the dreamer anya @misswynters - Tumblr Blog

Jun 13

THE PRINCE'S QUARRY Chapter I

PAIRING. AERION "Brightflame" TARGARYEN X FEM! READER

WARNINGS: 18+, smut, enemies to twisted betrothed lovers, obsession from Aerion's side, grinding, fingering, reader being AFAB, Aerion being an expert with his tongue and fingers, p in v in the future chapters, kind of slow burn, etc.

WC: 8K

a/n. i did not want to go through the trials and errors of picking boy names for the sons of Lord Mantheon so he got cassian orson theo and another random guy idk (might change).

The ink had dried before you were allowed to leave the room.

That was how it was done; your brother Orson had explained to you on the ship from Monestria. The betrothal contracts were signed, witnessed, and sealed, and only then were the parties permitted to depart. As though the leaving itself might constitute a renegotiation. As though the moment you stepped out of the magister's study and into the corridor beyond, you might simply dissolve the arrangement by the act of walking away from it.

You had thought, briefly, that you might try. But you hadn’t.

You were the daughter of Lord Edwyn Mantheon, of the House that had held Monestria for six hundred years. You had been raised in the knowledge that the things you wanted and the things required of you were not always the same. That was the difference between a noblewoman and a fool: knowing which of those things to pursue and which to set aside without complaint. Your mother had taught you that. Your mother, who arrived at your father's house at the age of fifteen with a marriage contract signed by men twice her age, created something so peaceful and stable that it appeared to be almost content from the outside.

You were not your mother. But you were her daughter. The night before, you had stood in Magister Antaryon's study and watched the quill move across the parchment without saying anything. When it was finished, you walked back to your chambers with a straight back and a calm expression, and you spent a long time sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark.

It had become morning.

The guest chamber's high windows let in long, pale bars of sunlight that were warm and calm, unaffected by the fact that you hadn't slept. Pentos moved outside. The sounds of it drifting up from the streets below, the distant cries of vendors, and the low echos of a city that did not know or care who you were. You had pressed your forehead to the window glass the night before and watched the lights on the water until they blurred. The bay was beautiful. You would grant Pentos that much.

You dressed without calling for the handmaid they had assigned you. You did not want to be looked at this morning, even by someone paid not to react to what they saw. You chose the simplest gown you had brought. It was a deep blue, high-necked with no embellishment, and you put your hair up yourself. So, when you were done, you looked in the polished bronze mirror on the wall and recognized the face that looked back at you without feeling.

You were betrothed to Aerion Targaryen.

Prince Aerion Targaryen. Second son of the Morning Star, Prince Maekar. Known at court, if the whispers that reached even Monestria could be believed, for a beauty that rivaled his father's and a temperament that rivaled nothing so much as dragonfire. He was beautiful to look upon but absolutely catastrophic to be near. There were stories. You had grown up on them, like most things that happened in King's Landing. Monestria was not the capital. Your father was powerful but not proximate to the throne, and the Targaryen princes had always been more legend than reality to you.

Until last night, when you had stood in a salon and one of them had looked at you like you were a prize.

You pressed your fingers flat against the surface of the dressing table and breathed. It did not help but it was something to do.

Orson came to your door an hour after dawn.

He was the eldest of your brothers, 10 years your senior, and he had your father's jaw with your mother's eyes and a quality of careful steadiness that had, at various points in your life, been either comfort or an obstruction. This morning he came in without knocking, a habit of his, and stood in the center of the room with his hands clasped behind his back.

"It's done," he said.

"I know it's done. I was there."

"Father will be pleased."

You looked at him. He had the grace, at least, to look slightly uncomfortable.

"Aerion Targaryen is a prince of the blood," he said, which was not an answer to anything you had said. "The match elevates the house. Father always said that if the Prince Valarr’s arrangement fell through—"

"Orson."

He stopped.

"I'm not going to argue with you about it," you said. "It's done. You said so yourself." You turned back to the mirror and adjusted a pin in your hair that didn't need adjusting. "I would simply like to not be told that I should be pleased about it as well."

Silence.

"He looked at you," Orson said, and his voice was a whisper. "Last night. I noticed."

"Most people look at me. It is not generally considered noteworthy."

"This was different."

You met his eyes in the mirror. He was not wrong. You had noticed Aerion Targaryen's attention, the way it had settled on you and stayed there like something that had decided it had found what it was looking for. It had not been the look of a man being introduced to his future wife. It had been something older and less negotiated than that, something that made the back of your neck prickle even now in the morning light, hours later, when he was presumably in another wing of this vast manse and nowhere near you.

"He is going to be my husband," you said. "I expect he will look at me rather often."

Orson's mouth tightened. He wanted to say something else. You could see it in the set of his shoulders, the thing he was weighing and deciding against.

"The magister has arranged a midday gathering in the courtyard," he said instead. "Father wants you present."

"Then I will be present."

He left. You let out a breath you hadn't realized you were holding and looked at your own reflection for a moment longer before you turned away. The morning stretched on.

You were not a woman who sat well with idleness, and the hours before the midday gathering moved with the slowness of time that had nothing useful to fill it. You read for a while from the book you had brought. It was the history of the Freehold, dry and dense, exactly the kind of thing that usually steadied your mind. Today it did not. The words moved past you without catching.

Eventually you went out.

The magister's estate was enormous in the sense of Pentoshi wealth, with wide corridors, lofty walls, and surfaces covered in hanging silk and painted tiles. It was designed for impression rather than privacy. There were servants carrying trays, linens, and other items you couldn't identify as they moved silently through it with their eyes down. None of them paid you any attention. You were a guest here, not a resident, and in Pentos guests apparently enjoyed a particular invisibility that suited you well enough this morning.

You found the garden by following a corridor toward the light.

It was a long terrace along the eastern face of the manse, open to the morning air, with a low stone balustrade running the length of it and beyond that a view of the city falling away down the hillside toward the bay. The garden itself was formal in the Pentoshi style. It had clipped hedges, patterned stone paths, and flowers in colors so vivid they looked artificial in the early sun. Wisteria climbed the inner wall in heavy purple cascades. The water from the white stone fountain at the far end had a steady, low sound.

There was no one else here.

You strolled over to the balcony, placed your hands on the warm stone, and gazed out at Pentos.

The Free Cities were new to you. Although your father had taken you to King's Landing twice and Oldtown once for a conclave, Monestria was not a remote location; however, the Free Cities had always been a popular destination. Merchants. Exiles. Princes who were sent abroad to keep them from causing chaos at home.

You thought about that last category and looked at the wisteria.

Pentos was beautiful, in a foreign and unsettled way. The light was different here than it was at home — whiter, more direct, without the quality of softness that came off the sea around Monestria. It was like looking at a painting where the colors had been slightly altered beyond reality; everything was warm and clear.

As you stood there with nothing on your mind, you heard footsteps behind you.

It was not a servant's footstep. You had been hearing servants all morning and you knew the sound; it was quick, light, and practiced in the art of taking up as little space as possible. This was not that. Slower. Careful in a way that is meant to be heard.

You did not turn around.

"Lady Mantheon."

The voice was not one you recognized, and you turned then, because an unrecognized voice was more worth attention than a recognized one. The man standing at the far end of the balcony was not a servant, and he was not one of the Targaryen retinues you had been introduced to the night before. He was Pentoshi by the look of his clothes. Probably a merchant, perhaps, or a lesser magister, richly dressed in green and gold with a heavy chain around his neck. He was around forty years old, broad-shouldered, had a dark beard, and had an expression that tried to be friendly but failed.

Two men stood behind him.

There was a quiet, focused sensation in your chest.

"I think you have mistaken me for someone," you said.

"I have not." He moved forward one step. His men moved in a non-casual manner, but they did not follow. "Lord Edwyn Mantheon of Monestria is your father. Four days ago, you came to Pentos on the Silken Thread from the harbor at Mora Sound. You are promised to the dragon prince as of last night, and you have four brothers."

Each item was delivered with the flatness of a man reciting a list he had prepared. Your pulse had not changed. You were aware of the balcony behind you, the fall beyond it, the distance to the door through which you had come. You were also aware that you were wearing a gown that restricted your motion while in soft-soled shoes that were not made for running and the fact that there were three of them and only one of you. Screaming would likely bring someone, but not quickly enough.

"You have done a great deal of research," you said.

He smiled. It did not improve his face. "The Targaryen match is not yet solemnized. A betrothal is a contract, not a wedding. Contracts can be broken."

"You would need my father's agreement for that. My father is not in Pentos."

"No," he agreed. "He is not."

The two men behind him moved.

You moved first.

Not toward the door—that was what they expected, the instinct of every creature cornered near an exit, and you had spent enough time with your brothers in the training yard to know that you did not run toward the obvious. You went sideways, along the balustrade, putting stone between yourself and the nearest man, and when he reached for you, you brought your elbow up and back with the particular sharpness your brother Cassian had drilled into you one summer afternoon when he had decided that his sister ought to know at least something useful.

It connected. He swore. You had perhaps three seconds before the other one reached you.

You were opening your mouth to scream when the door at the far end of the terrace opened.

What happened next was quick. It was fast close and ugly, like real violence always was, and it was over before you had fully processed that it had begun. There were raised voices and sounds of someone hitting stone. The man who had been reaching for you was no longer reaching for you, and the man who had been speaking to you had gone very still with an expression that had abandoned its earlier pretense entirely.

Aerion Targaryen was standing between you and them.

He had not waited for his two men, who appeared to be knights dressed in the Targaryen household colors. That was the first thing you noticed. He had come through the door first and dealt with the nearest threat himself, and there was something unhurried about the way he stood now, his hand still resting on the pommel of the blade he had partially drawn, that suggested this was not a situation he found particularly alarming.

He looked at the man in green and gold.

"Leave Pentos," he said. It was conversational. Almost pleasant. "If I see your face in this city on the morrow. I will have your tongue cut out and sent to Magister Antaryon as an apology for the trouble."

The man left.

His men went with him, one of them still holding his face where you had hit him. The door closed.

You smoothed the front of your gown.

"Are you injured?" Aerion said plainly. He had not turned to look at you yet. Though he was watching the door through which the men had gone with an expression you could not read from the angle.

"No."

He turned then.

In the daylight he was, you had noticed it the night before and you noticed it again now, extraordinarily fair. That was the only word for it. The Targaryen look in full: silver-gold hair, light eyes, and sharp features arranged like they were born as godly. He was dressed simply for the morning, a dark doublet and riding boots, and the informality of it made him look somehow more dangerous than he had the night before in the salon.

He was looking at you the way he had looked at you then. That same attention that looked calm. "You hit him," he said.

"He reached for me."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth like a smirk. "Most women would have screamed."

"I was about to scream," you said. "Though you, my lord prince had arrived before I needed to."

He studied you for a moment. Then he moved past you, to the balcony, where he stopped and looked out at the city below with his hands clasped behind his back. As though three men had not just attempted to remove you from the balcony by force.

He said, "Do you know who he was? "It wasn't exactly a question.

"No. He knew a great deal about me. He seemed to feel that a betrothal was a negotiable arrangement."

"He was not wrong, technically." Aerion looked at the city. "A betrothal is not a marriage. There are parties who would prefer House Mantheon's alliance to go elsewhere. Your father has refused several offers in the past year alone." He paused then continued, "He will not try again. But there are others who might."

You looked at his appearance. "You are telling me I am not safe in Pentos."

"I am telling you that you are safe where I can see you." He said it simply, not as a threat but also as a threat. There was something in the register of it that was matter-of-fact, like a man stating a condition of the weather. "Which is a thing you will find easier to accept sooner rather than later."

The bluntness of it sat in the air between you.

"You are very certain of yourself," you said.

"Yes." He didn't look at you. "That is generally remarked upon."

"It was not a compliment."

Now he turned. He looked at you with those pale eyes and there it was again, that quality of gaze. It was deeply unsettling in a way you were determined not to show.

"I know," he said.

"Why were you on this balcony?" you said. "You came through that door very quickly."

His expression changed in some way. Barely visible.

"I saw you come out," he said. "I was in the corridor."

You looked at him for a moment. "You were watching me."

"I was in the corridor," he said again, and smiled, and the smile was the kind that answered nothing and admitted everything simultaneously.

The back of your neck was prickling again. You kept your face composed with the ease of long practice and looked back out at the city.

"You saved my life," you said. "Or at least my liberty. I suppose I am expected to be grateful."

"Are you?"

"I am sensible," you said. "Which is near enough."

He laughed. It was not a sound you had expected from him it was short and genuine. It changed his face briefly into something that looked almost like a person.

"Practical," he repeated, as though testing the word. "Yes. I think that is what you are."

You did not ask him what he meant. You did not particularly want to know.

"The midday gathering is in two hours," you said instead. "I should return to my chambers."

You moved to step past him toward the door. He did not move to stop you, he didnt reach out or speak or do any of the things that the presence at the back of your neck had been half-expecting. He simply stood on the balcony and let you pass, and you were almost to the door when his voice came, whispered and calm:

"You are not frightened of me."

You stopped. But you did not turn around.

"No," you said.

"You should be."

The morning air moved through the wisteria. Below the hill, Pentos went about its business, loud and warm and entirely indifferent.

"Perhaps," you said. "But I have found that fear is a luxury, my prince. I cannot afford it at present."

You went through the door and did not look back.

You did not tell Orson or any of your brothers.

It was not because you were protecting Aerion Targaryen, though you owed him nothing, not even the courtesy of silence, but you were under no illusion about what his concern for your safety was rooted in. A man did not watch a woman walk out into a garden and follow at a distance out of chivalry. A man did that because the woman was his or was about to be, and the thought of something happening to her was intolerable not out of love but out of possession.

But you did not tell Orson because telling him would mean a conversation that would last several hours. It would mean guards posted outside your door and a shortening of your already limited freedoms within the manse and a great deal of careful discussion about the wisdom of walking unaccompanied in parts of the house that were not your own.

And you would not be confined. Not today. Not while you could still move through a room without a keeper.

You came to that thought and sat with it.

You sat down at the writing desk in your chamber and pulled a piece of parchment toward you, then sat there looking at it without writing anything. The window was open. The sounds of Pentos came in with the warm air. You thought about Aerion Targaryen's face when he had told you you were safe where he could see you. The way it had not been a reassurance. The way it had been was a statement of another kind - a statement of purpose, a declaration of a thing already decided.

You stood in the corridor. pressing the tip of the quill onto the parchment though you didn't write anything.

You were a practical woman. You had said so yourself, an hour ago, to the face of the man you were going to marry, and you had meant it. It was practicality that had gotten you out of bed this morning, dressed and out of your chambers and through this whole suffocating day so far without doing anything that could not be undone.

Practicality tells you this:

The betrothal was concluded, and the match would go on. Some months. You would marry Aerion Targaryen in whatever ceremony satisfied the requirements of both houses. Then you would be his wife, and whatever that meant, it would mean it for the rest of your life or his, whichever came first.

He was watching you. He had been watching you since the moment you had walked into Magister Antaryon's hall and apparently given him a matter to fix his attention on. You did not know yet the full shape of what that meant. You only knew what you had seen with the quality and the patience of a man who already knew the outcome.

He was not wrong. But he might be about the certainty.

You put the quill down.

You were the only daughter of House Mantheon. You had been born in the high keep at Monestria with the sea on three sides and stone beneath your feet , a six hundred years of your family's choices in the walls around you. You watched your mother manage your father, and your father manage his bannermen, and your brothers manage each other, and what you had learned from all of it was this: the shape of a cage mattered less than whether its door was locked.

Aerion Targaryen was going to be your husband. But he was not your husband yet. And you had always been very good at finding doors.

The midday gathering was arranged with the exhausting care of Pentoshi hospitality. Magister Antaryon moved through his guests like a man tending a garden, pausing here and there, adjusting as needed, ensuring that the right people were in proximity to each other. And of course the wrong people were gently redirected. There was food on long tables with ale and wine being served. Somewhere, a pair of musicians playing a tune that was light and sounded beautifully.

You stood with your brother Theo near the wall at the garden's edge, eating a pastry you did not taste while watching the gathering.

You saw Aerion across the courtyard.

He was with a small group that consisted of his father's advisors, by the look of them, men in travel-worn Westerosi clothes. He was listening more than speaking, which surprised you faintly. In the salon the night before he had seemed like a man who enjoyed the sound of his own voice. Perhaps he was selective about his audience.

He was not looking at you.

You were undoubtedly aware of this.

"He's watching you," Theo said, very quietly beside you.

You did not look away from the pastry. "He is not. He is speaking with Lord Peake."

"He was watching you when you came in. Then he stopped looking when you looked toward him. He hesitated. "He is really skilled at it."

You took this into account. "You have a keen eye, brother."

"Well, I have three brothers who play cards," Theo said. "I learned to read faces, or I learned to lose money. What is he like?"

You thought about the balcony. And his calmly spoken words of "You are safe where I can see you."

"He is certain," you said. “Any and all. Like most royal men who have not yet been wrong about things that mattered to them.”

"That will end."

"Yes," you agreed. "It inevitably does."

Theo was quiet for a moment. He was the second youngest of your brothers, nearest to you in age and temperament, and he had a habit of understanding things you did not say out loud. "Are you frightened of him?" he said.

You thought, 'Fear is a luxury.'

"No," you replied. "But I think I should be paying attention."

Across the courtyard, Aerion Targaryen said something to Lord Peake that made the older man laugh, and his eyes though briefly, moved to find you where you stood.

He didn't see that you had already found him, so you looked down at your pastry.

Practical as you thought it would be. You were just that.

─── ⋆⋅☼⋅⋆ ───

It would have to be enough.

You had not planned to leave the residence.

That was the truth of it, or near enough. You had gone to bed at a reasonable hour just like any other woman who had signed her future away the previous evening and needed the unconsciousness of sleep to put distance between herself and the fact of it. You had lain in the dark for a while. You had listened to the city and had thought about nothing at all.

And then you had gotten up, dressed in the plainest clothes you had brought which were a dark gown and a cloak with a deep hood, and gone out through the servants' corridor that you had noted that morning when the handmaid brought your breakfast.

You were simply being sensible and pragmatic. The residence was suffocating in places where you were a guest but not a resident. Every comfort provided, every freedom quietly limited, your movements tracked not by guards but by attention, the awareness of being watched. You needed air, but most importantly you needed the anonymity of a city at night; a crowd could make you so invisible that even an empty room sometimes could not.

You needed to be somewhere that was not the magister's palace, where the walls had absorbed the memory of yesterday's signing and gave it back to you in every corridor.

So, you had gone out.

Pentos at night was a different creature than Pentos in the day. The heat softened after dark into pleasant feelings with the air carrying the mingled scents of the bay and the floral essences you could not name. It was perhaps some Pentoshi attribute that had no equivalent in Monestria. The streets near the magister's hill were wide and well-maintained, lit at intervals by hanging lanterns that cast everything in warm amber, and the people moving through them at this hour had the ease of a city that knew how to enjoy itself after sunset.

You walked with your hood up while keeping your eyes forward and didn't need to hurry. It only attracted attention. A woman walking at a steady pace in a good cloak was simply a woman going somewhere. A woman hurrying was a woman running from something and running invited pursuit.

Another thing Cassian had taught you, on an afternoon in one of your family's residences in Monestria. You had gone perhaps three streets from where you stayed when you became aware that you were being followed.

It was a sensation, a prickle at the back of the neck that meant something behind you was paying you the negative kind of attention. You had felt it once before, and you recognized it now with the unpleasant memory of an experience you had not enjoyed the first time around.

You turned left at the next corner, into a narrower street, and counted your steps. If the footsteps behind you adjusted then you were being followed. If they continued at the same pace and faded, you were being cautious for no purpose.

They changed. You breathed slowly through your nose. One set of footsteps, you thought. Possibly two. The second was harder to tell apart; it was quieter.

Here was the thing about being followed in a city you did not know: you could not lead them back to the residence. It was the one place you could not afford trouble, and you could not go to ground in an unknown alley because that was how women ended up in situations considerably worse than the one you were currently handling. What you needed was a public place with enough bodies in it to make you anonymous and enough exits to make you able to roam.

You had passed it two streets back: a building set slightly apart from its neighbors, lanterns at the door in deep red, music drifting out into the night air, and the sound of voices. Underneath it all lay money, privacy and the commerce of pleasure. A pleasure house.

You turned around.

The woman at the door of the pleasure house looked you over with the efficiency of a long time worker. You were clearly not a typical laborer because your cloak was too fine, and your hands were too uncalloused. With the way you were carrying yourself with the unconscious authority of someone who had grown up being attended to rather than attending. But you were also clearly not a wife who came looking for a husband, because wives came in pairs and looked harried and you were alone and looked, if anything, merely interested.

"Private room," you said in the halting Valyrian you had been drilling on the ship from Monestria. "For the evening. I will pay."

The woman looked at you for another moment, then stepped aside.

Inside, the pleasure house was warm and smelled of incense beneath the smoke of candles burning in colored glass. The main room was large, with silk hangings in deep jewel tones and furniture minimal and cushioned. There were twenty people scattered through it and no one looked up when you came in. Discretion was the primary product, and the people who frequented them had learned to keep their eyes in their own corners.

You were led up a small staircase by a young woman dressed in blue silk who appeared at your side. The private room was small and warm, with a couch along one wall draped in embroidered fabric and a table with a bottle of wine and two cups set out. A single lamp burned on the shelf, turning everything in the room the color of old honey.

You sat on the couch, poured yourself a cup of wine, and waited. You did not wait long. The door opened perhaps ten minutes after you had settled which was long enough for you to have drunk most of the first cup and begun on the second. You had been watching the door since you sat down. You were not surprised when it opened. You were almost pleased.

Aerion Targaryen filled the doorframe with ease. He had dressed in disguise in the same way you had but there was very little that could make him anonymous. It was not only the face, extraordinary as it was. It was the quality of his presence, the way a room seemed to reorganize itself subtly around him the moment he entered it, the way the lamplight found him. A beautiful man.

He looked at you sitting on the couch with your wine cup and said nothing. You looked back at him.

"Close the door," you commanded at him, looking back at your wine glass. "You're letting the incense out."

He closed the door. Though he didn't sit, he stood with his back against it, arms loose at his sides, while he looked at you with that expression that said nothing at all.

"You knew," he said.

"That you were following me?" You considered your wine. "Since the second street from the where im staying at."

"Yet you came here anyway."

"I came here because I was being followed by someone else as well," you said. "Someone less obvious than you and I needed a public place." You looked up at him. "Though I confess the private room was perhaps a hiccup in that strategy."

His expression changed. "Someone else..."

"Behind me. Two streets before the lantern district, they moved when I turned." You set your glass down. "I don't think it was one of yours."

The almost-smile was entirely gone now. He pushed off the door and moved to the small window, looked out into the street below for a moment, then stepped back. "I will have it looked into," he said.

"I assumed you would."

He looked at you then. The look that made the back of your neck do its thing.

"You are remarkably composed," he said, "for a woman who has been nearly abducted once and followed through a foreign city at night."

"I am a Mantheon," you said. "We are not generally given to visible distress."

"No." He moved from the window toward the table, and for a moment you thought he was going to sit across from you, but he did not. He stopped at the table's edge, standing, looking down at you on the couch with an expression you couldn't read. "Tell me something."

"That depends considerably on what you want to know."

"Did you know I was following you when you chose this place?"

The wine was warm in your chest. Two glasses, and you were not drunk; you were not a woman who became drunk easily, another inheritance from a household of four brothers who had thought it was funny to share their wine with their little sister from an early age. Though you felt honest enough. The boundaries of the careful composure you maintained by default had softened slightly, just enough to make the next words come easier than they might have otherwise.

"Yes," you said.

He was very still.

"I chose it because it served my purpose," you said. "Privacy once I was inside." You looked up at him. "But I will not pretend I was displeased to know you were behind me."

"Won't you," he said.

"You want me to lie?"

"I want—" He stopped. His face was more unguarded than anything you had seen from him. He recovered it quickly, smoothing it back into that composure that was so like yours and so unlike it in substance. "No," he continued. "I don't want you to lie."

You reached for your wine cup again, more for something to do with your hands than because you wanted it. "You have been watching me since the feast," you said. "I noticed."

"I am certain you noticed that."

"Then you know that I have not," you paused, choosing the word carefully, “objected."

The silence this time was different. It felt like an intense and charged moment that you would usually have with a partner already established. Or it was like the air before a storm, that silence that was not an absence but rather an accumulation.

"You are going to be my wife," he said plainly. It sounded rawer than that before, though "raw" was not the right word for a man like him.

"So I have been told," you said. "...the contract and everyone else around me. And the general weight of the situation." You set your cup down. "I am aware of the arrangement, my lord prince."

"Aerion."

You looked at him.

"My name," he said. "When we are not in company."

"Aerion," you repeated, and his mouth curved into a brief smile. "As I was saying. I am aware of the arrangement. I did not choose it. I suspect you did not choose it either, not precisely. I suspect it was chosen for you, as these things generally are, and you merely decided to find it acceptable." You stood.

The room was small. Standing put you closer to him than the couch had, the table between you but barely, and the lamplight made everything feel more immediate than it was.

"What I find interesting," you continued, "is that you have spent two days watching me as though I were already your wife," you considered. "A pursuit, for lack of a better word. And you have done it with a great deal of patience and a great deal of care, for a man who is said to be neither."

"People say plenty of things about me."

"They do. Cruel. Ruthless. Beautiful and dangerous in equal measure." You looked at him directly. "None of it has particularly alarmed me."

"Why not?"

"Because I have four brothers," you said simply, "and none of them frightened me either."

He stared at you.

And then slowly, his mouth once again curved into a smile; this time it was not a brief one. "You are nothing, like I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Valarr's sort of woman. Soft and content to be placed."

You let out a short and genuine laugh. "And instead, you got me."

"Yes," he agreed, "I got you."

The table still stood between you. You looked at it and then at him; the wine and the lamp and the incense rising from somewhere below all did their collective work, and you thought that you were very tired of being responsible. Of being the one who maintained the distance. Of standing on one side of a thing and being precise and composed while everything in the room pulled in another direction entirely. You moved around the table.

He watched you come without moving and watched you with those pale lavender eyes. There was fire in them like a dragon. A feeling hotter than anger.

You put one knee onto the couch cushion beside his hip; he had settled onto the arm of it at some point like a man making himself comfortable in a room, and then you placed your forearm along the back of the couch behind his shoulder. He leaned back into it and looked up at you with an expression that was pure heat yet full of patience. The face of a man who had been waiting for this and had just watched it arrive.

"You followed me through Pentos," you said.

"I did."

"Through the lantern district and into a pleasure house."

"Yes."

"Do you make a habit of following women through foreign cities at night, my lord prince?"

The title landed between you like a small weight. His eyes moved with a flicker, and the corner of his mouth curved.

"Only one," he said.

"Ah,” you replied. "And does she mind it?"

"You tell me," he said.

And there it was. You were the youngest in your family, had grown up watched by brothers, managed by a father, and measured against a mother who had perfected the art of wanting nothing that required taking. You had been looked at your whole life just like any woman of your station was always looked at. With the assessment and appraisal eyes that considered what you could provide, represent, or become.

Aerion Targaryen looked at you like you were truly extraordinary.

Something he had decided he could not look away from.

You knew the difference between a man who wanted a woman and a man who wanted to own a thing of value, and you did not flatter yourself that this was purely the former. You knew what he was. The stories were not wrong. Cruel, they said. Ruthless. A prince who had a beautiful face wrapped around something significantly less beautiful beneath it. A man who had done things in his life that the court spoke of in quiet voices. None of it moved you the way it was supposed to.

"I don't mind it," you said. "I find I—" you paused, honest, because the wine had burned away the last of your careful distance “like it. The attention." You held his gaze. "I have four brothers. I am accustomed to being the last considered. You look at me as though I am the only thing worth considering."

Something moved through his expression—deep, brief, and gone.

"You are," he said. And it was not a courtly thing. It came out of him with the simplicity he had not decided to say but said anyway, the way true things sometimes escaped before the more careful version of oneself could catch them. The inches between your faces were very few.

You could see the details of him from here — the precise silver-gold of his lashes, the line of his jaw, and the particular quality of his mouth that was, you thought, probably the most dangerous thing about him, which was saying a considerable amount given the competition. He was not moving. He was waiting like he had been waiting for two days.

You close the distance. His mouth met yours and the patience he had broke.

It was not a gentle kiss or it was not only that. It began as a rush of sudden attraction and passion, then became another immediately, a momentum that surprised you even though you had been the one to start it, a hunger in him that the carefully collected surface had not prepared you for. His hand came up to the nape of your neck, his fingers threading into your hair with a grip that was certain without being rough. It drew you in with a firmness that left no space for hesitation and his other hand found your waist, settling there pulling you in closer by inches until there was no more distance left to close.

You kissed him back.

You had known that this was coming but what you didnt know was how it would feel. The feeling of pressure and heat building up since the first day you locked eyes with him at the salon and had finally, with the certainty of water finding its level, found release. His mouth was warm and the evening, and the hand at your nape moved, tilting you toward him, and you went because you chose to. That distinction mattered to you.

He pulled back just far enough to breathe, his forehead nearly against yours, and looked at you from an inch away with those pale eyes that were not pale at all up close, lit from within, burning with something that made the word "fire" feel like the only accurate word there was.

"There," he said, very quietly, against your mouth. As though this was the answer to a question he had been asking since the feast. You were breathing harder than you had any intention of admitting.

"Don't be arrogant," you said.

He smiled against your lips. "I am an arrogant man."

You did not stay long after.

That was the sensible part of you, reasserting itself in the way it always did, that kept one eye on the door even when the rest of you was occupied elsewhere. You sat beside him on the couch for a little while, your shoulder against his arm, finishing your wine in a silence that was comfortable. He did not press. That surprised you too.

You had expected something — more advancement, more of the acquisition quality that had characterized his attention since the feast. Instead, he sat beside you like a man who was, for the moment, entirely satisfied to remain exactly where he was.

"The contract says before year's end," you said, eventually.

"Yes."

"That is some months."

"It is."

You turned your cup in your hands. "We will be in Pentos for how long?"

"A fortnight more. After that, Myr. Then the ship goes back to Westeros." A pause. "Your father will meet us at King's Landing."

You thought of King's Landing... About the Red Keep in mind your father's face and the inevitable outcome that had been set in motion the moment that quill had crossed the parchment two nights ago. It was so far from here, so far from this little warm room. "And the person who followed me tonight," you said.

"I will know by morning who sent them."

"What if it happens again?"

He looked at you. "It won't." A simple fact, spoken with the unwavering certainty of a man who saw no gap between decision and action.

You should have found it alarming. It did not alarm you.

That, you decided, was worth a look. Following that, you had been back in your chamber after the wine had worn off and you could think with the full, uncompromised apparatus of your mind.

You stood. Straightened your gown. You settled your cloak around your shoulders and pulled the hood up and turned to find him watching you with the expression you still couldnt put a word to.

"I can find my way back," you said.

"I know you can." He stood as well. "I'll follow at a distance."

You looked at him.

"For safety," he said, and the almost-smile was back, and you thought that if you were not incredibly careful, you were going to find that almost-smile considerably more troublesome than anything else about him.

"Of course," you said. "For peace of mind."

You went out.

The much cooler night air met you at the door, the city quieter with the lanterns burning lower than they had been. You walked back toward the residence of the maester at a steady pace, your hood up, your hands folded in your cloak.

You did not look back.

You could feel him behind you anyway with three streets of distance between you. A wedding in whatever hall your father (and his) had deemed appropriate and a life on the other side of it that you had spent two days trying not to think about too directly. You thought about it now.

Finding it with some surprise to be pressing on you differently than it had in the morning after the signing, when you had sat in the dark on the edge of your bed and felt the full, suffocating weight of it.

It was only practical, you reminded yourself.

You were beginning to think that practicality prevailed and you were going to require a renegotiation.