His Handmaid's Tales [REWRITTEN]
Chapter Three | Wherein Mercy is Given
Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
Only when he had gone did she let herself look down at the bandages again, white against her reddened skin, and at the little pot of salve sitting on the table like a thing smuggled in from some gentler story.
She closed her fingers round it carefully. Not tenderness, she told herself. No.
Only a prince making his preferences known.
Ha.Â
Notes: Sweetling gets her name. This chapter was originally posted on AO3. I highly suggest following the story there, as this chapter has been posted there since last week.
Sorry for the silly delay; I dished out a 43-page assignment this weekend for one class, and my brain was absolutely fried.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
Sweetling learned quickly that lye was a crueler master than most men.
Men shouted. Men struck. Men reached with greedy hands and named the reaching want, or right, or sport. Men could be watched, if a girl were wise enough and quick enough and had not yet grown so tired she mistook danger for peace.
It lived in the washwater brought up in steaming pails from the lower kitchens and laundries, where shirts and smallclothes and table linens were boiled, beaten, and turned white by force. It took its due in silence. A woman would plunge in her hands pink and whole and pull them out flayed raw at the knuckles, the skin tight and reddened and smarting as though some invisible creature had gone to gnawing there. The older washerwomen wrapped rags round their fingers when they could spare them. The younger ones learned to bear it or else weep into the steam.
She stood at the long trough with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, the morning already damp and close around her, and worked the princeâs linen through the hot water with the care one gave to sacred cloth. Aemond Targaryen did not favor lace or foolish ornament, but what he wore must be spotless all the same, and sharply kept besides. His tunics were dark, his undershirts pale, his stockings plain. He liked order in all things. That much she had learned soon enough.
Around her, the laundry room breathed and sweated. Steam crawled up the stone walls. Girls bent over tubs with their hair stuck to the backs of their necks. Wooden paddles slapped wet linen. Somewhere, a woman coughed, deep and wet. Somewhere else, another laughed too loudly at something not worth the laughter. The place smelled of soap, wet wool, mildew, old stone, and the sourness of human labor. Even belowstairs, the Red Keep had its own perfumes.
âMind that seam,â one of the laundresses muttered beside her. âRoyal cloth tears like pride. Easy enough to damage, hard to mend.â
Sweetling murmured that she would mind it. She always minded, however, for her hands were red already. By midday, they would be worse.
The first sting came and went unnoticed. So did the second. It was only when she reached for another shirt and the wet cloth rasped against the inside of her fingers that she felt the true hurt of it. She did not flinch. Flinching won no comforts. She only turned her hand beneath the water and saw where the skin at the base of her thumb had gone raw and glossy, rubbed near through.
It was not the first place.
The heels of both palms were roughened from the stone steps and the carrying of pails. Two fingers on her right hand were cracked at the joints, and one small split had opened at the side of her forefinger where yesterdayâs work had not yet quite dried into a scab before todayâs began afresh.
Sweetling curled her fingers and went on.
There was no use in bringing such hurts to anyone. Mistress Rylene would have called them the wages of service. The older maids would have laughed and told her she still had soft hands for a girl out of Harrenhal. The septa would have spoken of patience. The queen perhaps would not have noticed at all.
She pushed that thought away with the shirt into the water.
Aemond had eyes for everything. That was plain. Yet to be seen by such a man was not the same as being spared. Dragons saw sheep well enough before they burned them.
The washwater stung worse with every plunge.
By the time the bells marked the afternoon, the skin over her knuckles had gone a bright, angry pink, and the small cut on her finger had split again wide enough to bead a thin crescent of blood before the water chased it pale.
She turned her hand quickly beneath the suds so none might remark upon it.
âGirl,â barked old Marra from the far side of the room, broad as a brewerâs cask and twice as red in the face, âyouâve left the wringing half done on that stack.â
Sweetling moved at once. âYes.â
Sweetling bit back the rest and crossed to the bench where the wet linen lay in a pale heap like drowned things. She set her hands to twisting, and the fire shot up to her wrists. Her jaw tightened. She kept twisting. It was only linen. It was only skin. Yet when she finished and reached for the basket, her fingers failed her once, and a folded shirt slid from her grasp and dropped into a puddle darkening the floor.
Marra snorted. âSeven save us from dainty little creatures.â
Sweetling stooped to retrieve it before the older woman could.
âI said Iâve got it,â another voice put in, sharper, younger.
A servant girl not much older than Sweetling nudged in beside her and snatched up the shirt. Bessa, her name was. Bessa of the crooked front tooth and the quick eyes that always seemed on the hunt for either jest or weakness.
âIâve got it,â Bessa repeated, and handed it over with a look too knowing by half. âWouldnât want his princely smallclothes taking the dust.â
Sweetling took the shirt. âThank you.â
Bessaâs grin flashed. âYou touch enough of his things now, I hear.â
That only made the other girl bolder. âClosed doors and private summons. Fine work if a maid can get it.â
Marra barked a laugh at that, though whether at the jest or at Sweetlingâs silence was hard to say.
Sweetling bent to the basket. âMistress Rylene says loose tongues are whipped quicker than slow hands.â
Bessa clicked her tongue. âHear her. Little sermon.â Yet she backed off all the same.
That was the way of it in the Keep. A girl need not accuse. She needs only remind another of a greater mouth somewhere above them all.
Sweetling gathered the linen and escaped as soon as the work allowed. Not to rest. Rest was for ladies with cushions and old men with titles. She had still to carry the folded washing up the back stairs and deliver the princeâs things to the press room off his chambers, where another maid kept the garments sorted by use, color, and season.
By then, her hands burned so fiercely that the linen seemed rough as burlap.
She had been Sweetling scarcely long enough to grow used to the name, and already she understood that a handmaid too quick to complain was no handmaid for a prince.
The press room was cooler than the laundry, though only just.
It sat two turns down from Prince Aemondâs own apartments, near enough for convenience and far enough to keep the lesser servants from forever crossing his threshold. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, crowded with folded shirts, dark tunics, cloaks brushed clean of dust, spare hose, belts, gloves, and riding leathers smelling faintly of horse and oil. A narrow window admitted a grey blade of light. Dust danced in it like drifting ash.
Sweetling set the basket down upon the worktable and began to sort.
Small motions hurt the worst. Great labor numbed a body; neat labor reminded it where all the wounds lay. Folding shirts made the skin at her knuckles pull tight. Smoothing cuffs made the cut on her finger sting. When she reached for the last of the princeâs undertunics, her hand betrayed her altogether, and she hissed softly through her teeth before she could stop it.
âDoes it pain you so much?â
She started so hard the garment slipped from her fingers.
Prince Aemond stood in the doorway.
He had come without sound, or else she had lost the ears for hearing any footfall but her own. He wore black that day, black wool trimmed in darker black, severe as a maesterâs ink and far better cut. His silver hair was bound back from his face. The patch sat smoothly over the ruined eye, and the eye that remained was on her at once.
Sweetling dropped into a curtsy deep enough to make her smarting palms brush her skirts. âMy prince.â
He did not bid her rise at once. He looked from her face to the table, from the table to the basket, from the basket to her hands, which she had clasped together too quickly and too tightly in a poor effort to hide them.
âWhat pains you?â he asked again.
âNothing, my prince.â
Aemond stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
Not hard. Not meaningfully. Yet the click of the latch seemed to sharpen all the air.
The word was quiet. Quieter than kindness would have been. Kindness invited denial. Command did not.
Sweetling hesitated a heartbeat too long.
Aemondâs mouth tightened. âMust I ask twice each time?â
âNo, my prince.â She unfolded her hands.
The redness was uglier in the cool light. Raw skin stood out at the base of her thumbs and along two fingers. The cracks at her knuckles had whitened with soap and opened pink at the centers. One still held the faintest dried line of blood.
That frightened her more than anger might have.
His gaze lingered on her palms, then lifted to her face. âFrom the laundry.â
âThey put you to lye.â
Sweetling wet her lips. âThere was washing to be done.â
âThat was not my question.â
âNo.â She swallowed. âYes, my prince.â
Aemondâs jaw shifted once.
He came nearer. She fought the urge to close her hands again. A servant who snatched herself out of sight invited more looking, not less.
âDid you think to bind them?â
Sweetling blinked. âWith what?â
A faint impatience crossed his face. âCloth.â
âThere is not always spare cloth belowstairs.â
She could not help it; the answer slipped out before caution caught it. âAnd be called wasteful?â
For one terrible beat, she thought she had gone too far. Mistress Rylene had warned her of that as well: even truth could sound like insolence if spoken with poor timing to the wrong ears.
Yet the prince only studied her.
At last, he said, âWho oversees the laundry today?â
âMarra.â He rolled the name once, as if committing not the woman herself but the inconvenience of her existence to memory. Then his gaze dropped again to Sweetlingâs hands. âAnd no one thought fit to spare these.â
Not your hands. Not you. These, as he might say of a saddle girth worn thin or a page of vellum damp-spotted by careless storage.
Sweetling did not know why that made the breath catch in her chest.
âIt is common enough,â she said, to fill the silence before it grew teeth. âFor laundries.â
âI did not ask whether it was common.â
Aemondâs voice cooled a degree. âDo you intend to make me drag you here by the wrist?â
Sweetling placed one hand in his.
His palm was warm and dry and callused in different places than hers. Sword-calluses. Rein-calluses. Pen-calluses as well, she thought suddenly, remembering the ribbon and the books and the long fingers that turned pages with more care than most men gave prayer. He turned her hand over once, then the other. Not gently, not roughly. Efficiently. His thumb brushed the rawness at the heel of her palm, and she almost shivered, not from softness but from the sharpness of the pain where he found it precisely.
Aemondâs eye narrowed. âHow long?â
âHow long have they looked so?â
âAnd you said nothing.â
âThere was nothing to say.â
At that, he released her so abruptly she almost thought she had angered him after all.
âThere is always something to say,â he said. âEspecially when silence makes work worse.â
Sweetling lowered her eyes. âI did not thinkââ
âNo,â Aemond said. âYou did not.â
The rebuke landed hard. Yet there was something strange beneath it, something not quite contempt. Annoyance, yes. But annoyance like a man finding rot in wood he meant to use, rather than annoyance at the wood for rotting.
He turned toward the door.
âRemain here,â he said.
Sweetling looked up before she could stop herself. âMy prince?â
Aemond had already opened the door. Over his shoulder, he said, âIf you touch so much as one more wet cloth before I return, I shall know you have either no sense or no wish to keep the use of your fingers.â
Sweetling stood in the little room of folded black and white linen, staring at the empty doorway as if it might explain itself.
Remain here. Not fetch this. Not bring that. Not do not tell Mistress Rylene. Only remain.
Outside, footsteps passed. Voices murmured. Once she heard some distant laugh from down the corridor, then the rattle of armor, then silence again. In the press room, the light shifted by degrees. Her palms throbbed. She turned them upward and studied them as if they belonged to some other girl less used to labor than she liked to pretend.
That question had no safe answers.
Aemond Targaryen was not a man grown, not yet, but there were times he wore his youth like armor and times he seemed to have none. He spoke too plainly for court, and too carefully for kindness. He named things others preferred smeared over with courtesy. He could unsettle with a glance better than some men could with a scream.
Sweetling did not know whether to fear most the moments he seemed cruel or the ones he did not.
When the door opened again, she straightened at once.
The prince entered with a small stoppered pot in one hand and a strip of clean linen in the other.
Aemond shut the door with his heel and came to the table. He set both items down between them as if placing tools for some ordinary task.
âSalve,â he said. âSit.â
His eye lifted to hers. âDo you begin every instruction with confusion?â
âMy prince. . . â She looked at the pot, then at him. âThis is not necessary.â
Aemondâs expression went flat. âI was not under the impression that necessity required your consent.â
Sweetling flushed. âThat is not what I meant.â
âThen mean something else.â He nudged the chair out from beneath the worktable with his foot. âSit.â
The prince took up the pot and unstoppered it. The room filled at once with the scent of herbsâcomfrey, perhaps, and beeswax, and something sharper green beneath. Not the rich perfumes ladies favored. This smelled of kitchens and gardens and healing rooms. A useful smell.
âIt will sting,â he said.
Sweetling looked from the salve to his face. âYou mean to do it yourself?â
Aemondâs mouth twitched, faint and humorless. âDo you see another pair of hands in the room?â
She nearly said I have my own, but held the words back just in time.
He noticed anyway. He always noticed. âYou may use them poorly enough alone,â he said, âbut I prefer not to have blood on my linens.â
Something in her eased and hurt all at once.
Aemond dipped two fingers into the salve and took her right hand before she could think better of yielding it. The ointment was cool. The first touch of it to the split skin made her bite the inside of her cheek.
âI told you it would sting,â he said.
He spread the salve with careful economy, no more pressure than needed, no less. His hands were deft. That surprised her, though it should not have. A man so exact in one discipline would be exact in others. He worked the ointment into the cracks at her knuckles, into the rubbed places at the heel of her hand, over the bright, angry skin at the base of her thumb.
Sweetling sat rigid as carved wood.
Aemond glanced up once. âIf you flinch each time, we shall be here until moonrise.â
âI am trying not to.â
This one was worse. The prince frowned at the raw patch beneath the forefinger where the skin had nearly peeled away.
âYou scrub too hard.â
âThe stains do not lift for gentleness.â
Aemond made a soft sound that might have been agreement or irritation. âThen someone else may scrub. You are not useful to me half-lamed.â
Again that curious almost-nothing, colder than pity and somehow kinder than it had any right to be.
He finished with the salve and took up the strip of linen, tearing it cleanly in two narrower lengths. âHold still.â
He bound one hand and then the other, wrapping the cloth across the worst of the rawness and around her palms, leaving her fingers free enough to move. The bindings were neat and snug, better done than some maestersâ dressings she had seen in poorer halls.
âYouâve done this before,â she said before she could stop herself.
Aemond tied off the second strip and sat back a little. âEveryone at court bleeds. Some merely do it more decoratively.â
Sweetling did not know whether she was permitted to smile at that. She kept her mouth composed.
The prince replaced the stopper on the pot.
âYou will keep this,â he said, pushing it toward her. âUse it after washing. And before. Twice daily.â
Her eyes dropped to the little pot. It looked expensive, though perhaps that was only because anything whole and useful seemed dear belowstairs.
âI cannot take this.â
Aemondâs face chilled at once. âCannot?â
âMistress Rylene saidââ
âI am aware,â he cut in, and now impatience showed plain. âMust every other sentence in this castle pass through that woman first?â
Aemond leaned one hand on the table between them. âListen carefully. This is not a trinket. It is not lace, or a ring, or sugared almonds meant to turn your head. It is salve. For your hands. So that my servant may perform her duties without ruining herself into clumsiness.â
The last word he spoke with faint disdain, as though clumsiness were the true sin here.
âYou will keep it,â he went on. âIf Rylene asks, tell her I ordered it. If she dislikes that, she may bring her complaint to me.â
Sweetlingâs throat tightened. âMy prince. . . she will thinkââ
âI do not care what she thinks.â His voice went very soft. âAnd neither, for this, will you.â
He straightened. The moment changed with it, drew shut like a curtain.
âWhen you return to the laundry,â he said, âyou will not put your hands in lye again today.â
She bowed her head. âYes, my prince.â
Aemond considered her a moment longer, then added, almost carelessly, âI will have Marra told that I require you elsewhere. If she grumbles, let her. Old women and dogs both bark at closed gates.â
It was so unexpected an image that Sweetling looked up too quickly, and this time she could not quite stop the flicker in her eyes.
Aemond saw it. Of course he did.
For the barest instant, something shifted at the corner of his mouthânot softness, never that, but the shadow of satisfaction at having surprised something honest out of her.
He moved to the door and opened it. Before stepping through, he said without turning, âAnd Sweetling.â
âDo not mistake this for indulgence.â
The words should have struck cold. Instead, they landed warm in some wounded place she had not meant to keep open.
Aemond went on, âRaw hands catch on cloth. Torn cloth wastes time. I dislike wasted time.â
âYes, my prince,â she said, because that was what he required.
Only when he had gone did she let herself look down at the bandages again, white against her reddened skin, and at the little pot of salve sitting on the table like a thing smuggled in from some gentler story.
She closed her fingers round it carefully. Not tenderness, she told herself. No.
Only a prince making his preferences known.
The bandages were the worst of it.
Not because they hurt. They did not. The salve had cooled the fire in her palms to a dull, manageable ache, and the linen Prince Aemond had wound about her hands kept the worst of the rubbing from the air. She could flex her fingers now without feeling as though the skin would split open anew. The hurt was still there, but quieter.
It was the whiteness that doomed her.
Fresh linen showed. Fresh linen always showed in a place like the Red Keep, where every rag had a history, and every whole thing belonged to someone above you. A servant with clean wrappings on both hands looked tended to. A tended servant invited questions. Questions were only gossip before they found a mouth mean enough to sharpen them.
Sweetling knew all that before she ever stepped back into the lower passages.
Even so, when she left the press room with the little pot of salve hidden in the pocket sewn into the side of her skirt, she half hoped no one would mark the change. The hope died young.
A boy with a basket of trenchers was the first to stare. His gaze dropped to her hands and lingered a heartbeat too long before he remembered himself and hurried on.
Then a scullion girl looked. Then an old woman carrying ripe, fat onions. Then one of the spit boys, all elbows and soot, whistled low under his breath and grinned a gap-toothed grin she would have liked to slap from his face if her hands had been less precious all at once.
By the time she reached the laundry again, she could feel the eyes before she crossed the threshold.
The room was hotter than before. Steam rolled thick as morning fog above the troughs. Someone had opened one of the high shutters, but the air that came through was mean and damp, smelling of river and smoke. Wet linen slapped wood. A kettle hissed. Women bent to their labor like penitents at prayer.
And then they straightened, one by one, as she came in.
Not all of them. Not fully. But enough.
Marra saw her first. Marra always saw first. The old laundress was planted near the far vat, red-armed and broad-backed, her grey hair escaping its knot in damp curls that clung to her temples. Her little eyes narrowed.
âWell,â Marra said, loud enough for three rooms to hear, âlook whatâs been mended.â
There were chuckles at that.
Sweetling kept her face still. âPrince Aemond required me elsewhere.â
âAs I live and breathe,â Marra said, âdid he.â
A younger laundress snorted into a sleeve she was wringing. Bessa did not bother hiding her grin at all.
Sweetling moved toward the bench where her work had been left in an untidy stack. âWhat remains?â
Marraâs gaze dropped to the bandages. âNot that.â
There was another little burst of laughter.
Sweetling stopped. âMy prince said I was not to put my hands in lye today.â
That sharpened the room faster than a shout.
Some servants loved nothing better than hearing a command repeated from noble lips, especially when it arrived in the mouth of someone too low to enjoy speaking it. It was indecent in its way, like seeing a beggar wear velvet. Not because velvet ceased to be velvet, but because everyone must stare at how strangely it sat.
Marra planted both fists on her hips. âDid he?â
The old woman looked her up and down as if measuring not the truth of the thing, but the insolence required to bring it. âAnd did His Grace also tell you to come back down here and stand in my way?â
âThen use the wits the gods denied you less of than your tongue and get to folding.â Marra jerked her chin toward a stack of dried linen near the window. âThat needs no lye.â
Sweetling crossed at once and bent to the task.
Folding was kinder to her hands, though not kind. The bandages brushed the cloth with each turn, and the linen beneath them warmed quickly. Still, it was work she could do, and work made a shield if not a wall. She kept her head bowed, her fingers careful, and tried to become what Mistress Rylene had once advised every servant to be: forgettable, neat, useful as a cup left waiting on a tray.
But the Red Keep did not forget what it found amusing.
Bessa wandered near after a time with a basket on her hip and mischief all over her face.
âThatâs fine wrapping,â she said. âCleaner than what the infirmary gives to kitchen girls.â
Sweetling folded a shirt. âThen perhaps you should burn your hands on purpose.â
Bessa gave a bark of laughter. âThereâs a tongue after all.â
Sweetling regretted the answer at once. Wit was a luxury for girls with fathers or dowries or at least enough meat on their bones that a beating would not show too much. She lowered her gaze further.
Bessa leaned closer. âDid he bind them himself?â
The question was soft. Too soft.
The shirt in Sweetlingâs hands seemed suddenly louder than thunder.
It was not wholly a lie, she told herself. Not in spirit. Not in safety. He had not done it as a kindness. He had done it as a command. The distinction mattered. It had to.
Bessa studied her profile for a moment, then clicked her tongue. âBad liar.â
Sweetling set the folded shirt atop the pile. âAnd you are too curious.â
âCuriosity keeps girls alive.â
Bessaâs grin thinned. âSilence keeps girls buried, too.â
Before Sweetling could answer, Marraâs voice came cracking through the steam. âBessa, if your fingers are idle, Iâll give them a pot to scrub through.â
Bessa rolled her eyes and moved off. Yet she did not move far. No one ever moved far from a scent of scandal.
Sweetling folded two more shirts, then a tablecloth, then a stack of small squares meant for a lordâs face or a ladyâs spills. Around her, the murmuring began in earnest, not directed at her, which would have been easier, but angled just beside her hearing, where each half-heard word did more work than an accusation shouted plain.
â. . . lucky little thing . . . â
â. . . or unlucky, if heâs took an interest . . . â
â. . . not that one, sheâs too cold in the face for it . . . â
â. . . cold girls melt quickest . . . â
â. . . hush, fool, walls have ears . . . â
The walls did. The floors did. Sometimes even the rushes seemed to.
At Harrenhal, she had learned that mockery could be outwaited if one made no gift of oneâs humiliation. Mockers grew hungry. They wanted color in the cheeks, wetness in the eyes, tremor at the mouth. They wanted the sweetmeat of visible injury. Deny them that, and often they turned to easier sport. Often. Not always. She counted herself quite a lucky girl, for she had her mother to protect her from wagging tongues and sharp-eyed vultures.Â
Alas, but Alys, her mother, was not here.Â
Marra came herself when the room had been simmering long enough.
The old woman seized a linen sheet from Sweetlingâs stack and held it up to the light as if inspecting the work, though the sheet was fine and they both knew it.
âTell me,â Marra said, âdo princes hand out bandages to every maid they work raw, or are you favored above the rest?â
It did not still. Laundry rooms never stilled. Water still steamed, cloth still dripped, someone somewhere still coughed. Yet the listening in the room tightened so sharply Sweetling could almost feel it gathering behind her ears.
She kept her eyes on the sheet in Marraâs hands. âMy prince said my hands were needed for his service.â
Marra barked a laugh. âAnd what service is that?â
Heat rose beneath Sweetlingâs skin. It would have been better had Marra struck her. Bruises could be hidden. This was a stripping. A making-public. The old woman wanted the roomâs laughter like a dog wants blood from a torn rabbit.
âI am his handmaid,â Sweetling said.
âThat you are.â Marra lowered the sheet. âAnd what sort of handmaid gets coddled for a little lye?â
The word coddled pricked harder than it should have. It made of the bandages something soft, something foolish, something chosen by weakness. Sweetlingâs fingers curled beneath the linen wrappings. But, before she could speak, another voice cut across the room.
âThe sort a prince names.â
Mistress Rylene stood in the doorway.
She had a talent for appearing as if summoned by the worst possible thought. Tall, straight-backed, severe in her plain dark gown, with her ring of keys at her hip and disapproval worn like another layer of cloth, she seemed less a woman than a judgment passed down in shoes.
The room bent around her at once. Backs lowered. Eyes dropped. Even Marra lost some measure of her breadth.
Rylene stepped inside, her gaze passing over the vats, the wet heaps, the women, and last of all, Sweetling.
âWho speaks Prince Aemondâs mind in this room?â she asked.
âMarra?â Rylene said.
The laundress gave a stiff shrug meant to seem smaller than it was. âNo one, mistress. We were onlyââ
âYou were only forgetting yourselves.â Rylene came farther in. âA common disease belowstairs. It spreads quickest among women with too much spit and too little sense.â
Sweetling did not look up. She did not dare. Still, she could feel Ryleneâs attention like a ruler laid across the shoulders.
âAt whose order are those wrappings there?â Rylene asked.
The question was for Sweetling.
âAt Prince Aemondâs, mistress.â
Sweetlingâs breath caught. So. He had told her.
âAt Prince Aemondâs,â she repeated.
Rylene let the silence lengthen.
Sweetling set down the towel she had been folding and untied the outer knot of one bandage enough to peel back the cloth from the heel of her palm. The rawness there had gone less angry already, the salve having done its quiet work. Even so, the skin looked thin and sore.
Rylene inspected it without softness.
When she spoke, it was to the room. âThis servantâs hands were damaged in the princeâs service. The prince chose to preserve their use. That is all any of you need to know.â
The words snapped through the steam like a banner cracking in hard wind.
Not kindness. Preserve their use.
Sweetling nearly looked up then, hearing in Ryleneâs mouth the same hard framing Aemond himself had used. For one strange moment, she wondered which of them had taught the other that language, or whether people sharpened by the same court simply came to cut alike.
Marra grunted. âNo one said otherwise.â
Rylene turned her head. It was a small movement. It made Marra look suddenly very mortal.
âYou implied much,â Rylene said. âImply it again, and you may finish your years gutting fish on Dragonstone where the wind can carry your opinions out to sea.â
A maid near the far vat choked on a laugh and smothered it into a cough.
Marraâs mouth worked. âI meant no offense.â
âThen let meaning and speech make each otherâs acquaintance at last.â
The rebuke landed. Even Bessa looked impressed.
Ryleneâs gaze returned to Sweetling. âBandage that hand again.â
Sweetling rewound the cloth, fingers clumsy now from being watched too hard. When she had finished, Rylene crossed the room and, to Sweetlingâs great surprise, took the stack of folded linens in hand herself. She checked the edges. The corners. The neatness.
âThey are acceptable,â she said.
It was the nearest thing to praise Sweetling had yet heard from her.
Rylene set the stack down. âYou will leave the laundry.â
Sweetling blinked. âMistress?â
âPrince Aemond has altered your duties for the remainder of the day. You are to inventory the press room, see which garments require mending, and make note of what must be replaced before the next turn of the moon.â Her eyes narrowed slightly. âThose tasks require eyes. Not lye. They might sound the same, but they are, indeed, quite different in nature.â
There was no mistaking the source of the phrasing now. Aemondâs hand lay on the command even where he was absent.
Sweetling bowed her head. âYes, mistress.â
Rylene looked at the others. âAs for the rest of youâif any tongue in this room makes a sport of the princeâs household, I will know. And if I know, the queen may know. You may decide for yourselves how pleasant that would be.â
That bought her silence at last.
Not loyalty. Not goodwill. But silence was worth more.
Rylene turned and went out as sharply as she had come, leaving the room pressed flat behind her.
No one spoke for the space of three breaths.
Then Marra spat into the rushes.
âOff with you, then,â the old laundress muttered, not daring more while the echo of Rylene still hung in the doorway. âGo count his stockings.â
Laughter tried to rise at that and failed.
Sweetling gathered herself, not the folded linen this time, but only the small measure of composure that remained her own. She took up the basket meant for the upper rooms and left the laundry without haste.
It was only in the passage beyond that she let herself breathe properly.
The corridor felt cold after the steam. Her bandaged hands seemed too bright in the dimness. She flexed them once and felt the linen pull at her skin, snug and real.
Count his stockings, Marra had said.
Yet it was not mockery that stayed with Sweetling as she climbed the back stairs. It was the roomâs silence after Rylene spoke, and the shape of the thing settling inside her.
A princeâs notice could shield.
A princeâs notice could also mark.
She had known that, in theory, as one knew that wildfire burned green or that dragons cast great shadows. Knowing a thing at a distance was not the same as standing close enough to feel the heat. Prince Aemond had not been gentle. He had been exact. He had not comforted. He had corrected. Yet his correction had rippled outward through the keep at once, bending labor, drawing eyes, stiffening spines, altering the day itself.
And because it had touched her, however lightly, others would now look for the bruise of its fingers.
At the turn of the stair, Sweetling paused beside a narrow arrow slit where the light came in thin and colorless from the bay. Below, the water was iron-grey. Gulls wheeled and cried. Far off, somewhere in the yards, steel rang against steel.
She imagined him there in black and silver, moving with that merciless economy of his, as if every stroke meant to punish waste itself. She imagined those same hands fastening linen round her own and calling it nothing. She imagined his voice: Do not mistake this for indulgence.
No, my prince, she thought. I am beginning to think it is something worse.
Then she climbed the rest of the way.
The press room kept better company than the laundry.
Linen did not smirk. Doublets did not whisper. Cloaks hung where they were placed and did not lean together afterward to decide what they had seen. Sweetling had not known, until that day, how grateful a girl might be for the society of folded cloth and polished buckles and shelves that minded their own business.
She shut the door behind her and stood for a moment with her back against it, breathing in the roomâs cooler air.
Wool, cedar, lamp oil, and leather.
And beneath it, fainter, Prince Aemond.
Not perfume, for he wore none. Not any sweetness that clung to courtiers and their silks and their powders. His things smelled clean, severe, and usedâblack wool aired by wind, leather darkened with saddle soap, steel oil from belts and scabbards, beeswax from candles burned low beside books, and something sharper that might have been him alone, like cold iron warmed by the hand.
Sweetling pushed herself off the door at once, disliking the thought as soon as she had it.
Work was safer than noticing.
She set the basket down on the long table by the narrow window and began the inventory Mistress Rylene had named for her. Shirts first. Undershirts, riding shirts, finer linen for court, plainer for training. Then stockings, dark and pale. Tunics by weight and season. Spare points and ties in a small wooden box. Gloves. Belts. One pair of riding leathers that wanted cleaning at the knees, where dust from the yard had dried into pale smears.
The task suited her. It asked for eyes and memory and neat hands, all things she possessed in better measure than boldness. She counted beneath her breath, then counted again to make certain, for a servant who miscounted a princeâs belongings could find herself accused of theft, stupidity, or both. She noted a cuff frayed on one black undertunic, two missing hooks from a dark grey over-robe, and a loose seam near the lining of a cloak too heavy for spring yet not put away entirely, as if the prince disliked trusting the season to keep its word.
That, she thought, sounded like him.
At the far end of the shelf, she found a pair of gloves stiff with old wear, the fingertips marked darker where reins had rubbed. Aemondâs left glove was always the more worn. She had noticed that already. Men favored their sword hand or their writing hand. Aemond favored whatever hand the world had not yet thought to watch.
She set the gloves aside for oiling.
Her own bandaged hands moved more slowly than usual, but the pain no longer ruled them. The salve did its work quietly, the way kind things must in a place like this if they meant to survive.
Kind things, she thought, and then corrected herself at once.
She flexed her fingers once and reached for a folded undertunic on the upper shelf.
Something slipped free and drifted down, brushing her wrist like a moth.
Sweetling started and caught it before it touched the floor.
Dark, narrow, plain enough to be mistaken for any scrap of binding cloth but for the care with which it had been folded once upon itself before being tucked between the garments. Not new. Not fine. Frayed at one end, as though torn away from some longer length.
The sight of it struck her strangely.
Not on the shelf. In his hand.
The princeâs fingers with the dark strip draped across them, his voice quiet and implacable:Â Take it.
Her own refusal, dry-mouthed and terrified.
Sweetling stood very still with the ribbon lying across her bandaged palm.
A careless servant might have left such a thing tucked in with the linen, but nothing about Aemondâs belongings felt careless. Even his disorder had the look of a chosen disorder, as though each object had earned the place where it waited.
She turned the ribbon over once between her fingers. Plain cloth. No embroidery. No scent. Nothing a court lady would fight to own, no jewel to mark a favor, no token a fool would brag of receiving. That made it mean more, not less. Small things endured because no one feared them until too late. Sweetling refolded it carefully and stood on her toes to place it back where she had found it. Not hidden. Not displayed. Exactly as before. Then she took her hand away as though the shelf had grown hot.
The Keep had rules enough for every hour of the day, yet none for this: what to do when a princeâs notice lingered in little scraps and changed the shape of a room.
She returned to the inventory.
Outside, feet passed from time to time in the corridor. A page ran by once, too fast, earning a barked reprimand from some older servant farther off. Two guards exchanged a few low words at the turn. Somewhere distant, a door opened and shut with measured weight. Life in the upper passages went on: quieter than belowstairs, cleaner, and no less full of listening.
Sweetling had nearly reached the last shelf when she heard it.
A womanâs laugh, softened by distance and stone, but edged with the mean delight of someone feeding on a morsel too fresh not to taste again. Another voice answered, lower. A man this time. Then the woman said, clear enough through the door for the shape if not each syllableâ
ââbandaged by his own hand, I heard.â
Silence followed. Then the man gave a short sound, half scoff and half amusement.
Sweetling froze where she stood.
Mistress Rylene had silenced the laundry, but silence in one room was only that. A story did not need legs if it had enough mouths to carry it. She could almost see how it had gone already, passing from steam to stair to corridor to pantry to guard-post, growing as it went. A bandage became a touch. A touch became a favor. A favor became a private fondness. Before nightfall there would be girls belowstairs swearing she had sat on the princeâs knee and boys abovestairs wagering which of them would be cast off first, her or his temper.
Sweetling shut her eyes briefly.
Rylene had warned her. Aemond himself had warned her. They will decide a story.
The first true fear was not fear for herself, though that came near enough. It was the thought that he would hear.
Aemond Targaryen did not strike her as a man who enjoyed becoming a jest.
She had just begun counting belts when the latch clicked.
The sound was slight. It sent a bolt through her all the same.
Prince Aemond entered without page, guard, or heralding servant. He had changed since the yard. The black training leathers were gone. He wore a dark tunic plain enough for ease, but cut close through the shoulders, with silver fastening at one cuff and none at the other. His hair, still faintly damp at the temples, had been drawn back again. There was a fresh stillness to him, the sort men wore after washing blood or sweat from themselves and finding their thoughts no gentler for it.
His eye went first to the table, then the shelves, then the basket, then to her.
Sweetling curtsied. âMy prince.â
Aemond shut the door. âHow far have you got?â
The question startled her with its plainness. Not why are you pale? Not have they spoken? Only work first, as if work were the most trustworthy language between them.
âI have counted the shirts, hose, gloves, and belts,â she said. âThere are two frayed seams, one missing pair of hooks, and a riding pair that wants oil.â
Aemond came farther in. âShow me.â
He looked where she indicated and not elsewhere, listening with the exact attention he gave everything that mattered to him. When she named the garments, he touched each only once, fingertips brief and sure. He seemed to know the state of his possessions already and required from her not discovery but proof that she knew it too.
At the gloves, he paused.
âThese,â Sweetling said, âhave hardened at the fingers.â
âI thought oil might soften them.â
Aemond glanced at her. âIt might.â
Not praise. Not dismissal. Only acknowledgment, which, from him, felt more dangerous than either.
He moved to the next shelf. His hand stopped on the dark undertunic where the ribbon lay hidden among the folds. Sweetling felt the pause as though it had occurred in her own body.
Aemondâs finger rested on the cloth a moment longer than needed.
âWho has spoken to you since you left the laundry?â
The room seemed to narrow by an inch.
Sweetling lowered her eyes, then lifted them again because he hated evasion more when he could smell it. âMistress Rylene.â
âI am aware of Rylene.â His voice cooled. âWho else?â
Aemondâs face did not change. That was somehow worse. Anger one could brace for. Stillness was a blade kept sheathed for later.
âSome in the laundry spoke,â she said carefully. âAnd in the corridor. . . I heard voices.â
âI do not know who they were.â
âThat was not my question.â His eye fixed on her. âWhat did they say?â
The words seemed ridiculous when spoken aloud. Shame always did. It turned itself silly at the mouth, though it felt sharp enough inside to draw blood.
Sweetling clasped her bandaged hands before her. âThey said. . . â Her throat tightened. âThat I had been bound by your own hand.â
Aemond stood without moving.
A less observant soul might have thought him unmoved. Sweetling had learned enough by then to know that with him, stillness often meant the opposite. Something in his jaw set harder. His fingers withdrew from the shelf and closed once at his side. âAnd that amused them,â he said.
Aemond looked toward the door as though he might see through wood and stone to the precise throats that had shaped the sound.
âOf course it did,â he said softly.
There was no heat in it. None. The lack of heat chilled her more than anger would have. Men in rages struck wide. Cold men chose.
Sweetling found herself saying, âMistress Rylene silenced the room.â
âI did not ask whether she did her duty.â
He began to walk again, once from shelf to window and back, not pacing in any common fretful way but moving as if thought itself required a line to travel. âI told Marra you were required elsewhere.â
âI told Rylene what had happened.â
âAnd still the keep found sport.â
He stopped by the table. âIt never takes long.â
The last was spoken almost to himself.
Sweetling watched his profile and thought, absurdly, that he looked older in silence than in speech. Boy and prince sat uneasily in him at times, as if the world had forged one over the other and not waited for the cooling. In that moment, it was the hardest metal she saw.
âI am sorry,â she said.
His head turned sharply. âFor what?â
The question caught her. âFor causingââ
âYou caused nothing.â The words came so quickly they nearly cut hers in half. Aemondâs eye narrowed. âDo not make the mistake of claiming blame simply because others are eager to hand it to you.â
He seemed to realize what he had said only after it was spoken. Or perhaps he realized its nakedness. His mouth hardened at once.
âThis,â he amended, with deliberate contempt, âis exactly why I told you not to mistake correction for indulgence. You are in my household. If they chatter over a bandage, they chatter over my order.â
There it was again. The wall was set back in place stone by stone. Yet she had heard what came before it, and once heard, it could not be unheard.
Aemond saw that she had heard. Of course he did.
His expression cooled another degree. âDo not look at me as though I have said something tender.â
âI was not, my prince.â
She lowered her gaze at once because the wretched thing was that she had been.
Aemond exhaled through his nose. A humorless sound, near a laugh, and nowhere close. âYou are very poor at deceit for a girl who means to survive court.â
âI had thought myself better at it.â
âThat is because no one has examined your efforts properly.â
There was, buried very deep in the dryness of it, the ghost of mockery aimed not to wound but to unsettle her into steadiness. It nearly worked. A corner of her fear loosened despite itself.
âGood,â he said. âKeep enough wit to hear me now.â
âThe story will spread faster because it is small,â he said. âSmall stories are easier to carry. No one need prove them. They only need to enjoy them.â He moved closer, stopping at the edge of the table. âSo we will give them nothing else.â
Sweetling could have bitten out her own tongue. âBeg pardon, my prince.â
Aemond ignored the apology. âYou will do precisely as you were doing before. No shrinking, no hurrying, no skulking down side passages as though guilt has put weight in your shoes. Shame invites pursuit.â
The bluntness of it struck true. She had already thought to take the servantsâ darker ways at supper, to hide the bandages in her apron, to become smaller if she could.
Aemond went on, âAnd if anyone speaks to you plainly, you will answer plainly. âThe prince ordered salve. My hands were damaged in service. That is all.â Can you remember so much?â
He looked at her hands then, at the white strips crossing her palms. âHow badly do they pain you?â
The question came too naturally to be for show.
Sweetling answered before caution could dress the truth. âLess.â
His eye flicked up to hers. âLess.â
Aemond was silent for half a beat.
Then, in a tone drier than dust, âOne would hope salve could distinguish itself from lamp grease in at least that regard.â
It was so unexpected she nearly smiled.
His gaze sharpened at once. âDo not grin. I am not performing mummery for you.â
But there had been something there. Not softness. Never softness. The harsher, stranger thing that lived where softness might have been in another man.
Aemond turned back to the shelf, lifted the dark undertunic, and from within its fold withdrew the ribbon.
Sweetlingâs breath caught.
He held it between two fingers, looking not at it but at her. âDo you know why I kept this?â
âBecause you refused it.â
The answer struck harder because it was quite simple.
Aemond let the ribbon hang. âMost people take what a prince offers before they have thought whether taking will choke them later. You did think. Poorly, perhaps. Fearfully, certainly. But you thought.â
Sweetling could find no safe answer to that.
He went on. âThat makes you rarer than you ought to be.â
The ribbon disappeared into his fist.
âAnd therefore more troublesome.â
There. The wall again. Yet this time she heard the mortar being mixed.
âMy prince,â she said slowly, âif it displeases you that I refusedââ
âIt displeases me,â Aemond said, âthat everyone in this keep imagines my smallest gesture must mean what theirs would mean.â His voice flattened. âI gave you cloth because I wished to see whether you knew the difference between a favor and a leash.â
Aemondâs gaze did not soften. âYou did.â
The room went quiet enough for her to hear the sea wind scratching faintly at the narrow pane.
At last, she said, âThen why offer it at all?â
The question was out before she could stop it.
A prince might have rebuked her. Another man might have smiled. Aemond did neither. He seemed, instead, to consider whether the insolence was real or merely the tax exacted by honesty.
Finally, he said, âTo know.â
âWhether you could be warned and still think.â His mouth tightened. âOr whether you were only another trembling creature waiting to be told which hand to kiss.â
Sweetling did not know what to do with that, so she did what she always did when bewilderment threatened to show in her face.
âThere are still the winter cloaks to count,â she said.
For one beat, two, she thought she had gone too far.
Then something altered at the corner of Aemondâs mouth. Not a smile. Something leaner and stranger. Approval wearing armor.
âYes,â he said. âThere are.â
He set the ribbon on the table between them, not offering it this time, merely placing it there as one might place a knife to see whether another knew to touch the handle and not the edge.
She crossed to the far shelf and began naming the cloaks one by one: black wool lined in fur, grey travel cloak, a lighter riding mantle, one rain-dark cape still smelling faintly of horse and weather. Aemond remained where he was at first, then moved to the table and listened. Once or twice, he corrected her count before she reached the end, not because she had erred but because he already knew. That too seemed like him: to test accuracy by possessing it in advance.
At the fourth cloak, she realized the room had eased.
Not safely. Never that. But into some more dangerous, more intimate steadiness, where silence no longer meant only fear.
When she finished, Aemond said, âThe rain cloak is missing a fastening.â
Sweetling checked. It was.
âYou did not see it.â
He lifted the ribbon from the table and tucked it once more into the fold of the undertunic. âAnd Sweetling.â
His eye rested on her bandaged hands. âTomorrow you will not go near the laundry.â
The command startled her. âMy prince, if Mistress Ryleneââ
âI will speak to Rylene.â
âThat will make them talk more.â
Aemondâs face changed then, only slightly, but enough.
âYes,â he said. âIt may.â
For the first time since entering, he sounded not surprised by the keepâs malice but tired of it. Not tired enough to yield. Only tired in the way one might be tired of a wound that reopened each time rain came.
He looked toward the door.
âLet them,â he said at last. âThey were going to, whatever I did.â
The truth of it struck her quiet.
Aemondâs hand rested briefly on the table, long fingers spread against the wood. âThe difference,â he said, âis that I do not mean to let them decide what happens next.â
Then he straightened, and the softness of honesty vanished as though it had never dared show itself at all.
âYou will finish the inventory,â he said. âLeave the list on my desk. If the salve is gone before the cuts close, you will ask for more.â
Sweetling stared. âAsk?â
Aemondâs brow arched. âDo you know another way to acquire things without theft?â
The dryness of it nearly undid her again.
âI meant. . . â She stopped. âYes, my prince.â
âGood.â He moved to the door, then paused with his hand on the latch. Without turning, he added, âAnd if you hear them laugh againââ
Aemondâs voice came cool as ever. âRemember that servants live on stories because they possess so little else. I would not envy them their diet.â
Sweetling stood in the press room among his ordered things and the fading echo of him, her hands wrapped in linen and no steadier than before, only changed. Outside, the Keep still breathed and muttered and fed itself on whispers. It would do so tomorrow as well, and the day after. A bandage had become a story. A story would become a weapon. She knew that now.
Yet as she turned back to the shelves and began again to count what remained, another thought followed close behind it, lean and dangerous as a shadow with one eye.
Aemond Targaryen might despise being misunderstood, but let it be known that he despised surrendering the meaning of his own acts even more. And gods help the fool who mistook that for gentleness.
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