UPDATE (04/23/2026):
I took down Parts 8 and 9 of You Were Never the Problem because after going back through them... yeah no ❤️ I wasn’t happy with them. My friends finally read it too and said it was good, just a little emotionally charged, which is very much what happens when I write directly out of my feelings lmao.
So sowwie everyone, those chapters are being reworked/rehauled because they didn’t feel true to what I established and I don’t want to keep them up in a version that doesn’t feel right to me. Thank you for being patient with me while I fix them 🤍and for those that read them thank you so much for enjoying it and atleast it was a nice treat to see what some of ideas have been lol.
♱ A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms ♱
♡ Valarr "The Young Prince" Targaryen
↳ Part 1: You Were Never the Problem | Part 2: Can we try? | Part 3: He was reaching for both of them. | Part 4: You brought yourself. That’s enough [you are here]. | Part 5: The First Thing He Ever Asked For | Part 6: The One That Looked Like It Could Never Break [You are here] | | Part 7: Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage?
↳ Part 1: You Must Be His Nursemaid | Part 2: A Prince and A Dragon | Part 3: Where Princes, Ladies, Lords, and Knights Gathered in Candlelight | Part 4: Silk Morning, Bloodied Field | Part 5: Where the Dragon Set Its Gaze and Bared Its Teeth
↳ What the Photographs Missed
↳ The Woman After the Dead
↳ The Prince in the Witch's Bed
↳ What a lonely thing it was, to be his wife | Part 2: If I lose myself, I lose it all
↳ My Only Peace Was You
↳ That is not my baby, you heathen | The Baby Is Built Like a Royal Loaf | The Princes Were Fine. Valarr Wasn't.
↳ His Promised One, His Ruin
↳ Even The Gods Watch Us Die: CH 1 | CH 2
♡ Aerion "Brightflame" Targaryen
↳ Part 1: You Were Never the Problem | Part 2: Can we try? | Part 3: He was reaching for both of them. | Part 4: You brought yourself. That’s enough [you are here]. | Part 5: The First Thing He Ever Asked For | Part 6: The One That Looked Like It Could Never Break [You are here] | | Part 7: Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage?
↳ They called me your wife again | Part 2: Yes, She's my Wife
From the same universe: That is not my baby, you heathen and The Baby Is Built Like a Royal Loaf
Summary:
The eldest son of Prince Valarr steals a cart, loads his very chonky baby brother into it, recruits his dragon, and disappears into Dragonstone for what he considers a perfectly sensible royal progress. What follows is panic, laughter, raided kitchens, reckless uncles, and Valarr Targaryen loving his family so fiercely it nearly kills him.
Warnings:
Baelor lives, and he is king in this. Humor. Family fluff. Daeron suffering. Body shaming a baby?! He is chonky though. It is a very chill, feel-good, everyone-is-alive-and-safe vibe. Daeron and Kiera are married in this.
Part I: The morning Dragonstone lost two princes
Morning broke over Dragonstone in pearl and iron, the first light thin and cold as watered milk upon black stone. Below the castle walls the sea beat itself senseless against the rocks, a ceaseless dark music that filled every court and corridor whether men wished it or no. Wind came hard off Blackwater Bay, salted and sharp, smelling of brine, wet rope, tar, kelp, and the faint ghost of smoke from cookfires kindled too early in too many hearths. The gulls had been at their shrieking since dawn. So had the men on the docks.
Everywhere there was movement. Servants hurried through the passageways with armfuls of folded wool, bundles of winter linen, cedar chests bound in iron, and baskets of bread wrapped in cloth against the sea air. Men-at-arms shouldered spears and shields toward the yard. Stableboys ran breathless between the lower gates with tack, oats, and shouted apologies. Beneath it all came the deeper groan of Dragonstone herself, the long damp sigh of ancient stone holding the night’s cold in her bones.
For the king had sent word that the youngest son of Prince Valarr was to have a nameday worthy of his blood.
There would be a tournament. There would be a hunt. There would be feasting enough to make lesser lords purse their mouths and mutter over cups. King Baelor, being both grandsire and king, had decided his grandson’s nameday ought to be marked with all the joy of a royal occasion and none of the restraint of a prudent man. Never mind that he had only been crowned a few moons before. Some men, once given a crown, took to grandeur the way sailors took to drink. And what better excuse for fresh celebration than his second grandson, that richly cherished child, the chonky baby as he had already become in the unguarded speech of kin, though in formal style he was the second son of the direct heir to the Iron Throne, a prince of the blood, born to weight, scrutiny, and too much love.
And so Dragonstone had fallen into cheerful disorder.
It was exactly the sort of morning in which one might lose track of many things.
A glove. A goblet. A steward.
Perhaps even, if the gods were in sportive temper, a prince or two.
In your chambers the confusion had taken on a gentler shape, though no less frantic for that. The room smelled of beeswax, lavender sachets packed among the trunks, warm milk, damp stone, and the faint dragon-musk that had grown so common in your household you scarcely noticed it now unless a stranger wrinkled his nose. The sea light came thin through the narrow windows, silvering the edges of carved furniture and catching on the brass clasps of open chests. A maid knelt by one coffer sorting little tunics no bigger than folded handkerchiefs. Another argued softly with the nurse over swaddling cloths. A third stood near the hearth with a list in hand, looking as though she might sooner face battle than another round of your instructions.
You sat near the window in a high-backed chair, one hand resting on the arm, the other occupied with pointing, sorting, deciding. On the settle beside you lay your younger son, broad-cheeked, heavy-limbed, and deeply at peace with the world. He kicked his sturdy legs against a blanket edged in red and black thread, his little heels making soft thumps against the cushion. Pale cream silk strained faintly across his middle. His hair, soft and near-white, caught the morning light like spun silver. One eye was blue, the other brown, and both blinked up at the ceiling beams with solemn disapproval, as if all this bustle for a voyage he had not requested was faintly beneath him.
Across the room his elder brother stood at the window seat and watched.
You had dressed him yourself not half an hour before, smoothing back his pale hair with damp fingers, fastening the little buttons of his coat while he stood with all the grave patience of a child convinced he did his mother a favor by allowing it. “We will be leaving soon,” you had told him, touching the tip of his nose with one finger. “So take care, and try not to dirty your clothes too much.”
He had giggled and scrunched his face. “Mama, I will be fine. Do not worry.”
Prince Aenar said it with such princely certainty that you had nearly laughed. Your firstborn had never yet doubted his own competence in any matter. It was endearing in a child. In a grown Targaryen man, you knew, it would likely become ruinous. You kissed his brow all the same, gave him one last smile, and sent him to play with his brother and the carved toys near the hearth while you turned back to the business of packing.
No one noticed that he was watching.
That was the first trouble.
Usually, a hand would ruffle his hair. A maid would smile and ask some absurdly respectful question. A guard would bow and let him finger the pommel of a sword he was not meant to touch. More often still, Valarr would sweep in and take him off somewhere, to the mews to look at hawks, or to the yard to learn another few Valyrian words, or to the dragon yard to see what fresh offence his hatchling had committed.
When Valarr was occupied, you made your own processions of it, taking both boys out along the galleries or down toward the strand where the sea could be admired safely from a mother’s chosen distance. Aenar was accustomed to being seen. Not spoiled precisely. Royal children were too visible to be left wholly unformed. But noticed, certainly. Loved in ways that bent the world toward them.
Not this morning.
This morning the current of the household moved around him and away. His brother was being kissed, adjusted, padded, admired, lifted, settled, fussed over, and discussed at a level of seriousness that suggested he was not a baby at all but the crown jewels done up in cream silk. Even the nurse, who loved Aenar dearly, seemed more occupied with whether the younger child had fed enough and whether his cloak would sit comfortably over those abundant little shoulders.
Aenar frowned.
He adored his brother with that earnest and possessive tenderness only elder siblings could manage, a love made partly of pride and partly of the delighted certainty that this splendid little creature belonged in some way to him. Yet there was something strange in the morning’s neglect, in the way no one thought to ask what he meant to do with himself. He felt, for perhaps the first time in his brief and coddled life, left somewhat to his own devices.
And since he was his father’s son, and had inherited a princely confidence entirely disproportionate to his years, he drew the worst possible conclusion.
If no one had time to take him about Dragonstone, then he would do it himself.
And if everyone was too busy fussing over the baby, well.
He would take the baby too.
It was, to his mind, an excellent plan.
There remained only one flaw in it. He had no intention of going alone.
Curled beneath the window alcove in a patch of thin sun was his young dragon, no hatchling any longer. The beast had grown past the size of any hound and was nearer a small pony now, all rangy limbs, long tail, knifing claws, and black-red scales that gleamed like banked coals where the light found them. Its head lay pillowed upon its forepaws, one wing half-furled, but at the slight scrape of Aenar’s slipper on stone one golden eye cracked open.
Lately you and Valarr had taken to murmuring over whether the creature ought soon to be housed elsewhere. It was good company for the boy, fiercely attached, and clever in the maddening way of dragons who learned too quickly what amused them. But it chewed Valarr’s boots, drooled on your sleeves, stole scraps from the table if given half a chance, and had once sprawled full length across Aenar’s bed as though prince and bedding alike existed for its comfort. Dragonstone was built for dragons, aye, but family chambers were another matter.
Aenar paused before it.
The dragon lifted its head.
“We are going on a progress,” the boy told it.
That, apparently, was invitation enough.
It rose, giving itself a full-body shiver that rattled scales and half-opened wings, then padded after him with the heedless confidence of creatures too young to understand the word no.
Opportunity came sooner than any saint would have wished. The nurse was sent for another wrap. One maid took herself downstairs. Another crossed to the wardrobe. You turned aside to answer some question about gloves and did not see your elder son slip from the window seat with the solemn stealth of a child embarking upon destiny.
In one corner of the room stood a low wheeled cart meant for folded linen and travel things, narrow enough for passage doors, lined already with spare quilts against the shipboard cold.
To Aenar it was not a cart at all.
It was a carriage.
He crossed to it, set both hands on the handle, gave it a testing shove, and nodded when it rolled. Behind him the dragon padded nearer, claws ticking softly against the floor, and sniffed the quilted lining with such grave suspicion one would have thought it an enemy stronghold.
Then the boy went to the settle.
His brother blinked up at him.
“We are going on a progress,” Aenar announced.
The baby, being a baby, lodged no objection.
The dragon gave a soft chirr that sounded suspiciously like approval.
It took more effort than Aenar had expected to move his brother. The younger child possessed that treacherous density some babes seemed born with, all softness and cream to the eye and yet unexpectedly weighty in the arms, as though made of bread dough and iron. Adults laughed when they lifted him. Aenar did not laugh. He grunted, braced his feet, and with stubborn princely labor succeeded in half-lifting, half-dragging, and half-guiding the baby into the quilted cart.
His brother landed with a small affronted sound.
Then the wheels moved, the carriage rolled, and all offence vanished.
Aenar set both hands to the handle and pushed. The dragon trotted alongside, tail held high with excitement.
Out they went.
The guards on the outer solar did not stop them. Why would they? One saw princes with purpose and bowed. Another stepped aside smiling. The dragon slipped after them, too familiar now to rouse true alarm, and in any case too princely itself to be treated quite like a beast. Aenar nodded in return with all the grave courtesy he had seen his father use on lesser men. His brother kicked both feet and burbled happily.
The corridor beyond was all dark volcanic stone, salt damp in the mortar, narrow windows admitting bars of cold light. The cart rattled and wobbled over the uneven floor. The baby’s cheeks trembled faintly with each jolt, making him look like some immensely satisfied little lord borne through his domain. The dragon darted ahead and doubled back again, half-spreading its wings in restless delight.
They went first to the painted gallery, because Aenar liked the shields there. Dragonstone kept old things with the same tenacity she kept grudges. Along the walls hung war-helmets gone orange with age, torn banners, old painted shields, and display armor too storied to melt down and too ceremonial ever to have kept a man alive. The air smelled faintly of oil, old leather, iron, and stone gone cold through centuries. In the narrow hush of the place, the little rattle of cart wheels seemed loud as a challenge.
Aenar liked the gallery because it made the world seem larger than his nursery, larger than even Dragonstone, full of old names and dead men and battles half understood. His brother liked it because everything shone. The dragon liked it because the world, in its view, existed to be sniffed, stalked, bitten, or singed.
The baby gave a pleased cry and flung both hands toward a polished breastplate displayed near the end of the hall.
“No,” said Aenar with all the authority of five generations of dragonlords condensed into one small body. “That is knightly.”
The baby lunged anyway.
At the very same moment the dragon caught sight of its own warped reflection in a vambrace, puffed itself up with outrage, and smacked the thing smartly with one clawed foot.
The cart rolled forward.
One wheel struck the stand.
The armor trembled.
Paused.
Then collapsed in a screaming clatter of steel that rang up and down the gallery and into every adjoining corridor like a trumpet of doom.
The dragon sprang back with an indignant squeal and flared its wings at the fallen knight as if prepared to finish what the cart had begun.
Both boys froze.
For one full heartbeat there was only the echo.
Then the baby shrieked with laughter.
Not fear. Not tears. Laughter.
He laughed until his whole body shook against the quilts, one blue eye and one brown gone bright with joy, as if the gods had invented noise and wreckage for no purpose but his delight.
Aenar stared at the scattered armor. Then at the dragon. Then at his brother. Then back at the armor.
“This,” he said with immense dignity, “is not ideal.”
It was at that precise moment that Prince Daeron came around the corner.
He had come up from the yard half dressed for travel, gloves tucked carelessly through his belt, his hair in need of a comb, and Lady Kiera at his side saying something in the long-suffering tone wives reserved for husbands who heard only half of what was said and remembered less. She, unlike him, saw the disaster at once and stopped dead.
There in the middle of the painted gallery stood one small prince with both hands upon a cart handle.
Inside the cart sat a second prince built like a well-fed loaf, kicking in triumph amid royal quilts.
Beside them prowled a young dragon with its wings half spread and smoke nearly in its nose.
At their feet lay the remains of a knight’s display glittering across the stone.
Kiera made a sound of alarm. “Seven save us.”
Daeron looked at the boys. Looked at the dragon. Looked at the armor. Looked back at the boys.
And because he was precisely the wrong sort of man to encounter such a sight and improve it, a grin broke slowly across his face.
“Well,” he said, “this looks serious.”
Aenar drew himself up. “We are exploring Dragonstone.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
Kiera had gone pale. “Where is your mother?”
Aenar hesitated.
Daeron crouched before the cart, all conspirator’s charm. “And are your lady mother and father aware of this splendid progress?”
There was the faintest pause.
Then Aenar said, “They are busy.”
Kiera shut her eyes.
Daeron, rather than taking warning from that, turned his gaze upon the dragon, which was now sniffing a fallen gauntlet as though deciding whether to eat it. “Oh, it cannot be harmful,” he said lightly. “Look at it. It is scarcely bigger than a pony.”
Kiera stared at him. “Daeron.”
“What?”
“It breathes fire.”
“Poorly,” he said. “And only when vexed.”
As if summoned by the insult, the dragon gave the nearest breastplate a tiny affronted puff. A thin curl of smoke rose from the polished steel. Kiera looked ready to seize husband, princes, and beast by their ears and drag them all back herself.
Daeron, who ought at that moment to have done precisely that, instead fell prey to the bright lawless delight that children and small disasters always seemed to wake in him.
“Then,” he said, rising, “you are fortunate we found you. Every royal progress requires an escort.”
Kiera turned on him in disbelief. “We are not encouraging this.”
“We are supervising it,” Daeron corrected.
“We are ending it.”
But Aenar had brightened already. The baby had begun banging the fallen gauntlet against the side of the cart in delighted approval. The dragon had come to stand at the prince’s heel with all the self-importance of a creature included in some great state affair.
And because Daeron was Daeron, and Kiera too soft-hearted to wrench the children bodily away the instant she saw how earnest they were, and because family chaos possessed a momentum all its own once loosed, the thing did not end at all.
It was merely guided into worse shape.
They went first to the sea stair, though only to the upper landing where the air was colder and the wind came off the water with enough force to tug at sleeves and hair. Below, the harbor seethed with labor. Men shouted. Crates swung. Oars knocked hollow against hulls. Kiera had taken the baby out of the cart with a firmness that brooked no appeal, and carried him on her hip, broad and warm and content against her. Daeron kept a hand upon Aenar’s shoulder and another half-ready for the dragon whenever it skittered too near the outer edge.
The younger prince stared out over the glittering water, his mouth rounding with wonder.
“That,” said Daeron solemnly, “is a ship. You are not allowed to command one yet.”
The baby slapped the air in delight.
Aenar pointed downward. “That one is ours.”
“Likely three of them are,” Daeron said.
The dragon climbed halfway onto the stair rail and spread its wings to the wind with unmistakable vanity until Kiera caught it neatly behind the forelegs and set it back upon the stone.
“None of that,” she said.
Daeron smiled as if to say you see. “Entirely harmless.”
Kiera gave him a look that promised a reckoning later.
From there they went through the lower hall of carved dragons, where every pillar ended in a snarling stone head blackened by time and torch smoke. Aenar insisted on showing each one to his brother. The baby answered each dragon in turn with a delighted pat upon whatever carved snout Kiera brought within his reach. Their own dragon, apparently insulted by such crude imitations, hissed at one weathered stone face and climbed into the cart as though to prove the superiority of living flesh over carved rock.
Then there were the kitchens, because no progress worth the name could go unfed.
The cooks, seeing Prince Daeron arrive with Lady Kiera, one prince marching ahead, another on Kiera’s hip, and a dragon riding in a linen cart like some satanic lapdog, assumed the whole affair must have sanction from someone too high to question. Warm rolls appeared. Pears were sliced. Aenar ate with grave concentration, crumbs gathering at his mouth. Kiera tore soft pieces of bread for the baby, who accepted them with the serene greed of a tiny king. Pear juice glistened on one fat wrist. The dragon was bribed with scraps of roast meat and immediately decided the kitchens were sacred ground.
“He is built well,” one kitchen woman said fondly of the younger child.
“Like a little fortress,” said another.
Kiera laughed before she could stop herself. “Do not let his mother hear you say so. She may have all our heads.”
Daeron watched the baby gnaw bread, the elder prince attempt to instruct a dragon in proper behavior, and the kitchen women melt around them, and looked absurdly pleased with the whole lot of them.
By the time they turned back toward the inner ward, the princes were in an excellent humor.
Dragonstone was not.
Back in your chambers you had turned from the wardrobe to ask whether the babe’s fur-lined cloak had been packed and found the settle empty.
At first you thought the nurse had taken him.
The nurse, returning that instant, thought you had sent for him.
Then someone asked where Aenar had gone.
No one knew.
The silence that followed was brief and absolute.
After that the castle erupted.
Valarr was summoned from the yard so quickly he came up the steps with one glove half-fastened and fear already whitening his face beneath the flush of exertion. The nurse wept. Guards were sent to the docks, to the sea stair, to the lower halls. The steward began barking orders so fast he forgot what half of them were. Servants flattened themselves against walls as men rushed past. Far off, a dog began barking in the outer yard. The sound of boots on stone multiplied until it seemed Dragonstone herself had broken into motion.
You stood in the center of it all very still.
Valarr knew that stillness.
It meant you were frightened enough to become dangerous.
“They cannot have gone far,” some fool of a knight said.
Valarr turned such a look on him that the man near swallowed his tongue.
“They are children,” Valarr said. “On Dragonstone.”
No more needed saying.
The cliffs. The stairs. The sea. The blind corners. The wells of darkness in old keeps. The thousand places a boy could wander in a castle built for dragons.
And then someone whispered that Aenar’s hatchling was gone as well.
Valarr’s face changed.
For one brief and terrible moment he looked like a man prepared to tear the castle apart stone by stone until his family fell out of it.
It was perhaps the only mercy of that morning that they found them before his mind could go any darker.
They came back through the western passage as though returning from some cheerful outing.
Daeron pushed the little cart one-handed, easy as summer. Aenar walked beside him carrying a wooden practice sword someone had apparently seen fit to give him along the way. Lady Kiera came on the other side with the younger prince on her hip, broad, sticky with pear, and entirely pleased with life. The dragon rode curled in the cart among the quilts and stolen kitchen scraps like a lord returned from campaign.
They turned into the great hall outside your chambers and found half Dragonstone waiting.
Everything stopped.
The guards.
The maids.
The nurse.
Valarr.
You.
Even the baby, sensing perhaps that the air had gone suddenly wrong, blinked and fell quiet.
No one moved for one suspended beat.
Then Valarr crossed the floor in three strides and went first to Kiera, taking the baby from her arms. He dropped to one knee so quickly his boot struck the stone with a hard echo. His hands went over the child, to his face, shoulders, ribs, arms, legs, searching for hurt with the brutal efficiency of a frightened father. Finding none, he shut his eyes for one naked instant of relief.
You were already kneeling before Aenar, both hands on his shoulders, looking him over with a breath still trapped high in your chest. When you saw the dragon winding between his ankles as smug and unharmed as the boy himself, something inside you broke the wrong way between laughter and tears.
“Where,” you asked very softly, “have you been?”
Aenar lowered his head.
Kiera stood a little apart then, caught between sympathy for you and the knowledge that against all good judgment she had been swept into the misadventure too.
Daeron still had one hand upon the cart and the look of a man only just beginning to suspect that others might not admire his stewardship.
It was Valarr who turned to him first.
“You found them,” he said.
Not loudly.
That made it worse.
Daeron blinked once. Kiera spoke before he could worsen himself. “In the gallery.”
“With the dragon,” Daeron added, as though this improved matters.
No one answered.
“They said they were exploring,” he tried.
Valarr made a sound that might have been disbelief, despair, or a prince’s last remaining patience.
You closed your eyes.
Daeron, perhaps feeling the floor turn dangerous beneath him at last, added, “In my defense, the dragon was with them.”
Silence.
“Which meant they were well protected?” he offered.
“That was not better,” Kiera told him.
Aenar, still under your hands, whispered at last, “I only wanted to show him Dragonstone.”
Valarr was still pale from fear. You were still trembling with the aftershock of terror. Daeron was still, regrettably, Daeron. But the heart of it shifted, because there it was in the plain and devastating truth of a child. No malice. No rebellion. Only pride. Only brotherhood. Only the earnest conviction that the world was too large and too beautiful for his little brother not to see it.
Your face softened first.
“Oh, my sweet boy.”
He looked up, uncertain. Valarr reached for him, drawing him close with one arm while his other hand remained braced upon the younger child’s round little belly as if he could not yet bear to let either son go fully from his grasp.
“You do not take your brother on a progress without telling us,” Valarr said quietly.
“I know.”
“You do not leave the apartments alone.”
“I know.”
“You do not take your dragon.”
Aenar blinked. “He wanted to come.”
Even Kiera made a strangled little sound at that, half laugh, half horror.
“And,” Valarr said, glancing toward the cart, “you do not knock over ancient armor.”
Aenar looked wounded. “I did not mean to.”
“That,” Daeron muttered, “was mostly the dragon.”
The beast, hearing itself mentioned, gave a proud little trill and climbed onto Aenar’s shoe.
Valarr looked up.
Daeron lifted both hands.
Kiera said, in a tone of perfect sweetness that promised misery later, “You will not survive the voyage.”
The baby chose that moment to crow and slap Valarr’s cheek.
And that was the end of severity.
Not the end of the scolding. That would come after. But the hard edge of fear broke there beneath the sheer ridiculousness of it all, crumbs still clinging to princely silk, one dragon sitting in a cart like a pleased accomplice, and both children safe in their parents’ reach.
Valarr bowed his head once, laughing too, though with the shakiness of a man who had only just come back from some abyss no one else had seen.
The nurse began crying in earnest.
One guard, convinced no one watched him, leaned his forehead against the wall.
Kiera covered her face with one hand, shoulders shaking as she lost her battle with laughter. Daeron, astonishingly pleased with himself, crouched before the younger prince and tapped him beneath the chin.
“Well,” he said, “you have had your first adventure.”
The baby beamed.
The dragon chirped.
Kiera pointed one finger at her husband without looking at him. “You are never to escort them anywhere again.”
Daeron opened his mouth.
Valarr said, “Not one word.”
Daeron shut his mouth.
Then, after a beat, “May I still attend the nameday feast?”
Kiera lowered her hand and gave him a look sharp enough to skin bark. “Yes. So that I may watch you suffer through every course.”
“That seems fair,” said Daeron.
Aenar, safe again beneath his father’s arm, looked from the baby to the dragon.
“Did he like it?” he asked.
Valarr and you both turned.
The baby, as if understanding himself discussed, patted his father’s shoulder with enormous satisfaction.
The dragon gave an approving chirr.
Daeron grinned. “Oh, he loved it.”
And because in the end the morning had given you back both boys whole, and the dragon too, because the ships were still waiting below and King Baelor’s grand nameday feast would still be there at journey’s end, because fear was easier to bear once passed and because love in that family had always had a way of collapsing into laughter when the worst was over, Dragonstone began at last to breathe again.
Servants returned to their burdens. Guards resumed their posts. Trunks were dragged on. Rope went down to the docks. Voices picked up where panic had snapped them short.
Valarr settled the baby fully against his shoulder, where the child went heavy at once with the serene weight of something loved beyond reason. You took Aenar by the hand. The dragon curled itself around his boots. Kiera fell in at your side, near enough that your sleeves brushed, her face all apology and tired affection. Daeron followed under strict suspicion from every soul present.
Behind them the little cart stood abandoned in the hall like the true villain of the tale.
And before that day was out, all Dragonstone would know that the sons of Valarr had gone wandering through the castle with a dragon in tow, felled a knight in the gallery, raided the kitchens, and very nearly sent their parents into early graves before breakfast.
Which, for princes, was not the worst beginning to a nameday journey.
Part II: Valarr catches Aenar peering into the dragon’s mouth
It happened three days later in the inner yard just before supper, when the wind had gentled and the last of the day lay honey-gold upon the black stone. The sea was quieter then, though never still. Below the walls it muttered and sighed against the rocks like some old beast too weary to rage. In the yard the evening light caught along spearheads and glazed the worn flagstones. A kitchen boy hurried across with trenchers. Somewhere above, a woman called for shutters to be closed against the coming damp. The castle was settling into that hour between labor and feast when even noise seemed to lower its voice.
Valarr stood near the archway speaking with a captain about stores, tides, and the order of ships for the morrow’s sailing. He listened with one ear only. The greater half of his attention, as fatherhood had taught him to do without rest, remained fixed elsewhere.
Aenar was in the yard near the low wall with his dragon.
The beast lay sprawled in a tangle of wing, tail, and juvenile arrogance, its scales catching the evening light in dark red glints like garnets buried in soot. Aenar knelt beside it, patting its neck and speaking in the solemn private murmur children used with creatures they deemed both friend and subject. Every so often the dragon flicked its tail. Every so often it nudged him with its snout hard enough to rock him half a step. Each nudge earned it a reprimanding hand on the jaw and a few grave words.
Valarr watched them with that complicated tenderness fathers were never taught and never spared.
He knew the bond between them was true. He knew the dragon would sooner bite through its own tongue than willingly harm the boy. He knew, too, what men forgot too easily when love made them foolish. Dragons were not hounds. Not horses. Not any creature so tamed as men liked to imagine once they had fed it from their own hand and heard it croon at their child. Dragons were themselves. Proud, quick, changeable, and old in instinct even when young in years. They could be coaxed, cherished, commanded if it suited them, but never wholly possessed.
That knowledge lived in Valarr’s bones.
It was why, when the dragon yawned wide enough to bare a red mouth full of pale hooked teeth, and Aenar, taken with simple child curiosity, set both hands on its jaw and rose on his toes to put his head directly inside its mouth, Valarr stopped hearing anything else in the world.
He crossed the yard before the captain had finished the sentence he was speaking.
“Aenar.”
The word cracked out of him sharper than he intended.
The boy jerked so hard he nearly toppled backward. The dragon snapped its mouth shut, more startled than ashamed, and gave Valarr a low affronted rumble as though to protest the interruption of a perfectly respectable investigation.
Valarr was already there.
He caught Aenar beneath the arms and lifted him bodily away, setting him back against his chest with a force born less of anger than naked fright. For one terrible instant his heart did not know how to beat. He could feel it hammering against his ribs as if it meant to bruise its way out.
Aenar blinked up at him, wide-eyed. “Papa?”
“What,” Valarr began, and had to stop because the word came too sharp. He drew one slow breath through his nose and tried again. “What were you doing?”
Aenar pointed at the dragon as if the matter ought to be plain. “I wanted to see.”
“See what?”
“His teeth.”
As if proud of them, the dragon yawned again.
Valarr stared at it.
Then at his son.
Then back at the dragon.
Behind him came the sound of you beginning to laugh.
Not unkindly. Not even truly at him. But helplessly, because you had come into the yard just in time to see your husband move as though he were snatching an heir from wildfire, only to discover the mortal peril in question had been a boy’s scientific interest in dragon teeth.
Valarr turned his head. “This is not amusing.”
“It is a little amusing,” you said, though the softness in your face betrayed you had seen how pale he still was.
Aenar, held securely against his father now, frowned in honest confusion. “He would not bite me.”
Valarr looked down at him. There was no insolence there, only certainty. Childhood had not yet taught him that love and danger might live in the same body.
“I know he would not mean to,” Valarr said.
Aenar frowned harder. “He is mine.”
“Yes,” Valarr said. “And you are his. I know that.”
The boy accepted this for all of half a heartbeat.
“Then why may I not look?”
Valarr closed his eyes briefly.
Because he was a father, and fathers were cursed with visions of ruin no one else could see. Because he had seen dragons turn in battle. Because he had seen fire run wrong. Because he knew better than most men that love did not unmake nature. It only persuaded it, and sometimes not even then. Because the beast before him, however bonded, however beloved, however used to sleeping outside his son’s chamber like some monstrous pet, still possessed a mouth full of knives.
When he opened his eyes again some of the sharpness had gone out of him.
“Because,” he said, shifting Aenar higher on his hip, “dragons are not toys.”
The dragon made a low offended croon.
Valarr fixed it with a look. “You are not helping yourself.”
By then you had come near, the skirts of your gown whispering over the stone. You laid one hand upon Aenar’s back and another briefly over Valarr’s wrist. “He was curious,” you said.
“I know.”
“And frightened half to death when you shouted.”
At that Valarr looked properly at his son and saw, beneath the confusion, the little uncertainty there.
He exhaled. The tightness in his mouth eased.
“I should not have shouted.”
Children forgave in the span of a breath. Aenar leaned into him. “I only wanted to count.”
“How many did you see?”
The boy considered this with deep seriousness. “Many.”
That tugged at the corner of Valarr’s mouth despite himself. “Yes,” he said dryly. “That is generally the trouble with dragon teeth.”
You laughed outright then, low and warm, and even Valarr could not maintain severity against the absurdity of it.
The dragon, deciding peace had returned, lowered its great head and nudged insistently at Aenar’s leg.
The boy brightened. “See? He is sorry.”
“I do not think he was ever ashamed,” Valarr said.
“No,” you murmured. “That sounds more like him.”
Aenar reached for the dragon again.
Valarr caught his wrist before the experiment could begin anew. “You may pat him. You may feed him. You may sit beside him. You may not place any part of yourself inside his mouth.”
Aenar looked up. “Not even one finger?”
“Especially not one finger.”
“Not if I am fast?”
“Aenar.”
The boy sighed the long sigh of the cruelly burdened and let his head fall against Valarr’s shoulder. “Very well.”
You smiled. The dragon, who had understood none of the words and seemed nonetheless offended by all of them, snorted a thin ribbon of smoke across the yard.
Valarr looked at the beast. Then at his son. Then at you.
“I am surrounded by creatures determined to kill me by degrees.”
You laughed again and rose to kiss his cheek. “No. Only love you badly.”
That left him with no answer worth speaking.
So he only tightened his arm around Aenar, reached down with his free hand to scratch the dragon once between the horns, and stood there a while longer in the falling evening light with his family gathered close around him, the boy, the beast, and the woman who had somehow made every fear he carried worth enduring.
Part III: Valarr places Daeron on restrictive duties
It was late by the time Valarr found him.
Dragonstone had quieted at last, though a place like that was never truly still. The sea remained below the walls, turning and striking and muttering in the dark like some old beast too stubborn to die. Wind slipped through the arrow slits and open arches in thin cold fingers, stirring torchflame and making the shadows breathe upon the stone. Somewhere below, from the lower kitchens, came the faint clatter of platters being stacked and the low murmur of servants finishing the day’s labor. A door shut softly in some distant passage. Boots rang once upon a stair and were gone.
The castle had begun to exhale.
Valarr had not.
He found Daeron in one of the long sea-facing galleries, half turned toward an open arch where the night lay black beyond the carved stone. There was wine in his hand and salt in his hair, and he looked, as he always did after causing trouble and surviving it, extremely pleased to still be alive. Torchlight ran bronze across one side of his face. The rest was shadow.
For a moment Valarr simply stood there and looked at him.
Daeron heard the step, glanced over, and smiled with entirely too much ease. “If you have come to thank me for the successful return of your heirs, I should like it noted that I acted bravely and with considerable instinct.”
Valarr kept coming.
Daeron’s smile thinned a little. “Ah,” he said. “So not thanks, then.”
He lifted his cup slightly. “Drink?”
Valarr almost refused on principle. Then, perhaps because the day had been too long, or because Daeron knew him too well and offered without mockery for once, he took the cup from his hand and drank.
The wine was dark and rough and a little too warm, but it burned all the same. Salt hung heavy in the night air. Somewhere out in the harbor a rope knocked against a mast with slow, regular rhythm, hollow as a pulse. For one brief moment it felt almost like other nights, easier nights, when he and Daeron had stood shoulder to shoulder as boys grown into men, trading sour wine and worse judgments while the sea snarled below. That almost made it worse.
For a beat or two neither spoke.
That was usually the more dangerous kind of silence with him.
Daeron knew it too. He shifted his cup from one hand to the other and tried, with only partial success, to look less like a man preparing to enjoy his own defense.
“At least,” Daeron said, “it may comfort you to know they were having an excellent time.”
Valarr turned his head.
There were men who shouted when angry. Men who struck tables. Men who reached for threats because they had nothing weightier to offer.
Valarr had never needed that sort of noise.
“You,” he said, very calmly, “are currently on restrictive duties with my children.”
Daeron blinked.
Then he laughed, because surely this was a jest.
Valarr did not laugh.
The sound died quickly enough.
“You are serious.”
“I am.”
Daeron stared at him as if he had been accused of treason over a misplaced boot. “Restrictive duties.”
“Yes.”
“That sounds military.”
“It is meant to.”
Daeron gave an incredulous little breath. “Valarr. Come now.”
“No.”
“Truly?”
“More than truly.”
Daeron lifted his cup slightly, as though appealing to the gods, the sea, and any ancestor listening. “They were unharmed.”
Valarr’s gaze stayed on him.
Daeron made a small concession with one hand. “For the most part.”
Valarr’s expression did not alter. That somehow made the whole thing worse.
“There is no acceptable fraction of harm,” he said, “where my sons are concerned.”
That landed.
Daeron’s grin faded by degrees.
Below them a wave struck hard enough that the sound came up through the stone beneath their feet.
Valarr turned back toward the dark water for a moment, jaw tight. The torch behind them hissed softly in its iron bracket. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.
“I know you meant no ill.”
Daeron said nothing.
“I know Kiera was with you.”
Still nothing.
“I know Aenar was proud of himself, and the baby too young to know better, and the dragon pleased with every bad decision in the company. I know all that.”
Daeron leaned one shoulder against the wall and watched him more carefully now. The humor had not gone wholly from his face, but it had gentled.
Valarr’s hand remained spread upon the stone. His fingers flexed once, then stilled.
“When they were gone,” he said, “I had one man tell me they could not have gone far.”
Daeron winced, just slightly.
“I thought of the stairwells. The sea doors. The bridge walks in the wet. The old shafts cut into the rock. I thought of one child trying to carry the other. I thought of that dragon taking fright at the wrong sound. I thought…” Here Valarr stopped, not because he lacked words but because he had too many, all of them darker than he cared to speak aloud.
The silence after that was not empty. It was crowded with everything he had seen in his mind and could not quite forgive himself for imagining.
Daeron looked down into his cup.
When he spoke, some of the brightness had left him. “I did not think it through.”
“No,” Valarr said. “You did not.”
“That is a very cold way to agree with me.”
“You do not deserve warmth at present.”
Daeron huffed a laugh at that despite himself, but it did not last. “I saw them in the gallery and thought, gods, look at them. They were so proud. Aenar looked like he had mounted a campaign. The baby was sitting there like some tiny conquering lord, fat as a feast day pudding. Kiera was horrified, obviously. I was not blind to that. I only thought…” He glanced up. “I thought a little supervision would turn it into a family story instead of a disaster.”
Valarr’s mouth moved, not quite a smile and not near kind enough to be mistaken for one. “And instead you made it both.”
That, at least, Daeron accepted. “Fair.”
The wind shifted. Somewhere farther down the gallery a servant passed in stocking feet carrying folded rush mats, saw the two princes standing there, and vanished again so quickly he might never have existed.
Valarr let out a long breath.
Inside the chambers behind them, far down the corridor, his sons were sleeping. He had stood over both beds before coming here. The younger had sprawled on his back in total surrender to comfort, one fat hand open atop the blanket, his hair gone wild over the pillow. Aenar had curled onto his side with one arm thrown around the dragon’s neck, as though even in sleep he required a beast to guard. Valarr had looked at them too long. He knew that. He had not cared.
When he spoke again, the sharpness in him had changed shape. It was less anger now than the bruised ache left after fear.
“I am aware,” he said, “that I may seem excessive.”
Daeron gave him a look. “May?”
Valarr ignored that. “But you did not see my wife’s face. And as her husband, I would do anything to ensure her comfort and happiness, whatever it may require.”
That killed the jest entirely.
Daeron knew which face he meant. All the realm knew that face. Songs had been made of Valarr and his wife already, more songs than either of them deserved and more than most marriages ever earned. Singers liked to make romance of them, the prince who looked at his lady as though the court were empty when she entered it, the lady who stood beside him as though crowns, councils, and kingdoms were nothing next to the life they had made between them. Noblewomen sighed over such songs. Merchant daughters repeated them at loom and hearth. Even wives already wed had been known to listen with a certain faraway look, as if wondering what it might be to be loved so openly and so well. Men spoke too, though in different fashion. Some said it boded well for the reign to come, that when their hour arrived, prince and princess together would make a gentler power than the realm had any right to expect.
Valarr had never cared for the songs.
He cared for the woman.
“She was frantic,” he said at last, and even now the memory darkened his voice. “Wringing her hands, white as milk, and near tore a Kingsguard to pieces for taking his eyes off the boys. That is always worse.”
He did not have to explain it. Men who loved women long enough learned which silences could be borne and which meant the world had come loose beneath them. The quiet griefs, the soft hurts, the angers that passed. Those could be survived. But a woman afraid for her child and trying not to break under it, there was very little on earth more terrible than that.
Daeron lowered his eyes for a moment. “Kiera said as much after.”
Valarr nodded once.
“I had the baby in my arms afterward,” he said, more quietly still. “And he was laughing. Laughing. As though the whole world had only just now begun to amuse him. I could still feel my hands shaking.”
That was the truest part of it, perhaps. Not the fear in the moment itself, but the indignity of the trembling after, when the children were safe and his body had not yet understood it was permitted to stop fighting ghosts.
Daeron was silent a long while.
At last he said, “I am sorry.”
Valarr looked at him.
Daeron lifted one shoulder, smaller now, stripped of its swagger. “Not in the airy way. In the real one.”
That earned him more grace than anything else had.
Valarr studied him a moment, then gave the smallest incline of his head.
“Good,” he said. “Remain so.”
Daeron exhaled through his nose. “And these restrictive duties, then. What do they entail?”
Valarr folded his arms.
“You may greet my children in the presence of myself, my wife, or Kiera.”
Daeron stared.
“You may not escort them anywhere.”
“Cruel.”
“You may not supervise them.”
“Valarr.”
“You may not, under any circumstance, discover them in the midst of wrongdoing and decide it would be charming to continue.”
Daeron looked wounded. “That seems pointed.”
“It is.”
“And the dragon?”
Valarr’s expression did not shift. “Especially the dragon.”
Daeron took a drink of wine, perhaps because he felt it was the only dignity left available to him. “This is a gross abuse of princely authority.”
“This is fatherhood.”
“That seems worse.”
“It often is.”
Daeron let that sit, then because he was not wise enough to leave himself well alone, said, “So, in the matter of your younger son, he is chonky.”
Valarr turned his head very slowly to look at him.
Daeron lifted his cup. “Fondly.”
“That is not a word.”
“It is in my heart.”
“You are a heathen.”
Daeron laughed then, low and easy, and some of the iron in the night seemed to loosen with it. “Yet not wrong.”
Valarr made a sound that might have been disgust, might have been the ghost of a laugh. “Say that in front of his mother and she will have your liver for supper.”
“She may have it anyway.”
“That would be justice.”
Daeron smiled into the rim of the cup. “Suppose, entirely by chance, your chonky younger son extends both arms to me in unmistakable preference and delight. Am I to reject a prince of the blood?”
Valarr looked at him for a long beat.
“Yes.”
Daeron made a scandalized sound. “Monstrous.”
“He will survive it.”
“I am less certain that I shall.”
Valarr’s mouth twitched then, finally, against his will. It was not much, but Daeron saw it and pounced.
“Ah,” he said softly. “There he is.”
“Do not mistake a lapse in severity for forgiveness.”
“I would never.”
“You absolutely would.”
Daeron smiled into his cup. “Fair.”
For a little while, they stood together looking out at the black water and the pale churn of surf below. The castle around them had gone softer now. Torches burned lower. The air had turned colder. Somewhere behind them, a woman laughed quietly and was hushed.
At length Daeron said, “For what it is worth, Aenar worships him.”
Valarr did not need to ask who.
“He talks about the baby as though he were a prince in the songs already. Kept showing him things. Explaining them. As if the boy were only waiting to understand.”
That struck deeper than Daeron perhaps intended.
Valarr looked out into the dark a moment longer.
“I know,” he said.
“And your younger one,” Daeron went on, because he was not wise enough to stop when sentiment had entered the room, “has the look of a child who will grow into the sort of man everyone would die for and no one can reason with.”
Valarr sighed. “That is exactly what I fear.”
Daeron laughed softly. “You should. He is built like a battering ram already.”
Valarr turned his head.
Daeron lifted his free hand. “Affectionately.”
There was just enough warmth in that to let it pass.
Then Valarr straightened from the arch.
“One moon,” he said.
Daeron blinked. “One moon what?”
“One moon on restrictive duties.”
Daeron stared at him in fresh outrage. “A moon?”
“You are fortunate I do not make it two.”
“For allowing your sons to have one memorable morning?”
“For surviving it.”
Daeron pressed a hand to his chest as though wounded beyond speech. “I shall appeal to the king.”
“You may explain to Baelor that you misplaced both his grandsons and one dragon before breakfast. I would enjoy hearing that.”
Valarr paused, then added with perfect calm, “And while you are there, your father has requested you join the tourney. My sons are quite looking forward to seeing their uncle joust.”
That did it.
Valarr grinned at last, brief and sharp, because he knew very well jousting sat somewhere near the bottom of Daeron’s list of enjoyable pursuits.
Daeron glared at him, then pointed with the hand holding the cup and shook his head slowly, the gesture plain as speech. You cheeky little shit.
Valarr’s grin only deepened.
Daeron considered.
Then grimaced. “No. I see the weakness in my case.”
Valarr gave one satisfied nod and turned to go.
“Valarr.”
He paused.
Daeron’s voice, when it came, had gone easier again, but not frivolous. “I did love them. You know that.”
Valarr glanced back over his shoulder.
The torchlight put one side of Daeron’s face in gold and left the other in shadow. For all his recklessness, the truth of that was plain enough.
“I know,” Valarr said.
Then, after the smallest beat, “That is why you are only on restrictive duties.”
Daeron barked a laugh at that, and this time Valarr let himself keep the ghost of a smile as he walked away.
By the time he reached the turn in the corridor, the sea still muttering below and the torchlight following him in long wavering stripes, he could hear Daeron calling softly after him in a tone of deep offence, “One moon is excessive. I want it noted somewhere official that this is excessive.”
Valarr did not look back.
“Have it noted,” he said.
And because the children were sleeping, and the dragon had not yet eaten anyone, and the woman he loved was waiting in their chambers warm beneath lamplight and wool, the weight in his chest felt, for the first time since morning, a little less like stone.
Pairing: Prince Aerion Targaryen X Stark!Reader X Prince Valarr Targaryen
Summary:
Aerion Targaryen loved her first.
The realm gave her to Valarr anyway.
Now one prince haunts her nights, the other shares her bed, and the dark is beginning to answer back.
Warnings: dark romance, angst, love triangle, forbidden love, unrequited love, requited love at the wrong time, doomed love, emotional infidelity, marriage of duty, obsessive love, possessive behaviour, toxic devotion, haunting, grief, dark Targaryen men.
You had not always feared the dark.
That came later.
Once, when you were younger, and the world had not yet shown you how gently it could ruin a life, you had loved the dark for the hush of it. Night had been a merciful thing then. It softened sharp corners. It dimmed the watchful glitter of court. It turned torchlight to gold and made every corridor feel less like a stage set for other people’s judgments. In darkness, faces blurred at the edges. Expectations loosened. The realm itself seemed to draw one long breath and hold its tongue.
In darkness, Aerion had once seemed almost gentle.
That was the thing no one would have believed afterward. Not the courtiers with their careful mouths and frightened eyes. Not the old women who touched the seven-pointed stars at their throats when his name was spoken too near sunset. Not the stableboys who went pale when he passed, nor the squires who laughed too loudly at his jests because they knew too well what happened to boys who did not laugh quickly enough. Aerion Brightflame was not a man the court loved. He was a man the court endured, beautifully, carefully, at a distance.
He had his father’s blood and his mother’s beauty and something else in him besides, something bright and wrong and hungry.
Men said he smiled like a prince and looked like a dragon and had the soul of a knife.
Women lowered their eyes around him.
Children were warned not to wander too near his rooms.
Prince Maekar, stern and iron-backed, still loved his son in the hard flinty way proud fathers loved difficult children, but even he watched Aerion sometimes as though measuring how close flame might come before it consumed the hand that fed it. There were stories. There were always stories. A cat thrown down a well and the lie told afterward with that lovely princely face still untroubled. Cruel little torments worked upon younger siblings. Jests that left servants white-faced and shaking once the prince had gone. Strange books, darker curiosities, mutterings that Aerion fancied the dragon in him more literal than metaphor. Men called him capricious, arrogant, touched in the head. Others used uglier words more quietly.
Monster, some said, when they were certain he was nowhere near enough to hear.
And yet with you he had been softer.
Not safe. Never quite that, for safety implied peace, and Aerion had no peace in him to give. But something in his cruelty bent around you as water bent around stone. Something in him, seeing you, had chosen not to wound.
Perhaps that was why it ruined you so completely.
You had met him first in the red dusk of a wet summer evening, when the sky still held storm-light and the gardens smelled of rain-struck earth, crushed rosemary, and damp rose leaves. Supper had been loud that night, too many men drinking too much wine, too many ladies laughing like little bells struck too hard, and you had slipped away as you often did when the court pressed too close. Your slippers made no sound on the path. Water dripped from the clipped hedges in soft patient taps. The fountain ahead caught the last of the light in broken silver.
Aerion stood beside it as though he had been waiting there for years.
He was all sharp beauty and dangerous stillness. Silver-gold curls damp at the temples. Violet eyes darkened by evening. A black cloak edged in scarlet satin spilled from his shoulders in rich folds darkened further by the wet. One gloved hand rested against the marble rim of the fountain, the other hung loose at his side, and in the half-light his face seemed carved rather than born, too perfect, too cold, too imperious to belong to any kindly world.
You should have gone another way.
Instead, he turned and saw you.
For one brief moment, something ugly was still on his face. Not anger exactly, but its close kin. Some private dark humour, half-formed and mean-edged. Then his gaze settled fully on you, and the expression altered.
Not gone.
Only altered.
“Are you fleeing,” he asked, “or merely hiding?”
There were men at court who asked questions like traps. Aerion asked as though he genuinely wished to know which sort of creature you were.
You looked not at him but at the rain-rippled water. “Does it matter?”
The corner of his mouth moved.
“Very much.”
You ought to have given a polished answer. Something harmless, courtly, and easy to forget.
Instead, because you were tired and the dark was kind and his voice had come without mockery, you answered honestly.
“Hiding,” you said.
When you looked up again, he was watching you with open interest.
“Good,” Aerion said. “So am I.”
That was how it began.
Not grandly. Not in song. Not with garlands or glances across a feast hall while harps played. Only with two solitary creatures finding one another in the dark and recognizing something familiar there.
After that, he seemed to be everywhere.
Or perhaps you only learned where to look.
In the library at hours when most noblemen were drinking or dicing, where beeswax candles guttered low beside towers of old chronicles and the parchment smell was dry as dust in summer fields. In the mews, one bare hand outstretched to a hawk savage enough to draw blood from anyone else. In the galleries beyond the feast hall when you slipped away to breathe. In the yard before dawn, sword in hand, cutting through the practice pell as though the stuffed man had personally offended him.
With others, Aerion was exactly what the stories promised. Cruel. Beautiful. Restless. He could smile and make a man feel flayed. He could make a boy stammer just by turning his head. He was all courtesy before his father and all contempt once the old prince’s back was turned. You saw it yourself, the flash in him, the bright contempt, the delight he sometimes took in other people’s fear.
Once, a young lordling from the Reach made some sly remark about northern women being all solemn faces and cold beds. You had not even understood, at first, that the jest was aimed at you. The hall had been hot with torchlight and roasted capon, thick with the smells of wine, wet wool, lamp smoke, and sweet oranges cut for the high table. Pages slipped between benches. Servants carried trenchers slick with grease. Somewhere near the musicians’ alcove, a harp string went briefly sour.
Aerion heard the remark.
He set down his wine cup very carefully.
The room seemed to notice before the Reach lord did.
“Say it again,” Aerion said.
His voice was soft.
That was the truly frightening thing.
The young man went pink and then white. “My prince, I meant no…”
“I know what you meant.”
Nothing in Aerion’s tone rose. Nothing sharpened. He looked almost bored. The room had gone still around him. You could hear the hiss of torchfire in its iron brackets and the faint clink of a lady’s bracelets three seats away.
Aerion leaned back in his chair, smiling faintly. “Now say it again. I should like to hear how brave you are with your own tongue in your own mouth.”
No one spoke.
No one moved.
The Reach lord mumbled something like an apology and spent the rest of supper staring into his trencher. Afterward two ladies said under their breath that Brightflame was mad, and one old knight muttered that the young fool was lucky to leave the table with his teeth.
You should have been frightened.
Instead, in the corridor later, when you found Aerion alone in the dark beneath a row of slit windows open to the cooling night, you said softly, “You need not do that.”
He looked down at you. The torchlight made old gold of the edges of his hair.
“Need,” Aerion said, “and desire are different things.”
You went back to your chamber and lay awake until dawn.
It was not that he became another man with you.
That would have been easier to mistrust.
No, Aerion remained himself. Proud. Strange. Sometimes terrible. He still frightened others. He still carried that bright wrongness inside him, that sense of a fire always half a breath from turning wild. But with you, the fire banked. With you, he seemed to listen to the silences between things.
He learned quickly what hurt you and what soothed you. He learned that bright rooms made you feel watched. That too many eyes at table made your appetite vanish. That you slept poorly in total darkness, not because you feared thieves or ghosts, but because blackness too complete made your thoughts feel larger than your body could hold. He learned that when you were overwhelmed, you grew quieter rather than sharper. He learned that your hands trembled sometimes after feasts, though never while anyone could see.
Once, after a feast where three jeweled ladies had hemmed you in with smiling cruelties until your lungs seemed too tight for proper breath, you escaped into a narrow side passage and stood with your forehead against cool stone, trying to steady yourself. Drafts moved through the corridor in little cold fingers. Somewhere below, in the kitchens, copper pots clanged and scullions laughed too loudly. A serving girl went hurrying past with folded linens and cast you one startled glance before lowering her eyes and vanishing around the turn.
Aerion found you there.
He did not ask what had been said.
He did not tell you to ignore them.
He did not offer one of those useless princely comforts men gave women so they might feel kind without having to understand a thing.
He simply lifted the lamp from its wall-hook and carried it farther down the corridor, until the light no longer fell so hard across your face.
“There,” he said. “Better.”
You could have wept for the tenderness of it.
A man who noticed that brightness itself could humiliate.
A man who understood that comfort was sometimes only moving the light.
You loved him from then, though perhaps you had already begun long before.
Cautious women did not love safely. They loved inwardly and all at once. They built whole cathedrals inside themselves and let no one hear the labour of the stone. By the time the court began smiling to see Aerion’s moods ease where you stood, you were already lost.
The whispers began with servants. Then ladies. Then men who spoke politics with rings on every finger and thought women deaf when they discussed marriages. A Stark daughter, they said. Good blood, old blood, proud enough without being troublesome. Quiet. Composed. Highborn. A daughter of Winterfell. Perhaps she would soothe him. Perhaps she would anchor him. Perhaps Prince Aerion, for all his uglier habits, had finally fixed himself to one thing gentle enough to keep him from flying apart.
You did not dare hope at first.
Then you did.
That was the true tragedy. Not that you loved him. Not that you lost him.
It was that for a little while, you believed you would be allowed to keep him.
The first time he kissed you, rain was striking the castle windows like handfuls of thrown gravel.
Most of the court had withdrawn from the galleries because of the storm. The braziers smoked in the draughts. The servants had begun shuttering windows one by one, and thunder kept rolling over Blackwater Bay in long low growls that made the glass tremble in its lead. You had stopped beneath a stone arch where one could see the sea flare white when lightning split the sky. Aerion came behind you so quietly you only knew he was there when one hand settled, light as breath, beside yours on the sill.
The sea flashed silver.
Darkness.
Thunder rolled again.
“Aerion,” you whispered.
You never knew afterward if you meant it as warning or prayer.
He turned his head and kissed you before you could decide.
It was no courtly thing. Not neat, not measured, not practiced. It felt like something long denied finally taking form. His hand came to your jaw with startling gentleness. Rain battered the panes. Lightning turned the world white for one heartbeat, and in that fierce brief brightness his expression looked almost wounded with wanting you.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.
“I should not have done that,” he said.
You were trembling.
“No,” you whispered.
He kissed you again anyway.
Afterward, you lived in a kind of bright terror. Every day seemed too precious to survive being noticed. Every look he gave you in public felt like a secret already half-lost. Every evening you did not see him felt unfinished. He was not easy. He was not good, perhaps not in the ways songs liked men to be good. But with you, he had become careful, and carefulness from a creature made for damage was its own form of devotion.
So when he asked for you, no one could say they were surprised.
The first time Prince Maekar saw his son truly brought low, it was not by battle, nor by shame, nor by any public humiliation the court could whisper over for years afterward.
It was by love.
Or something near enough to it to do the same damage.
Aerion came to his father’s solar late, long after supper, when the castle had gone dim and the last of the torches in the outer galleries had been trimmed low. The room smelled of wax, old parchment, and the smoke of a brazier gone half to ash. Maps lay strewn across a broad oak table, corners pinned with daggers and heavy stones. A cup of wine sat untouched near Prince Maekar’s hand. The red coals in the hearth pulsed like watchful eyes. Beyond the shutter, wind worried at the iron latch.
Prince Baelor was there as well.
That mattered.
Baelor Breakspear stood near the hearth in a dark doublet worked subtly at the collar, one hand resting on the pommel of the dagger at his belt. Firelight made bronze and shadow of his face. He had his father’s gravity and more patience than any man ought. Crown prince, heir to the Iron Throne, husband, father, and the sort of prince the realm trusted because he gave it reason to. Beside him, Prince Maekar seemed the colder blade. Between them, without being spoken, sat the future.
And Valarr stood somewhere inside that future too.
Valarr, Baelor’s son. Valarr, second in line to the Iron Throne after his father. Valarr, the safer choice in every way a lord might weigh a prince when daughters were involved.
Maekar stood over the table, one hand braced on the wood, his hard face cut in half by firelight. He did not look up at once when the door opened. He only said, in that grave flat voice of his, “You are late.”
Aerion shut the door behind him.
That sound alone made Maekar glance up.
There was something wrong in his son’s face.
Not madness, not the bright mean amusement he so often wore when he meant to make someone smaller. This was something else. Something more dangerous for being less familiar. His beauty looked sharpened by strain. The bones of his face stood out too clearly. His eyes were lit from within by something fierce and miserable.
“Father,” Aerion said.
Maekar straightened.
Already he knew.
He had known, in truth, before Aerion ever opened his mouth. A father watched his children whether he wished to or no, and Maekar had watched this son in particular all his life because one watched fire differently than one watched stone. He had seen the change in him these past months. The strange calming. The lessening of certain cruelties. The way his temper banked in your presence instead of blazing higher. The way he sought you in rooms without seeming to understand that he did it. The way he had, for the first time in years, begun to look less like a prince amusing himself by torment and more like a man trying, however clumsily, not to become the thing others already called him in private.
It had frightened Maekar more than Aerion’s usual savagery ever had.
Because if his son had truly fixed himself upon something tender, then the breaking of it would be catastrophic.
And now here it was.
“I want her,” Aerion said.
No preamble.
No courtesy.
No elaborate court phrasing to dress what he meant in silk.
Only that.
Maekar’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “You are speaking of Lady Stark.”
“You know damned well who I mean.”
Baelor’s gaze shifted, only a little. A prince trained since childhood to school his face might have seemed motionless to others, but not to family. Not to blood.
Maekar’s face hardened.
Aerion laughed once, ugly and breathless. “There. There you are. I come here to ask you for one thing, one thing, and before I’ve even finished speaking you’ve already decided to answer me like a prince and not a father.”
“You came here,” Maekar said evenly, “already speaking like a man who thinks wanting and deserving are the same thing.”
Aerion’s nostrils flared. “I am not asking for a trinket. I am not asking for a horse or a sword or some whore dragged warm from another man’s bed. I am asking for my wife.”
Something cold moved through the room.
Maekar looked at his son for a long moment, and when he spoke, his voice was iron. “She is not your wife.”
Aerion’s mouth pulled thin. “She would be.”
“No.”
There it was.
So simple.
So final.
For one second Aerion said nothing at all. His face went very still, and Maekar felt, with the old exhausted instinct of a father who had weathered this child’s storms too many times, the precise moment at which temper crossed into danger.
Aerion smiled.
That was worse.
“Is that it?” he asked softly. “No?”
Maekar did not move. “Lord Stark has made his will plain. A Stark daughter will not be wedded to a man this court watches with one hand on its throat.”
Aerion blinked once. Twice.
Then he laughed.
It was not laughter. It was the sound of something cutting.
“Say it plain.”
Maekar’s gaze did not waver. “He will not give his daughter to a prince with your reputation. He will accept Valarr.”
Silence followed that.
Even Baelor did not move.
Valarr.
The name sat there between them, heavy with politics. Not only because Valarr was decent, but because he was useful. The son of Baelor Breakspear. A prince with the realm’s confidence. A cousin the North could stomach because the blood ran nearer crowns and steadier tempers alike.
Aerion’s jaw flexed once. “Of course he will.”
Baelor spoke then, quiet and careful. “This is not meant as insult.”
Aerion turned his head toward him with such cold contempt that even the candle flames seemed to shrink. “No? Then what is it meant as? A kindness?”
Baelor held his gaze. “A safeguard.”
Aerion smiled with split malice. “For whom?”
Neither man answered.
That was answer enough.
Maekar said, “You frighten men. You delight in cruelty. You have made yourself a spectacle too many times for me to pretend otherwise. I will not hand Lord Stark’s daughter into that and call it wisdom.”
Aerion took another step. Then another. The room seemed smaller for him, the fire hotter, the shadows closer.
“And Valarr?” he asked. “That’s your answer? Valarr gets the Stark girl because he smiles at the right moments and doesn’t frighten old men over their wine?”
“This is not about smiles.”
“Then what the fuck is it about?”
Maekar’s voice sharpened. “Enough.”
“No.” Aerion was shouting now. “No, you do not get to do that. You do not get to sit there in your lordly calm and talk to me like I am some snarling beast at the end of a chain when you know what she is to me.”
Maekar’s hands curled on the edge of the table. “I know exactly what you are.”
That landed.
Gods, how it landed.
Aerion’s expression changed in one terrible instant. All the brightness in him turned naked. Hurt stripped clean of vanity. Wounded pride. Boyhood somewhere far beneath the monstrous reputation and princely silk. For the first time that night, he looked young, not in years, but in ache.
Baelor saw it too. His face tightened by a fraction, almost nothing, but enough.
Maekar had already spoken.
And fathers, like kings, were too often prisoners of words once loosed.
Aerion’s voice was quieter now.
That was worse than the shouting had been.
“What am I, then?”
Maekar did not answer at once. Fire shifted in the brazier. Somewhere beyond the door, a guard’s foot scraped stone, then went still.
At last Maekar said, “You are my son. You are a prince of this house. And you are a man the realm does not trust with gentleness.”
Aerion’s face twisted. “Trust?” he repeated. “Trust?”
He struck the edge of the table with one hand so hard the inkpot rattled and a rolled map slid half to the floor.
“I came here, and I asked you.”
Maekar stared at him.
Aerion laughed again, softer now, and infinitely more terrible. “Do you hear me? I asked. I did not take. I did not threaten. I did not corner some lordling in a corridor and make him piss himself. I did not do any of the foul little things you have spent half my life expecting of me. I came to you like a son and asked for the woman I mean to marry, and you stand there and speak to me as though I’ve just begged permission to skin her alive.”
“Aerion…”
“No!”
The shout cracked through the room.
Aerion’s chest was heaving now. Whatever princely polish he had brought in with him was gone. There was only the man beneath it, furious, desperate, humiliated by the very fact of needing anything enough to plead for it.
“I love her.”
Silence.
It sat between them like another living thing.
Maekar had thought he was prepared for anything his son might say.
He had not been prepared for that.
Nor had Baelor, who looked away for one heartbeat as if the sight of naked grief in kin was too private a thing to witness with honour.
Aerion’s face had gone white with the force of saying it aloud. “I love her,” he said again, as if daring the room to laugh. “And if you mean to tell me I am too cursed, too cruel, too wrong in the blood for that to matter, then say it to my face and be done with it.”
Maekar looked at him.
Really looked.
At the beautiful ruined arrogance of him. At the pride cracking under strain. At the boy he had once held, feverish and burning, who had grown into a man the realm feared and the family endured and who had perhaps, perhaps, just this once found a road that might have led him somewhere gentler.
And he felt pity.
Gods help him, he felt pity.
His voice, when it came, was lower. “Aerion.”
Aerion did not move.
“My sweet boy,” Maekar said quietly.
Aerion flinched as though struck.
“Do not,” he said at once.
Maekar’s throat tightened. “Please understand.”
“No.”
“The Starks…”
“No.”
“…will not allow it.”
Aerion let out a sound then, half laugh, half broken breath, wholly dreadful.
“The Starks?”
Maekar’s own face had gone tired now, older suddenly under the firelight. “The realm will not allow it. The court will not allow it. Lord Stark will not allow it. And if I am being honest…” He stopped, because honesty had already done enough damage tonight.
Aerion took one step closer. “Say it.”
Maekar closed his eyes once. Then opened them.
“And if I am being honest,” he said, “I do not know that you would not destroy her when the black moods take you.”
Aerion stood as if turned to stone.
For three heartbeats nothing moved.
Then he whispered, “You think I would hurt her.”
Maekar did not answer.
He did not need to.
Aerion’s laugh this time was pure ruin. “You miserable old fool,” he said.
Maekar’s face hardened at once. “Mind yourself.”
“No, you mind yourself.” Aerion came around the table like something unchained now, pointing at his father with a shaking hand. “You dare speak to me of what I am? You made me under this fucking roof. You let men bow and scrape and whisper mad prince, monster prince, Brightflame, and all the while you stood there and watched me become exactly what was easiest for everyone to fear.”
“Aerion,” Baelor said quietly.
Aerion rounded on him. “And you.”
Baelor’s face hardened.
Aerion laughed once, bitter as gall. “The worthy one. The realm’s darling. The father of the prince they’d rather give her to.”
Baelor did not rise to it. That, more than anger might have, seemed to infuriate Aerion further.
“You should have let me have one good thing!”
Maekar roared back then, his own temper finally breaking loose. “I am trying to save what goodness remains in this family from your hands!”
The words rang.
Both men froze.
Too late.
Too far.
Maekar saw at once what he had done.
Aerion’s face emptied out.
It was almost more frightening than rage.
When he spoke, it was in a dead calm voice Maekar had not heard since boyhood illness had once left him staring too long at nothing. “She will be wed to Valarr, then.”
Maekar said nothing.
Baelor did not answer either.
Aerion nodded once. “I see.”
“Aerion…”
“No.” He stepped back. “You have said enough. More than enough.”
He turned for the door.
Maekar moved then, one hand half-lifted despite himself. “Son…”
Aerion stopped with his hand on the latch but did not look back.
“If he touches her,” he said quietly, “do not ask me afterward to behave like a cousin.”
Then he was gone.
You did not hear all of this at once, of course. Truth at court never arrived cleanly. It came in fragments, in frightened servants, in tears swallowed too fast, in old retainers who remembered the prince as a boy and were foolish enough to pity him. But piece by piece the shape of it was laid before you, and by evening the castle had begun treating you as though you were already Valarr’s.
That was how you knew.
Not because someone told you kindly.
Because your maid would not meet your eyes. Because two ladies stopped speaking when you entered. Because Aerion saw you across the hall at supper and did not come.
That last hurt worst of all.
He did not come because he knew that if he did, he might burn the whole hall down around him.
You saw it in his face. The violence of restraint. The ruin of it.
And still you loved him.
Later, much later, after you had somehow reached a disused gallery overlooking the black water below the castle walls, he found you in the dark. The storm had passed. The night smelled of wet stone and salt and quenched torches. Water still dripped from the gargoyles into the darkness below. A serving boy hurried along the lower walk with fresh rushes under one arm and never looked up.
You had one hand pressed to your own mouth because you could not seem to breathe without shaking.
Aerion came toward you like a man walking straight into the wound that had killed him.
“They said no,” you whispered, though you knew.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He laughed then, and the sound was so empty it frightened you more than anger would have.
“Because you are too good for me, apparently.”
You flinched.
Aerion saw it and shut his eyes once as if he hated himself for the line even while meaning every word inside it.
“My father,” he said more quietly, “and yours, and every frightened old bastard between them, believe you should be given to a better man.”
The sea crashed once below the cliff face.
You could hear it even from here.
“A better man,” you repeated.
“Valarr.” His mouth turned bitter around the name. “Baelor’s son. The prince after the prince. Safe. Decent. Everything a Stark daughter ought to be handed to when the realm wants sleep without nightmares.”
You began to cry then.
Not gracefully. Not quietly. The tears came too fast, too hot, humiliating in their helplessness. Aerion stopped at the sight as though struck. Of all his cruelties, you thought wildly, it was still this that undid him most, your pain when he was the cause or witness of it.
He came closer.
His hands took your face with impossible care.
“I asked for you,” he said.
That broke you worse.
“I know.”
“I asked for you,” he said again, as if repetition itself might undo the world. “I stood before them and asked.”
You covered his wrist with your own hand and wept harder.
He bowed his head until his brow rested against yours.
For one suspended moment, he was not Brightflame, not the prince men feared, not the mad cruel dragon-son whispered about in corridors.
Only a man being denied the single thing in his life he had ever reached for cleanly.
“I would have married you,” he whispered.
You shut your eyes.
“I know.”
If grief had ended there, cleanly, nobly, all in one great breaking, perhaps you might have survived it better.
But grief was greedy.
It did not take and leave.
It took and lingered.
It buried itself beneath the skin and stayed warm there.
Your marriage to Valarr followed swiftly.
That was another cruelty. Court did not allow pain time to settle before dressing it in silk and calling it order. You were given little space to mourn what had never been made official. There were gowns to fit, jewels to choose, vows to prepare, old women to instruct you in the solemn duties of being pleased by what had just destroyed you.
Valarr, to his credit, was not blind.
He came to see you once before the wedding, chaperoned only by the open door and propriety’s thin fiction. He stood at a distance in the solar assigned for the meeting, hands clasped behind him, gaze steady and grave. Beyond the threshold two guards stood with the patience of carved men. Somewhere in the yard below a horse screamed and was answered by another.
You had dreaded him unfairly.
Not because he had done anything cruel.
Because he was the form your loss had taken.
He was handsome in a quieter way than Aerion. Less fire, more stone. There was kindness in his face and some lingering uncertainty in the way he held himself, as though he understood too well that this conversation had been forced upon you both.
“My lady,” he said.
You inclined your head.
For a moment neither of you spoke.
Then Valarr said, “I will not insult you by pretending ignorance.”
Your throat tightened.
He glanced toward the open window, where late light touched the sill. “I know what this is.”
It was the first mercy anyone had shown you since Maekar’s refusal.
You looked at him then, fully.
Valarr did not smile. “I cannot mend what was done before I was summoned into it,” he said. “But I swear to you I will not make your life harder for resenting me.”
You stared.
Something hot and painful rose in your chest, not love, not even gratitude yet, but the raw relief of not having to perform delight before a man determined not to see.
“You do not deserve resentment,” you said softly.
Valarr’s face changed a little at that, as if the honesty cost him more than you knew. “Perhaps not,” he answered. “But I was chosen where another man was denied. I think that buys me no innocence in your eyes.”
You wanted to hate him then.
It would have been easier.
Instead you saw only a good man standing in the wreckage arranged for him by others, trying not to tread too heavily upon what had already been broken.
“I will do my duty,” you whispered.
Valarr’s expression tightened, and for one second you thought you had wounded him.
Then he said quietly, “I hope, in time, we may offer one another something kinder than that.”
You nearly cried again.
Because cruelty was simple.
Kindness, here, was unbearable.
So you wed him.
And Valarr proved as good as promised.
That was the misery of it.
He was considerate without being smothering, attentive without demanding gratitude for it. He did not ask you to love him. He did not pry at wounds still bleeding. He noticed when crowds made you quieter and found reasons to shorten feast nights. He had more lamps put in your chambers but never asked why you wanted the dark less complete. He learned which wines you liked, which corridors overwhelmed you, which hours of the day you most missed the North. He treated your silences not as insults but as weather to be read kindly.
In time, he began to learn the smaller things too, the things that made up the private shape of a life. Which songs you liked least because they made you homesick. Which fruits you pushed aside without thinking. How you touched the edge of your cup with one finger when you were troubled. What look came over you when snow was mentioned. Which stories from the North you would tell if asked gently and not before too many listeners. Little by little, he began to gather your joys until he could no longer quite separate them from his own. He would hear a jest and think at once whether it would make you smile. He would see hawks above the yard and remember the way your face turned upward when you watched them. He would reach for music, for food, for quiet, and find that somewhere along the road of marriage your answer had become bound up in his question.
You could have made a decent life with such a man.
That was what made Aerion’s grief so dangerous.
Because Valarr was not cruel.
Because Valarr was becoming, day by day, someone you could not despise.
Because the realm had not merely torn you from one man and given you to another. It had given you to a man who might, with time and gentleness, become beloved in a quieter and more durable way than fire had ever allowed.
And because none of that changed the nights.
That was when the dark stopped being merciful.
You would lie beside your husband in the hush before sleep and think, foolishly, perhaps tonight I am at peace.
Then you would close your eyes.
And hear his voice.
Not truly, not in the way songs made ghosts of dead or absent lovers. Worse than that. You would hear memory where silence ought to have been. Aerion at the fountain. Aerion in the corridor. Aerion in stormlight saying your name as though it had wounded him to learn it. There were nights when you could have sworn the shape of his hand still lingered at your jaw in the dark, though Valarr lay warm and living beside you.
You told yourself you had buried it.
You told yourself you had covered the wound, laid silk over it, duty over it, quiet over it, and become the wife the realm required.
But why, then, was it still there?
Why did every shadow lean in his direction?
Why did every darkened passage seem to remember him before you did?
Your only prayer, on the worst nights, was that he leave you alone.
Because in every glance you still saw his face.
Wherever you went, his shadow clung to your hand.
You were being slowly buried alive by your own heart.
Valarr noticed more than he said.
That, perhaps, was his greatest kindness.
Once he woke in the deepest part of night and found you sitting upright in bed, your breath too quick, your face turned toward the black corner of the room where no candle burned. Outside the shutters, rain whispered over slate and stone. Somewhere in the corridor a guard coughed. The bedcurtains stirred faintly in the draught.
Without a word, he reached for the taper and lit the lamp.
Gold bloomed softly over the chamber.
Only then did you breathe.
Valarr looked at you in the low light. He did not ask whose name had followed you out of sleep. He did not ask what ghost you were looking for. He simply set the lamp nearer and lay back down without putting out the flame.
Please turn on the lights, your grief seemed always to beg of life.
Please. Please. I cannot wake in the dark.
And still you could not quite be free.
Aerion saw it too.
That was the beginning of the real disaster.
At first he kept away. Out of pride, perhaps. Out of fury. Out of the hard bright dignity wounded men sometimes mistake for strength. He did not come near your chambers. He did not speak to you alone. At feasts, he looked past you with such terrible discipline that it made your hands shake beneath the table.
But absence did not cure anything.
It only sharpened it.
You began seeing the strain in him. The old cruelties returned elsewhere, uglier for having once been softened. A squire left his presence in tears. A groom took a blow meant for a horse. One courtier said Brightflame had become unbearable again, and another muttered that perhaps this was what came of denying mad princes the one thing they fixed their teeth into.
And still your heart, faithless and wounded, turned toward him in every room before you could stop it.
Then came the evening on the cliff path.
The castle sat above black water and sharper stone, and there were narrow walks along the outer edge where one might go to be half alone with the wind. Valarr had taken to walking there in the evenings when council left him tired. That night, perhaps by misfortune, perhaps not, Aerion found him there.
The cliff path should have been empty.
Instead, it held two princes and all the violence pride could make of grief.
One of your women came running, pale-faced, saying only, “My lady, outside, the princes…”
So you went, heart pounding so hard it hurt.
The wind off the water was cold enough to sting. Torches burned low in their iron stands. The sea below moved black and endless, climbing and breaking against the rocks in long white snarls. Salt sprayed the air. Your cloak snapped at your calves. Loose gravel shifted treacherously beneath your slippers as you came to the stone wall and stopped in its shadow before they saw you.
Valarr and Aerion stood half in darkness, facing one another like drawn blades.
Aerion was in black and flame-colors, scarlet satin snapping at the hem of his cloak. Valarr stood broader, plainer, grave in dark wool and leather, but there was nothing mild in his face then. He had his father’s solidity about him in that moment. Prince Baelor’s son entire, steady in stance, shoulders squared against the wind, anger held hard beneath the skin.
Only silence stretched between them at first.
Then Valarr said, flatly, “Go back.”
Aerion smiled.
“That sounds perilously like an order.”
“It’s a warning.”
Aerion stopped a few feet away. “From you?”
Valarr’s face did not change. “From a man running out of patience.”
Aerion laughed under his breath and looked toward the sea. “How noble.”
“You’ve been seen too often near her chambers.”
That did it.
Aerion turned his head slowly back toward him. “Seen?” he said. “Gods, have I disturbed the perfect little peace of your new marriage?”
Valarr took one step forward. “Stay the fuck away from her.”
The wind seemed to pause.
Aerion’s smile sharpened into something feral. “There he is.”
“Do not test me tonight.”
“You think I’m testing you?” Aerion spread one hand in mock wonder. “Cousin, I have barely begun.”
Valarr’s jaw clenched. “She is my wife.”
Aerion barked a laugh. “Your wife? Is that the charm you mutter to make yourself brave? Your wife. Your wife. Say it enough and perhaps you’ll stop hearing how they handed her to you like a prize goat because your father thought I was too monstrous to keep what was mine.”
Valarr moved fast then, faster than Aerion expected. He closed the space between them and seized a fistful of black cloak just below the throat.
“She was never yours.”
Aerion looked down at the hand gripping him, then up into Valarr’s face.
Something bright and murderous lit behind his eyes.
“She was mine before they made her yours.”
Valarr shoved him back hard enough that Aerion’s boots scraped stone.
“Watch your fucking mouth.”
Aerion laughed again, louder now, breathless with fury. “Why? Does the truth offend you?”
“The truth,” Valarr snapped, “is that she is under my protection now, and if you come near her again with this half-mad lovesick bullshit…”
Aerion hit him.
It was not princely. Not measured. Just a savage straight punch driven with all the force of a man too proud to survive humiliation cleanly. His fist cracked across Valarr’s mouth.
Valarr staggered one step, tasted blood, and then went for him.
They crashed together like hounds.
No elegance. No tourney skill. No courtly restraint. Boots skidding on stone, fists grabbing cloth, shoulders slamming hard enough to make both grunt with the impact. Valarr drove Aerion back against the cliff wall. Aerion’s head struck stone with a dull crack and instead of slowing him, it only made him meaner. He surged up with a curse and buried his fist in Valarr’s ribs.
“Fuck you!” Aerion snarled.
Valarr drove an elbow into his shoulder and shoved him away. “Stay away from her!”
Aerion came back at him at once, wild now, all control burned off. “She loved me first!”
Valarr punched him in the jaw.
The blow snapped Aerion’s head sideways. Blood showed at once at the corner of his mouth, dark in the torchlight. He turned back slowly, licking it from his lip.
“That all?” he asked.
Valarr hit him again.
This time Aerion went down on one knee.
The wind was ragged in both their lungs now. Blood gleamed at Valarr’s split mouth. Aerion’s hair had come half loose, silver strands whipping across his face in the sea wind.
Valarr stood over him, chest heaving, fury stripped bare at last. “Listen to me, you arrogant deranged bastard. Whatever she felt before, whatever you imagined, whatever your father denied you, it ends here. You do not haunt her corridors. You do not send messages. You do not corner her in gardens like some lovesick fucking dog begging scraps from the table. You stay away from her.”
Aerion rose slowly.
There was blood on his teeth when he smiled.
“You think this is about scraps?”
Valarr’s hands curled into fists again.
Aerion laughed, harsh and ugly. “Gods, you really are the better man, aren’t you? That’s what they all say. Steady Valarr. Decent Valarr. Safe Valarr.” He spat blood onto the stones between them. “And still when you lie beside her, you’ll know exactly what they took from me to make you so fortunate.”
Valarr lunged again and slammed him back against the rock. Aerion’s shoulders hit hard. A shower of grit pattered down the cliff face.
“Say one more thing about her.”
“She still looks for me in rooms.”
Valarr drove his forearm across Aerion’s throat.
“Say it again.”
Aerion was laughing even then, though the pressure on his neck stole the ease from it. “She was mine before you,” he hissed.
Valarr’s voice dropped to something deadly quiet. “You ever speak of her like property again and I’ll throw you off this fucking cliff myself.”
Aerion’s eyes flashed. “And you think she’d forgive you that?”
“She’d sleep easier for it.”
That struck.
Aerion’s face changed instantly, rage swallowing mockery whole. With a snarl he wrenched free and swung again. Valarr ducked it, caught him round the middle, and the two of them staggered dangerously close to the edge where loose gravel slid and pattered down into the black.
“Crazy fuck!” Valarr shouted.
Aerion shoved him off with both hands. “Coward!”
Valarr came back breathing hard. “You want to die over this?”
Aerion’s face was bloodied now, beautiful and wrecked and incandescent with fury. “I want my life back.”
The words hung in the wind.
Valarr’s expression tightened for one fleeting second, pity perhaps, or understanding, or the weary recognition of a wound no man could heal by punching it.
Aerion saw it and hated him for it.
“Don’t you dare pity me.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
Valarr wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think you’re a fucking tragedy, Aerion. There’s a difference.”
Aerion made a sound like a wounded animal and came at him again.
They collided once more, half fight and half grapple, boots slipping on wet stone, each trying to force the other back without being the first to lose footing. There was cursing now, full-throated and vicious, the kind men only used when they had stopped pretending to be princes and become merely male and furious.
“You think she wanted you?” Valarr shouted.
Aerion shoved hard. “I know she did!”
“You think love makes you fit to keep her?”
“At least I wanted her!”
Valarr’s face went black with rage. “And you think I don’t?”
That stopped them.
Only for a second.
But it did.
Aerion stared.
Valarr was breathing like a man after battle, hair half-loose, lip split, fury and something rawer showing through at last. “When they gave her to me,” he said, voice shaking with anger, “they gave me a woman already grieving. Do you understand that? I walk into my own chambers and can feel the ghost of you in the fucking room. Every kindness I show her feels like I’m borrowing ground another man already bled on. So do not stand there and tell me I know nothing of wanting what I cannot have cleanly.”
Aerion’s face had gone strange again, furious, yes, but gutted now too. For a moment he looked very young.
Then his mouth curled.
“And still you married her.”
Valarr did not look away. “Yes.”
“Because you’re dutiful?”
Valarr’s voice dropped, rough and full of loathing. “Because I would sooner spend my life learning every wound in her and easing it, than leave her to be loved by a man who would drag her into his ruin and call that devotion.”
That one landed.
It hit harder than the blows.
Aerion’s face emptied for a single heartbeat, as though Valarr had found the one place flesh could not cover.
Then he smiled with blood on his teeth.
“You think you know me that well?”
“I know enough,” Valarr said. “Enough to see what you are.”
Aerion’s eyes flashed.
Valarr took one step nearer, voice low and deadly. “I would treat her more gently in one night than you would in a lifetime of wanting her. That is the difference between us. You make wreckage of everything you touch and call it passion.”
Aerion hit him again for that.
Not as hard.
Almost sloppier.
Valarr returned it at once, driving him sideways hard enough that both nearly lost footing on the wet stone.
They were still at it when footsteps sounded on the path behind.
Voices.
Guards.
And then Maekar’s, like a blade drawn in the dark. “What in the name of God are you doing?”
Both men turned.
Maekar stood in the torchlight with two guards behind him, face thunderous, older somehow than he had looked in the solar, as if tonight had laid years on him all at once. Beside him was Prince Baelor, broader in the shoulder, grave as winter oak, his face pale with fury and something like dread. Baelor’s gaze went first to Valarr’s bloody mouth, then to the cliff edge, then to Aerion. His hand had gone to the sword at his hip without seeming to know it.
“Aerion,” Maekar said.
His son laughed once, still breathing hard. “Come to choose him again, Father?”
Maekar’s expression tightened.
Valarr straightened first, wiping blood from his mouth. He looked ready to speak, perhaps to make it smaller than it was, perhaps to preserve some final scrap of dignity.
Aerion spared him the chance.
“He told me to stay away from her,” he said, eyes fixed on Maekar.
Maekar’s gaze flicked to Valarr, then back.
“And I told him,” Aerion went on, voice beginning to shake now from some strain more dangerous than temper, “that she was mine before he ever laid a hand on her.”
“Aerion,” Maekar said, warning heavy in the word.
“No.” Aerion turned on him fully then, chest heaving, blood drying at his mouth. “No, you do not get that tone with me now. Not after this. Not after you looked me in the face and said no like I was asking for sport.”
Baelor stepped forward then, his own voice low and dangerous. “That is enough. Whatever grievance you nurse, you will not spill my son’s blood over it.”
Aerion turned his head and smiled at him with split lips. “Your son’s blood?” he said. “You’ve had my whole fucking life handed to him. Why stop at blood?”
Baelor’s face hardened.
Maekar said, “Enough.”
“You always say that.” Aerion laughed again, brokenly. “Enough. Enough. Enough. Enough of my temper. Enough of my wanting. Enough of my shame. Enough of everything in me that does not fit cleanly beneath your hand.”
“Aerion, stand down.”
“Make me.”
The guards shifted.
Valarr moved then, one step, not toward Aerion but toward the space between him and the cliff edge.
Maekar saw it. So did Baelor. So did Aerion.
Something ferocious lit again in Aerion’s face.
“Oh, look at him,” he said. “Still trying to save everybody.”
Valarr’s voice was hoarse now. “Go inside.”
Aerion turned on him with a snarl. “Fuck you.”
Maekar’s voice cracked like thunder. “That is enough!”
Silence dropped.
The sea crashed below.
For one awful moment, father and son only looked at one another.
Then Aerion said, very quietly, “You called me sweet boy.”
Maekar did not move.
Aerion’s face twisted. “You called me sweet boy and still you gave her away.”
Maekar’s expression finally broke, not fully, not openly, but enough. Enough for any man watching close to see the grief in it.
“Aerion,” he said, lower now. “I was trying to save you from…”
“From what?” Aerion shouted. “From being loved?”
The words tore themselves out of him.
Even the guards looked away.
Baelor went still beside Maekar, his hand falling from his sword.
Maekar closed his eyes for one second. When he opened them, he looked every inch the prince again, because men like him had been trained since childhood to turn pain back into command before anyone could use it against them.
“Take him inside,” he said.
No one moved.
Aerion laughed softly. “Go on, then. Choose for me again.”
Maekar did not answer.
Valarr looked between them both, blood on his mouth, fury cooling into something heavier.
Aerion’s gaze slid to him last.
This time when he spoke, there was no shouting in it at all.
That made it worse.
“You can marry her,” he said. “You can bed her. You can spend twenty years being gentle and decent and grateful for the scraps the realm handed you.” He smiled, but it was a dead thing. “But if you think that means I will stop having loved her first, then you are a greater fool than I took you for.”
Valarr’s face went hard again.
Maekar said, “Aerion…”
And that was when Aerion saw you.
You had not meant to step forward.
Perhaps the wind shifted your cloak. Perhaps your slipper scraped stone. Perhaps some cruel god had simply decided the scene was not yet broken enough.
But his eyes found you.
Everything changed at once.
The bloodied half-smile vanished. Something rawer, wilder, and infinitely more dangerous took its place. For one heartbeat he looked as he had in the gallery above the sea, wounded and stripped bare, the man who had once held your face as if it were a prayer. Then the grief in him twisted.
He moved before anyone understood.
“Aerion,” Valarr said sharply.
Too late.
Aerion crossed the space between you in three hard strides and caught you by the wrist. Not gently this time. Not cruelly either, not in the ways he had once been cruel to others. Worse than cruelty, because his hand was shaking. Because when he dragged you into the torchlight it felt like despair taking hold of flesh.
You gasped. “Aerion.”
Valarr lunged at once. “Let her go.”
Aerion pulled you back against him, one arm locked hard across your middle, the other still clamped round your wrist. You could feel the heat of him through your cloak, the hammering of his heart, the raggedness of his breath against your hair. He smelled of blood and sea-salt and cold night air.
“Don’t,” he said.
It was not said to you.
It was said to all of them.
Maekar swore under his breath.
Baelor took one step forward. “Aerion. Fuck. Let her go.”
That startled you almost as much as the grip itself, your ever-diplomatic father by law speaking like any other man whose fear had outrun rank.
Valarr had gone white beneath the blood on his mouth. “Look at me,” he said to you, though his eyes never left Aerion. “Look at me.”
You did.
Aerion’s arm tightened.
The cliff edge lay only a few steps behind him. The wind came up hard from below, salt and cold and blackness. Loose stones skipped over the lip and vanished. The torchfire guttered sideways. Somewhere far beneath, the sea hurled itself at the rocks and broke.
And above, high against the ragged dark, the dragons were circling.
They had come restless to the turmoil, great shadows carving through moonlight and cloud, wings beating the air into uneasy gusts. One screamed overhead, long and sharp, the sound carrying over stone and sea like torn metal. Another answered, lower, angrier, banking wide above the cliff path in a sweep of scale and shadow. Whether they understood the shape of the quarrel below or only the fear and fury of the men bound to them, no one could have said. But they wheeled above the path like omens, restless, alarmed, and vast, and each pass of their wings sent a harder wind over the cliff edge.
Aerion stepped backward.
Not enough to fall.
Enough to make everyone stop breathing.
Baelor sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. One of the guards murmured a prayer. Maekar’s face went gray beneath the torchlight.
“Aerion,” Valarr said, and for the first time there was open fear in his voice. “Don’t.”
Aerion’s hold on you changed. Not looser. Never that. But his hand at your wrist faltered just enough that you felt the tremor in it. He looked not at the cliff, not at Maekar, not at Baelor, but at Valarr.
“You have her because they were afraid of me,” he said softly. “Do you think that makes you better, or merely luckier?”
“Let her go,” Valarr said again.
You could hear how hard he was breathing. Could see the way his hands had opened, empty, palms half raised now as if he dared not look threatening lest Aerion step back again.
Aerion’s mouth trembled once. You had never seen that before.
“They said I’d destroy her.”
“Then prove them wrong,” Baelor said, his voice deep and steady despite the strain in it. “If there is anything human left in you, prove them wrong now.”
Aerion’s face turned toward him, slow as a wound opening.
“Human,” he repeated.
He tilted his head, and for one mad instant, with the wind tearing black and scarlet about him and the torchlight striking the old Targaryen beauty of his face, he looked like the dragon-blood in him had risen up to sneer at them all. There was a dangerous glitter in his eyes, a sinister little curve to his mouth, as if Baelor had addressed not a man in grief but something older and less merciful wearing princely flesh.
Then he laughed.
Above, one of the dragons gave another harsh, restless cry.
And Aerion took another half-step back.
You cried out.
The stones shifted beneath his boots. You felt the cliff behind you without touching it, the great emptiness waiting there, the cold rush of wind clawing upward from the dark.
Valarr made a sound then, low and horrible, a sound you would remember longer than shouts. “No.”
Your hand flew toward him of its own accord.
“Valarr.”
He came one step forward.
Aerion’s arm locked tighter. “Don’t.”
“Please,” you whispered, and now it was to Aerion, because there was no one else to say it to. “Please.”
You were clawing at the forearm braced across you, fingers slipping against leather and wool. He drew you harder against his chest, and you felt him breathe you in, hair, skin, salt, tears. His mouth brushed your cheek, not a kiss, not quite, more like a broken man trying to inhale the proof of what he could not bear to lose. When he felt the tears damp against your face, something in him seemed to flare brighter, not gentler. His heart hammered so hard you could feel it through both your bodies.
His breath hitched at your ear.
For one heartbeat you thought he might break.
Not the way men broke in battle or rage.
The way glass broke. The way ice did when spring water moved beneath it.
“My only peace was you,” he whispered, so low only you could hear.
You turned your face toward him as much as his hold allowed. “Then do not do this.”
Ahead of you Valarr’s eyes were fixed on your face. His own blood gleamed black-red at his lip in the torchlight. One hand was still outstretched. You reached for him, fingers trembling in empty air.
“Aerion,” Valarr said, raw now, stripped of pride and fury both. “Give her to me.”
Aerion’s laugh came again, thin and wrecked. “Hear him.”
“Aerion,” Maekar said, and now the old prince sounded not stern, not regal, but terrified. “Son.”
Aerion shut his eyes.
His grip on you tightened.
Then loosened.
Then tightened again.
The whole world seemed to hang inside that terrible hesitation, the torches flaring and guttering, the dragons wheeling and screaming above, the sea roaring below, Baelor rigid as carved oak, Valarr one breath from rushing him and knowing it might kill you both, Maekar with both hands empty at his sides as if fatherhood itself had failed him.
You reached farther for Valarr.
He took one step.
Aerion’s boot slid on the shale at the edge.
And for one awful, endless heartbeat, all of you moved at once.
It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the world seemed to thin. The torches, the sea, the men, the screaming dragons above, all of it sharpened into something almost unreal. There was a melancholy in him then that felt older than anger, older than pride, something dark and ruinous that looked into the void and heard it answer. The old call of it seemed to rise from the drop below, from the black water striking stone, from the empty air behind his heels.
se brōzagon hen zōbrie.
The call of the void.
You felt Aerion’s body jolt.
His footing went.
Valarr shouted your name.
Baelor lunged.
Maekar cursed.
The dragons screeched overhead, wild and furious, their wings beating the night into frenzy.
The world lurched.
Stone vanished beneath your feet. Wind tore the breath from your mouth. Somewhere in the chaos, a hand seized for you. Another refused to let go. There was the savage wrench of bodies dragged in opposite directions, the sound of leather straining, cloth tearing, someone making a sound so raw it did not seem human at all.
For one fractured instant you saw everything at once: torchfire blown sideways, black water far below, Valarr’s outstretched hand, silver hair whipped madly in the dark, and Aerion’s face—bloodied, beautiful, and unreadable.
You could not tell if he had slipped.
You could not tell if he had chosen it.
You only knew that when the cliff gave way beneath the two of you, Aerion’s hand did not let go.
Pairing: Prince Aerion Targaryen (Modern AU) X Reader ("You" referred, she/her vibes)
In the same universe as: They called me your wife again
Summary:
The family already treats her like one of their own. The child has already reached for her first. The media circles. The internet loses its mind. And when Aerion finally says too much, in public, with cameras rolling, the bachelor market dies screaming.
Because it was never anyone else.
It was always her.
Warnings
modern Targaryen family business chaos | succession angst | old money media frenzy | wife allegations that are maybe not allegations anymore | quiet building-wide gossip | bakery paparazzi disaster | public possessiveness | hand on waist disease | emotional repression in luxury tailoring | one of the youngest billionaire heirs in the country behaving very unseriously about one engineer | Maekar secretly approving but refusing to act like a person about it | the whole Maekar branch basically adopting her in real time | Duncan being the best friend Aerion has to tolerate because she loves him and Egg thinks he’s hilarious | yearning | family integration as foreplay | “the mother of my child” incident | not married but spiritually, politically, and emotionally already there | open ending but romantically devastating
Aerion did not calm down after the boardroom.
That was the first thing you understood.
Not really. Not in any way that brought comfort.
He only grew quieter, and that was worse.
Men like Duncan burned bright when they were angry, all heat and profanity and restless hands, a storm you could hear coming long before it hit. Daeron went sharp when something got under his skin, smiling that beautiful, careless smile of his while he said things meant to bruise. Maekar turned cold enough to make the air in a room feel thinner, as if even the walls understood better than to move the wrong way around him.
Aerion, though, only went still.
He had been still since the moment Donnel called ahead from the car. Still, when Ellyn opened the boardroom door. Still, when he saw the bandage at Maelor’s temple. Still, when he took his son from your arms for just long enough to check him over himself, broad hand cupping the side of the boy’s face, fingers brushing the scrape with such instinctive care it nearly undid you. Still, when Maelor, drowsy and offended and recovering by the second, admitted that yes, he had climbed higher than he was supposed to because he thought he could get the kite down faster than everyone else.
Still, too, when Maekar informed the directors that the meeting would resume when his son decided it was worth resuming.
No one argued.
That said enough all by itself.
Now, in Aerion’s office, with the door shut and the city spread in muted grey behind the glass, he crouched in front of the sofa where Maelor sat with juice, crackers, and the wooden dragon puzzle Ellyn kept in a cabinet that was definitely meant for emotional emergencies, no matter what she claimed. His sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms. His tie was gone. His hair, usually controlled even in disorder, had been pushed back too many times, and the pale gold at the front had started to fall loose again. The whole room smelled faintly of expensive paper, dark coffee gone cold, and the soft clean scent of the hand soap from his private washroom. Evening light lay dim and silver over the dark wood and black stone, turning the office into something quieter than an office had any right to be.
Maelor fitted one of the dragon pieces into place, looked up at his father, and said with solemn little gravity, “They scared me.”
Aerion’s face changed.
Barely.
Just the slightest tightening around his mouth. A deeper stillness. Something old, dark, and princely flashing once through the violet-blue of his eyes.
“I know,” he said.
His voice was quiet. Gentle, even.
That made it worse.
You stood near the side of his desk, one hand resting on the back of the chair you had never sat in. Aerion looked up at you then. Just once. Just enough for you to see that same expression had not disappeared at all.
It had only shifted targets.
Not Maelor.
The people who had frightened him.
The people who had crowded you both outside the school. The whole hungry, flashing, filthy machine of public interest that had started treating Aerion Brightflame’s private life like a sport.
Maelor, oblivious to the several elegant legal destructions his father was probably composing in his head, shoved another piece into place and announced, “I’m okay now.”
Aerion reached out and brushed two fingers along the side of his son’s face. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”
Then Maelor, little traitor that he was, leaned into the touch and said, “She made it better.”
A pause followed. Aerion’s hand stayed where it was for one beat longer. Then he glanced at you again. It was always unbearable when he did that, looked at you as if nothing else in the room mattered beside one small, simple truth.
“I imagine she did,” he said.
Maelor nodded. “I wanted her.”
Your throat tightened.
He did not say it cruelly. He did not say it to wound his father. He said it the way children said the truest thing first, with no strategy and no fear, because they had not yet learned that adults could turn honesty into war.
Aerion did not flinch. He did not look away. He only let out one slow breath through his nose and said, “That’s why she came.”
Then he stood.
The movement was fluid and sudden enough to shift the whole room with it. One moment he had been bent before his son, the next he was all height and heat and black wool and ember-dark shirt, crossing toward you with that terrible, contained purpose that had made entire departments dread the sound of his footsteps long before the press learned how photogenic it was.
He stopped close.
Too close for friendship. Too practiced for accident.
His hand came to your waist the way it always did now, low and firm and thoughtlessly proprietary, as if some deeper part of him had made a decision his mouth had not yet caught up to. His thumb pressed once through the fabric there.
“You haven’t sat down,” he said.
“You haven’t either.”
“I’m not the one who spent half the afternoon with cameras in my face and my son shaking in my arms.”
That landed harder than it should have.
Maybe because he said my son like that. Not to separate. Not to remind. Only because the words had come naturally, and there was room enough inside them for both of you.
You swallowed. “I’m alright.”
Aerion’s gaze moved over your face like he was checking the claim for fractures. “You nearly fell.”
“I didn’t.”
“Because I caught you.”
The words were simple.
The tone was not.
For one stupid second all you could think of was the bakery pavement, the crush of bodies, the slip of your foot, Maelor’s sharp frightened gasp, and Aerion’s hand locking around your waist hard enough that it had almost bruised, dragging you back against him as though gravity itself had made an unacceptable choice.
Behind him, on the sofa, Maelor had begun humming to himself, fitting the dragon’s wing into the puzzle with all the concentrated seriousness of a prince handling statecraft.
Aerion followed your glance and something in his expression changed again. Softer. Not soft, exactly. Aerion was never soft in any way that others could safely survive. But softer than before.
Then he looked back at you and said, low enough that only you heard it, “I need five minutes before I go back in there.”
You blinked. “Into the meeting?”
“No.” His fingers tightened slightly at your waist. “Before I go back in there and decide to ruin several careers.”
That almost made you laugh.
Something shifted at the corners of his mouth. Not a smile. Never anything that easy. But enough to change the air between you.
On the sofa, Maelor suddenly lifted the completed dragon puzzle high and declared, “Done.”
Aerion stepped away from you at once.
Not far. Never far. But enough to kneel in front of his son again and accept the puzzle with due seriousness.
“Well done.”
Maelor preened under the praise. Then his expression turned calculating in the hopeful little way it always did before he asked for something he absolutely intended to get. “Can we have a treat because I was brave?”
Aerion looked at him.
Then at you.
Then back at him.
“Were you brave,” he asked, “or have you noticed asking for things works better when she’s here?”
Maelor considered that with comical seriousness. “Both.”
You laughed then, helplessly, and Aerion’s eyes flicked to you as if the sound had caught him by surprise.
Something in his face gave way.
He rose and reached for his jacket where it hung over the chair. “Fine,” he said.
Maelor brightened instantly. “Fine yes?”
Aerion shrugged into the jacket with one hand. The other found your waist again, as if it had gone looking for somewhere to settle and found only one answer worth keeping.
“Fine yes,” he said.
Then, looking at you instead of his son, he added in that lower voice that always seemed to mean more than the words themselves, “Let me take my family out for some pastries and some hot chocolate.”
Everything in you stopped. Not your heart. That only got worse.
But everything else, the easy defenses, the practiced sidestepping, the small safe refusals you had lived inside for years, all of it went still.
Aerion, perhaps realizing what he had just said, did not take it back.
That was the thing.
He could have.
He could have turned it into a joke. Let Duncan wear the word for him. Blamed Maelor. Blamed the day. Blamed the press and the pressure and the thousand grinding things trying to turn him into a harder man than he already was. And behind that steady gaze, you could see it, finally. Not confusion. Not caring is mistaken for a habit. Not affection blurred by routine, proximity, and the child between you.
Maelor bounced upright on the sofa. “Hot chocolate?”
Aerion, still looking at you, said, “Yes.”
“With whipped cream?”
“If you ask her nicely.”
Maelor whipped toward you at once, all curls and bandage and hope. “Please?”
You should have said no.
You should have said maybe later, maybe after Papa’s meeting, maybe after all of you pretended nothing devastating had just happened in this office. Instead, you heard your own voice, softer than intended and far too fond.
“Alright.”
Maelor cheered.
Aerion closed his eyes for half a second like a man being actively tested by gods he did not believe in.
Then he reached for his phone and sent what was probably the single most terrifying message Ellyn had ever received.
Two minutes later there was a knock at the office door.
Ellyn stepped inside first, unruffled as always. Duncan came directly behind her as if summoned by scent alone, with Egg at his shoulder and Daeron strolling in last, already amused by something he had not yet heard.
That, perhaps, was the thing about Duncan. He was yours first. Your best friend, your chaos, your ride-or-die disaster of a person. Aerion tolerated him because he came attached to you, which in practice meant Aerion allowed far more from him than he ever would from anyone else. Somehow, against all logic and probably several laws of nature, Duncan had also integrated himself into the family with disgusting ease. Egg adored him. Daeron found him hilarious. Even Aemon had long since resigned himself to Duncan’s presence the way one resigned oneself to weather, bad but inevitable. Maekar pretended Duncan did not exist, which in Maekar terms was practically a blessing.
Duncan took one look at the three of you and narrowed his eyes. “Why do I feel like something emotionally inconvenient has happened.”
“Nothing has happened,” you said too quickly.
Daeron’s grin was immediate and wicked. “Oh, excellent. So something has absolutely happened.”
Egg’s gaze went from you, to Aerion’s hand still fixed at your waist, to Maelor already trying to put his shoes back on by himself. “Are we leaving?”
“You are not,” Aerion said.
Egg looked offended. “That’s hostile.”
“It’s accurate.”
Duncan folded his arms. “Where are you taking them?”
Aerion slid the phone into his pocket. “Out.”
Daeron tipped his head. “Out where.”
“For pastries,” Maelor announced, far too loudly, “because we are family.”
Silence fell.
A magnificent, echoing, lethal silence.
Duncan made the first sound, a choked little gasp as he folded over laughing hard enough to brace a hand on his knee.
Daeron actually had to lean a hand against the doorframe.
Egg looked delighted in the way only younger brothers could when handed a weapon and no instructions.
Ellyn lowered her eyes at once, though the corner of her mouth betrayed her.
And Maekar.
Maekar, who had appeared in the open doorway behind them all without a single one of you noticing, said in the driest voice known to man, “Marvelous. The child has started doing press for us.”
You turned so fast you nearly walked into Aerion’s arm.
Maekar stood there in dark charcoal, broad as an old fortress and no warmer for the expensive tailoring. Beside him was Aemon, precise and elegant, already half-smiling in the way he only did when his family lost all control of itself in public. Behind them peered little Rhae and Daella, who had plainly been with whichever nanny had just lost custody of them to curiosity.
Daella spotted you first and made an immediate break for the room.
“Auntie!”
She hurled herself at your legs with the confidence of a child who had never once doubted she would be caught. Rhae followed with considerably more dignity and far less speed, though she still reached for your hand the moment she got close enough.
That was how it always was with Maekar’s side.
They had never announced what you were to them.
They had simply made room.
At first it had been little things. Daeron calling you when he needed a tie chosen for some rehab-softened interview because, as he put it, “you’re the only person in this bloodline who understands color and consequence at the same time.” Egg wandering into your office with match-day kits and gala questions and all the casual entitlement of a younger prince who had already decided you were safe. Aemon, more controlled than the rest, leaving cufflinks and event briefs on your desk with no explanation beyond, “You do them better.” Maelor, of course, refusing on at least three separate occasions to attend a family event unless you had approved both his shoes and his cardigan.
Then Maekar.
That had been the shock.
Not because he asked.
Because he never did.
One winter gala he had simply stood in the corridor outside the family dressing suite, looked down at the tie in his hand, then at you, and said, “This is wrong.”
That was it.
No softness. No request.
Just the fact laid before you like a problem in governance.
You had taken the tie from him, looked once at the black velvet jacket and the old Valyrian steel cufflinks and the silver in his beard, and replaced it with deep wine instead, dark enough to remain his, rich enough to warm the severity.
He had looked in the mirror afterward and grunted, “Better.”
That had been the beginning of the end.
Now it was simply understood.
You dressed Maekar’s line.
Egg for football dinners and family portraits and school galas where he had to look enough like a prince to quiet the tabloids. Daeron for interviews, fundraisers, recovery panels, and every public appearance in which he wanted to look like himself but improved by remorse and good tailoring. Aerion, who acted like he did not care and yet stood in silence every time you adjusted his tie, smoothed his collar, or changed his watch because the darker one suited the line of his coat better. Maelor, who adored matching his father and would tolerate no substitute. Aemon, who preferred cleaner lines and cooler colors and let you choose the exact shade of silver-blue that made him look like the best of the family and none of its chaos. Rhae and Daella, who treated the whole business as ritual and would spin in front of mirrors until you told them they looked like dragon-princesses out of old stories.
Even Maekar had stopped pretending it was temporary.
The whole branch had.
Online, they called it the Brightflame Uniform, the dark dragon wardrobe, the Maekar line aesthetic.
They had no idea.
It was not an aesthetic.
It was love, translated into fabric, collars, cufflinks, polished shoes, and the quiet certainty that somebody would notice if the tie was wrong.
Daeron, recovering first, pointed at Maekar. “Tell them.”
Maekar looked unimpressed. “Tell them what.”
“That she dresses all of us.”
Rhae lifted her chin importantly. “She picked my blue one.”
“And my ribbons,” Daella said.
Egg, bastard that he was, crossed his arms. “And my match-day coat.”
Aemon added, mild as mercy, “She corrected Father’s winter opera look in under ten seconds.”
Duncan made a scandalized noise. “You style Maekar too?”
Maekar’s stare could have stripped paint. “Careful.”
Duncan clutched his chest. “No, I’m genuinely moved. This is domestic monarchy.”
Egg, who had slipped closer to Duncan while all this was happening, was grinning like a menace. Egg always brightened around Duncan, as if Duncan existed solely to validate every bad instinct he ever had. More than once you had suspected they texted one another simply to make Aerion’s life worse.
Daeron laughed. “You think that’s bad? Ask Aerion who finds his watches before donor dinners.”
Aerion looked like he wanted the floor to open.
Egg, glowing with betrayal’s holy light, supplied, “And who has all Maelor’s little sweaters organized by weather.”
“And who remembers Papa doesn’t like the rough wool one,” Maelor chimed in.
Aemon’s mouth twitched.
Rhae announced to the room, “She also fixes Uncle Daeron when he tries to dress like heartbreak in rehab.”
Daeron put a hand over his heart. “That was one time.”
“Three,” Aemon corrected.
Ellyn made a very suspicious coughing sound into her fist.
Duncan was openly crying laughing now. “Oh, this is over. This is fully over. The internet’s gonna combust if this ever gets out.”
Egg looked thoughtful. “It might already be out.”
Aerion turned slowly. “What did you do.”
Egg had the gall to look wounded. “Nothing yet.”
“Yet,” repeated Maekar with deep disapproval.
“It’s not my fault people notice things,” Egg said. “One of the shorts from the school entrance already has a side-by-side of Aerion and Maelor’s coats from this week.”
Daeron leaned against the door. “And the old museum gala clip from last month is trending again. The comments have figured out she color-matches the whole branch.”
Duncan pulled out his phone at once. “Hold on, I need to see this.”
“No,” Aerion said.
Too late.
Duncan was already reading aloud, eyes bright with malicious delight.
“‘How is she at lunch with Daeron, pitch-side with Duncan and Egg, holding Maelor, fixing Aemon’s cuff, and somehow also the only person who can get Maekar into a tie with emotional depth?’”
Egg let out a strangled delighted laugh.
Duncan scrolled again, nearly vibrating. “Oh, this one’s better. ‘She didn’t marry into the dragon family, the dragon family simply found a competent woman and arranged themselves around her like distressed nobility.’”
Even Aemon laughed at that.
Aerion did not.
Which was how you knew it had struck far too close to bone.
You turned slightly. “Aerion.”
His gaze came to you at once.
Always. Immediately. Instinctively.
You did not know if the others saw how fast it happened. Perhaps they did. Perhaps that was half the problem. The whole family had started treating you as central because Aerion already did, and people built habits around the weightiest thing in a room without even meaning to.
“You were going out,” Maekar said then, cutting neatly through the chaos.
It was not a question.
Aerion nodded once.
“With him,” Maekar said, glancing at Maelor.
“Yes.”
Maekar’s gaze shifted to you.
Then, to everyone’s private astonishment, he said, “Take Daella and Rhae too. They’ve been insufferable since noon.”
Daella lit up. Rhae tried, nobly, to appear more reserved and failed at once.
“You want us to take them?” you asked.
Maekar’s stare implied you had asked whether the sun intended to rise. “You’re going anyway.”
Duncan pointed wildly. “See? See? This is what I mean. He’s outsourcing the children to you like you’re already the crown-appointed family management system.”
Maekar looked at him. “And yet I notice no one objecting.”
No one did.
Not Egg, who had already started asking if he could come too, and Duncan immediately chiming in that if Egg went he was absolutely going too because someone had to stop the prince from live-posting a custody battle with pastry. Not Daeron, who wanted to know if the bakery still had those obscene little custard things. Not Aemon, who quietly asked if there might be tea. Not the girls, now attached to either side of you. Not Maelor, who had accepted all of this as the natural shape of the world.
And not Aerion.
Aerion, whose hand came once more to your waist, who looked over the small riot of his kin gathering around you, and whose expression changed in that dangerous quiet way it did when something mattered too much to touch carelessly.
“No,” he said.
The room paused.
Daella blinked. “No?”
Aerion, looking at absolutely no one but you, clarified, “Not all of you.”
Duncan threw his head back. “Oh, he’s jealous. Gorgeous.”
Daeron smiled like the devil at prayer.
Egg said, “I knew it.”
Aemon lowered his head to hide a smile.
Even Maekar’s mouth shifted, infinitesimally, in the direction of understanding.
Aerion ignored them all.
He only looked at Rhae and Daella and said, “Next time.”
Rhae, old enough to catch the tone, narrowed her eyes. “You want her to yourself.”
Maelor gasped softly, scandalized by such naked truth.
Aerion said, without shame, “Yes.”
That shut everyone up for a full two seconds.
Then Duncan made a sound like a dying orchestra.
Daeron covered his face.
Egg started laughing so hard he had to lean into the wall, one hand clutching at Duncan’s sleeve like the man might save him from the force of his own delight.
You could not feel your pulse properly anymore.
Aerion stepped closer.
His hand slid from your waist to the small of your back, warmer now, broader, more certain. His head bent toward yours just enough that the others became noise rather than audience.
“Come with me,” he said quietly. “Just us. Him. You.”
Your heart thudded once, vicious and helpless.
“And hot chocolate?” Maelor asked, just to make sure no one had lost the plot.
Aerion’s mouth almost softened. “Yes, little dragon. Hot chocolate too.”
Then he turned, still close enough that your sleeve brushed his, and addressed the room at large like a man making an operational announcement instead of salvaging his own heart in real time.
“Ellyn can reschedule the directors. Donnel comes with us. Roland stays here. Duncan does not.”
Duncan squawked in outrage. “This is discrimination.”
“This is peacekeeping,” Aerion said.
Egg, predictably, burst out laughing again.
“Daeron,” Aerion added, “keep him out of my building.”
“I’ll try,” Daeron said, already failing.
“And Egg.”
Egg straightened.
“If you post anything from today, I’ll have your phone dissolved in acid.”
Egg looked affronted. “That’s medieval.”
“We are Targaryens,” Daeron said cheerfully. “Medieval is branding.”
That, at last, dragged the smallest huff of laughter out of you.
Aerion heard it.
Of course he did.
He turned back and held your gaze for one suspended beat. The room was still full of family, of staff, of cousins and brothers and children and old power dressed in modern black. Yet somehow, as ever, he made it feel like there was only the line of your body near his, the warmth of his hand at your back, Maelor tugging at your fingers, and the terrible, impossible tenderness of being chosen in front of all of them without any of them needing it explained.
Maekar cleared his throat.
When you looked his way, he said in that same gruff iron tone, “Bring the boy back before eight.”
Then, after the briefest pause, “And get him the chocolate one. The vanilla there is useless.”
You stared.
Daeron actually clutched the doorframe laughing. “Father just recommended dessert. Mark the time. Call the historians.”
Maekar glared at him. “Shut up.”
But the damage was done.
Rhae was already whispering to Daella that Grandfather liked the bakery after all. Aemon was smiling into his tea request. Egg was typing something he would absolutely deny later, probably to Duncan, probably about you and Aerion finally acting like two people with eyes. Duncan was still muttering about domestic monarchy under his breath, delighted beyond all reason to be standing close enough to witness it.
And Aerion.
Aerion leaned down just enough that only you heard him when he said, rough and low beside your temple, “Do you see what you’ve done.”
It was not accusation.
It was awe, dragged through exhaustion and want and that darker thing he was always trying to keep on a leash.
You looked at the room.
At Maelor holding one of your hands.
At Daeron and Egg and Aemon and Maekar, all of them impossible in their own ways, all of them somehow bent toward you like iron toward a lodestone.
Then back at Aerion.
“No,” you whispered, because your throat had gone tight. “I think I see what you’ve done.”
Something moved behind his eyes.
Something deep enough to drown in.
He did not answer.
He only took your coat from the chair, shook it out once, and held it for you with that old-world formality he only ever seemed to remember when he was trying very hard not to say the larger thing.
You slipped your arms into it.
His fingers lingered at your shoulders once it settled.
Then he bent, pressed a kiss so fleeting and warm at your temple you almost thought you imagined it, and drew back just enough to say, for all the room to hear this time:
“Come on. Let me take my family out for some pastries and some hot chocolate.”
And because the entire Maekar line had already, long ago, decided what you were to them, not one of them argued the word.
By the time you reached the private lift, the internet was already ahead of you.
Of course it was.
Duncan had somehow managed, despite explicit instruction, to send you three screenshots before Daeron bodily confiscated his phone for, as he had apparently put it, “the sake of the realm.” Egg had sent one anyway through a burner group chat he swore did not exist. Ellyn, in a moment of quiet treason, had forwarded exactly one link with no comment beyond:
this is becoming operationally absurd
The first edit had gone up before noon.
By one, there were seven.
By four-thirty there were entire compilations.
You opened the first one while Aerion adjusted Maelor’s coat where the child sat on the leather bench inside the lift, kicking his feet and asking if whipped cream counted as dinner if he ate enough of it. The lift walls reflected all of you back in soft brass and smoked mirror, too polished, too expensive, too intimate. Aerion stood between the doors and the rest of the world like he always did when things had gone wrong, one hand fixing Maelor’s collar, the other braced lightly against the bench.
The video was one of those TikTok edits made by girls with too much music, too much editing software, and an absolutely diabolical sense of timing. Slow-motion clips. Elegant transitions. A shot of you coming out of a florist with Daeron two weeks ago, him carrying your bouquet because he had insisted it would make him “look rehabbed and reformed in the eyes of old ladies.” A clip of you and Duncan laughing outside a bookstore, his hand flying as he talked, yours on Egg’s shoulder while the boy rolled his eyes in that particular younger-brother way that suggested deep affection wrapped in constant exasperation. Duncan looked exactly like what he was in the clip, your best friend, your chaos, your chronic problem, and yet somehow somebody the dragon family had simply absorbed. Egg, in particular, adored him with the fervent loyalty of a younger prince who loved anyone irreverent enough to make Aerion visibly suffer.
Then came the football clip from Sunday. Egg in white and black on the pitch, you in the stands with Maelor on your lap and Duncan beside you, all three of you shouting yourselves hoarse while Aerion arrived halfway through the second half in a dark coat and sunglasses, looking like he had stepped out of a private-equity threat assessment instead of an ordinary family afternoon.
The edit slowed right at the part where he leaned over the back of your seat, said something into your ear, and settled one hand at your waist as naturally as if it had belonged there all his life.
The comments were a wasteland.
WHO is she because every branch of this family is obsessed with her
no because why is daeron at lunch with her, duncan at football with her, and aerion looking ready to kill for her
that’s not a situationship that’s a succession plan
aerion brightflame has hand-on-waist disease and i support him
maelor matching with his dad every week and now we find out there’s a woman involved??? oh she’s mothering
the targ men said one brunette engineer and we’re keeping her forever
You made some horrible, strangled little sound before you could stop it.
Aerion looked up at once. “What.”
You turned the phone around.
He scanned the screen. His expression did not change much at first. Then it changed just enough for you to know he had reached the part where strangers were speculating whether the three of you were already living together, whether Maelor called you mum when cameras were not on him, and whether Aerion had been “soft-launching his wife for two fiscal quarters.”
His mouth flattened.
Maelor peered at the phone, saw his own face in one clip, and lit up instantly. “That’s me.”
“Yes,” Aerion said dryly. “That is unfortunately you.”
Maelor pointed. “And you.”
“Yes.”
“And her.”
Aerion’s gaze moved to you.
It was only one look. It still landed like something dropped from a height.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Her too.”
The lift opened before you could answer that.
Donnel was waiting outside already. Roland was not with him. Aerion, true to his word, had kept one behind and brought the other. It felt less like a simple errand and more like a royal extraction.
Which, given the last week, perhaps it was.
The bakery sat on the quieter side of the avenue, tucked between an old bookseller and a luxury childrenswear boutique that had once tried very hard to gift Maelor a coat in exchange for visibility. Aerion had returned the coat and bought two more at full price out of spite. The owner had nearly cried.
It should have been safe enough.
That was the lie.
Nothing involving Targaryens was ever quick once cameras scented blood.
The moment Donnel turned the car onto the street, you saw them.
A black SUV half a block down. Another just beyond it. Two men with long lenses pretending very badly to admire a lamp post. A woman with a phone already raised. Three girls outside the café opposite who looked first at the car, then at each other, then immediately down at TikTok like they had just glimpsed a cryptid in cashmere.
Donnel’s jaw tightened once. “Right.”
Aerion saw them too.
Of course he did.
His expression shut like a vault door.
Maelor, oblivious, pressed his nose to the glass. “Pastries.”
Aerion reached out and tugged him gently back from the window. “Stay close.”
You felt it before he touched you, that shift in him, the old instinct, the possessive attentiveness, the way his whole body went from tired to weapon-ready in half a breath.
Then his hand came to your waist again.
Low. Firm. Familiar.
Donnel got out first. He opened Aerion’s door, scanned the pavement, then yours.
“Quickly,” he said.
You stepped out with Maelor on your hip because, despite everything, he had abruptly decided the world was easier viewed from your arms. Aerion came around the car a second later, shut the door behind you, and kept one hand at the small of your back as he guided you toward the bakery steps.
The shouting began immediately.
“Aerion, are you two official now?”
“Is marriage on the table?”
“Did Maekar approve the relationship?”
“Is she moving into Summerhall full-time?”
“Aerion, are you thinking of marrying her?”
He did not answer.
He never did when questions were stupid.
He only stepped closer, one hand flat and possessive at your waist, guiding you up the front steps while Maelor tucked himself against you, suspicious now of the flashes. Donnel moved ahead. One of the girls from the opposite café whispered, far too audibly, “Oh my god, it’s literally the hand-on-waist thing in real life.”
If Aerion heard, he gave no sign.
Inside, warmth hit at once, sugar and butter and chocolate and the rich, soft scent of fresh bread still cooling behind the counter. Gold light spilled over tiled floors and polished glass. There were little boxes tied in deep cream ribbon, dark wood shelves, a display of glazed fruit tarts that looked too pretty to survive children, and at the far end a copper machine steaming milk for hot chocolate in little ghost-white curls.
Maelor made the smallest delighted gasp.
Aerion’s hand tightened once at your waist.
Not because of the bakery.
Because the sound had made him breathe again.
There was no crowd inside, thank God. Only two old women in pearls sharing tea, a young couple pretending not to stare, and the owners, who visibly recognized Aerion and then, far more interestingly, recognized you.
That was how it always went. People saw Aerion Brightflame and straightened. People saw you with him and understood the real story was somewhere else entirely.
The woman behind the counter smiled the second she saw Maelor. “There’s my favorite prince.”
Maelor brightened at once. “I was brave today.”
“So I hear,” she said gravely. “That sounds like a matter requiring chocolate.”
“Grandfather says the vanilla is useless,” he informed her.
Aerion made a quiet, betrayed sound.
You pressed your lips together.
The woman’s eyes danced. “Does he now.”
“He’s correct,” Aerion said.
That startled you enough to laugh.
His gaze flicked to you immediately, catching the sound like it was something far too precious to waste.
The owner’s husband emerged from the back just in time to hear the tail end of it. “The usual?”
Aerion started to say something, then paused.
He looked at you.
The whole room seemed to notice.
“Do you want the usual?” he asked.
Your stomach dropped stupidly. “You remember the usual?”
His expression did not change much. “Yes.”
The old women at the tea table exchanged a look so delighted it bordered on indecent.
You managed, “Then yes.”
Maelor, meanwhile, had already pressed both palms to the glass pastry case and was trying to determine whether courage entitled him to one pistachio éclair, two raspberry custard things, or total social collapse.
Aerion crouched beside him, dark coat folding elegantly around him, and said, “One.”
Maelor did not even look at him. “Counterpoint, two.”
“One.”
“I was brave twice.”
You choked on a laugh.
Aerion’s hand came to the back of your knee where you stood beside him, just a brief grounding touch, while he said to his son, “That is not how mathematics works.”
“It is how pastry works.”
The owner’s husband turned away, shoulders shaking, clearly unwilling to laugh in front of a man who looked like a dragon made of hedge funds and tailored wool.
In the end Maelor got one pistachio éclair, one little pain au chocolat because the bandage had begun to be used as blackmail, and a hot chocolate so extravagant it came with whipped cream, chocolate curls, and a dusting of gold that was absolutely unnecessary and therefore perfect.
Aerion ordered a black coffee he did not want, because what he actually wanted was clearly to stand close to you and watch you breathe in peace for ten consecutive minutes. You got the dark hot chocolate with sea salt and orange the owners always saved for you when you came. Maelor announced that Papa should have had whipped cream too because he was sad and mean-looking.
The entire front of house heard it.
Even Aerion almost smiled.
You took the little table in the back corner beneath the window, half hidden, warm, and private enough to feel like a pocket cut out from the rest of the world. Maelor clambered in beside you, already sticky with pastry flakes. Aerion sat opposite, then changed his mind and moved to your side instead, shoulder brushing yours, knee touching yours beneath the table.
He did not comment on the choice.
Neither did you.
That would have made it realer than it already was.
Maelor took one sip of hot chocolate and sighed like a man who had finally been understood by God.
Then he looked up with sudden seriousness and asked, “Are we really family?”
The question landed on the table like glass.
You froze.
Aerion did not, or perhaps he did, only better than the rest of you.He looked at his son for a long moment. Then his gaze shifted, just once, to you. Not asking permission. Not checking for escape. Only seeing where you were, as if your presence was part of the answer.
“Yes,” he said.
Maelor accepted that at once. Children always knew when adults were telling the deepest truth. He returned to his éclair without another scrap of doubt.
You, unfortunately, were an adult.
You stared at the table for a beat too long. Aerion’s hand settled, low and hidden, over yours in your lap. Warm. Large. Certain.
“Drink your chocolate,” he said quietly, not to Maelor.
You looked at him.
He did not look back.
That was somehow worse.
The peace lasted nine minutes.
That was more than expected.
The first sign was Donnel at the front window, visible only when he shifted and the light caught the hard line of his frame. The second was the change in the room, that subtle collective tightening, like the whole bakery had taken a quieter breath at once. It happened when strangers gathered outside with phones in their hands and the wrong kind of patience in their eyes. The third was the old women at the front table turning in their seats, not startled, not alarmed, just interested, in that particular way women of a certain age observed scandal as both a hobby and a public service, and male weakness as something to be catalogued for sport.
You followed their gaze and saw the crowd.
It was not huge.
Worse.
A manageable number of people were always more dangerous than a mob. A mob knew itself for what it was. A smaller crowd still believed itself made up of reasonable individuals, not a pack. They edged closer. They smiled like they meant well. They told themselves boundaries were flexible things. They thought they could be reasoned with right up until they were halfway over the line.
Phones lifted. Pale flashes flickered against the front glass. A man with a camera stepped closer to the window than any decent person would have. Another lifted a hand and pointed, trying for subtlety, toward the little back table.
Maelor noticed none of it.
He had just discovered that whipped cream left a mustache.
Aerion noticed all of it.
His expression did not change so much as settle. His coffee remained untouched, dark and cooling in front of him. One hand still rested over yours beneath the table, warm and steady against your skin. The other stayed close to Maelor’s plate, loose and ready.
“Finish,” he said quietly.
Maelor nodded at once, cheeks already full.
You were halfway through your hot chocolate when your phone vibrated.
Then again.
Then again.
Duncan, of course.
You looked despite yourself.
OH MY GOD THERE ARE PICTURES ALREADY
A second message came immediately after.
ONE OF THEM GOT YOU IN THE WINDOW AND HE’S HOLDING YOUR HAND UNDER THE TABLE I CAN SEE IT FROM THE REFLECTION IM GOING TO DIE
You locked the phone and shoved it face down against the table.
Aerion, without taking his eyes off the window, said, “What.”
You stared at him. “Do you have eyes in my bloodstream?”
“What did Duncan say?”
“That he’s intolerable.”
“That is not news.”
Maelor, who had caught only the name, brightened at once. “Can Duncan come next time?”
“No,” you and Aerion said together.
Maelor nodded, perfectly satisfied by the unity.
Outside, someone called through the glass, the sound muffled but sharp enough to cut through the warm noise of the bakery.
“Aerion.”
Then another voice, louder.
“Is that your son and girlfriend?”
Then a third, bolder, carrying with ugly confidence.
“Did you bring her here because this is where your family takes wives?”
Aerion stood.
The whole room changed with him.
Maelor looked up instantly.
You set your cup down too fast, ceramic clinking against the saucer, your heart stumbling hard enough to make your chest ache.
Aerion did not move toward the window. He did not need to. He only adjusted the cuff of his coat once, slow and precise, then turned his head toward Donnel and said something too low for you to catch.
Donnel gave one short nod and stepped out the front door.
Through the glass you watched him speak. Watched the first row of phones lower by instinct. Watched one man keep filming anyway, stubborn enough to mistake nerve for wisdom.
Aerion observed the scene for three seconds more, expression carved from something colder than patience, then sat back down as though none of it had cost him anything at all.
Your pulse was still sprinting.
He looked at Maelor first. “You’ve got cream on your face.”
Maelor licked wildly at the wrong cheek.
“The other side.”
You reached across with a napkin. Maelor accepted your help like it was his rightful due. Aerion’s hand returned to yours beneath the table with the ease of breathing, like it had never left.
You looked at him. “That’s it?”
“For now.”
You repeated, “For now?”
“For now,” he said again.
The old women at the front table had given up all pretense of discretion. One of them, silver-haired and magnificent in emerald silk, called across the room, “If you’re going to marry the girl, do it before the press ferments entirely.”
You nearly inhaled your own soul.
Maelor looked delighted. “See?”
The young couple at the front were trying so hard not to laugh that they were visibly shaking.
Aerion, because apparently shame belonged to lesser dynasties, inclined his head politely toward the old woman and said, “Thank you for your counsel.”
She beamed like she’d been personally decorated.
Her friend leaned in and stage-whispered, “He’s definitely going to.”
That sent the whole bakery over the edge.
Laughter rippled through the room in helpless bursts. Even the owner’s husband had to retreat into the back again, shoulders trembling.
You turned to Aerion in disbelief. “You’re encouraging them.”
“No,” he said. “I’m failing to care.”
“Those are different things.”
“Not enough to matter.”
Maelor, his face now clean but his hands a complete loss, suddenly announced, “She picks our clothes.”
Silence.
Aerion closed his eyes.
You looked up at the ceiling as if perhaps divine intervention might finally take pity on you and bring the whole roof down.
The old women sharpened visibly.
Maelor, once he had an audience, saw no reason whatsoever to stop. “She picks Papa’s ties, and my sweaters, and Uncle Egg’s football coat, and Uncle Daeron when he looks like sadness, and Grandpa Maekar when he does the grumpy operas.”
The woman in emerald actually clutched her chest.
Aerion muttered, “Treason. Open treason in a pastry shop.”
Behind the counter, the owner’s wife looked like she might never recover.
Your phone buzzed again.
You did not need to check it.
You knew, with bone-deep certainty, that somewhere online an entirely new set of edits had already begun.
And sure enough, by the time Aerion finally deemed it safe enough to leave, the first video was waiting.
Short. Grainy. Clear enough.
Taken through the front window.
Aerion in profile at the tiny back table, all dark coat and dragon-bone structure and cold, impossible beauty, softened only by the child at his side and the woman beside him. His hand hidden under the table. Yours resting where his was. Maelor talking with all the heedless authority of a small prince born to dynasty and whipped cream.
The caption read:
not the dark targ heir taking his family out for pastries after a crisis day
And below it, the comments multiplying by the second:
he is DONE FOR
the way he sits next to her instead of across from her? oh that man is terminal
maelor just exposed the entire wardrobe operation
SHE STYLES THE MAEKAR BRANCH??? SHE IS THE MAEKAR BRANCH
sorry but if grandpa maekar lets you dress him you’re already married in old valyria
hand on waist. hand under table. family pastries. somebody sedate me
aerion brightflame is one public incident away from announcing a wife
You locked the screen before it could get any worse.
It was already worse.
Aerion rose first. He buttoned his coat with one hand while the other lifted Maelor down from the seat once the child had been made reasonably portable again. Then he looked at you, saw your expression immediately, and held out his free hand.
“Come on,” he said.
There was no world in which you should have taken it in front of the whole room.
You took it anyway.
The old women made matching approving noises. Outside, the crowd had grown.
Donnel opened the door. The air beyond was cold and bright and sharp in the lungs, full of winter glare and camera shutters and the restless energy of people already convinced they were about to witness something important. You got maybe two steps of peace before the questions started again.
“Aerion, is that confirmation?”
“Are you dating, or is marriage already being discussed?”
“Did Maelor just call her family?”
“If you’re not leading Brightflame Holdings outright, what are your next steps as heir?”
“Are there going to be layoffs or structural changes now that Daeron has stepped down?”
Aerion got you halfway down the bakery steps before one of them lunged too close, crowding forward for a better angle.
A shoulder slammed into your side.
Your foot slipped.
The world tilted.
Maelor jerked in your arms with a frightened cry, and a sharp yelp tore out of you before you could stop it.
And Aerion,
Aerion caught you so fast it almost hurt.
One second you were pitching forward with Maelor clutched to your chest, the pastry box swinging wildly from your wrist, your stomach dropping into open air. The next, his hand had locked around your waist, hard and unshaking, dragging you bodily back against him before either of you could hit the stone. The force of it knocked the breath from your lungs. Maelor was crushed safely between your bodies. Your heart leapt so violently it seemed to lodge in your throat.
For one terrible second, nobody moved.
Then Aerion went still.
That was worse.
His arm remained around your waist, iron-hard, holding you there like letting go had ceased to be an option. His other hand came up to steady Maelor, broad and protective over the small back of the child’s coat, and only then did he turn.
Slowly.
The street quieted around him. Not truly quiet, not with traffic still moving beyond the curb and shutters still snapping in frantic bursts, but it felt like silence anyway. Like the whole block had just remembered, all at once, exactly who he was.
He looked at the reporter who had hit you.
Then he said, very softly, “Yeah. Fuck no.”
Nobody breathed.
Maelor made a small, shaken sound and buried his face into your shoulder. You were still trying to pull air properly into your lungs, one hand knotted hard in the front of Aerion’s coat, when he stepped half in front of you without ever fully letting you go.
“You do not touch her,” he said.
Each word landed clean.
Cold.
Measured.
“You do not come near my son. You do not shove a woman carrying a child because you want a better shot.”
The reporter tried to speak. Accident. Didn’t mean to. It was crowded. Aerion didn’t let him finish.
“I do not care.”
God.
That was the part that did it.
Not the volume. Not rage. Not spectacle.
Just the finality of it.
His hand tightened once at your waist, like he could still feel the exact split second you had nearly gone over. His jaw looked sharp enough to cut glass.
“You want photographs,” he said, pointing once down the pavement, “you take them from there.”
Donnel stepped up beside the car. “Or I can move you there myself.”
No one laughed.
Aerion kept looking at the man like he was one bad breath away from becoming a memory.
“You come that close again,” he said, “and Donnel handles it.”
“With enthusiasm,” Donnel added pleasantly.
Still nobody laughed.
Your knees felt weak. You could feel Maelor trembling against you, tiny aftershocks running through his body, and that more than anything seemed to sharpen something outright lethal in Aerion’s face. He looked toward the nearest phone, the nearest camera, the nearest idiot still stupid enough to think this was a game.
“If I ever answer any question about my private life,” he said, each word precise and icy enough to burn, “it will not be because a stranger shouted it at the mother of my child after putting his hands on her in public.”
The world broke open.
You felt it.
Actually felt it.
The collective inhale. The violent lift of every phone in sight. The sharp crack of renewed camera flashes. Somebody across the street gasped out loud. Three girls near the café whipped around to stare at each other with the exact expression people had when they realized they were watching the precise second something stopped being rumor and became fact.
Aerion did not care.
He was already turning back to you.
His hand slid higher on your waist, steadier now, almost careful. His eyes moved over your face once, then to Maelor, checking, counting, making sure. And when he spoke again, his voice had changed.
“Look at me,” he said.
You did.
“You’re alright.”
It was not a question. It was an order. A promise. A decision he was making for both of you because he refused to allow any other possibility.
Maelor sniffed hard against your shoulder. Aerion’s expression shifted immediately, some of that violence burning down into something quieter and somehow worse, something more intimate, more possessive, more dangerous.
“I’ve got you,” he said, and this time he meant both of you.
Then he opened the car door with one hand and looked back at no one.
“Get in.”
Too late, far too late, for the crowd to pretend they had not just watched him draw a line around you in public and dare the world to cross it again.
Only once you were inside, only once Donnel had rounded the car, and the door had shut out the first wave of screaming internet catastrophe, did Aerion finally meet your gaze.
Neither of you said anything.
Neither of you could.
Maelor, strapped into his seat and clutching the last bite of pastry with reverent determination, looked between the two of you with the deep, satisfied serenity of a child who believed the adults around him had finally started behaving sensibly.
In the front, Donnel started the engine.
Your phone exploded.
Duncan.
Egg.
Daeron.
Ellyn.
Three news alerts.
Two unknown numbers.
A headline draft already spreading:
AERION BRIGHTFLAME CALLS MYSTERY WOMAN “THE MOTHER OF MY CHILD” IN STUNNING STREET EXCHANGE
And because apparently the gods hated you personally, a second push notification followed ten seconds later.
SOCIAL MEDIA MELTS DOWN OVER BAKERY CLIP: “HE BASICALLY JUST ANNOUNCED A WIFE”
You made a helpless little noise and dropped your head into your hands.
For one second there was only the low hum of the car, Maelor’s soft content chewing from the back seat, and the city sliding past the tinted windows in blurred bands of gold and slate and wet winter gray.
Then Aerion reached across the seat.
His hand closed around your wrist.
You looked up.
His expression would have been unreadable to anyone else. To you, it was a disaster written in perfect control.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
You stared at him. “For what part.”
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of one. “All of it.”
“That did not sound like all of it.”
“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”
He still had not let go of your wrist.
Neither of you seemed inclined to make him.
From the back, Maelor announced around the last of his pastry, “I liked today.”
Aerion closed his eyes once.
When he opened them again, they were already on you.
“So did I,” he said.
And that, more than the street, more than the cameras, more than the phrase that would be clipped and slowed and dissected and set to orchestral music by midnight, was the thing that truly ruined you.
Because he meant it.
Every devastating second.
By the time you got back to the tower, the internet had become a funeral pyre.
Not for you but for whatever privacy remained.
Donnel pulled into the private garage while your phone continued its endless death-rattle of notifications, each buzz sharp in the quiet after the street. Egg had somehow found a way to send you seven screenshots despite Aerion’s direct threat against his devices. Duncan had sent a voice note that was only six straight seconds of incoherent screaming followed by, mother of his child??? aerion brightflame i owe you financial compensation for this. Daeron had sent:
Well. That’s one way to do it.
Then, thirty seconds later:
Father has already asked if the clip is real. I hope that frightens you.
It did.
Quite a lot.
Maelor had fallen into the blissful, sugar-sated drowse of a child who had eaten well, been carried often, and witnessed enough family drama to sleep like the dead. His curls were mussed against the seat, his lashes smudged low against his cheeks, one little hand still sticky at the knuckles from pastry. Aerion lifted him out of the car before Donnel could and settled the boy against his shoulder with a tenderness so practiced it hurt to look at. One broad hand spread between Maelor’s shoulder blades, anchoring him there as if the whole terrible day could be kept from touching him any further so long as Aerion held on tightly enough.
Then he turned to you.
Something had gone strangely quiet between you in the car. It was not cold, and not awkward either, not exactly. It felt charged instead, tight with something that made language seem less useful than breathing. The bakery clip had already gone out into the world, and the street statement with it. By now the whole city, perhaps the whole country, was pulling apart that one line with the ruthless fascination people reserved for anything bright enough to cut.
The mother of my child.
Not his son’s emergency contact, not his friend, not merely someone close to their family. That. You still had not asked him whether he had chosen those words deliberately, and you were not at all sure you could survive the answer if he had.
The garage lift doors opened onto the private floor. Of course the tower had already heard.
The first assistant you passed nearly walked into a column because she looked at Aerion, then at you, then at Maelor asleep on his shoulder, and visibly remembered that she enjoyed being employed. The second lowered her tablet much too quickly and pretended, with almost tragic incompetence, that she had not been reading a live update article. At the end of the corridor stood Ellyn, composed as ever, like a woman born to witness dynastic collapse with a straight face. Her gaze swept once over Maelor asleep against Aerion’s shoulder, over your expression, over the atmosphere stretched taut between the two of you.
Then she said, in the calm tone of someone announcing the weather, “The clip has reached twelve million views.”
Aerion did not break stride. “Wonderful.”
“Elaborate edits are now being made.”
“I hate this century.”
“Egg has been placed on temporary device restriction.”
That got his attention. “By whom?”
“Maekar.”
Aerion sounded deeply satisfied. “Good.”
Ellyn’s eyes flicked toward you. “Also, for administrative clarity, would you prefer I continue referring to you as Miss…”
“No,” Aerion said.
Ellyn did not even blink.
You turned to him, but he kept looking straight ahead, jaw set, as though the corridor itself had offended him. “You do not need to clarify anything with anyone tonight.”
There was something in his voice that made the words land harder than they should have. Ellyn, who knew exactly when a line had just been drawn in blood instead of ink, inclined her head once.
“Understood.”
When she peeled away toward the executive offices, Aerion kept walking until he reached the family suite on the residential floor above the tower offices, a private cluster of rooms used for the children, for late nights, and for the sort of long inter-branch days when going all the way back to Summerhall was more trouble than it was worth.
He laid Maelor down first.
You helped ease the little shoes off carefully, trying not to wake him. Aerion bent over the bed and smoothed the child’s hair back from his forehead, then adjusted the blanket with the same fierce gentleness you had seen a hundred times and still had not learned to witness without something in you giving way a little. The suite was dim and warm around you, lit by shaded lamps and the soft wash of city light through the high windows. Somewhere deeper inside, a kettle ticked softly as it cooled. The air smelled faintly of cedar, clean linen, and the sugar Maelor always seemed to carry with him like a second skin.
When the boy settled and stayed asleep, Aerion straightened slowly.
For a moment neither of you moved.
Then, because someone had to say it, you did. “Aerion.”
He looked at you and braced himself.
That was the worst part. He braced the way a man did when the thing in front of him mattered enough to wound him clean through.
“You said it.”
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
There was a pause.
“Yes.”
Your breath caught sharply in your throat.
He looked away first, only for a second, and lifted a hand to the back of his neck. The old gesture. Irritated. Cornered. Honest despite himself.
“I was angry,” he said.
“That doesn’t answer me.”
“No.” His gaze came back to yours, direct now. “I was angry, and they were too close, and they frightened him, and they frightened you, and I was tired of listening to people use the wrong language for what you are to us.”
To us.
Your pulse stumbled.
You crossed your arms, not because you were cold, but because if you did not hold yourself together somehow, you thought you might simply come apart. “And what am I?”
Something changed in him then. Not his face exactly, but something under it, something older and deeper than expression.
Aerion had always looked like a man carved too sharply to belong among ordinary people, too aware, too severe, too beautiful in a way that had once tipped almost cruel because it had not yet learned the cost of being feared. But the cruelty had mostly gone out of him now, burned down into precision, discipline, and that dangerous, impossible tenderness he reserved for almost no one. You. Maelor. Sometimes, in his own sideways fashion, the rest of his blood. But mostly you and Maelor.
“You know what you are,” he said quietly.
“Then say it.”
You had not meant to push him, or maybe you had. Maybe the whole damned day had been one long blade pressed to skin, and now that you were finally alone there was no way not to lean into the cut and see how deep it went.
Aerion took one step toward you, then another. He stopped only when he was close enough that you could see the exhaustion at the edges of his eyes, the strain of the day still living in the set of his mouth, the remnants of that old temper banked hard behind control. He was close enough that when he spoke again, his voice felt less like sound and more like something laid directly against your skin.
“You are the person my son asks for when he’s hurt.”
Your throat tightened.
“You are the person he looks for when he wants comfort, or routine, or someone to tell him which sweater is the right sweater and which story is the bedtime story and whether the sky means boots or not.”
He came a little closer still.
“You are the person Daeron calls before interviews because he trusts you more than any stylist money can buy. The person Egg listens to when he’s already decided not to listen to anyone. The person Aemon lets correct him without argument. The person my father does not thank because he has never learned how, but has already built into the shape of his household as if there were never a world where you were not there.”
You could not breathe properly.
Aerion’s gaze dropped, just once, to your mouth, then lifted again.
“And you,” he said, his voice roughening at last, “are the woman I have been trying not to terrify for years by wanting too much.”
That was what did it.
Not the street. Not the edits. Not the family. Not the old women or the headlines or the hand at your waist or the private language made out of clothes and watches and children and hot chocolate.
That.
You stared at him, and he stared back. Then, because honesty had apparently decided to tear straight through every Targaryen defense left standing tonight, Aerion added, lower now, stripped bare in a way he almost never allowed, “I did not say the wrong thing outside. I said too much too soon.”
Your lips parted, but no sound came out.
He seemed to take that silence for refusal, or shock, or perhaps simply the stillness before being told he had ruined everything. His jaw tightened. He stepped back half an inch.
Then you caught his sleeve.
His gaze dropped instantly to your hand, and your fingers tightened in the fabric.
“Aerion,” you whispered. “I’m not scared of you wanting too much.”
That was not quite true. You were scared of it, only not for the reasons he thought.
You were scared because if he wanted too much, and you wanted the same, there would be no going back. No safe half-life. No pretending the family’s affection was merely affection and not a slow, relentless folding-in around a truth no one but the two of you had been cowardly enough to leave unnamed.
Something in Aerion’s expression shifted. Not visibly, perhaps, not to anyone who did not know him, but to you it changed like a kingdom changing banners.
His hand came up slowly, as if he were giving you every possible chance to refuse him, and touched your waist again.
Then he said, in the quietest voice you had ever heard from him, “No?”
You shook your head.
For one suspended, impossible second, the whole world narrowed to that gesture. His hand at your waist. Your fingers still curled in his sleeve. Maelor asleep a room away, safe inside the life the two of you had somehow built without ever daring to name it.
Then Aerion bent his head.
His forehead touched yours first, brief and deliberate, like an old vow from an older world. When he spoke, the words brushed your mouth.
“Tell me to stop.”
You did not.
So he kissed you.
Not like a man uncertain of himself, but like a man uncertain only of whether he had been allowed this all along.
It was not soft in the easy way first kisses were soft in stories. Aerion was not made for easy things. It was careful, though, terribly careful, controlled only by force of will and all the more intense for it. His hand tightened at your waist. Yours slid from his sleeve to the front of his shirt, and beneath your palm you could feel the steady, hard beat of his heart.
When he drew back, it was only far enough to look at you.
You were not sure what he saw on your face, but whatever it was, it undid him.
His mouth found yours again, and this time the control frayed. Not completely, never completely, but enough that you could feel the hunger in it now, the years of restraint, the years of standing too close and touching too little, the years of letting the world assume what he would not yet dare say.
When he finally let you breathe, he rested his forehead against yours once more and exhaled like a man who had crossed through fire and found, impossibly, that there was still something waiting on the other side.
Somewhere in the suite, your phone began vibrating again.
Neither of you moved.
It buzzed a second time.
Then a third.
Aerion closed his eyes. “If that’s Duncan, I’ll kill him.”
Despite everything, you laughed. The sound felt strange and bright in the quiet room. Then he kissed the corner of your mouth once, brief and warm and devastatingly tender, and said, “Come here.”
As if you were not already there. As if he had not been pulling you toward him for years.
He drew you fully against him then, one arm around your waist, the other settling at your back, and for the first time all day, all week, perhaps even longer than that, you let yourself rest in it.
The Morning After
A collage of clippings, headlines, transcripts, posts, and public hysteria
BRIGHTFLAME HOLDINGS / TARGARYEN INC.
Official Statement
For Immediate Release
Issued 8:14 AM
Targaryen Inc. and Brightflame Holdings today confirmed that, following Daeron Targaryen’s formal decision to relinquish his hold within the Brightflame line of succession, Aerion Brightflame Targaryen has been designated the legal and official heir to Brightflame Holdings, a subsidiary of Targaryen Inc.
As established under the governance framework of the Maekar branch, Aerion Brightflame Targaryen will, upon the future step-down of Maekar Targaryen, assume the voting authority, succession rights, and executive privileges attached to that office. Until that transition takes place, Brightflame Holdings will remain under its current leadership structure, with succession proceeding in a measured and carefully governed manner.
This process is intended to be deliberate, not accelerated.
Targaryen Inc. and Brightflame Holdings remain committed to preserving continuity of leadership, maintaining confidence among shareholders and partners, protecting staff stability, and ensuring that the long-term value of both Brightflame Holdings and Targaryen Inc. is not diminished at any stage of transition.
No disruption to current operations, staffing, or strategic commitments is expected as a result of this announcement. Both entities remain focused on disciplined stewardship, market stability, and the continued protection of enterprise value.
When asked separately whether recent speculation regarding Mr. Targaryen’s relationship status was accurate, representatives declined further comment beyond his public statement outside Maison Aurelle:
“I am not available for public speculation, and neither is she.”
No further statement will be made at this time.
Buried beneath the official language, in the kind of sentence old-money dynasties use when they are trying very hard not to sound triumphant, was the line everyone screenshotted anyway:
He is widely understood to be one of the youngest billionaire heirs expected to inherit a significant share of the long-standing Targaryen business empire.
And that was when the internet, predictably, lost its mind.
THE FINANCIAL REGISTER
Society & Capital
Headline: One of the Youngest Billionaire Heirs in the Country Appears Officially Off the Market
After months of speculation, viral clips, hand-at-waist photographs, and increasingly impossible public denial, Aerion Brightflame Targaryen appears to have confirmed what both society watchers and online sleuths have been saying for weeks.
He is no longer available.
Widely understood to be one of the youngest billionaire heirs positioned to inherit a substantial share of the long-standing Targaryen empire, Aerion has long occupied a rare place in upper-tier society, young, devastatingly wealthy, dynastic, and still unattached.
That era now appears over.
The woman at the center of the frenzy is understood to be an engineer already quietly linked to the family for years, and now, if recent events are anything to go by, very much linked to its future.
“THE HEIRESS HOUR”
Episode: The Dragon Bachelor Is Gone
“I need everybody to sit down and understand the scale here. This is not just some rich guy getting caught with a girlfriend. This is Aerion Brightflame Targaryen. This is dynasty money. This is one of those old families that stayed rich because they were strategic, ruthless, beautiful, and very, very good at keeping power where they wanted it.
“And now this engineer, this smart, gorgeous woman who has apparently been quietly folded into the family for years, has effectively locked down one of the wealthiest men in the country.
“I’m sorry, what do you mean that’s real.
“And let’s also be honest, this whole family had no business producing that many attractive daughters and sons. It’s offensive at this point.
“Aerion is out. Fully out. Gone. Which means the remaining age-appropriate heirs people are going to start circling are basically Valarr, Aemon, and Daeron.
“The market is in collapse, ladies.”
TIKTOK ACCOUNT: @usernamefiller1234
Caption over slow orchestral audio:
one of the youngest billionaire heirs alive
old money
private bloodline
strategic marriages for generations
former wild child
former problem heir
beautiful rich boy with too much money and too much damage
and then he met one engineer
looked at her
and said
no thanks
she’s mine
Top comments:
@usernamefiller: not him leaving the marriage market like a man withdrawing shares 😭
@usernamefiler: she didn’t just bag a billionaire heir, she accidentally became infrastructure to an empire
@usernamefiller: no because she’s gorgeous, smart, has a beautiful son already attached to her, and now a dragon of a man who loves her publicly. i’m unwell
PAGE SIX-STYLE GOSSIP RAG
Headline: HEIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW
Subhead: Aerion Brightflame Targaryen Tied Down After Months of “Mystery Woman” Drama
Sorry to the social climbers, heiress daughters, PR wives-in-waiting, and every woman (or man, for that matter) who thought they had a shot.
Insiders say Aerion Brightflame Targaryen is very much not single anymore.
After months of seeing the same beauty orbiting not just Aerion, but the whole Maekar side of the family, sources now say what the internet has been screaming for weeks:
she’s not a fling,
she’s not temporary,
and she’s been effectively family for a long time.
Better yet, the woman in question is not just pretty arm candy. She is an engineer with her own standing, already deeply tied to one of the wealthiest families in the country, and now, apparently, tied to its future too.
One source put it more bluntly: “She didn’t just marry up. She married into the final boss level of old money.”
YOUTUBE NEWS RECAP
Title: WHY AERION BRIGHTFLAME TARGARYEN GOING “OFF MARKET” IS A BIGGER DEAL THAN YOU THINK
If you’re wondering why the internet is acting like a minor monarchy just fell, let me explain.
Aerion Brightflame Targaryen is not just rich. He is dynastic rich. He is one of the youngest men expected to inherit a major portion of one of the most established family empires still operating at this scale. The other is his cousin Valarr, but that man is another can of worms we can open in another video.
But anyways back to aerion like now he is, by all visible accounts, taken.
Not casually. Not discreetly. Not in a way that leaves room for interpretation.
The woman at his side is an engineer with her own standing, but what’s making people lose their minds is not just that she is beside him. It seems the whole family has already made room for her.
Also, yes, Duncan is just the best friend. Calm down. He is not the rival. He is the tolerated court idiot. Aerion has to live with him because she loves him, Egg adores him, and at this point the family has clearly decided he’s part of the furniture.
TIKTOK ACCOUNT: @usernamefiller
Spoken audio transcript:
Okay, I need everybody to lock in for a second because some of you still do not understand the scale of this.
This is not just some rich guy with a hot girlfriend.
This is Aerion Brightflame Targaryen.
This is one of the youngest billionaire heirs in the country. This is dynasty money. This is one of those long-standing families that stayed rich because they were strategic, terrifying, hot, and very, very good at marriage, alliances, business, and never letting the bloodline fumble the bag.
Families like this do not stay at the top by being careless. They cling to power, money, reputation, and expansion like their lives depend on it, because for people like them, it kind of does.
Nothing is random. Nothing is casual. Nothing gets integrated into the family machine unless it matters.
And now Aerion is effectively off the market.
Gone.
Finished.
Closed for business.
And the woman at the center of it all is not some random socialite they plucked out of a gala lineup. She’s an engineer. She’s gorgeous. She’s clearly been embedded in the family for years. The child already sees her as central. The Maekar branch clearly adores her. And the real kicker is, she works under Baelor’s branch, which means no, she is not just some decorative attachment hanging off Aerion’s arm.
She is part of the whole picture.
That is a huge deal.
Because a family like this does not let just anybody into the structure. Not emotionally, not socially, not professionally. So when people say she married up, sure, yeah, technically.
But that’s underselling it by a mile.
She didn’t just marry up.
She got absorbed into the final boss level of old money.
Also, this family had no business being that attractive across multiple generations. Sons, fathers, mothers, daughters, cousins, everybody looks like wealth, old blood, and bad decisions in formalwear.
And now that Aerion is out, the list of remaining heirs people are going to be weird about is basically Valarr, Aemon, and Daeron.
The bachelor market just lost a nation-state, and frankly, recovery is not expected.”
Caption:
not a boyfriend. a dynastic event.
not her accidentally becoming central to one of the wealthiest families in the country
Top comments:
@usernamefiller: the way he didn’t get “caught” with her, he fully integrated her into the bloodline
@usernamefiller: he was never single emotionally and THAT is what is killing me
@usernamefiller: no because Duncan being the best friend this whole time while Aerion had to just DEAL with him is making me crazy
@usernamefiller: EXACTLY. that’s her emotional support menace and now he’s accidentally the court jester of the dragon branch
@usernamefiller: also this family producing that many attractive daughters and sons should actually be illegal
@usernamefiller: and the fact that she works under Baelor’s branch too??? babe she is not just part of Aerion’s life, she is part of the whole structure
REDDIT THREAD
r/OldMoneyDrama
Title: Aerion Brightflame Targaryen Is Officially Off the Market
u/maekarsledger
People do not get how major this is.
This is one of the youngest billionaire heirs connected to one of those sprawling old dynastic family empires that never really lose. They evolve, acquire, marry well, and keep going. He was basically a walking strategic asset.
And now every signal says he’s tied down to one woman who the family has apparently loved for years.
Not just random socialite wife material either. An engineer. Educated. Competent. Already professionally linked to one of the wealthiest families in the country before the public even realized what they were looking at.
She’s gorgeous, the kid already sees her as central, and Aerion looks at her like the rest of the world is administrative inconvenience.
That’s not gossip.
That’s succession with feelings.
u/c:
i can joke about being available but that man looks so gone over her it feels like applying to a job that was filled three years ago
u/i:
EXACTLY. it’s not even competitive anymore. it’s like showing up to an interview and the hiring manager is already married to the candidate
u/h:
this was not a rich boyfriend situation. this was dynastic acquisition. corporate merger but make it yearning
u/d:
exactly. she did not just marry up socially. she married into a structure of power. that is why everybody is foaming at the mouth
u/s:
the most devastating part is that he does not look trapped. he looks relieved. i need everyone to suffer with me
u/s:
yes. that’s the real killer. he looks like a man who finally got to stop lying
*One year later, Egg posted the wedding photograph with no warning; the entire Targaryen dynasty gathered in one frame behind Aerion and you, every branch, every household, every husband, wife, child, and heir, a rarity so staggering the papers would later call it the photograph of the century.
It broke the internet.
Pairing: Prince Valarr x Lannister!Reader (She/Her, "You" and "Y/N" referred ), Prince Daeron X Lannister!Reader (strictly platonic)
Part 2 of "What a lonely thing it was, to be his wife"
Summary:
The court calls her blessed for carrying Prince Valarr Targaryen’s third child. They see the jewels, the sons, the future queen consort, the kind of marriage songs that are written about. What they do not see is the grief beneath it — the loneliness, the silence, the humiliation of loving a man who can keep her, touch her, father her children, and still leave her starving in every place that matters. And when Valarr finally realizes something is wrong, he does not bridge the distance between them with tenderness. He crosses it through another woman’s ears.
Warnings:
pregnancy, pregnancy anxiety, “good husband, awful at being loved correctly” marital grief, emotional neglect, arranged marriage misery, domestic loneliness, domestic sorrow, betrayal of trust/confidence, surveillance disguised as care, creepy little emotional surveillance, maid-as-emotional-spy, jealousy, old feelings / old ghosts resurfacing, children noticing the sadness in the house, children catching the vibes, maternal guilt, wife at the end of her rope, painful confrontation, devastating yearning, hurt with little to no comfort, beautiful wife / foolish man tragedy, husband doing literally everything except communicating, Valarr fumbling the woman of all time, Valarr making the worst possible choices with his full chest, angst to the filthiest degree
Additional warnings for later sections:
graphic childbirth, blood, difficult labour, birth trauma vibes, fear of maternal death, brief body horror-ish hatching imagery, mention of pregnancy loss/miscarriage grief (Kiera)
By the time you carried his third child, the court had already decided you were blessed.
They said it with smiles, with jewelled hands, with the soft, pleased certainty of people who had never had to live inside your marriage. Blessed. Fortunate. Favoured. The golden princess from the west, wife to Prince Valarr Targaryen, mother to two sons, now with another child beneath her heart. They spoke as though the gods had leaned down and touched your life with mercy.
No one asked whether a woman might still be lonely beneath a miracle.
No one asked whether she might lie beside her husband at night and still feel, in all the places that mattered, untouched. At court, blessing was counted in children, in beauty, in rank, in how many people envied you across a hall. No one thought to count the quieter things. The silences. The distance. The terrible ache of being admired by everyone and truly held by no one.
No one asked whether the child they praised had first come to you in the shape of dread.
And perhaps that was the cruellest part of all. That while the court smiled and called you blessed, you had first laid a hand over your belly and felt not joy, but grief so soft and frightened it hardly knew its own name.
It was Myria who knew first.
The smell of the morning tray turned your stomach before she had even crossed the threshold. Sausages gleaming with rosemary fat, hot bread torn open to steam, butter steeped in herbs, rich enough to sit heavy in the air. By the time she reached you by the window seat, you had gone pale enough that she caught your wrist in alarm. Beyond the shutters, the bells from the sept tolled soft and distant through the morning, and somewhere below in the yard one of your boys was laughing at something a page had done with a hoop and stick.
You sat very still, one hand braced hard against the carved arm of the chair as if the room had tilted beneath you.
“I think,” you said, so quietly she almost did not hear it, “that I know what this is.”
Myria, who had been kneeling to unfasten your slippers, stilled at once. “My lady?”
You looked down at her. Your hair had come half-loose and spilled over one shoulder, pale as old gold in the morning light. Your face was too composed for such words, which frightened her more than tears would have.
“I have been late.”
The room seemed to gather itself around that truth and hold its breath.
Myria rose slowly. You did not smile. You did not cry. You only lowered your hand, very gently, to the still-flat place low beneath your gown.
“Oh,” she whispered.
It was not much, that little sound, but women who loved you had long since learned that joy did not always arrive bright. Sometimes it came trembling. Sometimes it came wrapped in fear. Sometimes it looked too much like grief to be known for anything else at first glance.
You sat in silence for a long while after that. The bells still tolled. The sun lay warm across the stone floor. Dust drifted in the slant of light. In the passage beyond your chamber a maid hurried past with folded linen over her arms, her soft-soled shoes whispering over the rushes. Somewhere farther off a door shut, and the sound went echoing down the corridor like something dropped and not picked up again.
At last you asked, “Do you think it cruel?”
Myria stared at you. “Cruel?”
“To a child,” you said. “To begin its life in such a season.”
Her eyes filled at once. “My sweet lady.”
But you only looked away.
That was the first grief of the third child, not that it was unwanted, but that you wanted it so desperately while feeling so unable to welcome it as it deserved.
When you had carried Aelor, there had still been hope enough to gild everything. Hope had turned each ache into promise. Hope had made you blush when Valarr rested a hand upon your belly and smiled, faint but real, at the first movement beneath your skin. Hope had made the future feel survivable. Hope had made the silence in your marriage seem temporary, as if time and patience and children might yet soften it into something warmer.
With Baelon there had still been some pale thread of that hope left.
But now you knew too much.
You knew what it was to lie beside your husband and hear another woman’s name in the dark. You knew what it was to be loved dutifully, and how duty, polished and princely and perfectly correct, could leave a woman starving in all the same places as cruelty. You knew what it was to stand in your own chambers while Valarr crossed first to his sons with warmth on his face, and only then, remembering some secondary obligation, turned to ask whether you had eaten, whether you had slept, whether you had taken broth.
You knew how a marriage might remain whole in the eyes of the realm while quietly failing in every room where no one sang of it.
So when the maester confirmed what your body had already told you, and left with his grave assurances and the faint rustle of his chains, and the chamber stood empty save for Ellyn, Myria, and Ysilla, you bent your head and wept.
Not loudly. Never loudly at first.
You cried with one hand over your mouth and the other over your belly, as though you meant to shield the child from your own sorrow.
“I should be happy,” you whispered. “Gods forgive me, I should be happy.”
Ellyn crossed the room in two quick steps and dropped to her knees before you, drawing your hands gently down from your face. “You are allowed to be frightened.”
“I am not frightened,” you said, and the laugh that came with it was broken clean through. “I am ashamed.”
Ysilla, quietest of them all and therefore often the cruelest where truth was concerned, said from beside you, “Ashamed of what?”
Your breath caught.
“That I still care what he feels.”
That was the true humiliation of it.
Some part of you, bruised and wiser and sadder than before, had still imagined this child might feel like renewal. Not in some girlish, foolish way, but in the slow soft manner of domestic life. You had thought perhaps one day Valarr would look upon you and the babe and their brothers and see not duty, not heirs, not a fortunate arrangement made between crown and Rock, but his family. Something chosen. Something cherished.
It shamed you to know you still wanted that.
“Do not tell him yet,” you said at last.
The maids exchanged a glance.
“My lady,” Myria began carefully.
“Not yet.”
They obeyed because they loved you, and because they knew there were truths a woman had the right to hold in her own two hands for a little while before surrendering them to the world.
So the child lived first as a secret between your body and the women who dressed it.
It lived in the nausea at dawn, and in the strange fatigue that sent you back to the settle by the window after the smallest exertion. It lived in the unconscious way your hand drifted, whenever you were alone, low over your middle. It lived in the prayers you whispered before sleep, half-apology and half-plea. Forgive me for being sad. Forgive me for fearing the world you come into. Forgive me for already loving you in the middle of all this hurt.
The boys noticed before Valarr did.
Children always found the truest part of a room first. They had not the words for sorrow, nor the long experience to name distance when it settled into a house, but they felt it all the same. In silences. In the way a mother smiled too quickly. In the way a father’s warmth came and went like weather. They felt cold long before they knew the word for winter.
Aelor climbed up beside you one morning while you sat near the window with a cool cloth at the back of your neck. The day beyond the shutters was bright, but the chamber itself still held that soft early chill that clung to stone before the sun had fully warmed it. He touched your cheek with one small warm hand and frowned at you with the grave concern only children could wear without shame.
“Are you ill, Mother?”
“No, sweetling.”
“You look like Baelon did when he had fever.”
At the sound of his own name, Baelon toddled across the chamber on unsteady little feet and came at once to bury his face against your skirts. At two years old he loved with his whole body. If he wanted you, he came. He had not yet learned rank or pride or the careful little distances adults laid between one another when love had grown difficult.
You drew both boys close at once and bent to kiss their hair.
“I am only tired.”
Aelor considered that with solemn seriousness. “Then Father must not bother you.”
It startled a laugh out of you. A real one, soft and sudden, enough to make both boys beam merely for having won it. For one fleeting moment, the chamber seemed warmer.
Then Baelon, with all the unknowing certainty of babes and fools and perhaps little souls still near enough to heaven to hear what others could not, patted your belly and said, “Baby.”
All three maids froze.
You stared at him. He only grinned, pleased with himself, one little hand still spread over the place where your secret sat hidden beneath silk and sorrow.
Something in your face changed then, too small for the boys to understand, but not too small for women who loved you.
“No one told him,” Ellyn whispered later, once the children had run laughing out toward the gallery.
No. No one had.
But children knew things before language reached them. Or perhaps mothers did, and the little ones still close enough to their making merely felt it in the pulse of them.
You sat very still after they had gone, your hand resting where Baelon’s had been. Then, all at once, you rose and went after them.
They had not gone far. Aelor was only just at the turn of the passage, Baelon stumbling after him with one nursemaid hovering close enough to catch him if he fell. At the sound of your skirts, both boys turned.
“Mother?” Aelor asked.
You sank to your knees there in the corridor, heedless of the cold stone beneath your skirts, and opened your arms.
They came at once.
Aelor with the eager trust of a child who still believed all hurts could be mended by being held, Baelon with his usual wholeheartedness, nearly toppling into you. You gathered them both so tightly your arms trembled with it. Their little bodies were so warm. They smelled of milk and soap and sleep and the faint dust of the nursery floor.
And because they were too small to understand, because that was the mercy and the cruelty of it both, the tears came then.
Only one at first.
It slipped free before you could stop it and caught in Aelor’s hair like a drop of rain.
He drew back at once, alarmed. “Mother?”
You shook your head quickly and pulled him close again, kissing the crown of it. Baelon had already lifted one tiny hand to your cheek, puzzled by the wetness there.
“I am sorry,” you whispered.
The words were not meant for children, and yet you could not seem to stop them.
“I am so sorry, my sweet boys.”
Aelor had gone very still in your arms now, not frightened yet, only listening. Baelon pressed his face beneath your chin, content simply to be held.
You shut your eyes.
“I wish,” you said, and your voice broke so softly it scarcely seemed your own, “I wish this house were warmer for you. I wish it were full of more love.”
The nursemaid at the end of the passage turned away at once, pretending not to hear. Ellyn, farther back, pressed a hand to her mouth.
Aelor did not understand the words, not fully. But he understood enough to wind his small arms about your neck and cling. “It is warm,” he said stubbornly, in the way children contradicted sorrow when they could not bear it. “You’re here.”
That was what undid you.
You bent your head between them and held them tighter, as if you might shield all three of your children from the life they had been born into, from the cold places in it, from the silences, from the careful hurts, from the love that existed and still somehow failed to fill a room.
“I am here,” you whispered, though it came out more like a prayer than a promise. “I am here, I am here.”
And in that moment, with one boy clinging and the other heavy against your breast, you loved them so fiercely it felt almost like grief.
Because children knew.
Children always knew. And long before they learned the words for distance, for marriage, for loneliness, they had already begun to feel the want of warmth in the walls around them.
Valarr learned not from you, but from the shape of the household, and that in itself felt like failure.
It happened at the midday meal. The table had been laid with trout in cream, still warm enough to send up pale curls of steam, fresh bread, greens dressed in sharp vinegar, sugared pears for Aelor, and a bowl of stewed apples that Baelon wore more often than he ever managed to eat. Sunlight fell wan and thin through the high windows, striping the polished floorboards and the legs of the table. Two servants moved quietly against the wall, practiced in that particular invisibility good servants learned early, their eyes lowered, their hands quick and silent. You sat between your sons in pale gold silk, your food untouched, one hand wrapped lightly around your cup as if merely holding it were effort enough.
Valarr came in from council with a folded parchment in one hand and the look of a man who had spent the morning among older men and worse ideas. The leather of his boots struck softly against the floor. He smelled faintly of cold air, candle smoke, and the wool of council chambers. He bent first to kiss Aelor’s hair, then lifted Baelon with that absent ease fathers sometimes had, settling the boy back in his seat before turning at last to look at you.
“You have not eaten.”
“I will.”
His brow furrowed. “You said that this morning.”
Ellyn, who should have known better, hesitated just long enough while pouring the wine for him to notice.
“She is not to have that?”
Silence followed.
The dangerous sort.
His gaze moved from the untouched wine to Ellyn, and then to you, and all at once he understood there was knowledge in the room from which he had been excluded. Something in his face changed, not visibly enough for a stranger to mark it, but enough for you, who had studied all the little failures of his expression for years.
“How long?” he asked.
Aelor stopped chewing. Baelon, sensing only that the air had sharpened, leaned hard against your side and pressed one sticky hand into your sleeve. You laid your napkin down very neatly beside your plate.
“A few weeks.”
Valarr stared at you.
“A few weeks.”
His tone made Aelor flinch.
The child looked from you to his father, uncertainty dimming the brightness of his face. “Is Mother ill?”
“No,” you said at once, because the boys came first. Always. “No, sweetlings. Hush.”
Valarr’s hand tightened on the back of the chair beside him. You saw the tendons rise beneath the skin.
“And you said nothing?”
You kept your gaze on your plate. To look at him before the children would have felt too much like being stripped. “I had not meant to tell the whole hall.”
His voice lowered then, though not into softness. Only lower, tighter, more dangerous for the effort it cost him.
“You mean to go through this half-ill and half-alone because you would rather keep silence than ask for what you need?”
It was such a Valarr sentence. Not monstrous. Not truly cruel. Only wrong in every place that mattered.
Because the true wound was not those few hidden weeks. The true wound was that you had already gone through years half-alone.
You could not say that before your sons.
So instead you answered, “The babe is not harmed.”
His jaw set. Under the anger, something else flashed and vanished before it could settle into a name. Fear, perhaps. Hurt pride. Guilt. Valarr wore all his feelings badly. They moved through him like storms through deep water, felt more than seen.
Aelor, solemn as a little lord, looked between the two of you and asked, “Is there truly a baby?”
You turned to him at once and made yourself smile. “Yes,” you said. “There is.”
The room changed.
Aelor’s face lit at once, wonder washing clean away the uncertainty. Baelon slapped both palms against the table and crowed, “Baby,” as if he had personally arranged the matter and was very pleased with himself for it.
Valarr looked at the boys and then at you.
For one suspended heartbeat, you saw what might have been had life been kinder. Two sons delighted. A wife carrying a third child. A husband startled into some rough, awkward joy. A family, plain and simple, without all the cold spaces in between.
Then the moment passed.
He said only, “We will speak later.”
You nodded.
That was all.
At supper the boys argued happily over whether the babe would be another brother or a sister with hair like sunlight. Their little voices filled the chamber brightly enough to hide the strain beneath them. You smiled where you ought to smile and broke your bread into pieces so small you never had to actually eat them.
Later, after the children had been taken to the nursery and the corridors beyond your chambers had gone quiet, Valarr stood at the hearth and asked again, “How long?”
The room was lit only by fire and two lamps. Shadows moved low along the walls. The wind pressed faintly at the shutters, and somewhere far off in the passage a servant’s hurried footstep echoed and was gone. You sat on the settle with a shawl about your shoulders, though the chamber was not cold enough to require it.
“Three weeks, perhaps a little more.”
He looked at you as he looked at council failures and broken harnesses and anything else that ought, in his mind, to have been mended before it became a larger trouble.
“You should have told me.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I would not have arranged what was needed?”
At that, something like laughter moved through you, though it made no sound at all.
Arranged.
Always that.
Not comforted. Not held. Not reassured. Arranged.
Valarr saw it in your face and went still.
“What?”
You lowered your gaze. “Nothing.”
“No.” He turned from the hearth fully then, the firelight catching the hard line of his cheek. “What?”
The anger had left him. What remained was worse. Confusion. Honest confusion. He did not understand why what he had said was not enough. Why what seemed plain and practical and sufficient to him landed like another wound in you.
You looked at the fire because it was easier. The flames licked low around the blackening wood. The heat touched one side of your face while the rest of you felt curiously numb.
“I know you would have arranged what was needed,” you said softly. “That has never been the difficulty.”
He stood motionless.
After a long silence, he asked, with effort, “And what is the difficulty, wife?”
The old answer rose at once. Nothing, my prince. Only weariness. Only the weakness of women. Only humors and softness and foolishness. But perhaps the child had made you braver, or perhaps only more tired of swallowing hurt until it turned bitter inside you.
“That I no longer know whether I bring you joy or burden.”
Valarr stared at you as though you had spoken another tongue.
The words seemed to strike him and go no farther, as if they had hit armor he did not know how to unfasten. For a moment, something almost like pain crossed his face. Then, because he was Valarr, and because men like him reached for practicality whenever feeling threatened to swallow them whole, he nodded once and said,
“You should have more help.” You closed your eyes.
Two days later he gave you a fourth maid.
Her name was Jeyne.
She came with downcast lashes, deft hands, and the sort of face great households prized in women meant for service, pleasant, soft, and easy to forget unless one was looking closely. She was clever enough to learn a room before crossing it, pretty enough to please the eye, plain enough not to alarm anyone. The morning she was brought in, the light in the solar was pale and watery, thin from a sky veiled in cloud, and the warmth from the hearth did little against the damp that old stone held in its bones. Aelor and Baelon were upon the carpet with their carved beasts spread between them, and Aelor, with all the solemn authority of the elder-born, was teaching his brother how lions ought properly to hunt dragons.
“She is sensible,” Valarr said, presenting the girl with the grave satisfaction of a man who believed he had solved something. “You have greater need of attendance now.”
You sat in the morning room with your embroidery untouched in your lap. Silk thread lay loose between your fingers, forgotten. You looked at Jeyne. Jeyne curtsied low, her hands folded neatly over her skirts, her eyes lowered in the proper measure of humility.
“How kind,” you said.
Valarr seemed relieved.
That should have warned you.
At first you thought nothing of it. Why should you. Great ladies were forever being attended, undressed, fed, brushed, eased, watched, and measured. A prince’s wife belonged to more hands than her own. Her body, doubly so when with child, became a household concern. There were always women fastening sleeves, arranging cushions, bringing broths, counting bites, drawing baths, lowering candles, and telling one another in low voices what color had come or gone from your face. You had been looked after all your life in one way or another. It ought not to have felt strange.
And Jeyne was very good at gentleness.
She learned quickly that rosemary turned your stomach and had it quietly removed from your chambers before the scent could cling to the hangings. She remembered which pillows eased your back and which worsened it. She carried Baelon when he grew too heavy in your arms and tied Aelor’s cloak correctly on the first attempt, which delighted him beyond reason. She moved softly, spoke softly, and had a way of making care seem unforced, as though she had come into the world knowing how to smooth a blanket or cool a brow without being told.
More dangerously still, she listened.
At court there were women who spoke only so they might hear their own voices returned prettily to them. Men asked questions only to hear their own thoughts reflected back with better phrasing and a more flattering tilt. Even among your own household there were certain things you no longer said because you had grown tired of sounding sorrow aloud, tired of hearing your own heart made too visible in the air. Silence, over time, had become easier. Safer. More graceful.
But Jeyne listened.
When she loosed your hair in the evening and you murmured that you had begun to hate the sea-green gown because it made you look broad and ill, she did not rush to contradict you with some bright little lie. She only said, “Then we shall not lay it out again.”
When you admitted you had not slept more than two consecutive hours in a moon’s turn, she did not prattle that all pregnant women suffered the same. She brought warm milk sweetened with honey and sat near the hearth while you drank, her hands folded in her lap, saying nothing until your eyes began to droop.
When you said, very quietly, “I miss the sound of the sea,” she answered, “Then no wonder the river here seems too small.”
It was such an understanding thing to say that for one shameful instant you nearly wept.
That was your mistake.
Not loving too deeply this time. Not Valarr. Not Keira’s shadow. Not duty mistaken for devotion.
Only loneliness mistaking quiet for safety.
And because loneliness, once given a sympathetic face, grew greedy, you told her more.
Not all at once. Never all at once. Sorrow did not spill so easily from you anymore. It came in fragments while she unpinned your sleeves, while she folded gowns, while she brushed your hair before the fire. Small offerings first, the sort that seemed harmless enough once spoken aloud.
You told Jeyne that you dreaded great hall suppers because the watching had become unbearable. The glances. The soft smiles. The way every woman seemed to count how much you ate and every man seemed to look at your belly as if it belonged more to lineage than to you.
You told her that some days the pregnancy felt less like joy than like carrying a jewel through a room full of men who thought it theirs to appraise.
You told her that Kiera unsettled you not because she was cruel, but because she was honest in ways that left bruises. That she had a talent for saying only a little and leaving the wound to deepen on its own after.
You told her you could not decide whether your pity for the woman made you nobler or only more pathetic.
The room would be dim when some of these things were said, the candles guttering low, the fire collapsed into red coals, the shadows deep in the corners. Outside, servants passed in the corridor and their soft footfalls went by like thoughts one did not want to keep. Within, it would be only the brush moving through your hair, the rustle of linen, the quiet of women after dark, and the dangerous ease of being heard.
You told her, in an hour of greater weakness, that Prince Daeron was easier company than most courtiers because he spoke as though he did not expect women to pretend before him. You told her he asked strange questions and gave stranger answers. That he looked at people too directly when sober and too knowingly when drunk, and that both could be unsettling in their own fashion.
You told her, foolishly, fatally, about Lucan.
Not all of it at once. Not the old childish promise beneath the stair-arch. Not the summer heat at the Rock with a carved lion pressed into a boy’s hand. Not the whole shape of that softer, smaller grief. But enough.
That there had once been a red-cloak from the west who remembered the girl you had been before marriage turned you into use and title and careful silence.
That he had looked at you once in a corridor and said you looked tired, and no prince in King’s Landing had asked you that in earnest in a very long while.
That part of you hated yourself for how much such a small kindness could still wound.
Jeyne had listened with damp eyes and soft sympathy. She never reached too far. Never pressed too hard. She only held the silences properly when they came and answered in the small, understanding ways that made a lonely woman foolish.
And you, in your stupidity, had thought she was keeping your heart for you a little while.
The signs came one by one.
At first they were small enough to excuse, if you were minded to excuse them. A passing remark. A question too timely by half. The sort of thing a wife might once have mistaken for attentiveness and treasured like a starving woman making a meal of crumbs. The first time, Valarr only remarked, while fastening a clasp at his wrist before the fire, “Do not wear the sea-green today. It makes you look wan.”
You looked up sharply, though he had already lowered his eyes again to his sleeve.
Another evening, with no lead into it at all, he asked, “Has the smell of rosemary ceased troubling you?”
Your throat tightened.
A week later, after you had confessed in private that the silence after the children were abed had become the worst hour of the day, he said over supper, while Aelor chattered about a carved wooden horse and Baelon, sticky with stewed apple, was trying to feed the hound beneath the table, “You may take your evening meal privately more often if the great hall tires you.”
Another time, in a chamber full of courtiers and candle-smoke, with pages moving quietly between the tables and old men talking over their cups of wine, he had a western musician brought in, a narrow-faced greybeard with silver in his beard, who played a sea-song from Lannisport your mother used to hum beneath her breath when the winds off the Sunset Sea ran high. The first notes struck you like a hand closing hard about your throat. You turned to Valarr in startled pain, and he only said, “You seemed homesick lately.”
Homesick.
You had used that very word to Jeyne.
Each thing alone might have passed for thoughtfulness.
Together, they became a net.
It was not merely your gowns, or your appetite, or the herbs in your broth.
It was Daeron too.
One afternoon Valarr said, too casually, “You spend a fair deal of time in the west gallery these days.”
You stilled. “Do I?”
“With my cousin.”
The words were neutral. That frightened you more than anger would have.
“He speaks of dreams,” you said.
Valarr’s mouth changed. It was no more than that, a slight hardening, a minute shift at the corners, but you saw it. “And what do you speak of?”
There it was.
The shape of another woman’s ears between you.
That night you lay awake with one hand over your belly while cold understanding crept through you inch by inch, like winter finding the cracks in stone. Beside you Valarr slept heavily, one arm flung loose across the blanket, his face turned toward the dark as if rest had always come easily to him. You stared up into the black rafters above the bed and felt the truth settling into you with a chill so deep it seemed to reach the child itself.
He had not learned you.
He had learned around you.
He had set another woman close enough to hear the things he still did not know how to ask with his own mouth.
And still you may have lied to yourself a little longer, had he not spoken of Lucan.
It happened in the dressing chamber.
Jeyne had just finished hooking the back of your crimson gown, the velvet too tight now through the breasts, the weight of it dragging at your shoulders until you had laughed bitterly and told her it made you feel like some brood mare dressed for display. The mirrors caught candlelight and dimly reflected it back over the chamber. The air smelled of beeswax, brushed silk, and the faint sweet smoke from the brazier. You had gone out to the evening room afterward with your face composed and your jewels in place, and Valarr, seated with a parchment in his hand and the fire at his back, had looked up only briefly before saying, “That gown is a poor choice. Wear the dark gold instead. The crimson sits badly on you now.”
The room did not spin.
It only went very still.
Then, because perhaps he had already gone too far in his own thoughts to stop, he set the parchment aside and said, in that same measured tone, “Was Lucan the knight you spoke to when your father’s retinue was here? The westerman with the red cloak.”
You looked at him.
He had not asked before. Not when Lucan had bowed over your hand in the yard. Not when he had spoken to you in the corridor with that old softness of the Rock still clinging to him like the smell of sun-warmed stone. Not when Valarr had watched from a distance with that unreadable face of his.
Your silence seemed to answer more than words might have.
Valarr’s gaze sharpened.
“So it was.”
“He is nothing to you,” you said quietly, though your heart had already begun to pound.
“To me?” His laugh was short and joyless. “No. To me he is nothing.”
He rose then, folding the parchment once in his hand before setting it aside altogether. Firelight moved over the hard planes of his face, caught in the silver-white of his hair, turned one side of him to bronze and left the other in shadow. There was something in him now that had not been there when he first spoke. Not rage exactly. Something meaner for being held in so tightly.
“But he is not nothing to you.”
You stared at him.
Valarr took one step closer. “You think of him.”
Something hot and humiliated rose in your chest. “And how would you know that?”
His jaw tightened.
That told you enough.
For a long moment neither of you spoke. The fire shifted behind him. Somewhere in the passage beyond the chamber a servant hurried by and the faint soft echo of their steps was swallowed by stone.
Then he said, quieter now and somehow more dangerous for it, “You are my wife, are you not?”
The words struck like a slap.
You felt your spine go very straight.
“There is no reason,” he continued, each word too controlled, “for you to be keeping another man in your thoughts.”
You laughed then, but there was no warmth in it. It was a small, breaking sound, too wounded to be called amusement.
“Jealous?” you asked. “Of whom?”
Valarr’s jaw tightened. “Do not mock me.”
“I am not mocking you.” Your eyes burned now, but you would not look away. “I am astonished.”
The fire cracked softly behind him. Somewhere beyond the chamber door, footsteps passed and faded. The whole room felt too still, as if even the walls were listening.
“You are astonished,” he repeated.
“Yes.” Your voice sharpened. “Because I have been loyal to you in thought, in body, in all the miserable little ways that matter when no one is looking, and still you stand there speaking to me as if I have wronged you.”
He took a step toward you. “You said yourself that man is not nothing.”
“He is not my husband.”
That stopped him.
You were breathing too hard now. You hated that he could see it, hated more that your hands had begun to tremble.
Valarr took another step, slower this time, and lifted a hand as if to touch you, perhaps your wrist, perhaps your face. You stared at it, then at him, and gave a short, disbelieving laugh that hurt your own throat.
“Really?” you asked. “Now?”
His hand stopped in the air.
For one suspended heartbeat he did not move. Then, slowly, he let it fall.
That hurt him. You saw that it did. You did not care. Or rather, you cared too much, and that was the misery of it.
“I love you,” you said, and the words came out angrier than tenderness had any right to sound. “You foolish, fucking man, I love you.”
Valarr went utterly still.
You laughed again, and this time there were tears in it.
“Do you think I would have done all this for duty alone?”
His face changed, but you did not let him speak.
“I learned you, Valarr. I learned the look on your face when you are holding back laughter. I learned your dry little jests, the ones no one else notices because they come too late and too quiet. I learned how you pretend not to care for songs and yet always listen when the good ones are played badly.” Your breath caught. “I learned how you read with one hand against your mouth when something truly holds you. I learned how you go softer with the boys when you think no one sees. I learned which wine you reach for in winter, which books you favor when troubled, how you stand when you are angry, how you go silent when you are hurt.”
He stared at you as though he had never seen you before.
“And you are not lacking,” you said, more quietly now, which was somehow worse. “You are not some failed knight or lesser man. You show up for our sons again and again. You are the picture of what a father and an heir ought to be. You are not faulted in every way. You are clever, honorable, careful, and good in more ways than you seem to understand.” Your voice shook. “You only fail where feeling is concerned. That is the tragedy of you.”
Still he said nothing.
“And I admired you,” you went on, your tears falling freely now. “Gods help me, I admired you. I admired the way you carry duty as though it weighs nothing, even when it is bowing your whole back. I admired how clever you are beneath all that silence. I admired how careful you can be with our sons. I admired how you keep showing up for them, every day, whether anyone praises you for it or not. I admired you when there was hardly enough tenderness from you to live on, and still I admired you.”
Valarr swallowed hard. “Do not.”
You stared at him. “Do not what?”
“Do not say these things,” he said, and his voice had gone rough with something close to panic. “Not like this.”
“Why?” The word came out sharp. “Because now you must hear them?”
His mouth opened. Closed again.
You wiped angrily at your cheek, but more tears followed.
“So do not stand there and speak to me of another man,” you whispered. “Do not make me answer for scraps of kindness or old ghosts when all I have ever done is love you with more patience than you ever deserved.”
Valarr opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
“If I had wanted someone else,” you said, “I would not be standing here half-broken from trying to be enough for you.”
That landed.
You saw it land.
He took another half-step, as if some part of him still meant to reach for you, still thought perhaps he might close the space between you if only he moved carefully enough. This time you stepped back.
Not far.
Only enough.
But he saw it.
Gods, he saw it.
And the look that passed across his face then was almost worse than anger. It was the look of a man arriving late to a wound and finding it closed against him.
“The misery of it,” you said, because some cruel part of love always wanted to be understood even after it had been wounded, “is not that you think I could love another man.”
Your voice shook.
“It is that I loved you so plainly, and you still did not know.”
The silence after that was terrible.
Because that was the truth. If he had been openly vile and openly disloyal, perhaps hatred would have come more easily. But Valarr’s cruelty had always been of the quieter kind, the kind that could hide inside decency and still leave bruises no one else ever saw.
By the time Jeyne came to unpin your hair that night, your face had settled into something pale and composed and almost aristocratically blank, as though women were not betrayed every day in quieter ways than adultery.
At last you said, “Stay.”
Jeyne’s fingers stilled.
“Ellyn,” you said to the older maid in the doorway, “take the boys to the painted gallery. Let them see the dragons.”
Ellyn looked from you to Jeyne and, because she had known you since the wedding day and the sound of your voice had changed, bowed at once and withdrew.
When the chamber had emptied, you turned in your chair.
Jeyne was already pale.
“How long?” you asked.
“My lady?”
“If my husband wished to know me,” you said softly, “he ought to have done it to my face. How long?”
Tears rose in her eyes at once.
That angered you more than if she had stood dry-eyed. It meant she had perhaps come to care for you at all. It made the thing fouler.
“He only asked after your health at first,” she whispered. “Whether you were eating. Whether you slept. Whether the sickness worsened.”
“You reported my gowns.”
She swallowed. “He feared you would not tell him what was wrong.”
You stared at her.
That answer hurt most of all.
Not malice. Not spite. Not some neat little household treachery for coin.
Only this.
Valarr, too proud and too helpless in feeling, had done what he always did. Reached for control where tenderness was required.
“I thought,” you said after a long moment, “that you were sent to comfort me.”
“I was,” she said, crying now. “Truly, my lady. I only, he asked, and he is the prince, and I.”
“You were sent to supervise me.”
“No.”
Your voice did not rise. That frightened her more.
“Did you tell him of Daeron?”
She covered her mouth.
You felt something inside yourself go very still.
“Did you tell him of Lucan?”
Her silence answered faster than speech could have.
You closed your eyes.
“Did you tell him what I said of Lady Kiera?”
“My lady, I only said you pitied her, and that you feared offending her, and that you thought.”
You opened your eyes.
“What I thought,” you repeated.
Jeyne sank to her knees.
“I am sorry.”
You looked at her for a long time. Your fingers, almost of their own accord, had gone to the little lion token you still kept tucked away among your things, worn smooth by years and by the pressure of your own hand. You held it now as if it might anchor you, the blunted little ear pressing into your palm.
When you spoke again, your voice was no colder than before. If anything, that gentleness made the scene crueler still.
“Do you know what is worst in this?”
She shook her head, tears slipping down her face.
“That I have so little.” You swallowed. “So very little that is only mine. My three women, my children, a few corners of this castle where I can still breathe, and I asked almost nothing of you but honesty.”
Her mouth trembled.
“I do not begrudge you your bread,” you said softly. “Nor your safety. I will not be the cause of your dismissal. I will not make pain for you because I have been given more than enough of my own.”
At that, Ellyn, who had not gone far and had come back silent as a shadow, turned her face away. Myria’s eyes had filled. Ysilla stood like carved stone, but her hands were white where they clasped one another.
Because they understood then too.
Not only that Jeyne had betrayed you, but that some wall had gone up inside you with the knowing of it.
“I would not have taken your place from you,” you said. “I would not even have hated you, had you only been honest with me.”
Jeyne bowed lower, weeping.
“I do not want an apology,” you said. “It will not mend the thing itself.”
“My lady, please.”
The plea broke on a sob.
You brushed one tear away from your own cheek with your thumb, almost absently, as though even that small tenderness must now be done for yourself.
“You may keep your place,” you said. “Continue your service. If my husband wishes to know things of me through you, then let him hear them plainly.” Your fingers tightened around the little lion. “If he asks what he wishes to know, you will tell me, and I will answer plainly. There is no reason for me to hide anything from him now.”
Jeyne made a broken sound.
More quietly, almost as if speaking to yourself, you said, “I am his wife. He is owed the knowledge of me.”
Then, after a long moment, you said the thing that wounded her worst precisely because it was so gentle.
“But please stay away from me.”
Jeyne covered her mouth and bowed until her forehead nearly touched the floor.
The other women said nothing.
They did not need to.
They knew. You knew. Jeyne knew.
Something had ended in that room, and no apology would raise it again.
A knock came then, careful and light.
Myria opened the door a crack. “My lady? The prince asks whether the boys are ready. He means to take them to the river terrace to see the fishing nets drawn.”
Of course.
Of course the world still required cloaks and shoes and little princely hands washed clean.
You rose slowly. Jeyne still knelt at your feet.
“Now my husband wants the boys,” you said. “Please prepare their things.”
Then you stepped past her.
Only in the empty turn of the corridor did you stop with one hand braced to the wall because your eyes had blurred at last. The stone was cold beneath your palm. From below came the faint sound of boys laughing somewhere in the yard, unaware of the small death that had just taken place above them.
You did not go to Valarr.
That was the important thing.
In other years, in other hurts, some part of you would have gone to him even then, gone trembling and foolish and still somehow hoping that if only he understood the wound he might finally gather it in and make it smaller.
Not now.
Now your feet carried you elsewhere.
You found Prince Daeron where one most often found him when he wished not to be found, in an old gallery off Maegor’s Holdfast, where dust lay thick in the corners and the narrow windows let in bars of late gold light that turned the floating motes to fire. The place smelled of cold stone, old vellum, and the wine he wore like a second shadow. The walls were close and high, built for defense rather than beauty, yet age had made a kind of melancholy grace of them. The mortar was cracked in places, the tapestries long since removed, and only a faded painted border of dragons remained near the ceiling, half lost to soot and years. Somewhere beyond the wall a rook called from a parapet, harsh and lonely. The sound echoed thinly through the passage like something unanswered.
Daeron lifted his head at the sound of your step.
“My lady cousin,” he said.
You had always been startled by how kind he could sound when no one else was listening. In hall or feast or yard he was too often careless, too often laughing too sharply or drinking too freely, wearing mockery the way some men wore mail. But here, with the light falling sideways across his face and the cup loose in one hand, there was no performance in him at all. He looked at you only once, properly and not politely, and something in his expression shifted at once.
“Ah,” he said quietly. “Today is not a day for lies.”
It was such a Daeron thing to say that, had you been even a little less miserable, you might have smiled.
Instead you crossed the room and sat opposite him with less grace than you would once have allowed yourself. The bench was hard beneath you. A draft came down some hidden stair and touched the nape of your neck. For a little while neither of you spoke. The late light striped the floor red and gold. Dust drifted through it. In the distance a door closed somewhere in the keep, and the sound went hollow through the stone.
At last you said, “I thought I had made a friend.”
Daeron drank, because he was Daeron and because the cup had become part of the way he sat with human sorrow. He tipped it back only once, then lowered it to his knee and looked at the floor between you.
“In this castle?” he asked after a moment. “That was brave.”
A laugh broke from you then, thin and too close to crying. It was not much of a laugh, only the sad little shape of one, but it seemed to pain him more than if you had wept outright.
He let the silence sit a while longer. Then he asked, “Was it your husband?”
You looked at him in surprise.
He gave one shoulder a slight lift. “It usually is, where highborn women are concerned.”
You looked down at your hands, clasped too tightly in your lap. “He gave me another maid for the child.”
“And instead gave you another pair of eyes.”
“Yes.”
Daeron’s mouth twisted. “Valarr means well in the manner of men who were raised by command.”
You nearly laughed again. “That is a very neat cruelty.”
“It is also true.”
The wind scraped faintly at the casement. Somewhere deeper in the holdfast voices passed, low and indistinct, then faded. Daeron sat with his cup and his old book open across one knee, and for a strange moment the quiet of the place felt almost merciful, as if the stone itself had agreed to keep what was said there.
Then, because the wound was open and because Daeron was strange enough to let truth in through the side door, he asked, “What did she hear?”
“Everything.”
He waited.
You swallowed. “My preferences. My sleeplessness. My worries about the child. My fear of Lady Kiera. My talks with you.”
That made his brows rise.
“And Lucan,” you whispered.
Daeron looked at you more sharply then.
“The red-cloak from the Rock?”
You stared. “You know of him?”
He gave a soft, humorless snort. “I know of many things people assume I am too drunk to notice.”
Your face heated despite your misery. He saw it and did not press. That was one of the strange kindnesses in him. He knew when to speak and when to let silence do the gentler work.
After a moment he said, with surprising softness, “Tell me.”
You did not know why you obeyed. Perhaps because he had already heard so much of your grief in fragments that this only felt like giving the thing its proper outline at last. Perhaps because he looked at you as though he wanted the truth rather than the performance of it.
So you told him.
Not all of Lucan. Not every childish promise. Not the whole secret shape of that smaller, sadder longing. But enough. That there had once been a boy at the Rock with wind-burnt cheeks and a wooden sword and a way of looking at you as though your silences were worth waiting through. That you had given him a small carved lion with one blunted ear. That years later he had stood in a crimson cloak beneath slanting light and spoken to you like the girl you had been rather than the arrangement you had become.
Daeron listened without interruption. He did not smile. He did not mock. He only turned the cup slowly in his hand, his thumb moving once along the stem as though he were thinking through something too delicate to handle roughly.
When you finished, he said, “And did you love him?”
“No,” you said, quieter now. “Not as one loves a husband. I was very young, and I had not yet learned how hard this world could be. Perhaps in another life, one gentler than this, it might have become something more. But I do not think I should like to reach into that imagined life and steal it from whatever self of mine was allowed to keep it.”
Daeron’s expression softened in a way you had not expected.
“That is not sin,” he said.
You looked at him. “No?”
“No.” He glanced down at the cup and back again. “It is only grief with a face on it.”
That struck you silent.
Then, because he was Daeron and could not remain wholly solemn for long without seeming to feel foolish in his own skin, he added, “Besides, if all we counted as infidelity was imagining kinder spouses, half the marriages in King’s Landing would collapse before breakfast.”
That startled a real laugh out of you.
He looked absurdly pleased, though he tried to hide it behind the cup.
After that, the friendship deepened.
Not scandalously. Not in any way a singer might set to harp and call romance. Nothing so simple, and nothing so easy to condemn. It deepened in the quiet, dangerous manner by which two lonely people grew used to being honestly seen. Sometimes you found him there in the old gallery. Sometimes in a dusty little solar with a narrow fire and a shelf of cracked books no one else bothered with. Sometimes in the west gallery when the light was turning and the windows cast long pale bars across the floor. A prince and a prince’s wife, speaking of things that ought perhaps to have been too strange or too intimate for easy conversation, yet somehow were not.
You asked him of dreams.
He asked you whether the court still praised endurance as though it were joy.
You asked what red smoke meant.
He answered, “Sometimes blood. Sometimes forge-heat. Sometimes warning. Sometimes only fire before a hatching.”
You asked him once, very softly, “What is it to know something dreadful is coming and be unable to prevent it?”
He considered for a long while, his gaze on the light turning amber in his cup. “Very tiring,” he said at last.
Another time, when you confessed that you feared Lady Kiera thought ill of you, he answered, “She thinks ill of fate, of herself, of the gods, of the narrowness of women’s lives, and of my father’s bloodline by turns. You rank nowhere near so high.”
You smiled despite yourself.
That, too, was one of his gifts. Not comfort, exactly. He did not speak the soft, easy lies women were so often handed in place of truth. But he had a way of making sorrow feel less singular, less shameful. He spoke as if pain were a thing one might examine by candlelight rather than merely endure in silence, and there was mercy in that.
In time you came to understand that he was lonelier than anyone at court truly knew. The mockery that clung to him, the drink, the prophecy, the odd sharp humor, all of it had made him easy to dismiss. Yet beneath those things there was a tiredness in him that answered something tired in you. He had been misunderstood so long he no longer seemed to expect understanding, which made his gratitude for it all the more painful to witness. And you, who had spent years trying to make yourself smaller, gentler, easier to keep, found in his company the strange relief of not having to pretend that you were not hurting.
It was not love.
That would have been simpler, in its way. Easier to name. Easier to condemn.
It was something far more dangerous to lonely people. It was recognition.
By your sixth month, the friendship had become a fact of the castle, though not yet one anyone named aloud. If anyone saw you in the long west gallery with Daeron bent over some worm-eaten text on dragon dreams, they thought perhaps the pregnant princess sought novelty, or distraction, or some harmless learned pastime to fill the slower hours of her confinement. If anyone noticed that the prince men mocked for drinking too much had grown soberer in your presence, or that you smiled more after such talks than you did after whole evenings beside your husband, they kept it behind their teeth. Castles lived on such observations. They were built of stone, secrets, and the discipline of knowing when not to speak.
Prince Maekar did not.
Maekar noticed everything. He only spoke on half of it.
He saw Daeron leave one of the old solars with you at his side, your maids gathering themselves and walking a few respectful paces behind after allowing their lady the privacy due her, and he saw that your face was less shuttered than usual. He saw, too, the way his eldest son, his impossible, dream-haunted, often-drunken eldest son, turned his head slightly toward you when you spoke, not with the softness of a man courting a woman, but with an attentiveness no less intimate for being chaste. It was the look of a man listening not merely to words, but to the spirit beneath them. Maekar had not seen him grant that many people at all.
And because he was Maekar, and because his first instinct in all troubled matters was caution before mercy, he worried.
Not because he truly believed you dishonorable.
That was the uncomfortable part.
No. What unsettled him was that he did not believe you were cheating, and yet some intimacy clearly existed all the same, one the court might choose to name foul whether or not it was. Courts did not require sin to ruin a woman. They required only closeness, loneliness, and someone willing to speak the uglier version of a harmless truth.
So one evening, after a feast had thinned and the candles burned lower beneath the painted dragons of the hall, Maekar spoke first to Daeron. The boards were sticky in places with spilled wine. Servants moved between the trestles clearing trenchers and bones. Farther down the hall, some lesser lord was still laughing too loudly at something no one else had found worth hearing. The smoke from the wall torches clung beneath the rafters in a faint dark haze.
“What business have you so often with your cousin’s wife?”
Daeron, already two cups in and therefore perversely clearer than most sober men, looked at his father with open annoyance. “Conversation.”
Maekar’s face did not move. “Do not try my patience.”
Daeron gave a low, bitter laugh. “You might try patience with me once, Father. It would be novel.”
Maekar’s mouth tightened.
Then Daeron, perhaps because he knew mockery would only worsen things, said more quietly, “She asks of dreams.”
“And that requires half the galleries in the castle?”
“It requires someone who does not treat me as though prophecy were either a jest or a sickness.”
That silenced Maekar more than anger would have. He knew enough of storms to recognize one, and Daeron had been living inside a storm for years. Maekar was a man bred to meet weather with steel in hand and his feet planted firm, to ride through rain, through battle, through grief, and come out on the far side bloodied perhaps, but standing. Yet even he could not wholly deny that a storm might leave damage behind even when it did not kill. Roofs held. Trees remained rooted. Men survived. But the earth was changed after. So too with Daeron. The boy had lived through dragon dreams, through prophecy, through the haunting knowledge of things half-seen and half-understood, and if he wore the bruise of it strangely, in wine and bitterness and laughter too sharp by half, still the bruise remained. It was easy for harder men to call such wounds weakness. Harder still to admit that the mind, once riven by enough fear and foreknowledge, did not always mend cleanly.
Maekar looked hard at his eldest son. Daeron met the stare with tired steadiness.
“And she,” Daeron said after a moment, “is kind enough to try and understand what even her betters cannot be troubled to.”
That night Maekar said nothing further.
But the thought followed him.
A few days later he crossed paths with you alone in the outer walk above the inner yard. The day was all pale wind and thin autumn light. The sky hung white as old wool overhead. Your veil stirred where the breeze caught at it, and one hand rested at the small of your back while the other lay over the roundness of your belly, not protectively, but with the absent heaviness of a woman long accustomed now to bearing life beneath her ribs. Below, your sons were with a nurse and two pages, all bright hair and shrill delight, darting in and out of the watery sunlight like little banners come loose from their poles. Daeron was nowhere in sight.
Maekar stopped.
You curtsied as much as the child allowed. “Prince Maekar.”
“My lady.”
For a moment he only looked at you.
You were beautiful, yes. Any fool could see that. But beauty had nothing to do with what unsettled him now. It was the tiredness in you. The effort. The strange quiet dignity with which you seemed to go on carrying both hurt and child and expectation without turning bitter enough to poison the whole castle. Most people mistook silence for peace. Maekar was not most people. He knew the difference between calm and endurance.
At length he asked, blunt as ever, “Why do you spend so much time with my son?”
You did not pretend not to know which one he meant.
“Because he is lonely,” you said.
Maekar stared.
Then, because you had already been too honest to retreat, you added, “And because he is kinder than people allow him to seem when they are not making sport of him.”
Maekar’s face did not soften. But something in his gaze altered, however slightly.
“You are very sure of that.”
“No.” A faint smile touched your mouth and vanished. “Only willing to listen long enough to learn it.”
He looked away then, out across the yard where Aelor had climbed up on the low edge of the fountain and the nurse was already hurrying toward him in alarm. “Do you think yourself equal to the task?”
You followed his gaze to where your sons ran beneath the open sky, their laughter carrying upward through the cold like little bells.
“No,” you said. “But I think trying matters.”
That answer stayed with him.
Later still, in a chamber off the council rooms where the air smelled of wax, old parchment, and damp wool drying before the fire, Maekar said to Prince Baelor, “That girl is trying very hard.”
Baelor looked up from the report in his hands.
The room was a narrow one for princes, crowded by shelves and chests and a long table half-buried beneath maps, sealed letters, and the bones of some meal long gone cold. A fire muttered low in the hearth, doing more to redden the chamber than to warm it. Outside, the keep went on about them in muffled sounds, boots on steps, a distant latch falling shut, the faint call of a guard changing watch beyond the wall. Candlelight trembled over parchment and steel and the strong planes of Baelor’s face, catching in the first threads of grey at his temples. He was dressed as simply as ever, dark wool, plain leather, no needless ornament, yet even seated he had that same grave weight about him, the stillness of a man other men yielded space to without knowing they had done it.
Maekar, who did not often admit fault because fault admitted in princes became weakness all too easily, went on in the flat voice of a man forcing honesty through his teeth.
“I do not say she is without danger. Courts will make danger of anything. But I think we were wrong to take her measure so early, and so poorly.”
Baelor sat very still.
Maekar frowned at him. “Do not look so stricken. I only say what is there.”
For a moment Baelor did not answer. He folded the parchment once, then again, too carefully. His broken nose cast a harder shadow in the candlelight. At last he said, quietly, “I know.”
Maekar leaned one hand upon the table. “She makes an effort where more arrogant women would have given up. She is gentle with the boys. She has patience enough for Daeron, which is more than can be said for half our blood. She has borne Valarr’s failings more quietly than he deserves.” He let out a breath through his nose, harsh and brief. “Hard thing to admit, but I think we made a mistake in losing the girl inside the lady before we ever truly got to know her.”
For once Baelor had no ready princely phrase to smooth the edge of it.
He only looked down at his hands.
Because he knew it too.
He had seen you standing at the edge of Targaryen conversation, smiling with your hands folded while old blood spoke around you as though you were furniture in your own marriage. He had seen how carefully you managed the children, the household, the court, and the tempers of everyone but yourself. He had called you dutiful because it was easy. Quiet because it was useful. Good because goodness was convenient in women. It had pleased him, in some thoughtless and practical part of himself, that his son’s wife was not troublesome, not vain, not loud, not difficult in the ways great ladies so often were when unhappy.
And all the while he had missed the cost of it.
That was the part that sat ill in him.
Baelor was a man used to seeing clearly. Men trusted his judgment because it was usually worth trusting. He could read a battlefield at a glance, measure another knight by the seat of him in the saddle, tell when a bannerman lied, when a levy would break, when mercy would bind a foe more tightly than fear. He had made a life of being right in the moments that mattered.
And yet he had looked on a lonely girl doing her utmost not to fail his son, and had mistaken her effort for ease.
He had seen your quiet and thought it peace. Seen your grace and thought it nature. Seen your patience and thought it endless. Worse, he had seen the Lannister gold, the useful match, the beauty, the sons already at your skirts, and let all of that stand in place of understanding. A prince’s daughter by marriage, a great lord’s child, a fortunate alliance, a wife who caused no scandal. It had all seemed enough.
Now it seemed a poor and ugly arithmetic.
“We paid for in gold,” Baelor said at last, almost to himself.
Maekar said nothing.
Baelor’s hand tightened once upon the folded parchment. “And thought that explained everything.”
The words seemed to darken the room.
For a little while neither man spoke. The fire shifted. A coal broke with a soft red sigh. Somewhere outside in the passage a pair of servants passed in low conversation, their voices fading almost as soon as they were heard.
Baelor stared into the hearth, but what he saw was not flame.
He saw you as he had first seen you at court, bright-haired, soft-spoken, too composed for a girl so new to dragonstone halls and Targaryen tempers. He saw all the times he had mistaken your carefulness for confidence. All the moments he had accepted your smile and not troubled to wonder what effort it cost. He saw you standing a half-step too far from the center of a conversation, never interrupting, never demanding, learning and learning and learning the shape of a family that had never once thought to learn yours in return.
He saw, too, his son.
Valarr, dutiful and honorable and blind in the places where blindness did the greatest harm.
And for perhaps the first time, Baelor felt not only disappointment in the match, nor concern, nor even princely regret, but something sharper and more personal.
Shame.
Not the loud sort. Not the kind that made men confess or fall to their knees.
Only the hard, bitter knowledge that a just man could still fail someone thoroughly while never once meaning to.
“She was young,” Baelor said at last, and his voice had gone lower than before. “We brought her here among strangers, and dragons, and old griefs that were not hers. We asked her to smile, to bear sons, to offend no one, to fit herself to us so neatly that we need never feel the edges.” His gaze remained on the fire. “And when she did it, we praised her for being easy.”
Maekar’s silence was answer enough.
Baelor gave one short, humorless breath, not quite a laugh. “Gods.”
That one word carried more weight than any curse.
Because the true wound of it was plain now. You had not failed them.
They had failed you first, and so quietly none of them had thought to call it failing at all.
At length Maekar said, “There may yet be time.”
Baelor lifted his head then, and whatever lay in his face was too tired to be hope.
“For what?” he asked.
The question was simple. The grief in it was not.
Maekar did not answer at once.
For men like them, time had always seemed a thing that could be ridden down, commanded, spent wisely, won back by action and strength and sufficient will. But houses were not battlefields, and hearts did not mend because a prince had finally decided they ought.
Baelor looked back into the fire.
By then he knew enough to fear that the great mistake had already been made, not in some single cruelty that might be named and atoned for, but in a hundred smaller neglects. In all the times you had tried and no one had noticed the trying. In all the times your goodness had been taken for granted because it came so softly. In all the years his son had been given a woman who might have loved him down to the bone, and had answered that devotion with duty, silence, and the kind of injury decent men did not even know they were capable of inflicting.
When Baelor spoke again, it was so quiet the fire nearly swallowed it.
“I think,” he said, “that by the time a man learns the worth of what was given him, he has too often already taught it how to live without him.”
This time, Maekar had nothing to say at all.
By the time Kiera spoke plainly to you, the leaves had begun to brown at the edges and the first true coolness of autumn was in the air.
You found her in the queen’s garden at dusk, beneath a pear tree gone nearly bare. The branches above her were thin and black against the dimming sky, with only a few curled leaves still clinging stubbornly to them. The last of the evening light had gone soft and grey. It caught faintly on the gravel paths, on the clipped hedges, on the marble rim of a dry fountain streaked green with age. Somewhere beyond the garden walls, a bell sounded from the keep, low and distant. The smell of damp earth and bruised herbs rose when the wind stirred. Kiera stood very still in Tyroshi blue that made her look colder than ivory, and there were shadows beneath her eyes no jewels could hide.
“You have been speaking often with my husband,” she said.
There was no accusation in it at first. That made it worse.
You stood with one gloved hand over the roundness of your belly, where the child shifted slow and heavy beneath silk. The movement was small, but you felt it all the same, a private tug inside your body. “We speak of dreams.”
Kiera’s mouth twisted. “Then he has told you more than he tells me.”
The sadness in that was too naked to answer.
You looked at her properly then, and all at once your old jealous dislike had to make room for something rougher and more uncomfortable. She looked tired. Not feast-tired. Not court-tired. Bone-tired. The sort of tiredness grief laid into a woman and never wholly withdrew. Even her stillness seemed heavy with it.
“Has he not?” you asked quietly.
Kiera looked away toward the hedge. The wind worried one loose strand of dark hair against her cheek. For a long moment she said nothing. Then, with the flatness of something repeated too often to still draw blood on the speaking of it, she said, “I have conceived three times.”
The whole garden seemed to still.
“None lived,” she went on. “Not long enough to be named. Not long enough for the court to remember after.”
Your throat closed.
She laughed once. Ugly and brief. “They whisper, of course. Some unions are fruitful. Some are not. Some brides are favored. Some are merely decorative.”
You had no answer fit for that. The gravel path, the dark hedges, the dying light, it all seemed suddenly too sharp, too close. You only stood there with your hand over your child and your pity rising like shame.
Kiera looked then, not at your face, but at your belly.
“I do not hate you,” she said at last. “I thought perhaps I might. It would have been simpler.”
You swallowed. “I never wished…”
“No. I know.” Her voice sharpened, though not with anger so much as weariness worn raw. “That is part of the misery.”
She glanced away again, toward the keep looming dark beyond the garden wall. When she spoke next, her voice had gone quieter, and stranger for it. “Whatever lived between Valarr and me is gone.”
You did not breathe.
She gave the faintest shrug, but it looked less like carelessness than surrender. “He buried it as men bury many things, by saying nothing and going on. Poorly, perhaps. Clumsily, certainly. But he buried it.”
The words landed harder than if she had wept.
Kiera looked back at you, and there was something almost cruel in her honesty, though cruelty was not what she meant. “Do not comfort yourself with ghosts, my lady. He is not mine to lose. Not now.” Her gaze flicked once more to your belly, then away. “Whatever else he has failed to do, whatever tenderness he has denied you, whatever blindness he wraps himself in like armor, he is bound to you. To your sons. To the life already built around him. He may wear that bond badly, but he has not slipped it.”
Your fingers tightened against the silk over your child.
It was not the thing you had expected her to say. Not balm. Not accusation. Not even rivalry. Something colder than all of those, and harder to bear.
Kiera’s mouth thinned. “Do not think I am praising him.”
“I did not,” you said, though your voice came out smaller than you liked.
“No.” Her expression did not change. “I thought not.”
The wind moved through the garden again, and the last leaves above you whispered together like dry paper. Somewhere a servant crossed a far arcade with a lantern, the light bobbing briefly through the dark before vanishing behind stone.
Then, after a pause, Kiera said more quietly, “Do not think the gods love you merely because they permit you to keep what they denied me. Gods are not so simple.”
She left you with that.
You watched her go, her blue skirts passing between the hedges like the last color of evening sinking out of the world. For a long while after she was gone, you did not move. The child stirred once beneath your hand, and all at once the garden felt too large, too empty, too cold for the smallness of your own breathing.
That night, when Daeron found you in one of the old solars with the painted dragons on the ceiling gone smoke-dim with age, he took one look at your face and did not bother with courtesy.
“She told you.”
“Yes.”
The room was half-dark, lit only by a low fire and three candles guttering in their brass cups. The painted beasts above had once been vivid, red and black and gold, but years of smoke had dimmed them into ghosts. Dust clung in the corners. The air smelled of ash, old vellum, and the wine Daeron had set down near his hand. Outside the narrow window the night had come on fully.
He poured wine into a second cup, then remembered and set it aside untouched.
For a long while you sat with the fire burning low. It snapped softly now and then, and each little sound seemed too loud in the quiet. Daeron did not press. That was one of the strange mercies in him. He let sorrow speak at its own pace.
At length you asked, “Did you love them?”
Daeron stared into the flames. Their light moved over his face and caught in the hollow beneath his eyes. “The children? Or the hopes?”
You shut your eyes. “That answers me.”
He drank.
Then, very softly, he said, “A man may mourn what he never held. There is no law against it.”
You turned your face aside. The words hurt because they were kind, and because they did not try to diminish anything.
Daeron watched you a moment longer, and when he spoke again his voice was low enough that it seemed made for the room and the hour and nothing beyond them.
“They call you blessed because they have never mistaken endurance for joy.”
That was the kindest thing anyone had said to you in months, and it felt, for that very reason, almost unbearable.
At seven months, he told you the dream.
You were in the west gallery, where the windows stood open just enough to let in air sharp enough to sting. Autumn had come properly by then. The light was thin and pale, the sort that made the stone look colder than it was. Below in the yard, Aelor and Baelon chased one another around the fountain, shrieking with laughter while a nurse and two pages failed nobly to keep them from soaking their hems and boots. Water flashed silver when their little shoes struck too near the edge. One page caught Aelor by the sleeve and lost him again at once. Baelon slipped, righted himself, and kept running with all the stubborn dignity of a child too young to accept defeat.
Valarr stood on the steps with one hand ready whenever Aelor went too near the stone lip. He did not smile often these days, yet he watched the boys with that grave, instinctive attentiveness fathers had, as though their bodies tugged some string in his own whether he willed it or no. Lately, he had begun to linger nearer whenever you sat in the galleries or solar rooms, especially if Daeron was there too. Not hovering, not quite. Not foolish enough now to forbid a comfort he had been too blind to provide himself. He would come with the boys, or find some reason to remain within call, joining you at times, withdrawing at others, as if he were trying to learn by instinct what the proper distance was and failing slightly no matter where he stood. It was an effort. You saw that. It only hurt that effort had come after so much else.
Still, he was trying.
Not gracefully. Not well. But truly.
The boys made it easier than either of you did. They climbed into your lap, tugged at Valarr’s sleeves, interrupted silences before they could grow sharp, and stitched the four of you together in those small domestic ways children had, heedless of the damage already done. Some days it almost felt natural. Others, the old soreness sat between you like an unseen third presence, quieter now, but not gone.
You had been smiling faintly at them when Daeron said, without warning, “I dreamt of your child.”
Every instinct in you stilled.
He sat with long fingers loose about the stem of a cup he was not drinking from. The wind lifted his pale hair and worried at the sleeves of his dark coat. The old book in his lap lay open and forgotten, its parchment leaves fluttering once in the draft before settling again. When you turned to him, the expression on his face was not drunkenness, not mockery, not even fear. It was something stranger and more solemn, the look of a man who had seen something in sleep that had followed him into waking and would not let go.
“What did you see?”
His mouth tightened. For a moment he only watched the boys below, as if their bright, careless little movements made what he meant to say harder. “A cradle lined in lion-red. A dragon egg inside it instead of a babe.” He swallowed once. “There was blood on linen. Women weeping. A golden-haired mother with her hands red to the wrists. Then the egg cracked. I heard a child cry, and something cried back.”
Your hand went to your belly of its own accord.
The child shifted beneath your palm, slow and heavy now, real enough to answer fear with movement. The stone bench beneath you felt suddenly too hard. The wind too cold. Somewhere down the length of the gallery, beyond the turn in the wall, a servant passed with folded linen in her arms, soft shoes whispering over the rushes, and even that small sound seemed too loud for the stillness that had come over you.
“Is it a bad dream?”
Daeron’s smile was strange and tired. “That is always the question, is it not? Men hear blood and think doom. Dreamers hear blood and think birth.”
He looked at you then, properly, and for all the oddness in him there was pity in that look. Not the soft, easy pity that sought to soothe. The grimmer kind. The kind that saw too much and did not lie about it.
“I do not think the child dies.”
You let out a breath you had not known you were holding.
“But I think,” he said very softly, “that the mother is very lonely.”
That nearly undid you more than the blood.
For a moment you could not answer. Below, Aelor shouted something triumphant as Baelon slipped on the wet stones and landed on his bottom with all the offended dignity of a prince twice his age. Valarr bent and hauled him back up one-handed. The nurse rushed in too late, scolding. The pages laughed under their breath. It was such an ordinary little scene, so bright with life, that the dream Daeron had laid between you felt all the more terrible for it.
You looked down into the yard again because it was easier than looking at him.
“Do you ever grow used to it?” you asked after a while. “Knowing such things.”
Daeron turned the cup once in his fingers. “No,” he said. “You only grow more tired.”
The answer sat between you in the cold air.
You kept your hand on your belly. Below, Valarr lifted Baelon now, settling him against his hip while Aelor tugged at his sleeve and demanded judgment on some fresh childish dispute. He looked solid there, broad-shouldered in the pale light, every inch the prince the realm saw. Yet from where you sat above him, with Daeron’s dream still in your ears and the weight of the child beneath your hand, he seemed oddly far away. Not in distance. In something else. Something harder to cross.
“I think,” you said at last, and stopped.
Daeron did not press you.
You tried again. “I think I was meant to find that comforting.”
“The dream?”
“No.” Your eyes stayed on the yard below. On your sons. On your husband with one child against him and another circling close. “That you do not think the babe will die.”
Daeron was quiet for so long you wondered if he meant to let it pass unanswered.
Then he said, “Perhaps on another day it would have been.”
You turned to him then.
He gave one faint lift of the shoulder. “But that is the trouble with fear. It is greedy. It never comes alone.”
That, too, was true enough to hurt.
The wind moved through the gallery again and touched the back of your neck. Aelor laughed below. Baelon, secure in his father’s arms now, had begun patting impatiently at Valarr’s shoulder as if he owned him. Valarr turned his face up then, perhaps at the sound of your voice drifting down, perhaps by chance alone. For one brief instant his eyes met yours through the pale afternoon light.
Something moved across his face.
You could not have named it.
Not before. Not now.
He only looked. Then Aelor was demanding him again and the moment was gone.
Beside you, Daeron watched the yard with the strange stillness of men who had seen too much of endings.
The child moved once more beneath your hand.
And all at once the west gallery, with its cold stone and narrow light and the ordinary sounds of pages laughing below, felt like the edge of something vast and unseen. Not doom. Not yet. Only the terrible knowledge that joy and grief so often approached dressed in the same colors, and that by the time one learned which had come, it was already too late to bar the door.
At eight months, the whole keep had begun to watch you differently.
Not openly. Not enough that any lady might be called cruel for it after. But you felt it all the same. The longer looks that lingered half a heartbeat too long. The lowered voices when your hand went to the small of your back. The way old women in service crossed themselves when you passed, as if prayer alone might strengthen bone and blood alike. By then the child sat low and hard in you, a heavy, insistent presence that altered the whole shape of your body and every hour within it. Some days the weight of her made your steps slow and careful on the stone stairs, one hand trailing the wall for steadiness. Some nights you woke already aching, one palm spread over your belly while the dark breathed softly around you and the dying brazier gave off the faint red pulse of a failing heart.
Even the maester had begun to frown too much.
“It is early yet,” Myria had whispered once, after he had gone with his chain clicking softly against his chest, the sound of it lingering down the corridor long after the man himself had passed from sight. “Too early for him to wear that face.”
But women knew what men dressed up in grave tones and swallowed looks too often meant. Hard pregnancy. Heavy burden. Too much strain. Too much blood likely. The old words went from woman to woman without ever needing to be spoken aloud. They lived in glances, in the way hands lingered when fastening your gown, in the way Ellyn watched how you sat, how you rose, how long you stood before the ache forced you down again. You knew it too. You only did not say it aloud. To give fear a name was sometimes to make a chamber of it, and you had little wish to sleep inside one more.
So the keep watched.
It watched in all the small, quiet ways castles did. Servants stepping aside too quickly in torchlit corridors. Ladies pausing in conversation as you passed beneath arched windows full of pale autumn light. Pages staring and then remembering themselves. The whole great stone body of the place seemed to know you were carrying something fragile through it, and had begun, without ever saying so, to fear the cost.
Daeron’s dream haunted the chamber long before the labor came for you.
Blood on linen. Women weeping. A golden-haired mother with her hands red to the wrists. An egg cracking. A child crying, and something crying back.
You could not look at the cradle egg warming near the brazier without thinking of it. Could not wake in the night with pain in your back or the child shifting heavily beneath your ribs without hearing again the strange low weariness in Daeron’s voice when he had spoken of it. The dream settled over everything after that, not loudly, not like some wild terror, but like weather creeping into stone. It lived in the curtains. In the glow of candlelight. In the stillness after the boys had been put to bed and the chamber went quiet save for the hiss of the fire and the soft sounds of your own breathing.
He had not known the ending.
That was perhaps the most terrible part of prophecy.
Not that it lied.
That it spoke in pieces.
It showed enough to wound and never enough to soothe. That it laid grief in your hands without telling you whether grief was all you held. That it gave blood and weeping and cracking shell and answering cries, but not the shape of mercy, if mercy was there at all. And so you carried that too in the eighth month, along with the child herself, along with the ache in your back and the weight low in your body and the knowledge in every woman’s face. The dream had no ending, and so your mind gave it a hundred of its own, each one darker than the last.
The labor came in storm.
Rain struck the tower walls so hard it sounded like fists. The shutters rattled in their frames, and the wind came shrieking in off the bay like something hunted and furious, clawing at the stone, worrying every crack and seam as if it meant to pull the whole tower down into the black water below. You woke before dawn with one hand clenched in the sheets and pain already moving through you low and deep, not sharp at first, but dreadful in its certainty. For one half-blind moment you lay still beneath the blankets, breath trapped high in your throat, and hoped perhaps it might yet be some lesser thing, some ordinary ache of the eighth month. Then the pain came again, heavier, more sure of itself, and all foolish hope went out of you at once.
Valarr woke to the sound you made trying not to cry out.
“What is it?”
You could not lie well enough through that first pain. “The child.”
He was up at once.
After that the chamber became movement and heat and women’s hands. Candles were lit. More candles. Basins brought. Linen fetched. Fire stirred until the room glowed red and gold and stifling, the shadows driven back only to gather again in the corners, thick and watchful. Myria sent pages flying for the midwife, the maester, more hot water, more cloth, more everything. Ellyn went for the birthing stool with shaking hands. Ysilla braided your hair back from your face with a steadiness that looked almost cruel in its calm. The room filled quickly with the smells of hot wax, damp wool, wet stone, bitter herbs crushed under hurried fingers, and the clean metallic edge of fear.
Outside, the storm went on battering at the tower as if it meant to be let in.
Somewhere in the passage, the boys woke crying.
Children always knew when fear changed shape in a household.
Their voices carried once, thin and frightened through the door, Aelor asking something too quickly to be understood, Baelon only sobbing because his brother did, before a nurse hushed them away. That sound hurt almost worse than the pain, because it was so small and helpless and familiar, and because you knew they would be frightened now without understanding why, tucked away in some distant chamber while the keep seemed to shake around them.
Valarr stood in the middle of it all like a man caught in battle without armor.
The midwife, an old, hard woman from Driftmark who feared no prince alive and had little patience for men in birthing rooms however royal, took one look at him and snapped, “Either hold her upright or get out of my way.”
So he held you upright.
For hours.
The storm raged. Your cries broke and rose and broke again, torn from you whether pride would allow them or not. Sweat ran down your spine and cooled and ran again. Your fingers bruised his wrists where you clung. Once you bit him hard enough to leave marks, and he did not even flinch. He held the basin when you retched. He wiped your face when Myria thrust a cloth at him. He steadied your shoulders when your strength failed and caught you when the pain bent you too far forward. The candles guttered and were replaced. More water came. More linen. The room grew hotter. The air thicker. Time loosened itself until there was no hour, only the next pain and the next breath and the next time Valarr said your name as if that alone might keep you tethered to the world.
He had never looked less princely.
Never looked more like a husband.
Never looked more afraid.
His hair had come half-loose in the labor of tending you. Blood and water marked his sleeves. Fear had stripped the polish from him so thoroughly that there was nothing left but the man beneath, broad-shouldered, white-faced, shaking at the mouth when you could not catch your breath, all his old distance burned away by helplessness. He spoke your name like prayer and command and apology all at once, and if there were other words in him, better words, more careful words, the storm and your pain and his terror had scoured them out of him. What remained was rough and desperate and real.
And that, perhaps, was the cruellest thing of all. That it had taken blood and storm and the threat of losing you to make him look at you as though your life were the whole of his.
Outside the chamber, the news spread in fragments.
Not the birth. Not yet.
Only this: the prince’s lady was in labor, and a month too soon.
That was enough.
Daeron heard it first from a page who came tearing through the torchlit passage half out of his wits. “My prince, the lady, Prince Valarr’s lady, they sent for the midwife, it has begun, it is too soon—”
Daeron was moving before the boy had finished. His cup struck the floor behind him, wine spreading black across the stones.
Maekar saw him at the stair. “What is it?”
“Her labor.”
Maekar went still, then followed at once. “What do you know?”
Daeron did not answer.
Maekar caught his arm hard. “What do you know, boy?”
Daeron turned then, and there was no wine in his face now, no bitterness, no mockery. Only dread.
“I know enough,” he said.
Maekar’s grip tightened. “Enough for what?”
Daeron looked toward the upper passage, toward the shut birthing door neither of them could yet see.
“Enough,” he said, his voice gone flat, “to wish I had seen the end.”
That silenced Maekar.
Baelor heard the same word a moment later from a guardsman who had sense enough to lower his voice, though not enough to hide the fear in it.
“In labor, my prince. Too soon.”
Baelor needed no more than that.
So the three of them came by different corridors and met outside the chamber beneath shaking torchlight and the storm’s relentless muttering against the walls.
Daeron reached first.
He stopped dead before the shut door.
From within came women’s voices, the clatter of basins, the low orders of the midwife, and once, terribly, your cry.
Daeron closed his eyes.
Not in prayer.
In knowing.
Blood on linen. Women weeping. The mother’s hands red. He had seen all of it. But never the end.
When Maekar reached him, wet from the rain and dark with temper sharpened by helplessness, he said more quietly, “Tell me.”
Daeron did not open his eyes.
“There was blood,” he said.
Maekar’s jaw hardened. “There is always blood.”
“Not like this.”
That gave even Maekar pause.
Daeron opened his eyes then, and something in his face made his father fall silent at last.
“I saw women weeping,” he said. “I saw her hands red to the wrists. I saw the egg crack.” His voice roughened. “I heard a child cry, and something answer it.”
Maekar stared. “And you said nothing?”
“I told her what I could.”
“What you could,” Maekar said, low and dangerous, “or what you dared?”
Daeron gave one short, ugly laugh. “Do you think I know the difference anymore?”
Before Maekar could answer, another cry came from behind the door, ragged enough to make every man in the corridor go still.
Daeron’s shoulders bowed.
Only slightly.
But both of them saw it.
Baelor came then, broad-shouldered and grave, still in his day clothes, damp at the hems. He looked at the door, at Daeron, at Maekar’s face, and the silence deepened around the three of them.
“What has he seen?” Baelor asked.
Maekar answered first. “Enough to be afraid.”
Baelor looked to Daeron. “Will she live?”
Daeron’s face changed.
That was answer enough for a moment.
Then he said, “I do not know.”
Baelor’s mouth tightened.
Daeron looked back at the shut door. “That is the curse of it. I saw enough to fear it. Not enough to spare anyone.”
The whole corridor seemed to go colder after that.
Servants gathered and scattered farther off like frightened birds. A kitchen girl cried openly until an older woman hushed her. A guardsman changed watch with his voice lowered. The keep held itself very still around that one closed door.
Then, softly, as if he no longer meant the words for anyone but himself, Daeron said,
“Gods let me have been wrong.”
No one answered.
Because that was the one thing none of them believed.
Inside, the labor turned vicious.
There was more blood than with the boys.
You knew it by the speed of the linen, by the way the cloths vanished from the bed and came back redder each time. By the way the midwife’s mouth hardened. By the way Myria stopped speaking except when she had to, as if words themselves had become a waste beside the work of keeping you in the world. By the looks that passed between women who loved you and could not bear to say aloud what they feared. The chamber had grown stifling with heat, thick with the smells of blood, hot water, damp wool, and bitter herbs bruised beneath hurried hands. Candles guttered in every corner. The storm still battered the tower walls beyond the shutters, but even that wild noise seemed farther off now, as if all the world had drawn inward to the bed and the body upon it.
Valarr saw it too.
It made him wild.
When the maester, grey-faced and damp with sweat beneath the crushing heat of the room, looked once at the blood and once at the midwife and said in the careful voice men used when they wished horror to sound like reason, “My prince, if the child cannot be turned, we may have to cut her open,” the room itself seemed to stop.
Not movement. Not breath.
Something deeper.
Valarr turned so slowly it was worse than if he had shouted at once.
“What did you say?”
The maester swallowed. His chain clicked softly against his chest. “If it comes to it, my prince, there are cases in which the babe may yet be saved, though the mother—”
He did not finish.
He did not need to.
Valarr stepped toward him.
There was blood on his sleeves, on his hands, across one cuff where you had clutched him. His hair had come half-loose. His face looked carved from something harsher than flesh, pale with fear, sharpened by fury, all the princely restraint in him stretched so thin it had become almost transparent.
“The mother lives,” he said.
The maester went pale. “My prince, I only meant that should the choice—”
“There is no choice.”
His voice was low. It shook the room more than shouting would have.
“The mother lives.”
The maester tried again, perhaps because learned men were too often fools where terror was concerned. “If the babe is lost, the realm may yet have others, but if there is some chance to preserve—”
Valarr’s restraint broke.
He seized the front of the man’s robe and slammed him hard enough against the stone that the candles trembled in their holders and one basin rang sharply where a servant’s shaking hand struck it against the table. No one moved. Even the storm seemed to draw back to listen.
“Guarantee her life,” he said.
The maester’s mouth opened once and closed again.
Valarr leaned closer, his face white with fury and fear. “You hear me? Her life. The babe is secondary.”
The words shocked the room.
They shocked you, even through pain.
The maester stammered, “My prince, no man can guarantee—”
Valarr’s hand tightened.
“Then do not speak to me of cutting her open unless you mean to lie upon the table after her and feel the same blade in your own flesh.”
The chamber had gone utterly still. The women did not look at one another. The servants did not breathe. The fire snapped once in the hearth, small and ugly in the silence.
“If any fate is laid upon her by your counsel,” Valarr said, each word like something forged, “it will be followed through with you. Do you understand me?”
The maester’s lips trembled. “Yes, my prince.”
The midwife, old and hard and wiser than most men of learning, snapped, “Then stop frightening fools and help me keep her breathing.”
Valarr let go of him.
The man nearly fell.
Then at once Valarr turned back to you, all that terrible violence collapsing into something rawer the moment his eyes found your face again. He came to your side and dropped to his knees, one hand sliding beneath your damp hair, the other finding yours where your fingers had clawed uselessly at the sheets. His palm was hot and shaking. His breath came harsh. In the firelight he looked younger and older at once, stripped down to something more frightened than princely.
“I am here,” he said.
You could barely hear him through the pain.
He bent closer, forehead against yours, breath unsteady, his voice breaking on the edges now where fear had worn it thin.
“Look at me.”
You did. Barely.
“Stay.”
It was desperate.
“Stay with me,” he said again, and now his voice was breaking outright. “Do you hear me? Stay.”
Another pain tore through you before you could answer, hard enough to blind the room white at the edges. But his hand was still there, bruisingly warm around yours, his voice at your ear, rough and shaking and real, and for the first time in all your marriage he sounded like a man who had finally understood what your life meant to him only when the thought of losing it was already standing in the room.
Outside, Daeron heard your cry and knew.
Or thought he knew.
He shut his eyes against the torchlight and saw the dream again, more vivid than waking. The blood. The linen. The women. The red hands. He had told you the truth as far as he could bear it, but not all of it. Not the sheer scale of the blood. Not the force of the grief in the dream. Not how the chamber in it had felt like a tomb and cradle both, like death and beginning laid down side by side and dressed in the same colors.
Maekar saw his face and said, “What?”
Daeron did not answer.
He stood with one hand braced against the cold stone wall, his head slightly bowed, as though if he did not hold himself upright by force he might fold altogether. Torchlight shook along the corridor and caught in the strain of his mouth, the terrible stillness in him.
Baelor looked from one son to the other, and in that moment all the old strength in him was of no use at all.
For once there was nothing to do but wait.
And somewhere else in the keep, where the storm sounded farther away and the walls were colder, Kiera heard the change first in the bells.
Not the bells of alarm.
Not the bells for prayer.
The bells for life.
One. Then another. Then more, until the sound rolled through the stone like something jubilant and merciless. It came down the passages and under the doors and through the cracks in the old walls, bright and brazen and impossible to mistake. Somewhere outside her chamber a servant girl ran laughing and half-crying at once, her shoes slapping too fast against the floor.
“A daughter,” the girl gasped to someone farther down the passage. “A daughter, and a dragon, gods save us, a dragon—”
The words broke apart in her wake.
Kiera stood very still.
The room around her was dim, lit only by one lamp and the red coil of a brazier burning low. The shadows had gathered thick in the corners. Her hands had gone cold. She could hear the keep rejoicing in pieces now, footsteps hurrying, voices rising, doors opening, the whole place brightening with the news of another woman’s child as if dawn had come early and chosen every chamber but hers.
A daughter.
Their third child.
A dragon hatched.
A life bells would toll for.
And all at once Kiera sat down hard on the edge of her bed as though her knees had ceased to belong to her.
For a while she did not cry.
She only sat there with her hands fallen useless in her lap while the bells kept going and the keep went on becoming brighter around her grief. She thought of the little lives she had carried and lost before they could be named, before they could be blessed, before any bell had ever rung for them at all. She thought of how quietly women were expected to bury certain griefs. How neatly. How prettily. She thought, too, of the girl from the west, blood-spent now perhaps, pale and trembling and alive, with a daughter at her breast and a dragon waking beside her.
Then the bells went on.
New life.
New blood.
Joy.
Miracle.
Kiera lowered her head into both hands and wept soundlessly, because the whole castle was ringing for a life that was not hers and would never be hers, and there was something unbearable in hearing joy made public when grief had always had to be borne in private.
“That is not my life,” she whispered to the empty room.
The bells kept tolling.
Toward dawn, as the storm finally began to break itself against the paling eastern sky, the child came.
You screamed once, a terrible raw sound that stripped every layer of princessly composure from you, and then there was the wet rush of life into waiting hands and the brutal, suspended silence before the babe chose whether to breathe.
Valarr stopped breathing first.
Then the child cried.
A high, furious, living sound.
The room broke around it.
Myria wept openly. Ellyn laughed and sobbed in the same breath. The midwife barked orders no one heard because relief had turned the chamber bright and strange, as though the world had tipped and righted itself in one shaking instant.
“A daughter,” she announced.
Valarr made some low, broken sound and came at once to your side.
“A daughter,” he said, as though he had not believed such a thing possible until it lay bleeding and living before him.
You were too weak to answer. They laid her to your breast, small and red and furious, with damp gold already on her head, and for one suspended moment the whole world shrank to the astonishing heat and weight of her.
Then something cracked in the next room.
Every woman froze.
Another crack. Sharper.
Then the unmistakable shatter of shell.
Daeron moved first.
He crossed the antechamber just as the old egg split open down the middle, steam and heat spilling from it in a rush that smelled of iron, ash, and something ancient waking. The brazier flame bent toward it. For one impossible moment the air itself seemed full of remembered wings. The hatchling clawed free, slick and black-red, no larger than a cat, with wings half-glued to its sides and tiny jaws opening in a furious cry.
Behind him, from the bed, your daughter cried back.
The dragon answered.
And in that instant Daeron understood.
Not death.
Not doom.
Blood for blood.
He had seen so much blood because something had to be paid. He had seen the women weeping because birth and terror had always stood too near one another. He had not seen the end because the end had never been death at all.
It had been hatching.
He shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, there were tears standing there. “It was the egg,” he said softly, to no one and everyone. “Gods. That was it. Blood for blood. It was the egg.”
And outside in the corridor, where Maekar and Baelor had been waiting beneath the torchlight with all the uselessness of fathers and princes before a birthing door, they heard first the child’s cry, and then, stranger and sharper, something smaller answer it with fire in its throat.
Maekar went white.
Baelor did not move for one whole heartbeat.
Then the door opened and the news came at last, too large for the passage to hold cleanly.
A daughter.
She lives.
The lady lives.
And a dragon.
Baelor closed his eyes only briefly.
His third grandchild.
A granddaughter.
And your life spared.
When he opened them, the stern heir to the throne was there still, but something in the man beneath him had softened and split all at once.
“A daughter,” he said, almost to himself.
“And a dragon, my prince,” the servant whispered, still shaking.
Baelor looked toward the chamber door, and for one fleeting instant he did not think of the realm at all. Only of how small she must be. How hard your labor had been. How Valarr must be looking at you now.
Then duty returned.
“Keep the keep orderly,” he said, his voice low but carrying. “Let no drunken fool shout this through the halls before the women in that room have had peace enough to draw breath. Ring the bells now, since fools have ears already, and let the sept know.” He paused. “And send the boys up. Washed.”
The servant ran.
Baelor remained where he was for a moment longer beneath the wavering torchlight, his broad shoulders still, his broken nose casting a hard shadow down his face. Maekar stood beside him in silence. From below, the bells had already begun to toll.
A daughter.
A dragon.
And the mother had lived.
For a man like Baelor, it struck in two places at once, the prince and the grandfather.
Then the keep erupted.
The news ran like fire through dry straw. Bells rolled through the dawn. Servants cried in the passages. Guards grinned like boys. The whole castle seemed to wake at once to joy.
Down in the yard, Aelor shouted that his sister had a dragon. Baelon, understanding only that the world had suddenly become wonderful, spun in circles until he fell laughing. Later, scrubbed and straightened and wild-eyed with delight, they crowded your bed without ceremony or fear.
“Is that truly ours?” Aelor whispered, staring at the hatchling like the gods themselves had dropped it from the sky.
“Our sister,” Baelon declared, patting at the blankets before Ellyn caught his wrist.
You lay pale against the pillows with your daughter in your arms and the dragon wrapped near the brazier in red cloth, its tiny sides fluttering with each breath. Your sons pressed close at either side of you, bright-haired and flushed and utterly certain that this was where they belonged.
Valarr stood very still.
Not because he did not want to come nearer.
Because he did.
That was the cruelty of it.
He had been there for every cry. He had held you through the labor. He had seen the blood and thought, in one sick, blinding moment, that he might lose you before he had ever truly made himself worthy of you.
And now, with the child alive and the dragon hatched and the boys climbing over the bed to press themselves against you, he felt like the outermost figure in a painting he had helped create and no longer knew how to enter.
Your daughter rooted weakly against your breast. Aelor asked three questions at once, all bright and breathless and tumbling over one another. Baelon laid his head in your lap as though there had never been, in all the world, a safer place left for him to rest it. And you, ruined and blood-weary and scarcely done trembling, still found something soft for them. Something warm. Something instinctive. Something that seemed to rise from you even now, even after pain, even after fear, even after all that had been taken from your body in the bringing forth of them.
Valarr stood a few feet away and watched it as if the bed held the whole of his life opened before him.
Wife. Sons. Daughter. Dragon. The fragile, terrible miracle of all of it.
Love too.
Love most of all.
Not gone. Not withheld. Not even diminished, perhaps, in the cruelest accounting of it. Still there. Still living. Still turning outward from you in all the ways that mattered most. Given to your children without hesitation. Given even now to the room itself, to the little lives gathered close, to the babe at your breast and the boys pressing against your side.
And for the first time, Valarr understood something so plainly that it seemed to strike him like a physical blow.
He had not lost your love.
That would have been simpler. Cleaner. Easier to grieve, perhaps, than this.
No — the horror of it was that you still loved him.
He knew it suddenly with the sick, helpless certainty by which men knew the worst truths of themselves. You still loved him. Patiently. Faithfully. In that bruised and steadfast way gentle women sometimes did, when they had given their hearts once and never wholly learned the trick of taking them back.
But somewhere along the way, piece by piece, silence by silence, disappointment by disappointment, he had done something perhaps even crueler than driving love from you.
He had taught it to expect so little.
He had made a life in which your heart still made room for him, and yet no longer leaned toward him first. No longer reached for him with the same blind sweetness. No longer waited, perhaps, in all the quiet hopeful places where a wife ought to be able to rest.
Not because you had cast him out.
Not because you had ceased to care.
But because he had loved you too poorly, too cautiously, too late, until the deepest part of you had learned what to do with the emptiness he left.
It had learned how to carry on.
How to mother through it. How to smile through it. How to endure it. How to keep tenderness alive for others, even where he had failed to tend it in you.
That was the wound.
Not that you did not love him.
That you did.
And he did not know, standing there with the bells beginning to ring below and the storm-broken dawn creeping pale through the windows, whether he still knew how to come back from what he had made of that love.
For what was he meant to do with a thing so faithful when he had mishandled it nearly unto breaking?
What balm was there for a wife who had not stopped loving him, only stopped expecting to be held rightly by it?
What repentance could mend years?
What tenderness, offered now, would not seem like panic arrived too late?
The bells below began to peal in earnest then, loud and jubilant and full of news the realm would devour gladly. A daughter. A dragon. Old blood waking. A prince blessed beyond measure. They would turn all of it into song by dusk. They would speak of miracles and legacy and the favor of the gods. They would see the bed and call it glory.
No one would speak of the quieter thing standing just beyond it.
No one would name the man who had been given the very heart of a gentle woman and only understood its worth once he no longer knew how to reach it cleanly.
Valarr looked at you then — at your face drawn pale with weariness, at the damp hair clinging to your temples, at the babe at your breast, at the boys folded into you as though every road in the world still led back to your body — and something inside him went hollow with fear.
Because he loved you.
Gods, he loved you.
Loved his sons. Loved the small red-faced daughter now crying weakly in your arms. Loved the dragon in the brazier, loved the strange holy terror of the life you had made together.
He wanted his family.
Wanted you.
Not as duty. Not as arrangement. Not as the mother of his heirs or the lady at his side.
You.
And standing there with all of it before him, more precious than anything he had ever been promised by birth or blood, he understood at last the most miserable truth of all:
love did not tell him how to mend this.
Love did not give back the years.
Love did not teach a clumsy man how to repair, in one moment, what he had neglected in a hundred smaller ones.
He had thought there would be time. That was what undid him.
He had thought there would be more ordinary mornings. More evenings by the fire. More chances to grow softer at his leisure. More seasons in which to say what ought to have been said long ago. He had thought a loving wife would keep waiting if only he came to her properly in the end.
Now dawn spread pale and merciless through the chamber. The bells rang for his daughter. The keep roared with joy.
And Prince Valarr Targaryen, standing only a few feet from the bed that held everything he loved in this world, knew with a dread so deep it seemed to hollow out his very bones that a man might come late not merely to his own heart—
but to the mending of it.
He did not kill her love. He exhausted its innocence.
Pairing: Prince Valarr x Reader ( "You" referred, she/her vibes)
Summary:
There is no Father’s Day in the Seven Kingdoms, so your three children decide that it is the realm’s mistake to correct. What follows is a secret little conspiracy of handmade gifts, honey cakes, dragons overhead, and Prince Valarr being quietly, thoroughly destroyed by how much his family loves him.
A soft, romantic, dangerously domestic Summerhall morning where nobody dies, everybody is safe, and the prince who belongs to the realm discovers he belongs to you and your children first.
Warnings:
Everyone lives. Everyone is safe. Dragons are alive but loosely mentioned. Three children. Family fluff. Royal domesticity. Handmade gifts. Honey cakes. Valarr is in emotional distress because his wife and children love him too much. Entirely feel-good.
There was no Father’s Day in the Seven Kingdoms.
There were namedays, feast days, holy days, harvest days, days of victory and mourning, coronations and weddings and funerals grand enough to feed ten thousand mouths, but nowhere in all the customs of Westeros was there a day set aside simply for fathers. Men were honoured in the old ways instead. A lord was given obedience. A prince was given loyalty. A husband was given heirs, if the gods were kind, and daughters fair enough to sweeten alliances, and sons sturdy enough to bear a name forward into the years. That was deemed honour enough.
Your children, naturally, found the omission outrageous.
You were in the gardens when they came to you, three little storms in silk and soft leather, half breathless and wholly intent, their slippers scuffing the worn red stone as they tumbled out from the long galleries of Summerhall. The morning had already ripened warm. Sunlight lay bright along the old brick walls and flashed silver in the dew still clinging to the herb beds. Rosemary and mint scented the air. Somewhere nearby, the fountain murmured, and overhead, one of the younger dragons wheeled lazily through the blue, pale copper scales flashing whenever she caught the light.
You had been embroidering in the shade of an arbor wound through with late-blooming roses. The hoop was still in your lap when Prince Vaeron all but collided with the bench beside you, chest heaving, fair hair in disarray.
“Mama,” he said with the grave urgency only a boy of eight could summon for matters of the greatest importance, “we need your help.”
Princess Saelora, six years old and already possessed of the kind of composure lesser lords twice her age could not manage, came up beside him with one ribbon slipping from her silver-gold braid. Her blue eyes were solemn.
“It is important,” she said.
Behind them came little Daevor, slower only because his legs were shorter and his dignity greater, one blue eye and one brown fixed on you with princely gravity. He marched rather than ran, though one of his hands was sticky with fig preserve and his lower lip had that familiar sulk about it that told you he had likely been interrupted in the middle of some private feast.
You set the hoop aside. “Should I be frightened?”
“Yes,” Vaeron said at once.
“No,” said Saelora, turning on him with immediate scorn. “Not frightened. Only ready.”
“That is worse,” you said.
Daevor, who had no patience for suspense and even less for standing, climbed straight into your lap without asking leave, warm and sturdy and smelling faintly of honey. He settled himself with the complete confidence of a child certain the world existed to receive him and announced, with grave importance, “It is Papa.”
At once your mouth softened.
Valarr had been gone since dawn. Some matter in council, then petitions after, and no doubt the usual crop of tedious quarrels that clung to courts like burrs to wool—arguments over boundaries, grain stores, old grievances wrapped in courtesy and passed hand to hand until they became a prince’s burden to untangle. He would come back from such mornings with a stillness in him sharper than anger, that look which said he would sooner face ten mailed men in the yard than another smiling noble with a complaint tucked beneath his tongue. It was his nameday in two days’ time, though he had made his customary attempt to dismiss it as of no real consequence.
Your children, unlike their father, believed with all their hearts in occasions.
“What about Papa?” you asked.
Vaeron leaned in so quickly his shoulder brushed yours. “Ser Harrold said a prince’s nameday ought to be marked properly, and Lady Betha said fathers should be cherished while they are still here to be troublesome, and then Saelora said—”
“I said,” Saelora interrupted, lifting her chin and speaking over him with calm finality, “that if there is not a day for fathers, then we ought to make one.”
For a moment you only looked at her.
Then your smile came, slow and helpless.
Of all the dangerous things your children had inherited from their bloodline—stubbornness, pride, intensity, that terrible certainty that any idea once seized must be driven through to its end—this was amongst the sweetest.
“And you want my help to make your father a celebration.”
All three of them nodded.
Daevor, not to be left out, added, “A very big one.”
“Not too big,” Saelora said immediately, frowning at him. “Papa hates fuss.”
“Then a good one,” Vaeron declared, as though he had neatly solved the matter.
You laughed and pressed a kiss to Daevor’s temple. “Your father is a prince, yes, but more importantly he is your father. So no jewels, no fine dagger, and no dull little courtesy gift sent by some steward who has never watched him plait your hair or carry you to bed when you’ve fallen asleep in front of the hearth.”
Daevor wrinkled his nose. “No socks?”
“Especially no socks.”
That earned the first giggle, quick and bright as birdsong.
Vaeron frowned, thinking terribly hard. “Then what do we give him?”
You looked out over the garden then, beyond the clipped hedges and white roses and old walls sun-warmed to red-gold. Somewhere far off, one of the dragons gave a low rolling call that shivered through the air like distant thunder over water. The sound lingered. So did the thought that came with it—simple, tender, and therefore more perilous than anything sharp.
When you turned back to them, you were already smiling.
“I know exactly what we shall do.”
The plan, of course, did not remain neat for long.
Plans never did, where children were concerned.
At first, it seemed simple enough. You would make of Valarr’s nameday a father’s feast of your own invention. No hall draped in banners. No singers. No lords hovering about with practiced smiles and compliments that wanted something in return. Only the five of you, tucked away in the little garden court beneath his chambers, before the rest of Summerhall properly woke and remembered it had a prince to claim.
Each child would give him something made by their own hands.
Vaeron, being very much his father’s son in pride if not in patience, resolved at once that he should present a warrior’s gift. This, after much debate and one minor crisis, became a painted wooden shield in Targaryen colours. The dragon upon it had three heads, true enough, but each looked so ferocious and malformed that together they resembled a furious cat with wings and a grievance.
Saelora decided that her gift would be words. She had once heard Valarr speak an old High Valyrian blessing over one of the cradle eggs when Daevor was born, and had never forgotten the strange music of it. She wished to learn it and say it back to him without stumbling.
Daevor, after grave thought and much chewing of his lower lip, announced that he would make cakes.
You suspected this owed less to filial devotion than to his private worship of honey, but you did not say so.
And so your days became a conspiracy.
You stole hours where you could. In the mornings you met Vaeron in a quiet corner of the training yard, where the red dust clung to hems and boot leather and the practice dummies leaned like weary sentries against the wall. The banners above stirred in the warm breeze. Now and then a knight passed at the far end of the yard, or a stableboy hurried by with an armful of tack, but no one troubled you.
Vaeron painted with his tongue peeping from the corner of his mouth, fingers stained black and crimson, while you sat cross-legged nearby and tried not to laugh at the dragon taking shape beneath his hand.
“It looks angry,” he complained.
“It is a dragon,” you said. “Angry is acceptable.”
He squinted at it. “It looks stupid.”
You leaned in, studying the shield with all the gravity of a woman judging war terms. “Yes,” you said. “That is less ideal.”
Vaeron groaned and dragged a paint-stained hand down his face, only to go still when he realized, far too late, that his fingers were still wet. His whole face scrunched at once in horrified regret. You had to swallow a chortle at the sight of him and reached over to wipe the streak of paint from his cheek before it could spread any farther.
He let out a long, suffering sigh and bent over the shield again, repainting the middle head with all the solemn misery of a boy who had decided art was a cruel invention meant to test him personally. Still, he kept at it, stubborn and serious, and more than once, watching him hunch over his work in fierce concentration, you caught a sharp glimpse of Valarr in him that made your heart give one of those small, quiet aches it never quite knew how to guard against.
In the afternoons you took Saelora to the shaded gallery outside your chambers, where the marble floors remained cool even under summer heat and the breeze came in soft through the arches. There the shadows were blue and thin, and one could hear the distant life of the castle in softened pieces—the scrape of rushes in a maid’s basket, the faint murmur of stewards conferring below, the far clang of steel from the yard, the hush of slippered feet over stone. Saelora would sit very straight with a cup of watered pear juice at her elbow and repeat the blessing over and over until the old Valyrian ceased to tangle on her tongue.
“Again,” she would say each time she finished.
“You have it nearly perfect.”
“Nearly is not perfect.”
At that you would turn your face aside so she did not see you smile. Valarr had never once had a hope of resisting a daughter like that.
As for Daevor, Daevor took possession of the kitchens as though they were his by right of conquest.
The cooks adored him, which was its own misfortune. Grown women who adored Daevor almost never denied him anything, and that was how discipline was lost and sugared fruit disappeared by mysterious means. He stood atop a stool with an apron tied twice round his middle, overseeing the placing of berries upon the honey cakes with all the solemn authority of a commander arranging men before battle.
“No,” he told one long-suffering cook, pointing with a sticky finger. “That one is wrong.”
“Wrong how?” you asked.
He frowned at the cake as if deeply wounded by its failures. “Papa likes neat.”
“Your father also likes reaching the table before you have eaten half his gift.”
Daevor blinked up at you in pure offense. “I am tasting for poison.”
From somewhere behind you, one of the older cooks muttered, “A very brave prince,” and the whole kitchen had to go still for a heartbeat so as not to laugh.
You laughed so suddenly and so helplessly you had to set down the bowl in your hands.
It was on the second evening, when flour still dusted Daevor’s cheek and Saelora had a red ribbon knotted absurdly through the wrong braid, that Valarr nearly caught you all out.
The sun was sinking low, staining the western windows gold and copper, when he found the four of you slipping through a side passage just off the lesser stair. You were flushed from haste, the children disordered, and guilt hung round the whole of you as plain as perfume.
He stood in the archway in dark riding leathers, one hand braced against the stone, his hair wind-tossed from the yard. For a moment he said nothing. His gaze moved with quiet, terrible precision from Vaeron’s stained fingers, to the parchment half hidden behind Saelora’s back, to the honey on Daevor’s sleeve, and only then to you.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Where,” he asked, with dangerous mildness, “has my entire household been?”
Nobody answered.
Vaeron looked at Saelora. Saelora looked at you. Daevor, after one thoughtful pause, licked the honey from his cuff.
The children froze. Panic moved through them at once, visible as weather. Vaeron went stiff. Daevor pressed himself against your skirts. Saelora alone recovered first, which surprised no one.
She stepped forward, folded her hands behind her back, and said, “With Mama.”
Valarr looked at you.
You arranged your face into its most innocent expression. “Occupied.”
His brow lifted. “Doing what?”
“Something instructive.”
“For whom?”
Vaeron made a small strangled noise and turned it into a cough so poor an effort that even Valarr’s mouth twitched. He knew you lied. He knew the children lied.
He knew, no doubt, that the four of you had entangled yourselves in some secret undertaking that would either melt his heart or set one of Summerhall’s tapestries ablaze. Yet after a long enough pause to make all three children feel the sharp edge of suspense, he only stepped aside.
“I see,” he said gravely. “Then I can only pray the realm survives its instruction.”
Daevor ran to him at once and lifted his arms. Valarr stooped and gathered him up with that easy strength which never failed to stir something soft and aching in you. He kissed the boy’s brow, then looked over Daevor’s shoulder at you.
There was warmth in his face now. Curiosity too. Affection. The private kind. The sort he never gave away where others might lay claim to seeing it.
“You are all very strange,” he said.
“You married into it,” you replied.
This time, he smiled outright.
The morning of his nameday came soft and pale over Summerhall, with the first light gathering slowly along the eastern walls and the castle still wrapped in that fragile hush which only existed in the hour before the household properly woke. It was the sort of silence that was never truly empty. Somewhere below, a kitchen door opened and shut with care. A servant’s steps whispered over stone. From farther off came the faint rattle of pails in the stable yard and the drowsy trill of birds nesting in the ivy that climbed the outer walls. The air was cool enough still to raise a shiver over your skin when you rose from bed, though you knew the day would turn warm soon enough. Summerhall held the night in its stones longer than one expected.
Valarr had not stirred when you slipped from beneath the coverlets. He slept on his side, one arm still flung across the place where you had been, hair ruffled over the pillow, his face unguarded in the dimness. There were times, in moments like that, when it struck you afresh how strange it was that the realm’s prince could look so young in sleep. Not less, never that. Only softer. Stripped of all the hard, bright things men laid upon him when they spoke his name. He was no dragon then, no heir, no figure wrought for songs or fear. Only your husband, warm in the half-dark, breathing slow and deep with his hand still reaching for you even in dreams.
You stood looking at him longer than you ought to have. Long enough to feel that familiar ache take root low and quiet in your chest. It was never absence, never sorrow exactly. Only the tender pain of loving something too much while knowing the world, in all its greed, would always keep asking for pieces of him. His house asked. His blood asked. His name asked. The realm asked most of all. Yet in sleep his hand still searched for you.
You dressed by candlelight and went down yourself rather than waking one of the women. The gown you chose was soft and pale, light enough for morning, the sleeves narrow and the bodice simply laced. When you braided your hair, your fingers smelled faintly of rosemary from the oils kept in the cedar chest. By the time you stepped into the corridor, the candles along the walls had burned low, their little flames fluttering whenever some draft moved through the old stone passages. Summerhall at dawn was all blue shadow and gold embers, its arches half-lost in dimness, its corners full of sleeping silence and old warmth. A pair of maids passed you on the stair with their heads bowed and their baskets full of fresh rushes, both of them smiling in that secret way servants did when they knew more than they pretended.
In the kitchens the cakes were waiting exactly as you had left them, honey-sweet and still fragrant, their tops glistening with berries and little curls of candied lemon. The bakers were already at work on the day’s bread, the ovens breathing heat into the room, the smell of yeast and flour and smoke wrapping round you like something homely and dear. One of the older cooks pushed the ribbon-tied box gently toward you without a word. Her hands were red from work. There was a knowing kindness in her face. Summerhall, you suspected, had long since become a co-conspirator in this little plot.
The children were waiting in more excitement than order. Vaeron stood as straight as he could manage in black velvet with crimson stitching, trying with all his might to look princely and solemn, though he was still so obviously a boy that it made your heart turn over. Saelora shone pale and silver in the dawn, her braids neat at last, her little face composed with such severe determination that she looked as if she were preparing to negotiate a peace rather than present a gift to her father. Daevor had honey on one cuff before the day had even begun, and his hair, no matter what was done to it, still curled rebelliously at the crown.
You took them through the quiet gallery beneath Valarr’s chambers and into the little garden court. The place was small by the standards of princes, tucked away behind a carved stone arcade and half-hidden by climbing roses. A fountain stood at its center, the sound of its water soft and ceaseless. Dew still clung to the petals. A few candles guttered in their sconces where you had lit them before dawn, and their weak gold mingled gently with the growing light of morning. The paving stones were cool beneath your slippers. Somewhere overhead, unseen beyond the red walls and rising towers, one of the dragons gave a low call that rolled through the waking air like distant thunder softened by height.
There you set the table yourself. Warm bread beneath linen. A dish of pears cool from the cellar. Soft white cheese. Fresh milk in a small pitcher for the children, watered wine for you and Valarr. The honey cakes at the center in their tied box. Vaeron’s painted shield propped where it might be seen at once. Saelora’s folded parchment laid carefully beside it, though by now she no longer needed the words written there. It was a simple table, intimate and unshowy, and for that reason lovelier than any feast the great hall could have offered.
Then you sent Vaeron to fetch his father.
The waiting seemed longer than it was. Long enough for Daevor to fidget and begin reaching for the ribbon on the cakes. Long enough for Saelora to murmur the first line of the blessing to herself under her breath. Long enough for you to look once toward the stair and feel your pulse jump foolishly when footsteps came at last.
Vaeron returned first, very proud of his own success, and behind him came Valarr, his hand still held in the boy’s.
You nearly forgot to breathe.
He was not dressed for court. That, more than anything, made the sight of him feel private and somehow unbearably dear. He wore only a dark tunic unlaced at the throat and plain breeches, with no belt of office, no jewels, no ceremonial steel. His hair was tousled as though he had run his fingers through it upon waking. Morning gentled him. It softened the severe edges of his beauty into something warmer, more human, more dangerous for how deeply it invited love. He looked like the man you woke beside in darkness and lamplight, not the prince lords watched with careful eyes.
Then he saw the table.
Saw the children waiting.
Saw you.
He stopped at once.
For a moment no one moved. The fountain sang on. A breeze stirred the roses, shaking dew loose in little bright drops. Light from the east touched the wall behind him and turned the edges of his hair to silver fire. He looked, in that suspended breath of time, like a man who had walked unsuspecting into some holy place and found his own heart laid bare before him.
Daevor, being incapable of bearing silence when it threatened to become solemn, tore free of your side and cried, “Happy Papa Day!”
You covered your mouth at once.
“It is Father’s Feast,” Vaeron hissed, scandalized. “You donkey.”
Before either brother could descend into mutiny, Saelora stepped forward. Her chin was high. Her little shoulders were square. She looked every inch a princess of old Valyria, though her hands were clenched so tightly behind her back you knew her nails must be biting into her palms.
“There is no day for fathers in the realm,” she said, clear and steady in the cool morning air, “so we made one. Since it is your nameday, and you belong to us before you belong to them.”
Silence followed.
Then Daevor, unable to endure solemnity for longer than a heartbeat, pointed at the cakes and announced, “Those are also for Papa. Mostly.”
Vaeron made a scandalized sound. “You promised not to say that.”
And only then did you see the full force of it reach Valarr. His mouth parted slightly. His gaze moved from Saelora to Vaeron to Daevor and at last to you, as if he could not quite decide whether to laugh or give in to the thing altogether.
He had been given honours all his life—ceremony, obedience, the bowed heads of men who wanted something from him, reverence heavy as chains. This was not that.
Not duty. Not the old, heavy sort of honour men laid at a prince’s feet and expected him to carry without complaint. This was smaller than that. Handmade. Slightly crooked in places. Mortal in all the ways that mattered.
Which, perhaps, made it harder to withstand.
Vaeron stepped forward first, unable to bear suspense, and thrust the painted shield at his father with both hands.
“I made it,” he announced. “Mama only fixed the left head because it looked witless.”
At that, something in Valarr’s face gave way at last. Not fully, never before the children. But enough. Enough for the corner of his mouth to pull, enough for his hand to take the shield with absurd care, like the thing was hammered gold instead of painted wood. His thumb brushed its rim. He looked at it as though it were something precious because his son had touched it.
“It is the finest shield in Westeros,” he said.
Vaeron flushed with such fierce pleasure he seemed on the verge of levitating.
Then Saelora unfolded her parchment, though she scarcely glanced at it, and spoke the blessing in High Valyrian. Her voice was clear and sweet and very nearly perfect, carrying strangely in the little stone court. She stumbled only once, and when she did, she caught herself with such quick determination it hurt you to hear it. She wanted this for him so badly. She wanted him to have every beautiful thing.
By the time she finished, even the servants in the corridor beyond had gone still. You could feel it—that attentive hush, that quiet understanding that something tender was happening in the hidden spaces of the castle, and no decent soul ought to tread too loudly across it.
Valarr bent and kissed Saelora’s brow.
It was the gentlest thing he had done all morning. His hand rested briefly at the back of her head, silver hair against golden. Saelora swallowed hard and caught at his sleeve for a single heartbeat before drawing herself back up into composure, all dignity and trembling pride.
Then came Daevor, shuffling forward with the ribboned box clutched in both hands.
“I made cakes,” he declared. “I tasted for poison six times.”
“Seven,” Vaeron said darkly.
Daevor shot him a glare of pure outrage. “Seven.”
Valarr laughed then.
It started low in his chest and came out soft, surprised, then warmer and fuller, until it filled the little garden court with a sound so rich and helplessly fond that it made your own chest ache. He crouched to take the box and opened it with the care of a man handling relics. Inside, the cakes sat slightly lopsided and lovingly made, their berries crooked, their honey glaze uneven.
He looked at them as though they were treasures reclaimed from lost Valyria.
Then he looked up at you.
You had seen him astride a dragon with the wind tearing at his cloak. You had seen him bloodied in the yard, terrible in anger, remote in state, beautiful in that cruel princely way that made people speak of him as though he were more legend than flesh. This was rarer than all of it. This was the man beneath the name, looking at you with his heart so plainly in his face that it felt almost indecent to witness.
“You did this,” he said, but there was no accusation in it. Only wonder. Only roughened gratitude.
“We did,” you corrected softly.
For a breath he only stared at you.
Then he rose, closed the distance between you, and put his hand behind your neck.
It was such a familiar touch that it undid you instantly. Warm palm, roughened slightly by sword and rein, fingers spreading at your nape as if to steady something precious. He kissed you beneath the waking roses, and the kiss was slow enough to make the rest of the world blur at its edges. It was not for show. Not a princely courtesy given before the children. It was the sort of kiss that said he had understood exactly what you had done for him and that there were not words enough in any tongue to answer it. When he drew back, he did not go far. His forehead rested against yours. His breath mingled with yours in the cool morning.
“This is unfair,” he murmured.
You smiled, though your throat had gone tight. “How?”
“You have made it impossible for any nameday after this to mean anything.”
Behind him, Daevor had already climbed onto a chair and was reaching shamelessly for a cake. Vaeron was demanding to know whether the shield might be hung in the prince’s solar so every visiting lord would be obliged to admire it. Saelora was correcting both of them with all the regal despair of a woman burdened by fools.
You glanced past Valarr at the children and then back to him. “That was rather the point.”
He looked at you for one long heartbeat more, and what lived in his eyes then was enough to ruin a woman for lesser men forever. There was no grandeur in it, no prince’s polish, no distance. Only devotion, quiet and terrible in its depth. The kind that did not need speaking because it had already made itself known in a hundred smaller ways—in the hand at your back through crowded halls, in the look that sought yours first when he entered a room, in the care with which he listened when you spoke of ordinary things, as if nothing from your mouth could ever be unworthy of his attention.
Then he turned and opened his arms.
All three children flew to him.
He gathered them in as though he had been built for this and nothing else: Vaeron tucked against one side, Saelora pressing in close beneath his arm, Daevor hoisted to his hip. They clung to him without shame. He held them with a stillness that felt almost reverent, as if some part of him was afraid to move too quickly and wake from it. The morning light was growing stronger now, slipping over the walls in warm gold, catching on hair and eyes and the pale flush high in his cheeks.
For a long moment, he did not speak.
When he did, his voice was rough.
“This is the best gift I have ever had.”
Daevor patted his father’s cheek with sticky fingers. “Even better than your dragon?”
Valarr leaned back just enough to look genuinely scandalized. “Let us not be hasty.”
The children burst into laughter. You did too, hand to your mouth, helpless with it.
But then his expression changed. The jest softened and gave way to something deeper. He looked first at Vaeron, then Saelora, then Daevor, and at last he lifted his eyes to you.
There was such naked love in them that for one mad instant you thought if the whole court came pouring into the garden that moment, they would see it from the walls.
“I jest, my love,” he said, and his voice had gone quiet in that way it only ever did for you. “You three are the finest gift I have ever had in this life.”
Then he looked at you fully.
The children were still in his arms. The morning was gold around him. The roses stirred softly overhead. Beyond the walls, somewhere high and distant, a dragon cried to the sky.
“And your mother,” he said, “has been my one true blessing.”
The words struck deeper for how simply he said them.
No flourish. No courtliness. No grand prince’s speech shaped to charm a hall.
Only truth.
Your breath caught. Heat rose suddenly behind your eyes, sharp and humiliating and impossible to stop. It seemed to you then that all the long corridors of Summerhall, all its old stone and red walls and secret gardens, all the years behind you and those waiting still ahead, narrowed to that one moment: the man you loved standing in the morning light with your children in his arms, looking at you as if the gods had once been kind and placed their only mercy in your hands.
Saelora smiled first, small and knowing.
Vaeron made a theatrical face and said, “Gods, Papa.”
But he was grinning too broadly to mean it.
Daevor, understanding only that love had turned the air golden and soft, dropped his head contentedly onto Valarr’s shoulder and reached for another cake.
And when the sun at last crested the walls in full, pouring warm gold across the garden stones and catching in silver hair, dark hair, and eyes both blue and brown, it found House Targaryen as the realm almost never did—not terrible, not splendid, not carved from legend and fire and blood, but only this: a family at breakfast, ridiculous with love.
The children did not stay still for long.
They never did.
Once the first sweetness of the morning had passed and the honey cakes had begun to vanish from the table, they spilled out of Valarr’s arms in a tumble of silk, laughter, and sunlit motion. Vaeron had already snatched up his painted shield again and was arguing that it ought to hang in the prince’s solar where every visiting lord would be forced to admire it. Saelora informed him, with the grave displeasure of a child born to command, that if he shouted any louder the whole of Summerhall would know of their secret feast. Daevor, sticky to the wrist and heedless of both, had fixed himself upon the remaining cakes with unwavering purpose.
Their voices drifted toward the far side of the little garden court, where the fountain threw white-gold light across the basin and the roses climbed thick along the low red wall. At the archway, a nursemaid lingered with studied discretion, her eyes turned elsewhere. Beyond her, the castle had begun to stir in earnest. Doors opened softly in the galleries. Slippered feet moved over stone. Somewhere below, a servant’s tray rattled faintly, and farther off still came the muted clang of steel from the yard where men had begun their morning drills. Summerhall was waking, stone by stone, voice by voice.
But Valarr did not follow.
He stood where he was in the early gold of morning, watching the children with such quiet wonder in his face that your heart tightened all over again. There was laughter still at the corner of his mouth, but beneath it lived something deeper, something steadier, the kind of feeling that silenced a man rather than loosed him.
When he turned back to you, it was almost with reluctance, as if he had to gather himself from whatever tender place they had left him in.
You tried to smile, but the look he gave you stole some of the strength from it.
He came toward you without haste, and there was no prince in that movement now, no courtly polish worn for watching eyes. Only your husband. Only Valarr, crossing the little space between you until the hem of his dark tunic brushed your gown and the warmth of him settled around you like another garment. His hand found your waist as naturally as breath.
“You have undone me,” he said.
His voice was low and quiet, too honest for jest and yet not wholly without it.
You lifted your face to his. “That was the intent.”
“Cruel woman.”
“You do not sound much aggrieved.”
“I am suffering greatly,” he said, solemn as a septon. “Songs may yet be written of it.”
A laugh escaped you then, soft and helpless, but it faded when his thumb moved once against your side.
Beyond him, Daevor cried out in outrage over some grave injustice involving cakes. Vaeron declared that Father’s Feast ought to be held every year. Saelora said rarity was the whole point. The fountain murmured between their voices, and overhead the roses stirred in the mild summer breeze, shaking the last bright drops of dew from their petals.
Valarr glanced once toward the children, and when he looked back at you there was such helpless fondness in his face that it seemed a wonder he remained standing.
“No crown,” he said quietly, “has ever sat so well upon me as this.”
You arched a brow. “Being harried over pastries in your own garden?”
“One might call it a siege.”
“One would be wrong.”
His mouth twitched. “I have had men kneel. I have had lords flatter and scheme and bow until I thought my skull would split from hearing lesser men dress their greed as duty. I have flown above armies. I have worn everything the realm names greatness.” He lowered his head a little, and his voice softened further. “None of it has touched me as deeply as hearing my daughter say I belonged to her before I belonged to them.”
That landed cleanly.
Your hand rose without thought and came to rest against the open throat of his tunic, where the cloth fell loose and the warmth of his skin met your palm. At once he covered your hand with his own, holding it there. It was such a small thing, and so terribly him, that it near undid you more than the words had.
“You do belong to them,” you said softly. “A little.”
“A little,” he agreed.
His eyes did not leave yours.
“But not in the way I am yours.”
Your breath caught.
It was one thing to know such a truth in all the quiet ways a marriage taught it: in the hand that found yours in sleep, in the instinctive turn of his body toward yours in every crowded room, in the thousand small acts by which love made itself known without speech. It was another thing entirely to hear him say it plain.
Valarr was not a man careless with words. What he gave voice to, he meant.
You heard movement beyond the arch then, servants passing in careful silence as the household gathered itself into the day. He felt it too. You saw it in the brief flick of his eyes toward the corridor, in the slight tightening of his jaw, that old knowledge that the morning would not remain yours much longer. Then one maid stepped into view, caught sight of the two of you, and wheeled about with such speed and dignity that you might have laughed, had your pulse not already been beating too hard. Valarr noticed. Of course, he noticed. The faintest ghost of amusement touched his mouth.
Perhaps that was why his hand slid from your waist to the small of your back and drew you nearer until there was hardly any air left between you.
His head bent. The brush of his mouth at the side of your throat was slow enough to make your pulse leap. Another kiss followed, just beneath your jaw, and then the faintest drag of his lips upward, unhurried and warm and far too knowing. Your fingers tightened in the cloth at his chest.
“Valarr,” you whispered, though it came out weaker than you meant.
He made a low sound against your skin, not quite laughter and not even close to an answer. When he lifted his head, there was love still in his face, but something else beneath it now, too—that old, ruinous hunger sharpened rather than gentled by years, by children, by tenderness, by all the quiet domestic ways in which you had become necessary to him.
“You cannot say such things to me,” you murmured.
“Which things?”
“That I am your blessing.”
“You are.”
“That no crown has mattered so much.”
“It has not.”
“That you belong to me.”
At that, his whole expression gentled.
“My love,” he said, and now his whole face had gentled, “if I did not know it at first, that was only because I was slower than you deserved.”
For a moment you could only look at him.
Then, because it was easier than weeping in the middle of the garden like some maid in a song, you said, “You are insufferably pleased with yourself this morning.”
He huffed a quiet laugh and kissed you properly then, deep enough to warm you through, brief enough to remain dangerous. When he drew back, his forehead rested against yours.
“Mm,” he murmured. “You planned all this for my nameday, and not even half so much for your own. I think I must do something grander when yours comes.”
You pulled back just enough to frown at him. “No.”
His eyes gleamed.
“No?” he echoed.
“No,” you said more firmly. “I do not want anything grand for my nameday.”
“Do you not?”
“I do not.”
“Strange,” he said softly. “I do not believe you.”
Before you could answer, his hand slipped lower and gave the soft flesh of your backside a bold, scandalous squeeze that made you yelp outright.
You slapped a hand over your mouth too late. The sound had already escaped you, sharp and shocked and wholly undignified.
Valarr smiled against your cheek, utterly shameless.
“Valarr!”
Heat rushed into your face so quickly it felt like fever. You struck his chest in a bashful little blow that had no force in it at all, and that only made him laugh under his breath.
“My prince,” you hissed, glancing at once toward the archway, where one passing maid had turned her back with heroic swiftness, “I shall have you strangled.”
“Will you?”
“I am serious.”
“You are blushing too prettily for me to believe it.”
You hit his chest again, and this time he caught your wrist, turned your hand, and pressed a kiss into your knuckles as though he had not just scandalized you in your own garden.
“I mean it,” you whispered, half laughing in spite of yourself. “Nothing grand. No spectacle. No songs.”
“Mm.” His mouth curved slowly. “Try stopping me.”
That won another helpless sound from you, somewhere between outrage and laughter. He looked wickedly young then, silver-bright and pleased with himself in a way the court almost never saw, and the sight of it was so dear it near robbed you of your irritation altogether.
For one bright moment the whole of Summerhall seemed far away—the servants, the corridors, the waiting council, the realm itself. There was only warm stone beneath your feet, the scent of roses and honey in the air, and the man before you laughing low in his throat because he knew exactly what he was doing to you.
Then Daevor’s voice rang across the court.
“Papa! Vaeron says I cannot have another cake because I am little!”
Valarr closed his eyes briefly, as though mastering himself against the competing claims of husbandhood and fatherhood was a trial sent by the gods personally.
“You see?” you said, still flushed, still breathless enough to hate yourself for it. “The realm is not your only burden.”
“No,” he said, glancing toward the children and then back to you with fondness so deep it bordered on helpless. “Only the least beloved one.”
He kissed your brow once, lingeringly, before stepping back at last.
Then he went to them—to settle the grave dispute of the cakes, to listen to Vaeron’s arguments, to endure Saelora’s correction, to hoist Daevor up before the boy could steal another pastry unobserved. You stood where he had left you with your hand still at your mouth, smiling like a fool.
The sun had climbed higher now, laying gold across the paving stones and catching in silver and dark hair, and eyes both blue and brown. Summerhall had fully woken. From beyond the garden walls came the living sounds of the castle in motion—voices in the galleries, the clatter of hooves in the yard, the far cry of a dragon somewhere above the towers.
Yet none of it touched you.
You only watched him crouch beside his children, solemnly bargaining over cakes as though peace itself depended on it, and thought that the realm might keep its crowns and councils and songs.
Let it have them.
You had this, and for that morning at least, it was enough.
Pairing: Prince Valarr x Witch!Reader (She/Her, "You" referred )
Summary:
A wounded Targaryen prince stumbles half-dead into a witch’s cottage in the middle of a storm, and by the time the rain lets up, they are already far too deep in each other to come away cleanly.
He leaves her his ring, a promise to return, and every soft part of himself.
She lets him go with all of it and keeps his blood.
The rain had gone from a storm to a siege.
For two days and nights, it had battered the hills without mercy, running down the slopes in silver streams, turning the paths to slick brown mire and the woods beyond your cottage into a blur of wet branches and mist. The roof drummed with it. The shutters whispered with it. Even the little brook below the rise had swollen, loud and mean, churning over the stones like a thing angered by the sky.
Only Truffle was louder.
Your pig had taken the weather as a personal insult.
She squealed from beneath the lean-to beside the garden, affronted by mud, wind, damp straw, and perhaps existence itself. You stood in the doorway with your fur-lined shawl pulled close around your shoulders and stared at her with no small amount of judgment.
“You are pink, fat, warm, and fed,” you told her. “You have no cause for tragedy.”
Truffle answered by snorting directly into the rainwater and flinging a spray of muck against your hem.
You took one step toward her, ready to deliver a lecture on ingratitude, when another sound reached you through the rain.
Hoofbeats.
You froze.
The sound was slow, uneven, and wrong.
The horse came stumbling through the curtain of rain like some ghost of war, dark with water and foam at the mouth, its head low with exhaustion. The rider atop it was scarcely more upright than a corpse lashed to a saddle. He leaned forward over the horse’s neck, one hand slack on the reins, the other pressed hard to his side. Blood had dried there and half-washed away again, leaving dark rust-colored streaks over wet leather and wool.
He would have ridden straight past your gate if the horse had not decided otherwise.
The beast halted of its own accord, trembling.
The man swayed in the saddle.
Then tipped.
You were through the gate before you had decided whether or not you ought to be.
He was heavy. Gods, he was heavy. All long limbs and broad shoulders and soaked noble cloth dragged down with rain. Your hands caught at his arm and chest as he slid, and for one terrible moment you thought the both of you would go sprawling into the mud. Instead you managed to take enough of his weight to guide him down ugly and graceless, his boots splashing hard into the yard before his knees gave out beneath him.
His head lifted just enough for you to see his face.
Rain-dark hair clung to his brow and temples, a rich brown deepened nearly black by the storm. But at one side, beginning just behind his ear and trailing downward toward the nape of his neck, ran a streak of white so stark it seemed to catch what little light remained. Not the silver of age, but something sharper. Something memorable. His features were too fine for any common rider, though blood loss had leeched the warmth from them. And when one eye cracked open to look at you, you startled despite yourself.
One was blue.
The other was brown.
Heterochromia looked strange on other men. On him, it looked like something out of story.
And at his hand, half-curled in the mud, was a ring of red gold set with the three-headed dragon.
You stared.
“Well,” you murmured. “That is interesting.”
Even half-dead, there was something in that look. Pride, perhaps. Or the stubborn habit of command. Those mismatched eyes caught on your face, lingered, and narrowed faintly.
“Where,” he said, voice rough as torn silk, “are my men?”
“You haven’t any,” you replied. “Only a horse, a great deal of blood, and a very poor sense of direction.”
That seemed to displease him. His brow furrowed, then the motion clearly hurt, because his mouth tightened.
He tried to straighten. Failed.
“Did I ride into a witch’s wood?” he muttered.
You glanced at the ring once more. Then at the rain still pouring off the eaves. Then at the wound darkening his side.
“Yes,” you said. “Unluckily for you, she is in a charitable mood.”
He might have answered, but his eyes closed again.
You sighed.
Then you dragged a prince through your front door.
The cottage seemed smaller with him in it.
Perhaps it was not true, not truly, but it felt so. He took up your bed as though he had been built to inconvenience humble rooms. You had to cut away more of his clothes than you liked to reach the worst of the wounds. Rain-soaked fabric clung stubbornly to blood and skin. Leather straps had to be undone. Linen peeled back. A prince, broad and bruised and half-conscious, reduced to wet hair, fever heat, and the helpless honesty of torn flesh.
You kept your hands steady.
That had been your first gift, long before the others. Steady hands. A clean stitch. A sharp eye for where flesh would heal best and where it would pull ugly if left unattended.
The wound at his side was the worst of it. Another at the shoulder. Bruising darkening at the jaw. A cut along the ribs. He smelled of rainwater, horse, iron, and the sharp salt of blood.
You heated water. Burned thread clean in the fire. Crushed herbs beneath the heel of your palm. And when ordinary skill could only do so much, you pressed your hand over the worst of the bleeding and reached for the older thing in your blood.
Not bright magic. Not the sort sung of in halls.
Yours was quieter.
Bone-deep. Flesh-deep. The kind that coaxed blood to clot, fever to lower, pain to dull enough that the body remembered how to mend itself.
Warmth moved through your palm and into him.
He stirred once, brow furrowing.
Then settled.
By the time you had finished and bound him in fresh linen, the rain was still falling, Truffle was still offended by life itself, and a prince of House Targaryen lay half-naked and alive in your bed.
You sat back on your heels and looked at him a long moment.
“Well,” you said softly to the unconscious man. “You had better be worth the trouble.”
Truffle squealed from outside, as if offering an opinion.
“You are not helping,” you called toward the door.
He woke to firelight.
Not bright firelight, but the low, amber kind that made shadows long and skin warm and strange. It flickered over the beams of your cottage, over the bunches of drying herbs near the hearth, over the rough wool blanket drawn over his hips, and over you, sitting in the chair beside the bed with a bowl in your lap and your sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He did not move at first.
Men who had nearly died often woke in stages. Breath before thought. Pain before memory.
Then his gaze dropped.
His chest was bare.
Not entirely bare. Clean linen had been wound about his ribs and shoulder, and someone had seen fit to preserve a shred of decency by leaving the blanket where it was. Still, enough was missing that his suspicion arrived all at once, sharp as a knife.
His hand moved instinctively, first toward his ring, then to his throat, then to where a blade ought to have been.
Nothing.
His eyes snapped to yours.
You watched that understanding strike him in real time. Strange cottage. Unknown woman. Half-naked state. No weapon in sight.
He tried to sit up too quickly.
Pain caught him at once. He hissed through his teeth and braced a hand against the mattress, one broad palm whitening with the effort.
You did not rise.
“You should not do that,” you said mildly.
“Where are my things?”
His voice was hoarse, but the command in it was plain enough. The sort of tone that had likely made squires, guards, and courtiers jump since he was old enough to string words together.
It did not have nearly the desired effect on you.
Instead you looked him over, truly looked him over, before letting your gaze drift back to his face with slow, deliberate consideration.
“You are quite handsome enough to be sold into the slave trade,” you said thoughtfully. “Though I think trying to barter your gear for coin would bring me more questions than profit. A woman alone in the hills turning up with velvet, silver buckles, princely boots, a dragon-work cloak and a ring fit for a royal hand?” You tilted your head. “No. People would stare.”
For one absurd moment, he only stared at you.
Then one corner of his mouth threatened, however faintly, to turn.
Not a smile. Not yet. But close enough to unsettle you.
It was the eyes, perhaps. One blue, one brown, both fixed on you now with growing clarity, as if he had woken not merely to pain and suspicion, but to the unsettling fact of you.
A strange woman. A low fire. A cottage that smelled of rosemary, smoke, and rain. His life preserved by hands he did not know.
And still he looked at you as though you were the thing that had most confused him.
You should have liked that less.
“You jest,” he said.
“Of course I jest.”
He stared a heartbeat longer, as though trying to decide whether you were foolish, insolent, or mad.
Then, very carefully, he said, “My cloak.”
You set the bowl aside and rose.
By the hearth, drying on a chair near the fire, lay the things you had stripped from him when the rain-soaked cloth had clung too hard to his wounds to leave on. His cloak, black as wet midnight, now drying in soft folds. The dragon embroidered over one shoulder in red thread so rich it gleamed even in low light. His sword-belt. His shield set propped against the wall. His lance laid neatly in the corner. And on the shelf above them, where it would not be knocked loose or forgotten, the signet ring.
When you took them up and brought them back one by one, his gaze followed your hands.
You gave him the ring first.
His fingers closed around it at once.
Something in his face changed then. Not softening, not quite, but some final hard edge of suspicion gave way. He slid the ring back onto his hand and looked up at you with new attention, as though only now realizing that if you had wished him harmed, you need not have bothered keeping him alive at all.
“The cloak,” you said, holding it up lightly by its edge, “is worth more than everything in this cottage together, I think.”
His mouth twitched despite himself.
“That embroidery was done in King’s Landing.”
“So I guessed.”
“You guessed?”
“It is too fine for anywhere else.”
That drew a real look from him.
Not dismissive. Not wary. Curious.
Rain sang against the shutters. The fire popped softly between you.
You crossed to the chair at his bedside and folded the cloak over the arm instead of handing it over. Then his shield after. Then the lance, which made the room feel smaller by several feet.
At last you sat once more.
“There,” you said. “Your dignity is restored.”
“My dignity,” he repeated, “was not what troubled me.”
“No?”
“No.” His gaze slid, pointedly, over his own bare chest and back to you. “Though I note you were thorough.”
That made you smile.
“I had to be. You were bleeding on everything.”
His eyes lingered on your mouth then, just for a heartbeat, long enough to make heat stir low and annoying in your belly.
“Do not look so alarmed, my prince. I saw nothing worth swooning over.”
He stared at you as though the fever had returned full force. “Nothing of note?”
You lifted one shoulder. “I was rather occupied with keeping you from bleeding to death.”
“A cruel answer.”
“An honest one.”
“I begin to recover only to be wounded afresh.”
At that, your mouth twitched. “Then recover faster, and perhaps you may defend your pride properly.”
Fuck me.
The thought struck him so suddenly he nearly looked about the room as though someone else might have spoken it. She was undoing him. Not with softness, not with shy glances or practiced charm, but with that maddening wit and that infuriating little twitch of her mouth, as though princes could be stitched, mocked, and set aside in the same breath. He had known beautiful women. He had known clever ones too. But this was worse. This was a woman who looked at him half-undressed, wounded, stripped of sword and title, and still found the composure to tease him as though she held his pride in one hand and the needle in the other. Gods, he was getting hooked on her.
You broke the look first and reached for the bowl again.
“Sit still,” you said. “You have a fever yet, though less than before. At least the bleeding has stopped.”
“What is that?”
“Willow bark, honey, a little crushed mint, and two things I shall not name, because men grow difficult when they think herbs too mysterious.”
His brow lifted faintly. “And do I strike you as difficult?”
You glanced at the weapons. The ring. The rich cloak. The one blue eye and the one brown eye currently fixed on you with grave offense because a woman in the woods had seen him half-undressed and not bowed.
“Yes,” you said.
To your private delight, he laughed.
It hurt him at once. The sound broke off into a wince, and his hand pressed lightly to his side.
You leaned forward before you thought better of it.
“Do not be vain and wounded both,” you murmured. “It is too much trouble.”
His eyes met yours.
Too close, suddenly.
Near enough that you could see the dark lashes, the faint exhaustion still bruising the skin beneath his eyes, the way pain had sharpened rather than dimmed the beauty of him. He looked less like a prince now than something half-made by storm and story.
“You speak very freely,” he said quietly.
“You came bleeding to my door.”
“And that permits insolence?”
“It obliges it.”
For a moment neither of you moved.
Then, slowly, he let you bring the bowl to his lips.
He drank because he had not the strength to argue properly, but he made a face halfway through and said, “That tastes vile.”
“And yet,” you said, “you continue to live.”
He watched you after that.
Not boldly, not in the manner of men who wished to be noticed doing it. It was quieter than that, which somehow made it worse. You would feel it before you saw it, a warmth between your shoulder blades when you crossed from the hearth to the table, a curious stillness in the room when you bent to lift a kettle or wring out a cloth, as if the air itself had gone attentive. As if some part of him had woken before the rest and fixed on you first.
Once, when you thought him half-asleep, you moved to change the bandage at his shoulder and found his gaze already on you.
Not startled. Not embarrassed.
Simply there.
You should have looked away at once. Instead you lingered for one foolish heartbeat, taking him in by firelight. The heavy fall of brown hair over his brow. The white streak behind his ear. The roughness of healing at his jaw. The broad, warm line of his bare chest beneath the blanket, far too much of him for so small a bed, far too princely for so humble a room.
“What?” you asked at last, softer than you meant to.
His eyes did not leave your face.
“You make a great deal of noise for someone who moves so lightly.”
You blinked at him. “That is not a compliment.”
“It was not meant as one.”
You narrowed your eyes and reached for the fresh linen with perhaps more force than necessary. “And yet I am the one keeping you alive.”
“That,” he said, and there was the ghost of laughter under it, “is why I am tolerating your nature.”
You made an offended little sound and leaned in to tie the bandage more snugly than kindness strictly required.
He hissed.
Then, after a pause, quieter now, “Gentler, if you please.”
Your fingers stilled.
The words themselves were simple enough, but there was something in the way he said them, low and close, with that roughening of his voice that only seemed to appear when the room had gone too quiet. You became suddenly, absurdly aware of how near you were. Of the heat of his skin. Of the clean scent of herbs, rain-damp wool, and something warmer underneath that was only him.
You looked up, meaning to say something clever.
Instead you found him looking at your mouth.
For one sharp, suspended second neither of you moved.
Then Truffle gave a violent, offended squeal outside, as if outraged by whatever strange silence had fallen over the house.
You jerked back first.
Valarr shut his eyes briefly and gave a low exhale through his nose that might almost have been a laugh.
“Your pig,” he said, “has a talent for timing.”
“She is protective of me.”
“She is a menace.”
“She can be both.”
At that, he opened his eyes again, and this time when he smiled, it was small and unwilling and unfairly beautiful.
You hated how quickly your heart began to wait for it.
He told you his name on the second morning.
By then the rain had eased from a siege to a relentless curtain. The world outside remained grey and washed-out, the hills all mist and dripping stone. Truffle had forgiven the weather enough to root happily in the corner by the woodpile, grunting as though the whole world existed for her convenience.
You were kneeling by the hearth when he said, “Valarr.”
You turned.
He was awake and propped awkwardly against the wall of your bed, one arm loose across the blanket, the other still bandaged. The fire cast copper and gold over him, and the brown of his hair had dried now into soft disorder, the white streak near his ear stark against it. One blue eye and one brown rested on you as if that had become their favored place.
He looked terribly princely for a man sitting shirtless in a stranger’s cottage with a pig outside and a healer-witch scolding her kettle.
“Only Valarr?” you asked.
One corner of his mouth moved.
“Would the rest impress you?”
“No,” you said. “But it might explain the ring.”
That earned you a quieter smile.
“Valarr Targaryen.”
You let the name sit a moment.
A prince, then. Not merely born noble. Not merely rich enough to wear dragon-thread and carry king-made steel. A real prince, with all the danger that entailed.
And yet he had nearly died in your yard like any other man.
“Well,” you said at last, stirring the pot again. “That is a mouthful. I shall keep calling you Valarr.”
“I thank you for the mercy.”
“Do not. I do it for my own convenience.”
He watched you after that.
Not the way men in market towns watched. Not the way frightened men watched after seeing you come back from the woods in the shape of a fox or a hawk or once, to the horror of a passing shepherd, a great black hound. Valarr watched as though piecing together a puzzle he found more and more compelling.
You felt it when his eyes were on you.
At the table while you cut roots and dried herbs. At the washbasin when you wrung bloody cloth clean. At the door when you returned from checking on Truffle with rain in your hair and wet on your lashes.
And when you looked up, there he would be.
Watching.
Not like a prince surveying a curiosity. Not like a wounded man guarding himself.
Like someone trying to learn the shape of a thing already dear to him.
That was the part that frightened you.
Not his blood. Not his name. Not even the ring.
Only this. That some soft and treacherous part of you had begun, already, to wait for his eyes.
And worse still, he did not seem to fare any better.
You saw it in the way he quieted when you touched him. In the way his gaze followed your hands as though your fingers had become the measure by which he understood safety. In the way he listened when you spoke, even when you were only muttering at Truffle or scolding the kettle or cursing the weather under your breath.
As though nothing you said was too small to matter.
As though he had begun, without meaning to, to belong to the sound of your voice.
On the third day he caught you shifting.
Only the hand this time. Only the fingers. You had been coaxing a timid wren with a damaged wing onto your wrist, and when she panicked and fluttered, you had reached for her too quickly, skin shimmering for an instant into fine dark feathers before returning to itself.
He saw.
You knew he saw because the room went still.
When you looked up, he was watching you with that same strange, steady focus.
“Well,” you said after a moment. “There goes my mystery.”
Instead of recoiling, he leaned back against the pillows and studied you harder.
“Can you become any creature?”
“Not any.”
“Which ones?”
“The clever ones. The graceful ones. The useful ones.” You paused. “And once, disastrously, a badger.”
That startled a laugh out of him.
“A badger?”
“I was younger.”
“And less wise?”
“Considerably.”
The laughter faded, but the warmth of it did not.
Rain ran down the shutters in silver threads.
His gaze moved over your face, then your hands, then back again. “You are not at all what I expected to find at the edge of death.”
“Oh?”
“I expected mud. Perhaps a cave. A hermit with no teeth.”
“And instead?”
His eyes held yours.
“A woman who keeps dragons’ sons alive and makes fun of them while doing it.”
That was, you thought, entirely too good an answer.
So you looked away first and reached for his bandages.
“Let me see the wound,” you said.
He obeyed.
He obeyed more easily now, which was almost more dangerous than the princely command had been. The blanket slipped low enough for you to unwrap the linen at his ribs. He sucked in a breath when your fingers brushed his skin, but not only from pain. You knew the difference. You were not so innocent as all that.
Nor, apparently, was he.
You should have been used to touching him by now.
That was the lie you told yourself.
You had cleaned the blood from his skin. Stitched him. Bound him. Pressed cool cloths to fevered brow and bruised ribs, guided bitter tinctures to his mouth, braced his shoulders when pain took him too sharply. You had touched him more in four days than propriety would forgive in four years.
And still, every time, it surprised you.
The warmth of him. The weight of him. The way he went still beneath your hands, not from discomfort, but from that dangerous, attentive quiet he seemed to fall into whenever you drew too near.
You unwound the linen at his ribs carefully.
He watched you the entire time.
Not your face. Not at first.
Your hands.
The room was small enough that you could hear every change in his breathing. The rain whispering against the shutters. The soft crackle of the hearth. Truffle snorting in her sleep beneath the table. And underneath it all, the slow, steady beat of your own pulse, loud as a drum in your ears.
“This part,” you murmured, touching lightly just beneath the angry line of the cut, “will pull if you move like an idiot.”
He looked down at you, one brown eye, one blue, both darker now in the low firelight.
“And if I move wisely?”
Your fingers stilled.
You should have laughed. Should have called him vain again, or insufferable, or both. Instead your hand remained against his side, palm spread just enough to feel the warmth of his skin and the slow expansion of breath beneath it.
“That,” you said after a beat, and your voice came out more quietly than intended, “would be a welcome change.”
He smiled then, but only with his mouth. His eyes stayed fixed on you with a softness that made something low in your chest draw tight.
“You dislike me,” he said.
“I dislike princes.”
“That is not what I asked.”
No, it was not.
You tied the bandage, more slowly this time.
When you finished, he caught your wrist.
Not hard. Barely at all. Just enough to stop you from pulling away too quickly and pretending there had been nothing in the air between you.
His hand was warm around the bones of your wrist. Careful, though he was a man built for careless strength.
“Why do you live out here alone?” he asked.
You met his eyes.
There were a hundred answers. Too many. None you wished to give him.
So you said, “Because the woods ask fewer questions than people do.”
Something shifted in his face at that. Not pity. Never that. Something quieter. Recognition, perhaps. As if loneliness, in one shape or another, was a language he knew.
His thumb moved once against the inside of your wrist before he let you go.
That brief touch lingered long after his hand had fallen away.
And you knew, then, that whatever this was becoming, it was no longer yours alone.
Then Truffle shrieked outside for no earthly reason at all.
You shut your eyes once, briefly.
Valarr laughed low in his chest.
“Saved by the pig,” he said.
“Do not mock her. She is my dearest companion.”
“She is a tyrant.”
“She is sensitive.”
“She bit my boot yesterday.”
“You deserved it.”
He laughed again, and this time you smiled despite yourself, tying the bandage back into place with gentler hands than you meant to use.
That night the rain softened to a patient murmur.
Not the furious battering of the first two nights, but a steady, silver hush that wrapped the cottage close and turned the dark beyond the shutters into something secret and far away. The fire had burned low. Truffle had wedged herself against the side of the hearth like a spoiled child determined to die warm. The horse shifted once in the lean shelter outside, then settled again.
You ought to have been asleep.
Instead you lay awake on your pallet, staring at the rafters, listening to the small sounds of the room and to the far more dangerous sound of Valarr breathing only a few feet away.
Then, into the dark, he said, “Are you always awake at this hour?”
You turned your head toward the bed. “Are you?”
A pause.
“No.”
You smiled despite yourself. “Then perhaps this is a special occasion.”
“For what?”
“For finding yourself half-dead in a witch’s cottage.”
“I had imagined it differently.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” His voice was low and roughened by sleep. “There was less scolding in the version I pictured.”
You let out a small laugh before you could stop it.
The sound seemed to please him more than it ought.
After a moment, he said, “Do you ever tire of being alone?”
You did not answer at once.
Outside, rain whispered over the roof. Somewhere in the walls, old wood settled with a soft creak.
“Yes,” you said at last.
He was quiet for so long you thought perhaps he had drifted back to sleep.
Then, very softly, “So do I.”
The simplicity of it nearly undid you.
No title in it. No grandeur. No prince. Only a man in the dark, speaking into the hush between you as if the truth had slipped free before pride could catch it.
You turned onto your side, facing the outline of him.
“Surely that cannot be true,” you murmured, trying to rescue yourself with teasing. “I had thought princes were never left in peace long enough to feel lonely.”
He gave a soft sound that might have been a laugh. “You mistake being surrounded for being known.”
That silenced you.
There was a tenderness in those words that felt too large for the small room, too honest for the hour.
You swallowed.
“In that case,” you said, and hated how gentle you sounded, “you may stay lonely one more night. I am not moving from this floor.”
A rustle of blanket.
Then, “Come here.”
Your breath caught.
“Valarr.”
“You are cold.”
“I am not.”
“You lie poorly.”
You could hear the smile in his voice now. Infuriating man.
“And you command too much.”
“Only because I am often obeyed.”
That made you snort softly.
Still, after a moment, you rose.
The bed was too small. It had been too small for one of him, let alone two, and yet he shifted with surprising care, making room as best he could. When you lay beside him there was scarcely an inch to spare. The warmth of him wrapped around you at once, inescapable and immediate.
Neither of you spoke.
His arm did not go around you, not at first. It only rested behind you, close enough that the heat of it soaked through your sleeve.
Then Truffle snored like an old man choking to death, and the spell cracked just enough for you both to laugh under your breath.
His hand found your shoulder in the dark.
He touched you as if asking for something he had no right to ask for, and trusting you to understand it anyway.
Not possessive. Not urgent.
Just there.
You lay awake for far too long after that, listening to the rain and to his breathing and to the treacherous beat of your own heart. Every so often, he would shift just enough that his chest brushed your back or his breath warmed the nape of your neck, and each time it sent a fresh wave of impossible awareness through you.
You had lived alone long enough to forget what it felt like to be wanted gently.
That was the most dangerous part.
Not desire, sudden and bright.
But tenderness. The quiet sort. The kind that made room for itself before you realized it was there.
At some point, when he thought you asleep, his fingers brushed once along your arm, light as a question.
Then he drew a slow breath and whispered, so softly you might almost have imagined it, “I do not want to leave you.”
Your eyes burned unexpectedly in the dark.
You did not answer.
But when sleep finally took you, it came with the terrible, creeping knowledge that you had already begun to love him in all the places sense could no longer reach.
By the fourth day the downpour weakened.
Not gone, no, but gentled. The sky broke in places. The world beyond the cottage glimmered wet and green and silver under the pale wash of afternoon light. The horse had regained some strength in your little lean shelter. Truffle had returned to being merely ill-tempered instead of apocalyptic.
Valarr stood for the first time without swaying.
He was near the doorway, one hand braced against the wood, his dark trousers belted back into place, his cloak hanging loose around his shoulders though he had not fastened it. He looked more himself now, more like the man who had once commanded horses and steel and men at his back.
Because it meant he would leave.
He saw the thought on your face before you could school it away.
“Do you regret dragging me in from the rain?” he asked.
You folded your arms. “Sometimes.”
“That is honest.”
“I pride myself on it.”
He came one step closer.
Only one. But in a cottage as small as yours, one step changed everything.
“You saved my life,” he said.
“I stitched you. The rest was your own stubbornness.”
“No.” His voice had gone quieter now. Softer. “You saved my life.”
You tried to make light of it and found, to your annoyance, that the words would not come.
So you said instead, “What happened at the crossing?”
Something old and hard moved behind his eyes then.
“Bandits,” he said. “Or men calling themselves bandits. There is a difference, sometimes.”
“A dangerous one.”
“Yes.”
“Will they come this way?”
“If they have sense, no. If they do not…” His gaze flicked meaningfully toward the woods beyond your door. “I begin to think your hills would swallow them before you ever had to.”
You smiled at that.
“Perhaps.”
He reached up then, slowly enough for you to turn away if you wished.
His fingers caught a damp strand of hair near your temple and tucked it back.
The touch was absurdly light for such a large man. Careful. Almost reverent.
Your pulse stumbled.
“You are very calm,” he said.
“I am not calm at all.”
That made something warm spark in his expression. “No?”
“No.” You swallowed. “I have simply had practice pretending.”
His thumb brushed once, softly, along the line of your cheekbone before his hand fell away.
You did not know whether to kiss him or flee into the forest as a hawk.
Fortunately, the choice was taken from you by distant sound.
Hoofbeats.
More than one.
Valarr heard them too.
The whole of him changed at once. Straightened. Sharpened. Became prince again from the bone outward.
You hated that more.
“They’ve found me,” he said.
“Yes.”
For a moment neither of you moved.
Then he fastened the cloak at his throat, and the red dragon on black fell into place over his shoulders like the world remembering what he was.
When his men finally arrived, soaked through, road-weary, and visibly relieved to find him alive, they were wise enough to keep their questions behind their teeth. Their gaze moved over the cottage, the drying herbs, the narrow bed, the woman standing near the hearth with her sleeves rolled and her chin tipped just slightly upward, and the pig lingering in the doorway like some unlikely little guardian of the place. Then their attention shifted to their prince, to the bandage at his side and to the look in his eyes, a softness there that no wound, no battlefield, and no victory had ever managed to carve into him before.
Two white cloaks dismounted at once and started forward, but Valarr stopped them with nothing more than a raised hand. He had already learned the shape of your caution, the way you stiffened at sudden closeness, the way you preferred space before trust, and he would not have that peace broken now, not for ceremony, not for duty, not even for men sworn to lay down their lives for him. In that moment, your ease mattered more.
That, too, they saw.
They understood enough.
One of them stepped forward at last, leading his horse.
Valarr did not take it at once. He came to you instead.
The room felt very small then. Smaller than ever.
You knew, then, with a terrible and useless certainty, that if he touched you gently you would be lost.
“I owe you more than thanks,” he said.
“You owe me a blanket,” you answered, because otherwise your voice might have betrayed you.
His mouth curved.
“I owe you that too.”
He looked at you for a long moment after that. Not rushed. Not uncertain. Simply looking, as though he meant to remember every part of your face should the world try to keep him from it later.
Then he said, quietly enough that only you could hear, “When I woke, I thought I had been robbed.”
You lifted a brow. “And now?”
“Now I think I left with less armor than I arrived in.”
Heat rushed straight through you.
“Dangerous thing for a prince,” you managed.
“Dangerous thing for anyone.”
His hand came up to your jaw.
He kissed you before you could answer.
It was not hurried. That was the worst of it. Or perhaps the best.
There was nothing stolen in it, nothing clumsy or uncertain. He kissed you like a man who had denied himself too long in too small a space, who had lain awake listening to your breathing across the room, who had watched your hands mend what steel had torn open and learned, too late, how dangerous tenderness could be.
His thumb curved along your jaw, then settled warm beneath your ear, as if he could not bear the thought of letting your face go untended even now. His other hand, careful of his healing wound, came to your waist and drew you nearer by the barest degree, enough that the front of his cloak brushed your skirts and your breath caught before the kiss deepened.
Warm. Slow. Ruinous.
His mouth moved over yours with impossible care, as if he were discovering something precious and trying, in the same breath, not to frighten it away. Yet hunger lived beneath that gentleness, quiet and tightly leashed, and all the more devastating for the restraint of it. He kissed you like he knew exactly how badly he wanted more and meant, somehow, to be kind about it.
The taste of him lingered at once, rain-cool air, bitter herbs, and something wholly his own that made your head go light. Your fingers caught in the front of his cloak before you even understood you had reached for him. You clung because there was nothing else to do. Because standing upright through it had become suddenly impossible without proof that he was real.
When his lips parted against yours, when he breathed in and drew your next breath half from your own mouth, the world seemed to narrow to the warmth of him and the unbearable softness of being kissed as though you mattered already.
You felt it everywhere.
In the weakness that stole into your knees. In the flutter low and aching in your belly. In the tightness in your throat that had nothing to do with breath and everything to do with wanting, too quickly, too much. Your hand slipped upward to his shoulder, then into the damp-soft hair at his nape, and when your fingers caught there, he made a sound so quiet it nearly broke you.
Not quite a sigh.
Not quite your name.
Something more intimate for having no word at all.
He kissed you again after that, and the second kiss was worse.
Deeper now, though no less gentle. A little more certain. As if the first had been question enough and this was the answer. As if he had learned the shape of your mouth in a single touch and was already unwilling to forget it.
By the time he drew back, you were breathless. Not because he had taken the air from you, but because he had given it back changed.
His forehead rested against yours.
For one suspended, terrible, perfect moment, neither of you moved.
Had he asked then, you might have followed him anywhere and called it your own idea.
That was the true danger of it.
Not the prince.
Not the blood.
Not the promise.
Only this. The quiet, impossible sweetness of being kissed like something to be cherished.
“I do not want to leave,” he said at last, and this time the words came rough, honest, with none of a prince’s polish left in them. Only a man. “Gods, I do not want to leave you here and ride away as if this can be borne.”
Something in your face must have changed, because his mismatched eyes softened all at once.
One blue. One brown. Both full of you.
His hand slid from your jaw to close around yours.
“But I will come back to you,” he said, more firmly now, as if making a vow before gods and earth alike. “I swear it. I will come back to you.”
You should have said something clever. Something teasing. Something that would leave him smiling all the way down the hill.
Instead you looked at him and, hating how much you meant it already, only shook your head a little and whispered, “I hope so.”
His eyes changed at that.
Something softer. Deeper. The sort of look women ruined their lives for in songs.
Then he smiled, small, private, devastating.
Slowly, as if the act mattered, he pulled the signet ring from his finger and closed your hand around it.
The metal was still warm from his skin.
“I promise I will come back for you,” he said quietly. “Keep it safe, and know that my heart and mind will be on you until I do.”
For one fleeting moment, despite the blood and the danger and the prince’s men waiting only a few paces away, he looked boyish. Young, almost. Like a man giving away something precious because he could not bear to leave empty-handed.
Your fingers closed around the ring slowly, almost reverently, and when you looked back up at him there was something helpless in your chest, something soft and aching and far too close to hope.
Hope was a dangerous thing. Hope made women foolish, and patient, and faithful to things that had not yet earned it.
You had learned better.
Hadn’t you?
Still, your hand rose of its own accord and touched his cheek.
His skin was warm beneath your fingertips. His lashes lowered at the touch, not quite closing, as though he wanted to feel that small kindness fully and feared that if he did, he might not leave at all.
The thought struck you so sharply you nearly drew your hand away.
But he turned his face just slightly into your palm.
The gesture was small, which only made it worse.
You stilled your heart by force.
Or tried to.
Then he turned at last and went out into the washed-bright afternoon with his men behind him and the dragon on his cloak dark against the light, and it felt a little as though the cottage exhaled him reluctantly.
You stood in the doorway long after the sound of hooves had faded.
Truffle came to press her damp snout against your calf, demanding to be acknowledged in your hour of romantic suffering.
You looked down at her.
“Oh, be quiet,” you murmured, though she had not made a sound.
For a long while you stood there holding the ring so tightly that the edges pressed crescents into your skin.
The yard still smelled of wet earth and trampled grass and horse, of rain drying slowly under the weak afternoon sun. The world felt changed and not changed at all. The same trees. The same leaning fence. The same little cottage with smoke curling thinly from the chimney. Truffle rooting near the woodpile as if princes had not just come and gone from your life like the passing of some bright and dangerous star.
And yet nothing was the same.
You could still feel his mouth on yours.
That was the worst part.
Not merely remembering it, but carrying it. Like warmth left in cloth after someone had risen from bed. Like the afterglow of a fire that had not wholly gone out. You touched your own lips once, lightly, then stopped as if caught in something shamefully tender.
“I hope so,” you whispered, though he was long gone and the hills gave no answer.
Truffle nudged your leg.
You looked down at her, and because there was no one else to see, you let yourself smile the small, wrecked smile of a woman who had already begun to miss someone she had no right to miss at all.
Then the shadow moved behind you.
And the world, which had softened for one dangerous moment, sharpened again.
When the prince’s party had passed beyond the hill and vanished into the pale horizon, a shadow materialized into a man behind you.
Truffle squealed and startled, then quieted at once, recognizing the shape that slipped from the trees.
Your brother stepped out from beneath the dripping boughs as though the forest itself had spat him up. Rain darkened his cloak. A knife hung easy at his hip. His face, lean and sharp and too handsome for the sort of work he did, was arranged in that same familiar look of dry contempt he reserved for nearly everyone alive.
A fellow magic-user, though his gifts had curdled in a different direction than yours. Where you coaxed flesh closed and borrowed the shapes of beasts, he dealt in blood. In opened veins, old bargains, whispered bindings. These days he lent those talents to pettier things, theft, quiet murders, ugly little contracts bought with uglier coin.
His gaze drifted toward the road Valarr had taken.
“You should’ve killed him when you had the chance.”
You smiled gently.
Then, without haste, you drew a small vial from the pocket sewn cleverly into your skirt.
It was no taller than your hand, stoppered tight with wax and twine. Inside, dark against the glass, rested the prince’s blood. Only a little. Enough gathered from water basins, bandages, and cloth. Enough to matter.
Your brother’s expression sharpened.
“I have something better,” you said.
The vial gleamed in the wet grey light.
In the hands of a witch such as yourself, blood was no small thing. Blood could beckon. Blood could bind. Blood could sicken, weaken, turn a man’s own body against him, or drag him to heel from half a kingdom away if the spell were cruel enough and the will behind it crueler still.
Your fingers tightened around the glass.
In your other hand, hidden in the fold of your palm, his ring was still warm.
That was the worst part.
Not the contract. Not the blood. Not even the promise.
Only this. That he had kissed you like something precious, and gone away believing you might become it.
Truffle nudged her snout against your calf, soft and pleading.
You looked down at her and gave a little, unhappy pout.
“I know, sweetheart,” you murmured. “I liked him as well.”
Your brother gave a short, humorless laugh.
You lifted the vial and watched the dark red cling slowly to the glass.
Then you closed your fingers tighter around the ring.
Pairing: Prince Valarr Targaryen X Royce!Reader ("You"/ "Y/N" referred, she/her vibes) and Prince Valarr X Keira of Tyrosh (one-sided attraction)
Summary:
You were the first wife, and nothing could come after you.
When Lady Y/N Royce dies, bringing forth Prince Valarr’s twins, their dragon eggs hatch beside the cradle, and grief turns her into something the realm never lets rest. Years later, the court still wants her back. The city still wants her back. Valarr still loves her like an open wound. And Keira, the dutiful second wife sent to him for politics and peace, finds herself trapped in the shadow of a woman so beloved that even death could not make people stop choosing her.
Some women die and become memories.
You died and became the measure by which every living thing was found wanting.
Warnings:
major character death, childbirth death, grief, widowhood, second wife angst, memory and mourning, dead wife haunting the narrative, emotional infidelity themes, complicated marriage, bitterness, inherited grief, children grieving a dead mother, court politics, dragons, doomed love, tragic romance, everybody still being in love with the first wife, Valarr cannot catch a break from me, super angst, Kiera bashing, Keira sadness (sorry for fans of her, this aint that story)
There were some nights so heavy with grief and wonder that the realm refused ever to let them rest.
The night you died was one of them.
Years later, men still spoke of it in the Red Keep as if it had happened last moon. They spoke softly, with that careful reverence men use for things too sacred to touch and too painful to forget. Servants lowered their voices when your name came up. Guards went still over their cups. Washerwomen paused with wet linen in their hands. Old maesters who had seen wars, plagues, and princes laid beneath stone would fall quiet, then shake their heads as if memory itself had teeth. No one who had lived through that night had ever truly stepped free of it. The realm had gone on, as realms always did, but some part of it had remained kneeling beside that bedchamber door.
It had begun in terror.
The labor came hard and wrong, with rain lashing the windows and the castle black beneath the storm. The sea threw itself against the rocks below the hill with such violence it seemed determined to break the world open. Wind shrieked through the chimneys. Torches spat and guttered in their sconces, throwing gold over wet stone before surrendering whole corners of corridor back to shadow. The walls sweated damp. Drafts moved beneath doors and along the floor, cold enough to find bare ankles beneath skirts and the hems of robes. Somewhere in the dragon yard the beasts had gone restless, their cries carrying thin and eerie through the downpour, and later those who heard them would swear the creatures had known before any man dared say aloud what the night intended to take.
You had been laboring nearly a day by then.
The midwives came and went with blood on their hands and fear in their faces. Septas prayed until their voices thinned to rags. Maesters muttered together in corners, too low to be heard and yet not low enough to hide the dread in them. Lady Jena did not leave the chamber door. Baelor paced the corridor until the rushes flattened beneath his boots. Maekar stood by the hearth in a silence so hard it seemed another kind of armor, his thick hands locked behind his back so tightly that the knuckles blanched pale.
And Valarr.
Valarr had begun the night like a prince and ended it like a man being slowly flayed alive.
He did not sit. He did not drink. He did not speak unless spoken to. Rain still clung to his hair and darkened the shoulders of his tunic from where he had come in from the yard, half wild with waiting, and then simply stopped moving as if motion itself had become impossible. Every cry from within struck him visibly. He did not hide it. Could not. Once, when your voice rose sharp enough to cut through oak and stone and storm alike, he took one blind step for the door before the Grand Maester barred his path with one arm.
“You cannot help her there, Your Grace.”
Valarr turned and looked at him with such naked hatred, such helpless and terrible fury, that the old man faltered and stepped back half a pace without meaning to.
Inside, you were still yourself.
That was what undid them all later, when they remembered.
You were pale with pain, yes. Shaking with it. Drowning by inches in the monstrous work of dragging life into the world. But you were still yourself. Still sharp. Still proud. Still fierce enough to make courage look almost like temper.
When one young septa began weeping openly at your bedside, you turned your head against the pillow, teeth clenched against another pain, and managed, “If I must do this, you may at least stop making it look so grim.”
One of the older midwives burst into tears after that, though she hid it by turning away and pretending to fuss with the linens.
Near dawn, the first child came.
A son, red-faced and furious, shrieking his outrage at the world as though the world had offended him already. His cry seemed to split the storm itself. One of the maids flew into the corridor laughing and sobbing all at once, cheeks wet, cap half-fallen.
“A son,” she cried. “A prince. Strong-lunged and lusty.”
For one bright and shattering instant, the world changed.
Lady Jena broke into tears of relief. Baelor covered his face with one hand. Even Maekar let out the breath he had been holding. Valarr moved toward the chamber as if called by the cry itself, his whole soul fixed on crossing that threshold and reaching you.
Then the second pains took you.
The room changed. Women knew it first. Healers next. A wrongness entered. A silence sharper than shouting. Faces tightened. Hands moved faster. Hope, which had blazed so hot only a heartbeat before, began to dim in their throats.
The daughter came smaller, quieter, though living still. Another silver-haired child, wet with life, drawn bloody and miraculous into the world. Another cry. Another little body. Another prince’s child.
And their mother dying between them.
They told the story a hundred ways afterward, because grief that large was never content to remain itself. Some said you asked first whether the babes breathed. Some said you asked whether Valarr had heard them cry. Some swore you demanded to know whether the girl had all her fingers, because one Royce aunt had been born missing half of one, and laughed weakly when told yes and said, “Then she is luckier than half the men at court.”
What no two people ever told the same way was the end.
Some swore Valarr was called in before the last of it and took your hand. Some said he came too late. Some insisted you smiled when you saw him. Others said your face had already turned toward the children and never looked anywhere else again.
But all agreed on the cruelest truth.
He did not really get to say goodbye.
By the time they let him into the chamber there was too much blood in the bed, too many bodies in the room, too much hope dying all at once.
You lay propped against the pillows white as linen, your hair damp at the temples, your lips parted with the exhausted stillness of someone who had gone farther than the rest of them could follow. The children had already been wrapped. The wet nurse hovered uselessly. The midwives moved quickly in that dreadful, purposeful way that meant disaster had already chosen its side.
Valarr crossed the room at once.
He went to you first.
He dropped to his knees beside the bed and seized your hand, blood and all, as though he did not see it, as though he would have taken every wound into his own body if the gods had left him any bargain at all.
“Y/N.”
That was all at first. Just your name, broken open in his mouth.
Your lashes stirred. You turned your face toward him, and whatever you saw there seemed to pain you more than the dying did, because you made the faintest effort at a smile.
“The babes?” you whispered.
“Living,” he said at once, too quickly, like a prayer offered before the gods could change their minds. “Both living. A son and a daughter. You did it. Gods, you did it.”
Your fingers moved weakly in his. “Do not look so frightened.”
There were tears on his face by then and he did not seem to know it.
“You will mend,” he said.
It was not belief. It was desperation dressed in language and forced through broken teeth.
You looked at him with the terrible tenderness of a woman who loved too deeply to lie well to the man she loved. “Valarr.”
“No.”
That single word held more grief than dignity.
Lady Jena turned away weeping. Baelor stood by the hearth like stone forced to witness its own breaking. Maekar lowered his head.
Your gaze shifted, restless and searching. “The children,” you whispered again.
So they brought them.
First the boy. Then the girl. Wrapped in soft cloth and still squalling their fury at life. They were laid in the great carved cradle beside the hearth, where warm stones had been tucked beneath the blankets to keep out the storm chill.
And then the miracle came.
The dragon eggs had been placed there hours earlier, more hope than certainty, gifts laid beside the cradle because old blood loved its symbols even when the gods answered only with cruelty. One was dark as bronze shot through with smoke. The other pale silver, veined with blue like lightning trapped beneath stone.
As the twins were settled, the first egg cracked.
It was a tiny sound. Sharp. Unmistakable.
Every soul in the room turned.
Then the second cracked too.
The wet nurse cried out. One midwife dropped to her knees. The little prince in the cradle wailed louder as if in answer, and the princess flung one small hand free of her wrappings while the shells split wider and two hatchlings dragged themselves wet and shrieking into the firelight.
Later, singers ruined the truth of it.
They said the dragons came at the very instant their mother breathed her last, as though the gods had traded woman for wonder and found the bargain fair. They sang of silver babes and waking flame and blood made holy by loss. They turned sweat and terror and opened flesh into something bright enough for harps.
What truly happened was crueler.
For one heartbeat, only one, the room forgot you were dying.
Even Valarr turned.
How could he not. Dragons. Living dragons. The first hatchlings the court had seen in years, blind and shrieking beside the cradle meant for his children. The chamber broke open in astonishment, reverence, fear, joy.
And in that one heartbeat of wonder, death did what it always did.
It took without asking leave.
By the time Valarr looked back, you were slipping.
He caught for your hand too late, like a man trying to seize water.
“No. No, no.”
Your eyes found him once more. Not the hatchlings. Not the miracle that would outlive you. Him.
That was what made the memory unbearable.
Even with dragons screaming in the cradle, even with half the room falling toward its knees, you looked only at him.
You lifted your hand with what little strength remained and cupped his cheek. Your palm was cold and damp with blood, but the touch was gentle enough to kill him where he knelt. They were both crying then, not prettily, not nobly, just two people who knew. One because death had already put its hand upon her. The other because love had taught him the shape of losing before loss was complete.
Valarr covered your hand with his own and bent over it like a man trying to warm life back into your skin. “Stay,” he whispered, and then, breaking on the word, “Please.”
Your breath caught. When you spoke, it was scarcely more than air.
“You were the best thing that ever happened to me. I love you. Please, love them.”
Then you were gone.
No great speech. No courtly grace. No beauty in the thing itself. Only the soft and hideous stillness of a wife and mother who had been warm one moment and was not the next.
The sound Valarr made afterward was one no one in that room ever forgot.
It was not a cry. Not shouting. Not even weeping as other men wept. It was something lower, stranger, torn from so deep within him that Lady Jena sank into a chair with both hands over her mouth, Baelor turned away altogether, and even Maekar looked stricken by it.
In the cradle, the hatchlings shrieked and clambered blindly over the blankets toward the newborn twins, as if drawn by blood or warmth or some older call men had long since forgotten how to name.
So that was how you entered memory.
Not simply as Prince Valarr’s wife.
But as the woman who had given him twins, given the realm dragons, and died in the same breath.
Blessed, people called you. Revered. Adored.
And worse than all of that, wanted.
Wanted back.
That was the part the songs never said plainly. Not just that they mourned you. That they had gone on wanting you long after wanting had become useless. The city wanted you back in its alleys and courtyards and sickrooms. The nursery wanted you back. The mews wanted you back. The council chamber wanted your clear voice and your practical wit. Lady Jena wanted you back every time one of the twins laughed too suddenly. Baelor wanted you back whenever duty forced him to remember what it had cost his son. Even Maekar, who would sooner bite off his own tongue than speak sentiment cheaply, had wanted you back and gone on wanting you back with a silence so hard it scarred.
And Valarr.
Valarr wanted you back in a way that turned the wanting poisonous, because there was nowhere in this world he could set it down.
Years later, when Lady Keira of Tyrosh crossed the sea to wed Prince Valarr, she did not yet understand the full cruelty of what she was entering.
She knew the match was political. Everyone did. Daemon Blackfyre was dead, but his sons still lived in Tyrosh, and Tyrosh was a city thick with old loyalties and dangerous memories. Baelor had looked east and done what men like him always did when the realm felt uncertain. He had taken a daughter from the place where trouble might breed, wrapped her in royal honor, and called it wisdom.
Keira knew all that.
What she did not know was that she had been sent not into a marriage, but into a house still waiting for its dead.
The first time she entered the nursery, she thought she had stepped into another woman’s afterlife.
The twins sat by the hearth, silver-haired and solemn, already carrying too much memory in their little faces. Above them hung your portrait in its gilded frame, commissioned, a nursemaid whispered, when your first pregnancy had been announced. In it you stood with one hand curved over the swell of your belly and a hawk-glove at your wrist, strong-shouldered and bright-eyed, not meek, not arranged to flatter anyone, not painted like a vessel meant to soothe men’s pride. You looked alive. Worse, you looked loved.
And beside the hearth, beneath glass on a velvet cushion, rested the cast-off shells of the eggs that had hatched the night you died.
Keira stood staring at them until the nursemaid said softly, “Those are the prince and princess’s dragons’ first shells. We keep them for luck.”
Luck.
Keira nearly laughed.
The little princess, Daena, looked up at her and said with the merciless honesty of children, “You do not look like her.”
“No,” Keira said.
Aelor studied her with grave grey eyes too old for his face. “Father says she could outshoot half the men at court.”
“And ride harder than the rest,” the nursemaid added before she could stop herself.
Daena brightened. “And she was not afraid of hawks.”
“And she remembered all the little poor children’s names in Flea Bottom,” Aelor said. “Nana told me.”
Keira stood there in her wedding silks beneath the portrait of a dead woman who had somehow remained everywhere, and thought with sudden, awful clarity that there was no corner of this house where you were not already seated.
And there was not.
In the stables they remembered how you sat a horse like you had been born in the saddle. In the mews they spoke of your steady wrist and how once your hawk had stolen Valarr’s kill and you had told him before half the court that dragons grew soft when overpraised. In Flea Bottom, old women still blessed your name because you had brought bread, blankets, coin, apprenticeships, and the rarest thing of all, attention. In council, Baelor and even Maekar had valued your judgment. Lady Jena had loved you like a daughter chosen by the heart.
Valarr loved you in a way that left wreckage behind it.
He was never cruel to Keira. That was part of the misery. Cruelty could be hated. Cruelty named itself. Valarr was grave, courteous, restrained. He thanked her when she comforted the children. He stood when she entered. He came to her bed like a man discharging duty to gods and realm alike, gently enough that she could not accuse him of brutality and emptily enough that she lay awake afterward feeling lonelier than before he had touched her.
He almost never spoke your name.
Grief spoke well enough for him.
It lived in the way his face changed when one of the twins laughed too much like you. In the way he kept your bow polished though no hand would ever draw it again. In the way he paused at the nursery threshold and looked first to your portrait, then to the children. In the way his body, even in sleep, seemed to remember a woman no longer there and refuse the one beside him.
And that was the cruelty of you.
That dying did not lessen you. It made everyone love you harder.
It made them ache for you more.
It made them keep choosing you after you were gone.
Keira, poor Keira, was left to live inside all of it.
She did not mean to become foolish all at once.
That was the worst of it. Folly would have been easier to bear if it had come in one proud, dramatic act, something stupid enough to be named and regretted cleanly. Instead it came by inches, disguised as effort. As duty. As that humiliating little hope that if she could only step where you had stepped, wear what you had worn, do what you had done, the court might finally stop looking through her as though waiting for the dead to return.
It began with small things.
She wore hawk-brown one autumn morning because a seamstress told her you had favored it. She let her hair be dressed more softly because an old maid murmured that such a style had once suited the nursery portraits well. She asked the mews-master for the gentlest bird in the mews and stood with the glove on her wrist until her arm trembled, though the hawk’s talons bit through the leather and its bright, hard eyes watched her with no affection at all.
“Lady Y/N never flinched,” the mews-master said before he could stop himself.
Keira smiled as though it had not landed where it did. “Then I suppose I must learn not to.”
So she learned.
She learned to stand with a hawk on her wrist and not shame herself when it beat its wings against her balance. She learned to mount more quickly, though she had never loved the saddle the way you had. She let the master-at-arms hand her a bow twice too heavy because some page whispered that the late princess had drawn stronger ones for sport. She rode in the yard where men might see. She gave alms in Flea Bottom with careful generosity, naming apprenticeships and bread allotments and blankets for widows, only to watch old women look up at her with wet eyes and the wrong hope in them.
One of them took the coin from Keira’s hand and said, “You are kind, my lady.”
Then, after a pause that should have been nothing and felt like a knife,
“She was kind too.”
Too.
Keira carried that word back to the Red Keep like a bruise beneath silk.
After that she tried harder.
She asked after the old accounts you had once reviewed. She lingered near council longer than she was invited to. She repeated, nearly word for word, phrasing older men had once admired in you. She stood beneath your portrait and asked the twins about their dragons, their lessons, and the stories they had been told about their mother, though every answer hollowed her further.
One evening, Daena sat curled in the window seat with a book open over her lap, though she had not turned a page in some time. Firelight moved softly across her silver hair and the carved stone around her, and beyond the glass the last of the evening had gone dark over the city. Aelor sat cross-legged upon the rug nearby, solemn as ever, a little wooden figure forgotten in his hands.
“We were told Mother used to read here,” Daena said at last. “Sometimes Aelor and I like to sit here because it feels like being closer to her in some way.”
Keira said nothing for a moment. The words had not been sharp, yet they landed so precisely that she felt them all the same.
Daena’s gaze drifted toward the hearth, toward the high-backed chair beside it, toward the patch of worn rushes before the fire as though she could still picture a life she had never truly seen. “Nana said she would sit by the fire and read stories to Father while she sat on his lap.”
Aelor nodded with grave certainty, the way children did when repeating something they had been told often enough to make it sacred. “And when their dog bit the blanket the first time, she laughed.”
Keira kept her face still with effort. “That sounds lovely.”
Daena looked back down at the book in her lap, her fingers smoothing the edge of the page without seeing it. “We heard it was,” she said, not cruelly, only true.
And that was worse.
Not memory. Not even grief in its first bright violence. Something quieter. Two children born too late to keep their mother and yet old enough to begin loving the shape of her absence. They sat where they had been told you once sat. They looked toward the fire where they had been told you once laughed. They gathered stories about you the way other children gathered treasures, hoarding each one carefully because each one brought them a little nearer to a woman the whole castle still spoke of as if she had only just stepped out of the room.
Keira stood among that tenderness like an intruder.
The fire gave a low crack. Somewhere in the passage beyond, a servant’s steps passed and faded. Candlelight shifted over your painted face above the hearth, catching in the varnish at your eyes so that for one ugly instant it almost seemed as though the portrait itself watched her.
Daena rested her cheek lightly against the stone embrasure and said, very softly, “Sometimes I think if we sit here long enough, it might feel like she was only just here.”
Aelor lowered his carved toy into his lap. “Or like she might come back.”
Something in Keira gave way then. Not loudly. Not grandly. Just a thin, tired thing at last splitting under too much strain.
“She will not come back,” Keira said.
The words themselves were not cruel. Her voice was.
The children both looked at her.
Keira heard herself continue and could not seem to stop. “Stories make the dead easier than they were. Kinder. People always do that. They turn them into saints because the dead cannot disappoint anyone.”
Silence fell so abruptly it seemed to hollow the room.
Daena went still in the window seat. Aelor’s small hand tightened around the wooden figure until his knuckles whitened. Neither child spoke. Neither needed to. Hurt moved plainly across their faces with the terrible clarity only children possessed, open and unguarded and impossible to mistake.
Keira felt the shame of it at once.
She had not meant you, not wholly, not exactly. She had meant the court, the city, the thousand suffocating comparisons, the way every kindness shown to her felt like pity because it had once been love when offered to you. She had meant her own exhaustion. Her own bitterness. The fact that she was so tired of losing to a ghost that she had begun to resent even the shape of your absence.
But children did not hear wounds the way adults did. They heard only what was said.
And what she had said, in that room, beneath your portrait, was ugly.
Daena’s mouth trembled before she pressed it shut. “Mother was kind,” she said, with the fierce, frightened certainty of a child defending something holy.
Aelor looked not angry but stricken, which was somehow worse. “Nana said she was.”
Keira took one step toward them. “I did not mean it that way.”
“Do not do this.”
Valarr’s voice came from the doorway, low and sharp enough to stop the air itself.
No one had heard him enter.
He stood just within the threshold, one hand still on the doorframe, as though he had come in quietly and then stopped dead at what he heard. The corridor light behind him threw the edges of him into shadow, but there was nothing shadowed in his face. He looked not furious in the way men looked at insult. He looked wounded in the way men looked at sacrilege.
Keira went pale.
Valarr crossed the room, not quickly, not dramatically, which only made it worse. He went first to the children.
Daena had already set the book aside. Aelor did not move from the rug. Valarr crouched before them and laid a hand briefly, gently, against Daena’s shoulder, then against Aelor’s hair, steadying them as though they had both been struck. His face changed when he looked at them. Softened. Broke, almost, though only for a heartbeat.
“Your mother was kind,” he said quietly. “Do you hear me. She was.”
Daena nodded at once, though her eyes were bright.
Aelor nodded too.
Only then did Valarr rise and turn to Keira.
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
“Not to them,” he said.
Keira opened her mouth, but he did not let her speak.
“Not in this room. Not with her above them. Not when they have so little of her that they must make a life out of stories.” His voice roughened, and that roughness was more terrible than anger. “Do not do this.”
Keira could not seem to draw a full breath. “I did not mean for it to sound that way.”
“No,” Valarr said. “You meant it to sound wounded. You meant it to sound tired. You meant it to sound true enough to ease something in yourself. But they are children, Keira. And she is their mother.”
The word landed like judgment.
Mother.
Not the late princess. Not the dead. Not the woman in the portrait.
Their mother.
Keira’s eyes burned. “I know that.”
“Do you?” he asked, and the grief in him made the question crueler than contempt could have. “Because they do not have her. They have a portrait. A nursery. A thousand people telling them who she was. That is all. And now they must carry this too?”
Daena had gone very still behind him. Aelor had lowered his eyes to the floor, clutching his carved figure like a talisman.
Keira saw them then and wished the stones would open beneath her feet.
“I was wrong,” she said, and for once there was no pride left in it. “I was wrong. I know.”
Valarr looked at her for a long moment, and what hurt most was that he did not look triumphant. He looked tired. Tired and heartsick and older than the room around him.
“Yes,” he said at last. “You were.”
Then he turned back to the children.
That, more than the reprimand, was the humiliation of it. That he turned away from her as one turned from something already decided, and knelt again before Daena and Aelor with all the careful gentleness he had once reserved for loving you aloud.
Keira stood beneath your portrait and understood, with a clarity so sharp it was almost clean, that there were some wounds in that castle she was not permitted even to brush with her hand, because they were not hers, and because the people carrying them had already lost enough.
The true humiliation came a fortnight later.
Keira ordered one of your old gowns taken from storage.
Not for court. Not for a feast. Not for any public spectacle that could be dismissed as calculation. She did it in private, which made it worse. She wanted only to see it. To understand. To place her fingers on the fabric and perhaps find, in some worn seam or lingering scent sunk deep in the threads, the answer to why the whole realm had made a chapel of your absence.
The gown was riding silk, dark and serviceable, the sort of thing a woman wore who expected to mount a horse later and did not care to ruin herself for display. The collar modest. The sleeves practical. The only vanity in it lay in how clearly it had been made for a body loved enough to be measured with care.
Keira stood before the glass while her maid fastened it.
It did not fit.
You had been broader in the shoulder, narrower in the waist. There was strength in the cut that did not belong to Keira’s frame, and for one awful moment she looked not transformed but haunted, like a child playing at queenship in her mother’s clothes.
The maid’s hands faltered.
Keira saw the expression in the glass before the girl could hide it.
“Out,” Keira said.
The maid fled.
Keira was still standing there, half-laced and burning with shame, when the door opened again.
It was Maekar.
He filled the doorway in a way that had nothing to do with height and everything to do with force. Thick through the chest and shoulders, hard as if war had shaped him with a hammer, he seemed made of some meaner material than other men. Pale silver hair, touched faintly with gold, fell straight around a face marked by old pox scars. His beard was square-cut. His violet eyes were cold, sharp, impatient.
He shut the door behind him.
Keira wished, stupidly, that he had come shouting. Maekar in anger was easier to imagine than Maekar in silence.
He looked at the gown. At her. At the half-open chest where the rest of your things had been laid out by careful hands.
Then he said, in a voice flat as steel laid on stone, “Take it off.”
Keira went white.
For one wild instant she considered refusing.
Instead she lifted her chin. “My prince, I did not know this room was forbidden.”
“It is not,” Maekar said. “That is what makes this so foolish.”
Heat flooded her face, shame and anger together. “If you came to scold me, do it plainly.”
He crossed the room and stopped before her, not cruelly close, but close enough that she could feel the iron in him.
“I am doing you the kindness of plainness,” he said. “Take it off.”
Her hands trembled. “Why? Because she was so beloved? Because no one may touch what she touched? Because even dead she must be kept finer than the living?”
His eyes narrowed. “Because if you wish to survive in this castle, you must not do something so witless as put on a dead woman’s skin and hope men mistake you for her.”
The words struck hard enough to leave her breathless.
He was not done.
“She rode because she loved to ride. She hunted because she loved the hunt. She went to Flea Bottom because she could not bear not to. She spoke in council because she had a mind for it and no taste for flattery. She was not admired because she performed herself correctly. She was admired because she was wholly herself, and the court, for once, was wise enough to know the worth of it.”
Keira swallowed. “And I am not.”
“I did not say that. Do not ask questions simply to invite your own humiliation.”
She looked away first.
That seemed to anger him more.
Maekar caught her chin in two fingers, not gently and not cruelly, and turned her face back to his.
“You think the court cruel,” he said. “It is. You think it compares you to her. It does. You think half these halls would prefer a ghost to a living woman. They would. Fools always prefer the dead. The dead ask nothing, change nothing, disappoint no one.”
Keira’s eyes burned.
He released her at once.
“But hear me well. The moment you begin bowing to that ghost, the moment you begin offering yourself up as her lesser copy, they will devour you. Not because they hate you. Because they will not even have to. You will have done the work for them.”
The room felt very small then. The fire hissed. Somewhere below, a bell rang the hour. In the silence after it, Keira could hear her own breathing.
She laughed suddenly, and the sound cracked in the middle. “You speak as though I had some stronger self waiting to be unveiled.”
Maekar’s face did not soften, but something in it shifted.
“You crossed the sea to marry a grieving prince for the sake of peace,” he said. “You have buried children and risen the next day to dine beneath banners as though your body were not a tomb. You have endured a court too enchanted by tragedy to show common mercy. Do not speak to me as if you are made of nothing.”
That did it.
Keira turned away and pressed a hand to her mouth, because the cruelest thing a hard man can do is tell the truth kindly.
When she found her voice again it was thin. “Then why does it all feel so useless?”
Maekar was quiet for a long while.
“Because you chose the wrong battle,” he said. “You cannot replace her. Not for Valarr. Not for the twins. Not for the city. Not for the realm. If the gods themselves sent her back from the grave, half these fools would still say memory had made her finer. That is the nature of courts and mourners both. So stop trying.”
Keira looked down at the gown, at the sleeves that sat wrong on her arms, at the bodice shaped for another woman’s life. Suddenly she could scarcely bear the touch of it.
“You speak very sternly for a man who loved her too,” she said.
Something terrible passed across his face then, not softness but the memory of it denied.
“Yes,” he said.
Only that. Yes.
No speech. No ornament. No attempt to make grief pretty. Yet in that single word lay enough to break on. Respect. Affection. Loss. The memory of a woman he had judged worthy, which for Maekar might have been the rarest praise living.
He looked at her then not as a rival to the dead, nor as a failed successor, but as a woman standing foolishly at the edge of her own undoing.
“Baelor will pity you,” he said. “Jena will weep for you. Valarr will blame himself, and that will help no one. I am not them. So listen carefully. If you would live here, live as yourself. Bitterly, if you must. Imperfectly, certainly. But as yourself. Do not make a shrine of another woman and crawl inside it.”
Keira closed her eyes.
It was the first honest thing anyone had said to her in months.
When she opened them again, they were wet. “What if there is nothing in me they want?”
Maekar let out a short, humorless breath. “Then let them suffer the lack.”
He turned toward the door, then paused.
Without looking back, he said, “You would have despised this, you know.”
Keira stared at him.
“She did not spend her life teaching men to look a woman in the face only to have you teach them they were right not to.”
With that, he left.
The door shut behind him with a clean, final sound.
Keira stood still for a long while. Then, slowly, she reached for the laces at her back.
Her fingers shook. Twice she fumbled them. At last the gown loosened. The borrowed shape of it slipped from her skin with a whisper of silk, like something surrendering. She stepped out of it carefully, almost reverently, not because it was sacred, but because it was no longer hers to war against.
When the maid returned, summoned by a bell pulled with an unsteady hand, she found the gown folded neatly atop the chest and her lady standing in her shift by the window.
“My lady?” the girl whispered.
Keira did not turn. “Pack it away.”
“Yes, my lady.”
The maid hesitated. “Shall I bring you another dress?”
Keira looked out across the darkening city, toward the black line of the river and the roofs beyond, toward a world that had loved another woman openly and might never love her at all.
“Yes,” she said after a moment. “Bring me one that is mine.”
She tried after that. Gods knew she tried.
But differently.
She no longer wore your colors because you had worn them. She no longer asked the twins questions merely to collect relics of your grace. She no longer forced herself into your shape and called it effort. Yet the castle did not become kinder for her honesty. If anything, it only made her loneliness clearer.
She was still patient with the children. Still gracious to servants. Still dutiful to husband and court. She even went to Flea Bottom one bitter morning with coin and bread and linen, thinking perhaps she might carve one small corner of goodness for herself.
An old woman there caught sight of her and began to weep.
For one impossible moment Keira thought it was joy.
Then the woman clutched her hand and said, “My lady, when I saw your colors I thought our princess had come back.”
The hope died in the woman’s face when she looked closer.
“No,” the crone whispered. “No, you are not her.”
No insult could have wounded Keira more cleanly than disappointment.
Years passed. Keira buried stillborn sons beneath Targaryen banners and court silence. The twins grew. Their dragons grew. And your shadow only deepened, because now Keira was not only less loved. She was less blessed too. Less golden. Less touched by the gods. You had given Valarr living twins and dragons and died beloved. Keira gave him small wrapped griefs and lived.
The court found it easier to forgive death than endurance.
In the end, it was the nursery that undid her.
It was always the nursery.
She stood there one night while the twins slept and the fire burned low, your portrait glowing above them in the wavering candlelight. Beneath the glass, the old eggshells shone pale and ghostly. Beyond the walls, somewhere far off, the dragons stirred in their sleep, and the faint scrape of chain and stone carried through the keep like an old wound shifting.
Everywhere she looked, some trace of that night remained.
When Valarr found her there, he stopped in the doorway.
“You will wake them,” he said quietly.
Keira did not turn at once. “No. The dead keep watch better than I do.”
His face changed. “Do not speak so.”
At that she laughed, and the sound frightened even her. “Why? Because it is cruel? This room has been cruel to me since the day I first crossed its threshold.”
“Keira.”
She turned then, and what he saw in her face was worse than anger.
Exhaustion.
“I have tried,” she said. “Gods know I have tried. To be patient with children who see what I am not. To be gracious to servants who speak of her as if she might walk back through the door tomorrow. To be worthy of a husband who is kind enough never to strike me and cruel enough never to love me. I have even tried to be generous to her memory.”
Valarr said nothing.
Keira lifted a trembling hand and pointed, not at him, but above him, to your portrait.
“Do you know what it is to live beneath the face of a woman who won everything before you ever arrived? She had your love freely. She had living children. She had dragons in her cradle. She had your father’s admiration, Lady Jena’s devotion, Prince Maekar’s respect, the city’s gratitude, the court’s worship. She had the hawks and the hunts and the stories and the poor and the princes and even the bloody gods.”
Her voice thinned, but did not break.
“What was left for me?”
Valarr looked at her like a man watching his own house burn and finding himself too late to stop it.
“It was never my wish to wound you,” he said.
“I know.” Tears stood in her eyes now. “That is the part that has finally made a coward of me. If you had meant it, I could have hated you cleanly. But you only grieved. And the rest of us were buried in it.”
He took one step toward her.
She stepped back at once.
That one movement struck him harder than if she had slapped him.
Keira looked up once, just once, toward your painted face.
Then she said, very softly, “I think she even died in a way that left no room for the rest of us to live.”
The words hung in the nursery like a bell tolling.
Valarr shut his eyes.
Because it was true.
You had not merely died. You had died in blood and wonder, beneath storm and dragon-song, leaving behind heirs, miracle, and memory all at once. You had died so terribly and so beautifully in other people’s telling that no ordinary woman could ever come after you and be allowed to remain ordinary. Keira had been asked to live where legend still slept warm.
When Valarr opened his eyes again, they were bright.
“I loved her before duty ever touched us,” he said, his voice rough with the shape of truth. “Before counsel. Before my father. Before any of it.”
Keira nodded once. “Yes.”
He looked at the sleeping twins, at the glass case holding the broken shells, at your portrait above the hearth, and finally at the woman before him who had never been permitted to arrive as herself.
“When she died,” he said, “I thought if I remembered her fiercely enough, I would not betray what she was.”
Keira’s mouth trembled. “And instead?”
Valarr looked at her like a man standing in the ruin of his own making.
“Instead, I betrayed everyone who was still living.”
And because there was nothing left to say that would not come too late, Keira turned first to the children. She drew Daena’s blanket higher. Smoothed Aelor’s hair back from his brow. Only then did she move past Valarr toward the door.
At the threshold she stopped, though she did not look back.
“They will remember her kindly,” she said. “Everyone will.”
Valarr did not answer.
Keira’s hand tightened on the doorframe.
“I think,” she whispered, near to breaking, “no one will ever remember how hard I tried not to hate her.”
Then she left him there beneath the portrait of the woman he had loved in life and crowned in grief, with their sleeping children below and the relics of miracle still gleaming beside them.
And Prince Valarr remained in the nursery long after the candles burned low, staring up at your painted face and understanding at last that some women are loved so greatly they do not become memory when they die.
They become the measure by which every living thing is found wanting.
And you, poor thing, were loved so much that even death could not persuade anyone to stop asking for you back.
Pairing: Prince Aerion Targaryen (Modern AU) X Reader ("You" referred, she/her vibes)
Summary:
Daeron has stepped down. Maekar’s branch is shifting onto Aerion’s shoulders. The board is circling, the tower is tense, and she is supposed to be spending her day off buying groceries with Duncan on Aerion’s card.
Then Maelor falls at school.
Now she’s walking into Targaryen Tower with Aerion’s son on her hip, security is waving her through like they know better than to stop her, a new assistant mistakes her for his wife, and Aerion takes one look at her and forgets, very publicly, that anything else was ever supposed to matter first.
If everyone already thinks she belongs to him, what happens when he finally stops denying it?
Warnings:
minor child injury scare but he is okay | school phone call from hell | modern Targaryen family business chaos | succession angst | Duncan being ride-or-die and annoying in exactly the correct way | mistaken wife allegations | quiet building-wide gossip | Aerion said one thing and now I need to lie down | Maekar secretly approving but refusing to act like a human about it | yearning | hand on waist disease | emotional repression in luxury tailoring | open ending but make it romantically devastating | Duncan is your bestfriend and Aerion has to deal with that as is | you guys got sad Valarr, now be prepared for this wife Aerion one idk
Her day off had not belonged to her from the moment Aerion handed over his card that morning.
He had done it in the same way he did most things when he was trying not to make care sound like dependence. One hand around his coffee, phone lighting up every few seconds on the kitchen island, tie hanging loose around his throat as if he had only remembered it existed halfway through dressing, he had slid the black card across the marble toward her and said, “Get whatever’s needed. For the flat. For Maelor. For tonight.”
Duncan, leaning against the opposite counter in one sock and no shame, had looked up from the shopping list on his phone. “You say that like I’m incapable of buying groceries.”
Aerion had not even glanced at him. “You bought sparkling water, the wrong rice, and dog treats.”
“We do not own a dog.”
“Exactly.”
You had taken the card, trying not to smile. Aerion finally looked at you then, and the expression on his face had done that quiet, dangerous thing it always did when he was exhausted and pretending he was not. Blue eyes sharp, mouth set, the whole of him wound too tightly beneath the surface. His jacket was still off, but the shirt he wore was a deep ember-red under the kitchen light, dark enough to look almost black until he moved. His hair had been pushed back from his face with impatient fingers, silver-gold and a little untidy at the front, and he looked far too beautiful for the amount of strain he was carrying.
There was still fire in him, even now.
He no longer wore it the way he once had, not openly, not in those shameless years when he had seemed to delight in setting himself ablaze just so everyone else would have to look. Gone were the loud reds and molten golds, the theatrical flourish, the silk and arrogance and the almost taunting way he used to move through rooms. But the thing beneath all that had never disappeared. It had only narrowed. Refined. Learned control.
In his youth, Aerion had been the kind of beautiful person that people spoke about with resentment in their throats. Silver-gold hair, pale skin, a high brow, hard cheekbones, deep blue eyes that could look amused, bored, or cruel with almost no warning. There had been something imperious in his face even then, something too aware of its own effect, too certain that the world ought to rearrange itself around him. And he had been cruel once. Capricious. Vain. Spectacularly difficult to love. The kind of man who could be all smiles and polished courtesy in front of his father, then turn around and show his teeth the moment the room changed.
That version of him had left damage behind.
He knew it.
So did the rest of them.
But he had changed, which in some ways made him more unnerving now, not less. The recklessness had hardened into discipline. The arrogance had become precision. The need to provoke had thinned into something colder and more useful. Even his temper had improved, which was perhaps the most alarming thing of all.
Men who stayed monsters were easy to understand.
Men who learned restraint were not.
And today, with Daeron stepping down and Brightflame’s internal structure shifting like a fault line under all their feet, he looked like a man being pushed toward power whether he wanted it or not.
Daeron had laid his portion down that morning. Publicly, it had all been phrased the way such things always were, private realignment, long-term stability, continuity, all the polished language wealthy families used when they were trying to keep fracture from sounding like weakness. But everyone who actually mattered knew what it meant.
Daeron was done.
He had too much going on in his head, too much damage gathering where none of them could pretend not to see it anymore, and he wanted to step back before it took the rest of his life with it. The family had agreed, begrudgingly, and only because his performance had been slipping for too long. It was no longer yielding the kind of results expected from a Targaryen son bred for inheritance and scrutiny. His drinking had become its own quiet scandal. Public enough to embarrass, private enough to bury, but only just. It had become surprising, frankly, that he had not yet been flagged for something uglier. A DUI. A formal incident. A case someone could not make disappear quickly enough.
So Aerion had been brought in next.
Not the whole family. That still belonged to Baelor’s line and all the glittering, cold authority that came with it. Valarr, golden and correct and built for rooms full of shareholders and cameras, stood closer to the center of the dynasty’s public face. But Maekar held a brutal amount of private leverage. Voting power. Quiet capital. Senior partnerships. The kind of internal force that never made headlines because it did not need to. When he moved, men noticed. When he withdrew support, people bled.
And now that Daeron had stepped aside, more of that burden was shifting onto Aerion, with the unspoken certainty that when Maekar was gone, the full force of that power would become his.
You had seen it in him for days. The tightness around his mouth. The shorter patience. The way he seemed already braced for impact before the first blow had even landed.
This morning, though, all he had said after sliding the card toward you was, “Don’t let Duncan decide anything that requires judgment.”
Duncan had put a hand to his chest. “That is deeply insulting.”
Aerion had looked at him then, deadpan. “You’ll survive.”
Then he had gone still for a second, like another thought had occurred to him too late. His gaze shifted back to you.
“Take Donnel with you.”
You blinked. “For groceries?”
“Yes.”
Duncan laughed. “Christ. We’re buying yogurt, not transporting state secrets.”
Aerion ignored him completely. “Take Donnel. Let him do the driving.”
“Aerion,” you started.
“No.” His tone did not rise, but it sharpened. “No argument. Take him.”
You stared at him.
He looked back at you for one hard, unblinking second, and there it was beneath the control. Not paranoia. Not quite temper. Calculation. The kind that had only gotten worse since the news broke that morning. Since finance pages started talking. Since social media had turned into a landfill fire of speculation, edits, slander, threads, and badly informed analysis from people who suddenly believed they understood the inner structure of the family because they had seen two headlines and a grainy board photo.
Aerion Brightflame taking on Brightflame Holdings.
Aerion stepping into Daeron’s place.
Aerion joining billionaire heir lists.
Aerion, the former family nightmare, now expected to carry a meaningful portion of Maekar’s side of the empire.
Reddit was calling it a disaster in a good suit.
TikTok had already made edits of him leaving the tower the week before, slowed down under music so dramatic it should have come with a government warning. Clips of him in dark tailoring. Clips of him ignoring cameras. Clips of him walking like he was carrying violence in his pocket instead of documents and legal briefings.
And not just him.
There were edits of you and Aerion with Maelor wandering through the expensive side of downtown, his little hand in yours, while Aerion carried the bags and looked annoyed enough to make the comments lose their minds. Gala photographs where you stood somewhere in the frame, not centred but never accidental either, surrounded by the Targaryen family, like you had always belonged there.
Photos in the background of Egg’s stories and posts, boating weekends, polo matches, horseback riding, long lawns and old-money sunlight, where you were simply there. Sometimes with Maelor on your hip. Sometimes beside Aerion. Sometimes in the distance, speaking to Maekar about God only knew what. No one ever filtered you out. You were not a one-time guest or a rumour. You were a constant. A familiar one. A welcome one, if the outside world were any judge of it.
The only thing most people ever seemed to know for certain about you was that you and Aerion had met in the first year at university, when you both took the same required course that happened to overlap between your degrees. He had started in mechanical engineering before he pivoted, surprisingly and irritably, toward actuarial work and eventually the financial structure of the family empire. You had stayed the course, moved into software engineering, and actually finished it.
Through your friendship with Aerion, you had later secured a role within the wider Targaryen business structure as a software engineer, but even that had been positioned carefully. Not under Maekar’s office. Not under Aerion. Under Baelor, Maekar’s elder brother, after the same interviews, the same coding assessments, the same technical screening everyone else sat through. You had not ridden Aerion’s coattails into the building, and everyone who mattered knew it.
You had earned your place.
Both in business and, increasingly, in their lives.
When Maelor had been announced, the public never learned who his mother was. Only a select few knew the truth, that it had been a fucked-up one-night stand Aerion regretted deeply, though never once his son. The arrangement had been swift, ugly, and buried almost as quickly as it had surfaced. NDAs. A private agreement. Full custody to Aerion. A lump sum to make the woman disappear from the story before the story ever really began. No public war. No custody battle. No damage that could not be covered over with money, silence, and the family’s usual efficiency.
Half the comments online called Aerion dangerous.
The other half seemed to think danger was the point.
And a select few were simply appreciative of his face.
And all morning, his name had been climbing.
You understood then.
Not groceries.
Exposure.
So you only nodded. “Fine.”
His jaw eased by a fraction. Then he kissed the top of Maelor’s head, brushed two fingers lightly over the back of your hand where it rested near the card in one of those thoughtless, intimate gestures he never seemed to realize were more dangerous than open flirting, and said to no one in particular, “Good.”
Donnel drove.
He was one of the older security men, broad-backed, quiet, and so immaculately unruffled he gave the impression of having been born in a black suit with an earpiece already in. Duncan rode with you, still in full grocery-errand mode, while Donnel took the wheel like he had been expecting this all morning.
At first, it really did feel stupidly domestic.
Pasta sauce. Cereal arguments. Duncan holding up two jars like the fate of nations depended on your answer. Donnel saying almost nothing from the front except once, very dryly, when Duncan asked if he wanted to weigh in on pasta shapes.
“I like whichever one gets us home fastest, sir.”
That made Duncan bark out a laugh.
Then your phone rang.
The screen made your stomach drop.
Summerhall Private Academy
Duncan saw your face change instantly. “What happened?”
You were already answering. “Hello?”
The woman on the other end sounded calm in the careful, professional way that always meant the opposite. “Hello, is this Maelor’s mother?”
Your eyes shut briefly.
Of course.
Of course that was how they still had you listed.
“Yes,” you said automatically, then corrected yourself too late. “I mean, I’m his emergency contact. What happened?”
“Maelor is alright, I want to make that clear first, but he had a fall during recess. The nurse has seen him, there are no immediate signs of anything more serious, but he’s upset and asking for you. We attempted to reach his father, but his office told us he was unavailable in meetings.”
Unavailable.
No shit.
Not today. Not when half his future had just been dropped in his lap and the other half was being measured by men who still thought his sins at twenty-two mattered more than his competence now.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” you said.
“Thank you. He’ll be very relieved.”
The call ended. Duncan took the cart from your hands without being asked.
“How bad?”
“He fell. They said he’s okay, just shaken.”
Duncan nodded once. The humor had gone from his face. “Go.”
“What about this?”
“I’ll finish.”
“You bought the wrong detergent last time.”
“I’ll call you from the detergent aisle and let you supervise me like the tyrant you were born to be.” Then, softer, “Go get him.”
Donnel was already moving.
By the time he had pulled the car around to the front curb, the whole shape of the day had changed.
He met you at the entrance with the rear door already open. “School?”
You nodded once. “Maelor fell.”
Donnel’s expression did not change much. He only said, “Understood,” and got you moving before the first question could fully settle in your throat.
The drive to Summerhall was quiet in the front and too loud in your own head. Duncan texted twice. Once to ask if Maelor was okay. Once to send a photo of two detergents with the caption:
choose wisely, my tyrant
You almost laughed.
By the time you reached the school, your pulse had worked itself into a tight, aching knot. The place looked exactly the same as always, all polished glass, private funding, and landscaped discretion, but you barely noticed any of it beyond the doors.
The first thing you did notice when Donnel opened your door was the black SUV idling half a block down.
Then another.
Then a man with a camera pretending not to be facing the entrance.
Donnel noticed them too.
His jaw tightened once. “Right.”
Inside, Maelor was sitting outside the nurse’s office with his backpack in his lap and his cheeks still pink from crying. There was a bandage near his temple, and the sight of it made something in you drop hard and fast. The second he saw you, he sat up so quickly his shoes knocked the edge of the chair.
You crossed the floor and crouched in front of him. “Hey, sweetheart. Let me see.”
His eyes went glassy all over again. “I fell.”
“Oh, baby.”
That was enough.
He came straight into your arms, and you held him close while the teacher, already half-apologetic, explained what had happened. A kite had gotten stuck high in one of the trees, and Maelor had tried to help another student get it down. He had climbed higher than he should have, slipped coming back down, and scared himself badly in the process. The nurse was confident it was more fright than true injury. No vomiting, no dizziness, no blackout, no confusion. Just a scraped temple, a hard cry, and a little boy who wanted someone familiar.
You signed the forms one-handed, kept one palm steady against his back, and listened with the kind of focused calm that was really just worry in cleaner clothes.
Then the teacher smiled and said, “He was so happy when we told him his mum was coming.”
Your pen paused for the smallest second.
You should have corrected her. You did not.
Maelor tucked his face harder into your neck, and that settled the matter more than words could have.
The problem started the moment you stepped back outside.
The cameras saw you first.
Or rather, they saw Maelor in your arms, saw Donnel immediately changing course toward you, saw the school doors open, and understood at once that something had happened and they were about to get more than they had expected.
“Ma’am, can we get a comment?”
“Is Aerion prepared to take on Brightflame now that Daeron’s stepped down?”
“How is he handling the transition?”
“Has Maekar formally backed him for a bigger role?”
“Is he expected to join the top-earning heirs list this quarter?”
“Is the family worried about optics?”
“Is Aerion ready to lead?”
“Can you comment on the market reaction?”
The questions came fast and ugly, colliding into one another as more of them surged toward the pavement.
Maelor jolted against you.
That was the only thing you registered clearly.
You pulled him tighter instantly, one arm locked hard around him, the other hand spreading over the back of his head and pressing his face into your neck. He hid there at once, small body curling inward. You could feel his breath against your throat, too fast, too shallow.
Donnel stepped in front of you like a door slamming shut.
“Back the fuck off,” he snapped, voice carrying clean across the entrance. “Back. Up.”
The nearest photographer kept moving.
Donnel took one step toward him and said, colder now, “Do not make me repeat myself.”
It worked.
Not because they were decent, but because they knew who employed him.
Still the shouting continued.
“How does Aerion feel about taking this on when Daeron was supposed to carry it?”
“Has Maekar chosen him?”
“Is the family united on this?”
One idiot with a phone shouted, “People online are calling him the dark horse of the family. Is that fair?”
The flashes started going off. White, sharp, ugly.
Donnel opened the rear door of the car without ever fully turning his back on them.
“In,” he said.
You did not waste a second.
Once inside, you pulled Maelor properly into your lap in the back seat, even though he had technically outgrown that years ago. He pressed himself against you without complaint, face buried in your neck, your hand still firm over the back of his head while the other rubbed slow circles between his shoulders.
Donnel slammed the door, rounded the car, and got behind the wheel in three long strides.
By the time the vehicle pulled away, the shouting had dulled into muffled noise behind tinted glass.
Maelor did not lift his head.
You kissed his hair and kept your voice low. “You’re alright. I’ve got you.”
His fingers clutched harder at your coat.
Outside, the city kept moving. Inside the car, your phone would not stop vibrating.
Notifications.
Messages.
News alerts.
Three missed calls from an unknown number.
A trending clip somewhere of the school entrance, probably, or the tower from that morning, or one of those edits people kept making of Aerion walking into buildings like he was carrying a knife between his teeth and not a tablet full of merger documents.
You did not look.
Not yet.
Donnel did, once, in the mirror.
“I’ve already called ahead,” he said.
You looked up. “To the tower?”
“Yes.”
That made something in your chest loosen, just a little.
The drive into the city felt different after that. Less like panic. More like bracing.
You got Maelor buckled in again when he finally let you, wiped the last dried tear-tracks from his cheeks, gave him water, and turned the music down so low it was more background than sound. He spent most of the drive looking out the window, little face reflected in the glass, watching traffic lights streak red and gold across it.
Then, somewhere between the expressway and the downtown turn, he said softly, “Papa’s going to do the forehead thing.”
Despite the knot in your chest, you almost smiled. “The forehead thing?”
Maelor pressed two fingers between his brows and dragged them down into a dramatic, severe frown.
“That one.”
A soft laugh escaped you. “Yeah. He probably is.”
He nodded, pleased you understood. Then, after a small pause, he added, “I like when you come better.”
That one landed.
Your grip tightened on the wheel, and the rest of the drive passed with a different kind of ache sitting in your ribs.
By the time Targaryen Tower rose into view, black glass and dark steel against the grey afternoon, you were braced. It looked less like an office building than a modern keep, built by a family that no longer needed crowns because voting power, private leverage, and controlling interest did the same work with better press.
Security recognized your car before you reached the barrier.
The guard at the entrance barely glanced at the screen before lifting it. “Afternoon, ma’am.”
No pause. No check-in. No delay.
Nobody in that building was stupid enough to delay you when you had Maelor with you. More than that, nobody wanted to be the person Aerion discovered had made your day harder than it already was. The fact had become something close to legend over the last year. He had once reduced a junior assistant to tears because she left you waiting in reception for eleven minutes while he was in a call. Another time, a security contractor had tried to insist on protocol while Maelor was sick and half-asleep in your arms. He had not lasted the week.
People learned.
And if Aerion’s temper did not teach them quickly enough, Maekar’s colder displeasure usually did. That surprised outsiders more than it should have. But the old man noticed everything, including who mattered to his son and grandsons. Anyone who made life difficult for you had a way of finding the tower less welcoming after.
So the staff let you through.
Not because they pitied you. Not because they were indulging some unofficial favorite.
Because they knew better.
The tower entrance was already prepared when you arrived.
Two security men were outside before the car fully stopped. The doors were opened for you instantly. The small crowd clustered beyond the outer barrier barely had time to surge before one of the guards stepped forward and cut them off.
“Back.”
There were shouts immediately.
“Can we get a statement?”
“Is Aerion inside?”
“Was that Maelor?”
“Is the family responding to market speculation?”
But you were already moving.
One hand on the back of Maelor’s head. One arm tight around him. Donnel half a step ahead of you and one of the tower guards at your shoulder, clearing a path so efficiently it felt almost choreographed.
Inside, the lobby shifted the second you crossed the threshold.
Not subtly.
Immediately.
A receptionist was already coming around the desk. One of the assistants near the lifts straightened so quickly she nearly dropped her tablet. The new girl at the secondary desk, clearly not yet trained enough to hide her nerves, stared at you, then at Maelor, then at Donnel, and went pale.
No one asked you to sign in.
No one stopped you.
No one was stupid enough.
Because everyone in the building knew what happened when you arrived carrying Aerion’s son and looking like that.
And because if the crowd outside thought they could get a statement from you here, they were about to learn what the inside of this family actually looked like when its own were involved.
Inside, the lobby was all dark stone, brass, and hush. Old money. The kind that did not need to prove itself. Heads turned the moment you stepped inside with Maelor on your hip, but not in a gawking way. More like the floor itself had adjusted to your arrival.
One of the newer assistants stood from behind the secondary reception desk the second she saw you. She looked polished, young, and just uncertain enough to give herself away as new. Her eyes moved from you to Maelor and widened slightly.
“Oh,” she said quickly, smoothing her skirt, “I’m so sorry, ma’am, he’s still in strategy, but if you’d like, I can let him know his wife and son are here?”
You blinked.
Maelor, little menace that he was, said nothing at all. He only settled more comfortably against you and curled his fingers around the necklace at your throat, the gold pendant Aerion had given you, two dragons entwined to signify him and Maelor.
Before you could correct her, the older receptionist beside her made a strangled sound into her throat that was suspiciously close to a laugh and rose to her feet. “I’ve already called Ellyn.”
The new assistant went pink.
You did not correct her.
Not because you were trying to claim something. Not even because some quiet, shameful part of you liked the sound of it more than you should have.
Mostly because correcting it with Maelor in your arms and the whole lobby listening would have made it something larger than it needed to be.
A moment later, the private lift opened.
Ellyn stepped out in charcoal and silk, tablet under one arm, expression composed. She took one look at you, one look at Maelor, and one look at the new girl’s face, and understood everything instantly.
“Well,” she said dryly, coming toward you, “I see we’re having a day.”
“I fell,” Maelor told her with grave dignity.
“I can see that.”
Then, lower, to you, “He’s on the edge. The meeting’s gone on too long, Daeron’s papers are finalized, and three directors have already said the phrase fiduciary continuity like it means anything worth hearing.”
That made you huff the smallest laugh.
Ellyn’s mouth twitched. “The building is still standing, which counts as success.”
She turned to the new assistant. “With me.”
The girl looked like she wanted the floor to open beneath her.
Upstairs, the executive level was all frosted glass, muted light, and the oppressive quiet of expensive places where men with power preferred their panic to happen softly. Ellyn crossed to the boardroom and knocked once before stepping inside.
Voices. Low, clipped, tired.
Then Ellyn’s voice, smooth as polished stone.
“Sir,” she said, “your wife and son are here to see you.”
Silence hit the room so hard it was almost audible.
Then the door opened.
Aerion came out like the room had failed him personally.
His tie was gone. His collar was open. His jacket was still on, but only just, like he had kept it there out of spite. The color beneath the black of the suit was dark and ember-red, visible only when he moved, and it made him look like what he had always been at heart, a man with fire banked beneath control. His hair had been pushed back too many times already, silver-gold disordered at the front. Exhaustion had deepened the violet of his eyes until they looked almost bruised.
Then he saw Maelor.
Everything in him rearranged.
The boardroom vanished from his face. The directors, the votes, the transition, Daeron’s absence, Maekar’s pressure, all of it dropped back the second his attention landed where it mattered.
He was in front of you in a heartbeat, too close, too fast, one hand going first to Maelor’s cheek, then to the back of his head with a tenderness that never failed to catch you off guard because of how complete it was. Not performative. Not careful for witnesses. Just real.
“What happened, little dragon?”
Maelor blinked at him. “I fell.”
Aerion’s gaze swept the bandage, the faint puffiness around his eyes, the dried traces of crying you had not quite managed to wipe away. His jaw tightened. The line appeared between his brows exactly where Maelor had predicted. But his hand stayed gentle, thumb brushing once, carefully, below the bandage.
“I can see that.”
“He was checked by the nurse,” you said quietly. “No dizziness, no nausea, no confusion. He mostly scared himself.”
Aerion looked at you then.
That was the dangerous part.
Not the temper. Not the name. Not even the history.
The way he looked at people he loved.
There was nothing casual in it. No half-measures. No polite distance. Aerion had once been a man who burned through things out of boredom, arrogance, and sheer appetite. Now, when he cared, he did it with terrifying focus. Enough to make a person feel pinned where they stood. Enough to make the room around you both feel briefly irrelevant.
His hand stayed cupped at the back of Maelor’s head.
The other slid around your waist, low and sure, like it had every right to be there and had long since stopped asking permission.
“Thank you,” he said, and the words came out rougher than they should have, quiet enough that they felt like something meant only for you.
It would have been easy, in that moment, to forget the room behind him entirely.
Easy, if Maekar had not risen.
He stepped into view at the far end of the table, broad and severe and unmistakably built from some older, harsher world. Thick through the chest and shoulders, beard cut square, hair silver touched with gold, pox scars faint on his cheeks, he carried himself with the dense, immovable force of a man who had never needed charm because he had always had authority instead. Even in a modern suit he looked like he ought to have been wrapped in black velvet and dragon teeth, one hand on the haft of a mace.
His gaze went first to Maelor.
Something in it softened.
Not enough for anyone outside the family to catch. But you saw it. Aerion saw it. Ellyn certainly saw it.
Maekar loved his grandson in the manner of hard men who had never learned softness and considered that a private failing, not a public one. He did not coo over them. He did not fuss. But rooms shifted for them. Schedules bent. Tempers were reined in. The world, where possible, was made safer.
Then his gaze moved to you.
He did not smile. He probably had not smiled properly in twenty years.
But the look he gave you was not neutral either.
It was that same stern, grudging approval he had never spoken aloud but never really hidden from you, either. The look of a man who thought you were good for his son, knew it, and resented his own inability to say so in a way that did not sound like an operational briefing.
If Maekar had been made with gentler language, he would have said that you steadied Aerion in ways the rest of them could not. That you had never asked anything from the family but had somehow become essential to it. That you made his son less reckless, his grandson happier, and the building itself calmer when you walked through it.
Instead, he said, “I assume the tower can survive ten minutes without you.”
Aerion did not look away from you. “It will have to.”
Maekar’s gaze dropped once to the bandage, then back to you. “Take him into the office.”
It was not really about the child.
It was Maekar’s way of saying go, of making space for Aerion without dressing it up as kindness, of choosing you both openly enough that anyone in the room with half a brain would understand.
Then Maelor, because children were born to betray the adults who loved them most, tucked his face against your shoulder and said, “They called her your wife again.”
The silence that followed was glorious.
The new assistant at the back of the room looked like she might pass out.
Ellyn’s eyes lowered at once to hide her amusement.
Something flickered at the corner of Aerion’s mouth.
He looked at his son first, then at you, and some tiny fraction of the strain left his face.
“There’s my honest boy,” he murmured.
Maelor blinked up at him. “I didn’t tell them no.”
That got you. A laugh slipped out before you could stop it.
Aerion heard it, and the look he gave you after was enough to make your pulse stumble.
Then, still holding your waist like letting go would be an error in judgment, he said quietly, “Come upstairs with me.”
Not a request.
Not really an order either.
Just the truth in its most controlled form.
You went.
His office was dim compared to the corridor beyond, all dark wood, low lamps, and glass running from floor to ceiling behind the desk. The skyline looked cold through the windows, the city blurred silver and slate beneath the weather. Maelor was settled onto the long sofa with juice, crackers, and one of the wooden puzzles Ellyn kept in a cabinet for emergencies that were never officially called emergencies.
By the time the door shut behind you, the hush in the room felt different from the hush outside.
Aerion took his jacket off and dropped it over the back of a chair. He crouched in front of Maelor first, checked the bandage himself, pressed a kiss just beside it, brushed the hair back from his forehead, and asked the same questions the nurse had already asked because he needed the answers from his son’s mouth, not anybody else’s.
Only when he seemed satisfied did he stand.
He dragged one hand over his face, exhaled, and turned toward you.
You leaned a hip against the edge of his desk, watching him. For a moment, neither of you said anything. The city glowed beyond the glass. Maelor rustled softly on the sofa behind you.
Then you said, “They called me your wife, Aerion. What is that?”
His head lifted slowly.
For one suspended beat he only looked at you.
Then he crossed the room.
He stopped close enough that your knees nearly brushed his, one hand coming to your waist again, the other braced beside you on the desk. The position turned the question into something hotter than you had intended, though perhaps not hotter than you had feared.
His gaze dropped briefly to your mouth and then rose again.
“The first sensible thing anyone’s said to me all day,” he said softly.
That would have been enough.
It was not all he did.
His thumb moved once against your waist, slow and deliberate, and then he leaned in just enough for his forehead to touch yours for the barest moment, like a confession he had no intention of offering anyone else.
Behind you, Maelor gave a sleepy little sigh from the sofa.
Aerion did not look away from you.
“Stay close,” he murmured. “I’ve had enough of everybody else deciding what matters today.”
Because there he was, a man with half a branch of the family settling onto his shoulders, a boardroom full of directors waiting, Maekar watching, Daeron gone, Brightflame shifting, the whole goddamn tower braced for him to become something harder, and still he was standing there with his hand at your waist like the only thing in the room he trusted not to fail him was you.
Pairing: Prince Valarr x Lannister!Reader (She/Her, "You" and "Y/N" referred )
Summary:
Everyone thinks she has the perfect life: the face, the jewels, the husband, the sons, the kind of future that kingdoms are built on. Married to the second in line to the Iron Throne, she is meant to one day stand as queen consort of the Seven Kingdoms.
So why does it still feel like she is standing at the edge of her own marriage?
What no one sees is the loneliness beneath it, or how a man can be faithful, trying, and still leave the woman beside him starving for something gentler, warmer, and finally spoken aloud.
Warnings:
“good husband, terrible at being loved correctly” marital grief, soft devastation, emotional neglect, arranged marriage, pain, old feelings that never died properly, domestic loneliness, beautiful wife, dumb man, devastating yearning, Valarr fumbling the woman of all time, Valarr being foolishness (unfortunately), Kiera bashing? (kind of), angst to the max
You had not been born cold.
That was the thing no one at court ever understood, though courts were forever mistaking silence for pride and reserve for disdain. You had been raised amongst lions, and lions were loud creatures even when finely dressed. Casterly Rock had rung with bright laughter through gilded halls, with splendid tempers, sharp tongues, and easy boasts, with uncles and cousins who embraced noisily, quarrelled noisily, and made peace just as noisily over wine. The Lannisters were beautiful in the way songs preferred—fair and golden, bright as hammered coin in sunlight, with green eyes clear as sea glass and crimson cloaks spilling from their shoulders in rich folds. Their guards were red cloaks, their banners red and gold, and their pride was as old as the Rock itself.
You were all of those things too. You had the pale gold hair, the emerald eyes, the fine bones, and the lion’s pride.
You simply had not inherited your kin’s ease with noise.
As a girl, you had often stood just behind the others, smiling softly while the room filled around you. You felt things too deeply and spoke too little. In the west, that had been understood for what it was: shyness, reserve, gentleness turned inward. Your mother would smooth your hair and call you tender-hearted. Your cousins would talk enough for three people and pull you laughing into their games regardless. At Casterly Rock, no one mistook your quiet for frost.
At King’s Landing, they did.
By the time you came east, the match had already been measured in ledgers and whispered over at council tables. Prince Valarr had thought, in the vague, careless way young men often thought of futures not yet nailed down by older hands, that he might one day marry Keira of Tyrosh. Not for love, perhaps not at first, but because she had been there, and because she had been easy in his company in a way few women were. Keira was clever and handsome, and quick enough to laugh at him without making him feel small for it. He knew the tilt of her chin when annoyed, the cadence of her voice in gardens and hawking fields, and the little courtesies that had begun, over time, to feel like the first stones laid in the road of something more.
Then Prince Daeron was offered Keira instead.
It was called a finer match. A wiser one. A more useful one. Men with rings on every finger said so in grave tones, and women in jeweled sleeves nodded as though marriages were bolts of silk to be weighed and priced. For Valarr, as though some god in a bitter mood had chosen to salt the wound, there came a bride from the westerlands with Casterly Rock at her back and Lannister gold in her veins.
“Lannister coin will strengthen the crown,” Prince Baelor had said.
What Valarr heard was simpler and crueler: Keira is gone, and you are to be paid for in gold.
He said nothing, because princes were not reared to complain prettily when duty was laid upon them. He bowed his head, accepted the terms, and stood in the hall like something carved while men older than he was decided the shape of the rest of his life.
You arrived a moon’s turn later beneath banners stirring in a dry black wind off Blackwater Bay. The day was bright and pitiless, all hard light on pale stone and brazen helms. You descended from your litter in crimson velvet lined with lion fur, gold thread at the hems, your hair partly hidden beneath a jeweled net. You came with a small train of handmaidens chosen by the royal household to ease your settling into court—though in time they would become far more than attendants.
You curtsied before the royal family with perfect grace.
Your hands did not tremble.
Your face was composed so beautifully that one might have mistaken calm for indifference.
Valarr looked at you as one might look upon a polished shield: fine enough, but cold to the touch.
You saw the look and hated him a little for it. You were already frightened, already trying not to show it, and the thought that the man you were to wed believed you proud and unyielding felt like one more weight laid on your shoulders before the marriage had even begun.
Their wedding, your wedding, was a splendid misery.
The sept was full. Candles burned in long pale ranks beneath crystal stars. Silk rustled. Swords whispered against scabbards. Lords in dark velvets and ladies crusted in gems watched with the bright, hungry stillness courts reserved for unions that mattered. The singers sang. The bells rang. The court smiled as though it had not just watched one bride exchanged for another like a treaty clause amended after midnight. Valarr did all that was expected. He cloaked you. He kissed you when the septon bade it. He danced. He drank. He smiled until his jaw ached.
Across the hall, Keira sat beside Prince Daeron in Tyroshi silk and pearls, graceful as enamel on ivory. Daeron leaned to murmur something in her ear. She laughed softly. Valarr saw it. He hated that he saw it. He hated even more that the sight of her followed him into the bedding chamber that night.
You sat on the edge of the bed in crimson silk, your back very straight, your hair half-unbound and spilling over one shoulder in pale waves that caught the candlelight. The chamber smelled of wax and spiced wine and crushed rose petals underfoot, with smoke from the brazier lingering faintly in the rafters. Outside, the distant noise of revelry rolled through the stone like surf.
“You may look at me as though I am a sentence passed upon you,” you said at last, “but it will not make the door open again.”
Valarr, half-undressed, turned toward you.
There was no tremor in your voice. No plea. No tears.
He ought to have admired that. Instead he said, sharper than he meant, “Did they teach you to say that in the west?”
“No,” you answered. “In the west they taught me not to beg where I am not wanted.”
For one ugly moment, he almost laughed.
That should have warned him. That should have told him there was wit in you, and hurt pride, and some slender hidden softness held upright by sheer will. That should have been the beginning of something honest between you.
Instead, it became the shape of what followed.
And yet it was Valarr, strangely, who first saw the truth of you. Not in any song-worthy fashion, not by moonlight in a garden or with vows half-spoken into a kiss, but in the common, unbeautiful places where the heart sometimes showed itself despite all effort.
At your first feast in the capital, the great hall had been a roar of voices. Targaryens at one end, mighty lords at the other, silver dishes flashing beneath torchlight, musicians sawing at strings, courtiers pressing too near with curiosity dressed as courtesy. You bore it beautifully, because Lannisters did not tremble where anyone could see. You answered what was asked. You smiled when proper. You lowered your head when expected. But beneath the table your hands were clenched so tightly your nails bit crescents into your palms.
Valarr, seated beside you, went still after some time.
Then, without announcement and without looking at you, he said quietly, “You need not stay until the final course. I can say you are tired from the journey.”
You turned, startled.
He only reached for his cup as if nothing of consequence had passed between you.
But when the roasted swan came out and every eye in that end of the hall was drawn toward some drunk Reach lord making too much of himself, Valarr rose and offered you his arm with princely ease.
“My lady wife has had a long day,” he said to those nearest. “I’ll see her to her chambers.”
There was no mockery in it. No impatience. Only simple understanding.
It should have meant nothing.
It meant everything.
Later, in the corridor beyond the hall, where the noise fell away behind thick stone and a pair of servants hurried past carrying trenchers slick with grease, you let out one long breath you had not known you were holding. Torches hissed in their brackets. A draft from some stairwell touched your cheeks coolly through the heat left by the feast.
Valarr glanced at you. “You looked as though you were about to bolt like a frightened doe.”
To his surprise, you laughed.
Not the little polished court laugh women learned young, the one meant to smooth over a man’s vanity. This laugh was warmer, younger, unguarded. It eased something in his face in answer.
“I may yet,” you said.
“That would be difficult in those skirts.”
You looked down at the heavy fall of crimson silk and, for the first time since coming to court, smiled with your whole mouth.
That was how it began.
Not with passion. Not even with hope at first. Only with the dangerous tenderness of being seen.
He did other things too, all of them small enough that another woman might have called them nothing at all. You, being made as you were, made a home of them. He noticed you ate little at feasts and had simpler food sent up afterward—warm bread, honeyed apples, broth with herbs—saying only that royal cooks ruined everything by over-seasoning it. In crowded corridors, he shifted so careless young knights and swaggering men-at-arms had to go around you rather than brush too close. Once, when you woke from a bad dream in the Red Keep—strange stone, stranger bed, no sound of the sea, only the vast uneasy silence of a place full of watchers—you found a lamp had been left burning low. He had noticed, on the second night of your marriage, that you slept poorly in darkness. He never mentioned it.
You loved him for that most of all.
You were not a woman who fell quickly, but you fell completely.
Quiet women often did. They loved in hidden, stubborn ways. They built whole cathedrals inside themselves and let no one hear the labour of the stone. By the time you were carrying your first son, you were already his in every way that mattered, not merely by law, nor by bed, nor by duty, but in that soft and terrible place where a wife begins to turn toward her husband before anyone else in the room, where she saves thoughts for him, where evening feels unfinished until his step sounds in the corridor.
The handmaidens chosen for you by the royal household saw it before anyone. Ellyn saw how you brightened when Valarr came unexpectedly to break his fast with you. Myria saw how you kept the books he favored nearest the chair by the window. Ysilla saw how you wore more black and red than crimson and gold after marriage, not because anyone asked it of you, but because you wanted to please him. They saw, too, how frightened you were of wanting too much.
And perhaps you had reason.
Because you were everything a prince ought to have wanted. Beautiful, dutiful, gentle, highborn, fertile. The court said so often enough. They praised your grace, your modesty, the calm way you carried yourself through the dragon-haunted strangeness of King’s Landing. They said you were a good wife to the second heir to the Iron Throne. They said you would be a good mother to princes. In time, they would say you might even be a good queen.
You were lovely enough to be admired. Soft enough to be praised. Obedient enough to make old men nod in approval.
And still, in your husband’s eyes, you lived beneath another woman’s shadow.
Keira.
Not because he was dishonorable. That was the misery of it. Valarr was married to you now. Keira was wed to Daeron. He did not touch her. He did not shame you with open disloyalty. He was too decent, and too proud, for that. He respected the life that had been laid before him. He came to your bed. He gave you sons. He stood where a husband ought to stand.
But sometimes respect was not the same thing as surrender.
Because Keira had not been some passing fancy. She had not been a pretty stranger glimpsed across a feast hall. She and Valarr had spoken first. Walked first. Laughed first. They had become close in the quiet, unguarded way two young people sometimes did before anyone named it aloud. There had been gardens, and hawking fields, and those long, easy conversations that taught one person the shape of another. By the time the court began speaking of them as a likely match, the ground had already been laid.
Then the plans changed.
Daeron was offered Keira.
Valarr was promised you.
No vows were broken, because none had been spoken. No betrayal had happened, because the world had cut them off before either could claim such a word. That only made it worse. Their story had not ended in scandal or sin. It had ended in silence, in duty, in a future folded away before it had fully begun.
And so it lingered.
Not in any way the realm could condemn. Only in the small, unbearable ways a wife noticed and no one else did.
In the way his face would still alter, faintly, when Keira laughed from across a room. In the way he never overstepped, never lingered too openly, and yet seemed to go still for half a breath whenever she entered his notice. In the way older courtiers still smiled sometimes when their names rose together in talk, as though remembering some gentler version of the future before politics had done what politics always did and laid human hearts out like pieces on a board.
And Keira herself was not innocent in it.
Not cruel, perhaps. Never openly. Never enough to disgrace herself. But darker than simple kindness allowed.
She moved through the Red Keep as though she belonged there, and that belonging itself felt like a quiet triumph. She spoke to Prince Baelor without seeming foolish. She laughed with Daeron’s kin and was laughed with in return. At feasts, no one mistook her pauses for uncertainty. At hunts, she rode with the men, speaking over hoofbeats as though she had been born to it.
And when she looked at Valarr, sometimes there was still something there.
Not enough for anyone to name.
Only enough for you to feel.
Enough to make your stomach turn cold.
Enough to make you understand that though she had married Daeron, some corner of her still kept the memory of what might have been. Not because she wanted to take him from you now. Not because she meant to start some vulgar little war between women. But because certain feelings, once grown properly, did not die only because wiser people arranged otherwise.
That was the cruelty of all of it.
He did not cheat on you.
She did not tempt him.
No one crossed the line.
And still you knew, with the miserable certainty of a wife who loved too deeply, that you did not have him whole.
Once, after a feast where Keira had moved through the room with her usual easy grace, you found yourself alone with her by a bank of candles guttering low beneath painted saints.
“You are well loved here,” you said before you meant to.
Keira looked at you then, really looked, and some brightness went out of her face.
“No,” she said softly. “Only well worn-in.”
You blinked, startled.
She traced one finger along the stem of her wine cup. “Do not mistake fitting into a room for belonging to it.”
Then, after the smallest pause, she said, “Men are not the only ones who learn to live with what they were given.”
That was when you understood.
Keira had wanted him too.
Not foolishly. Not all at once. But slowly, in the dangerous way friendship became fondness and fondness became something neither of them had been allowed to finish.
You had married him.
She had not.
And still, some part of her looked at you and saw the woman who had been given the life she once thought might be hers.
That was the first time you hated her a little.
Not because she was cruel.
Because she was honest.
Because in that one quiet sentence, she told you she knew exactly what sat between the three of you, and had chosen to carry it so gracefully that no one would ever dare call it grief.
Then someone called her name, and she turned away before you could answer.
You thought of that moment more often than you wanted.
Because in the end, it seemed true of all three of you.
Keira had lost the life she might once have had.
Valarr was trying.
That was the worst part.
If he had been cruel, perhaps you could have hated him. But he was only blind, and there was no easy way to stop loving a man who kept reaching for the life before him and still failed to see it.
At first, you told yourself it did not matter.
Valarr had married you. He had come to your bed. He had touched your belly when your first son moved and smiled in wonder. He had stood over you after the birth, smelling of leather and wind and cold air from the yard, and bent to the babe with a softness you had never seen him turn on anyone.
“A son,” he said.
You, white with exhaustion, damp-haired, aching from two days’ labor, looked up at him with something terribly hopeful still alive in your eyes. “Yes,” you whispered. “A son.”
He touched the child’s cheek. His face changed then, softened by wonder in a way that made you love him a little more, poor thing. You thought perhaps this was how doors opened. Through children. Through patience. Through quiet trying.
“What shall we name him?” you asked.
Valarr did not answer at once. His fingers were still on the babe’s face. “Aelor,” he said finally.
It was a prince’s name. A good name.
You smiled, tired and radiant. “Aelor, then.”
Valarr kissed the child’s brow. He kissed your forehead too, but only briefly, and perhaps only because the midwife stood watching.
You told yourself it was enough.
Women had made whole lives from less.
You learned his habits with the devotion of someone trying to solve a riddle no one else believed existed. You learned how he liked what wine he preferred during evening meals in the winter, what books he reached for when angered, how he hated too much noise at supper after council, and how he softened at the sound of a child laughing nearby. You kept his household well. You bore yourself with dignity among dragonlords and vipers. You learned High Valyrian lullabies, though the words felt awkward in your lion’s mouth.
You wrote letters home and waited for letters back. At first, you wrote carefully bright things: the weather, the beauty of the royal gardens in spring, the little kindnesses of court, the way Prince Valarr had once noticed when you were overwhelmed at a feast and brought you away without embarrassing you, the way he warmed your side of the bed in winter, the way he smiled, once, when the babe first closed a hand around his finger.
The replies came late, smelling of cedar and sealing wax and distance.
Your mother wrote of her health, of which cousins were soon to wed, of a septon newly come to the Rock.
Your father wrote less.
When Aelor was born, the letter from the west was rich parchment and fine words. You have done your house honour. A son strengthens your place. The realm sees your worth now.
You read it twice.
Then a third time, more slowly, searching for something else between the lines. Are you well? Are you happy? Does he cherish you? Are you lonely?
There was none of that.
After Baelon, the message was colder still in its own polished way. A second son brings further pride to your name and secures your position admirably. You have done all that was asked of you.
All that was asked of you.
You folded the letter carefully, set it aside, and cried so quietly that Myria, seated only a few feet away with embroidery in her lap, did not at first understand what she was hearing.
There were moments, too, when you tried very hard to belong not only to Valarr, but to his world. You tried to sit with him when his kin were present, but Targaryen talk moved strangely around you—old names, old grievances, dragon memories you had no part in, glances that carried the weight of shared blood. You would add a word here or there, smile where you ought, ask a question politely, and feel at once the slight pause that came after, the subtle shifting of a conversation that had not truly expected your shape within it.
No one was unkind.
That was the misery of it.
Prince Baelor, your father-in-law, grave and measured in all things, would always speak to you with perfect princely respect. He was never unkind. That was part of the hurt. But when you tried, once, to ask his thoughts on some hawk from the Reach that Valarr had mentioned admiring, Baelor answered kindly enough and then turned almost at once to one of his brothers over some question of levies and patrol roads. You stood there smiling with your hands folded while their voices moved on around you like water over stone.
It was not that he disliked you.
It was worse.
You were dutiful. Quiet. Manageable. In a household crowded with louder tempers and more difficult kin, you were never thought likely to cause scandal, discord, or trouble. Others drew the eye because they were troublesome, glittering, or politically useful.
You were simply the one no one worried about.
And in a court like that, a woman who brought no trouble was too easily mistaken for a woman who needed nothing at all.
You felt foolish afterward for minding.
Foolish for wanting more than courtesy.
Foolish for thinking that becoming a wife ought to have made you less of an outcast in your own husband’s family than you had been on the day you arrived.
At first, Valarr noticed some of these things.
He simply did not understand what noticing required of him.
Then your second son was born.
By then, the court called yours a strong marriage. Fruitful. Fortunate. A prince with two healthy heirs and a lady wife who comported herself flawlessly—what more could a man ask? Men toasted him for his good fortune. Women praised your grace, your gowns, your modesty, your sons. Singers called you the Golden Princess. Only those who watched closely saw that you smiled less.
Valarr still came to your chambers, though less often after the second child. At first, you thought it was weariness. Court had grown heavier around him. His father pressed more upon him. The realm always wanted something from men born too near crowns. Then one evening, while he fastened the clasp of his mantle before the fire and the nursery beyond the inner door murmured with soft child-sounds, you asked very gently, “Will you come to me later?”
He did not even turn.
“I have heirs enough,” he said.
The silence after was so complete that you could hear a torch sputtering in the corridor beyond and the faint scrape of a maid’s slipper over the rushes outside the door.
You sat at your dressing table with your hair half-braided, staring at his reflection in the polished silver mirror. He had not meant, perhaps, for the words to sound as they did. Valarr had a rare gift for the wound he did not intend.
Still, he had said them.
Not, I am tired. Not forgive me. Only that.
As if you had been something to pass through, and now pass beyond.
He must have felt something of the change afterward, because he began bringing you gifts: a hawking glove from Myr, a comb of worked ivory, a length of sea-green silk, a carved cradle-piece for little Baelon, a silver mirror backed with lions and dragons twined together.
They were all costly. They were all beautifully made.
Not one of them was right.
The glove was stitched in the Tyroshi style Keira had once worn. The silk was a shade you despised against your skin. The comb was too delicate for the braids you favored. The mirror was a princely apology offered by a man too cowardly to speak plain words.
You thanked him for each one with perfect courtesy.
Then came the morning that killed something in you.
It was early, scarcely light. The room still held that bluish hush before dawn when everything seemed suspended between worlds. Your younger son had cried in the night and been carried off again by his nurse only a little while before. You had not gone back to sleep properly after. You lay awake beside Valarr, one hand resting over the ache in your side, watching the first pale seam of day beneath the curtains and listening to his breathing in the dark.
He stirred beside you then, not fully waking, his face still turned into the pillow. For one small foolish moment, you thought he was troubled. His brow had drawn faintly, and there was something strained in the way he breathed, as though some dream had hold of him. Without thinking, with the softness that had always been your ruin, you reached for him. Your hand came to rest on his bare shoulder, gentle, instinctive, almost tender enough to be a prayer.
And then, rough with sleep, still half-lost to whatever place he had wandered in dreams, he murmured one name.
“Keira.”
The world did not shatter loudly.
That would have been kinder.
It only went very still.
Your fingers slipped from his shoulder as though you had touched iron in a flame. At first you thought you must have imagined it. You had to have imagined it. But the cold came at once, thin and sharp and absolute, running through you from the inside out like sea-wind in winter. Valarr breathed once more, deeper now, and opened his eyes a little. He saw you sitting upright. He saw your face.
And in that instant, he knew.
“[Y/N]—”
You had already risen.
He pushed himself up, all sleep gone, horror rushing in where drowsiness had been. “[Y/N], wait.”
You crossed the chamber barefoot, one hand hard against your mouth as if to hold something inside yourself—not anger, not words, but some smaller, uglier, more humiliating sound. That was the cruelty of it. You had reached for him to soothe him, thinking he was uneasy, thinking perhaps he needed comfort, and instead he had opened his sleep-ravaged mouth and given you another woman’s name as though it lived somewhere truer in him than you ever had.
“Listen to me,” Valarr said, rising after you. “I did not mean—”
You turned then.
He had seen you grave, shy, dutiful, pale with childbirth, smiling with your sons, overwhelmed in crowded halls, but never like that. Never stripped so bare of composure. You looked as though he had struck you.
Not only hurt. Shamed.
Keira. Another woman’s name, from your own husband’s mouth, spoken in your bed while dawn still lay over the marriage like a blessing not yet spent.
Your lips trembled once. “I know,” you whispered.
That was what undid him. Not accusation. Not fury. Only that soft, awful answer.
I know. I know you did not mean it, which means it was true enough to live beneath thought. I know there is still a place in you where I am not the woman you wake beside. I know I reached for you in kindness, and you answered me with the shape of someone else.
Tears rose despite your pride. They came too quickly, too hot, too helpless. You turned away sharply, but not before he saw them. And once he saw them, you hated it all the more, because now even this grief—which felt private, humiliating, too raw to survive daylight—had become something witnessed.
Valarr took a step toward you and stopped, because he did not know how to cross the distance he had made with one word.
“[Y/N]—please.”
You laughed then, and it was a dreadful little sound, broken straight through. “Do not,” you said, your voice shaking so badly you scarcely knew it for your own. “Do not beg me not to feel it. You have already said it.”
He reached for you then, not boldly and not even with certainty, but like a man who had finally understood that you had not been made of stone, only taught to stand still while he hurt you.
You flinched from him.
That seemed to wound him too, but not enough. Never enough.
Your breath broke on the next inhale. You covered your mouth harder with your hand, but it was no use. The sound came anyway, small and torn and mortifyingly real. Not graceful tears. Not silent suffering. A wounded sound, the sound of a woman who had held herself together for too long and discovered too late that the thing splitting her open would not even have the decency to do it in private.
Then you fled into your dressing room and shut the door between you.
He heard you crying.
That was the worst memory of his life afterward. Not the name itself, though that would have been wound enough. It was the sound of you weeping on the other side of a door, where you thought he could not reach you, and his own uselessness before it. Prince of the realm, husband in name, and still unable to mend what he had broken because he had never learned how to kneel before grief he himself had caused.
Inside, Ellyn found you first. You had sunk onto the stool before the mirror, one hand pressed to your chest as though you might still your own heart by force. Your hair had fallen loose over one shoulder. Tears slid down your face helplessly, no longer quiet, no longer controlled. You had cried silently before. This was worse. This was breath catching and shoulders shaking and the miserable humiliation of being unable to stop.
Ellyn dropped to her knees at once. “Oh, my sweet lady,” she murmured.
That broke what little composure remained.
You bent forward and covered your face, and then you were sobbing in earnest, your whole body shaking with it. Myria came running at the sound. Ysilla shut the outer door and drew the curtains before any passing servant or curious groom in the corridor could glimpse you undone. No one asked you anything at first. They simply gathered around you. Myria held your hands. Ysilla fetched cool water no one drank. Ellyn pressed your head against her breast as if you were no princess at all, only a girl far from home who had loved unwisely and been made to know it.
When you finally managed to speak, it came out raw and small and ruined.
“I thought—” You had to stop. Your breath caught again. “I thought he was having a nightmare.”
Ellyn made a sound then, one of those quiet wounded noises women make for one another when words are not enough.
“I touched him because I thought—” Your voice broke completely. “I thought he was troubled.”
That was somehow worse than the name itself. Worse because it laid your tenderness bare. Worse because it meant you had gone to comfort him and been answered with another woman’s ghost.
Then came the truth that had been choking you from the moment it happened, and once it was out you could not stop it.
“I tried so hard,” you whispered. “I tried so hard to be enough.”
Ellyn’s eyes filled. “You were never meant to earn what should have been given freely.”
After that, you changed.
Not at once. Not sharply enough that a man like Valarr—emotionally armored, proud, slow in all matters of the heart—could point to the very day and say, there, there is where I lost her. But the change came all the same.
You remained perfectly dutiful.
That was part of the tragedy. Had you screamed, or raged, or publicly shamed him, the court would have named it a quarrel and expected its end. You did none of that. If anything, you became more flawless.
You dressed with exquisite care. You stood beside him in public without misstep. You managed the household superbly. You gave him no scandal. You continued to be gentle with your sons, and soon the court began to praise you not merely as a great lady, but as the very model of what a prince’s wife should be. Shy, they called you now. Reserved. Pious. A little sad, perhaps, but sweet with your children. And oh, how devoted you were as a mother.
That part was true.
People saw you in the gardens with Aelor and Baelon, your golden head bent while they chattered over pebbles and petals and insects caught in childish hands. They saw you kneel without complaint to tie a little shoe, to wipe a mouth, to kiss a scraped palm. They saw how your face softened for your sons in a way it never did for anyone else. Women at court began speaking of you tenderly. Poor shy Lady [Y/N]. So pretty. So well-mannered. Such a good wife. Such a good mother.
And because the world was cruel in ordinary ways, they praised you most just as you became loneliest.
After the second boy was born,
Valarr did not become cruel in any way that court singers would have understood. He did not raise his hand to you. He did not shame you before the realm. He did not bring whores beneath your roof or make a spectacle of betrayal. In some ways, that made it worse. He became, instead, the sort of man whose neglect could be mistaken for virtue.
He loved his sons.
Gods, how he loved them.
He would return from the yard smelling of horse and leather and cold air, and the moment he crossed the threshold of your chambers, his face would change for the boys in a way it no longer changed for you. Aelor would cry out and Baelon would reach with both arms, and Valarr would go to them at once, smiling with that unguarded tenderness you had once thought, in the first sweetness of marriage, might one day be yours too. He would lift one child high and settle the other against his hip, laughing when little hands caught in his hair or tugged at the chain about his throat.
You would rise when he entered, because wives did, because princesses did, because some part of you still did it in hope rather than habit.
Often, he would not even see that you had risen until after the boys had been kissed, admired, and praised.
“Look at you,” he would say to them, warm as summer. “Have you tormented your lady mother all day? Have you eaten well? Has Baelon’s cough eased? Has Aelor been brave?”
Only then, sometimes, would his eyes flick to you.
“You ought not keep them up too late.”
“They should have thicker cloaks in this wind.”
Always through the children.
Always around you, rather than to you.
You learned there were griefs so small and daily that no one named them. To stand in your own chamber, hands folded in silk, and watch your husband smile as though the room had become blessed simply because his sons were in it, while the woman who had borne them stood only a few feet away and might as well have been another carved chair. To know he was not a bad man, not truly, only a man who had somehow placed all his softness in one part of his life and left the rest to starve. To be unable even to resent him properly, because the sight of him loving your children was beautiful, and you had prayed for that beauty before either boy had drawn breath.
That was the shameful part.
You were glad he loved them.
You only wished he did not seem to love them in place of you.
Once, in early autumn, you gathered your courage and asked if you might all go hawking together—only the four of you. Your voice was careful when you said it, as if softness itself might save the request from being damaged.
“The weather is fair,” you told him. “Aelor has been begging to see the birds flown, and Baelon loves the horses. Might we go, just us?”
Valarr looked almost surprised, then agreeable enough. “If you like.”
For a day and a half, you were absurdly happy.
You chose warm wool for the boys yourself. You had little gloves lined in fur brought out for Aelor. You made certain Baelon’s hood was mended where the stitch had loosened. You packed honey cakes and apples sliced small, a flask of watered wine for Valarr, and sweet milk for the children. You dressed not as a princess at court, but as a wife hoping to be a wife, in a dark green riding gown that would not startle the hawks. Even Ellyn smiled to see the color in your face.
When the morning came, the yard was crisp with cold and the sky pale as hammered steel. The horses were saddled. The boys were bundled and shining with excitement. You had Baelon in your arms and Aelor tugging at your sleeve when Valarr came down the steps.
He was not alone.
Prince Baelor was with him. So were two uncles, three cousins, and a knot of sworn men behind them. One of the hawk-masters came too, along with a pair of young pages, and by the time the little party moved out through the gate, it had become not a family day at all but something half progress, half princely outing, full of male voices and easy familiarity and the old blood-kinship from which you always stood a little apart.
Valarr seemed not to notice.
Or worse, perhaps he did notice and thought nothing was amiss.
“Aelor, ride with your grandsire” Baelor said, and Aelor went delightedly, because he was a child and proud of such things.
One cousin took up a conversation with Valarr about hounds and a boar seen three days earlier in the kingswood. An uncle laughed over some old hunting memory. The hawks shifted and rustled. Leather creaked. Hooves struck the frosted ground.
You rode at the edge with Baelon before you and your little basket strapped behind the saddle.
Every now and then, Aelor would twist around in his seat to look for you, waving when he found you and shouting, “Mother, look!” each time a hawk lifted, or a dog barked, or a horse stamped. Baelon kept patting your gloved hand and leaning back against your breast as if, by childish instinct, he knew you needed the closeness more than he did. When the company halted near a thin stand of leaf-bare trees, you dismounted and laid out the food you had packed for the four of you.
The pages and grooms ate it too.
Valarr praised the cakes without realizing what he was saying. “These were well thought of.”
When you finally went to your chamber, Ellyn helped unpin your hair and found dried salt at your temples where the wind had touched tears you had never wiped away.
There was another time.
Months later, when you asked again—not for hawking this time, but for something simpler.
The market.
Nothing grand. Nothing intimate enough to frighten him, you thought. The city was lively that morning, the weather fair, and the boys were old enough now to be delighted by cluttered stalls and sugared almonds and toy sellers and little carved beasts. You thought perhaps that was safe enough. A family thing. A public thing. A modest thing. By then, you had learned not to ask for too much.
So you waited until Valarr had broken his fast and the boys were still talking eagerly over some little painted cart Aelor had seen from a window the day before.
“There is a market near the Street of Flour,” you said, keeping your tone light. “The children would enjoy it, I think. We might all go together. Just for an hour.”
Valarr was reading some note from council. He looked up only after a moment.
“The market?”
“Yes.” You smiled, because smiling made requests sound smaller. Safer. “Aelor would like the toy stalls. Baelon loves anything with wheels. And there is a woman who sells sugared apples in the autumn. I thought—”
“It is a good idea, wife,” he said.
Your heart rose too quickly.
Then he added, in the same practical tone one might use when discussing cloaks or horses, “But I think I should take only the boys.”
You went still.
Valarr folded the note once. “The streets will be crowded. It would slow things if all of us went.”
The room remained warm. Somewhere behind you, Baelon was humming to himself over a crust of bread. Aelor had started talking about apples without understanding any of it.
You heard your own voice come out very small. “Slow things.”
“I only mean,” Valarr said, not quite looking at you fully, “with guards and nursemaids and the children and you besides, it becomes more of an event than an outing. They will enjoy it better if it is simple.”
If you are not there, the words seemed to finish.
You stood very still. “I see.”
He must have heard something in your voice then, because he frowned faintly. “It was not meant unkindly.”
That almost made it worse.
“Of course not,” you said.
Aelor looked up from the table. “Mother, are you coming?”
You smiled at him. You had become so very good at smiling. “No, sweetling. Today you shall have your father to yourself.”
Baelon, hearing only the uncertainty in your tone, stretched his arms toward you at once, and you took him up because otherwise you might have begun to cry before everyone.
Valarr rose. “Have them dressed warmly.”
You nearly laughed again at that. Warmly. As if you had not already thought of their cloaks, their mittens, the scarf Aelor complained of but always needed. As if mothers did not live inside such details by reflex.
When he had gone, taking with him the sound and certainty of the outing, you stood in the middle of the chamber with Baelon on your hip and felt, for one humiliating instant, as though someone had slapped you.
Ellyn found you a little later in the dressing room, not yet changed, still with Baelon’s little shoe in your hand because you had been the one lacing it when Valarr told you that you would not be coming.
“My lady?” she said carefully.
You did not turn. “He said it would be slowed down if all of us went.”
Ellyn closed her eyes.
You gave a thin, breathless laugh. “All of us. I am all of us.”
Then, because the boys were already laughing in the courtyard below and you could hear Aelor calling excitedly about horses and sweets and carts, you pressed the shoe to your mouth and cried without making a sound.
When they returned, Aelor came bursting in with stories about ribbons and nuts and a painted spinning top. Baelon had sugar on one cheek and a little wooden cart tucked in both hands. They were delighted. They loved you. They climbed into your lap at once and tried to tell you everything all at once, as if by saying it to you they could somehow include you after the fact.
You kissed them and listened and smiled in all the right places.
Then later, after they slept, you broke over the sight of the little market basket still sitting unused by the door.
These were the griefs no one wrote songs for.
The market basket untouched.
The riding cakes eaten by pages.
The waiting lamp gone dark.
The seat beside him filled by sons and cousins and fathers and not by you.
The way he would say good idea, wife and make you feel, for one heartbeat, chosen, only to brush you aside with perfect reasonableness the next.
You stopped trying to fill every silence after that.
At supper, you no longer told little stories from the west that no one in King’s Landing understood. You no longer placed the choicest pieces on Valarr’s plate before he could reach for them. You no longer reminded Aelor to tell his father what he had learned that morning. You ate what was before you and let the clicking of utensils fill the long spaces where a wife’s warmth had once been.
The boys noticed, though children never knew how to name what they noticed.
Once, Aelor climbed onto the bench beside you and asked, puzzled, “Mother, why do you not give Father the honey anymore?”
You nearly dropped your spoon.
“I think,” you said after a long pause, “your father can reach it himself.”
The child considered that with solemn seriousness and then pushed the honey dish toward Valarr anyway, because children hated imbalance instinctively.
Valarr thanked him.
He did not understand why you looked away.
So the days went on.
The court went on mistaking your ruin for grace.
And still, you loved him.
That was the true humiliation of it.
That night, after the boys had finally been coaxed to sleep, you remained in the nursery long after there was any need for it.
Aelor had one hand curled into his blanket. Baelon had turned onto his side, cheek soft against the pillow, breathing in the deep, even rhythm of the truly sleeping. The brazier had burned low. Candlelight trembled against the walls and turned the carved beasts upon the bedposts into long, wavering shadows. You sat upon the floor between them, your back resting against the settle, one hand still lying loose upon Baelon’s coverlet as though, if either child stirred, you meant to soothe him before he woke.
You did not hear Valarr come in at first.
It was only when he spoke that you looked up.
“You will wake stiff there,” he said quietly.
His voice was low enough not to wake the children.
You looked at him, then back at your sons. “I had not meant to stay.”
But that was not true, and both of you knew it.
For a moment he said nothing. He stood in the doorway with one hand braced lightly against the frame, still in his shirt and half-undone doublet, as though he had come looking for you and had not expected to find you here like this, hidden amongst the little quiet breaths of your children.
Then he stepped inside.
The floor gave a faint creak beneath his weight. He stopped first at Baelon’s bedside and drew the blanket a little higher over the child’s shoulder. It was such a small gesture that it ought not to have mattered. But you watched his hands do it, careful and gentle, and felt that old ache move through you again.
When he turned back to you, he did not speak at once.
Instead, to your surprise, he lowered himself down before you.
Not onto the settle. Not into one of the carved chairs.
Down.
Kneeling.
That alone was enough to make your breath catch.
He did not reach for you. Perhaps he knew you might pull away. Perhaps he feared you would.
The nursery was very still. Beyond the shuttered window, somewhere in the yard below, a guard’s step passed and faded. Aelor sighed once in his sleep and settled again.
Valarr looked at the rushes, then at his own hands, and only after that at you.
“I do not know how to mend this,” he said.
You went so still it almost hurt.
His mouth tightened, as though even that much truth sat badly on his pride.
“But I know,” he said, more roughly now, “that I have done you wrong in ways I was too blind to see while they were still small.”
You stared at him.
He let out one slow breath. “I thought being dutiful to you was enough.”
The words seemed to fall between you and stay there.
You looked away first.
The candle near Baelon’s bed had bent low enough that wax had begun to spill crookedly down one side. You fixed your gaze on that instead, because looking at Valarr while he said such things felt more dangerous than you knew how to bear.
He spoke again, quieter now.
“I think perhaps I have hidden inside duty,” he said, “because it was easier than admitting I did not know how to be better than dutiful.”
Something in your chest tightened so sharply you had to press your hand against your skirt.
“You do not need to say this now,” you whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
That silenced you.
He swallowed once. In the low light, he looked younger somehow. Not softer, not quite, but less armoured. Less princely. Only a man at last standing before the hurt he had made and finding no clean way around it.
“You have given me more grace than I earned,” he said. “You have given me sons. You have kept my house. You have borne…” He stopped, and for the first time his voice faltered. “You have borne me at my worst, and I let you do it alone.”
Your eyes burned at once.
You hated that they did.
You hated more that some part of you, bruised and foolish and still too full of love, wanted so badly to believe him that it felt like another humiliation all its own.
Valarr looked at you then in a way he had not in a very long time. Not glancing. Not passing over. Looking.
“You deserved more than courtesy from me,” he said. “You deserved to be cherished.”
Your breath shook on the way out.
That was the word, then.
Not duty. Not kindness. Not patience.
Cherished.
You had not known until that moment how badly you needed to hear it spoken aloud, or how cruel it was that it should come now, when you were already too wounded to receive it cleanly.
For a moment neither of you moved.
Then, very carefully, as though approaching a frightened creature that might still startle and run, he lifted one hand and laid it over yours where it rested clenched in your lap.
His palm was warm.
You did not pull away.
That was the mercy you gave him.
Only that.
His thumb moved once, a small, unthinking stroke across your knuckles, and you nearly broke at the tenderness of it because it came so late, so simply, and from the same man who had taught you to live on so little.
“I cannot unsay what I said,” he murmured.
No. He could not.
The wound of it still lived between you.
But he was here now, kneeling on the nursery floor while your sons slept only feet away, speaking as though duty had finally failed him and left him no shield but honesty.
You looked at your joined hands and said nothing.
After a long while, Valarr bowed his head over them.
Not a prince’s bow. Not something formal. Only a tired, aching lowering of himself, as though shame had at last found the proper posture for his body.
When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper.
“But if you will let me,” he said, “I would learn.”
That was all.
Not a vow.
Not a promise grand enough to heal you.
Only a beginning so small it might have been mistaken for nothing.
And perhaps that was why it hurt so much.
Because even then, with his hand over yours and your children sleeping near enough to hear if either of you wept, hope still came like pain in another dress.
So when the red-cloak guard came,
it felt less like temptation than like grief taking on another shape.
His name was Ser Lucan Hill, though once, long ago in the warm sunlit yards beneath Casterly Rock, he had only been Lucan. A boy with wind-burnt cheeks and scraped knees and a wooden sword forever tucked beneath one arm. His mother had served a lesser household branch tied to the Rock, and Lucan had grown beneath lion banners all his life. As children, he had played with you in those half-wild, half-guarded ways children of unequal station sometimes did before adults remembered themselves. Once, when you were very small, you had given him one of your toys to share—an old carved lion with one ear slightly blunted where you had dropped it on stone. He had treasured it absurdly. Beneath a stair-arch one hot summer afternoon, you had both made a childish promise over it, solemn as septons, that one day you would be husband and wife, because children thought love meant only I like you best, so you shall stay.
Then you had grown.
And he had not stayed.
He rose instead. Not high enough to dream madly, never that, but high enough for a crimson cloak and a sword at his hip and the grave reserve of a man who had learned the line between wanting and speaking.
You spoke to Lucan only once alone.
Not truly alone, of course. Nothing in King’s Landing is ever truly alone. There are always footsteps somewhere beyond the turn of a passage, always servants with lowered eyes, always guards at a distance pretending not to listen. But for a little while, there are only the two of you beneath a narrow stone gallery where the late light slants red through the arrow-slits and paints bars across the floor.
He stands in his crimson cloak with his hands clasped behind his back, as if he is afraid to let them hang loose lest they betray him. He is broader now than the boy you once knew, quieter too, but some things have not changed. He still tips his head a little when he is nervous. He still looks at you as though your silences mean something and are not merely empty spaces for other people to fill.
“My lady,” he says.
You almost laugh at that, though there is nothing funny in it. Once, he called you [Y/N] with scraped knees and dirt on his cheek and a wooden lion clutched in his fist. Once you had both been small and foolish enough to think that liking someone best was the same thing as being allowed to keep them.
Now he calls you my lady.
Now you are a prince’s wife.
Now he stands with the care of a man who knows exactly how dangerous tenderness can be when spoken aloud.
“You need not be so formal with me,” you say, though your voice comes out softer than you meant it to.
“Yes,” he says after a pause. “I do.”
That hurts more than it ought.
For a little while neither of you speaks. Somewhere below in the yard a horse stamps. Farther off, a child laughs—one of yours, perhaps, though you cannot tell which. The sound rises bright and then is gone.
Lucan’s eyes flick to you and then away again. “You look tired.”
It is such a small sentence.
No prince has asked you that in earnest in a very long time.
You lower your gaze to your hands. “I am well.”
He does not insult either of you by pretending to believe it.
The light has shifted enough now to catch on the red of his cloak. It reminds you absurdly of summer at the Rock, of banners snapping over stone, of childish games in the yard. The memory comes so swiftly it almost steals your breath. You remember pressing the little carved lion into his hands because he had no toys of his own. You remember him looking at it as though you had given him the crown itself. You remember the two of you swearing beneath the stair-arch, with all the solemn stupidity of children, that one day he would be your husband and you would be his wife and the lion would sit between you so neither of you forgot.
You should not think of such things now.
You think of them anyway.
“Lucan,” you say, and the name feels dangerous in your mouth after all these years.
He goes very still.
You do not know why you ask it. Perhaps because you are lonelier than pride can survive. Perhaps because he is the only person in this place who ever looks at you and sees the girl you were before you became useful. Perhaps because some part of you wants to know whether you imagined that old childish tenderness, or whether it had lived somewhere real once.
“If things had been different,” you say quietly, “if we had found one another again when we were older—”
Your throat tightens.
You almost stop.
But you have already come this far, and pain has made you reckless in small quiet ways.
“If that had happened,” you finish, looking not at him but at the bars of red light on the floor, “do you think you might have been happy with me?”
The silence after is terrible.
Not empty. Full.
When you finally force yourself to look up, Lucan’s face has changed. There is grief in it now, plain and unhidden, the sort of grief only a man of low enough station and old enough love would ever dare carry before you without dressing it up as politeness.
He swallows once.
Then he says, very softly, “I liked you then more than I had any right to.”
Your breath catches.
He gives a short breath that is almost a laugh and not a laugh at all. “Gods, I was a fool for you.”
You stare at him.
No one has ever said anything so simple to you in a way that felt so devastating.
Lucan’s voice drops lower. “If the fates had been kinder in this life, I think I would have loved you a very long time.” He looks away then, jaw tightening once before he masters it. “And I think I would have spent that life trying to make you happy.”
You shut your eyes.
For one hideous, suspended moment, it feels as though your heart is being torn cleanly in two—the life you have, and the life no one ever meant you to have, laid side by side at last.
When you open your eyes again, he is still standing where he was, but there is distance in him now. Restraint. The old hard wall of understanding built back up brick by brick.
“But the fates were not so kind in this one,” he says.
Then he bowed, and when he straightened, he was a red-cloak guard again, and nothing more.
Later, much later, after your family has gone and the castle has swallowed the day whole, Ysilla comes to your chamber with a little parcel in her hands.
You know at once it must be from him.
Your heart begins to pound.
“Does Valarr know?” you ask, too quickly.
“No, my lady,” Ysilla says.
Ellyn is already crying. Myria will not meet your eyes.
You tell them you ought not take it. You say it because it is what ought to be said. Because you are a prince’s wife. Because you are a mother. Because somewhere beneath your ribs there is a small new heaviness you have not yet named aloud, though your body has already begun to know it in the queasy mornings, the strange weariness, and the way your gowns have started to sit differently across your middle.
Perhaps it is nothing.
Perhaps it is not.
You do not say a word of that either.
Myria kneels before you and whispers, “My lady, please.”
So you take the parcel.
Your fingers are trembling badly by the time you peel the wrapping back.
Inside is a small carved lion.
Plain wood. Smooth with age and handling. One ear blunted.
For a moment, the chamber disappears.
You are seven again in the Rock’s summer heat, pressing your favorite toy into a boy’s hands because he has none, because you like him best, because children think love means here, take what I treasure; I trust you with it. You hear your own little voice swearing that one day you will be husband and wife. You hear his answering promise, so earnest it had made you laugh.
He kept it.
All this time, he kept it.
Your hand closes around the lion, and the other goes, without thinking, to the slight tender secret low in your belly.
Then you begin to cry.
Not prettily. Not quietly, at first. It comes up through you like something breaking at last, and you bend over the little lion with your shoulders shaking while Ellyn catches you, Myria presses one hand to your back, and Ysilla turns toward the door to guard what little remains of your dignity.
Because he remembered.
Because he remembered the child you were.
Because somewhere beyond these walls there might have been a life in which that remembrance became a home instead of a wound.
And because, even now, with another child perhaps beginning its silent life beneath your heart, you know exactly where you will sleep tonight.
In the prince’s chambers.
In the great cold marriage.
In the life the fates chose.
You cry until there is no breath left in you, the little wooden lion clutched so tightly in your hand that the carved ear bites into your palm. Ellyn says your name once, very softly, as if she fears you might shatter completely if spoken to any louder. Myria is crying too. Ysilla has turned her face toward the door, guarding your grief the way other women guard jewels.
But none of them can help you.
Because the worst part is not the lion.
Not the memory.
Not even Lucan’s quiet voice in that red-lit passage, telling you that in a kinder life he thought he might have loved you a very long time.
The worst part is the hand that drifts, helpless and unthinking, to your belly.
The worst part is knowing that by this time next year, they will call you blessed again.
They would praise your beauty, your sweetness, your grace, your fertility.
No one would know that on the night you first held your third child beneath your heart, you were on the floor weeping over a little wooden lion and mourning the life you had never been allowed to live.
And that, perhaps, was the cruellest thing of all:
The realm would call her blessed for the very life she was mourning.
From the same universe: That is not my baby, you heathen
Summary:
Prince Baelor takes both of his grandsons on a cheerful tour of Summerhall and promptly discovers that the younger one is built like a royal loaf. After one near-disaster on the stairs, he earns the ire of his daughter-in-law. Valarr is left pleading “Father, please” for the sake of his marriage and his life, and Aerion makes everything worse by calling the baby chonky.
Warnings:
Baelor lives. Duncan and Aerion are on better terms. Humor. Family fluff. Aerion suffering.Body shaming a baby?! He is chonky though. It is a very chill, feel good, everyone is alive and safe.
The morning had ripened fair and bright over Summerhall, all pale gold sun and long clean banners stirring lazily from tower and parapet. The keep seemed gentler in such hours, before the day’s petitions gathered, before men began bringing their grievances and ambitions into its halls. Servants moved through the corridors with baskets of linen and polished flagons, maids with ribbons at their belts and boys carrying logs for hearths not yet in need of them. Through the open windows the scent of rosemary and warm stone drifted in from the gardens below, mingled with the faint sweetness of crushed grass and the distant, dusty smell of the yard where squires had already begun their morning’s bruising labor.
It ought to have been a peaceful hour.
It might even have remained one, had Prince Baelor not come striding into the family solar with the bright, dangerous confidence of a grandsire who loved his descendants dearly and therefore believed himself equal to every task involving them.
Your elder son had gone to him gladly enough, for he adored his grandsire with that easy, unquestioning devotion children gave to men who laughed readily and made the world feel broad and exciting. He had been perched already upon the carved window seat, half listening while Ser Duncan told him some account of horses from years past, when Baelor entered and opened his arms.
“There is my young prince,” Baelor had said, and the boy was across the room at once.
The younger one had been in your lap, drowsy with milk and recent sleep, all soft cheeks and milk-white hair and stubborn little fists. He was heavy even at rest. Not merely well-grown, but substantial. He had the serene, treacherous weight of a babe who appeared all softness until one attempted to lift him and discovered, too late, that he had been made out of lead and cream.
Baelor, seeing one grandson already in his arms and the other blinking up from your lap, had smiled with fatal confidence.
“Well,” he said, “I cannot walk the keep with only half my pride in hand.”
You had laughed then, because the day was bright, because Baelor looked so pleased with himself, and because it had not yet occurred to you that the gods were about to be amused.
Valarr, who had been standing near the hearth fastening one dark leather glove about his wrist, glanced over at once. “Father,” he said, and there was the faintest note in his voice, no more than the first warning tremor before a bridge gives way, “perhaps take them one at a time.”
Baelor waved him off.
“Nonsense. Have I gone soft, that I cannot manage my grandsons?”
Prince Maekar, seated not far off with a cup of watered wine in hand, watched over the rim with the sort of expression he reserved for tourneys, council sessions, and Aerion. It was not disapproval exactly, but a grave expectation that foolishness was imminent and that he would somehow be made to suffer it merely by witnessing it.
Aerion, lounging by the open archway with his shoulder against the stone and his arms folded, said nothing. Yet a certain stillness came into him, a particular brightness about the eyes that suggested he, too, sensed some coming entertainment and meant to enjoy it as long as none of the consequences touched him.
Baelor bent and gathered the babe from your lap with every appearance of ease.
For a single, glorious heartbeat, all was well.
Then the baby settled fully into his arms.
Baelor’s brows rose.
It was a very small movement, but those who knew him saw it at once. The slight hitch in breath. The abrupt tightening through the shoulders. The near-imperceptible shift of stance as he adjusted his footing like a man who had expected a cushion and instead found himself handed a sack of wet grain in embroidered swaddling.
Your elder son, already balanced happily upon Baelor’s other arm, turned his head and looked at his baby brother with keen interest, then back to his grandsire.
“He is heavy,” he observed.
Baelor, who had far too much pride to retreat while observed by half his family, let out a short laugh. “Only because he is thriving.”
“Thriving,” Aerion murmured under his breath, not quite softly enough, “like a castle-fed piglet.”
Maekar’s head turned.
Not sharply. That would have wasted energy. He merely looked at Aerion.
It was enough.
Aerion lifted one shoulder, as if to say he had spoken no falsehood and saw little reason to repent of accuracy merely because it had offended decorum.
Valarr, who knew his cousin too well, shut his eyes for one brief moment and then opened them again.
Baelor, determined now, resettled the child higher against his chest. The babe, delighted by motion and utterly trusting, gave a pleased little hum and seized a fold of Baelor’s sleeve in one plump fist. His white head gleamed in the sunlight. One blue eye and one brown fixed solemnly upon the room as if he were already judging it.
“There,” Baelor said, more to reassure his audience than himself. “You see? Perfectly manageable.”
“No one said otherwise,” Valarr answered, which was princely speech for put him down before you embarrass yourself.
But Baelor had already committed. That was always the danger of him. Once some bright notion seized his heart, he carried it forward with all the vigor of a man half his age and twice the confidence.
“I shall show them the eastern gallery,” he declared. “And the painted shields. And the old dragon carvings on the stair. A prince ought to know his home.”
“Both of them?” you asked, smiling despite yourself.
Baelor looked almost offended. “What, would you have me deprive one grandson for the comfort of my own arms?”
That was noble enough in sentiment, if not in wisdom.
So off he went, one boy riding easily upon his left arm, the younger clutched upon the right, and a small procession trailing after in varying states of fondness, alarm, and morbid curiosity. You rose and followed. Valarr came too, though with the resigned pace of a man already anticipating disaster. Duncan, drawn perhaps by the same instinct that led large dogs toward kitchen mishaps, came behind him. Egg slipped after them with bright eyes. Maekar set down his cup with the dignity of a man accepting punishment from the gods and followed as well. Aerion lingered last, because he would rather die than appear eager, though he came all the same.
The first part went well enough.
Baelor carried the boys through the sunlit passage above the inner court, speaking to them as though both were already of an age to understand. He pointed out old tapestries browned at the edges with time, told your elder son which king had built which tower, and informed the babe, with complete seriousness, that one day he must learn the difference between a dragon worked in red thread and one done in black. The elder listened earnestly. The younger gnawed upon his own fist and drooled onto Baelor’s collar.
Servants smiled as they passed. Guards bowed their heads. One old woman in the laundry gallery made the sign for luck when she saw the little princes borne along so proudly, as if Summerhall itself had decided to soften and grow domestic for an hour.
Then they came to the turning stair.
It was broad enough and shallow enough, with carved stone dragons crouched along the banister, their wings curled and their teeth worn smooth by generations of childish hands. Baelor paused there, perhaps intending some grand gesture, perhaps merely shifting the baby’s weight before continuing.
That was the moment the child chose to lean.
He did it with all the cheerful conviction of infancy, sudden and absolute, one plump leg kicking, one arm flinging outward toward the carved dragon on the post as if he had decided, in that instant, that he must possess it.
Baelor, taken unawares, adjusted too late.
The babe slipped.
Not far.
But enough.
Enough that Baelor’s grip lurched. Enough that the child’s weight tipped heavily downward. Enough that every soul upon that stair felt the bottom drop out of the morning.
“Oh—whoa, whoa—”
The words came from half a dozen mouths at once.
You made a sound that did not belong in princely corridors at all.
Valarr moved so fast the leather of his boots bit the stone. One hand shot out beneath the baby before he had dropped more than an inch, the other bracing Baelor’s arm. Duncan lunged forward behind him on pure instinct. Egg nearly collided with Duncan’s back in his own haste to see. Your elder son clutched at Baelor’s shoulder, eyes wide. Even the nearest guard stepped forward before remembering that to lay hands upon princes unbidden was its own kind of madness.
Prince Maekar, standing two steps below, flinched visibly.
It was not dramatic. He did not cry out. Yet the wince crossed his face plain as daylight, brief and sharp and unhidden, the expression of a man who had seen tourney lances splinter and sons thrown from horseback and who had no wish to add dropped royal infants to the tally of things he must endure before death.
By the time the moment had finished unfolding, the baby was safe.
Very safe.
Safe in that absurd way children sometimes were, where seven adults had nearly died of fright and he himself only blinked, offended by the interruption of his adventure.
Valarr had him now, one strong hand under his son’s bottom, the other firm across his back. The child stared up at him for a moment, surprised, then gave a happy little noise as if this had all been an elaborate game staged for his amusement.
Silence fell.
Baelor stood empty-armed on one side and your elder son still upon his other arm, blinking with all the sober concern of a boy not yet old enough to hide his feelings.
Valarr looked at his father.
He said nothing for one beat too long.
Then, very mildly, very clearly, he said, “Father. Please. If my wife had seen that cleanly, she would have had both our heads.”
For a moment there was nothing.
Then you heard Egg choke.
Duncan coughed into his fist.
Baelor, to his credit, had the grace to look ashamed for perhaps the length of half a heartbeat. After that, his pride reassembled itself quickly enough.
“Well,” he said, drawing himself up while your elder son still clung to him, “I am sorry. I did not think he would be this big.”
The words hung in the stairwell.
Valarr shut his eyes for the briefest moment. One could almost see the thought pass across his face: Father, why would you say that aloud?
Your own eyes widened at once, sharp with offended astonishment, as though for a heartbeat you could scarcely believe what you had just heard.
And from behind them all, low under his breath but not low enough, came Aerion’s voice:
“Because he is a chonky thing.”
Every head turned.
It happened as one motion. Duncan. Egg. You. Valarr. Even Baelor. Maekar last of all, but his was the look that mattered.
Aerion, caught squarely in the full regard of his kin, did not retreat. He merely lifted his chin the smallest fraction, as if prepared to defend himself in single combat over the right to describe the obvious.
Maekar stared at him with the cold weariness of a father whom the gods had cursed with a son both handsome and determined to be himself at every opportunity.
“Do not,” Maekar said, each word clipped clean as a blade, “call your kinsman a chonky thing.”
The word sounded profoundly unnatural in Maekar’s mouth. Even the guards had to lower their eyes and bite at the insides of their cheeks, for the whole of it had become too strange and too ridiculous to bear with proper dignity.
Aerion’s mouth twitched. That was the worst part. He was trying not to smile.
“I was speaking quietly.”
“Yes,” Egg said weakly, already beginning to fold in on himself, “that was the problem. We all heard it.”
That finished it.
You laughed first, because the fright had to go somewhere and laughter was kinder than tears. It came out breathless and bright, half relief, half scolding, half the sheer ridiculousness of seeing princes and heirs and great lords brought low by one very plump infant.
Baelor laughed next, loud and easy, because shame never held him long and the child was safe and the world had not ended. Your elder son, seeing that all was well, began to giggle too, burying his face against Baelor’s shoulder. Duncan let out one helpless bark of laughter before attempting to strangle it into something respectable and failing utterly. Egg leaned against the stair rail, one hand over his eyes, shoulders shaking.
Even Valarr gave in at last, enough that the stern line of his mouth softened and the light returned to his eyes as he looked down at the baby in his arms.
The baby, as if sensing triumph, patted his father’s jaw and crowed.
Baelor peered at him, then at Valarr, then at the babe again. “I swear he weighs more than your elder son did at twice that age.”
“You forget,” Maekar said dryly, “that your other grandson did not spend his infancy being admired into fatness.”
“He is not fat,” you said at once.
“He is well beloved,” Duncan offered, with the solemn diplomacy of a man trying to save everyone.
“Which is another way,” Aerion muttered, “of saying chon—”
“Aerion,” said Maekar.
Aerion looked almost wounded by the interruption. “I was going to say comfortable.”
“You were not,” said Egg.
“I might have.”
“You absolutely were not,” your elder son informed him, still laughing. “You said chonky.”
Traitorous child.
Aerion stared at him as if personally betrayed by blood.
Valarr shifted the baby higher and pressed a kiss against the fine white hair atop his son’s head. “You hear what they call you,” he murmured, low enough only those nearest could catch it. “And after your mother works so hard to keep you splendid.”
The baby blinked up at him, one fist still wrapped in dark cloth, with all the grave serenity of a prince secure in his own importance.
Baelor reached over then, more cautiously this time, and smoothed one broad hand over the child’s back. There was laughter still in him, but also something softer, something older. Love sat very plainly upon his face in that moment.
“He is a fine boy,” he said.
Valarr’s expression eased fully then. “He is.”
“And a heavier one than he looks,” Baelor added, which sent Egg into another fit and Duncan into a fresh cough and you into helpless laughter all over again.
Maekar closed his eyes once, very briefly, like a man beseeching the Seven for patience. When he opened them, though, even he was less severe than before. Not smiling, precisely. That would have been too much to ask of him before noon. But gentled.
“Next time,” he said to Baelor, “take one grandson and leave the other to his parents.”
Baelor sighed as though this were tyranny of the blackest sort. “You would strip an old man of joy.”
“I would spare the rest of us heart failure.”
“That too,” said Aerion.
Maekar gave him a look.
Aerion, who had apparently decided one reprimand per hour was his limit, raised both hands in surrender and leaned back against the carved dragon post.
Your elder son twisted round in Baelor’s arm to look at his baby brother, then asked very seriously, “May I still show him the painted shields later? When he is bigger?”
Valarr smiled at that. “You may show him everything.”
The boy nodded, satisfied.
And so the little procession re-formed, though with rather more care than before. Baelor kept only the elder this time and bore the change with noble resignation. Valarr carried the younger against his chest, where the child seemed entirely pleased to remain, warm and sturdy and adored. You walked beside them with your hand resting once upon the babe’s back just because you could. Duncan and Egg followed, still exchanging looks of disbelief whenever someone said the word heavy. Aerion came after with the lazy air of a man who wished it known he had not enjoyed himself, though the mutinous curve at one corner of his mouth betrayed him. Maekar brought up the rear like a stern shadow over all of it.
And Summerhall, bright under the morning sun, seemed to gather the sound of their laughter into its old stones and keep it there.
For all its towers, its blood, its pride, its dragons carved and living, it was in such moments that the place felt richest.
Not in ceremony.
Not in power.
But in the absurd, whole-hearted tenderness of one family nearly undone by the weight of a very beloved baby.
The torches in the outer passages had burned low, their light gone soft and golden against the stone, and the great keep seemed to breathe more slowly once the household had retired behind carved doors and heavy curtains. Somewhere far below, in the dark belly of the castle, a servant shut a distant door with careful hands. The sound traveled faintly upward and was gone. Outside, the wind moved warm through the gardens and set the cypresses whispering. From the stables there came now and then the muted shift of horses in straw.
Valarr found his father in the long gallery outside the family apartments, standing beside one of the arched windows with a cup in hand and the moonlight silvering one side of his face. Baelor had shed the greater weight of the day from his shoulders. Without court around him, without petitioners and retainers and watchful eyes, he looked only what he had always been beneath the dignity of his rank: a man of easy warmth, broad feeling, and occasional ruinous confidence.
He glanced over at the sound of footsteps and smiled at once.
“There you are. I thought you’d gone to bed.”
“I had meant to.”
Baelor’s smile widened. “Ah.”
Valarr came to stand beside him, one hand resting briefly on the stone sill. Beyond the window, the courtyard lay washed in pale light, banners stirring faintly above the roofs and towers. He was quiet for a moment, as if considering how best to begin.
Baelor, being Baelor, ruined that silence almost at once.
“If you have come to scold me again,” he said, “I remind you that the child did not fall.”
Valarr let out a slow breath through his nose.
“No,” he said. “He did not. By the mercy of the gods and the speed of my reflexes.”
Baelor gave a low laugh into his cup. “You are beginning to sound like your grandsire.”
“I should hope not.”
“You do when you are vexed.”
Valarr turned his head and looked at him then, pale-eyed and patient in the way that meant he was not patient at all.
“Father.”
Baelor’s laughter softened, though the amusement still lingered in his face. “Very well. I admit it. I misjudged him.”
“That is a graceful way of saying you nearly dropped my son on a stair.”
“I nearly did no such thing.”
Valarr’s brow lifted.
Baelor paused, reconsidered, then amended with dignity, “I came nearer to mishap than I had intended.”
“That,” said Valarr, “is not as reassuring as you seem to think.”
For a moment Baelor looked as though he might laugh again, but something in his son’s face held him back. He lowered the cup a little.
“You are truly angry with me, then.”
Valarr was silent.
Not angry, exactly. Not in the hot and fleeting way of boys and cousins and foolish court frictions. What sat in him now was older than that, heavier, shaped by marriage and fatherhood and the strange terror of loving something so small that one could imagine losing it in a single breath.
“At the stair,” he said at last, “I thought only that if he slipped—” He stopped there, jaw tightening a little. “And after, I thought of my wife.”
Baelor’s expression changed.
The jesting ease in him gentled, then receded.
Valarr looked back out across the moonlit court rather than at his father. “She was frightened enough already. You saw her.”
“I did.”
“And then everyone laughed.”
Baelor made a faint sound. “He was safe.”
“He was,” Valarr agreed. “That is why they laughed.” His mouth quirked once, without much humor. “And I laughed too, in the end. I know how it looked. I know no cruelty was meant. But she has been strange of late where the babe is concerned.”
Baelor listened without interruption now.
Valarr continued more quietly, “She thinks he is too large.”
Baelor blinked once. “Too large?”
“Yes.”
“He is a babe.”
“I am aware of that.”
Baelor’s mouth twitched.
Valarr gave him a warning look.
“I am trying,” Baelor said, with some effort, “not to say anything unhelpful.”
“That would be a first.”
Baelor huffed a laugh despite himself, then grew sober again. “Go on.”
Valarr folded his arms. “She frets over everything. Whether he feeds too much. Whether he is too heavy when she carries him. Whether the nurses notice. Whether the maids talk. Whether everyone thinks she has indulged him too much, held him too much, loved him too much.” He glanced aside then, and there was something weary and tender in him both at once. “As though a child may be ruined by being cherished.”
Baelor’s face softened fully then.
“Ah,” he said, and this time there was no laughter in it at all.
For a while neither spoke.
The wind moved lightly through the open arch and stirred the edge of Valarr’s sleeve.
At last Baelor said, “And I made it worse.”
Valarr looked at him. “Not gravely. Not beyond mending. But yes.”
His father exhaled.
“I only meant that he is a healthy little thing.”
“I know.”
“And he is somewhat…” Baelor paused, searching perhaps for a word less dangerous than the ones used earlier that day.
Valarr looked at him steadily.
Baelor tried again. “Round.”
Against his will, some fragment of amusement returned to Valarr’s face. “Father.”
“Well, he is.”
“I know he is.”
Baelor spread one hand helplessly. “Then what would you have me do? Pretend I have not got eyes?”
“No. Only do not say it before my wife.”
Baelor stared at him for a moment, then barked a laugh before he could stop himself.
Valarr closed his eyes.
“Come now,” Baelor said, still half laughing. “He is chubby.”
“I know.”
“And very much so.”
“I know.”
“And built like a—”
“Do not finish that sentence.”
Baelor had the grace to look somewhat ashamed, though not ashamed enough to cease being amused. “You cannot blame me overmuch. The boy is magnificent.”
“He is,” Valarr said at once, and with enough feeling that Baelor’s mirth quieted again.
The words had come too quickly to be anything but true.
Valarr’s gaze had gone distant now, as if seeing not the gallery but the bedchamber beyond, where the fire had burned low and the curtains breathed softly with the night air. His wife would be there, perhaps asleep at last, perhaps not. Perhaps lying wakeful as she often did now, one hand against the cradle and some needless worry turning over in her mind.
“I would not change a thing about him,” Valarr said. “Not his cheeks. Not his hands. Not the weight of him. Not the way he goes heavy and warm when he sleeps against her shoulder. He is exactly as he ought to be.”
Baelor said nothing.
Valarr’s mouth softened then, and despite the late hour and the quiet there came into him that unmistakable look of a man in love beyond all dignity or cure.
“And if she is troubled,” he added, “then I must spend half my time persuading her he is perfect, and the other half persuading her she is.”
Baelor watched him, something warm and knowing passing over his face.
“That,” he said, “sounds like marriage.”
Valarr let out a faint breath that might have been a laugh.
“It is exhausting.”
“It seems to suit you.”
“It does,” Valarr said.
Then, after the briefest pause, he added with perfect seriousness, “Which is why I would prefer not to spend my evenings repairing damage done by my father when I might instead be back in bed with my wife.”
Baelor stared at him.
Then he threw back his head and laughed outright, warm and booming in the moonlit hush of the gallery, so that Valarr had to glance once down the corridor in case some poor soul had been woken by it.
“Oh, that is the truth of it, is it?” Baelor said.
“Yes.”
“You did not come here only out of concern for the child.”
“I came here out of concern for my peace.”
Baelor laughed harder. “Gods preserve me.”
Valarr endured it with long-suffering dignity.
“At least you are honest.”
“I am married. Honesty is cheaper than failure.”
That seemed only to amuse Baelor the more. He wiped once at the corner of his eye and shook his head.
“You are very far gone.”
“I have children. That is usually a sign.”
“No,” Baelor said, still smiling. “I mean with her.”
And there it was, said plainly, without mockery.
Valarr did not answer at once. He looked again into the courtyard, where the moonlight lay white across the stone and the shadows of the towers stretched long and black.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I am.”
Baelor’s smile gentled into something deeper then, something touched perhaps by memory. “Good.”
The word sat softly between them.
After a moment Baelor lifted his cup, then thought better of it and set it aside upon the sill instead.
“I will be more careful,” he said. “With the babe. And with my tongue.”
Valarr glanced at him. “Truly?”
“I said I would.”
“You also said this morning that you could carry both boys without issue.”
Baelor drew himself up. “And for most of the morning, I did.”
Valarr looked at him for one long beat, then laughed despite himself.
It was quiet laughter, worn down by the hour and the day and all that fatherhood had made of him, but real. Baelor smiled to hear it.
“I shall apologize to her properly tomorrow,” Baelor said. “Not in a way that makes matters worse.”
“That last condition matters most.”
“I know how to speak to women, boy.”
“Do you?”
Baelor gave him an affronted look. “I managed your mother.”
Valarr’s mouth curved. “That is not the same as success.”
Baelor made a noise of theatrical offense.
Then, because tenderness always sat very near the surface in him, he reached out and clasped Valarr once at the shoulder.
“He is a fine child,” he said. “And she is a good mother. Better than she knows.”
Valarr’s expression eased.
“I know,” he said quietly. “I only need her to know it too.”
For a little while longer they stood there, father and son, with the hush of Summerhall all around them and the moon keeping silver watch over stone and garden and sleeping towers. Then Baelor gave his shoulder a final squeeze and stepped back.
“Go on, then.”
Valarr glanced at him.
“To bed,” Baelor said, with a wicked glint returning at last to his eyes. “Before your wife decides your absence is my fault too.”
Valarr shook his head once, though there was laughter in him now.
“It usually is.”
“Ungrateful boy.”
“Good night, Father.”
“Good night, son.”
Valarr turned then and went back down the quiet corridor toward his chambers, where warmth waited, and the cradle, and the soft-breathed stillness of the woman he loved. And Baelor, left alone in the moonlit gallery, smiled to himself and murmured into the dark:
Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage?
Pairing: Prince Valarr (Modern AU) x Reader (She/Her) | Prince Aerion (Modern AU) x Reader (She/Her)
Part 1: You Were Never the Problem | Part 2: Can we try? | Part 3: He was reaching for both of them. | Part 4: You brought yourself. That’s enough. | Part 5: The First Thing He Ever Asked For | Part 6: The One That Looked Like It Could Never Break | | Part 7: Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage? [you are here]
Word Count: ~11.3K
Summary:
Valarr is done being reasonable when it comes to love.
Aerion refuses to surrender the one life that has begun to feel worth living.
Baelor and Maekar know this bloodline has never known how to love without turning it into something dangerous, beautiful, and impossible to survive unchanged.
Warnings: angst, yearning, emotional vulnerability, crying, overstimulation, tenderness, kissing, intimacy, implied sexual content, emotional conflict, family tension, and looming heartbreak.
The elevator doors had barely shut before the shape of the hallway seemed to change.
For one suspended second, Baelor remained where he was, staring at the polished steel as though he might still stop it, still call his son back, still undo the last thirty seconds by sheer force of will. But the lift was already descending, taking Valarr with it, and the silence that followed felt wrong in a way power could not correct.
He stood very still.
Then, slowly, he turned away.
When he returned to the boardroom, every man present had perfected the art of pretending not to have witnessed anything. Papers had been straightened. Pens lifted. Neutral expressions arranged with all the cowardly elegance of men who hoped composure might absolve them of seeing another man’s pain.
Baelor hated them for it, a little.
He resumed his seat, said what needed saying, and drove the meeting to its end with clipped efficiency and not a breath more than necessary. They were wise enough not to question him. By the time the room emptied, his temper had cooled into something harder and more exacting.
He found Valarr two floors down in one of the private offices no one used unless they wished very badly not to be found.
The lights were off, save for the dim glow of the city pouring through the glass. It silvered the line of his son’s shoulders, the sharp edge of his cheekbone, the hand braced flat against the desk as though the dark wood were the only thing in the room keeping him upright. His suit was still immaculate, dark and perfectly cut, the collar crisp, the cuffs untouched, but the man inside it looked as though he had been holding himself together by habit alone.
Baelor closed the door behind him.
Valarr did not turn at once.
“I assume,” he said after a moment, his voice restored to something controlled though not quite steady, “that you’ve come to tell me I embarrassed you.”
Baelor watched him.
“No,” he said. “You managed something rarer than embarrassment.”
Valarr let out a short, humourless exhale.
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is meant to.”
Only then did Valarr turn.
The polish was back on him, but it had been reapplied too quickly. Baelor could see the strain beneath it, the fatigue, the rawness not yet properly hidden. His son looked expensive, coldly composed, every inch the heir people expected. He also looked like a man who had come apart in private and had not been given enough time to put the pieces back in their proper places.
Baelor folded his hands behind his back.
“Who,” he asked, “is she?”
For one brief second, surprise crossed Valarr’s face. Then it was gone, replaced by wariness.
“You already know the answer to that.”
“No,” Baelor said. “I know only that my son, who has spent the greater part of his life behaving as though need were a vulgarity, looked at me in that hallway like a man standing at the edge of ruin.”
Valarr’s jaw tightened.
Baelor took one step nearer.
“And I know,” he said more quietly, “that Kiera has never once inspired that expression.”
A long silence followed.
Outside, the city moved on in indifferent glitter. Somewhere far below, a siren rose and fell, then was swallowed by distance.
When Valarr finally spoke, the effort of it showed.
“It was Aerion.”
Baelor’s expression changed, though only slightly. “Aerion.”
“Yes.”
The word came flat and bitter, as though it had been chewed on too long and left a foul taste behind.
Baelor studied him. “He answered her phone.”
Valarr looked away.
That, more than anything, confirmed it.
For a moment, Baelor said nothing at all. He knew Aerion’s name well enough, knew what Maekar’s second son had once been and what he had, to everyone’s continued surprise, become. He knew, too, of the recent absences, the carefully managed distance, the curious way Aerion had fulfilled duty without ever offering devotion. He had not, until now, considered where all that absence had gone.
“She is with him,” Baelor said at last.
Valarr laughed once, low and ugly.
“She is somewhere with him,” he corrected. “I know that much. Whether she knows who he is in the full sense, whether she knows what he is to me, I don’t know. Whether he knows what she was to me—”
He stopped.
Baelor heard the break in that sentence like glass underfoot.
“What was she to you?” he asked.
Valarr’s face changed then, not with anger, but with something far worse. A kind of exhausted honesty. The sort men offered only when holding it back had become more painful than confession.
“Everything that was mine,” he said quietly. “And nothing I was brave enough to keep.”
Baelor did not move.
Valarr’s gaze had drifted back to the city now, but Baelor knew he was not seeing it.
“She used to make soup when I came in late,” Valarr said after a moment, as though the memory had risen unbidden and refused to be swallowed again. “Not because she had planned some performance of care. Not because she wanted anything from me. Just because I was tired and she noticed.” His mouth pulled faintly at one corner, but there was no real humour in it. “She would tuck blankets around me as if I were too stupid to understand cold. She talked to me like I was a person, not an arrangement. She made that tiny apartment feel more like home than any place I have ever paid for.”
He swallowed.
“And I left her standing outside my life like something precious I was too cowardly to claim in daylight.”
Baelor felt something tighten in his own chest.
Valarr went on, quieter now.
“I loved her.”
The simplicity of it made it land harder.
“Not a little. Not conveniently. Not in some way that could be folded away when it became inconvenient to the family. I loved her, and still, when the moment came, I thought first of timing. Optics. Consequence. I thought of the board, the company, the name, the expectation, every fucking thing I was taught to think of before myself.” His voice roughened. “And she stood there asking for ordinary things. Dinner. A weekend. Her mother and brother meeting me properly. A life that did not need to be pre-approved like a merger.”
Baelor closed his eyes for one brief second.
When he opened them, Valarr was staring at nothing again.
“Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage?” he asked.
The question was not rhetorical. It was too raw for that.
Baelor stood with it for a moment before answering.
“Because men like us,” he said slowly, “are taught fear in the language of duty.”
Valarr’s throat moved.
Baelor continued, the words coming harder than he liked, as though something old and rusted in him was being forced open.
“You were taught that hesitation was prudence. That silence was discipline. That putting the family first was virtue in all cases, under all circumstances, no matter what it cost you. You were praised for endurance so often that you began mistaking it for wisdom.”
Valarr looked at him then, sharply.
“And whose fault is that?” he asked.
Baelor accepted that blow because it was deserved.
“Mine,” he said.
The word sat between them, unsoftened.
Valarr stared at him for a long moment, as though unsure whether he had heard correctly.
Baelor did not look away.
“At least in part, mine,” he amended. “I taught you how to carry this family. I do not know that I taught you how to set it down long enough to keep anything else alive.”
That did something to Valarr. Not enough to break him, perhaps, but enough that the rigid line of his shoulders altered by a fraction.
He pressed the heel of his hand briefly against his brow, then let it fall.
“All I know,” he said, “is that she is with Aerion now. And maybe he does not know she was the only woman I have ever truly loved. Maybe she does not yet know what he is to me. Maybe neither of them understands the shape of this at all.” His eyes darkened. “But I do. I know what I did. I know what I let happen because it was easier to disappoint one woman than an entire dynasty.”
He broke off, then gave a short, bitter laugh with no warmth in it at all.
“And the ugliest part,” he said, “is that I have spent years being sent to fix him.”
Baelor went still.
Valarr looked back toward the glass, toward the city lights smeared pale against the dark, and his voice took on that dangerous calm it always had when anger had been refined into something cleaner and colder.
“A year and some months ago they sent me halfway across the world because Aerion had vanished again. The Silver Stag. Rain still on my coat when I walked in. A receptionist nearly shaking apart at the desk because she knew exactly who I was and exactly what it meant that I had come asking for him.” His jaw flexed. “I had to threaten half the hotel hierarchy just to get his suite key. I found him in a room that stank of liquor, sweat, smoke, sex, and whatever narcotic he’d decided to drown himself in that week. Clothes on the floor. Bottles open. Some stranger in his bed. And I was the one expected to walk in, clear the room, cover him up, feed him in the morning, shove a newspaper in front of his face, and remind him that no matter how badly he wished otherwise, he still belonged to this family.”
Baelor said nothing.
Valarr’s expression did not change, but the strain under it sharpened.
“I have been doing that for years. Fixing Aerion. Translating Aerion. Containing him. Going where no one else wanted to go because I was the one trusted to keep my head while he lost his. When he changed his name, when he tried to step outside the line and still keep one hand in its wealth, when he disappeared into scandal and drugs and women and headlines, who do you think they sent?” He looked at Baelor then, and there was something terrible in the steadiness of it. “Me.”
The room felt smaller.
“I was always the one made to understand him,” Valarr said. “Always the one asked to be patient. To be strategic. To remember what he meant to the structure. To remember that he mattered, even when he behaved as though none of us did.”
Baelor’s mouth tightened.
“And now,” Valarr said, more quietly, “he gets to be reclaimed.”
For the first time since Baelor had entered the room, something near helplessness showed cleanly through.
“He gets to stagger through ruin and be called redeemable. He gets to disappear, disgrace himself, make a mockery of his name, and somehow still be granted the dignity of a return.” Valarr’s laugh this time was softer and somehow worse. “And I know, I know, I know that I am not blameless here. I know I failed her. I know I chose cowardice dressed up as responsibility. But tell me how it is that he is allowed destruction and recovery both, and I am expected to lose the only woman I ever loved and call that maturity.”
Baelor inhaled slowly.
Valarr looked away again before he could answer.
“Do you know what the worst of it is?” he asked. “I did everything that was asked of me. I cleaned his messes. I protected the family. I held the line. I was reasonable when reason was the only thing anyone ever wanted from me. And for what?” His voice dropped lower. “So that in the end he could have the one thing I could not make myself brave enough to keep.”
Baelor felt something cold settle in his own chest then, because this was no longer just grief. It was grief sharpened by years of obedience, years of discipline, years of being useful in precisely the ways that hollow a man out.
Valarr dragged a hand over his mouth and exhaled.
“I did not tell him,” he said.
Baelor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Tell him what?”
“That she was mine. That she mattered. That if he has touched even the edges of what I lost, he is standing in the path of something he does not yet understand.” His expression hardened. “I did not confront him. Not then. Not when I first realised. Not now.”
Baelor watched him carefully. “Why?”
“Because I know myself too well.” Valarr’s answer came flat and immediate. “And because if I had gone to him with this still fresh in me, it would not have been a conversation. It would have been old history, old rage, old family poison with her caught in the middle of it. She deserves better than to become the site of another Targaryen civil war.”
Baelor’s stare did not move from his face.
“What have you done, then?”
Valarr hesitated only once.
“I scheduled a meeting. Seperately.”
Baelor went very still.
“When?”
“A week from now.”
The words fell with frightening neatness.
Baelor studied him, and for the first time there was something like alarm beneath his composure.
“With her?” he asked.
“With her first,” Valarr said. “And with him, if it comes to that.”
If it comes to that.
It was the sort of phrase men used when trying to dress violence in civility.
Baelor knew his son too well not to hear the edge beneath it.
“A week,” he repeated.
Valarr’s face remained unreadable. “Yes.”
“That is a long time to sit with this.”
“It is,” Valarr said.
“And what, precisely, are you planning to do with those seven days?”
Valarr’s mouth flattened. “Make certain that when I speak, I do it clearly.”
Baelor’s concern deepened rather than eased.
There was something more frightening than a man who exploded. It was a man who had chosen not to, and had instead begun arranging his fury with care.
Valarr seemed to read some part of that in his face, because his expression altered slightly, not into softness, but into something grim and tired and almost self-mocking.
“I know how this sounds.”
“Yes,” Baelor said. “You do.”
Valarr gave the smallest nod.
“I am trying,” he said, and that was somehow the most human thing he had admitted yet. “I am trying very hard not to do this in the ugliest way available to me.”
Baelor absorbed that in silence.
Then Valarr drew in a breath, and when he spoke again, the words came lower, steadier, and with a force that had less to do with temper than decision.
“I am tired, Dad.”
Baelor felt himself go still.
“I am tired,” Valarr repeated, “of behaving as though the only life worth protecting is the one this company can account for on paper. I am tired of watching everyone in this family call sacrifice 'love' when what they really mean is 'obedience'. I am tired of pretending that if I lose her quietly enough, it becomes noble.”
His voice thickened, but he did not stop.
“I am not going to put her last again. Do you understand me? I won’t. Come what may, I will fight for her. This company has taken too much from me. This family has as well. And I will not go to my grave having lived exactly as expected and calling that a life.”
The room seemed to change around them.
Baelor had heard his son command rooms, dismantle men, negotiate numbers, and sharpen silence into weaponry. He had not, perhaps ever, heard him speak with so little armour.
For a moment, he saw not the heir, not the brilliant strategist, not the future everyone had measured and prepared for, but the boy who had once followed him through corridors because usefulness was the only form of love he knew how to offer.
And suddenly Baelor hated that.
Not the boy.
The lesson.
“She agreed to meet with me. She wants to talk,” Valarr said at last. “She didn’t want to handle something like this over the phone. Apparently, Aerion answered one of the calls meant for her, and she didn’t even realize I had tried to reach her until today, when she was going through her call logs. She called back asking if I was—somehow—alright…” He wet his lips. “She doesn’t know who Aerion is to us. Remember, he doesn’t carry the Targaryen name anymore, but somehow everything about him still moves through it, still benefits from it.”
He paused.
“And I have not said a word to him. Other than to set up a meeting” His eyes lowered for only a second before lifting again. “Not because he is owed consideration. Not because I mean to spare him. But because this time I will not let my first instinct be to fix him, manage him, or clean up after him before I decide what I actually want. I have done enough of that for one lifetime.”
Baelor heard the finality in that and felt, beneath everything else, a sharp and unwelcome thread of fear.
Not merely for the scandal.
Not even for Aerion.
For Valarr himself.
For what happened when a man that disciplined finally decided he had nothing left to lose.
When Baelor spoke again, his own voice had roughened almost beyond his liking.
“Then do not fight cleverly.”
Valarr blinked.
Baelor held his gaze.
“You have tried cleverness already. It made sense. It preserved order. It cost you the woman you love.” He took another step forward, and for once it was not chairman to heir, nor father to polished son, but simply one man addressing another too long denied gentleness. “If you mean to fight for her now, then do it plainly. Do it fully. Do not send another half-measure and call it courage.”
Something flickered across Valarr’s face. Pain. Relief. Disbelief. Some mixture of all three.
“And if I am too late?” he asked.
Baelor’s answer came honestly.
“You may be.”
Valarr closed his eyes.
“But if you are,” Baelor said, “let it not be because you chose silence again.”
He let the words settle, then added, quieter now, “And do not mistake restraint for weakness. If you are waiting this week because you mean to be honest rather than cruel, then good. But if you are waiting only to make the blow land cleaner, then I am afraid for you.”
That made Valarr look at him sharply.
Baelor did not flinch.
“I know that look,” he said. “I know what you become when you decide to act only after feeling has been cut down into something neat enough to carry. You are never more dangerous than when you are calm.”
A long silence followed.
Then, at last, Valarr looked away, the city glass throwing pale light across the severe line of his face, his dark suit, the tired elegance of a man holding himself upright by will alone.
“That,” he said quietly, “is probably true.”
For a long moment they stood there in the dimness, father and son and all the years between them.
And Baelor, looking at the stillness in his son, thought with sudden certainty that a week was either enough time to save something—or more than enough time for everything to become irreversible.
Valarr had been sent home.
Baelor had watched him go with the uneasy, helpless sensation of a man dismissing something dangerous into the dark and having no certainty whether he had just prevented a disaster or merely postponed one. The lift doors had closed. The silence had returned. And for all the power he possessed in every room that bore the family name, he had been left standing in the office with the distinct and humbling knowledge that he could no longer direct this matter as though it were a negotiation, a vote, or a problem to be contained by timing.
So Baelor remained where he was.
For a little while, at least.
He stood alone in the private office Valarr had left behind, the city stretched out beyond the glass in a thousand cold points of light, and tried to steady the shape of his own thoughts. His son’s words had not left him. They hung in the room like smoke.
I am tired, Dad.
Not the anger of it. Not even the threat in it.
The exhaustion.
That was what stayed.
Eventually, because standing there changed nothing and because the night had not yet finished taking from him, Baelor left the office and went in search of the only other man in the building who might understand the weight of what had just happened.
Maekar was still there when Baelor found him.
Of course he was.
His younger brother had always worn endurance like an insult directed at sleep itself. He was in one of the smaller executive lounges, jacket discarded over the back of a chair, tie loosened, though not enough to look careless. A glass of whisky sat untouched at his elbow beside a spread of briefing papers, but he looked less as though he were reading them than glaring them into submission. The lamplight caught the hard lines of his face and threw the rest into shadow, leaving him looking older than he had that morning and more like the man their father had shaped him to become.
He glanced up when Baelor entered.
“That expression does not promise pleasure,” Maekar said.
Baelor shut the door behind him with more care than the words deserved. “I was not aware I needed to.”
Maekar sat back slightly, one brow lifting. “You look like someone has either insulted the company or confessed feelings in your vicinity.” His mouth flattened. “Which is it?”
Baelor gave him a flat look.
Maekar exhaled through his nose. “Gods,” he said. “Feelings, then.”
“Must you make everything tedious before it has even begun?”
“It is a gift.”
Baelor did not sit at once. He stood by the windows for a moment instead, one hand in his pocket, the other loose at his side, looking out over the city while he gathered words he had not expected to say aloud tonight. Below them, traffic moved in slow red and white streams through the dark, indifferent as blood through veins.
“It is Valarr,” he said at last.
Maekar’s face altered at once, though subtly. That alone said enough.
“What has happened?”
Baelor let out a quiet breath.
“He is in love,” he said, and because that sounded almost absurd when laid beside everything else they had built their lives around, he added, “Truly, I think.”
Maekar stared at him.
Then, to Baelor’s surprise, he laughed once under his breath.
“That sounds less like disaster than the way you are telling it implies.”
“It would not,” Baelor said, “if he had not managed to lose her first.”
That silenced him.
Maekar set his glass down untouched. “Ah.”
Baelor moved farther into the room at last and sat opposite him. The leather chair gave softly under his weight, though there was nothing soft in the moment.
“For years,” he said, “I thought I had raised him well because he asked for nothing. Because he endured. Because he made himself useful before he made himself known.”
Maekar was quiet.
“And tonight,” Baelor said, “for the first time in his life, he asked me for something.”
Maekar’s gaze sharpened. “What?”
“Room,” Baelor answered. “Time. The right not to lose her because I wanted him in a boardroom.”
Maekar’s jaw shifted.
“And you gave it?”
“No,” Baelor said.
The honesty of it sat heavily between them.
Maekar leaned back. “Then I assume you are here because that no longer feels like a triumph.”
Baelor looked at him with some exhaustion. “Do not be clever.”
“That is rich coming from you.”
Neither smiled.
After a moment, Maekar said, “Which girl?”
Baelor’s gaze sharpened. “You know something?”
“I know Aerion has not been vanishing into thin air for months.” Maekar’s mouth flattened. “I also know he has been less impossible than usual, which should have warned me that a woman was involved or a miracle had occurred, and I do not believe in miracles.”
Baelor studied him.
“You knew?”
“I suspected there was someone,” Maekar said. “Not who. Not how serious. And certainly not…” He paused. “Not that she had once belonged to Valarr.”
“Belonged is the wrong word.”
Maekar’s eyes flicked to his brother’s face, registering the correction and everything inside it.
“Yes,” he said after a beat. “I suppose it is.”
Silence gathered again, thick and low and tired.
Then Baelor said, more quietly than before, “Do you ever think we have failed them?”
Maekar looked almost offended by the question.
“Regularly,” he said. “I simply do not usually say it aloud.”
That drew the barest huff of breath from Baelor. Not quite laughter. Close enough to remember the shape of it.
Maekar reached for the whisky then, took a measured sip, and looked into the amber as if it might answer for him.
“Aerion learned too early that if he could not be the son expected of him, he might as well become the one no one could control,” he said. “Daeron learned that charm and retreat could make disappointment softer at a distance. Aegon…” He stopped, and for the first time that evening something gentler touched his voice. “Aegon still comes to me sometimes as though I am merely his father. I do not know what I did to deserve that mercy.”
Baelor listened.
“And Valarr,” Maekar said, “became perfect.”
The word was spoken with a kind of contempt. Not for Valarr. For the necessity of it.
Baelor’s mouth tightened.
“We praised them,” he said slowly, “for being easy to build with.”
Baelor looked down at his own hands. In another setting they would have looked steady. Here they only looked practiced.
“I taught my son to be formidable,” he said. “Tonight I realized I may also have taught him that love was something to postpone until the dynasty finished with him.”
Maekar stared at him for a long time.
Then, very quietly, he said, “That is because it is what we were taught too.”
There was no comfort in that. Only inheritance.
Baelor rubbed a hand once across his mouth.
“He asked me,” he said, almost to himself, “why love sometimes fails to become courage.”
Maekar’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in judgment, but in recognition of the wound beneath the phrasing.
“And what did you tell him?”
“The truth,” Baelor said. “That we taught them to confuse fear with duty.”
Maekar went still.
For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the low hum of the climate system and the faint murmur of the city beyond the glass.
Then Maekar let out a long breath.
“If Aerion has any sense left in him,” he said, “he will not make a sport of this.”
Baelor’s gaze lifted sharply. “You think he knows?”
“I think Aerion notices more than people credit him for.” Maekar’s expression darkened. “Whether he understands all of it is another matter. He has a talent for stumbling into the middle of things that were bleeding long before he arrived.” His mouth hardened. “However, I cannot truly say whether he knows the extent of her connection to Valarr, or what she is to him.”
That, unfortunately, sounded true.
Maekar sank back more heavily into the chair then, not in comfort, but like a man whose body had finally remembered its own exhaustion and resented him for ignoring it. Some of the force seemed to leave him all at once. He set the whisky down and stared past Baelor for a moment, into nothing, and when he spoke again there was an unfamiliar reluctance in him.
“There is more,” he said.
Baelor felt something in himself brace.
Maekar’s fingers moved once against the arm of the chair, then stilled. “Aerion messaged me earlier.”
Baelor said nothing.
“He said the paparazzi have overstepped boundaries again and that he wants to discuss a permanent gag order.”
Baelor’s expression changed very little, but Maekar knew him well enough to see the shift.
“I am inclined to support it,” Maekar continued. “Aegon has been heavily affected by the scrutiny, and the girl Aerion is so taken with has been as well. From my understanding, she is a good person. If anything, both Aegon and Aerion have defended her rather ardently.” His mouth tightened. “I have not met her yet. And by some cruel intention of the gods—and of Aerion, perhaps—I do not think I ever will.”
Baelor’s gaze sharpened further. “Why?”
Maekar looked tired then. Not weak. Not diminished. Just tired in that rare and dangerous way men like them only allowed when the room was shut and blood was all that kept it private.
“Because he has asked to move north.”
The words seemed to alter the air.
Baelor went very still.
Maekar continued, more quietly now. “She graduates in a year and a half. She has done well for herself. There are prospects for her there—real opportunities, from what he says. And Aerion is intent on following her.”
For one suspended second neither man moved.
Then Baelor said, “He is serious.”
“Yes.”
Maekar’s voice carried no mockery at all now.
“He is serious,” he repeated. “More serious than I have heard him sound in years.”
He looked down at his own hands, picking once, absently, at the edge of a nail, the small human gesture strangely out of place against the sharp dignity of him.
“I am proud of him,” he admitted, and the confession seemed to cost something. “God help me, I am. He has gone through so much and come out stronger than I expected. In that strength he has found his boundaries, and his voice, and for once he is asking not how to survive a life but how to choose one.”
He gave a short exhale.
“But the path he has chosen is not one I can follow him down. Nor, I suspect, is it one where I am particularly wanted.”
Baelor heard more in that than the words themselves.
For all Maekar’s hardness, for all his exactitude and pride and impossible standards, there it was beneath the surface: the hurt of a father recognizing that his son had built the shape of a future beyond his reach.
And then, of course, came the other horror.
If Aerion meant to leave—truly leave, not disappear in one of his usual fits of self-destruction, but choose a life elsewhere for the sake of a woman—then Valarr’s narrow window was even narrower than Baelor had feared.
From what Valarr had said, she was an amazing woman. Not merely because he loved her. Not merely because losing her had broken something open in him. But because even in pain he had spoken of her with that terrible simplicity men reserve for the rarest kind of person: the ones who make a life feel warmer, smaller, more human, more possible. The ones who do not ask for grandeur, only truth.
And truth, Baelor thought bleakly, had arrived rather late.
“She must be extraordinary,” he said at last.
Maekar looked at him.
Baelor held his gaze. “From what Valarr has said.”
Some understanding passed over Maekar’s face then, old and unwelcome and plain.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I expect she is.”
Maekar’s gaze drifted away for a moment, toward the darkened glass, where the city shone back at them in cold, fractured light.
“I think she is good for him,” he said at last, and the admission came reluctantly, as though dragged up from somewhere pride had hoped to keep buried. “Perhaps better than anything else has been in years. He sounds…” He paused, almost irritated by the difficulty of the word. “Steadier. Less at war with himself.”
Baelor said nothing.
Maekar’s mouth tightened. “But that does not make me easy.”
His fingers tapped once against the arm of the chair, then stilled.
“I do not know how to think like an ordinary father about these things. I look at a woman near one of our sons and my first thoughts are never simple ones. I do not only wonder whether she is kind, or clever, or whether he loves her. I wonder whether she can survive this family. Whether she can bear what comes with him. Whether she can keep him happy without being destroyed by the effort of it. Whether she can protect him—or whether he will destroy himself trying to protect her.”
That settled heavily between them.
“He has suffered enough,” Maekar said more quietly. “More than I ever wanted for him, and certainly more than I ever knew how to prevent. So yes—I think she is good for him. I think she may be the best thing that has happened to him in years. But I do not know whether goodness is enough. With men like ours, with a name like ours, love is never left alone to remain merely love.”
Baelor’s expression darkened.
“No,” he said. “It never is.”
Maekar let out a slow breath.
“And if Aerion has finally built something clean out of all that wreckage,” he said, “he will not release it lightly. Not now. Not after everything it took to drag himself out of hell. He may have once thrown away whatever came near him, but not this.” His eyes lifted to Baelor’s. “Not if he believes this woman is the shape of the life he fought to have.”
Baelor held his brother’s gaze and felt the truth of it land with sickening clarity.
“I know,” he said.
And he did.
He knew what it meant that Aerion, who had once treated his own life as something disposable, had at last found a reason to defend it. He knew what it meant that Valarr, who had spent years swallowing want until it became discipline, had finally chosen to fight for something of his own. He knew, too, what kind of men both of them were when love ceased to be theory and became something living, threatened, and real.
Valarr had a fight in front of him.
Aerion would not yield easily.
And for one grim moment, with the city burning cold beyond the glass and the old weight of blood thick in the room, both brothers were afraid of the same thing: not simply that one son would lose, but that whichever one won would drag ruin behind him, and none of them would escape it clean.
Baelor rose at last.
Maekar watched him. “What will you do?”
Baelor thought of his son in the dark office. Of the immaculate suit and the wreck beneath it. Of the way he had said I am tired, Dad, as if he had reached the end of something much longer than this one night.
“At this point,” Baelor said, “I think the better question is whether I can keep from making it worse.”
Maekar gave a humourless half-smile.
“A noble ambition for our family.”
Baelor moved toward the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame.
Behind him, Maekar spoke again, the words reluctant enough to sound almost painful.
“For what it is worth, if Valarr means to fight, I would sooner he do it now than wake at fifty with everything he was promised and nothing he ever wanted.”
Baelor glanced back once.
It was not tenderness, exactly.
But it was close enough to count.
When he left, the corridor outside felt quieter than before, the polished floors pale beneath the late hour lights, the whole building wearing the expensive stillness of power after midnight. Somewhere far below, a lift chimed. Somewhere else, a door shut. Life continued in neat, muted sounds, as though nothing in the world had shifted.
But everything had.
And somewhere else in the building—or perhaps already beyond it—his son was moving at last not like an heir being directed, but like a man who had finally decided that if love was to have any dignity left in it, it could no longer remain polite.
When Valarr left, the corridor outside felt quieter than before, the polished floors pale beneath the late-hour lights, the whole building wearing the expensive stillness of power after midnight. Somewhere far below, a lift chimed. Somewhere else, a door shut. Life continued in neat, muted sounds, as though nothing in the world had shifted.
But everything had.
Somewhere beyond that building, moving through the night with all the terrible resolve of a man who had finally chosen not to surrender quietly, Valarr was stepping toward a future he did not yet understand.
He did not know the woman he loved was carrying his child.
He did not know he was already on the edge of becoming a father.
He did not know that love had already rooted itself more deeply into his life than loss alone.
And if he had known, he would have understood at once how little of himself still belonged to the life built for him. Not because a child would have been the first reason to choose her—he had loved her long before that, deeply enough to grieve her while she still breathed—but because the truth would have stripped away every last excuse. There would have been no more talk of timing. No more illusions about duty first and love later. If he had known, he would have crossed mountains to keep them. He would have torn his life up by the roots before he let the dynasty devour what was his again.
But he did not know.
And ignorance had always been one of fate’s cruelest tools.
Behind him, in the glass-and-steel stillness of the tower his family had built, Baelor and Maekar remained with the older knowledge: that to be a Targaryen was, too often, to learn that love and ruin rarely arrived separately. That power did not spare a man from grief. That legacy did not teach peace. That men of their blood were raised to mistake endurance for virtue, silence for dignity, and sacrifice for love until they no longer knew how to reach for happiness without feeling they had stolen it.
To be a Targaryen was to be born into fire and taught to call the burning duty. They had all been raised beneath the old family shadow that their blood was a cruel gamble—that greatness and ruin so often lived side by side in them, that brilliance could curdle into obsession, that love itself could turn sharp in the hand if held too tightly. It was to inherit beauty and damage in equal measure: pride, hunger, longing, and the old brutal instinct to survive one’s own heart by mastering it. To stand straight while suffering. To make pain look elegant. To bleed inward and call it strength.
And yet mastery had never saved them.
Not really.
It had made them formidable. It had made them feared. It had set glory and wealth at their fingertips, old prizes of blood and inheritance, ardently defended from one generation to the next. It had made them excellent at carrying sorrow with straight backs and beautiful manners.
But it had not made them gentle.
It had not made them whole.
And it had very rarely made them happy.
Perhaps that was the real struggle of their kind: not to conquer, not merely to endure, but to find some graceful way out of the inheritance. To remain decent in spite of it. To love without destroying. To be powerful without becoming cruel. To become, somehow, a good man before becoming a legend.
And somewhere else in the dark, Aerion too was standing before that same old fire.
He had dragged himself out of hell in pieces. Out of scandal. Out of grief. Out of the long, private ruin that teaches a man to expect himself to spoil everything he touches. And now, for once, he had something he meant to keep clean. Something he had chosen not in defiance, not in appetite, not in self-destruction, but in hope. He had a life beginning to prosper beneath his hands for the first time in years, and he meant to protect it.
That was the misery of it.
One man moving toward love too late, not knowing fatherhood was already racing toward him in silence.
Another finally holding something good and refusing to let the world drag it back into the dark.
And behind them, the older men were left with the bitter truth of their blood: that for Targaryens, love so rarely arrived as peace. More often it came as reckoning. As wound. As fire.
Some families passed down land.
Some passed down wealth.
Theirs passed down beauty, pride, damage, and the terrible habit of mistaking suffering for worth.
So often, the real fight was not merely to keep love.
It was to keep from turning love into ruin.
And somewhere beyond their reach, two sons were already moving toward the same storm from opposite sides of it.
One did not yet know he was a father.
The other had finally built a life he meant to defend.
And perhaps that was the cruelest truth of all: that even when love came real and human and worthy of being kept, it almost never came gently to men like them.
It came as fire.
And asked whether they would burn as they had been taught—
Pairing: Prince Valarr (Modern AU) x Reader (She/Her) | Prince Aerion (Modern AU) x Reader (She/Her)
Part 1: You Were Never the Problem | Part 2: Can we try? | Part 3: He was reaching for both of them. | Part 4: You brought yourself. That’s enough. | Part 5: The First Thing He Ever Asked For | Part 6: The One That Looked Like It Could Never Break [You are here] | | Part 7: Why does love sometimes still fail to become courage?
Word Count: ~11.3K
Summary:
Valarr remembers her coffee order.
He brings groceries. He learns her people. He stays.
This chapter is about the terrible softness of being loved in ways that look ordinary from the outside.
The kind of love built from repetition, tenderness, and the accumulating fact of someone remaining.
A piece of their story from before everything changed, before fear put its hand to what they had made.
A/N: Hi, readers. I am absolutely hitting you with a one-two combo here. This chapter was my retribution and redemption for all the Valarr fans, and I had so much fun writing it. I was honestly hoping to stir up a little chaos for Team Valarr and Team Aerion with this one, and I have been excited about these scenes for a while now. I was literally thinking about parts of this chapter while I was bored at my part-time job.
Please let me know what you think. I love your comments so much. They genuinely make me so happy and giggly when I read them. I really want you all to feel everything with this chapter. The ache, the softness, the yearning, the loveee, the tears, and everything in between. I was over here cheesing, crying, and kicking my feet while writing it. We are progressing, readers.
Also, I have been thinking about updating the nursemaid series because I actually have a skeletal structure for it now, ahhhh. But I also wanna do even Gods Watch Us Die, but ehh I will see. I get ideas, and then I just write them.
Warnings: angst, yearning, emotional vulnerability, overstimulation, crying, kissing, intimacy, implied sexual content, and foreshadowing of heartbreak.
At first, she could not stop herself from looking back for the moment everything had started moving toward its ruin.
Moments had begun to matter to her in a way they never had before. That, too, was probably Valarr’s fault. Ever since him, she had started to understand life in terms of openings and closures, chances taken or missed, doors quietly unlocked or sealed shut forever. Possibility had become its own kind of torment. So had the endless ache of what if.
Her theory was simple enough: there had to be one point of origin. One fixed place from which everything else had followed.
She did not think the way Valarr did. She lacked that terrifyingly ordered mind of his, that cold, elegant precision which seemed able to measure consequence before it had even fully arrived. He was the kind of man who looked at risk and instinctively began calculating its cost, its probability, its long-term damage. He had been trained into that habit, sharpened by it, made formidable by it. Numbers, forecasts, consequences, structure—those belonged to him as naturally as breath.
But her own understanding of causality, though clumsier, was stubborn in its own way. Nothing came from nowhere. Every unravelling had a first loose thread. And it had become a quiet habit of hers—borrowed from him, perhaps—to search backward through the wreckage of feeling until she found the point of entry and could say: there. That was where it began.
Had it begun the first time Valarr looked at her?
Was it when he asked if she was alright? Was it when she looked up through tears and embarrassment and found that the man standing over her in that absurdly expensive coat was not irritated, not repulsed, not even especially inconvenienced, but only startled in that watchful, still way of his? Was it when she blundered into him outside the coffee shop, already overstimulated and half-frayed, and poured a three-dollar drink down the front of what looked like a thousand-dollar coat? Or did it begin a few seconds later, when her laptop, her printed pages, and whatever remained of her dignity all struck the pavement at once, and she stood there crying as though the world had finally decided she was carrying more than she was meant to?
Maybe the disaster itself was not the thing that mattered.
Maybe it was what came after.
The way he crouched without hesitation. The way he caught her papers before the wind could claim them. The way this contained, business-minded, emotionally constipated man said almost nothing and still managed to make the whole scene feel less unbearable. The way he used the edge of his sleeve, careful and strangely gentle, to wipe the tears from her face as though it were the most obvious thing in the world to do.
Or perhaps even that was only the aftermath. Perhaps the true beginning belonged to something older—days, months, years of separate motion already pulling them toward the same point. Maybe people only called something fate when they were standing too close to see the machinery beneath it.
With her, everything had always come back to sacredness, though not in any formal sense of the word. She found it in rituals that looked ordinary from the outside: long walks with nowhere urgent to be, the first sip of something warm after a day gone badly, late evenings spent half-reading and half-drifting, certain songs chosen because they fit the shape of her sadness, certain streets taken because they let her feel, for a little while, as though her life still belonged to her. She was always trying, in one way or another, to make the world match the weather inside her. Some places gave her quiet. Some gave her distance. Some gave her that sharp, private relief of being surrounded by strangers who wanted nothing from her. Devotion changed its clothing over time, but not its nature. People still needed somewhere to put their longing. They still needed somewhere to set down their hope.
The coffee shop had often served that purpose for her before, which was perhaps why it mattered that it became the site of her undoing.
She had gone there for the same reason she always did: because it gave the impression of momentum. Everyone inside was absorbed in something, moving toward something, busy with some small private urgency. It was crowded, overheated, noisy with scraping chairs and bright screens and the bitter-sweet smell of espresso and burnt sugar. It should have soothed her. Instead it was simply too much—too much sound, too much heat, too much pressure, too many people who seemed to know where they were going while she sat in the center of her own failing motion. By the time she stepped back outside balancing her drink, her papers, her laptop, and the full accumulated weight of everything she no longer felt capable of carrying, it had taken almost nothing to push her over.
So maybe that was the moment.
Not because it was lovely. Not because it looked like destiny in any obvious, romantic sense. But because it was ugly in a way that felt true. Public. Humiliating. Intimate despite itself. It resembled something in her she did not much enjoy examining: that she was often nearest to revelation when she was nearest to coming apart.
In hindsight, her choice to stop there that day seemed to carry the force of significance. The kind that rippled outward long after the thing itself had ended. But what, then, had set that in motion? Had she met Valarr because fate had intervened with theatrical precision, or because they had already been moving along parallel lines of vacancy and pressure and were bound, sooner or later, to collide? Was it destiny, or merely recognition? Had he been empty where she was empty, and had something in each of them known enough of that shape to answer it in the other?
And in the end, did it matter where it started?
Perhaps yes—terribly—because everything came from something, and therefore whatever became of them had been forming long before either of them knew to name it. Or perhaps not at all, because beginnings and endings were never as important as the suspended moments in between—the ones in which a thing might still become several different things at once. Maybe the meaning lived in the whole shape of the story. Or maybe it lived only in fragments: the interrupted breath, the wet sleeve, the scattered pages, the hand that remained when it might just as easily have withdrawn.
By the end, she would think of it differently.
It would stop being a question of when it began and become, instead, a question of when return had ceased to be possible. That was the real threshold, perhaps. Not the first meeting. Not the first glance. Not even the first kindness. But the moment after which life could no longer resume its earlier shape.
In the end, as in the beginning, it had always been about possibility.
Because once, within a moment that might have meant everything or nothing at all, there was suddenly someone else inside the structure of her life.
And from there, everything remained exactly as it had been. Only never quite the same again.
After the coffee
He did not ask for the coat to be cleaned.
More than anything, that was what unsettled her.
She had expected irritation at the very least—a clipped smile, perhaps, or the cold, expensive civility of a rich man pretending not to mind that a stranger had spilled cheap coffee down the front of cashmere. Instead, he had crouched on the pavement in a coat worth more than her monthly groceries, gathering her essay pages before the wind could carry them into the gutter.
Mortified, she had asked for his number. Then, because panic made her practical, she had asked for his email too, so she could e-transfer him something for the dry cleaning. Replacing the coat was impossible, and even cleaning it would probably gut her budget for the next two months. But Valarr had only laughed softly and made a joke of it, brushing the whole thing aside like it meant nothing. The relief that went through her had been sharp enough to make her lightheaded. They exchanged numbers anyway.
Two days later, after asking if he could meet her again and getting a wary yeah, sure—meet me at the campus library, he appeared outside with a neat folder in one hand and a paper cup in the other.
She stared at him through the glass doors as though he had been conjured by some private humiliation she had not yet fully escaped.
When she stepped outside, he lifted the folder slightly.
“You dropped page seven into a puddle,” he said. “So I had it reprinted.”
Her mouth opened.
Then closed.
“You—what?”
“The formatting was inconsistent,” he added. “It annoyed me.”
She looked at the folder, then back at him.
“You had my paper reprinted because the formatting annoyed you?”
“I am not claiming this is a noble quality.”
Despite herself, she laughed. It came out short and startled, a little rusted from disuse.
His gaze shifted at once, just slightly, as though some private calculation had tipped in his favor.
“And,” he said, offering her the coffee, “I thought perhaps this one deserved a second chance.”
She took it automatically.
Then looked down at the label.
Not her usual order.
Her exact order.
She looked up so quickly that he almost smiled.
“You remembered?”
“You cried on me,” he said. “It leaves an impression.”
She made a face. “You really know how to flatter a girl.”
“I am out of practice.”
Something in the way he said it made her look at him more carefully.
Not at the coat this time, nor the watch, nor the impossible polish of him. At the restraint. At the strange stillness that clung to him even in daylight, as if he had spent too much of his life teaching himself how not to reach too quickly for anything.
She tucked the folder against her chest.
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you?”
For one brief second, he seemed to consider giving her the easy answer.
Then decided against it.
“Because you looked,” he said slowly, “as though everything had become too much at once.”
Her throat tightened.
“That obvious?”
“To me,” he said.
There was no pity in it. That was what made it dangerous.
She glanced down at the coffee cup in her hand, suddenly shy in a way she disliked.
“Well,” she said, “thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He did not leave.
Neither did she.
After a moment, she said, “So what now? You save me academically and vanish into the mist?”
One corner of his mouth lifted.
“I was going to suggest tea, actually.”
She blinked. “Tea.”
“Lower stakes than coffee,” he said. Then, after the slightest pause, “Though I suspect I would have accepted worse odds, if they ended with you saying yes.”
This time her laugh came easier.
“God,” she muttered. “You’ve been waiting to use that.”
“A little.”
She narrowed her eyes at him over the lid of her cup. “Tea stains too, you know.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Were you suffering?”
“Quite a lot.”
That made her smile into the cup before she could help it.
“Alright,” she said. “Tea.” And because some part of both of them already knew this mattered, though neither would yet call it by its proper name, he fell into step beside her as though he had always meant to.
The first date that was not called one
The place she chose was small and almost offensively ordinary.
He should have expected that. She had laughed when he offered reservations somewhere impossible and expensive and told him, very plainly, that if she had to wear uncomfortable shoes to speak to him, she would rather stay home.
So they ended up in a narrow tea shop with crowded tables, fogged windows, and handwritten chalk specials, squeezed into a corner beside the radiator while students hunched over laptops around them.
Valarr looked faintly out of place, which she found deeply satisfying.
“You hate it,” she said.
“I did not say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Your posture said it in three dialects.”
“My posture is impeccable.”
“It’s terrified.”
He glanced around at the close tables, the hiss of steam behind the counter, the little jars of sugar no one had bothered to align properly.
“It is,” he admitted, “a touch intimate.”
“It’s a tea shop, not a battlefield.”
“That remains to be seen.”
She grinned over the rim of her mug.
He watched her for a second too long.
She noticed.
His gaze dropped at once to the table between them, to the spoon beside her saucer, to anything but her face.
Something warm and complicated moved through her.
“You really came,” she said before she could stop herself.
He looked back up.
“You asked.”
“Yes, but men like you often hear invitations as hypotheticals.”
“Men like me?”
“You know,” she said lightly. “Very expensive. Mildly frightening. Emotionally repressed.”
He almost smiled. “Only mildly?”
“Today, yes.”
That nearly won a full one.
She saw how hard he held it back and thought, not for the first time, that his restraint was less arrogance than habit. As though ease had never been his native language and he was translating himself in real time.
“What?” he asked.
“You look like you’ve never been anywhere without a purpose before.”
He was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Not often.”
The honesty of that settled gently between them.
She turned her mug by its handle.
“That’s a little sad.”
“Probably.”
“You should fix it.”
His brows lifted. “Just like that?”
“Yes,” she said. “You should learn to waste time properly. It’s good for the soul.”
“And you are an authority on that?”
“I am excellent at useless wandering.”
“I have noticed.”
“You have not known me long enough to notice anything.”
“Haven’t I?”
The question was so quiet it made her still.
For a brief second, the shop around them seemed to soften at the edges—the hiss of milk steaming, the scrape of a chair, the low murmur of strangers’ lives continuing all around them. He was looking at her in that attentive, almost unnerving way of his, like a man memorizing not facts, but significance.
She looked away first.
“Drink your tea,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
That made her smile into her cup.
By the time they left, dusk had blue-washed the street outside. He walked her halfway home without asking if he might. She let him.
At one corner, she stopped and looked up at him.
“This,” she said, “was a date.”
His expression shifted with something almost boyishly caught.
“I had inferred that.”
“You looked like you were still collecting evidence.”
“I prefer certainty.”
“And now?”
He looked down at her, hands in his coat pockets, city light catching along the line of his face.
“Now,” he said, “I am certain.”
Her breath caught, though she laughed immediately after to disguise it.
“You say alarming things very calmly.”
“So, I’ve been told.”
He did not kiss her that night.
But when he walked away, he turned once at the crossing, and she saw him glance back to make sure she had made it inside. That, absurdly, was what undid her.
Groceries, because life continued to happen
Their third date should not, by any recognizable standard, have counted as a date at all.
She had texted him that she could not come because she still had two readings left, a half-finished response paper, and nothing in the apartment to eat besides yogurt, mustard, and one onion that looked as though it had begun trying to regenerate itself.
He replied three minutes later:
Open the door.
She had stood there in leggings and one of Karl’s old hoodies, hair half clipped up, fully prepared to be annoyed, and opened it to find Valarr in the hall holding two canvas grocery bags like a man trying very hard to make something look accidental.
She stared.
He stared back.
Then she looked at the bags.
“Did you bring me produce?”
“Yes.”
“Are you insane?”
“Possibly. Let me in.”
She stepped aside on instinct.
He entered, took in the apartment in one sweeping glance—the books stacked on the floor, the blanket slung over the sofa, the dish towel hanging from the oven handle, the evidence of a life lived rather than styled—and then looked at her.
“What?”
He shook his head once.
“Nothing.”
“You said that like there was definitely something.”
“I am simply adjusting,” he said, setting the bags on the counter, “to the fact that you live exactly like I imagined.”
“That sounds invasive.”
“It probably is.”
She moved beside him and peered into the first bag.
Pasta. Tomatoes. Bread. Strawberries. Greek yogurt. Garlic. Olive oil. Her favorite brand of granola bars.
She turned slowly.
“This is my grocery list.”
“Yes.”
“How do you have my grocery list?”
“You left it in my car.”
“I did not.”
“You left it in your coat pocket,” he corrected, “and then left your coat in my car.”
She put a hand over her heart.
“This is stalking with plausible deniability.”
“It is efficient care.”
“God, you really are a businessman.”
“I am trying, against instinct and training, to court you. Kindly do not make it impossible.”
The words were dry. The honesty beneath them was not.
Something in her softened at once.
She leaned one hip against the counter and looked at him.
“You brought me groceries because I had homework.”
“Yes.”
“And this is somehow romantic to you.”
He met her gaze.
“It is practical.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
For a moment he said nothing.
Then, more quietly, “It is romantic to me because you needed something and I could provide it.”
Her expression gentled.
“That’s a very dangerous answer.”
“Why?”
“Because it almost sounds sincere.”
He looked faintly offended. “It is sincere.”
“See?” she said. “Dangerous.”
He exhaled something that might have been a laugh.
Later, after he had cooked while she sat cross-legged on the counter reading parts of her article aloud in an increasingly dramatic voice simply to irritate him, he brought her a bowl of pasta and nudged her knee with his.
“Eat.”
“Yes, sir.”
His hand paused on the counter between them.
Then, carefully, he said, “You make it very difficult to maintain authority.”
She twirled pasta around her fork.
“You don’t want authority.”
“No?”
“No,” she said. “You want to be let in.”
For once, he had no answer ready.
That was when she knew it had already become serious.
Duncan, the study table, and the problem of Valarr in daylight
It happened on a Thursday, which was already offensive on principle.
She and Duncan had been in the library for nearly three hours, surrounded by open notebooks, half-dead highlighters, and the kind of academic despair that made every sentence on the page look personally insulting. Duncan was halfway through explaining, with unnecessary passion, why one of their readings was “written by a man who had clearly never met another human being,” while she stared at her laptop like it had betrayed her.
“I’m serious,” Duncan said, tapping the article with the end of his pen. “There is no reason for anyone to use this many words to say absolutely nothing.”
“That,” she muttered, not looking up, “is also how I feel about my response paper.”
Duncan leaned back in his chair and looked at her screen.
“No, yours is worse. Yours has citations.”
She let her forehead fall briefly into one hand.
“I hate everything.”
“That’s not true,” Duncan said. “You like soup. And being right.”
“I don’t even know if I like soup anymore.”
“That’s how I know it’s bad.”
Her phone lit up beside her laptop.
Outside.
She stared at the message.
Duncan noticed at once.
“What was that face?”
“No face.”
“That was absolutely a face.”
She looked at him, then at the phone again.
“It’s Valarr.”
Duncan went still in the delighted way of a man who had just been handed gossip disguised as information.
“Outside,” she said, because apparently humiliation required witnesses now.
Duncan sat up. “Outside the library?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He said he was in the area.”
Duncan looked at her for one long second. “That man has never been coincidentally in an area in his life.”
She kicked him lightly under the table and stood before she could be interrogated further.
“I’m going downstairs.”
“Oh no,” Duncan said, rising immediately. “Absolutely not. If a mystery man is appearing with timing like that, I’m meeting him.”
“He is not a mystery man.”
“He absolutely is. He sounds expensive.”
“He is expensive.”
Duncan looked vindicated. “Exactly.”
By the time they reached the entrance, Valarr was standing just beyond the glass doors with one hand in his coat pocket and the other holding a paper bag from the café across the street. He looked as he always did: unreasonably composed, faintly separate from the rest of the world, as though even the weather had been instructed not to touch him directly.
At the curb, a black car idled, sleek enough to reflect the wet light. Duncan looked at it, then at Valarr, then back at her with renewed offense.
“Oh, that is obscene,” he said.
Valarr glanced over one shoulder. “It’s just the car.”
“Exactly,” Duncan said. “That is the problem.”
Then he saw her, and something in his face changed.
Not visibly, not unless you knew to look for it.
Enough.
She pushed open the door.
“You were actually outside.”
His gaze moved over her face, then briefly to the stack of papers under her arm.
“You sound surprised.”
“I am,” she said. “You told me you were in the area.”
“I was.”
Duncan made a quiet sound beside her that was almost certainly judgment.
Valarr’s eyes shifted to him.
She let out a breath through her nose. “Right. Duncan, this is Valarr. Valarr, Duncan.”
Duncan held out a hand at once, all bright curiosity and zero shame.
“The famous Valarr.”
Valarr looked at his hand, then took it.
“I was not aware I was famous.”
“You’re not,” Duncan said. “But you are the reason she’s checked her phone six times in the last hour and pretended she wasn’t.”
She turned on him at once. “I’m going to kill you.”
“Violent,” Duncan remarked.
Valarr’s mouth threatened at one corner.
Interesting, Duncan’s face seemed to say.
Valarr lifted the paper bag slightly.
“You said you hadn’t eaten.”
She blinked. “I said that?”
“Yesterday,” he replied. “In passing.”
Duncan looked between them.
“Oh, that’s upsetting,” he said.
She ignored him. “You brought food?”
“And coffee,” said Valarr. “Though I’m beginning to learn that coffee is not always your safest sport.”
That made her laugh despite herself.
Duncan watched the whole exchange with the fascinated air of a man witnessing a rare and possibly dangerous species behaving unexpectedly well in captivity.
“What?” she asked.
Duncan shook his head slowly. “Nothing. I’m just adjusting.”
“To what?”
“To the fact that he’s real.”
Valarr, infuriatingly calm, said, “I have that effect on very few people.”
Duncan grinned. “Oh, she likes you.”
She stared at him. “Duncan.”
“What? This is useful social data.”
Valarr glanced at her, then said, very mildly, “I’m glad to hear it.”
That shut her up far more effectively than it should have.
Duncan noticed that too, which was a tragedy.
He took the coffee cup Valarr handed her, inspected the label, then looked at her in fresh outrage.
“You remembered her order?”
Valarr’s expression did not change. “Yes.”
Duncan looked at her, then back at him.
“That,” he said, “is either romantic or deeply predatory.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive,” she muttered.
Valarr handed Duncan the second coffee.
Duncan looked down at it. “You got me one too?”
“You looked like you would take offense if I didn’t.”
Duncan considered this.
“That is,” he said at last, “completely fair.”
For a moment, the three of them stood there in the washed-grey light outside the library entrance, paper cups warming their hands, the city moving around them in damp and indifferent currents. And she felt it then—not as spectacle, not as some great cinematic shift, but as something quieter and almost more dangerous.
Valarr was no longer just occurring to her.
He was beginning, gently and without permission, to enter the architecture of her life.
Duncan took a sip of his drink and narrowed his eyes.
“This is good,” he said suspiciously.
“Yes,” said Valarr.
“That annoys me.”
“Yes,” said Valarr again.
She laughed, and Duncan pointed at him.
“No, see, that. That’s exactly the problem. You’re both doing some kind of weird dry-flirting thing and I’m trying to study in the blast radius.”
Valarr looked past him toward the floors above. “What are you working on?”
She made a face at once. “A response paper that has become vindictive.”
Duncan held up the reading packet. “And an article written by a man who feared clarity.”
Valarr held out his hand.
Duncan gave him the packet immediately, because apparently loyalty could be bought with decent coffee.
Valarr scanned the page for less than a minute.
Then he said, “He is making a fairly simple argument and disguising it as complexity so no one notices the scaffolding is weak.”
Duncan stared at him.
She stared at him too.
Valarr looked up.
“What?”
“That,” Duncan said slowly, “was the most useful thing anyone has said about this in two days.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you secretly evil in every possible genre?”
“I’m versatile.”
Duncan laughed so suddenly he nearly choked on his coffee.
Then he stepped back toward the doors and looked between them with offensive perceptiveness.
“You know what? I’m going upstairs. Alone. Like a gentleman. Because clearly the academic atmosphere has now been compromised.”
She reached for his sleeve. “Duncan—”
He leaned down and said out of the side of his mouth, with all the subtlety of a fire alarm, “He brought you food, remembered your order, and analyzed the reading. If you don’t marry him, I will.”
Then he disappeared back into the library before she could kill him.
She stood there in horrified silence.
Beside her, Valarr was very still.
She closed her eyes. “I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She looked at him. “That’s your response?”
One corner of his mouth lifted.
“I found it encouraging.”
And because she was already doomed by then in ways she did not yet have the courage to name, all she could do was laugh into the coffee cup he had brought her and think, with a kind of helpless clarity, that this was how it happened.
Not all at once.
Just like this.
A man arriving with food and impossible timing, stepping without fuss into the crowded, unglamorous middle of her life, and somehow looking as though he had always meant to be there.
The life between things
After that, their love grew in ordinary increments.
Not with spectacle.
With repetition.
He began to know the shape of her week: which days left her tender with overstimulation, which classes made her angry in interesting ways, which bus route she hated, which café she only visited when sad, which sweater she wore when she wanted comfort without admitting it. He learned that she hated fluorescent light, liked her toast almost burnt, and had a private habit of rereading the same pages when tired without absorbing a single word.
She learned, in turn, the architecture of his silences.
At first, he hid tiredness as though it were a failing. He apologized for lateness as though she were a board he had inconvenienced. He took calls he should have ignored and looked faintly ashamed whenever his attention fractured under the weight of obligations he never fully named.
So she began, gently and without fanfare, to make room for him.
Some nights, that meant soup reheated after midnight.
Some nights, it meant sitting beside him on the sofa in silence while he answered emails with one hand and absentmindedly held her wrist with the other, like a man taking his own pulse through someone else.
Some nights, it meant dragging the laptop shut and saying, “You are finished now,” in the exact tone one might use on an overworked horse.
The first time she did that, he stared at her.
“I am not finished.”
“You are glassy-eyed and typing the same sentence three times. You’re done.”
“I have responsibilities.”
“You also have a frontal lobe. Use it.”
He looked almost scandalized.
She held out her hand.
“Come here.”
He did.
Not gracefully. Not quickly. But with the odd, solemn obedience of a man who had almost never been cared for in ways that did not require him to earn it first.
She tucked a blanket around him on the sofa.
He looked down at it, then up at her.
“Have I become eighty?”
“Yes,” she said. “Tragically. It happened very young.”
“That seems unfair.”
“So is your sleep schedule.”
He caught her hand before she could step away.
His fingers closed around hers with quiet certainty.
She looked at him.
He looked back and said, in a tone so low it altered the room around it, “Stay.”
Nothing in her had ever been especially prepared for that word in his voice.
So she sat beside him.
A few minutes later, without comment, he shifted until his head rested against her shoulder.
She stared at the top of it for a moment.
Then she smiled and leaned her cheek lightly against his hair.
That was how they fell in love, perhaps more than in any singular grand confession: by making rest possible for one another.
Her brother, her family, the future that almost was
Karl liked him before Valarr had properly learned how to deserve it.
In retrospect, that felt like one of the crueler parts of the story.
The first time she put Karl on speaker while Valarr was in the kitchen, her brother had been halfway through some chaotic account of a class project gone wrong when he heard the second voice and stopped short.
“Who is that?”
She grinned.
“No one.”
“A male no one?”
Valarr, who had just set down two mugs of tea, said calmly, “Good evening, Karl.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then: “Jesus Christ.”
She laughed so hard she nearly spilled her drink.
“Karl,” she said, breathless, “please behave.”
“I am behaving,” he said, scandalized. “I just wasn’t aware you had a full-grown mystery man in your kitchen.”
Valarr sat down opposite her, expression composed in the face of ambush.
“I assure you,” he said, “the mystery is greatly overstated.”
Karl snorted through the speaker. “That sounds exactly like something a mystery man would say.”
She kicked Valarr lightly under the table and watched the corner of his mouth threaten.
After that, Karl began texting him independently—sometimes for help, sometimes for memes he pretended not to enjoy, and sometimes because he had discovered that Valarr, for all his frost, gave excellent advice when caught off guard.
One night, after Karl had sent a truly hideous photo edit of her mid-blink with devil horns drawn over her head, she buried her face in her hands.
“I’m going to kill him.”
Valarr looked at the phone, considered it, and said, “No. This one should live for his art.”
She laughed into her palms.
Then looked up and caught him watching her.
Not politely.
Not idly.
As though he had fallen into something and knew it.
She sobered first.
“What?”
He seemed to consider lying, then once again decided against it.
“Nothing,” he said. “Only that you are very easy to love when you’re laughing.”
The room went still.
She looked at him.
He looked back, and though he did not retract it, she could see the aftershock of his own honesty pass through him.
Her voice came out softer than she intended.
“That was almost terribly romantic.”
“Almost?”
“You said it like a quarterly observation.”
His mouth moved.
Then, quietly, “Would you prefer I said it like a man?”
She felt her heart turn over in her chest.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He was silent for one breath. Two.
Then he set the phone down between them and said, with no cleverness left in him at all, “I think I am in trouble with you.”
Her eyes stung suddenly.
“That bad?”
“Yes,” he said. “Quite bad.”
She smiled then, small and aching and helplessly glad.
“Good,” she said. “I’d hate to suffer alone.”
Much later, when they were in bed with the window cracked open to let in rain-cool air and the city gone soft with distance, she lay with her head on his chest and traced idle shapes against his shirt.
“Mum wants to meet you.”
He went still beneath her hand.
Not enough for someone else to notice.
Enough for her.
She lifted her head.
“Valarr?”
“She wants to meet me,” he repeated.
“Yes,” she said, smiling a little. “That is generally how this goes when people are in love.”
His gaze settled on her face in the half-dark.
“Are we?”
The question should have been infuriating.
Instead, it made something tender ache inside her, because she knew him well enough by then to hear what lived beneath it.
Not doubt.
Wonder.
Fear.
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at him.
“Yes,” she said.
He lay very still.
The city hummed faintly beyond the glass. Somewhere below, a taxi horn sounded and vanished.
She brushed her fingers once through his hair.
“Karl already likes you,” she said. “Mum will too, once she recovers from how alarmingly expensive your watch is.”
That drew the ghost of a smile.
She smiled back.
“We could do something small,” she said. “Nothing terrible. Lunch, maybe. Or dinner. You don’t have to perform.”
His hand came up and settled at her waist.
“I know.”
But there had been something in his voice then that she had not fully known how to read.
She knew now.
That was the tragedy of it.
At the time, she only leaned down and kissed him softly, once, as if sealing something good in place.
He kissed her back like a man already trying to hold on to what he had not yet lost.
There were evenings, later, that became sacred to him simply because she existed inside them.
A rainy Sunday, for instance. Her feet in his lap while he pretended to read something work-related and in fact read the same paragraph six times because she kept talking about a documentary she had watched, and he preferred the movement of her face to any market report ever printed.
A farmer’s market where she held up ugly heirloom tomatoes with solemn reverence and declared them “spiritually important.”
“Spiritually,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“That seems excessive.”
“No,” she said. “You’re just emotionally underdeveloped.”
He took the bag from her before it could cut into her fingers.
“That is a cruel thing to say to a man carrying your vegetables.”
“You love carrying my vegetables.”
“I do not.”
“You do,” she said. “You like being useful.”
He glanced at her.
She saw it the second the teasing struck something true.
So she reached for his hand, threaded her fingers through his, and squeezed once.
“I like you useful,” she said more gently. “But I also like you when you’re just here.”
He looked down at their joined hands as though the sight of them did something to him he had not prepared for.
When he finally answered, his voice was quieter.
“That is not a thing I have often been allowed.”
She stopped walking.
The crowd moved around them in soft weekend currents—people with bouquets and paper cups and canvas bags, the city warm with late-afternoon gold.
She turned fully toward him.
“Well,” she said, “you’re allowed with me.”
He looked at her then in a way that made the whole bright market seem to recede.
And because she had, by then, become brave in the places he was not, she rose onto her toes and kissed him in the middle of the sidewalk.
He made a low, startled sound against her mouth, one hand tightening reflexively around the vegetable bag, the other coming to her waist.
When she pulled back, smiling, he looked almost dazed.
“That,” he said, “was public.”
“Yes.”
“You seem alarmingly pleased with yourself.”
“I am.”
He glanced around them, then back at her, and something unguarded crossed his face.
“Do it again.”
She laughed.
“Demanding.”
“Yes.”
“Terrible.”
“Yes.”
She kissed him again anyway.
And because love is often most itself in the smallest moments, that was the afternoon he first thought—not in theory, not in fear, not in some distant strategic sense of possibility, but with full and dreadful certainty—that he wanted every ordinary day she might ever allow him.
The rainy pho night
There were nights with Valarr that became holy in retrospect.
Not because anything grand happened.
Because nothing did.
Because love, when it was true, often revealed itself in small rituals repeated often enough to become a language of their own.
This one began with rain. Not dramatic rain, not the kind that made the city cinematic and sorrowful, but the thin, persistent sort that silvered the sidewalks and sent people hurrying along with their shoulders tucked in. By the time Valarr met her outside her apartment building, one sleeve was pulled over her hand, a damp patch darkened her shoulder, and she wore the vague mutiny of someone who had spent all day being competent and had now decided she was done. He crossed the distance quickly, lifted the umbrella over her before she could protest, guided her toward the car, and opened the door for her with quiet efficiency. Once she was safely inside, he shut it, circled to the driver’s side through the rain, and took one look at her before saying, “You need feeding.”
She blinked up at him. “No hello?”
“That was hello.”
“That was a diagnosis.”
“You look under-rested and irritable,” he said, falling into step beside her beneath the umbrella. “I know your tells.”
“That’s invasive.”
“That’s partnership.”
She shot him a look. “Partnership? We haven’t even had dinner yet.”
He tilted the umbrella farther toward her, taking more of the rain on his own shoulder without comment.
“That,” he said, “is why I said you need feeding.”
She looked at him for a second, then smiled despite herself.
“Pho.”
He nodded at once. “Already booked.”
She stopped walking. “You booked pho?”
“Yes.”
“You cannot book pho like it’s a Michelin tasting.”
“One can book anything,” he said, “if one dislikes queues.”
She stared at him gravely. “That is the most Valarr sentence ever spoken.”
“I have said worse.”
“You’ve said many worse things.”
“Name three.”
She resumed walking. “No. I’m saving them for cross-examination.”
He made a low sound that might have been a laugh, and they kept going, umbrella angled between them, the rain ticking softly overhead like a second, quieter city.
The pho place was warm, noisy, and fogged at the windows. The kind of place where the tables sat too close together, the menus were slightly sticky at the corners, and nobody cared because the broth was worth it. The air smelled of star anise, charred onion, basil, beef stock, and steam. Around them came the clink of ceramic, bursts of laughter from the back tables, and the constant hum of people being hungry together.
She was halfway through taking it in when she caught the flash of recognition at the edge of the room. A movement outside. A camera lifting through the rain-blurred glass.
Valarr had already seen it.
His hand came to her waist at once, steady and unhurried, turning her neatly into his side so that her face disappeared against his coat while his shoulders took the rest of the attention.
“Eyes down,” he said softly, not alarmed, only practiced. “Keep walking.”
Valarr paused just inside.
She noticed at once.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
He glanced around at the bright lights, the packed tables, the toddler at the next booth being handed noodles over someone’s shoulder, the delivery driver squeezing past with a bagged order.
“It is,” he said carefully, “busier than I pictured.”
She stared at him.
Then burst out laughing.
“Oh my God.”
“What?”
“You’re scared.”
“I am not scared.”
“You are absolutely scared.”
“I am adapting.”
She caught his sleeve and tugged him farther inside, grinning so hard she could barely breathe.
“Valarr Targaryen, conqueror of boardrooms, brought low by fluorescent lighting and soup.”
He looked down at her hand on his sleeve. “I am being slandered before broth.”
“Yes,” she said. “And in public too. Character-building.”
He let her steer him to the table.
When the menus arrived, he opened his with the grave attention of a man reviewing a legal contract.
She looked over the top of hers and laughed again.
“You have no idea what any of this means, do you?”
“I know enough to recognize categories.”
“That is not confidence. That is bluffing.”
He glanced down. “There appear to be fourteen variations of beef.”
“There are,” she said, leaning across the table. “And you are not getting tripe.”
He looked faintly alarmed. “Was that under consideration?”
“You were hovering.”
“I was evaluating.”
“You were lost.”
She pointed to the menu. “Get rare beef if you want safe. Get brisket and rare beef if you want best. Meatballs are good, but you seem emotionally unprepared for pho meatballs.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “Emotionally unprepared?”
“Yes.”
“That is an extraordinary sentence.”
“It is also true. And you need extra basil, extra lime, and chili sauce on the side, because you’ll pretend to be conservative and then steal mine.”
“I would not.”
“You absolutely would.”
He glanced back down at the menu. “And what are you having?”
“The usual.”
“The rare beef. No cilantro.”
She went still for half a beat. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything about your food.”
That was said in the same tone other men used to discuss weather, which made it worse.
She cleared her throat and pointed back to the menu before he could look too pleased with himself.
“You’re getting brisket and rare beef.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Trust me.”
His mouth shifted. “That seems rash.”
“Valarr.”
“Fine.”
When the server came, he ordered her meal exactly right—rare beef pho, extra lime, no cilantro, brown sugar milk tea with less ice—and then, after one brief glance at her, ordered the brisket and rare beef for himself with the additions she had chosen.
The server smiled faintly as she wrote it down.
Once she left, Valarr folded the paper sleeve from his chopsticks with exact, elegant fingers.
“That,” she said, leaning forward, “was actually psychotic.”
His brows lifted. “You object to being known?”
“I object to being known by a man who acts like he doesn’t pay attention.”
“I have never acted that way with you.”
She went quiet for just a moment.
Of course, he said things like that in the same tone other men used to discuss train delays.
“That,” she said after a beat, “was smooth.”
“It was factual.”
“That’s worse.”
By the time the pho arrived, her mood had already softened. The bowls came down in clouds of fragrant steam, broth deep and amber-gold, ribbons of onion floating at the top, herbs piled high on the side plate. Valarr looked into his bowl with the solemn concentration of a man being introduced to a religious rite.
She brightened at once.
“Okay,” she said, reaching for the basil. “This part matters.”
“Does it?”
“Yes. Tear the basil. Don’t dump it in whole unless you want to look unserious.”
He watched as she scattered herbs into her broth.
“You’ve become very commanding.”
“You need guidance.”
“I’m beginning to suspect that is your favorite phrase.”
“It is when I’m right.”
She squeezed lime into his bowl before he could object, dropped in a few bean sprouts, then nudged the chili sauce toward him.
“Small amount,” she warned. “You have rich-boy taste buds.”
“I resent that.”
“You should. It’s accurate.”
He obeyed with deep skepticism, then lifted a spoonful of broth to his mouth.
She watched him over the rim of her own bowl.
“Well?”
He swallowed.
Then looked at her.
“Oh,” he said.
She smiled, triumphant. “Exactly.”
“That is absurdly good.”
“I know.”
For a little while they ate in easy quiet, the kind that only existed between people who had already learned that silence did not always need filling. She watched him attempt the noodles with the focused dignity of a man negotiating a merger.
“How,” she asked eventually, “are you making pho look corporate?”
He looked up. “I wasn’t aware I was.”
“You look like you’re conducting due diligence.”
“One should maintain standards.”
“It is soup.”
“It is structure.”
She laughed so suddenly broth nearly went the wrong way. He waited until she stopped coughing to slide his water toward her without comment.
She took it, still smiling.
“You know what’s funny?” she said.
“What?”
“If someone saw us from across the room, they’d think you were the difficult one.”
He gave her a level look. “I am not difficult.”
“You absolutely are.”
“And yet you persist.”
“Because,” she said, stirring her noodles lazily, “underneath all the terrifyingly expensive repression, you’re actually sort of… domestic.”
He went still in that way he sometimes did when something landed closer to truth than he liked.
“I don’t think anyone has ever accused me of being domestic.”
“That’s because no one else has seen you remember my bubble tea order or hold an umbrella like it’s a military exercise.”
“I hold umbrellas correctly.”
“There is no correct umbrella posture.”
“There absolutely is.”
She smiled into her bowl.
He watched her for a moment, then said more quietly, “What do you think it is?”
She looked up. “What?”
“A real partnership.”
The question shifted the air between them.
Not heavily. Not enough to frighten either of them. Just enough that the rest of the restaurant seemed to blur a little at the edges.
She leaned back in her seat and thought.
“I think,” she said slowly, “it’s when someone becomes part of the rhythm of your life without making you feel crowded.”
He was listening with his full attention now.
She twisted her straw wrapper between her fingers.
“They know when to talk and when not to. They know how you take your food, how you get when you’re tired, which version of you is real and which one is just stress wearing your face.” She smiled a little, embarrassed by her own earnestness. “It’s when care stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like habit. Not because it matters less. Because it matters so much you stop announcing it.”
He did not speak for a moment.
Then he said, very quietly, “That’s a beautiful answer.”
She made a face to cover how much that pleased her. “Well. I contain multitudes.”
“That must be exhausting for the public.”
“It is. They suffer.”
That nearly won a smile.
She tilted her head. “What about you?”
He looked down at the condensation beading on his glass.
For once, when he answered, it was without polish.
“I think it is when being useful to someone no longer feels transactional.”
That made her still.
He went on, eyes still on the table between them.
“When care is not leverage. Or obligation. Or something performed to preserve order. When it is simply…” He glanced up. “Yours to give. Theirs to trust.”
Something in her chest tightened, soft and deep.
“That’s a little sad,” she said gently.
“Yes.”
She reached across the table without thinking and touched his wrist.
His eyes dropped to her hand.
Then rose back to her face.
“But I know what you mean,” she said.
For a second neither of them moved.
Then the server arrived with their bubble teas and the spell broke just enough for her to pull her hand back and say, too brightly, “Excellent. Now we can resume being unserious.”
“Were we serious?”
“Horribly.”
“That sounds like your fault.”
“Everything good is my fault,” she said.
“That,” he murmured, finally unwrapping his straw, “I’m beginning to suspect.”
After dinner, they drove back through the rain with their drinks in hand, and by the time they reached her building she was leaning a little more into his side than strictly necessary, full of broth and warmth and the kind of quiet contentment that made the city seem, briefly, less cruel.
Outside, two photographers were already waiting at the curb, one calling his name, the other trying for hers.
Valarr did not break stride. His hand settled at her waist at once as he steered her toward the car, opened the rear door with his free hand, and put her inside first with the practiced ease of a man accustomed to making the rest of the world wait.
By the time he slid in beside her, one of his security men had already moved cleanly between the cameras and the glass.
“Sorry,” he said softly, his thumb brushing once over her wrist. “I should have expected that.”
By the time they got back to her apartment, Valarr had already managed to shake the paparazzi. Inside, she kicked off her shoes with immediate relief and dropped her keys into the bowl by the door.
He set his umbrella aside to dry, slipped off his coat, and pulled something rectangular from the tote bag he had carried in from the car before placing it on the coffee table.
She blinked.
“Is that your Switch 2?”
He glanced at it. “Yes.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “You brought a gaming device on a date?”
His expression remained utterly composed. “I came prepared.”
“For what? Emotional downtime?”
“For your inevitable demand that I stay longer.”
She stared.
Then grinned. “That is disgustingly confident.”
“And accurate.”
He was, infuriatingly, correct.
She changed into soft shorts and one of her oversized sweaters while he sat on the couch, tie loosened, sleeves rolled, setting up Zelda with the grave concentration of a man preparing a state document. When she came back out, he looked up once, briefly, and whatever passed over his face in that second made her very glad she had not chosen the uglier sweater.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it.”
“You look comfortable.”
She laughed. “That is the least seductive compliment anyone has ever given me.”
“It was not meant to be seductive.”
“Liar.”
He looked back at the screen. “I make no comment.”
She climbed onto the couch, anyway, tucking herself against his side. He shifted instinctively to make space for her, one arm lifting so she could curl in against his chest. After a moment of adjustment, she ended up half-reclined between his legs, her back against his front, one of his knees bracketing hers while he held the console out beyond them.
It was indecently cozy.
She let out a long sigh and settled fully.
He glanced down. “Better?”
“Yes,” she said. “Now perform.”
He stared at the screen. “Perform?”
“You heard me. I want gameplay.”
“This is not a circus.”
“This is absolutely a circus. You brought Zelda to my apartment.”
“It is a critically acclaimed open-world experience.”
She snorted.
He began playing anyway.
For a while she watched in contented silence, her hands folded loosely over his forearm where it rested across her waist. Every now and then he would absentmindedly press his thumb against her side when concentrating, a small unconscious movement that undid her more than anything dramatic could have.
Then he missed a jump.
She gasped. “Valarr!”
“What?”
“That was criminal.”
“It was a minor miscalculation.”
“You walked him directly off a cliff.”
“He recovered.”
“He died.”
“He returned.”
“That is not the same.”
“It is in this franchise.”
She tipped her head back against his shoulder to look up at him.
“You are very defensive for a man who just killed Link in front of me.”
He looked down at her, expression dry. “You are alarmingly judgmental for someone not holding the controls.”
“That’s because I’m providing commentary. We all have roles.”
“Ah,” he said. “A partnership.”
She smiled. “Yes, actually.”
Something softened in his face then. Not visibly enough for anyone else to catch. Enough for her.
He resumed playing.
Every so often she pointed at the screen.
“No, go that way.”
“That way is structurally unsound.”
“It has treasure.”
“It has nonsense.”
“Same thing.”
“You are a terrible strategist.”
“And you,” she said, snuggling deeper into him, “are a loot coward.”
He made a sound that was definitely a laugh this time, low against her hair.
“You cannot simply invent insults.”
“I can. Watch me.”
He let her talk him into chasing Koroks, solving shrines badly, and attempting things she was certain would work and he was certain would fail. They were wrong in approximately equal measure. At one point she got so animated over a horse choice that she seized his wrist mid-button press.
“Not that one.”
“Why not?”
“He looks emotionally unreliable.”
Valarr looked at the horse. Then at her.
“You assigned that horse an attachment style.”
“He has the eyes of a man who leaves.”
There was just enough truth in the joke to make the room dip strangely quiet.
His hand stilled on the controls.
She felt it instantly and almost hated herself for it.
Then he bent his head slightly and said, very softly near her temple, “Then we won’t pick him.”
Her throat tightened.
She covered it with a smile and pointed instead. “Good. Take the chestnut. He looks like he won't eat all your food.”
“That,” he said, voice steadier again, “is perhaps the least romantic criterion you have ever offered.”
“I’m thinking long-term.”
“I’m beginning to understand that.”
After a while she stopped pretending to watch only the game. Half the pleasure was him: the focus in his face, the little crease between his brows when he concentrated, the way his mouth shifted when amused, the occasional absent brush of his thumb against her hip. The ease of him here felt rare enough to be precious.
She turned a little in his arms.
“You know, this is weirdly intimate.”
“Playing Zelda?”
“No. This.”
He looked down at her.
“Pho,” she said, counting on her fingers against his sleeve, “bubble tea, then domestic gaming while I judge your choices and slowly fuse to your chest like a sleepy parasite.”
“That is an unkind description.”
“It’s accurate.”
His arm tightened slightly around her. “I wasn’t objecting to the accuracy.”
The flirtation in it was so quiet she almost missed it.
Then she smiled, slow and warm. “Oh. So you like me fused to your chest.”
“I find it restorative.”
“That sounds medical.”
“It is not.”
“No?”
“No.”
She turned a little more, enough that she was now half facing him, one knee sliding between his, his console lowered for the moment onto his thigh. Their faces were closer than before. The game music went on softly in the background, almost absurdly tender for what the moment had become.
“And what is it, then?” she asked.
He looked at her like a man answering carefully because carelessly was no longer possible.
“Dangerous,” he said.
Her breath caught, though she smiled. “Because of the parasite thing?”
“No.”
His hand came up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers lingered there a second too long.
“Because I could get used to it.”
The words sat warm between them.
Rain tapped softly at the window.
She looked at him, at the composure he wore like tailored clothing and the feeling that still somehow reached her through it, and felt that helpless tenderness rise in her.
“Well,” she whispered, “that sounds a little like your problem.”
“It may be.”
“And?”
He glanced once at her mouth, then back to her eyes.
“And I am not certain I wish to solve it.”
She kissed him before he could say anything more impractical.
It was not urgent at first. Just soft. Familiar. The kind of kiss that belonged to people who had already learned one another’s silences. Then his hand came fully to her waist, the console tipped dangerously on the couch cushion, and she laughed against his mouth.
“Your hero’s dying,” she murmured.
“He’ll survive.”
“Confident.”
“Not about him.”
That made her flush, and because he noticed everything, his mouth curved faintly against hers.
When they finally parted, she stayed close, forehead resting lightly against his.
From somewhere behind them Zelda’s idle music kept playing to no one.
She smiled. “You should probably save your game.”
He looked at her with that low, undone softness she had come to treasure most because he gave it so rarely.
“Maybe later.”
She leaned back into him, pleased with herself in a way she did not bother hiding.
After a moment she glanced at the console, then at him.
“You know, if you keep leaving this here, eventually I’m going to assume you live with me.”
He went still.
Not badly.
Just enough that she felt it.
Then he looked around her apartment—the blanket on the sofa, the bubble tea on the coffee table, the umbrella drying by the door, his Switch 2 abandoned in the middle of her living room as though it belonged there already—and said, with a quietness that reached deeper than flirtation,
“Some part of me already does.”
She turned fully then.
Whatever she had been about to say vanished.
He seemed to realize, just after speaking, how naked the truth of it had been. But he did not take it back.
Neither of them moved.
Then she touched his face with one hand and smiled that small, helpless smile of a woman who knew she was already far gone.
“Good,” she said softly.
And because love sometimes announced itself most clearly in moments that looked like nothing from the outside, he set the Switch aside without another thought, drew her properly into his arms, and let the game wait while she made a home of his chest and he, without yet fully meaning to, left something of himself behind in her apartment that would not easily be reclaimed.
He did leave the Switch there
Neither of them mentioned it at first.
It remained on the coffee table the next morning beside two empty bubble tea cups, one sock of his somehow worked loose beneath the sofa, and the charger he had borrowed from her and failed to put back in his bag. It should have looked temporary.
It did not.
It looked like the beginning of overlap.
She stared at it while making coffee, then took a picture and sent it to him.
You abandoned your child.
His reply came less than a minute later.
I was under the impression he was safe in your custody.
She smiled into the steam rising from the kettle.
He’s very upset. Says his father is emotionally unavailable.
There was a pause.
Then:
That is an outrageous accusation from a console currently sitting in your living room beside your sweater.
She looked down.
Her sweater really was draped half over it, as though the thing had been tucked in for the day.
Her smile widened.
Don’t parent my cardigan.
Another pause.
Then:
I’ll come by tonight.
She read that line three times.
Not because it was particularly romantic.
Because it was.
Not Would you like to see me? Not Are you free? Just that quiet certainty of return, as though the thread between them had already been tied and he was simply following it back.
She typed:
For the Switch?
His answer came immediately.
Among other things.
She carried that message around all day like a lit secret.
By evening, the city had turned blue and gold with dusk. She had changed twice, hated both options, and finally settled on soft lounge shorts and one of the long-sleeved tops that made her feel most like herself. The apartment smelled faintly of garlic, laundry detergent, and the candle she had lit half an hour earlier in an attempt to make the place feel less obviously as though she had spent the last ten minutes cleaning for someone who had already seen it messy.
When he arrived, he let himself in with the key she had started leaving with the concierge for him on late nights.
That, too, had happened without ceremony.
She heard the door open, the quiet click of it closing, and then his voice from the entryway.
“Is that basil?”
She leaned out from the kitchen. “It’s pasta.”
He stepped into view, dark coat open over a charcoal sweater, hair touched faintly by the cold outside. He looked tired around the eyes, but softer than most evenings, as though simply coming here had already eased something in him.
“I thought,” she said, “since your gaming son is spending another night, we should probably feed him properly.”
His mouth moved.
Not a full smile.
Enough.
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
“I’m nurturing.”
“You’re deranged.”
“Yes,” she said. “But warmly.”
He crossed the room and stopped in front of her.
For one brief moment neither of them spoke.
Then he reached up and tucked a strand of hair back from her face.
“You wore the good shirt,” he said quietly.
She looked at him. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I know which ones you reach for when you want to be comfortable,” he said, “and which ones you reach for when you want to be looked at.”
Her throat tightened.
“That’s a dangerous observation.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m learning.”
She handed him the wooden spoon before she could embarrass herself further.
“Stir.”
He took it obediently, frowned into the pan, and said, “This ratio is chaos.”
“It’s sauce.”
“It’s imprecise.”
“It’s emotional.”
“That is not reassuring.”
She laughed despite herself and leaned against the counter, watching him stir with absurd concentration.
“Do you realize,” she said, “that you are the only man I know who could make domesticity look like a hostile takeover?”
He glanced at her. “I am helping.”
“You’re auditing.”
“I’m improving the process.”
She gasped. “Get out of my kitchen.”
He laughed then, properly this time, low and brief and real enough that she felt warm all over at the sound of it.
Later, they ate cross-legged on the sofa because she refused to use the tiny dining table for anything except holding mail she did not want to open. He balanced his bowl with irritating elegance. She nearly lost a noodle down the front of her shirt twice.
When she reached for her glass, his hand moved automatically to steady the bowl in her lap before she could ask.
She looked down at his fingers there.
Then up at him.
“What?”
He seemed almost surprised by the question. “You were about to spill.”
“That’s very married of you.”
He paused.
That happened more often lately, she had noticed. Small domestic words reaching him like thrown pebbles striking something deeper than either of them had intended.
He set his own glass down carefully.
“Would that alarm you?” he asked.
The room softened at the edges.
She swallowed.
“Not in theory,” she said lightly, though her voice came out quieter than she meant it to. “In theory it sounds very nice. I’d obviously keep the better blankets.”
His gaze stayed on her.
“And in practice?”
There it was again — that terrible sincerity of his, the thing that made flirtation dangerous because it so often tipped, without warning, into truth.
She tucked one leg beneath her and looked down at the bowl in her hands.
“In practice,” she said after a moment, “I think I’d want it to feel like this.”
He did not speak.
So she kept going, softer now.
“Not grand. Not performed. Just easy. Like two people who keep showing up. Who know each other’s weird food orders and sleep schedules and bad moods. Who don’t have to become strangers the second real life starts happening.”
When she finally looked up, he was watching her with an expression so unguarded it nearly undid her on the spot.
“That,” he said, “sounds dangerously close to happiness.”
She smiled a little. “Yes. Awful, isn’t it?”
“Terrifying.”
“See? You get it.”
“I’m beginning to.”
After dinner, the Switch lasted all of ten minutes before it was abandoned again.
She had climbed into his lap by degrees, as she always seemed to do now, until his arm had settled around her waist and her back rested against his chest as though that had always been the intended design. The game went on in his hands for a while. Her brother called. There was laughter, teasing, the humiliating subject of mothers and mystery men. Then quiet again.
After a moment she said, “He likes you.”
“So I gathered.”
“And my mother would too.”
Valarr’s hands rested lightly against the console, but he was no longer playing.
When he spoke, his voice had gone low.
“I would want that.”
She turned her head. “What?”
He looked down at the paused screen. “Not as theatre. Not as performance. I would want to know the people who made you. The ones who knew what you were like before I did.”
Her heart gave one painful, tender turn.
She shifted in his lap until she could look up at him properly.
“You say things like that,” she murmured, “and then act surprised when I stare at you.”
His mouth moved faintly. “I wasn’t aware I was surprised.”
“You go all still.”
“I go still often.”
“Not like that.”
Rain tapped softly at the window.
She touched his face, and he leaned into it before he could stop himself.
That was the thing about them by then. The small instincts had begun telling the truth before caution could catch up.
“I like this,” she said.
He looked at her. “This?”
“You here,” she said. “Your things here. You being impossible about my cooking and weirdly parental about soup and leaving your game console in my apartment like some sort of breadcrumb trail toward cohabitation.”
That earned the ghost of a smile.
“I see.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
There was no dramatic shift. No music swelling. No revelation grand enough to announce itself.
Just his hands lowering the console to the cushion beside them.
Just the way he looked at her then, without wit or deflection to soften it.
“I know,” he said.
Her breath caught.
He kissed her then, slowly at first, with that same strange reverence he sometimes brought to the smallest touches, as though care itself had become a language he meant to learn thoroughly. She kissed him back with a softness that did not remain soft for long. The couch became too narrow in the way furniture often did once kissing stopped being merely kissing. He made a low, helpless sound against her mouth when she shifted in his lap, and somewhere beside them the game dimmed itself to sleep, forgotten.
He drew back only far enough to look at her, forehead resting lightly against hers.
“You should tell me to go,” he said quietly, though nothing in him was moving away.
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“Then don’t suggest foolish things.”
His eyes closed for one brief second.
When he opened them again, there was something more naked in them than before. Not less controlled. Just more honest.
“Stay with me tonight,” she whispered.
The answer was already in the way his hand tightened at her waist.
“Yes.”
And later, in the bedroom, they did not stop at kissing.
The rain went on softly against the window. The city was dim beyond the glass. He touched her with the same care he had brought to every small thing between them, and when they finally made love, it felt less like crossing a line than like arriving somewhere they had both been moving toward for a very long time. Not hurried. Not careless. Tender, yes, but unmistakable in its wanting. The sort of closeness that changed the air around it. The sort after which nothing could honestly be called uncertain again.
By morning, he was still there. And that, perhaps, was how love advanced most dangerously between them — not through declarations alone, but through the accumulating fact of him remaining, night after night, until the shape of her life had begun to curve around his without either of them yet admitting how much it would hurt if it were ever forced to unlearn him. Perhaps this was the real point of collision after all: not the first meeting, not the first kindness, but the moment they saw one another clearly and stayed. Later, when fate had altered its face, and she was left searching backward through the wreckage of what if, this would be one of the moments she returned to most. The one that looked, for a little while, like it could never break.
From the same universe: The Baby Is Built Like a Royal Loaf
Summary:
Long after the Ashford Tourney, tempers are mended, old wounds have settled, and for once, the Targaryens are having a peaceful day. The kind of peace people once wished for, back when life felt simpler.
Then Duncan looks at Valarr’s very chonky baby, looks at Aerion, and says the worst possible thing out loud.
Aerion is horrified. Egg is losing his mind. Valarr is far too amused. And everyone is left wondering whether Duncan is blessed by the gods or just impossibly lucky.
Warnings:
Baelor lives. Duncan and Aerion are on better terms. Humor. Family fluff. Aerion suffering. Body shaming a baby?! He is chonky though.
A/N: Pls do not speak to me about this, I am who I am. On my momma this is the last one for a while… orrrr maybe I can finally update Even the Gods Watch Us Die now tehehe. Unfortunately, avoidance and procrastination are core parts of my personality.
The late afternoon sun lay warm upon the terrace at Summerhall, spilling across the pale stone in a wash of amber light that gentled the hard lines of balustrade and column alike. The castle seemed almost kindly in such an hour. Its pale walls, half honey and half rose, where the day’s warmth still clung to them, glimmered above the gardens. The carved arches cast long bars of shadow over the floor, and somewhere below, beyond the terrace wall, a fountain whispered over stone. From farther off came the muted ring of steel from the yard, the faint cry of boys at practice, the rustle of wind through dry grasses gone gold at summer’s edge. Even the servants crossing the far gallery moved quietly, slippers brushing the stone, as if unwilling to disturb the stillness.
Almost peaceful, it might have been, had peace been a thing allowed to endure wherever princes gathered.
You sat beneath the shade of a carved alcove where the light fell dappled through the latticework, your younger son firm and heavy in your lap. He was a plump child, all soft weight and cherub cheeks, with a head full of white hair fine as milkweed silk and eyes that marked him unmistakably as his father’s son: one blue, one brown, striking in so young a face. There was determination in him already, for all his milk-soft mouth and unsteady limbs. At present that determination had fixed itself, with the stubborn force only babes and kings seemed to possess, upon Prince Aerion Targaryen.
The child leaned forward at every opportunity, straining against your arm with eager little grunts, both chubby hands opening and closing in fierce, wordless demand. He wanted Aerion. That much was plain enough.
Aerion stood a few paces off in a shaft of sun, his arms folded hard across his chest as though he meant to barricade himself against fate itself. Light caught in the pale silver-gold of his hair and along the sharp line of his cheekbone, but there was no warmth in him. His whole posture was refusal, the stillness too deliberate, the shoulders held too rigidly, the mouth drawn into that thin, disdainful line he wore like armor when crossed.
“No,” he said.
There was such finality in the single word that a lesser woman might have yielded to it. You only smiled.
“Oh, come now.”
“No,” he said again, each letter clipped clean.
At your side, your elder son leaned forward with grave interest. At six, he was just beginning to lengthen from babyhood into boyhood, all fine bones and watchful eyes, carrying already some shadow of his father’s quiet poise. Yet the glint in him when he scented mischief was all yours. He rested one hand upon the bench, looking up at Aerion with innocent solemnity so artful it might have done credit to a courtier thrice his age.
“He likes you, Uncle Aerion.”
“That,” Aerion said flatly, “is unfortunate.”
As if encouraged by insult, the babe gave a squeal of delight and lunged harder, near pitching himself out of your lap altogether. You caught him close against your breast, laughing under your breath as his little boots kicked uselessly at the air.
“Hold him for a moment,” you said.
“No.”
“Aerion.”
“No.”
Your elder son tilted his head. “Please?”
Aerion’s eyes narrowed. “I know what you are doing.”
The boy blinked at him, all wide-eyed innocence. “I do not know what you mean.”
“You are your mother’s son.”
You smoothed the baby’s tunic where it had ridden up beneath his struggle. “That is hardly an insult.”
The younger one let out a fretful sound, low and offended, and threw himself forward once more with such vigor that you had to tighten both arms around him. He smelled of milk and clean linen and sun-warmed skin. One soft hand batted the air in Aerion’s direction, tyrannical as any little princeling making his first command.
“There,” you said lightly. “Now you’ve offended him.”
Aerion did not so much as uncross his arms. “I can bear it.”
“Coward,” you murmured.
His eyes snapped to yours at once, sharp as drawn steel. For a moment something old passed between you in that look, something born in younger years and too many shared summers, when teasing him had been half your sport and half your privilege. He would have answered, no doubt, had not another sound intruded then: the heavy cadence of boots upon stone from the far end of the terrace.
Ser Duncan the Tall entered first, broad as a gatehouse and twice as guileless, with Egg beside him in princely neatness and boyish curiosity. They had the look of men come in from brighter places, a little dust at Duncan’s boots, a faint warmth in Egg’s cheeks, the smell of sun and yard and horse following them faintly into the shade. Both slowed as they took in the scene before them.
You seated beneath the alcove with two children.
One boy at your side.
One baby in your lap, clamoring with all his round little heart for the prince standing over you.
And Aerion himself, rigid as a man beset.
Duncan, being kind and honest and built for straightforward things, arrived at the simplest conclusion with the ruinous certainty of a man who did not know he walked toward a precipice.
“My prince,” he said, respectful and entirely sincere, “I think your son would like to be held.”
The silence that followed fell hard as a dropped blade.
It seemed for a heartbeat that even the fountain below had ceased its murmuring. Your elder son went still. One of the servants crossing the far arcade paused just long enough to sense disaster before hastening on with lowered eyes. The babe, traitor that he was, gave another happy squeal and stretched both hands toward Aerion again, as if to lend the lie all possible strength.
Egg blinked once.
Then made a small choking sound.
Aerion did not move. That was the most dangerous thing of all. Only after a long beat did he turn his head, slowly, toward Duncan. His face had gone very still.
“My what?” he asked softly.
The big knight frowned, only then beginning to suspect he had put his foot somewhere mortal. “Well, he’s reaching for you, and the older boy’s there, and...”
“He is not my son.”
The words came quickly, a reflexive defence against whatever slight he believed he had just endured, but there was no real bite in them. It sounded less like outrage and more like sheer, disbelieving what the fuck, no.
Your elder boy, helpful in the merciless manner of children, lifted his chin and said with perfect clarity, “Our father isn't Prince Aerion.”
“Oh,” said Duncan.
A beat passed.
Then, more faintly, “Oh.”
Aerion might have let it rest there, had Duncan been blessed with better instincts. Instead, the poor man looked from the elder boy to the babe in your arms, to Aerion, and then back again, his confusion so plain it was almost painful.
“Well then,” he asked, honest as daylight and twice as disastrous, “whose chonky baby is this?”
That finished whatever discipline remained upon the terrace.
Egg turned away at once, one hand over his mouth, his narrow shoulders beginning to shake so violently he looked half-strangled. Somewhere behind the nearest pillar, a guard coughed with painful force and not much success in disguising what threatened beneath it. You pressed your lips together, but the laughter was already rising in your chest, traitorous and bright. Aerion, meanwhile, looked very much like a man contemplating murder and calculating whether witnesses might be disposed of quickly enough.
“That,” he said, pointing with lethal precision toward the baby in your arms, “is my cousin’s son. Valarr’s, not mine.”
The babe gurgled up at him in blithe agreement.
“And I am too,” your elder son added.
Poor Duncan looked as if he wished the floor might open and take him whole, but the worst of it had not yet passed. He squinted down at the babe as if trying to recover some dignity through observation, then said, with painful sincerity, “He is a very sturdy little fellow.”
Egg made a strangled noise and bent double.
You laughed outright then, unable to help yourself. “A sturdy little fellow?”
Duncan, realizing too late that he had only worsened his own ruin, nodded once. “Aye. A sturdy little fellow. Chonky, but in a healthy way.”
“In a healthy way,” Egg repeated faintly, nearly dying of it, still unable to believe that his knight had just called a member of the royal family chonky and, worse, somehow decided that chonky baby must belong to Aerion — his brother, who had shown precious little interest in being a father and even less in being anything other than a pampered prince.
Aerion looked at Duncan as though he had become the realm’s greatest trial.
Before Aerion could recover his dignity, before Duncan could blunder further into ruin, the air upon the terrace shifted.
It was a small thing at first. The guards at the steps drew straighter. A passing maid lowered her eyes and slipped aside. Conversation from the gallery beyond thinned to nothing. It was the sort of change that came before a man of rank had spoken a word, when presence alone was enough to alter the shape of a place.
You knew before you turned.
Valarr had come.
He entered without herald or flourish, yet none who saw him would have mistaken him for anything less than a prince born and bred. The light caught at his fair hair and at the fine dark cloth of his doublet, rich but not ostentatious, the cut of it falling clean across his shoulders. There was calm in him, and ease, and that quiet certainty that belonged to men who had never needed to shout in order to be obeyed. He stepped from the brightness into the half shade of the terrace and stopped.
Because he saw.
You beneath the alcove.
Your elder son at your side.
The baby straining in your lap.
Aerion fixed like a man under sentence.
And the thick, awkward remains of Duncan’s mistake hanging in the air like incense after prayer.
Valarr’s gaze moved with unhurried care, from you to your eldest, from your eldest to the baby, and from the baby at last to Aerion. One pale brow rose.
“Am I interrupting something?”
Egg made a strangled sound that might, in kinder company, have passed for a cough. Duncan straightened as if before judgment itself.
“Your Highness, I can explain...”
Valarr turned his head just enough to look at him. “Can you?”
Mildly said, it was somehow far worse.
“Father,” your elder son said at once, all bright relief.
Something in Valarr’s face softened then, subtle as the touch of dusk upon water. He crossed to the boy and rested one hand briefly atop his head, fingers lingering a moment in silent affection. Then his gaze shifted to the younger child, who was still writhing with determined displeasure, still reaching, still demanding Aerion with a persistence that bordered on royal insolence. Only after observing that little struggle did Valarr glance once more toward his cousin.
“Curious,” he said.
“It is not what it looks like,” Aerion said at once.
You could not resist. “That depends,” you said sweetly, “on what it looks like.”
Aerion shot you a look full of old grievance and present betrayal.
Duncan, poor doomed soul, found it in himself to speak again. “I only thought the babe was his, and...”
Valarr’s eyes returned to him. “His son?”
The baby, as if summoned for evidence, squealed and reached again with both hands.
Aerion’s voice dropped lower. “No.”
Valarr let the silence stretch between them just long enough to sharpen it.
“Ah,” he said at last. “Then I have arrived at an interesting moment.”
Egg was no longer pretending to restraint. He turned his face aside, shoulders shaking openly now. You laughed then, soft at first and then with less decorum than a lady ought. Your eldest, seeing at last that no storm was coming, smiled too, and leaned lightly against your sleeve. Aerion looked from one face to another as though the whole terrace had risen against him in treason.
“Are you all children?”
“Yes,” said Egg promptly.
“Some of us quite literally,” you added.
Valarr’s gaze dropped once more to the baby, who had by now reached such heights of determination that he was nearly throwing himself headfirst from your lap in his effort to get to Aerion. Something amused and fond flickered in Valarr’s eyes.
“He has interesting taste,” he said.
“He has none,” Aerion replied.
Your elder son tilted his head, studying his uncle with that bright, dangerous seriousness children sometimes wore when they knew more than they ought. “He likes you because you talk to him.”
The terrace stilled again.
Aerion froze so completely he might have been cast in pale marble.
Valarr looked down at the boy. “He does?”
“Yes,” your son said. “He says things like, ‘stop staring at me,’ and, ‘why are you sticky.’”
Egg gave a little gasp of delight. You turned away at once, laughter shaking you too hard to hide it now. Even one of the guards had lowered his head to conceal what was surely a grin.
“That,” Aerion said tightly, “was not meant to be shared.”
“You said it out loud,” your son replied with patient logic.
Valarr was openly amused now, though the expression in him remained restrained, more dangerous perhaps for that very reason. He folded his arms and considered his cousin in silence for a moment, while warm wind moved along the terrace and stirred the edge of your sleeve. Somewhere in the yard below, a horse whickered.
Then Valarr looked down at your elder son and smoothed a hand over his hair once more.
“I had meant to steal my heir away for an hour,” he said.
The boy looked up at once, all bright curiosity. “To where?”
“To the Dragonpit,” Valarr said. “Your dragon has been fed already, but not by you, and I am told that is a grave offense.”
The child straightened at once, delight flooding his face. “Truly?”
“So I have heard,” Valarr replied gravely. “I thought perhaps you might like to help with the next cut yourself, before the creature decides I have replaced you.”
“He would never,” your son said at once, scandalized by the thought.
“No?” Valarr asked mildly.
“No. He likes me best.”
“That,” said Aerion darkly, “is exactly the sort of confidence that gets Targaryens bitten.”
Your son ignored him completely, already half turned toward his father with excitement glowing through him. “Can I bring the thick leather glove? The dark one?”
“You may,” said Valarr. “And the smaller knife for the meat, if your mother allows it.”
Before you could answer, Duncan, who perhaps had still not suffered enough for one afternoon, looked from the eager boy, to Valarr, to the dragon-talk, and then at last down again to the round little tyrant in Aerion’s arms.
The babe, white-haired and plump as cream, gurgled happily and tightened his fist in Aerion’s hair.
Duncan blinked.
Then, with the same earnest gravity that had doomed him the first time, he muttered, “Well. Good. I was beginning to worry the chonky baby might be bound for the Dragonpit too.”
There was a beat of silence.
Then Egg made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. Your shoulders shook at once. Even Valarr looked away for a moment, one hand rising toward his mouth in some last, failing attempt at princely restraint.
Aerion turned his head with glacial slowness.
“The what?”
Duncan swallowed. “The babe, my prince.”
“The chonky baby,” Egg repeated weakly, now fully losing the battle.
Your elder son laughed outright, bright and delighted, while the babe, traitor to all decorum, gave a bubbling squeal as if he too approved the title.
Aerion looked down at the child in disbelief. “Do not encourage this.”
The babe answered by drooling onto his shoulder.
Duncan, somehow still alive, cleared his throat. “I only meant he looks well loved.”
“Well loved,” you repeated, smiling too hard to stop.
Valarr’s mouth curved. “That is kinder.”
“It is more accurate,” Duncan said, defending himself now with all the solemn bravery of a doomed man. “Though I still think sturdy little fellow fits.”
Egg leaned against the pillar for support. “No, no. Chonky is better. That is what makes it memorable.”
Your elder son stepped closer to Aerion and the baby, peering up with grave interest. “He is chonky.”
“I am surrounded by enemies,” Aerion muttered.
“Yes,” said Valarr pleasantly. “But affectionate ones.”
That, perhaps, was what saved the moment from dissolving into cruelty. For all Aerion’s offense, for all Duncan’s irreparable honesty and Egg’s shameless delight, the terrace had gone soft with it now, sun-warm, wind-bright, threaded through with laughter too fond to wound.
The babe, still triumphant in Aerion’s arms, patted at the prince’s cheek with a sticky hand and gave another happy hum, as if laying claim to him once and for all.
Aerion stared at him.
The babe stared back.
Then, after a long moment, Aerion shifted him, not gracefully and certainly not eagerly, but with marginally less alarm than before.
Valarr saw it. So did you.
Your elder son, however, was distracted anew, already tugging lightly at his father’s sleeve. “Can we go now? Before he sleeps? I want to see if he remembers me.”
Valarr glanced down at him, then toward the gardens beyond, where the light had begun to turn richer, dusk creeping gold along the edges of the stone.
“In a moment,” he said. “Let your uncle survive this first.”
“He won’t,” said Egg.
Duncan, still attempting to salvage his honor, offered, “I could take the babe, if His Grace prefers.”
“No,” said Aerion at once.
Everyone looked at him.
Aerion went still.
Then his mouth tightened. “He is already here.”
Your elder son’s eyes widened with wicked delight.
Valarr’s brow lifted.
And you, unable to help yourself, smiled with all the old mischief he should have known better than to trust.
“Oh,” you said sweetly. “So now he is your chonky baby?”
Aerion looked as though the Stranger himself had come personally to test him.
“He is no one’s chonky baby,” he said with frigid dignity.
The child promptly seized a fistful of his hair and squealed in his face.
Egg nearly collapsed laughing.
Valarr only smiled.
And in the warm gold hush of the terrace, with the fountain whispering below and the last of the daylight clinging to the pale stone, the sound of it all, your laughter, Egg’s helpless choking, Duncan’s mortified silence, your eldest son’s delighted questions, and even Aerion’s long-suffering outrage, seemed to settle over the moment like something bright and living.
For one brief, absurd stretch of evening, Summerhall felt young.
As the maids moved softly through the bedchamber, tying ribbons, fastening hooks, and smoothing the last folds of your gown into place, Valarr lingered nearby with the baby in his arms as though he had no intention of being anywhere else. The child lay heavy and content against his father’s chest, all soft limbs and round cheeks, one tiny hand tangled in the black silk at Valarr’s shoulder. Valarr looked down at him for a long moment, amusement stirring slow and bright across his face, before he lifted his gaze to you.
“Hm,” he said, his voice rich with quiet mischief. “Your mother may indeed be spoiling you.”
You narrowed your eyes at once, already knowing that look too well.
Valarr’s mouth curved further. He brushed his knuckles lightly over the baby’s cheek, then added, with altogether too much satisfaction, “You are very chonky.”
You made a sharp, offended sound and seized the nearest pillow, flinging it at him with all the dignity you could manage while half-dressed and being fussed over by maids.
He caught it badly against his arm and laughed, low and full, the sound warming the chamber more than the fire ever could. “Have a care,” he murmured, glancing at you over the babe’s pale head. “If you mean to punish me, wife, do it when I have not got your son in my arms. Else I shall think you jealous of the attention he steals.”
One of the maids nearly choked trying not to smile. You, scandalized beyond bearing, reached at once for the second pillow.
Valarr laughed harder then, shifting the baby easily against his chest, his eyes bright with the sort of affection that always felt dangerously close to worship when turned upon you. “There,” he said softly to the child, though he never looked away from your face. “You see how fierce she is? And still I dare admire how well she has kept you.”
And the babe, traitorously content in his father’s arms while you burned beneath that look, only gave a sleepy little sigh and nestled closer, as though he knew perfectly well that between the two of you, he was cherished far too much to come to any harm.
Pairing: Prince Valarr (Modern AU) x Reader (She/Her, "You" referred )
Summary:
Everyone online thinks she has the perfect life: the face, the ring, the husband, the child, the dynasty, the kind of marriage people envy in photographs and edits online.
What they cannot see is the loneliness inside it, or how a woman can be deeply loved and still left starving for something gentler, warmer, and spoken aloud.
When their son brings home a rumour cruel enough to shatter the silence between them, Valarr is forced to reckon with the difference between loving his wife and making her feel loved.
Warnings:
unrequited love but not really unrequited, emotional neglect, marital loneliness, angst, Valarr is a damn fool, child caught in parental tension, rumours of infidelity, family pressure, difficult communication, crying, reconciliation, you have son, and he is named
A/N: Studying was the plan (but it's okay, my finals won't be here for another three weeks....yikes). but anywaysss, Valarr was the reality. I know what I said, and I know I should have committed to being productive, but I couldn’t help myself. Take this for what you will. I just love him very much.
The marriage had been arranged so early, and spoken of so often, that sometimes it felt less as though a wedding had happened and more as though a contract had simply risen one day and put on silk and gold.
Your family and House Targaryen had been tied to one another for years through old money, older obligations, and the kind of corporate alliances powerful families still dressed in softer language. By the time Baelor Targaryen began preparing Valarr to succeed him as CEO, the union had already been decided. It was practical. Strategic. Clean. Your family strengthened theirs, theirs elevated yours, and the future of the company looked steadier for it.
Everyone called it a perfect match.
You were beautiful, poised, educated, and from the right family, with the kind of grace that made people lower their voices when you entered a room. Valarr was Baelor’s heir, sharp and self-contained, the future face of Targaryen Consolidated, a man the business press had circled for years like hawks awaiting a crown. Together, you photographed beautifully.
That was the problem with beautiful things. They made people think they understood them.
The photographs caught your wedding in gold and white and crystal light: Valarr in a black tuxedo cut so perfectly it looked severe on any other man and princely on him, your gown falling in clean silk over your body, your veil soft behind you, his hand steady and possessive at your waist as though even then he had already decided where you belonged. They caught the old family chapel, the private reception high above the city, the way he bent to kiss you beneath flashes of light and chandeliers and everyone’s approval, one gloved hand sliding gently to your back as though shielding you even from the cameras. Later, they caught your son seated between you both in tailored little clothes, solemn-eyed before the camera, his dark hair smoothed carefully back.
They captured the shape of happiness.
They did not capture the quiet inside it.
His name was Vaegon.
He was six years old, sweet in a way that made your heart ache, all soft eyes and gentle hands and careful little questions. He was not loud or difficult or wild. He thanked the house staff when they brought him things. He apologized when he bumped into furniture. He pressed little kisses to your cheek for no reason at all except that he wanted to. He liked animals, soft blankets, storybooks, and curling up against you with complete trust, as though the whole world could not touch him while he was there.
You loved him with a ferocity that lived in your bones.
You fussed over him. Smoothed his hair. Buttoned his little shirts even when he could do it himself. Straightened the collar of his school coat. Cut his fruit into neat little pieces. Remembered every preference, every fear, every tiny thing that pleased him. You kissed bruises, soothed bad dreams, and packed his lunches yourself because you liked knowing that some small part of your care followed him out into the world.
Vaegon was the truest thing in your life.
The penthouse atop Targaryen Tower was all sleek glass, marble, soft lighting, curated art, and a view that made guests fall quiet when they first entered. It was elegant to the point of sterility, the kind of place that might appear in magazines under titles like How the Next Generation of Power Lives.
It only ever felt real when Vaegon left something out of place.
A toy dragon on the sitting room rug. A little cardigan draped over the back of a dining chair. Colored pencils left by the window where the light was best.
Valarr tolerated the mess.
This, in its own restrained language, was tenderness.
He was not cruel. Cruel would have been easier. Cruel men were simpler to hate, simpler to understand. Valarr was attentive in all the wrong ways and absent in all the ones that mattered most. He noticed everything. He missed you anyway.
He made sure your driver knew your exact weekly schedule. He had your preferred tea sent in when the brand you liked became difficult to find. He replaced Vaegon’s favorite books the moment one tore or went missing. He remembered anniversaries, doctor’s appointments, and the name of the florist your mother preferred. When you were sick, medicine appeared before you asked. When something in the house broke, it was fixed by morning. When Vaegon needed anything, it was already handled.
And when it came to you, he placed you above everything in the quiet, maddening architecture of his life — above the board, above appearances, above himself — yet he did it so wordlessly, so inefficiently, that it often felt less like devotion than management.
He noticed more than he ever said, remembered more than he let on, and took care of you in every way he knew how.
But he loved like a man who had been taught affection was safest when disguised as competence.
And because he loved you so badly — so deeply, so helplessly, so carefully — you often mistook it for the absence of love altogether.
That was the tragedy of it.
At dinner, he sat at the head of the table in dark work clothes, usually a charcoal shirt with the sleeves folded once over his forearms, the lines of the day still clinging to him. Vaegon sat to his right, small and neat in his school uniform, trying so hard to behave like a little gentleman. You sat to Valarr’s left in one of your softer house dresses, and from a distance the three of you must have looked impossibly composed. One elegant family above the city. The future of the dynasty already secured.
Vaegon tried, sometimes, to fill the silences.
“Mama made my lunch herself today,” he said one evening, with unmistakable pride.
Valarr looked up from the report he should not still have been reading. “Did she?”
Vaegon nodded brightly. “She cut the strawberries the way I like.”
You smiled despite yourself. “They taste the same whole.”
“No,” Vaegon said gravely. “They taste better when you do it.”
Something shifted in Valarr’s face then. Not much. Just enough for you to see it.
He loved moments like that.
Loved you in them, perhaps most of all — you with your softness, your patience, your impossible instinct for making care seem effortless.
But where another man might have smiled, might have reached across the table to take your hand, might have said something warm enough to settle in your chest and stay there all evening, Valarr only lowered his eyes again and said, after a moment, “Then your mother is spoiling you.”
Vaegon beamed. “Yes.”
You laughed softly.
Valarr’s mouth almost moved.
Almost.
That was how it always was. Almost.
You had tried, in the beginning, to meet him halfway.
You learned the names of the investors he disliked and the branch relatives he distrusted. You mastered the social rules of their world quickly enough that even Baelor’s hard-eyed wife had little to correct. You hosted beautifully, dressed perfectly, and moved through charity galas, shareholder dinners, and political fundraisers at Valarr’s side with the ease expected of you. In fitted gowns and diamonds chosen by family stylists, with Valarr’s hand resting firm at the small of your back, his thumb sometimes moving once in a gesture so slight no one else would notice, you became what such a wife was meant to become: graceful, useful, calm, impossible to fault.
And privately, you tried to love him too.
Not because you had no pride, but because he was your husband, and because there were quiet things about him that reached you in spite of yourself. The way he went still when he was deeply tired. The way he softened, almost imperceptibly, when Vaegon leaned against his arm. The way he watched you when he thought you did not notice. The way his hand at your back in public was always steady, protective, never careless. The way he reached for your hand in elevators or private corridors without ever seeming to realize he was doing it, only to let go once the doors opened and the world saw him again.
The internet loved those fragments.
A blurry video from a charity gala had once made the rounds for days because some account swore a lip reader had caught Valarr leaning close with his hand firm at your waist and murmuring, If I have to wear this tie another hour, it may actually kill me, in a tone so dry it had made you laugh and reach up to fix it for him. In the clip, your fingers smoothed the silk at his throat while he looked down at you with that rare, unguarded softness people online were always desperate to catch. The comments had been unbearable. People insisting he was in love with you. People replaying the few seconds over and over as though devotion could be proven in pixels.
There had been other moments too. Photographs of you at lunch with his parents, the four of you leaving some old restaurant uptown while Vaegon ran half a step ahead with a pastry in his hand, Baelor pretending sternness while his wife dabbed icing from his cheek. A grainy Sunday shot of the three of you at a winter market, your gloves linked with Vaegon’s little ones while Valarr carried far too many bags and looked faintly offended by the existence of handcrafted ornaments. Another set from the botanical gardens, where Vaegon had talked the adults into riding the miniature train meant for children, and the internet had nearly died over the sight of Valarr Targaryen, future terror of the financial world, folded awkwardly into the tiny carriage while you laughed beside him and his mother took photographs like any other grandmother.
People loved those pieces of you. The polished candidness of them. The proof, however small, that this beautiful and frightening family knew how to be warm with one another. Strangers built whole marriages out of five-second clips and long-lens stills. They called you enviable.
Once, after an ordinary afternoon in late autumn, a grainy paparazzi set made the rounds online — you and Vaegon leaving a children’s boutique downtown, your coat belted neatly at the waist, oversized sunglasses on though the sky was overcast, one hand holding a shopping bag and the other wrapped around your son’s little gloved hand. Vaegon, serious as a tiny prince in his wool coat and polished boots, looked up at you while you bent your head to listen to whatever solemn thing he was saying.
The caption on one gossip account had read: to be pretty, rich, and married to Valarr Targaryen while shopping for your beautiful little boy… some women really do live in fairytales.
Another post called you the internet’s favourite rich mother.
Someone zoomed in on the ring on your finger and wrote a thread about old dynastic jewelry. Someone else made a montage of photographs of the three of you, set to melancholy music, and called your family modern royalty, done right. There were comments from women who envied you, from men who wanted you, and from strangers who insisted they could tell from a single still frame that Valarr was obsessed with you. There were edits of him stepping out of black cars in dark coats, edits of you at galas in silk and diamonds, edits of Vaegon tucked between you both in little formalwear, all of it stitched together into the same glossy lie.
You had stared at one of those posts too long one evening while the apartment was quiet around you.
It had nearly made you laugh.
Because yes, you looked beautiful. Yes, your son was adored. Yes, your husband’s hand always found the small of your back before a camera could catch you at an awkward angle. Yes, from the outside it looked like a fairy tale.
Only you knew how lonely it was to be so beautifully kept.
You began to love him in the spaces where he failed to speak.
Which might have been romantic, perhaps, had it not also been so lonely.
Sometimes, late at night, he would come to your room after long hours in meetings with Baelor and the board, his tie loosened, his hair slightly disturbed, weariness hidden beneath that same elegant control. He would stand in the doorway for a moment as though bracing himself, then cross to you and touch you with a care so restrained it hurt.
He was never thoughtless with you.
Never rough. Never entitled. Never cold once his hands were on you.
That was almost worse.
Because it meant you knew there was feeling in him. Great feeling, perhaps. Enough to make his restraint tremble at the edges. Enough to make his breath catch when you touched him back. Enough to make him kiss you like a man trying not to show how badly he needed it — one hand at your waist, the other cupping your jaw, his mouth careful at first, lingering and warm, and then not careful at all, as though every quiet hunger in him lived there. Enough to make him hold you afterward with his face buried in your hair, one arm around your middle, his fingers spread at your hip as if anchoring himself there, as if he wanted to say something and never could.
And by morning it was gone again, tucked away behind polished silence and unreadable eyes, leaving you to wonder whether you had imagined all of it.
It began to feel less like marriage and more like loving a locked room.
And still you doted on Vaegon.
He became the place where all your untouched tenderness went. If Valarr made you feel kept at arm’s length, Vaegon flung himself at you with total certainty. You brushed his hair back from his forehead while he read. You packed little notes in his lunch. You let him crawl into your bed after bad dreams. You sat on the edge of the tub and washed shampoo from his hair while he told you solemn little stories about his day.
“Did you miss me?” he asked one afternoon after school, still in his uniform, climbing into your lap though he was getting a little too big for it.
“Always,” you said, kissing his temple.
He considered this. “Even when I am only gone a little bit?”
“Especially then.”
He smiled and tucked himself closer, satisfied.
Valarr stood in the doorway and saw it.
He said nothing.
But the look in his eyes lingered with you all evening — something pained, yearning, almost hungry. Not for the child, never that. For the softness. For the easy certainty with which Vaegon was loved and knew himself loved. For something in you he did not seem to know how to reach without breaking it. For the kind of tenderness he wanted from you and for you, and did not know how to ask for in words.
One Saturday morning, you were in the kitchen packing Vaegon’s lunch for a school picnic because he refused to eat “sad sandwiches” prepared by anyone else. You cut fruit, tucked in little sweets, folded napkins, and added the small chocolate wafer biscuits he loved most.
By the time you came downstairs dressed and ready, handbag over your shoulder and coat belted neatly at the waist, Valarr was already at the elevator with Vaegon in his little navy coat.
“You’re leaving now?” you asked.
Valarr checked his watch. “We should have gone three minutes ago.”
“I know. I just had to finish his lunch.”
Vaegon brightened when he saw you. “Mama, did you pack the little biscuits?”
“I did.”
Valarr took the lunch bag from your hand. “I’m taking him.”
You blinked. “I’m coming.”
His gaze rested on you. Calm. Controlled. Impossible.
“You were tired yesterday.”
It took you a second to understand. “That doesn’t mean I’m too tired to go to his school picnic.”
Vaegon looked between you both, his small face beginning to tighten with uncertainty.
Valarr’s voice stayed even. “It’s crowded. Loud. Half the parents there will want to talk to you. Stay home.”
Stay home.
As though he were sparing you something.
As though you were a delicate thing to be managed for your own good.
You smiled for Vaegon because mothers did that even when something inside them ached. “I wanted to go, sweetheart.”
Vaegon’s expression fell at once. “Can’t Mama come with us?”
Valarr was quiet for one beat too long. “Not today.”
It was not harsh, and perhaps that made it worse.
Vaegon stepped forward and wrapped his little arms around your waist before the elevator arrived, pressing his cheek against you. “I’ll bring you something back.”
Your throat tightened. You bent to kiss the top of his head. “You do that.”
When the doors closed behind them, the silence in the foyer felt enormous.
They came back three hours later, flushed with sun and schoolyard excitement. Vaegon ran to you at once, as he always did, clutching a paper craft in one hand.
“Mama! Papa beat all the dads at soccer.”
“Did he?”
Vaegon nodded with great seriousness. “It was very dramatic.”
Behind him, Valarr held out a small white box tied with ribbon.
You looked at it, then at him.
“I stopped on the way back,” he said. “I thought you might like them.”
You opened the box.
Inside were delicate pistachio-rose macarons from a famous patisserie downtown.
You hated pistachio.
He knew, in theory, that you did not particularly care for nut-based desserts, but somewhere amid the thousand details he carried about your life, he had remembered wrongly. Or half-remembered. Or perhaps he had only recalled that once, years ago, you had admired the shop window and failed to notice you had been looking at the cakes, not the macarons.
You stared one second too long.
Valarr saw it instantly.
Of course he did.
Vaegon peered into the box and said in a hushed voice, “Oh no.”
You let out the tiniest breath that might have been a laugh if it had not hurt. “I don’t like pistachio.”
Valarr went still.
Not angry. Not offended. Just still in that awful way he had when something struck deeper than he let show.
Vaegon looked stricken on both your behalves, as if he alone had witnessed a small domestic tragedy. He glanced from the box to your face, then back to his father with dawning alarm.
“But Mama doesn’t like those,” he said softly, in the tone of a child offering a correction with mercy.
Valarr’s gaze shifted to him. “No?”
“No,” Vaegon said, scandalized by the mistake. “Mama likes lemon things. Everybody knows that.”
“I know,” Valarr said, and the worst part was that he sounded like he hated himself for getting it wrong.
That night, the macarons remained untouched in their box.
The days did not collapse in some dramatic fashion. That would almost have been a relief. Instead, things eroded. Quietly. Tastefully. The sort of marital sadness that looked elegant from the outside and suffocating from within.
You still did everything expected of you. You still stood beside him at events. You still remembered every detail of Vaegon’s life. You still made the apartment warmer than it deserved to be. But some bright part of you began to withdraw.
You stopped texting Valarr in the middle of the day.
You stopped waiting up in the living room when he worked late.
You stopped trying to fill every silence at dinner.
Vaegon noticed first, because children always did.
He would come to you after school and hesitate, as though checking whether the old rituals still held. Would you kiss his forehead? Would you open your arms before he asked? Would you fuss over whether he had eaten enough?
You always did.
Always, always for him.
But even then, the sadness in the house had changed shape. It no longer belonged only to you.
One afternoon the school called.
There had been a fight.
You arrived first, heart in your throat, only to find Vaegon sitting outside the principal’s office with red-rimmed eyes and his little hands clenched in his lap. He looked so small in the chair that something in you twisted sharply at once.
You knelt in front of him. “Baby.”
He looked at you and burst into tears.
You gathered him immediately, stroking the back of his head, kissing his damp cheek, murmuring soft nonsense meant more to soothe than to mean anything. “I’m here, I’m here, sweetheart, it’s all right.”
Vaegon clung to you with shaking little hands. “I’m sorry.”
“You do not need to be sorry before I even know what happened.”
But he only cried harder, which frightened you more.
Valarr arrived twenty minutes later straight from the office, still in his suit, carrying that severe polished authority he wore like another skin. Staff moved differently when he entered rooms. Even school administrators seemed to feel it.
The principal invited all of you inside with the stiff, strained smile of someone who would have preferred to be anywhere else.
Valarr’s gaze went first to Vaegon. Always first. “What happened?”
Vaegon wiped his face with his sleeve and looked down.
The principal cleared her throat. “There was an altercation on the playground. Another student made some remarks, and Vaegon reacted physically.”
Valarr’s voice remained level. “What remarks?”
The principal hesitated.
You already knew you were going to hate the answer.
Vaegon’s mouth trembled. “He said Papa has a girl at work.”
The room went completely still.
Your stomach dropped so sharply it almost felt physical.
Vaegon’s face crumpled again. “He said everybody knows rich men do that, and that Mama probably cries when I’m at school, and I said to stop and he wouldn’t stop, and then he said Papa doesn’t really love Mama because if he did he wouldn’t—”
His voice broke.
You were not shocked by the rumor, not because you believed it, but because some sick, broken part of you knew at once why other people would.
The principal looked mortified. More than mortified, perhaps. This was not merely any family sitting in her office. The Targaryens had funded the new arts wing, the scholarship endowment, and half the restoration of the old chapel on campus. Their children had attended the school for generations. Their name was etched into buildings, printed in gala programs, spoken with careful gratitude at every fundraiser. Vaegon was not simply a student here. He was legacy, dynasty, expectation.
“We are handling the other child appropriately—” she began.
“Leave us,” Valarr said.
There was nothing raised in his tone. Nothing dramatic.
It was somehow more absolute because of that.
The principal went pale and stood at once, all apology and professional stiffness, as though she understood too late that this had moved beyond schoolyard discipline and into something far more intimate and dangerous.
The door closed.
Vaegon sat there breathing in little shaking gasps, humiliated by crying and too young to hide it properly. You moved toward him, but Valarr reached him first and crouched in front of his son.
He did not touch him immediately.
“Look at me,” he said quietly.
Vaegon obeyed with wet lashes and trembling lips.
“You do not hit people at school.”
Vaegon swallowed hard. “I know.”
“But.”
That one word hung there.
Valarr’s expression did not change much, but something in him had sharpened into frightening clarity.
“But no one speaks about your mother that way.”
Vaegon’s face gave way entirely then. “He said you were making her sad.”
And that did it.
Whatever controlled distance Valarr usually kept between himself and his feelings cracked clean through.
He gathered Vaegon into his arms without hesitation, holding him firmly against his chest while your son cried in earnest now, all the pent-up confusion and fear pouring out at once.
“I am not cheating on your mother,” Valarr said into his hair, each word low and precise and meant to be believed. “Do you understand me?”
Vaegon nodded against him.
“I have never cheated on your mother.”
Another nod.
Valarr closed his eyes for one brief second, his hand large and steady at the back of Vaegon’s head. When he opened them again, he looked at you over your son’s shoulder.
And in that look was something almost unbearable.
Not indignation.
Not merely anger at the rumor.
Shame.
Because he understood, all at once, that the rumor had only been believable because of the kind of marriage you had all been visibly living inside.
That people could look at your sadness and his reserve and think: of course. Of course that powerful man is making his wife lonely. Of course there must be someone else. Of course she is the beautiful, neglected wife in the tower.
Not because it was true.
Because it looked true.
That night, after Vaegon had fallen asleep curled against you while you stroked his hair until his breathing turned soft and even, you stood alone by the apartment windows and looked out over the city.
Valarr came in behind you.
For once, he did not begin with composure.
“I have never touched another woman,” he said.
You shut your eyes.
“That’s not the point.”
“I know.”
He sounded tired. More than tired. Stripped back.
You turned to face him. He was still in his office clothes, tie loosened, the top button undone, as though he had come apart by increments and not nearly enough. “Do you?”
His face was pale in the low light, all sharp planes and restraint stretched too thin. “Yes.”
“Because if our son can sit in a principal’s office listening to another child tell him his father is cheating on his mother, and it sounds believable enough to hurt him, then something is very wrong.”
Valarr flinched.
Small. Barely visible.
But you saw it.
“I know,” he said again.
Anger rose then, not hot and explosive, but exhausted and aching. “You know what the worst part is? It isn’t even that I believed it. I didn’t. Not really. It’s that I understood why someone else would.”
He said nothing.
So you kept going, because years of sorrow had finally found a crack to rush through.
“You make me feel loved in fragments,” you whispered. “In competence. In arrangements. In things arriving on time. In your hand at my back before cameras. In every careful thing except the one thing I have been starving for.”
His breathing changed.
You stepped closer. “I know you are not faithless. I know you are not careless. That almost makes it worse. Because it means all this distance has happened while you were standing right there, loving me in your own way and watching me hurt, and still saying nothing.”
He looked at you as though each word had landed exactly where it was meant to.
“I was trying not to burden you with myself,” he said at last.
You stared at him. “What?”
His laugh was brief and joyless. “There it is. That look.”
“Valarr, that doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does to me.”
His voice had gone quieter now, roughened at the edges. “My father loves me. I know that he does.” He looked away for a moment, jaw tight, as though even saying that plainly cost him something. “He has never been careless with me. Never indifferent. He gave me everything — education, protection, discipline, a future already built strong enough to step into. He is proud of me. Proud in the way men like him know how to be.”
He paused, then looked back at you.
“But in this family, love rarely arrives by itself.”
You said nothing.
“It comes bound up with expectation. With pressure. With shaping you into what the family requires. With legacy, responsibility, performance. My father did not fail to love me.” His mouth tightened slightly. “He loved me with all the weight of what I was meant to become.”
Your throat tightened.
Valarr’s voice lowered further. “So I learned what it was to provide, to protect, to manage risk, to keep what mattered safe. I learned how to carry people. How to anticipate needs before they became problems. How to make myself useful, reliable, necessary.”
He exhaled once, quietly.
“But wanting someone gently,” he said, and there was something almost pained in the softness of it, “wanting someone in a way that was not also about duty or structure or obligation… that was never something I was taught how to do.”
Your throat tightened.
He looked away for a moment, then back. And there, finally, was the thing itself — not hidden well enough anymore.
“I loved you too early,” he said.
The words landed like a blow.
You did not move.
Valarr’s eyes held yours with painful steadiness. “Before I knew what to do with it. Before I knew how to speak it without ruining it. Before I knew how not to turn it into another obligation laid at your feet.”
Your lips parted, but nothing came out.
He continued, more softly now. “So I tried to make your life easier. More comfortable. More secure. I tried to remove burdens before they touched you. I tried to be careful.” His mouth tightened. “And all the while I was apparently making you feel abandoned in your own marriage.”
You could hardly breathe.
That was the shape of it, then.
Not absence. Not rejection.
A love so repressed and badly expressed it had curdled into loneliness.
You whispered, “Valarr…”
He took one step closer, then stopped, as though even now some part of him needed permission to cross the rest.
“When Vaegon said that boy thought I didn’t love you,” he said, “I realized I have built a life with you that makes that lie look plausible. I would rather be accused of almost anything else.”
You pressed your fingers to your mouth.
His voice lowered further. “I have never loved anyone but you.”
It was not dramatic. That made it worse.
No flourish. No grand seduction. Just the plain truth, laid down at your feet years too late.
You felt tears prick at once.
“You make it feel unrequited,” you said shakily.
Something in his face broke then — not in spectacle, but in pain.
“I know.”
And the fact that he said it like confession, not defense, nearly undid you.
“I loved you,” you whispered, “like a fool. For years. In scraps. In looks. In the way you held Vaegon. In the way you came to me at night and then shut the door by morning. I kept thinking perhaps I had imagined it. Perhaps I was just… making a feast of crumbs.”
His eyes closed for one brief moment, and when they opened again, they were darker than before.
“No,” he said. “Never crumbs. I loved you in full. I simply handed it to you in a language no one should be asked to survive on.”
You cried then.
Not neatly. Not prettily. Years of being lonely beside the man you loved had made the tears too old for elegance.
Valarr crossed the rest of the distance at once and held you.
This time there was nothing measured in it. Nothing polite. He held you like a man whose restraint had finally become more unbearable than the risk of being known. One hand spread across your back, the other cradling the base of your skull, keeping you close with an urgency he no longer tried to hide. When he kissed your temple it was trembling and reverent and wrecked all at once, and when he drew you tighter it felt less like possession than desperation — as if he had spent years holding himself apart and could not bear another inch of it now.
You pressed your face into his chest and wept.
“I am sorry,” he said into your hair, and the rawness in his voice shocked you. “I am so sorry. You were never unloved. Only badly loved by a man too afraid of the size of it.”
You clutched his shirt harder.
He went on, quieter now, as though saying truths pulled from somewhere he had buried them deep. “Do you think I don’t see the way you love Vaegon? The way you soften for him? The way he runs to you first because you are warmth itself?” His breath shook once. “I have watched you for years and loved you for making this house human. For giving our son gentleness. For being everything I never knew how to ask for.”
You lifted your face enough to look at him.
“You really are terrible at showing it.”
To your surprise, a broken sort of smile touched his mouth. “Yes.”
You let out a watery laugh.
His thumb brushed beneath your eye. “But I will learn.”
That mattered.
Not perfection. Not some instant transformation into a different man. Just that. That he knew now. That he meant to try.
In the morning, Vaegon came to breakfast quieter than usual, watching both of you with careful little eyes, as though he did not trust peace unless he could see it held together in front of him.
You opened your arms at once, and he climbed into your lap as naturally as breathing. You kissed his cheek, smoothed his hair back from his forehead, and held him close while he leaned into you with the solemn, sleepy trust only children possessed.
Valarr stood at the far side of the kitchen for a moment, coffee untouched beside him, watching.
He had already dressed for the office. Dark suit. Crisp shirt. Silver watch at his wrist. Every line of him composed as ever — except for his eyes, which were fixed not on the table, not on the morning brief glowing on his phone, but on you and Vaegon.
Then, without a word, he crossed the room.
Vaegon looked up first.
Valarr crouched beside your chair, bringing himself level with your son. “Vaegon.”
Your son blinked. “Yes, Papa?”
“What that boy said yesterday was a lie.”
Vaegon studied his father’s face with painful seriousness, still small enough to hope adults could mend the world simply by saying the correct thing in the correct tone.
Valarr did not look away.
“I have never betrayed your mother,” he said. “I never will. There has never been anyone else. There will never be anyone else.”
Vaegon searched him for a long moment. “Promise?”
Valarr answered at once. “On everything I am.”
Vaegon seemed to accept that, but only partly. His little hand remained curled in the fabric of your sleeve.
And Valarr, who had once built whole walls out of silence, looked at him and did something he should perhaps have done years ago.
He kept speaking.
“I have made mistakes,” he said quietly. “Real ones. I have made your mother feel lonely when she should never have felt lonely a day in her life. I have loved her badly when I should have loved her openly. That is my fault. Not hers.”
You went completely still.
Vaegon frowned in the earnest way he did when trying to understand grown-up sorrow. “Did you forget to say nice things again?”
A sound escaped you — half laugh, half something much more fragile.
Valarr’s mouth changed, the ghost of pain moving through it. “Yes,” he said. “Among other things.”
Vaegon looked between you both, as if judging whether this answer was satisfactory, then turned in your lap and cupped your face in his little hands.
“Mama,” he said with deep concern, “Papa is silly.”
This time your laugh broke properly, wet at the edges.
“Yes,” you whispered. “He is.”
Valarr exhaled, but he did not retreat behind that small moment of ease. He rose, turned to you, and for one suspended second it felt as though the whole room had narrowed to the space between his body and yours.
Then, in full view of the morning light and your son and the silent staff moving somewhere far beyond the kitchen doors, he reached for you.
Not the polished hand at the small of your back that cameras knew. Not the discreet touch meant to guide, to manage, to maintain appearances.
This was different.
His fingers slid around yours and held.
Firmly. Deliberately. No audience in mind but the two people who mattered.
You looked up at him.
Valarr’s expression was unreadable to anyone who did not know him. But you knew him now. Or perhaps, at last, he was letting himself be known.
“I meant what I said last night,” he said.
Your throat tightened.
Vaegon had gone very still between you both, sensing something important and sacred in the air even if he could not name it.
Valarr did not look away from you. “I have spent years placing you above everything in my life,” he said, his voice low and even and far too honest to bear. “Above the company. Above the board. Above my father’s expectations. Above my own comfort. Above my own pride. But I did it like a coward.” His grip on your hand tightened. “I made you carry the consequences of my silence and called it care.”
You could not speak.
He took one step closer.
“I will not do that to you again.”
Something in your face must have changed, because his own softened in answer — not into ease, exactly, but into a kind of grief-struck tenderness so naked it almost hurt to look at.
“You are my wife,” he said. “You are the mother of my son. You are the best thing in my life, and the only person I have ever loved in a way that frightened me.” His jaw tightened once before he went on. “I am done behaving as though that love is something shameful, or dangerous, or better left unsaid.”
The room felt unbearably quiet.
Vaegon whispered, almost reverently, “Oh.”
Your eyes burned.
Valarr looked at you as though there were no one else in the world.
“I know apologies are cheap if the life beneath them does not change,” he said. “So watch me change it.”
And because he was still Valarr — still a man who did not mistake emotion for disorder, still a man built of discipline, timing, and the cold steadiness that had made half the board fear him and the other half depend on him — he did not theatrically cast aside the day.
He reached for his phone instead.
You watched him, not yet understanding.
Valarr opened his calendar, scanned the morning, and sent off three messages with the kind of terrifying efficiency that made entire departments move faster. One to his chief of staff. One to legal. One directly to the board secretary.
He lifted the phone to his ear when it rang back almost immediately.
“Push the investor call to eleven-thirty,” he said precisely. “Move the strategy review to this afternoon. I’ll join the Dorne numbers meeting remotely from the car if necessary. Anything requiring signature authority comes to me directly before noon.”
A pause.
“No,” he said, and something in his tone made it clear the discussion was already over. “Nothing is being neglected. It is being reordered.”
Another pause.
Then, more coolly, “If the board has a concern, they may raise it with me when I arrive.”
He ended the call.
For a moment the kitchen remained very still.
You stared at him. “You didn’t cancel anything.”
“No.”
It was not defensive. Merely true.
Valarr slipped the phone onto the table and looked at you with a steadiness that felt more intimate than if he had touched you. “I am not going to insult you by pretending my responsibilities do not exist. They do. They always will.”
Your throat tightened.
“But neither will I keep using them,” he said, “as an excuse for letting you live on whatever remains of me when the day is done.”
That landed harder than if he had shouted.
He took one step closer.
“For years I told myself I was doing right by you because everything material was handled. The home. The schedule. The staff. The schools. The security. The comfort. I made sure you never had to ask for anything.” His jaw tightened. “And all the while I was behaving as though love could be delegated into proof.”
Your breath caught.
“I can do my job,” he said. “I can run a company. I can manage a board that would happily eat weaker men alive. And I can still come home before my son is asleep. I can still stand beside my wife at dinner without making her feel alone. I can still answer a message from you before midnight like you are not an interruption to the machinery of my life.” His gaze did not leave yours. “I should have been doing all of that already.”
Something in your face must have changed, because his expression softened, not into weakness, but into something far more dangerous in a man like him: honesty.
“You were never asking me to be less capable,” he said quietly. “You were asking me to be present.”
“Yes,” you whispered.
He nodded once, like a man receiving a truth he should have understood years ago. “Then that is what will change.”
Vaegon, who had been listening with solemn concentration from your lap, blinked up at his father. “Are you still going to work?”
Valarr looked at him.
“Yes,” he said.
Vaegon frowned. “Then how are you fixing it?”
And there it was — the brutal simplicity only children possessed.
Valarr crouched in front of him. “By not making your mother compete with work for whatever is left of me,” he said. “By acting like she matters before the day is over, not after.”
Vaegon seemed to think this through with great seriousness.
“Oh,” he said.
Then, after a moment: “So… pancakes first?”
To your surprise, Valarr’s mouth shifted — not quite a smile, but something warmer and more human than usual.
“Yes,” he said. “Pancakes first.”
Vaegon brightened instantly.
Valarr rose and turned back to you. “I have forty minutes before I need to leave for the office.”
You looked at him, uncertain.
He stepped closer.
“In forty minutes,” he said, “I can have breakfast with my family. I can take my son downstairs myself. I can sit beside my wife and speak to her like she is not some beautiful fixture waiting for me to remember she has a heart.” His voice lowered. “And when I leave, you will know I am coming back to you, not merely to this apartment.”
Your eyes burned.
That seemed to undo something in him.
His hand came up to your face, thumb brushing lightly beneath your cheekbone, the gesture so careful it hurt more than roughness ever could have.
“I am not choosing the board over you,” he said. “I am choosing to stop behaving as though loving you properly would cost me my competence.”
You let out a shaky breath.
“And it won’t,” he said. “It will cost me pride. Habit. Distance. Silence.” A pause. “Good.”
That was better. Much better.
Because it still sounded like him.
Not a man becoming lesser for love.
A man finally understanding that love asked him to be braver, not smaller.
Something unsteady and damp and disbelieving moved through your face then, enough that his mouth softened at the edges.
“How noble,” you said, your voice fragile with the remains of tears. “A great sacrifice. Valarr Targaryen, at last laid low by the terrible burden of adoring his wife properly.”
A quiet, surprised huff of laughter left him.
It changed him more than the confession had, in some ways. Took ten years off his face. Made him look, for one suspended second, not like the heir to an empire or the future terror of a boardroom, but simply like your husband — the man beneath all that ironed self-command.
“Yes,” he murmured gravely, playing along with just enough solemnity to make it worse. “A tragic fate. Behold me. A man brought to ruin. Entirely beholden to his wife.”
You gave a wet laugh and slapped him lightly on the chest.
“Oh, shut up.”
His hand slipped from your cheek to your waist at once, and before you could say anything else he pulled you into him properly, not hard enough to startle, just firmly enough that the movement stole the rest of your breath. He dipped his head, smiling now against your skin in that rare, dangerous way of his, and nosed softly at your cheek, once, then again, until another unwilling laugh escaped you.
“There,” he murmured near your face. “That’s better.”
“Valarr—”
But you were laughing now, and he seemed almost helpless before the sound of it.
He kissed the corner of your mouth first, then your cheek, then lingered there as if reacquainting himself with the shape of your happiness. One of his hands stayed spread warm at your waist while the other moved behind you, drawing you closer still, until there was no space left for pride or distance or any of the old, careful silences.
When he bent his head to your neck, it was not theatrical, not some polished seduction. It was quiet and terribly fond, his mouth brushing the place just beneath your ear in a kiss so soft it made you shiver. Then another at the curve of your jaw. Then one more against your cheek when you turned back toward him with that half-breathless, half-embarrassed look he knew so well.
“You are laughing at me,” he said.
“You are being ridiculous.”
“I am being sincere.”
“You are being ridiculous and sincere.”
At that, his mouth curved properly.
A real smile this time. Small, but devastating.
When he bent to kiss you, it was still intimate, still aching, but now it carried that same steadiness too. One hand warm at your jaw, the other braced lightly at your waist, his mouth lingering as though he was learning the shape of honesty in real time. Not frantic. Not careless. Just devastatingly deliberate.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested briefly against yours.
“I will still go to work,” he murmured.
“I know.”
“But I will not leave you starving in the doorway of this marriage and call that sacrifice again.”
Part 1: You Must Be His Nursemaid | Part 2: A Prince and A Dragon | Part 3: Where Princes, Ladies, Lords, and Knights Gathered in Candlelight | Part 4: Silk Morning, Bloodied Field | Part 5: Where the Dragon Set Its Gaze and Bared Its Teeth
Pairing: Prince Valarr Targaryen x Reader ( referred to as 'You')
Summary:
It was meant to be a harmless puppet show.
Before the night is through, hands are broken, secrets are exposed, and princes are one breath from killing each other.
A/N: Well. Um. So. Here comes the fucking showdown. Aerion goes fully unhinged, Valarr decides he is absolutely not tolerating anyone laying a hand on his family, and everything goes to hell in spectacular fashion. The action is here, the emotions are high, and apparently, I fell in love with Valarr even harder while writing this… which is frankly embarrassing because I built him like this on purpose. I felt like spoiling y'all with like three stories in one go, for I will be taking a break from Tumblr to study for things that very much need my focus, but I will come back to see the comments cause I love reading people's thoughts and reactions. It's been entertaining. :)
Thank you all so much for the love for this story. I mean that with my whole heart. I’m genuinely so excited for what’s coming next, especially the Trial of Seven ahahaha. And yes, this is still a Baelor fix-it… but I never said the road there would be painless.
Warnings: major cursing, violence, blood and injury, physical assault, fire, emotional distress, frightened child, family in danger, mature themes
Dunk could not blame him. The shouting from the lists still rolled over Ashford like storm thunder trapped too low to the earth, ugly and swollen and not yet spent. Even at a distance, the whole field seemed befouled by what had happened there. Men were still roaring their outrage. Horses snorted and shied, taking fright from the temper of the crowd. Somewhere behind them, a woman’s voice rose sharp as a seabird, only to vanish at once into the greater clamour. The autumn light had done the place no kindness. If anything, it made the blood and wreckage crueller for being so plainly seen.
“Aye,” Dunk said.
They turned their backs on the lists and walked away over trampled grass and the churned black margin of the grounds, where hooves and boots had beaten the earth into a sucking mire. Egg went beside him in taut little silence, his shaved head catching the last thin gold of the declining sun. His hands were balled so tight the knuckles showed pale beneath the dirt. Dunk could not watch pain in another without trying to hammer some use out of it, reached—as earnest men always did—for instruction where comfort would not come.
“That was a terrible sight,” he said after a time, awkward in his own voice. “But a squire must be strong. A mishap may befall me one day, and I’ll need you to keep your wits if it does.”
Egg looked up at him then, and there was nothing childlike in his face. No fright, not now. Only a flat disbelief that seemed too old for so small a boy. “That was no mishap.”
Dunk had no answer to that. None worth giving. The truth of it walked beside them plain as the mud on their boots.
By the time evening began to gather in earnest, daylight had gone soft and brown at the edges, that muddled hour when every cookfire seems warmer than it is and every smell in camp grows thicker. Smoke drifted low between the pavilions. Somewhere a spit was turning, and the scent of roasting meat mingled with horse dung, sour ale, trampled grass, and the sweet stickiness of spilled cider. Lord Baratheon already too deep in his cups to fear either shame or God, was butchering a song about Alice with three fingers while half the camp cheered him for it and the other half shouted for filthier verses. Men laughed too loudly. Women rolled their eyes and listened all the same. Ashford was trying, in its coarse and human way, to make itself merry again, though the day’s ugliness had not gone anywhere. It kept pace with Dunk and Egg like a third companion.
“Do you suppose there really was an Alice?” Egg asked suddenly, as they passed between a brazier of chestnuts and a man selling cheap ribbons from a cart.
Dunk glanced down at him. “A crippled girl who shoved her hand up men’s arses?”
Egg considered that with maddening seriousness. “I think there probably was.”
That drew a snort out of Dunk, though little mirth sat in it. “Aye. There’s likely been a girl for every ugly song ever sung.”
“Do you think her name was truly Alice?”
Dunk took a moment with that. Lantern-light trembled over the passing faces around them—squires, hedge knights, serving girls, camp followers, a juggler with painted cheeks and eyes too tired for his bells. “No,” he said at last. “I think Alice is a pretty name, and pretty names fit songs better than true ones.”
Egg walked on a few steps in thought. “That seems sad.”
Dunk looked out over the shifting press of people and thought of all the women the world had chewed and used and only thought worth remembering after it had taken what it liked from them. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s the song that matters in the end.”
Egg frowned faintly. “I think the name ought to matter too.”
“You may be right.”
A little farther on the boy said, with all the grave certainty of a child finding something bright in a dark heap, “Perhaps it is honour.”
“Honour?” Dunk repeated.
“A misfortuned girl making the best of what she had,” Egg said. “Giving more than what was asked.”
Dunk looked at him sidelong and wondered, not for the first time, what strange sort of child could find a hard shining thing buried in almost any ruin. “That’s a queer way of seeing it.”
Egg shrugged. “Not wrong, though.”
Then came the fortune teller.
She sat hunched beneath a patched awning with a cloth spread out before her, all bones and charms and scraps of ribbon faded by weather. Her eyes were white with cloud and age, her fingers thin as roots. Dunk let her take his hand for sport, grinning like a fool while she muttered over his palm and promised him wealth greater than a Lannister’s and triumphs enough to shame all his foes. He laughed at that, because it cost him nothing to laugh.
Egg’s turn was another matter.
The old woman took one look at him and went still. Her blind eyes seemed fixed on his face all the same. When she spoke, her voice came low and cracked, like dry reeds breaking underfoot.
“You shall be king,” she croaked, “and die in a hot fire, and worms shall feed upon your ashes. And all who know you shall rejoice in your dying.”
Egg stared at her. “What?”
Dunk barked a laugh at once, too loud and too quick, and dragged him off before the words could settle properly. “Come on,” he said. “She’s mad as a milk cow in a storm.”
But even as he spoke, the thing clung. Some words had hooks in them.
They had not gone much farther when Raymun Fossoway found them, bright in his apple colours and easier company than most men Ashford had drawn. There was cider in his hand and a half-smile on his mouth, and for a little while that seemed reason enough to stop. Egg, seeing Tanselle’s booth beyond the shifting press of bodies, said he could wait at the puppet show and bring Dunk his shield after.
Dunk agreed.
That left him with Raymun, the cider, and talk, and as such talk often did, it found its way back to Aerion soon enough.
“My squire thinks Aerion meant to kill the horse,” Dunk said, turning the cup in his hand. “Hard to accept that a knight might be so dishonourable. Let alone a prince.”
“Why is that hard?” Raymun asked.
Dunk faltered. “I—well—”
Raymun snorted into his drink. “They’re incestuous aliens, Duncan. Blood-magickers and tyrants who burned our lands, dragged us into their wars, and think pale hair makes them nearer gods than men. Every brat they’ve saddled us with seems madder than the last. The only honorable thing a Targaryen can do for this realm is finish on his wife’s tits. So aye. I think he meant to kill the fucking horse.”
He belched softly, then grimaced, as if even he knew he had run a little too hot. “Got a bit carried away there.”
Dunk laughed despite himself, more from the shock of it than the wit.
“I heard that part about the tits from Steffon,” Raymun added after a moment, which made the laugh come easier.
Still, he was not done. He took another swallow and looked off toward the keep, where the last of the light was catching on pale stone and the dark line of banners above the walls. “Though I’ll say this,” he muttered, “the only good thing that calamity of a family seems to have managed lately was Prince Valarr wedding Lady Baratheon, Lyonel’s niece. She’s tempered them some. Brought them pride and joy again with that son of theirs—and that fire-breathing beast besides. I scarce believe it still, that dragons are back. Stranger still to think it came of true love, if half the songs are to be trusted. Valarr’s truly gone on the lady, and on the boy too. Ain’t nothing in him but it. Nothing in this world’s getting in the way of that.”
Dunk said nothing. He had seen enough already to think Raymun might not be wrong. He remembered the prince’s face in the yard, the ease in it when he looked upon his wife and child, the plain certainty of a man who knew where his heart had gone and did not begrudge it the journey.
Even so, Raymun’s rant stayed with him. There was truth in it. Too much truth, perhaps. Or not enough. Dunk did not know. He only knew that what he had seen at the lists had looked nothing like honour.
Not long after, Egg came running.
He came so fast he was half stumbling, half flying, his breath torn short and his face gone white beneath the dirt and evening light. There was something in his eyes that made Dunk rise before the boy had even reached him.
“Ser,” Egg gasped. “Ser Duncan, you have to come. Aerion’s hurting her.”
Dunk was on his feet before the words were fully out. The cider sloshed forgotten in his hand, then spilled altogether as he dropped the cup outright.
Vaelor did not ask to see the puppets until after the screaming had stopped at the lists.
That made it worse.
You had taken him back into the cooler quiet of the keep for a little while, into a lesser chamber where the shutters had been drawn half-closed against the sinking light and the rushes underfoot still held the faint bruised scent of lavender. Servants came and went softly, bringing watered wine for you and sweet milk for him, and none of them seemed to know where to rest their eyes. Their hands were careful. Their voices were low. It was the sort of hush people made when something ugly had happened in public, and no one yet knew what shape the official lie would take.
Valarr passed through that hush like a man being pulled apart by obligations. He was summoned once by Lord Ashford, once by a maester come from Ser Humfrey Hardyng’s pavilion, once by men already muttering of compensation, apology, insult, affront, recompense. There was always another lord to steady, another whisper to outrun, another crack to plaster over before the whole day split wider. Each time he came, he bent to kiss Vaelor’s brow. Each time he left, his hand touched your shoulder as though making certain you were still there beneath his palm. Each time he crossed the threshold again, he wore the same look: fury leashed so hard it had gone cold.
Baelor came as well, and that pained you more than if he had stayed away.
He was not a man given to empty comfort. He stood a moment in the doorway before entering, as though he feared even his presence might press too heavily upon the room, then crossed to Vaelor and laid one hand gently atop the child’s hair. His face, usually grave and measured, had been hollowed by the day. Not merely anger. Not merely shame. Something older and sadder than either. He asked softly whether the boy wanted anything, whether he hurt anywhere, and whether he wished for Vharyx to be brought nearer the window so he might be seen. Vaelor only leaned closer into your side and said no.
Baelor looked then to you, and in that glance there was apology, helplessness, and the weary knowledge that princes could mend laws more easily than they could mend what children had seen.
Vaelor sat small beside you, all the brightness gone out of him.
“Why did he do that?” he asked once.
You smoothed his hair back from his brow. “I do not know.”
“Was it allowed?”
“No.”
“Will Father do that?”
“Never.”
He was quiet after that for so long you thought perhaps the questions had run dry at last. You heard only the soft crackle of the brazier, the muted tread of servants in the corridor beyond, the faint cry of gulls wheeling somewhere outside Ashford’s walls.
Then, in a very small voice, he asked, “Are we still going to see the puppets?”
The choice came there, and sharp as a blade.
Keep him inside with the horror, and let the day end as blood and screaming and confusion.
Or keep your promise and try, against reason, to return to him one soft bright thing before sleep.
You chose the softer road because you loved him.
Valarr hesitated when you told him. You saw it plainly. He had not liked the lists. He liked even less, perhaps, how much had already cracked loose beneath the silk and painted joy of the day. Too much had gone wrong too quickly, and he was no fool. He understood better than most how swiftly embarrassment could rot into danger.
“It is a puppet show,” he said at last, though he sounded like a man trying to convince himself. “He will have guards. Roland with you. Royce as well.”
Then, lower, with that same dangerous tightness still held under the skin, “I do not like Aerion being near him tonight. I do not like him being near either of you. If anything feels wrong, you come back at once. I do not care if the whole fucking crowd stares. You come back.”
He knelt then and gathered Vaelor close. Their son slumped into his lap at once, worn thin enough now that even grief had softened into exhaustion. Valarr held him with one arm and ran his hand over the boy’s back in slow, steady strokes while Vharyx, curled restlessly near the hearth, gave a low chirrup and crept nearer, nosing at Vaelor’s slipper as if he too understood something had gone wrong and could not name it.
Baelor had his own reservations. That was plain enough as well. He had spoken with Aerion already—quietly, sternly, with that grave patience he reserved for those he still hoped might one day prove worth the effort—but Valarr scarcely believed his cousin had taken a word of it to heart. Aerion could wear remorse when it suited him. He could look chastened, sound sweet, lower his eyes at the proper moment. Yet the thing itself never seemed to sink very deep. Had the matter touched only his pride, only the family’s reputation, only some nameless commonborn, only a knight scarcely worth the mud on his boots, he would have shrugged it off by morning. It was only because Vaelor had been frightened, because Valarr had seen it, because Baelor had seen it, that he made any show of remorse at all.
Still, the outing had been promised before the lists, and Vaelor had been expecting it. Royce was already set to go, and Roland would remain behind. Aerion had been included too, invited before the day’s ugliness at the tourney had fully revealed itself. Targaryen guards would keep to the edges. Baelor and Valarr stayed at the keep, where too much still demanded tending: Ser Humfrey’s injury, Lord Ashford’s affront, and the delicate question of what must be said aloud and what must be quietly swallowed.
So the outing was permitted.
Vaelor looked so tired by then that even his quiet triumph at being allowed it seemed borrowed from another child.
At dusk you wrapped a cloak about your shoulders and led your son out beneath the first lanterns of evening in hopes that stories might mend what steel had broken.
Ashford at dusk was gentler than Ashford at noon.
The crowds near the puppet show were smaller and softer, more children and tradesmen than shouting knights, more warm food and shadow than banners and challenge. Lamps swung golden in the deepening dark. Somewhere a pipe was playing, sweet and thin. Dogs nosed at crusts beneath benches. Smoke drifted lazily from cookfires and blurred the edges of the light so that everything seemed part fair, part dream.
Royce walked beside you, doing with all his nature what men like him always did in the presence of frightened children: trying to bully darkness backward with levity.
“See?” he said lightly to Vaelor. “No horses here to go murdering each other. Only puppets. Much better company.”
Vaelor gave him a weary but very solemn look. “Puppets can still fight.”
“Gods preserve us,” Royce muttered. “He’s right.”
Ser Roland kept a little behind, his white cloak pale as a wandering spirit in the lantern-glow, while the Targaryen guards lingered far enough back not to trouble the crowd and near enough to mark any fool before the fool came too close. Still, he felt the pressure of it keenly. Prince Baelor had spoken to him. Prince Valarr had too. Roland had seen battle in the black heat of the Blackfyre Rebellion, had heard men die with curses in their throats and blood in their teeth, yet even that had not readied him for a charge such as this. Trouble tonight would not earn him the anger of one lord, nor even one prince, but two—and both stood so high above the station of every man gathered here that only the king himself stood higher still.
And with good cause did Ser Roland keep watch so carefully. Under his eye walked Lady Baratheon, Valarr’s wife and the mother of his children; Baelor’s grandson, the only young dragonrider the realm had seen in some years; Lord Baratheon’s nephew, a boy well-placed to inherit should his uncle leave no heir; and Prince Aerion, son of the king’s fourth son, with all his rank, temper, and ruinous lack of restraint. Gods help him.
Tanselle’s booth had been transformed exactly as promised. By lantern-light the colours glowed richer, stranger. The painted dragon seemed almost to move when the lamps swayed. The little stage looked lovelier for the dark around it, as some things did. Children crowded close on stools and crates and parents’ laps, their faces all amber and anticipation.
Tanselle saw Vaelor and smiled.
“My prince,” she said, as though remembering him had pleased her.
He straightened, despite his weariness, and held his mother's hand. “We came back.”
“So you did.”
“And Vharyx will hear all of it,” he informed her.
“I shall perform accordingly, then.”
That won the ghost of a smile from him, and you felt something inside your chest unclench for the first time since the lists.
For a little while, it worked.
Vaelor sat tucked against your side, half in your lap by the time the play began, drowsy but intent, the warmth of him slight and dear beneath wool and silk. Tanselle’s hands brought the world alive. The fool capered. The knight rode. The dragon hissed and spread its wings to the delight of every child there. Even the smallest motions seemed touched with a kind of magic in the lantern-glow.
Vaelor even smiled.
“There,” he whispered once, pointing. “Look, Mama.”
“I see.”
“Is that dragon bad?”
“In stories,” you murmured, “it depends who is telling them.”
He considered that and watched on.
Then the story turned.
The dragon was threatened. Chased and cornered.
The children around you gasped in the pleased, frightened way children did when danger was only tale and lantern and painted wood. Parents smiled. Someone laughed softly. The knight puppet raised its spear.
But Vaelor went still.
When the knight struck and the dragon fell—when the little painted beast gave its final theatrical thrash and slumped beneath the victor’s point—the children around you shrieked and clapped their hands. To them it was only a story ending as stories often did: beast slain, hero triumphant, danger conquered.
Vaelor did not clap.
He looked up at you with his whole face broken open in confusion and hurt, and then he began to cry.
The tears simply came, helpless and bewildered, as if some part of him could not understand why the world had chosen to make even this cruel. He pressed himself hard into you, as though hiding might undo what he had seen.
“Mama,” he choked. “Mama, the dragon—”
You understood at once why he had begun to cry.
To the crowd it was mummery. Painted wood and strings. A harmless tale.
But to Vaelor, dragons were not symbols. They were Vharyx, curled warm beside the hearth, a bond forged in the deep-rooted magic of Targaryen blood. They were blood and birthright, terror and wonder, the shape of the future the realm had already begun fastening to his narrow shoulders. They were no mere beasts, but beloved companions, fierce and dear. A dragon slain before him was no harmless jest. Not truly. Not now. Not when dragons had only just returned to the world through him.
And yes—some colder, more political part of Valarr understood as well, in that same raw instant, that it was dangerous foolishness to stage a dragon’s death before a Targaryen crowd in a season such as this. The line had been weakened, diminished, mocked in whispers often enough. Then Vaelor’s dragon had hatched, and the realm’s imagination had been remade at once. To show a dragon falling beneath a knight’s spear, before such blood and such eyes, was unwise.
The thing rising in Aerion’s face when he stepped from the edge of the crowd was not grief.
Nor wounded love of kin.
It was pride. Old blood-vanity. The same cruel delight that had shown itself on the lists, only now dressed in the language of dragon-honour. He saw a crying child and found in those tears permission. Worse than that—he found a stage.
You saw at once that he meant to make your son’s grief his weapon.
“Aerion,” Royce said sharply, already moving, “it is a puppet play, nothing more.”
Aerion did not so much as look at him.
The children had gone silent now. Tanselle herself had frozen behind the little stage, one hand still wrapped around the rod that held the fallen dragon. All the lesser sounds of the fair seemed to pull back, as if the very air had felt what manner of man had stepped into it.
Aerion’s voice cut through the confusion bright as a blade. “Do you call this sport? Sedition dressed in rags? The dragon ought never lose.”
Vaelor was still weeping against you. You held him closer, your whole body already bracing against what you saw coming and could not yet stop.
“The child is frightened,” Royce snapped. “Not insulted on your behalf. Have you lost your damned mind?”
That won him only a flash of contempt.
Aerion stepped up onto the little performance space as if it were already conquered. Tanselle recoiled. The crowd—smallfolk and gentleborn alike—had that same stunned, witless stillness people wore just before panic remembered it had legs.
Then Aerion seized her.
Everything after that happened with the sickening speed of nightmare.
Tanselle cried out. Someone shouted for him to stop. One of Aerion’s men kicked the little stage aside. Another caught at the canvas, and lantern-light flared wrong, too bright, as cloth took hungry spark.
“Aerion, enough,” Royce said again, louder now, but there was something in the prince’s face that had already gone beyond reason.
Tanselle screamed when he bent her hand back.
The sound that followed—bone snapping, quick and intimate and hideous—seemed to pass through Vaelor like a spear. He clung to you in full terror now, sobbing openly, his whole small body shaking. Around you the crowd lurched from confusion into horror. Lyonel Baratheon, who had been laughing somewhere moments before, now swore with such force it silenced men near him. Raymun Fossoway stared as if every ugly thought he had ever harboured about dragon-blood had suddenly stood upright before him and smiled.
The little tent was burning now. Children cried. Someone dragged a bench aside. Someone else retched.
And in the middle of it Aerion still held Tanselle as if cruelty itself had become ceremony.
Then Duncan the Tall hit him.
One moment Aerion was upright, splendid and monstrous in the firelight. The next he reeled with blood in his mouth and a loosened tooth, because a hedge knight with more decency than caution had thrown himself into the thing.
You saw him and knew him at once.
Ser Duncan.
The enormous earnest man who had once made your son laugh now stood between a prince and a mutilated puppeteer with murder in his face and no thought at all for what would come of it.
Duncan went for Aerion again, driven by the clean doomed instinct of a good man who has seen too much.
You moved before thought.
Aerion was monstrous, vain, vicious, impossible—but he was still blood, still bound to all the people you loved, and one more blow landed full before the guards reached them might have turned the whole scene from horror into slaughter.
“Mama—”
“Sister—no—”
“My lady—”
Voices broke around you, but you were already there.
You shoved at Aerion to get him back and out of Duncan’s path. Duncan checked himself too late. His momentum struck you hard enough to send you down. You thrust out a hand to catch yourself and twisted as you fell, protecting your belly first, but the ground caught your knees cruelly and something sharp pulled low through your middle all the same.
For one sick instant the whole world narrowed to that pain.
You cradled your stomach at once.
Vaelor broke from you with a cry and ran toward where you had fallen, small and frantic and terrified beyond reason. Royce was on his knees beside you in the next breath, one hand at your shoulder, the other already reaching as though he might haul you upright by sheer will alone.
“Look at me,” he said, too fast, too sharp. “Are you hurt? Where?”
Then someone in the crowd shouted, “By the Gods—she’s bleeding!”
The words seemed to strike Royce harder than any blow. You had one arm curved tight over your belly, the other braced weakly against the ground, and when Royce drew his hand back from your face and looked down at his palm, there was blood on it.
For a heartbeat he only stared.
The color went out of him all at once. Fear, nausea, and disbelief crossed his face nakedly, too fast to hide. His sister was hurt. Under his watch.
You barely registered your uncle Lyonel Baratheon forcing his way through the crush, shoving gawkers aside with broad, furious sweeps of his arm.
“Move,” he barked. “Move, you useless fucks. Give her air. Fetch a maester. Now.”
The crowd lurched backward. Someone ran. Someone else began shouting for water, for cloths, for guards, for room.
Royce looked back at you then, blood still wet across his hand, his voice rougher now, lower, and far more frightened than before. “Stay with me,” he said, one shaking hand hovering for a moment before settling carefully at your shoulder. “Do you hear me? Stay with me.”
Vaelor made a broken little sound and tried to reach you, but Lyonel caught him fast and passed him back toward safer hands before the boy could throw himself down beside you.
It was all too much then. Too much fire. Too much shouting. Too much fear. Too much movement under the lanterns. The whole evening had come apart in your hands like wet cloth.
The guards had Duncan almost at once. Too many hands. Too much steel. They bore him down, pinned him, cursed at him while he fought like a man who knew he had already gone too far to save himself.
Aerion spat blood and stared.
“Why did you throw your life away for this whore?” he asked, almost wonderingly. “She’s scarcely worth it.”
Dunk’s breath came hard and ragged. “She’s not a traitor.”
“She’s a traitor,” Aerion said. “The dragon ought never lose.”
He touched his mouth and looked at the blood there with quiet, poisonous fury. “You’ve loosened one of my teeth. And harmed a wife of the dragon. So we’ll start by breaking out all of yours.”
“No,” cried a child’s voice.
Egg came flying through the edge of the crowd, shoving past men twice his size with the imperious certainty of blood no shaved head and muddy boots could quite disguise.
You saw him, and your stomach turned over as dread completed itself.
“Don’t touch him!” he shouted.
Dunk, pinned hard to the ground, twisted his head. “You stupid boy! Hold your tongue or they’ll hurt you.”
“No, they won’t,” Egg shot back.
He was breathing hard, his face flushed, his eyes too bright with something past fear. One of Aerion’s men reached for him and stopped dead when Egg rounded on him with all the authority of birth suddenly impossible to ignore.
“If they do, they’ll answer to my father. Let go of him. Wat. Yorkel. Do as I say.”
Aerion stared.
For the first time all night, true surprise broke through his rage.
“You impudent little rat,” he said softly. “What’s happened to your hair?”
Egg lifted his chin, his bald head stark in firelight and lantern-glow alike.
“I cut it off, brother,” he said. “I didn’t want to look like you.”
The whole field seemed to tilt with that.
Around you came the rippling shock of recognition. Men staring. Women gasping. The soft collective intake of breath when a secret ceased to be secret and became fact in the open world.
For everyone else it was revelation.
For you it was only the moment fear stopped being private.
You had kept his secret. Trusted him. Let him go.
Now he stood there in the wreck of the evening with ash on his boots and royal blood suddenly visible in every line of him.
The court might soothe some part of this by morning. Baelor would speak. Valarr would mend what could be mended. Lords would be compensated, stories shaped, blame portioned, scandal dressed up as discipline and mercy.
But nothing beneath that silk would be clean again.
Not Tanselle’s broken hand.
Not Vaelor’s sobbing terror.
Not the pain still sharp under your own ribs.
And not this; Egg standing in the firelight with his secret flayed open before half the realm.
The evening came apart in torchlight, shouting, smoke, and the ugly, stumbling business of getting the wounded and the royal blood back behind stone walls before the whole horror worsened into something still harder to mend. Tanselle was borne away weeping and half-fainting, her ruined hand swaddled in blood-soaked cloth already darkening to black in the firelight. Duncan was dragged off beneath a crush of guards and white cloaks, still fighting like a man too honest to save himself and too furious to stop. Egg’s bald head and wild, furious little face remained fixed in your mind like something glimpsed in a lightning-flash, too bright and too strange to forget. Vaelor cried the whole of the way back to Ashford Keep, thin with terror and grief, while Vharyx shrieked overhead and swooped low and erratic enough that even hardened men ducked from the beat of his wings. Everything had happened at once. A prince had been struck and left bloodied before half the realm. A prince’s wife, the mother of his heir, was hurt and bleeding. A nameday tourney had been fouled, a girl maimed, a crowd near panicked, and all the silk and pageantry of Ashford had split open to show the rot beneath.
By the time you reached the keep, the night had curdled entirely. Servants came running from every passage as doors were thrown wide before you. Someone was sent for the maester. Someone else for hot water, clean linens, milk for the boy, wine for you, blankets, braziers, cushions, guards. Footsteps rang on stone. Candles were lit in shaking haste. Women in aprons and frightened pages pressed themselves flat to the walls as you were hurried through the halls. You scarcely knew who said what. You only knew that your body hurt in too many places at once, that your son would not let go of you, and that Valarr’s hands, for all their outward steadiness, had gone frighteningly cold.
He did not allow himself rage yet.
Not while you sat pale beneath the rushlights and trembling despite the heat of the room. Not while Vaelor clung to him, sobbing into his shoulder in broken little gasps about the dragon, the fire, the screaming woman, the knight, Uncle Aerion, Mama falling. Not while Vharyx paced the chamber with his tail lashing and his wings held half-raised, hissing at every servant foolish enough to come too near the bed. Not while the ache low in your body had gone sharp enough to make him call for the maester twice, and in a tone that sent men running faster the second time than the first.
He made himself useful first. That was always his way.
He got you seated. Got Vaelor wrapped in blankets. Got the room cleared of all the frightened hands and useless eyes that crowded a hurt thing only to stare at it. He sent for cloths, milk, wine, warmed stones, and the fucking maester. He knelt before you once, just once, to ask where the pain was worst, and when you answered he said nothing at all, which frightened you more than if he had cursed.
Yet he was only barely holding himself together. You could see it in the terrible brightness of his eyes, in the rigid set of his jaw, in the way his gaze kept catching on the blood that had trickled from your temple to crust along your cheek. Vaelor could not be torn from you, not even to breathe easier, and every fresh sob from the boy seemed to drive the fury deeper into Valarr rather than spend it. When no maester appeared at once, he began to bark for one with a violence that made even the guards at the door flinch.
“Where the fuck is the maester?” he snapped, wheeling on whichever servant had been nearest unlucky enough to hear it. “Why are they not tending to my wife? What kind of fucking keep is this, to stand so unprepared while blood is on the floor?”
He checked himself after that, or seemed to, but only by force. The rage did not lessen. It only narrowed.
It may have been Royce, or one of the guards by the door, who muttered at last that the maester had first been taken to Brightflame, because Duncan’s blow had bloodied the prince’s mouth and loosened one of his teeth.
Valarr went still.
It was not calm. Not even cold. It was the kind of stillness that came just before something gave way.
You saw it happen in him. Vaelor was still against his chest, weeping in little shuddering breaths, and Vharyx had climbed onto the bed beside you, wings tucked tight and eyes bright as wet garnets in the firelight. For one foolish heartbeat, you thought Valarr might simply bear this too, as he bore so much else.
Instead, he handed Vaelor to Royce.
Not roughly. Never roughly. But with a sharpness that made Royce look up at once.
“Hold him,” Valarr said.
Royce took the boy without argument, though his brow furrowed at once. “Valarr—”
“Hold him.”
And then he was gone.
He crossed the corridor like a man with murder already in his mouth. The guards outside Aerion’s chamber barely had time to straighten before he shoved through the door hard enough that it struck the wall with a crack.
The room inside was warm with lamplight and close with the stink of blood, wine, sweat, and the bitter herb-reek of the maester’s satchel. Aerion sat on the edge of a carved chair while the old man dabbed carefully at his split lip. One side of the prince’s face had already gone dark where Duncan had struck him. He looked up at the interruption with more annoyance than pain, as though the whole wretched evening had been no more than an inconvenience too common for his taste.
That, more than all the rest, did it.
Valarr crossed the room in three strides and seized him by the collar so hard the chair legs shrieked against the stone.
The maester cried out and stumbled backward. Aerion’s head snapped up. For one startled instant even he looked too shocked to speak.
Then Valarr dragged him half upright.
“You fucking dare,” he said.
It was not loud.
That made it worse.
Aerion blinked at him, lip bloodied, silver-gold hair disordered, purple eyes widening first in surprise and then narrowing with insult. “Cousin, really—”
Valarr slammed him back against the wall so hard the cups on the nearby table rattled.
“You fucking dare,” he said again, and now the fury was there, vast and ugly and wholly unmasked. “My wife is hurt. My son is in pieces. He cannot stop crying. Vharyx near tore a maid’s hand open from fear. And you sit here letting the maester fuss over your bloody mouth as if you’re the one wronged?”
Aerion gave the ghost of a sneer, though Valarr’s fist had twisted his collar so tight it half-choked him. “She fell,” he said. “That is hardly my doing. If your wife chooses to fling herself where men are settling matters—”
Valarr hit the wall beside his head with such force the rushlight nearest them guttered in its bracket.
Royce came in fast behind him then, having thrust Vaelor off into safer hands at last, and swore the instant he saw the state of the room. He caught at Valarr’s arm, but it was like trying to turn a gate in a storm.
“Valarr,” Royce snapped. “Valarr, leave him enough breath to answer—”
Aerion, witless as ever where his own survival was concerned, smirked.
“It was nothing,” he said, bright with that same hateful little arrogance. “The boy cried. Children cry. If he is frightened by a puppet and a little fire, perhaps he is softer than—”
Royce wheeled on him at once.
“Shut the fuck up, Aerion.”
The room went still.
Royce almost never sounded like that before princes unless he meant every word with his whole chest. He jabbed a finger toward the corridor, toward the rooms beyond it, toward the ruin Aerion had made of the whole night.
“Y/N is hurt. Vaelor’s terrified. The whole keep can hear him. So do not stand there with blood on your mouth and tell me it was nothing, you stupid cunt. Valarr has every right to put you through that wall. You have been in the fucking wrong all night.”
Valarr stepped closer still, his hand never loosening in the collar of Aerion’s doublet. “The fact that she felt the need to protect you for a fucking cause that was not even hers,” he said, each word dropped like iron, “because she actually cared whether your dumb ass lived through your own folly, is beyond me. You should be grateful. You should be on your knees thanking her. You should be bowing to her.”
Aerion laughed, though it came thin now beneath Valarr’s grip. “Bowing? To her?” His split mouth curled. “Because she chose to meddle? Because she could not bear to watch a proper dragon do what needed doing? If she bruised herself playing savior, that is no debt of mine.”
Valarr’s face changed.
Not wildly. Not theatrically. If anything, it became more controlled, and therefore more dangerous.
Royce saw it too. “Fuck’s sake,” he muttered, and tightened his hold on Valarr’s arm.
Maekar arrived at that exact moment, with Baelor only a pace behind him.
The sight that met them would have stopped a lesser father’s heart: Valarr with Aerion by the collar, Royce trying to wrench one prince off the other, the maester flattened white-faced against the far side of the room, and the guards frozen in that particular dread that came when no man wished to be the fool who laid hands upon the heir’s heir whilst his wife and son still shook from harm.
Maekar swore softly beneath his breath.
He knew both boys too well. Aerion was vicious and fast and loved the uglier sort of fight. Valarr was every inch as skilled, perhaps more so, and where his wife and child were concerned he was near impossible to beat, because he ceased caring what happened to himself the moment they were threatened. Royce knew it too. That was why his grip had gone from restraining to bracing.
“Valarr,” Baelor said.
His voice was the only calm thing in the room.
“Let him go.”
Valarr did not.
Aerion, because he had never in his life known when silence might save him, gave a low and foolish laugh. “What?” he said, still half-choked in Valarr’s fist. “You mean to strike me now? In Father’s sight? Over a puppeteer, a crying child, and a woman too weak to keep her feet?”
Maekar moved at once.
He caught Valarr hard by the shoulder just as Royce got hold of his other arm in earnest. “Enough,” Maekar barked. “Enough, both of you.”
Valarr’s gaze never left Aerion’s.
“He frightened my son,” he said.
Every word came out like iron dropped one piece at a time.
“He laid hands on a woman before my wife. He turned the whole field to scandal.” His grip tightened in Aerion’s collar until the prince’s throat worked. “And then he made her fall.”
That last part rang through the chamber like steel on stone.
Baelor went still. Royce’s mouth shut. Even Aerion lost the shape of his next retort.
Valarr stepped nearer, so near now that Aerion had to tilt his head back to meet his eyes.
“If anything has happened to her and the child in her belly,” he said softly, “I will kill you.”
There was no flourish in it. No princely threat. No performance for fathers or guards or gods. Valarr did not care whether men named him kinslayer after, if only his wife and children were kept safe.
Just truth.
For the first time that night, even Aerion seemed to understand the edge he had reached.
Maekar forced himself bodily between them then, shoving at Valarr’s chest while Royce finally hauled Aerion backward by the shoulder. “Out,” Maekar said to his son, not taking his eyes off his nephew. “Not one word. Not a single fucking word.”
Aerion opened his mouth anyway.
Baelor turned his head and said, in a voice quiet enough to shame a hall, “Do not test me tonight.”
That shut him.
But not for long.
Aerion’s lip curled, blood still bright at the corner of his mouth. “You all look at me as though I set the Seven Kingdoms on fire. She threw herself where she was not called. The boy cries because he is a child. Must the whole keep drown because none of you can stomach what men are?”
Maekar rounded on him with such force that even Royce loosed his hold half a step.
“What men are?” Maekar said. “Is that the song you sing yourself now? That cruelty is manhood? That maiming a girl, terrifying a child, and dragging blood through another lord’s feast is princely conduct?”
Aerion’s chin lifted. “Better blood than mockery. Better fear than laughter. They should remember that dragons are not to be made sport of.”
Baelor’s face hardened then in a way it rarely did. “Do not dare wrap this in dignity,” he said. “Do not dress your temper in the language of house and crown. You did not defend us tonight. You shamed us.”
Aerion laughed once, short and bitter. “Shamed us? By reminding them what we are? You would rather have them laugh, Father. Smile, bow, be loved, be merciful, be weak.”
Baelor took one step toward him.
“And you,” he said, “would rather be feared for being monstrous than respected for being just. That is the coward’s road, Aerion, though you have never yet had the wit to see it.”
The words struck harder than a blow. Aerion’s face changed—not to remorse, rarely that, but to raw insult.
Royce was still breathing hard, one hand planted against Aerion’s chest to keep him back, yet there was something strained in his face now beyond simple anger. He had known Aerion too long for this to be easy. They had been boys together once, all of them half-wild in the Red Keep’s yards and corridors, trading bruises, jests, and the easy loyalties of youth. You had grown up there too, a ward beside Royce, and through those years it had been Aerion, of all people, who had most delighted in what grew between you and Valarr. He had seen it early, mocked it often, encouraged it all the same, bright-eyed and wicked-mouthed and oddly earnest beneath it. Royce remembered that prince. So did you. That was the cruelty of it. The change had not come all at once, not so brutally that any of them could point to one day and say there, that was when he turned. It had come by degrees—in uglier jests, sharper amusements, tempers that lingered too long where once they had flared and passed—until now. Until this. Until even you could no longer tell whether Aerion meant only to frighten or truly to maim, and found that perhaps the difference no longer mattered.
Royce gave a short, disbelieving laugh, but there was no humor in it. “Seven bloody hells,” he muttered. “You just cannot stop, can you? One ruined tourney, one maimed girl, one terrified child, and still you have to keep picking.” His jaw tightened. “For fuck’s sake, Aerion. We grew up with you. She grew up with you. You were meant to know better than this.”
Aerion’s lip curled. “You all act as if I butchered half the Reach.”
Royce’s laugh came again, harsher this time. “No, you miserable fuck. We act like we asked you, begged you, to calm the fuck down and act like a proper prince for a handful of days, and here you are, fucking it all to hell. What has our friendship come to, that you cannot think of anyone but yourself for even one night? We act like you behaved like a mad prince with too much blood and not enough sense, because that is exactly what you did.”
Aerion turned his sneer on him. “And now you bark at me like some kennelmaster? Have you all grown so fond of Baratheon silk and nursery tears that you’ve forgotten your own blood?”
Maekar’s expression went dead flat.
That was worse than anger.
“Look at me,” he said.
Aerion did not.
Maekar stepped forward anyway and caught his son by the jaw, not gently, forcing his face up. “Look at me when I speak to you.”
Aerion’s nostrils flared, but he obeyed.
“That woman you sneer at,” Maekar said, each word bitten off clean, “shielded you tonight when you had done nothing to deserve it. My brother’s grandson cries because of you. My nephew’s wife is hurt because of you. A child unborn may yet pay for your madness. And still you stand there trying to make yourself the injured party.” His grip tightened. “You disgust me.”
The room went silent.
Even Aerion had nothing ready for that.
Baelor spoke into the quiet, and there was weariness in him now deeper than wrath. “Do you know what I saw tonight?” he asked. “Not a dragon. Not strength. Not fire. I saw a prince so ruled by his temper that a puppet, a girl, and a frightened little boy were enough to unmake him before half the realm.”
Aerion’s face flushed dark. “Must you always choose the weak?”
Baelor’s answer came at once. “No. I choose the decent.”
That landed harder than Maekar’s grip.
For a heartbeat the chamber seemed to breathe around them all—the maester rigid against the wall, Royce still braced for violence, Valarr standing taut and shaking with fury not yet spent.
Then Maekar released his son with visible disgust.
“Get out,” he said.
Aerion did not move.
Maekar’s voice dropped lower. “If you make me say it again, I will forget you are mine before this room.”
That did it.
This time Aerion obeyed.
Not because he had learned better, nor because repentance had touched him. Only because, for once, every face in the room had turned against him together, and even he knew when the ground beneath him had worn perilously thin.
When he was gone, the chamber changed.
Valarr stood where he was, shoulders taut as drawn wire, breath coming harsh, jaw set so hard it looked painful. Baelor came to him first.
Not as prince to heir.
As father to son.
“She needs you,” Baelor said.
That landed where command would not have.
Valarr shut his eyes.
Just for a moment.
When he opened them again the rage was still there, but banked now, forced down into the place where all his worst things went when duty dragged them there by the throat. He looked to Royce.
“Vaelor?”
“With her,” Royce said, gentler now. “Still crying some. Dragon will not leave him.”
Valarr nodded once.
Maekar exhaled through his nose and looked suddenly older than he had an hour before. “Go to them,” he said, his voice roughened now by something nearer shame than rage. “I will deal with my son.”
Valarr said nothing to that.
He only turned and went back the way he had come, with blood still on his knuckles from Aerion’s collar and murder still unfinished in the line of his mouth.
Part 1: You Must Be His Nursemaid | Part 2: A Prince and A Dragon | Part 3: Where Princes, Ladies, Lords, and Knights Gathered in Candlelight | Part 4: Silk Morning, Bloodied Field | Part 5: Where the Dragon Set Its Gaze and Bared Its Teeth
Pairing: Prince Valarr Targaryen x Reader ( referred to as 'You')
Summary:
A hidden prince in the camp. A child prince in the market. A dragon overhead.
Vaelor wants toy horses, puppet stories, and an evening full of wonder.
Dunk wants a chance. Egg wants a place to belong.
But Ashford’s splendour is already rotting underneath the silk, and by midday the blood shows through.
A/N: Hi, readers. I’m a little nervous sharing this because I genuinely don’t know how much interest there is in this storyline, though I do think it’s such a fun premise, and I’ve gotten really attached to it. I’ve loved seeing the comments and the interest this one has gotten so far, and I really hope people have been enjoying the buildup. I hope this little piece finds the people who wanted it, and if you’re still here reading, thank you. It means more to me than I can really say. ♡
Warnings: Angst, canon-typical violence, animal injury, child distress, family tension, public humiliation, emotional trauma, protective/possessive family dynamics, darker Targaryen themes, and heartbreak.
Dawn came grey over Ashford Meadow, with mist lying low upon the trampled grass like breath not yet spent. The pavilions, so bright and lordly by torchlight the night before, had gone dull and mortal in the morning, their damp silk sides darkened by dew, their guy-ropes caked in mud, their banners hanging limp until the first true wind should wake them. Here and there, the last revel fires smouldered in blackened pits, breathing up thin, sour threads of smoke. The songs had burned themselves away into snores, groans, and the coarse mutter of waking men. Grooms stumbled from beneath wagons, rubbing sleep from their eyes, squires yawned and pissed against cart wheels, and somewhere farther off, a horse struck at its stall-board in dull irritation. In the pale wash of morning, all the splendour of great houses looked suddenly makeshift: canvas, ropes, timber, dung, and weary flesh.
By the brook, where the bank had been churned soft by hooves and the ground gave wetly beneath a boot, Egg was trying to teach Thunder not to fear his own weight.
The horse snorted hard and tossed his head, steam blowing white from his nostrils into the chill. He was a great brute of a thing, wide through the chest and thick in the neck, with the deep, solid build of a destrier and the uneasy temper of an animal not yet persuaded that he approved of the work men meant to make of him. Water lapped at the stones nearby, slow and indifferent. Egg had shaved his head bare, so that he looked half stable whelp and half runaway novice from some mean little sept, all ears, sharp bones, muddy boots, and patched roughspun. Yet there was nothing uncertain in his hands. Small though they were, they held the reins with a confidence that belonged less to a boy than to someone who had been born expecting obedience and had spent all his life disguising the habit of it.
“Easy, boy,” he muttered, low and intent, as though the horse alone deserved the truth of his voice. “Come on. Just run. Move.”
Thunder resisted out of sheer bloody-mindedness for three steps, planting his feet and giving a resentful toss of the head, then surged forward all at once in a rude burst that sent mud splashing halfway to Egg’s knees. The boy staggered, recovered, and broke into a trot beside him, breath puffing in pale bursts. Sheep on the far bank lifted their stupid heads to stare, affronted by the disturbance in the solemn manner of sheep everywhere.
“You’re stubborn as old iron,” Egg said, half scolding and half admiring. “He’s twice the size of your last rider, and the field could be just like this or worse, so you’d best get your feet under you.”
Thunder blew through his nose and rolled one dark eye back at him, as if to suggest that Egg himself might profit from taking the same advice. The horse’s hide twitched beneath the touch of the cold air. Beneath the smell of wet grass and brook water lay the stronger scents of horse sweat, damp leather, and old trampled earth.
“My father told me you should never talk to a horse,” Egg went on after a moment, lowering his voice as Thunder settled into a sullen stillness. “He said they’re dumber than dogs and only understand the crop.”
Thunder’s ears flicked backward, then forward again.
Egg sighed. “But I don’t think that’s true. I think a horse doesn’t want to be ordered about any more than a man does.” He laid a hand briefly against the thick, warm arch of the horse’s neck, feeling the muscle twitch beneath the skin. “Ser Duncan only has us. And if he loses, he won’t even have that. I can get the weapon in his hand somehow. But then it’s up to you.”
The horse stamped once, splashing muck. Egg clicked his tongue.
“Hyah. Go.”
This time Thunder sprang cleaner, gathering himself better beneath all that heavy strength. Egg laughed outright, the sound bright and boyish in the grey morning.
“That’s it. Go, Thunder. Come on. Good boy. Good boy.”
He let the horse have his head for a little stretch, then slowed him again and began rubbing him down with a fistful of wet grass, working at the shoulder where the hide had gone warm. Beyond the meadow, the first strip of sun was pushing thin gold over the horizon, touching spearpoints, wagon rims, and puddles with a cold sort of brightness. Egg glanced up at it once, then farther still, toward the open field beyond the outer lines of tents.
For just a moment, he saw a shadow move across the paling sky.
Not a bird. Not cloud.
The shape passed swift and dark over the meadow grass, long-winged and sinuous, and Egg knew it at once for Vharyx. The little dragon would not be so little for long. He watched the shadow slide over the world and vanish, and thought that cousin Valarr must have taken his wife and their son farther afield in the early light, away from the press of lords and lists and staring eyes, to let the creature stretch its wings before the day’s pageantry began. Perhaps the beast was hunting. Perhaps merely flying because it could. Egg wondered, not for the first time, how it must feel to belong to no reins at all.
Then the sound of a voice behind him broke the thought in two.
“You steal that horse? Tell the truth. We’ll be fair.”
Egg turned.
Ser Robyn Rhysling stood above him on the bank, one eye bright and hard as a nailhead, the other lost beneath scar and patch. He looked as if some god had begun fashioning a knight out of anger, iron, and old blows, then lost interest halfway through and left the thing unfinished: broken nose, hard jaw, shoulders thick beneath a weathered cloak, menace enough for two men and patience enough for none. Another fellow stood a step behind him, broad-faced and already half amused, his hands tucked into his belt.
Egg glanced once at Thunder, then back at the knight. “It’s not stealing if you mean to put it back.”
The other man barked a laugh. Even Ser Robyn’s mouth twitched, though whether with humour or irritation was hard to say.
Thunder whinnied softly and tossed his head. Egg soothed him without looking away.
Ser Robyn came down the bank a little, boots crushing wet grass and sending small stones skipping into the brook. “What’s wrong with your hair?”
Egg looked him full in the face. “What’s wrong with your eye?”
The other man laughed outright at that, sharp and delighted. Ser Robyn narrowed his one good eye, and for the space of a heartbeat, it seemed entirely possible he might cuff the boy straight into the water and be done with him. The brook went on babbling at their feet. A crow called somewhere behind the tents. Egg did not move.
Then Ser Robyn gave a grunt that might almost have been approval.
“You’re Ser Robyn Rhysling,” Egg said before the knight could speak again. “You’re the maddest knight in the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Who told you that?”
Egg shrugged. “No one. It’s plain enough.”
That sent the other man into still more laughter. Ser Robyn did not laugh. He only stared, weighing insolence against spirit as if they were coins on a scale and he had not yet decided which he hated less.
“You’re small for a squire,” he said at last.
Egg drew himself up at once, all thin chest and shaved head and princely affront. “I serve Ser Duncan the Tall. He’s large enough for the both of us.”
“We’ve not heard of him.”
A faint smile tugged at Egg’s mouth, quick as a knife-flash and gone as fast. “You will.”
That left them with little more to say. Ser Robyn studied him another moment, then snorted through his nose and turned away, as if he could not determine whether the bald little brat was brave or witless and found the distinction not worth the labour of his morning. His companion followed, shaking his head and still grinning to himself.
Egg watched them go, one hand resting on Thunder’s neck. The horse shifted beneath his palm, warm and solid and alive. Overhead, the sky had gone paler still, and all through the meadow the great camp of lords and knights was waking to itself at last. Men shouted for squires, kettles began to clatter, a smith’s hammer rang somewhere dull and steady, and from far across the field came the faint rasp of a dragon’s cry borne thin upon the cold morning air.
By the time the sun had climbed clear of the tents, Egg had mud on his boots, horsehair on his sleeves, and the dangerous satisfaction of a boy who had already lied twice before breaking his fast.
Under a hard blue autumn sky, Ashford looked almost harmless.
The nameday splendor had spilled well beyond the castle walls and out across the roads and meadows, so that even the market wore the air of festival. Ashford orange and white stirred from poles and awnings in the dry wind. Honeyed nuts cracked and spat in black iron pans. Sweet cakes, set too long in the sun, had begun to shine with stickiness, drawing wasps in lazy circles. Merchants cried their wares in half a dozen accents, their voices crossing and tangling above the crowd like pennons in a gust. Their carts were bright with small delights and common vanities: dyed lengths of cloth, stitched leather belts, cheap tin brooches made to mimic silver, painted animals on strings, wooden swords, ribbons, whistles, little shields no larger than trenchers. The air smelled of sugar, horse, warm wool, crushed herbs beneathfoot, and the faint sourness of too many people gathered in one place since dawn.
Vaelor loved it at once.
He had dressed for the outing with grave determination, as if the market itself might take offence should he present himself carelessly before it. His brown hair had been tidied as much as any child’s would allow, though the white streak at his brow still caught the light like frost laid upon dark earth. He walked at your side with solemn wonder in every line of him, his small boots careful on the packed road, his gaze moving restlessly from stall to stall. There was in him that particular princely seriousness children sometimes had, as though each new thing must be examined not merely with delight, but with judgment.
Ser Roland Crakehall followed a pace behind in his white cloak, broad and patient as a gatehouse, with two Targaryen guards farther back and to either side, discreet enough not to make a procession of it. You had been careful of that. Too many men in arms would have turned a market walk into an inspection, and too many eyes would have made Vaelor stiffen into ceremony. This was meant for him. For one morning, at least, you wanted him more boy than omen, more child than symbol. The realm had already begun to look at him and see a dragon before a son. You had no wish to encourage it in daylight over ribbons and carved toys.
Vaelor, of course, did not make the task easy.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing to a row of tin whistles that glinted dully on a cloth.
“Whistles,” you said.
He looked at them, then at you. “Why?”
“So that children may annoy their parents.”
He considered that with all due seriousness. “That seems an unwise trade.”
Two stalls later, he had halted before a painted shield no larger than his chest, running his fingers just above the rim without touching. Three stalls beyond that, he stood frowning over a basket of wooden horses, selecting among them with the concentration of a lord choosing mounts for a campaign. At last, he lifted a grey one with red tack and a black mane.
“This one is vain,” he informed you.
You turned your head. “How can you tell?”
“It looks like it would bite servants.”
You bit back a smile. Behind you, Ser Roland made a sound suspiciously close to a cough.
At the next stall, Vaelor paused before a row of bright painted masks hung on pegs beneath an awning pole. One was a lion, all golden mane and bared teeth, another a fox with sly black eyes, another some cheerful green-toothed creature with a grin so wide it bordered on madness.
“Would Vharyx like one?” he asked.
“A dragon in a mask?”
“He might wish to be mysterious.”
“He is a dragon,” you said. “He is already mysterious enough.”
Vaelor accepted this at once and moved on, because the world was too full of other interesting things to linger long on one conclusion.
He had just turned a little carved dragon over in his hands, testing the sharpness of its tiny wooden wings with one thoughtful finger, when he saw the puppets.
The tug on your sleeve came sharp and urgent.
You followed the line of his finger and found a little painted world suspended beneath a striped awning. There hung a knight in red, a lady in blue, a fool with a crooked smile and bells at his cap, and beside them a dragon worked in greens and bronze, its wings stretched wide upon threads so fine they seemed to vanish whenever the light caught them wrong. Even in stillness, there was life in them. Their shadows moved faintly on the cloth behind, as if they had stories waiting impatiently in their joints.
Vaelor went utterly still.
That stillness, with him, always meant complete captivation. Not boredom. Not fear. Wonder had a way of quieting him where command never could.
“There,” he said, very softly, as if louder speech might startle the painted creatures back into wood and string.
A woman stepped out from the shaded mouth of the booth. She was tall and fine-boned, with skin the warm gold-brown of Dorne and eyes quick as sunlight on water. There was ease in her carriage, neither cringing nor overbold, only the settled confidence of someone long used to working with her hands before all sorts of men and finding no need to lower her gaze unless she chose. Her gown was plain beside court silks, but clean, and her sleeves had been rolled slightly where the rods of the puppets had polished the cloth smooth. You noticed, as you noticed such things, the callus at the base of one finger, the deftness in the way she moved, the care she had taken to keep her painted world bright despite the dust and wear of the road.
She dipped her head when she saw your escort, then looked properly at Vaelor and smiled.
“Good morrow, my lady,” she said. “My prince.”
It was the manner of it that struck you first. Respectful, yes. She knew well enough who stood before her. Yet there was none of that false glitter some people put into their voices when they spoke to royal children, as if sweetness were a form of tribute and tribute a bargain. She did not gush. She did not coo. She greeted him like a child worth addressing plainly.
“My son has been looking forward to your play,” you said. “We thought it might be this morning.”
“Not this morning, my lady,” she replied, her smile lingering. “At dusk. The children like it better by lantern-light.”
Vaelor’s mouth fell a fraction.
It was only for a heartbeat. Disappointment had no great hold on him when wonder still remained in sight. He took one step closer to the awning and pointed at the dragon.
“Can that one fight?”
“It can,” said the puppeteer gravely.
“Does it breathe fire?”
“When properly encouraged.”
“Does the knight always win?”
“No,” she said. “Not always.”
“Will the dragon die?”
That question landed differently than the rest. You felt it at once, though you could not have said why. The woman’s fingers paused very briefly where they rested on one of the rods, a hesitation no larger than a blink, before she smiled again. Softer, this time. More careful.
“In stories,” she said, “many things happen.”
Vaelor studied the painted dragon in silence, thinking with all the deep seriousness six-year-olds reserve for matters adults dismiss too quickly. Then, after a beat, he asked, “Can I touch one?”
She did not choose the dragon. Instead, she selected a small painted knight with a red plume and a long spear, then bent and placed it into his hand.
“Gently.”
He held it as though it might wake.
Its little wooden face wore the foolish fixed smile puppet faces often had, but Vaelor’s attention had already gone elsewhere: to the tiny shield, the painted rivets, the joints at the knee and elbow, the way the legs shifted if he turned the body just so. He tested its weight, moved one arm, then looked up again.
“It is brave,” he pronounced.
“I hope so,” said the woman.
“What is your name?”
“Tanselle.”
He repeated it once, carefully, as if committing some small but not unimportant truth to memory. Then he gave a solemn nod, the sort of nod a maester might offer another over some serious matter of ink and kings.
“Then we must come back,” he said. “Vharyx will want to hear about it.”
Tanselle blinked once. The smile she gave him after that was warmer than before, though she had the sense not to ask whether Vharyx was a hound, a horse, or something stranger.
“I should not like to disappoint him,” she said.
You smiled despite yourself. Behind you, Ser Roland shifted his weight and looked very studiously at nothing at all.
Vaelor returned the puppet knight with visible reluctance. Tanselle accepted it with care, as if the small trust of a child prince were gift enough and needed no gilding.
The moment ended on a promise. That mattered more than you knew then. Vaelor walked away expecting enchantment at dusk, not grief.
It was only later, after another dozen steps and two more stalls, that you saw the bald boy watching from half the length of the market road away, and the warmth of the morning seemed to leave you all at once.
At first, it was only that he stood wrong.
A common squire might be insolent. Common boys were insolent every day of their lives. They slouched when ordered to stand straight, stared when they ought to lower their eyes, and obeyed with the sulk of creatures born to too little comfort. Yet there was something in this one’s stillness that did not belong to commonness at all. The set of the shoulders. The stubborn angle of the head. The sense that every command complied with cost him privately, and that he resented the cost even while paying it. He had no hair now, not a lock left upon his head, which altered the face more than most would have thought. It left him barer, smaller, sharper. Yet not enough. Not where the eyes were concerned.
You saw him glance once over his shoulder, and the glance alone was enough.
Egg.
Not Aegon then, perhaps—not in his own mind, shaved down into rough cloth and muddy boots and the service of a hedge knight—but himself all the same.
You stopped.
Vaelor looked up at once. “Mama?”
“Only a moment, sweet boy.” You turned slightly. “Ser Roland, I should like to look more closely at those ribbons. Stay with the prince.”
The Kingsguard’s heavy brow furrowed, but not enough to question you. “As you wish, Your Grace.”
You moved away before Egg saw you coming. The market was crowded enough that a lady in fine silk might vanish for half a minute if she chose the press of bodies well, and you had grown up half among Baratheons. You knew how to slip through noise when it suited you, how to let stronger voices and bigger shoulders hide your own passing. A basket of apples. A cart of wool. A pair of arguing traders. By the time Egg noticed you at all, you were already close.
You caught him just beyond a cart of fruit, where he had stopped with the look of someone not yet certain whether he meant to flee or stand insolently through discovery.
“Do not look at me like that,” you murmured. “I know exactly who you are.”
He started so hard you might almost have pitied him.
“My lady—”
You flicked his ear lightly before he could invent whatever lie had been rising to save him.
“Whatever this is, I trust you. I will keep your secret. But be careful.”
For the first time since you had known him, he looked fully his age. Not prince. Not dragon-blood. Only a boy caught out in something dangerous and too proud to retreat from it.
“Yes, my lady.”
Then, quieter, “I mean to be.”
“You had best. Your father is half out of his mind with worry, though whether for you or for the shame of not knowing where you are, I could not say.”
That won the smallest twist of guilt from him, though nowhere near enough to send him hurrying back to Maekar’s side.
“I’m where I mean to be,” he said stubbornly.
“Of course you are.”
You touched his bare head once, almost without thinking, your palm warm against the sharpness of his skull, then let your hand fall. “Go on, then. Before I decide to drag you by the ear to your grandsire myself.”
That got a faint, scandalized look out of him. Good. He ought to be scandalized now and again.
Egg had always had the dangerous confidence of boys born too high and loved too well. As you turned away and went back to your son, your face already smoothed into calm once more, you could only pray Ashford would prove kinder to him than such confidence usually deserved.
Now you carried two private burdens through the bright nameday morning:
your son’s happiness for the evening to come,
and the knowledge that one lost prince was not lost at all, only hiding in plain sight with mud on his boots and audacity in his bones.
When Egg returned, Duncan was sewing a patch and looking as though the patch had personally insulted him.
The great knight sat cross-legged outside their poor little shelter beneath an alder—or elm, as he would have it—with his broad shoulders hunched over the cloth and his tongue caught foolishly between his teeth, trying to force neatness onto something already half-ruined. The morning had brightened since dawn, and with it the camp had begun to stir in earnest. Men stumbled past with belts half-buckled, squires ran where they ought to have walked, horses stamped and snorted in their pickets, and somewhere a cook was already cursing over a kettle. Thunder stood a little way off, rough-coated and sour-eyed, his mane still damp in places and his temper no doubt worsened by Egg’s morning efforts along the brook.
“Where have you been?” Dunk demanded, without looking up.
“Training.”
Dunk gave a grunt through his nose. “Don’t wander off without telling me.”
Egg came to stand over him and peered down at the patch. “What are you doing, ser?”
“Sewing a patch.”
“Is that not my job?”
Dunk glanced up at last, saw the boy’s bare head properly in the morning light, and blinked. “What in seven hells happened to your hair?”
Egg ignored that entirely. “Is it not my job?”
“You know how?”
Egg lifted one narrow shoulder, as if to say that of course he knew how, and how dull the question besides. There was something in him, even bald and grubby and dressed in rough little squire’s clothes, that did not take kindly to being underestimated. Dunk snorted, surrendered the cloth, and shoved it toward him.
“Then quit jawing and get the brushes. Thunder looks like he’s been dragged through a hedge.”
“What about breakfast?”
“There’s salt beef after you’re done.”
Egg made a face. “I’d sooner eat the horse, ser.”
“You’ll eat my fist if you don’t do as you’re told. Never mind that—here. Close to the edge. That’s it. That’s your whipstitch.”
Egg took the patch and tried. The first stitch went crooked. The second pulled too tight. He frowned, picked at it with quick fingers, and tried again.
“How’d you get it so even?”
Dunk squinted at the cloth as though the answer might be stitched there, too. “Practice. Just… like that. Again.”
Egg obeyed, and this time the stitch held neat and close.
“There,” he said.
Dunk leaned nearer, peering with all the solemnity of a lord inspecting fortifications, then brightened despite himself. “Yes.”
Egg, who took praise like a cat took rain, contrived at once to look as though the matter were beneath his notice. “Ser?”
“Mmhmm?”
“Is it odd that I have black hair growing out of my stones?”
Dunk looked up at him in honest horror. “It’s odd that you’re telling me.”
By then, the camp had gone fully to noise. Somewhere not far off, a drunkard was butchering a song about princes, bastards, rebels, and giant, veiny hammers with such gusto that it seemed almost uncharitable to silence him. The fellow had one of those voices that carried no matter how badly it ought not, and every verse grew filthier and less tuneful than the last. Dunk, who had been half green with nerves since first light, heard only a line or two before he had to duck behind the tent flap again and retch into the grass while the singer bellowed on about grass green in summer and red in war.
The camp, being the camp, took no pity on him for it.
At last, because no man’s misery goes long unmocked in such places, Dunk wiped his mouth, rose red-eyed and resentful, and said, “It’s time. Fetch my armour.”
Egg looked up from the brushes. “Now?”
“Aye, now.”
“Why?”
“Because I mean to enter the lists.”
Egg blinked. “You don’t have your shield.”
“We’ll gather it along the way.”
Egg nodded with infuriating calm, as though this were all very sensible. “Mmhmm. Also, the right of first challenge goes to knights of high birth and renown. Are you a knight of high birth and renown, ser?”
Dunk stared at him.
“Wait,” he said slowly. “So I cannot enter the lists today?”
“Not today, ser, no. Only knights of high birth and renown.”
Dunk went utterly still. Then, in wounded disbelief, “Then why the fuck have I been vomiting all morning?”
Egg considered that gravely. “It’s a mystery.”
Dunk looked as if he might strike him, laugh, or be sick again. In the end, he did none of the three. He only stood there for a moment in the brightening day, broad and miserable, while above the camp the cries of hawkers drifted in from the market road and the songs of the drunk and the curses of the grooms all tangled together in one great human noise.
It was then that a shadow passed over them.
Not cloud. Not hawk.
Dunk lifted his head.
High above the tourney fields, where the morning air had gone clean and pale, something dark and sinuous wheeled against the blue. Its wings caught the light strangely as it turned, neither bird’s wings nor bat’s, and the long tail trailed after it like a lash. It moved with a freedom so easy and terrible that for a heartbeat all the camp below seemed crude and earthbound by comparison—mere men and horses and canvas crawling over the ground while that thing owned the sky.
Dunk stared. “Is that really his dragon?”
Egg followed his gaze and, even after all this time, did not answer at once. There was still something odd in speaking of it plainly, as if naming the thing too easily might wake old blood and older terrors both. He watched Vharyx circle once, twice, over the far meadow, its shadow sliding over trampled grass and pavilions, over banners and men too busy to see what passed above them.
“Yeah,” Egg said at last. “Their pride and joy, the Targaryens. Vaelor’s dragon. Vharyx.” He hesitated a beat, then added, almost grudgingly, “It’s getting bigger.”
Dunk turned to him, incredulous. “What do you mean it gets bigger?”
Egg gave him a look that plainly asked how any living man could fail to know such a thing. Dunk returned one of his own, broad and blank and entirely serious.
They stood there, both looking upward, while the dragon went on circling in great loose sweeps over the field. It did not fly like a hawk, nor like any creature born wholly of this world. There was arrogance in the flight, whether beast knew it or not, as if it scarcely understood there ought to be competition in the sky and found the lack of it natural. After a time, it turned in a wider arc and banked back toward Ashford Keep, wingbeats flashing dark against the morning. Even from that distance, there was purpose in the turn.
“Going back to its bonded,” Egg muttered.
Dunk watched until the creature dwindled against the towers. The sight sat strangely in him. He had seen many things in his life—hunger, hangings, battlefields after the fighting, noble cruelty and common meanness both—but a dragon circling free above a tourney field was the sort of thing that made the old songs feel uncomfortably near.
Later, when the first confusion of the morning had settled, and the camp’s noise had become simply part of the air, Dunk and Egg sat together on a rise overlooking the tourney grounds. From there, the whole bright sprawl of Ashford seemed laid open beneath them: the pavilions rank on rank, the practice yards, the market road winding busy as an anthill, the castle itself standing beyond with its banners stirring in the dry breeze. Men looked small from up there. So did their ambitions, though not, perhaps, to those who bore them.
Egg sat with his knees up, arms looped around them, his bald head catching the sun. For a while, he watched the movement below in thoughtful silence. Then, with all the solemn ambition of a prince pretending not to be one, he said, “I think I could be quite happy in a place like this.”
Dunk glanced sideways at him. “You’re in a place like this.”
“I meant for a while.”
“Ah.”
“After I lead a great campaign for my lord, of course.”
“Of course.”
Egg kept his gaze on the grounds below. “I return a war hero, and he gives me a parcel of land for my very own, and the hand of his second most beautiful daughter.”
Dunk looked down at him. “Second most?”
Egg sniffed. “Well, you’ve already married the first most. Have you not, ser?”
Dunk laughed at that in spite of himself, the sound breaking out of him rough and brief.
Egg, encouraged, went on as if he were already reckoning the shape of his future acres. “I’d keep horses, plant oats and peas. Raise cows.”
“And lambs, perhaps.”
Egg turned at once, scandalized. “Fuck your lambs.”
Dunk chuckled. “Did you really ride all the way here in the back of some farmer’s wagon?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’ll say this for you,” Dunk said, still smiling. “You’re a good worker when you put your mind to it.”
Egg cast him a quick look, wary as if praise were some trick. “Think so?”
“Mmhmm.”
That seemed to matter more than he wanted it to. He tried to hide it and did not quite succeed.
“Does that mean I can stay on as your squire after the tournament?”
Dunk looked back out over the field. “If I lose my first joust, I’ll scarcely be a knight after the tournament.”
“But if you win?”
Dunk scratched at his jaw, buying himself time. “If I win… If I win, you can…”
“Ser Duncan? A word, if you please.”
They were midway through arguing about lambs—Egg being emphatically against them—when Plummer came puffing up the rise with phlegm in his throat and scheming in his eyes.
That part of the day went sour at once.
Plummer drew Dunk off under the pretence of private business and offered him the kind of rot that always came smiling. Lord Ashford, he said, had overspent. The pageant had cost dear. Winter had bitten hard. Fortunes must be mended where they could. And if some bold hedge knight were to unhorse Ser Androw Ashford against all expectation, why, certain men might profit handsomely from such a surprise. Money. Horse. Arms. Armour. A tidy sum for a poor knight with little but his name and an elm tree to call home.
Dunk listened, uncomfortable and tempted both, the way any hungry man is tempted when silver is waved before him. Yet he refused in the end with more honour than good sense, perhaps, though perhaps good sense too. A man who had only his name could not afford much dirt upon it.
When Plummer left him, hocking and spitting and telling him to mind his pride, the pageantry of Ashford felt a little less golden than it had that morning.
By midday, the royal box had filled with light, colour, and that careful stillness which so often attended great lords when they wished to seem entirely at ease. Below, the lists shone beneath the hard autumn sun. Bright pavilions stood rank on rank in ordered splendour, their silks stirring now and again in the dry wind; shields gleamed beneath bannered lances; enamel, polished steel, horseflesh, and painted wood flashed together until the field seemed less a place for sport than some grand display of the realm’s vanity. Whenever a favourite rode by, the crush of common voices rolled upward in waves, breaking faintly against the carved fronts of the noble seats. It was spectacle at its most polished: silk and heraldry and pride, every house dressed in its own idea of magnificence, every man intent on being seen.
Prince Baelor sat at the centre beneath Ashford’s colours, grave and composed, the sort of man around whom even noise seemed to arrange itself with respect. Lord Ashford moved near him with all the brittle hospitality due a man hosting dragons at his daughter’s nameday, smiling when required, bowing where he must, and never once forgetting the danger in honour. Gwin Ashford sat not far off, lovely and pale in soft autumn shades, her hands folded with proper grace in her lap, though there was something a touch too careful in the set of her shoulders, as if even joy had become a posture she must hold for the sake of everyone watching. Royce sprawled in his seat with Baratheon ease and no Baratheon restraint, broad and sun-warmed and looking as though formal company existed chiefly to be annoyed by him. Valarr had already ridden earlier and acquitted himself well, yet the triumph of it had not sweetened the day as it ought to have. If anything, it had only sharpened what followed. He sat nearer the front of his tent now, one arm resting against the armchair, the helm from his earlier tilt set within easy reach, outwardly composed, though you knew too well the habits of his stillness not to see what sat beneath it. He had spent too long before the tilts half expecting Aerion to name him. So had others.
Maekar’s chair remained empty.
That absence was its own kind of presence. Everyone felt it. The missing prince. The missing youngest son. The father gone riding the roads himself rather than sit smiling through ceremony while two of his boys were still unaccounted for. Men did not speak of it openly, not here, not before the lists and ladies and half the Reach besides, yet it hung over Ashford all the same, like a storm too far off to wet the ground and yet near enough to darken it.
Vaelor, who had recovered some little brightness after his father’s victory, leaned against the rail with the earnest concentration of a boy who believed all things ought to be explained if only he asked often enough. He had, of all people, found a companion in Lady Gwin, and was speaking to her with solemn courtesy as if she were another child obliged to answer him honestly.
“What did you get for your nameday?” he asked.
Gwin looked at him, startled first and then amused despite herself. “Why, my prince, rather a great many things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Silks. Jewels. Books. A hawk from my father.”
Vaelor considered that with due seriousness. “Did you like the hawk better than the jewels?”
That won a brief laugh from her, quiet and genuine enough to soften her face. “I think perhaps I did.”
He nodded, pleased by the answer. “Father wants to take me hawking when the weather is better, when we go back to Dragonstone. He keeps all his prized hawks there. It’s his favourite hobby.” He paused, then added with a child’s frank gravity, “I’m excited to learn, though I don’t know when I’m to get one of my own.”
Gwin smiled at that, more easily now. “Perhaps when you’ve learned not to let it eat too much feed and treats.”
Vaelor thought that over as if it were serious counsel. “That seems fair, but very difficult.”
Baelor heard that and smiled despite himself, a small, knowing smile. He had seen his grandson’s fondness for feeding animals treats never meant for them, without ever quite understanding that affection could fatten a creature as surely as any careless hand. He had heard Valarr’s chagrin more than once when Vaelor insisted that Vharyx ought to have honeyed dates and sugared tarts, as though dragons were made to be pampered on sweets instead of blood and flesh. Patiently, his father had tried to teach him that a dragon must eat meat, and only meat, if it was to stay lean enough for the sky. Yet Vaelor, stubborn in the tender way of children, had only frowned and said that he would rather have his dragon happy and allowed the joys of life than leave him merely fit to fly and never tasting any of them. It was too deep a thought for a boy so young, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that was simply Vaelor’s strange little gift.
“Do you like the jousts?” he asked next.
“A little,” she admitted. “Do you?”
“Yes,” said Vaelor. Then, after a beat, with the gravity of one speaking on a matter already well considered, “Except when they are badly done.”
Royce barked a laugh at that. Even you, who had come into the day lighter than you had been the evening before, felt warmth stir in you. For a little while, the mood held. The sun was bright. The field was splendid. Vaelor was curious and grave and very much a child, asking questions about shields and namedays and whether one could keep a hawk in one’s bedchamber if one was lonely. Gwin, to her own mild surprise, answered him. The sounds from below rose golden and harmless, and for a few brief moments, the day almost remembered how it was meant to look.
The bright mood lasted until Aerion was announced.
The herald’s voice rang over Ashford clear as bronze. Below, the grandson of King Daeron rode out in a blaze of silver hair and princely arrogance, every movement sharpened by the knowledge of being watched. Aerion Brightflame had beauty enough to shame many women and cruelty enough to shame most men. Both were plain in him from horseback. Sunlight flashed on his armour and turned his pale hair almost white. He rode like a man convinced the world existed to frame him well.
Yet even before the first lance was lowered, there was something in the way his gaze lifted toward the royal box that set your skin on edge. He looked not merely at the seats, nor vaguely toward the princes gathered there, but directly where Baelor sat, and that look lingered just a little too long to be innocent. You felt Royce stiffen before you even looked at him. When you did, your eyes met briefly and found the same thought reflected there.
Prince Baelor looked down toward his nephew then, and though the change in his face was slight, you knew him too well to miss it. It was not anger. Not yet. It was caution, worn almost like appeal. A look so restrained another might have taken it for nothing, yet you knew what sat beneath it all the same.
Boy. Watch yourself. Time and place.
Rare enough from a man like Baelor, and more telling for that rarity. He knew Aerion’s temper. Knew his bright cruelties, his hunger for spectacle, his dangerous delight in pushing each room to the point of rupture and then smiling when it broke. Whatever came next, Baelor had seen the shadow of it before the rest.
Vaelor, seeing only that another prince was about to ride, straightened at once in open excitement. “Uncle Aerion.”
He could not hide it. For all the tightness in the men around him, for all the caution and history and rank, Vaelor was still a child, and he loved seeing his uncles do anything. He loved prowess, display, horses, loud voices, laughter, bright silk, all the shining parts of manhood before he had yet learned what else might hide beneath them.
You saw Aerion lower his lance. Saw the turn of his horse. Saw the deliberate drag of the moment.
And for one sick heartbeat, you thought he meant to name Valarr.
Valarr went very still at first, leaning forward in his seat as though he could scarcely believe this was truly happening. Then, with a movement so slight most eyes might have missed it, he rose, helm tucked beneath one arm, and lifted a brow toward his cousin as if to say, Try me, then.
Aerion’s smile sharpened.
“Cousin,” he called.
The word carried easily. Heads turned. For that one thin instant, the whole field seemed to hang upon what might come next.
Valarr did not answer at once. He only stood, tall and pale and composed, looking down at Aerion with that cool disdain the two of them knew too well in one another.
“Not today,” Aerion said brightly. “Do not worry. I’m not going to embarrass you.”
Valarr gave a short, contemptuous scoff and shook his head once, as if to say typical fucking Aerion, though he was too well bred to put the words to air before half the realm.
Royce stopped moving altogether, one hand still half-curled about his armchair.
Baelor’s face altered by so little that any stranger might have missed it, but you did not. Nor, you thought, did Gwin Ashford, whose fingers tightened almost invisibly in the folds of her skirt.
Then Aerion swerved away with that same bright, casual malice and called for Ser Humfrey Hardyng instead.
The whole box breathed again, though not easily.
“It’s time you faced the dragon,” Aerion called, his voice carrying clear and hard for all the field to hear.
Vaelor leaned farther over the rail, interested now rather than wary. To him, it was still pageantry, still princely sport, still something that might be explained.
The first tilt ran.
At the last instant, Aerion leaned, not cleanly, not bravely, but in that ugly, crooked way that made true knights wince even before the full meaning of it had settled. Hardyng’s lance slipped uselessly past. There came a sound from the crowd—not outrage yet, but something uglier than disappointment.
Booing.
It climbed in ripples from the commons, not loud at first, then louder, until even Ashford’s nobility could not pretend not to hear it. It was a coarse sound, all contempt and offended instinct, and for a prince to draw it upon himself in open tilt was a thing not soon forgotten.
Vaelor blinked. “Why are they booing?”
No one answered at once.
Baelor’s jaw tightened so slightly that another man might have missed it.
Royce said at last, very quietly, “Because that was not well done.”
Vaelor looked from him to the field below, trying to understand how a prince could win and yet be shamed for it. He was old enough to hear displeasure, young enough still to believe rank ought to protect against it.
You felt it then, too, hot and ugly beneath the ribs: not personal shame, but dynastic shame. The kind that comes when another man’s dishonour drags at your own colours because the world will not separate one dragon from the next. A prince’s disgrace did not remain his alone. It clung. It travelled.
Below, Aerion laughed.
The second tilt began.
Something in the angle of his lance was wrong before the horses even met. Someone somewhere on the lower benches cried out, too low, but too low was all the time a cruel man needed.
The point struck not man but horse.
The scream that followed tore straight through the day.
Vaelor cried out and seized your sleeve.
Hardyng’s mount went down in a collapsing storm of leather, blood, and ruin. The knight was thrown badly, and when the horse crashed over him, there came a sound no one who heard it would soon forget—a cracking, wet and hard both, like thick branches snapped beneath weight. The crowd’s great voice vanished for one frozen instant, as if all of Ashford had stopped breathing together.
Then the field erupted.
Horror turned to rage so swiftly it scarcely felt like change at all. Men shouted. Women screamed. Stones flew. Someone below the box called Aerion coward with enough force to be heard even through the rising clamour. Ashford soldiers rushed to hold back those who would have stormed the lists, and white cloaks flashed below like knives moving through surf as the Kingsguard drove themselves into the swell of chaos.
Valarr was moving before the first stone struck wood.
He came up out of his seat in a single hard motion, all stillness gone from him now, and the force of it alone sent the nearest men scrambling to obey before he had even spoken. “To my son,” he snapped at the guards nearest his tent, his voice cutting clean through the uproar. “Now. You—stay with my wife. Do not leave her. Get them back from the rail.”
You had already pulled Vaelor against you, but the boy’s face was buried only half against your gown, half turned stubbornly toward the field despite himself, because children always looked even when terror told them not to. His fingers had clenched hard in the silk at your sleeve.
Valarr did not wait to see whether the order was obeyed. He knew it would be. He was already coming from his place before his tent and through to the edge of the confusion, shoving past men with the kind of cold authority that made lesser men clear a path without thinking. Aerion still sat on his horse amid the fury as if he had done something beautiful.
Valarr reached for the bridle and caught it hard.
“Get down here, you little shit,” he said, low and savage enough that only those nearest could hear it.
Aerion turned, bright with indignation and not nearly enough sense. “Take your hand off—”
“Move,” Valarr bit out. “Now.”
For one flashing instant, it looked as though Aerion might argue, might smile, might bare his teeth and make a game of it even now. Valarr stepped closer instead, his face gone so still it had crossed over into something dangerous.
“Get to safety,” he said. “I will see to my wife, my son, and my father. If one stone meant for you strikes them instead, I swear to all the gods I’ll make you regret drawing breath.”
For once, that checked him.
Whether it was the words or simply the look in Valarr’s face, something in Aerion gave way to calculation. Not shame. Never that. But the first reluctant scrape of self-preservation.
Valarr released the bridle with visible contempt. “Move.”
Then he turned from him without another word, because Aerion could wait. His family could not.
“Did the horse die?” Vaelor whispered again.
You could not answer.
Baelor sat as if carved, but too much had gone from his face. It was not the stillness of a man merely embarrassed, nor merely angered. It was heartsickness, plain and heavy, the kind that comes when shame and grief and weary recognition all find the same chair. His eyes came first not to Aerion, nor even to the ruined knight below, but to you and Vaelor. There was something almost helpless in that glance, brief and searching. He had no comfort to offer that would not sound thin. No words fit for this. Yet he lifted one hand and motioned to one of the nearer guards, sending him closer toward his daughter-by-marriage and grandson with the instinct of a man who could not mend what had been done, but would at least gather what remained of his house tighter against it.
Valarr moved through the edge of the chaos with fury held hard on the leash. Sword heavy at his side, lance still clutched in his right hand, he barked orders to the guards and to Ashford men alike, forcing shape upon panic where he could. He did not draw steel. To bare it now would only have worsened the crowd’s rage. But there was enough command in his voice, enough fury banked and sharpened in him, that men obeyed all the same.
Royce said, blunt as only Royce could be, “Seven bloody hells.”
Gwin Ashford looked genuinely stricken. Whatever girlish nameday fancies had begun this spectacle had no place in her face now. She looked not like a celebrated daughter, but a lord’s child who had just watched a prince foul her father’s tourney and drag blood through the silk of it.
Below them, Aerion sat his horse amid the fury as if he had done something beautiful.
After that, no bright banner in Ashford looked quite so bright.
