vroom vroom

she/they || 21+ || f1 hyperfixation

[lxclerc]

if you’re like me and you only watch f1 for free, here are some free sites you can watch it live at:

sportshub.stream - this is my personal favorite

totalsportek.pro

sportsurge.club

thehomesport.net

weakstream.org

there are also free apps you can watch it in:

Live player

strym tv - you need a code to watch in this app so you just press the + sign on the upper left corner, choose “Import playlist from URL” and paste this url http: //movitv. pro just remove the spaces

all of these have ads and if you have access to VPN, you might want to use it but i’ve tried all these links and app last season and hadn’t gotten a virus.

[chiarrara]

why was messi lowkey serving saddam hussein hiding spot

[jeezilikesports]

YESSS

[sixteensecrets]

this hit me like a line of coke

[luzxxii]

[autumn816]

alex just breezing through vs george pausing and pushing arvid to the flag sdksksk

[troublepunk-ldn]

me as a teenager: man it sucks to have no privacy or autonomy but i guess its for a good reason. when i turn 18 i will realise how young i was and understand why they did all that.

me as an adult: teenagers are an oppressed class, their abuse is normalised and systemic and they need to start killing people

[alexturntable]

whatever is going on here

[dogpuppy]

[etheltempest]

this would happen to connor bedard

[machy-march]

Just kiera and their baby waiting for valarr to finish his meeting at the council.

Let me be delusional so I can upload more of them

[novaursa]

The Sea and the Tower

- Summary: A captured dragonrider finds herself bound to the enemy in ways neither war nor blood can easily undo.

- Pairing: velaryon!reader/Ormund Hightower

- Rating: Explicit 18+ (There is an intimate scene in the story, but it isn’t overly descriptive. I wanted this piece to have a different tone and focus rather than turning it into straightforward smut this time.)

- Tag(s): @oxymakestheworldgoround @sachaa-ff @idenyimimdenial @albekstime @human169 @ilocuras24 @celestrys

The dragon that hatched for you had come from one of Meleys’ eggs, laid in the old warmth beneath the Dragonpit stones long before your mother took the Red Queen away from King’s Landing for the last time. Corlys had called it a sailor’s omen when the egg quickened in your cradle chamber on Driftmark, because the shell had been smooth as wet pearl, veined through with red and deep violet, as if someone had trapped dawn inside a storm cloud. Your mother had only laughed at that and said dragons did not care for sailors’ omens, nor for men naming every miracle after themselves. When the hatchling split the shell, the creature came out pale as moonlit foam, with a narrow skull, long limbs, black horns, and wing membranes streaked with crimson. The scales along the spine gleamed with a nacreous luster in daylight, white at one angle, rose-gold at another, and almost bruised purple beneath cloud. You named the dragon Velaryx, a name that pleased your father too much and made your mother roll those violet eyes, but even Rhaenys admitted the sound suited the creature. Velaryx grew lean and fast, never as massive as Meleys, never as brute strong as Vhagar, but quick in the air, brutal on a dive, fond of vanishing into cloud and coming down with the sun behind those pale wings. The smallfolk of Driftmark called Velaryx the Pearl Wraith after the first time your dragon came out of sea mist over Hull and sent half the fishing boats scattering as if the Stranger had learned to fly.

By the time the Dance became more than ravens, council mutterings, and men with old grudges finding new names for them, Velaryx was no hatchling. Neither were you. Your mother had died with Meleys at Rook’s Rest, fire and blood and betrayal folded into one red ruin, and whatever soft places had still existed in you were buried with her. Men looked at Corlys and saw the Sea Snake, old and grand and still dangerous enough to make younger lords swallow before speaking. They looked at Rhaenys while your mother lived and saw the Queen Who Never Was, a woman who had outlasted insult with dignity and made the realm remember what it had denied. When they looked at you, they saw a prize before they saw a rider. That had always been the idiocy of men in war: they looked at a dragonrider and still found a way to think first of marriage beds, inheritance, hostages, and wombs. If stupidity were coin, half the lords of Westeros could have purchased Valyria stone by stone.

You had flown for the blacks because your mother’s blood demanded it, because your father’s house had been bound to Rhaenyra by marriages, oaths, ships, graves, and because there was no clean place left to stand. The Reach burned in patches beneath you that autumn. Fields of wheat and barley lay crushed under hoof and boot; hedges were torn apart for firewood; villages shuttered themselves at the first cry of wings. Lord Ormund Hightower had marched from Oldtown with his banners, his spears, his mounted knights, his pious confidence, and the green flame of Aegon’s claim fluttering over his host like a sickness. He had Lord Hightower’s wealth, Oldtown’s pride, and more Reach swords than any man needed unless the gods had cursed him with ambition. Worse, he had Daeron Targaryen.

Prince Daeron was younger than many of the men who shouted his name, but Tessarion was no child’s toy. The Blue Queen had changed the war along the Honeywine. You had heard the reports before you saw the proof yourself: cobalt wings over the river, copper claws shining through smoke, blue flame pouring down onto men who had thought Lord Ormund beaten. Daeron had been named daring after that, knighted by Ormund with the Valyrian steel sword Vigilance, and everyone from Oldtown to King’s Landing had swallowed the tale as if songs won wars by themselves. Songs did not show burned hands. Songs did not show horses shrieking with their entrails in the mud. Songs did not show boys pissing themselves when a dragon’s shadow crossed the sun. Songs did not show the rider afterward, blood at the mouth from biting his tongue during a dive, shaking so hard he could barely unfasten his gloves. Songs were cowardly little things.

You found Daeron three days after the Honeywine, when Ormund’s host moved north and east, swollen by victory and slowed by wounded men. You had meant to harry them, not break them. Velaryx could strike at scouts, supply wagons, baggage trains, horse lines. Your father had taught you that a fleet was not beaten only by sinking ships. Sometimes one burned ropes, spoiled water, lamed draft animals, and left proud men starving in their armor. A host on the march was just a fleet dragged onto land, and land made fools of sailors and knights alike.

The first pass went beautifully. Velaryx came down out of a low bank of cloud with wings tight and throat bright, and the baggage carts at the rear of the column burst into white-red flame. Oxen screamed. Men scattered. The banners of three lesser houses vanished behind smoke. You heard horns below, frantic and overlapping, and you leaned forward against the saddle, knees locked, gloved hands steady on the dragon’s spines. The wind tore at your braid. Ash hit your cheeks. Below, the Green host lurched like a stabbed beast.

Then Tessarion came.

The Blue Queen rose from beyond a ridge with a scream that cut through smoke and steel alike. Tessarion was smaller than Velaryx but viciously quick, colored like twilight over deep water, cobalt scales lit by the coppery gleam of claws, crest, and belly. Daeron rode well. That was the most irritating part. The boy did not sit Tessarion like some perfumed princeling tied to a saddle and praying not to die. He rode as if he listened with his bones. When Tessarion banked, he moved with the turn. When your dragon rolled away from blue fire, Daeron followed before you had finished cursing him.

“Up,” you shouted, and Velaryx obeyed.

The sky became teeth, flame, wingbeats, and terrible speed. Velaryx climbed hard, pale body flashing against the cloud, then snapped sideways as Tessarion lunged from below. Blue fire spilled past your left side close enough for heat to slap through leather and mail. Velaryx shrieked, not from pain but fury, a sound inherited from Meleys’ blood, and answered with a burst of fire white at the heart and red at the edges. Tessarion twisted away. For a moment you saw Daeron’s face across the gap, young and strained under soot, silver hair whipped loose from its tie, eyes fixed on you with horror and resolve tangled together. The boy knew who you were. Of course he did. Every dragonrider knew the others, if only because there were so few of you left and fewer every moon. The gods had created dragons, and men had immediately decided the best use for them was murdering cousins. Civilization, as usual, had a splendid sense of humor.

You could have run. You knew that even then. Velaryx could outclimb Tessarion if given clean air. But below, the wagons still burned, and Ormund’s rear line was collapsing into itself. Another pass could ruin his supplies for days. Another pass might starve the Hightower host before it reached stronger ground. So you turned back.

That was where the scorpions came in.

Later, men would say Tessarion took down Velaryx. Men liked clean stories. They liked a young prince with a blue dragon and a brave victory. They liked making war into a tapestry because tapestries did not stink. The truth was messier and uglier. Tessarion drove Velaryx lower with blue flame, and as your dragon swerved away from those jaws, a hidden scorpion bolt launched from behind a screen of half-burned carts. The bolt did not pierce the heart or skull. It struck the webbing near Velaryx’s right wing joint, punched through membrane and muscle, and tore a ruin wide enough for daylight to pour through. Velaryx screamed so loudly the sound seemed to split the sky. You felt the whole body jolt beneath you.

“Hold,” you snarled, as if rage could stitch a wing together.

Velaryx tried. Gods, your dragon tried. The wounded wing beat once, twice, crooked and failing. Tessarion came in too close, and Velaryx caught the Blue Queen across the chest with claws, ripping cobalt scales free in a bright scatter. Tessarion screamed in turn, blue flame spilling wild, and Daeron pitched forward in the saddle as if struck. For one mad instant, the two dragons were locked together, falling through smoke, claws raking, tails lashing. Velaryx bit Tessarion’s neck crest and tore copper-bright flesh. Tessarion’s fire washed over Velaryx’s shoulder. You smelled burned scale, burned leather, burned hair, and then there was no sky left.

The ground came like a thrown mountain.

You survived because Velaryx took most of the impact. That was the kind of debt no rider ever repaid. You remembered mud, crushed grass, the taste of blood, and the terrible silence after a dragon stopped screaming. You were still half tangled in saddle straps when men came running, though none came close at first. Even injured, Velaryx snapped at the nearest horse and bit through its neck with a wet crack. The remaining animals reared and threw riders. You cut yourself free with shaking hands and slid down the hot slope of your dragon’s shoulder, landing badly, one knee almost giving beneath you. Your sword was still at your hip. Your left arm burned from shoulder to wrist. Your ribs felt as if some giant had closed a fist around them.

“Back,” someone shouted. “Back, you fools, the beast still lives.”

Velaryx did live. Barely. The right wing lay twisted, the membrane torn, the shoulder smoking where blue fire had touched scale. The great pale head lifted as you staggered in front of it, and one silver-violet eye found you. There was pain there. Rage too. Confusion. A dragon was not a horse, no matter what maesters wrote after sniffing ink too long and mistaking themselves for useful. A dragon knew. Velaryx knew the sky had been stolen.

You turned with your sword drawn when the first Green men approached. “Come closer and feed my dragon,” you said.

Some of them believed you. A few had enough sense to look at Velaryx’s teeth and reconsider their devotion to King Aegon. Then the line parted, and Lord Ormund Hightower rode through on a dark horse with white socks, armor smoke-stained, green cloak torn at one edge, and a blade at his side that did not look like ordinary steel. Vigilance. Even before anyone named it, you knew Valyrian steel by the way it caught light, dark ripples moving under the surface as if water had been folded into metal. Ormund was not young, but not old either, a man in his strength, broad through the shoulders, with a face made stern by habit rather than ugliness. His eyes were pale and watchful. He looked less like a court lord than you expected and more like a man who had discovered long ago that command was mostly deciding which disaster should be allowed to happen first.

Behind him, Daeron had dismounted from Tessarion. Blood ran from the prince’s hairline, and one arm hung wrong against his side. Tessarion crouched beyond him, bleeding from the neck, chest heaving, bright blue scales scored by Velaryx’s claws. The young prince looked at Velaryx, then at you, and whatever triumph men would later sing about was nowhere on his face.

Ormund raised one gauntleted hand. His soldiers halted.

“You are Lady Y/N Velaryon,” he said.

“You are standing too close.”

His gaze flicked to Velaryx. “So it seems.”

“My dragon is alive.”

“For the moment.”

You took one step toward him, sword still raised. Men shifted. Spears lowered. Velaryx growled behind you, deep and ragged, a furnace sound dragging through ruined lungs. Tessarion answered from the far side of the field with a wounded hiss. The whole world smelled of blood and scorched grass.

Ormund did not draw Vigilance. That was clever of him. “Put down your sword.”

“No.”

“I would rather not have you shot full of quarrels in front of your dragon.”

“Then do not order it.”

His mouth tightened, but something like respect passed through his eyes. Not kindness. Not mercy. Those were soft names people gave themselves after the hard decisions were already made. Respect was colder and more useful. “You are beaten, Lady Velaryon.”

“My dragon still breathes.”

“And my prince’s dragon still stands. Neither of them will survive another command given in anger.” Ormund looked past you toward Velaryx again. “You know that.”

You hated him for being right. It would have been easier if he were stupid. A stupid man could be provoked, tricked, led by pride into slaughter. Ormund Hightower sat his horse and measured the field, your wound, Velaryx’s wound, Daeron’s injury, Tessarion’s lowered head, the ring of soldiers, the smoke from his own ruined wagons. He was not thinking of glory. He was counting costs.

Daeron stepped forward, pale under the blood streaking his temple. “Lord Ormund,” he said quietly, “the dragon should not be slain.”

You looked at him then, really looked. The boy sounded winded. His right hand trembled, though he tried to hide it. There was soot across his mouth. He had almost died, and the first clear words he offered were not for vengeance.

Ormund did not glance back. “No one has given that order, Your Grace.”

“See that no one does.”

Your laugh came out harsh and broken. “How noble. Shall I thank you for not butchering what you could not kill cleanly?”

Daeron flinched. Ormund did not.

“You may thank him by living,” Ormund said. “Yield your sword, my lady. I give you my word you will not be harmed if you do.”

“Your word as a Green?”

“My word as Lord Hightower.”

That should not have mattered. It did anyway. There were old houses whose words carried weight even when you despised the cause they served. House Hightower had stood before dragons came to Westeros. Oldtown had seen kings rise, rot, and become songs. Ormund was your enemy, but he was no sellsword captain pawing at a ransom prize. You looked back at Velaryx. The great eye watched you, lid flickering. Blood, dark and steaming, ran beneath those pearl scales into the trampled grass.

You lowered the sword.

A murmur moved through the Green soldiers, relief dressed up as discipline. Ormund dismounted before taking the blade from you himself. That surprised you. He did not let some hedge knight snatch it from your hand. He stepped close, met your stare, and accepted the weapon hilt first when you offered it with as much contempt as your aching arm could manage.

“If Velaryx dies,” you said, “you will learn how much trouble one unarmed woman can cause before your men finish the job.”

“I do not doubt it,” Ormund replied.

That was your first true conversation with him. Not exactly the stuff singers would choose for romance, but singers were cowards and fools, and most romance began in less honest places.

They did not chain you that day. Ormund had you carried, which was humiliating enough to make you consider biting someone, but your left side had gone numb by then and pride did not mend cracked ribs. Daeron insisted on sending his own healer to Velaryx, as if dragon wounds were something a man could stitch with linen and hope. The healer could do little, but Daeron stayed near the dragons while the Hightower beast handlers and terrified grooms cleared the field. You watched from a canvas litter as the prince approached Velaryx with empty hands and a face too solemn for his years. Velaryx hissed smoke at him. Daeron stopped, bowed his bloody head as one dragonrider to another, and backed away.

Ormund saw you watching.

“He is not cruel,” he said.

“He rides for usurpers.”

“He rides for his brother.”

“Those are not different things.”

“No,” Ormund said after a moment. “Often they are not.”

That should have been the end of it. You should have remained a hostage in a guarded tent, traded eventually for prisoners, ships, coin, promises, or some uglier bargain struck by men who loved you but still saw the board before they saw the blood on the pieces. Instead, war did what war always did. It dragged. It thickened. It turned every simple thing into a knot.

Your first days as Ormund’s prisoner were fever and pain. The healers found no deep break in your skull, but your ribs were cracked, your left arm burned, and bruises flowered across your body in black, blue, and yellow. Your tent stood near the center of the Hightower camp, close enough to Ormund’s command pavilion that no man could approach without being seen. Two guards watched the entrance at all hours. They were polite, which was almost worse than cruelty because it gave you less to sharpen yourself against. The first time one called you “Princess,” you told him that you are no princess. The second time, he remembered. The third time, he brought broth and looked as if he expected thanks, because the Reach produced wheat, wine, and men in desperate need of applause for basic competence.

Velaryx lived.

That was the first thing you asked every morning and the last thing you demanded every night. At first no one answered quickly enough. Then Ormund learned that withholding the answer made you impossible. After the fourth cup you threw, he came to your tent himself, ducking beneath the flap with the weary expression of a man who had led armies, negotiated alliances, seen dragonfire, and still discovered that one furious captive could sour his whole camp.

“Velaryx fed today,” he said without greeting. “A bullock. Half of one, in truth. The dragon would not take more.”

You were sitting upright against cushions, sweating through a linen shift, hair unbound and tangled down your back. Your arm was bandaged. Your ribs hated breathing. “Fed by whose hand?”

“No hand. We dragged the carcass within reach and then withdrew before your beast decided Hightower men were sweeter.”

“Velaryx prefers horse.”

“I will inform the quartermaster that our cavalry is now dragon fodder.”

That startled a laugh out of you. It hurt. You hated him for that too, naturally. There were only so many things a person could hate at once, but you were making a disciplined effort.

Ormund looked at you with faint surprise, then glanced at the shattered cup near the tent pole. “Must everything become a missile?”

“Bring worse pottery.”

“I will have wooden cups sent.”

“I’ll find something heavier.”

“I believe you.”

That was the second conversation.

The negotiations began through ravens. Ormund wrote first to Dragonstone, then to Driftmark, then to whatever lord or captain could reach your father fastest. He did not parade you before his host, did not force you to write begging letters, did not send a lock of hair, bloody ribbon, or any of the other theatrical garbage men performed when they wanted cruelty to look like strategy. He wrote formally. Lady Y/N Velaryon lived. The dragon Velaryx lived but would not fly soon, if ever. Lady Velaryon would be treated according to birth and honor. Lord Corlys Velaryon was invited to discuss exchange.

Your father’s first answer was short enough that Ormund read it twice, perhaps hoping more words would appear through force of irritation.

“You may tell Lord Hightower,” Corlys had written in a hand still strong despite age, “that if harm comes to my daughter, I will close the sea around Oldtown until his grandchildren learn hunger as a cradle song.”

Ormund folded the letter and looked at you across the table in his pavilion. By then you could walk, though not far, and you had demanded to hear every word sent in your name. He had allowed it because he was either fair-minded or had concluded refusal would lead to more broken objects. Both were possible.

“Your father has a gift for warmth,” Ormund said.

“He likes to make good impressions.”

“I asked for an exchange.”

“He offered you a prophecy.”

“A threat.”

“With my father, the distinction is mostly decorative.”

Ormund’s mouth moved, not quite smiling. He had removed his armor for the evening. In a dark green doublet, with smoke washed from his hair and the day’s blood cleaned from his hands, he looked more like what he was: lord of the oldest and richest house in the Reach, uncle’s nephew to queens and kings, a man raised under the shadow of the Hightower and the Starry Sept’s memory. There was power in him that had nothing to do with armies. A steadiness. A discipline that did not need shouting to prove itself.

“You speak as if you admire him,” Ormund said.

“I do.”

“And resent him.”

“I do.”

“That seems uncomfortable.”

“Family usually is.”

He nodded once, accepting that. You found yourself studying him as he turned toward the map table. Colored markers sat over the Reach roads, rivers, towns, and holdfasts. The Honeywine curled in ink. Oldtown stood marked with a tower sign, a little carved flame set beside it. Dragonstone and Driftmark lay far away on another parchment weighted down by a dagger. Men had been moving pieces across maps for the whole war, pretending carved wood could keep them from smelling corpses.

“Why show me these?” you asked.

“You know the roads.”

“I know the coasts better.”

“You know dragon range better than any of my captains.”

“Ask Daeron.”

“I do. He is young.”

“He beat me.”

Ormund turned back. “Tessarion, a scorpion hidden behind burning wagons, and your own refusal to retreat beat you. Daeron knows that. So do I.”

You did not answer at once. Praise from an enemy was a strange thing. Too much felt like mockery. Too little felt like insult. Ormund had an irritating habit of choosing exactly enough.

“You speak very gently of your prince,” you said.

“He was my ward before he was the realm’s darling.”

“He is your weapon now.”

His expression cooled. “He is a boy in a war made by men older than him.”

“That has never stopped men older than him from using boys.”

“No,” Ormund said, and the word landed with more weight than agreement. “It has not.”

You looked away first. That annoyed you too. The man was becoming a collection of small annoyances: too calm, too perceptive, too careful with your dignity, too willing to admit unpleasant truths without using them to excuse himself. A proper enemy should make hatred easy. Ormund Hightower was failing at his appointed task.

Weeks passed. The war shifted around you. Ravens arrived with reports of castles changing hands, burned mills, lords declaring too late and too loudly, towns paying for banners they had never chosen. The Hightower host moved by stages, slow but disciplined, its wounded carried in wagons, Tessarion recovering enough to fly short circuits over the column. Velaryx could not fly. That wound did not heal as cleanly as men pretended wounds should. The membrane closed in ugly ridges, but the wing joint remained stiff, and your dragon dragged that side when turning. A dragon grounded was a grief so large it made human language look cheap.

Ormund allowed you to visit Velaryx once you could walk without nearly fainting. Six guards came with you, though they kept a respectful distance after Velaryx lifted that pale head and showed teeth as long as daggers. Your dragon had been moved to a burned pasture ringed with wagons, chains, and prayers. The chains were mostly theater. If Velaryx truly thrashed, half the camp would die before anyone stopped it. Still, Ormund kept his men from cruelty. No hooks. No teasing. No brave fools with spears trying to prove themselves. The first soldier who threw a stone at Velaryx lost two fingers to Ormund’s justice before your dragon could remove anything more useful.

You knelt beside Velaryx’s head and pressed both palms to the warm scales above the jaw. “I know,” you whispered in High Valyrian. “I know, sweet terror. I know.”

Velaryx rumbled, a low sound like stones moving under tide. Smoke leaked from one nostril.

“You are a bad patient.”

The silver-violet eye narrowed.

“Do not give me that look. You are. You always have been. Do you remember when you bit the maester on Driftmark?”

Velaryx breathed hot air into your hair.

“He deserved it,” you admitted.

A soft tread sounded behind you. You did not turn. “If you brought more guards, they are wasted.”

“I brought meat,” Ormund said.

You looked back. He stood beyond the safest reach of Velaryx’s neck, one hand resting near Vigilance but not on it. Behind him, men hauled a dead horse from a cart. A mercy, or a bribe. With lords, the two were often siblings.

“You waste horseflesh on an enemy dragon,” you said.

“I waste nothing. A fed dragon is less inclined to eat men I still need.”

“Practical.”

“Always, when possible.”

Velaryx’s nostrils flared. The dead horse was dragged closer. Ormund dismissed the men before they began trembling themselves into mistakes, then remained while Velaryx burn and tore into the carcass with a wet crunch. Uncooked blood spread dark over pale grass.

“You do not look away,” you observed.

“I have seen dragon feeding before.”

“Not like this.”

“No,” he admitted. “Not this close.”

“You should be afraid.”

“I am.”

That made you glance at him.

Ormund’s face remained composed. “Only a fool would stand before a living dragon and feel nothing.”

“There are many fools in your camp.”

“In every camp.”

“You included?”

“Frequently. I try not to make a religion of it.”

The words should not have warmed you. They did. Not sweetly. Nothing about that time was sweet. It was more like finding one dry room in a flooded castle, then resenting the room for existing because now you knew shelter was possible.

After that, Ormund visited Velaryx with you when duties allowed. At first you thought it was strategy. Perhaps it was. He asked questions about dragon temper, healing, appetite, wing strain, flame after injury. You answered some and ignored others. He never pressed too hard. He had a commander’s patience, which was different from a saint’s patience and far more dangerous. Saints waited because they believed suffering improved people. Commanders waited because timing killed more reliably than force.

Daeron came too, once Tessarion could land without favoring the foreleg Velaryx had raked open. The prince approached with humility so sincere you wanted to dislike it and could not quite manage.

“I am glad Velaryx lives,” Daeron said.

“You sound surprised.”

“I did not know if the wound would take fever.”

“Dragons do not die to please men’s expectations.”

“No,” he said softly. “They die because we bring them to war.”

That silenced you. Ormund, standing beside you, looked at the prince with something paternal and pained moving behind his eyes.

“You nearly killed my dragon,” you said.

Daeron looked down. “Yes.”

“I nearly killed yours.”

“Yes.”

“Do you apologize for war, Prince Daeron?”

“No.” His voice was steadier then. “I apologize for being glad I lived when your dragon fell.”

A clean answer. Painfully clean. You had no weapon for it.

“Then keep your apology,” you said. “You may need it later.”

Daeron bowed and withdrew. Ormund watched him go.

“He is better than his side deserves,” you said.

“Most young men are better than the banners that claim them.”

“Were you?”

He breathed out through his nose, almost amused. “No. I was worse. I wanted glory.”

“And now?”

“Now I want victory.”

“That is worse.”

“Yes,” Ormund said. “It is.”

The third letter from Corlys offered exchange of noble prisoners taken at sea, ransom in gold, and the return of two Hightower cousins captured by black loyalists near the Mander. Ormund rejected it. The terms were not equal, he said. A dragonrider of your blood could not be balanced by coin and cousins. Your father’s fourth letter was less polished. Your fifth week in the camp ended with Corlys threatening to send ships against every green-aligned harbor from Oldtown to the Arbor. Ormund answered that Oldtown was well defended and that any attack on the city would put you in greater peril, which was both true and manipulative in the tidy way statesmen adored.

“You use me as a shield,” you said after reading the copy.

“I use you as leverage.”

“Prettier word. Same stink.”

“You prefer I lie?”

“I prefer you return me.”

“To what? Dragonstone? Driftmark? Another saddle? Another sky full of kin trying to burn kin?”

“That is not your choice.”

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

Yet he did not send you back.

The closeness came in pieces, which was probably how it survived. Anything sudden would have been too easy to distrust. Ormund began by letting you dine in his pavilion instead of your guarded tent, because you were a lady and because eating alone made you feel like an animal being kept for inspection. The first meals were hostile. You spoke only when necessary. He offered news without requiring gratitude. You corrected his maps when coastlines were wrong, because bad maps offended you more than silence helped you. He had the gall to thank you.

“You have marked Cape Wrath too far north,” you told him one evening, leaning over the parchment despite your sore ribs. “And that inlet is deeper.”

“You know this from memory?”

“I was raised by Corlys Velaryon. I knew tides before I knew embroidery.”

“That must have disappointed septas.”

“Everything about me disappointed septas.”

“I find that easy to believe.”

You looked up. “Was that meant to insult me?”

“No. Them.”

Your mouth twitched. His eyes followed the movement before he looked back at the map. You noticed. Captivity narrowed the world, and in a narrow world, every glance grew larger.

Another night, rain battered the pavilion roof so heavily that the maps had to be rolled away from leaking seams. The camp sank into mud. Men cursed outside. Somewhere, a mule screamed as if personally offended by weather. You sat near the brazier with a cup of watered wine, wrapped in a cloak because the damp made old bruises ache. Ormund entered late, soaked across the shoulders, smelling of rain, leather, and smoke. He removed his gloves finger by finger, slower than usual.

“Bad news?” you asked.

“Always.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer war gives consistently.”

He poured wine and did not water his own. His face looked drawn in the firelight. Not weak. Never that. But tired in a way men rarely allowed women to see unless they mistook them for furniture.

“You lost men,” you said.

“A foraging party. Ambushed near a mill.”

“Black loyalists?”

“Hungry villagers, by the look of it. Perhaps both. These lines become thin.”

You watched him drink. “Will you hang them if you catch them?”

“If they killed soldiers, yes.”

“You say that as if it costs nothing.”

“It costs plenty. That does not change the answer.”

“You could choose mercy.”

“I could. Then the next village learns that killing Hightower men carries no price.”

“You sound like my father.”

“I will try to recover from the insult.”

“You sound like every lord who has ever explained why corpses are necessary.”

His gaze cut to you then, not angry, but close. “And you sound like every dragonrider who has seen men scatter beneath wings and decided the view from above cleans the killing.”

That struck. You set the cup down. “Careful, Lord Hightower.”

“I am tired of careful.”

“Then you are tired of being alive.”

For a moment, rain filled the silence. Ormund looked at you, and something changed there. Not softened. Changed. The air between you had carried anger before, suspicion, grudging humor, political assessment, the strange intimacy of two people trapped on opposite sides of a war neither could stop. This was different. Rawer. You felt it under your skin before either of you named it.

“I know what dragonfire does,” you said, lower now. “I have smelled men after it. Do not make the mistake of thinking I feel clean because I flew higher.”

His jaw worked once. “No. I should not have said that.”

“But you believe it.”

“I believe power excuses itself with height, titles, law, blood, gods, necessity. Mine does. Yours does. Your queen’s does. My king’s does. Every man in this war has dressed murder in silk and asked history to admire the tailoring.”

You stared at him. “That was almost honest.”

“It happens occasionally. I try not to let it spread.”

A laugh escaped you before you could stop it, small and tired and real. He watched you as if the sound had done him some private harm.

After that night, he stopped pretending not to want your company. You stopped pretending not to expect his. The guards remained, because the world had not turned gentle just because two enemies had discovered conversation. Ormund still sent ravens demanding terms your father would never accept. You still watched every road for a chance to run. But he began bringing you books taken from some Reach sept’s traveling chest, histories mostly, a few volumes of Valyrian fragments copied by maesters who had never heard the words spoken aloud. You mocked the errors in the margins. He read them later, and the next day he asked why you had called one translation “an insult to goats.”

“Because goats are useful and the translation was not.”

“That seems fair.”

You spoke of Driftmark, though never too softly. You spoke of your mother only once at length, and that was after a raven brought word that men in green camps had begun using Rhaenys’ death as proof that dragons could be killed, that queens could fall, that black courage was mortal. You had gone very still when Ormund read that report aloud. He stopped halfway through.

“Continue,” you said.

“I need not.”

“Do not treat me like glass.”

“I would not insult glass so severely.”

“Read.”

He did. His voice did not flinch, which was a mercy. When he finished, you stood and walked out into the cold.

He found you beside Velaryx, though the hour was late and the guards were furious about it. Your dragon slept in fits, injured wing tucked wrong, pale body rising and falling with slow breaths. Clouds covered the moon. The campfires made dull red stars across the field.

“My mother deserved a better death,” you said.

Ormund stood a few paces behind you. “Yes.”

“She was worth ten of every man who shouted for Aegon or Rhaenyra.”

“Yes.”

“She should have been queen.”

A longer silence. Then, quietly, “Perhaps.”

You turned then. “Careful. That sounds like treason.”

“It is history. Often the same thing, depending on who wins.”

You hated that your throat tightened. Hated that he had not offered some Green answer about rightful succession, lawful kings, Viserys’ sons, Alicent’s blood, and all the other polished bones men set out when they wanted a feast of excuses. He simply stood there, cloak dark in the night wind, and allowed your grief to exist without trying to conquer it.

“She taught me not to bow my head when men mistook patience for defeat,” you said.

“I can see that.”

“She would hate this.”

“Being captive?”

“Being fond of you.”

The words came out before fear could stop them. There it was, then. Ugly, dangerous, alive. The silence afterward felt like standing in a dragon’s open mouth.

Ormund did not move closer. That restraint struck harder than any advance could have. “And are you?”

You could have lied. It might even have saved you. “Yes.”

His eyes closed briefly, as if something in him had been confirmed and condemned in the same breath. “That is unfortunate.”

“You have a gift for romance.”

“I have a gift for recognizing disasters.”

“Most men call that cowardice when women do it.”

“Most men are idiots.”

That nearly made you smile, but the ache in your chest was too large. “Do not make me regret telling you.”

“I will likely make you regret many things before this war ends,” he said. “But not that.”

He stepped closer then, only one pace, enough for the firelight from the nearest guard post to catch the silver at his temples and the hard line of his mouth. You realized you had been thinking about his mouth for days. During councils. During dinners. While reading letters from your father threatening to unmake him by sea. A ridiculous, inconvenient fixation. The world was collapsing, dragons were bleeding into the mud, and your mind had chosen a widowed Hightower lord with enemy banners as its next act of treason. The body had no dignity. None.

“You should go back to your tent,” he said.

“You should stop telling me what I should do.”

“I am responsible for your safety.”

“You are responsible for my imprisonment.”

“Yes.”

The honesty went between you again, blade-bright and cruel. You moved first. Not far. Just enough that the hem of your cloak touched his boot.

“I know what you are,” you said.

“Do you?”

“Enemy. Captor. Lord. Widower. Father. Soldier. Liar when duty requires it. Honest when it hurts enough to be useful.”

“That is quite a list.”

“I am not finished.”

“No?”

“No.” You looked up at him. “You are also not as cold as you wish to be.”

Something flickered across his face. “And you are not as untouchable as you pretend.”

You should have stepped back. Instead, you said, “No.”

His hand rose slowly, giving you time to refuse. When his fingers touched your cheek, the contact was almost unbearably careful. A thumb brushed the edge of your jaw, not claiming, not commanding. Testing reality, perhaps. Ormund looked like a man facing an army he understood far better than this.

“If I kiss you,” he said, voice roughened, “you must know I am not setting you free afterward.”

No pretty lie. No pretending desire dissolved chains. No foolish attempt to make captivity into a song.

Your breath trembled once. “If I kiss you, you must know I am not surrendering.”

His gaze dropped to your mouth. “No. You would not.”

You kissed him because you chose it, because war had taken your mother, your sky, your dragon’s wing, your father’s peace, and you would be damned before you let it take every hunger that still belonged to you. Ormund held himself still for the first heartbeat, perhaps giving you one last chance to turn this into a mistake with an escape route. Then his hand slid into your hair and his mouth opened under yours, controlled at first, then not. The kiss was not sweet. It had too much restraint breaking inside it. He tasted of wine and rain. You tasted blood where your lip had split days earlier and reopened against him. He made a low sound when he noticed, anger or want or both, and pulled back enough to look at you.

“You are bleeding.”

“You have seen worse.”

“That is not permission to ignore it.”

“You talk too much.”

He laughed under his breath, and then you kissed him again to stop it.

Nothing more happened that night. That mattered later. He walked you back to your tent himself, with the guards staring hard at anything else because soldiers were not always clever but they did possess a survival instinct. At the entrance, Ormund paused.

“Lock your tent from within,” he said.

“You never gave me a lock.”

“I will have one brought.”

“You trust me with a lock?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

His gaze held yours. “Because you should have a door no man enters without leave.”

It was such a small thing. That was why it cut. Grand gestures were easy for powerful men. They could throw gold, horses, jewels, castles, fleets, and call it devotion when it was mostly inventory. A lock in a war camp, given to a prisoner by the man who kept the guards outside, was not freedom. It was not enough. But it was something real. That was the rotten trick of tenderness. Even when insufficient, it remained tenderness.

The lock came before dawn.

After that, the camp knew without knowing. Servants always knew. Guards knew. Daeron knew, though the prince had the decency to look embarrassed rather than judgmental. Ormund’s captains suspected and became careful with your name. A few men muttered. One knight made the mistake of saying too much within earshot of Ormund’s steward and found himself reassigned to latrine pits for a fortnight. Nobody needed to tell you. The smell was evidence enough.

The negotiations worsened. Corlys offered more. Ormund demanded guarantees that could not be granted. Safe passage for Hightower ships through waters your father did not wholly command. Release of prisoners Rhaenyra’s men would not trade. A pledge that Velaryx would not be used against the Green host again, which made you laugh aloud when Ormund read it to you.

“You asked my father to chain the sea,” you said.

“I asked him to chain one dragon.”

“You asked him to chain me.”

“Yes.”

The word struck harder than denial would have. You stood near his writing table, one hand braced against the carved edge. Outside, the camp was settling into dusk, all low voices, cook smoke, clatter, and distant groans from the wounded tents. Ormund had dismissed everyone else. The pavilion felt too warm.

“And if he agrees?” you asked.

“He will not.”

“If he does.”

Ormund’s face was unreadable. “Then I would have to decide whether my honor or my king’s cause commands me more strongly.”

“Do you have an answer?”

“No.”

“You always have an answer.”

“Not for you.”

The words settled into the space between you. You could hear the brazier crackle. A moth battered itself stupidly against a lantern, because every creature in the world apparently wished to die in fire sooner or later.

“My father will come for me,” you said.

“I know.”

“He will not stop.”

“I know that too.”

“He will burn your fleets if he must.”

“I have considered it.”

“You speak as if this is a weather report.”

“If I speak otherwise, I may do something foolish.”

You looked at him. “Such as?”

His eyes lifted to you, and that was answer enough.

The second kiss was not outside beneath cold stars. It was in his pavilion, with rain threatening again and maps rolled shut, with your father’s letter lying open between you like a judgment neither of you planned to obey. You crossed the space first again because you needed that truth preserved. Ormund had power over your body in every public way that mattered. Guards, camp, ravens, road, ransom. But not this. Not the step. Not the yes. Not the hand you placed against his chest when you reached him.

“Tell me to leave,” he said.

“This is your pavilion.”

“I will leave it.”

“You are very determined to be noble at inconvenient times.”

“I am trying to avoid becoming the worst thing you could later say of me.”

That steadied you more than seduction would have. “Then listen carefully. I am not asking for freedom as payment. I am not mistaking your bed for a peace treaty. I am not helpless because your guards stand outside. I know exactly where I am.”

His breathing changed.

You continued, because he needed to hear it and because maybe you did too. “I want you. That is all. That is enough. Do not dress it in pity. Do not ruin it with guilt before it has even happened.”

Ormund stared at you for a long moment. Then he said, low and almost bitter, “You are going to undo me.”

“Probably.”

His laugh was brief and broken. Then he kissed you.

This time, restraint did not survive long. He kissed like he commanded, not carelessly, never that, but with attention so complete it felt like being studied and consumed at once. His hands settled at your waist first, then drew you closer when you did not pull away. Your fingers worked at the fastenings of his doublet with less grace than impatience, and he made a sound that might have been your name if his mouth had not been against your throat. You felt the old ache in your ribs and ignored it until he noticed the catch in your breath and stopped at once.

“No,” you said, furious with your own body.

“Your ribs.”

“My ribs are not invited to give counsel.”

“Unfortunately, they are attached to you.”

“You are impossible.”

“I have been called worse by better men.”

“Not better women?”

His gaze darkened. “No.”

That should not have pleased you. It did. You tugged him back by the open collar of his shirt, and he came this time without argument. He undressed you slowly enough to make you want to curse him, but his care was not hesitation. It was reverence with teeth. Each lace loosened, each layer eased away, each pause asking without words whether you remained with him. When your shift slipped from one shoulder, his hand hovered before touching the burn scar left by Tessarion’s flame along your upper arm. Not ugly, not to him. You saw that before he bent his head and pressed his mouth near the edge of it.

“She marked you,” he murmured.

“Tessarion?”

“Yes.”

“Velaryx marked her worse.”

His lips moved against your skin. “I saw.”

“You sound proud.”

“I sound grateful Daeron lived through it.”

There was that truth again, inconvenient as a stone in the shoe. You touched his face and made him look at you. “I am glad he lived.”

Ormund closed his eyes for one breath, and when he opened them, something inside him had yielded.

The bed was narrow for two people and too plain for a lord of his station, a campaign bed built for function rather than pleasure. Later, that would seem fitting. Nothing about the first time between you had the softness of court. There were no silk curtains, no music, no perfumed sheets, no illusion that the world outside had paused out of respect for desire. Armor stood on a rack nearby. Vigilance lay within reach. Rain began tapping against the pavilion roof. Men laughed somewhere outside, then fell silent as an officer barked at them. The war remained. It did not politely excuse itself.

Still, for a while, it did not get to have you.

Ormund learned your body as if haste would be an insult, and when patience became too much, you told him so with your hands, your mouth, the arch of your back, the blunt demand of his name. He did not smile then. He looked wrecked, which was better. His control frayed by degrees, and watching it happen gave you a fierce, wicked satisfaction. Here was Lord Hightower, commander of armies, wielder of Vigilance, keeper of ravens and terms and guarded tents, undone by the sound you made when his mouth found the hollow beneath your jaw. Good. Let the realm have that written down somewhere between battles and betrayals. Let some maester choke on the footnote.

When he finally joined you, it was with one last pause, forehead pressed to yours, breath rough, one hand braced beside your head.

“Tell me no,” he said, almost pleading. “If there is any part of you that means it.”

You took his face between your hands. “I mean yes.”

That was enough. It had to be. The rest belonged to skin, heat, the rain, the quiet breaking of names against each other. He was careful until you demanded less care. He was controlled until you took that from him too. Pleasure came not as softness but as force, a living thing that drove thought out and left only the body’s bright, merciless truth. For a little while, you were not Corlys Velaryon’s daughter, not Rhaenys Targaryen’s surviving blood, not the Pearl Wraith’s rider grounded by blue flame, not a hostage, not a bargaining piece in a civil war that had devoured sense and kin alike. You were only yourself, alive in the dark, held by a man who should have been nothing to you but enemy and had somehow become the one person in the camp who looked at you and saw the whole of the ruin, not merely the value of what could be ransomed from it.

Afterward, Ormund did not speak for a long time. He lay beside you with one arm around your waist, fingers spread over your stomach as if anchoring himself. His breathing steadied slowly. You listened to the rain and the distant restless sounds of the army. Your body felt loose and sore and strangely calm. That would pass, you knew. Everything passed except consequences.

“You are thinking too loudly,” you said.

His chest moved against your back in a quiet exhale. “I was under the impression thoughts were silent.”

“Yours are not.”

“What am I thinking?”

“That you have done something unforgivable.”

His hand stilled. “Have I?”

You turned enough to look at him. In the dim light, he looked older, but not weaker. Just stripped of the armor command put on men even when they were naked. “Do you want absolution from your prisoner?”

“No.”

“Good. I would charge too much.”

His mouth curved faintly, then faded. “I want to know whether you will hate me.”

“I already hated you.”

“Yes. You made that clear.”

“I do not hate you for this.”

His eyes searched yours. “And tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I may hate you for several things. Your letters. Your banners. The guards outside. The fact you still have my sword. The fact Velaryx cannot fly. The fact my father will grieve and rage and threaten the sea into obedience. But not for this.”

He absorbed that as if it hurt. “You divide matters very cleanly.”

“No. I divide them because if I do not, they eat each other.”

Ormund lifted one hand and brushed hair back from your face. The gesture was so domestic it nearly frightened you. Battle did not. Dragonfire did not. Tenderness, apparently, was where courage went to embarrass itself.

“My first wife died in childbed,” he said suddenly.

You went still.

He looked past you, not hiding but not meeting your eyes either. “Years before the war. Lyonel was already old enough to remember her. The younger ones less so. Bethany barely. I had thought grief would make me gentler. Instead, it made me efficient. There were children to raise, accounts to settle, Oldtown to rule, kin to answer, ships to count, walls to maintain, men to command. Grief became another duty. That is not a noble confession. It is only true.”

You touched his wrist. “Did you love her?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. “Not as songs insist men love women. Not madness. Not worship. But partnership. Familiarity. Trust. The comfort of being known before entering a room.”

“That is not lesser.”

“No,” he said softly. “It was not.”

You nodded. Jealousy would have been childish and useless, and you had no patience for either. “I am not trying to replace a ghost.”

“I would not ask it.”

“Good.”

His gaze returned to you. “And you? Has there been someone?”

“Men have tried.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one worth giving.” You shifted onto your back, looking up at the tent roof. “I had offers before the war. Velaryon blood, Targaryen blood, a dragon, my father’s favor. I was a feast table men circled while pretending they had come for prayer. Some were handsome. Some were kind. A few even spoke to my face instead of my inheritance. I did not want them enough.”

“And me?”

You looked at him. “You are inconvenient enough to be interesting.”

He huffed a laugh, then leaned down and kissed your shoulder. “A devastating compliment.”

“You should treasure it.”

“I shall have it carved on my tomb.”

“You may need a large tomb. My father might send several pieces home.”

His amusement faded, but not entirely. “Your father will despise me.”

“My father despised men for breathing too close to his ships. Do not feel special.”

“I am keeping his daughter.”

The words went cold between you.

There it was, dragged out at last.

You sat up slowly, pulling the sheet over your chest. Ormund did not reach to stop you. He sat up too, bare to the waist, hair disordered, face now fully Lord Hightower again except for the mark your mouth had left near his collarbone.

“What does that mean?” you asked.

He was silent long enough for anger to wake.

“What does that mean, Ormund?”

“It means the negotiations are failing.”

“You are failing them.”

“Yes.”

“On purpose?”

“Yes.”

The word hit worse than shouting.

You left the bed. The movement pulled at your ribs, but you welcomed the pain. It gave you somewhere clean to put rage. You found your shift and dragged it over your head. Your hands were shaking, not from fear. Ormund stood, reaching for his own clothes, but stopped when you turned on him.

“Do not,” you said.

He froze.

“You do not get to touch me while saying that.”

His jaw tightened. “I know.”

“Do you? Because you were inside me less than a quarter hour ago and now you speak of keeping me like a castle you took by siege.”

The flinch was small but visible. “That is not how I meant it.”

“I am rapidly losing interest in what you meant.”

“I do not plan to return you to a war that will put you back on a dragon before the wounds close, if Velaryx ever flies at all.”

“You do not decide that.”

“No. I do not have the right.”

“And yet.”

“And yet,” he said, voice lower, rougher, “I will not hand you back to men who will use you better than I have.”

You laughed then, once, ugly and incredulous. “Better? You think this is better?”

“I think I can keep you alive.”

“I did not ask you to.”

“No. You asked me not to insult you. So I will not. This is selfish. It is political. It is desire. It is fear. It is every foul thing men mix together and call judgment. I want you here. I want you alive. I want you away from the next field where dragons tear one another apart for crowns that will sit on skulls.”

“You want.”

“Yes.”

The bluntness took some of the air from the room.

Ormund stepped closer, slowly, stopping well outside reach. “I also know what you are. Enemy. Captive. Rider. Daughter. Woman. Proud enough to walk into flame if anyone tells you the ashes are forbidden. I know that if I send you to Corlys, you may never forgive me for the delay. If I keep you, you may never forgive me at all.”

“You make it sound tragic. That is convenient.”

“It is not tragedy. It is choice. Mine. And I will bear the cost.”

“How noble,” you said, each word bitten clean. “How very lordly of you to bear the cost of my captivity.”

“I deserve that.”

“You deserve worse.”

“Yes.”

The agreement enraged you because it left no wall to strike. You wanted excuses. You wanted command. You wanted him to become simple. Instead he stood half-dressed in lamplight and accepted your anger as if it were overdue debt.

“My father will come,” you said.

“I know.”

“Rhaenyra will demand answer.”

“She may.”

“Velaryx will heal.”

“I hope so.”

“If my dragon flies again, no chain in your camp will hold me.”

His eyes lifted. “I know that too.”

“Then you are a fool.”

“With you, increasingly.”

You hated the warmth that moved under the anger. Hated it enough to pick up his wine cup and throw it at him. He moved aside just enough for it to miss his head and strike the map table, spilling red wine across the Reach.

For one heartbeat, neither of you spoke.

Then Ormund looked at the stained maps and said, “That was a very old Arbor vintage.”

“Bill my father.”

His laugh came unwillingly. Then he stopped, because you were not laughing.

“I need to leave,” you said.

“The tent?”

“No. This pavilion. Before I say something I cannot forgive myself for softening later.”

He nodded. “I will escort you.”

“No.”

“The camp is dark.”

“I know where the guards stand.”

“My lady.”

The title sounded different now. Not formal. Not distant. Almost a plea.

You looked at him from the entrance. “You had better write carefully, Lord Hightower.”

Then you left him there.

The camp air was cold enough to bring sense back in pieces. The two guards outside Ormund’s pavilion looked startled and then aggressively blank. Good men, perhaps. Or cowards with manners. Same result. You walked past them toward Velaryx’s enclosure instead of your own tent, and neither dared stop you. Behind the cart ring, your dragon lifted that pale ruined head from sleep before you spoke. Velaryx always knew.

You pressed your brow to the warm scales of the jaw and finally shook. Not crying. You refused that. Your body shook because fury needed somewhere to go and had found bone. Velaryx rumbled beneath your hands, smoke curling around your shoulders like a living cloak.

“He means to keep us,” you whispered in High Valyrian.

The dragon’s eye opened fully. In it, the campfires reflected like a hundred tiny burnings.

“I know.”

Velaryx growled.

“I know.”

The wing shifted, dragging against the ground with a sound that made your stomach turn. Not yet. Not soon. But someday, perhaps. Dragons were stubborn creatures. So were you. Meleys had given that to Velaryx, and Rhaenys had given it to you.

Across the camp, in the pavilion you had left, Ormund sat alone until the lamps burned low. He did not summon wine to replace what had been spilled. He did not call for a servant to clean the map. Red spread across the parchment roads, soaking into inked rivers and little painted hills, turning the Reach into something closer to truth. At last he dressed properly, fastened his doublet with steady hands, and sat at the writing table.

The first sheet he ruined after three lines.

The second after seven.

On the third, he stopped pretending diplomacy would save him from saying the thing plainly.

Lord Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides, Master of Driftmark,

Your daughter lives and remains under my protection. Velaryx lives also, though the dragon’s wing is not yet fit for the sky. You have offered gold, prisoners, safe passage, threats, and promises in turn. I have considered each with the seriousness owed to your name, your grief, and your power upon the seas.

I will not return Lady Y/N to you.

He paused there. The quill hovered. Outside, the army muttered in its sleep. Somewhere far off, Tessarion cried out, a low blue note in the dark. Velaryx answered, rougher, deeper, wounded but alive.

Ormund closed his eyes briefly.

Then he continued.

This is not because I misunderstand the consequence. I know what insult this gives House Velaryon. I know what wrath it invites from you. I know also that any word I choose may appear as theft dressed in courtesy, and perhaps that judgment will stand. I will not insult either of us by pretending this choice is clean.

Your daughter was taken in battle after nearly killing Prince Daeron and Tessarion, and after burning my host’s supplies with a courage that would have been praised in every hall of Westeros had the banners beneath her been green. Since that day, Lady Y/N has been treated according to rank. No harm has been done by my order, nor will any be done while I command. Yet rank is not the whole of it. She is not cargo to be weighed against coin. She is not a gull to be released into a storm because the sea demands its own.

Another pause. His hand tightened around the quill.

If returned now, she will be sent again into war. You may deny this. I would not believe you. She would not allow any of us to believe it. Your daughter is too much Rhaenys Targaryen’s blood and too much yours to sit safely behind walls while others burn. That valor honors you. It may also kill her.

The words blurred for a moment. He blinked once, hard, and wrote on.

I do not ask your forgiveness. I do not expect your restraint. Send what answer you must. Send ships, curses, ravens, knives, or silence. I will receive them as Lord Hightower must. But understand me clearly: I will not trade her back to the fire.

Ormund Hightower, Lord of the Hightower, Defender of Oldtown

He sanded the letter, sealed it in green wax, and pressed the Hightower mark deep.

Only after the seal cooled did he allow himself to look toward the dark beyond the pavilion, where you stood with your wounded dragon beneath the camp’s dying stars, neither free nor broken, grieving and furious and alive.

By dawn, the raven would fly.

By dawn, Corlys Velaryon would have a new enemy.

And Ormund, who had commanded men through mud, flame, hunger, and dragon shadow, sat alone at his table with your blood still bright in his memory and understood that the war had taken him prisoner too.

[shitapril]

as @ned-in-net said, pengtwins ! 🐧💛

[miss-mollys-ballet-blog]

Tessarion being confused is one of the best things I've ever seen.

[ashtalkshockey]

canucks: we took our prospects rafting 🥰

sharks: we took our prospects bowling 🥰

oilers: we took our prospects paddle boating 🥰

nashville: we took our prospects in a fire truck 🥰

canes: GET IN THE SPIN CLASS 😤😤 ELBOWS UP AND DOWN 😡😡 ROD BRIND'AMOUR COULD DO IT 🗣🗣🗣🗣 IF YOUR LEGS AINT HURTIN YOU AINT WORKING HARD ENOUGH ❗️❗️❗️

[osarina]

LIFE IS STRANGE

FEATURING: Jacaerys Velaryon x fem!reader

SUMMARY: A prince washes up on the shore outside your cottage, and you must decide whether you’re going to leave him to his fate or save his life. Either way, you know there will be consequences. 

WARNINGS: fem!reader, commoner!reader, eventual dragonseed!reader, jace lives, eventual smut, class differences (jace is obviously a prince and reader is a commoner). Reader is not too fond of him at first because she is from Sharp Point. This is a bit of a mix of show canon and book canon in that Jace went to the Gullet to save his brothers and Rhaena still claimed Sheepstealer

AUTHOR'S NOTES: i HADDDD to do a fic for our beloved boy </3 i miss you jacaerys velaryon, prince of dragonstone, heir to the iron throne. I will truly never move on from this death </3 so we need a world where he does not die. I'm saur excited for this because it's my first time writing a reader who comes from a commoner background, AND I finally get to write the dragons ... originally she was not supposed to be a dragonseed, but I just cannot help myself. If I'm going to be writing a hotd era fic, our girl is going to have a dragon. ANYWAY I hope you guys enjoy! please leave a comment or reblog mwah mwah

You wonder whether it is chance or divine intervention that a Targaryen prince washes ashore beside your cottage.

By the time you get to the edge of the sea after catching a glimpse of the corpse from your porch, it is half buried in the wet sand, lying limp at your feet, and there is a lump in your throat that you cannot seem to swallow away. 

You do not know how you didn’t notice the sigil sooner.

It should have been the first thing that caught your eye, considering it was only a fortnight past that the Prince Aemond brought the great dragon Vhagar over the town you were raised in and razed it to the ground. The green and gold banners have been flying over the area since, and soldiers from the Reach have been constantly patrolling the roads, seeking out rebels and sympathizers.

You know better than to involve yourself in the affairs of any man that dons the three-headed dragon, you tell yourself, trying to will yourself to walk away from the corpse before anyone can catch you standing near it.

Red or gold, black or green—it does not matter to you, the wars of nobles are graves for common folk, and you have no desire to meet an early one. You have done well enough for yourself since your father passed. You refuse to squander the life you’ve built because a prince washed up on the shore near your home.

The boy at your feet is young, you cannot help but notice—your age, perhaps—dark of hair and fair of skin. At a distance, he had looked like any other body the sea had decided to return, and your first instinct had been to rush toward him rather than avert your gaze and pretend you had seen nothing.

Your hands tremble at your sides, and you have to forcibly still them as you take in a deep breath.

This is war, you recall the soldiers saying when the survivors demanded to know the reason for the tragedy that took place at Sharp Point—mothers with tears in their eyes and no bodies to bury, fathers who had lost their livelihood and the children for whom they built it, your neighbors, your friends. They say Lord Bar Emmon sits on the usurper’s council, so all of the commonfolk who were unfortunate enough to be born beneath his banners have been made to pay the price of his loyalties, allies of a queen they have never seen and casualties of a war they never chose.

This is war, they will tell you the same as they cut off your head if they see you kneeling beside this corpse and call mercy treason. Because it is always the burden of the commonfolk, paying the price of noble quarrels. Princes speak of honor and succession, of rights and oaths and stolen crowns, and it is fishermen and farmers who have to bury their dead. They will not care to hear what you have to say if they think you're affiliated with the Black queen and her supporters, just as the Prince Aemond did not care whether the people of Sharp Point had declared for the Blacks or merely happened to be born beneath the wrong lord.

But now, a prince lies dead upon your shore, and you wonder if this is how it begins again. 

You should leave him.

The thought comes immediately, sensible in light of the circumstances, even if it does make your stomach flip. You should turn around and go home, bolt your door, and tell no one what you saw. The sea will reclaim him, or the crabs will pick his bones clean; maybe the patrol will stumble upon the body before the tide rises, and they can parade it through the streets the same way you heard they did to Princess Rhaenys’s dragon.

By the morning, he will be gone one way or another, and you can move on with your life as though you never saw him at all. He will be somebody else’s misfortune, or more hopefully, no one else’s at all. 

It is a corpse, anyway. The boy has not moved since you arrived, and his chest does not seem to be rising and falling. There are two arrows through his shoulder, and a blueness to his lips that you’ve only seen in the dead, so—

As though to mock you, he lets out a wet, ragged cough, water bubbling at his lips, lashes fluttering just enough for you to catch sight of dark, hazy eyes that slip over you once before they slide shut again.

You feel sick to your stomach.

He does not stir again. One side of his face is bruised an ugly purple, his dark hair plastered to his brow with seawater and blood. He cannot be much older than you—the traitorous thought crosses your mind again. There is something terribly young about him, lying there half-drowned in the surf, one hand curled weakly into the sand as though, even unconscious, he is still trying to cling to something.

He does not look like a prince, you think miserably. He looks like a boy who is going to die.

The sea foams around your boots, and his body twitches as it threatens to reclaim him—the only feeble resistance he’s capable of in his state. You do not know how he still breathes—the fires might still burn on the Gullet, but the fighting ended days past. How long has he been floating about, dragged around by vicious currents and tossed by waves? It doesn’t even seem as though it should be possible, as though the Seven themselves intervened and—

—and dropped him on your shore, in your hands, and you are contemplating leaving him to die.

The thought is unpleasant, a heavy stone in your chest in place of your heart.

You are not a cruel person. You have cared for gulls with broken wings, and you leave scraps outside your door for the old orange cat that wanders the area. During the winter three years prior, you spent a fortnight nursing a lamb that did not even belong to you because you could not bear the sound of it crying.

And now there is a boy at your feet—bleeding, drowned, scarcely clinging to life—and because there is a dragon sewn onto his chest, you are trying to convince yourself to let the sea finish what arrows and war could not. 

His lashes are dark against his cheek. Young, you think again, even more traitorous than the last, no older than ten and nine, if even. There is salt crusted at the corners of his mouth and blood soaking through his tunic in sluggish, rusty streams that stain the pale sand beneath him.

He looks cold—traitor, traitor, traitor.

He looks like a prince, you try to insist. A dragon prince, fire and blood and ruin, dangerous. 

Cold. Hurt. Dying.

You need to walk away, you tell yourself again, desperate this time, because the longer you stand there staring at him, the more you fail to convince yourself of the correct path. 

A prince's life is worth more than yours, more than your cottage and your little patch of land and the fishing boat your father left you. It is worth armies and dragons and castles and men willing to kill for a name. 

If this boy lives, others will come looking for him. 

And if the soldiers discover him in your home, they will not ask questions. They will not care that you found him by chance or that you never bent the knee to Queen Rhaenyra—that you could not even tell anyone why one half of House Targaryen wishes the other dead. They will see the three-headed dragon on his breast and the roof over his head, and that will be enough to condemn you.

Worse, the Prince Aemond and the dragon Vhagar could return. You think of Tom, the miller’s son, pulled from the boiling river after dragonfire reached the gristmill. You think of little Grace’s face as she searched the ashes for her mother. You think of all of your neighbors, all of your friends, who hardly survived the first time fire rained from the sky, and you think of all of those who didn’t. 

He is not worth it. He is not worth the risk. A prince is only a man born with a special name, there’s no reason you should save him and condemn countless others—he bleeds the same, he dies the same, and when the Stranger comes for him, he is no more spared than any other man.

Except, he didn’t, did he? 

He should be dead—any other man would be dead.

Two arrows through the shoulder, half-drowned, tossed upon the sea for days on end—there is no surviving that. Yet he breathes still, ragged and shallow though it may be, his fingers twitching every now and then.

The Stranger came for him and left empty-handed.

The Stranger came for him and left him with you. 

Why?

There are no prophecies in your life, no gods whispering in your ear. You are a fisherman's daughter with a cottage by the sea and enough coin to keep yourself fed through winter if the catch is good. You know little of the gods save for the prayers your father taught you as a child and the candles you light for him on his nameday. The Seven did not save your father or your town; they did not save Tom or Grace’s mother or any of the others who screamed as dragonfire turned their homes to ash.

So why? Why this boy? Why this prince? Why should the gods spare a dragon's son when they had not spared children and fishermen and mothers? Why have they left him for you?

You do not have an answer. The only answer before you is a body on the sand, breathing when it ought not to be.

You stare down at him, furious and distressed and so, so unsure. He looks dead again—still as driftwood, cold and pale, stiff. His lips are blue like the dead, and his chest hardly rises and falls. You wonder if you imagined what you saw before. If your guilt conjured a cough where there had been none, if your conscience simply could not bear the thought of walking away even from a corpse.

Slowly, you sink to your knees beside him, damp sand clinging to your knees, the sea foam wetting your trousers. Your hand is still trembling in spite of all efforts to still it. You lift it to his throat, hesitating only for a moment. 

If there is life, you will do what you must.

If there is not, you will turn and walk away. 

You have never prayed for someone to be dead before. 

Please, you think now miserably. Please.

Your fingers brush the skin of his throat—it is cold. He must be cold. So cold, that for a brief, terrible moment, hope flares in your chest, and then—

There is a flutter—it is weak and uneven, so faint that you almost miss it, but it is there.

Your head hangs forward, and you blink away the tears that prick in your eyes, because you know this action will have consequences. You know that there is no going back once you have entangled yourself with dragons. You know that every story told of House Targaryen ends in blood and fire and ruin for everyone foolish enough to stand too close them.

You know that this boy could be the death of you.

The soldiers could discover him. Your neighbors could discover him—as much as they care for you, they fear Vhagar more. If word spreads that a prince of the black faction lives and is hidden beneath your roof, you could hang for it. They could burn your cottage to the ground. They could drag you through the streets and call you traitor.

Worse still, he could recover.

Because then he would not be a half-dead boy on the sand. He would be a prince again. A son of the house of the dragon. He would leave, and the war would continue, and perhaps one day you would hear his name in some tavern and learn that he had mounted a dragon and burned a town much like your own.

The sea rushes forward again, cold water washing over your boots and his legs alike. He does not move. He is so cold.

“Why did you have to wash up here?” you breathe out—frustrated, angry, resigned, because you have never been one to turn your back on someone in need. 

His pulse flutters once more against your fingers, and he does not stir. 

Then, because the gods have a cruel sense of humor and because your heart has always been softer than your head, you slide your arms beneath the prince’s shoulders and knees.

With a soft curse and the sea at your heels, you gather the dragon prince into your arms and carry home your ruin.

—————————

He is Jacaerys Velaryon, son of Queen Rhaenyra, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne. 

Three days have passed since you found him on the shore, and he has hardly stirred since you dragged him into your cottage. You have been riddled with anxiety since, jumping at every sound and fearing the worst when someone addresses you. It is only a matter of time—whenever a rider passes on the road beyond the trees or the patrol sweeps down your shore, you think they care coming for him. Coming for you. 

You spend the first day trying to keep him alive. 

You drag him home, soaked to the bone and half-frozen, laying him atop your bed as you get a fire going and wrap him in your blankets. For a while, you can only stand there staring at him, because it is one thing to decide not to leave a boy to die and another entirely to realize you have no idea how to save him.

You have to cut away his tunic to remove it, and it makes it easier to breathe once the three-headed dragon is out of sight, but then you have to address the monstrosity beneath it—bruises darkening one side of his ribs, yellow and purple and black, cuts everywhere, salt crusting his skin and body a ruin of blood. 

You wonder how many rocks the currents slammed him into before he finally washed to shore. The sea around Sharp Point is, well, sharp. Jagged rocks and narrow inlets line the coast, and more than one fisherman has vanished into the sea after his boat drifted too close to reefs beneath the tide.

It is a cruel stretch of sea—crueler still to a boy half-dead and alone. 

And then there were the arrows. 

The shafts protrude from his shoulders at awful angles, the flesh around them angry and swollen. You cry while removing them, because you have never done something like it before, and your hands cannot stop shaking. A part of you wonders if the gods left him for you so that his blood could be on your hands instead, and you cannot fathom what you’ve done to deserve this.

You expect him to wake once you start removing them. At the very least, you expect him to scream. The first shaft pierced cleanly through his shoulder and is easy enough to ease out, but the second lodged itself deep in the flesh, refusing to budge until you brace your foot against the bedframe and pull with both hands. 

It should have been agony—any man would have cried out. 

The prince does not so much as flinch.

You remember staring at him afterward, the arrow clutched in your hand and your own cheeks wet with tears, wondering if he had died while you were removing it. You press your fingers to his throat with a panic that borders on hysteria, and you aren’t sure if you’re relieved or disappointed when you feel the fluttering pulse still there. 

A traitorous part of you wishes that he had died. 

A corpse is a tragedy, but a tragedy can be dumped in the sea and abandoned. A tragedy will not bring more war to your ravaged home.

A living prince, on the other hand, is a catastrophe that you do not know what to do with. Your home has already faced ruin once, and the longer he remains in your care, the more at risk you will be of bringing it upon you all again, because if he is captured in your care, then that means war and blood and fire and more dragons. The whole town, all of the survivors, everyone will be branded traitors to the crown.

But the prince lived, so you can only hope that he will heal quick enough and be gone before you have the chance to regret helping him.

The fever comes on the second day, and the corpse in your bed finally gives to life. 

You notice it when you are wiping the blood from his face, and your hand brushes his forehead. It’s as though all of the cold of the sea had fled his body at once and left only fire behind. It’s what you expect of a Targaryen prince, really—the burning heat, closer to dragon than man— it feels more natural than the cold, but you are scared anyway. 

You do not know much about treating battle wounds, but you do know about fever. 

Your younger brother died of it during a long winter a decade past—no matter how hard your mother worked to keep it at bay, he was dead by nightfall. Your mother passed in the same moon, to the same sickness, as did half of the children in Sharp Point, because fever does not care whether you are young or old, rich or poor, prince or peasant.

His skin is flushed, sweat beading along his brow and soaking the dark hair at his temples as he twists in the sheets violently, threatening to reopen the wounds you just stitched close. His breathing changes too—no longer the slow drags of air, shallow and erratic, like he had spent days at sea only to begin suffocating on dry land.

You fetch water from the well until your shoulders ache. You lay cloths upon his brow and change them whenever they grow warm. You feed the fire, then fear you have made him too hot and let it die down, only to panic that he would grow cold again and build it back up.

Every few minutes, you find yourself pressing your hand to his forehead or his throat, checking for fever and pulse alike. There is never a change—still alive and burning, and you don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified. 

At one point, he begins muttering. You cannot make out most of it—the words are slurred, little more than broken sounds spilling from fevered lips. Names, you think. Places, maybe. Some do not seem to be spoken in the common tongue.

Once, very clearly, he whispers, "Mother.”

You have to change the cloth on his forehead afterward and pretend your eyes are not stinging with tears. You curse the gods throughout that second day—you wish that you’d never left the cottage at all the morning you found him, you wish you’d left him to die, you wish, you wish, you wish, as though any of it matters anymore. 

You sleep little that night, sitting beside your bed and watching him breathe. Terrified every time his breathing slowed, and equally terrified every time it quickened. You count the moments between each breath until dawn creeps through your shutters, and by morning, you feel like you have lived a lifetime in a single night.

The third day—today—you have to make the trek into town.

You have used the last of your willow bark, and there is only a heel of stale bread left, a few onions, and enough drinking water to last another day if you’re careful. You need fruit and vegetables, more barley, and you have a catch that you never got the chance to bring to the market to trade the morning you found the prince. 

You cannot put it off any longer, much as you may wish—the prince needs supplies, and unfortunately, so do you.

You do not like going into town. You have never liked going into town—you have always been fond of your neighbors and your friends, but you were not fond of the way they circle and crowd you whenever you make your weekly appearance for trade. You got overwhelmed too quickly, and you didn’t know how to make an exit without seeming rude, so you ended up staying there for hours when there were many chores you had to get done at home.

Now, it is like a graveyard. The destruction following the Prince Aemond’s attack on Sharp Point has yet to be cleared. The soldiers are too busy with war and patrols, and the survivors are too busy trying to salvage what they can of their ruined lives. 

When you enter the town, you can still smell charred flesh and death. 

The children usually run to you when you arrive, chattering about the games they’ve played and the rumors they’ve heard, if you saw the wild dragon Grey Ghost while you were out on your boat this week, and you smile and nod along with them. But all of the children are dead now, and you are not crowded by friends and neighbors eager to make conversation with you, because most of them are dead now too.

It is in the market when you overhear green-cloaked soldiers talking about the battle that took place in the Gullet, and you finally put a name to the face of the prince in your home. You try to pretend that you’re not eavesdropping, fingers shaking terribly as you sort through the fruits and vegetables that Wylem carted in from his farm, because you need to know if they have figured out what you’ve done, if they know the prince is in your care, under your roof.

But they only laugh as they speak of dead dragons and a mourning pretender queen. They say the Blacks have lost two dragons, and the bastard prince, Jacaerys Velaryon, is dead. Any man who can find his body washed up on the shore to deliver to the King will see unfathomable riches. 

Momentarily, you are angry at yourself because the royals brought this war and have caused all of this suffering, but when your lashes flutter shut, for a split second, you can only picture the haunted look on your mother’s face as she held your dead brother in her arms. You think of Miss Ellyn, who tossed herself into the sea when she found out her son had been killed on the Kingsroad. You think of your friend, Marie, who you found screaming, fisting her infant daughter’s ashes after the burning of the town. You think of them, and then you think of the black queen on her throne, and you feel the same lump in your throat.

Then you remind yourself that this is her doing. 

Her doing, her half-brother’s doing, the other nobles’ doing. They brought this war to Westeros, they brought death and destruction, fire and blood, and you force yourself to shake your head and push it all away, trading some of the fish you caught for fruits and vegetables and barley with a watery smile that you’re sure Wylem took notice of. 

There are more important things to worry about: if there is a bounty on the prince’s body, everybody will be searching for him. Not just soldiers, the people too—your friends, your neighbors, everyone. Many starve, more struggle, so if there is an opportunity for gold, they will all be on the hunt. You need to burn his cloak and tunic when you get back to the cottage, anything that associates him with House Targaryen. 

You nearly trip over your own feet racing back to the cottage, second-guessing every conversation you had in the town. Wylem asked you why you were getting twice as much food as you usually get—you do not remember how you responded. 

Did you imply that you had a visitor? Why can’t you remember? What excuse did you give? Did the soldiers overhear? Are they following you? Do they know? Why can’t you remember? You’re scared—you do not think you’ve ever been so scared in your entire life. 

You look over your shoulder every five steps, worried that they’re going to come charging after you, demanding you to bring them to the Prince Jacaerys before taking your head. You’re not cut out for this—you’re the daughter of a fisherman. There’s no world where you should be worrying whether soldiers are going to hunt you down for saving a prince. 

There are tears in your eyes when you make it back to the cottage, and your fingers are trembling around the bags Wylem packed for you. You shut the door behind you, and it takes you three tries to bolt it properly. When you finally do, you rest your forehead against the wood and let out a trembling sigh.

You—

“Who are you?”

There is a knife to your throat.

You stare at the crack in the wood of your door, breath catching, desperately trying not to move lest you risk the knife slicing through your skin. The crack appeared last winter, you remind yourself, trying not to focus too much on the fact that you can feel the cool edge of the blade. Your friend, Evander, was meant to fix before the next, but Evander is dead now, and you may well be too, if the knife at your throat presses any deeper. 

“Answer me, who are you? Where am I? Wh—” the prince—Jacaerys Velaryon, Prince of Dragonstone, Heir to the Iron Throne—falters suddenly, and you can only breathe again when the knife drops from your neck, and you feel the presence at your back disappear. “You—you are a woman.”

You do not turn to look at him immediately, eyes sliding shut as you fight to steady the frantic beating of your heart, drawing one slow breath after another until your shaking eases enough to trust your legs. Your fingers tighten on the bags cradled in your arms before you force yourself to turn around.

Prince Jacaerys Velaryon stands three paces behind you, one hand braced against the edge of your table, pained, pale, barely conscious. He is bare from the waist up, and the stitches you painstakingly worked through his torn skin have pulled loose, fresh blood soaking the bandages and dripping down his chest and back. 

You see more clearly in the light of the afternoon sun just how ruined his body is, bruises and cuts—you think his ribs must be broken, you did not notice just how bad off he was when you had him lying in the dim corner where you keep your bed. 

For a moment, you forget that you are face-to-face with a Targaryen prince—it is only the boy you dragged in from the sea and spent hours trying to keep alive. 

Your lips curve down into a deep frown, brows knitting together. You exhale as you say, “You reopened your wounds. It took me an hour to get them properly closed.”

The prince stares at you. 

As soon as the words fly from your mouth, you remember who it is before you. The son of a queen. The heir to the Iron Throne, if one listens to his mother. A pretender's heir and bastard, if one listens to her enemies. You do not know which of them is right, nor do you particularly care. Such questions belong to lords and knights and people with far too much time to argue over crowns. 

To the likes of you, prince is title enough for you to keep your mouth shut and your head bowed.

He does not immediately respond, gaze flicking around your cottage uncertainly. Your bed, stained with his blood. The dying hearth. The table where you left out the last bits of the bread, just in case he awoke while you were gone and was hungry. The bandages you left at his bedside. The basin of pink water you forgot to empty before leaving for town.

His lips, dry and cracked, part as he stares at you and murmurs more to himself than to you, “You tended my wounds.”

You hesitate, then nod, swallowing once. “I found you on the shore a few days past, my prince—” Your Grace? What is the proper way to address a prince? My Lord does not seem grand enough for the heir to a queen. Prince feels the safest—whatever he may be, no one seems inclined to dispute that part. “—I… you should probably be resting.”

“I need to know what happened,” he says instead, stepping closer to you. He is too pale, sweat beads at his forehead, dark curls matted to his skin. His eyes are wide and wild, pupils dilated the same way you’ve seen in men mad with grief or fear or fury, moments before lashing out at the nearest person. You find yourself tensing instinctively. “What do you know of the battle that took place on the Gullet? Did Baela make it back to Dragonstone? And Rhaena—she was on that wild dragon, and—my brothers, did my brothers make it back? How long has it been? Where are we? How far is it to Dragonstone? I must return immediately, I—”

The prince only just seems to realize how you’ve drawn away, back pressed against the door to your own home, arms tightening around the sack in your arms whenever he comes closer. His tongue darts out to wet his cracked lips, gaze flicking to the knife he dropped onto the floor and the fear in your face. 

Shame crosses his expression instantly.

“I—” His expression twists as he puts space between the two of you again. You wonder whether it’s from pain or from struggling to force out an apology. Both, likely. He continues, “You have helped me—saved my life, most like—and here I am frightening you. I… I thought I’d been captured. I woke in an unfamiliar place. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know if I was a prisoner or if the battle had been lost. I heard the door open and…”

He trails off, and you stand there awkwardly, tension easing slowly from your shoulders. He is still on guard, but he does not seem so inclined to pull a blade on you again. Your lips part to tell him where he is, what little you know of the battle on the Gullet. 

Instead, you ask, “Do most enemy strongholds look like a fisherman’s cottage, my prince?” 

You are mortified the moment the question spills from your lips—he is a Targaryen prince, they are known for blood and fire and madness, dragons and crowns, and you speak to him as though he’s one of your peers. 

Prince Jacaerys stares at you for a long moment, and then, to your astonishment, his gaze flicks around the inside of your home again, and something suspiciously like embarrassment crosses his face. 

“I suppose not.”

The corner of your mouth twitches despite yourself, and you let out a soft puff of air through your nose before making your way across the room to place the sack you’ve carried from town onto the table. You will have to sort all of what you’ve got later; for now, you need to get the prince resettled before he opens up any more of his wounds.

You turn to look at him again, faltering when you see the pained expression that crosses his face, so sudden that it steals all the color from his cheeks. His hand shoots to his side, fingers digging into the bandages wrapped around his ribs.

“My prince?” you ask hesitantly, taking half a step forward, arm only slightly extended. It is one thing to carry him to your cottage and treat his wounds while he’s unconscious; it is different now that he’s awake.

Prince Jacaerys inhales sharply through his teeth. He is swaying on his feet, breath gone shallow—he looks as though he’s moments from collapsing hard onto your wooden floor. Still, his jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck tighten as he draws himself upright through sheer stubbornness.

“I am fine,” he insists.

“You should sit, my prince.”

“I am standing,” he replies with a tight smile, as though a bead of sweat isn’t rolling down his temple from strain to remain upright and his lips aren’t trembling with pain.

“Barely.”

The prince blinks as though caught off guard by the response, casting a look that is partially confused, and mostly offended in your direction. Your lashes flutter shut as you brace yourself for a volatile reaction, because he is a prince and you are a fisherman’s daughter, and you are arguing with him as though he is an equal and not one of those dragon-riding royals people compose songs about. You think you must have lost your wits entirely these past few days. 

Instead, he shoots back, with all the dignity he can muster while visibly swaying, "I have endured worse."

You stare at the blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his shoulder, uncertain if you believe him. You say with less heat, "That is not the same as being well, my prince."

His jaw tightens, and you fight a sigh. Gods, he actually looks as though he is preparing an argument. 

You wonder, briefly, what your life has become. Three weeks ago, your greatest concern had been whether the currents would ease up enough for you to take the boat out of the shallows to catch some fish. Now, Sharp Point has burned and you are standing in your cottage, arguing with a dragon prince about his injuries. 

The absurdity of it nearly makes you laugh, wondering if perhaps this entire ordeal is some fever dream brought on by bad fish and Leila’s uncle’s dubious ale. 

Then, Prince Jacaerys’s left leg buckles. 

He reaches for the table and misses, injured shoulder slamming into the edge hard enough to wrench a strangled cry from him, and before you can think better of it, you're moving.

You let go of the sack of fruits and vegetables and barley you were keeping steady on your table; it topples over, and all of your pristine apples go rolling across the floor of your cottage, but you barely notice, panicked when you realize that he careening right toward the hardwood floor.  

You catch the prince around the waist just as he starts to fall, but he is heavier than you expect.

You brace yourself, convinced that he is going to take you down with him, but you manage to steer him sideways toward the chair beside the table. He collapses into it heavily, breath hissing through clenched teeth as pain flashes across his face.

Momentum carries you forward with him—far, far too forward.

One hand lands against the uninjured side of his chest to steady yourself, the other gripping the arm of the chair. For a horrifying second, you are practically sprawled across the heir to the Iron Throne’s lap. You jerk away so quickly you nearly trip over one of the escaped apples, face burning and hands shaking.

"Sorry," you blurt, mortified. “Sorry. Sorry, I did not mean—”

“I believe,” Prince Jacaerys begins with a grimace, “that was my fault.”

You do not respond, flustered, trying to put more distance between you to calm yourself down. Your gaze flicks back over to him, but he is too busy grinding his teeth as he glances down at his wounds to pay you any mind. You let out a soft puff of air through your nose before you look at the apples rolling about your floor, and then reach for one still on your table—you might have lost some sense over the past three days with the little sleep you’ve gotten, but you are not about to feed a prince food off your floor.

You make your way back over to him and hold the apple out to him. He blinks once at it before his gaze lifts to yours questioningly.

“I do not know when last you ate—a while, certainly,” you tell him quietly. “You should get something in you while I redress the bandages. I’ll cook some stew once I’m certain you’re not going to bleed out.”

Prince Jacaerys exhales through his nose before he takes the apple from you, rolling it between his fingers. You step past him so that you can move the basin of water closer to where he’s sitting, grabbing a clean rag and the bandages that you left next to your bed. 

You come to stand in front of him again, hesitating before you motion to the wounds on his shoulder. You ask, “May I?”

His dark gaze flicks up to yours briefly before he nods, and your throat tightens as you shift closer, fingers fumbling a bit as you grab for the edge of the bandages to unwind them from around him. It is much more intimidating doing this while he’s awake, inches away from you, and eyes tracking your every move.

“I found you three days ago, my prince,” you tell him at last, trying to remember all of the questions he asked earlier so that you can busy your mind with something other than the fact that you can feel his skin hot against yours. “Before that, the fighting died another three. In truth, my prince, I do not know how you survived so long at sea.”

Prince Jacaerys says nothing in response. His attention remains fixed somewhere beyond the wall behind you, expression distant. You suspect he is counting the days since the battle, the hours his family has believed he is dead, the minutes his mother has spent mourning him. You keep your gaze trained on his shoulder as you unwind the last of the bandages and set them down on the table. 

You press your lips together when you see that the stitches have loosened at the back of his shoulder—where one of the arrows had dug deep, but not deep enough to pass cleanly through. Pulling it free had torn through muscle and flesh alike, leaving a ragged injury that had taken you nearly an hour to clean, stitch, and stop bleeding.

You exhale as you run the pad of your finger briefly over the stitches, trying to figure out if you can salvage what effort you already put in or if you would have to pull them out and redo them entirely. 

“And my family? My younger brothers? Baela and Rhaena? Have you heard what has become of them?” the prince asks, and you glance up just enough to see how his jaw tightens when your finger brushes over the wound. “Did we win the battle?”

“I do not know if anyone can be said to have won that battle, my prince,” you answer quietly, tongue darting out to wet your lips as you finally start to get to work at reclosing the wound. Your gaze slips to the side when he finally starts to eat the apple you passed to him. He makes a noise in the back of his throat, as though he’s only just realized how hungry he is. “Both fleets were decimated. The dead still wash up on the northern shore.”

How did Prince Jacaerys make it to your shore, then? 

Not for the first time, you have to wonder if the gods themselves placed him directly into your hands. 

Most of the rest of the dead have washed up on the northern and western shores of Sharp Point, as it is where the currents run strongest, but the prince somehow made it to where your cottage sits on the eastern shore. If he had washed up anywhere else, the patrol would have certainly found him by now. You've heard they have spent the last several days combing the beaches, hauling bloated corpses from the tide and turning them over with the tips of their spears, searching for the dragon prince they are certain the sea claimed.

Prince Jacaerys’s breath hitches when you tug lightly at the stitches holding the skin of his shoulder together. Already, he’s finished the apple you handed him, absentmindedly turning the core between his fingers while his thoughts remain leagues away. 

It is only when the last bite is gone that he seems to notice, and his gaze drifts toward the table. He hesitates, and you think it is almost comical—this is the heir to the Iron Throne, a dragonrider, a prince who has flown into battle, and he looks as though asking for another apple might be an imposition too great to make when he’s been floating at sea for at least a week. 

You hold the stitches carefully with your right hand so that you can lean forward and grab another apple from your table to pass to him. His cheeks color slightly when he realizes that you noticed.

“I did not mean to stare,” he murmurs, taking the apple from you and cradling it carefully between his hands. He asks again, “Have you heard what has become of my family?” 

You shake your head, focusing on tending to his wounds again. You think that you’ll be able to salvage your work. It is good, you think—you can get him resting and then cook some stew for the two of you. You didn’t eat much yesterday, frazzled by the fever and trying to keep him comfortable, and you’re starting to feel a lightness in your head. 

“I’ve only heard what the soldiers say in town, my prince,” you murmur, trying to figure out how to go about speaking the news he certainly won’t take well. The last thing you need is for grief to send him bolting for Dragonstone before he can so much as walk across your cottage without collapsing. If he does not kill himself by straining his body when it is not ready, then the patrols will certainly catch him and have his head—and then yours. 

You let out a soft sigh as you tie off the stitches on his shoulder blade and lean down to wet the clean rag before lifting it to his bloody skin. You’re careful around the edges of the wound, trying not to disturb the stitches, working slowly at the dried and wet blood from the curve of his shoulder, over the collarbone, down the length of his back. 

You try not to think too hard about what you’re doing. 

If you do, it begins to feel far too intimate. 

It is one thing to drag an unconscious stranger from the sea. It is another to stand so close that you can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, to brush your fingers across the line of his shoulders. You have spent three days tending him without much thought, because there had been no room for embarrassment while the Stranger lingered at his bedside.

Now he is awake and watching you, and every accidental brush of your knuckles against his skin seems to linger a heartbeat too long. He is a prince of the realm, and you are a fisherman’s daughter—people like you are not supposed to touch people like him, and yet—

You exhale through your nose harshly. You busy yourself with the rag, scrubbing a little harder than necessary at a streak of dried blood along his collarbone simply to distract yourself, and his jaw pinches.

“Sorry,” you say quietly.

“It does not hurt,” he replies—a lie, surely, any man would be in agonizing pain. But maybe not; any man also would have died in the sea. Maybe the rumors are true: the Targaryens are closer to god than man; they do not feel pain or have to fear the Stranger the same way people like you ought to. “What have you heard from the soldiers in town? Where are we?”

“Half a league from Sharp Point, my prince,” you answer, still evading the question, which he seems to realize from the way he glances at you over his shoulder, gaze sharp and accusing. He knows you are withholding something. You exhale lightly through your nose and then say hesitantly, “They say two dragons fell over the Gullet. I could not tell you which.”

“Two?!” Prince Jacaerys demands, immediately rising to his feet, so quickly that the chair scrapes against the floor, and you fear he might rip back open the stitches. He whirls on you, eyes wide, pupils large as coins, and you almost flinch. “Two dragons?”

You swallow thickly as you nod. “My prince—”

“One must be—” His voice catches. He cannot finish the thought. For the first time since he awoke, real grief overtakes him completely. It drains his face of what little color had returned, leaves him staring at nothing as though he can already see the answer waiting for him. “I need to know the second. Whose was it? Which dragon fell?”

It unsettles you how close he sounds to pleading when moments before, you had been wondering whether the stories of the Targaryens’ deism held some weight, because gods do not look like this. They do not stand in a stranger’s cottage with fear plain on their face, hands trembling as they wait for an answer they already dread. 

The same lump forms in your throat now that did when you heard the soldiers mocking a grieving queen and couldn’t help your thoughts from turning to your own mother, to Miss Ellyn, to your friend, Marie. For a moment, he is not a Targaryen prince or a dragonlord; you see a son and an older brother. A boy your age who knows there are only a handful of dragons flying over the Gullet, and every one of them belongs to someone he loves.

“I do not—”

“I need to return home,” he says immediately, as though his face isn’t white with pain and his stitches don’t strain every time he moves. His eyes glaze over you as though you’re not even there, and he takes a step toward the door to your small cottage. “Sharp Point—there must be passage to Dragonstone, there—”

Panic flares in your chest when he makes as though to leave. It is noon, and the patrols have become more frequent along the shores outside your cottage. They’ve spent a week carding through the western and northern shores, and they’ve been sending more and more men to the east—you worry they’re becoming desperate. The longer they go without finding a corpse, the more they may fear that there isn’t one.

If they have an inkling that Prince Jacaerys is still alive, they’ll start kicking down doors, and if they start kicking down doors, they will find him, and your life will be forfeit for harboring him. 

“You cannot,” you say before you can think better of it, lunging forward as though to grab his wrist, but you stop yourself before you can make a terrible mistake, stopping a hairsbreadth from brushing his skin. 

What is wrong with you? you think furiously. You need to rest tonight before you do something you cannot take back. Already you have gotten snide with and you have argued with a prince of the realm—now you have commanded him and nearly tried to seize him. You would have been lucky to only lose your hand in any other circumstance. Had he been standing in a hall instead of your cottage, surrounded by knights instead of rough-hewn furniture, you might have lost your head. 

“I cannot?” Prince Jacaerys turns to you, bafflement momentarily eclipsing the fear that had consumed him only seconds before, as though he cannot quite fathom that someone has just told him no. 

“My prince, you can scarcely stand,” you say. His gaze drops to where your hand is still hovering near his arm, head cocking to the side and brows lifting, and you snap it back to your chest immediately, heat flooding your face. “You have lost a lot of blood, you have barely eaten in a week, your wounds have only just been stitched again, and there are patrols searching for you every road between here and the sea.”

He continues to stare at you, disbelief riddling his expression. You have the distinct impression that no one has ever spoken to him this way before—certainly not a fisherman’s daughter. You force yourself to press on while he’s silent, hoping to make your point and rid him of this futile endeavor before he gets you both killed. 

“The Prince Aemond burned Sharp Point’s harbor. There are no ships capable of navigating the currents of the Gullet, and the water still burns besides. I do not have a horse for you to ride to Stonedance. You could not get to Dragonstone even if you were not hurt,” you insist. “I will return to town tomorrow to try to get more information, but please, my prince, you mustn’t leave. You will only be putting us both at risk.”

For a long moment, you think that he will invoke his title or duty and insist upon leaving anyway, or maybe he will simply walk out the door despite everything you have said, and there is nothing you could do to stop him. 

Then, his expression changes, twisting into something pained as he looks away, a shuddered breath escaping his lips. His shoulders, held tense since the moment you uttered the word two, sink ever so slightly. The panic that had driven him to his feet has nowhere left to go, draining from him all at once, leaving only exhaustion behind. 

One hand drops back down to his ribs, pain crossing his face. Whatever strength carried him to his feet abandons him just as quickly as the panic, leaving him swaying where he stands. He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he reopens them, the panic has been replaced by a type of defeat that is infinitely more difficult to look at.

You step forward cautiously when you see how his body is trembling, hand hovering uncertainly between the two of you, silently asking permission to help him. Prince Jacaerys stares at your outstretched hand, then at the bed on the far side of the room; you think, for a second, that he will attempt to cross on his own, but then his nostrils flare as he exhales, inclining his head just enough to grant you the permission his pride refuses to voice aloud.

Carefully, you slip beneath his uninjured arm, taking care to avoid the fresh bandages. He is warm—still warmer than he ought to be—and you can’t help but wonder if his fever has returned or if this is just how hot dragon prince’s typically run. 

He leans into you only slightly, weight settling lightly against your shoulder—you suspect he is trying very hard not to. The journey from the door to your bed is scarcely a dozen paces, but it feels much longer. 

“We were supposed to win this victory for her,” Prince Jacaerys says after a moment, voice breaking, the words slip free before he can stop it. You do not think the admission is meant for you, so you stay quiet. His throat works as he swallows. “We were supposed to—”

He cuts himself off, looking away again as you help him ease back down into your bed. As soon as he is seated, something close to relief crosses his face, lashes fluttering; the pain is still there, but not quite as terrible as it was when he was straining on his feet.

“The fact that you are alive at all is a victory, my prince,” you say quietly, even though you do not think the words will be of any reassurance. “You should rest. The sooner you are well, the sooner we can figure out a way to get you home. I’ll cook up a stew and wake you when it’s finished.”

He exhales again, jaw tightening as he looks away with a resigned expression. You turn your back on him to deal with the mess you made of the kitchen area, grimacing slightly at everything spilled across your floorboards and the table. 

“What is your name?” Prince Jacaerys asks you suddenly. “I think I ought to know the name of the woman who saved my life.”

You let a soft breath, glancing over your shoulder at him. He is pained still, but there is an earnest look in his eyes that makes you falter—you remember how close you were to leaving him to his fate, and you have to look away again before he can catch the guilt that crosses over your face.

With a shaky exhale, you give the prince your name, and you cannot help but feel as though your life has irrevocably changed, and you do not think for the better. 

————————————

The sea is on fire.

Jace cannot tell where the flames end and the water begins. Ships burn around him, masts collapsing into the waves with deafening cracks; men scream as they’re consumed by the fire, and dragons let out terrible shrieks as they dive low to bring down another ship full of Myrish mercenaries. 

He tries to focus.

He chases after the rogue dragon, hoping to kill the rider before the dragon can burn any more of the Velayron fleet—or worse, catch Baela and Moondancer. But there is panic clawing at his chest, and smoke and salt clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. He’s screaming at Vermax to fly faster, to kill the rider, and then—then he sees Rhaena. 

He sees Rhaena atop the wild dragon, and she is screaming, crying, desperately trying to get it under control, and Jace is confused, reeling as he yells at Vermax to stop at the last second. He and dragon both diving down away from the chase before Vermax could breathe fire on his cousin.

Rhaena does not have a dragon, he thinks, trying to figure out what is happening, and Rhaena is supposed to be with his brothers, and his brothers are captured by the enemy, and he isn’t sure if Stormcloud and Aegon made it to shore, and there is too much going on, and—

—and Vermax is falling. 

Vermax is banking hard, being dragged down into the sea, and Jace’s stomach lurches. He’s yelling—begging—Vermax to fly, and Vermax is trying, he’s trying so hard, wings beating smoke through the air. He shrieks as another bolt catches him in the wing, and Jace feels the pain himself—he feels the pain, the primal fear, everything that Vermax does, because Vermax is his, and he is Vermax’s, and they are bonded, and Vermax is drowning, and the water is so cold, and Jace cannot feel his legs or his hands or his face.

He fumbles as he tries to unhook himself from the saddle, choking on water and air, maybe a sob, as Vermax sinks into the sea, a stream of bubbles rising to the surface as he cries for Jace, slowly disappearing into the dark waters. Jace desperately tries to dive after him, as if he has the strength to hold them both above the sea, because Jace has already lost Luke, and he—he cannot lose Vermax. 

Not the dragon who had slept beside his cradle before he was old enough to walk, the hatchling he had grown up alongside, whose neck had once fit beneath his arm, whose first uncertain flights had ended with both of them tumbling into the sandy shore of Dragonstone while his mother laughed herself breathless.

Jace does not know a life without him—he does not want to know a life without him. His earliest recollections are not of nursery songs or wooden swords, but of warm green scales beneath tiny hands and the deep, rumbling croon that had lulled him to sleep when he was scarcely more than a babe. 

When Jace learned to walk, Vermax learned to fly; when Jace’s voice deepened, Vermax’s roar had too. 

There has never been a Jacaerys without Vermax.

But Jace’s lungs are burning, and he cannot see the familiar green scales anymore, and his body is reacting, seizing and spasming because there is no air left in him and water all around. He does not know which way is up and which way is down, the water is too dark and too cold, and he cannot think, but—but he sees the bubbles. He sees the bubbles, and he follows them, and even as Vermax sinks to the bottom of the sea, he saves his rider one final time. 

He reaches the surface with a gasp, gulping the smoky air, and everything hurts. His arms ache, his chest is too tight, his eyes burn, and he cannot breathe, because Vermax is gone. He can feel that Vermax is gone; there is a gaping hole in his chest where his dragon used to be, and Jace does not know what to do, he does not know how to live anymore, and he wants—

He wants his mother.

He just wants his mother. 

He hears the cheers before he feels the first arrow, gaze lifting to the sky as he searches for Baela and Moondancer—they are not too far, he thinks, she'll come for him.

And then, there’s a dull throb in his shoulder blade as he pulls himself over a floating piece of driftwood, but he hardly takes note of the pain, because everywhere hurts, because Vermax is gone, because he wants his mother. He turns when he hears the cheering, and he sees the men on the ship, and he sees the crossbows and the bows and the Myrish banners, but he does not see anything at all, really, blinking once, staring.

The second arrow catches him closer to the chest.

And then—then all he remembers is sea. 

White foam and bubbles, vicious currents and sharp rocks. He thinks he is dead more than he thinks he is alive, but there is so much pain. There is pain and emptiness, and Jace just wants—

“... prince, the stew is ready.”

Jace startles awake, breath hitching in the back of his throat. His body tenses immediately, because he does not remember where he is—he remembers the sea and the waves and rocks and pain and Vermax, but he does not remember…

The cottage. Waking up alone. The door opening, the fear—was he captured? Where is he? Where are his brothers? Where is Baela? What was Rhaena doing on the wild dragon? Mother, mother, mother—

You avert your eyes suddenly, an awkward expression on your face, and Jace suddenly remembers. He remembers you, the apple you passed him as you tended to his wounds; how he held a knife to the throat of a woman who is risking her own life to save his. He remembers that he is stuck bedridden in the bed of a commoner while his mother thinks he’s dead and fights for her throne alone.

He opens his mouth to apologize—to tell you that he will leave as soon as he is able, that he will ensure you’re properly compensated for saving his life—but he falters when he feels something hot and wet drip down his face.

He lifts his hand to his cheek and wipes at his face, looking down at the wetness smeared on his fingertips. For a long moment, he does not understand—seawater, maybe? But he is no longer being tossed around by the sea. He is warm in your cottage, the hearth burns low and your blankets are tangled around him. He blinks once, and another fat droplet of water rolls from his eye down his cheek.

Is he crying?

Heat rushes to his face so quickly he thinks it rivals the fever. He wipes away furiously, not sure if it’s more or less humiliating that you’re pretending not to notice for his sake, turning your back to him to ready the table. 

Jace has wept before, more than most ought to—for the father who taught him fishing and sea shanties, and the other who passed before either of them could speak the truth out loud, for the grandfather he never truly knew, for the brother who felt less like a brother and more like his other half—but never, never in front of a stranger. 

Jace promptly clears his throat and pulls himself together. He glances at you, praying that his face does not betray him, an excuse on his lips as takes a deep breath. Then he falters, mouth watering instantly, gaze cutting to the side where you are busy ladling stew into two chipped wooden bowls, back politely turned, as though you never noticed anything at all.

Jace doesn't think he’s ever been this hungry. He has dined in castles all his life—roasted swan, lemon cakes, arbor wines. He has consumed the finest meals Westeros has to offer and found them lacking, but he almost feels dizzy with need and pleasure at the scent of the stew you made.

“It—” Jace’s voice is hoarse from sleep. Embarrassed, he clears his throat again to try to even it out. “It smells good.”

You look at him over your shoulder with a small smile and murmur demurely, “I’m sure nothing compared to what you’re used to, my prince.”

“I do not know that,” he says lightly as he forces himself to his feet, grimacing as pain immediately shoots through his body. 

Everything aches—his chest, his shoulders, his legs, his arms, his head. In truth, all he wants to do is curl up and sleep more; he cannot bear to keep going. Not now. Not after Vermax, after Luke, after making such a terrible mistake that he might have cost his mother her throne. His stomach flips at the thought, and he fights a shuddered breath.

He needs to keep going—there is no other choice. He needs to get back to Dragonstone as soon as possible.

You pause in the middle of setting the bowls on the table at his words to give him a questioning look. “My prince?”

“I have not tasted it yet,” he tells you, forcing levity into his tone, because you have saved his life, tended to his wounds, and now stand over a pot of stew you cooked for him, worrying that it is not good enough to satisfy a prince. The least he can do is ease your mind. "It would seem unfair to compare a meal I have not eaten yet.”

You blink at him once, and then you smile slightly—it’s a genuine one, not like the small one you forced in his direction just before—and Jace tries his best to return it as he crosses the small room. He shuffles the last few steps toward the table with considerably less grace than he would have liked.

“Perhaps” you reply softly, waiting for him to take a seat at the table before you do as well. 

You do not immediately lift your spoon, and Jace hesitates—for a brief moment, an old childhood lesson surfaces. Do not eat until someone else has tasted it. Feasts at King’s Landing and supper at Dragonstone had been meticulous about such things—cups were poured and tasted before his mother, and plates were sampled before any of them took a bite of their food. The paranoia claws at him and disappears as quickly as it comes.

You had dragged him half-dead from the sea, spent days stitching his wounds and breaking his fever, and gave up your bed so he could sleep comfortably. If you wished him dead, you need only have left him on the shore. 

“I never thanked you for what you’ve done for me,” he says at last, fingers grazing the wooden spoon dipped into the broth. “When I return to Dragonstone, I shall speak with my mother. She will see you properly rewarded.”

“There is no need,” you murmur, finally taking a sip of the stew when Jace lifts the spoon to his lips. 

The broth is hot enough to sting his tongue, but he scarcely notices. It is a simple meal—carrots and celery, chunks of what he thinks is rabbit. It is the plainest thing he has eaten in years, and yet somehow, the best meal he can remember.

His stomach twists painfully as warmth settles into it, and before he can stop himself, he takes another spoonful, then another, the hunger of the past week overwhelming whatever restraint court etiquette had once led him. It is only when half the bowl is gone that he realizes how quickly he is eating.

Embarrassed, he forces himself to slow, lowering the spoon.

“My apologies,” he says, clearing his throat. “I fear I may have forgotten my manners.”

“You haven’t had a meal in over a week, my prince. You’re allowed to be hungry,” you say with a faint smile.

Jace lets out a half-hearted huff of amusement through his nose, though his smile fades as quickly as it came, returning to conversation to try to force himself to slow down and show a modicum of etiquette before he embarrasses himself further. 

“There is every need for reward,” he disagrees, leaning forward slightly to look at you. For the first time since he woke in your cottage, he actually observes you—you cannot be much older than he is, beautiful certainly, but there’s a weariness in your expression that Jace cannot help but feel as though is his fault. “You saved the life of the heir to the Iron Throne. You surrendered your bed, tended wounds that would have killed most men, and risked the wrath of the Greens simply by allowing me beneath your roof. I cannot allow that debt to go unanswered.”

You stare at him for a moment, a conflicted expression on your face, and Jace shakes his head slightly as he presses.

“I do not possess enough coin to repay such a debt myself—” nor, he suspects, does anyone “—but my mother will. You needn't live here any longer if you do not wish to. We could see your cottage rebuilt if the fighting has damaged it, or grant you land elsewhere, if that is what you'd prefer. Whatever you ask, so long as it is within my power, I will see it done.”

You are quiet for a long while as Jace finishes off the stew, but he expects hesitation as you mull over what to ask for: gold, land, a better ship, perhaps. Your gaze drifts off to the side, and Jace’s follows it, faltering when he realizes that you’re looking in the direction of what remains of Sharp Point.

That’s right, he remembers—you mentioned your cottage was less than a league away. 

From where he sits, he can just see the destruction through the small window. The town is little more than scorched foundations and splintered timbers now, dragonfire having reduced generations of work to ash in the span of a single afternoon. He cannot look at it for long, stomach twisting so unpleasantly that he fears the stew you just cooked him might come right up. 

You stay silent for so long that Jace wonders if you have not heard him, and his lips part to repeat himself futilely. 

“We used to think they were beautiful, you know?” you say, voice barely over a breath. “We would watch your family fly from King’s Landing and Dragonstone. The children would cheer and call out the names of whatever dragon and royal was passing overhead, even though they knew you could not hear them.” A wistful smile tugs briefly at your lips, and Jace suddenly feels a rock in his stomach, a heaviness that he cannot seem to push away. “There is a wild dragon in these parts—we call him Grey Ghost. He hunts fish along the eastern shore. I see him frequently when I take my father’s boat out. We lived alongside him for years—sometimes he swoops down close when we have a big catch, but he never bothers us. My father always said he was curious—shy, but curious.”

You exhale suddenly as you rise to your feet; Jace wonders if he should ignore the unshed tears in your eyes the same way you politely did for him.

“Then the Prince Aemond and Vhagar came,” you say at last. “The only thing I want, my prince, is for this war to end, but I know you cannot give me that. If you don't mind, I should see to my father's boat before the tide turns. There is more stew in the pot if you would have it. Then you ought to rest. You'll not heal by arguing with your own body.”

Jace opens his mouth.

He does not know what he intends to say, caught between guilt and indignation, because everybody wants the fighting to end—he does, his mother does. Maybe not Daemon, but why do you say it as though he stands opposed to peace? He did not choose this, nor did his mother. It is not his fault that the Greens usurped his mother's throne.  

He desperately tries to formulate an answer, but how is he supposed to respond to that? What were they meant to do? Yield to the usurpers? Stand aside while his mother’s birthright was stolen? Let Luke die for nothing? Should he say that he is sorry for your loss? That his mother would never have done this? That Vermax would never have burned a fishing village? That this was all the Greens? That they fight to avenge what happened here? 

That dragons are not cruel creatures, he feels the need to tell you when he sees the disdain on your face—it is the people who ride them. It is the Greens. It is Aegon and Aemond, Alicent Hightower and her father.

His lips are parted as though to respond, but he only finds himself staring at you helplessly. 

You incline your head politely before slipping out the door, the cool air rushing briefly into the cottage before it shuts behind you once more. Jace remains where he is, staring into the last of his stew until the steam no longer rises from it, the reality of his situation settling over him—Vermax is dead, Luke is dead, and his mother believes them both lost. He does not know whether his brothers and cousins are safe, if his mother still fights for her crown. He is useless, wounded in a fisherman's cottage, alive only because a woman from a town his family failed to protect chose mercy over sense.

He does not think he has ever felt less like the heir to a kingdom.

[countingstars-17]

charles running to his TEAM ❤️

[brawngp2009]

the fog of war