Sweetling told herself this was relief.

She lay on her narrow pallet in the little chamber she shared with two other serving women, listening to rain skitter against the shutters and Bessa snore softly from the far bed. The air smelled of damp wool, lavender soap, and the onion broth someone had eaten too quickly before sleep. Her hands rested folded atop her blanket like a corpse’s.

The ribbon lay beneath her pillow.

She had hidden it there after supper. Then taken it out. Then hidden it in her sleeve. Then in the small pocket of her spare apron. Then beneath the pillow again, because apparently she had become the sort of girl who could not be trusted with cloth.

It had not come because he had not sent it.

Good, she thought.

Then: coward.

Then, horrified at herself: ungrateful fool.

He was doing what he had promised. He was letting her choose. He was not pressing. Not summoning. Not sending a seal that would force Alicent’s hand and hers together. Not making a spectacle of restraint so that she might praise him for it.

He was behaving honorably.

Sweetling turned onto her side and stared at the dark.

Honor, she decided, was extremely inconvenient.

Bessa snorted in her sleep and rolled over.

From the pallet nearest the door, an older maid muttered something about goats.

Sweetling closed her eyes.

Aemond’s mouth waited there.

She opened them.

“No,” she whispered into the dark.

Bessa snored.

Sweetling slid one hand beneath the pillow and closed her fingers around the ribbon.

It was cool at first. Then warmed quickly.

A choice.

That was the trouble. Choices were heavier than commands. A command could be obeyed while one kept some little injured place within blameless. A choice belonged to the chooser. It could not be set down later at a prince’s feet, or a queen’s, or a gods’. If she went to him, she would be going because she wished to. Not because of duty and not because of fear. But because she wanted the danger badly enough to name it.

Sweetling lay very still for a second more, then she sat up.

The room remained dark. Bessa breathed on. The older maid muttered again. Rain kept its counsel.

Sweetling slipped from bed and drew on her plain robe over her shift. Her feet found cold stone, and she stood for a moment with the ribbon clutched in one hand and her own heartbeat making war in her throat. Before, she told herself. Decide before you leave the room. She looked at the door. 

“I choose,” she whispered.

No one heard.

That was just as well.

Sweetling tucked the ribbon into her sleeve and stepped into the corridor.

She did not go to Prince Aemond’s chambers.

Not yet.

First, she went to the linen room, because even foolishness required order. She lit one small lamp. She took up a basket and placed within it two clean cloths, a needle case, black thread, a pot of salve, and one of the prince’s shirts with a loose tie she had deliberately not finished after supper because some new, sly part of her had apparently learned strategy from dragons.

Then she stood in the warm little pool of lamplight and waited.

A corridor away, footsteps passed.

A guard coughed.

The castle breathed.

Sweetling took the ribbon from her sleeve and laid it atop the folded shirt.

Not sent by him. Sent by her. A warning—a question—a confession in cloth. She lifted the basket. By the time she reached the turn before his apartments, her courage had become a thin, bright thing, liable to snap. The guard outside Aemond’s door straightened when Sweetling stopped before him.

“The prince did not summon you,” he said.

“No.”

His eyes dropped to the basket. Then to her face.

She hated him for seeing the heat there.

“I bring mending,” she said.

“At this hour?”

“Yes.”

The guard’s mouth twitched.

Sweetling lifted her chin by a fraction. “You may announce me, or you may explain to Prince Aemond on the morrow why you turned away his handmaid with his linen unfinished.”

The guard stared. Then, very wisely, he knocked.

Aemond’s voice came from within. “What?”

The guard opened the door only enough to speak through. “My prince. Your handmaid.”

Silence.

Sweetling’s grip tightened on the basket.

Then Aemond said, “Send her in.”

The guard stepped aside, and Sweetling crossed the threshold.

Aemond stood by the desk, one hand braced on its edge, a letter open beneath his palm. His hair was loose. He wore no outer tunic, only a dark shirt unlaced at the throat and black breeches tucked into boots he had not bothered to remove. Candlelight made him sharper. Lonelier.

His eye went first to her face.

Then to the basket. Then to the ribbon lying on top. The whole room seemed to still. Sweetling shut the door behind her. Aemond did not move.

“You were not summoned,” he said.

“No.”

“You were told the risk.”

“Yes.”

His gaze pinned her. “And yet.”

Sweetling crossed the room on legs that felt much too mortal for what she asked of them. She set the basket on his desk, careful not to disturb the letter beneath his hand. Then she picked up the ribbon and held it out.

Aemond looked at it.

He did not take it.

“You send my own warning back to me?” he asked.

Her pulse beat everywhere. “No.”

“What, then?”

Sweetling swallowed.

Her mouth had gone dry. Of course it had. All her grand courage had carried her to the edge of speech and then abandoned her there like a faithless knight.

Aemond waited.

He could be patient when cruelty would have been easier. She wished he would stop proving that. It made everything worse.

“I choose the risk,” she said. “Again. I shall continue to choose the risk, again and again.” 

Aemond’s face changed, enough that she noticed it. He came around the desk slowly, knuckles dragging across the wood. “Do not say that because you think I wish to hear it.”

“You do wish to hear it.”

His mouth tightened.

Sweetling held the ribbon between them. “But that is not why I said it.”

He stopped before her. “Why, then?”

Because I wanted to know whether you would let me come to you.

Because I wanted you to know I could.

Because all day I have been praying for gentleness and thinking of your hands.

Because I am frightened, and I came anyway.

She said, “Because I wanted to.”

Aemond closed his eye. Only for a moment. When he opened it, the hunger there had gone quiet. He took the ribbon from her hand and set it on the desk. 

“Then we begin again,” he said, and then he kissed her as if he had been starving in silence.

There was no sweetness at first, no shy fumbling courtship such as girls whispered about over laundry tubs when the older women had gone. Sweetness came later in songs, polished clean by singers who had never stood in a prince’s chamber after midnight with a ribbon hidden in their sleeve and the door shut soft behind them. This was hunger made careful. This was a hand at her waist that could have bruised, and did not. This was his mouth taking hers with such deliberate restraint that Sweetling understood, with a sudden bright terror, that gentleness was not the opposite of danger. Sometimes it was danger held by the throat.

She had stepped into his hand, and he had taken that as an answer enough to begin, but not an answer enough to forget. 

Even as he kissed her, even as his fingers tightened through the plain wool of her robe and drew her nearer until her basket pressed awkwardly against the edge of the desk, he kept a measured space between their bodies, no more than a breath, no less than a warning. Sweetling felt that space more keenly than she would have felt his weight. It invited. It asked. It made her choose again with every inch.

Her hands found his sleeves. Black cloth, warm beneath her palms. He wore no rings tonight, no jeweled ornament, nothing but the severe fastening at his cuffs and the leather belt at his waist. Somehow, that plainness made him worse. Less prince, more man. Less court, more body. Aemond Targaryen with his hair unbound and falling against her cheek, with his breath catching when she did not pull away, with his mouth hot and exacting and already learning the shape of hers.

He broke the kiss before she did.

Sweetling had not known she was clinging until his mouth was gone, and her fingers tightened as if to call it back.

Aemond looked down at her hands, then up at her face.

“You came here,” he said.

Her lips felt swollen. “Yes.”

“Not summoned.”

“No.”

“With that.” His gaze flicked to the ribbon lying on the desk where he had set it, dark against pale parchment. “And with mending.”

She remembered the basket then. The shirt inside. The needle case. The little coward’s excuse she had carried with her so she could pretend to herself that she had not crossed half the sleeping Keep because she wanted to be kissed again.

Her cheeks heated.

Aemond saw, of course. His eye sharpened with that cool, unbearable pleasure he took in every honest betrayal of her face.

“Were you going to mend my shirt?” he asked.

“If it needed mending.”

“It does not.”

“I thought it might.”

“You lie poorly after being kissed.”

Sweetling lowered her gaze, but he caught her chin before it could fall too far. His fingers were firm beneath it, not painful, merely refusing her escape.

“No,” he said. “You do not get to hide from the answer and enjoy the question.”

That made her breath catch, which was answer enough to darken his gaze.

Aemond bent, not to kiss her mouth this time, but the corner of it. Then beneath it. Then the place where her jaw softened toward her throat. The kisses were not hurried; he put them down one by one, as if each had a use and he meant to discover it. Sweetling stood very still under them, eyes half-lidded, fingers gathering black cloth at his sides. When his mouth found the pulse beneath her ear, her breath escaped her in a small sound she could not call back.

He stopped.

Not withdrew. Stopped.

His mouth remained against her skin. She felt the stillness of him before she understood it: the sudden lock of his shoulders, the halt of his breath, the hand at her waist gone fixed, as if he had taken himself by force and held.

Sweetling opened her eyes.

“Aemond?”

He lifted his head just enough to look at her. The candlelight made a blade of his cheek, a shadow of his scar, a dark pool of his remaining eye. His mouth was parted. Not much. Enough.

“Say it again,” he said.

She swallowed. “Aemond.”

The hand at her waist flexed once.

“Again.”

“Aemond.”

He kissed her then with something rougher in him, though still not careless. It was not the controlled lesson of the sept, nor the restrained answer at the threshold. It was hotter, deeper, his tongue pressing into her mouth as if patience had thinned and the taste of her had become an argument against every rule he had set himself. Sweetling answered without meaning to. Her mouth opened for him. Her hands slid from his sleeves to his shoulders, and when she rose onto her toes, chasing him, Aemond made a low sound against her lips.

That sound ruined more of her than any touch had.

It was not princely. Not composed. Not measured. A breath of want, caught too late.

Sweetling pressed closer.

This time, he let her.

The space between them disappeared. Her body met his through wool and linen and black cloth, softness against hard line, trembling against restraint. He was warm. Warmer than she expected. She had thought dragons might feel like fire, but he felt like a man who had trained until heat lived in his blood and then stood too long alone with it. His chest rose hard against hers. His belt brushed her stomach. One of his thighs came between the folds of her robe, not forcing, only there, and the pressure of it made her fingers dig into his shoulders.

Aemond broke the kiss with a quiet curse in High Valyrian.

She did not know the word, but she understood its shape.

“Sweetling,” he said, and it was nearly a warning.

“Yes?”

His mouth twitched, though there was no amusement in it now. “Do not answer me so sweetly when you know what you do.”

“I do not know.”

That was true enough to make him still.

Her face burned as she forced herself to meet his eye. “Not as much as you think.”

Aemond looked at her for a long moment, and the hunger in him changed again. It did not lessen. Gods, no. It deepened, became heavier, more dangerous because it had found tenderness and did not know whether to devour it or kneel before it.

“You came to my chamber at night,” he said.

“I did.”

“You brought my ribbon back.”

“Yes.”

“You told me you chose the risk.”

“Yes.”

“And still you would have me believe you innocent?”

“No,” she whispered. “Only not practiced.”

His hand rose to her face. The backs of his fingers touched her cheek, then turned, knuckles brushing down the side of her throat. The path was slow enough that she felt every place before and after it, each inch of skin waiting its turn. He reached the tie of her robe and stopped.

“Then we will practice honesty first.”

Her pulse beat hard against his hand. “Honesty?”

“If you want my mouth,” Aemond said, voice low, “you will say so. If you want my hands, you will say so. If you want me to stop, you will say that too. Not with frightened eyes. Not with silence. With words.”

Sweetling’s throat tightened. A fine thing, words. Useful things, in theory. She had spent a life learning which words to swallow, which to soften, which to bury entirely. The Red Keep had taught her that speech was dangerous, that a handmaid survived by becoming a shadow with hands. And now here was the prince, the most dangerous man in the room, demanding that she stand in the candlelight and name what she wanted of him.

It felt obscene before she had even spoken.

Aemond’s thumb brushed the knot of her robe. “Do you want my mouth again?”

Her lips parted. No sound came.

His gaze did not leave hers.

“Sweetling.”

“Yes,” she managed.

“Where?”

The word went through her like a spark dropped into dry rushes. Her hands tightened where they rested against him. She could have said on my mouth. That was safe. True. Already known. But his thumb was still at her throat, and his body was still against hers, and the want in her had become a creature with claws.

“My neck,” she whispered.

Aemond’s eye darkened.

He did not smile. That would have been easier to bear. Instead, he inclined his head as if she had answered correctly in some private lesson and bent to her throat.

The first kiss was soft enough to make her ache.

Then his lips parted.

The wet heat of his mouth closed over the place she had offered, and Sweetling’s head tipped back before she could stop it. He kissed her throat, then sucked lightly, enough to pull a gasp from her, enough to make her fingers slide up into his hair without asking. He allowed it. More than allowed it; she felt his breath change when her fingers tightened in the pale strands. Aemond’s hand came up behind her neck, supporting, guiding, holding her exactly where he wanted her while his mouth moved down to the hollow above her collarbone.

Her robe had loosened. She did not know whether by his hand or hers. The cord hung slack, the wool gaping enough that cold air touched the thin shift beneath. Aemond’s mouth paused at the edge of exposed skin.

“Hands?” he asked.

It took her a moment to understand.

Then the understanding nearly undid her.

He was asking.

Again.

Not because he did not want. She could feel the want in him, against her, hard and unmistakable. Not because he was gentle by nature, as his mother had said, he was not cruel by nature, both women speaking as if nature were a thing that mattered once power entered the room. He asked because he had chosen to make himself ask, and the effort of it showed in the set of his jaw.

Sweetling’s fingers trembled in his hair.

“Yes,” she said. “Your hands.”

“Where?”

Her shame rose up hot and useless.

Aemond lifted his head. “You came all this way to become shy?”

That should have angered her. It did, a little. Enough to give her spine back.

“My waist,” she said.

His hands went there at once, fitting over her through the robe, large and warm and sure. A simple touch. Almost proper, if one were blind and charitable. But there was nothing proper in the way he drew her closer, nothing courtly in the way his thumbs moved inward, finding the curve beneath her ribs, measuring the smallness of her against the span of his hands. Sweetling’s breath shook. Aemond watched it happen, then bent and kissed her again, as if her reaction had pleased him past patience.

The kiss turned hungry quickly.

This time, when he backed her toward the desk, she went with him. Parchment crinkled beneath the basket. A letter slid to the floor, and neither of them looked at it. Aemond’s hands remained at her waist until the edge of the desk met the backs of her thighs, then one hand shifted, palm pressing flat beside her hip as he leaned over her. The other slid up, not to her breast, not yet, but to the open edge of her robe.

“May I?”

The words were quiet. Roughened.

Sweetling’s heart knocked once, hard.

“Yes.”

Aemond drew the robe open.

Only that.

Only wool parting from wool, the plain garment falling wider over the desk behind her, leaving her in the thin shift she had worn beneath. Yet Sweetling felt more naked in that moment than if he had stripped her bare. Candlelight passed through the linen where it pulled over her breasts and waist. She saw his gaze move over her, not greedily, not at first, but with terrible concentration, as if he meant to remember the sight correctly.

Then greed came.

She saw it enter him.

His eye lifted to hers, almost accusing. “You wear this beneath your robe?”

“It is only a shift.”

“It is nearly nothing.”

“It is what I sleep in.”

Aemond’s gaze dropped again. “I know.”

The answer was too quick, too dark. Sweetling’s breath caught.

He had imagined it, then.

The thought of him alone in this chamber, severe and composed before others, imagining her in thin linen and undone braids, sent a shameful little heat through her belly. Aemond saw that too. His mouth parted faintly.

“What is that look?” he asked.

She shook her head.

His hand caught her jaw, not hard, but with enough command to halt the lie before it formed. “Words.”

“You thought of me,” she said, barely audible.

The pad of his thumb touched the corner of her mouth. “Often.”

No embroidery. No denial. Often.

Sweetling felt the room tilt.

“And how did my prince think of me?” she asked before she could lose her courage.

Aemond went utterly still.

For one heartbeat, she thought she had gone too far. Then his thumb moved over her lower lip, dragging it down a fraction, and his eye fixed on the small parting of her mouth with such heat that her knees would have weakened had the desk not been behind her.

“Do not ask questions you are not prepared to have answered.”

“I am trying to learn.”

His gaze snapped back to hers.

Ah, that pleased him.

It was there and gone, a spark beneath black water.

Aemond lowered his mouth to her ear. “I thought of you on your knees.”

Her breath stopped.

“Not like that,” he murmured, and now there was a trace of cruelty in his softness, not enough to wound, enough to make her feel the blade. “Not yet. I thought of you kneeling to mend a cuff. Kneeling to gather fallen parchment. Kneeling because servants kneel when told, and every fool in this castle thinks obedience is the same as surrender.”

His hand slid from her jaw to her throat, thumb resting just beneath her chin.

“I thought of how often you lower your eyes when you wish to look. How carefully you hold your tongue when you wish to answer. How still you make yourself when fear passes through you, as if stillness makes you safe.” His mouth brushed her ear. “And then I thought of making you less still.”

Sweetling’s hand closed around his sleeve.

Aemond kissed the side of her neck. “There. That was the thought.”

“You are cruel,” she whispered.

His mouth paused.

“Sometimes.”

The honesty of it chilled and warmed her both.

“Are you cruel now?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then what are you?”

His answer came against her skin.

“Hungry.”

His hand moved at last to her breast.

Over the shift first, palm settling with firm, almost reverent pressure. Sweetling gasped. Her body arched before she could command it otherwise, and Aemond caught the movement with his mouth at her throat, sucking once, harder than before. The ache that answered between her thighs shocked her into silence. She had known wanting in little ways, in flushed cheeks and restless nights, in the memory of kisses that made her press her knees together beneath blankets.

This was different. This was want with teeth.

Aemond’s thumb found the shape of her nipple through the linen.

Sweetling made a sound she had never heard from herself.

His hand stilled.

“Pain?”

“No.”

“Fear?”

She swallowed. “Some.”

His eye lifted. “Enough to stop?”

“No.”

The word came fast. Too fast. She blushed, and his mouth curved against her skin.

“And want?” he asked.

Sweetling closed her eyes.

His thumb moved again, slow over the stiffened peak.

“Yes.”

Aemond kissed her with a groan caught low in his throat. The sound was almost angry. His hand closed more fully over her breast, kneading through the linen, testing, learning. He was careful at first, maddeningly so, until she arched into his palm and his control slipped enough for his fingers to tighten. The sharper pressure sent heat racing through her. She clutched at him and heard herself whisper his name.

That did something to him.

His mouth dragged from hers to her jaw, then down. He bent, and for one dizzying moment, Sweetling did not understand what he meant to do until his lips closed over her breast through the shift.

She cried out softly.

The linen dampened under his mouth. Heat, pressure, the scrape of teeth barely there. Aemond sucked her through the thin fabric, one hand braced at her back to keep her from slipping off the desk, the other holding her breast to his mouth. Sweetling’s fingers twisted in his hair. Her head fell back. The chamber blurred to candlelight and rain and the obscene wet warmth of his mouth pulling at her like he meant to draw the soul out through her skin.

Aemond lifted his head only far enough to look at her.

Her hand remained tangled in his hair, fingers gone tense where they had caught and held him to her. The linen clung wetly to the shape of her, transparent where his mouth had worked it, and beneath the damp cloth her nipple stood hard and dark against the fabric. Sweetling’s eyes were unfocused, her lips parted, her fingers still twisted deep in his hair as though she had forgotten she could let go.

He looked at her hand first.

Then at her mouth.

He had had his mouth between her legs the night before. 

“Sweetling,” he said, and her name came low, roughened against the edge of his restraint.

She swallowed. “Aemond.”

He had already made her cry out into the storm. He had already learned how she broke and how she trembled after, how quickly shame rose behind pleasure and how fiercely she tried to gather herself back into modesty once it was done. This was not the first opening of some forbidden gate. That gate had already yielded to him, and gods help them both, she had walked through it willingly. Tonight felt different because of that. Less discovery, more return. 

Less accident . . . more answer.

“You pull harder when you forget to be ashamed,” he said.

Sweetling’s blush came at once, warm and furious, spreading from throat to cheek. “I did not mean—”

He bent again, but not to her breast this time. His mouth found the other through the thin linen, slow and possessive, and Sweetling’s head tipped back with a little helpless sound she tried too late to bite down. 

Aemond’s hand slid behind her, broad palm braced against the small of her back to hold her where he wanted her. He did not rush—that, somehow, was worse. He sucked her through the fabric with lingering attention, dragged his tongue over the stiffened peak until her nails scraped lightly at his scalp, then caught her gently with his teeth and made her gasp his name again.

“There,” he murmured against her. “That one.”

“What?”

“The sound.” His mouth moved to the damp edge of her shift, pushing it aside with the bridge of his nose rather than his hands, as though he meant to keep the act slow enough for her to stop him if she wished. “You make it when you forget to be ashamed.”

Her face burned hot. “I do not.”

Aemond lifted his head.

The look he gave her was flatly disbelieving, and somehow that almost made her laugh. Almost. It died before it could become sound, smothered by the heat in his gaze.

“You are a poor liar after I’ve had my mouth on you,” he said.

“You keep saying that.”

“You keep proving it.”

His hand slid from her waist to her thigh, gathering the thin shift upward by inches. He did not duck his head between her legs as he had the night before. He did not lower himself to his knees and feast until she came apart over his tongue, though the memory of it moved between them like a third presence in the room. She felt it in the way his eye darkened when her knees parted around him, in the way his mouth, still wet from her breast, curved with private knowledge.

“Do you expect my mouth to be there again?” he asked.

The wickedness of it stole the breath from her.

Sweetling’s gaze flew to his. “Aemond.”

“Is that yes or rebuke?”

“It is—” She swallowed, dignity in ruins. “It is your name.”

His expression sharpened, pleased despite himself. “So it is.”

His thumb traced the inside of her knee. Not higher. Not yet. The restraint of it was cruel because it was deliberate, because she could see how easily he might have moved differently and chose not to. He watched the place where his hand rested against her bare skin, then looked back at her face.

“I remember how you tasted,” he said quietly.

Sweetling closed her eyes.

“No,” he said.

They opened at once.

“There. That is better.” His thumb slid higher, slow as sin. “You do not get to hide from what you already gave me.”

“I gave?” she whispered.

His eye lifted. “Did you not?”

The question struck softer than a command and deeper than a kiss. The night before, he had asked. Again and again, in that severe way of his, as if words could make a wall strong enough to keep both of them from ruin. He had made her say what she wanted, made her answer fear and want separately, made her understand that surrender and permission were not the same thing.

Sweetling’s throat tightened. “I did.”

Aemond’s hand stilled on her thigh. 

His eye searched her face. He brought her hand back to his jaw and held it there, as if the touch were something he had decided to endure and wanted more of in the same breath. 

So she touched him.

Only that. 

Only her fingers against his cheek, the slight rasp of new-shaved skin beneath her fingertips, the hard set of his mouth easing by a fraction he would have denied if she named it. He looked almost angry with the tenderness of it. Sweetling understood. Tenderness was not safe for either of them. It stripped more cleanly than desire. Desire could be called weakness, appetite, sin; tenderness asked what a person might become if they were held and not used.

Aemond turned his face enough to press his mouth to her palm.

Her heart clenched.

Then his teeth closed lightly against the tender heel of her hand. The softness vanished into heat. For a breath, the hunger in him changed shape. It did not lessen. It became more dangerous, more focused, as though the truth had given him something to hold and something to break himself against.

He kissed her then, not gently, not at first. His mouth took hers with the heat he had left on her breast, and Sweetling tasted rain, candle smoke, and the faint salt of his skin. She opened for him because she wanted to, because she had learned the shape of his kiss and wanted it deeper. His tongue slid against hers; his hand tightened at her thigh; her body, traitorous and honest, rolled toward him.

Aemond groaned.

It was low. Almost swallowed. But she heard it, and hearing it made her bold.

Her hands left his hair and lowered her hand to the front of his tunic, fingers brushing the dark cloth where the fastenings sat. “Last night, you stopped.”

“Yes.”

“You did not let me touch you long.”

Aemond’s jaw flexed.

“You said it would be another night.”

“I did.”

“And is this another night?”

The room seemed to still.

Rain whispered at the shutters. The candlelight bent in the draft. Beneath her fingers, his breath went shallow and controlled, each rise of his chest too measured to be natural. Sweetling’s own courage faltered beneath the weight of his stare, but she did not take the question back. It had cost too much to ask.

Aemond leaned closer, one hand braced beside her hip on the desk. “Do you know what you are asking?”

“No,” she said, because he had taught her better than lying. “Not wholly.”

His eye darkened with something more dangerous than desire.

“Then ask what you mean,” he said.

Sweetling swallowed.

Her hand slid lower, not to his belt yet, only to the place where his tunic ended, and the leather began. She could feel the heat of him even through the cloth. Feel how still he had made himself. The control in him was frightening. The wanting beneath it more so.

“I want to touch you,” she said.

Aemond’s mouth parted slightly.

For one breath, nothing happened. Then he closed his eye, just once, as if gathering the words inside him before they could come out as a command rather than an answer.

“When you touched me last night,” he said, “you did it because I guided you.”

“Yes.”

“If you touch me tonight, it will be because you choose to.”

“I know.”

“No.” His eye opened. “You know the words. That is not the same.”

Sweetling’s temper sparked, small and bright beneath the heat in her face. “Then teach me the difference, if you are so determined to lecture me half-naked on your desk.”

Silence.

Then Aemond laughed.

It was quiet, low, gone almost as soon as it came, but it was real. The sound caught Sweetling so wholly off guard that her own mouth softened into an answering smile before she could stop it. Aemond looked at that smile as if it were the most inconvenient thing in Westeros.

“You will be the death of someone,” he said.

“Hopefully not me.”

His amusement faded, but not into coldness. “No. Not you.”

The promise was too grim to be sweet. Still, it settled warm somewhere beneath her ribs.

He took her hand, the same hand that had hovered uncertainly at his belt, and placed it flat over the leather buckle. Sweetling stared at her fingers there.

Aemond did not help this time.

The difference was immediate. Last night, he had guided her through the first shock of it, taken her wrist, and shown her the shape, movement, and pressure that pleased him. Tonight, he made her reach for knowledge herself. It was cruel in the way honesty could be cruel. It was also exactly what she had asked for.

Her fingers worked the buckle loose. Slowly. Too slowly, perhaps, because Aemond’s breath grew rougher above her. The leather came free, then the ties beneath. Her hands trembled once at the threshold of it, and Aemond’s gaze snapped to her face.

“Stop there if you wish.”

The words made her look up.

He meant it. Again, curse him; he meant it. His pride hated the offer. His body hated it more . . . yet he gave it.

Sweetling shook her head.

His eye narrowed.

She remembered. “I do not wish to stop.”

“Good.”

The word sounded almost pained.

She drew him free with less surprise than last night but no less awe. The sight of his cock still stole the sense from her for a moment—the hard, flushed length of him, heavy in her palm, hot against her skin. He was pale in thickness and a bit darker at the tip, a soft pink that nearly matched her lips. Aemond watched her face so intently she felt the flush spread from her cheeks down her throat to where her shift hung loose and damp from his mouth.

“You are warm,” she said foolishly.

His mouth twitched. “Was I meant to be stone?”

“No,” she whispered. “Only you seem it sometimes.”

“That is because stone is rarely asked what it wants.”

The words came too quietly. Too bare.

Sweetling looked up.

Aemond seemed to regret them at once. His face hardened, the prince returning like armor drawn over skin, but she had heard the man beneath. She had felt his heart. She leaned forward and kissed the place beneath her palm.

Aemond’s breath caught.

Not much.

Enough.

His hand moved to the back of her neck with dangerous speed, not hurting her, but holding her there as if the kiss had struck somewhere he did not know how to defend. Sweetling pressed another to his chest, then another, her mouth warm against him through the open tunic. She did not know what she was doing. Not truly. But she knew what he had done to her: the deliberate learning of her body, the way he had followed every breath and tremor until she could no longer pretend she was not being known. Perhaps this was the same. Perhaps it could be.

Aemond’s fingers tightened in her hair.

“Sweetling.”

She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, mouth still close to his skin.

The sight seemed to undo something in him.

He bent and kissed her, hard enough that she had to brace one hand behind herself on the desk. His other hand returned to her breast, but no longer content with damp linen. He tugged at the neckline of her shift until the fabric slipped low, baring her properly to candlelight.

Sweetling sucked in a breath and almost covered herself.

Aemond caught both her wrists in one hand.

“No.”

The word was firm, but not angry. A command, yes, but one that waited on her face. His gaze moved down to her bare breasts, and this time there was nothing between his mouth and her. Nothing to soften the sight of his hunger. Nothing to save her from the way he looked at her, as if the court, the crown, the gods, the rain, all of it had become less real than the small, trembling lift of her chest.

“You are lovely,” he said.

It sounded almost resentful.

Sweetling’s eyes stung. “You say it as though it displeases you.”

“It does.”

That surprised a laugh out of her, breathless and shy. “Why?”

“Because I have enough trouble.”

Then his mouth closed over her bare breast.

The laugh broke apart into a moan.

Aemond’s hand released her wrists so he could grip her waist, holding her steady as his tongue circled the stiffened peak. The first touch was wet and hot and direct enough that her spine arched. He sucked slowly, then harder, drawing at her until pleasure pulled tight from her breast to the deep ache between her thighs. His teeth scraped with just enough edge to make her gasp his name, and when she did, he answered with a low sound against her skin that she felt more than heard.

He did not rush.

That was the cruelty of him—the devotion of him. He gave the same attention to her breasts that he had given to the rest of her the previous night, as if no part of her body deserved to be passed over simply because he had already learned another. He tasted one nipple until it was swollen and wet from his mouth, then crossed to the other with maddening patience, his hand kneading what his lips had left behind. Sweetling’s shift sat bunched beneath her breasts, her robe open around her, her thighs parted around the hard line of his body. She had never felt so exposed. She had never felt so held.

Her hands went to his shoulders.

This time, she did not ask.

Aemond’s mouth curved against her breast.

“Good,” he murmured.

The praise—if praise it was—settled low and hot inside her. She hated how badly she liked it; hated worse that he knew.

His hand slid beneath her shift again, over her hip, across the soft lower curve of her belly. Sweetling’s breath quickened before he reached where she wanted him. Aemond paused.

“Already?” he asked.

“You are being cruel.”

“I have barely touched you.”

“You know what you are doing.”

That pleased him.

Gods help her, it pleased him.

His fingers slipped beneath the edge of her smallclothes and found her wet.

They both went still.

Aemond shut his eye for one brief moment, as if some disciplined part of him needed darkness to survive the discovery. Sweetling watched his face while his fingers rested against her, not moving yet, only feeling the slick heat she could not hide. The night before, she might have died of shame beneath such attention. Tonight, shame still burned, but it no longer stood alone.

She wanted him to know.

That was the terrible part.

Aemond opened his eye. “You are not frightened of this now.”

“I am frightened.”

“Not of my hand.”

Her lips parted.

No answer came.

He was right.

The fear lived elsewhere now: in the door; in the whispers; in the queen’s quiet gaze, Rylene’s warnings, and Jeyne’s mean little smile.

Not here. Not exactly. Not with his hand between her thighs and his mouth still warm from her breast.

“No,” she admitted.

His expression shifted. Hunger, satisfaction, and something like wonder made darker by pride.

“No,” he repeated.

His fingers moved.

Sweetling bowed forward with a broken breath, forehead nearly touching his shoulder.

He stroked her slowly at first, parting her with the kind of care that made the intimacy worse. He knew her now. He knew what made her hips lift, knew where to press, knew that circling too softly made her impatient and circling too firmly made her clutch at him with both hands. He knew because he had learned it from her body the night before, and now he used that knowledge without the clumsiness of first discovery.

She made room for him.

That, too, he noticed.

His mouth brushed her temple. “There she is.”

The words were soft, almost fond, and filthy for all that.

Sweetling turned her face into his shoulder. “Do not say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“As though you have been looking for her.”

His fingers slowed.

For a moment, only rain spoke.

Then Aemond said, “I have.”

The answer entered her more deeply than his touch.

She lifted her head. His face was close, too close for either of them to pretend. His eye moved over her features as if searching for the line between what she could bear and what he wanted to take. His fingers were still under her smallclothes, slick against her, but his attention had gone to her mouth.

“I thought of you today,” he said.

Sweetling’s breath caught. “When?”

His mouth curved faintly. “Often.”

“Doing what?”

The question came before shame could stop it.

Aemond’s eye darkened.

“You ask dangerous questions after midnight.”

“You answer them better after midnight.”

That earned her a look sharp enough to cut silk.

Then he kissed her, and while he kissed her, his fingers slid lower, one pressing slowly inside. Sweetling gasped into his mouth. Not surprise, not the way she had the night before. Recognition. Her body clenched around him as if welcoming a known trespass. Aemond felt it and groaned softly, his composure slipping again, just enough for her to feel powerful and endangered all at once.

He moved his finger inside her with slow, deep strokes, his thumb working above in the rhythm he had discovered before. Sweetling’s hands found his open tunic, pushing it wider, needing skin beneath her palms. He let her. More than let her. He shifted closer, giving her access to the hard plane of his chest, the lean cut of muscle beneath pale skin, the heat of him. She touched him clumsily, greedily, while his hand ruined her. His breath thickened when her nails dragged lightly over his ribs.

“You like that,” she whispered.

Aemond’s eye flashed to hers.

The answering pride in her own voice seemed to surprise them both.

His fingers withdrew almost fully, then pressed back in with a second alongside the first.

Sweetling’s pride vanished into a moan.

Aemond’s mouth found her breast again, sucking hard as his fingers worked inside her, and the room turned molten. Desk beneath her. Maps crushed under her palms. Rain at the windows. His hair against her skin. His hand was between her thighs. His mouth at her breast. Her own hands learning the shape of him with growing desperation. She was not new to pleasure now, but knowing did not make it smaller. Knowing made it worse because she could feel where he was leading her, and she still went willingly.

Her hips began to move with his hand.

Aemond lifted his head.

He watched.

The look on his face made her burn hotter than the touch itself. Not because he seemed amused. He did not. Not because he seemed gentle. He did not. He looked fiercely attentive, almost reverent in the most dangerous way, as if her pleasure were a thing he had summoned and now meant to master without breaking.

“Do not stop,” she whispered.

His jaw tightened. “I had not planned to.”

A laugh almost escaped her, but his thumb pressed more firmly and it became a whimper instead.

Aemond kissed her mouth, her jaw, the side of her throat. “That is it. Let me feel it.”

The words were too much. His voice was too close. Sweetling clutched at him, body tightening around his fingers, pleasure coiling low and bright. She knew the edge now, and knew the terrible swelling rush before it. Her thighs shook around his hand.

“Aemond.”

“I know.”

He did not take her maidenhead. He did not push toward what he had promised would not be tonight. Instead, he made the denial into another kind of torment. He touched her where she was already swollen and slick, pressed and circled and stroked until she shook against him, all while he thrust into her hand with harsh, controlled movements that grew less controlled each time she moaned. His mouth returned to her breasts, dragging the shift lower now, baring one to the candlelight so he could close his lips over her skin without linen between them.

Sweetling cried out.

Aemond’s free hand rose at once to cover her mouth, but his lips did not leave her breast. The double claim of it—his hand silencing her, his mouth drawing pleasure from her, his body straining into her touch—sent her nearly senseless. She tasted salt and skin against his palm. Her eyes stung, not with pain, not with sorrow, but with the intensity of being held in so many ways at once.

“Quiet,” he murmured against her breast.

She nodded, though both of them knew obedience would soon fail her.

His fingers moved faster.

Pleasure climbed in her again, familiar now and no less frightening for it. She knew the crest. Knew the bright, impossible edge of it. Last night he had pulled her over it with his mouth. Tonight he brought her there with one hand while the rest of him trembled for what he had not yet allowed himself to claim.

Sweetling’s hand moved desperately around him. She wanted to give him that same loss. Wanted to see his control break and know she had done it. Wanted, with a sudden fierceness that startled her, to be the reason Aemond Targaryen forgot himself.

His breath caught against her skin.

“Sweetling.”

The warning in her name made her pulse leap.

She tightened her grip as he had shown her last night, twisting on the upward stroke, thumb brushing the place that made his hips jerk harder into her hand.

Aemond groaned.

It was not loud. The storm outside might have swallowed it. But she felt it in his chest, in his mouth at her breast, in the sudden rough pressure of his hand between her thighs. That sound undid her. Pleasure broke hard and sudden, wringing a muffled cry as her body tightened beneath his fingers. Aemond kissed the sound from her mouth, then dragged his lips back down to the breast he had dampened earlier, taking it again through the linen while his hand worked between her thighs. Sweetling nearly lost her grip on him. 

His teeth grazed her, his tongue soothed the same place, and pleasure folded in on itself—his mouth at her breast, his fingers below, his hard length in her hand, all of it too much to keep separate.

Her release took him with it.

His head bowed against her shoulder. His hips drove once, twice into her hand, control shattering in tight, restrained pulses as he spilled over her fingers with a sound bitten nearly in half by pride. Sweetling held him through it, dazed and shaking, her cheek pressed to his hair, her own pleasure still moving through her in faint aftershocks.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

Rain tapped at the window.

The candle guttered.

Parchment lay crushed beneath them, maps of kingdoms ruined by the weight of a handmaid’s hip and a prince’s poor restraint.

Aemond removed his hand from her mouth slowly.

Sweetling drew a breath that trembled on the way in.

He did not lift his head at once. That was the strangest part. He remained bowed against her, mouth near the bare curve of her breast, hair falling over her loosened robe, breathing as if the world required effort. Sweetling’s clean hand rose, hesitated, then settled on the back of his head.

He went still.

She stroked his hair once.

“Aemond?”

“Do not,” he said.

Her hand froze. “Do not what?”

His voice came low against her skin. “Make it gentle yet.”

The words hurt in a place she could not name.

Not because he rejected gentleness. Because he recognized it and feared what shape it might demand of him.

Sweetling resumed stroking his hair anyway.

Aemond said nothing.

After a moment, his hand closed around her wrist—not pulling her away, only holding her there.

Afterward, Aemond cleaned her fingers himself.

Sweetling protested at once, because there were limits to what a girl could survive with her dignity intact, and apparently having a prince kneel between her knees to tend to the evidence of his pleasure was very near one of them.

“I can do it,” she said, mortified.

“I know.”

He did not give her the cloth.

She sat on the edge of his desk with her shift pulled properly into place and her robe tied loosely enough to be a lie. Her hair was half fallen from its braid. Her mouth felt swollen again, though less from being taken by surprise than from being kissed too thoroughly for too long. Her knees still trembled whenever she shifted. Aemond stood before her with a damp cloth in hand, his own clothing restored with irritating efficiency, though his hair and breathing had betrayed him enough that she did not feel entirely conquered.

He took her hand.

The warm cloth passed over her palm, between her fingers, along each knuckle with the same grim care he gave wounds and weapons. He did not make a spectacle of it. That made it more intimate, not less. Sweetling watched his face as he worked. His expression was severe, almost distant, but the set of his mouth had softened in ways he likely did not know. Or knew and hated.

“You are thinking,” he said.

“I am often thinking.”

“Not always wisely.”

She almost smiled. “No.”

His gaze lifted to hers. “What?”

The question was too direct. She looked at their hands instead.

“Last night,” she said carefully, “afterward, I thought I would feel ruined.”

Aemond’s hand stilled around hers.

Sweetling felt the room tighten.

“And did you?” he asked.

“I felt frightened. And ashamed. And pleased.” She swallowed. “The pleased part frightened me most.”

His thumb moved once over her cleaned palm. “And now?”

She should have lied. Not because he would fail to catch it, but because honesty had begun to feel like undressing more thoroughly than desire had managed.

“Now I feel foolish,” she said.

Aemond’s face hardened.

Sweetling shook her head before he could speak. “Not because of you. Because I thought knowing what your mouth could do would make me less helpless to it.”

The corner of his mouth shifted.

Ah. There was that flicker of wickedness. He tried to hide it and failed poorly enough that, despite herself, Sweetling laughed under her breath.

Aemond’s eye narrowed. “You find your helplessness amusing?”

“I find your pride amusing.”

“My pride?”

“You look pleased enough to start a war over it.”

“I have started no wars over your thighs.”

“Yet.”

The word escaped before she understood how bold it was.

Aemond went still.

Sweetling’s laughter vanished.

For half a heartbeat, she thought she had ruined the ease between them. Then his gaze dropped to her mouth, slow and dark, and she realized the danger was not anger.

“No,” he said softly. “Not yet.”

The heat that went through her was immediate and devastating.

He finished cleaning her hand, then set the cloth aside with more force than necessary. That, too, pleased her. Aemond Targaryen, undone by a handmaid saying one foolish word. She would have liked to keep that knowledge folded somewhere secret, pressed between the pages of herself like a stolen flower.

His hand came to her chin, tipping her face up.

“You grow bold after midnight,” he said.

“You told me you disliked half-courage.”

“I did.”

“I am trying to be obedient.”

His mouth curved.

“Liar.”

This time, the word was almost fond.

Sweetling did not know what to do with almost fond. Fondness seemed far more dangerous than lust. Lust had at least been named in warnings. Fondness came quietly, wearing no heraldry, and set itself beside a girl before she realized there was room for it.

Aemond seemed to sense the same danger, for he stepped back and turned toward the basin.

“You will return by the west stair,” he said. “Not the lower passage.”

Sweetling gathered the edges of her robe, pulling herself back into order piece by piece. “You said that last night.”

“And you remembered?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

She slid from the desk, and her knees nearly betrayed her. Aemond caught her elbow at once.

They both looked down at his hand.

It should not have mattered after everything else. Yet this touch was different. Public enough in shape to be innocent, private enough in timing to undo her.

“I can walk,” she said.

“I did not ask whether you could.”

“No. You merely grabbed me.”

“I kept you from falling.”

“I was not falling.”

“You were considering it.”

That startled another laugh from her, softer this time. He watched it in the way he watched things he meant to understand and disliked needing. His hand remained at her elbow.

“Aemond,” she said.

The name altered the room again.

He released her slowly.

Sweetling reached for the basket she had brought, only to find that it had been knocked half beneath the desk. The shirt inside remained unmended. The needle case had spilled open, black thread looping over the floor like some little shadow-snake. She stared at it.

Aemond followed her gaze.

“The mending,” she said.

His mouth twitched. “Yes. That grave purpose for which you came.”

“I did come with mending.”

“You came with an excuse.”

She bent quickly to gather the thread, because if she looked at him her face would show too much. “It was still mending.”

“You mended nothing.”

“That is not true.” She tucked the needle case into the basket with unnecessary care. “Your patience was in tatters.”

Aemond stared at her.

Then, impossibly, he laughed again. This one lasted even less than the first, but it warmed her all the same. It made him look almost startled at himself afterward, as if she had somehow stolen the sound from him rather than earned it.

Sweetling straightened with the basket in hand, her smile small and traitorous.

“Do not look so pleased,” he said.

“I am not.”

“You are.”

He sent her away with one final kiss. 

The corridor beyond was cold enough to make her shiver. She walked as he had told her, west stair, Maegor’s tapestry, eyes lowered but not blind. No one stopped her. No one saw enough to matter. Beneath her sleeve, the ribbon brushed her pulse with every step.

By the time she reached her narrow bed, the castle had gone quiet in the strange way living beasts went quiet before dawn. She undressed without lighting a candle and slid beneath her blanket with shaking legs and a mouth still warm from his.

Bessa snored softly from the far pallet. The older maid near the door muttered in sleep. Sweetling lay on her back and stared into the dark. She had crossed into his chamber as a handmaid with a basket; she had returned as something else. Not beloved, maybe, and not safe. Not ruined, though the court would name her so if it knew. 

Not wife, not whore, not lady, not lamb.

His, if she gave it. Hers, if she chose it.

Between those two truths, sleep came for her at last, dark and deep and full of dragons.

It came down over King’s Landing in thin, needling silver, not hard enough to empty the streets, though not soft enough to ignore. The gutters choked. The flags above the Red Keep hung sodden and heavy from their poles, green and gold and black-red alike gone dark at the edges. Smoke crawled low from the city’s chimneys, too damp to rise properly, and the whole of the castle seemed to breathe wet stone.

Sweetling hated rain more after that night.

Not because of the cold. Cold was honest. Cold bit and was done with it. Rain crept. Rain found seams, loosened knots, dampened hems, drew hair from pins, and secrets from mouths and tongues. Rain had put her in Prince Aemond’s chambers with her robe clinging and her courage behaving like that of some drunkard’s fool. Rain had beaded on his pale lashes when he looked down at her, and made the linen of her shift treacherous beneath his hands, and turned the sound of his breathing into a thing she could still hear now, though the morning bells had long since rung. Rain had found her in Prince Aemond’s bed, with her robe twisted upwards, and his head between her thighs. 

Foolness, though, or perhaps shame, had her sitting in the queen’s sewing room with six other women, a basket of mending at her feet and a green sleeve across her lap, and tried very hard not to think of Aemond Targaryen’s mouth and tongue and hunger.

This proved difficult because her body had become a traitor.

Every prick of the needle called back the scrape of his teeth against her throat. Every draw of thread through cloth remembered the slow pull of his fingers at the cord of her robe and across her breasts. When one of the serving girls leaned across the table, and her sleeve brushed Sweetling’s wrist, she nearly flinched as if touched somewhere bare.

Fool, she told herself.

Then, more harshly: grateful fool.

That was the danger of a little wanting, she was learning. It did not remain little. It did not stay where one placed it. A girl might tuck it into her sleeve like a ribbon, close her fingers around it, swear she understood the risk, and still by dawn find it had crawled under her skin and warmed itself there.

Mistress Rylene stood near the brazier, reading from a small ledger with the grave displeasure of a woman taking account of sins. Her keys hung at her hip, dull in the grey light. “Two tablecloths to be rehemmed,” she said. “Four napkins from the king’s dinner with grease at the edges. A torn cuff from Ser Lorent’s surcoat. A green oversleeve from Her Grace’s blue chamber gown.”

“That sleeve is mine,” said Jeyne.

Sweetling did not look up.

Across the table, Jeyne’s needle paused. It always did when she wished others to notice she had been interrupted by some thought worth noticing. The other girls knew the pause, and one or two glanced her way with that small, hungry readiness women had when boredom had softened their morals.

Mistress Rylene did not glance up from the ledger. “It is whoever finishes it well.”

“I only meant,” Jeyne said, all sugar and old vinegar, “—that I had been told to see to Her Grace’s finer gowns. By Her Grace’s own woman.”

“Then Her Grace’s own woman may sew with your hands for you, if she likes them so much.”

A little laugh tried to rise at the table and died stillborn beneath Rylene’s gaze.

Jeyne lowered her eyes. “Yes, mistress.”

Sweetling kept her needle moving.

The sleeve in her lap was indeed Alicent’s, dark green silk over linen lining, the embroidery at the edge done in thread so fine it seemed spun from candle-flame. The tear was small. A careless jewel had caught it, perhaps, or a thorn from some arrangement of winter greenery brought too near the queen’s chair. It required patience. Sweetling had patience enough when her mind obeyed her.

Today, her mind was a dog without a leash.

Aemond’s voice: Tell me to stop.

Her own foolish head shaking. Aemond’s hand catching her wrist when she tried to close her robe. No. Not cruel. Not gentle. A command that sounded, horribly, like reverence.

She drew the stitch too tight.

The silk puckered.

Sweetling froze.

“Oh,” Jeyne said softly.

There it was. Barely a word. A breath in the shape of triumph.

Sweetling did not answer. Carefully, she slid the needle's point beneath the stitch and worked it loose with steady fingers. Thank the Seven for that, if the Seven had any hand in small mercies. Around her, the room resumed its quiet clatter of thread, scissors, and women breathing.

Rylene closed the ledger.

“Sweetling,” she said.

The needle stopped in Sweetling’s hand.

Every head at the table lifted just enough not to seem as though it had.

“Yes, mistress.”

“Take the finished linen from the queen’s solar to the press. Then report to the sept. The candles have gone low after last night’s vigil.”

The sept. Sweetling felt the ribbon inside her sleeve as if it had warmed at the word.

“Yes, mistress.”

“You will not wander.”

“No, mistress.”

“You will not linger in upper corridors.”

“No, mistress.”

“And if any man stops you, you will remember that being polite is less useful than being missed.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Rylene’s mouth pressed flat. That was all. No accusation. No soft Oh, child. No hand at her chin searching for the evidence of a kiss. That, somehow, made Sweetling feel worse.

Jeyne’s gaze followed her as she rose. Sweetling folded the queen’s sleeve and set it aside to be corrected later. She took the basket Rylene indicated—linen warmed from the brazier, clean, sweet with lavender and rosemary—and moved toward the door. As she passed, Jeyne said quietly, “Mind the rain, Sweetling.”

Not girl. Not handmaid.

Sweetling stopped, and the room sharpened. It would have been wiser to keep walking. She knew that. Wisdom sat in her like a small, severe septa with a switch in hand, and for once, Sweetling heard her clearly. Walk on. Be quiet. Let spite spend itself. Instead, she turned.

Jeyne looked up at her with wide innocence. Too wide. Too innocent.

Sweetling smiled, only a little. “Thank you,” she said. “I have been learning when to stay dry and when wetness serves a purpose.”

Jeyne’s eyes narrowed by a hair. The other women around them paused, needles stilling in their stitches. Mistress Rylene’s keys gave one soft chime. Sweetling curtsied to the room—not deeply, not mockingly, only properly—and went out with the linen against her hip and her heartbeat behaving as if she had stolen something.

The Red Keep had more passages than sense.

Some were wide enough for three knights to walk abreast beneath carved beams and painted shields, where lords liked to hear their own boots on stone and ladies drifted by in gowns that whispered money. Others were scarcely more than cracks hidden behind screens or tapestries, servant-ways with walls close enough to bruise an elbow if one turned too sharply. Sweetling knew more of the second sort than the first. Everyone belowstairs did. The castle’s fine face was for those who owned it; its bones were for those who kept it standing.

She took the western service stair because the eastern way crossed too near Prince Aemond’s apartments.

That was prudence. Halfway down, she realized the western stair also passed beneath the gallery overlooking the yard. That was punishment. Or the gods were laughing. Perhaps both.

Steel rang below.

The sound slipped up through the open arches with the smell of wet sand, horse, leather, men’s sweat, oiled mail. Sweetling should have kept walking. She did keep walking, mostly. Yet at the turn, where a narrow window opened to the training court, her steps slowed of their own will.

Aemond was there. Of course, he was there. Where else did dragons go when not permitted to burn?

He wore black leather darkened further by rain, his pale hair tied at the nape and already escaping in damp strands. Ser Criston Cole stood across from him with shield raised, white cloak sodden at one shoulder. Three squires waited near the wall, miserable and fascinated. The yard’s sand had turned treacherous with mud, but Aemond moved as if the ground owed him firmness and dared not disappoint.

His sword struck Criston’s shield with a crack that made one squire wince.

Again.

Again.

Not wild. Never wild. Each blow was placed, and each retreat measured. His anger, if anger it was, had been folded so neatly into discipline that only someone looking too closely might see the shape of it.

Sweetling was looking too closely.

Criston said something she could not hear.

Aemond answered with steel.

The next exchange was so quick she lost the first half of it. Criston’s blade came low; Aemond turned it, stepped inside, drove an elbow toward the knight’s ribs, and stopped the blunted edge of his sword an inch from Criston’s throat. The yard went still after that.  Aemond’s mouth moved.

This time, Sweetling heard him.

“Again.”

Criston lowered his sword a fraction. “My prince—”

“Again.”

Aemond’s head turned then. Not much—barely at all, in truth . . . but only enough for his eye to find the window. And he then found her. Sweetling’s breath caught with a shiver down her spine. She stepped back at once, though not quickly enough. The basket shifted at her hip. Linen brushed stone. Below, Aemond neither smiled nor frowned. He only looked at her through rain and distance with the same terrible stillness he had worn among the candles.

Like a man watching the first line of a war . . . or perhaps a man watching his future. 

Sweetling lowered her eyes and moved on. Behind her, steel rang again. This time, she did not stop.

By morning, the rain had made liars of all clean things.

It came down over King’s Landing in thin, needling silver, not hard enough to empty the streets, though not soft enough to ignore. The gutters choked. The flags above the Red Keep hung sodden and heavy from their poles, green and gold and black-red alike gone dark at the edges. Smoke crawled low from the city’s chimneys, too damp to rise properly, and the whole of the castle seemed to breathe wet stone.

Sweetling hated rain more after that night.

Not because of the cold. Cold was honest. Cold bit and was done with it. Rain crept. Rain found seams, loosened knots, dampened hems, drew hair from pins, and secrets from mouths and tongues. Rain had put her in Prince Aemond’s chambers with her robe clinging and her courage behaving like that of some drunkard’s fool. Rain had beaded on his pale lashes when he looked down at her, and made the linen of her shift treacherous beneath his hands, and turned the sound of his breathing into a thing she could still hear now, though the morning bells had long since rung. Rain had found her in Prince Aemond’s bed, with her robe twisted upwards, and his head between her thighs. 

Foolness, though, or perhaps shame, had her sitting in the queen’s sewing room with six other women, a basket of mending at her feet and a green sleeve across her lap, and tried very hard not to think of Aemond Targaryen’s mouth and tongue and hunger.

This proved difficult because her body had become a traitor.

Every prick of the needle called back the scrape of his teeth against her throat. Every draw of thread through cloth remembered the slow pull of his fingers at the cord of her robe and across her breasts. When one of the serving girls leaned across the table, and her sleeve brushed Sweetling’s wrist, she nearly flinched as if touched somewhere bare.

Fool, she told herself.

Then, more harshly: grateful fool.

That was the danger of a little wanting, she was learning. It did not remain little. It did not stay where one placed it. A girl might tuck it into her sleeve like a ribbon, close her fingers around it, swear she understood the risk, and still by dawn find it had crawled under her skin and warmed itself there.

Mistress Rylene stood near the brazier, reading from a small ledger with the grave displeasure of a woman taking account of sins. Her keys hung at her hip, dull in the grey light. “Two tablecloths to be rehemmed,” she said. “Four napkins from the king’s dinner with grease at the edges. A torn cuff from Ser Lorent’s surcoat. A green oversleeve from Her Grace’s blue chamber gown.”

“That sleeve is mine,” said Jeyne.

Sweetling did not look up.

Across the table, Jeyne’s needle paused. It always did when she wished others to notice she had been interrupted by some thought worth noticing. The other girls knew the pause, and one or two glanced her way with that small, hungry readiness women had when boredom had softened their morals.

Mistress Rylene did not glance up from the ledger. “It is whoever finishes it well.”

“I only meant,” Jeyne said, all sugar and old vinegar, “—that I had been told to see to Her Grace’s finer gowns. By Her Grace’s own woman.”

“Then Her Grace’s own woman may sew with your hands for you, if she likes them so much.”

A little laugh tried to rise at the table and died stillborn beneath Rylene’s gaze.

Jeyne lowered her eyes. “Yes, mistress.”

Sweetling kept her needle moving.

The sleeve in her lap was indeed Alicent’s, dark green silk over linen lining, the embroidery at the edge done in thread so fine it seemed spun from candle-flame. The tear was small. A careless jewel had caught it, perhaps, or a thorn from some arrangement of winter greenery brought too near the queen’s chair. It required patience. Sweetling had patience enough when her mind obeyed her.

Today, her mind was a dog without a leash.

Aemond’s voice: Tell me to stop.

Her own foolish head shaking. Aemond’s hand catching her wrist when she tried to close her robe. No. Not cruel. Not gentle. A command that sounded, horribly, like reverence.

She drew the stitch too tight.

The silk puckered.

Sweetling froze.

“Oh,” Jeyne said softly.

There it was. Barely a word. A breath in the shape of triumph.

Sweetling did not answer. Carefully, she slid the needle's point beneath the stitch and worked it loose with steady fingers. Thank the Seven for that, if the Seven had any hand in small mercies. Around her, the room resumed its quiet clatter of thread, scissors, and women breathing.

Rylene closed the ledger.

“Sweetling,” she said.

The needle stopped in Sweetling’s hand.

Every head at the table lifted just enough not to seem as though it had.

“Yes, mistress.”

“Take the finished linen from the queen’s solar to the press. Then report to the sept. The candles have gone low after last night’s vigil.”

The sept. Sweetling felt the ribbon inside her sleeve as if it had warmed at the word.

“Yes, mistress.”

“You will not wander.”

“No, mistress.”

“You will not linger in upper corridors.”

“No, mistress.”

“And if any man stops you, you will remember that being polite is less useful than being missed.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Rylene’s mouth pressed flat. That was all. No accusation. No soft Oh, child. No hand at her chin searching for the evidence of a kiss. That, somehow, made Sweetling feel worse.

Jeyne’s gaze followed her as she rose. Sweetling folded the queen’s sleeve and set it aside to be corrected later. She took the basket Rylene indicated—linen warmed from the brazier, clean, sweet with lavender and rosemary—and moved toward the door. As she passed, Jeyne said quietly, “Mind the rain, Sweetling.”

Not girl. Not handmaid.

Sweetling stopped, and the room sharpened. It would have been wiser to keep walking. She knew that. Wisdom sat in her like a small, severe septa with a switch in hand, and for once, Sweetling heard her clearly. Walk on. Be quiet. Let spite spend itself. Instead, she turned.

Jeyne looked up at her with wide innocence. Too wide. Too innocent.

Sweetling smiled, only a little. “Thank you,” she said. “I have been learning when to stay dry and when wetness serves a purpose.”

Jeyne’s eyes narrowed by a hair. The other women around them paused, needles stilling in their stitches. Mistress Rylene’s keys gave one soft chime. Sweetling curtsied to the room—not deeply, not mockingly, only properly—and went out with the linen against her hip and her heartbeat behaving as if she had stolen something.

The Red Keep had more passages than sense.

Some were wide enough for three knights to walk abreast beneath carved beams and painted shields, where lords liked to hear their own boots on stone and ladies drifted by in gowns that whispered money. Others were scarcely more than cracks hidden behind screens or tapestries, servant-ways with walls close enough to bruise an elbow if one turned too sharply. Sweetling knew more of the second sort than the first. Everyone belowstairs did. The castle’s fine face was for those who owned it; its bones were for those who kept it standing.

She took the western service stair because the eastern way crossed too near Prince Aemond’s apartments.

That was prudence. Halfway down, she realized the western stair also passed beneath the gallery overlooking the yard. That was punishment. Or the gods were laughing. Perhaps both.

Steel rang below.

The sound slipped up through the open arches with the smell of wet sand, horse, leather, men’s sweat, oiled mail. Sweetling should have kept walking. She did keep walking, mostly. Yet at the turn, where a narrow window opened to the training court, her steps slowed of their own will.

Aemond was there. Of course, he was there. Where else did dragons go when not permitted to burn?

He wore black leather darkened further by rain, his pale hair tied at the nape and already escaping in damp strands. Ser Criston Cole stood across from him with shield raised, white cloak sodden at one shoulder. Three squires waited near the wall, miserable and fascinated. The yard’s sand had turned treacherous with mud, but Aemond moved as if the ground owed him firmness and dared not disappoint.

His sword struck Criston’s shield with a crack that made one squire wince.

Again.

Again.

Not wild. Never wild. Each blow was placed, and each retreat measured. His anger, if anger it was, had been folded so neatly into discipline that only someone looking too closely might see the shape of it.

Sweetling was looking too closely.

Criston said something she could not hear.

Aemond answered with steel.

The next exchange was so quick she lost the first half of it. Criston’s blade came low; Aemond turned it, stepped inside, drove an elbow toward the knight’s ribs, and stopped the blunted edge of his sword an inch from Criston’s throat. The yard went still after that.  Aemond’s mouth moved.

This time, Sweetling heard him.

“Again.”

Criston lowered his sword a fraction. “My prince—”

“Again.”

Aemond’s head turned then. Not much—barely at all, in truth . . . but only enough for his eye to find the window. And he then found her. Sweetling’s breath caught with a shiver down her spine. She stepped back at once, though not quickly enough. The basket shifted at her hip. Linen brushed stone. Below, Aemond neither smiled nor frowned. He only looked at her through rain and distance with the same terrible stillness he had worn among the candles.

Like a man watching the first line of a war . . . or perhaps a man watching his future. 

Sweetling lowered her eyes and moved on. Behind her, steel rang again. This time, she did not stop.

The queen’s solar was empty when Sweetling entered, except for a sleepy hearth and the ghost of Alicent Hightower.

Some women left scents behind them, the way others left gloves and handkerchiefs. Alicent’s rooms held lavender, rosemary, beeswax, old parchment, and the faint metallic worry that seemed to cling to the queen no matter how fine her gown. The chairs sat in their places; the embroidery frame near the window was covered with emerald-green cloth, and a cup of cooled tisane rested untouched beside a folded letter.

Sweetling did not look at the letter.

Looking was not reading, and reading was not betrayal, but in the Red Keep, such distinctions often died under questioning.

She placed the linens in the proper press, checked the shelf for dampness, and smoothed the stack twice. Her hands moved by habit. That was useful. Habit kept a girl alive when thought became dangerous.

At the little side table, she found one of the queen’s gloves.

Alicent favored gloves more than most women. Fine kid leather, green or cream or black, depending on the occasion, worked tight over fingers that had learned to fold themselves in prayer rather than claw at the world. This one lay palm-up beside the tisane as if dropped in weariness. The inner seam had split near the thumb.

Sweetling ought to have left it for Jeyne.

She took out her needle.

It was foolish. Small foolishness, yes, but foolishness all the same. The sept waited. Rylene had said go and come back. The queen’s glove was not her charge.

Still, she sat by the window where the light was best and mended the seam.

The leather was soft, the split clean. A quick repair. A little kindness, if anyone could call service kind. Sweetling bent her head over it and let the rain’s hush fill the room. Stitch by stitch, the torn place closed.

She thought of Alicent’s eyes, shaped by marriage and childbirth and betrayal that arrived much too early in girlhood. Not angry, though anger existed in the same breath as exasperation, but . . . careful measuring.

She thought of Aemond’s mouth shaping the words: My mother believes herself subtle. She is not.

Then she thought of his hands on her waist, on her breasts, and his tongue collecting wetness between her thighs, and pricked her finger. “Seven hells,” she whispered.

“An unusually devout prayer.”

Sweetling surged to her feet so quickly that the chair scraped against the stone.

Alicent Hightower stood in the doorway. Not crowned. That made her worse. A crown announced a queen. Without it, Alicent seemed more wholly herself: a woman too young to look as tired as she did, hands folded over a dark green gown, auburn hair bound back, face soft in all the places worry had not sharpened.

Sweetling dropped low. “Your Grace.”

Alicent’s gaze moved from her face to the glove on the table, then to the needle in her hand. “Rise.”

Sweetling rose.

The queen came forward. Her steps were quiet—a lady’s steps, learned young and never unlearned. “I sent for that glove this morning. I was under the impression that Jeyne, perhaps, would be the one mending it.”

Sweetling’s stomach tightened. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I found the seam torn and thought to mend it before—”

“Before anyone noticed?”

The words were mild. The trap beneath them was not.

Sweetling lowered her eyes. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Alicent took the glove and examined the repair in silence. For a moment, there was only the sound of rain at the shutters. “You sew well.”

“Thank you, Your Grace.”

“My son thinks so.”

Sweetling’s mouth went dry.

Alicent set the glove down, pulled her shoulders back, and laced her hands together. “Do not look so frightened. It makes me feel crueler than I have yet decided to be.”

That startled Sweetling into looking up. A mistake. Alicent saw too much in her face. Queens did that. Mothers did worse. The silence lengthened into something terrible, something that sent twelve stones, heavy and round, into her tummy.

Then Alicent said, “He trained hard this morning.”

Sweetling had no idea what answer was safe. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“You saw him?”

“I passed the gallery.”

“And stopped?”

The room had become very cold.

“For a moment,” Sweetling admitted.

Alicent’s mouth tightened. Not anger; pain, perhaps, or recognition, which was less merciful. “For a moment,” she echoed.

Sweetling wished for Rylene’s hard voice, for Jeyne’s spite, for Marra’s steam and lye, anything simpler than being alone with a queen who loved her son enough to fear him.

Alicent moved to the window. Rain blurred the city beyond into dark streaks and pale smoke. “When Aemond was small, he would follow the others into the yard and watch them with such hunger that I could hardly bear it. Not hunger for play. No. He was never much for play. Hunger to be included. To be feared less, mocked less. A Targaryen with a dragon is terrible for the world. A Targaryen without a dragon is worse.” Her fingers touched the windowsill. 

“. . . then came Driftmark.”

Sweetling did not move; she did not need to. Everyone in the castle knew the word. Driftmark. The Lady Laena Velayron’s funeral. The she-dragon Vhagar, one of the conqueror’s mounts. The blade, the eye, the sapphire, and the prince made sharper by what had been taken from him. “He came back to me with one eye gone,” Alicent said softly, “—and told me it was a fair exchange.”

The queen’s voice did not break, and that made it worse.

Sweetling swallowed. “I am sorry, Your Grace.”

Alicent turned. “Do not be sorry for old wounds. The court has enough mourners when it wishes to seem virtuous.” Her gaze fixed on Sweetling’s mouth. Her lips were not bruised . . . at least not visibly, though Aemond had kissed her enough the last night that Sweetling felt the look all the same.

“My son is not his brother,” Alicent said.

“No, Your Grace.”

“And yet . . . that is not enough.”

Sweetling’s hands tightened around the needle.

Alicent saw. Her eyes softened, briefly, and then hardened because softness had so rarely served her well. “He has given you a choice, I take it.” It was not a question.

Sweetling felt the ribbon hidden in her sleeve.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Do you understand how strange that is?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand how dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand,” Alicent said, voice sharpening now, “that a prince may give a choice one day and resent being held to it the next? Or that a dragon might possess you like gold? My son Aegon has fathered enough bastards that Flea Bottom is said to resemble Valyria. While Aemond is not Aegon, men are still men, and men prefer to think with their cocks than their minds.”

Sweetling’s throat tightened. Aemond would not, some foolish part of her wanted to say, but she did not know that. Not yet, and perhaps not ever. She did not know if Aemond would keep her the way men kept their favorite whores at the brothels, or if his tongue and mercy held more promises than expected. 

“I . . . understand that he is a prince,” she began, each word slow and careful.

Alicent’s face changed, only slightly, though enough. “Good.” 

It was not praise. It did not stop Sweetling from gathering her courage in both hands and hating how small a handful it made of it. “Your Grace.”

Alicent waited.

“He stopped.”

The words hung between them, improper and plain.

Alicent went still.

Sweetling forced herself onward. “When I did not know how to ask it. When I was frightened. He stopped.”

Alicent looked away first.

For a moment, she did not seem like a queen at all. She seemed like a woman who had prayed for a son to grow into something better than the world allowed men to be, and feared every day that prayer was another form of pride.

“At least he knows the shape of it,” Alicent murmured.

“Of what, Your Grace?”

“Restraint.”

Sweetling thought of Aemond in the yard, rain in his hair, blade at Criston’s throat. She thought of him in the sept, stepping back when she had wanted him closer. She thought of him at the desk with his hand around her wrist, and his voice roughened by wanting. “He is learning,” she said before she could stop herself.

Alicent looked back at her.

This time, the queen’s eyes were not soft.

“They all learn,” she said. “The question is what lesson they prefer.”

Sweetling bowed her head.

Alicent crossed the room and took up the mended glove. “Go to the sept. Leave the candles neat. And Sweetling?”

“Yes, Your Grace?”

“If he sends the ribbon, you may refuse.”

Sweetling’s breath caught.

“If he sends the seal,” Alicent continued, “you will come first to me.”

That was no small command. It was treason in miniature, if one wished to be dramatic. A seed of betrayal planted in the soil of protection. A queen laying claim across a prince’s claim. A mother reminding the handmaid that dragons did not own every sky they flew beneath.

Sweetling curtsied. “Yes, Your Grace.”

Alicent’s mouth pressed thin. “Do not make me regret protecting you.”

“No, Your Grace.”

“And do not make him regret trying.”

Sweetling looked up, but Alicent had already turned toward the window, glove in hand, rainlight on her face as she stared across the yard.

The audience was done.

The sept smelled of wet wool and melting wax.

It was colder than the queen’s solar, colder even than the service stairs, for holy places in King’s Landing often seemed to mistake discomfort for virtue. The seven faces above the altar watched with their usual stone patience. The Mother’s carved eyes were kind if one stood far enough away. The Father’s were not. The Stranger’s face, shadowed behind a black candle, offered no opinion at all.

Sweetling preferred the Stranger for that.

No novice slept near the candles today. No septa scolded. The chamber stood quiet but for the rain whispering somewhere beyond the walls and the soft, faint hiss of dying wicks. She knelt first, not because she was especially pious in that moment, though she tried to be. Habit drew her down before thought did. Her knees found the worn place in the stone and her hands folded.

Maiden, keep me gentle.

She hesitated. Gentleness had begun to seem like a gown sewn for another girl.

Mother, keep me strong.

That, at least, she could pray honestly.

Father, keep me just.

Justice belonged to those high enough to afford it, but she prayed anyway.

Warrior, keep me brave.

That one felt dangerous. Brave girls died quicker than quiet ones, Rylene had said in a hundred different ways without ever saying those words exactly. Brave girls perished in childbirth, and beneath men they had believed they could tame. 

Smith, keep my hands true.

Her fingers still bore faint marks from lye and needle, though the skin had healed where Aemond’s salve had done its work.

Crone, keep my eyes open.

Too open, perhaps.

Stranger—

She stopped. The black candle guttered. 

In the silence, footsteps sounded behind her.

Sweetling did not turn. Fear moved first, then hope, and she disliked hope more, as hope had no discipline. Hope was a little animal running toward a hand that might hold bread or a knife. The footsteps stopped beside the Warrior.

“I thought to find you here,” Aemond said.

Her eyes closed.

Of course.

She rose carefully and turned, head bowing just a little. “My prince.”

His gaze dropped to her mouth at the title.

“Aemond,” she corrected, softer.

The displeasure left his face by half a degree. He wore the same black from the yard, though he had changed his damp outer leather for a dry tunic. His hair was still tied back, but rain had curled one pale strand against his cheek. The eyepatch made him look severe. The sapphire beneath it, unseen, made him feel worse: a secret blue fire hidden where an eye had been.

“You spoke with my mother,” he said.

Sweetling folded her hands. “Yes.”

“You were alone.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And she told me to come here.”

His mouth tightened. “That is not what I ask.”

“You did not ask anything.”

Aemond stared at her.

The sept seemed to grow interested.

Sweetling’s courage immediately tried to flee her body. Too late. The words had left. They stood now in the space between them, small and bold and foolish as a candle set beneath a curtain.

Then Aemond’s mouth moved. “Hm.” 

Not quite a smile.

“You are becoming a trial.”

“I am trying not to.”

“No.” He stepped nearer. “You are not.”

Warmth moved through her, not modest warmth, and not proper. A low, curling thing she had no prayer for.

Aemond stopped a pace away. “What did she say?”

Sweetling glanced toward the seven faces. “She told me that if you send the seal, I must go first to her.”

His eye hardened.

“I see.”

“She means to protect me.”

“She means to manage me.”

“Both may be true.”

“That is her great talent,” Aemond said coldly. “Making a chain look like shelter.”

Sweetling looked at him then, really looked.

Rain had left a line of damp at his collar. His jaw was tight. His hands, those careful hands, were held still at his sides. But the stillness did not fool her; she knew him better than that now, knew the little signs, and knew when pride was hurt and when anger was covering something less armored. “You gave me the ribbon,” she said.

His eye flicked down to her sleeve. “Yes.”

“Was that a chain?”

“No.”

“Was it shelter?”

“No.”

“What was it, then?”

“A choice.”

She stepped closer, not by much, barely enough to count, but enough that his gaze sharpened and held. “And choices are not shelter?”

Aemond said nothing.

Sweetling’s heart beat hard. She wondered if all courage felt like sickness at first. “The queen does not trust you,” she said carefully. “Not with this. Perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps she is not. But she fears for me, and I cannot hate her for it.”

“You defend her to me?”

“I defend fear when it is not cruel.”

His expression changed.

“Careful,” he said.

“No,” Sweetling whispered.

His eye narrowed.

The word had startled them both.

She swallowed, then made herself continue. “No. I am careful in corridors. I am careful with Jeyne. I am careful with Mistress Rylene, and with Her Grace, and with every guard who looks too long. With you, Aemond, I am trying to be honest.”

Aemond’s breath left him slowly.

“You think honesty safer?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

Because you listen, she had said once.

That answer had been true. It was not all of it.

Because you stop, she might have said. Because you gave me a way to refuse you and hated needing to give it, and gave it anyway. Because when you look at me, I feel seen and endangered and chosen and doomed, and some foolish part of me has begun to prefer danger with a name to safety without one. She said none of that. Instead, she reached into her sleeve and drew out the ribbon.

Aemond’s face went still.

The cloth lay across her palm, dark and plain. A servant’s scrap. A prince’s signal. A warning. A mercy. A thing that had become too heavy for what little it weighed.

“I have it,” she said.

“I see that.”

“I did not return it.”

“I did not ask you to.”

“No.” Her fingers curled around it. “You asked me to understand the risk.”

“And do you?”

“Not enough.”

His gaze held hers.

“That answer pleased you yesterday,” she said.

“That was yesterday.”

“And today?”

“Today,” Aemond said, “I find I dislike how well you remember me.”

Sweetling smiled before she could help herself. Aemond looked at her mouth. The sept changed at once.

Not in any way the gods would admit. The candles still burned. Rain still whispered. Stone still watched. Yet all the air between them drew tight as pulled silk, and Sweetling felt the memory of his hands at her waist as if he had touched her anew. Aemond did not move, and somehow that was worse than movement.

“Do not smile at me so,” he said.

“How do I smile?”

“As if you think me better than I am.”

Her smile faded. “I do not think that.”

His eye returned to hers.

“I think you are trying,” she said. “That is different.”

Aemond laughed once beneath his breath. “A poor compliment.”

“It was not meant as one.”

“No. That is why I believe it.”

Then he touched her. Only her hand. His fingers closed over the ribbon and her palm together, warm and dry, sword-callused, frighteningly careful. Sweetling looked down. His hand was larger than hers, the bones long and clean, the knuckles marked by training. Hers disappeared under his for a moment.

“Tell me,” he said.

Her voice thinned. “Tell you what?”

“That you understand this, too.”

His thumb moved once over the back of her hand. It was not enough to be called a caress, but it was enough to make her breath catch.

Sweetling looked up. “That you want me?”

His face hardened with the bluntness of it.

“Yes.”

“I understand.”

“No,” he said softly. “You understand that a man wants. You do not yet understand how a dragon does.”

Her pulse stumbled. Aemond’s fingers tightened, then eased at once, as if he had felt himself do it and corrected the force before it could become command. “There,” he said, almost bitterly. “That is the lesson.”

Sweetling drew in a breath.

“You could be gentle,” she said.

The words struck him more visibly than she expected.

Aemond stared at her as if she had accused him of some secret vice.

“I could be many things,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That does not mean I am.”

“No.”

“You are determined to be foolish.”

“I am determined to know.”

“To know what?”

Sweetling looked at their joined hands. The ribbon was trapped between them. “To know whether restraint is all you will allow yourself.”

Aemond went very still.

For one heartbeat, two, she thought she had truly gone too far. That he would step back, turn cold, cut the little growing thing between them down to the root because she had dared name it. But he did not step back. He came closer. Slowly. So slowly, she had every chance to move away. Her back met the edge of the altar rail. The carved wood pressed through her gown. Aemond’s hand left hers and rose to her face, stopping just shy of her cheek, though he did not touch her there yet.

“Say my name,” he murmured.

“Aemond.”

“No.” His voice lowered. “Not like prayer.”

Heat flooded her throat.

“Aemond,” she said again, and this time it was not prayer.

His hand cupped her cheek. The first touch was barely there. His thumb rested beneath her lower lip, not pressing, simply feeling the warmth of her breath. Sweetling held still because if she moved, she feared she would move toward him too quickly and shame them both before the gods.

Aemond bent his head.

He kissed her as if the last kiss had taught him manners and made him resent them.

Not soft, not quite, but slower. A mouth held back by will. His lips brushed hers once, parted, returned. Sweetling’s fingers caught the front of his tunic, not clutching this time, only holding. The difference seemed to please him; she felt it in the way his breath changed.

He drew back a fraction. “Open your eyes.”

She had not known she’d closed them.

She obeyed.

Aemond was very near. Near enough that the sharpness of him blurred: scar, cheekbone, pale lash, the dark leather of his patch, the living eye fixed on hers with such hunger that her knees weakened.

“There,” he said. “Look at me when I kiss you.”

“I thought you liked lowered eyes.”

“I like obedience.” His thumb brushed her lower lip, feeling the plump softness there. “I also like knowing when you forget it.”

Sweetling’s breath shook.

That pleased him too. Gods help her, she liked that it did.

This kiss went deeper. His tongue touched hers, slow and hot, and she made a small sound into his mouth that drew his hand from her cheek to the back of her neck. He held her there, not trapping, but making the possibility of escape feel like something she would have to choose aloud.

She did not choose it. Her hands slid up, over damp black wool, over the hard line of his shoulders. Aemond shuddered. The sound was slight, more felt than heard. Sweetling’s heart answered it. He broke the kiss and set his mouth to the corner of hers, then her jaw, then the tender place below her ear. Each kiss was measured, deliberate, as if he were learning a map and meant never to need it drawn again. Her head tipped without permission, and his hand tightened at her nape.

“Aemond,” she breathed.

“Again.”

“Aemond.”

His mouth found her throat.

The sept vanished by degrees.

Not truly. The gods remained; the candles remained; the rain remained. But the world narrowed to his lips, his breath, the heat of him against her, the altar rail behind her, and the ribbon crumpled in her hand. When his teeth grazed the side of her neck, she gasped and caught at his sleeve.

He stopped at once.

Sweetling opened her eyes.

Aemond had gone rigid, his mouth still near her skin, breath warm and uneven.

“Pain?” he asked.

“No.”

“Fear?”

She swallowed, mouth tugging at the corner. “A little.”

He drew back enough to see her face.

“And want?”

The word was indecent in a sept. It was also honest.

Sweetling’s cheeks burned. “Yes.”

His eye darkened. For a moment, she saw what it cost him not to take that yes and make a feast of it; she saw it in the hard line of his jaw, in the tendon standing at his throat, in the faint tremor that moved through the hand not touching her.

A prince of the blood. A dragonrider. Vhagar’s chosen. Aemond One-Eye, feared in the yard and corridor, holding himself still because a handmaid’s voice had gone soft around the word yes. Sweetling’s chest ached. Without thinking, she lifted her hand and touched the edge of his eyepatch.

Aemond caught her wrist before she reached it.

The movement was quick enough to frighten.

Not painful. Never painful.

But fast.

His face had closed.

Sweetling’s breath hitched. “Forgive me.”

He did not let go.

“You do not touch that,” he said.

“No.”

“Not unless I allow it.”

“I understand.”

“No,” he said, and now there was steel in him again, but it was not turned only outward. “You do not.”

Sweetling held still beneath his grip. “Then tell me.”

Aemond’s mouth tightened.

For a moment, she thought he would refuse. Men disliked explaining old wounds. Princes disliked it more, because explanation made of pain a thing shared, and shared pain could become pity if handed to the wrong person.

Aemond despised pity. She knew that as surely as she knew he liked order and quiet.

But he did not release her.

“My eye is not yours to wonder at,” he said.

“I know.”

“It is not a curiosity.”

“No.”

“It is not a debt I owe your courage.”

That struck her. Her eyes stung, which was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“I was not being brave,” she said. “I wanted to touch you.”

His grip loosened.

Not fully.

Enough.

The anger in his face shifted, uncertain of where to stand.

Sweetling lowered her wrist from his hand slowly. This time, he let her. She did not reach for the patch again. Instead, she set her palm flat against his chest, over the black wool, above the place where his heart beat hard and uneven beneath her hand.

“This,” she said. “Only this.”

Aemond looked down at her hand, and a moment later, his own rose and covered it. The silence that followed was worse than any kiss. Worse, because it was tender and neither of them knew what to do with tenderness. Tenderness in the Red Keep was a smuggled thing. Contraband. A knife hidden in flowers. A loaf of bread stolen from a lord’s table and passed beneath a door.

Aemond’s fingers closed over hers.

“Sweetling,” he said.

She looked up.

His voice was rough. “I cannot make you safe.”

“I know.”

“I can make others afraid to harm you.”

“That is not the same.”

“No.”

The admission seemed to cost him more than the kiss.

She stepped closer. He allowed it. “I do not need you to make me safe,” she said. “I need you not to make me less so.”

His eye searched hers, then his mouth curved, faintly and without joy. “There is the clever girl my mother feared.”

Sweetling huffed a laugh before she could stop herself.

Aemond stared.

The sound had surprised them both.

It was not graceful. Not courtly. Barely more than breath. But it escaped her honestly, and once it did, she could not call it back. Her smile followed, reluctant and small.

“You should not laugh at princes,” he said.

“No.”

“Especially not in septs.”

“No.”

“Especially not when they are trying very hard to behave honorably.”

That did it.

The laugh came again, softer this time but real.

Aemond’s face changed.

For one impossible heartbeat, he looked young.

Not harmless. Never harmless. But young enough that the burden of his pride showed as something worn rather than born. Young enough that Sweetling could imagine the boy who had watched others laugh and sworn never again to be the cause of it.

His hand left hers and touched the corner of her mouth.

“Dangerous,” he murmured.

“My laugh?”

“Your joy.”

The words made the laughter die.

Aemond seemed almost angry that he had said them. He kissed her again before either of them could examine it.

This kiss was different.

Not gentler, exactly. Aemond’s gentleness had edges. But it was less like hunger being denied and more like hunger being taught patience. He kissed her until the altar rail pressed into her back and her fingers curled in his tunic. He kissed her until she understood that restraint was not the absence of want; rather, it was want given a shape—want held in two hands and made to kneel. When he drew away, his forehead nearly touched hers.

“Go,” he said.

Sweetling blinked. “Now?”

“Yes.”

Her lips felt swollen. “Why?”

“Because if you remain, I will become less honorable, and you will no longer stand there a maiden.”

The answer sent heat through her so fierce that she could hardly breathe, and she felt the slightest feeling of wetness beginning to pool between her thighs. Her face felt hot. Aemond noticed. Of course, he noticed. 

His mouth tightened with dark satisfaction. “And because you are smiling like that.”

“I am not smiling.”

“Liar.”

She was, but only a little, only for him.

Sweetling stepped back, though every foolish part of her wanted the opposite. She smoothed her gown, then realized it needed no smoothing. He had not disordered her. Not truly. The danger of him remained mostly invisible. Mostly. Her mouth, perhaps. Her eyes, too.

The gods would know. But gods gossiped less than servants.

She curtsied. “My prince.”

His eye narrowed.

She rose. “Aemond.”

“Better.”

She turned toward the candles because she had duties, and duties were the last rope left to pull herself from madness. The low candles needed trimming. Two had guttered nearly to nothing before the Mother. She replaced them with fresh tapers, hands careful, breath slowly steadying.

Aemond watched her work.

That, too, she felt.

When she finished, she took up the empty candle box and moved toward the sept doors.

“Sweetling.”

She stopped, smiling before she turned, which was dangerous.

“Yes?”

He stood where she had left him, black-clad before the seven faces, rainlight silvering his hair. His expression had returned to composure, but not entirely. Something remained beneath it. Some heat. Some wound. Some wanting thing leashed and waiting.

“If I send the ribbon,” he said, “—what will you do?”

She touched her sleeve.

“I will choose.”

“And if you choose no?”

His mouth barely moved around the word. No was still a foreign thing to him. A difficult language. He was learning it anyway.

Sweetling’s throat tightened.

“Then you will have to endure it,” she said.

Aemond looked at her for a long moment, then he bowed his head. Not much. Not to her. Never that. But enough. “I will.” 

Sweetling left before her face could betray her any further.

The Red Keep had not changed while she was in the sept.

That disappointed her, though she had not realized she expected otherwise.

The corridors remained cold. The rain remained sly. Servants still hurried with baskets and trays, guards still watched without seeming to, and somewhere below, a woman scolded a boy for tracking mud across clean rushes. Life did not pause because a handmaid had been kissed before the Father and Mother and Warrior alike. The castle did not tremble. The gods did not strike anyone dead.

A pity, perhaps. It might have simplified matters.

Sweetling returned the candle box to the linen room and found Mistress Rylene waiting.

Of course.

Rylene stood at the folding table with both hands planted on either side of a stack of towels. Her keys were very still.

Sweetling stopped just inside the door.

“Did you wander?” Rylene asked.

“No, mistress.”

“Did you linger?”

Sweetling hesitated.

Rylene’s eyes sharpened.

“Yes,” Sweetling said.

The room seemed to inhale.

Rylene looked past her, toward the corridor, as if expecting a dragon to appear in the doorway. “With whom?”

Sweetling’s fingers tightened around the empty box. “Prince Aemond.”

Mistress Rylene closed her eyes; it was worse than shouting. When she opened them, she looked ten summers older. “Child.”

“I am not—”

“You are,” Rylene snapped. “Do not be proud with me. Pride is for people who have somewhere to fall from.”

Sweetling lowered her eyes.

Rylene came around the table. “Did he summon you?”

“No.”

“Did you summon him?”

“No.”

“Did he touch you?”

Sweetling’s face burned.

Rylene swore softly. “Seven save me from princes and girls who smile at them.”

“I did not—”

“You did.” Rylene’s voice cut clean. “Perhaps not with your mouth. Perhaps not where anyone saw. But you smiled somewhere, else he would not have had the courage to be a fool.”

Sweetling stared at her.

Rylene gave a bleak little laugh. “Yes, courage. Men call it desire when they want to feel innocent. Often it is only courage without discipline.”

“He has discipline.”

“He has training,” Rylene said. “Do not confuse the two.”

Sweetling’s hands curled.

Rylene saw and sighed, which was nearly worse. “Ah. There it is. You want to defend him.”

“He stopped when I asked.”

“Did you ask?”

Sweetling had no answer.

Rylene’s face softened by the smallest degree, though her voice did not. “That is the matter, isn’t it?”

“I would have,” Sweetling said, hating how small it sounded.

“If you knew how. If fear did not tangle your tongue. If wanting did not make you stupid. If a prince’s hand did not feel like command even when he means it otherwise.”

Sweetling looked down.

Rylene took the empty candle box from her and set it aside.

Then, very unexpectedly, she reached out and adjusted the edge of Sweetling’s sleeve. The gesture was brisk, almost irritated, but not unkind. Her fingers paused.

She felt the ribbon hidden there.

Rylene’s eyes lifted.

“He gave you that?”

Sweetling nodded.

“To refuse him.”

“Yes.”

The older woman’s expression became unreadable.

For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then she tucked the sleeve back into place and stepped away. “Keep it where no one sees.”

Sweetling blinked. “You are not taking it?”

“Would you give it?”

The answer came at once. “No.”

Rylene made a sound that was not quite approval. “Then I would have to wrestle a handmaid over a scrap of cloth, and I have too much dignity left for that.”

A laugh startled out of Sweetling.

Rylene pointed at her. “Do not make that noise at me. I am not your friend.”

“No, mistress.”

“I am also not your enemy, which in this castle is nearly as useful.” She returned to the towels. “Listen to me now. If he sends the ribbon, you decide before you leave whatever room you stand in. Not in the passage. Not at his door. Not after seeing his face. Before. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If you choose yes, you take someone with you as far as the door.”

Sweetling swallowed. “That will make people talk.”

“People are already talking. Give them work to do while they do it.”

“And if I choose no?”

“Then you send it back by the same hand that carried it, and you go where there are witnesses.”

Sweetling nodded.

Rylene’s mouth tightened. “And Sweetling?”

“Yes, mistress?”

“If you choose yes because you fear his displeasure, you are a fool.”

“I know.”

“If you choose yes because you think desire is the same as devotion, you are a greater fool.”

Sweetling’s face heated.

Rylene’s gaze did not soften. “If you choose yes because you understand the cost and still wish to pay it, then the gods help you. I cannot.”

The words were harsh. They were also a gift.

Sweetling curtsied. “Yes, mistress.”

Rylene looked at her for one more moment, then waved toward the table. “Fold those towels. Your hands are not broken, and neither, despite your best efforts, is your head.”

Sweetling obeyed.

For a time, there was only the quiet snap and fold of linen. Outside, rain tapped the window. After a while, Rylene said, without looking up, “Was he gentle?”

Sweetling’s hands stilled.

The question sat strangely in the room. Not like gossip. Not like an accusation. Like a woman asking whether a door had held against the weather. Sweetling thought of Aemond’s mouth at her throat, his hand catching her wrist, his voice saying, Pain? Fear? And Want? She thought of his hand covering hers over his heart.

“He tried to be,” she said.

Rylene’s face gave nothing away.

“That is something,” the older woman said at last.

Then, quieter, so quiet, Sweetling almost missed it:

“Not enough. But something.”