, and I have no intention of doing so ever." He held your gaze, not blinking, not letting you look away. "I don't know what she told you or why she told it, but it was a lie. Every word of it."

You searched his face the way you searched paintings, looking for the thing that was not right, the detail that would give the lie away. There was nothing. There was only Baelor, steady as he always was, telling you something plainly and without performance, the way he told you everything.

"Why would she say it then," you said. "She had details. She said you wrote to her."

"She is a woman who enjoys the particular power that comes from making other women feel small," he said, without heat or drama, as though he were noting the weather. "And you are new here, and a princess, and a considerable threat to people who were comfortable before you arrived. She said it because she could and because she wanted to see what it would do to you."

Your mouth was dry. "And what did it do to me."

Something shifted in his expression. Softened, in that way that still caught you off guard when it happened. 

"It made you speak to me," he said. "First. Without waiting to be spoken to."

You hadn't thought of it that way. You hadn't thought of much of anything clearly today. You became abruptly and uncomfortably aware of how close he was, his hand still at your face, the warmth of him in the cooling room.

"I made a fool of myself," you said quietly.

"You were jealous," he said. "That's not foolish."

You felt heat climb your neck. "I wasn't—"

"You were." And there was that near-smile again, the one that lived at the very corner of his mouth and barely made it further than that. "I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I'm telling you because I'd rather you know that I noticed and that it mattered to me. That you mattered enough to be jealous over."

You didn't have anything to say to that. You had prepared for denial and deflection and a polite dismissal, you had not prepared for this, for him standing in the candlelight holding your face and telling you plainly that you mattered, without ceremony, without asking for anything back.

"You should have told me," you said finally, because you had to say something and it was the truest thing left. "If she had said those things to you about me you would have told me. You wouldn't have let me believe it."

"No," he agreed. "I wouldn't have." He studied you for a moment. Then: "I'll speak to her."

"Don't." The word came out quickly. "It will only make it worse. It will only give her more to say."

He shakes his head in a silent no. “She won’t, I’ll make sure of it.” 

"Baelor, please." You moved after him as he turned, reaching for his arm without thinking. "I'm asking you not to. She will humiliate me further for it. She will talk about me behind my back to anyone who will listen, she'll make my life a living—"

He kissed you.

Not gently. Not the way he had kissed your forehead on the wedding night, careful and brief and almost impersonal. This was something else entirely. His mouth pressed to yours with a kind of fierce certainty, one hand cradling the back of your neck, his thumb tilting your jaw up, and the sheer unexpectedness of it emptied your mind of every word you had been about to say.

For one stunned moment you simply stood there. Then, without deciding to, your eyes closed and you leaned into it. It was not a polite kiss. It was not the kind of kiss a man gives a woman he is merely fond of. It was hungry and deliberate, all heat and pressure and the slide of his tongue against yours, the faint graze of teeth at your bottom lip, his beard rough against your skin, and it tasted like wine and something underneath it that was just him, and it stole the breath from your lungs so thoroughly that when he finally pulled back you had to remind yourself how lungs worked.

You looked up at him. Your mouth was still parted. You had nothing at all to say. He did not step back. He did not look remotely apologetic. He simply watched you absorb what he had done.

A faint thread of warmth lingered between your lips when he pulled away, and his thumb came up to swipe it from your skin almost absently, eyes never leaving yours.

“That is what you were afraid of,” he said quietly.

You swallowed. “Of being kissed?”

“No.” His thumb pressed once against your lower lip. “Of wanting it.”

Heat climbed your neck.

Before you could answer, he leaned in again, but this time the kiss was slower. Not an interruption. Not a silencing. His mouth moved over yours with intent, coaxing instead of claiming, and when you softened beneath him, when your hand tightened at his chest and your body leaned into his without instruction, he made a low sound of approval in his throat.

“Good girl,” he murmured against your mouth. “That is honest.”

His hands slid down from your shoulders to your waist, broad and steady, and then lower, settling at your hips. He pulled you flush against him, slow enough that you felt the full press of him between you, solid and unmistakable even through layers.

Your breath caught.

He noticed.

“You feel that,” he said, not asking.

“Yes.”

“And you thought I had no appetite.”

The corner of his mouth lifted faintly.

Candlelight had been your sole provider of light for most of the evening. Your tired eyes creased at the corners as you scanned over the various drafts, letters, and requests that had overtaken your dining table, your mind reeling in a dizzying whirl trying to organize it all. Your husband's own duties had piled up of late, with him leaving your bed well before dawn most mornings and secluding himself in his solar far into the night. And on fortunate days when he returned to your chamber earlier than anticipated, he retired to bed earlier than you, with one of his histories in hand and his wine perched on the bedside table; he sipped it carefully, glancing at you between pages. "Do you think the Baratheons and the Tyrells would be tolerant of one another?" you asked in a resigned tone, rubbing your eyes with the back of your wrist.

"Mm," he mused into his glass while he turned the page. His mismatched gaze briefly flicked up to where you sat, lingering on the stubborn jut of your jaw as you muttered thoughtfully to yourself. "I think your eyes need rest, and the issue will resolve itself tomorrow." A grumble of annoyance escaped you. His mouth curved slightly in response as he returned his attention to the book. "I believe Lord Lyonel will find anyone tolerable so long as he has enough ale at his disposal." "Fair point," you huffed in agreement, eyes dragging up to rest on where he sat atop the deep-red covers of your shared bed, clad in a robe as black and silken as a raven's feather. The ties had come loose in the hours since you helped him into it, allowing you a generous view of his lean chest and the dark hairs that adorned it. A familiar heat settled low in your stomach at the sight, knowing he would shed it all soon when you both retired fully for the night. The longer the thought lingered in your mind, the more you felt the ache in your neck and the strain in your wrists. And the more you wished to curl up against his chest and bask in his warmth while he read until his own eyes started to tire. A small draft carried through the room, filling your lungs and snapping you out of your thoughts. You dropped your gaze to the inky cloth you had been using all evening, running it deftly across your hands before you stood, crossing the room to the balcony. "You won't find the answer out there," he called from where he sat, a hint of amusement coloring his voice. You rolled your eyes at that, folding your arms against your chest and propping yourself against the wind-kissed stone of the archway. Each slow inhale of night air eased the tension your mind refused to cast aside. Baelor looked up from his novel once more, noting the contemplative distance in your gaze and the way you chewed on your thumbnail, just like you always did when you were nervous or troubled. His watchful eyes moved over every taut line and gentle curve painted by the faint blue gleam of night across your skin. The fragile silence that had settled between you was soon broken by the soft thud of him closing his book and setting it aside with a sigh. "Come to bed, my love," he commanded quietly, propping himself on his elbow while his gaze dipped briefly to your backside. It had become rare to even speak to him past noon, much less to have him calling you so sweetly to bed, with only the wish to hold you and savor the few moments unburdened by his duties. The familiar tinge of guilt gnawed at the back of your mind, wanting nothing more than to fall into his embrace and let his strong arms and tender hands soothe your constant pondering and the day's aches. But your mind would not rest until you at least had some semblance of structure for the seating chart. When you did not answer after a moment, he pressed further, tilting his head to the side. "My love," he said, a slight edge creeping into his tone. The usual stern crease of his brow deepened as he saw you turn back towards the table.

"Hm?" you mused, making your way back to the table. Your hands immediately found purchase against the hard oak, urgently sifting through scattered papers for your quill as an idea popped into your head. The heavy weight of his stare tracked every movement you made. "Don't make me ask again," he said with that soft-spoken authority that usually made you pause. But in this instance, you had been so consumed by the fleeting idea that you neglected to even hear him rise from the bed with a hushed grunt or notice the unhurried steps he was making towards you now. "I still need to wash my hands and put out the—" You stopped when his slender fingers wrapped around your arm, halting your gestures; his other hand snagged your earlier cloth off the table. His eyes met yours instantly; the dying embers of the hearth melted into the warm amber of his left eye—silvery gleams of moonlight along the tiled floors reflected into the striking blue of his right. A sight that had never failed to enchant you, even more so when you felt him take the cloth tenderly to your fingers, wiping away every worry and idea you had been contemplating. "No more excuses," he stated, raising his brows in the barest of an arch. His eyes never left yours, almost daring you to protest while he worked the cloth over your stained fingers with the leisure and practiced ease of a man who had all the time in the world. Never rough, never chaste, just sure in his movements, sure in bringing you comfort. You held his stare for a long moment, letting out a resigned sigh when you realized any protest you made in your defense would be futile.

"Fine," you conceded, as he licked the edge of his thumb, brushing it tenderly over the worn dot of ink on your cheek until it refused to mark your skin any longer. The gentleness of his touch against your stressed form reminded you of the heaviness that had been settling over you all evening, slow and inevitable as a stone finding the bottom of a pond. "I don't usually have to battle you to get you to lie beside me," he murmured fondly against your forehead, his hand coming to cradle the back of your head as he pulled you into him. "You're right; I usually have to battle you for the privilege," you said, only partially in jest. He chuckled lightly at that, knowing the truth in your words. Your hands glided to the loose opening of his robe, reveling in the warmth of his skin. He hummed at the notion, pulling away just enough so he could rest his calloused palms on your hips, just a bit too low to be proper in any other instance.

"I will deal with the seating arrangement tomorrow," he said, looking down at you, watching the way your eyes followed your fingers as they came up to thread through the grey edges of his beard. Your arms eventually came to rest around his neck, partially resting your tired weight against him.

"Baelor, please—"

"No, I will not hear any of it, no more about this seating arrangement tonight," he stated as he hoisted you up with ease, in spite of the fatigue he carried. You yelped in surprise, legs wrapping around him instinctively as he carried you to the bed. He set you down gently against the pillows, placing a delicate kiss on your lips before leaning back to admire the way your hair fanned out along them. The way he looked at you, like he was trying to brand this sight into his mind as a remedy for every hour you spent apart, made your heart flutter against your chest.

"Entirely unfair; I can't pick you up," you grumbled, your eyes lingering on the way he slipped his robe off his shoulders, leaving him in just his small clothes.

"You've never complained about me picking you up before," he said wryly, tossing the robe onto the nearby chair. Your eyes dipped to the gentle lines of aged muscle along his abdomen as he climbed over you, the bed dipping marginally under his weight. His lips lowered to plant slow kisses across your neck before dragging them across the subtle curve of your jaw to nibble your earlobe between his teeth. You giggled, squirming slightly at the soft pricks of his beard against your skin. The retort that had been building on your tongue slowly ebbed away like the dying light of a candle.

A moment later his lips reluctantly parted from your skin as he dropped next to you fully, the bed creaking softly as he rolled onto his back. His arm snaked its way around your side, pulling you insistently into him. The hard planes of his body melted against the delicate frame of yours. Your hand rested along his chest, while his slender fingers caressed the smooth skin of your shoulder through your nightgown.

"I will allow your help under one condition," you hummed, a hint of exhaustion creeping into your tone. His ministrations faltered for the barest of seconds as he swallowed the urge to press the matter; a long sigh left him instead.

"I don't recall saying the matter was up for negotiation," he said simply, his fingers climbing up your shoulder, beginning to rub the stiff muscles along your neck.

You let out a hushed groan as his fingers pressed tighter into a particularly sore spot. "I want you to be here when I wake," you said, your voice strained as you ignored his deflection.

He shifted slightly, devoting his full attention to you. The dim lighting of the room rendered you unable to fully discern his features but you could see enough to notice the way his gaze softened as he registered the stubbornness in your eyes.

"Very well," he relented with a slight bow of his head. You smiled immediately at his words, scooting your body closer to his as you chased his warmth. His lips ghosted over yours in a feather-light touch before sealing them in a tentative kiss. A slow heat spread across your skin, unraveling the tension that still lingered.