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Labour

Dark!Ormund Hightower X Targ!Reader (looks not described) X Gwayne Hightower (will be present in part two, Saviour)

A/N: If you are triggered by SA, you can skip this part before reading Saviour. This part focuses on her abuse, while Saviour will center on her healing and finding love.

TW: kidnapping, captivity, violence, graphic violence, murder, character death, physical abuse, torture, sexual harassment, sexual assault, non-consensual touching, sexual coercion, forced nudity, religious abuse, humiliation, degradation, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, manipulation, misogyny, power imbalance, threats of rape, rape. ORMUND IS EVIL!

WC: 29K

You have been traveling for months now, long enough that the sway of the carriage has become a second heartbeat, a constant rhythm of jolts and creaks and the muffled thunder of hooves on packed earth. Your back aches from the endless motion. The cushioned seat, once plush and comfortable, has compressed into a hard slab that offers no relief no matter how you shift your weight. You press your palm against the wooden frame and try to find a position that does not make your spine feel like a column of bruised stones.

You miss Silverwing, the absence of her is a physical ache lodged beneath your sternum, a hollow space where the bond should hum warm and steady. You picture her coiled on the black volcanic beaches of Dragonstone, her scales catching the pale northern light, steam rising from her vast nostrils as the surf crashes against the shore nearby. She would be restless without you. Silverwing always grew restless when you were gone too long, pacing the beach, snapping at the dragonkeepers, refusing to eat. You feel the same restlessness mirrored in your own bones, a constant agitation that no amount of walking or riding or dancing can soothe. Mother insisted you leave her behind, and you understand the logic. Truly, you do. Your mother looked you in the eye and said, "You will leave Silverwing on Dragonstone. I know you, daughter. The moment a suitor displeases you, you will fly home and claim the tour was a failure. I need you to complete this journey. I need you to give each house a genuine opportunity." You agreed because she was right, because you knew yourself well enough to recognize the truth in her words. Understanding does nothing to fill the hollow place inside you. It does nothing to ease the ache.

Your mother's letter arrived four days ago. The words were brief but urgent. The handwriting was your mother's own, but it was shakier than usual, the letters pressed so hard into the parchment that the quill had nearly torn through in places. War has begun. Aegon has been crowned in King's Landing. Your brother Lucerys is dead, murdered by Aemond Targaryen at Storm's End. Return to Dragonstone immediately. Do not delay. Do not stop for any reason. Ride day and night if you must. Come home.

You read the message three times before the shaking started in your hands. The fourth time, you read it aloud to yourself in a whisper, as if hearing the words would make them less terrible. They did not. Lucerys. Sweet Luke, your younger brother, with his easy laugh and his earnest eyes. Dead. Murdered by your uncle Aemond.

Now the carriage moves as fast as the horses can manage, your escort riding close on all sides. Ser Harrold leads them, he has served your mother since before you were born. You remember him lifting you onto your first pony when you were four years old, his calloused hands gentle and sure. He promised your mother he would deliver you safely home, and you believed him when you set out. You believed him with the absolute certainty of a child who has never known true danger. You are less certain now. The roads feel different. The air hums with something invisible and threatening, like the pressure that builds before a thunderstorm breaks. Ser Harrold rides with his hand on his sword hilt at all times. His eyes never stop scanning the horizon. You have caught him muttering prayers under his breath.

You close your eyes and lean your head back against the seat. The motion of the carriage becomes a rocking rhythm, almost soothing despite the discomfort. Your thoughts drift. They always drift to the same place when you are tired and unguarded, when the exhaustion strips away your defenses and leaves the old memories raw and exposed.

Lord Ormund Hightower.

The name curdles in your mind like milk left too long in the sun. You were six and ten when he first appeared at court, the ladies of your mother's household whispered about him constantly. They gathered in corners and alcoves, their voices hushed and breathless, trading observations like stolen treasures. How handsome he was. How commanding his presence. How he moved through a room like a man who knew exactly what he wanted from the world and exactly how to take it. You remember their giggles. You remember the way they blushed when he glanced their way. You remember rolling your eyes so hard it gave you a headache that pulsed behind your temples for an hour afterward.

Handsome. You scoffed at the word then, and you scoff at it now, alone in the dusty confines of your carriage. The man was old. Thirty-five years to your sixteen. Nineteen years gaped between you like an unbridgeable chasm. Your entire lifetime, plus three more years. When he was your age, squiring for some lord or another, you had not even been a flicker of possibility in your mother's womb. You made that observation loudly and often to anyone who would listen, and you made it with the absolute conviction of a girl who believes her opinions are unassailable truths. Your ladies in waiting—Jeyne, Lysa, and sweet little Margot—became your captive audience for a running commentary on Lord Ormund's many, many deficiencies.

"Did you see him at the feast last night?" you asked, sprawled across the velvet settee in your chambers while Jeyne worked your hair. The fire crackled in the hearth, casting dancing shadows across the stone walls. Your shoes lay discarded on the floor where you had kicked them. "He kept sniffing the wine before he drank it. Sniffing it. Like a dog trying to decide whether something is worth eating. I watched him do it three separate times. Three times."

Your ladies laughed, you fed on their laughter like a flame fed on dry kindling, growing brighter and hotter with every sound.

"And his nose," you continued, warming to the subject with the pleasure of a performer who knows her audience is captivated. You sat up straighter on the settee, gesturing dramatically at your own face. "Have you ever seen a nose so... so..." You waggled your fingers vaguely in the air, searching for the most devastating word. "So present? It occupies half his face. It enters a room before he does. I swear to the Seven, he could smell a rose blooming three kingdoms away. He could smell a baker baking bread in a village on the other side of the Narrow Sea."

Jeyne snorted, unladylike and delighted. "You're terrible."

"I am accurate," you declared. "There is a difference. And the way he reacts to scents—have you noticed? He's so sensitive. So delicate. Lady Willa walked past him in the gardens yesterday wearing rosewater on her wrists, just a few drops, barely noticeable. He practically flinched. Flinched! A grown man, a lord of one of the greatest houses in the realm, and he cannot tolerate the scent of flowers. He wrinkled his nose like a child tasting something sour."

Lysa, always the diplomatic one, offered a gentle counterpoint. "They say his sense of smell is exceptionally keen. Some consider it a gift from the gods. The Hightowers have always been known for it—like a family trait, passed down through the blood."

"Some consider it a gift," you repeated, your voice dripping with theatrical disdain. "I consider it ridiculous. What use is a nose that sensitive? He must spend his entire life being assaulted by every odor within a league. Imagine being him at a tourney—the sweat, the horses, the blood. He must be in agony."

"Perhaps he is," Margot offered quietly. "Perhaps that's why he always looks so serious."

You waved her suggestion away with a flick of your wrist. "He looks serious because he has no sense of humor. None. I have never seen him laugh."

Your ladies exchanged glances, you pretended not to see.

You mocked his hair next. "I imagine him standing before a mirror every morning," you said, your voice taking on a cruel, lilting quality, “brushing and arranging and fussing, making sure every single curl falls exactly where it should. His manservant must have the patience of a septon. 'No, my lord, that curl is a quarter-inch too far to the left. Allow me to adjust it.'”

The word creepy became your favorite descriptor, the weapon you reached for most often. Everything about him was creepy. The way he looked at you with those pale eyes, steady and unblinking. The way he seemed to appear wherever you went, materializing at feasts and garden parties and walks through the castle grounds as if he had somehow memorized your schedule. The way he always managed to position himself close enough to speak with you, to compliment the color of your gown or the arrangement of your hair, to let his gaze linger on your face a moment longer than propriety allowed.

"He's ugly," you announced one afternoon with the absolute finality of a judge delivering a sentence. You were lounging in the window seat of your chambers, the spring sunlight warm on your face, while your ladies worked on their embroidery nearby. The declaration came from nowhere, unprompted, as if the thought had been simmering in your mind and finally boiled over. "I don't care what anyone else says. I don't care what the other ladies whisper about. He is old and ugly and odd, and I wish he would go back to Oldtown and stay there. He has no business being at court. He has no business being anywhere near me."

Your ladies exchanged glances again. You knew what those glances meant. You knew every woman at court considered Ormund Hightower devastatingly attractive, with his tall frame and his strong features and his air of authority. You knew Jeyne had once described him as "the most beautiful man I have ever seen" after drinking too much wine at a private supper. You knew Lysa's cheeks flushed pink whenever he entered a room. That knowledge—that universal, undeniable consensus—only made you more determined to despise him. You would never give them the satisfaction of admitting what your eyes could plainly see. Let them call him beautiful. You would call him a relic. You would call him a fossil. You would call him ancient and decrepit and on the very edge of his grave.

The tourney for your sixteenth nameday was meant to be the grandest event of the season, a celebration that would be talked about for years afterward. Knights from every corner of the realm flocked to King's Landing to compete for glory and for the chance to catch the eye of a Targaryen princess. You sat beside your mother in the royal box, elevated above the common spectators, a crown of silver flowers woven through the elaborate coils of your hair. You felt like the center of the universe. You felt like the sun.

You loved every moment of it. You loved the attention that washed over you like warm water, the way every eye turned toward the royal box when you rose to greet the crowd. You loved the spectacle, the pageantry, the thunder of hooves and the crash of lances. You loved knowing that this entire event—the knights, the feasts, the flowers, the music—was all in honor of you. Your mother beamed with pride beside you, her hand occasionally reaching over to squeeze yours. You were her heir, her firstborn, her most precious treasure, and she wanted the whole realm to see what she had created.

The knights paraded past the royal box one by one, their destriers caparisoned in house colors, their armor gleaming with fresh polish. They dipped their lances in salute as they passed, and each dip made the crowd cheer. You smiled and clapped and leaned over to whisper commentary to your ladies, who sat in the row behind you. A young knight from House Mallister winked at you, and Jeyne gasped behind her hand. Lord Ashford's eldest son nearly fell off his horse trying to bow too deeply, and you had to bite the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

Then Lord Ormund Hightower rode into view on a massive gray destrier, and the laughter died in your throat, the horse was a magnificent creature, easily seventeen hands high, its coat the pale silver-gray of morning mist. Ormund sat astride it with the easy confidence of a man born to the saddle. His armor gleamed green and silver, the colors of his house, every plate polished to a mirror shine. His helmet was tucked under one arm, leaving his face bare to the sunlight. His hair fell in perfect light brown curls around his shoulders. His blue eyes scanned the stands with calm, unhurried assurance. The crowd cheered. Your stomach clenched.

He reined his horse to a stop directly in front of the royal box. The massive destrier stood motionless, trained to perfection, while Ormund gazed up at you. The sunlight caught the burnished metal of his pauldrons and turned his curls to spun gold. His eyes found yours and held them. The noise of the crowd seemed to dim, to recede, as if the world had narrowed to just the space between you and him.

"Princess," he said. His voice carried across that space with impossible clarity, rich and deep and perfectly controlled. "I would be honored beyond measure if you would grant me your favor this day. To carry your blessing onto the field would give me strength beyond any armor."

Your stomach dropped as if the floor of the royal box had vanished beneath you. The silence that followed his request was suffocating in its intensity. Every person in the stands was watching. Every lord and lady. Every knight waiting in the lists. Every servant and squire and common spectator. You felt their gazes like pins pressing into your skin from every direction. Your instinct screamed at you to refuse. The words were already forming on your tongue designed to wound him as deeply and publicly as possible. Something cutting about his age. Something cruel about his presumption. Something that would make the crowd laugh at him instead of cheer. You opened your mouth.

Your mother's hand closed around your wrist beneath the railing where no one could see, her grip was iron. Her fingers dug into the delicate bones of your wrist with the strength of a woman who had spent years gripping dragon saddles. Her eyes, when you turned to look at her, were steel.

"You will not shame him," Rhaenyra whispered, her voice barely audible beneath the noise of the crowd and utterly impossible to argue with. "Not here. Not today. Not in front of the entire realm. Give him the favor, Y/N. Now."

The injustice of it burned through your chest like dragonfire, hot and consuming. You wanted to scream. You wanted to wrench your arm free from her grip and stand up and tell every single person watching exactly what you thought of Lord Ormund Hightower and his honor and his beautiful, stupid face and his sensitive, ridiculous nose. You wanted to throw the crown of silver flowers to the ground and grind it beneath your heel. You wanted to summon Silverwing and burn the whole tourney ground to ash. You wanted—

You were a princess. A princess did not throw tantrums before the entire realm. Not even you, and you had thrown more tantrums in your sixteen years than most princesses managed in a lifetime.

Your hands moved mechanically, divorced from your will. You lifted the wreath of silver flowers from your hair, the favor you had prepared for no one in particular, the symbol of your blessing that you had assumed you would grant to some dashing young knight close to your own age. The flowers were delicate things, silverbell blossoms woven with silver thread, their petals soft as moth wings against your fingers. You extended the wreath toward Ormund. Your hand trembled with the force of your suppressed rage. You hoped he could see it. You hoped he knew that every fraction of your smile was a lie.

Ormund reached up and took the wreath from your hands. His fingers brushed against yours in the exchange, deliberate, lingering. The touch lasted half a heartbeat longer than necessary. His skin was warm and rough with calluses from sword practice. His eyes never left your face. They held yours with an intensity that made your breath catch in your throat, regardless of how much you wished it would not.

"I will wear it proudly, Princess," he said, and his voice was warm, almost tender, as if you had given him a genuine gift instead of a forced and bitter concession. His thumb traced a slow, deliberate circle against the inside of your wrist before he withdrew, a touch so subtle that no one in the crowd could have seen it, a secret pressed into your skin. "I will think of you with every pass I make. Your favor will be the shield that guards me and the sword that guides my arm."

He secured the wreath to the end of his lance wrapping the silver threads around the dark wood until the flowers sat bright and unmistakable. Then, as the crowd watched in breathless silence, he lifted the wreath to his face and inhaled deeply. His nostrils flared, his pale blue eyes sliding half-closed with an expression of almost indecent satisfaction. The gesture was intimate, private, a thing meant for bedchambers rather than tourney fields. The crowd roared its approval, blind to the violation in the act. Your mother released your wrist. You drew your hand back into your lap and sat motionless, your spine rigid, feeling something cold and heavy settle into the pit of your stomach like a stone dropped into deep water.

You spent the remainder of the tourney silently wishing for his horse to throw him. You imagined it with vivid, detailed clarity, the massive gray destrier stumbling, Ormund pitching forward over its neck, his beautiful armor clattering in the dust, his perfect curls getting tangled with dirt and horse manure. You imagined the crowd gasping in shock. You imagined sending a maester to tend to his bruises, a maester who was very old and very slow and very bad at his job.

None of it happened. Ormund rode brilliantly that day, as if he had been born in the saddle and nursed on victory. He unhorsed three knights in succession, each opponent fell before Ormund's lance like wheat before a scythe. Each victory brought him back to the royal box to salute you, his horse prancing sideways in a display of controlled power. Each time, he lifted his lance high so the silver flowers caught the afternoon light and sparkled. Each time, the crowd cheered louder, their voices growing hoarse with enthusiasm. Each time, his eyes found yours with that same unwavering intensity, and each time, you felt that gaze like a hand pressing against your skin. Each time, you wanted to sink through the floorboards and disappear into the earth.

"He's doing it to spite me," you hissed to Jeyne during a brief pause in the competition, while servants rushed onto the field to clear away the debris of shattered lances. Your voice was low and venomous. "He's showing off. He's rubbing my face in it. Look at him down there, preening like a peacock. He thinks my favor means something. He thinks I actually wanted to give it to him."

Jeyne, who had served you long enough to recognize the particular edge in your voice that preceded an explosion, wisely said nothing. She kept her eyes fixed on the tourney field and her hands folded primly in her lap.

The feast that evening was interminable, you were seated at the high table, the place of honor beside your mother, with the tourney champion given the seat directly to your right. The arrangement was traditional. Inescapable. You understood with bitter clarity that your mother had orchestrated it deliberately, a gesture of respect to the victor, a public acknowledgment of his achievement. Ormund had shed his armor for a doublet of deep green velvet embroidered with silver thread, the Hightower sigil worked in miniature over his heart. He smelled of sandalwood and something muskier beneath the clean scent, like woodsmoke or old leather. You noticed the scent despite yourself. You noticed it because he was so close that his shoulder nearly brushed yours every time he reached for his wine cup, because he leaned toward you whenever he spoke, his voice pitched low and intimate beneath the roar of conversation that filled the great hall.

"You are not eating, Princess," he observed, halfway through the second course. His knife moved with surgical precision as he cut a sliver of roasted boar, the meat so tender it parted like butter beneath the blade. "The boar is excellent. The kitchens have outdone themselves."

"I am not hungry." Your voice was flat and cold as a winter lake.

"That is a pity." He lifted the morsel to his mouth and chewed slowly, deliberately, his eyes never leaving your face. You watched his jaw work. You watched the muscles of his throat move as he swallowed. "A young woman should have an appetite. You are still growing, after all. Still... developing."

The pause before the word was calculated. You felt it land like a stone dropped into still water. His gaze flicked down from your face—just for an instant, just far enough to make your skin crawl—before returning to your eyes. His expression remained perfectly pleasant, perfectly polite. A faint smile curved the corners of his mouth.

You stabbed your fork into the piece of roast fowl on your plate with enough force to make the porcelain shriek. "I find that my appetite depends greatly on the company I am forced to keep."

If the barb struck home, he gave no indication. His smile merely deepened, settling into the lines around his mouth like it belonged there. "I have always admired your spirit, Princess. It is one of the things I find most compelling about you. You are not like the other young ladies at court—so eager to please, so desperate for approval. You are a dragon. Untamed. Unbroken." He lifted his wine cup and swirled the dark liquid within, watching it cling to the sides of the goblet. "I have always wondered what it would take to gentle such a creature. What hand would be steady enough, patient enough, to earn her trust."

"Perhaps no hand at all," you replied, your voice clipped. "Perhaps the creature in question has no interest in being gentled."

"No interest in being gentled," he repeated, as if tasting the words. His tongue swept across his lower lip, slow and thoughtful. "How delightfully fierce. How wonderfully... spirited." He leaned closer, his shoulder pressing against yours now, his mouth dipping toward your ear. His breath was warm and wine-sweet. "But even dragons can be taught to accept the saddle, Princess. It is only a matter of finding the right rider."

He pulled back before you could respond, lifting his goblet in a toast to Lord Beesbury, who had risen to offer a rambling tribute to the tourney champion. You sat rigid in your chair, your heart hammering against your ribs, your appetite truly dead now. You could still feel the heat of his shoulder against yours, the phantom press of his breath against your ear, the way his eyes had dropped from your face in that fleeting, invasive assessment.

The dancing began after the fourth course was cleared away. The musicians struck up a lively tune, and the center of the great hall transformed into a whirl of silk and velvet and flashing jewels. You danced with half a dozen partners in quick succession, a young Lord Caron with sweaty palms, a knight from House Swann who stepped on your toes twice, Lord Rowan's eldest son who kept his eyes fixed on your bodice throughout the entire reel. You smiled through all of it, your cheeks aching with the effort, your mind fixed on the moment you could reasonably excuse yourself and retreat to your chambers.

Then the music shifted. The lively reel faded into something slower, something more intimate, a waltz, measured and stately, the kind of dance that required partners to stand close, to move in unison, to hold each other's gaze for long, suspended moments. You felt his presence before you saw him, a heat at your back, a whisper of sandalwood and woodsmoke curling through the air.

"Princess." Ormund's voice was a low rumble behind you. "I believe this dance is mine."

It was not a question. You turned to face him and found him already extending his hand, his palm upturned, his expression one of patient expectation. Every eye in the hall was upon you again. The champion claiming his privilege. Tradition demanded you accept. Your mother's gaze, from across the room, was a silent, implacable command.

You placed your hand in his, his fingers closed around yours, he drew you onto the dance floor with the smooth confidence of a man who had done this a thousand times, leading you into the first turn of the waltz with effortless precision.

"You dance beautifully," he murmured, his free hand settling at your waist. His palm was broad and warm, his fingers splayed against the small of your back. The heat of his touch radiated through the silk of your gown. "Though I suspect you know that already. You do everything beautifully, don't you, Princess? Even sulking. Even glowering at me as though you wished I would spontaneously combust."

"I am not glowering."

"You are. Fiercely. Your brows are drawn together and your jaw is clenched and there is a vein in your temple that pulses every time I speak." His thumb traced a small circle against your waist, the motion idle, almost unconscious. "It is deeply endearing. I find myself wanting to provoke it more often, just to watch you react. You are so very alive when you are angry. So very vivid."

"I am so very glad my discomfort amuses you, my lord."

"Not discomfort." He spun you through a turn, his hand guiding you with firm authority. When you came back together, you were standing even closer than before. The length of his body was a wall of heat against yours. "Passion. Fire. That Targaryen blood running hot in your veins. You should be grateful for it, you know. Most women your age are so dull, so tame. They simper and blush and say precisely what they think a man wants to hear." His head dipped toward you, his voice dropping to a register that was barely above a whisper. "You bite. I find it... refreshing."

The dance swept you across the floor in a series of measured steps. His hand at your back guided you with subtle pressure, steering you through the other couples with the ease of long practice. His eyes never left your face. That pale blue gaze was a weight, a pressure, a thing you could feel on your skin like the heat of a candle held too close.

Then his hand moved, a gradual slide from the small of your back downward, palm flattening, fingers spreading wide. By the time you registered what was happening, his hand was resting on the curve of your arse, his grip firm and possessive, his fingers pressing into the silk of your gown with unmistakable intent.

You froze mid-step, your body going rigid as a drawn bowstring. The breath seized in your lungs. "Careful," he murmured, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. His hand did not move. His fingers flexed, gripping once, a slow and deliberate squeeze. "You would not want to cause a scene, Princess. All these people watching. Your mother watching. Imagine the scandal."

Your face flooded with heat. Rage and humiliation warred in your chest, a storm of fire and ice. You wanted to shove him away. You wanted to slap his smug, handsome face. You wanted to scream. But his grip on your other hand was unbreakable, and his body was a solid wall blocking your retreat, and the dance was still going on around you, the other couples spinning and laughing, utterly oblivious to the violation happening in their midst.

"Let go of me," you hissed through clenched teeth, your voice low and shaking with fury.

"In a moment." His hand squeezed again, slower this time, almost contemplative. You could feel the heat of his palm through the layers of your gown, the strength of his fingers, the casual ownership in the gesture. "I have been watching you all evening. Watching you dance with those boys. Watching them fumble and stammer and fail to hold your attention for more than a heartbeat. Do you know what I thought, Princess? I thought, She deserves better. She deserves a man who knows how to handle her."

"I would sooner be handled by a Dothraki savage."

His laugh was a low rumble against your ear. "There. That fire. That is what I mean." His hand finally—finally—slid back up to the acceptable territory of your waist, but the memory of its presence lingered like a brand. "I am going to enjoy taming you, little dragon. Every sharp word. Every flash of defiance. Every time you look at me with those furious eyes and think of ways to wound me." He spun you through another turn, and when you came together again, his smile was wolfish and knowing and utterly, terrifyingly patient. "And you will wound me, I am sure. You will try. But I have been wounded before, Princess. I have survived. And I have a very long memory."

The waltz ended. He released you with a formal bow, lifting your hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to your knuckles that lingered a fraction of a second longer than propriety allowed. His eyes met yours over the back of your hand. They were bright with satisfaction, with anticipation, with the quiet certainty of a man who had already won.

"Thank you for the dance," he said, loud enough for the nearest onlookers to hear. "It was everything I hoped it would be."

You fled the great hall the moment you could extricate yourself from the crowd. You fled to your chambers and slammed the door behind you and stood there in the darkness, trembling, your hand pressed to the place on your gown where his fingers had gripped you. You could still feel the phantom pressure of his palm. You could still smell sandalwood and woodsmoke clinging to your skin. You did not sleep that night. You sat at your window and watched the stars wheel overhead and hated him with a purity of feeling that was almost religious in its intensity.

The memory shifts. It blurs at the edges and reforms into a different moment, the same sick feeling coiling in your stomach.

You are standing in the corridor outside your mother's solar. The stone walls are cold against your back where you press yourself against them, hidden in the shadows of a recessed alcove. Sconces flicker along the hallway, their flames guttering in a draft you cannot feel. The door to the solar is not quite closed. A gap of perhaps two inches remains between the heavy oak and the frame, and through that gap, voices drift into the corridor. Your mother's voice, measured and careful, the voice she uses when negotiating something delicate. Another voice, Ormund's voice. You recognize it instantly, the way you would recognize a snake's hiss.

"She is young," your mother is saying. Her voice carries the weight of careful diplomacy. "She has only just turned sixteen. She has a strong will and a stronger temper. You understand what you are asking of her. You understand what you are asking of me."

"I understand completely, Your Grace." Ormund's voice is calm and steady, utterly sure of itself, as if the outcome of this conversation is already decided. "I have thought of nothing else since I first saw her at court. She is extraordinary. Fierce. Intelligent. Beautiful beyond measure. I am prepared to wait for her. I am prepared to be patient while she grows accustomed to the idea. But I wanted to make my intentions known formally, before another suitor pressed a claim that might complicate matters."

A pause. You hear the soft clink of a wine cup being set down on a wooden surface. You imagine your mother taking a long drink, buying herself time to think.

"She is my heir," Rhaenyra says at last. "My firstborn child and my successor. Any man who marries her will one day stand beside the Iron Throne as consort. He will share in her power and her responsibility. You understand that as well, Lord Ormund. This is not simply a marriage. This is the future of the realm."

"I do understand, Your Grace. I understand completely." Ormund's voice is grave now, respectful, pitched to convey the full weight of his sincerity. "My house has served the crown faithfully for generations. The Hightowers have always been leal subjects to the Targaryen dynasty. I would be honored to continue that tradition. I would be honored to stand beside your daughter and support her claim with all the strength of Oldtown and the Hightower behind us. Our children would unite two of the oldest bloodlines in Westeros."

Our children. The words hit you like a physical blow. You press your hand against your mouth to stifle the sound of disgust that rises in your throat. The thought of bearing his children—of him touching you, of his hands on your body, of his seed taking root in your womb—makes your stomach lurch violently.

Another pause, longer this time. You hold your breath until your lungs begin to ache. The flames in the sconces gutter and dance. Your mother does not respond immediately. You hear the rustle of fabric, the soft sound of a goblet being lifted and set down again.

"I will speak with her," Rhaenyra says at last, and her voice carries something you cannot quite identify, caution, perhaps, or weariness. "I will present your suit to her and hear her thoughts on the matter. But I make no promises, Lord Ormund. My daughter's happiness is not a small consideration. It is the primary consideration. I will not force her into a match she cannot accept."

"I would expect nothing less from you, Your Grace. You are a devoted mother as well as a queen. Your daughter is fortunate to have you." A pause. The scrape of a chair being pushed back. "Thank you for hearing me. Thank you for considering my suit. I will await your daughter's decision with hope in my heart."

Footsteps approach the door. You scramble backward, your heart hammering against your ribs so hard you can feel your pulse in your temples. Your slippers make no sound on the stone floor—a small mercy—as you duck around the corner and press yourself into a narrow alcove hidden behind a tapestry. The fabric smells of dust and old incense. You hold your breath.

The door opens. Ormund Hightower walks out of your mother's solar and into the corridor. His stride is confident, unhurried, the stride of a man who has just won something far more valuable than a tourney. His shoulders are relaxed beneath the fine fabric of his doublet. His expression is calm and satisfied, the faint ghost of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He pauses for a moment in the corridor, looking left and right as if orienting himself.

Then he stops, his nostrils flare. His head turns, slowly, deliberately, toward the tapestry behind which you are hiding. His eyes—those pale, piercing blue eyes—fix on the exact spot where you are concealed. The smile on his face widens by a fraction.

"Jasmine," he murmurs, almost too quietly to hear. "Such a distinctive scent."

He stands there for a long, terrible moment, his gaze boring through the tapestry as if it were made of glass. Then he turns and continues on his way, his footsteps fading gradually into the distance.

Your hands clench into fists at your sides. Your jaw tightens until your teeth ache. You wait until his footsteps have faded completely, and then you are moving, shoving yourself out of the alcove and storming toward the solar door. You push it open with enough force to send it crashing against the interior wall. The sound echoes through the room like a thunderclap. Your mother looks up from her desk, startled, a goblet of wine halfway to her lips. Her expression shifts from surprise to resignation in the space of a heartbeat.

"He asked for my hand." Your voice comes out in a snarl, low and furious and barely controlled. "He asked for my hand in marriage, and you let him. You listened to him. You heard him out while he stood there and talked about me as if I were a piece of property to be negotiated over—"

"Y/N." Your mother sets down the goblet with a deliberate, careful motion. Her voice is dangerously calm, the calm of a dragon before it opens its jaws. "Close the door."

You slam it. The heavy oak crashes into its frame with a boom that rattles the sconces on the walls. "He is old, Mother. He is thirty-five years old. That is nearly twenty years older than me. He is practically in his grave. He is a relic. He is a fossil. He is an ancient, decrepit, gray-haired—"

"His hair is not gray."

"It will be soon! He is closer to forty than thirty. When I am his age, he will be nearly sixty. Sixty, Mother. Imagine being married to a man of sixty. Imagine sharing a bed with a man of sixty. I would rather die. I would rather feed myself to Silverwing. I would rather—"

"You will lower your voice." Rhaenyra rises from her chair. The movement is slow and deliberate, full of the unconscious authority of a woman who has worn a crown for many years. Her eyes flash with warning.

"I will not lower my voice!" You are shouting now, your voice rising to fill the solar. "I will scream it from the rooftops if I must. I will climb to the top of the Tower of the Hand and announce it to the entire city. I will not marry Lord Ormund Hightower. I would rather marry a stable boy. I would rather marry a Dornish horse. I would rather marry the horse's saddle. I would rather marry no one at all and let the succession fall to—"

"Enough." The word cuts through your tirade like a blade through silk. Your mother's voice is not loud, but it carries absolute command. Her eyes flash with the fire of old Valyria. "You will not speak to me this way. You are my daughter and my heir, and I love you beyond measure, but you are still a child in many ways. This display proves it. You are acting like a petulant girl who has been denied a sweet, not like a future queen who understands the weight of political reality."

The sting of that rebuke steals your breath. You stand there in the center of the solar, your chest heaving, tears of fury pricking at the corners of your eyes. The words hit you harder than any blow could have. Your mother sighs. The tension in her shoulders softens slightly. She reaches up and rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers.

"He touched me." The words tear themselves from your throat, raw and shaking. "At the feast. During the waltz. He put his hand on my—he touched me where no one should touch, and he told me not to make a scene, and I could not say anything because everyone was watching, and—"

"What are you talking about" The word cuts through your tirade like a blade through silk. Your mother's voice is not loud, but it carries absolute command. Her eyes flash with the fire of old Valyria. "Tell me everything. Slowly. From the beginning."

You tell her. The words pour out of you in a flood, the hand on your backside, the whisper in your ear. Your mother listens in silence, her face growing paler and harder with every word. When you finish, you are shaking, tears of fury and humiliation streaming down your cheeks.

"I will not marry him." Your voice cracks on the words. "I will never marry him. If you make me marry him, I will—I will feed myself to Silverwing. I will throw myself from the highest tower of the Red Keep. I will—"

"You will not marry him." Your mother's voice is iron, absolute, unshakeable. "I give you my word. Whatever political advantages a Hightower alliance might offer, they are not worth your safety. They are not worth your dignity." She rises from her chair and crosses the room, taking your face in her hands. Her palms are warm and steady against your tear-wet cheeks. "I did not know, my darling. I did not know about the dance. If I had known, I would never have allowed him in this room. I would never have heard his suit."

"Then refuse him." Your voice is a broken whisper. "Promise me you will refuse him."

"I promise." She presses a kiss to your forehead. "I will tell him tomorrow. He will leave court within the fortnight. You will never have to see him again."

The carriage lurches to a halt so abruptly that you are thrown forward against the opposite seat. The violence of the stop catches you completely off guard. Your shoulder strikes the wooden frame with a sickening crack, and pain blossoms through your arm in hot waves. You cry out, the sound torn from your throat before you can suppress it. For a moment, you are simply stunned, crumpled against the seat, trying to understand what has happened.

Then you hear the shouting, your guards are yelling, their voices sharp with alarm and edged with something that sounds terrifyingly like fear. Ser Harrold's voice rises above the others, bellowing orders that you cannot quite make out. Then other voices join the chaos. Rougher voices. Harsher voices. Voices you do not recognize, voices that bark commands in an unfamiliar cadence.

A horn blows. The sound is harsh and brazen, cutting through the shouting like a blade. Steel rings against steel. The clash of swords is unmistakable, a sound you have heard at tourneys a hundred times, but never like this. The metallic shriek of blade meeting blade is punctuated by screams of pain, by the wet, heavy sound of steel sinking into flesh.

Your blood turns to ice. The cold spreads outward from your chest, creeping down your arms and legs until your fingers feel numb and distant. You scramble to the window on hands and knees, your heart hammering so hard you can feel it in your throat. Your fingers fumble with the curtain, clumsy with sudden terror. You tear the fabric aside and press your face to the narrow gap.

Your escort is fighting. Ser Harrold is fighting you can see him in the center, his gray beard matted with blood, his sword flashing in the afternoon sun as he cuts down one attacker and turns to face another. His movements are desperate, the movements of a man who knows he is fighting a losing battle but refuses to yield. Around him, your other guards are falling. You watch Ser Wilsem take a sword thrust through his belly and crumple forward over his horse's neck. You watch young Pete, the squire who blushed every time you looked at him, get dragged from his saddle by three men in green and silver armor. They are outnumbered. They are being slaughtered.

Green and silver armor gleams everywhere you look. Hightower colors. Hightower soldiers. They swarm around the carriage like ants on a carcass, like wolves around a wounded deer. There are so many of them—twenty at least, maybe thirty, their surcoats bright with the tower-and-flame sigil.

An arrow takes Ser Harrold in the throat, you see it happen. You see the gray-fletched shaft appear as if by magic, buried deep in the flesh of his neck. You see the shock register on his weathered face. You see his mouth open as if to speak, and blood bubbles out instead of words. You see him sway in the saddle, his sword slipping from his fingers. You see him fall. You see the blood spray bright and arterial across the trampled grass, a crimson arc that catches the sunlight and seems to hang in the air for a terrible, frozen moment.

A scream tears from your throat, it is a raw, primal sound, ripped from somewhere deep in your chest. It scrapes your throat raw on the way out. You slam your fist against the carriage door, pounding on the wood hard enough to bruise your knuckles. You fumble for the latch. You need to get out. You need to run. You need to find a horse, steal a horse, do something, anything—

The door rips open with a violence that sends splinters flying, a soldier's face appears in the gap, filling the doorway. "There she is," he says, and his voice is a crow's caw of triumph. "The little dragon princess. Lord Ormund's prize. Right where they said she'd be."

You kick him in the face, your foot connects with his nose, driven by pure, animal panic. You feel the cartilage crunch under your heel, a sickening sensation that travels up your leg. Blood sprays from his nostrils, bright red and immediate. He staggers backward with a howl of pain and shock and rage, his hands flying to his ruined face. You launch yourself toward the open door, toward the rectangle of afternoon light, toward freedom.

Hands catch you before you take two steps. Too many hands. They come from every direction, rough and calloused and implacable. They close around your arms and your waist and your shoulders. They drag you from the carriage, your feet leaving the wooden step entirely, and you are fighting, screaming, thrashing, twisting in their grip. You scratch at any flesh you can reach. Your nails rake down a soldier's cheek and you feel the skin tear, feel blood well up under your fingernails. He curses and backhands you across the face with brutal, casual force. The blow snaps your head to the side and fills your mouth with the taste of copper and salt. Bright lights burst behind your eyes.

"Careful with her, you fool!" someone barks from nearby. The voice carries the sharp edge of command. "Lord Ormund said unharmed. He was very specific. Unharmed and unspoiled. Do you want to explain to him why her face is bruised? Do you want to be the one who answers for it when he sees a mark on her?"

The soldiers laugh. It is an ugly sound, thick with dark implication. They hold you fast despite your continued struggles, your arms pinned behind your back at a painful angle, your feet barely touching the blood-slicked grass. The world spins around you, the wrecked carriage, the bodies of your guards scattered like broken toys, the green and silver soldiers moving among the dead. The horses are gone, run off into the fields or stolen by the attackers. The carriage is a wreck, one wheel splintered and the door hanging from its hinges. The afternoon sun beats down on the scene of slaughter with indifferent brightness.

"Pretty thing," one of the soldiers says, leaning close to your face. His breath is hot and foul against your ear, and you flinch away from him, but there is nowhere to go. The hands holding you do not loosen. "Can see why the lord wants her kept whole. A face like that, you'd want to keep it pretty."

"Don't get ideas," another soldier warns. "Lord Ormund's been waiting a long time for this. A very long time. He's not going to share."

"He's been waiting two years," a third soldier adds. There is something knowing in his voice, something that suggests he has heard stories. "Remember how she treated him at the tourney? My cousin was there. Said she gave him her favor with a face like she'd swallowed a cup of piss."

They laugh again. The sound crawls across your skin like insects with too many legs.

"Wouldn't be me," the first soldier mutters, still dabbing at his bleeding nose with the back of his hand. "Someone treated me like that, I'd have taught her some manners right there. Tourney or no tourney. Princess or no princess."

"That's why you're not Lord Ormund," another soldier says. "The man has patience. The man has plans. He's been thinking about this for two years. He told us he can still smell the jasmine in her hair, clear as the day he first caught her scent. Told us he'd know her blindfolded, in a room full of women, just by that smell alone."

"Speak of the scent and the scent shall appear," another soldier says with a dark chuckle. "The lord's going to be very pleased to have her back under his nose. Very pleased indeed."

They bind your wrists with rough rope that bites into your skin the moment it tightens. The rope is coarse hemp, unsoftened by use, and it scrapes your flesh raw with every movement. The soldier tying the knots pulls them cruelly tight, and you feel the rope dig into the delicate skin of your wrists, feel the circulation cut off, feel your fingers begin to tingle and grow numb. You keep struggling anyway. You keep twisting in their grip, keep searching for any weakness, any gap, any opportunity to break free. There is none. These men are soldiers. They are hard and practiced and utterly without mercy. They have done this before. The realization settles over you like a shroud.

They throw you onto the back of a horse like a sack of grain, your stomach hitting the saddle with a force that drives the breath from your lungs. A soldier mounts behind you, swinging up with practiced ease, and his arm locks around your waist with bruising force. You feel the solid bulk of his chest against your back, the rough wool of his surcoat scratching your neck. You feel his breath on your ear, warm and damp. Revulsion crawls across your skin like a living thing, like a thousand tiny feet.

"Lord Ormund's going to be very pleased," the soldier says, and his voice is a low purr of satisfaction. "Very, very pleased. He told us to watch for you special. Gave us your route. Told us exactly where you'd be and exactly when you'd be there. Told us your escort numbers and your travel speed and everything else we needed to know."

The words sink into you like stones dropped into dark water, each one heavier than the last. Gave us your route. Told us exactly where you'd be. He knew. The horse begins to move. You are surrounded by armed men. Your wrists are bound. You are being delivered like a parcel to a man you publicly humiliated, rejected, and mocked without mercy.

The memories crowd in again. They come without your permission, flooding your mind with vivid, unwelcome clarity. The garden, the sniffing, the way you made your ladies laugh. The tourney, his thumb on your wrist, his nose buried in the silver flowers. The feast, his hand on your body, his voice in your ear. The alcove, the tapestry rough against your back, his eyes finding you through the fabric as if you were lit by torchlight.

The soldiers talk among themselves as they ride. Their voices weave around you like a net tightening with every passing mile. You catch fragments of crude commentary and casual brutality.

"...heard she's got a dragon. Big silver one. Silverwing, they call her. Used to belong to the Good Queen herself..."

"...where's the dragon now, Princess? Why isn't she here to save you? Did your mother make you leave her behind?..."

"...smart of the queen, really. Send her Heir defenseless across the kingdoms..."

"...shame, though. Would've liked to see a dragon up close. Never seen one. My father saw Vhagar once, back during the old king's reign. Said it was the most terrifying thing he ever witnessed..."

"...they say Silverwing breathes fire hot enough to melt stone. Hot enough to turn a man to ash where he stands. Good thing she's not on that dragon now..."

More laughter. It rolls over you in waves, suffocating and inescapable. You close your eyes and try to find that place inside yourself where Silverwing waits. The bond between dragon and rider is ancient magic, deeper than blood, stronger than distance. You reach for it desperately. You cast your mind out across the leagues of countryside, searching for the familiar warmth of her presence. She is too far away. The bond is there—you can feel it, a faint thread of connection humming at the very edge of your awareness—but it is stretched thin by distance, useless. She cannot hear you. She cannot know what is happening. She is coiled on the black beaches of Dragonstone, and you are here, and there are too many miles between you.

You are a dragonrider, bonded to one of the most magnificent creatures in existence. You are your mother's daughter, raised to be a queen, and you are completely, utterly, terrifyingly powerless.

The column rides on. The shadows lengthen and darken. The sun sinks toward the horizon in a blaze of orange and pink and blood-red, and the sky darkens from blue to purple to the deep velvet black of a country night.. You are cold. The spring night air has a bite to it that cuts through the thin fabric of your gown. Your dress is torn at the shoulder where the soldiers dragged you from the carriage, the sleeve hanging by threads. The bruise on your face throbs in steady rhythm with your heartbeat, a dull, persistent ache that sharpens every time you move your jaw. The ropes around your wrists have rubbed your skin raw, and you can feel the sticky warmth of blood trickling down your fingers.

Your mind keeps circling back to the same terrible image, the same memory that plays on an endless loop behind your eyes. Ormund Hightower, standing in your mother's solar, calm and patient and utterly certain. I am prepared to wait. I am prepared to be patient.

And now the waiting is over.

The torches of the camp appear through the darkness like a swarm of fireflies scattered across the hillside, hundreds of pinpricks of orange light flickering against the black expanse of the night sky. Your body has gone numb from hours of riding—your legs aching, your shoulders screaming from the angle at which your bound arms are wrenched behind your back, your wrists raw and slick with blood where the rope has worn through the first layers of skin. The soldier behind you keeps his arm locked around your waist, and you have long since stopped struggling against his grip. There is no point. There is nowhere to run. Even if you managed to break free, you would be cut down or recaptured before you made it ten paces.

The camp grows larger as you approach, the soldiers ride directly through the heart of the camp. Men look up from their meals and their dice games and their weapon maintenance. They see you. They stare. Some of them grin with recognition. Some of them nudge each other and gesture in your direction. You catch fragments of their murmured comments—"There she is," and "The princess," and "Lord Ormund's been waiting"—and each word lands on your skin like a brand. You are a spectacle. You are entertainment. You are the prize being delivered to the conqueror.

The horse stops outside the largest tent. The soldier behind you dismounts first, and then his hands close around your waist and drag you down after him. Your legs buckle when your feet hit the ground. The muscles in your thighs and calves have gone dead from hours of forced immobility, and you crumple forward before the soldier yanks you upright by your bound arms. The pain that shoots through your shoulders is bright and electric, and you bite down hard on your lip to keep from crying out. The taste of copper floods your mouth.

"Walk," the soldier growls, shoving you forward. "Lord Ormund doesn't like to be kept waiting."

Two soldiers grip your arms and drag you toward the tent. The canvas flaps are pulled aside by guards stationed at the entrance, and then you are inside, stumbling forward into the warm, golden glow of interior light.

The tent is enormous, more like a portable hall than a simple campaign shelter. Rich carpets cover the packed earth floor in overlapping layers of crimson and gold. Oil lamps hang from the support poles on delicate chains, filling the space with soft, wavering illumination. A heavy wooden table stands to one side, covered with maps and markers and the scattered detritus of military planning. Servants move quietly around the periphery of the space—men and women in simple woolen clothes, their eyes carefully downcast, their movements silent and efficient.

And at the center of the tent, dominating everything, sits a large copper bathtub, steam rises from the surface of the water in lazy curls, carrying the faint scent of lavender oil and something else, something herbal and clean. The tub is positioned so that anyone entering the tent sees it immediately, and you see it, and you see him.

Lord Ormund Hightower reclines in the bath with his arms resting along the copper rim, his head tipped back slightly, his eyes closed in an expression of perfect, languid relaxation. The water laps at his chest, obscuring the lower half of his body but leaving his shoulders and arms bare to the lamplight. His light brown curls are damp, darkened by the water, clinging to his temples and the back of his neck. His skin gleams in the warm light, the muscles of his shoulders and arms shifting subtly as he breathes. A faint smile plays at the corners of his mouth. It is the smile of a man who has been anticipating this moment for a very long time.

Standing near the tub, holding a folded length of drying cloth, is a boy. He looks around your age, eighteen, perhaps, or a little younger. His hair is a striking shade of red, the color of autumn leaves or a fox's pelt, falling in soft waves to his upper shoulders. His eyes are blue, a pale and watery blue, and they are fixed firmly on the floor. He does not look up when you enter. He does not look at anything except the ground. There is a stillness to him, a quiet watchfulness, that suggests he sees far more than his downcast eyes would indicate.

"Our lord," the lead soldier announces, his voice gruff with deference, "we have brought the princess. Her escort has been dealt with. Killed to the last man."

Ormund's eyes open slowly, languidly, as if he has all the time in the world. His pale blue gaze finds you across the tent, and the faint smile on his lips widens by a fraction, with the slow, savoring satisfaction of a cat finally closing its claws around a mouse it has been stalking for hours. His tongue sweeps across his lower lip, slow and thoughtful. He looks at you the way a man looks at a meal he has been starving for.

"Princess," he says, and the word drips from his mouth like honey laced with poison. "No. Not a princess."

The word hangs in the warm, lavender-scented air. The soldiers holding your arms shift slightly, uncertain. Ormund lifts one hand from the rim of the tub and gestures idly, a dismissive flick of his wet fingers. Water droplets scatter across the carpet.

"Not even a lady," he continues, his voice smooth and unhurried, the voice of a man delivering a sermon he has rehearsed a hundred times. "Not even a legitimate daughter. She is a bastard. A baseborn creature of sin and deceit. Her whore of a mother spread her legs for whatever man would have her because Laenor Velaryon was more interested in pretty young men than in his own wife, and so that fat, entitled cunt, found her pleasures wherever she could get them. In stables. In storerooms. In any dark corner where a man would have her."

Your body goes rigid. The words hit you like blows, each one a slap across your already bruised face. A sound tears from your throat—a strangled noise of pure, incandescent rage.

"You lie," you snarl, straining against the hands that hold you. "You vile, lying—my mother is worth a thousand of you, you craven—"

The soldier to your right backhands you across the mouth, the blow snaps your head to the side. Pain explodes through your jaw, bright and blinding, and your lip splits against your teeth. Blood floods your mouth, hot and copper-sweet, and you stagger in the soldiers' grip. The tent swims around you, the lamplight fracturing into a thousand spinning points of gold.

"Do not interrupt me," Ormund says, and his voice has not changed at all. It is still calm, still smooth, still utterly unhurried. "You will learn. You will learn that when I speak, you listen. When I command, you obey. Your opinions are worth less than the dirt beneath my boots, and I have no interest in hearing them. Do you understand?"

You spit blood onto the beautiful crimson carpet. It lands in a bright red spray, stark against the gold patterns. "I understand that you are a coward and a monster," you say, your voice shaking but defiant. "I understand that you had to ambush a carriage full of guards to capture one unarmed woman. I understand that you are pathetic and old and so desperate for my attention that you have been obsessing over me for two years like some kind of—"

This time it is not a backhand. The soldier drives his fist into your stomach, and the breath leaves your body in a single, agonizing rush. You double over, retching, your bound arms twisting behind you at a brutal angle. The world goes gray at the edges. You cannot breathe. You cannot think. There is nothing but the white-hot pain radiating through your gut, the taste of blood and bile in your throat.

Ormund watches. He watches with that same faint smile, that same expression of patient satisfaction. When the soldier pulls your head back by your hair, forcing you upright again, Ormund's eyes trace the fresh blood on your lip, the tears streaking through the dust on your cheeks, the way your chest heaves as you struggle to draw breath.

"You are a bastard," he says, picking up the thread of his speech as if there had been no interruption. "You and your brothers are all bastards. Sins born out of wedlock. Abominations in the eyes of gods and men. You have no right to the Iron Throne. You have no right to any title or claim or pretense of nobility. You are the product of your mother's lust and your mother's lies, and nothing more. Your very existence is an insult to every law of gods and men."

He pauses. His eyes, still fixed on you, glitter in the lamplight like chips of ice. His hand moves idly through the bathwater, fingers trailing through the steam.

"And yet," he says, and his voice drops slightly, growing softer and more dangerous, almost intimate, "this bastard, this sin made flesh, this walking monument to her mother's whoredom, once thought herself above me. She mocked me. She laughed at me with her little friends. She called me old and ugly and odd. She called me a fossil, a relic, a man practically in his grave. She turned up her nose at my suit and screamed at her mother that she would rather marry a Dornish horse than suffer my touch. She made a performance of sniffing the air whenever I drew near, asking her ladies if they could smell something unpleasant."

He rises from the bath, the water sluices off his body in sheets, streaming down his chest and his stomach and his thighs. He steps out of the copper tub with the unhurried confidence of a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, and he makes absolutely no move to cover himself. He stands there, completely naked, the lamplight painting his body in shades of gold and shadow. Droplets of water cling to the dark gold hair of his chest, trace the lines of muscle down his abdomen, slide along the powerful sweep of his thighs. His body is that of a man in his prime, broad shouldered, lean hipped, the muscles of his arms and chest defined by years of sword work and riding. His cock hangs heavy between his legs, half-stirring from the heat of the bath. He does nothing to hide it. He does nothing to shield you from the sight. He stands before you utterly exposed, utterly unashamed, and the smile on his face says that he knows exactly how uncomfortable it makes you.

Your face burns. The heat rushes to your cheeks, your neck, the tips of your ears. You try to look away, try to fix your eyes on the carpet, on the tent wall, on anything but the naked expanse of his body, but the soldier's hand tightens in your hair and wrenches your head back. You have no choice but to look. You have no choice but to see all of him.

"What's the matter?" Ormund asks, his voice dripping with mockery. He takes a step closer, and then another, his bare feet silent on the thick carpets. Water drips from his body onto the crimson wool. "You seem uncomfortable. You seem... flushed. Is something wrong? You were so eager to mock my appearance before. So eager to call me old and ugly and decrepit. Take a good look. Does this look decrepit to you?"

He stops directly in front of you, close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from his bath-heated skin, close enough that you can smell the lavender oil and the clean, sharp scent of the soap he used, close enough that if you reached out your bound hands, you would touch him. He is so close that you have to tilt your head back to meet his eyes, and doing so forces you to look up the entire length of his body—his thighs, his hips, the flat plane of his stomach, the broad expanse of his chest. He knows this. He positioned himself deliberately to make it unavoidable.

"My mother will burn you for this," you whisper, your voice shaking but still fierce. "When she finds out what you've done, she will feed you to Syrax. She will reduce your precious Oldtown to ash and rubble. She will—"

His hand closes around your throat, the grip is not hard enough to choke, but it is hard enough to silence. His fingers wrap around the column of your neck, damp from the bath, warm, implacable. His thumb rests against the hollow of your throat where your pulse hammers frantically, and you can feel the calluses on his palm from sword practice, rough against your skin.

"Your mother," he says, his voice a low, venomous murmur, "is a usurper and a whore. She will be dead within the year. Aegon sits the Iron Throne now, and when this war is over, there will be no more pretenders. No more bastards claiming what is not theirs. Your mother will die screaming, and your brothers will die with her, and you—" His grip tightens fractionally, just enough to make your breath catch. "You will be here. Serving me. Learning humility. Learning what happens to bastard girls who think themselves above their betters."

He releases your throat with a small, contemptuous push. Your head snaps back, and you gasp for air, your chest heaving. "Look at you," he says, stepping back slightly, his eyes raking over you with disdain. "You are filthy. Your dress is torn. Your face is bruised. There is blood on your wrists and dirt on your hands and dust in your hair. You smell of sweat and horses and fear." His nostrils flare, and he makes a show of wrinkling his nose, a deliberate, mocking echo of the gesture you once used to humiliate him. "You reek. You are filthy inside and out—your body, your blood, your very soul. The bastard daughter of a whore princess, captured and delivered like the common criminal she is."

Behind him, the red-haired boy moves. He approaches Ormund with his eyes still downcast, still fixed on the floor, and he holds out a long green vest. His movements are practiced and deferential, the movements of someone who has done this many times before. Ormund does not acknowledge him. He does not turn away from you. He simply extends his arms slightly, and the boy slips the vest onto his shoulders with careful, efficient hands. The green fabric settles over Ormund's still damp skin, and the boy fastens it with quick, discreet movements. The vest falls only to Ormund's hips. It covers nothing below his waist. He remains exposed, unashamed, and he makes no move to rectify this. The boy steps back to his place by the tub, his gaze never once rising from the floor.

Ormund continues to stare at you. His eyes trace the lines of your face, the bruise darkening on your cheekbone, the blood drying on your split lip, the wild tangle of your hair. That faint smile remains on his lips, but there is nothing warm in it. It is the smile of a man savoring a victory long delayed, a revenge long anticipated.

"Take her," he says, and his voice carries easily through the tent. He is speaking to the servants now, to the men and women who stand waiting along the canvas walls. "Take her to the river. Strip her of those ruined clothes—cut them off her if you must—and wash the filth from her skin. Scrub her until she is raw. I want every trace of her former life washed away. She will be dressed in servants' garments—plain wool, sturdy and serviceable, appropriate to her station. Brown. Undyed. The color of dirt. The color of nothing."

He reaches out. His hand, still slightly damp from the bath, closes around your jaw. His grip is harder than before, fingers digging into the soft flesh of your cheeks, forcing your mouth into a slight pucker. His thumb presses against the edge of your bruised cheekbone, directly on the darkest part of the bruise, and the pain is sharp and immediate. You whimper despite yourself, a small, involuntary sound that makes his smile widen.

"She will serve me," he says, his eyes boring into yours. "She will wait on my table. She will clean my quarters. She will empty my chamber pot. She will perform whatever tasks I assign to her, no matter how menial, no matter how degrading. She is a servant now, a baseborn creature of no name and no house, and servants do not wear silk. Servants do not wear jewels. Servants do not speak unless spoken to, and they do not raise their eyes to their betters, and they do not—" He shakes your head slightly, a small, sharp movement. "—talk back."

"If she fights," he continues, releasing your jaw and turning away, "bind her tighter. If she screams, gag her. If she tries to run, hobble her. If she speaks a single word of defiance, strike her across the mouth. She will learn her place. She will learn humility. She will learn that a bastard does not refuse a lord. She will learn that a sin does not mock a righteous man. She will learn that the nose she mocked so cruelly will follow her scent to the ends of the earth if she tries to flee."

He gestures dismissively toward the tent flap, still not bothering to cover the rest of his body. The green vest hangs open, framing the broad expanse of his chest, the trail of dark gold hair that descends past his navel.

"The boy will accompany you," he adds. "He will ensure that the task is done properly. He is very good at ensuring things are done properly. Aren't you, boy?"

The red haired youth bows his head lower. "Yes, my lord," he says. His voice is soft, barely above a whisper. He still does not look at you. His hands are folded in front of him, his shoulders slightly hunched, his entire posture one of quiet, careful submission. There is something in the way he holds himself that suggests he is far more aware than he appears.

"Go," Ormund says. "Wash the stink of her old life from her skin. I want her clean when I see her next."

The soldiers drag you backward toward the tent flap. You twist in their grip, craning your neck to keep your eyes on Ormund, on his half naked form standing in the center of the lamplit tent, on the satisfied smile that curls his lips.

"You will never break me," you spit, blood and saliva flying from your torn lip. "You can strip me and beat me and dress me in rags, but I am still a Targaryen. I am still my mother's daughter. And when Silverwing finds me—when she burns this camp to ash—I will stand in the embers and watch you die."

Ormund laughs. It is a soft, almost gentle sound, utterly devoid of humor.

"Silverwing," he repeats, savoring the name. "The Good Queen's dragon. A magnificent creature. I've heard she's on Dragonstone. A long way from here. A very long way." He turns his back on you, walking toward the table covered in maps. "But please, hold onto that hope. Nurture it. Let it keep you warm at night. It will make it so much sweeter when you finally understand that no one is coming for you."

The soldiers drag you through the tent flap and out into the cold night air. The last thing you see before the canvas falls shut is Ormund Hightower standing over his war table, naked beneath his half-fastened vest, still smiling.

Your breath tears out of you in harsh white plumes that dissolve almost instantly into the darkness. The wind finds every tear in your gown, every gap in the fabric, and slides through like a blade. Goosebumps erupt across your arms, your chest, the backs of your thighs. Your nipples pebble painfully against the ruined silk of your dress, and you cannot cross your arms to hide it because your wrists are still bound behind your back.

They march you through the rows of tents, past the dying cookfires that still pulse with a dull orange glow, past the picketed horses that shift and snort in the darkness, past the soldiers who pause in their dice games and their weapon cleaning to watch you pass. Some of them grin. Some of them nudge their companions and murmur things you cannot quite hear but can easily imagine. Some of them look at you with an expression that makes your stomach clench and your skin crawl.

The lake opens up before you without warning, one moment you are in the trees, and the next the forest falls away and you are standing on a narrow strip of pebbled shore, staring out at an expanse of black water that stretches toward the far treeline like a sheet of polished obsidian.

Along the shoreline, several servants are already waiting, they stand in a tight cluster near the water's edge, their lanterns casting pools of flickering orange light across the pebbles. There are four of them—three women and one man, all dressed in the same rough wool you will soon be wearing, their faces weathered and expressionless. They have brought buckets and rough cloths and a lump of harsh-looking soap, and they hold these implements with the practiced ease of people who have performed this task many times before.

The soldiers release you at the water's edge. Your legs buckle immediately, the muscles in your thighs giving way like wet parchment, and you collapse onto the pebbled shore with a jarring impact that sends pain shooting through your knees and palms. The stones are sharp and cold beneath you, slick with lake spray, and they bite into your skin through the torn fabric of your gown.

"Lord's orders," one of the soldiers says, his voice flat and bored. He is speaking to the servants as if you are not there, as if you are a piece of furniture that has been delivered to the wrong room. "Wash her. Thoroughly. I mean properly scrubbed, every inch, until she's clean enough to serve at his lordship's table. Put her in the clothes we brought. If she fights, bind her tighter. If she screams, gag her. If she tries to run—" He glances down at you, crumpled on the stones at his feet, and something that might be amusement flickers across his weathered face. "She won't run. But if she does, the boy stays to make sure she's caught."

The soldiers turn and walk back up the path without another word. You watch them go with a strange, hollow feeling in your chest, something between despair and relief. They are gone. But the camp is right there, at the top of the path. The soldiers are right there. Even if you broke free from these servants, even if you ran into the trees and kept running until your legs gave out, there is nowhere to go. The Reach is Green territory. Every lord, every castle, every village between here and Dragonstone has sworn allegiance to Aegon. You are a Black. You are the enemy. You are alone.

The servants descend on you, they untie the ropes around your wrists, and the sudden rush of blood back into your hands is an agony beyond description, a thousand needles of fire prickling through your fingers, your palms, the bones of your wrists. You gasp and double over, cradling your raw and bleeding hands against your chest, and a low moan escapes your lips before you can stop it. The ropes have carved deep furrows into your skin, angry red channels that ooze blood and clear fluid. The flesh around them is swollen and hot to the touch.

The servants pull you to your feet with the same impersonal efficiency, and then they begin stripping away your ruined gown, the fabric tears further as they pull it over your head—it was already hanging by threads, already ripped at the shoulder where the soldiers dragged you from the carriage—and the sound of ripping silk is loud in the quiet of the lakeshore. The cool night air hits your bare shoulders, your bare arms, the curve of your spine, and you shudder so violently that your teeth clack together. You are left in nothing but your thin linen shift, and the wind cuts through it as if it were made of spiderwebs. Then hands are at the ties of your shift, pulling it down over your shoulders, and you try to clutch it to your chest but your fingers are still numb and useless from the ropes, and the shift slides down your body and pools around your ankles on the wet stones.

You stand naked on the shore of the lake. Completely, utterly naked. The wind licks at your bare skin with a cold, invasive tongue. It raises goosebumps across your breasts, your stomach, the curve of your hips. It slides between your legs and makes you flinch. Your arms wrap around yourself on instinct—one across your chest, one lower—but it does not help. It does not hide you. It does not stop the servants from seeing everything you have.

The red-haired boy has turned his back, you notice this through the haze of your humiliation, and the observation lodges in your mind like a splinter. He is standing several paces away, at the edge of the treeline, his shoulders stiff and his head bowed. He is facing the darkness of the forest rather than the lake. His hands are clasped behind his back, and even from here, even through the dim lantern light, you can see that his knuckles are white, clenched so tightly that the bones threaten to break through the skin. He does not look at you.

The servants grip your arms and walk you toward the water. Your bare feet crunch on the pebbles. The stones are slick and cold and sharp-edged, and they dig into the tender arches of your feet with every step.

The cold, when it comes is death, your foot touches the surface of the lake, and the shock of it is so total, so absolute, that for a moment your mind simply goes blank. It bites into your ankle and shoots up your leg like lightning. The breath leaves your lungs in a single, explosive gasp. You try to pull back—your body rebels, your muscles scream, every instinct you possess howls at you to flee—but the servants hold you fast with their impersonal, unbreakable grip, and they push you deeper.

The water rises to your calves. Your knees. Your thighs. Each inch is a fresh assault, a new layer of agony laid over the old. The cold is so intense that it burns. Your skin flushes red and then white, and the fine hairs on your legs and arms stand on end. When the water reaches your waist and laps at the curve of your stomach, a sound tears from your throat that you cannot contain—a sharp, keening cry, animal and raw.

"Please," you gasp. The word is torn from you without permission, without pride, without any of the dignity you have been clinging to since the carriage door was ripped open. "Please, it's so cold, I can't—I can't breathe—"

One of them scoops water into a wooden bucket and pours it over your head, the shock of it steals what little breath you had left. The water streams down your hair and into your eyes and your mouth, and it tastes of minerals and the faint, green bitterness of lake weed. It plasters your hair to your skull and runs in rivulets down your neck and between your shoulder blades. You sputter and choke, and another bucket of water crashes over you before you can recover.

They scrub you with rough cloths that feel like sandpaper against your chilled, goosebumped skin. They work the dust and the sweat and the dried blood from your body with methodical, unhurried thoroughness, your arms, your shoulders, your back, the nape of your neck. They lift your hair and scrub the dirt from behind your ears. They take your hands, your raw, bleeding, rope-burned hands and scrub the grime from beneath your fingernails until the water runs pink.

"Poor little princess," one of the servants murmurs as she scrubs at the back of your neck. Her voice is low, barely above a whisper, pitched for your ears alone. She is the oldest of the women, her face lined and weathered, her hands gnarled with age but still strong. "Fallen so far so fast. I remember when you rode in your silks and your jewels, with the whole city turning out to cheer for you. Now look at you. Naked as a newborn and shivering in a lake."

You flinch at the word princess. Ormund's voice echoes in your memory, smooth and venomous. Not a princess. A bastard. A baseborn creature of sin and deceit.

"That one there," the old servant continues, her voice dropping even lower. She tilts her head almost imperceptibly toward the treeline, toward the boy with his back turned and his fists clenched. "That's Prince Daeron."

The words land on you like stones. You turn your head and stare at the boy's rigid back with new eyes. Daeron. Your uncle. You knew he existed but you have never met him. You have never seen his face. You have never exchanged a single word with this boy who shares your blood.

He is standing on the shore of a freezing lake in the middle of the night, his back turned to his niece's naked, shivering body, because he cannot bring himself to look and he cannot bring himself to leave.

"He's a good lad," the old servant murmurs, wringing out her cloth. "Quiet. Keeps to himself. Doesn't make trouble. Lord Ormund is hard on him, but the boy never complains. Never says a word against his lord." She pauses, her hands stilling on your shoulder. "I've seen him weep, though. Late at night, when he thinks no one is watching. He weeps for his dragon. They say she's a beauty—blue and copper, with fire hot enough to melt stone. Tessarion. But Lord Ormund won't let him fly."

The servants finish their work. They drag you out of the water, and the transition from the freezing lake to the merely cold air is almost pleasant by comparison. Almost. Your body is shaking so violently now that you can barely stand—great, wracking shudders that convulse through your muscles and rattle your bones.

The servants wrap you in a length of coarse, undyed wool and rub your limbs with the same brisk, impersonal efficiency they used to wash you. The friction burns. It pulls at your raw wrists and your rope-burned skin and the bruises already blooming across your ribs and arms. But gradually, slowly, the shivering begins to subside. Your teeth stop chattering. Sensation creeps back into your extremities in tingling, painful waves.

Then they dress you, a rough woolen dress, dyed a drab, muddy brown, the color of dirt, of tree bark, of nothing at all. "There now," the old servant says, and there is something in her voice that might almost be pity. "It's done. Best not to fight it, girl. Fighting only makes it worse."

She gestures toward the treeline, toward the boy with the copper hair who still has his back turned, who still has not moved.

"Take her back," she says. "She's ready."

Daeron turns around, he does it slowly, reluctantly, as if bracing himself for a blow. His blue eyes find you—just for a moment, just for a heartbeat—and then drop immediately to the ground. But in that heartbeat, in that brief flash of contact, you see something that makes your breath catch, you see something that looks almost like shame.

"Come," he says. His voice is quiet, so quiet you can barely hear it over the whisper of the lake water and the rustle of wind through the trees. It is a careful voice, a controlled voice, the voice of someone who learned very early that speaking too loudly was dangerous. "Walk ahead of me. I will tell you where to go. Keep your eyes down when we re-enter the camp. Do not look at the soldiers. Do not speak to anyone."

"You are Prince Daeron," you say. Your voice comes out hoarse and raw, scraped clean by screaming and cold water. It does not sound like your voice at all.

"I am," he says. "Now walk. It's not safe to linger here. Lord Ormund will expect you back in the camp before the hour is out, and he does not like to be kept waiting."

You walk. You walk because you are too cold and too tired and too hollowed out to do anything else. You walk up the path through the dark trees, your rough wool dress scratching against your thighs, your too-large shoes slipping on the loose gravel, your bound hair dripping lake water down the back of your neck. Daeron walks behind you, close enough to guide you if you stumble, far enough away that he does not have to touch you.

"Listen to me," Daeron says. His voice is still that low, barely-there murmur, pitched for your ears alone. It is the voice of someone who has learned to speak in secrets. "I am going to tell you something, you need to hear it, and you need to not argue with me, and you need to do exactly what I say. Your life depends on it."

You say nothing. You keep walking. A tree root snags at your too-large shoe, and you stumble, and Daeron's hand shoots out and catches your elbow before you hit the ground. The touch is brief—just long enough to steady you, his fingers warm through the rough wool of your sleeve—and then he pulls his hand back as if your skin had burned him. He still does not look at your face.

"Lord Ormund is not a man you want to anger," he says. His voice is flat, emotionless, the voice of someone reciting a lesson learned through painful repetition. "I know that seems obvious. I know you think you already understand. But you don't." He pauses. His footsteps falter for just a moment. "I have. I know what he is like when he is pleased. I know what he is like when he is annoyed. And I know what he is like when he is truly angry. You have seen him pleased tonight. You do not want to see him angry."

"He humiliated me," you whisper. The words scrape out of you like broken glass, like stones dragged across raw skin. "He stripped me of my title. He called my mother—he said things about her that—"

"I know what he said." Daeron's voice tightens, a wire drawn taut. "I was standing three feet away from you. I heard every word. And I am telling you that what happened tonight was him being gentle. That was him being welcoming. That was Lord Ormund in a generous mood, savoring the moment, drawing out the anticipation." He takes a breath, and when he speaks again, his voice is barely a whisper. "I have seen him flay a man's back to the bone for spilling wine on his maps. I have seen him keep a deserter alive for three days while he personally oversaw the tortures. I have seen him smile while he did it. The same smile he wore tonight. The same exact smile."

You walk in silence for a moment. The trees are beginning to thin, and you can see the torchlights of the camp flickering through the branches ahead. The thought of going back there—of walking into that camp in your servant's dress, of facing Ormund again, of spending the rest of your life under his control—makes your stomach clench and your throat tighten.

"Then what do you suggest I do?" you ask, and your voice cracks on the question. "Just accept it? Just bow my head and scrub his floors and empty his chamber pot and let him call my mother a whore every day for the rest of my life?"

"Yes." Daeron's voice is flat. Absolute. "That is exactly what I suggest you do. Do your work. Keep your head down. Do not speak back to him. Do not defy him. Do not play games or plot rebellions or try to escape. Do not give him any excuse to escalate. Because he will escalate. He is looking for reasons to escalate. He wants you to fight back. He wants you to give him an excuse. The only outcome that does not end in your suffering—in more suffering than you can possibly imagine—is you doing your job and doing it well and giving him nothing to feed on."

You emerge from the treeline into the camp. The torches are still burning, the Hightower banner still flying, the soldiers still moving between the rows of tents. "Why are you telling me this?" you ask. Your voice is barely above a whisper now, pitched for his ears alone. "Your family is the reason I am here, in this camp, wearing these clothes, walking toward that tent. We are at war. Why would you help me?"

Daeron is silent for a long moment. "I am not helping you," he says, and his voice is very quiet and very tired. "I am warning you. There is a difference. And I am doing it because no one deserves what Lord Ormund is planning to do." He pauses. His blue eyes, pale and watery, flicker up to meet yours for the briefest of moments. "Not even a bastard niece I have never met. Not even the daughter of the sister who probably doesn't remember I exist."

He looks away again, his gaze dropping to the ground. His hands are still clenched at his sides.

"Now walk," he says. "Keep your head down. Don't look at anyone. I'll take you to the servants' tent. Tomorrow, your work begins."

—

You learn the rhythm of Lord Ormund's day before you learn anything else. He wakes at dawn—precisely at dawn, as if the sun itself obeys his schedule—and you must be standing outside his tent before he stirs, a basin of warm water in your hands and a clean drying cloth draped over your arm. The water must be exactly the right temperature. Not too hot, not too cold. He can tell the difference instantly. He can tell by dipping one finger into the basin, and if the temperature is wrong, he does not shout. He simply looks at you. He looks at you with those pale blue eyes, and he sets the basin aside, and he says, "We will discuss this later," and the anticipation of that discussion is worse than any immediate blow could ever be.

You must wait in silence while he wakes. This is part of the ritual. He does not rise immediately. He stretches, long, languid movements beneath the furs of his bed, his arms extending over his head, his back arching, the muscles of his shoulders shifting beneath his skin. He makes sounds. Small sounds. Groans of satisfaction, sighs of comfort. He takes his time. He luxuriates in the warmth of his bed while you stand three feet away with a basin of water growing incrementally colder in your hands, and he knows you are watching, and he wants you to watch. That is the point. That is always the point.

"Good morning, little bastard," he said on the third day, and the words were almost affectionate. "Did you sleep well? Did you dream of home? Of your whore mother? Of your dead brother?"

You did not answer. You had learned by then that some questions were not questions at all, the morning routine is the most intimate, and therefore the worst. You must kneel beside his bed and hold the basin steady while he splashes water on his face. You must be close enough that you can feel the heat radiating from his body, close enough that the water droplets from his splashing land on your hands and your sleeves. You must hand him the drying cloth and take it back when he is finished, and the cloth is warm from his skin and damp from his face, and it feels disturbingly intimate in your hands, like holding a piece of him.

Then you must help him dress, this is the part that makes your stomach clench and your throat tighten and your jaw ache from the effort of keeping your expression blank. This is the part that has not gotten easier, not once, not in seven days of repetition. He stands before you in his sleeping clothes and he waits. He does not help you. He does not move to undress himself. He stands there with his arms slightly extended, his head tilted, that faint smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and he waits for you to approach him. He waits for you to come to him.

"Well?" he said on the first morning, when you hesitated a moment too long. "I am waiting, girl. Or do you require the cane to motivate you?"

You approached and you reach up with trembling fingers and begin to unlace his shirt. The laces are fine linen, delicate, and your fingers feel clumsy and thick. You fumble. You always fumble. He watches your face the entire time, his blue eyes tracking every flicker of expression, every flush of color, every moment of hesitation. You can feel his gaze on your cheeks, your lips, the curve of your throat where your pulse hammers visibly beneath the skin.

"Your hands are shaking," he observed on the morning. His voice was conversational, almost pleasant. "One would think you had never touched a man's clothing before. Tell me, did you have lovers at court? Did some young lordling ever get far enough to let you practice unlacing his doublet? Or were you the type to spread your legs without bothering to undress first?"

You said nothing. You focused on the laces. Your face burned. You could feel the heat radiating from your cheeks like a fever.

"I asked you a question." His voice sharpened, just slightly. "When I ask a question, I expect an answer. That is how conversation works."

"No, my lord." The words scraped out of you like stones dragged across gravel. "I had no lovers at court."

"No lovers." He sounded almost disappointed. "Eight and ten years old, a princess of the realm, and no one ever sampled the goods? No one ever peeled back that silk and had a taste? I find that difficult to believe. A pretty little thing like you, with those—" His gaze dropped deliberately to your chest, lingered there. "—assets. Surely someone must have tried."

"No one, my lord."

"Hmm." He considered this. His shirt was unlaced now, hanging open, exposing the broad expanse of his chest. "Then I am the first man to see you like this. To have you on your knees before me, undressing me, serving me. How special. How intimate. We are sharing a first together, you and I."

You pulled the shirt over his shoulders. You had to reach up to do it and the movement brought you chest to chest with him for a brief, horrible moment. His bare skin brushed against the rough wool of your dress. You felt the heat of him, the solidity of him and he inhaled deeply as you did it, his nostrils flaring, and you knew he was breathing in the scent of your hair.

"Jasmine," he murmured. "The soap they gave you is harsh and common, but I can still smell it underneath. The jasmine oil you used to wear. It's still there, deep down. Lingering. Like a memory that refuses to fade."

You stepped back as soon as the shirt was off, but he caught your wrist. His grip was not hard, but it was absolute. You could no more have pulled free than you could have stopped the sun from rising.

"The breeches," he said. "You forgot the breeches."

You had not forgotten the breeches. You had been hoping he would not make you. You had been hoping, with the desperate, irrational hope of a trapped animal, that today would be the day he showed mercy.

He never showed mercy, your fingers found the laces of his breeches. They were looser than the shirt laces, easier to work, but your hands were shaking so badly now that you could barely grip them. You fumbled at his waist, your knuckles brushing against the flat plane of his stomach, he sucked in a breath at the contact, a small, sharp sound, almost a hiss.

"Cold hands," he said. "But not unpleasant. Continue."

You loosened the breeches. You began to work them down over his hips and found yourself staring directly at his cock—soft, but substantial even in repose—and you made a sound, a small choked gasp, and he laughed.

"Disappointed?" he asked. "Were you expecting something else? Something smaller, perhaps? Something more appropriate for a man of my advanced age?"

You did not answer and you saw the way it stirred slightly at the exposure, at the cool morning air, at the proximity of your face so close to his groin. You saw the way it twitched when your breath ghosted across his skin. You saw everything.

"Like what you see? You stare at it so intently. One might almost think you were curious. Have you ever seen one before? In the flesh, I mean. Not in paintings or tapestries. Not on statues. A real, living cock, attached to a real, living man."

"No, my lord." The words were barely audible.

"No." He savored the word. "Of course not. You were a maiden princess, untouched and unsullied. And now the first cock you ever see is mine. The first cock you ever touch will be mine. The first cock that ever—" He stopped himself, smiling. "But I get ahead of myself. Smallclothes first. You may finish dressing me."

You handed him his smallclothes. You helped him into his breeches and his shirt and his doublet. You fastened his belt and straightened his collar and brushed his hair, you knelt to put on his boots, and he placed his hand on top of your head while you did it, his fingers threading through your hair with a casual possessiveness that made your skin crawl.

"Good girl," he said when you finished. "You are learning. Slowly, painfully, but learning nonetheless. One day, you will do all of this without trembling. One day, you will do it without being told. One day, you will anticipate my needs before I voice them, and you will meet them eagerly, gratefully, with the devotion of a truly excellent servant." His hand tightened in your hair, just slightly. "That is what you want, isn't it? To be excellent? To please me?"

"Yes, my lord." The response was automatic now. You had learned to say it without thinking, without feeling, without letting the bile rise in your throat.

But it was the evening bathing that truly broke something inside you. Every evening, without exception, Lord Ormund took his bath. The copper tub dominated the center of the tent, gleaming in the lamplight, filled with water so hot that steam rose from the surface in thick, fragrant clouds. The servants heated the water over the campfires and carried it in heavy buckets, their arms straining, their faces blank with exhaustion.

When the tub was full, Ormund dismissed the other servants. Only you remained. Only you and him and Daeron, standing silently by the tent wall with his eyes fixed on the floor and his hands clasped behind his back and his jaw tight with a tension that never seemed to release. You did not know why Daeron was required to stay. You suspected it was another layer of the punishment—having your uncle watch, having him bear witness to your degradation, knowing that he would report it all back to his mother and his brothers, knowing that the Greens would hear every detail of how Rhaenyra's daughter had been brought low.

"Attend me," Ormund would say, and you would walk forward on legs that felt like water, and you would undress him as you had dressed him that morning, piece by piece, your fingers brushing his skin no matter how careful you tried to be. He made sure of it. He shifted at the last moment, leaned into your touch, positioned himself so that your knuckles grazed his stomach or your palm pressed briefly against his chest.

"Clumsy," he said once, when your hand slipped and brushed against the head of his cock. "Or perhaps not clumsy at all. Perhaps you wanted to touch it. Perhaps all that staring in the morning has made you curious."

"It was an accident, my lord. Forgive me."

"Forgive you?" He laughed. "There is nothing to forgive. Curiosity is natural. Healthy, even. A young woman should be curious about such things." His voice dropped, becoming almost conspiratorial. "If you ever want a closer look—a proper look—you need only ask. I am not an unreasonable man."

You would die before you asked.

He stepped into the tub and sank down into the water with a groan of satisfaction that was almost obscene in its pleasure. The water sloshed around his body, lapping at his chest, obscuring the lower half of him in steam and shadow. Then he handed you the washing cloth and the lump of harsh soap, and you knelt beside the tub and began.

You washed his back first. That was the safest place, the only safe place. You dipped the cloth in the scalding water and worked the soap into a thin, weak lather, and you scrubbed the broad planes of his shoulders and the long muscles of his spine. He leaned forward to give you better access, his head bowed, his damp curls brushing the surface of the water. The steam rose around both of you, thick and cloying, heavy with lavender oil and the faint, animal musk of his body. Your wool dress grew damp and clung to your skin.

"Harder," he said on the second evening. "I am not made of porcelain. I will not crack under pressure. Put your back into it."

You put your back into it. You scrubbed until your arms burned and your knuckles were raw from the rough cloth and the harsh soap. You scrubbed his back and his shoulders and his arms, and then he turned to face you, and you scrubbed his chest.

"You are blushing," he observed on the fourth evening. "It is remarkable, really. A testament to your... innocence. Most servants lose their modesty within the first few days. But you cling to yours like a drowning woman clings to driftwood." He smiled. "I find it endearing. I truly do. It makes these moments so much more... piquant."

You said nothing. You scrubbed his chest. The cloth ran over the planes of his pectorals and the ridges of his stomach and the curve of his ribs. You kept your eyes fixed on the cloth, on the work, on anything except his face. You could feel his gaze on you like a physical weight, like a hand pressing against your skin.

"Lower,"

Your hand stopped. The cloth hovered in the air above the waterline, dripping soapy water back into the tub. You knew what he meant. You had known this was coming. He had been patient—more patient than you had expected—but his patience was not infinite. It never was.

"I said lower." His voice was still calm, still pleasant. "The bath is for washing the entire body, little bastard. You have been neglecting certain areas. I have allowed it during your... adjustment period. But we are a week into your education now. It is time to advance the curriculum."

Your hand moved. It moved without your permission, driven by the bone-deep knowledge of what happened when you disobeyed. The cloth dipped below the waterline. You looked anywhere except at what your hands were doing.

You felt him. Through the cloth, through the warm water, you felt him—the shape of him, the weight of him, the way he stirred and thickened at your touch. Your stomach lurched. Bile rose in your throat. You wanted to pull your hand back as if burned, but you did not. You could not. You continued washing him, your movements mechanical and detached, your mind retreating to some small, safe corner of yourself where this was not happening.

He made a sound. A low sound, deep in his chest, almost a purr. His hips shifted slightly in the water, pressing up into your hand.

"That's it," he murmured. "That's it. Not so difficult, is it? Not so terrible. A simple task, simply performed. You are doing so well."

When it was over—when he finally told you to stop, his voice slightly rougher than before—you pulled your hand back and dropped the cloth into the water. Your fingers were trembling. Your entire body was trembling. You felt dirty in a way that had nothing to do with the grime of a day's labor, dirty in a way that no bath could ever wash clean.

"Good girl," he said, and his voice was thick with satisfaction. "You see? You can learn. You simply require the proper motivation. The proper guidance. The proper... hand."

He reached out and caught your chin in his wet fingers, tilting your face up toward his. His grip was firm, his skin still hot from the bathwater. His thumb traced across your lower lip, slow and deliberate, pressing slightly against the soft flesh.

"One day," he said, his voice barely above a whisper, "I will teach you to use your mouth for more than sullen silence. But that is a lesson for another time. You may go now. Dream of me."

That was bathing. That was every evening. And when you made mistakes—and you did make mistakes, because you were exhausted and terrified and operating on the ragged edge of your endurance—there was punishment.

The cane was thin and flexible, made of pale rattan that had been polished smooth by use. It lived on his desk, placed deliberately among the maps and markers and scattered documents of war, impossible to ignore. You could not enter the tent without seeing it. You could not look at the desk without your eyes finding it immediately, drawn to it like iron to a lodestone. Sometimes, when he was speaking to his captains or reading his correspondence, he would pick it up and tap it idly against his palm, and the sound—that soft, rhythmic thwack, thwack, thwack—would make your blood run cold.

The first time he used it was the second day. You had spilled wine on his maps, it was a genuine accident. Your hands were shaking from exhaustion and hunger—you had not been fed since the previous morning, and your body was beginning to rebel—and the goblet slipped from your fingers and tipped across the parchment, spreading a dark red stain across the carefully inked troop positions. You froze. The goblet rolled off the desk and thumped onto the carpet. Your heart stopped beating in your chest. For a single, suspended moment, the world was perfectly silent.

Then Ormund stood up with the slow, deliberate movement of a predator uncoiling from rest, and he looked at the wine spreading across his maps, and then he looked at you.

"Clumsy," he said. The word was soft, almost gentle. Almost kind. "I expected clumsiness. You were raised as a princess, after all—waited on hand and foot, never required to carry anything heavier than a silk fan. You never had to learn coordination. You never had to learn care. But lack of learning does not excuse error. Clumsiness has consequences. You understand that, don't you?"

Your throat had closed. You could not speak. You could barely breathe.

"The cane," he said, pointing at his desk. "Bring it to me. Now."

Your legs nearly gave out beneath you. The tent tilted and swam around you. You looked at the cane on the desk—that thin, terrible length of pale wood—and you looked at Ormund's face, and you saw that his expression was utterly, terrifyingly serious. This was not a threat. This was not a warning. This was the consequence he had been waiting for since the moment you arrived in his camp.

"I will not repeat myself," he said, and his voice sharpened to a razor's edge. "The cane. Now. Or I will double the strokes and have the soldiers hold you down while I deliver them."

You fetched the cane. Your fingers closed around the smooth wood, and it felt alive in your hand—warm, almost, as if it had been waiting for you. You walked back to him on legs that did not feel like your own, and you held it out, and he took it from you with the casual ease of a man who had performed this ritual a thousand times.

"Bend over the desk," he said. "Lift your dress. Your shift can remain—I am not a savage. I have no desire to see the goods before I'm ready to examine them properly."

There were people in the tent. Daeron was there, standing in his usual spot near the wall, his knuckles white where he gripped his own wrist behind his back. Two soldiers had been delivering a report when you spilled the wine, and they were still there, standing near the entrance, their expressions shifting from professional neutrality to undisguised interest. A servant was refilling the oil lamps, and she paused in her work to watch, her face blank but her eyes sharp. Everyone would see. Everyone was meant to see.

"Please," you whispered. The word escaped before you could stop it, a small, broken sound. "Please, my lord, not in front of—not with everyone—"

"Everyone?" He looked around the tent with exaggerated surprise, as if noticing the audience for the first time. "You mean my soldiers? My servant? My squire?" His eyes found Daeron, and his smile sharpened. "But they are part of the lesson, correction is not a private affair. It is a public education. When a servant errs, everyone must see the cost of error. It maintains order. It reinforces discipline. It reminds everyone present of their place in the natural hierarchy." He turned back to you, and his voice dropped, becoming almost intimate. "Besides, you should be grateful. Some men would do this in the center of the camp, with the entire army watching. I am giving you the courtesy of a roof and a limited audience. Now bend over the desk, or I will triple the strokes and remove your shift entirely. Your choice."

You bent over the desk. The wood was cold against your palms, rough with the grain, smelling of old parchment and spilled ink and the faint, metallic tang of blood from previous punishments. You gathered the rough wool of your dress in trembling hands and lifted it, bunching the fabric around your waist. The air was cold on the backs of your thighs. Your shift remained but it provided almost no protection. It was a gesture of modesty that was not modesty at all.

"Count them," he said. "Out loud. If you lose count, we start over."

The first stroke landed with a crack that echoed through the tent like a whip. Pain exploded across your arse—a bright, searing line of fire that made you gasp and lurch forward against the desk. For a moment, you could not breathe. For a moment, the world was nothing but that white-hot stripe of agony.

"One," you choked out. Your voice was a strangled thing, barely recognizable.

The second stroke landed a heartbeat later, slightly lower, overlapping the first. The pain doubled, trebled, became a living thing that clawed at your skin.

"Two."

"Louder," he said. "I want everyone to hear you. I want the soldiers outside to hear you. I want the camp to know that justice is being served."

"Two!" you cried out, your voice cracking on the word.

He gave you five strokes that first time. Five strokes for a ruined map and spilled wine. By the third, tears were streaming down your face and your legs were shaking so badly you could barely stay bent over the desk. By the fourth, you had bitten through the inside of your cheek, and blood mingled with the salt of your tears. By the fifth, you were sobbing openly—great, heaving sobs that tore through your chest and left you gasping for air. Through it all, he was silent except for the rhythm of the cane—crack, pause, crack, pause—and the sound of his breathing, which remained steady and calm, as if he were performing some mild physical exercise rather than beating a teenage girl.

When it was over, he placed the cane back on the desk beside your trembling hands. "Stand up," he said. "Straighten your dress. Wipe your face. You are a servant of House Hightower, not a sniveling child. Compose yourself."

You pushed yourself upright. Your arse was a mass of fire, and the movement of straightening your dress—pulling the rough wool back down over your bruised and swollen flesh—was an agony all its own. You wiped your face with the back of your hand, smearing tears and blood across your knuckles.

"Thank you for my correction, my lord," you said, because he had taught you to say that too. He had made you practice it. He had stood you in front of a mirror—the only mirror in the tent, a small polished disc of silver—and made you repeat the words until they came out smooth and unbroken, until you could say them without crying.

"You are welcome," he said. "Now clean up this wine. Use your dress if you must. It is already ruined."

You knelt on the carpet and scrubbed at the wine stain with the hem of your dress while the soldiers watched and Daeron stared at the floor and Ormund sat back down in his chair and returned to his maps as if nothing had happened.

The second time was the fourth day. You had been too slow bringing his breakfast tray—his eggs had cooled, he said, and he did not tolerate cold eggs. Three strokes. The third time was the fifth day, when you spoke without being spoken to—a single word, "Yes," when you should have said "Yes, my lord." Two strokes. The fourth time was the sixth day, when you flinched while undressing him for his bath. Four strokes. "You will learn not to flinch from me," he said, and delivered each stroke with deliberate, measured force. The fifth time blended into the sixth, and by the end of the week, your backside was a tapestry of overlapping welts in various stages of healing—fresh red stripes laid over fading purple bruises laid over yellowing remnants of the first punishment. You could not sit without pain. You could not lie on your back. You slept on your stomach on a thin pallet in the corner of the servants' tent, and every morning you rose before dawn and carried the basin of warm water to Lord Ormund's tent, and you knelt at his bedside and waited for him to wake.

The dreams were almost worse than the waking hours. You dreamed of Silverwing—her vast silver wings blotting out the sun, her roar shaking the foundations of the earth, her fire sweeping across the camp in a tide of gold and crimson. You dreamed of her landing outside the tent, her claws tearing through canvas like paper, her great head dipping down to nuzzle against your chest. You dreamed of climbing onto her back and rising into the sky, leaving the camp and the soldiers and the cane and Ormund's pale blue eyes far below. You always woke before the dream could finish. You always woke to the cold darkness of the servants' tent, to the snoring of the other women, to the ache in your backside and the rawness of your wrists and the hollow pit of hunger in your stomach.

—

On the tenth night, your exhaustion betrays you, you are helping him dress for bed. This is the final task of each day, the mirror of the morning routine, and in some ways it is worse than the morning because you are so tired by then, so wrung out, that your defenses are lower and his voice seems to find its way deeper into your ears.

You are lacing the front of the shirt when it happens, your hands are trembling slightly. They always tremble now, a fine, persistent tremor that never quite goes away, the residue of constant fear and insufficient food and the bone-deep cold of the servants' tent at night. The laces are old. You have noticed this before, in the distant way you notice everything now—the frayed edges where the threads pass through the eyelets, the worn spots where his fingers pull them tight each morning. The cord is thin, weakened by repeated washing and tying, and when you pull it taut to begin the bow he prefers, it snaps in your fingers.

The sound is very small. A quiet pop of breaking thread, barely audible. But in the silence of the tent, it sounds as loud as a thunderclap. As loud as the cane striking flesh. As loud as your own heartbeat hammering in your ears.

You freeze. Your hands hover in the air, still holding the broken ends of the lace, the frayed threads curling uselessly around your fingers. Your heart, which had been beating in the steady, exhausted rhythm of routine, slams against your ribs like a caged bird throwing itself against the bars. You stare at the torn cord, and your mind races through all the possible outcomes, all the punishments you have endured for lesser offenses. The dropped goblet had earned you five strokes. The slow breakfast had earned you three. The single spoken word without proper address had earned you two. This mistake—destroying his property, ruining his garment, failing in the most basic task of your service—will earn you worse. Perhaps much worse. Perhaps something you have not yet experienced. Your arse still aches from the last punishment, you cannot imagine fresh pain on top of the old. Your body cannot imagine it. Your mind cannot hold the thought without wanting to scream.

"I'm sorry," you whisper, and the words tumble out of you before you can stop them, high and thin and trembling. "My lord, I'm so sorry, it was an accident, the lace was old, I didn't mean—"

"Shh." The sound stops you cold. It is not a word, not quite—just a soft exhalation, a gentle hushing noise like a mother soothing a frightened child. Ormund looks down at the broken lace dangling from your fingers and the expression in his pale blue eyes is not anger.

It is satisfaction.

"My lord," you breathe, and you hate the way your voice shakes, hate the way you sound like a child begging for mercy. "Please, I can mend it. I can sew it back together. I'll do it tonight, I'll stay up as long as it takes—"

"Shh," he says again, and this time he lifts one finger and presses it gently to your lips. The touch is feather-light, almost tender. His skin is warm and dry against your mouth. "Hush now. None of that. There's no need for mending. No need for panic. Accidents happen, little one. Even the most diligent servant cannot prevent every mishap."

He lowers his finger from your lips. His hand moves to your face, cupping your cheek with a gentleness that makes your skin crawl far more than any blow could. His palm is broad and warm, rough with calluses from sword practice, and it cradles your jaw as if you are something precious.

"Finish dressing me," he says. His voice is quiet, almost intimate. "Use the other lace. We will deal with this afterwards."

Your fingers are trembling so badly that it takes you three tries to tie the remaining lace. You manage it eventually, your movements jerky and uncoordinated, your breath coming in short, shallow gasps. The whole time, his hand remains on your face. His thumb traces a slow, idle arc across your cheekbone, back and forth, back and forth, the motion almost hypnotic. You can feel his eyes on you, studying your expression, cataloging every flicker of fear that crosses your features. When you finally finish the knot, you step back, and his hand falls away from your face with a reluctance that feels almost theatrical.

"Good," he murmurs. "Very good. You have such clever fingers when you're not panicking. Such delicate, nimble fingers." His eyes drop to your hands, folded now in front of you, and something flickers in his expression—a heat, a hunger, quickly suppressed. "I have noticed that about you. Among other things."

He walks to his bed. He sits down on the edge of the mattress, his weight sinking into the feather-stuffed ticking. The oil lamps flicker around him, casting shifting shadows across his face, highlighting the sharp planes of his cheekbones and the silver threads in his doublet and the way his light brown curls fall across his forehead. He is wearing only his sleeping shirt and breeches now, his feet bare, his collar loose, and he looks almost relaxed. Almost casual. He looks like a man settling in for a pleasant evening. That terrifies you more than his anger ever could.

"Come here," he says.

You walk to him. Your legs feel like they belong to someone else, like they are moving through deep water, like the floor of the tent has turned to mud. You stop a pace away from the bed, your hands still folded in front of you, your eyes fixed on the floor. You can see his bare feet on the carpet, the bones of his ankles, the fine dark gold hair dusting his toes.

"Closer."

You step closer. Your knees are nearly touching the edge of the mattress now. You can smell him—the lavender oil from his bath, the faint trace of wine on his breath, the clean wool of his sleeping clothes, and beneath all of that, the warm, animal scent of his skin. You can feel the heat radiating from his body. He is so close that if he leaned forward, his forehead would touch your stomach.

"Look at me."

You raise your eyes. His face is inches from yours. His blue eyes are dark in the lamplight, the pupils wide and black, and they search your expression with that terrible, penetrating intensity that makes you feel flayed open. His lips are slightly parted. His breathing is slow and even.

"Do you know why I'm not angry?" he asks. His voice is a low murmur, pitched for your ears alone, as intimate as a lover's whisper. "Do you know why I'm not reaching for the cane right now?"

You shake your head. Your throat is too tight for words.

"Because the cane is a tool for correcting mistakes," he says. "The cane is for carelessness. For sloppiness. For a servant who spills wine because she is not paying attention, or who speaks out of turn because she has forgotten her place. The cane is for lessons that need to be learned quickly." He pauses. His tongue sweeps across his lower lip, slow and deliberate. "But you didn't break that lace because you were careless, did you? You broke it because it was old. Because it was worn. Because it was going to break eventually no matter how careful you were. That's not carelessness. That's not a mistake. That's just... circumstance. Fate. The universe giving me a gift."

He reaches up and takes a strand of your hair between his fingers. He rubs it slowly, feeling the texture, watching the way it catches the lamplight. His expression is almost reverent.

"I have been very patient with you," he continues, his voice soft and musing. "Ten days. Ten days of service. Ten days of watching you kneel at my bedside and undress me and bathe me. Ten days of watching your face when you pull down my breeches and see what's waiting for you. Ten days of watching your hands tremble when you wash my chest and your breath catch when I touch your chin and your eyes fill with tears when I correct you." He releases the strand of hair. His fingers trail down the side of your face, tracing the curve of your ear, the line of your jaw, the column of your throat. "Ten days of being so very, very good. So restrained. So gentle. When all I have wanted to do since the moment you were dragged into this tent is put my hands on you properly."

Your blood runs cold. Your heart is pounding so hard you can feel it in your temples, in your throat, in the tips of your trembling fingers. You know what is coming. You have known since he sat down on the bed and told you to come closer. You have known since he hushed you with his finger on your lips.

"Please," you whisper. The word is barely audible, a thread of sound. "Please, my lord—"

"Shh." His finger touches your lips again. "No begging. Not yet. I haven't even told you what I'm going to do."

He leans back slightly, his hand falling away from your face. He regards you with that patient, assessing gaze, the gaze of a man examining a painting he is considering purchasing.

"The cane was for mistakes," he says. "I am going to put you over my knee, little bastard. I am going to pull up your dress, and I am going to pull down your shift, and I am going to spank you with my bare hand on your bare flesh until you are sobbing and sore and very, very sorry that you broke my lace. And then—" His voice drops even lower, becoming almost a purr. "—then I am going to rub the sting away. I am going to soothe the heat I put there. I am going to show you that I can be gentle as well as firm, that my hands can give pleasure as easily as they give pain. Would you like that?"

The question hangs in the air between you like a blade suspended by a thread. You stare at him, your mouth open, your eyes wide. Your mind is screaming. Your body is frozen. You cannot move. You cannot speak. You cannot do anything but stand there and look at his smile and feel the tears already burning at the corners of your eyes.

"I asked you a question," he says, and his voice sharpens slightly, a thread of steel beneath the silk. "Would you like me to be gentle with you afterwards? Would you like me to rub the pain away? Or would you prefer I simply send you back to your pallet with your arse on fire and no comfort at all?"

You know what he wants you to say. You know the script. You have learned it over ten days of servitude. But the words stick in your throat like bones. You cannot make yourself say them. You cannot make yourself ask for his gentleness, his comfort, his hands on your body in any context.

His smile fades. His jaw tightens. The shift in his expression is subtle, but you have learned to read him, and you see the danger approaching like a storm on the horizon.

"I see," he says. "Still defiant. Still clinging to that little spark of pride. Very well. We will do this the hard way. Get on my knee. Now."

You don't move. Your body has locked up entirely, every muscle frozen, every instinct screaming at you to run even though there is nowhere to go. You think of Silverwing, circling somewhere over the black beaches of Dragonstone, and the thought of her is a blade twisted in your chest. She is so far away. She cannot help you. No one can help you.

"I will not ask again."

His voice is quiet, but the threat in it is absolute. You have heard that tone before, the calm before the storm, you know what happens when he has to ask a third time. You know, and your body knows, and your body moves without your permission, driven by a fear that has been carved into your muscles and your bones over ten days of servitude.

You lower yourself across his lap, the position is humiliating beyond words. Your stomach rests on his thighs, the hard muscle of them pressing into your belly. Your upper body is supported by the mattress on the other side, and your hands grip the blankets in white-knuckled fists. Your legs dangle behind you, your arse is raised and vulnerable, presented to him like an offering. You can feel his thighs beneath you, warm and solid, and the intimacy of that contact makes your stomach heave.

"There we are," he murmurs, and his voice is warm with satisfaction. "That wasn't so difficult, was it? You see? You can be good. You simply need the proper encouragement." His hand settles on the back of your thighs. The touch is light, almost gentle, a soft pressure through the rough wool of your dress. "You're trembling. I can feel you shaking. Are you afraid, little one?"

"Yes," you whisper into the blankets. Your voice is muffled by the bedding, small and broken. "Yes, my lord."

"Good." The word is a caress, soft and pleased. "Fear is healthy. Fear is appropriate. Fear means you understand the gravity of the situation." His hand begins to move, stroking slowly up and down the backs of your thighs. The motion is almost soothing, almost tender, and that makes it worse somehow—the gentleness that precedes the violence, "But I want you to understand something. This isn't about punishment. Not really. This is about you learning that my hands can be many things—firm, gentle, painful, soothing—and that all of those things come from the same place. All of those things are expressions of my... care for you."

His hand slides up to the hem of your dress. His fingers find the rough wool and begin to gather it, pulling it upward inch by agonizing inch. The fabric scrapes against your legs as it rises, exposing your calves, your knees, the backs of your thighs. The cool air of the tent brushes against your bare skin, and you shiver, and goosebumps erupt across your flesh.

"Lift your hips," he says. "Help me. Show me that you are learning to cooperate."

You lift your hips. The movement is small, barely more than a twitch, but it is enough. He makes a soft sound of approval and pulls the dress the rest of the way up, bunching the fabric around your waist. You are left in nothing but your thin linen shift, the fabric so worn and washed that it is nearly transparent in the lamplight. You can feel his gaze on your body, you can feel him looking at the shape of you beneath the shift, the curve of it, the lines of your thighs.

"Beautiful," he murmurs, and the word is barely more than a breath. "Do you know how long I have waited to see you like this? Spread across my lap, trembling, waiting for my hand? Two years. Two years of imagining this moment. Two years of lying in my bed at night and picturing exactly what you would look like with your dress pulled up and your shift pulled down and your bare skin waiting for me."

His hand settles on your arse. The touch is light, almost reverent, his palm cupping the curve of your flesh through the thin linen. His fingers spread wide, covering as much of you as he can, and he squeezes gently—just once, a soft, possessive grip that makes your breath catch and your stomach clench.

"Please," you whisper again, and you don't know what you're asking for. You don't know if you're begging him to stop or to continue or to just get it over with. You don't know anything except that his hand is on your body and his thighs are beneath you and his voice is in your ear, soft and warm and utterly inescapable.

"Please what?" His hand begins to move, rubbing slow circles over your backside. The friction of the linen against your skin is almost pleasant, almost soothing, and that makes it so much worse. "Please stop? Please continue? Please hurry up so you can run back to your pallet and cry into your blanket?" He laughs, a soft huff of breath. "I don't think so. I've waited too long for this. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to savor every moment. And you're going to lie here and take it, and when it's over, you're going to thank me for it. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lord." The words come automatically, beaten into you by repetition.

"Good girl." His hand pauses in its rubbing. His fingers find the hem of your shift, the edge of the worn linen where it rests against the tops of your thighs. "Now. Let's get rid of this."

You feel the fabric begin to rise.

"No—" The word tears out of you before you can stop it, high and desperate. You twist on his lap, trying to pull away, trying to cover yourself with your hands. "No, please, my lord, please—"

His hand comes down on your back, pressing between your shoulder blades, pinning you to the mattress with implacable strength. His other hand continues its work, pulling the shift upward, baring your skin inch by inch. The linen slides over your thighs, your backside, the small of your back, and then there is nothing. Nothing between your bare flesh and the open air. Nothing between your body and his gaze.

You are completely exposed. Completely vulnerable. You can feel the cool air on your skin, raising goosebumps across the swell of your backside and the tops of your thighs. You can feel his eyes on you, roaming over every inch of bared flesh, looking the fading bruises from previous punishments, the curves and planes of your body that no one has ever seen before. You have never felt so naked in your life—not when the servants bathed you in the freezing lake, not when you knelt beside his tub and washed his chest, not in any of the countless humiliations you have endured.

"Lovely," he breathes, and his voice is thick with something that makes your skin crawl. "Even lovelier than I imagined. All that soft skin. All those pretty curves." His hand releases your back and settles on your bare backside. The contact of his palm against your naked flesh is electric—warm and rough and terrifyingly intimate. You flinch at the touch, a full-body shudder that runs from your shoulders to your feet, and he laughs softly. "Still so shy. After everything we've done together. After all the baths and the dressing and the undressing."

He squeezes. His fingers dig into the flesh of your backside, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to possess, to claim, to leave the imprint of his hand on your skin. His thumb traces a slow circle over the curve of your hip, and the touch is almost tender, almost loving. You bury your face in the blankets and sob once, a single broken sound muffled by the bedding.

"You will count each stroke aloud, and you will thank me for it. If you lose count, we begin again. If you try to cover yourself, I will bind your hands. If you scream loudly enough that the soldiers outside can hear, I will gag you and double the strokes. Do you understand?"

Your voice is a broken whisper, barely audible. "Yes, my lord."

"Good."

His hand comes down on your bare flesh, the slap is loud, a sharp crack that echoes through the tent. The pain is different from the cane—not worse, not better, but different. The cane was a thin line of fire, precise and cutting, a stripe of heat that flared and then faded. This is a broad, spreading sting that covers the whole of your backside, a wave of heat that radiates outward from the point of impact and sinks deep into the muscle. Your flesh jiggles under the blow, and the sensation of that movement—the way your body yields to his hand—is a fresh humiliation.

"Count," he says.

"One," you choke out. The word is barely intelligible through your tears. "One, my lord."

His hand lands again, on the other side this time. The sting doubles, layers of heat building on heat, and you can already feel your skin beginning to warm under his palm. He is not holding back. He is not being gentle. He is spanking you the way a grown man spanks a disobedient child, with the full weight of his arm behind each stroke.

"Two," you sob. "Two, my lord."

He takes his time between each stroke, letting the anticipation build, letting you feel the full weight of each impact before the next one falls. His rhythm is unhurried, almost meditative—slap, pause, slap, pause—and in the pauses, his hand rests on your burning flesh, feeling the heat he has created, rubbing slow circles over the stinging skin.

"You're doing so well," he murmurs after the fourth stroke. His voice is soft and warm, almost affectionate. "Your skin turns such a pretty shade of pink. Like the inside of a seashell. Like the petals of a rose. I could do this all night—just sit here and watch the color bloom across your backside. Would you like that? Would you like me to keep going until you can't sit down for a week?"

"Please," you sob, and you don't know what you're asking for. Mercy, maybe. An end to the pain. Or maybe just the sound of his voice, the warmth in his tone, the strange and terrible comfort of being praised even as you are punished.

"Please what?"

"Please... please..."

"Count," he reminds you, and his hand comes down again.

"Three—three, my lord—"

"Good girl." Another stroke. "Four."

"Four, my lord—"

"See? You can do it. You can be good when you try." His hand rubs slow circles over your burning skin, and the sensation is almost soothing, almost pleasant. The pain fades to a warm, throbbing heat, and his palm is cool against the sting. "You are so much better at this than I expected. So much more... receptive. I think you needed this. I think you've been waiting for someone to take you in hand, to show you your place, to give you the discipline you've been craving." He leans down, his breath warm against your ear. "I think you're going to thank me for this. Not because I tell you to. Because you mean it."

His hand comes down again. Harder this time. You cry out, your voice cracking on a sob.

"Five," you gasp. "Five, my lord."

"Good. That's five. We're halfway there."

By the seventh stroke, you are sobbing openly and continuously, your body limp across his lap, all the fight drained out of you. Your arse feels like it is on fire—a deep, throbbing heat that radiates outward from the center of each cheek and spreads down into your thighs. Every nerve ending is screaming. You can barely get the words out through your tears, barely remember what number comes next.

"Eight," you choke out, and the word is barely intelligible. "Eight, my lord."

"You're almost done. Two more. Can you give me two more?"

"Nine—nine, please—"

"One more. Last one. Make it count."

The final stroke is the hardest, delivered with a firm, deliberate force that makes you see stars behind your closed eyelids. The pain is so bright and so total that for a moment you cannot breathe, cannot think, cannot do anything but lie there across his lap and shudder.

"Ten," you whisper. The word is a thread of sound, barely there. "Ten, my lord. Thank you for my correction."

His hand lifts away from your skin. For a long moment, nothing happens. You lie there across his lap, your bare backside blazing with heat, your face buried in the blankets, your body shaking with sobs. You can feel the tears soaking into the fabric beneath your cheek. You can hear your own breathing, ragged and broken. You can feel his thighs beneath your stomach, solid and warm, and his hand resting lightly on the back of your neck.

Then his hand begins to move, it slides down your spine, slow and gentle, tracing the ridges of your vertebrae through the thin fabric of your shift. It pauses at the small of your back, where the skin is still bare, and his fingers trace idle circles over the dimples there. Then his hand moves lower, settling on your punished arse, and his touch is feather-light now, barely there, the barest whisper of palm against burning flesh.

You flinch. The contact, even that gentle, sends a fresh wave of sensation through your raw nerves. But he does not lift his hand. He does not spank you again. He simply rests his palm against your heated skin, letting the warmth of your body seep into his hand, letting you feel the weight and the presence of him.

"Shh," he murmurs. "It's over now. You did so well. I'm so proud of you."

His hand begins to move. Slow, gentle circles, rubbing the sting away. His palm is cool against your burning flesh, and the sensation is strange and confusing—pain and relief tangled together, punishment and comfort blurring into something you cannot name. You lie there across his lap and let him rub your arse, let him soothe the heat he put there, and you hate yourself for the way your body responds to the gentleness. The way your muscles begin to unclench. The way your breathing begins to slow. The way a small, broken part of you is grateful—actually grateful—for the soft touch after the hard one.

"That's it," he croons, his voice a low, hypnotic murmur. "That's it. Just breathe. Just let me take care of you. You took your punishment so well. Such a good girl. Such a brave girl."

His hand continues its slow, soothing motion. Up and down. Side to side. Tracing the curves and planes of your arse with a tenderness that feels almost reverent. His fingers dip into the crease where your thigh meets your body, tracing the edge of your most intimate places without quite touching them, and you flinch and squirm on his lap, and he makes a soft shushing sound and moves his hand back to safer territory.

"I am going to take care of you," he says, and his voice is soft and earnest, almost sincere. "Do you understand that? All of this it is all because I want to make you better. I want to help you become the person you were meant to be. Not a spoiled, arrogant princess who looks down on everyone around her. A good girl. An obedient girl. A girl who knows her place and is content in it." His hand stills, resting on the swell of your arse. "That is all I have ever wanted for you. Even when you mocked me. Even when you laughed at me. Even when you told your mother you would rather marry a horse than suffer my touch. I wanted to help you. I wanted to teach you. I wanted to love you, in my own way."

You make a sound against the blankets, something between a laugh and a sob, broken and bitter. He does not know what love is. He does not know what any of this is except possession, control, the slow and methodical destruction of everything you used to be.

But his hand is still warm on your skin, and his voice is still soft in your ear, and your body is still limp across his lap, and you are so tired. So unbearably tired. The exhaustion lives in your bones and your blood and the hollow space behind your eyes. You have been fighting for ten days. Ten days of fear and pain and humiliation. And now he is touching you gently, and his voice is praising you, and a part of you wants to believe him. Wants to believe that this is care. Wants to believe that someone in this world wants what is best for you.

You crush that part of yourself before it can speak. You smother it with hatred and humiliation and the absolute refusal to let him win. But it does not die. It goes into hiding, burrowing deep into some hidden corner of your heart, waiting for the next moment of gentleness to emerge again.

He pulls your shift back down. The linen settles over your blazing flesh, a soft barrier between your skin and the air. Then he pulls your dress down over that, the rough wool scratching against your punished backside. You whimper at the sensation, and he shushes you again, his hand stroking your back in slow, soothing circles.

"Come here," he says. His hands slide under your arms, lifting you with surprising gentleness, guiding you until you are sitting upright on his lap. Your arse presses against his thighs, and the pressure sends a fresh wave of pain through your bruised flesh. You gasp and try to shift your weight, and his arm tightens around your waist, holding you in place.

"Shh," he murmurs. "I know it hurts. It will hurt for a few days. But that's good. Every time you sit down, every time you feel the ache, you will remember this lesson. You will remember what happens when you are careless with my belongings. And you will be better."

His hand comes up to cup your face. His thumb brushes the tears from your cheek, wiping them away with a tenderness that makes your stomach turn. His blue eyes search your face, and his expression is soft, almost loving.

"Such pretty tears," he murmurs. "Such a pretty face, even when it's all blotchy from crying. You really are beautiful, you know. I know you don't believe me. I know you think I'm an old, ugly monster who only wants to hurt you. But I do find you beautiful. I have always found you beautiful. From the very first moment I saw you in the gardens, with the sunlight in your hair and the jasmine on your skin."

He leans forward. His lips brush against your forehead—a soft, dry kiss, barely there. The touch of his mouth on your skin makes you flinch, makes your stomach heave, but his arm around your waist holds you in place.

"One day," he whispers against your forehead, "you will not flinch when I touch you. One day, you will lean into it. You will crave it. You will come to me willingly—eagerly, even—and you will thank me for the privilege of my attention. One day, you will call me master and mean it."

He pulls back. His hand drops from your face. His arm loosens around your waist.

"You may go," he says. "Sleep well, little one. Dream of me."

You slide off his lap. Your legs nearly give out when your feet hit the ground, and you have to catch yourself on the edge of the bed. Your backside throbs with every heartbeat, a deep and intimate ache that makes every step an agony. You walk to the tent flap on shaking legs, your hand pressed against the small of your back, your breath coming in short, ragged gasps.

"Little bastard?" His voice stops you at the threshold. You freeze, your hand on the canvas, your heart hammering against your ribs. "You did well tonight. Better than I expected. I am genuinely proud of you. Remember that."

You do not turn around. You do not acknowledge his words. You push through the tent flap and out into the cold night air, and you do not stop walking until you reach the servants' tent, and you do not stop shaking until you have buried yourself beneath your thin blanket and pressed your face into the pallet and screamed—a silent scream, a scream with no sound, a scream that goes on and on inside your head until exhaustion finally drags you down into the dark.

—

The sack of Tumbleton changes everything, Ormund takes the lord's chambers for his own. They are the finest rooms in the castle, a spacious solar with a large feather bed and a hearth of carved stone and tapestries on the walls depicting hunting scenes. The lord's wife's belongings are still scattered across the dressing table—a silver brush, a vial of rose oil, a small mirror in a gilded frame. Ormund sweeps them aside with one arm and tells you to put your pallet in the corner of the room.

"You will sleep here from now on," he says. "I want you close. The castle is large and unfamiliar, and I do not trust you not to wander where you should not. You will be within arm's reach at all times."

You sleep on the stone floor at the foot of his bed, wrapped in a thin blanket that does nothing to soften the cold that seeps up through the flags. You listen to the sound of his breathing in the darkness, slow and steady, and you stare at the ceiling and wonder if Silverwing can feel your fear across all the miles that separate you.

The sept becomes part of your routine on the third day after the sack. "Your soul is filthy," Ormund tells you that morning. He is breaking his fast at the lord's table, cutting slices of bread and cheese with precise, deliberate movements. You are standing behind his chair, waiting to refill his cup or fetch whatever he might require. "I have been cleansing your body through labor and discipline, but your soul remains black with sin. You were raised by a woman who flouted the laws of gods and men. You were taught that your bastard blood meant nothing, that you could reach for a throne that was never yours. That corruption must be scrubbed away."

You say nothing. You have learned that silence is safest. "Today," he continues, "we will begin your spiritual instruction. There is a sept, you will kneel before the altar and you will pray for forgiveness. You will beg the Seven to cleanse you of your mother's whorish ways, of your own inherent sinfulness, of the stain of bastardy that marks your very existence. You will do this every day until I am satisfied that your contrition is genuine."

The sept is cold. The candles on the altar have burned down to stubs, their flames guttering in the draft. The faces of the Mother and the Father stare down at you from the colored window, their expressions serene and distant and utterly indifferent to your suffering.

Ormund points to the stone floor in front of the altar. "Kneel." You kneel on the cold stone floor of the sept, your voice scraping through prayer after prayer, your throat raw and your knees numb and your soul hollowed out by the relentless rhythm of your own degradation. The candles on the altar have burned low, their flames drowning in pools of melted wax that have overflowed the iron stand and dripped down onto the white altar cloth in long, waxy tears. The faces of the Seven glow faintly in the colored light of the narrow window, their expressions serene and distant and utterly without mercy. The Mother holds her painted child in her painted arms. The Father raises his painted hand in painted benediction. Neither of them moves. Neither of them speaks. Neither of them saves you.

"Pray," Ormund says. He stands behind you, close enough that you can feel the heat of his body seeping through your rough wool dress, close enough that his breath stirs the fine hairs at the nape of your neck. "Pray aloud. I want to hear every pathetic, sniveling word. I want the Seven themselves to hear the sound of Rhaenyra Targaryen's bastard begging for their forgiveness."

You pray. You pray to the Father for justice, though you no longer know what justice means in a world where men like Ormund Hightower hold all the power. You pray to the Mother for mercy, though mercy has been in conspicuously short supply since the soldiers dragged you from your carriage and slaughtered your guards in the road. You pray to the Warrior for strength, to the Smith for endurance, to the Maiden for the innocence you lost somewhere between the torn silk of your gown and the rough wool of your servant's dress.

"Not like that." Ormund's voice cracks through the sept like the cane across your backside. "You sound like a noblewoman ordering tea. You are not a noblewoman. You are not a lady. You are a baseborn creature of sin and filth, and you are begging the gods to forgive the crime of your existence. There is a difference. Put some shame into it. Put some groveling into it. Begin again."

You begin again. Your voice comes out halting and unsteady, the words tripping over themselves in their haste to escape your mouth.

"I—I beg forgiveness for my sins. I beg the Seven to cleanse me of—of—"

"Of your mother's whorish ways." Ormund supplies the words with the patience of a tutor correcting a slow student. His voice is calm, helpful, almost warm. It is the voice he uses when you do something right, and you hate how your body responds to that warmth, how some small, broken part of you craves his approval. "Say it. Your mother, Rhaenyra Targaryen, who calls herself a queen but is nothing more than a fat, grasping cunt who spread her legs for any man who looked twice at her. She whelped four bastards while her sword-swallower husband played with his squires in the next room. She made a mockery of her marriage vows and a mockery of the throne and a mockery of every law of gods and men. Her sins are your inheritance. You carry her corruption in your blood like a disease. Acknowledge it. Grovel for it. Beg the Seven to burn it out of you."

Your stomach heaves. The words he speaks are poison, and he wants you to drink them, to speak them aloud, to make them your own with your own voice and your own breath. You think of your mother's face, her steady hands, the way she held you when you were small and afraid of thunderstorms and told you that you were her greatest joy, her brightest star, her heir and her heart. You think of the word bastard and how it has followed you your entire life, whispered in corridors and shouted at tourneys and scrawled on parchments slipped under your door, and now spoken here, in this cold stone sept, by the man who owns you body and soul.

"Say it." Ormund's voice has not risen—it never rises, that is the terrifying thing, he never shouts, he never screams, he simply intensifies, his calm becoming harder and sharper like water turning to ice—but there is an edge to it now that you have learned to recognize. The edge that precedes pain. "I will not ask again, little bastard. You know what happens when I have to ask again."

You know. Your arse still bears the marks from the last time he had to ask again. The bruises have faded but the memory of the cane is fresh, and the memory of his hand is fresher still.

"I beg forgiveness," you whisper, and the words scrape out of you like broken glass dragged across raw skin, "for my mother's whorish ways."

"Louder. The Seven are ancient and half-deaf. I want them to hear your contrition. I want the Father to lean down from his golden throne and cup a hand around his divine ear."

"I beg forgiveness for my mother's whorish ways." Your voice cracks on the words. They taste like bile and betrayal and something worse—something that feels dangerously like surrender. "She spread her legs for any man who would have her. She made a mockery of her marriage vows. She—she whelped four bastards."

"And what does that make you?"

"A bastard." The word is a stone dropped into still water. "A sin. A creature of lust and deceit."

"Good." His hand settles on your shoulder. The touch is light, almost approving, and you despise the way your body leans into it, the way some traitorous part of you is grateful for the warmth of his palm after so many days of cold and pain and isolation. "Continue. Beg forgiveness for the specific sin of your own bastardy. You were born outside the bonds of lawful marriage. Your very first breath was an insult to the gods. Your existence is a walking desecration, a living monument to your mother's insatiable cunt. Acknowledge it. Own it. Wallow in it."

You draw a shuddering breath. The stone floor is brutally cold beneath your knees, the chill seeping through your wool dress and into your bones. The candles flicker on the altar, their flames bending and twisting in a draft you cannot feel, casting strange shadows across the carved faces of the Seven. The Mother looks down at you with her blank stone eyes, and you wonder if she sees you at all. You wonder if anyone sees you anymore.

"I beg forgiveness for the sin of my birth," you say. Your voice is flat now, mechanical, the voice of a woman reciting lines she has been forced to memorize. "I was born of lust and adultery. I am a bastard. I am a sin made flesh. My existence is an affront to the gods. I am—I am a walking desecration."

"And your brothers," Ormund says. His hand is still on your shoulder, his thumb tracing slow, idle circles against the rough wool. The touch is almost tender. That makes it worse. "Your bastard brothers. Lucerys, Jacaerys, who thought himself heir to driftmark, Joffrey, the youngest whelp, the afterthought, the one your mother squeezed out when she was already tired of the game. All of them bastards. All of them sins. All of them products of your mother's diseased womb. Beg forgiveness for them as well. They cannot beg for themselves—Luke is rotting at the bottom of sea, and the other two will join him soon enough—so you must do it for them. You must be their voice. You must carry their shame as well as your own."

The mention of Luke's name hits you like a fist to the sternum. Luke, who is dead. Luke, who was murdered by Aemond Targaryen and Vhagar above the storm-lashed waters of Shipbreaker Bay, Luke, who used to sneak honey cakes from the kitchens and share them with you in the gardens. Luke, who cried at your mother's knee when the other children called him bastard and asked you why the word hurt so much when it was true. Luke, who will never laugh again or fly again or grow old enough to understand what was taken from him.

You cannot speak. Your throat has closed completely around the words, a fist of grief and rage and despair that chokes off your voice. You kneel there on the cold stone floor, your hands clasped so tightly in front of you that your knuckles have gone white, your eyes fixed on the guttering candles, and you cannot make a sound. You cannot give him this. You cannot speak Luke's name in this context, in this place, to this man.

The silence stretches. One heartbeat. Two. Three.

Ormund's hand leaves your shoulder. For a suspended moment, you are certain he is reaching for the cane—he brought it with him, you saw him carrying it when he marched you to the sept, that thin length of pale rattan that has become as familiar to you as your own reflection—but instead, he kneels behind you.

You feel his body settle against your back, the heat of him seeping through your rough wool dress like fever-warmth. His chest presses against your spine, solid and unyielding. His thighs bracket your hips. His breath stirs the fine hairs at the nape of your neck, and you can smell the wine on it, sweet and dark and faintly sour.

"You are stubborn," he murmurs. His voice is very soft now, very close to your ear, so intimate that it feels like a violation all its own. "You are proud. After everything I have done for you—after all the lessons, all the corrections, all the patience I have shown you—you still cling to your pride like a child clinging to a broken toy. You still think of your dead brother as anything other than the bastard whelp he was."

His hands settle on your waist. The touch is light, barely there, but your entire body goes rigid as a drawn bowstring. You can feel each individual finger through the wool of your dress, pressing into the curve of your hips, the soft flesh of your sides. His thumbs trace the ridges of your hipbones, slow and deliberate.

"He was a bastard," Ormund breathes into your ear. "Lucerys Strong—no, not Strong, he had no right to that name—Lucerys Waters was a bastard. He was born of sin and he died in sin, torn apart by a trueborn prince on a trueborn dragon. That is justice. That is the will of the gods. And you will beg their forgiveness for his existence. You will speak his name and you will call him what he was and you will thank the Seven for striking him down. Say it."

You cannot. You cannot. The words are poison and they will kill you if you speak them, kill something essential and irreplaceable that has somehow survived everything else he has taken from you.

"No," you whisper. The word is barely audible, a thread of sound, but it is the first time you have defied him directly since the tenth night. The first time you have said no.

The silence that follows is absolute. Even the candles seem to stop flickering, their flames freezing in place. Ormund's hands on your waist go perfectly still.

"No?" His voice is soft. Wondering. Almost delighted. "Did you say no to me, little bastard? Did that word actually come out of your mouth?"

He moves. His hands leave your waist and grip your upper arms, and he hauls you backward against his chest with a force that drives the breath from your lungs. His body is a wall of heat and muscle behind you, and his mouth is pressed against your ear, and when he speaks again, his voice is no longer soft.

"You said no to me. While I am trying to save your wretched soul from the eternal fires." His fingers dig into your arms hard enough to leave bruises. "Do you know what happens to proud little bastards who say no to me? Do you know what happens to girls who defy their masters in the sight of gods and men?"

He releases one of your arms. His hand moves to the back of your head, fisting in your hair, yanking your head back until you are staring up at the vaulted stone ceiling, at the painted stars and the carved angels and the distant, indifferent face of the Father.

"Your brother is dead," he hisses into your ear. "He is dead and he is never coming back and nothing you do—no amount of silent defiance, no amount of stubborn silence—will bring him back. He died screaming. Do you understand that? He died screaming and bleeding and burning, torn apart by Vhagar's jaws, and his last thought before the water swallowed him was probably of you. Probably of his big sister, the princess, the dragonrider, who was supposed to protect him. And where were you? Fleeing across the Reach in a carriage, running away from the war like the coward you are."

Tears are streaming down your face now. You cannot stop them. They pour from your eyes and run into your hair and drip onto the stone floor between your knees. A sob tears from your throat—a raw, broken sound that echoes through the empty sept.

"Cry," Ormund says. His voice is savage with satisfaction. "Cry for your dead brother. Cry for your whore mother. Cry for the throne you will never sit and the dragon you will never ride again. But while you cry, you will pray. You will beg forgiveness for his bastard existence. You will thank the Seven for striking him down. And you will mean every word, or we will stay in this sept all night, and I will make you repeat the words until your voice gives out and your knees bleed on the stone. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," you sob. "Yes, my lord."

"Good. Now say it. Say that your brother Lucerys was a bastard and a sin and an abomination. Say that his death was justice. Say that you thank the Seven for striking him down."

Your mouth opens. The words are there, waiting, terrible and inevitable. You have learned that he always wins. You have learned that resistance only makes it worse. You have learned that the only way to survive is to give him what he wants and hate yourself for it afterwards.

"Lucerys," you choke out, and his name is a blade in your throat, "was a bastard. He was a sin. His death was—his death was—"

"Justice," Ormund supplies. His hand tightens in your hair. "Say it."

"His death was justice." The words are barely audible, broken by sobs. "I thank the Seven for—for striking him down. I thank the Seven for delivering him to Vhagar's jaws. I thank the Seven for—for—"

You cannot finish. The lie is too enormous, too monstrous, and it lodges in your throat like a bone. You are sobbing openly now, your whole body shaking with the force of your grief and your shame and your self-hatred.

Ormund releases your hair. His hand moves to your face, cupping your jaw, tilting your head back further. His thumb brushes the tears from your cheek with a gentleness that makes your skin crawl.

"You did not finish," he says. "But I am feeling merciful tonight. You have made progress—genuine progress—and I do not wish to undo that progress with excessive correction." He releases your jaw and stands, looking down at you with an expression of proprietary satisfaction. "Continue your prayers. Beg forgiveness for your pride—the pride that made you say no to me, the pride that made you think you had the right to refuse me anything. And when you are finished, we will return to the camp, and you will serve my supper, and we will never speak of your defiance again. You are forgiven."

He pauses. His hand settles on your head, a gesture that might be a benediction if it came from anyone else.

"Provided, of course, that you never say no to me again. In a sept or anywhere else. Do we understand each other?"

"Yes, my lord." The words are automatic now, beaten into your bones. "Thank you for your mercy, my lord."

"Good girl." His hand strokes your hair once, twice. "Now continue. You must also beg forgiveness for your body," he murmurs. His lips brush the shell of your ear, not a kiss, not quite, but something adjacent to it, something that makes your skin crawl and your stomach clench with revulsion. "Your body is sinful. It is a vessel of temptation, a piece of meat wrapped around a corrupt soul, designed by your mother's whorish bloodline to lure righteous men into the pit. You have been trying to entice me. From the very first moment you were dragged into my tent with your gown torn and your eyes wild, you have been using your face and your form and those big, wet eyes to tempt me away from righteousness."

"No." The denial tears out of you before you can stop it, broken and desperate and utterly futile. "No, my lord, I never—I have not tried to—I would never—"

The back of his hand cracks across your cheek, the blow snaps your head to the side. Pain explodes through your jaw, bright and immediate, and you taste blood where your teeth cut the inside of your mouth. The candles blur and swim before your eyes. Your ears ring with the force of it.

"You have," he says, and his voice is utterly calm, utterly controlled, as if he did not just strike you across the face in a house of the gods. "Do not lie to me, little bastard. Lying is a sin. Lying in a sept is a double sin. And lying to your master—" His hand finds the back of your head again, fisting in your hair, yanking your head back until your throat is bared to the vaulted ceiling. "—is the worst sin of all. You have been tempting me. You may not have done it consciously—you are too stupid to do anything consciously, too much of a brainless little animal following her base instincts—but the sin is in your nature. It festers in your blood. You cannot help it any more than a bitch in heat can help lifting her tail."

His free hand finds your breast, cupping it roughly through the wool, his fingers digging into the soft flesh with a bruising pressure that makes you gasp.

"Your very existence is a temptation," he breathes against your ear. "The way you move through my tent with your head bowed and your hips swaying. The way you bend over my desk to receive correction, presenting your backside like an offering. The way you kneel beside my bath with your breath quick and your hands trembling on my bare skin. The way you look at me with those wet eyes, pretending to be afraid, pretending to be innocent, when we both know what you really are." He squeezes, hard, and you whimper despite yourself. "You are a whore in spirit, just as your mother was a whore in flesh. You were born to spread your legs and take whatever a real man chooses to give you. Acknowledge it. Grovel for it. Beg the Seven to scour the filth from your worthless cunt before it drags me down to the seventh hell."

Tears are streaming down your face now, dripping from your chin and spotting the gray wool of your dress. The salt stings the fresh bruise blooming on your cheekbone. You are still praying, still speaking, the words pouring out of you in a desperate, broken torrent because you have learned what happens when you stop, you have learned what happens when you hesitate, you have learned what happens when you defy him.

"I beg forgiveness for my body," you choke out, and your voice is barely recognizable as your own. "I beg the Seven to purify my flesh. I am a vessel of temptation. I am a whore in spirit. I have tried to lure my lord into sin with my—with my base animal nature. I am no better than a bitch in heat. I beg to be cleansed. I beg to be made pure. I beg the Seven to burn the lust from my blood before it corrupts the righteous man who owns me."

"Good," Ormund breathes, and the word is thick with satisfaction. His hands are still on your breasts, still kneading with that slow, patient rhythm, his thumbs working in deliberate circles against the stiff peaks of your nipples. Your body betrays you utterly. Your nipples have tightened into hard, aching points beneath his touch, and the heat that pools low in your belly is a shame so profound you think it might drown you. "You feel that? You feel how your body responds to me? That is the sin inside you. That is your mother's whore blood rising to the surface. Even now, even when you are begging the gods for forgiveness, your worthless little nipples are hard and your cunt is getting wet. You cannot help yourself. You were made for this."

He pinches. Hard. The pain is sharp and bright, and you cry out before you can stop yourself, the sound echoing through the empty sept like a bell.

"Continue," he says, and his voice is a low, pleased purr against your ear. "Continue begging. Beg the Seven to strip the lust from your flesh. Beg them to burn the wantonness from your corrupted blood. Beg them to close up that treacherous little cunt before it leads some poor, unsuspecting man straight into the fires of damnation. Beg until your voice gives out and your knees bleed and I am satisfied." His teeth graze the curve of your ear—just barely, just a whisper of pressure. "And I am not satisfied yet, little bastard. Not nearly."

You continue praying, his palms cup your breasts through the rough wool of your dress, his fingers spread wide to encompass as much of you as possible, his thumbs circling the hardened peaks with a patience that terrifies you more than violence ever could. He has been touching you like this for what feels like hours—kneading the soft flesh, testing its weight, learning its shape with the obsessive attention of a scholar studying a rare and precious text. His breath stirs the fine hairs at the nape of your neck, warm and steady against your chilled skin. His chest is solid against your back, a wall of heat and muscle and implacable control. You can feel his heartbeat through the wool of your dress, slow and steady, utterly unhurried.

"You are doing well," he murmurs against your ear. His lips brush the sensitive shell of it as he speaks, and a shudder wracks through your body that has nothing to do with the cold. "Your prayers are growing more sincere. I can hear the contrition taking root in your voice. But there is still corruption in you. I can feel it. I can feel it burning beneath your skin like a fever. The taint runs deeper than words can reach. It is woven into your flesh. It is coiled in the very core of your being. Words and prayers and confessions can only cleanse so much. The deepest stains require a deeper purification."

You do not understand what he means. You do not want to understand. You continue to pray, your voice cracking on every syllable, and you try to drift somewhere far away from your body, somewhere his hands cannot follow, somewhere the heat of his palms and the press of his fingers and the slow, grinding rhythm of his touch cannot reach. But his voice pulls you back. His voice always pulls you back.

"Do you know how long I have wanted this?" he asks. The question is soft, almost conversational, as if he is inquiring about the quality of the wine at dinner or the likelihood of rain tomorrow. "Do you know how many nights I lay awake in my chambers at court with my hand wrapped around my cock, thinking about this exact moment? Thinking about you on your knees before me? Thinking about all the ways I would humble you, strip you, gut that pride out of you like a fish?"

His hands squeeze your breasts, hard enough to make you gasp, hard enough that you'll find bruises there tomorrow—purple fingerprints pressed into the pale flesh like a signature on a contract. He laughs at the sound you make, a low, dark chuckle against your ear.

"Yes," you whisper. "I do."

"Of course you do. You've always known. Even when you were laughing at me with your little whores in waiting, even when you were wrinkling your nose and sniffing the air and asking if anyone else could smell something unpleasant—even then, some part of you knew." His lips trace the curve of your ear, and his tongue flicks against the lobe, wet and warm and obscene. "Some part of you knew you'd end up here. On your knees. In the dark. With my hands on your body and my name in your mouth. Didn't you?"

His hands slide down from your breasts, tracing the curve of your waist, the flare of your hips with the slow, savoring pace of a man who has waited two years and intends to enjoy every second. They grip your thighs through the rough wool of your dress, his fingers digging into the soft flesh with the possessive strength of a man who has claimed something and has no intention of ever releasing it. His nails press crescents into your skin through the fabric.

"I imagined this," he continues. His voice has dropped to a murmur, low and thick with a hunger that makes your stomach heave. "Every night. Every single night for two years. I imagined you on your knees. I imagined your pride crumbling. I imagined that sharp tongue of yours finally silenced, finally still, finally good for something other than mockery. I imagined touching you the way I'm touching you now—learning every inch of your body with my hands the way a sculptor learns clay. I imagined the sounds you'd make. The way you'd tremble. The way you'd try so hard to hide what your body was feeling, and the way you'd fail so completely."

His fingers find the laces of your dress. You feel the ties loosen one by one, each tug a small death.

"I imagined that first night, after the tourney, when you fled the feast with your face burning and your hands shaking. I lay in my bed and I thought about you in your chambers, alone, pulling off that silk gown, and I wrapped my hand around my cock and I thought about what you'd look like under all that fabric. I thought about what sounds you'd make if I were there to help you undress. I thought about what your face would look like when I pushed into you for the first time."

The laces come free. The rough wool slackens across your shoulders. Cold air touches the bare skin of your upper back, and the sensation cuts through your daze like a blade of ice. You have been half-paralyzed by the rhythm of his voice, by the relentless, proprietary movement of his hands, by the grotesque intimacy of his confession—but the loosening of your dress snaps you back into your body with violent, desperate clarity.

"No." The word tears out of you like a living thing, raw and frantic. You twist away from him, scrambling forward on your knees, your hands flying to your chest to clutch the loosened fabric against your body. "No, my lord, please—please, not this, anything but this—I will pray harder, I will be better, I will do any penance, any punishment, the cane, I'll take the cane a hundred times, I'll take it until I can't stand, I'll take it until I bleed, please—"

You don't get three feet. His hand closes around your ankle, he pulls you back across the stone floor, and your knees scrape against the flags, and you kick and thrash and claw at the stone, your fingernails catching in the cracks between the flags and tearing back to the quick, leaving faint red smears on the gray rock. You might as well be fighting the tide. You might as well be fighting gravity. He pulls you back to the altar with the casual ease of a man dragging a sack of grain, as if your resistance is not even an annoyance, as if your terror is a minor scheduling inconvenience.

"Shh." He kneels over you, his weight pressing you down against the cold floor, his thighs bracketing your hips, his body a cage of heat and muscle from which there is no escape. His voice is soft, gentle, the voice of a man soothing a panicked horse before he breaks it to the saddle. "Shh. Shh. Be still. Be calm. Why are you crying? Why are you fighting? This isn't a punishment." He leans down, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. "This is a reward. This is the culmination of everything we've been working toward. You've prayed and you've begged and you've confessed your whore mother's sins and your bastard brothers' sins and your own filthy, prideful sins, but there are some stains that words cannot wash away. You know this. You've always known this. Deep in that black little bastard heart of yours, beneath the pride and the defiance and the dragon's arrogance, you have always known you needed to be cleansed properly. You needed a man to do what your mother never could. You needed a man to make you clean."

His hand strokes your hair. The gesture is tender, almost loving, and it makes your skin crawl and your stomach heave and your heart pound against your ribs with a terror that is beyond reason.

"I have wanted this since the first moment I saw you," he says. His voice is still soft, still gentle, still terrifyingly intimate. "I knew the moment I saw you that you were meant to be mine. I knew that all your pride and all your beauty and all your dragon's blood was a gift that the gods had placed in my path. You were not meant for those simpering young knights who stammered through their compliments. You were not meant for some fat lord who would grow bored of you and take a mistress. You were meant for me. You were always meant for me."

His hand drifts lower. It traces the line of your throat, the hollow between your collarbones, the upper curve of your chest where your hands are still clutching the loosened fabric of your dress.

"Let go," he says. "Let go of the dress. It will not protect you. Nothing will protect you. You are mine. You have been mine since the day you gave me your favor at the tourney, even if you did not know it then. Every insult you spoke, every joke you made, every time you turned your face away from me—all of it was just delaying the inevitable. You were always going to end up here, beneath me, on this altar. The gods ordained it. I am simply fulfilling their will."

You do not let go. Your fingers are locked around the fabric with the desperate, white-knuckled strength of a woman clinging to the edge of a cliff. But he does not pry your hands away. He does not force them. He simply waits, his hand resting lightly on your chest, his thumb tracing slow circles over your knuckles.

"I can wait," he says. "I have waited two years. I can wait a few more minutes. But you will let go eventually. You will let go because you know, deep down, that I am right. You know that you need this purification. You know that your mother's whorish blood and your father's dragon blood have corrupted you beyond the reach of ordinary prayer. You know that only I can cleanse you. Only my blood, my seed, my righteous essence can burn away the taint that stains your soul. You will let go because you want to be cleansed. You want to be made pure. You want to be worthy."

His voice is a drug, low and hypnotic, seeping into your exhausted mind and clouding your thoughts. You have been kneeling on this cold stone floor for what feels like hours. You have been praying and confessing and degrading yourself until your throat is raw and your mind is numb. You have been touched and groped and handled until your body no longer feels like your own. And through it all, his voice has been constant, a steady current of words and whispers and murmured obsessions that have worn away your resistance like water wearing away stone.

Your fingers loosen on the fabric. "Good," he breathes. "Good girl. That is my good girl. Let go. Let it all go. Let me cleanse you."

He reaches for your dress again. This time, you do not fight. The fight has been drained out of you by exhaustion and fear and the relentless, grinding pressure of his will. His fingers work the laces with calm efficiency, pulling them free of their eyelets one by one. The dress loosens further, gaping open at the back, and then he is pulling it down over your shoulders. The rough wool scrapes against your skin as it falls, catching on the peaks of your breasts, dragging over the sensitive flesh. You hear the fabric rustle as it pools around your knees on the stone floor. You are left in nothing but your thin linen shift, and the cold air of the sept raises goosebumps across every inch of your exposed arms and shoulders.

"Beautiful," he murmurs. His hands settle on your shoulders, bare now except for the thin straps of your shift. His palms are warm against your chilled skin. His hands slide down your arms, tracing the curve of your biceps, the tender skin of your inner elbows, the delicate bones of your wrists. He lifts your hands away from the crumpled fabric of your dress and holds them in his own, his thumbs pressing into your palms.

"Continue praying," he reminds you. His voice is steady, almost detached, as if he is performing a routine ritual rather than dismantling every layer of protection you possess. "Beg the Seven to witness your purification. Beg them to accept the offering of your corruption. I want to hear your voice when I take you. I want the gods to hear it too."

You pray. The words come out in a broken, stammering stream, barely intelligible through your sobs. You beg the Mother to have mercy on your wretched soul. You beg the Maiden to preserve what little virtue you have left, even as you feel it slipping away from you. You beg the Crone to light a path through this darkness, to show you how to survive what is about to happen. You beg the Father to judge you fairly, to see that this is not your choice, that you are being forced, that you have no power to refuse.

The shift comes off over your head. Ormund lifts it slowly, almost reverently, as if unveiling a sacred object. The linen slides up over your stomach, your ribs, your breasts. The cold air hits your bare skin like a physical blow, and you wrap your arms around yourself instinctively, hunching forward, trying to hide. Your breasts press against your forearms, the nipples hard, your stomach is bare. The curve of your hips is exposed. Every inch of you is laid open to the candlelight and the indifferent gaze of the Seven and the patient, hungry eyes of Lord Ormund Hightower.

He draws a sharp breath. The sound is soft, almost reverent, the sound a man might make upon seeing a holy relic for the first time.

"Look at you," he whispers. "Look at you. All those months I spent imagining, and my imagination did not come close. You are exquisite. You are perfect. Every inch of you is a testament to the gods' craftsmanship. It is almost a shame that such beauty was given to a bastard, to a whore's daughter, to a creature so steeped in sin. But I will make you worthy of it. I will purify you until your body matches your new soul."

His hands settle on your shoulders. He pulls you gently but firmly away from your protective hunch, straightening your spine, drawing your arms away from your body. You resist for a moment, and then you let him. You let him because you are too tired to fight anymore. You let him because his voice has wrapped around your will and squeezed until there is nothing left but compliance.

He looks at you. His blue eyes trace the lines of your body with obsessive, meticulous attention—the slope of your shoulders, the swell of your breasts, the narrow curve of your waist, the flare of your hips, the triangle of hair at the junction of your thighs. He looks at you for a long time, his breath coming slow and deep, his hands still resting on your shoulders.

"Two years," he says again. "Two years I have waited to see this. Two years I have imagined it. And now here you are, naked before the altar of the Seven, exactly as I always knew you would be. The gods are good. The gods are just. They have delivered you into my hands, and I will not waste their gift."

He takes your arm and guides you upward. Your legs are so weak you can barely stand. The stone floor has numbed your knees, and you stagger as you rise, and he steadies you with a hand on your waist. His thumb presses into the soft flesh just above your hip bone, and you flinch, and he smiles.

The altar is before you, a simple slab of stone draped in white linen, the candles flickering at its corners in their iron stand, the colored light from the window casting the shadows of the Mother and the Father across its surface. The white cloth is pristine, untouched, waiting. You stare at it and know with horrible certainty what is about to happen on that cloth.

"Lie down," he says.

You do not move. You stand there, naked and shivering, your arms still wrapped around yourself, and you stare at the altar. Your mind is screaming. Every instinct you possess is telling you to run, to fight, to scratch his eyes out, to do anything other than lie down on that stone and let him do what he is about to do. But your body does not obey. Your body has learned too well the cost of disobedience. Your body remembers the cane and the bruises and the cold lake and the endless, grinding humiliation of the past weeks. Your body is no longer yours to command.

"Lie down," he repeats. His voice is still soft, still patient, still terrifyingly gentle. "Or I will bind you to it with rope and strip you of even the pretense of choice. I would prefer you to accept this willingly. I would prefer you to offer yourself to the gods as a willing sacrifice. But if you cannot find the strength to do that, I will force you into grace. The purification will happen regardless. The only question is how much suffering you must endure before you surrender to it."

You lie down, the white linen is cold against your bare back. The stone beneath it is colder still, and the chill seeps through the cloth and into your skin, into your muscles, into the marrow of your bones. You stare up at the vaulted ceiling of the sept, at the shadows dancing in the rafters, at the faint traces of old paint that once depicted the seven-pointed star in gold and silver. You do not look at him. You cannot look at him. You fix your eyes on the ceiling and you try to drift away, to float up into the shadows, to leave your body behind on this cold stone slab while your mind escapes to somewhere he cannot reach.

He does not let you drift. His face appears above yours, blocking out the ceiling, blocking out the shadows, blocking out everything except his blue eyes and his light brown curls and the faint, satisfied smile that plays at the corners of his mouth.

"Look at me," he says. "I want you to look at me while I purify you. I want you to see the man who is cleansing your soul. I want you to remember this moment for the rest of your life—the moment Lord Ormund Hightower reached into the depths of your corruption and pulled you out, remade and reborn and finally worthy of the gods' regard."

You do not look at him. You keep your eyes fixed on a point just over his shoulder, on the colored window, on the Mother's painted face. His smile fades slightly. His jaw tightens.

"Look at me," he repeats, and this time there is an edge to his voice, a hint of the steel beneath the silk. "You will look at me, or I will make the purification as painful as I possibly can. I came here intending to be gentle with you. I came here intending to ease you into this, to make your first time as comfortable as possible despite your resistance. But if you defy me now, I will not be gentle. I will not be comfortable. I will use your body the way a conqueror uses a conquered city, and you will feel every moment of it, and you will know that you brought it on yourself with your stubbornness and your pride."

Your eyes move. They move against your will, drawn by the threat in his voice, drawn by the memory of the cane and the bruises and all the other punishments you have endured. They move from the window to his face, and you look into his eyes, and you see the hunger there. It is a terrible, consuming hunger, the hunger of a man who has starved for two years and is finally about to feast. It is an obsessive hunger, a desperate hunger, a hunger that goes beyond lust into something darker and more profound. It is the hunger of a man who has built his entire world around the possession of a single object, and that object is you.

"There," he breathes. His smile returns, softer now, almost tender. "There you are. There are those eyes. Do you know how many nights I dreamed of those eyes? How many times I pictured them looking up at me with fear and surrender instead of contempt? This is better than any dream. This is real. This is happening. And you are going to remember it forever."

He begins to undress. His fingers work the buttons of his doublet with the same calm efficiency with which he removed your dress. He holds your gaze as he undresses, his eyes never leaving yours, as if he wants you to witness every moment of this, as if the act of undressing is part of the ritual.

"The blood of Old Valyria flows in your veins," he says. His doublet falls to the floor with a soft rustle of fine wool. "The blood of dragonlords. The blood of sorcerers and conquerors and sister-fuckers. It is a savage bloodline. A corrupted bloodline. The Targaryens have always been closer to beasts than to men. They lie with their siblings. They burn their enemies alive. They twist the laws of gods and mortals to suit their whims. They believe themselves above all authority, above all decency, above the gods themselves. Your mother is the worst of them—a woman who believes her cunt gives her the right to rule, a woman who spreads her legs for any man who catches her eye and then demands the realm bow to her bastards."

His shirt follows his doublet. The candlelight plays across the bare skin of his chest, painting the muscles in shades of gold and shadow. He is beautiful, objectively beautiful, and the knowledge of that beauty makes everything worse. It would be easier to hate him if he were ugly. It would be easier to endure this if his body did not look like something carved by a master sculptor.

"You carry that corruption in your blood," he continues. His hands move to the laces of his breeches. "The sin of bastardy is one stain, but the sin of dragonblood is another. You are tainted on both sides, a double abomination. Your mother's lust and your father's lineage have combined to make you a creature of pure sin, a vessel of corruption so profound that ordinary prayer could never hope to cleanse it. Words and prayers and canings and cold baths cannot reach the depths of your taint. Only something deeper can reach it. Only something planted at the very core of your being, in the womb that carries your mother's whorish legacy."

His breeches fall. He stands before you naked, his body silhouetted against the candlelight, and you see the evidence of his desire rising hard and insistent from the dark gold thatch of hair at his groin. Your stomach clenches. Your throat closes. You try to look away, but his eyes hold yours, and you cannot escape them, cannot escape the hunger and the obsession and the terrible, patient certainty that burns in their blue depths.

"House Hightower has served the Faith since before the Targaryens came to Westeros," he says. He places one knee on the altar, then the other, positioning himself above you. The stone shifts slightly under his weight. "We are the guardians of the Starry Sept. We are the sword and shield of the Seven. Our blood is blessed. Our seed is sacred. Our lineage stretches back to the Dawn Age, to the first men who raised the first tower in Oldtown and lit the first flame to guide travelers home. We are the light in the darkness. We are the fire on the hill. And I am going to plant that light inside you. I am going to fill you with Hightower seed until the dragon blood is diluted and the whore's blood is purged and you are made clean at last."

His hands settle on your thighs. The touch is electric, your bare skin against his bare palms, and you flinch involuntarily, your whole body jerking against the altar stone. He does not remove his hands. He lets them rest there, warm and heavy and possessive, his thumbs tracing slow circles on the tender flesh of your inner thighs.

"Continue praying," he commands. "Do not stop. I want the gods to hear your voice when the purification takes hold. I want them to witness the exact moment your corruption is burned away by righteous fire. I want them to see your soul being wrenched from darkness into light. Pray."

You pray. You pray because the alternative is to scream, and you have learned that screaming only makes things worse. You pray because prayer is the only thing holding your mind together, the only thread connecting you to the world beyond this cold stone room. You beg the Father for a justice that will never come. You beg the Mother for a mercy that does not exist. You beg the Warrior for the strength to endure what you are about to endure. Your voice is a thin, reedy whisper, barely audible over the guttering of the candles, but you do not stop. You do not stop because if you stop, you will have nothing left. If you stop, he will have taken everything.

His hands push your thighs apart. The motion is slow and deliberate, as if he is opening a precious book, as if he is unveiling a sacred relic. You feel the cold air of the sept against the most intimate parts of your body, against the wetness that shames you, against the evidence of a physical response that your mind has not consented to. You sob, and the sob interrupts your prayers, and you force yourself to continue, to push the words out through the tears and the shame and the terror.

"Beautiful," he murmurs. He is looking at you. He is looking at all of you, at the most private and vulnerable parts of your body, and his expression is one of pure, reverent wonder. "Even here, you are beautiful. Even in the place where your mother's sin took root, you are exquisite. I have imagined this so many times. I have imagined the color of your flesh, the shape of your sex, the way you would look spread open before me. My imagination was a pale shadow of the reality. You are a masterpiece. You are a temple. And I am going to worship at your altar until you are purified."

His hands grip your hips. The grip is firm, possessive, the grip of a man who has claimed something and has no intention of ever letting it go. His fingers dig into the soft flesh, hard enough to leave bruises, hard enough to mark you as his. He positions himself between your thighs, and you feel the heat of him against your most intimate place, and every muscle in your body locks tight with a terror so profound it blots out everything else.

"The savage blood will be tempered," he murmurs. His voice is thick now, roughened by desire, no longer calm and detached. The mask of clinical detachment has slipped, and beneath it is the raw, obsessive hunger of a man who has waited two years for this moment. "This is salvation. And you should be grateful for it. You should thank me for it. You should beg me to continue until every last trace of your mother's sin has been scoured from your soul."

His hips shift. You feel him position himself against your entrance, hard and insistent and impossibly large. Your body tries to recoil, but there is nowhere to go. The altar is solid beneath your back. His hands are iron on your hips. You are pinned like a butterfly to a board, spread open and helpless and utterly at his mercy.

"Pray," he commands. "Pray now. Pray loudly. I want the gods to hear you."

You pray. You pray as he pushes inside you. The sensation is a tearing, a burning, an invasion that feels like it will split you in two. Your maidenhead gives way with a sharp, searing pain that wrenches a scream from your throat, and the scream echoes off the stone walls of the sept and mingles with the names of the Seven, and you keep praying through the scream, keep gasping out the words even as your body convulses around the intrusion. He groans, a low and guttural sound, and his fingers dig deeper into the flesh of your hips.

"Tight," he gasps. His voice is strained, trembling with the effort of restraint. "So tight. So perfect. I knew you would be. I knew it. Two years I have imagined this—the heat of you, the grip of you, the way you would feel around me. Two years of dreams and fantasies and sleepless nights, and none of them came close to this. None of them came close to the reality of your body welcoming me home."

He begins to move. The rhythm is slow at first, deliberate, each thrust a fresh violation, a fresh agony. You feel every inch of him inside you, feel the way your body stretches to accommodate him, feel the blood and the slickness and the raw, animal reality of what is happening. You pray as he moves. You pray as your body rocks against the altar with each thrust. You pray as tears stream down your face and pool in the hollow of your throat and spill over onto the white altar cloth. You pray as the candles gutter and the colored light shifts and the faces of the Seven stare down at you with their painted eyes and their serene, indifferent expressions.

"Yes," he breathes, and the word comes out ragged now, frayed at the edges, his carefully maintained control finally beginning to crack like ice under pressure. His rhythm quickens, each thrust driving deeper, harder, the wet slap of his hips against your thighs echoing obscenely in the stone silence of the sept. "Yes. Feel it. Feel the purification taking hold. Feel the Hightower seed working its way into your corrupted blood, chasing out the taint, burning away the filth. Feel the dragon rot being scoured from your veins. Feel the whore's legacy being overwritten, rewritten, replaced by something pure. Something of mine. This is holy work we are doing. This is righteous work. You are being remade from the inside out. You are being reborn in my image. You are becoming mine in body as well as soul, and nothing—no war, no dragon, no whore queen on her stolen throne—will ever separate you from me again."

His hand leaves your hip, where his fingers have pressed bruises into the soft flesh, and tangles in your hair. He yanks your head back, forcing your chin up, exposing the long, vulnerable curve of your throat. The position is one of absolute submission—your body pinned beneath his, your legs spread, your throat bared like a wolf offering its neck to the alpha. He lowers his mouth to your neck, and his lips trace the frantic flutter of your pulse at the side of your throat. You can feel the beat of your own heart hammering against his mouth, a trapped bird throwing itself against the bars of its cage. His lips part. His teeth graze the tender skin just below your jaw, his tongue follows, wet and warm, tasting the salt of your sweat and the salt of your tears and the faint, lingering trace of the jasmine oil that still clings to your hair despite weeks of harsh soap and cold water.

"You mocked me," he whispers against your throat, and his voice vibrates through your skin, through the column of your neck, through the delicate bones of your inner ear. His hips are driving into you relentlessly now, each thrust a punishment and a claim, each word punctuated by the wet, visceral sound of his body entering yours.

His thrusts are brutal now, punishing, each one driving the breath from your lungs in a sharp, involuntary gasp. The stone altar is cold and unyielding beneath your back, a bed of granite that offers no comfort and no mercy. The cloth beneath you is already stained with the mingled evidence of your violation. Your tears have pooled in the hollows of your ears and the dip of your collarbone. Your hands, which you raised to push him away when this began, now lie limp and useless at your sides, your fingers curled into loose fists, your nails biting into your palms.

"But who is beneath whom now?" Ormund's voice is a savage, gloating snarl against your throat. "Who is the one on her back on a stone altar with her legs spread wide and her maiden's blood staining the cloth beneath her? Who is the one being used and filled and remade from the inside out? Who is the one who will walk out of this sept carrying my seed in her womb? You are beneath me. You have always been beneath me, even when you were too proud and too stupid to recognize it. And now you will never be above me again. You will learn to love this. You will learn to crave this. You will learn to beg for the purification only I can give you, the cleansing that burns away your mother's sin and your father's weakness and the dragon's arrogance. You will kneel before me every morning and every night and you will thank me for the gift of my seed, the gift of my discipline, the gift of my attention."

His words are poison and prophecy, and they seep into your mind like ink spilled on parchment, staining everything they touch. You cannot escape them. You cannot escape him. You can only lie on the cold stone altar, your body rocking with the force of his thrusts, your tears tracking silently down your temples and into your hair, your lips moving in a soundless prayer to gods who have clearly abandoned you to this fate. The Mother's stone eyes gaze down at you from above the altar, blank and pitiless. The Father's stone eyes gaze down in judgment. The Maiden, whose virtue you have just lost on this slab of granite, gazes down with an expression that might be sorrow or might be accusation—you cannot tell anymore, cannot read the faces of the gods, cannot find any comfort in their silent, staring presence.

His rhythm stutters. His body, which has been driving into you with the relentless, mechanical precision of a battering ram, suddenly loses its coordination. His thrusts become erratic, desperate, the movements of a man losing himself to sensation. His breath comes in ragged, gasping bursts against your throat, hot and wet and increasingly uncontrolled. His hand in your hair tightens convulsively, yanking your head back further, forcing your spine to arch, forcing your breasts to press against his chest through the sweat-damp fabric of your rough wool dress. You can feel him swelling inside you—a strange, terrifying sensation, a pressure building at the very core of your body where no one has ever touched before tonight. You can feel the tension coiling in his muscles, the way his shoulders bunch and his abdomen clenches and his thighs tremble against yours. You can feel the imminent release that will complete the ritual, the moment when he pours himself into you and seals this desecration with his seed.

"When you carry my child," he gasps, his voice breaking on the words, "when you swell with Hightower seed and your belly grows round and your breasts grow heavy and everyone can see what I have done to you—when you bring forth a trueborn babe from your bastard womb—you will understand. You will finally, truly understand. You will understand that this was always your purpose. Not the Iron Throne. Not the crown. Not the dragon. Not Silverwing. Your purpose was to be mine. To bear my children. To receive my purification. To spend the rest of your natural life on your knees or on your back or bent over my desk with your dress pulled up and your legs spread, serving me, pleasing me, thanking me for the gift of cleansing I have given you."

His words are coming faster now, tumbling over each other in their urgency, his carefully constructed composure crumbling into something raw and primal. "This is your destiny. This is your salvation. This is the only future you will ever have. Not as a princess. Not as a queen. Not as a dragonrider. As my vessel. As my property. As the mother of my children. Accept it. Accept it. Accept—"

His rhythm stutters violently, his hips jerking against yours in a series of deep, convulsive thrusts that drive him as far into you as your body will allow. His whole body goes rigid above you—every muscle tensed, every tendon drawn tight, his back arching like a bowstring pulled to its breaking point. His hand in your hair clenches so hard that you feel individual strands tear from your scalp. His mouth, pressed against the curve of your throat, opens wide, and he groans—a low, guttural, almost animal sound that seems to come from somewhere deep in his chest, somewhere primal and possessive and utterly without restraint. The sound vibrates through your skin and into your bones, and you feel it as much as you hear it.

He holds himself inside you as he spends, buried to the hilt, the base of his cock pressed flush against your most intimate flesh. His seed floods your womb in hot, pulsing waves—you can feel it, a wet, spreading warmth deep inside your body where nothing and no one has ever been before. The sensation is foreign and terrifying and intimate beyond words, a violation that goes beyond the physical, beyond the tearing of your maidenhead and the bruising of your hips and the ache in your thighs. This is an invasion of the most fundamental kind, a claiming of territory that was never meant to be claimed, a planting of his flag in soil that does not belong to him. You can feel his seed pooling inside you, can feel the excess beginning to leak out around the base of his cock, trickling down onto the white linen cloth beneath your hips. The cloth that was meant to prove your virtue. The cloth that will now prove your ruination.

He stays there for a long moment, buried inside you, his body still shuddering with the aftershocks of his release. His breath is hot and ragged against your throat. His heart pounds against your chest—you can feel it through the layers of wool and linen that separate your skin from his, a wild, thundering rhythm that gradually begins to slow. His hand in your hair loosens by degrees, the white-knuckled grip relaxing into something almost gentle, almost tender. His thumb strokes the nape of your neck in slow, idle circles, a gesture of comfort that is so grotesquely intimate it makes your stomach heave.

"There," he murmurs against your throat, his voice soft and sated and almost affectionate. "There. It is done. The ritual is complete. You have been purified. You have been claimed. You have been marked from the inside out with the seed of House Hightower, and no power in this world or the next can undo what we have done here tonight." He lifts his head from your throat and looks down at you, his pale blue eyes hazy with satisfaction, his lips curved in a smile of deep and proprietary contentment. "You are mine now. Truly mine. Wholly mine. Irrevocably mine. Body and soul and womb. And you will never be anything else again."

He withdraws from you slowly, deliberately, and the sensation of him leaving your body is almost as violating as the sensation of him entering it. You feel every inch of him as he pulls out, feel the strange, hollow emptiness he leaves behind, feel the hot trickle of his seed beginning to escape your body now that he is no longer plugging the entrance. It runs down the inside of your thigh in a slow, warm rivulet, and you cannot stop it, cannot control it, cannot do anything but lie there on the cold stone altar and feel it pooling on the white linen cloth beneath you. The cloth that was supposed to prove your purity. The cloth that will now be shown to his household as proof of your submission.

Ormund stands. He looks down at you for a long moment—at your tear-streaked face, your bruised throat, your rumpled dress bunched around your waist, your bare legs still spread from the position he held them in, the blood and seed staining the white cloth beneath your hips. His expression is one of deep, unhurried satisfaction, the expression of an artist contemplating his finished work.

"The purification is not complete," he says. His voice is steady again, the mask of calm control firmly back in place. "It will take time. The dragon blood is stubborn. The whore's blood is deeply rooted. It has had eighteen years to fester in your veins. It will not be cleansed in a single session. We will return here every morning until I am certain the corruption has been fully purged. Every morning, you will kneel and pray and confess, and then you will lie on this altar and receive my purification. This is your new purpose. This is your new life. Accept it."

He pauses. His thumb traces the curve of your cheekbone, the line of your jaw, the swollen bow of your lower lip.

"And when your belly begins to swell with my child," he adds, his voice dropping to a murmur, "when the proof of your purification is visible for all the world to see, we will be married. You will become my wife in name as well as in deed. You will be Lady Hightower, and you will live in the High Tower in Oldtown, and you will bear my children and keep my house and kneel in the Starry Sept every morning to thank the gods for the gift of your salvation. You will be happy. I will make you happy. I have waited years to make you happy, and I will not be denied."

You do not answer. You cannot answer. Your voice has finally given out, worn to nothing by prayer and screaming. You lie on the altar, naked and bleeding and filled with his seed, and you stare at the colored window, at the Mother's painted face and the Father's raised hand, and you whisper the names of the Seven without sound.

He takes your silence for acceptance. He takes everything for acceptance.

"Good girl," he says. "Dress yourself. There is work to be done."

—

The morning after the sept, you wake in his bed. This is wrong. This is the first coherent thought that forms in your mind as consciousness returns to you, rising up through layers of exhaustion and pain like a swimmer struggling toward a distant surface. You are in his bed. You have never been in his bed before. You have slept on the floor at the foot of his bed, wrapped in a thin blanket on the cold stone flags, listening to his breathing in the darkness, the rhythm of it a constant reminder of his presence, his ownership, his absolute control over every aspect of your existence.

Your cunt throbs. Your cunt throbs with a deep, persistent ache that radiates outward through your pelvis, your lower back, the tender insides of your thighs. You feel hollowed out. You feel like something has been scraped from inside you with a dull blade, leaving behind raw, bruised flesh that pulses with every beat of your heart. When you shift beneath the sheets, a slickness seeps from between your legs, his seed, still leaking from your body hours after he planted it inside you. The sensation of it trickling out of your hole, warm and thick and unmistakably present, makes your stomach lurch with revulsion.

You are naked beneath the sheets. You do not remember how you got here. You remember the altar. You remember the pain of his cock splitting you open, the tearing of your maidenhead, the blood that smeared across the white altar cloth. You remember him thrusting into you, his cock sliding deeper with each stroke, stretching your untried cunt around his thickness until you felt like you might split apart. You remember praying through it, clinging to the names of the Seven like a rope dangling over an abyss, your voice cracking on the words as his hips slammed against your bruised thighs. And then there is nothing. A blank space where memory should be. You must have passed out when he spent inside you, your body finally surrendering to the overwhelming assault of sensation. And he must have carried you here, his seed still dripping down your thighs, and laid you in his bed and pulled the sheets up to your chin.

The thought of him carrying your unconscious body, of his hands cradling your limp and naked form, of the tenderness he might have shown while you were unaware—this thought makes your skin crawl more than the memory of the rape itself.

Beside you, Ormund stirs, he has been sleeping on his side, facing you. His face is relaxed in repose, the lines of command and control smoothed away by sleep. His light brown curls are tousled against the pillow, tangled from the night's exertions. His lips are slightly parted. His bare chest rises and falls with slow, even breaths. He looks younger like this. He looks almost gentle. You know better than to trust the gentleness of his sleeping face. You have seen what lies beneath it. You have felt what lies beneath it—his cock, thick and hard and relentless, forcing its way into your body while you screamed and prayed and bled on the altar cloth.

His eyes open. They are blue and clear and immediately alert, as if he has been waiting just beneath the surface of sleep for the exact moment you woke. He looks at you, and the faint smile that you have come to dread curves the corners of his mouth. His gaze drops to the sheets bunched at your chest, to the bare skin of your shoulders, to the hollow of your throat where your pulse beats visibly beneath the thin layer of skin.

"Good morning," he says. His voice is soft, warm, intimate. The voice of a lover greeting his beloved on the first morning of their marriage. "How do you feel?"

You do not know how to answer this question. You feel like you have been split open and hollowed out. You feel his seed leaking from your cunt and his bruises darkening on your hips and his voice echoing in the hollow spaces of your mind. You feel like every inch of your body has been claimed and marked and remade in his image.

"I am sore, my lord," you whisper. It is the truth. It is the only truth you have left. "Between my legs. It... aches."

"Of course it does." He reaches out and touches your face. His fingers brush the curve of your cheek, the line of your jaw, the tender place beneath your ear. The touch is gentle, almost tender, and you flinch anyway because his gentleness is more terrifying than his cruelty. "I was inside you for a long time. And it was your first time. Your cunt has never been stretched around a man's cock before. Your maidenhead tore when I entered you—I felt it give way, felt the resistance break and the blood slick my shaft. The pain is natural. The soreness is natural. Your body will adjust. Your cunt will learn to accommodate me. In time, you will crave the feeling of being filled."

You say nothing. You do not believe him. You cannot imagine a world in which you crave the feeling of his cock inside you, stretching you open, pounding into your most intimate depths while you lie helpless beneath him. But you have learned that silence is safer than argument.

He sits up in bed, the sheets pooling around his waist. The morning light stripes across his bare chest, painting the muscles in shades of gold and shadow. His body is smooth, hairless, the result of the same grooming practices he will soon impose upon you. You can see the outline of his cock beneath the sheets, already half-hard, stirring with the morning arousal that comes to all men upon waking. The sight of it makes your cunt clench involuntarily, a spasm of remembered pain and anticipated violation.

"We have much to do today," he says. "Your purification was only the beginning. There are other impurities that must be addressed. Your body has been neglected. It has been allowed to grow wild and unclean, like a garden overrun with weeds. We must tend to it. We must make every inch of it worthy of its new purpose."

You do not ask what he means. You have learned that asking questions only brings more pain. You lie still in the bed, the sheets clutched to your chest, and you wait for him to tell you what to do. Your cunt continues to throb. His seed continues to leak from your hole, dampening the sheets beneath you.

He rises from the bed and walks to the door. He is completely naked, completely unashamed. His cock sways with each step, half-erect, the shaft thick and flushed with blood. You cannot look away from it. You have felt it inside you, felt the way it stretches your cunt, felt the ridge of the head dragging against your inner walls. Seeing it now, in the cold light of morning, makes the memory of last night more visceral, more real. He opens the door a crack and speaks to someone outside—a servant, one of the silent men who attends to his needs. You catch fragments of his instructions: "...hot water... the wax... the strips of cloth... my personal servants, the ones who attended me in Oldtown..." The door closes. He turns back to you.

"Stay in bed," he says. "The servants will be here shortly. They will prepare you. By the time they are finished, you will be as smooth and bare as I am. Your cunt will be clean and exposed, with no hair to hide its shape or its color or its readiness for my use."

The servants arrive within the hour. There are three of them—two women and a man, all of them older, all of them with the quiet, competent manner of people who have served Lord Ormund for many years. They bring basins of steaming water and soft cloths and jars of something that smells faintly of honey and resin, the same mixture used for hair removal in the finest households of the Reach. They bring strips of clean linen. They bring a small brazier of coals, which the man sets on the stone hearth and tends until the coals glow a steady, even red.

Ormund is still in the room. He has dressed himself in a loose robe of dark green velvet, belted loosely at the waist. The robe gapes open when he moves, exposing the flat plane of his stomach, the golden hairlessness of his chest, the heavy swing of his cock between his thighs. He sits in the lord's carved chair by the window, watching. He is always watching. His blue eyes follow every movement of the servants, every flicker of expression on your face, every tremor that runs through your body. He watches you the way a hawk watches a mouse, patient and predatory and utterly without mercy.

"Remove the sheets," he tells the servants. "I want her fully exposed. She has nothing to hide from me anymore. I have seen every part of her. I have been inside every part of her."

The servants obey. They pull the sheets away from your body, and the cool morning air washes over your bare skin. You gasp and try to cover yourself with your hands—your breasts, your cunt, the places that should be private—but Ormund makes a small sound of displeasure, a clicking of his tongue against his teeth, and you force your hands to your sides. You lie naked on the mattress while the servants move around you. The evidence of last night is still visible on your body—the dried blood smeared on your inner thighs, the bruises from his grip darkening on your hips, the slick residue of his seed glistening on the lips of your cunt.

"The hair," Ormund says, gesturing toward your body. "All of it. The hair on her cunt, her underarms, her legs. Every follicle from the neck down. Hair in the private areas traps sweat and odor and filth. It conceals what should be visible. I keep my own body completely smooth, as you have no doubt observed during your duties bathing me. You have seen my cock bare and exposed, the shaft clean, the head smooth. I expect the same standard of cleanliness from you. When I look at your cunt, I want to see every fold, every contour, every shade of color. I do not want your flesh hidden behind a thatch of coarse hair like a common peasant."

You have observed this. You had not realized it was deliberate. You had thought it had been some quirk of his birth.

The older of the two women approaches you first. She carries a small pot of warm wax, the honey-scented substance you smelled earlier. She stirs it with a wooden spatula, testing its consistency, and then she kneels beside the bed.

"Spread your legs, please," she says. Her voice is calm and professional, utterly without judgment. "Open them wide. I need full access to your area. The lord wants every hair removed, including the ones between your legs, the ones on your outer lips, the ones around your entrance. This will be easier if you do not resist."

You look at Ormund. He is still sitting in his chair, still watching. His robe has fallen open further, and you can see his cock stirring beneath the velvet, thickening, rising toward his belly as he watches the preparations. He is aroused by this. The sight of you being positioned and handled and prepared for his use is making him hard.

"Spread your legs," he echoes. "Let her see your cunt. Let her see what she will be working on."

You spread your legs. The movement pulls at the sore muscles of your inner thighs, makes your cunt ache with the memory of his intrusion. You are exposed completely—the lips of your sex, still swollen and tender from last night's assault. The curls of hair that cover your mound, matted with dried sweat and the residue of his seed. The inner folds, glistening, visible between the outer lips. The servant woman looks at it with professional detachment, the same expression a cook might wear when examining a cut of meat.

"Good," she says. "Try to hold still. The first strip is always the worst. After that, the pain becomes manageable."

She applies the warm wax to your cunt with the wooden spatula. The sensation is strange—warm and sticky, the wax clinging to the curls of hair that cover your mound, your outer lips, the sensitive crease where your thighs meet your groin. She works methodically, spreading the wax in smooth, even strokes, covering every inch of your pubic hair. The warmth of the wax is almost pleasant against your chilled skin. The anticipation of what comes next is not.

When the wax has cooled slightly, the woman presses a strip of linen against it, smoothing it down with firm, practiced pressure. Her fingers brush against your outer lips as she works, she waits a moment. Then she grips the edge of the strip and rips it away with a single, swift motion.

The pain is sudden and shocking and utterly unexpected. It is a bright, searing agony that tears a scream from your throat before you can stop it. The wax comes away with the linen, and with it comes the hair—ripped out at the root, dozens of follicles torn from your skin in a single violent motion. The patch of skin left behind is bare and stinging and inflamed, bright pink against the paler flesh around it. You jerk on the bed, your hands flying to your violated cunt, tears springing to your eyes. The skin is already beginning to burn, the nerve endings screaming at the sudden trauma.

"Hold her," Ormund says calmly. His voice betrays nothing but mild interest. "She must remain still, or the waxing will be uneven. I do not want patches of hair left behind. I want her cunt completely bare, completely smooth, completely perfect."

The man and the second woman move to hold you. They grip your arms and your legs, pressing you down against the mattress with firm but gentle pressure. You are pinned in place, your legs spread wide, your cunt fully exposed and vulnerable, while the first woman continues her work. You cannot close your legs. You cannot cover yourself. You cannot do anything but lie there and endure.

She applies more wax. She presses down more strips of linen. She rips them away one by one, and each rip is a fresh agony, a fresh violation, a fresh erasure of the body you once inhabited. The hair on your mound is torn away in strips, leaving behind bare. The hair on your outer lips—the most sensitive area, the place where the skin is thinnest and most delicate—comes away with a pain so intense that you see stars behind your closed eyelids. She works the wax into the crease between your thigh and your cunt, removing the fine hairs that grow there. She spreads your outer lips with her fingers and applies wax to the edges of your inner folds, removing even the smallest, finest hairs that grow along the sensitive border between your outer and inner flesh. When she reaches your ass, spreading your cheeks to remove the hair from your crack, you sob openly, the tears streaming down your face and pooling in your ears.

"Almost finished," the woman murmurs. "Just a few more strips. The area around your entrance needs attention. Lord Ormund's instructions were very specific."

She applies wax around your hole—the sensitive skin of your perineum, the cleft of your ass, the areas that have never been touched by anyone before. The pain there is different, sharper, more intimate. When she rips the strips away, you scream into the mattress, your fingers clawing at the sheets, your hips bucking against the hands that hold you down.

"Good," Ormund says, when the woman has finally finished. His voice is thick now, roughened by arousal. You can see his cock fully erect beneath his robe, tenting the green velvet, a dark spot of moisture visible where the head presses against the fabric. He has been watching you writhe and scream and sob for the past hour, and it has made him hard. "Now the underarms. And the legs. I want every inch of her as smooth as marble. I want to be able to run my tongue across any part of her body and taste nothing but skin."

The woman moves to your underarms. The pain there is different—sharper, more focused, the skin more sensitive than you expected. She rips the hair from your armpits in three swift strokes, and you scream into the mattress, your fingers clawing at the sheets. Then she moves to your legs, and the pain spreads across your calves and your thighs, an endless wave of burning, stinging agony that seems to go on forever. She removes the fine, downy hair from your thighs. She removes the coarser hair from your calves. She even removes the hair from your forearms, which you had not realized was included in his instructions. By the time she finishes, every inch of your body from the neck down has been stripped of hair.

When it is over, the servants release you. You lie on the bed, naked and hairless and trembling, your skin on fire, your eyes swollen from crying. The woman who performed the waxing wipes your skin with a cool, damp cloth, and the cold is a small mercy against the fire of the wax burns. She applies a soothing balm—something that smells of chamomile and calendula—to the most sensitive areas, her fingers gentle as she spreads it across your bare mound, your stinging outer lips, your raw and exposed entrance.

Ormund rises from his chair. His robe has fallen completely open now, and his cock juts out from his body, fully erect, the head purple and slick with the fluid that has been leaking from the tip since the waxing began. He walks to the bed and stands over you, looking down at your body with the critical eye of a collector examining a restored painting. He reaches down and runs his palm over your newly bare cunt. The touch is feather-light, but your skin is so sensitive from the waxing that even this gentle contact makes you gasp and flinch. His fingers trace the smooth, hairless mound, the bare outer lips, the exposed inner folds that glisten with the soothing balm.

"Beautiful," he says. His voice is husky with arousal. "This is how a woman's cunt should look. Smooth. Bare. Completely exposed. I can see every fold, every contour, every shade of pink. When I fuck you now, I will be able to watch my cock slide into you. I will be able to see the way your cunt stretches around me, the way your lips grip my shaft, the way your entrance flutters when you spend. There will be no hair to hide your body's responses. You will be completely visible, completely vulnerable, completely mine."

He strokes your cunt again, his fingers sliding along the bare, slick folds with possessive familiarity. His thumb finds the small, hard nub of flesh at the apex of your sex—the part of you that responds to touch regardless of your will, the part of you that he has learned to manipulate with expert precision. He circles it slowly, watching your face as your body betrays you, as your hips twitch and your breath catches and a flush spreads across your chest.

"This little pearl belongs to me now," he murmurs. "This is the seat of your pleasure, every rhythm that makes you gasp, every pressure that makes you spend. I will make your body sing for me whether you want it to or not. Your pleasure is mine to command."

His fingers slide lower, finding your entrance. He presses one finger inside you, and you gasp at the intrusion. Your cunt is still sore from last night, still raw and tender, and the penetration makes you wince. But he does not push deeper. He simply holds his finger there, feeling the heat and the tightness of your hole, the way your inner walls clench around the intrusion.

"This is mine," he says. "Every inch of your cunt is mine. The lips, the pearl, the entrance, the deep place where my seed takes root. All of it belongs to me now. You will be waxed like this every week. The servants will tend to you, and you will thank them for their service. You will thank me for the gift of cleanliness I have given you. And then you will spread your legs and offer me your bare cunt, and I will use it as I see fit."

"Thank you, my lord," you whisper. The words are automatic, beaten into you by weeks of repetition. "Thank you for the gift of cleanliness. Thank you for preparing my body for your use."

He smiles. His finger withdraws from your cunt, and he brings it to his lips, tasting the mixture of balm and your body's own moisture. "Good girl. Now rest. Tonight, we will begin your nightly purification. You will learn to crave the feeling of my cock inside you, stretching your bare cunt, filling you with my seed."

That night, you are lying in his bed when he comes to you. You have been lying there for hours, alone in the dark except for the dying embers of the hearth, your body still aching from the morning's waxing. You are wearing a silk nightgown, one of the many he has procured for you, replacing the rough wool servant's dress with delicate fabrics that cling to every curve. The nightgown is the color of pale cream, thin as a spider's web, and it hides nothing. Your nipples show through the fabric as dark shadows, hard pebbles pressing against the silk. The bare mound of your cunt is visible when you move, the smooth flesh outlined beneath the thin material. You feel more naked in this nightgown than you did without it.

He enters the room silently. He is wearing his green velvet robe, and his feet are bare on the stone floor. The candle he carries casts dancing shadows across the walls. He sets it on the bedside table and looks down at you, his eyes tracing the lines of your body beneath the sheer silk.

"You are beautiful," he says. "The silk suits you. Your body was made to be displayed, to be adorned, to be admired. But the silk is in the way. I want to see what was done this morning. I want to see my bare cunt."

He unties his robe and lets it fall to the floor. His cock is already hard, jutting out from the smooth, hairless plane of his groin. The shaft is thick and veined, the head purple and slick with arousal. He climbs onto the bed and positions himself above you, his weight pressing you into the mattress. His hands find the hem of your nightgown and push it upward, baring your legs, your thighs, your newly smooth cunt. He does not remove the nightgown entirely. He leaves it bunched around your waist, a pool of silk that frames the exposed parts of your body.

"Spread your legs," he says. "I want to see what I own."

You spread your legs. There is no point in resisting. Resistance only brings more pain, and your body is already exhausted from the morning's ordeal. You spread your legs and you watch his face as he looks at your bare cunt. His eyes darken with hunger. His cock twitches, a bead of fluid leaking from the tip. He reaches down and runs his fingers over the smooth, hairless flesh, tracing the contours of your mound, your outer lips, your inner folds. The waxing has left your skin hypersensitive, and every touch sends a jolt of sensation through your body.

"Look at it," he murmurs. "Look at how bare it is. How exposed. I can see everything. I can see the color of your lips, the shape of your pearl, the way your entrance flutters when I touch you. There is nothing hidden anymore. Your cunt is as open to my gaze as it is to my cock."

He positions himself between your thighs, the head of his cock pressing against your entrance. You are not ready for him—the waxing and the soreness from last night have left you dry and tense—but he does not wait. He pushes inside you with a single, steady thrust, and the friction of his entry makes you cry out. Your cunt stretches around him, the raw skin burning, the inner walls clenching in protest.

"Shh," he murmurs. "Shh. Your body will learn. Your cunt will grow accustomed to being filled. The soreness will fade, and in its place will come pleasure. I will teach your body to crave my cock. I will teach your cunt to grow wet at the sight of me. You will learn to spend on my shaft, to milk my seed from me with your muscles, to find your release in the rhythm of my fucking. This is your purpose now. This is what your body was made for."

He begins to move. The rhythm is slow and deep, each thrust a fresh invasion of your sore and tender flesh. Your body rocks against the mattress with the force of his movements. The silk nightgown rustles around your waist. The headboard taps against the stone wall in a steady, relentless beat. He stares into your eyes as he fucks you, his blue gaze holding yours with an intensity that makes it impossible to drift away, impossible to escape into the shadows of your mind.

"Look at me," he commands. "I want you to feel every inch of my cock sliding into your bare cunt. I want you to feel the head pressing against your deepest place. I want you to feel my seed when I spend inside you. I want you to remember every moment of your purification."

He fucks you slowly, deliberately, drawing out each thrust to maximize the sensation. You feel every ridge and vein of his cock as it moves inside you, feel the stretch of your entrance around his thickness, feel the pressure of his pubic bone against your bare and sensitive mound. His hand slides between your bodies and finds your pearl, the small, hard nub that he circled earlier. He strokes it as he thrusts, matching the rhythm of his fingers to the rhythm of his cock, and despite everything—despite the pain and the violation and the weeks of degradation—your body begins to respond.

Your hips twitch. Your breath quickens. A flush spreads across your chest and up your throat. The sensation builds in your core, a coiling pressure that you cannot control, cannot suppress, cannot deny. He watches your face with hungry satisfaction, his fingers working your pearl with expert precision.

"Yes," he breathes. "Yes. I can feel it. Your cunt is tightening around me. Your body is getting ready to spend. Let it happen. Let me feel you come on my cock. Your pleasure belongs to me, just like your pain. Let me have it."

You spend. It is not a choice. It is a reflex, a betrayal of your body that you cannot prevent. The orgasm crashes through you against your will, your cunt clenching and fluttering around his shaft, your hips bucking, a broken cry escaping your throat. He groans in satisfaction and drives into you harder, faster, chasing his own release.

"Good girl," he gasps. "Good girl. That is what I want. Your pleasure, your release, your body's surrender. All of it is mine. Now take my seed. Take it deep. Let it root inside you."

His rhythm stutters. His body goes rigid above you. He buries his cock to the hilt and holds himself there, and you feel the hot, pulsing flood of his seed filling your cunt. He spends for what feels like a long time, his cock twitching inside you, his breath coming in ragged gasps against your throat. When he finally withdraws, his seed leaks from your hole in a thick, white trickle, pooling on the sheets beneath you.

He collapses beside you and pulls you against his chest. His arms wrap around you, his hand stroking your hair with that terrible, confusing tenderness. His cock, still half-hard, presses against your thigh.

"You did well," he murmurs against your forehead. "Your body is learning. Your cunt is learning to accept me, to respond to me, to spend on my cock. The purification is progressing. Soon you will be clean. Soon you will be perfect."

He fucks you constantly after that, the days blur together in a haze of silk and bare skin and the endless rhythm of his possession. You wear the silk nightgowns he chooses for you—pale pink, ivory, sky blue, each one thinner and more revealing than the last. You do not leave his chambers except to go to the sept for your morning purification. The castle outside these walls has become a distant memory, a place you once walked through freely, a place where you once breathed air that did not smell of his seed and his sweat. Now your world is this room. This bed. This altar of silk and feather that has replaced the cold stone of the sept.

He takes you every morning, when the light is pale and golden and the servants are laying out his breakfast on the table by the window. You are still drowsy with sleep, your body warm and pliant beneath the sheets, and he rolls you onto your back and pushes your nightgown up and enters you before you are fully awake. His cock slides into your bare cunt with practiced ease, and he fucks you while the servants move around the room with their eyes carefully averted. They set out plates of bread and cheese and fruit. They pour wine into goblets. They tend to the fire. They do not look at the bed. They do not react to the sounds—the creak of the mattress, the wet rhythm of his cock sliding in and out of your cunt, the small, involuntary gasps that escape your throat. They behave as if nothing is happening. As if the lord of the house takes his pleasure every morning with his cock buried in his captive's cunt, and the girl beneath him is no more remarkable than the furniture.

Daeron is often present during these moments. He arrives with reports from the garrison, with updates on the occupation of Tumbleton, with messages from the other Green commanders. He enters the room with his eyes on the floor, as he always does, and the moment he realizes what is happening on the bed, he stops. He freezes in the doorway. His pale blue eyes, flick up for the briefest instant, taking in the scene before him—Ormund's bare ass flexing with each thrust, your smooth legs wrapped around his waist, the wet sounds of fucking filling the room—and then drop back to the floor.

"Lord Ormund," he says, his voice carefully neutral, "I have the morning reports. Shall I return later?"

"No," Ormund says, his voice slightly breathless but otherwise perfectly composed. He does not stop fucking you. His cock continues to pump in and out of your bare cunt, the rhythm steady and unhurried. "Leave them on the desk. I will review them when I am finished here. Her cunt is particularly tight this morning. I do not wish to rush."

Daeron crosses the room with quick, efficient strides. He places the papers on the desk without looking at the bed. His face is pale, his jaw tight. You can see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands clench at his sides. He is a year younger than you, and he has been forced to witness your degradation more times than you can count. But he never speaks against it. He never intervenes. He moves through the room like a ghost, silent and careful and desperately uncomfortable.

"Will there be anything else, my lord?" he asks.

"Send the other servants out," Ormund says. His hips are still moving, his cock still sliding in and out of your slick, bare cunt. "I want privacy for the remainder. I intend to make her spend on my cock, and I want to hear every sound she makes when it happens."

Daeron hesitates. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough for you to see the conflict flickering behind his carefully neutral expression. Then he nods. "Of course, my lord."

He gestures to the servants. They set down their tasks and file out of the room in silence, their heads bowed. Daeron is the last to leave. He pauses at the door, his hand on the latch, and for one terrible moment you think he is going to turn around and look at you, to see you spread open on the bed with Ormund's cock buried in your bare cunt, your legs wrapped around his waist, the flush of unwanted pleasure spreading across your chest. He does not. He closes the door behind him with a soft click.

"Good," Ormund murmurs against your ear. His hand slides between your bodies and finds your pearl, stroking it in tight, expert circles. "Now I can hear you properly. Now I can make you spend and listen to every sound you make when it happens. Come for me. Come on my cock. Let me feel your bare cunt milking my seed."

He fucks you against the breakfast table one morning, bending you over the polished wood with your silk nightgown rucked up around your waist and your bare cunt and ass exposed to the cool air. Your smooth mound presses against the table's edge with each thrust. Your pearl, bare and unprotected without its thatch of hair, rubs against the wood with a friction that sends unwanted jolts of pleasure through your core. The plates rattle with each impact. A goblet tips over and spills wine across the tablecloth, a dark red stain spreading like blood. He grips your hips with bruising force, his fingers digging into the waxed-smooth flesh, and drives his cock into you from behind, the angle different from when you are on your back, the head of his cock pressing against a spot deep inside you that makes your vision blur.

"This is my favorite way to take you," he grunts, his hips slamming against your ass. "Bent over like a bitch in heat. I can see everything from this angle. I can see my cock sliding into your bare cunt. I can see the way your lips grip my shaft. I can see your tight little asshole, waiting for the day I decide to claim it as well."

The threat makes your cunt clench involuntarily, and he groans at the sensation.

"You like that idea," he says. "Your body betrays you. Your cunt tightened at the thought of me taking your ass. Perhaps we will try that soon. But not today. Today, your cunt is enough. Today, I will fill this bare little hole with my seed and then send you to the sept to pray for forgiveness for the pleasure your body took from my cock."

He spends inside you with a guttural groan, his cock pulsing, his seed flooding your cunt. When he withdraws, you feel it leaking down your thighs, thick and white against your waxed-smooth skin.

He takes you in the copper tub one evening, the warm water sloshing over the rim as he pulls you astride him. Your legs spread on either side of his hips, your bare cunt pressed against his groin. His cock slides into you easily beneath the water, the heat and the slickness making the penetration smoother than usual. He grips your waist and guides you up and down, controlling the rhythm, controlling the depth, controlling everything. Your breasts, bare and smooth as the rest of you, press against his chest. Your nipples, hard pebbles in the cooling air, drag against the hairless plane of his pectorals.

"Look at me," he commands. "I want to watch your face when you spend. I want to see your eyes when your cunt tightens around my cock."

You look at him. His blue eyes are dark with desire, his pupils blown wide. His face is inches from yours. You can smell the wine on his breath, the lavender oil on his skin, the clean scent of the bathwater. He stares into your eyes as he guides your hips, his cock sliding deep into your cunt with each downward stroke, the head pressing against your womb. His thumb finds your pearl beneath the water, stroking it in time with the rhythm of your fucking.

"Come," he says. "Come on my cock. Let me feel it. Let me feel your bare cunt milking me dry."

Your body obeys. It always obeys now. The orgasm crashes through you against your will, your cunt clenching and fluttering around his shaft, your back arching, your head thrown back, a broken cry escaping your throat. He watches your face with hungry satisfaction, his own release following moments later, his seed pulsing into your depths in hot, thick spurts.

—

The days blur, and between the violations there are moments when he is almost tender, it happens most often in the aftermath, when his seed is still cooling on your thighs and your body is still trembling from the unwanted pleasure he has wrung from you. He pulls you against his chest and wraps his arms around you and strokes your hair with a gentleness that makes your skin crawl more than his cruelty ever could. His voice drops to a low, intimate murmur, and he speaks of the future as if it is a gift he is preparing for you, a reward you will earn through your suffering.

"When the purification is complete," he says one night, his fingers tracing idle patterns on your bare shoulder, "when every trace of your mother's corruption has been burned away, I will make you my wife."

You are lying in his bed, your body still aching from his latest use. Your cunt is slick with his seed, your thighs sticky, your bare mound still tingling from the morning's waxing. The silk nightgown is bunched around your waist, and he has not bothered to pull it down. His hand rests on your stomach, flat and warm, pressing gently against the place where his seed has taken root so many times.

"A proper wedding," he continues, his voice soft and dreamy. "In the Starry Sept of Oldtown, with the High Septon himself presiding. You will wear white—pure white, the color of maidenhood, because your purification will have made you a maiden again in the eyes of the gods. Your hair will be woven with flowers from the Hightower gardens. Your bare cunt will be smooth and clean beneath your gown, waiting for me to claim it as my husbandly right."

You say nothing. You have learned that silence is safest when he speaks this way, that any response can shatter the fragile gentleness and bring the cane or his hand or some new cruelty you have not yet imagined.

"You will be Lady Hightower," he murmurs. "The title you should have had from the beginning, if you had not been so proud, so foolish, so blind to your own best interests. You will sit beside me in the great hall and preside over feasts and receive the homage of our bannermen. You will bear my children—trueborn children, legitimate heirs to Oldtown and the Hightower. They will have your hair and my blue eyes, and they will be perfect. Pure. Free of the taint that once corrupted your blood."

His hand slides lower, cupping your bare mound. His thumb traces the smooth, hairless flesh with possessive familiarity.

"Three children," he says. "At least three. Two sons and a daughter who will look exactly like you—I will teach her obedience from the cradle, so she does not make the same mistakes her mother made. She will be betrothed young, to a lord who will appreciate her beauty and her bloodline. She will not have to learn humility through pain, as you have. She will be raised in the knowledge of her place and her purpose."

Your stomach turns at the thought of a daughter in his hands, a child with your face and his eyes, raised from birth to submit to a man like him. But you do not speak. You do not argue. You lie still in his arms and let him stroke your bare cunt and murmur his plans for the future he is building on the foundation of your suffering.

"There will be a garden," he continues, his voice growing more animated, more expansive. "A private garden, attached to our chambers, where you can walk and read and sit in the sun. You will have ladies in waiting again—proper ladies this time, not the giggling sycophants who encouraged your worst impulses at court. They will be chosen by me, and they will report to me, and they will ensure that you never backslide into the pride and arrogance of your former life. But you will be comfortable. You will be cared for. You will want for nothing."

He presses a kiss to your forehead. His lips are warm and dry against your skin.

"You will be happy," he says, and the word is a command more than a prediction. "I will make you happy. I will fuck the sadness out of your cunt and the defiance out of your heart. I will fill you with my seed every night until your belly swells with my heir. I will give you purpose and meaning and a place in the world. You will forget that you were ever a princess. You will forget that you were ever a bastard. You will know only that you are mine—my wife, my consort, the mother of my children. And you will thank me for it. Every day, you will thank me for the gift of purification I have given you."

His hand is still on your cunt, his thumb still tracing those slow, idle circles. You can feel his cock stirring against your thigh, thickening, rising.

"You have made so much progress," he murmurs. "Your body is learning to respond to me. Your cunt grows wet at my touch now, even when your mind still resists. You spend on my cock almost every night. You are so close to being ready. So close to being perfect."

He rolls you onto your back and positions himself above you. His cock is fully hard now, the head pressing against your entrance. Your cunt is still slick with his previous seed, and he slides into you easily, burying himself to the hilt with a single, smooth thrust. You gasp at the intrusion—still sore, always sore—but your body accepts him, your inner walls stretching around his thickness, your bare lips gripping his shaft.

"Soon," he breathes, beginning to move. "Soon you will be my wife. Soon you will be Lady Hightower. Soon you will be the mother of my heirs. And all of this—the pain, the humiliation, the purification—will seem like a distant dream. You will look back on your former life and wonder how you ever thought you could be anything other than what I have made you."

His rhythm quickens. His hand finds your pearl, stroking it in time with his thrusts. Your body responds, as it always does now, the unwanted pleasure coiling in your core.

"Say it," he commands. "Say you want to be my wife. Say you want to bear my children. Say you want to spend the rest of your life serving me and pleasing me and receiving my seed."

Your body is on the edge now, trembling, the orgasm building despite your hatred and your shame. His thumb circles your pearl with expert precision. His cock fills your cunt completely, stretching you, claiming you.

"Say it," he repeats, his voice a growl against your ear. "Say it, and I will let you spend. Say it, and I will fill your cunt with my seed. Say it, and I will make you Lady Hightower."

"I want to be your wife," you gasp, the words torn from you by pleasure and fear and the bone-deep knowledge of what happens when you refuse him. "I want to bear your children. I want to serve you. Please. Please let me spend. Please fill me with your seed."

"Good girl," he groans. "Good girl. That is what I want to hear. That is the truth you have been running from since the day we met. Now come for me. Come on my cock. Let me feel your cunt milking my seed."

Your body obeys. It always obeys. The orgasm crashes through you, and he follows moments later, his seed pulsing into your depths in hot, thick spurts. He collapses beside you and pulls you against his chest, and his hand returns to your stomach, pressing gently against the place where his seed pools inside you.

"One day soon," he murmurs, "my seed will take root. One day soon, you will carry my child. And on that day, your purification will be complete. You will be my wife in truth as well as in name. You will be Lady Hightower. You will be the mother of my heirs. And you will be grateful. You will be so, so grateful for everything I have given you."

He kisses your forehead again. His arms tighten around you, holding you against his chest like a treasured possession.

"Sleep now," he says. "Dream of our future. Dream of our children. Dream of the life we will build together when the purification is finally complete."

You close your eyes. You do not dream of children or gardens or a white gown in the Starry Sept. You dream of Silverwing, her vast silver wings, the fire building in her throat. You dream of the day she finds you and burns this castle to ash with everyone inside it.

But when you wake, you are still in his bed, his arms still wrapped around you, his seed still drying on your thighs. And you know that you will smile at him when he wakes. You will let him touch you. You will let him fuck you. You will say the words he wants to hear.

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