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♞ THE DRAGON IN THE STAR / AERION TARGARYEN

aerion targaryen x targaryen reader

SYNOPSIS: a beautiful targaryen princess, beloved daughter of baelor breakspear, is worshipped by the realm as a perfect star of house targaryen. but her monstrous cousin aerion brightflame sees the hidden dragon beneath her beauty, and his lifelong obsession draws her into a dangerous bond of desire.

WARNING: targaryen incest themes

WORD COUNT: 6k

NOTES: hi loves, i’m new to the fandom and this is my first time writing for aerion! comments and thoughts are always welcome. follow me on twitter: @aerrions

Before Ashford, before the seven shields were raised, before princes bled beneath a bright tourney sky and the realm learned that even the noblest dragon could be broken by his own blood, there was court.

There was summer on pale stone. There were banners moving like slow wounds above the Red Keep, black and red and gold, three-headed dragons snapping in the sea wind. There were knights in polished mail, ladies with throats white as milk, lords who smiled with their mouths and counted with their eyes. There were singers in the galleries, septons in embroidered robes, boys with wooden swords, girls with jewels at their wrists, and everywhere the old, sweet poison of House Targaryen: blood remembering itself.

And there was you.

They said you had been born at dawn. Not merely in the hour before the sun rose, no, for court never left a simple thing unadorned when beauty might be made from it. They said the eastern sky had opened like a pomegranate, red and gold spilling over Blackwater Bay. They said the clouds had caught fire. They said your first cry had come just as the first light touched the towers, and that Prince Baelor Targaryen, called Breakspear by men who loved courage more than crowns, had wept when they placed you in his arms.

That part was true.

Baelor had been young enough then for wonder still to wound him. He had taken you from the midwife with hands more suited to sword and lance than cradlecloth, and when you opened your eyes, violet as dusk seen through wine, he had gone still. There were men who looked upon their daughters and saw alliances. Baelor looked upon you and saw judgment. A thing so small, so breakable, so entirely his to protect that it terrified him.

“My little star,” he had whispered, and bent his brow to yours as though swearing fealty.

Afterward, songs were made of that too.

The realm adored making songs of you. It had begun before you could walk, before you could speak, before you understood that adoration was only another kind of hunger. You were Baelor Breakspear’s daughter, and that alone would have been enough to turn eyes toward you. But you had also been born with the old Valyrian beauty in its cruelest form, the kind that made people forget themselves. Pale silver and gold hair, soft as poured light. Eyes dark violet and bright together, changeful as twilight over a blade. Skin the court ladies called pearl, though pearls were duller. A face too composed in repose, too vivid in anger, too radiant when you smiled.

By the time you were twelve, singers had compared you to moonrise, maidenhood, dragonfire, and dawn. By the time you were fourteen, men old enough to have sons your age had begun watching your hands at feasts. By the time you were flowered and marriageable, half the realm had learned to say your name softly, as though gentleness might disguise ambition.

They wanted you beautifully. That was the trick of it. No man ever said plainly that your hand would bind him closer to Baelor, that your father’s honor would gild his house, that your blood would strengthen his children’s claim to old Valyria’s vanishing glory. No lord confessed aloud that to marry you would be to marry a song, a banner, a promise, a piece of the realm’s faith in better princes. They spoke instead of admiration. Of devotion. Of courtly reverence. They begged for dances, favors, glances, permission to wear your color in the lists. They knelt before you with the faces of worshippers and the appetites of wolves.

You learned early that beauty was not softness. Beauty was coin. Beauty was command. Beauty was a gate men pressed their mouths to while dreaming of conquest. Beauty could quiet a hall more quickly than a drawn sword, if worn correctly. Beauty could excuse cruelty when cruelty smiled. Beauty could make silence seem like innocence and calculation seem like grace.

Your father knew this. Baelor Breakspear knew court too well to trust it. He watched you be praised as other men watched borders.

When knights bent too low over your hand, Baelor’s gaze cooled. When a lord’s compliments grew too warm, Baelor interrupted with courteous murder in his voice. When letters arrived from houses too proud, too hungry, too close to old grievances, he set them aside unread until morning, when temper had less chance of ruling him. He did not lock you away, for he was not a fool and you were not a jewel to be kept in a box. He let you shine. He let the realm love you.

But he stood always between you and the part of love that devoured. Or he tried. There was one hunger he had never been able to turn aside.

Aerion Targaryen had been born ten months before you, and from the first moment he was old enough to understand the insult of those months, he made a kingdom of them. Ten months, to him, was seniority. Ten months was wisdom. Ten months was a crown, a sword, a divine decree. When you were both children, he would remind you of it whenever you defied him.

“I was here first,” he would say, chin lifted, silver hair falling into eyes too bright with malice for any nursery.

“You will die first too,” you told him once.

He had stared at you, then laughed until the nurse crossed herself.

You were first cousins. Your fathers were brothers, though little else in them seemed made of the same substance. Baelor was the noble dream of the dynasty, honor given flesh, a prince who made lesser men ashamed and better men braver. Maekar was iron where Baelor was light: stern, proud, sharp edged, a man who loved his children as he loved his sword, by keeping them hard.

Aerion was Maekar’s son in bone and temper, but there was something in him that had outrun even Maekar’s severity. Something theatrical. Something fevered. Something that looked at the world and did not see people, only fuel.

The court said you and Aerion had been bound from the cradle.

That was true too, though not in the way the court meant.

When you were still swaddled and sleeping in carved wooden cradles near one another, Aerion would scream whenever you were taken away. Not cry. Scream. He had a prince’s lungs and a demon’s persistence. Wet nurses came and went with bloody bitten fingers. Maids whispered that the little prince knew when the little princess left the room even in his sleep. If your cradle was moved nearer, he quieted. If it was moved farther, he raged. If you stirred, he stirred. If you wept, he shrieked as though your grief were theft from him.

“Charming,” the ladies called it.

“Dragon children know their own,” said men who enjoyed prophecy when it cost them nothing.

Baelor did not call it charming. Even then, he watched.

You were no gentler. That was the secret everyone took years to learn, and some never learned at all. You were quieter than Aerion, but quiet was not mercy. He was flame leaping openly from dry wood; you were the coal hidden under ash, waiting for breath.

When he stole your painted wooden dragon, you did not cry. You waited three days, smiling sweetly through lessons and prayers, until you found his favorite ivory horse unattended beside a window. Then you dropped it from the tower stairs and watched it break upon the stones below.

Aerion found you there, looking down.

“You broke it,” he said.

“You stole from me,” you answered.

His face twisted, not with grief, but with furious delight.

“I shall tell.”

“Tell,” you said. “I shall weep. They will believe me.”

He lunged at you then, small hands clawing, and you struck him across the mouth with your little fist hard enough to split his lip. Blood shone red against his teeth. A nurse shrieked. Aerion touched his mouth, looked at the blood on his fingers, and smiled at you as if you had given him a jewel.

“There you are,” he said.

He could not have known what the words would become. He was a child then, beautiful and wicked and half formed, with blood on his mouth and wonder in his eyes. But some phrases are born older than the mouths that speak them. Some vows choose children before children know the shape of vows.

After that, he followed you everywhere. Not gently. Never gently.

If you walked in the gardens, he appeared between the hedges with burrs in his hair and mud on his boots, accusing you of abandoning him. If you sat with your septa, he found ways to ruin the lesson, dipping quills in ink and drawing little black dragons along the margins of your prayer book. If a page made you laugh, Aerion tripped him before supper. If a lordling offered you a sugar plum, Aerion snatched it from your hand, took one bite, and crushed the rest beneath his heel.

“You cannot eat what is given by sheep,” he told you.

“You are very tiresome for someone so grand,” you said.

“I am a dragon.”

“You are a boy with dirty fingernails.”

He shoved you into a rosebush for that.

You came out bleeding from three scratches along your forearm, your gown torn, your silver hair caught with thorns. The gardener gasped. The nurse began to cry. Aerion stood very still, perhaps realizing too late that he had damaged what the court treated as sacred.

You looked at the blood. Then at him. Then you laughed. Not because it did not hurt. It did. But pain, you discovered, could be made into a throne if one refused to kneel before it. Aerion’s face changed. The fear vanished. Something hotter took its place.

You pulled a thorn from your sleeve and pressed it into his palm until he hissed and bled.

“Now we match,” you said.

For years, that was the shape of you.

The court saw two dragon children, wild in the way noble children were permitted to be wild before decorum was strapped upon them like armor. They saw silver heads bent together over cyvasse boards. They saw you racing through halls where kings had walked, your slippers silent and Aerion’s boots loud behind you. They saw him tug your braid and you smile like a saint before stepping on his foot hard enough to make him curse. They saw quarrels. They saw laughter. They saw blood sometimes, yes, but royal children were strange, and Targaryen children stranger still.

They did not see what Baelor saw.

They did not see the day Aerion found a beetle with a cracked shell and declared himself its king because it could not flee him. He placed it in the center of the nursery table and built a court around it from broken toys. A headless doll for a queen, a wooden knight without legs, a cracked cup for a throne. He commanded the beetle to bow.

“It cannot hear you,” you said.

“Then it is treasonous.”

You were seven. He was nearly eight and carried those ten months like a drawn dagger.

He lifted his hand to crush it.

You caught his wrist.

For a moment the two of you only stared at each other, violet eyes against violet eyes, old blood looking into its own dark mirror.

“Do not,” you said.

Aerion sneered. “Have you grown tender?”

“No.” You plucked the beetle from the table, carried it to the open window, and let it fall into the garden below. “I only wanted to be the one who decided.”

Aerion went silent. Then he kissed your knuckles. Not with sweetness. Not with innocence. With ceremony. As though you had done something worthy of homage.

The nurse, entering too late, saw only a prince bowing over a princess’s hand and clasped her own hands to her breast.

“How dear,” she whispered.

You and Aerion looked at each other and smiled.

When you were nine, you dared him to climb the broken outer wall above the training yard after rain had slicked the stones dark. He climbed because he would rather have fallen and cracked his skull than let you call him afraid. Halfway up, his foot slipped. For one sharp moment he hung by both hands, face white, boots scraping empty air. Below, boys shouted. A master at arms cursed. Someone ran for help.

You stood nearest, looking up at him with your heart hammering so hard it felt like joy.

“Beg,” you called.

Aerion bared his teeth. “Never.”

“Then fall.”

He laughed, wild and breathless, and hauled himself up by sheer spite. When he reached the top, soaked and shaking, he looked down at you as though he had conquered a kingdom. You climbed after him before anyone could stop you, your skirts torn to ribbons, your palms rubbed raw by stone. Baelor arrived just as Aerion pulled you over the parapet.

Your father’s face was the color of death. The rage came later. First came fear, and fear in Baelor Breakspear was more terrible than anger in lesser men. He did not shout before the guards. He did not strike Aerion, though for one moment his hand flexed as if it remembered every sword it had ever held. He only lifted you down from the wall himself, set you upon the ground, and cupped your face between both hands.

You had blood on your palms. Mud on your cheek. A torn sleeve. A smile you had not yet remembered to hide. Baelor saw it. That was the first time you understood that your father’s love had eyes.

“My star,” he said softly, and the softness made you look away. “There is no courage in courting the Stranger for sport.”

“It was only a climb.”

“It was a test.” His gaze flicked to Aerion, who stood rigid under Maekar’s grip. “And tests are not harmless because children name them games.”

Aerion’s mouth curled. “She wanted to climb.”

Baelor did not look away from you. “I know.”

That hurt worse than if he had blamed Aerion alone.

Later, in your chamber, as the maester wrapped your palms in linen, Baelor sat beside you and told you of dragons. Not the way singers told it, with wings blotting out suns and kings kneeling in ash. He told you of reins. Saddles. Commands. The bond between beast and rider. The discipline of guiding fire.

“A dragon left to hunger becomes a ruin,” he said.

You watched his hands. Broad, scarred, gentle. “I am not a dragon.”

“No,” he said, after too long a pause. “You are my daughter.”

That should have been answer enough. It was not. Because Aerion heard the same stories and learned the opposite lesson. To him, dragons did not require reins. They were not meant to bow beneath saddles, nor answer little men with little laws. Dragons took. Dragons burned. Dragons proved themselves by leaving marks upon the world. He grew beautiful in that belief, as poisonous flowers grow beautiful by drinking from graves.

By twelve, he had learned courtesy well enough to insult without consequence. By thirteen, he knew which servants feared him and which could be made to fear him. By fourteen, he smiled like a prince before fathers and septons, then turned in private with cruelty still warm beneath his skin. He was not mad in the way fools were mad. He was worse. He understood enough of the rules to know when he was breaking them.

And you understood him. That was the sin beneath all the others.

You understood the thrill he took in making the world flinch. You understood why obedience bored him, why gentleness offended him, why a person who would not resist seemed hardly alive at all. You despised his clumsier cruelties, not because they were cruel, but because they lacked art. Aerion was a torch thrown into dry straw. You preferred candles placed carefully beneath silk curtains, so that by the time anyone smelled smoke, the room was already doomed.

Once, when a young lady of House Darklyn mocked the Dornish cut of one of your gowns, you did not answer. You lowered your eyes. You let your mouth tremble. The court saw wounded sweetness and gathered around you in outrage. By sunset, the girl’s mother had apologized twice, her father had withdrawn a petition, and the girl herself stood red-eyed beside the fountain while you kissed her cheek and forgave her before half the court.

Aerion found you afterward in the godswood, though the Red Keep’s heart tree was pale and carved and strange beneath southern skies.

“You should have slapped her,” he said.

You adjusted the fall of your sleeve. “Then she would have been pitied.”

“She cried.”

“Yes.”

“You liked that.”

You looked at him. He was leaning against a tree, dressed in black and red, silver hair loose at his forehead messily, his face almost too lovely to belong to anything human. That had always been the trouble with him. Aerion looked as a prince in a tapestry ought to look, bright and dreadful, the sort of figure maidens dreamed of before waking afraid. His eyes shone when he was amused. They shone brighter when he was cruel.

“You would have made her bleed,” you said.

“I still might.”

“How vulgar.”

His smile widened. “There you are.”

You hated when he said that. You loved when he said that.

No one else spoke to the hidden thing in you so directly. The court praised your grace, your beauty, your modesty, your perfect courtesy. Your father praised your wit, your discipline, your strength when strength was yoked to honor. But Aerion looked at the pretty mask the realm had painted upon your face and laughed as though he could see your teeth beneath it.

You were not a fool. You knew what he was. You had seen him order a stableboy to hold a coal in his bare hand because the boy had laughed when Aerion slipped in mud. You had seen him draw his dagger over a table during supper, carving wings into the polished wood while an old lord pretended not to notice. You had seen him smile and laugh when men grew uncomfortable. You had heard him speak of smallfolk as though they were weather. You had watched his pride swell into something deformed whenever the word dragon left his mouth.

And still, when he entered a room, some part of you woke.

Baelor saw that too. Your father’s protection changed as you grew. When you were small, he shielded your body from falls, blades, fevers, careless hands. When you became beautiful, truly beautiful, the kind of beautiful that moved through court like a drawn curtain revealing fire behind it, he shielded your future.

Suitors came first in trickles, then in tides. A Baratheon cousin asked for permission to wear your favor in a melee and looked at your mouth instead of your eyes. Baelor refused him so politely the boy thanked him before realizing he had been dismissed. A Hightower lord sent pearls the color of milk and a letter praising your virtue with such oily precision that Baelor burned both. A Lannister wrote from Casterly Rock in phrases polished bright as coin. A Tyrell sent roses enough to drown your chamber in perfume.

You smiled over them all. Sometimes you enjoyed it. That was another truth too ugly for songs. You liked watching proud men become reverent. You liked choosing who might hope and who would be made ridiculous by hope. You liked the way ladies stiffened when their brothers stared too long. You liked knowing that your hand could alter the balance of great houses, that your glance could stir envy, that your silence could be mistaken for maidenly innocence when it was often judgment.

Baelor did not scold you for that enjoyment, which made you feel worse. Instead, one evening, he walked with you along a gallery where the dragon skulls slept in shadow below, vast and black and eyeless. Torches burned along the walls. Outside, rain tapped at the windows like fingernails.

“Power is not sin,” he said.

You glanced at him. “Have I been accused?”

“Not by others.”

You smiled faintly. “By you, then?”

“By your own face when you think no one is watching.”

That silenced you. He stopped before the skull of Meraxes, great and ruined, her empty sockets wide enough for a child to hide inside.

“You are loved,” Baelor said. “You are admired. You are desired. Those are three different things, and court will spend your life trying to confuse them.”

You looked at the dragon skull rather than him. “And what does Aerion feel?”

Baelor’s jaw tightened. There. There it was. The name neither of you had spoken, though he had walked between you from the beginning like a drawn blade.

At last your father said, “Aerion wants.”

You waited.

“He wants as fire wants,” Baelor continued. “Without gratitude. Without conscience. Without end.”

“He is my cousin.”

“Yes.”

“We are Targaryens.”

“Yes.”

That word hung there, silver and red, ancient and accursed. In other houses, blood was a wall. In yours, blood was a road. The histories were full of it. Brother to sister. Uncle to niece. Cousin to cousin. Dragonlords preserving dragonblood, kings wedding queens with the same pale hair and violet eyes, the realm protesting until victory or beauty or fear made it quiet again. You had been raised among portraits of ancestors who looked like reflections marrying reflections, their hands joined beneath painted dragons, their eyes solemn with destiny.

So Baelor did not say what another father might have said. He did not call the thought impossible. He did not pretend the blood between you and Aerion made desire unthinkable in a house built upon blood’s own vanity. That was not what frightened him.

“Aerion thinks blood absolves,” Baelor said. “He thinks being born of the dragon means never needing to become worthy of it.”

“And you?”

“I think the higher the blood, the deeper the duty.”

You looked at him then. Truly looked. He was not old, your father, though grief had not yet claimed him and Ashford had not yet opened its red mouth. He was strong still, handsome in the plain and noble way men trusted before they understood they loved him. His eyes held a gentleness that court had failed to kill. There were lines at their corners from laughter, from squinting beneath tourney suns, from worrying over the realm and over you.

“You think he will ruin me,” you said.

Baelor’s expression changed. “No.”

“No?”

“I think he will ask you to ruin yourself and call it freedom.”

You hated him a little then, for knowing. You loved him more for the same reason. That was the cruelty of Baelor Breakspear’s love. It was not blind enough to be easy. He did not worship the perfect princess as the realm did. He saw your vanity and did not turn away. He saw your temper, your hunger, your secret pleasure in being obeyed. He saw the sharpness under the silk. Yet where Aerion saw that hidden self and grinned as though finding treasure, Baelor saw it and grieved, not because he despised you, but because he believed you could master it.

Aerion never wanted you mastered. He wanted you revealed.

The year you came fully into the court’s gaze, the Red Keep changed around you. Or perhaps it had always been so, and you had only grown old enough to see the knives beneath the flowers. Feasts became theatres. Dances became negotiations. Every gown chosen by your ladies sent some message, whether you meant it or not. White made you maidenly. Red made you bold. Black made you dynastic. Blue softened you. Gold turned every singer witless. Pearls made old women sigh. Rubies made young men stupid.

You learned to enter halls slowly. Not timidly. Slowly. There was power in letting silence arrive before you reached the center of a room. Power in permitting people to look. Power in appearing unaware of the effect you had while measuring every last breath of it. You were Baelor’s daughter, yes, and the court loved you for his sake. But increasingly they loved him for yours too, because beauty rewrites loyalty in ways honor cannot.

At a harvest feast beneath a ceiling hung with red silk, Prince Valarr himself danced with you first.

Golden Valarr, your father’s son, your brother, bright with all the promise the realm had fastened upon Baelor’s line. He was courteous, handsome, beloved in that easy way Aerion hated most, as though admiration had simply come to him and laid itself at his feet. He smiled when he took your hand, brotherly or princely or both, depending on who watched and what they wished to see.

“You are causing unrest,” Valarr murmured as he led you into the dance.

You tilted your head. “By standing?”

“By standing beautifully. It is a grave offense.”

“I shall try to limp.”

“That may make it worse. Half these men would compose tragedies about the wounded swan of House Targaryen before sunrise.”

You laughed, and the hall warmed around it. Across the room, Aerion watched. He had been drinking, though not enough to blur him. Aerion never liked to be blurred. He preferred the world sharp, so that he might cut himself on it or cut others first. He stood with one shoulder against a pillar, a cup loose in his hand, black velvet at his throat, rubies like drops of hard blood along his collar. Firelight made his hair gleam white-gold. His eyes did not leave you once.

When Valarr turned you beneath his arm, Aerion smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.

Later, a Fossoway knight begged a favor for the morrow’s riding. He was young, freckled, earnest, and doomed by the hope in his face. You let him kneel. You let him speak. You let the watching ladies lean close behind their fans.

Then you drew a narrow ribbon from your sleeve, pale as moonlight, and held it just beyond his reach.

“You may wear it,” you said, “if you remember that a favor is not a promise.”

His face flushed scarlet. “Princess, I would not dare presume—”

“Men dare many things once cloth is tied around their arm.”

He swallowed. The court smiled. You tied the ribbon yourself. It meant nothing. That was why you did it.

You felt Aerion’s gaze like heat between your shoulders for the rest of the night. He waited until the feast had spilled into its softer hours, when wine had deepened voices and the musicians played slower songs. Baelor had been drawn aside by a lord with maps in his hands and worry on his brow. Valarr had gone to speak with friends. Your ladies had relaxed just enough for you to slip away beneath the pretense of air.

The terrace beyond the hall was cold. Below, the city breathed in darkness. Torches moved along the walls. Far off, the Blackwater carried moonlight in broken pieces. Above, the stars were pale and indifferent, all those cold little witnesses Baelor loved to name you after.

You had only taken three breaths before Aerion spoke.

“Did you enjoy it?”

You did not turn. “The feast?”

“The worship.”

Now you looked back. He stood in the archway, half shadowed, half lit. Beautiful as sin in a sept window. His cup was gone. His hands were empty, which made him seem more dangerous.

“I enjoy many things,” you said.

“Yes.” He stepped onto the terrace. “That is what they never understand.”

You faced the city again. “Go back inside, Aerion.”

“No.”

“I did not ask.”

“I know. I refused anyway.”

He came to stand beside you, close enough that his sleeve brushed yours. You could smell wine on him, and smoke, and the faint sharpness of the oils he used in his hair. For a moment neither of you spoke.

Then he said, “You gave him your favor.”

“I gave a ribbon to a boy who asked prettily.”

“You tied it yourself.”

“Was I meant to throw it at him?”

“You were meant not to give it.”

You laughed once, softly. “Because every ribbon in the realm belongs to you?”

His head turned. You felt it more than saw it.

“Everything of yours concerns me.”

“That is a sickness.”

“That is blood.”

You looked at him then, and there it was between you, ancient and breathing. Blood. The word that excused kings, doomed queens, built dynasties, warped cradles, joined hands, spilled brothers, crowned monsters, and made the realm swallow what it would have spat from any lesser house. Blood had placed you in the same nursery. Blood had made your fathers brothers. Blood had made your faces mirrors of old Valyria. Blood had taught Aerion that wanting you was not trespass but inheritance.

“You mistake relation for right,” you said.

His eyes glittered. “You mistake denial for virtue.”

“You are my cousin.”

“Yes.”

The word was not shame in his mouth. It was claim.

“You have been mine since before you knew words,” he said.

Your pulse struck hard once, then again.

“No,” you said.

Aerion smiled as though you had answered exactly as he wished. “You screamed when they took you from me.”

“I was an infant. Infants scream.”

“I screamed louder.”

“You still do.”

His smile sharpened. “Careful.”

“Or what? You will push me into roses again? Frighten another servant? Poor Aerion, forever proving himself fearsome to people too low to answer.”

The air changed. It always did when you cut too near the bone.

His face stilled, and the boy from the nursery looked out through the prince’s beauty: the child with blood on his teeth, the little tyrant commanding beetles, the creature who had hung from wet stone and laughed rather than beg. Only now he was taller than you, stronger, nearer to manhood than boyhood, with malice refined by years of practice.

“You think yourself above fear because men kiss your hand,” he said.

“I think myself above you because I do not need to announce I am a dragon every time I enter a room.”

His hand closed around your wrist. Hard enough to bruise. Hard enough to remind. You looked down at his fingers, then up at him.

“Let go.”

“No.”

“Aerion.”

He leaned closer. “Say it again.”

“What?”

“That I am not a dragon.”

You should have stopped. You knew the shape of the precipice. You knew Baelor’s warnings. You knew Aerion’s pride was not armor but a wound dressed in scales. You knew, too, with a thrill that made you hate yourself, that no one else in the world would let you be this cruel and call it truth.

So you smiled.

“You are a prince desperate to be a dragon,” you said. “That is not the same thing.”

For one heartbeat, you thought he might strike you. Instead, you struck him. The sound cracked across the terrace, small and bright and vicious. His face turned with it. Your palm burned. A red mark bloomed along his cheek, stark against the pale perfection of him.

Inside the hall, no one noticed. The music swelled. Laughter rose and fell. The court went on worshipping itself.

Aerion slowly turned back to you. His eyes were alight.

“There you are,” he whispered.

You hated the words. You had always hated them, because they reached past gown and jewel and courtesy, past Baelor’s little star, past the realm’s perfect princess, past every song ever made to cage you in beauty. There you are. As if he had hunted you through yourself and found the door unguarded. As if the cruelest, proudest, truest part of you had lifted its head at his call.

“You know nothing of me,” you said, but your voice had changed.

“I know what they do not.” His fingers loosened from your wrist only to rise to your face. He did not touch you gently. He touched you as though testing whether silk could burn. “I know the look in your eyes when men kneel. I know you smiled when that girl cried by the fountain. I know you wanted me to fall from the wall before you wanted me saved. I know every pretty lie they tell about you, and I know the thing beneath it that listens.”

“You know what you want to see.”

“I see you.”

“No.” The word came quickly. Too quickly. “My father sees me.”

At that, something ugly passed through Aerion’s face.

“Baelor sees a star,” he said. “Something distant. Bright. Untouched. He would hang you in the sky if he could, where no hand could reach you and no desire could stain you.”

“He loves me.”

“Yes.” Aerion’s mouth curved. “That is his weakness.”

“And what is yours?”

His gaze dropped to your lips.

The answer was there before he spoke it.

“You,” he said.

It should have sounded soft. From another man, perhaps it would have. From Aerion it sounded like a threat made before witnesses, though the stars were the only witnesses and they had seen worse from your house.

“You do not love,” you said.

“I do not love like sheep love.”

“You do not love at all. You claim.”

“Yes.”

The honesty of it robbed you of breath. He moved then, sudden as flame catching oil, and kissed you.

It was not sweet. Nothing about Aerion had ever been sweet except his face when he wished to deceive. The kiss was anger, recognition, conquest, punishment. His hand slid to the back of your neck, not pleading but holding. You should have pulled away. You should have thought of your father. You should have thought of the ribbon tied around some foolish knight’s arm, of Baelor’s careful warnings, of blood as burden rather than permission.

For one moment, you thought of nothing. Or no, that was not true. You thought: so this is fire. And worse, far worse, you answered. Not softly. Not innocently. You answered with the same violence with which you had once broken his ivory horse, the same pride with which you had laughed bleeding in the rosebushes, the same secret hunger you hid beneath pearls and lowered lashes. Your hand fisted in his doublet. His breath caught. Aerion, who made servants tremble and boys bleed and lords uneasy, trembled once beneath your touch. That pleased you. The knowledge of your pleasure frightened you more than the kiss.

When you tore yourself away, both of you were breathing hard. The mark of your hand still burned on his cheek. His mouth was red. His eyes were almost black.

“You see?” he said.

You wanted to slap him again. You wanted to kiss him again. You wanted to run to your father and confess like a child with bloodied palms. You wanted to stay exactly where you were until the terrace burned down around you.

Then Baelor called your name. Not loudly. He did not need to shout. Your father stood in the archway.

For a moment, the world narrowed to three Targaryens beneath the moon: Baelor in the light from the hall, noble and still; Aerion beside you in the cold, smiling with your handprint on his face; and you between them, beautiful enough to be forgiven, proud enough to be damned.

Baelor’s eyes went first to your mouth. Then to Aerion’s cheek. Then to your face. He did not speak Aerion’s name. Somehow that was worse.

“My daughter,” he said, and the tenderness in it cut deeper than accusation. “Come inside.”

You went. Of course you went. Each step toward him felt like waking from one dream into another. The warmth of the hall touched your skin. Music returned. Voices rose. The court was still there, jeweled and hungry, unaware that anything had shifted. Men still watched you and thought you perfect. Ladies still measured your gown. Knights still hoped for favors. Singers still prepared to make you into something simpler than flesh.

Baelor offered his arm. You took it. His hand covered yours, warm and steady. For a moment you were small again, palms wrapped in linen, listening to him speak of dragons and reins. You wanted to tell him everything. You wanted to say that he had been right, that Aerion was fire without conscience, that the danger had teeth and violet eyes and knew your hidden name. You wanted to say you were sorry. But sorry for what? For the kiss? For wanting it? For being seen?

Baelor bent his head slightly, his voice for you alone.

“My little star,” he said.

The name broke something in you. Because stars were distant. Stars were pure because no one could touch them. Stars burned alone where men could admire them safely.

But across the hall, Aerion had followed. He stood at the terrace arch, the red mark of your hand bright upon his cheek, his eyes fixed on you with a look older than desire and darker than love. When your gaze met his, he lifted a cup from a passing servant’s tray and raised it slightly. Not in apology. Not in farewell. In vow.

And in that glittering hall, beneath dragon banners and candleflame, with your father’s loving hand closed over yours and Aerion’s claim burning from across the room, you understood the first cruel truth of your life. You were Baelor Breakspear’s daughter.

But Aerion Brightflame was the first person who had ever made you feel like a dragon.

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