JACAERYS VELARYON PLAYLIST: The Cure by Olivia Rodrigo
Why can't you come stitch me up? (I'm unraveled)
Why can't it ever be enough? (I'm unraveled)
Why can't you come stitch me up? (I'm unraveled)
Why can't it ever be enough? (I'm unraveled)
It's not enough
Queen Rhaenyra’s daughter learns the shape of a gilded cage. Her guard is a formidable man, stoic, unmoved, and far too easy to want. History is always doomed to repeat itself. (one-shot)
pairings: Ser Luthor Largent x (Targaryen) Reader
contents/warnings: yearning, princess x knight, age-gap ( • ᴗ - ) ✧, smut, loss of virginity (it gets saucy up in here),slow burn, everyone is of age and consenting, duty vs desire
words: 8k
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
The Red Keep was aflame with petitioners. High and low, all came with requests, needs and expectations.
Your mother was incredibly busy balancing herself on a fragile peace. King’s Landing was won, but at what cost? Your brothers were killed, setting an emptiness in each of your souls.
On the very next day after King’s Landing opened its gates to your family, you took up half of your mother’s duties. She said you could help her, in the very brief moments you encountered her, you could help her. She never mentioned you speaking with the Queen’s voice, yet you thought it was expected of you.
You were her eldest after Jacaerys, fathered by Daemon Targaryen and rider of Vermithor. Wasn’t it to be understood that you were her heir? You rode the second most formidable dragon, its rider was the Old King before you. Surely, that would count for something in her eyes.
Yet, when she heard of you telling the maesters they could write to Dorne, asking for their soldiers and friendship in return for whatever terms they ask for. She chastised you. In front of that blubbering oaf Ulf and Addam. Ulf barely contained his laugh as your mother raised her voice at you and your father only looked at you with an expression you couldn’t possibly understand. She told you that you should behave. From now on, she doesn't need your help anymore. You fancied yourself a Visenya, but she’ll rather make a Helaena out of you.
Why couldn’t she see? Dorne could greatly aid you. Pushing against the Hightowers from Oldtown, you could attack them from both sides. She didn’t even wish to hear of your argument.
You wanted to ask whether she will proclaim you heir, now you’ll rather not say anything.
Vermithor was restless in the dragonpit tonight.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
You broke your fast the next morning on bacon, boiled eggs and warm honeycakes with your favorite berries inside of them.
Your maids brushed your hair and dressed you in your favorite scarlet dress, carefully beaded on your waist with two dragons. You read, listened to your ladies-in-waiting singing, then sat gazing upon the horizon like some great dragon of old. This was maddening, you were a woman grown, yet your mother confined you into your bedchamber like some spoiled child. You could hear the voices of the court outside, always asking, always questioning. You wondered what the septon might say to your mother crowning herself queen after he already crowned Aegon-
A knock on the door interrupted your thoughts. Your father’s voice came from behind it. You allowed him to enter.
He wasn’t alone.
“Good morrow.” He came to press a kiss on your cheek. “How has this day treated you?”
You didn’t need to answer as he already saw the displeasure in your eyes.
“Better to not answer, aye? I’ve brought you someone- A princess needs a guard.”
You didn’t even look to see the Gold Cloak standing behind him near the door.
“I have no wish for it. My Ladies are company enough, kepa.”
Your father had that disappointed look in his eyes again. He didn’t wish to argue with you once more. Sometimes you wondered if you reminded him too much of himself and your mother.
“Order from your Queen, tala. I do not wish to make a fuss of this. Your ladies won’t help you with anything if some rogue guard wants to kill himself a dragon.”
You turned your back with a thud on the ornate chair.
“Tell the Queen her thoughts are appreciated.”
He squeezed your shoulder before shutting the door behind you. You could feel the man’s presence in the room, interrupting any womanly peace you found amidst your ladies.
You turned your head to the side to address him.
“What is your name, Ser?”
“Luthor, Your Grace.” His voice was strong and deep. You couldn’t care enough to turn around and look the Golden Cloak in the eyes as you addressed him.
“You can exit now, Ser Luthor. A guard should sit outside the door, not inside.” You couldn’t fault the man, Gold Cloaks were merely the guards of the city, not protectors of Princesses.
“Yes. Your Grace.” He left.
You dismissed the other two women, as your favorite lady, Meredith, came to your side. She was of age to you, and followed you from Dragonstone to King’s Landing, even if she was born of a lesser house, you regarded her as your best friend.
She joined you in silence as you gazed upon the sea.
“What are you thinking of?” She asked you. Somewhere in the room, the wood from the fire crackled and sent sparks in the air.
“Nothing.” You shrugged. What if you were the one who went with Jace? He would know what to do. What to tell you so you could relax. Nothing could bring him back now.
You had to stop thinking about what was, “Addam looks quite handsome, don’t you think?” She blushed profusely, trying to mask it with a laugh.
“You’ve turned to matchmaking now?” Her copper hair shone in the sun, and her blue eyes turned bashful as she tried to shrug off your comment.
“Yes… I think I shall take up singing after. I think becoming a traveling bard would suit me.”
“Stop it.” He held your hand on the table “It’s not all bad…your mother will come to her senses and all will be well. I heard talk of a tourney-“
“She’s thinking of tourneys? Now? What else have you heard?”
“Nothing, just rumors. She has yet to appoint a Queensguard you see.”
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
Sleep found you hard, tossing and turning and unable to stop thinking about your mother. About your future. There were still alliances to be forged. She could marry you to someone who could actually help you and you wouldn’t mind it, you would do anything to see the realm at peace and your family on the throne. Even if in your heart you wished to find happiness with someone of your own choosing.
You took the heavy covers off of you as you stood from the bed.
Your nightshift brushed the floor with each step while you padded over to the heavy wooden door. You slowly opened it and looked outside, the night embraced the Red Keep with its columns and their torches blazing and crackling into the night air. You wished to wander the halls a bit, discover it and-
“Your Grace.“
“Seven Gods!” Your heart jumped to your throat.
“Apologies, Your Grace, I didn’t wish to frighten you.”
You completely forgot about the other column your father has anointed with your protection. You finally looked at him properly in the darkness of the great hall. The torches allowed for enough light that you could finally see his features. Black eyes and a heavy beard, with almost perfect curls on his head.
“It’s alright.” You tried to retain your composure “I must apologize, ser Lothar. I didn’t see you there.”
“Ser Luthor, Your Grace.” You saw how quickly he remembered that correcting a member of the royal family was not something anyone like him should ever do.
“Ser Luthor, yes. Sorry.” Here you were, in an awkward circle of apologetics with this man.
“Her Grace, the Queen, has forbidden you leaving the room. I am afraid I can’t let you leave.”
“I didn’t wish to leave… I merely wanted,” What did you want?
His eyes masked a hint of amusement, with the smallest smirk upon his face. Your heart dropped into a pit in your stomach. And suddenly you felt as if you were a child again.
“Oh, nevermind.” You shut the door and returned to your gilded cage.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
The next day brought the same stale quality. Your dragon tapestries only made you long for Vermithor and the sky he could offer you. He was as restless as you, and as restrained.
Your ladies brushed your hair and braided it into the custom of your house after you were dressed.
You told them to bring the guard inside as you dismissed them. He stood almost as broad as the door as he took off his helmet and bowed his head, the sun filtered behind his stature. His gold cloak hung about his shoulders, his gaze set as to not make eye contact, as that would be unbecoming of him.
This Luthor was a formidable man. You couldn’t help but remark at how much he looked like a soldier.
Your hands ached for something, and while your mother locked you in your chambers, she didn’t say you couldn’t have fun. You wanted to know more about this guard of yours.
“Your Grace.”
“I presume you know how to fight.”
He nodded, almost skeptical as to why you’d ask such a question “Yes, Your Grace.”
“Good.” You pushed the chair behind you and stood to gaze up at him. “Can you teach me?”
“I’m afraid not, Your Grace.” His answer came quickly and definitively.
Your smile dropped in an instant. You knew it was a wager, but hidden behind the door and with no one to ask or too busy to care about you now, it seemed like one you dared to make.
“You disobey me?” It was easier to look at him when his eyes weren’t upon you. “Look at me.”
His eyes went to your face and all courage left you.
“Your Grace, I was ordered to guard you.”
“And?”
“Not strike you.”
“You shan’t strike me.” You wanted to bring yourself more arguments in your favor. But all manner of thoughts escaped your mind as you looked at him.
“That is not a gamble I am willing to take.”
Desperation dug her claws into you. You wanted to scream and plead. Run out the door before he could catch you.
Maybe you could.
You were in the middle of the room, with him towering over you even if he was quite far.
In the back of your mind you knew it was for your own good, but this was cruel and unjust. Your mother couldn’t possibly handle you gone as well and you understood her in that regard. But couldn’t she see your desperation, doesn’t she think of you? How could she chain you up like this? You're not some dog.
You looked at the door, five steps. Slightly to the right of him and out. That’s all. You made a step to the right, and he noticed at once what you wanted to do.
“Don’t-“
You made a break for it. The floor heavy under your feet. One, two, three- a hand went to your shoulder, then he went before the door and you. You couldn’t possibly go or push past him.
Your father already knew, somehow, maybe, that you would want to escape. He knew what he was doing while appointing a man the size of a tree as your guard.
“Please…I don’t want to be here anymore“
“I apologize- I cannot let you leave.”
You felt a rush of tears to your eyes as you turned away from him.
“Leave me then. Go.”
You refused supper, deciding to chew on your current situation and state. You didn’t want to see anyone.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
When dawn broke, you refused everyone, deciding to dress yourself and brush your hair under the soft sun escaping through your windows. You settled with a book on the table overlooking the sea. It was a book about the customs of the Free Cities, even if you read it twice already, it seemed as interesting as the first time. You have wanted to visit them desperately since you were small.
Maybe when you wouldn’t be imprisoned.
Someone else entered, without announcement. You knew who it was at once.
“You think I want you to run and fly off to Gods know where- to press my claim and fight my war?”
You and your mother had been locked into another argument. It started softly at first, with her wanting to know why you got the idea to write to Dorne and you insisting that your plans were better than hers. If only she would take heed of them. Dorne couldn’t be conquered, they needed terms and acceptance and while granting them that, you could sweep the Hightower forces off their feet.
“And you wonder why I must bar you inside this room!?”
“If it was Jacaerys, you would let him sit on your small council and speak with the Queen’s voice!”
You wanted to be strong, not to have your voice break and tears threatening to fall.
“You are not Jacaerys!” That was the final phrase uttered in the room. A stillness fell upon you both. Rhaenyra softened after what she said and after the look on your face.
“You are my life…I cannot lose you too. Please, obey me. As your Queen and as your mother, obey me.”
You decided you didn’t wish to see anyone that day afterwards, deciding to shed your tears in your chamber, alone. He probably heard everything your mother said, sitting outside the room in his armor.
Someone knocked. You told them the princess is not requiring any visitors. They knocked again and you begrudgingly allowed them to enter.
It was the voice of your guard.
“Your Grace, pardon my interruption.” Interruption from tears and despair, you thought. With your back to him and a pillow closely tucked in your arms.
“What is it?” You lifted your head at once.
He was standing in the middle of the room. Two wooden swords at his side. He dismissed his armor and cloak for a simple black woolen tunic and trousers. He still looked as big as a carriage without the armor.
You tried to make sense of what you were seeing, then your heart soared and you quickly wiped your tears and tried to fix your braid. You came to stand in front of him. He looked at your face. If he noticed the redness about your eyes, he gave no sign of it. You wanted to wear pants as well, so you quickly sent him away as you changed then beckoned him back inside. The shirt was too long on you, and your pants had to be tied at the waist so as to not slip down.
Now that would be a sight.
You looked into a mirror and decided you looked as if you were a squire stealing his knight’s clothes. It would have to do.
His hands dwarfed the hilt of the practice sword, calloused across the palms and marked by old white scars. You found yourself wondering where the scars upon his hands had come from. Battle? The City Watch? Training? Before you realized it, your thoughts had wandered so far from your quarrel with your mother that the ache in your chest had quieted.
“Your footing is wrong.”
“You would be dead before you knew it.”
“That is not humanly capable of happening.”
Seeing your father and brothers practice, you truly thought it was as easy as it looked.
You saw an opening as he dodged your blow, and your sword went almost to his chest. At once he raised his and threw yours across the floor.
The practice weapon began to spin around the chamber until it landed in the corner. And struck the wall.
“Fetch it.”
“Again?”
“Yes. Again.”
Ser Luthor had a practice of throwing your sword with his own to the edge of the room whenever he caught you gaining too much confidence and making you get it. In truth, this was the most fun you’ve had in months.
No, years.
You laughed whenever he would retaliate and strike you, as his blow would come so hard and when it made contact with your skin it landed as softly as summer’s kiss. It almost tickled you. He seemed to enjoy it too, a smile breaking upon his face whenever you laughed and scurried away.
After a few hours, you started to get the gist of the easy movements he made you do. And could thoroughly enjoy the lessons. Whenever he would throw your sword across the floor you would ask:
“Again?” And sigh dramatically.
“Again.” He would answer, solemn as ever, with the slightest of smiles and his chest rising to catch his breath.
You realized after a few hours, as the sun was beginning to set across Blackwater Bay, bathing the royal chamber in orange and red, that each opening in his stance existed because he allowed you to believe it was there. He was formidable indeed.
Either that, or you were just incredibly bad at sword fighting.
He sat himself down next to you, the day’s exertion finally showing upon him. Damp curls clung to his brow, and the sleeves of his tunic were darkened with sweat at the forearms. The scent of worn leather lingered between you, softened by the jasmine climbing beyond the balcony doors.
You poured both of you water from the ewer on the small table next to the balcony.
You drank the first cup, then drank another.
“Thank you.” You looked at him as you rubbed your hands, already forming callouses from how tightly you gripped the sword.
“The honor is mine, Your Grace. Can’t say I ever taught a princess to fight before.”
“Now you can.” You asked the question before he could leave you once more.
“Will you be back tomorrow?”
He looked at you and nodded.
“As my Princess wishes.”
“Is this something…you want as well?” The thought of becoming a burden on him somehow made you miserable inside.
“It is my honor to be your guardian, Your Grace.” He folded his hands upon his lap.
However, you already had a guardian. Mightier than a mountain. His armor was stronger than Valyrian Steel and his fire burned brighter than the sun. With wings like a hurricane and bellows like thunder.
He longed for you each day.
“I already have a guardian, Ser Luthor.” He looked at you quizzically.
“He sits a few feet below the ground in the Dragonpit.” You smiled as you remembered your dragon. Vermithor was your pride and glory.
He smiled softly and the corner of his eyes wrinkled.
“I have heard the smallfolk petition Her Grace to keep their sheep from the dragons.”
You scoffed, yet it was light hearted.
“Vermithor would sooner swallow an aurochs whole.”
“Well we do have something in common.”
“And what is that?”
“I prefer beef as well.”
You laughed and he smiled. He looked the tiniest bit surprised at his joke, like he was completely serious about his statement and didn’t intend for it to be funny.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
Routine set in the next day. When all your handmaids were sent away and gossip turned into wooden swords.
Again and again he disarmed you. And you tried once more, every lesson tucked away into your mind to somehow make him be the one to get his sword. You never could disarm him however.
You would sit facing the door to the balcony once more and questions fluttered into your mind. Each more curious than the last. What was his story?
“Where did you get that?” He had a long scar stretching from his thumb to somewhere up his arm.
“Flea Bottom.” His answers always came short and to the point.
“Did you hear anything interesting from Her Grace?”
“No, my Princess. Just talk of soldiers and logistics.”
“Do you have someone?”
It came faster than you could stop it. And you immediately regretted it, wishing somehow to catch the words before they left your mouth.
He seemed almost surprised, for the briefest second. He re-adjusted himself on the chair. Black hair catching the setting sun.
“No. Your Grace.”
Immediately embarrassed, you tried to grasp at what dignity you had left.
“I merely wondered.”
“I understand, Your Grace. No harm done.” You wanted to bury your head in shame in the ground. What madness had possessed you? He was neither your friend nor one of your ladies. He was your sworn guard, a man grown, weathered by years you had not yet lived.
You dismissed him soon after and lingered in your bath until the water had gone cool.
Gods… what had possessed you?
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
The following day, you resolved not to ask another question.
No more curiosity, only lessons. He was the commander of the City Watch, not some young boy you could fancy. Besides, he wouldn’t even think about being with you like that. It would be unbecoming of one of such low birth.
Rumor had reached your chambers that Daeron had arrived within the Red Keep, and the news lifted your spirits enough that you thought you might finally give Ser Luthor a proper challenge.
Instead, you fought worse than before.
You missed openings you would have seen yesterday. Your footing faltered. Your grip slipped. More than once, you found your attention lingering upon the broadness of his shoulders or the certainty with which he carried himself, all while taking great care not to meet his dark eyes.
Your sword clattered across the floor once again.
“Fetch it.”
You obeyed in silence and as you bent to retrieve it, a miserable thought settled over you.
This was never what he wanted.
It was probably your father who urged him to busy your time. So you wouldn’t think to escape again. He was Captain of the City Watch. A commander of men. A soldier whose days belonged on the streets of King’s Landing, not shut away in a princess’s chambers humoring her childish whims. He had never asked about Vermithor, nor your books, nor why your eyes had been red the day he first entered your chambers with the swords.
You rested the practice sword against the table instead of returning to him.
“Is something amiss, Your Grace?” He tried to lean down and catch your eyes.
“I am sorry. It seems I am not myself today. You can leave. I’m sorry to keep you from your duties, Ser Luthor.”
“Pardon me, Your Grace?” His voice echoed through the grand room, even if he never raised his tone.
“You can go back to guarding the door.” You didn’t want to have tears prick at your eyes, but it seems that lately all you’ve encountered were disappointments.
“This was all a childish folly.” You turned your gaze towards him, “I am truly sorry to keep you from your true duties.”
“Pardon me, Your Grace, but you are my duty. Your father commanded as such.”
“Yes, but that is not what you want and I don’t wish to impose that on you.” You muttered, already wishing you could forget all about this and him. About what you felt when you looked into his eyes.
“With respect, Your Grace.” He paused before continuing: “It was me who asked King Daemon for the wooden swords.”
“What?”
“I believed it would do Your Grace good.”
You remained in silence, staring at him dumbfounded. He did this for you. He was the one who asked your father for this. Yet, he didn’t say that. He made a motion with his head for the sword on the table and you picked it up immediately.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
As Meredith joined you for supper, you found yourself speaking of Ser Luthor more often than you intended.
“Aye,” she said around a mouthful of lamb. “He is a handsome man. In a rather rugged sort of way.”
You frowned into your cup. Sweetened wine already turning sour at how quickly she could read you.
“That is not what I said.”
“No,” Meredith replied. “But it is what you meant.”
You toyed with the chased silver handle of your goblet.
“I merely told you he teaches well.”
She fixed you with a hard look, even if you knew it was light hearted.
“You speak of him as though you’ve known him half your life.”
“I do not.”
“You’ve spoken of nothing else since I sat down.”
Heat rose to your cheeks and took hold of your ears.
“I will not be lectured, Meredith.”
“I am not lecturing you.” Her voice softened. “I am warning you.”
She set down her knife.
“The court feeds upon gossip. A princess spending hours alone with the Captain of the City Watch…” She shook her head. “It will not matter whether anything happened. They will say it did.”
“Nothing shall happen.”
“You should hope Her Grace never hears of these lessons.”
“My mother is busy.”
Your mother herself had once favored a certain Gold Cloak. If the Queen came demanding answers, you already knew what you would tell her.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
“I heard Vermithor grew restless in the Dragon Pit.”
Ser Luthor had already set aside the practice swords, though his sleeves remained rolled to his forearms. The afternoon’s training had left loose curls clinging to his brow, and the fading sun caught the edges of them with copper light. He was handsome. So handsome in fact you almost forgot what he said after he said it.
“He’ll be fine.” You toyed with the Valyrian bracelet on your wrist. An old gift from your father.
“Would you like to meet him someday?”
He looked at you and smiled softly. Your belly was restless under his gaze. Did he think you were beautiful?
Why are you asking such things?
“-I would much rather prefer to not be burned to bone.” You didn’t catch the first part of what he said, only that his mouth was moving and he seemed larger than life next to you, legs stretched out in front of him.
“He won’t burn you. Not while I am there. He can saddle two, you know?” You wanted to show him something that you were good at. Truly good at.
He chuckled and looked away for a moment before saying: “It would be my honor, Your Grace. One day.”
“Yes, one day.”
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
The next day brought another lesson. Another foot to be corrected from his place and movements to be shown. The balcony allowed for a cool breeze to drift through. Sea gulls called out for each other somewhere in the distance.
After you were done, with your arms sore and legs heavy, Ser Luthor remarked from his seat next to you:
“You are getting better, Your Grace.”
“Yes, I only had to pick the sword a hundred times, not a hundred and fifty times.”
“A good swordsman is trained upon years of practice. Do not be so harsh upon yourself.”
“Tell me, Ser Luthor. What have you heard from the corridors of the Red Keep?”
He gave a deep breath and you could see him deciding if he should tell you this.
“What is it?”
“Not much, Her Grace asks frequently about your youngest brothers, many think it’s because she wants to call them back from Pentos.”
“Does she?”
She wants to make little Aegon her heir. You were sure of that. A woman has been named heir and look at the ruin it brought.
Still, you felt an indescribable sadness and…disappointment.
You changed the subject before he could try to make it better.
“Have you ever visited the Free Cities, Ser?”
“No, Your Grace. Have you?”
“No. But I have lost myself countless times in books about their customs and ways. I dearly want to visit Myr and Pentos, as well as Lys and Braavos. To see the great titan standing tall.”
You found yourself imagining him and you on a dock yard in Pentos, both scorched from the sun and smiling.
What has gotten into you?
“Would you ever wish to go?”
“The thought has never crossed my mind, Your Grace.”
“After all this is over. Would you like to come with me?”
He shook his head and tried to break the news as softly as he could. He hesitated a bit before saying:
“With all due respect, Your Grace… my place is with my men.”
Of course it was. You decided to put on a brave face and mask your disappointment.
“Then, I shall leave once this is over. Get on the Bronze Fury and fly hard and away.” You imagined the great white walls of Lys standing tall, its people gaping at the size of Vermithor and its Magister toasting you in his grand hall of white marble as a daughter of the ancient freehold.
“Maybe I’ll travel to Volantis and see Valyria’s last daughter. Then I’ll go south to Sothoryos and see the great apes rumored to walk the land. Maybe I can glimpse Valyria and the Smoking Sea and look upon Asshai by the Shadow from afar-“
You stopped your daydreaming.
Ser Luthor looked at you with an expression you couldn’t quite name. His eyes soft and the ghost of a smile on his lips towards your dreams of escaping to grand Esoos.
“Then…Your Grace shall be dearly missed.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to think that.” You looked at your hands, not bearing to look upon him and see his eyes.
“At most, I’ll aid my mother in her claim and marry a Lord. Then I’ll be back in a bedchamber, sprouting his children and taking care of his household.”
You felt your eyes sting, that would be your future, not fighting, not jousting nor seeking glory upon a battlefield. Soon you’ll be another daughter of a ruler in the annals of history, no one important enough to remember.
“Duty rarely asks what makes us happy.” He tilted his head to catch your eyes.
“I want to decide my own happiness.”
“Would traveling the world bring you happiness, Your Grace?”
Yes.
If you were with me.
We could cross the Narrow Sea together and never look back. You could teach me sword fighting properly instead of sending my blade skittering across the yard. We could wander the painted streets of Lys and lose ourselves amongst the markets of Pentos, dine beneath magisters’ gilded ceilings and watch the Titan of Braavos rise above the sea. I would take you upon Vermithor’s back and we could watch the whole world be swallowed in his bronze wings. Grand castles would look like nothing but children’s toys.
I could kiss you where no one knew our names, nor cared enough to learn them. I could marry you where no one cared that you were not born a lord. I could have your children, with hair as black as your own. Maybe some could have a silver streak from me to remind the world of the might of their mother’s homeland, long scattered to ash by The Ruin. We could be free.
“I think so.” You answered him.
He nodded slowly, his gaze lingering upon the floor before finding yours once more.
“Then I hope Your Grace finds the life she dreams of.”
He looked sad, though you could only be imagining it.
“What do you dream of, Ser Luthor?”
He pondered a bit on your question before answering.
“Peace.”
“Everyone wants that, tell me true.” You ardently wished to hear more from him. What were his hopes and dreams?
“Your Grace, I must admit I’ve never thought about it.”
“How come?”
“When I was a boy in Flea Bottom, I dreamt of warm bread and boots without holes in their soles. When I was older, I hoped to earn a place amongst the Gold Cloaks. Later, I hoped to command good men.”
He looked at his hands for a moment before lifting his eyes to yours.
“I have lived a life far greater than any I ever imagined for myself.”
He wasn’t dreaming of you, nor about what you could offer him. That was a foolish, childish thought.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
You didn’t see him the next day. There was no knock on the door from him, nor any wooden swords for practice. You paced the room and wondered why.
Surely he will come, surely.
He hadn’t.
You asked your ladies if they have heard word of him and Meredith told you he was dismissed from your guard. Your heart sank in your chest.
You didn’t have to ask who did it.
You left the room the following morning, with a fire under your skin. The guard your mother had placed in Luthor’s stead didn’t argue when you, quite loudly, told him to be quiet.
You didn’t know Maegor’s Holdfast well enough but you knew that the grand doors in front of the long corridor you rounded the corner on could only lead to the chamber meetings being held.
You tamed the Bronze Fury at two-and-ten, the second most formidable dragon in the known world. You were a Princess of the Blood, not some child hiding beneath her mother’s skirts.
You pushed the grand doors at once.
They were all locked in a debate, but every eye turned towards you at once. Your father called out your name, happy he could see you.
The Sea Snake and the Lady Mysaria bowed as you came closer. Your gaze was locked only unto one person.
“Why did you remove him?”
Your mother looked dumbfounded, eyes searching your face, “Who?”
“Ser Luthor. You removed him from service.”
She just watched you.
“Answer me.”
“I haven’t removed him.” She looked at Daemon and back again at you.
“Ser Luthor asked for the dismissal of his duties to you and I granted his wish.”
You paced the floor once more in your chambers, the tapestries on the wall showing great conquests only sought to further your despair. Your kind were conquerors and here you were, reduced to a sobbing mess. He didn’t want to see you, he had no wish to see you again. Was it something you said? Something you did?
In truth, you thought he warmed up to you as you did to him.
The day turned into night slowly so you lit up your chamber’s candles and fireplace for warmth and light.
It had been hours since you sent for him, with each dragging harder than the last.
There was a knock on the door and by the sound of it, you knew who it was.
You straightened your back, rubbed your eyes clean of tears, and bid him to enter. He wasn’t dressed as you knew him to do. He was in full armor, with the golden cloak atop his shoulders. He was probably ready to join his men on the city streets. You stopped him from that.
He bowed before you, “Your Grace.”
“Ser Luthor.”
He didn’t say anything else, awaiting your instructions as if nothing had happened between you nor any conversations had been talked. You came at once next to him. Close enough you could smell leather, steel, and the faint musk of him beneath it.
His eyes were locked unto the floor, those dark eyes you loved.
You loved him and you didn’t care if it was a flight of fancy. You wanted to love him and he didn’t want you. The least he could do was offer you answers, you deserved that much.
“Why did you ask to leave?”
His eyes were locked on the floor.
“Why? If you disapprove of me so, you could be a man and tell me.”
His eyes returned to your face and they were empty of any warmth.
You whispered, tears threatening to fall again: “Why did you leave?”
He finally mustered up the words to say: “I am trying to remember my place, Your Grace.”
His voice was that of the commander you remembered him as from the beginning.
“And what is that place? Taking hands off criminals? I thought you were happy here…with me.”
“I was happy, Your Grace.” He swallowed hard before his next words. “But I began to wish for things that were never mine to wish for.”
He looked over your face and he looked mournful. Some part of you knew what he meant, yet you asked anyway,
“Like what?” You whispered. It seemed that all anger had left you, leaving only a gaping pit in your stomach under his gaze.
His eyes settled over your lips.
You don’t remember if it was him that leaned down or you raised yourself up, but his lips were on yours and he tasted sweet. His beard slightly scraped against your skin, rough enough to make your skin tingle. One gloved hand came to rest uncertainly at your waist, almost trembling, before thinking better of it and falling away almost at once.
His breastplate was hard and cold compared to his tender kisses. Your lips parted and met again, each quiet sound of him and you traveling to your belly and lower still.
You brought your arms uncertainly to rest around his neck as he leaned down, to kiss you better.
When he finally drew back, it was only enough to rest his forehead against yours.
You could feel his breath upon your lips. The fire sent sparks into the air somewhere behind him. The sea to the left of you both crashed against the cliffs below, sending its song to your bedchamber.
“I am sorry,” he whispered, with his eyes closed.
You did not know whether he sought forgiveness from you, your mother in her bedchamber, or the gods above. And you didn’t care. You kissed him again, emboldened by the fire in your belly and the man in front of you.
He moved ahead and you stepped back before your back was brought to the wall, the cold stone hard against your dress and body. Luthor was everywhere and close enough you could taste him with every kiss, yet he wasn’t close enough.
Your hands traveled to his soft curls that you wished to run your hands into time and time again.
You had to be quiet, the guard was sitting outside your door. He couldn’t stay long.
This couldn’t be all. You decided at once.
His kisses turned desperate, mayhaps he came upon the same realization. His lips moved to your cheek, then your neck as his beard tickled you. You had to stop yourself before you let out a sound.
So this was what the books you read talked about during all those nights spent in the dark, with only a small candle to let you see the words on the page. You almost felt ready to write of it yourself, if only words could ever come close to the feeling of him.
His hands remained braced against the wall on either side of you as he pressed open mouthed kisses on your neck. He groaned as you let out a whisper of a moan and your legs felt like giving out under you. Luthor didn’t press himself against you, nor allow his hands to roam as freely as you thought he wished to. Your hands never left his hair and when he finally broke apart, they moved to the sides of his face.
His skin was warm, with a delightful redness across his cheeks.
“I…” He debated kissing you again, as his eyes returned to your lips, “I must go. I apologize, this shouldn’t have happened.”
“Will you come back tomorrow-”
“Yes.”
He answered before you could continue and your heart felt full. You were already thinking of how you could get rid of the guard outside your bedchamber as he took a step back, eyes never leaving your face.
His hands covered his crotch immediately and your ears and face felt on fire even more so than before.
“I…Good night, Your Grace.” He departed and the great door to your bedchamber swung under his heavy arm.
You heard his footsteps disappear down the hall.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
The next day you told your ladies to not bother you tomorrow or later that evening, they helped you wash and get ready for bed with knowing smiles you had no wish to question. You dismissed your guard as well, forever.
The day stretched on with the expectation of who will come to you later in the evening.
He would be here, with you.
The chamber was quiet, save for the fire cracking softly in the hearth and the sea singing somewhere below the cliffs. Moonlight spilled pale upon the floor.
You sat gazing into the fire, then you moved to the balcony. Somewhere below, the Gold Cloaks under his command were moving.
You blew out the candles, leaving only the fireplace for warmth.
There was a knock on the door and you bid him to enter. He looked almost nervous and uncertain, a clear change from the man who kissed you yesterday.
Luthor had no armor on, just the simple clothes he usually wore beneath it.
“Do you wish me to leave, Your Grace?” You were both whispering as you talked.
“No. Where did you get that idea?“
He merely looked at you, deciding if this was wise. It wasn’t, but you didn’t care.
The light from the fireplace bathed the room in the softest of lights, you could see him, and that was the most important for you.
He looked put together, more so than usual.
You moved to pour wine for you both, and he was close enough you could smell the soap and cold air still clinging to his skin. His fingers touched yours as you passed him the goblet.
“I must ask, is this something you wish for as well? And don’t come telling me about honor and respect.” He smiled before he took a deep breath.
“I do not wish to offend Your Grace, but I have wished and thought of it often. More often than a man in my place should.”
Luthor didn’t drink, only looked at you as you blushed. You wanted to kiss him again, and it seemed like he read your mind in that regard. He looked so impossibly handsome and as his lips collided with yours the wine was all but forgotten.
With your pulse in your ears you started walking backwards toward the bed. This time, he had enough courage to grab your waist with his strong hands while your hands rested on his face.
He bent down and lifted your nightshift high enough so he could rest comfortably between your legs. You could feel him there, hard and wanting, and your face burned at the knowledge that his longing had a body too.
He braced himself near your head as he trailed kisses down your neck. He was entirely too dressed for this. So you softly tried to get his tunic off, he lifted himself above you on his knees and quickly discarded it somewhere before returning to your neck and lips with hot kisses.
“When…when was the first time you’ve thought about us this way?” Hearing him say it would bring another type of pleasure. Luthor’s beard almost tickled you whenever he pressed his lips to your neck.
He broke apart only to speak before returning to your skin.
“When you thought-” He kissed you again near the middle of your neck, “-that I didn’t want to teach you.” He whispered against your skin.
Luthor continued before you could ask, “I had to imagine your hand instead of mine that night.”
He pushed his hips forward into yours as you moaned at the feeling of him.
“Then again the following night, and the night after.” His kisses traveled to your ear and you’ve never heard anything better, “I couldn’t wait to leave so I could imagine you like this.”
He looked into your eyes, curls wild and with the same redness your own face harbored.
You pressed another quick kiss to his lips before he lifted your dress entirely, you would be lying if you didn’t turn a bit shy under his gaze. His lips traveled lower, between your breasts and lower.
The air touched your bare skin and made you shiver. His hands moved to your knees, rough and warm, his thumbs smoothing small circles there as if to calm you.
You gasped as his lips touched you between your legs. This was infinitely better than anything in the world, you decided at once. His tongue moved again and again, steady as any lesson he had ever given you.
Whenever he made a sound of pleasure it only served to push against his face. Your fingers flew to his hair as you tried to find something to hold on to. You felt a coil wrapping tightly in your stomach and you wished to pull away, close your legs, even if it felt good. It felt better than good.
You squeezed your eyes tightly shut as he groaned and continued, his hair was soft in your hands. As you finally came undone, he stopped.
You stared at the canopy ahead trying to catch your breath. Hopefully the sounds leaving your mouth were not loud, though you couldn’t count on it. He rose up to kiss you again and his lips and beard tasted of you.
While you were trying to catch your breath, he removed his shirt and pants entirely, leaving him in the clothes he was born in. Your eyes traveled down his chest, all muscle and scars to the hair leading down between his legs.
The feeling of his skin on yours made you dizzy. He pushed a hand down between your bodies and you immediately braced.
It felt queer, a mixture of pain and discomfort coupled with the remaining pleasure you felt mere minutes earlier.
He groaned whenever he would give a thrust of his hips, yet he couldn’t enter you.
“Breathe.” He whispered against your face, as tears threatened to fall, “It’ll hurt just a moment.”
It did hurt, sharp and strange, enough that your nails dug into his sides when you both gasped. He stopped at once, breathing hard against your cheek, though you could feel how much it cost him to remain still.
The pain began to subside as he gently moved.
He kissed your cheeks and lips and muttered praises, “That’s it. You’re alright.”.
The bed creaked whenever his hips moved, but the sound only furthered both of your pleasure. You lifted your legs higher up his body as he picked up his pace. You tried to be quiet, truly, you did. The only sound was the bed, while you and your lover’s moans were merely whispered in each other’s mouths.
You’ve never felt more full, nor more alive. You wanted this to last forever and ever, have him on top of you and his heat on yours.
He buried his face in the crook of your neck as he continued, harder, then slower as to not spill himself too quickly.
Luthor’s breath came hot against your skin, uneven now, no longer the steady breathing of the commander you had known. His hands remained beside your head, gripping the sheets instead of you, as though he feared what he might do if he let himself touch you freely.
It was no longer pain now. Not truly. It was pressure and heat and the strange feeling of him filling a place inside you that had always been empty before. You wanted him closer than this somehow.
His breathing was becoming heavier and his thrusts more erratic, the bed creaked in protest continuously and you prayed no guards were patrolling outside at this hour. Your hands traveled to his shoulders and held him there. Luthor started moaning, sweet sounds traveling to your ears and between your legs. You felt him push so hard it almost felt like he was in your stomach, but the slight pain only furthered your pleasure.
Luthor’s restraint began to leave him in pieces. His sounds were quiet, almost broken, sweet against your ear and low in your belly. You whispered his name again and again, as if saying it could keep him there with you forever.
You thought, for one foolish, desperate moment, that you wanted all of him.
His hand went between your bodies again and he furrowed his brows shut as he came. Luthor kissed your lips again, before he went to clean the last part of him off of you.
The light from the fireplace was almost gone by now. You stared at the canopy above you, a smile on your lips.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
He came beneath the covers to embrace you and you’ve never felt happiness like this. His thumb rubbed circles on your hand as the sea continued singing down below.
“I want you here tomorrow as well.” Your voice was slightly hoarse.
“What if I get you with child?” He moved his head to sit better on the pillows behind you.
“Then I will marry you before my belly has time to grow.”
“Your mother might object to that.” You could hear the smile on his face.
“We will be quicker than her.”
A chuckle escaped him.
“You speak as if it is so simple.”
“It is.”
“It is not.”
“Then we will make it simple.”
He said nothing for a while. His hand tightened around yours, just enough for you to feel it.
“You are very sure of me.”
“I am.”
Your eyes had already begun to drift shut, ready to dream about him once more.
‘I love you,’ he said, so quietly, as if believing you already asleep.
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘˖*᯽*˖⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
author's note: Lyonel Baratheon I can't believe you made it into HOTD as well!!! The first time I saw this man, I was like 'hold up a sec, lemme get a better look' and gah damn he sexy lol. This was a long one, so I'm sorry for that, but I really like this idea of knight x princess. If you find it in your heart to let me know you enjoyed it, I would be very happy. Other than that, have a great day ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡, take care and know you can always write to me
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,690
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist
Chapter Four ✢ Salt and Sea
The Moon had returned three times since Jacaerys had been crowned when Cregan left the capital—it was still visible in the low sky that morning, gray and thick as was usual in early winter.
The whole Northern garrison that still remained had packed their meager belongings, horses were rested, fed and saddled, and all were ready to go home after nearly a year of war.
While Jacaerys loathed to see his friend and greatest ally go, he knew Cregan had his own burden to bear, his own throne of sorts to get back to. The North was wide and vast and he needed a trusted man holding its reins. As king, he would be the stronger for it, knowing that despite Cregan’s devotion to his own people, he would still keep an eye on the South and answer his call whenever he needed his support.
Jeyne Arryn had proven a great ally as well. She had held love for his mother, her cousin, and respect as a fellow woman governing men that resisted taking orders from someone they deemed lesser able. She was formidable in negotiation and with enough bite to her words and ways that it gave Jacaerys different perspective to what he would have otherwise thought.
He had come to realize that he needed tenacious, stolid counselors around him—he might have been quite learned and reasonably intelligent but he had recently understood how privileged he had been raised and how naive he still was in many ways of the world.
The lords he treated with sometimes let that particular fact show, but Jeyne, despite her honesty, never took any pleasure in educating him when he failed. Cregan had treated him in that same way, and he would forever be grateful for it.
“Thank you, my brother,” Jacaerys said as all that was left to do was say farewell, the men waiting for their commander to mount his horse and lead them home.
Standing in the middle of the courtyard, they embraced like kin. “The North is yours, my king,” was all that Cregan answered before he turned to his horse and left the young king to govern on his own.
To many at court it was the end of a reign they had detested, but Jacaerys was determined to prove to them that he could reign without Cregan’s influence.
He watched as the last Stark banners crossed the threshold, escorting the whole caravan out into the city, then turned to attend to the matters that waited for his ascend. However, he had barely set foot within the Red Keep that a squire came running.
“Word from Driftmark, your grace,” the young man said, handing him a letter bearing the Velaryon seal.
As Jacaerys broke it and unrolled the parchment, he knew within first glance that it was from Baela, from the unmistakable, elegant loops of her handwriting.
As all had been fearing in the last few months, the Sea Snake had died, and with him a legend was ending, although its legacy would continue in his sons and granddaughters—it was what he had wished all along, to leave his name behind and with it, shoulders to carry it.
The air was somehow colder on Driftmark, you thought as you made your way there for the funeral ceremony. You had never set foot there, and you regretted that you would only see it for such a grim event. It was also the first time the realm would see you, outside of the lords and ladies of the court, and the fact that it was for a funeral weighed on you as though it was a bad omen.
During the ceremony, you stood next to Jacaerys, the both of you dressed in similar black cloaks, embroidered with the same trimmings, although he wore a different sigil than yours. The Council had insisted that you showed a united front and as such you wore the Targaryen three-headed dragon on your cape, however you had found out upon arrival that a turquoise seahorse was embroidered at the chest of his doublet.
Now that he carried the Targaryen legacy, you had almost forgotten he had come into this world bearing the name Velaryon.
The gesture was clearly appreciated by the nephews of Lord Corlys and his heirs—Lord Alyn gave him a firm bow of his head, and Lady Baela’s smile wavered into sadness as she saw him, however she regained her composure before she greeted you with formality.
Despite the lack of outward hostility, you were unsure how to act towards the woman who should have been queen instead of you, and that shared such a close childhood with Jacaerys. You let nothing of it show and instead stood as you had been instructed to, silent and compliant, out of respect for the dead despite the raging storm in your chest.
The sea air brought clearer thoughts, in a way, after months of being confined to the Red Keep. The words of your mother and your cousin were still very much present in your head, and you were torn apart between loyalty, reason and duty, without any possible consideration for what you wanted.
You had been a pawn all your life, leveraged for influence or strength either at the benefit of Ormund or Aegon, and now that you were supposed to be the most powerful woman in the realm, you found yourself once more in the same position, possessing none of the authority you ought to have.
Once the ceremony was completed, you walked accompanied by a guard as you always were, along the ramparts of the castle, and it wasn’t until you came upon a balcony overlooking the sea that you realized the feeling in your chest was not anger after all, but terrible loneliness.
Along the shore, down the cliff that fell into long stretches of gray sand, the two silhouettes of Baela and Jacaerys were walking on the beach, and seeing them standing so close awoke something you could not yet name.
The two cousins had excused themselves from the rest of the party half an hour before, and all thought it appropriate that the king should confer with his kin on such a day.
“I am sorry, it was not how I wished to tell you,” Baela explained as they walked side by side, light rain falling in irregular droplets around them, leaving small craters in the wet sand. “Alyn and I have grown closer in recent months, and Grandsire had wanted to see us wed before he went.”
Jacaerys kicked slightly at the sand that was sticking to the soles of his boots, although it was rather pointless. “It is fitting that you should rule Driftmaker together,” he said earnestly, and it eased his burden to know that there wouldn’t be a crisis regarding the succession. “I know Corlys named Alyn as his heir, but I’ve always thought the Driftwood throne should have gone to you.”
As Baela did not answer he looked to her, finding her turned back towards the cliff, and together, they looked at the looming castle. “I thought of my mother a lot, today, and the first time we met, at her funeral,” she said, and there was much more to her words than she had just said.
“I wish I did not come to Driftmark only ever to commit its lords and ladies to the sea,” he replied.
“Its doors are always open, it can be your refuge whenever it is needed.”
Jacaerys was grateful for the offer, but his heart was heavy with grief. “There was a time when I thought I would visit Lucerys here. When we were older and wiser, each in our rightful place. Him ruling the seas while I ruled Dragonstone,” he said quietly.
For a while Baela did not speak, simply held his hand in hers, and they both clutched at each other. In that simple touch lived a life that would never happen, one that was too painful to even put into words.
“The world is so different now,” she sighed, and there was nothing more to say about it. “It is quite strange to look upon this place that saw so much life and death alike, and to think that we are now its stewards.”
“I feel much the same about the Red Keep. There’s ghosts around every corner and I’m supposed to rule as though nothing is amiss,” he lamented. “There remain so few of those who have peopled our shared youths, some days I think they will soon disappear from memory and the thought of it is unbearable.”
“We will remember them,” Baela promised, taking his other hand into hers, and for a moment he thought she would kiss him on the forehead like an older sister would. He wished she did. “All of them. All of those we have loved and lost. You do not have to carry this grief alone.”
“Well, I am alone,” he replied, leaning into her for a moment before pulling away. He no longer was the boy she had grown alongside of, nor the one she had nearly been betrothed to. He was her king now, her sovereign, and no matter how close they were, the crown would always stand between them. “The throne is a lonely place. My mother had warned me and I did not believe her.”
Baela watched him take a few steps away before following. “You are not alone, you have a queen.”
“A Hightower they all tell me I cannot trust,” he retorted, frustration bleeding into his tone, and he loathed that he was unloading his grief onto her on this day where she mourned her kin.
However, as usual she showed him only support, setting her own sorrow aside to help carry his burden. He wondered how he could ever repay her loyalty. “She is a Targaryen as much as you are. Do you not trust her?” she asked.
Jacaerys laughed, a cold sound that the wind carried to the sea too fast for her to hear. “In all honesty, as little as I trust myself.”
“Build trust along with her, then,” Baela encouraged, linking her arm with his and leading him back to the warmth of the castle, and he wished he could share in her optimism. “In each other and in yourselves.”
Baela’s words weighed heavily on his mind throughout the remainder of the day and well after supper, even more so when he found himself alone in his guest chambers. All day he had seen the way Baela and Alyn leaned together in their grief, and he was grateful that she had such support by her side.
While he had not stood alone, there had been no warmth against his shoulder, and for once he wished he could set aside the demands of the crown and be a simple man—a living, breathing man that longed for a hand to clutch or a breast to lay his head on.
For nearly an hour he debated with himself, weighing his arguments and inevitably, surrendering to the aching loneliness inside of him. The more he waited and paced, the more shoulder throbbed, made even more stiff by the wet air around him.
He summoned Ser Adrian through the door. “Ask the queen to come and see me,” he ordered the man.
“The king is in pain,” Ser Adrian whispered to you as you walked along with him a minute later. You stopped for a moment and looked up at the man and the pinched expression on his face.
You had not expected to be summoned to the king’s chambers, as you had never been in the two months since they had married. You realized now, seeing the pained crease between the kingsguard’s brows, that this was the moment you had been waiting for, the sort of moment many queens before you had lived, what made them who they were—a comfort for the king, a relief for his pains.
This was your leverage, how you gained power and influence.
You stepped into the room and forced your apprehension off your face and all the rest down to the pit of your stomach. Jacaerys was leaning his hip against a table, his right hand under the top sleeve of his night robe, clutching his left shoulder.
“You wished to see me, your grace?” you asked, meek in a way you never were, and Jacaerys glanced at you with a strange look in his eyes, but his pain seemed to overpower him.
“An arrow to the shoulder, and another to the chest,” he answered the other question you did not ask out loud, absently reaching down near his armpit. Then, he cleared his throat and gestured to the armchairs sitting in front of the hearth. “I thought we might keep each other company.”
He was in obvious pain, trembling with it, and you fell into the role that was expected of you easily. Aegon had been in pain too, and in the few weeks you had been his wife, you had learned how to soothe a man’s aches, of both the mind and body.
You stepped up to him, closer than you had ever stood since the night of your wedding. For the first time perhaps you watched his face in detail—his defined cheekbones, the way his lashes fluttered when you pressed a hand into his shoulder.
He seemed confused when you pressed up, your breath fanning over his face, and you felt joy surge up in you—for once, you had the advantage over him. “No,” Jacaerys gasped, turning his face away, and the rejection stung despite their mutual enmity.
“Why?” you asked as an accusation, suddenly turning cold.
“My reasons have not changed. This is not why I called on you,” he clarified, and he did not expect the sudden outburst that followed.
You removed your hand from his shoulder and took a few steps back as though he had struck you, and while he thought he had seen your hatred for him before, it was nothing compared to the fury etched on your face at that moment. “Then why take me as your queen?” you blamed him.
“Whatever is it you mean?” he asked.
“I am a prisoner here and I cannot even comfort myself in the fact that I am the queen, because I am not.”
“Did you not stand by my side as such today? Did you not treat with your cousin as such?” Jacaerys reasoned as best as he could—he did not understand where your anger was coming from, and why you were unleashing it upon him now. “You are the queen.”
“No, I am nothing but a puppet!” you shouted, and he winced, unused to anyone raising his voice at him, and he was glad that it was Ser Adrian outside the door, as he was the man he trusted the most among his guards to keep his private matters secret. “You haven’t touched me, therefore I am not your wife, I am not the queen, I am no one!”
Your voice broke on the last words of your accusation, and Jacaerys had the decency to look guilty. “Loathe it as you may, you might have to force yourself upon me,” you added, hammering your point deeper.
“I will not. That is not the sort of man I am, nor the sort of king I intend to be,” he replied, holding fast to his values, and under any other circumstances, you would have found it admirable.
While it did not appease you, it deflated your anger until all that was left was your sorrow, and your loneliness. “Then why did you take me as your queen?” you asked again, and this time it was not so much a reproach than profound regret.
“Because it was the overwhelming advice,” he replied, and you could tell it was the truth, no matter how terrible it was.
“As a way to subdue me. To cage me and merge my blood to yours so my line could be forgotten.”
“No,” he protested weakly, then his confusion turned into anger as well. He paced the carpet, a hand still clutching at his armpit, his shoulders still tight with pain, and you relished seeing him without his usual composure. “Do you think it is my will, to see you this way?”
“Yes. You are the king. Your word is law, and even your suggestions are to be obeyed as commands,” you scoffed.
“I do not have this power you think I possess. If anything I am powerless,” he cried out.
“Do not speak to me of powerlessness,” you answered, venom in your tone, and he knew deep down that you were right, and he had no ground to stand on. Whether it was his grief speaking instead of his mind, or simply the fact that power tended to reveal one’s flaws, he loathed how weak he had become since he had ascended the throne, doubting his own mind more than he ever had, even at war.
“Do you think me thriving? I am alone!” he shouted back. “Nearly everyone I’ve ever loved is dead and I sit on a throne that should not have been mine for thirty years!”
“Nearly everyone I’ve ever loved is dead as well and I am away from the only home I’ve ever known!” came your reply, and Jacaerys thought it a sorry sight, that a king and his queen should blame each other in this way when they shared such sorrow.
Raising his voice had made his chest ache and he now found himself nearly breathless, the back of his eyes prickling with hot tears. “I cannot annul our marriage nor send you away,” he argued, desperate for a solution that would appease you both. “What would you have me do, give you a place at my council?”
“Yes!” you screamed, and to your utter surprise, he seemed to settle instead of doubling down. Silence fell around the two of you once more, and you could see him pondering the issue before nodding to himself.
“Very well,” he concluded, as though your shouting had actually settled anything between you instead of digging up all your grievances. They all hovered around you, the air thick with them, nearly suffocating, and yet you felt you could breathe easier than you had in weeks.
“Is there anything else I could do, to ease your burden?” he asked, and to your amazement, you saw that he was sincere. You could not make sense of the way he acted towards you. You watched him wordlessly as he walked to the nearest armchair and lowered himself into it with a groan. “I would not have you as a puppet queen,” he promised. “We may not truly be husband and wife, but we are king and queen, you must believe that.”
“Will the council accept me?” you asked. “I am aware they named me as queen but do not trust me.”
You did not ask whether he would accept you, even if he would be the one to appoint you. Perhaps this was a way for him to appease you momentarily, only to dismiss your word and remind you of your true place.
“They will have to,” he said with a wave of his hand, staring into the fire. He looked older than he was suddenly, his eyes dark and dull when you had seen them bright and full of life at other times.
“If you command it,” you countered, but that made him frown. “If they fear you they will comply.”
“I don’t want to rule with fear,” came the defeated answer.
You carefully sat on the armrest of the opposing chair, remembering the nights you had sat with Aegon when his pain prevented him from taking you to bed, and how he attempted to convince you of the imaginary fear he inspired. “I’m afraid you may have to,” you reasoned—even if he would not take you into his bed, mayhaps this was how you could gain influence over him, with words spoken in the late hours.
“Why does power come with an obligation to command others into blind submission?” Jacaerys retorted, his frustration bursting through once more. “If this is power, I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it—”
He stopped himself, nearly ashamed of his outburst, unsure of why he was being so suddenly vulnerable in front of you. He would blame the ache in his shoulder if his heart was not so similarly bruised.
“Why did you summon me?” you asked again, quieter and softer in a way, but he could not answer. The truth was plain in the defeated line of his shoulders. “Surely you have a lady to keep you company, or tend to your needs.”
Baela came to both their minds even though her name was not said out loud. “No, I wouldn’t take another woman to my bed, not until we have consummated at the least. Not until your position is secure with an heir,” he explained, and you swallowed the hostile remark that rose in you about his parentage, wondering why it sounded like an other’s voice rather than your own.
“And yet you will not submit me,” you retorted. “You may come to resent me for it. Many a king have resented their queen for the lack of sons.”
“I would still like to think I am different in that regard,” he sighed.
“Perhaps you are now, but power changes people,” you murmured.
Jacaerys looked up at you then, watching the shadow of the flames dance on your face. Your grief was plain for him to see, and he knew in his heart the ghosts that haunted you—he had heard of Lord Ormund’s temper, and knew of Aegon’s less than pleasant manners. He also knew the way the realm treated girls.
He wondered if he was the first man of power you had ever met that didn’t seek to use you for his own gain or pleasure. “I will not let the crown change me,” he vowed, as much to you than to himself.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose.
Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,360
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist
Chapter Three ✢ We Light the Way
Night frost was still clinging to the windows and hindering the hinges of the doors when the young Lord Lyonel Hightower crossed the gates of the Red Keep atop his horse. He had left the inn on his last rest before reaching the capital early in the morning, and arrived before midday had risen in the sky, although the sun could barely pierce through the thick white clouds.
Snow was expected any day now, and he had written to you from the Roseroad to say he hoped his business in the capital would not take too long, so that he might return before the storms came from the Northern lands.
You were waiting for him on the balcony overlooking the inner courtyard when he crossed it in decided strides, his green cape floating behind him with a flourish. Your gazes met as you turned towards the staircase to meet him, and your heart picked up.
Nearly half a year had passed since you had set eyes on him—the last time you had seen him, he had been no more than a boy clutching the skirts of his step-mother, and now he was a young man at the head of a powerful house with powerful armies.
“Cousin,” Lyonel greeted as though you both remained unchanged since your parting, and embraced you like a sister.
“It is good to see you, cousin,” you replied, clutching him tighter for a moment, before releasing him.
As you stepped away, you noticed his eyes were raised to the staircase behind you, and as you turned to follow his line of sight, found Jacaerys standing at the very top of it. He was dressed in different clothes than you had seen on him so far. When he usually wore black these days, save for the lining of his cape, he now wore a crimson cloak draped over one shoulder, the crown of Jaehaerys sitting neatly atop his curls.
“Lord Hightower,” he called, making his way down slowly, content to make his guest wait at the bottom of the stairs. Two kingsguards were escorting him, right wrists resting loosely on the pommel of their swords. Lyonel said nothing in return, but you felt him tense beside you.
As Jacaerys came to face the new lord of the Hightower, he was stricken with how youthful of appearance he was—he was still very much a boy, barely two years younger than himself and yet appearing more juvenile. He looked very much like a Hightower, with bright red hair and light eyes, and the arrogant attitude that came with his father’s reputation.
“It is good of you to answer my call,” Jacaerys added when it became apparent he was not going to receive a formal greeting.
“I admit my surprise when on the way to the capital, we learned that my cousin had been crowned as queen,” Lyonel then said, crossing his arms. “I will be blunt, I am only here to see her.”
“The war is lost and over, Lyonel, let us keep the peace,” you placated, a hand on his arm, and he relented, following without a word when Jacaerys led him to the Council Room, and took the seat he was pointed to, across from the Hand’s chair where you sat.
Jacaerys saw Lyonel’s eyebrows raise when he then spoke, no doubt surprised at the subject he chose to address first. “It is my understanding that you’ve petitioned the High Septon to authorize you to marry your father’s widow,” Jacaerys said.
“Indeed,” Lyonel said, frowning.
“It is an unusual request,” he commented, and it was obvious Lyonel wanted to laugh in his face.
“I doubt a Targaryen would find it so strange as to notice it,” he said with an unpleasant sneer, and it took Jacaerys a second to understand there was a second meaning to his answer, which he chose to ignore. It had been his understanding that Lord Ormund had been a pious man, deeply motivated by his faith, and he did not know what to make of such a proclivity in the son.
“I was also told it was refused,” Jace continued, and Lyonel’s mood soured visibly.
“Which is disappointing, as the union has already been consummated,” Lyonel replied, crossing his legs at the knee and leaning back into his chair. “Lady Sam is with child.”
Your eyes widened at the news and you swallowed uncomfortably, but Jacaerys remained impassible, his face smooth as marble, his eyes fixed on Lyonel. “I might be able to convince the Septon,” he said calmly, as though none of the situation troubled him.
“And if you were not?” Lyonel pressed back.
“I would legitimize any child you would have with her,” he answered without a second thought.
Lyonel seemed to consider the proposal for a while. “Lady Sam advised me to come, she thought you might be sympathetic to our cause,” Lyonel admitted. “What would you ask of me in return?”
Jacaerys glanced at you then, a silent assent. “We ask that you disband your banners,” you requested, crossing your hands atop the table. “Some of your garrisons are still stationed along the Roseroad and the Mander, causing tension.”
Lyonel had a strange look in his eyes as he looked upon you, then glanced at Jacaerys suspiciously before he turned his gaze back to you again. “They have been waiting on my orders, no more,” he defended, uncrossing his legs so he could lean forward.
“We ask that you send your men home, and make a declaration of peace,” Jacaerys intervened.
Lyonel’s face darkened then, and Jacaerys thought he saw something familiar in the set of his jaw and the line of his brow—an authoritarian look he had seen many times on the face of his grandsire’s Hand.
“While your husband plays a pleasant tune, and my wife encourages me to fall into rank, I need to know, can I trust his word, my queen?” he asked, and Jace noticed something unspoken passing between the two of you, an understanding stemming from years as children together, raised under the same roof.
You swallowed but nodded. “The king has not broken any of the promises he’s made me so far.”
Lyonel stood then, sharply, forcing Jacaerys to mirror him. “Consider it done,” he said, but before Jace could reply, laid out his terms. “On the condition that my cousin is safe and treated properly. Let one thing be clear, Jacaerys, is that House Hightower is not loyal to you, but to our queen. One word from her, and we shall declare against you.”
Jacaerys extended his hand despite the threat. “I expected no less,” he said, gritting his teeth when Lyonel reciprocated, his grip unnecessarily tight on his wrist as they sealed their words—for the time being.
Jeyne Arryn made it to the capital a mere few days following Lord Lyonel’s arrival, and she immediately regretted that Jacaerys received him personally, without waiting for her counsel.
She faced the same slight displeasure from the men of the Small Council, no doubt slighted that none of them were chosen as Hand, and instead would have to take orders from a woman. Jacaerys supposed that endorsing the rightful queen was one thing, but obeying a woman chosen among other candidates was another entirely.
Still, Lady Jeyne took it in stride, and did not wait to be settled in the Hand’s Tower to take over the Small Council meetings and surveying what had been done so far. “Do you believe Lord Hightower to be trustworthy?” she inquired at supper the first night, after Jacaerys had recounted the meeting to her.
Jacaerys had chosen to host her in one of the dining halls instead of his own quarters, wary of allowing anyone in his quarters these days. He had started to wonder if he might also requisition one of the empty royal bedchambers to move his desk into, loathing the sight of it as he laid in bed, reminded at every second of the sheer scale of the work that awaited him.
“No, but he needs something from me and his wife apparently endorsed my mother,” he replied, to which Jeyne gave a surprised hum, spearing a braised plum on her fork. “Furthermore, he will not go against the queen’s direct order.”
“His loyalty is with her, then,” Jeyne concluded, then seemed to think on the issue for a moment. Across from her at the table, Cregan Stark was observing her with interest, seemingly pleased in what he was seeing in her. After a while of silent contemplating, she spoke again. “The Hightowers are vassals of House Tyrell, and while their lord is a babe, I heard the regent Lady Margaery is a sensible woman.”
“Do you mean to order the Tyrells to settle their banners?” Jacaerys inquired.
Cregan set his knife down at the suggestion. “She was not impressed by dragons in her lands, she refused to declare all throughout the war, I doubt forcing her hand is the way to treat with her.”
Jeyne did not smile nor frown, simply continued to cut into the sweet, caramelized fruit being served with the braised meat. “I shall write to her, woman to woman, and to Lady Sam as well,” she said, her voice as even as always. “We cannot trust Lord Lyonel’s word alone.”
Jacaerys was slightly reassured by the prospect, but his worries resurfaced when Cregan cleared his throat and addressed him. “Your grace, I could not help but notice that you gave leeway to the queen to socialize with her cousin, unsupervised,” he said carefully, and Jeyne tilted her head at the comment.
“I would not trust the queen to that extent,” she immediately replied.
A bright flare of irritation burst behind Jace’s breastbone, and he pushed his plate aside, his appetite soured. “It was the council’s idea that I wed her and now you tell me to be wary of my own wife?”
Cregan frowned at the display of temper, but Jacaerys supposed he was used to it by now. “She is a Hightower. She was raised by Lord Hobert and then Lord Ormund,” he replied, keeping his voice calm but firm. “Lyonel is more of a brother to her than Aegon or Aemond ever were.”
Jacaerys rose from the table then, startling the young page that had been waiting on him with a pitcher of fresh, dark wine ready to be served. “Out,” he snapped to the boy, who obeyed and scurried out, closing the door behind him. Pacing the room under the attentive eyes of his councillors, Jacaerys struggled to keep his temper at bay. “Do you think she would so easily betray me? Why encourage me to take a queen you know you cannot trust?”
Cregan rose as well then, while Jeyne kept to her seat, swirling her cup of wine slowly. At her feet, one of her lanky dogs crossed its paws and huffed as though it could understand the topic being discussed.
As he had done many times over, Cregan came to him and soothed his frustrated pacing with a hand to the shoulder, and Jace nearly regretted how disagreeable he had been then. “Trust is to be earned, your grace, and she will earn it by doing her duty,” he explained. “The sooner she bears you a child, the better.”
Jacaerys looked aside then, removing his hand with a sharp shrug of his shoulder. “I am aware of that,” he said in a tone that suggested no further comment would be tolerated, and Cregan took a step back in subtle deference. “Now if you’ll excuse me, Lady Jeyne, I shall see to my brothers,” he said before making his way towards the door, leaving his new Hand and his most trusted sword alone.
Alicent was already dressed for the night when you came to visit her that night, sharing a cup of tea as had become your ritual when you did, sharing wisdom in the quiet hours of the evening, when the troubles of the day kept you from settling.
“I have not been allowed to meet with Lyonel,” Alicent lamented as she tightened the belt of her night robe before sitting down across from you, the steaming tea between you on the small table. “He was a babe the last time I saw him and now he rules our house.”
You replied nothing to her lament, instead asked the question that had plagued you since Lyonel’s arrival and your discussions in the garden, reminiscing of your childhood, and in which memory your cousin had promised to raise his army if you so wished, uncaring for the pact he had made with Jacaerys.
“Why did you send me to ward with the Hightowers?” you inquired, and your mother looked sad then.
“I bore the king three Targaryen children,” she explained, and in those words you could feel the weight of decades of selfless service to the crown. “I wanted you, my last, to be a Hightower.”
“Well I am not. Lord Hobert was kind and I bless his memory, but Ormund never let me forget that my blood was tainted, that I would only be worthy of the Hightower name if I dedicated myself to the faith,” you replied, feeling now familiar frustration rise in you. It was your constant companion these days, and you could not determine the root of it so you might tear it from the ground and burn it.
Alicent seemed remorseful then, but you had no use of cold regrets. “I spent a decade praying for forgiveness, forced to reject my own blood until I was called to make use of it again,” you continued, remembering the letter Lyonel had received, ordering him to send you back to your king. “I am not a Targaryen but I am not a Hightower either. I don’t know that I belong anywhere.”
Alicent reached across the table to take your hands into hers. “You are a Hightower, by temperament and by upbringing, but also by blood. You are my daughter,” she assured you. “And now you are the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Am I?” you murmured, looking down at your knees. You hesitated to confess the truth of your position, but in the end, you allowed the truth to escape you. “The marriage is unconsummated.”
The cooling tea was definitely forgotten then, Alicent now more awake and incensed than she had been a minute ago. She shook her head, sighing in despair. “You cannot allow it to remain as such. As long as you are not married to the king, our position remains fragile,” she explained, even though she did not need to. “As long as he has not bedded you, he can replace you in an instant.”
“I am aware of that, mother,” you protested.
“Then you must go to him now,” Alicent urged you, rising and pulling you along, leading you towards the door. You looked aside when your mother reached for your robe, undoing the first few clasps and pulling the collar of your nightgown further down on your chest. “The sooner you give him a boy, the sooner you will obtain what it is you seek.”
You wanted to protest that what you sought did not rest in the hands of a husband you had not chosen, but you knew your laments would fall into deaf ears. Instead you nodded, compliant as you had been taught, and walked out into the cold hallway, following your memory without conscious thought until you came upon the king’s quarters.
However, your endeavor was stopped by the kingsguard that stood at attention in front of the heavy doors. “The king is not in his quarters, my queen,” the man said.
“Where is he, then?” you asked. So preoccupied by the matter at hand, you instantly thought of him in the arms of another—you had heard the rumors regarding his affection for his cousin Lady Baela—betraying you as you had feared the first night of your marriage.
While he had assured you of his intent to keep you as his queen, you wondered if perhaps it was a facade to appease the Hightowers for the time being, and now that he had their allegiance, although fragile, he would cast you away.
The guard was quick to soothe your sudden worries. “The king is in the nursery, your grace,” he said, pointing to the room across the hallway.
Slightly curious, you thanked him and made your way to the children’s quarters, from which a bright light was coming, spilling into the hallway. For a morbid second you wondered whether it was the room your nephew had lost his life in, but the question was chased away from your mind when you entered and took in the sight that awaited.
Jacaerys was sitting at the foot of a large bed where two boys were huddled together, their little heads resting side by side on the pillow, their white hair sticking into odd spikes, still wet from a bath. The king held a closed book on his lap, and while you could not see his face, you could see in the downturn line of his shoulders that he was not in a cheerful mood.
“I know that I am not your father, and that I will never replace him,” he was telling the children, his voice thick with emotion. “As I will never replace our mother, but I will do my best by you.”
The older-looking boy glanced over his brother’s shoulder then, and Jacaerys turned, catching you before you could step back into the hallway. “Forgive me, I did not mean to interrupt,” you defended yourself immediately, but instead of anger, it was exhaustion that spread over his face.
“Stay,” he said, twisting to glance at the other side of the room. Across from the boys’ bed, Jaehaera slept in her own crib. The nurse that sat with her rose when you approached, and you took her place, sitting in the rocking chair. The little girl was deep into slumber, clutching a doll made of cloth and an embroidered blanket—at first glance you thought they were flowers, but upon closer inspection, you noticed they were butterflies.
“She’s my niece and yet I am a stranger to her,” you commented, unsure why you were saying this out loud, to Jacaerys of all people.
Nonetheless, he seemed touched by your confession, and in the soft light of the nursery, you found he looked quite different than you had ever seen him—gone was the arrogant, self-assured young king who had met with your cousin. Instead he looked years older than his years, and weary beyond them.
“Would you like to raise her?” he offered. “There has been talk of sending her to ward with Lord Lyonel, but I would keep her here, with you, if that is what you wished.”
“Perhaps I should,” you answered, aware that it was not an answer.
For a while the both of you remained silent, looking upon the children the war had spared, and the utter devastation of it seemed to dawn on you. Orphans, they were, their respective parents dead in the pursuit of the throne, and once again you thought there was no justice to the whims of the Gods, leaving babes without mother nor father, left to carry a legacy of bloodshed and kinslaying.
When Jacaerys spoke again, it was as though the words came straight from your heart. “I am aware that our marriage is based on hatred, but the children are innocent in all this. May we leave the quarrels of the past behind, when it comes to them?” he asked. “They need serenity after what they’ve been witness to.”
There was only one thing you could answer then. “Of course.”
After that Jacaerys spoke to you no more, instead turning back to his Aegon and Viserys, and the book he was holding, opening it on his lap and letting the large pages fall on either side of his legs. You nearly started when he started to read what you supposed to be High Valyrian, and you suffered that you could not understand a word of it.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Chapter four will be posted in two weeks, on August 1st.
Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,745
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist
Chapter Two ✢ Sealed in Blood
The valley of the Kingswoods was plunged into near darkness even though it was the mid-morrow, the sky low and heavy, thick clouds coming in from the Narrow Sea, brought by the sharp winds that danced with the tide.
Near the edge of the cliff, where Jacaerys had learned Queen Aemma and Prince Baelon had been put to rest as well, two pyres were waiting, side by side like allies, when in truth they had been foes. Under the blanket of this dark sky, Aegon and Rhaenyra would bid farewell one last time and returned to ashes, to be buried together. While the gesture weighed heavily on Jace’s mind, he knew it was the right one if he wished to be known as a merciful, peaceful ruler.
This time there would be no dragon upon the hill to cast its fire—Rhaena’s Morning was still too small, and the only grown dragon that remained, Silverwing, was riderless once more. The Council had made a suggestion, that perhaps Jace could travel to Dragonstone and attempt to claim her, to add a strong symbol of legitimacy to the start of his reign, but the prospect of riding another than Vermax made him nauseous.
At his side where Lucerys and Joffrey ought to have been, Jacaerys was instead escorted by Cregan Stark and Baela, who had made the journey from Driftmark, taking the risk to leave her grandsire so close to the Stranger’s door. While those were the two people he trusted more than anyone in this world, the absence of his brothers ached fiercely, as much as the loss of his mother.
Torch in hand, he could hardly raise his arm to light the pyres, and where a word from him would have been expected, he could not summon his words. Instead the Maester recited a prayer in High Valyrian that he did not hear over the rush of his own blood in his ears.
“All eyes are on you, my king,” Cregan murmured once silence had returned to the assembly, not as a stern reminder, but as encouragement.
With a reassuring glance over his shoulder, to the nobles that had gathered, along with the Rivermen and the Northerners, as well as the Dragonkeepers, Jacaerys finally took the step forward. As he lit the pyres one by one, he prayed that wherever she was, his mother forgave him for his perceived sins.
Despite his reason knowing it was the order of things, there was no escaping the feeling that he had stolen the crown from her. It was unfair, against the very laws of nature, he would argue, that he would be king when she never had the chance to reign.
The assembly watched the pyres go up in flame, the smoke adding to the heavy sky above their heads.
“She would be proud of you,” Baela said in a whisper, meant only for him and Cregan to hear, but he could not accept the praise.
Instead he walked away without a word, dismissing the Kingsguard that offered to open the door to the litter for him. He mounted his horse, choosing the path that would lead him through the city unguarded, but he refused to be scared of his own people. Cregan and Baela followed on their own horses, flanking him as they had done all day, two pillars holding him up.
Once he would have crossed the gates of the Red Keep, he would have to disappear once more, instead replaced by the crown, the monarch, and there would be no time to mourn.
“All day long I am plagued by demands and advice that often contradict one another, how am I to know which decision is right?” he lamented as the party made their way back to the city's gate. “They all expect me to guide them, but how might I know that I am not leading this realm into war, once again?”
“Surround yourself with counselors you trust, who look out for the interests of this realm and not their own,” Baela advised, and he regretted that she could not stay, but he understood her reasons for returning to Driftmark. He knew that before long, the matter of the succession to the Driftwood throne would arise.
“I should dismiss Unwin Peake, then,” he spat, then once the vitriol had been spoken, came to a wiser, more useful conclusion. “I shall write to my mother's cousin, Jeyne Arryn. I will need a trusted Hand once you have gone back to the North,” he said, glancing at Cregan.
The young man frowned, but gave a nod of agreement. “I hope you do not see this as disloyalty,” he said.
Jacaerys almost laughed, a mirthless exhale pushing past his lips again. “There hasn’t lived a man as loyal as you, Cregan.”
“I shall stay and serve as your justice until it is done,” his friend promised, and he was grateful for such a strong presence at his side—it also comforted him in his decision that Jeyne would be an apt replacement. She was kind to her kin, in her own way, but stern and unyielding towards other matters, and that was what he needed.
“And I shall answer any call,” Baela reminded him firmly. “I am only across the Bay.”
Jacaerys looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, taking in her kind smile and earnest eyes, the strength he knew she carried in her body and spirit. In another life, perhaps, she would have made a good queen.
For a fortnight you remained a distant spectator to the start of Jacaerys’ reign, and as he had promised, no harm came to you while you waited to know whether your blood would come, or you would be burdened with Aegon’s child. The prospect of carrying a contender for the throne was one you feared, and even though you knew many were still loyal to your bloodline, the truth of the matter was that you remained a woman, and would only gather support in a son’s name.
Were you to bear Aegon’s son, you would be raising him to be at war with his own family, while Jacaerys had offered you a crown and a promise of peace.
The trials saw many men executed or sentenced to the Wall, when Cregan Stark seemingly judged there still remained enough strength and honor in them. In some ways you wondered whether the Northerner was ruling as he pleased, instead of acting on the orders of his king.
In a gesture of good will and mercy, Jacaerys had allowed you to visit your mother for a half hour, and while you were escorted to a small chamber deep inside Maegor’s Holdfast, you felt as though you were being led to the jails. The chamber was plunged into darkness even though it was afternoon, heavy curtains drawn against the sun, and the whole room smelled of prayer incense. The stones were cold under your feet, even through your slippers and the carpet.
When you had first crossed the threshold, Alicent had held you long and tight. She was dressed almost as a Septa, in black clothes that made her look thinner and more frail than she was. Gone was the woman who had welcomed you to the capital nearly three months prior, dressed as was proper for the Queen Dowager, and confident the war was being won.
Since then Aegon had died, poisoned by those he kept close, and so had Rhaenyra, her wounds festering until a fever took her, and a boy now sat the throne. “What is happening out there?” she asked, leading you further into her room. “I am not allowed to know any of it. Are we to stand trial as well?”
“I do not know, mother,” you said. “Many men have been put to the sword, or sent North, but it seems even Jacaerys isn’t certain of our fate.”
Something dark crossed your mother’s face then. “My son should be sitting the throne, not this—” Alicent nearly whimpered, clutching the rosary she carried everywhere these days, the points of the star digging into her palm.
She cut herself off, but you knew what words lurked beneath the surface. “All things considered, he has been merciful, mother,” you protested weakly, knowing full well you could have suffered terrible consequences for your confession.
“He might be merciful, but that doesn’t make him true. If there is a rightful king it should be Daemon’s son, the little Aegon,” she accused, the name sounding awful in her mouth.
You said nothing for a while as Alicent sat in an armchair, the weight of their downfall visible on her shoulders and in the lines of her face. You poured the bitter tea your mother preferred into two cups, watching the fragrant steam rise. “On advice of his council, he has offered me his hand in marriage,” you finally said, setting the strainer aside and putting the lid back on the pot.
“Oh, my daughter, you would be queen?” Alicent asked, rising once more and rushing to you. “In those circumstances, it would be well to use this to your advantage. Men are easily swayed by beauty, if you know how to work your charms,” she explained in a hushed tone, taking your hands into hers.
“Do you mean for me to seduce him?” you asked.
Alicent shook her head. “He is young and still malleable. He has just acceded to the throne, and his council and courtiers hold the power now, but you may influence him as well. Be agreeable to him and he will come to trust you, and listen to you, eventually.”
“I understand,” you nodded—it all seemed logical to you, in a sense.
Alicent looked nearly mad in the low light of the candles, her eyes blown wide and her hands trembling where she was clutching you. “And when the time comes, he will bare his back, and we will have our revenge,” she whispered. “You may still light the way for us.”
Alicent’s words ringing in your head, you made your way back to your chambers once the half hour had come to an end, wondering what path would be yours to take, muttering prayers as you climbed the stairs, pleading for a sign of what was right.
The Gods seemed to hear your desperate pleas, and as you reached the top of the staircase, a sudden ache in your core speared you into place. Gasping, you rushed to your chambers, heart in your throat, and slamming the door behind you, took a handkerchief that you wiped between your thighs.
The white linen came wet with a bright red smear.
You did not know whether to be relieved or devastated—one way or another,your fate was nearly sealed.
Late at night was the only moment in the day Jace was able to have some solace—or perhaps in the early seconds of the morning before he fully woke, still on the edge of slumber, when the whole world was at peace and he was not king yet, just a young man clinging to his dreams.
He spent most of his evenings at his desk, answering his private correspondence or writing in his journals, reading the diaries of former Maesters and lords, educating himself on the preceding reigns. He had taken to learn everything he could about his great-grandsire, Jaehaerys—the way he had built a strong, powerful reign, and the way his legacy had collapsed within the next three decades following his passing.
Jace was eager to learn from the past, and not repeat its mistakes.
To his relief, his mother’s cousin Jeyne Arryn had acceded to his request, and was now on her way to the capital, leaving her young nephew behind to regent the Vale. She had already proven herself, ruling the Vale for the last decade and a half while bearing the burden of being a woman, and such was the sort of advice he needed.
A sharp knock at the door came to interrupt him—he pressed the seal into the freshly poured wax, waiting until it hardened before peeling it back, and then called the visitor in. Ser Adrian Redfort, a white cloak personally chosen by the Lord Commander to protect Rhaenyra, stepped into the room.
“My king,” the man greeted. “The princess is requesting an audience.”
Jacaerys discarded his letter and waved for him to let you in, suddenly wary that an unfortunate news was to come. He remained seated as you entered, crossing his trembling hands at his lap, partially hidden by the tabletop. The look on your face was grave, but you did not waste any time before you spoke, putting an end to his torment.
“My blood has come,” you said, almost too quiet to hear, and he had never been so relieved to hear of blood. “I am not with child.”
Seated behind his desk, the young king seemed relieved, though he attempted to hide it, but you could see the way his frown smoothed over, and the corners of his mouth eased slightly. “Very well,” he replied.
“I have thought of your proposal,” you said. “I will marry you for the sake of the realm.”
“Before you agree, there are terms you should be aware of,” Jacaerys immediately answered, his gaze lowering to the desk in front of him where various letters were scattered over a map of the Reach.
“I am listening,” you said, your own eyes lingering to the coast where Oldtown sat, heart aching at the memory of your youth in the sun, far from the schemings of the capital.
“Lord Lyonel, your cousin’s son and heir, now rules House Hightower,” Jacaerys said, allowing you time to respond.
“I know him well, we were children together,” you replied, crossing your wrists at your belly, trying to gather some composure at the terms you would next be offered—all the while knowing you had no choice in the matter, and those would be orders instead of proposals.
“He is on his way to King’s Landing to treat with me,” Jacaerys explained, rising slowly until you were face to face, the large mahogany tabletop standing between the two of you . “He could treat with us together instead, if you could guarantee to think of the good of the realm instead of pride.”
Closing your eyes for a moment, you dropped your chin to your chest, reminding yourself of your mother’s words. “The realm has too long been at war,” you murmured.
“Neither of us will ever convince the other of their good right, but together we have a chance to put an end to this,” he said, so earnestly you raised your gaze to him again. You understood then that he truly believed it, and you wanted to laugh in the face of such blatant optimism.
“While the overwhelming advice is that I wed you for the common good, I would not bring an enemy into my bed,” he continued, and the menacing glint in his eyes made you shiver.
“No matter my thoughts on your legitimacy, you now hold the power,” you admitted bitterly.
“As queen, you would have power as well,” Jacaerys assured you, slowly walking the desk until he was standing so close you could see the flickering candles reflecting in his dark eyes. “Convince Lyonel to stand down and bend the knee, and I will grant you my trust. I don’t intend to keep my queen in chains.”
While you had never been an outward romantic, and you had always known you would marry for political gain or alliance, you had never thought you would one day be a pawn to bridge the chasm left by war. It was unfair, in many ways, on both you and Jacaerys, to be sacrificing yourselves for the good of the realm, but you supposed it was the role of both king and queen.
It did not feel right to be called queen when that title belonged to your mother and your departed sister, but Alicent had been right. This was the only way you could take back some authority, yield some political influence and perhaps, restore what had been stolen. You were the way to put Hightower blood back on the throne—Gods willing you would have a son, and then perhaps honor would be restored.
A royal wedding should have been a cause for celebration and rejoicing, instead it was a solemn ceremony held under the eyes of all in the city, nobles and commoners alike, a show of unity and reconciliation. Soon word would spread in the realm and all would know that the two lineages born of Viserys were one, and the conflict was well and truly over, or so Jacaerys seemed to hope.
Tradition was to be upheld, insisted both the Council and the Faith, but Jacaerys asserted that there would be no bedding ceremony of any kind. “I will not have anyone in this room. The Maester may come in once it is done,” he admonished, closing the doors to the king’s quarters in the court’s face once you had been escorted to his chambers.
“Thank you for that,” you whispered once the two of you were alone.
“I did it for my sake as well,” he confessed, looking nervous.
You did not answer and instead walked to the bed, ready to once again lay on your back and allow your husband to claim you as was his right. It would be the second time you would look at the moldings on the ceiling and forget about your own body until a man was done with it.
However, Jacaerys stopped your endeavor. “No,” he called, and you tilted your head in a silent question, confused as to what he expected from you. “I would not share your bed by force. I would not touch you until you wanted me to.”
“It is your right as husband and king,” you reminded him, a mirthless laugh on your lips.
Jacaerys went to his desk where a pitcher and cups sat, and swallowed a mouthful of wine, desperate for composure, loath to be in such a vulnerable position. “I have never been with a woman, and I would not have the first night I am to be a forceful occasion,” he confessed, and you could hardly understand how it was relevant.
“I am your wife, to do with as you see fit, you cannot force yourself upon me,” you replied, and it made him nauseous.
“We shall disagree on this, then,” he said, setting the wine aside, the sweet taste of grape turning sour in his mouth. “It will not be our last disagreement.”
Fear struck you then, as you remembered your mother’s words vividly. Your position would not be safe until you truly were the wife to the king, the rightful queen. The future of your blood rested in your hands, and no matter how honorable he was, you could not allow him to compromise your position.
Without a word you came to him and reached for the clasps of his doublet, undoing them swiftly, but he stopped you once more, grabbing both your wrists gently. “Please, your hands are shaking,” he said gently. “Is this what you truly want?”
You hated to admit it, but he had been honest towards you since the beginning, and thus you could not find it in yourself to lie. “No,” you said quietly, your eyes still fixed on the dragon brooch at his shoulder.
“Then you shall not lay a hand on me nor I on you,” he said firmly, letting go of you.
Your arms fell to your sides, defeated. “The Maester will know and our marriage will be invalid,” you protested.
“Leave that with me,” he said, gesturing to the armchairs in front of the fire. Uneasy, you still complied and sat where he wished, staring at the flames and wondering what other foolish ideas he had, if you had put yourself in danger by complying, if instead you should be the one to force his hand—he seemed unsure of himself at times, perhaps you could convince him.
You heard the sounds of a belt coming undone, then the ruffle of fabric and a sharp intake of breath. For a moment too long you sat there, listening to the rhythmic ruffles and short breaths, and it took you a minute to realize what was occurring, and when you did, you felt yourself flush in embarrassment.
Time stretched and his panting grew more frantic, until Jacaerys cursed under his breath. “Should I help?” you asked, biting your lip.
“No,” came the sharp answer. Finally, after a minute more, another sharp intake of breath pierced the air, a bitten groan that reminded you too well of your first wedding night.
You heard him undress, then wash his hands in the basin. “It is done,” he said. When you rose again, his doublet was discarded and his shirt as well. He had put on a robe over his bare chest—he looked flushed, his high cheekbones tainted with red. His hair looked as though he had raked his fingers through his curls, giving them an unruly look.
Jacaerys felt your eyes on him as he picked up a small knife from his desk, a seal opener, and cut the inside of his arm near the crease of his elbow. It would be easily hidden by a sleeve, and none would be the wiser. He smeared some of the blood on his palm, then wiped it on the mattress where the evidence of his solitary act laid.
“What is it?” you asked when he went back to staring at you.
“Your hair,” he answered, almost embarrassed. “It is too… tidy.”
“Oh,” you breathed, then reached for the braid and undid it, raking a hand through your mane. You were obviously embarrassed as well, and he thought it served him well.
As Jacaerys opened the doors to his chambers once more, and both the Septon and the Maester came into the room, you were reminded of the night of your first marriage. For the second time your humiliation was to be witnessed, your virtue publicly claimed by a man you did not love ; tears came to your eyes and you wished that Jacaerys would send you away soon, to pray for guidance and plan your revenge.
Now you had been queen twice, and yet you felt as powerless as you ever had without the crown.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Thank you so much for the amazing feedback on the first chapter, it went straight to my heart. Chapter three will be posted next Saturday, July 18th.
Series taglist ✢ @chaotichereticcavern @galactict3a @qtmoonies @multyfangirl @obsidian-gold1239
Tags ✢ post-Dance, grief/mourning, arranged marriage/political marriage, enemies to lovers, falling in love, eventual romance, eventual smut, angst with a happy ending
Wordcount ✢ 3,515
Summary ✢ Jacaerys is crowned king as his mother perishes from her wounds shortly after retaking the Iron Throne. He makes a match with you, the last daughter of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower, to secure peace and rebuild the Targaryen dynasty.
Series Masterlist ✢ Next Chapter
Chapter One ✢ King of the Ashes
The Great Hall had once been a symbol of power, of the supremacy of the House of the Dragon, however now it felt as though it carried the weight of a dynasty in ruins.
On the day after the morrow they would burn two enemies side by side, returning them to the ashes in which dragons made their nests, as was appropriate for two children of House Targaryen—Rhaenyra and Aegon would rest underground in the Sept, a symbol of what war could bring.
While the prospect of his mother sleeping her eternal sleep under the same floor as her treacherous brother enraged Jacaerys, he knew it was a show of honor the like was expected of a true, wise king.
Never in his ten and nine years of life had Jacaerys thought much about the sort of king he would make. After all, he had thought the crown was decades away, a lifetime, when his own children would have been grown and his mother would have been trembling and frail, passing into the mercy of the Gods.
Instead the Stranger had taken her in her prime, through dragon fire that had burned her flesh and rotted her core until she had eventually succumbed to it. Or perhaps it was the grief of losing another son, that in the end had been too much to bear. Many in the Red Keep suspected that the loss of Queen Helaena and their youngest son had been what had driven Aegon to madness, until his own men had taken pity.
Only the Gods knew the truth of it, now all there was for Jacaerys to understand was that the two rulers, legitimate and usurping, who had sat the throne after Viserys were now dead, and the crown had landed on his head.
Under the looming presence of the Iron Throne, Jacaerys paced the marble floors, attempting to make sense of the utter devastation around him. The high ceilings now felt suffocating, as though the very sky was crumbling over his head.
“I should not be there,” he said outloud, almost to himself, or perhaps to the Gods, but his faithful friend Cregan Stark still answered his call of anguish.
Wrists resting atop the pommel of Ice, which he carried at his waist these days, the young lord was watching over him as Kingsguard would, with the sort of silent presence that reminded Jacaerys that he was not alone in carrying his grief.
“This is your rightful place, my prince,” he reminded him with the steadfastness he had come to expect from the northerner.
“No it is not. It shouldn’t be, not by decades at least,” he resisted, and Cregan knew him to be right.
Upon answering the call of the Dragon Queen, never would he have imagined that he would see a great dynasty fall to its knees in such a short time. Dragon riders had risen and fallen as quickly as the tide and as unpredictably, and he feared that it was only through sheer fate that one legitimate heir remained.
While it was not in his character to contemplate potential ruin, he knew the face of the crown could have been a child not even a decade old, would Jacaerys have drowned along with his dragon at the Gullet.
“Why have the Gods allowed it? Why allow my mother to die but me to survive?” Jacaerys lamented, the healed wound in his shoulder throbbing then, a pulsing burn from an arrow that had scarcely missed his heart—in that instant he almost wished it had not, and had allowed him to rest at the bottom of the sea with Vermax, instead of standing to inherit ruins.
“It is not for us to know,” Cregan replied, knowing it was no comfort. Then he cleared his throat, meaning to lead the young king to where he was expected. “They are waiting for you.”
Jacaerys turned to him then, his eyes rimmed with red and his face gaunter than a man of his age should be, the face of a man who had seen the Stranger many a time. “I cannot rule.”
Cregan stepped forward and put a heavy hand on his shoulder—still, the touch felt like the comfort of a brother, the sort Jacaerys sorely missed, and he leaned into it for support. “Then allow me to counsel you. We have been friends, haven’t we?”
Jacaerys nodded, swallowing heavily—the battlefield forged strong friendships, bonds of brotherhood the like he would have never imagined beforehand. “We have,” he confirmed. “There is no one else I trust.”
“Then believe me when I say, you will be a fine king,” Cregan replied, and it planted the seed of an idea in him, that perhaps not all of it was a curse—perhaps this was the call of destiny, no matter how painful, and he only had to answer it. “One I will gladly bend the knee to.”
The Red Keep had been your birth place, and now you were certain it would be your resting place. It had now been a fortnight since Rhaenyra had taken the Iron Throne once more, returning to King’s Landing with an army several thousands strong, made of Rivermen and Northerners, only to find that the revenge she sought had already been taken from her. Aegon laid cold in his bed, and she followed mere days later.
You had been confined to Maegor's Holdfast, kept under close watch in your rooms most days, as though you were more than you were, more than a woman and instead a danger to the unlikely king now wearing the crown. You had never had to think of yourself as a political pawn until your brother Aegon, having taken the throne once more, had summoned you to the capital. You had obeyed your king, but in the span of a few weeks, he had perished and left you and your mother to face the consequences of his actions.
You loathed him as much as you loathed Rhaenyra and her brood. It was a cruel turn of fate, almost a cruel sort of poetry, that both pretenders to the throne had perished in the pursuit of it, leaving their heirs to scrub their blood from the stone floors and rebuild the dynasty they had destroyed, or pay the price of their pride in their own blood.
All those that had betrayed Rhaenyra’s faction were now facing justice, and you feared you were only waiting for the executioner’s blade. You wondered whether your nephew’s own sword would do it, or if he would entrust the task to his most loyal man, Cregan Stark. Perhaps they would show mercy and send you into exile, to become a Silent Sister.
Death or eternal silence,you knew what you would rather endure.
Thus you waited for the Stranger in the room that had seen your childhood and little else, as you had been sent to Oldtown for your education once the first spring of your womanhood had bloomed. The Faith of the Seven now rooted you and guided you, and you clung to prayers as not to fall into madness.
On the third night of his reign, it was not the hand nor the blade of justice that came to you, but Jacaerys himself, and you wondered whether the following morrow would be the last dawn you would see.
You stood abruptly as he entered, glancing towards the guard at the door with dread. “Rest easy, you have nothing to fear from me,” Jacaerys assured you. He was dressed in regal clothing made of black, the velvet layer on the inside of his cape a deep red. His hair fell to his shoulders in dark curls, nearly black in the low light of the candles.
“Don’t I?” you asked, openly weary and hostile. “Where are my niece, and my mother?”
“Confined to their own rooms,” the young man replied with what seemed to you as regret.
You noticed that he was not wearing the crown, but his head was bowed as though it was weighing on his neck, a constant presence. “Might I see them?” you inquired, but it sounded more like an order you were giving him.
“Your niece, yes,” Jacaerys conceded.
“She’s a motherless child. Surely you would not have her be confined alone,” you insisted, and it seemed to convince him.
“You will be escorted to see her,” he offered, but it did little to appease you.
You approached him in careful steps until he could see the unshed tears glimmer in your eyes, your brow furrowed in concealed anger. You were trembling, ever so slightly, and when he searched your face for any familiar flicker, he found none—you were his blood, and yet nothing tied the two of you together but hatred.
“What will happen to us, now?” you inquired, gauging him. Standing face to face, you were reminded then of the years of your childhood, and you wondered whether the boy you had known then was still within reach, or if he had perished alongside his kin, replaced by a man you did not know.
“Nothing, for the time being. You are to be confined until trials have been run,” he explained.
Hope burst in your chest then, a starving dragon freed from its chains taking to the skies, ready to burn the lands around it. “And after that?”
Jacaerys looked pained then, a frown between his brows. “I do not know,” was all he answered, and he looked like a child, frightened by his own crown and unable to yield the power he possessed, and you hated him for it.
“Why have you come, then, if you do not know of my fate?” you accused, your burning tears pearling at the corners of your eyes, your simmering rage like a silent sob caught in your chest, and he did not have any more answers for you.
Once Jacaerys had left, leaving more doubts and fears behind, you realized you had only addressed him in questions. There was a rage inside of you, and a primal fear that was no doubt similar to that of a beast caught in a trap, forced to eat through its own leg to free itself.
You only had blunt teeth, but you still hoped you could sharpen them in due time.
Over the last pair of years, Jacaerys had sat at many a council of war, at the Painted Table in Dragonstone, but always as a councilor himself, advising his mother—it was only now that he realized how comfortable such a position was, making the decisions without having to enforce them, or without having to consider their consequences.
Now he was the one standing at the head of the table, leading men that sat in front of their marble ball as though they had paid a price for it and ought to claim them with pride, when in truth they had been named because they were alive and breathing.
Corlys Velaryon was still abed from his wounds, but the men who had advised his mother during her last days were now serving him, waiting for him to name his council as he wished. All of them were taking their orders from a king young enough to be their son or grandson, one or two failing to conceal their contempt for that fact, and Jace wondered if such was the fate of all the kings that had preceded him.
However what Jace lacked in years lived, he made up for in the devastation he had seen. In many ways grief was his experience, more so than strategy and governance, and he supposed it forged a man just as well.
Before the war he had never realized what came with being king—the grief, knowing the crown had only been passed on because the previous monarch had perished. It was all the more burdensome knowing his mother had barely reigned, and never over peace.
Since Cregan’s declaration of devotion, he had had the time to contemplate the sort of king he would want to be, the sort of legacy he would want to leave behind, whether his reign would be long or short. What mattered to him most was not to assert his authority or to be admired—he needed to rebuild and to leave the crown strong for his heirs. His reign would not be for himself, but for those who come after.
With such a conclusion he sat before his council that morning, Cregan at his right where the Hand would usually be.
Roland Westerling, an older man with a calm disposition, handed a roll of parchment to Jacaerys, the seal of which had already been broken, a golden stag. “Lady Elenda Baratheon has accepted your terms of peace,” he informed the council as soon as they were all seated.
“Nearly half of the great houses in the land are now ruled by babes and their mothers as regents,” Unwin Peake commented, as though this simple fact held an inherent flaw.
“I will gladly deal with these women. They might make wiser rulers than their husbands, who took to arm against my mother,” he said, unrolling the parchment and reading it over quickly before passing it along to Cregan. “Lord Roland, your daughter Joanna now rules House Lannister, does she not?”
“Indeed,” Roland answered with a slight smile of pride. “Loreon is a boy of barely five.”
Once great, powerful houses with proud men at their helm, the Lannisters and the Baratheons were now led by women, mothers of their heirs who would now lead the very men that had marched to war refusing to bow to a queen, and Jacaerys would laugh at their fate if he could summon the mirth.
“There is still unrest in the Reach, I’m afraid,” Thaddeus Rowan said. “Those who remain loyal to the Greens are loath to settle, however the Hightowers are now ruled by a boy of seven and ten. He might easily be reasoned with.”
“Summon him to King’s Landing. I will receive him,” Jacaerys decided, to which Roland took note.
“He has made a rather unusual request to the High Septon,” Thaddeus continued with an appalled expression on his face. “He has asked for permission to wed his own father’s second wife, Lady Samantha Tarly.”
Jacaerys frowned—while there was no blood between a boy and his step-mother, it was still highly unusual and perhaps distasteful, especially since Oldtown was the cradle of the Faith. “How do you know of this, my lord?”
“Lady Sam is my niece, by my sister,” Thaddeus supplied.
Without a word, Cregan gave Jacaerys a slow tilt of his head. “The Tarlys supported my mother, as did your house, did they not?” Jacaerys asked Lord Roland. “Did Lady Sam’s loyalties lie with my mother?”
Thaddeus observed Jacaerys for a moment. “Indeed.”
“Write to the High Septon in my name,” Jacaerys then decided. “Have him grant the marriage.”
As soon had he given the order, barely breathing after his words, that Unwin Peake cleared his throat. “While we are speaking of marriage, your grace, there is a matter we must discuss,” the man said, sharing a look with the other lords that spoke of a preceding agreement. “I loathe to be the one to say it, but a young king shall need a queen and heirs.”
“My brothers are my heirs,” Jacaerys protested.
“The future of the realm partly rests on you securing a long-lasting peace,” Roland said. “While we have come to understand that an informal betrothal was made in childhood between yourself and Lady Baela Velaryon, she might not be the wisest match.”
Baela and himself had been children together, and while the expectation had been for them to marry, he cherished her friendship and had rarely considered the prospect. “A marriage is an alliance, a political calculation,” he continued.
Cregan crossed his hands atop the table and leaned forward. “What do you suggest?” he asked, but Jace could tell he already knew what point they were about to make, and he braced himself.
“The breach between the two branches of House Targaryen may be mended,” Thaddeus offered carefully. “Were his grace to wed the remaining child of King Viserys and Alicent Hightower.”
Horror rose from the pit of his stomach, settled only when he caught eyes with Cregan, whose gaze was calm and direct—without a word needed between them, the northerner gave him a slow nod, and with that, his fate was sealed.
Evening was falling, a heavy veil over the Red Keep, made of darkness and cold wind. Winter was settling and the days were darker and shorter, plunging the castle in a grim atmosphere that lasted from the end of the afternoon to the late morrow.
Supper was still an hour away when you were summoned to the king’s quarters. The room was brightly lit with candles and a fire, perhaps even more than was comfortable, as though Jacaerys was attempting to keep the darkness at bay. You stood near the threshold while he remained further into the room, arms clasped behind his back like a soldier at attention.
“I have asked you here to present to you a proposal I hope you will agree to,” he announced, the words sounding rehearsed, empty of all sincerity. “The realm is shattered and House Targaryen is in ruins, but together we might unite it.”
As soon as the words had left his mouth, you knew you had come to hear. “Will you wed me, and put an end to this bloodshed once and for all?”
Your answer came like the crack of a whip. “I may not.”
“I understand that this is not what you would have wanted, however—” Jacaerys prepared his arguments, but you did not let him speak.
With a raised hand, you silenced him. “You misunderstand me. This has nothing to do with what I want, but what I can do,” you explained, your face contorting in anguish.
“I don’t understand,” he said, cutting you off as though he suspected what was coming and desperately wanted to keep it at bay, but he could not have known, you thought.
Rage rose in your throat, acrid and burning, but you swallowed it down. You wanted to curse your brother out for putting you in such a vulnerable position, but damning the dead would do you no good, and you did not wish to betray your king’s memory in front of the man who had replaced him.
“A few days before Aegon died, he took me to wife in a secret ceremony,” you admitted, tears clouding your eyes, and Jace’s heart ached in sudden pity. “Ask the Septon and he shall confirm.”
“Aegon is dead, a widow is permitted to remarry,” he countered, and he could tell from your face how impatient you were becoming with him.
“I have not bled since,” you clarified. It had been two moons now, but the Maester could not say with certainty until the quickening, and your morrows remained without any sickness, yet you doubted, dreading the child that might be inside of you.
Jacaerys blamed his naiveness. “Are you implying—”
You looked upon him severely. “I may be carrying Aegon’s child, yes,” you said, and this simple but devastating truth rang loud in the room—it could be your salvation, as much as your downfall.
“This changes everything,” Jacaerys whispered, and upon noticing the subtle way you were trembling, once more inhabited by fear in his presence, quickly made his promise. “No harm will come to you, you have my word. I shall keep your secret until you are certain either way.”
You knew you should have been grateful, but you hated the mere thought of owing him any sort of gratitude. It was just as well that he ignored your tears, much as he had done the day prior, as though he sought you out not to converse with you, but to shout into a void that echoed back to him.
Jacaerys waved you away, crumbling once the doors shut and he was alone once more. He might have been young and uncertain of himself, but he knew what would happen if you were to birth a son.
Aegon’s supporters were still many, and his reign was still too fragile. Power often turned loyal men into self-serving traitors ; he could still easily be toppled, be murdered in this very room as Aegon had, and a babe placed upon the throne in his stead.
Unable to bear the storm inside of him he took hold of the crown resting atop the mantle of the hearth and threw it at the wall, wailing until his voice broke.
Grief held him by the throat, an invisible hand that felt like that of the Stranger choking his breath from his very neck. The wounds on his shoulders ached and throbbed anew, as fresh in his mind as the day they had been inflicted.
“What should I do, mother?” he pleaded to the night. “What would you have me do?”
Alone and broken, the young king wept.
Author's Note ✢ Dividers by @zaldritzosrose. Feedback is always appreciated. Ask in the comments if you want to be tagged in the next chapters. Chapter two will be posted next Saturday, July 11th.
SUMMARY: Ordered to infiltrate the enemy camp and kill Oscar Tully before the break of dawn, you make one catastrophic mistake: you step into Roderick Dustin's tent instead. Everything that follows is a very convenient kind of ruin.
WARNING(S): +18MDNI, explicit sexual content (if you squint very hard there's plot), AFAB reader (no use of y/n), enemies to lovers, attempted assassination, moral ambiguity, rough sex, hate sex, consensual power play, hair pulling (f and m receiving), light choking (f and m receiving) (breath play adjacent), pinning, biting (f and m receiving), marking, fingering, oral sex (f receiving), pinv sex, spit kink, switching power dynamics (like really, they're just fighting for the upper hand all along), size difference, mutual possessiveness, enemies who are way too much into each other, post-nut emotional vulnerability, happy ending (for now)
WC: 7.5k
A.N.: I was tired of being horny over Roddy lol. Reader is described as a former bastard of House Cerwyn, a northern lesser house (before you come at me, this fact only serves the narrative, as I am aware that no northern house actually supported the Greens during the Dance of the Dragons). Another note on Roddy's age: there's no info about it at the time of the war, but he is described as advanced in age on the books, so I pictured him as having roughly 55ish; I also picture him as tall and imposing because Tommy Flanagan is 1.83mts (6'0") and that's tall for me lol.
Three days of rain had turned the road to the kind of mud that swallowed men's boots whole, and you had seen enough drowned boots this fortnight to know the truth of it. The Red Fork ran high and brown, and somewhere beyond its far bank the Rivermen were doing what they had done every night for the better part of a month: slipping away before Ser Criston's host could close the distance, leaving nothing behind but cold fire-pits and the tracks of men who knew this country better than any of you ever would.
You had cut your third bridge that week, and it was the kind of work that told you plainer than any council of war could have that this campaign was not going as it ought. A host that is winning does not spend its strength unmaking bridges. It crosses them.
You had followed Ser Criston Cole across better than two hundred miles of the Riverlands by now, into this waterlogged country of willow and reed where every field had been turned to soup and every village emptied ahead of your coming. The men around you — Reachmen mostly, with a scattering of Stormlanders and a handful of Northmen like yourself, drawn south for reasons as various and as private as your own — had begun to walk with the loose, hollow gait of men who no longer expected a day to end in anything but more marching.
There had been no great battle since Rook’s Rest. There had only been bridges, and burned granaries, and small ugly skirmishes in the dark that were forgotten by breakfast because no one wanted to remember them.
You were there because Lord Cerwyn had gotten you on a woman he never married and had never found it in him to give you his name for it, whatever fondness he'd shown you in the years he let you ride at his side and learn the sword and pretend, for a while, that bastardy was as a small thing as it could be in Dorne. It was not a small thing. It had never been a small thing, not in the North, where blood and name meant near enough the same, and a bastard girl, however well-loved, could expect nothing of her father's hall once he was cold in his tomb.
You had worn Snow before this, plain and cold as the rest of it. So, when the Hightowers' men came through the North with their promises — fight for the Greens, and the Greens will make you legitimate, will give you a name to hand down to whatever children you might have — you had not thought on it long. You had thought on it exactly as long as it took to saddle a horse.
They had kept their word. That was more than you had expected of southern lords, and it was, if you were honest with yourself, the only reason you had not yet done what half this host seemed to be quietly considering: turned around and gone home.
Word came for you a little after the bridge, while you were still scraping river mud off your boots with the edge of your knife. A boy you didn't know — one of Cole's runners, thin as a reed and twice as nervous — told you the Hand wanted you, and told you to hurry, and did not wait to see whether you would.
Ser Criston Cole's tent smelled of wet canvas and tallow and, faintly, of the wine he no longer bothered pouring for anyone but himself. He did not look up when you entered. He was bent over a map weighted down at its corners with a dagger, a cup, and two river stones, and he studied it the way a man studies something he has already failed to understand and is too proud to admit it.
"You're the Cerwyn girl," he said. It was not a question. He had known who you were since the day you'd killed a Rivermen scout with your hands rather than lose the quiet of a blade, and men like Cole remembered things of that kind.
"I am, my lord."
"Good." He straightened, and his eyes — flat, paler in the lamplight, the eyes of a man who had long since stopped bothering to disguise what he was thinking — moved over you once, assessing, the way you imagined he might weigh a blade before deciding whether it was worth sharpening or throwing away. "Then you'll know the Tullys' whelp is with the river host. Oscar. The one they've propped up now his grandsire's finally had the grace to die."
You said nothing. There was nothing yet worth saying.
"He's young," Cole went on, "and soft, and by every account he should be too frightened to hold that host together. But alas, he is not. I want him dead by tomorrow morning. Not captured. Dead." He said it the way another man might have ordered a meal brought to his tent. "You'll know how to move without being heard better than any of these Reach boys who think stealth is only a matter of keeping their mouths shut."
"The Rivermen keep close watch on their camps, my lord." It was as near to argument as you dared. "Closer than most."
"So do wolves," said Cole, "and your people hunt those too, or so I'm told." He turned back to his map, which was as much dismissal as you were going to get. "Take what you need. I don't want excuses. I want a dead Tully."
You left the tent with your jaw set tight enough to ache, and said nothing to the two guards who watched you go, because there was nothing worth saying to them either, and because arguing with Ser Criston Cole had gone out of fashion in this host sometime around the second bridge, when it became plain that the Hand of the King heard disagreement the way other men heard insects — an irritation to be swatted, never a thing to be properly reasoned with.
You found Gwayne where you generally found him these days, some careful distance from the command tents, sharpening his sword with more attention than the beast strictly required. He knew it would be long before he could swing it again. He looked up when your shadow crossed him, and whatever he saw in your face made him set the brush down.
Gwayne Hightower was not a friend, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. You hadn't shared pints of beer and afternoons of recounting your experiences. But he was a comrade in arms, and you both independently knew you shared the same opinion about Cole's strategy. That made him the closest thing to a friend you could afford.
"That bad?"
"He wants Oscar Tully dead before the sun rises again." You kept your voice low, more from habit than any real fear of being overheard — every man in this camp was too tired to eavesdrop on anything that wasn't his own supper. "Quietly."
Gwayne's mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "And he's sending you into a Rivermen camp alone to manage it, I'd wager. No escort spared, no delay to the crossing to buy you better ground to work from. Just — go and do it, and don't trouble him with how."
"That's the shape of it, yes."
"It would be." He went back to the blade in swipes that had less to do with the sharpening than with needing somewhere to put his hands. "Do you know what I think, Cerwyn?"
You looked at him, waiting for his answer. Your father’s House name sat strangely on other people’s tongues, but you had tried to will yourself to ignore the feeling.
"I think Ser Criston has spent so long being clever that he's forgotten a host needs feeding more than it needs cunning. We've burned every bridge between here and the Gods Eye and gained nothing for it but a river host that hates us worse than it fears us, and men of our own who'd sooner desert than cut down one more span of timber for no battle waiting at the end of it. My cousin waits at Tumbleton with a host twice this one's size, waiting on us to arrive like civilized men instead of skulking through the reeds setting fires." He looked at you sidelong. "I mean to reach him. Without Ser Criston's leave, and without his company, if it comes to that."
It was not a small thing to say aloud, not to a woman he had known scarcely two months, not in a camp where Cole's temper had already found cause to hang men for lesser talk. You understood, then, why he had chosen you to say it to — not because he trusted you especially, but because you were a Northerner and a bastard made legitimate and had no particular love for anyone in this host beyond your own skin, and men like Gwayne Hightower had a talent for knowing precisely which coin would buy a silence.
"When?" was all you asked.
"Soon. Anyone who would follow and a night dark enough to cover the noise of leaving." He studied you a moment longer, and something in his face made you understand this was, in its way, an offer, though he was too proud a man to make it plainly. "You'd be welcome among them, if a throat-cutting in a Rivermen camp doesn't appeal to you."
You did not answer him then, only thanked him for the warning and left him to his sword, but the thought followed you back through the mud to your own tent and sat with you long after the camp had gone quiet around you.
You turned it over the way a woman turns over a coin, looking for the false ring in it, and found none. There was, you thought, a certain mercy in the way a battlefield forgave the dead their absences. A woman could go into a Rivermen camp in the black of night and simply not come back, and no one — least of all Ser Criston Cole, who had never once asked whether you wished to survive the errands he set you — would trouble himself wondering whether you had died on Tully steel or merely kept walking, north or east or anywhere that was not this rotting, bridge-burned war.
You thought of your father's hall, which had never been yours and never would be, whatever name you had bought with this campaign. You thought of the name itself, hard-won and already beginning to feel like a debt you were no longer certain you could keep paying in blood. And you thought, last of all, of the Rivermen camp waiting somewhere in the dark, and of a boy called Oscar Tully who had done nothing to you save be born to the wrong grandfather, and you found that for the first time since you had sworn your oath to House Hightower's cause, you were not entirely certain you meant to keep it.
You banked the thought before it could grow into a decision. There would be time enough for that later, you told yourself — after the camp, after the throat you had been ordered to open, after whatever the next crossing cost you. For now, there was only the mud, and the rain that had not stopped in three days, and a war that seemed determined to go on exhausting itself long after anyone left in it still believed in what it was fighting for.
Night had thickened the mud rather than dried it, and you moved through the Rivermen camp the way you'd been taught to move through the Wolfswood as a girl — weight forward, breath shallow, eyes given time to find what the dark was hiding before you trusted your feet to it. Dark leathers instead of mail, a plain dagger at your hip instead of the sword you'd have preferred, and no torch, because a torch was as good as announcing yourself to men who'd spent a month learning to sleep with one eye open.
You said a short prayer to the old gods, out of habit more than faith — the sort that asked for nothing so grand as victory, only that your knife stayed quiet and your feet stayed sure — and moved toward the first of the larger tents. Size told you nothing on its own. It could be any of them.
Snoring, thick and multiplied, answered you before you'd even reached the flap of the first one. A soldiers' tent, several men deep in the kind of sleep that came from a day spent digging entrenchments. You let it be and moved to the next.
That one gave you nothing at all — no snoring, no candlelight bleeding under the canvas, no sound of a man turning in his sleep. Empty, or near enough that it wasn't worth the risk of finding out otherwise. Which left the last of them: a low, steady flicker of firelight at the seam of the flap, and beneath it, silence. No breathing you could make out. A man awake and alone, you judged, or no man at all — either way, the only tent left worth your time.
You went in low and slow, hand ready to let the blade out from its sheath, and found the tent empty enough to make your shoulders drop half an inch before you caught the mistake in yourself and hated it.
A camp bed, unmade. A table crowded with a map you didn't have time to read, its corners weighted with small carved markers, chairs pulled close as though a council had only just broken up. Rugs laid over the worst of the ground, to keep the river's damp from climbing into a man's bones while he slept. No young lord. No Oscar Tully, soft and frightened as Cole had promised he'd be.
The candles, guttering low in their dishes, threw more shadow than light, and left the tent's far corners for the dark to keep. You were three steps from the flap, already rebuilding your plan in your head, when a hand closed hard around your wrist.
It happened too fast to name as anything but instinct. The world tilted, the table's edge caught you hard across the hips, and then you were bent face-down over the map itself, small carved markers skittering off into the rugs, a weight settling into your back that did not care in the slightest how you struggled against it. You threw an elbow that found nothing but air, twisted against a grip that would not give, and found only the greater, immovable truth of the body pinning you down.
"Is Cole really that desperate," said a voice above you, thick with a Northern burr you hadn't heard turned on you in years, "that he's sending women alone into the dark now?"
You knew the voice before you'd finished placing it, and the knowing went through you colder than the dagger you couldn't reach. Roderick Dustin. You had met him a handful of times in what felt now like another life — at Winterfell one long winter, at your father's hall once when you were still young enough to think yourself welcome there — and you understood, with the particular clarity of a woman flattened across a table, exactly why you couldn't throw him off you. He was built from the same stone as Barrowton itself.
"I haven't come for the pelt of an old wolf." Your voice came out steadier than you had any right to expect, though your accent — buried carefully these past months beneath a Green tongue — slipped loose with the effort of the lie. "Cole wanted trout for his supper."
That gave him pause. You felt it in the hand at your wrist before you heard it in his silence.
He turned you then, hard, off your front and onto your back against the ruined map, and before you'd finished the motion his other hand had found the crown of your head, fingers closing in your hair to tip your face up into what little the candles offered. You made a small, involuntary sound at the roughness of it, half pain and half something you refused to name, and he gave no sign of having heard it at all, too intent on what the firelight showed him.
"Robard Cerwyn's Snow whelp," he said.
"Not a Snow anymore." You managed something like a smile, difficult as it was with his fist still in your hair.
"Sold your loyalty for a surname, then."
"Easy to judge a woman for wanting a name," you spat, "when you were born into yours, Lord Dustin."
His house name came out of your mouth twisted, more challenge than courtesy, and you felt his hand leave your hair only to close instead around your throat — not cruelly, not yet you supposed, but with a deliberateness that told you exactly how little effort it would cost him to make it cruel. His eyes found yours in the low light and held them, and you watched him understand, in the space of a breath, that there was no fear in them to find.
"Tell me why I shouldn't kill you here and now."
You held his stare and played the only card you had left. "You're not going to kill me."
"Don't be so sure of that." His hand tightened, just enough to make its point, and he pressed his hips harder into the cradle of yours where he'd wedged himself between your knees.
There was no mistaking what you felt against your thigh then, hard and certain, and you understood in that instant that you had misjudged exactly nothing about tonight except which kind of danger you'd walked into.
"If you meant to kill me," you said, low, "my throat would already be open. And I think, my lord, that you're enjoying this rather more than you'd care to admit." To prove the point, you rolled your hips up against him, slow and deliberate, and felt the small hitch in his breath answer you before his voice did.
His hips answered in kind, harder than you'd braced for, and you let the grin spread despite yourself.
"Do you live up to the name then, Roderick the Ruin?" You asked and watched as something in him gave way.
He kissed you like he meant to win something by it, and you gave him back exactly as much as you took. There was nothing tentative or shy in it — his teeth closed over your lower lip hard enough to sting, and you answered in kind until he made a low sound against your mouth that wasn't quite pain, and it was that sound, more than anything else, that told you he meant to fight you for every inch of this the same way he'd fight you for a ridge line or a river crossing.
You got a hand into the collar of his shirt and pulled, hard, and felt something give — a seam, a lace, you didn't care which — and the small, vicious satisfaction of it emboldened you enough to shove against his chest, testing whether he'd yield an inch of ground. He didn't. He caught both your wrists instead and pinned them either side of your head against the table, and when you arched up to bite at his jaw for the insult of it, he let you, watching you do it with something dark and pleased in his eyes, as though your temper only confirmed what he'd already decided about you.
"Careful," he teased, "or I'll think you enjoy losing."
"I haven't lost anything yet."
You proved it a moment later, twisting free of one wrist while his attention was on the other, and used the leverage to drag him down and around until it was his shoulders that struck the table hard enough to rattle it, and you who stood over him for one triumphant, breathless second, a fist in his hair the way his had been in yours.
He let you have the moment — you understood even as you took it that he'd allowed it, the way a man allows an opponent one good strike before ending the bout — and then his hands were at your hips, hard enough that you'd wear the shape of his fingers tomorrow and welcome it, and he hauled you back against him with an ease that should have offended you and instead went through you like a struck match, and turned the two of you again.
"There," he said, low and satisfied. "Better."
Between one ungentle handful and the next, your leathers came away from you in pieces rather than by any lacing you'd have bothered to loosen. He tore what he couldn't be troubled to unfasten, seams splitting under his hands with a sound that should have alarmed you and went instead straight to the pit of your stomach, because there was something obscene and thrilling in being wanted by a man strong enough that he didn't need patience nor care for undressing you. You answered in kind, working the fastenings of his own clothes with considerably less care than they deserved, more interested in the sound of tearing wool than in the state you left him in after.
He filled his hands with you like a man taking inventory of ground he meant to hold — the curve of your waist, the muscle roped along your thigh from years on the saddle, an old thin scar above your hip that he traced once, slow, with an attention that had nothing gentle in its intent and everything deliberate in its execution.
When his mouth followed his hands lower you let your head fall back against the table and let yourself, for one unguarded moment, simply feel it — his beard rough against the inside of your thigh, his hands hard enough on your hips to promise bruises you'd count later, the maddening patience of a man who had decided to take his time ruining you and meant to enjoy every part of the doing.
His fingers found your cunt at last, slow where his hands had been anything but, and he took his time there too, testing your wetness with a deliberateness that felt like its own kind of cruelty — circling your clit until your thighs shook and then withdrawing just short of what you needed, watching your face the whole while with flat, assessing patience.
"Ask for it," he said.
"Go to hell."
He laughed — a short, rough sound, more surprised out of him than given — and gave you what you hadn't asked for anyway: two fingers driving deep enough to make you swear, curling until you were the one fisting a hand in his hair. You worked your hips against his hand, chasing your own satisfaction with as much determination as he'd shown chasing his, and won a taut, strangled noise out of him in turn when your palm found him through what remained of his clothes and closed around the hard length of his cock, stroking once.
You might have kept testing him like that, if the thought hadn't struck you first, sudden and vicious in its clarity. Your hand was already fisted in his hair — it had been for a while now — and instead of dragging his mouth back to yours again, you tightened your grip and pushed, guiding him down, past your collarbone, past your stomach, until he was on his knees at the table's edge with his free hand sliding beneath you to haul you forward, right up against his mouth, and he watched you the whole way down, something unreadable and hungry burning behind what little self-control he had left.
"Let's see what else that mouth is good for."
He didn't need telling twice.
When he finally put his mouth to your cunt there was nothing careful left in him at all. He ate you like a man half-starved, messy and greedy, no finesse spared for patience. His tongue worked broad and flat against your clit one moment and narrow and relentless the next, as though he couldn't decide which he wanted more and meant to have both before he was done with you. It was sloppy, wet enough that you felt it slick against your inner thighs, his beard scraping raw against skin gone oversensitive, and the sounds of it — his as much as yours — were shameless in the quiet of the tent. You found you didn't care in the least who might hear.
You kept your grip tight in his hair, steering him, holding him exactly where you wanted the drag of his tongue, and he let you direct him with a low, growled sound of approval that you felt more than heard, as though being told what to do by your fist in his hair was no hardship to him at all, only another kind of feast.
When you ground down against his mouth, chasing your own pleasure shamelessly now, he only groaned and gripped your thighs harder, holding you open, holding you still, as if the only thing he wanted less than for this to end was for you to stop using him exactly as you pleased.
It was that — his own eagerness, unhidden and entirely unlike the flat, controlled man who'd had you pinned across a war map just a while ago — that undid you as much as his tongue did.
Your thighs closed hard around his head, the fist in his hair gone white-knuckled, and the sound that tore out of you this time you didn't try to swallow, didn't try to spare him, and he only groaned again at the proof of it and did not let up until you'd shaken through the whole of it against his mouth.
He only pulled back once you'd gone still beneath him, chest heaving, and even then he took his time about it, pressing one last, unhurried kiss to the inside of your thigh before he finally lifted his head. His beard was completely wet, his eyes darker than you'd yet seen them, and whatever restraint he'd been holding onto through all of it seemed, finally, to have reached its end.
"Enough," he said, rougher than he likely intended, an order dressed up as a request.
You almost told him no, simply for the pleasure of making him ask twice. Almost. But he was already rising to his full height between your thighs, already gathering you back against him with the unhurried certainty of a man who'd decided the fight was over even if you hadn't, and when he finally pushed into you — slow, giving you every inch of his cock before he gave you the next — you found you'd lost your taste for arguing.
"There," you managed, echoing his own word back at him, and felt him go still for exactly as long as it took him to understand you were still teasing him. He drove into you hard enough to answer his own jest before you could add anything.
After that neither of you had breath left for winning.
He was thick through the middle the way a man built for winters and not for tourneys was thick — heavy in the chest, broad through the belly as much as the shoulders, no lean tapered thing but something wider and far more solid, every stone of him put there by long years of campaigns rather than vanity.
You found, hands roaming greedy over the scarred bulk of him as he moved in you, that you had never in your life wanted anything the way you wanted this — the weight of him pressing you into the table, the give of solid flesh under your palms where a slighter man would have offered you only bone and angle. He was built like the North itself, broad and heavy and made to endure, and you had no wish at all to be anywhere else.
He kept the pace slow at first, cruelly so, drawing out until you dug your heels into the backs of his thighs to keep him from retreating too far, and only quickened when you cursed him for it, low and vicious, in the Old Tongue you hadn't spoken since you were a girl.
His mouth found your breast without asking leave, tongue and teeth working your nipple until you arched hard against him, and when he bit down — not gently, and asking no pardon for it either — you answered in kind, sinking your teeth into the meat of his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark that would still be there come the new moon.
He groaned at that, low and rough and entirely uncivilized, his hips stuttering before slamming harder into you for the pain of it, as though you'd only fed something in him that wanted — needed — feeding.
"Do that again," he said against your skin, and you did, and felt him go nearly feral for it — one broad hand closing hard over your other breast, kneading, rough enough to ache, his thumb dragging over the nipple until you were the one cursing again, while his other arm banded beneath you, angling your hips to take him deeper still.
You raked your nails down the old ridged scars on his back and felt him groan against your throat, felt his rhythm falter and then redouble, rougher now, less patient, as though marking him had cost him the last of the composure he'd been so determined to keep.
There was nothing careful left in either of you after that — he drove his cock into you with the full, heavy weight of him behind it, thick enough that you felt every inch of the stretch and wanted more of it anyway, and he sank to the hilt with every thrust, until the root of him ground against your clit with each snap of his hips and you were meeting him in earnest, working yourself against that friction as shamelessly as you worked against him.
You met every thrust with one of your own, unwilling simply to be moved when you could move with him instead, and the table complained beneath you and neither of you cared enough.
"Say my name again," he said against your ear, rough and low, "and mean it this time."
"Make me," you tested the waters. It was reckless, and you knew it even as you said it, the words leaving you on a laugh that had no business sounding as steady as it did with him buried inside you to the hilt.
His hand left your body and found your throat instead — not gripping at the front of it the way a man might who meant you real harm, but circling to press firm at either side, enough to make the point of it plain, enough to remind you exactly whose hands you were in, without any true intent behind it beyond that. You understood the difference instantly, and something reckless and hungry in you loved him for drawing it so precisely.
You held his eyes and let your mouth fall open in a slow, wide grin, tongue curling out over your lower lip in open, filthy invitation. You didn't have to say what you wanted. He read it off you the way he'd have read a battle line and understood at once.
He spat into your open mouth, and you moaned around the obscenity of it, shameless, while he drove into you again and again, harder for the sound you'd given him, as though it had only unlocked some deeper, hungrier gear in him. You swallowed it while keeping the eye contact and he looked, in that moment, entirely undone from the flat, disciplined man he’d been half an hour ago. You found you had never wanted anyone the way you wanted him precisely like this — wrecked, feral, delighted by exactly how nasty you were willing to be for him.
"Roddy," you finally gave him the satisfaction through gritted teeth, the name breaking out of you on a pleasure so total it startled you even as you chased it, "fucking ruin me."
His rhythm stuttered at that — the diminutive undoing something in him the full name hadn't quite managed — but he didn't slow, driving deep and relentless even as his control visibly slipped its leash. You brought your own hand up to circle his throat in turn, mirroring the grip he had on yours, and felt the low, rough growl that tore out of him at the sensation, more pleased than protesting.
"Send me back to Cole," you said against his jaw, low and vicious and grinning, "with your seed running down my thighs."
His hand tightened at your throat for that — not cruelly, but enough that the edges of everything went soft and bright and dizzying all at once, the whole world narrowing down to nothing but the drag of him in and out of you and the pressure at your neck and the low sound he made at your words, half growl and half something that might, in a gentler man, have been a groan of surrender.
He drove into you once more, hard and deep and perfectly aimed, and that was all it took — your clit caught against the root of him with the force of it, and you broke apart around him entirely, shaking, your hand falling from his throat to claw instead at the scarred plane of his back, your teeth finding his shoulder again and biting down hard enough to answer everything he'd given you.
He hissed at the sting of it, pain and pleasure tangled together past telling apart and followed you over with a groan he buried against the crook of your neck, hips stuttering once, twice, before going still, his breath ragged and uneven against your skin as he emptied himself inside you.
Neither of you moved to disentangle for a long while after. He stayed inside you as your breath came back, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere else, and you found you didn't mind it — didn't mind the tangle of the two of you sprawled half across the now crumpled map and half against each other, sweat cooling on skin you couldn't quite tell from his anymore, his breath still uneven against your collarbone, yours no steadier against his.
The candles had burned low while neither of you was watching, the tent gone dim and close around you, and the cold that had followed you in from the dark outside seemed, for once, to have nowhere left to reach you through the heat you'd made between you.
A low, breathless laugh escaped you, an aftershock more than any real mirth, some last shiver of pleasure still working its way loose from your spine, and you felt him huff something like an answering laugh against your skin in turn.
Your hands found his back without any particular decision behind it, tracing idle, aimless patterns over the ridged old scars there, and after a moment his hands did the same at your hips — the same hands that had gripped hard enough to bruise not a quarter hour before now moving with a careful, kneading gentleness you hadn't felt from him yet that night, as though some of the fight had finally gone out of both of you and left only this.
You let the silence hold a while before you broke it.
"Make straight for Stony Sept and cut the bridge there," you said, into the quiet and the dark. "It will delay them, and you'll have Cole in the palm of your hand."
Roderick straightened without pulling away, his hands stilling at your hips, and you felt the change in him before you saw it — the soldier surfacing again beneath the man.
"You would betray your faction?"
You huffed, a short, humourless sound. "I have never had a faction. Not really. I wanted to stop being the bastard of Robard Cerwyn, and Aegon answered first." You held his gaze steady while you said it, let him look for the lie in it if he wanted to. "And fuck Criston Cole. He's a dead man walking, whatever happens at Stony Sept or anywhere else."
He looked at you a long moment, searching your eyes the way you imagined he'd once searched a battlefield for the weakness that would win it, and found nothing there to contradict you. Something in his face eased. He laughed — properly, this time, the sound rough with disuse, the corners of his eyes creasing in a way that made him look, briefly, younger. It was, you thought, the first time you'd seen him look like anything other than a man carved from the same grey stone as his own hills, and you found you wanted very much to see it again.
"We'll meet the rest of the Hightowers at Tumbleton," he said, when the laugh had faded. "Stay out of the war until then. When it's done, come to Barrowton with me." A pause, and something in his voice went quieter, more deliberate, than anything he'd said to you all night. "Come back home to the North."
This time it was you who searched his face for the lie, some easy way to dismiss it as a thing said in the heat of the moment and forgotten by morning. You found none. Your brow furrowed against the plain, unhidden truth of him, against a kindness you hadn't asked for and weren't sure you knew how to hold.
"I came here hoping to kill a River child," you said, "and I'll leave instead with the trophy of an old, greying wolf?"
"A wolf's pelt keeps you warmer in winter," he said, and tightened his grip on your hips, pulling you flush against him, the slow drag of his cock still buried inside you drawing another moan out of you before you could dress it up as anything else. You canted your hips against him in answer, slower now than anything you'd managed earlier in the night and felt the low growl it won out of him settle somewhere deep in your chest.
Your hand found the back of his head, fingers threading into his hair — gently, this time, nothing like the fist you'd made of it before — and held his eyes as you drew him to you and kissed him again, slow and open-mouthed, gentler than anything either of you had allowed the other yet.
Fuck Ser Criston Cole, you thought, and fuck the Greens along with him.
You could feel the decision settle into you like a blade finding its sheath, certain and complete, as you began to move again — unhurried this time, no longer two enemies fighting for the last word, only two people who had, somewhere in the last hour, stopped pretending they were anything else.
He moved in you slowly, in a way that had nothing to do with teasing and everything to do with a patience you hadn't expected from him — long, deep strokes that let you feel every inch of him, his forehead dropping to rest against yours, his breath mingling with yours in the small space between your mouths. There was no clothing left to tear, nothing left to fight for; only the drag of him inside you, and the quiet, astonished way he watched your face while he did it, as though he were memorising something he didn't yet trust himself to keep.
You wrapped your legs around him, drawing him deeper, and felt him groan low against your throat at the invitation of it, his hips rolling into yours with unhurried, devastating precision, less a battle now than something closer to a conversation neither of you had words for. His hand found your jaw, tilting your face up to his, and he kissed you through it — slow, thorough kisses that tasted of salt and something that had stopped, somewhere in the last minutes, being only hunger.
You found, somewhere in the slow warmth of your bodies, that you had no wish left to hide how thoroughly this had undone you — not behind banter, not behind a blade's-edge grin, not behind anything at all. It should have frightened you more than it did, being known this plainly by a man you didn’t, a few hours ago, even mean to run into. Instead, it felt like setting down something you hadn't realised you'd been carrying at all.
"Look at me," he murmured, when your eyes fluttered shut against the building pleasure, and you did, held his gaze through every roll of his hips, through the slow, building ache of it, through the way his composure — hard-won and iron-bound as it was — completely frayed the longer he looked at you looking back.
"Roddy," you breathed, no taunt left in it now, no weapon, just his name, offered plainly, and felt him shudder at the sound of it as though you'd handed him something he hadn't known he wanted.
He slid a hand between your bodies, pressing slow, deliberate circles against your clit in time with the drag of his cock, unwilling, it seemed, to let you finish without him; unwilling to let this end as anything less than together.
You built slowly beneath his hands, beneath his mouth, beneath the low words he murmured against your skin that you would remember later and never quite manage to repeat to anyone, and when you finally broke it was without violence, without the desperate edge of before — only a long, shuddering release that pulled him over with you, his own climax breaking on a groan he didn't bother to muffle this time, his forehead pressed to yours, his hips stilling deep inside you as the last of it worked through him.
Dawn was still some hours off when you finally dressed for the second time that night, and neither of you hurried about it. He watched you lace your leathers back together — clumsily, in places, where his hands had torn what you now had no way to properly mend — with an expression you didn't have a name for yet, something between amusement and a reluctance to let the night end that he was too proud to say aloud.
"Oscar Tully," you said, buckling your dagger back into place, "will sleep safely tonight. If you need, tell your men in the morning that a woman was seen near the horse lines and nothing more. I'll tell Cole the camp was too well-watched to risk it and let him believe what he likes about my nerve."
"And Stony Sept?"
"Send your riders tonight, before the break of dawn. They have barely any horses left, it will take longer for them to arrive." You allowed yourself a small, crooked smile. "I find I've grown fond of at least one wolf. I'd rather not see him eaten by Reachmen before I've had my fill of him."
He caught your wrist before you reached the flap of the tent — not hard, not the bruising grip of an hour before, but enough to still you — and drew you back for one last kiss, unhurried, thorough, a promise dressed up as an ordinary thing.
"Barrowton," he said again, against your mouth, as though repeating it might make it more binding. "When this is all done."
"When this is done," you agreed, and found, to your own quiet astonishment, that you meant it. You pressed your lips to his again and turned to leave.
You left him standing amid the wreckage of his tent and stepped back out into a night that had not stopped being cold, or muddy, or heavy with a war that would still have to be survived before either of you saw Barrowton or the North again.
There would be a reckoning to come, you knew — for the lie you'd have to tell Cole with a straight face, for the riders Roderick would send before sunrise, for whatever it cost either of you if the wrong man ever pieced together why a Green scout had come back from a Rivermen camp with an empty blade and a steadier heart than she'd left with. But that reckoning belonged to the days ahead, and you found you had no wish to borrow trouble from tomorrow when tonight had already given you more than the whole grinding length of this war had managed to.
You walked back toward the Green camp with something in your chest that hadn't been there when you'd left it. Something stubborn and warm and entirely unlike the girl who'd gone bastard-born and nameless into a war she'd never wanted, fighting for a surname instead of a cause. You had gone looking for Oscar Tully's throat, in the end, and had found instead the one thing this war will not take from you: your resolution.
Walking back through the mud with the first grey hint of dawn still hours off, you did not think you would give it up easily now that you had it.
A.N.: that was steamy hah *lights cigarette* now we can be all horny for Roddy together (can you tell that i was ovulating lol). Roddy deserves so many more fics tbh, spread lord Dustin love with a few reposts pretty please <3
“Criston Cole’s death is anticlimactic” THATS THE FUCKING POINT! He thinks that he is this great warrior who is going to die heroically in battle after taking down tons of other soldiers but instead he is killed by a woman and the rest of his men get slaughtered. His misogyny against Rhaenyra is what lead him to the green’s side of the war. For a woman to take him out like it’s nothing is a fitting end. It also shows how pointless this war has become. No one is really fighting for green or black, it’s just fighting to fight and in the end death is meaningless. Media comprehension is in the toilet in this fandom.
origamiaround
gracieabrams
