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THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2)

summary: gwayne finally returns from the war after months away to claim you at last, only to find that you and ormund have grown far closer than he anticipated, and that his cousin has no intention of letting you go so easily. (13k)

characters: gwayne hightower / fem!reader, ormund hightower / fem!reader, daeron targaryen, the baratheon envoy *wink wink*

contents: targ!reader (no physical descriptions), love triangle, enemies to lovers, angst, hurt/comfort, forbidden love, infidelity, canon divergence, cw for emotional manipulation, mentions of ptsd, descriptions of blood and gore, s3ep6 spoilers, smut 18+ (MDNI): gwayne gets a much needed handjob, fem receiving oral

( PART ONE ) | ( MASTERLIST ) | ( AO3 )

vi. RUIN & RETURN

It had been six days since Gwayne’s letter arrived at camp; five since the Hightower host marched for Tumbleton; and one since you arrived within the ancient walls to wait.

Ormund had not allowed you to read it. He tossed the parchment into the hearth before you could so much as ask and promptly reached for his sword, unsheathing the steel with a strange air of control, right before a shout tore from his throat. He brought the blade down onto the war table hard enough to splinter the old wood. “Useless craven— Coward— Cunt!” he bellowed with every blow, until the ivory pieces sitting atop the map scattered to the floor like knocked-out teeth.

You stood on the far side of the tent, wrapped in your nightgown and still sticky with sex between the thighs, and watched the man lose all of his usual composure in the space of a single breath. Daeron stood just in front of you, not quite broad or tall enough to protect you from his uncle’s rage, but trying to shield you from it nonetheless.

With one final wavering exhale, Ormund sheathed his sword again and left it lying flat on the ruined table before him. His tense shoulders loosened as he raised a hand to swipe a rogue auburn curl from his brow. He turned to face you again with a much more careful, if only slightly unhinged, smile on his mouth.

“There has been no sight of Aemond,” he announced at last. “Nor Vhagar— We’ll have to proceed to Tumbleton on our own. Gwayne will meet us there in time.”

It was not joy alone that heavied your chest at the sound of his name. It was much closer to dread, which burned as it rose into your throat like bile — alongside something that should’ve felt like love but had since grown into something far more complicated in your last few moons as prisoner. You turned from him at once and shoved the tent flap aside just in time to exorcise your sickness onto the dewy grass below.

The dread did not leave with it, and neither did the guilt.

Now you sit at the long table of another manse’s dining hall, far humbler than that of the Red Keep but still a palace compared to the war tents, and watch the last of the orange sunrise die over the hills through the arched windows. Somewhere down that road, your husband rides towards you — alone and hunted and entirely unaware of what awaits him in these walls.

“You’ve hardly touched your supper,” Ormund says beneath the soft scrape of his knife as he cuts himself a slice of honeyed boar. Despite not having properly dined since the war began, he eats with a methodical sort of restraint. He takes small bites, chews each of them thoroughly, and doesn’t talk again until he swallows. “I’m not going to have to feed you myself again, am I?”

You miss the amusement dancing on the edge of his melodic voice with your attention fixed on the window, where the dark edge of the hill meets the violet sky. “I’m not hungry,” you answer distantly.

“Yes. You said as much yesterday as well,” Ormund sighs with all the exasperation of a man grown tired of losing his battles with you. “I’d have thought you might be glad to have a proper kitchen. With proper cooks. With proper food.”

His apathy cuts you like a blade, which has grown sharper and more frequent since the letter arrived at camp. It seemed to sever whatever spell had briefly held the two of you together before now; or otherwise shut something in Ormund that has not opened since he learned of his cousin’s imminent arrival.

“Well, forgive me, my lord,” you say with a voice as thin as Valyrian steel. “If my husband’s sudden return from the dead has rather spoiled my appetite.”

Ormund’s eyes snap up from his plate at once. They’re pale and unreadable and utterly void of the warmth you’d grown so accustomed to. When the blue of his eyes are warm, they’re like swimming in the languid blue of a summer sea. They carry none of that silken familiarity tonight.

“He is not dead yet," Ormund reminds you with his brows raised to his hairline. “So far as either of us knows, anyway.”

Yet. The word alone makes you flinch, though you cannot yet tell if he means it as cruelly as it feels. You find more and more these days that you can no longer tell the difference with him now.

“What am I to say to him?” you wonder suddenly aloud, as if the question had been building in your throat since you learned of Gwayne’s arrival. Your anxious hands twist in the charcoal-silver skirts borrowed from Lady Footly’s closet; a gift, Ormund called it, despite it not belonging to either of you. “When Gwayne arrives— what do I tell him? How am I meant to look at him?”

“You are his wife,” Ormund responds plainly, with one careless roll of his broad shoulders. “I suppose you’ll look at him as you always have.”

Your face screws with a choked-back anger. “That’s not an answer—”

“No. But it’s the only one I have.” He sets his fork and knife on the plate with a heavy clink and leans back in his chair. He tilts his chin upward to stare at you over the top of the glittering candles between you, ringed fingers fidgeting over the pale white cloth.

“I have an army to feed, men to protect, and walls to build before Rhaenyra’s dragonfire can swallow the castle whole,” he continues in a monotone. “Unfortunately, I no longer possess the luxury, or the patience, of coddling your guilt.”

His words burn red-hot through your chest, searing you like a brand. You flinch away from them as if he’d struck you physically, though it might’ve hurt less if he had. Your eyes sting as your throat tightens around all the words you want to fling back at him — perhaps that he had not seemed so burdened by you a week past, when his mouth was on you and his fingers were in you; that he had not been so burdened by your guilt all the weeks before that, when he swore your safety mattered to him above his cousin’s own claim to you.

But you swallow down the accusations now and throw your napkin onto your untouched plate instead. Your chair scrapes hard against the cobbles as you rise from the table in a rush of black and silver silk.

“Where are you going now?” Ormund huffs.

“For a walk,” you answer without looking back at him.

“You haven’t even touched your food,” he calls to your retreating figure, motioning to your uneaten plate with a ringed hand. His even voice begins to fray at the edges, “Sit down and eat—”

“Feed it to the hounds—”

“Sit!” His voice cracks through the room like thunder when your hand curls around the cold brass door handle. The sheer volume of his voice, the raw bite underneath it, roots you in place. Your head turns slowly to find the man glaring at you from his spot at the table, though the scowl on his chiseled features disappears just as quickly as it came on.

His eyes flutter shut as his broad chest inflates behind his emerald coat, with a slow breath in through his nose. You watch the man walk himself down from some invisible ledge — tense shoulders dropping, clenched fists easing, rough breaths coming easier again.

“I’m sorry…” Ormund says when he opens his eyes again. The light in the pale blue of his gaze has returned to him, you find, and so has the softness in his smile when he rises from his chair to meet you. “I am sorry, my love— I forget myself— This war has driven me half-mad, if you could not already tell.”

He exhales a faint laugh that you do not join him in. He crosses the distance between you in a few short strides, wide hands settling along the outsides of your elbows — warm, even through the thin sleeves of your gown. You peer up at him through your lashes, uncertain whether the tenderness he extends to you now is real or simply the version he’s allowing himself to show you.

“If ever I am… cross with you. Or short with you in any way— It is never because of you, understand?” Ormund confesses lowly, eyes darting back and forth between your weary ones. “It takes me a moment to remember myself, is all… You understand that, don’t you?”

You swallow hard and nod wordlessly in response, though what you most desperately want to tell him in that moment is that Gwayne had never been so cross with you. That not once in your moons of marriage had he so much as raised his voice at you or frightened you the way Ormund has in such short time. You want to say it if only to see it hurt him the way his words have hurt you. Instead, you say nothing.

“He does not have to know,” Ormund murmurs to you, thumbs brushing your arm in an absent, reassuring gesture. “Nothing occurred between us that was not asked of me. I gave you only what you wanted— Surely a man cannot be faulted for answering his summons.”

Your brows lower over your narrowed eyes. “Are you saying that… that what we did is my fault alone?”

“Of course not!” Ormund laughs, broad hands rising to cup your burning cheeks between them. His palms are warm and calloused; they feel like velvet as they brush your skin. “I’m saying neither of us is at fault— You said it yourself, did you not? The war broke your vows. Not us.”

Some traitorous part of you, so desperate for absolution, nearly softens into his touch at that. You did not ask to be taken from the Red Keep; you did not ask for Ormund's protection; you did not ask for a husband to ride off at dawn and leave you to wonder all these months whether he was living or dead.

You are desperate and half-convinced in your own madness, but you think that perhaps Gwayne will understand that. That surely a woman who believed herself abandoned and already widowed cannot be faulted for the comfort she found in the meantime. It is a thing far too fragile to build a conscience on, but you cling to the comfort of it anyway.

“My cousin rides to Tumbleton alone— without his own army and with Daemon’s surely hunting him,” Ormund coos gently to you, sweeping his thumb across your skin. “It is entirely possible that he will not survive the journey here at all. And then there would be nothing for you to confess… And you would’ve spent all these days worrying for naught.”

The words settle over you like ice in your veins. Your eyes dart back and forth between his own as you search for something human within him — some acknowledgment of what he’s just comforted you with — and find nothing in return.

“You speak of his death like it would be a mercy to me,” you whisper, voice thick with unshed tears.

“I speak of it only as a possibility," Ormund corrects softly. “I only mean to spare you the fear of it, my love. Is that not a kindness?”

You do not answer him. You could not even if you wanted to; not with the invisible hand curling its way around your throat, as you listen to the man who’s protected you from certain death frame your husband's demise as a kindness done on your behalf.

But when Ormund ducks softly down to press a sickly sweet kiss to your mouth, tasting of the sweet wine and honeyed figs from supper, you cannot seem to pull away from him. Gods forgive you, but you lean into it instead; you ball the collar of his coat into fists and chase the comfort in his mouth the way you’ve chased the safety of his hands since you were brought to his side.

You think of the man who fed you bread from his own fingers when you would not eat; who cut down a hedgeknight before he could harm you; who wrapped you in his blankets and warmed your fingers in his hands on particularly freezing nights.

That man is still in there, somewhere, hidden beneath the throes of war.

You fear what might become of him before it’s done.

vii. MUD & MERCY

You stand before the tallest window of the Tumbleton manse, overlooking the winding ivied streets below. They lead straight to the western gate, where the scouts had seemingly spotted a rider without banners in the distance — a messenger from another camp, they said, or maybe Gwayne. The dying sunlight paints the sky in milky orange hues while you pick at the ragged skin of your thumbnail in an absentminded worry. The delicate nailbed splits and blooms red.

You do not notice until a silken handkerchief is motioned suddenly in the corner of your eye.

Your head whips to find Daeron standing at your elbow, green eyes glimmering and pink mouth fixed into a firm line of boyish solemnity. He stands taller than you now, which hadn’t been the case when you first arrived at camp — now you have to look up to properly meet the young boy’s gaze.

“Oh,” you say within a surprised breath. “Thank you.”

You take the cloth from him with a trembling hand. The pale linen blooms pink when you press it to the raging skin of your bleeding thumb. Daeron grimaces sympathetically in return, though you aren’t looking at him to see it.

“Are you nervous?” he wonders aloud, hands crossed firmly behind his back.

“A bit…” you confess in a sigh, dabbing at the wound and knowing that there is no string of words you could possibly put together to express just how nervous you are.

“Aye,” he nods. “I suppose I am, too… I’ve not seen him since I was a child.”

Your head turns slowly to flash the boy a knowing look. “You are still a child, my prince,” you remind him with a smile.

“A younger child, then,” Daeron mutters sheepishly back, freckled cheeks flaring as he turns back toward the window. His long, auburn tendrils sway softly at his shoulders when he shakes his head. “Long enough that I can no longer recall the last conversation I had with him… Though I’m sure it was about you, no doubt, with his betrothal to you and all…”

“Well, he spoke of you often,” you tell him, and watch the boy’s pale eyes flicker with a newfound life when he turns to you again. “He made it clear he was quite proud of you… And if it’s any consolation, I did not intend to steal him from Oldtown.”

“I’m glad for it,” Daeron blurts, then shakes his head at himself when the words don’t come out right. “Not that he left, of course, but that it was you he was given. There are far worse fates, to be true…”

He trails off and watches your face twist with confusion. His anxious gaze drops to the blood-spotted handkerchief as the tips of his ears glow pink. The words seem to escape him without a single thought in his floundering attempts to explain himself.

“I only mean that— that he is good. My Uncle Gwayne. The best of us, really, and Ormund is…” Daeron forgets why he brings up the older man the second his name spills from his lips, though he cannot seem to stop talking. “Ormund is good, too, I’m sure. Somewhere deep down. But he— He does not lose well, my lady. And I’ve learned that… that it's a dangerous thing, to— to be the prize he’s decided he’s won.”

The words come out of him in a rush; sentences half-formed and stumbling. He glances at you only once in a quick and searching look, before looking away again like he can’t stomach a second more of the contact. Your stomach twists in a sick feeling at each word from his mouth. Your throat runs dry as you choke on whatever response you might have given him — some careful deflection, maybe, or a warm laugh to soothe the boy — but a horn sounds from the tower before you can find any response at all.

Three short, sharp blasts send the keep into motion immediately.

“He’s here!” someone yells, far off in the distance. “Open the gates— it’s Ser Gwayne!”

Your feet seem to move on their own accord. Despite the dread sitting heavy in your belly, your legs carry you instantly towards Gwayne. You hold your dress skirts in your fists as you rush down the winding stone stairs, through the crowded hall, and out the heavy oak doors of the entrance. The humid, evening summer air takes the breath from your lungs as it strikes you across the face; it becomes near-impossible to take another one in, with your heart climbing so suddenly in your throat.

The thundering of hooves against cobblestone finds you before you’ve made it down the steep stone steps of the ancient castle. You’re blinded, briefly, by the setting sun until you hold a hand over your squinted eyes. Armored knights and groomed horses come into view — straddled loosely behind Bold Jon’s mare is Gwayne, though his face and hair are so caked with dirt and blood you scarcely recognize him.

Gwayne tries and fails to dismount on his own. His legs betray him after days of nonstop walking, and the exhaustion makes them buckle almost instantly. “Gwayne!” he hears you shout, right before he feels your hands reach for him before he can fall.

Your arms curl beneath his own to keep him upright. He leans the bulk of his weight against you without ever really meaning to, clinging to your warmth and the scent of floral bathing oils he isn’t quite used to. And, though he smells like dirt and death, you hold him back just the same.

“You’re alive,” you pant, breaths fanning in his muddied hair. “Gods, you’re alive—”

“Well…” He huffs a not-quite laugh that you can feel in his shoulder, pulling just far enough away to meet your wet eyes with a pair of duller, paler ones. “I told you I meant my vows, didn’t I?”

His words come out in rasps, voice dry from days of thirst and weeks of shouting. His chest sears with a foreign feeling at the way you’re looking at him now — like he’s half stranger, half god. “Apologies for my appearance, dear wife,” he pants and swallows down the sudden urge to cry. “But I have had a… rough go of things as of late…”

Your features crumble under the weight of your own tears. You shake your head at the man, and at his sorry attempt at a joke. “Gods, I’ve missed you...”

Gwayne exhales slowly through his nose as his cracked lips curve into a crooked smile, visibly exhausted but his even still. “Not nearly as much as—”

“Ser Gwayne.” The voice cuts through the bustling courtyard at once.

You feel every muscle in your body seize on instinct as your head whips back towards the stone steps, where Ormund stands at the top of them. His eyes scan the scene below — of you and Gwayne and your bodies only just now easing apart as the red-haired man attempts to stand on his own.

The silver chain of Ormund’s pomander clinks faintly in the newfound quiet as he brings the perfumed incense up to his nose, inhaling deeply to rid the scent of sweat and blood and death from his nostrils.

“I see you’ve made it,” is all he says.

Gwayne exhales an exhausted huff, a mixture of a laugh and a scoff. He sways softly on his muddied boots and clutches onto your shoulder with his free hand. “It’s good to see you too, cousin…” he responds in a monotone.

Ormund turns to Daeron, who’s hovering just beside him with his pale hands clenched into fists — it takes every bit of strength in the young boy’s body not to run down to his uncle alongside you, worried about how Ormund might react.

“See that a room is made ready for your uncle. And a hot meal is sent with haste— whatever the kitchens can manage quickly,” Ormund says to the boy, then pauses as his eyes drift back to Gwayne’s. “And perhaps a bath.”

Gwayne’s cracked lips curl into a slow smile. He breathes a laugh through his nose as he watches his cousin spin on his heel to walk away. “You always did have delicate sensibilities…” he attempts to call to the man, though he fails to muster the strength in his voice to be heard.

It is you who insists on escorting Gwayne to the bath. You wave off hovering knights and Tumbleton servants with a firmness that surprises even you — no longer a prisoner of war, but a high lord’s wife.

Gwayne, it seems, is much too spent from the journey to do anything more than lean into your shoulder the whole way up the winding castle. He braces himself on your firm weight as you peel the ruined layers of clothing from his body and coax him gently into the steaming tub.

Your own borrowed gown joins his tattered things in a forgotten heap on the cobbled floor as you sink into the water alongside him. The warmth laps gently at your waist as you shift yourself over his lap, resting the bulk of your weight on his thighs.

The bathwater turns the color of weak tea by the time you’ve worked the worst of the grime from Gwayne’s pale skin. Dark streams of dirt and old blood swirl away beneath the cloth in your hand, brushing a tad too gently over his shoulders and chest and back, as if anything too hard might break him entirely.

Gwayne sits slumped against the tub, eyes half-closed and head lolled back. The war had certainly taken its due upon his pretty features — the new hollows beneath his cheekbones, the fresh scar above his brow, the deep grey exhaustion under his once bright eyes. There’s a leanness to him now that suggests missed meals and weeks of marching; and a sort of heaviness in his gaze that suggests longer weeks of grief.

But still he softens for you, minute by minute, as you drag the cloth over the angle of his dirtied jaw. He exhales slowly through his nose and leans instinctively into your touch.

“You needn’t do this to yourself, you know?” the man murmurs, but makes no further move to stop you. “There are servants more than capable of tending to my bath.”

“I want to do it,” you tell him simply, dabbing at a speck of blood on his cheek. “I’ve missed you too much— I’d rather not share you with a servant just yet.”

He gives you a tired, crooked smile in response. “I missed you, too,” he says with a sigh, fingers clutching you harder by the waist beneath the water’s surface, like he’s still trying to make sure you’re still real. “Gods, you cannot imagine how badly…”

You rinse the cloth in the cooling water and press it gently to his hairline, dabbing at the remnants of dirt clinging stubbornly to him there. His adam’s apple bobs as he swallows through a tightening throat — being touched this gently threatens to undo him entirely, after weeks away and days of nonstop bloodshed.

His tense shoulders finally sink beneath the water as he admits, “I thought only of you… The entire way here… I fear it’s the only way I managed it— knowing that I could not die without seeing you first.”

Your throat tightens as guilt strangles you all over again; the bitter reminder of what you’d done, and all the nights you forgot to miss him back. Your fingers move anxiously to set the cloth on the rim of the tub and dip into the ceramic dish lying there. You scoop a handful of lavender soap onto your fingertips, and work it between your palms until it starts to foam.

“I thought of you, too,” you tell him with an averted gaze, which is true enough even though it feels like a lie when it escapes your mouth. “Every day.”

“And what of Ormund?” Gwayne wonders aloud, cracking one pale eye open to study your face as you rake the suds through his long auburn hair. The dull, muddy strands slowly return to their proper flaming color with each gentle pass of your fingers, as the last of the war’s blood and grim streams down his pale shoulders in dark rivulets. “I trust my cousin treated you well in my absence. He can be insufferable, I know, but he is not unkind… Not truly.”

You falter at the mention of him. Your hands still briefly in his damp tendrils as a sick feeling curls in the pit of your stomach. You swallow hard through the cold hands of guilt strangling your throat and force your fingers to keep moving, praying he does not notice how they tremble faintly against his scalp.

“He was… accommodating,” you answer carefully, eyes trained on his hair rather than on his attentive gaze, lest he read the whole truth of it plainly upon your face. “He kept me fed. Housed. Safe… For the most part— Tilt your head back; let me rinse your hair.”

You lift yourself slightly off the man’s lap to reach for the pitcher resting on the table beside the tub. Glittering rivulets of bath water cascade down your arms, glimmering in thin ribbons over the curves of your breasts in the dancing candlelight. Gwayne tips his head back to oblige you when you settle astride his scruffy thighs once more. His long, pale fingers smooth absently over your hips beneath the water, tracing idle circles along your soft skin.

“You’ve gone rather short with your answers, dear wife…” he observes lowly, peering at you from the bridge of his nose. “That’s not like you…”

“I’m just tired, is all…” you deflect, cupping one hand over his brow to shield his eyes while your other pours the clean water steadily over his hairline. The suds run clear down his temples and trickle back into the bath below. “It’s been a long day… A long several months, if I’m honest…”

“Yes… For us all, I’m sure,” Gwayne sighs and lifts his head once more when you shift to place the pitcher back onto its table. He arches an auburn brow and musters a quiet smile; the simple ease of being with you returns to him by the minute now, as his fingers settle over your ribcage again. “Though I do hope my letters kept you some company… Small comfort as they must have been.”

You go suddenly very still above him, muscle locking despite yourself. The guilt that had been simmering in your chest surges up your throat all at once now, in a red-hot flame that makes you feel halfway sick. For a long moment, you fail to make sense of the words — his letters — after so many months of waiting to hear from your husband, and after so many months of hearing Ormund tell you each day that there had been not a single word from him.

“…Your letters?” you repeat on bated breath.

“Yes,” Gwayne nods, brows pinching at your confusion. “I wrote every time I could manage it— At every stronghold we arrived… Did you not receive them?”

Your mouth opens and closes as you struggle to find the words to respond — words that would placate your own confusion without disclosing what you had been doing in the days awaiting his letters. “Perhaps… Perhaps they got lost. Along the road…”

Gwayne scoffs a humorless laugh at the thought. “Well, I pity the poor hand who got my letters instead of you…” he croons lowly.

“Why?” you press with a wavering grin. “What did they say?”

“Nothing of substance,” he shrugs his bare shoulders. “Just… foolish things.”

“Like…?” you trail off, soothing your palms down the pale canvas of his chest.

A faint uncertain smile tugs at his mouth as he watches your hands dip below the waterline. “I wrote of… what fields I passed. What foolish things Ser Criston said that day. What I’d seen— What I missed of home, what I missed of you…”

He trails off when your fingers find his cock, lying limp along his left thigh. He feels like velvet in your fist as you massage him slowly hard. “Keep going…” you coo to him.

His hips twitch beneath you when you tighten your grip on his stiffening length. “I— I wrote of your hands,” he manages, and swallows hard when your thumb swipes across the sensitive tip of his cock. His eyes grow heavy with desire as he watches you work at him through the haze of cloudy water. “How I missed the— the feel of them on me… Gods…”

“Go on…” you murmur, smearing your lips along his jaw.

“I wrote that… that I missed your smell,” he confesses, fraying with each slow pass of your hand. “Your hair after a bath… The wine on your breath after supper… The sweat between your thighs after a long day— Seven fucking hells.”

His jaw clenches tight when your free hand dips down to cradle his balls, squeezing the sensitive sack between your fingers until his cock jerks in your fist. His heavy head lolls into your kiss; he feels you smiling against his cheek.

“You’re already close, aren’t you?”

He swallows hard. “You have no idea how long it’s been…” he confesses in a blissful sigh.

“I’m sure there were plenty of whores on the road,” you singsong in his ears.

He shakes his head instantly in protest. “None as beautiful as you…”

His denial does little to comfort you. Instead, you feel a white-hot rage searing in your chest. Some distant, ugly part of you wishes he had taken a thousand whores while he was away, if only to take the weight of your own betrayal off your shoulders. At least then you could share it, this guilt, instead of living alone in your sin. You hate yourself most of all for even wishing it, and you feel very suddenly disgusted in your own skin — eager to be free of him and this moment altogether.

“Then cum,” you command against his pulse, jerking his cock faster in your fist. Gwayne’s fingers clutch at the plush skin of your hips hard enough to etch bruises there, and you revel in the hurt as his grumbled moan fills the bathing chambers. “Come on. Cum for me—”

He makes a broken sort of sound in the base of his throat as he seizes just beneath you, tense and trembling as his high hits him full force. The cooling water threatens to slosh off the rim as he twitches through his orgasm, which spurts into the cloudy water in short ropes of pearly-white, until he relaxes finally with a sigh.

“Give me a moment…” he pleads through ragged breaths. “I’ll make you feel good, I just— I need a moment…”

“I’m alright,” you assure him with a shake of your head, and with a sad smile that he doesn’t catch with his eyes still closed. “You rest tonight… I’ll see you in the morning.”

viii. CAGE & CONFESSION

You do not go to find Ormund until long after Gwayne’s breathing has steadied.

He takes up the whole of the bed in his inhuman exhaustion; one leg straight and the other bent beneath the quilts, one pale arm slung over his bare stomach and the other left reaching out for your empty side of the bed as you slip from beneath the silk. You storm for Ormund’s solar in the dimly lit halls in nothing but your thin ivory nightgown; the fabric catching at your ankles with every furious stride in the man’s direction.

You find the room lit by a sea of glittering candles when you throw open the door without ceremony. It strikes the wall a harsh bang, far too loud for the late night; the wind of the blow makes the flames gutter wildly in their sconces.

Ormund’s head snaps up from his dispatches at the sudden intrusion. His quill pauses on the parchment — because the work of war is never truly done, not even at the dead of night. His eyes are cold for a flicker with a soldier’s instinct, then warm again all at once when he finds no threat — only you. The corner of his mouth curls into a slow, knowing smile accordingly.

“Come to warm my bed already, have you?” the man lilts in his usual melodic voice, setting his quill aside as he slouches back into his cushioned seat. “I confess, I hardly expected to see you tonight, what with your husband so newly returned. Bold of you, really—”

“Don’t,” you snap.

The word slices through the solar like a blade, and wipes away the smug curve of his smile in an instant. Your nightgown billows around your ankles with every furious step inside; the shadows of the fabric catch in the candlelight and turn you into something half-spectral as you loom over the desk across from him.

“He wrote to me. For months, he wrote to me,” you agonize. “And when he asked whether I’d received them, I sat there like a fool, knowing I hadn’t gotten a single one.”

Ormund draws a long, even breath through his nose. His ringed fingers settle flat over the desk as he keeps a measured composure about him, even though yours unravels by the minute.

“Ah…” he hums under his breath.

A shocked laugh escapes your mouth. “That’s all you have to say to me?”

“What would you have me say?” he asks, pale eyes locked with yours as he braces himself on the arms of his chair to rise. The wood scrapes harshly along the cobbles when he stands to full height. “That I kept them from you? That I— read them for myself and burned each one in the hearth when I’d finished? Very well… I did.”

The plain admission threatens to knock the breath from your lungs. You had braced yourself for denial, to be true, to spend these late hours coaxing the truth from his lips. You were not prepared for confession; not so soon, and not so easily.

“Why?” you demand, half-breathless with tears. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because I did not wish to hurt you,” Ormund says, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. “You wept for that man every night for the better part of a moon’s turn. I thought it might ease you, if you’d believed he didn’t care enough to write to you at all. I thought I was sparing you the grief of it.”

“That was not yours to decide!” you shout, voice shaking beneath the weight of your girlish fury. “Those were my letters, Ormund! My husband's words! You had no right—”

“No right?!” he thunders through an emotionless laugh, ocean eyes flickering with madness in an instant. “You are my prisoner! Or have you so quickly forgotten, given how generously I’ve treated you?”

You flinch back as he rounds the desk, though you cannot seem to leave the spot ahead of him as he inches towards you like a predator to prey.

“You’re lucky you’re standing here at all. Any other Targaryen beast would be in chains, but you…” he continues, prowling another step closer. “I let you share my tent, my table, my bed. And I did it gladly because I came to love you despite the— taint in your blood.”

You peer up at him through teary eyes when he towers finally in front of you — brows raised, eyes hardened, jaw clenched tight.

“But… you are still my prisoner,” he reminds you evenly. “You have been since the day you arrived at my camp. So I have every right to decide which letters enter your hands and which ones do not.”

Each word strikes you like a physical blow — worse, somehow, than the searing one the hedgeknight had dealt you, which has caused an unnatural cracking of your jaw ever since. Maybe because these cruel, cruel words come from the same mouth that has kissed you, pleasured you.

“Prisoner?” you repeat tearily, features screwed in disbelief. “You say you love me and yet you call me beast in the very same breath. Wh… What am I meant to make of that?”

Ormund’s face falters finally at the sight of your tears, clinging to your lower lashes and glimmering gold in the candlelight. A soft crack splits down the unforgiving marble of him as he shakes his head down at you.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says and turns away.

“Like what?” you spit at the back of him.

“Like I've wounded you,” he snaps, long coat fanning slightly at his waist when he turns to face you again, now several paces away. “Where was your Gwayne when you hadn’t eaten in five days, and I fed you bread from mine own hand? Tell me that.”

Your mouth parts, but nothing comes out.

“Where was your dutiful husband when that hedgeknight had you pinned in the dirt with your skirts torn to your thighs?” Ormund continues, palms splayed at his sides for effect. “Because I did not see him riding to your rescue as I had. I did not see him holding you through the nights you woke screaming. That was me— Only me— And yet you still stand here and weep over a handful of mindless letters, as if that erases the whole of what I've done for you.”

Your chin jerks back as you flinch hard at his words, at the weight of them, which you can feel heavying your chest until every new breath feels impossible. Ormunds goes silent for a moment; the shadow of his clenched jaw comes and goes as he grits his teeth. His fists open and close at his sides until they finally relax, when the anger within drains into mourning.

“I’m sorry,” he mutters suddenly, boots padding along the cobbles as he closes the distance between you once more. “Forgive me. You’re right, I— I should not have kept them from you. I only meant to spare you, you understand that, right?”

His wide, gently calloused hands reach for your cheeks with a tenderness that feels maddeningly sincere compared to the vitriol he’d thrown at you moments ago. He lifts your chin and ducks his head into your eyeline when you do not meet his gaze. His blue eyes go round and wet with a boyish grief as hurt sears through his chest.

“I only want to keep you safe,” he whispers. “Whatever else I’ve done wrong— that much has always been true… You know this, don’t you?”

He peers down at you and waits on bated breath for a response. You say nothing just yet. Your trembling hands reach from the gold buttons of his coat. At first, he thinks you mean to push him away — you want nothing more, in fact, than to push him away and wrench yourself from his hands and return to your place in bed next to Gwayne.

You do not.

You just close your eyes, exhausted past the point of arguing any further. The threads of guilt and love and fury and anguish tangle together somewhere deep in your chest, until one is utterly indistinguishable from the others. The only thing you know now for certain is that the whole of your life can be categorized into two groups: those who have stayed and those who have gone.

Your own family had sailed across the Narrow Sea and left you behind without so much as a backwards glance; and Gwayne, gentle as he is, still rode off to serve a cause that mattered more to him than you.

Ormund is, perhaps, the only person in your life who has never once abandoned you. Whatever else he has done to you before now — however cruel or calculating or maddening he has since become — he has never once walked away from you. Not when you intended to starve yourself, not when you were pinned in the mud by your skirts, not when you woke up screaming on particularly brutal nights.

You hate how much it all matters to you, however fickle it may seem. You hate it, and you hate that cannot make yourself stop needing it all the same.

“I don’t know what to do…” you confess in a broken voice, clutching him hard by the collar of his coat. His softened face is bleary behind the tears burning in your eyes. “I feel so guilty, Ormund— I do not know for how long I can bear it. It sets heavy on my chest, all the time, and I cannot set it down—”

“Then let me carry it,” he tells you. His grip goes more solid when you attempt to turn away, thumbs pressing harder into your cheeks. “I can bear it well enough for the two of us, I swear it—”

The breath of his words fans across your chin when he ducks down to kiss you, hard and sudden and searing. He tastes of wine and mint leaves when the velvety pad of his tongue licks into your mouth without warning.

You sigh hard through your nose at the feeling of him and cling to the front of his coat as he walks you backward a few paces towards the desk. The edge of the wood catches hard against the backs of your thighs. Ormund’s hands dip from your face to your hips, balling the fabric of your gown until it rises up your legs.

“Did you take him into your bed tonight?” he pants rough against your mouth, with the tip of his broad nose nudging yours. “Your husband? Did you fuck him? Tell me.”

“No,” you shake your head on an exhaled breath. Your fingers curl into his dark curls as his wet mouth drags along your neck, down to your exposed collarbone. “I only pleasured him with my hand. Nothing more.”

Ormund nods swiftly, as though pleased by the admission. He peers up at you through his lashes as he kisses down your clothed chest. “Always a giver, aren’t you?” he hums lowly, mouth quirking softly at the edges. “Allow me to return the favor, then…”

He sinks to his knees, with your ivory skirt now pushed up to your thighs. You keep one hand splayed along the back of his knuckles and the other tangled in his curls as he kisses your cunt like he would your mouth. He moans when his tongue slots between your sticky folds, a muffled growl you can feel in the very pit of your stomach.

Ormund is not quite as measured with his mouth as Gwayne had been the evening before he left you. He’s fast and sloppy and loud — you can hear his tongue as it flicks against you, his lips as they suckle your clit, his moans as your honey pools on his tongue.

You swallow down a moan before it can swell through the quiet room. It turns into a whimper in your throat instead. “Ormund—” you gasp quietly, tugging him hard by the hair as his tongue laps at your swollen clit.

His bleary eyes open to peer up the length of your body — your heavy head tilted to your chest, your gaze lidded and glassy with pleasure, your chest rising and falling with uneven breaths. “Let me have it,” he slurs against your pussy, and smiles to himself at the pretty sound you make for him in response. “That’s it— Let me have it…”

Your mouth presses into a tight line to choke back a moan when his mouth returns to your cunt, suckling the sensitive button between his lips and flicking his tongue against it simultaneously. You shudder against his mouth when you cum for him, whimpering when he buries his moans and muffled murmurs of praise against your drooling pussy.

You do as you’re told — you give it all to him, you let him bear it — while Gwayne sleeps off the remnants of war across the hall.

ix. GARDENS & GHOSTS

The gardens of Tumbleton are modest things compared to the grandeur of the Red Keep, though you struggle to remember it so vividly now. Here there are only a few neat rows of late-summer roses gone wild for want of a gardener, an overgrown path winding between shaggy hedges, and a slowly weeping fountain gone quiet and still. You spend Gwayne’s second evening at the foreign castle walking beneath a canopy of drooping wisteria, with your hands looped loosely through the crook of his arm and your dress skirts whispering against the stone with every languid step.

“I’d nearly forgotten what this was like…” Gwayne hums, studying the wilting roses with distracted interest. “Walking somewhere without waiting for an arrow to find me first…”

“Don’t worry, Ser Gwayne…” you squint with a teasing lilt. “I’ll keep you safe.”

And though Gwayne hasn’t so much as seen you hold a real sword in your hand, he flashes you a tight-lipped smile anyway. “Of that, dear wife, I have no doubt…”

You fall into an easy quiet thereafter; the ordinary rhythm of marriage, though it still feels a bit foreign to you now. He asks only about small things: if the summer storms had frightened you too badly, if the men at the Hightower camp treated you well, and if you’d truly meant what you said about that farm. You answer each in turn, grateful for the ease of it — or, at least, for the brief illusion that nothing had changed between you at all.

“And the encampment?” Gwayne asks then, flashing you a knowing look from the corner of his eye. “You’d said precious little of it thus far. Surely, it wasn’t so unbearable— Though I’m sure my cousin likely wasn’t making it easy for you.”

“There isn’t much to say,” you shrug with a feigned air of detachment, though the words come out a little quicker than you mean them to. You catch the faint furrow of confusion between his brows, and pretend to be more preoccupied by the wilting wisteria overhead instead. “It was… eventful. I suppose. In its own way.”

“Eventful?” Gwayne repeats with an arched brow. An unsure laugh sputters from his chest a second later. “I can’t tell whether that’s meant as a comfort or a warning…”

“It’s nothing worth troubling over,” you tell him. “Truly.”

Gwayne’s eyes flit down to where your wrists are curled lazily around his bicep. The dull nails of your right thumb and forefinger pick aimlessly at the already marred skin of your left. He stops instantly in place — he had sensed something amiss since you caught him in the yard, to be true, but he sees it more plainly in your being than he had the night before.

“Did something happen?” he blurts.

Your head whips to him, eyes widening in an innocuous look. “I… I don’t know what you mean?”

He swallows once and rephrases. “Something happened…” he repeats, this time as a firmer statement. “At the camp. Something you’re not telling me.”

You exhale a slow and shaking breath, though it does little to loosen the tightness in your chest now. You find that, once cornered and with his pleading eyes searching your face, you cannot quite bring yourself to lie to him again.

“There was a… a man," you start unsteadily, eyes fixed on the overgrown hedge behind his shoulder rather than his face. “A hedgeknight. I was out gathering berries, and he— He asked me about a letter. The one you left me. And when I wouldn't— He tried to—”

“He tried to what?" Gwayne presses when you trail off, ducking his auburn head into your eyeline when you avert your gaze. His voice is low and careful, but you can hear the tension straining beneath it already.

“He grabbed for it… And I struck him, without thinking, and he struck me back…” Your fingers lift absently to your cheek, brushing the ghost of a bruise with your finger, long since healed but not yet forgotten. Your gaze goes glassy and unfocused with the recollection of the memory — the smell of the berries, the taste of the blood, the feeling of the wet earth beneath you. The rest of the words come out in choppy and nonsensical. “And I fell— and my skirts— I think he meant too— I don’t know truly, but I— I could not stop him—”

“Gods…” Gwayne huffs, as if the breath had been punched out of him entirely. His pale, handsome features screw together in horror as his pale eyes glitter with anger at himself. “I should’ve been there… I never should’ve left you.”

“Ormund killed him,” you add quickly and watch a complicated look flicker behind Gwayne’s eyes at the name. “Before he could…”

Gwayne nods when you trail off, signaling that you need not go on any further. “I am glad for that, at least,” he says, though there is a strain in his voice that suggests something other than gladness. His palms reach for your hands then, preventing you from picking at the skin there. “I am glad my cousin was there for you. Truly. I was a fool leaving you behind. I should’ve stayed, I should’ve—”

You shake your head in protest of his apologies. “No—”

“I should’ve been there—”

“Don’t,” you tell him, though the word spills broken from your mouth when you jerk your hands free from his. The sudden loss of his touch leaves your fingers strangely cold. “Don’t apologize. I do not deserve it.”

“Deserve it?” Gwayne echoes with lowered brows. “What do you mean, deserve it?”

“Your kindness,” you sniffle. “I don’t deserve it.”

Gwayne blinks owlishly at you, and feels a strange searing in his chest when you flinch back from him as he tries to step closer. “Why are you saying this?”

“I have— I have sinned.” Your breath catches hard on a sob. Your wet eyes try and fail to meet his gaze. “I have betrayed you.”

Gwayne tenses at once. His face goes still and solemn; the warmth he’d had for you moments ago drains slowly from his features now. “What do you mean?” he wonders lowly.

“With— With Ormund— We— I,” you attempt to speak through hitched breaths, though you cannot seem to get any of the words out. “I cannot express to you— how unspeakably lonely I have been—”

“Lonely?” he repeats, spits back at you like venom. “Do you think I was not lonely?”

“You at least had a war to fight!” you argue tearily. “I was taken prisoner, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“And do you think I would not have rather been home?” Gwayne shouts. “With you, instead of watching my men die in a field over a war I never wanted any part of?”

“You’re the one who left!” you exclaim when he turns away from you, already retreating down the gravel path before he can lose his composure completely. “If you stayed, we could’ve been together! And none of this would’ve happened! You act like someone was dragging you by your boots to go fight a useless war!”

Gwayne stops at that, a few paces ahead. His shoulders are rigid beneath his borrowed doublet when he turns to you again, though not enough to face you fully. Only his profile is visible to you now, with his auburn hair falling over his brow and his emotionless grin hinting at the corner of his mouth.

“I did not… want this marriage…” he confesses in calculated murmurs. “Not at first, anyway. That much I’ll admit, but… From the moment I wed you, it never once crossed my mind to seek comfort elsewhere.”

“Gwayne, I—”

“I meant my vows,” he tells you and turns, finally, to face you fully. You found no trace of fury in his face now, only a pained sort of look that turns his pale eyes a glassier shade of blue. “I have always meant them.”

“I didn't know if you were alive!” you agonize through a sob. “Don’t you understand that? Months, Gwayne — months without a single word! Not knowing whether you were breathing or rotting in some unmarked grave! And I couldn't even write to you to ask, because Ormund told me it wasn't safe. He said the letters might be intercepted, might lead Rhaenyra's army straight to you, and I could not risk that—”

“Ormund told you that?” Gwayne interjects, voice gone dull and cold. “That your letters weren’t— safe to send?”

“Yes,” you nod. “He said that—”

“And mine?” Gwayne presses with a slow step closer. “I presume he kept mine from you as well. That’s why you never got them, isn’t it? Because of him?”

You go quiet, unsure of how to answer — like there’s some joke here somewhere you have not yet been let in on. But, to Gwayne, your silence is answer enough. He exhales a long, shuddering breath through his nose.

“Ormund and I used to play a game,” he tells you suddenly, with a humorless smile ghosting across his mouth. “Run the tower, we called it— a footrace to the top beacon. And I let him win. Every time. Because he could not bear to lose even the smallest thing.”

Your eyes widen slightly, as you remember Daeron’s warning in the castle window — his anxious, hardly intelligible ramble. “It’s a dangerous thing to be the prize he’s decided he’s won,” the boy had told you. You hadn’t understood what he meant by that until now.

Gwayne’s features screw with a withheld fury, one that Ormund would’ve already unleashed on you tenfold by now if the roles were reversed.

“He was a thin-skinned twat even then. I thought it harmless, at the time. I never imagined…” he trails off, clicking his tongue against his teeth when he turns to you again. He shakes his head as his mouth twitches into a sympathetic sort of smile. “If you think Ormund loves you, dear wife, I assure you, he does not. He simply decided that you were another game worth winning.”

He does not wait for your response. He turns on his heel, and when he walks away this time, he does not stop.

His feet carry him down the overgrown path, through the winding unfamiliar castle, and straight towards Ormund’s solar — without him ever fully registering any of it; not until he swings open the heavy oak door, at least, and is met instantly with the humidity of an incensed bath. He nearly chokes on the musky oils sitting heavily in the air.

“Leave us,” Gwayne orders Daeron in lieu of a real greeting. The boy’s eyes widen in shock at the sudden intrusion from where he stands obediently off to the side, robe in hand. His gaze flits to Ormund’s on instinct, who gives him a curt nod of approval without looking up, before scurrying out of the room.

The older man sits submerged to the chest in a steaming copper tub. A wooden tray sits balanced across the rim, with his inkpot and parchment laid before him. His quill scratches against the paper in swift strokes until Gwayne unsheathes his long sword with a sharp hiss. The older man tenses when the steel kisses the soft skin of his throat.

“You will explain yourself,” Gwayne says, peering down at the man from the bridge of his nose. “Or, by the gods, I will open your throat right here in this tub.”

Ormund does not so much as flinch when he sets his quill back into its inkpot. He tilts his chin just slightly to look up at the man and feels the faint pressure of the blade against his adam’s apple. Amusement flickers in his blue eyes.

“She told you, then,” he hums — not quite a question but not entirely a statement either. “I did wonder how long that might take.”

“She told me everything,” Gwayne bites out through clenched teeth. “The letters— mine to hers; hers to me. Months of lies, cousin, you called protection.”

“Yes. I protected her," Ormund nods without reservation. “More than you ever did, seeing as you were hundreds of leagues away and all. I fed her when she attempted to starve herself grieving you. I killed a man who meant to rape her in a berry patch while you were off playing at war like a child—”

Gwayne tenses at the accusation buried in his words. The edge of the blade presses harder to Ormund’s throat, but still, he does not waver.

“I gave her a place to sleep when the storms came, and warmth when the nights grew cold, and company when she felt no one else in the entire realm cared whether she lived or died,” the man lilts evenly. His voice does not rise and his stare does not yield, not even with the cold steel resting steadily against his pulse. “So, please, spare me the outrage, cousin. I only gave her what she asked for— freely, and often, and more enthusiastically than you can imagine.”

Gwayne’s whole body goes rigid. A mixture of fury and humiliation prickles red-hot at his pale skin. His knuckles turn white around the hilt of his sword, but the blade does not move an inch.

“Well, go on, then,” Ormund tilts his head, eyes glimmering with amusement. “Finish it, if you mean to. Open my throat here, in my own bath, and we’ll see who she weeps for. You or me.”

Silence fills the empty solar. Gwayne grits his teeth and wills his hand to move; to either strike the man down or turn away entirely. He cannot seem to do either.

Ormund lifts a lazy hand to swipe the blade away without a word. He rises slowly from the bath a second later. Rivulets of water glisten as they rush down his lean body and trickle audibly when they hit the surface again. He stands before his cousin, unabashedly bare, and reaches for the linen cloth draped over the edge of the tub.

“For what it’s worth, cousin,” he says, swiping the nettle across his toned, golden skin. “I never intended to make an enemy of you. And I rather think, whatever she may tell you now to spare your pride, that she’d choose to stay exactly where she is, if given the choice.”

Gwayne opens his mouth to argue.

“Daeron!” Ormund calls out before he can.

The door creaks slowly open a second later. The younger boy reappears with an obvious hesitance, refusing to meet either of their eyes as he rushes to his uncle’s side. He settles the emerald fabric over the older man’s broad shoulders, and Ormund slides his arms through the long sleeves. He ties the sash with slow hands and with an expression that looks almost sympathetic.

“Best wash up soon, cousin,” he grins. “It’s nearly time for supper.”

x. STEEL & SUPPER

Supper that evening is a small and wretched thing; four places set at a round table dragged in from some lesser hall to make the arrangement feel less tribunal. It’s close enough that you can feel the heat of both men suffocating either side of you, along with the cold, watchful silence of Daeron across the way; young enough to shift awkwardly in his seat at the tense silence, but old enough still to understand exactly what such silence truly means.

No one speaks a word of the hard truth of it out loud. Neither of you needs to — the whole of your sin sits at the table like an uninvited guest, souring the wine in every cup and thickening the air until you can scarcely draw a single breath around it.

“So…” Ormund says first to break the silence. He talks beneath the soft scraping of his knife against the porcelain as he cuts into his meat. “Ser Criston fights on, and yet you alone have returned to us… Why is that, I wonder?”

Gwayne turns slowly to glare at the man with dull, blue eyes, already too annoyed for idle blather. “Because fighting on is madness,” he answers distantly.

Ormund scoffs with a wad of food in his cheek. He smiles as he swallows it down, angling his head in the young prince’s direction. “Do you think me mad, boy?”

Daeron’s eyes shoot up from his plate. His spine straightens instinctively at his uncle’s sudden attention. “No, sire,” he answers quickly.

Ormund nods, pleased, and then turns slowly to you. A fondness flickers in his pale gaze behind the challenge in his eyes. “And you, my—” He catches himself half a breath too late; my love, he’d nearly said, though you cannot tell if it was an intentional attempt to rile his already aggrieved cousin. “My lady… Do you think me mad?”

Your brows bounce in response, though your gaze never lifts from your lap as your nails work relentlessly at the already torn skin of your thumb. “I don’t think you want me to answer that—”

You freeze in place when Ormund’s wide hand reaches suddenly to splay his calloused palm over the back of your knuckles. Your head whips in his direction. You struggle to tell if the action is heedless or entirely uncaring, as Gwayne sits close enough to watch the exchange on the other side of you. The man inhales sharply through his nose and straightens his spine as he reaches for his goblet, trying hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed it at all.

“Why do you insist on ruining yourself this way?” Ormund wonders lowly, as his thumb rubs soothingly over your marred one.

“Seems to be a common affliction as of late,” you answer distantly and draw your hands from beneath his touch. “Messing with things we ought to leave well enough alone…”

“You are aware—” Gwayne says gruffly as he swallows down his bitter wine, setting down his chalice with a bit more force than likely necessary. “—That while you’re all in here playing happy families, there’s a dragon sitting on the hill above us? And five more not thirty leagues away?”

“Why do you think we came here, cousin?” Ormund scoffs and waves his concern away with a lazy flick of his knife. “Rhaenyra will not burn her own subjects. She is a woman, after all. Squeamish, by nature.”

A short laugh spills suddenly from your lips. “Squeamish?” you echo. “Says the man who requires a milk bath twice daily, lest he make it everyone else’s burden to bear?”

The jab earns a proud smile from Gwayne that he tries hopelessly to bite back, and a small grin from Daeron that he conceals behind the rim of his goblet. Ormund swallows hard through the embarrassment strangling his throat, angled jaw clenching as he grits his teeth.

“Well… If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were taking up the usurper’s cause.”

“I’m not taking up anyone’s cause,” you mutter. “I just want to go home.”

“Oh?” Ormund hums with a feigned air of curiosity, though you do not miss the bite in his words as he wonders aloud, “And where is that precisely? King’s Landing? Oldtown?”

“Well, it’s certainly not here—”

“No,” he agrees instantly, warmth freezing over in an instant. “But when the usurper’s host comes here, we will fight on our own terms, on our own ground— turning King’s Landing against that overweening cunt, little by little, bite by bite… And when we expose her as weak and unsuited to rule, the great houses will flock to our side, and then, my lady, we can all go home.”

“Have any yet come?” Gwayne wonders knowingly. “Great houses, I mean.”

Ormund’s gaze snaps in his direction. “The patient hunter gets the kill, cousin,” he says through gritted teeth. “I’d have thought you’d learned that much by now.”

“Only one of us at this table has actually been hunted, if you’ll recall…”

“Yes, you have endured much,” Ormund huffs and returns to his boar. “Though I’m sure you find some solace along the road… with whores, perhaps, or your… brothers in arms…”

The insinuation sits heavily in the quiet, thicker than smoke and choking the three of you accordingly. Gwayne’s jaw tightens hard enough to make the muscle flex. Whatever retort had been rising in his throat at that moment is killed instantly by the sudden creaking of the heavy door across the room. Bold Jon enters, flanked by a couple of punier squires.

“My lord,” the older knight announces. “House Baratheon has sent an envoy. They mean to bend the knee to House Hightower.”

Ormund is aglow in an instant. The sourness of the previous moment rolls off of his broad shoulders as a newfound satisfaction kindles behind his blue eyes. “Let the Stormlands lead the way…” he mutters to himself, mouth curling into a grin. “Highgarden will have no choice but to follow…”

He flashes you a proud and knowing look as he rises from his seat. “Alright. Stand up,” he says and begins to round the small table. When no one follows him quick enough, he snaps, “Stand up! All of you.”

You rise at once, abandoning your plates as you follow him to the front of the dining table. The three of you fall into line beside the high lord, who stands just ahead to greet the incoming knights Ser Jon ushers in. The knights are caked in dirt from the long road; their yellow cloaks are crusted thick with mud, and their boots track dark prints across the fine pale stone beneath them. They smell like earth and sweat, hardly noticeable to you, though you spot Ormund’s shoulders tensing instantly when the stench hits him.

“Lord Ormund Hightower,” Roxton announces formally. “Beacon of the South, Defender of the Citadel, and Voice of Oldtown.”

“Well met, Ser Ormund," the head of the envoy greets with a polite nod, arms propped along the pommel of his longsword. “I come on behalf of Lord Borros Baratheon, Lord Paramount of the Stormlands.”

“Mm…” Ormund hums, ringed fingers fidgeting at his sides as he attempts to swallow through the invisible hand strangling him. “You are quite welcome, Ser…?”

“Ser Arrion Baratheon. Cousin to Lord Borros.”

You freeze at once. A newfound fear settles ice-cold in your veins. Your eyes squint as you study the stranger’s bearded face more closely — his curls, his eyes, his nose, his mouth. You find that he looks nothing like the Ser Arrion you had once met, at a tourney some several moons back; the one where you first laid eyes on Ser Gwayne Hightower.

The man himself tenses at your elbow. His jaw clenches tight with knowing as he turns slowly to flash you a single, silent glance. You communicate without words. His folded hands fall casually beside the sheathed sword at his hip; yours cross behind your back, as you reach blindly for the fruit knife idling somewhere beside the plates of supper.

“I most regret presenting ourselves to you in this state,” the stranger continues.

Your jaw clenches tight in frustration as your fingers miss the handle in several agonizing attempts. You slide it closer with the very tip of your middle finger, slowly so as not to draw attention, before your fingers close finally around the hilt. You grip the blade to your back, palm going clammy around the grip.

“The road was long and filthy, but I thought it best to speak to you immediately.”

“We are honored to receive you,” Ormund assures him, entirely unaware. “And what word does Lord Borros send?”

“House Baratheon offers its banners in alliance with House Hightower,” the envoy says. “I have been charged to swear fealty on Lord Borros' behalf.”

“Well,” Ormund grins. “Your lord has made a wise choice—”

“Ser Arrion?” you call at once, stepping forward and drifting instinctively in front of Daeron with your arm still tight around your back. The boy’s eyes widen when he catches sight of the blade behind you. Your smile remains as artificially sweet as ever, despite the way your heart hammers hard against your ribs. “You do remember me, don’t you?”

The man’s heavy brows furrow as confusion flickers across his bearded face. He musters a similarly fake grin. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, my lady—”

The hesitant answer is confirmation enough. Gwayne unsheaths his sword in a blink and slices the imposter across the neck before he can finish his sentence. His throat splits wide open, bright crimson blood gushing out instantly. You feel it splattering across your cheek as the man falls limp to the ground in front of you.

The dining hall erupts into chaos in a blink. The shouting of Baratheon imposters and Hightower knights fills the room at once. One lunges towards you, trying to get to Daeron, you figure, though he’s met with the small blade clutched in your trembling grip before he can.

You drive the knife into the first soft place you can find — his eye, you think, and then the side of his neck, before he crumples to the floor screaming.

“No!” Ormund’s voice shouts over the ringing of colliding blades, flashing a fiery look at Ser Jon. “Stop them, you fool!”

Daeron steps quickly in front of the older knight. “No!” he says to the man, small as he is, but standing his ground regardless.

“These are assassins!” Gwayne shouts over the clash of steel, kicking one knight down before striking him across the skull. “Sent for Daeron— and probably you!”

A pair of thick hands close hard around your wrist, cold and calloused and unforgiving. It yanks a memory from some buried place in your mind — spilled berries, wet earth, pooled blood in the mouth. You do not know whether or not he intends to strike you, or if he truly does, or if he only means to stop you. You only feel a girlish fury clawing its way from your throat as a buzzing adrenaline prickles at your burning skin.

The bloody knife in your fist cuts him clean across the face — his throat, his jaw, his cheek, his eye, his temple. He stumbles back against the wall, bloodied and unrecognizable, but still you do not stop. Your blade follows him as he sinks to the ground in a gurgling, limp ball. His blood splashes warm across your face, clinging sticky to your fingers, but you still do not stop.

“Enough, enough…” you hear a voice say from behind you, muffled through the ringing in your ears. You feel a warmth press against your side and a gentle hand curl around your wrist. Gwayne’s voice follows more clearly in your ear, “He’s dead… It’s over now...”

The adrenaline seems to ebb from your veins at once, with a raw sob sputtered from your mouth. The knife slips from your limp fingers, clattering audibly to the bloodied cobbles below. You feel something warm trickling across your forehead and reach to wipe it with the back of your hand; blood smears wet across your brow in its place.

Across the wrecked hall, Ormund hunches over the back of his chair on the other side of the table. His face has gone pale-white; made more ashen, perhaps, behind the drops of vivid crimson splattered across his face. The thick copper stench of it settles in the back of his throat, along with the sweat and mud and death and shit hanging in the air.

“How—” he chokes hoarsely out. “How did you know— These men were false?”

“I was nearly betrothed to Lord Borros’ son once,” you hear yourself answer, though the words sound a bit distant, like they’re coming from someone else’s mouth. “I met his cousin… Lord Arrion… at a tourney in King’s Landing years ago… I gave him my favor that day—”

“Right before I cut him down,” Gwayne adds through panted breaths, with a distant satisfaction in his voice at the memory. “The real Ser Arrion Baratheon has hair of light chestnut, stands near a foot taller and is, as it happens, far more comely."

Ormund makes a low, strangled sound in the back of his throat. “I will cleave the bitch— From crown to cunt—” he manages between heaving breaths “—She will die wishing she never dared to... dared to…”

His body seizes as he retches — once, then twice — before doubling over the table and vomiting his supper along the plates ahead of him.

Gwayne watches on with a grim sort of amusement. “Best wash up now, cousin,” he hums in jest, as drily as Ormund had to him earlier that day.

His amused smile fades when he catches you swaying in the corner of his eye.

The room seems to tilt on its axis under your feet. The cobbles sway softly beneath you, as if you were standing on water instead of stone. You reach blindly for the back of the nearest chair to steady yourself; you watch your fingers curl around the embellished wood, though you cannot feel it under your palms. Daeron’s quick hand catches you beneath the elbow in a small attempt to steady you.

“My lady?” he mutters softly, beneath Gwayne’s firmer, “Are you hurt?”

Your mouth parts, but it takes a moment for the words to come out. They fall from your tongue in strange slurs that sound nothing like your voice. “My back…” You trail off before choking on a whimper. It is not pain you feel, not completely, but rather a cold numbness blossoming wide along the left side of your spine.

Ormund perks instantly, swiping a hand along his chin and fighting off his own dizziness when he watches Gwayne close the distance between you. His long, pale fingers skim carefully along your shoulders as he examines the back of you. They settle finally just above the thin tear in your bodice, where the fabric of your borrowed dress starts to bloom a darker crimson from the blood spreading from underneath it — from where a soldier’s blade must’ve kissed you in the chaos.

“Gods…” you hear Gwayne breathe just behind you. “You’re bleeding— Someone call the maester!”

Your knees buckle underneath you as the strength spills from your body like sand through your fingers. Two sets of hands keep you upright; one smaller and trembling, the other wider and far more steady. They guide you into the seat before you can collapse. You watch Gwayne kneel into your vision with his palms resting firmly on your knees. The world continues swaying all around you.

“Let me see it,” Ormund says through panted breaths, gripping the table’s edge as he attempts to walk to you despite his own weakening state. He’s still pale and sheening with sweat from the blood clinging to his skin and nostrils.

“You can barely stand yourself,” Gwayne scolds drily. “She is my wife— I am more than capable of tending to her.”

Ormund attempts to laugh, though the chuckle comes out wearier than he means to. “Are you?” the older man manages to choke out. “Because you surely haven’t cared about tending to her while you were off playing at war—”

“Enough…” The word comes out slurred and hoarse from your mouth. The men fall silent at once. Their heads whip in your direction with matching expressions of concern that would’ve felt almost comical in any other moment.

The pain has started to sharpen now beneath the somewhat pleasant numbness. A hot, insistent throb begins to settle in its wake, searing through you like fire.

Your first instinct is to reach for Gwayne, but the guilt of what you’d done to him weighs on your hands like cement — what right do you have, you think, to reach for him now with bloodied hands, after months of reaching for another?

And then you think inevitably of Ormund and the particular safety you’ve always found in his hands, after he’s already seen you blood-soaked and broken and ugly from war, and never once flinched away at any of it. And then you think of the burned letters and the lies, and then of Gwayne’s departure with only a sliver of parchment left in his wake.

You reach, in the end, for neither of them.

“Daeron,” you call instead to the boy hovering beside you. You turn your swimmy gaze to his wide and frightened ones. Your voice is unnaturally thick in your throat as you ask him, “Can— Can you help me up to my chambers, please?”

The boy blinks and forgets to look to his uncle for approval first as he nods. “O-Of course, my lady,” he stammers and loops your arm carefully over his shoulder. “Lean on me…”

You do not look back at either man behind you as Daeron eases you from the chair and guides you slowly towards the door; but you do feel both of their eyes following you like twin points of heat searing through your dress, just like the soldier’s blade had. Neither Gwayne nor Ormund says a single word; the hollow sound of your fading footsteps fills the silence as you go.

The two of them are left standing alone together, amid the bloody wreckage of the unfamiliar hall, staring at the space where you’d once been.

to those of you who made it this far, thank you, i love you, and i'm sorry lol more to come soon!