Lady Moztaza @ladymoztaza - Tumblr Blog

Aug 2

Education

Dark!Ormund X Reader

Summary: Ormund educates his wife about her responsibilities after she embarrassed him in front of her family.

CW: Marital rape (including forced oral sex, coercion, and degradation), Emotional and psychological abuse (gaslighting, isolation, manipulation), Physical intimidation (use of a belt as a threat, restraining), Victim-blaming and internalized self-blame, Dismissal of trauma (the abuser frames the assault as "teaching" and "obedience")

Set after ''The Marriage Debt'', part of ''The Whore'' Series

(This was originally meant to be a standalone where the reader is Alicent's daughter, but I changed it at the last minute to be part of the Whore series. If some things don’t make sense, it’s because I didn’t catch them while editing.)

The interior of the wheelhouse was lushly appointed, Ormund had spared no expense. The benches were upholstered in Hightower grey, the fabric soft and new and smelling faintly of the lavender sachets tucked into the seams. The curtains were heavy velvet, on the seat across from you sat a wicker basket packed with bread still warm from the ovens, apples polished to a glossy shine, a wedge of pale cheese wrapped in waxed cloth, and a stoppered skin of watered wine. Someone had also left a stack of books, histories of the Reach, a bestiary of the animals found in the Honeywine valley, a slim volume of love poetry written in the flowery style of the last century.

You had not touched any of it, your fingers had brushed the spine of the poetry book once, tracing the gold-leaf title, but you had pulled your hand back almost immediately. The poems inside were about knights and their ladies, about stolen kisses in moonlit gardens, about the kind of love that made your heart ache with longing. You had read them as a girl in your chambers at Dragonstone, curled up in the window seat with Aegarax's distant cries echoing across the bay, and you had dreamed. You had dreamed of a husband who would look at you the way the knights in the poems looked at their ladies. A husband who would write you letters full of tenderness and admiration. A husband who would touch you gently, reverently, as though you were something precious rather than something to be used.

Ormund had been that husband. During your courtship, he had been exactly that husband. His letters had arrived at Dragonstone every fortnight, sealed with the grey wax of House Hightower, filled with elegant compliments and gentle inquiries about your health and your interests and your dragon. He had asked about Aegarax with what seemed like genuine curiosity, what did he eat, how fast could he fly, did you feel his emotions through the bond or was it something more mysterious than that? No one else had ever asked about Aegarax. No one else had ever seemed to care.

He had brought you gifts, too, books of poetry he had found in the Citadel's vaults, translated into the Common Tongue by some long-dead maester. A scarf of Lyseni silk in the exact shade of pink you had once mentioned was your favorite. A small silver brooch shaped like a dragon in flight, which you had pinned to your bodice that very morning and worn to breakfast with a flutter of happiness in your chest.

At the wedding feast, he had been attentive without being overbearing. He had brought you plates of your favorite foods before you even realized you were hungry. He had danced with you three times—three!—when most husbands danced with their brides once and then retreated to the company of other men. He had held your hand beneath the table and traced slow circles on your palm with his thumb, and you had felt special. Loved.

And then the bedchamber, you closed your eyes against the memory, but it came anyway. The weight of him. The pain. The way he had not stopped even when you cried. The way he had woken you from exhausted sleep to take you again, and again, and again, until the bells were ringing for dawn and your body was a landscape of soreness and shame. The things he had called you. The way he had made you call yourself things.

But this morning—this morning, you had woken to gentleness. His lips on your neck, soft and warm. His voice in your ear, hoarse with sleep, calling you sweet girl. His apology, so earnest and unexpected, his forehead pressed to yours, his hand on your heart. I lost myself. I would never hurt you on purpose. Can you forgive me?

And you had forgiven him. Of course you had forgiven him. Because that was what wives did, wasn't it? They forgave their husbands. And because his apology had felt real, had felt genuine, had felt like the Ormund you had fallen in love with during your courtship finally returning to you after a night of some strange, temporary madness. He had held you afterward, just held you, his arm wrapped around your waist, his lips pressed to your hair, and you had felt safe. Protected. Loved.

It will get better, he had promised. I will be so good to you.

You had believed him, that hope was still fragile and new in your chest, like the first green shoot pushing through snow in early spring. It trembled there, uncertain, vulnerable. You cupped it carefully, the way you might cup a candle flame in a strong wind. Perhaps the wedding night had been an aberration. Perhaps he truly had been overwhelmed by years of celibacy, as he claimed. Perhaps now that the first desperate hunger was sated, he would be the husband he had been during your courtship, tender, attentive, kind. Perhaps you could still have the marriage you had dreamed of.

These were the thoughts that occupied you as the wheelhouse lurched through the city gates and onto the Roseroad, the cobblestones giving way to packed dirt, the swaying settling into a smoother, steadier rhythm. You pressed your face to the small glass window and watched King's Landing recede behind you. The Red Keep rose above the city like a crimson fist clutching at the sky and above it all, cutting through the pale autumn sky like a blade of light, was Aegarax.

She soared in wide, lazy circles, her silver-white scales catching the sun and scattering it into fragments of diamond. Her wings beat slowly, languorously, as though she had all the time in the world and no particular destination in mind. Her long tail streamed behind her like a pennant, the spiked tip flicking from side to side in what you recognized as contentment. Every few minutes, she would tip her head back and scream, a high, keening sound that rolled across the fields and made the horses below shift nervously in their traces and the guards clutch at their reins.

The afternoon wore on, slow and heavy. The sun slid lower in the sky, painting the horizon in shades of amber and rose and deep, bruised purple. The shadows of the trees stretched long and thin across the road, and the air that seeped through the cracks in the wheelhouse grew cooler, carrying the first hint of evening dampness. Aegarax's circles had grown tighter and lower, her screams more frequent and more plaintive. She could feel your unease through the bond, she always could, had always been able to sense your moods as clearly as if they were her own. When you were happy, she flew high and fast, looping and diving with the exuberance of a creature who knew nothing of sorrow. When you were sad, she drew closer, her shadow passing over you like a benediction, her cries softening to something almost gentle. And when you were afraid—

Well. When you were afraid, Aegarax burned things. But you were not afraid now. You were only tired.

When the wheelhouse door opened and Ormund climbed inside, the hope in your chest flickered and guttered like a candle flame in a strong wind, he had to stoop to clear the doorframe, he took the seat across from you without waiting for an invitation, it was his wheelhouse, after all, his escort, his journey. The bench creaked under his weight. The door swung shut behind him with a soft, final click, and the latch fell into place. The sounds of the column outside—the jingle of harnesses, the murmur of voices, the steady clopping of hooves—faded to a muffled drone, as though you were hearing them from underwater.

You had not expected him. Men did not ride in wheelhouses. They rode on horseback, with their men, projecting strength and authority, enduring the same hardships as their soldiers. Only women and children and the infirm traveled by carriage. You had seen Daemon refuse a wheelhouse with a laugh and a crude joke about growing old. The wheelhouse was for you, the delicate princess, the fragile bride, too soft to ride a horse for days on end.

So why was he here?

"My lord," you said, and your voice came out steadier than you felt. You were proud of that. You had been practicing—in the sept, at the feast, this morning after he left—you had been practicing keeping your voice steady when everything inside you was shaking. "Is something wrong?"

Ormund did not answer immediately. He removed his gloves first, slowly, deliberately, tugging each finger free one by one until the leather came loose with a soft sucking sound. He tucked the gloves into his belt, then he leaned back against the cushioned bench, his shoulders pressing into the grey upholstery, his legs stretching out in front of him until his boots were almost touching the hem of your pink silk skirts.

His eyes found your face, and they were not kind. They were the eyes of the man from the wedding night, he looked at you the way a falconer looked at a hawk that had refused the lure. Disappointed.

"I did not appreciate the way you spoke this morning," he said.

The words landed like stones dropped into still water, and you felt the ripples spread outward through your chest, cold and unsettling, displacing the fragile hope that had been living there. You replayed the morning in your head, scrambling to understand. The breakfast table. The conversation about Aegarax. The way Aegon had laughed. The question you had asked—an innocent question, a reasonable question, a question any dragonrider would have asked in your position. Where will Aegarax stay? That was all. Four words. Four simple words that had slipped out before you could stop them, because Aegarax mattered to you, and you had been worried, and you had not thought—

You had not thought.

"I do not understand," you said, and your voice was not as steady now. The steadiness was slipping, cracking at the edges, threatening to crumble entirely. "I only asked about Aegarax. I did not mean—"

"In front of your family." His voice was calm. That was what made it frightening. If he had been shouting, if his face had been twisted with rage, if his hands had been clenched into fists—you would have known how to respond. You had seen angry men before. You had grown up surrounded by them, after all. You had seen Daemon's cold fury and Aegon's drunken rages and your mother's quiet, simmering wrath. But Ormund was not any of those things. Ormund was calm. "You made me look like a fool."

Your mouth opened, the words came out smaller than you intended, a whisper almost lost beneath the rumble of the wheels and the creaking of the axles. "I did not mean to make you look like anything. I was only asking. I did not think—"

"No," Ormund said, and the word cut through your sentence like a blade through silk. "You did not."

He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The movement brought him closer to you, close enough that you could smell the dust of the road on his clothes, the clean salt smell of horse sweat still clinging to his skin, the faint spice of whatever he had eaten for lunch still on his breath. The wheelhouse swayed, and he swayed with it, perfectly balanced, his body absorbing the motion as naturally as if he had been born to it. He was so much larger than you. You had noticed that on your wedding night, of course, when he had been on top of you and inside you and all around you, but here in the confined space of the wheelhouse, with only a few feet of air between you, his size seemed almost monstrous.

"It does not matter what you meant to do," he said. His voice was low, almost gentle, the voice of a man explaining something very simple to someone very slow. That gentleness was worse than shouting would have been. It made you feel small and stupid and childish. It made you feel like a little girl who had misbehaved and was now being scolded by her tutor. "It matters what you did. And what you did was question my judgment in front of your mother, your family, and half the court. You made me look like a man who had not considered the most basic element of marrying a dragonrider. In front of your family, in front of Aegon who laughed and called me a fool." His lip curled slightly on your uncle’s name, a micro-expression of disdain that was gone almost before you registered it. "Who will certainly tell everyone he meets. Who will laugh about it for years. The Lord of Oldtown, so besotted with his pretty bride that he forgot about her dragon."

You had not thought of that. You had not thought of any of it—only of Aegarax, of the bond between you, of the impossibility of leaving her behind or stabling her like a common horse. The political implications, the social embarrassment, the way your simple, innocent question had made your husband appear foolish and unprepared in front of your entire family—none of that had crossed your mind. You had been thinking only of yourself. Of your dragon. Of your own fears and your own desires. You had not considered how your words would reflect on him.

"I am sorry," you said, and the words came out quiet and genuine, thick with the tears that were already beginning to prickle at the corners of your eyes. You blinked them back furiously. You did not want to cry. Crying made everything worse. Crying made him look at you with that expression—the one he was wearing now, the one that mixed disappointment and something that looked almost like satisfaction. "Truly, I am sorry. I did not realize—"

"No," Ormund said again, cutting you off with the same sharp finality. "You did not realize. That is the problem."

He tilted his head, studying you the way he had studied you in the sept, at the feast, in the wedding chamber when you had been naked and trembling and trying to cover yourself with your hands. Measuring your flaws the way a merchant might catalogue the defects in a length of silk.

"You do not think, do you?" he said. It was not a question. It was an observation, cool and clinical. "You feel. You react. You speak without considering how your words will land. You let your emotions rule you instead of your reason. It is a childish habit. A dangerous one, for the wife of a great lord. Words are weapons in the game of thrones, and you wield them with all the care of a toddler swinging a morningstar."

Your throat tightened until it was difficult to breathe. He was not wrong. That was what made it so terrible. He was not wrong, and you could not defend yourself, because you had always been this way—shy, yes, and quiet in the company of strangers, but when something mattered to you, when something touched the deep places of your heart, the words came out before you could stop them. Aegarax mattered. Aegarax was the other half of your soul, the beating heart outside your body, the only creature in the world who had never judged you or mocked you or found you wanting. And you had spoken without thinking about how it would make your husband look, because Aegarax was more important to you than politics, than appearances, than the careful dance of reputation and respect that governed life at court.

But that was the problem, wasn't it? Aegarax could not be more important than your husband. Your husband had to be more important than everything. That was what marriage meant. That was what duty meant.

"I will try to do better," you said. It was the only thing you could offer, the only promise you could make. Your hands were trembling in your lap, and you pressed them flat against your thighs to still them, the pink silk cool and slippery beneath your palms. "I will learn. I will think before I speak. I promise."

"Trying is not enough." He sat back, putting a few more inches of distance between you, though his eyes never left your face. His gaze was steady and unblinking, like the gaze of a snake watching a mouse. "You need to learn. You need to be taught. And I am going to teach you."

He was quiet for a moment. The wheelhouse hit a rut in the road, jostling both of you hard enough that you had to brace yourself against the bench. Outside, one of the guards cursed loudly and colorfully, something about the roads in the Reach going to shit since the last rains. Someone else laughed. Aegarax screamed overhead, her cry muffled by the wooden roof but still piercing, a long, questioning note that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. She knew. She always knew. She could feel your fear through the bond, a cold trickle seeping from your heart to hers, and she did not understand it. She only knew that something was wrong, and she was asking—demanding—to be told what it was.

You could not tell her. You could barely admit it to yourself, you opened your mouth to say something else—what, you did not know. Another apology. A promise to be better. A plea to be left alone. The words were queuing up behind your teeth, jostling for position, none of them adequate for the situation. You had been raised to be courteous and accommodating and sweet, and none of those things were helping you now. You did not know the words to make him stop looking at you like that. You did not know the words to make him kind again, the way he had been this morning.

But before you could speak, Ormund moved, he sat back fully against the cushioned bench and reached for his belt. The same belt he had just tucked his gloves into. Your eyes tracked the movement without your permission, drawn to his hands the way a bird is drawn to a serpent. His thick fingers found the buckle and began to work it loose with practiced ease, the leather sliding through the silver loop with a soft hissing sound that seemed impossibly loud in the confined space. You watched, frozen, as he pulled the belt free from the loops of his breeches, one loop at a time, the leather whispering against the dark wool.

"What are you doing?" you asked. Your voice came out strange—high and thin, not your own, the voice of a much younger girl. A frightened child's voice, coming out of a woman's mouth.

Ormund did not answer immediately. He finished pulling the belt free and held it in his hands for a moment, running the leather through his fingers as though testing its weight. Then he set it aside on the bench beside him, within easy reach. Not threateningly—not yet. Just... there. Coiled like a sleeping snake. A reminder of what he could do if he chose.

"We have a long road ahead of us," he said, and his voice was still calm, still conversational, as though they were discussing the weather or the quality of the harvest. "Days, perhaps longer, depending on the condition of the roads. We will be stopping at inns and holdfasts along the way. There will be lords and ladies to greet us, servants to wait on us, my own men to observe us. And I cannot have you embarrassing me in front of my people the way you embarrassed me in front of your family."

"I did not embarrass—"

"You did." He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The words were sharp enough on their own, cutting through your protest like a knife through silk. "And you will not do it again. So we are going to practice. Right now. You are going to show me that you understand what it means to be obedient."

You did not understand. You did not understand what he wanted, what he was asking for, what the belt had to do with any of it. Your mind raced through possibilities, each one more frightening than the last. Was he going to hit you? Beat you? Strike you with the belt the way unruly squires were struck when they failed their lessons? Your body tensed, bracing for the blow, and you realized with a distant sort of horror that you had no idea how to defend yourself. No one had ever taught you. No one had ever imagined that a Targaryen princess, the daughter of the heir to the Iron Throne, might need to know how to fight off an attacker.

But the blow did not come. The belt stayed coiled on the bench beside him, within reach but unused. Instead, he kept talking, his voice low and patient and terrifying in its gentleness.

"Show you how?" you asked, because you had to ask something, had to say something, had to break the terrible silence that kept threatening to swallow you whole. Your hands were trembling openly now, and you could not make them stop. "I do not—I do not know what you want me to do."

Ormund's expression did not change. But something flickered in his eyes—impatience, perhaps. Or disappointment. Or that strange, dark satisfaction you had seen on the wedding night, the satisfaction of a man who was getting exactly what he wanted.

"You do not know," he repeated.

"No," you admitted, and your voice was barely a whisper now, so quiet you were not sure he could hear it over the rumble of the wheels. "I do not. I have never... no one has ever told me... my mother did not..." You trailed off, your cheeks flooding with heat, the shame burning through you like wildfire. He wanted you to do something, to perform some wifely duty that everyone apparently knew about except you, and you could not even guess what it was.

Ormund sighed. It was a soft sound, almost gentle, the kind of sigh a parent might give when a child asked a particularly foolish question. But it made you flinch anyway, your shoulders hunching, your chin dropping toward your chest.

"My first wife," he said, "knew what to do. She had been taught. By her mother, by her aunts, by the septas who raised her. She came to my marriage bed knowing her duties—all of them. She was a proper lady. A proper wife. She never embarrassed me. She never questioned me. She gave me four children before the fever took her, and she never once complained."

He paused, letting the words hang in the air between you. The comparison was obvious, and it cut deeper than any blade. You were not his first wife. You were not a proper lady. You had not been taught. You had complained, silently, but he had seen it in your face, in your tears, in the way you had flinched from his touch.

"It seems your mother neglected certain parts of your education," he said.

The words stung. "I am sorry," you said again, because you had no other weapons. Sorry was the only shield you had, flimsy and inadequate, but you kept raising it anyway. "I am sorry that I was not taught. I will learn. I want to learn. I want to be a good wife to you."

"Sorry is not a method of instruction." Ormund leaned forward again, closing the distance between you. His hand came up, and you flinched—you could not help it, your body remembering the wedding night, remembering the way those hands had gripped your hips hard enough to bruise—but he only touched your chin, tilting your face up so you had to meet his eyes. His fingers were warm and rough "I am going to tell you what to do. And you are going to do it. And if you do it well, I will be pleased. If you do not..." His thumb brushed across your lower lip, a gesture that might have been tender if his eyes had not been so cold. "We will try again until you do."

Your heart was hammering so hard you could feel it in your throat, in your temples, in the tips of your trembling fingers. The hope that had been living in your chest withered and died, crumbling to ash. "What do you want me to do?" you asked, because asking was the only thing left. Asking and obeying and hoping that if you were good enough, if you were obedient enough, he would stop. He would be kind again. He would go back to being the man who had written you beautiful letters and brought you thoughtful gifts and kissed your forehead while you slept.

He released your chin and gestured to the floor directly in front of him. The space between the benches was narrow, barely enough room for a person to kneel, let alone do anything else. The wooden boards were dark with age and scarred from years of use, dust gathered in the corners and settled into the cracks between the planks. You could see a small knot in the wood just to the left of his left boot, a dark whorl that looked almost like an eye.

"Come here," he said, and his voice was soft and final. "On your knees."

You stared at the floor. The boards seemed to stare back at you, the whorl like a dark pupil in a wooden face. You imagined yourself kneeling there, your pink silk skirts pooling around you like a stain, your bare knees pressed against the rough, splintery wood. You imagined the humiliation of it, your husband sitting on his cushioned bench like a king on a throne, and you on the floor at his feet like a supplicant. Like a dog, or well, a bitch.

"Why?" you asked, and the question came out before you could stop it, the last defiant gasp of a part of you that had not yet learned to be silent. Ormund's jaw tightened. It was a small movement, barely perceptible, but you saw it. You saw the muscle in his cheek jump and then smooth out again. For a moment—just a moment, a heartbeat, less than a heartbeat—you saw a flash of something sharp and dangerous in his eyes. Something that looked like rage, held in check by the thinnest of leashes. Then it was gone, smoothed over by that pleasant, courteous mask, the face of the lord greeting guests at a feast.

"Because I am your husband," he said, and his voice was perfectly even, perfectly calm, perfectly terrifying. "And I am telling you to. That is all the reason you need. That is all the reason you will ever need."

If you refused him now, what would happen? Would he tell your mother? Would he send you back to King's Landing in disgrace, the alliance shattered, the peace broken, all because you would not kneel when your husband told you to? Would the lords who had already whispered about your parentage find new ammunition in your failure? Would your mother look at you with disappointment instead of pride?

You did not think you could bear that. You did not think you could bear any of it. And so you slid off the bench and onto your knees on the hard wooden floor of the wheelhouse, and the last ember of hope in your chest went cold.

Your knees hit the wood with a soft thud that you felt all the way up through your spine. The vibration of the wheels traveled up through your bones, rattling your teeth. The wood was harder than you had expected and colder, the dust that coated it gritty against your skin. You could feel a splinter pressing against your right knee through the thin silk of your dress, a sharp little point of discomfort that you did not dare move to avoid.

You knelt there, your hands clasped in your lap, your pink skirts pooling around you like spilled wine, and looked up at him. He was so far above you. So much larger than you. From this angle, he seemed to fill the entire wheelhouse, his shoulders blocking out the fading light from the window, his legs bracketing you on either side like the walls of a cage.

"Good," he said, and the word fell on you like a stone. "Now come closer. As close as you can."

You hesitated. The space was already so narrow. You were already so close, your skirts nearly touching his boots. But he wanted you closer still—close enough that there was no air between you, close enough that you could feel the heat radiating from his body, close enough that you could count the individual threads in the wool of his breeches.

You shuffled forward on your knees. The movement was awkward and clumsy, your dress bunching beneath you and catching on the rough wood, your hands flailing slightly before you caught yourself on the edge of the bench. You had never knelt like this before, had never had reason to. Highborn ladies did not kneel on floors. They sat on cushioned chairs and velvet benches, and when they knelt, it was in septs on padded kneelers, their hands folded in prayer before the altar of the Mother.

When you finally stopped, your knees were pressed against the worn leather of his boots, and his legs were on either side of you, and you could feel the heat of his body seeping through the fabric of his breeches and into your skin. The smell of him was overwhelming—leather and horse and sweat and that musky, masculine scent that had clung to the sheets of the marriage bed.

"Closer," he said again.

"There is no closer," you said, and your voice came out thin and breathless. "I am already—"

His hand came down on your shoulder and pulled you forward. You gasped as your chest pressed against his knees, your hands flying out instinctively to catch yourself on his thighs. The wool of his breeches was rough beneath your palms, still warm from the heat of his body, still smelling faintly of horse and dust. You could feel the hard muscle beneath the fabric, the solid, unyielding strength of him.

"There," he said, and there was satisfaction in his voice now. "That is closer."

He held you there for a moment, his hand still on your shoulder, his fingers pressing into the curve of your neck with just enough pressure to remind you that he could tighten his grip if he wanted to. You could feel each individual finger—the tips, the warmth of his palm, the cool metal of the signet ring on his smallest finger pressing against your collarbone. You stayed perfectly still, barely breathing, your heart hammering against your ribs like a trapped bird.

"I am going to teach you," he said, "how to apologize."

"I do not understand," you whispered, and you hated how small your voice sounded, how young, how helpless. "I do not know what else you want me to do."

His hand moved from your shoulder to your hair. His fingers tangled in the silver-gold locks, not pulling—not yet—just making sure you could not pull away. His thumb stroked the curve of your scalp, a gesture that might have been soothing if the context had been different. If everything had been different.

"Use your mouth," he said.

You blinked up at him, uncomprehending. "My mouth?"

"On me." He released your hair and reached down, his fingers finding the laces of his breeches. The same laces you had watched him do up this morning, when he had dressed in the grey light of dawn, his back to you, his movements brisk and efficient. He began to undo them now with the same practiced ease, the leather cords sliding through their eyelets with a soft whisper. "You will take me in your mouth. You will not bite. You will use your tongue. And you will not stop until I tell you to."

The world seemed to tilt sideways. You stared at his hands, at the laces coming undone, at the dark wool parting to reveal the linen of his smallclothes beneath. Your brain, which had been scrambling to keep up with the situation, simply... stopped. You had heard of this. Vaguely. In whispers and giggles from the more worldly of your mother's ladies. In crude jokes told by stable hands who did not realize a princess was within earshot. But you had never imagined—you had never thought—you had never believed that this was something wives actually did, something husbands actually demanded, something that could happen in a moving wheelhouse on the Roseroad with the afternoon sun slanting through the windows and your dragon screaming overhead.

"I cannot," you said, and the words came out strangled, desperate. "I do not know how. I have never—no one has ever taught me—I would not even know where to begin—"

"Then you will learn." His voice was patient. Terribly, horribly patient. The voice of a maester explaining something very simple to a very slow student. The voice of a man who had all the time in the world and no doubt whatsoever about the outcome. "Open your mouth."

You shook your head. The movement was small, involuntary, a spasm of refusal that you could not control even though you knew—you knew—that refusing him was dangerous. But your body was rebelling against your mind, your instincts screaming at you to flee even though there was nowhere to flee to.

"Please," you said, and your voice cracked on the word. "I do not want to do this. Please do not make me do this."

Ormund's hand caught your chin again, gripping it more firmly this time, forcing your face up toward his. His fingers dug into the soft flesh of your cheeks, and you could feel the bones of your jaw pressing against his palm. His eyes were cold and hard, and utterly without mercy.

"What you want," he said, and his voice was soft and cold and final, "is not the point of this marriage. What I want is the point. What I need is the point. Your comfort, your desires, your childish preferences—none of that matters. What matters is your duty. What matters is your obedience. What matters is that I need a wife who can perform her duties without crying about it."

"I am not crying," you said, but you were. You could feel the tears on your cheeks, hot and wet, sliding down toward your chin where his fingers still gripped you. You had not even noticed them start. They had just... appeared, leaking from your eyes like water from a cracked vessel, dripping onto the bodice of your ruined pink dress.

"Good," he said, and there was something almost like approval in his voice now. "Then you have no excuse."

He released your chin and sat back against the cushioned bench, his hands falling to his sides, his posture relaxed and expectant. His breeches were open now, and you could see—you could not help but see—the thick length of him, already half-hard, already rising to meet his belt buckle.

"Open your mouth," he said again. "And come here."

Your hands were shaking. Your whole body was shaking, trembling like a leaf in a storm, every nerve ending screaming at you to run, to fight, to do anything other than what he was asking. But there was nowhere to run. The door was latched, and even if you could reach it, even if you could throw it open and leap from the moving wheelhouse, where would you go? Your mother was hours behind you. Your dragon was in the sky and could not land on a narrow road surrounded by armed men. And Ormund was your husband, legally and truly, with all the rights that came with that title, rights that had been explained to you by septons and maesters and your own mother.

A wife's body belonged to her husband. That was the law of the land, the law of the Faith, the law that had governed marriages since before the Targaryens came to Westeros. If you refused him, he had the right to punish you. If you fought him, he had the right to restrain you. If you told anyone what happened in the privacy of your marriage, they would look at you with pity, perhaps, but they would not help you. They could not help you. There was no help to be given.

You opened your mouth, it was barely a parting of your lips at first, a small, hesitant gap, the kind of opening you might make to take a sip of too-hot tea. Your jaw trembled with the effort of holding it open. Your tongue felt thick and clumsy and useless. You could taste the salt of your own tears on your lips, could feel the wetness on your cheeks turning cool in the evening air that seeped through the cracks in the wheelhouse walls.

But Ormund saw the small surrender, and his hand came up to cup the back of your head again, his fingers tangling in your hair, his palm warm against your skull. He guided you forward, gently at first, almost tenderly, the way he had guided you through the steps of your first dance at the wedding feast. Down and down and down, until your face was inches from his lap, until you could smell him—the clean salt smell of sweat, the musk of arousal, the faint trace of the lavender soap he had used that morning.

"Wider," he said.

You opened your mouth wider, your jaw aching already, your throat constricting in anticipation. You felt like a baby bird, beak agape, waiting to be fed something you did not want.

He guided you down, the taste of him filled your mouth all at once, he was hot against your tongue, hot and smooth and impossibly large, larger than you remembered. Your mouth stretched around him, the corners of your lips burning with the strain, and your throat convulsed in protest as the head of him pressed against the back of your palate.

You gagged immediately. Your throat seized, your stomach heaved, and your hands flew up to push against his thighs, every instinct in your body screaming at you to pull away, to spit him out, to flee. But his hand was on the back of your head, firm and unyielding, not forcing you deeper but not letting you pull away either. He held you there, suspended, balanced on the edge of vomiting, while tears streamed down your face and saliva pooled in the corners of your stretched mouth.

"Breathe through your nose," he said, and his voice was calm, almost soothing, the voice of a riding instructor teaching a novice to stay in the saddle. "Slowly. In and out. Do not panic. Your body will adjust if you let it."

You tried. You truly tried. You forced yourself to breathe through your nose, slow and shaky, inhaling the scent of him—the musk, the salt, the faint trace of lavender soap—while your throat fluttered and spasmed around the intrusion. It was the hardest thing you had ever done, harder than mounting Aegarax for the first time, harder than watching your father waste away, harder than saying goodbye to your mother at the gates of King's Landing. Harder even than the wedding night, because on the wedding night you had only had to endure.

"Good," Ormund murmured, and his voice had changed now. It was rougher, deeper, threaded with a pleasure that made your skin crawl. "Good girl. You are doing so well."

Good girl. The words landed somewhere deep in your chest, tangled up with the shame and the fear and the horrible, undeniable flicker of something that might have been relief. He was praising you. He was not angry anymore. If you could just do this well enough, if you could just make him happy, then maybe it would be over. Maybe he would let you go. Maybe he would be kind again, the way he had been this morning, holding you and apologizing and promising that it would get better.

You hated that the praise helped. You hated that your shoulders relaxed, even slightly, even as the taste of him filled your mouth and your throat burned and your jaw ached. You hated that some small, broken part of you was desperate for his approval, desperate enough to do this, desperate enough to try.

He guided you deeper, and this time he did not pull back, your throat convulsed around him—a helpless, rippling spasm that you could not control—and the sound you made was wet and strangled and utterly humiliating. Saliva flooded your mouth, your body trying desperately to reject the intrusion, but there was nowhere for it to go. It pooled under your tongue and leaked from the corners of your stretched lips and dripped in thick, ropy strands onto the ruined silk of your bodice. Your nose was pressed flat against the coarse dark hair at the base of him, and you could smell everything, the salt of his sweat, the musk of his arousal, the faint lingering trace of the lavender soap he had used that morning. The hair tickled your nostrils and made you want to sneeze, but you could not sneeze, could not breathe, could not do anything except kneel there with your throat full of him while tears streamed down your face and your stomach heaved against the invasion.

"Hold it," he said, and his voice was tight now, strained with pleasure. His hand was heavy on the back of your head, keeping you pinned in place, his fingers twisted so deeply into your silver-gold hair that you could feel the pull at your scalp with every tiny movement. "Hold it right there. Do not move. Let your throat get used to me."

You could not have moved if you tried. You were frozen, impaled, your jaw stretched so wide that the hinges ached with a deep, throbbing pain that radiated up into your temples. Your lips were stretched into a perfect circle around the thickness of him, the delicate skin at the corners of your mouth burning and threatening to split. You could feel every inch of him inside you—the ridge of the head pressed against the back of your throat, the thick vein on the underside pulsing against your tongue, the weight and the heat and the impossible, overwhelming fullness of him. Your throat kept trying to swallow, a reflexive spasm that only made it worse, only made him groan and tighten his grip on your hair.

"There we go," he murmured, and his thumb stroked the curve of your skull, a gesture that might have been tender if everything else were not so cruel. "There we go. You feel that? That is your body learning to accept me. You will get better at this. You will learn to take me deeper. You will learn to breathe around me. And one day, you will not gag at all. One day, you will be able to take every inch of me down your throat without making a sound."

The thought was horrifying. The thought that there would be a next time, and a next time, and a next time—that this was not a single, isolated degradation but the beginning of something that would happen again and again and again until your body learned to submit to it. You made a sound against him, a muffled whimper, and he laughed softly above you.

"I know," he said. "I know. It feels like too much right now. But your body will adapt. Bodies always do. My first wife gagged the same way on our wedding night, and within a moon she could swallow me whole without a single tear. You will learn the same way she did. You will learn to love it."

His first wife. He was talking about his first wife while his cock was buried in your throat. He was comparing you to a dead woman, a woman you would never meet, a woman whose place you had taken in his bed and his household and his life. And he was telling you that she had learned this too. That she had knelt where you were kneeling now, had gagged the way you were gagging now, had been trained the way you were being trained now. Had she hated it? Had she cried the way you were crying? Had she stared at the canopy of her marriage bed and wondered if this was what love was supposed to feel like?

You would never know. She was dead, and you were here, and Ormund's cock was in your throat, and none of your questions mattered because no one was going to answer them.

He let you stay there for what felt like an eternity, your throat working helplessly around him, your lungs burning for air, your vision starting to blur at the edges from lack of oxygen. You could feel your pulse hammering in your temples, in your throat, in the place where his flesh met your flesh. You could feel the saliva pooling under your tongue and spilling over your lower lip in thick, glistening strings. You could feel every tiny movement he made—the twitch of his hips, the flex of his thighs beneath your hands, the way his stomach tensed when you swallowed involuntarily.

And then, finally, mercifully, he pulled you back, you came off him with a wet, obscene sound—a pop, almost, followed by a thick strand of saliva that connected your lower lip to the head of him, stretching and thinning and finally breaking to drip onto your bodice. You gasped for air, great heaving gulps of it, your chest rising and falling so hard that the stained silk of your dress strained across your breasts. Your throat was on fire. Your jaw screamed with pain when you tried to close your mouth. Your eyes were so blurred with tears that you could barely see him, just a vague shape looming above you, his hand still tangled in your hair.

"Breathe," he said, and his voice was almost kind. "Catch your breath. You did well."

You knelt there, gasping, and you hated that the praise still mattered. You hated that some small, broken part of you was still desperate for his approval, still clinging to the scraps of kindness he threw you like a starving dog begging for table scraps. He had forced his cock down your throat until you nearly passed out, and now he was telling you that you did well, and you wanted to believe him. You wanted to believe that you had done well, that you had pleased him, that this was something to be proud of rather than something to be ashamed of.

"Please," you whispered, and your voice came out hoarse and broken, barely recognizable as your own. "Please, I cannot—I need—"

"Shh." His hand moved from your hair to your cheek, his thumb wiping away the tears and the saliva that coated your chin. The gesture was gentle. Almost loving. "You can. You already are. Now open your mouth again. We are not finished."

You stared up at him, uncomprehending. Your throat was raw and burning, your jaw aching, your lips swollen and tender. You had done what he asked. You had taken him in your mouth. You had gagged and choked and nearly passed out, and still it was not enough, still he wanted more, still he was looking down at you with those eyes that held no mercy at all.

"I said open." His voice hardened, just slightly, just enough to make you flinch. His fingers found your chin again, gripping it, squeezing until your lips parted involuntarily. "Open your mouth and stick out your tongue."

You obeyed. What else could you do? You opened your mouth, stretching your aching jaw wide, and extended your tongue the way you had seen the maesters do when they examined patients for fever. The position was obscene, degrading, kneeling at his feet with your mouth open and your tongue out like a dog begging for scraps, your face wet with tears and spit, your dress ruined, your hair a tangled mess around your shoulders.

"Good girl," he said, and the words landed in your chest like stones. "Now hold still."

He took himself in his hand— the same hand that had held yours during the wedding feast—and guided the head of his cock to your extended tongue. He did not push into your throat this time. Instead, he tapped the head against your tongue, once, twice, three times, a slow and deliberate rhythm that made your stomach clench with dread. The contact was light, almost teasing, but you could feel the heat of him, the weight of him, the promise of what was to come.

"You have a pretty tongue," he said, and his voice was conversational now, almost casual, as though he were commenting on the weather or the quality of the wine. "Pink and soft. I have imagined this, you know. During our courtship. I would sit across from you in your mother's solar, watching you talk, watching your tongue move behind your teeth, and I would imagine what it would feel like on my cock."

He pushed the head of himself onto your tongue and held it there, letting you taste him again, you could feel the slit at the tip, could feel the bead of moisture that had gathered there, could taste it when it spread across your tongue in a thin, salty slickness.

"Close your lips," he instructed. "Just around the head. Yes. Like that. Now suck."

You did not know how to suck. You had never sucked anything in your life, you had never put your mouth on anything the way he was asking you to. But you tried, because trying was all you could do. You closed your lips around the head of him and hollowed your cheeks the way you had seen people do with sticky sweets, and you sucked.

The sound he made was not a word. It was a groan, low and guttural, dragged up from somewhere deep in his chest. His hand tightened in your hair, and his hips twitched forward, pushing another inch of him into your mouth before he caught himself.

"Yes," he said, and his voice was rough now, rougher than you had ever heard it, even on the wedding night. "Yes, like that. Again. Suck harder."

You sucked harder. Your cheeks hollowed, your tongue pressing flat against the underside of him, and you felt him pulse against your palate. The taste of him grew stronger—saltier, muskier—and you realized with a distant sort of horror that more of that clear, slick fluid was leaking from the tip, coating your tongue, sliding down your throat.

"Gods," he breathed. "Your mouth is so sweet. So soft. So eager to please."

He began to move again, but differently this time. He did not push deep into your throat. Instead, he fucked your mouth with short, shallow thrusts, just the first few inches of him sliding between your lips while you sucked and licked and tried to remember how to breathe. His hand guided your head, setting a rhythm, and you followed it because following was easier than thinking. In and out. In and out. The wet sounds of your mouth working him filled the wheelhouse—obscene, sucking sounds, the kind of sounds you had never imagined a person could make, let alone a princess, let alone you.

"Use your hand," he said, and his breathing was ragged now. "What you cannot fit in your mouth, stroke with your hand. Yes. Wrap your fingers around me. Tighter. Like that."

Your hand came up hesitantly, your fingers wrapping around the base of him where your mouth could not reach. The skin here was different—softer, looser, sliding over the hardness beneath. You could feel the coarse hair at the base, could feel the heavy weight of his stones hanging below. You stroked him the way he had shown you, up and down, your fingers meeting your lips with each movement, and he groaned again, louder this time, loud enough that you worried the guards outside might hear.

"That's it," he said, and his voice was barely controlled now, trembling with something that sounded almost like desperation. "That's my good girl. That's my perfect, obedient wife. You were made for this. You were made to be on your knees for me. Made to take my cock in your pretty little mouth."

Made for this. The words echoed in your head, tangling with the shame and the fear and the horrible, undeniable fact that your body was doing this, was learning this, was adapting to this the way he said it would. Your jaw was still aching, your throat still burning, but you were not gagging anymore. Your hands were still shaking, but they were stroking him in rhythm, finding a pace that made his hips twitch and his breath catch.

You were learning. You were getting better and that was the worst part of all.

He thrust deeper without warning, pushing past your lips and over your tongue and into your throat in one smooth, sudden movement. You gagged violently, your throat seizing, your hands flying to his thighs to push him away. But he did not let you. His hand held your head in place, his fingers twisted in your hair, and he held himself buried in your throat while you choked and sputtered and tears streamed down your face.

"Swallow," he commanded, his voice strained. "Swallow around me. Do it."

You could not swallow. Your throat was too full, too stretched, too overwhelmed. But your body tried anyway—an involuntary spasm, a reflexive clenching of muscles that you could not control. The sensation made him cry out, a guttural sound that was almost a shout, and his hips jerked forward, driving himself even deeper.

"Yes," he groaned. "Yes. Just like that. Fuck. Your throat is so tight. So perfect."

He pulled back, letting you gasp for air, and then thrust in again. And again. And again. He was fucking your throat now, properly fucking it, his hips pumping in a steady rhythm while you knelt there and took it. Your hands were still on his thighs, not pushing anymore, just holding on. Your throat had stopped gagging—or maybe you had just stopped noticing. Your mind had gone somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere the taste of him and the sound of his grunts and the ache in your jaw could not reach.

You thought about Aegarax. You thought about the wind in your hair and the sun on your face and the way the world looked from a thousand feet up, all the people and their problems reduced to specks of dust. You thought about your mother, and whether she had known, and whether she would care if you told her. You thought about the pink silk scarf he had given you during your courtship, the one that matched your ruined dress, and how you had worn it to the feast that night and felt like the most cherished woman in the world.

You thought about anything except what was happening to your body.

"That's it," Ormund was saying, his voice coming from very far away. "Take it. Take all of it. You are so good at this. Such a fast learner. Such a perfect little wife."

His rhythm was faltering now, growing erratic. His breathing was harsh and ragged, his hips snapping forward with increasing urgency. His hand in your hair tightened until it was almost painful, holding you in place while he chased his pleasure.

"I am going to spend," he said, and the words cut through the fog in your mind. "I am going to spend in your mouth, and you are going to swallow every drop. Do you understand?"

You did not understand. You did not know what he meant by spend, did not know what he was going to put in your mouth. But you nodded anyway, because nodding was what he wanted, because obedience was the only way to make this stop.

"Do not spill a single drop," he said. "If you spill, we will start again. Do you understand?"

You nodded again, more frantically this time.

He thrust once, twice, three more times, and then he buried himself in your throat with a guttural roar.

The first pulse of hot fluid hitting the back of your throat made you gag. It was thick and salty and bitter, more bitter than his skin, more bitter than the clear fluid that had been leaking from the tip. It flooded your mouth, coating your tongue, filling your cheeks, spilling down your throat in thick, viscous spurts that you could not swallow fast enough. There was so much of it. So much more than you had expected. It kept coming, pulse after pulse, each one accompanied by a low groan from above you and a twitch of his cock against your tongue.

"Swallow," he commanded, his voice hoarse. "Swallow it all."

You swallowed. The taste was overwhelming—salt and bitterness and something indescribably alien, something that coated your throat and your tongue and the inside of your cheeks and would not go away. You swallowed again, and again, your throat working desperately to keep up with the flood. Some of it escaped anyway, leaking from the corner of your mouth and running down your chin in a thick white rivulet that dripped onto your already-ruined bodice.

He pulled back, just enough to let the last few spurts land on your tongue. You saw it then, for the first time, what he had put in your mouth. It was white, thick and pearlescent, pooling on your tongue like spoiled milk. You stared at it, uncomprehending, and then he was speaking again.

"Do not swallow yet," he said. "Open your mouth. Let me see."

You opened your mouth, stretching your aching jaw as wide as it would go. Your tongue was coated in white, your cheeks smeared with it, the taste of it filling your nose and your throat and your entire awareness. You knelt there, on the hard wooden floor of the wheelhouse, with your mouth open and your husband's seed pooling on your tongue, and you waited for him to tell you what to do next.

"Good girl," he said, and his voice was soft with satisfaction. "Look at you. So pretty with your mouth full of my seed. This is where you belong, you know. On your knees. Serving your husband. This is what you were made for."

He reached down and touched your chin, tilting your face up so he could see you better. His eyes were sated now, the hunger in them temporarily banked. He studied you the way a painter might study a finished canvas, with quiet satisfaction and more than a little pride.

"Now swallow," he said. "And show me your empty mouth."

You swallowed. The thick fluid slid down your throat, coating it, leaving a trail of salt and bitterness that you knew would linger for hours. You opened your mouth again, sticking out your tongue to show him that it was gone, that you had been good, that you had done what he asked.

"Very good," he said. He released your chin and sat back, reaching for the cloth he had set aside earlier. He cleaned himself with a few brisk, efficient movements, then tucked himself back into his breeches and began refastening the laces. "You did well. Better than I expected. You are a natural, I think. All you needed was proper instruction."

You stayed on your knees, because he had not told you that you could get up. Your jaw ached, your throat burned, your lips felt swollen and bruised. Your pink dress was ruined—stained with tears and spit and the thick white fluid you had just swallowed. Your knees were raw from the rough wooden floor, and your hands were still trembling, and you did not think they would ever stop trembling.

"Is that—" you started, and your voice came out hoarse, scraped raw, barely recognizable as your own. You cleared your throat and tried again, wincing at the pain. "Is that what you wanted? Are you pleased now?"

"It is what I needed," he said, and the distinction felt important, felt significant, felt like a door closing somewhere deep inside you. Not what he wanted—what he needed. As though this had been necessary. As though you had made it necessary. "You will get better with practice. You have a natural talent for it, I think. Once you learn to control your gag reflex."

Practice. The word made your stomach turn, made bile rise in your throat, made the taste of him seem suddenly more present, more overwhelming. You were going to have to do this again. Tomorrow, perhaps. Or the day after. Or every day for the rest of your life. This was a skill you were expected to cultivate, like embroidery or dancing or playing the high harp. This was what it meant to be a wife.

Ormund refastened his belt—the belt he had set aside on the bench, the belt that had loomed over the entire encounter like an unspoken threat—and smoothed his tunic, adjusted his cloak, ran a hand through his auburn hair to restore it to its proper arrangement. His movements were calm and unhurried, the movements of a man who had done nothing more strenuous than pour a cup of wine or sign a document or give an order to a servant.

"Now," he said, reaching into the basket of supplies and withdrawing a clean linen cloth. He held it out to you, his expression almost benevolent, the expression of a lord rewarding a servant who had performed their duties adequately. "Clean yourself up. Your face is a mess, and your dress needs to be straightened. We will be stopping for the night within the hour, and I expect you to present yourself at dinner as though nothing has happened. You will sit beside me. You will smile. You will speak only when spoken to. And you will not, under any circumstances, let anyone see that you have been crying."

You took the cloth. Your fingers were shaking so badly that you nearly dropped it, the linen trembling in your grip like a living thing. You pressed it to your face, wiping away the tears and the spit and the other fluids, scrubbing at your cheeks and your chin and the corners of your mouth until the skin felt raw and tender. The cloth came away stained and damp, and you stared at it for a long moment, at the evidence of your humiliation made visible on white linen.

"There is a hand mirror in the basket," Ormund added, rising from his seat, ducking his head to avoid the ceiling. "Fix your hair before we arrive. You look like a woman who has been rolling in the hay with a stable boy, and that is not the impression I want to make on the innkeeper."

He said it lightly, almost teasingly, as though the whole thing had been a game. As though you had been a willing participant. As though any of this was normal.

"You will not speak of this to anyone," he continued, and his voice shifted, the lightness giving way to something harder, something that brooked no argument. "Not to your mother, not to your ladies, not to your dragon, not to whatever servants I assign to you in Oldtown. This is between husband and wife. What happens in our private chambers—or our private wheelhouse—is no one else's business. Do you understand?"

"Yes," you said, and the word came out barely a whisper, scraped and raw and broken. "I understand."

"And tomorrow," he said, one hand on the door latch, pausing to look back at you over his shoulder, "when we resume our journey, you will ride in the wheelhouse and you will keep your mouth closed unless I ask you a question. You will not contradict me. You will not question me. You will not speak out of turn. You will be the obedient wife that I agreed to marry. The wife you promised me you would be."

"Yes," you said again, because what else was there to say?

Ormund leaned down—not far, because from your position on the floor he was already so far above you—and tilted your chin up with one finger. His thumb brushed across your lower lip, wiping away a smear of moisture that you had missed. The gesture was almost tender. Almost loving. Almost like the man who had held you this morning and apologized and promised to be better.

"You are beautiful when you cry," he said, and his voice was soft now, almost wondering. "Did you know that? Your eyes go very bright, and your cheeks flush, and your lips part just so. It is quite lovely. I look forward to seeing it again."

You did not answer. You did not know how. You only stared up at him, at the pleasant, courteous mask of his face, at the eyes that had looked at you with such tenderness during your courtship and such cold satisfaction just now.

He smiled and released you. "Good girl," he said.

ladymoztaza

Jul 29

darktargslut

when princess gets with cregan, does she misses ormund or she starts understanding how toxic he was to her? how history books will describe them?

From Archmaester Gyldayn's Fire and Blood, Being a History of the Targaryen Kings

Ormund X Targ!Reader X Cregan

WC:2k

The marriage of the Princess to Lord Ormund Hightower was celebrated with all the pomp befitting the union of two great houses, though those with ears to hear noted that the bride smiled less than a maiden ought on her wedding day. Lord Ormund, for his part, comported himself with the dignity and restraint one would expect of a lord of his years and station, and it was widely remarked that he showed remarkable patience with a bride who had clearly been ill-prepared for the duties of wifehood by her mother's notoriously disordered household.

That the Lord of Oldtown was more than twice his bride's age occasioned little comment; such matches were common enough, and the princess was said to be of a meek and biddable disposition, Eustace notes with barely concealed satisfaction that Lord Ormund undertook the correction of these deficiencies with "patience and firmness befitting a father as much as a husband," and that within a moon of their wedding, the princess had shed the immodest Lyseni fashions of her maidenhood in favor of the woolens and silks proper to a Hightower lady. That she wept at the exchange is mentioned only in Mushroom's account, and Mushroom is not to be trusted in matters of women's tears.

What passed between them in the privacy of the Hightower is not recorded, though Eustace assures us that Lord Ormund was a man of "vigorous piety" who attended services at the Starry Sept each morning and kept a septon in his household for the spiritual edification of his young wife. Mushroom, predictably, takes the opposite view, devoting several lurid pages to the claim that the princess was so thoroughly subjected to her husband's "attentions" that she could scarcely walk on the mornings. The fool further alleges that Lord Ormund kept a collection of certain items—hair, ribbons, "tokens of affection"—which he would produce in the bedchamber to the princess's mingled shame and, Mushroom insinuates, secret pleasure. That Mushroom had never set foot in the Hightower seems not to have constrained his imagination in the slightest.

On the matter of the princess's behavior, the two sources are in rare agreement, though they differ in interpretation. Both record that she was seldom seen in public during the early year of her marriage, a circumstance Eustace attributes to her natural modesty and devotion to her household duties, while Mushroom—with a leer that is almost audible on the page—suggests she was kept close because Lord Ormund could not bear for other men to look upon what belonged to him. "He dressed her like a septa and locked her away like a jewel," Mushroom writes, "and she, poor simple creature, mistook his jealousy for love."

What is known is that the princess's famed dragon was seldom seen above Oldtown, and when it did appear, its cries were said to be so mournful that smallfolk made the sign of the Seven. Septon Eustace takes this as evidence that even the beast sensed the wickedness of its mistress, for dragons, as all men know, are creatures of sin and sorcery, bound to their riders by pacts that no godly man should contemplate. That Lord Ormund tolerated the creature's presence at all was counted as further proof of his extraordinary forbearance.

The servants' gossip, dutifully recorded by Mushroom with his customary indifference to decency, painted a picture of a household in which the lord was forever correcting his wife's deficiencies. She spoke too freely, it was said. She asked impertinent questions. She had been raised in the Targaryen fashion, which is to say without discipline, without modesty, and without any proper understanding of a wife's subordination to her husband. Lord Ormund, who had been blessed in his first marriage with a lady of impeccable breeding, was said to find his new bride's temperament trying in the extreme. Yet he never raised his hand to her in public, nor spoke a harsh word where others might hear—a restraint that Septon Eustace lauds as evidence of his sanctity, though Mushroom, with characteristic coarseness, suggests that whatever correction occurred happened behind closed doors and left no marks that could be seen when the lady was clothed.

That she bore him a child is indisputable, and Eustace takes care to note that she performed this duty without complaint, as befits a godly wife. Mushroom, ever eager to soil the cleanest linen, claims that Lord Ormund was so determined to see her with child that he kept her "occupied in the matter nightly" from the first week of their marriage, and that the princess, "young and tender as she was," learned to endure it and eventually to welcome it, for she knew no other existence.

When the war began in earnest, Lord Ormund—whether out of husbandly concern or a darker desire to keep his wife ignorant of her family's fortunes—took great pains to ensure that tidings from the east did not reach the princess's ears. Septon Eustace praises this as the act of a devoted husband protecting his delicate wife from matters too weighty for the female mind to bear, though even he admits that Lord Ormund's efforts went beyond ordinary solicitude. Letters from Dragonstone were said to have gone astray. Riders bearing news from King's Landing were turned away at the gates. The princess, by all accounts, knew nothing of her mother's mounting peril, of her brother Lucerys's death above Shipbreaker Bay, or of the gathering storm that would soon consume the realm.

Mushroom, inevitably, offers a third interpretation. The Lord of Oldtown, he claims, knew that if his wife learned of the war, she would fly at once to her mother's side on that wretched beast of hers, and he could not bear the thought of losing her—not to Rhaenyra, not to the blacks, not to anyone. "He kept her ignorant as a septa," the fool writes, "and just as cloistered, for he feared her dragon more than he feared the gods, and her mother's influence most of all." That Lord Ormund's motives were possessive rather than protective is a charge the greens have always denied, though it must be said that the princess's ignorance of such momentous events—occurring to her own blood, in her own name—required a degree of isolation that even the most devoted husband would find difficult to justify.

The revelation, when it came, was devastating, through a servant's careless remark, Mushroom claims, though Septon Eustace insists it was delivered gently by Lord Ormund himself, the princess, upon learning of her brother's fate, collapsed with a shriek that witnesses later described as inhuman. Septon Eustace, with his customary sympathy for the female condition, attributes her collapse to "the weakness of her sex, which cannot bear shocks that men must endure with fortitude." Mushroom attributes it to the fact that she had been deceived for weeks by the husband who had sworn to cherish her, and that her grief was as much for the lie as for the brother.

When Lord Ormund departed for the war, the princess remained at the Hightower for some months—long enough for Septon Eustace to praise her dutiful attention to the household in her husband's absence, and long enough for Mushroom to invent half a dozen scandals that supposedly occurred the moment the lord's back was turned. That she eventually flew to King's Landing with her child is not disputed. The meaning of that flight, however, has been contested by every chronicler who set pen to the Dance. Septon Eustace declares it an act of wifely desertion, a betrayal made all the more damning by the fact that she left Lord Ormund's children from his first marriage behind, "abandoning her stepchildren as carelessly as she abandoned her vows." Mushroom, by contrast, claims she fled because she had received word that her husband had fallen—a false report, as it transpired, but one she was eager to believe, for it freed her from a marriage she had come to loathe.

The fool further alleges that the princess miscarried a child upon learning of Prince Jacaerys's death, and that Lord Ormund was responsible not only for concealing the news but for the babe's loss itself, for "her womb had been so battered by his ceaseless demands that it could no longer hold what was planted there." This is Mushroom at his most indefensible, fashioning tragedy into titillation, yet the rumor took hold in certain circles and has proven difficult to dislodge from the popular imagination.

What followed in the North has been the subject of more ink than any other chapter of the princess's life. That she entered into an irregular union with Lord Cregan Stark while her lawful husband yet lived is a fact that even her most ardent defenders cannot deny. Septon Eustace pronounces it bigamy and whoredom, declaring that the princess had "inherited her mother's talent for spreading her legs wherever advantage might be gained." That she bore Stark a son within the year is cited as proof that the union was consummated with an enthusiasm unbecoming a woman who still had a husband living, whatever reports she claimed to have received.

Mushroom, predictably, provides details. The princess and Lord Stark, he writes, were inseparable from the moment of her arrival, the Northman being "everything the Hightower was not: young, hale, and possessed of an appetite that matched her own newly awakened desires." The fool devotes an improbable number of pages to the coupling itself—pages that remain popular in certain disreputable establishments to this day—claiming that the princess, after years of what he terms "Oldtown discipline," discovered in Winterfell that the marital act could be something other than duty and penance. That she took to it with a fervor that shocked even the Northmen, a people not known for prudishness, is presented by Mushroom as a redemption of sorts, though Septon Eustace sees only confirmation of her inherent depravity.

It was the young king, Aegon the Third, who prevented this catastrophe, though he was but a boy of ten and crushed by the griefs that would define his reign. His elder sister, the princess, had refused the throne in his favor—a decision Eustace calls humble and Mushroom calls foolish—and now she found herself in the impossible position of having two husbands, each of whom could claim her by law, and each of whom commanded armies that the crown could ill afford to oppose. That she loved one of these men and had borne him a son is indisputable; that she had also borne a son to the other, and had once loved him too, complicated matters beyond the solving of any maester's counsel.

What followed the war was a matter that threatened to plunge the ravaged realm into fresh conflict, for Lord Ormund Hightower, upon learning the full extent of his wife's second marriage, did not accept his cuckolding, he gathered his surviving forces—still some four thousand strong, hardened by the campaigns in the Reach—and began a march north with the stated intention of reclaiming his wife and child from the "savage seducer" who had stolen them. That Cregan Stark, for his part, began marshaling the northern levies in response is well documented, and for several tense months the realm stood on the brink of a private war that would have bled what little peace the Dance had left.

The compromise that was eventually brokered—by the princess herself, if Mushroom is to be believed, though Eustace insists it was the work of the King's Hand—was as unorthodox as it was pragmatic. The princess would remain the wife of Cregan Stark in the North, where the old gods held sway and the Faith's proclamations carried little weight. But she would also return to Oldtown for a portion of each year, bringing with her the son she had borne Lord Ormund, the child Aethan, so that the boy might know his father and his Hightower kin. That she would, during these visits, resume her duties as Lady of Oldtown—all of her duties, as Mushroom takes pains to specify—was an unspoken term of the arrangement, one that the princess accepted with what Eustace calls "penitent grace" and "She had been broken to the saddle young," Mushroom writes with characteristic crudeness, "and learned to ride whichever mount was beneath her."

Mushroom, who claims to have witnessed the first reunion of Lord Ormund and the Stark at a royal wedding some years later, describes the encounter with relish: "The Wolf and the Beacon stood at opposite ends of the hall, each with the princess between them like a bone between two hounds, and the looks they exchanged could have curdled milk. Yet she went to each in turn—to Ormund first, as courtesy demanded, for he was the elder husband and the one most grievously wronged—and spoke to him softly, and touched his face, and he unbent enough to press his lips to her lips. Then she crossed to Stark, who had watched the exchange with the patience of a man who knew she would come to him eventually, and he put his arm around her with a possessiveness that made the Hightower man reach for his sword. It was, all agreed, the most uncomfortable wedding feast since King Viserys had made his family dine together during the last year of his reign."

Lord Ormund, for his part, accepted the arrangement with the grim dignity of a man who had won the war but lost the peace. When she returned to Oldtown each spring with young Aethan, the servants noted that Lord Ormund seemed to shed ten years in a single day—and that on the mornings after her arrival, she was often seen walking with some difficulty, a detail that Mushroom, predictably, does not allow to pass without comment.

Thus the princess lived out her days, a wife to two men and mistress of two keeps, a dragonrider who spent half her year in the frozen North and half in the green Reach. That she bore children to both husbands is a matter of record; that Lord Ormund's fourth son, Aelias, was the child of his second marriage and the only one of her Hightower children to survive infancy, while her Stark sons grew tall and strong in the Northern fashion, occasioned much comment from Eustace, who saw in the disparity the judgment of the Seven. Yet Aethan, a spirited boy, devoted to his mother and to the half-brothers who visited Oldtown when the seasons permitted, he grew to manhood in the shadow of his parents' strange arrangement, spending summers in Oldtown and winters in the North. In time, he would earn his own place in the histories, though that is a tale for another chapter.

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