For his twentieth nameday, Queen Alicent presented her second son with a handmaid of his own.
“He is the only one of my children yet without such attendance,” Her Grace is reported to have said. “—let her be sweet and devoted, and quick upon her feet . . . a girl who will swear undying loyalty and service unto him, and to his needs.”
We are told Prince Aemond accepted the gift with all due courtesy, to the queen’s evident satisfaction. Yet if Alicent had intended only to soothe her son’s temper, or to bind him closer to her through gratitude, she misjudged the matter.
For what began as service did not remain so, and what had been offered as obedience took root, in time, as something perilously akin to love. So smitten was the prince with this girl, the pretty bastard daughter of a serving wench from Harrenhal (as Mushroom claimed).
By the end of 130 AC, Aemond had taken his handmaid to his bed and, in time, sired three children upon her. Any hour away from Vhagar was soon spent at the side of his “sweet girl,” as he took to calling her.
These, then, are the tales of their love story.
I. Mushroom's Accounts:
Chapter One: Wherein a Handmaid is Chosen
Chapter Two: Wherein Prince Aemond Makes His Preferences Known
Chapter Three: Wherein Mercy is Given
Chapter Four: Wherein the First Mistake is Made (And Want is Named by No Honest Word)
Chapter Five: Wherein a Dragon Learns Restraint (and Succumbs to Desire)
Chapter Six: Wherein Misery Enjoys Company
Chapter Seven: Wherein a Prince Learns the Shape of Want
Chapter Eight: Wherein a Dragon Keeps What He Has Chosen
knight!ghost x handmaiden!reader who can't keep their hands off of each other in corridors and secret staircases, who have to pass each other ten times a day as they both fulfill their castle duties but by the middle of the day ghost can't stand it anymore. He sees you hanging laundry just outside the servant's quarters and he sneaks up behind you, big hands engulfing your hips as his mouth swallows your gasp of surprise. knight!ghost who stares a hole through your tight, full bodice all night during the banquet as you pour drinks and pretend not to notice. knight!ghost who sneaks every night by candlelight through the dark underground corridors of the castle to get to your room, to climb into your tiny bed and press his face into the back of your neck. knight!ghost who has to ride into town the next day to help the king investigate the suspicious dissapearance of one of his lords, the same lord who had gotten a little too drunk and a little too handsy with you at the banquet.
tw: NONCON, possessive behavior, dark!snow, very dark themes.
a/n: should I make this into a full blown fic?
your first ever assignment. how lovely. it hadn’t been long since snow proposed that every women in the districts of panem become handmaids, fertile ones at least.
unfortunately, you were one of them. it was cruel that you were assigned to him, your past with snow was probably why you were. but nonetheless, you were a handmaid for him and his wife, livia.
he was a tyrant. And this was all for fear and control. That was already obvious. someone stood outside, probably a peacekeeper. he had many for security.
“it is a privilege, not a prison.”
the aunt had said that to you, and those words remained in your head. this was a privilege. you were the first to leave amongst the girls. but by now, which had been a few days since you first left, they might’ve gotten their assignment too,
your name no longer was yours. the doors opened, and there stood his wife. she reprimanded you about the rules and such. clearly, she didn’t like you, and you didn’t like her, the feeling was mutual.
livia looked older. though, it had been a few years since you’ve ever seen her. and that was brief. Her hair was still blonde and long. But her makeup made her look older than her age.
it wasn’t until a few days later that you had first seen him. and it was only because of the ceremony. oddly, he requested for livia to not show, this time. it wasn’t too necessary in his words. but the next time she would.
“relax, his calm and smooth voice assured you. you nod, but we’re shaking. you’d never relax. spreading your legs using his hands, your dress is lifted up.
you tried to be out of the situation, picturing yourself like that comforted you somewhat. this was your first time, and it was taken.
you didn’t cry, as he thrusts into you. at first, it’s painful. but it’s supposed to be, he always says, as you wince in pain. then it hits you why he wanted to be alone.
“you’re mine now, handmaid.”
they become sloppier, but still slow, and you appreciate that. maybe things will change one day. but he couldn’t. he’d never change.
you just nod, as he takes his possessiveness out on you. but for the sake of reproduction, of course. totally not anything else underneath.
Alicent drew in a breath that tasted of smoke and stone. “I am looking for a maid,” she began, and found that speaking it aloud made it sound smaller, almost foolish—a maid—as if she had sent for the Faith to discuss needlework.
The septa’s stillness shifted into something more alert, the way a cat becomes when it hears a mouse. “Which son, Your Grace? Prince Aegon has . . . attendants enough. And Prince Daeron is in Oldtown, under the Hightower—”
“Aemond.” Alicent did not soften the name. There was no point.
“My second son.”
Warnings: nothing.
WC: 5.9k
Notes: It’s been two years since I posted this one-shot. I have grown and matured significantly as a writer, thanks to my academic writing assignments in both my first MS program and my current MSW program, readings, and hobby fanfics.
Looking back, I cringe. . . a lot (that's just being human, hahaha), so, in honor of my growth and HOTD’s S3 returning in June, this is me taking a crack at rewriting perhaps my most popular HOTD series.
Happy readings :)
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
It began with the Queen.
The Motherhouse sept was colder than it ought to have been in late spring, though King’s Landing steamed outside its stone ribs like a pot left too long upon the fire.
Here, beneath the seven-faced crystal, the air held the damp hush of old prayers and old secrets. Wax pooled in pale bowls beneath the candles Alicent had lit—four, as was her habit when her thoughts would not be quieted by a single flame: one for the Maiden, one for the Mother, one for the Father, and one for the Stranger she refused to name aloud.
The septa waited with her hands tucked into her sleeves, thin as a weeping willow, all bones and linen and patience. Her wimple was pulled tight enough to make her face seem sharper, her eyes the color of weak tea. Septa Eustelle—no, not that Eustelle, long gone to dust and judgment, but another of the same name, as if the Faith liked reusing its tools.
“My queen,” the septa said softly, because soft words were safer in holy places. “You sent for me.”
Alicent’s fingers hovered over the candle for the Mother, as if she might pinch the flame between thumb and forefinger and snuff it like a child’s tantrum. She did not. She only watched it tremble.
“I did.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt. That was a queen’s first craft—hold the line, even when the line was only your own mouth. “I would speak with you in private.”
“As you wish.” The septa’s gaze flicked briefly to the carved faces above the altar, seven masks caught in perpetual witness. “The Seven hear all, but walls . . . walls have tongues in this city.”
“So do ladies,” Alicent murmured, and thought of silk sleeves and smiling mouths in the Red Keep. “And servants. And boys who sweep rushes. I have grown tired of tongues.”
The septa said nothing, which was what septas did best.
Alicent drew in a breath that tasted of smoke and stone. “I am looking for a maid,” she began, and found that speaking it aloud made it sound smaller, almost foolish—a maid—as if she had sent for the Faith to discuss needlework.
The septa’s brows rose a fraction. “For the Queen’s chambers?”
“No.” Alicent’s hands tightened. “For my son.”
The septa’s stillness shifted into something more alert, the way a cat becomes when it hears a mouse. “Which son, Your Grace? Prince Aegon has . . . attendants enough. And Prince Daeron is in Oldtown, under the Hightower—”
“Aemond.” Alicent did not soften the name. There was no point.
“My second son.”
Aemond. The word moved through the sept like a breath through a crack. There were those who spoke it with admiration, and those who spoke it with fear. Few spoke it with indifference.
“A handmaid,” Alicent clarified, because the septa’s eyes had narrowed, and she would not have the woman thinking she meant a wet nurse or a bedwarmer. Not yet. “He is the only one of my children not to have one.”
The septa’s mouth tightened, as though she were tasting something sour. “A prince’s handmaid is a delicate thing.”
“Everything is delicate,” Alicent said, sharper than she meant. She forced her tone back into calm, into piety, into the shape that pleased people. “I would have her be young. Eight-and-ten, perhaps. Old enough to know her duties, but not so old that she thinks she may bargain with them.”
The septa’s gaze lingered on the candles. “The Maiden is eight-and-ten, some say.”
“Then she will have a Maiden’s virtues,” Alicent replied, seizing on the thread. “Sweetness. Devotion. A gentle tongue. Quick on her feet. A girl who will swear her loyalty and service unto him and his needs, and mean it.”
“And what needs are these?” the septa asked, quietly, carefully. “A prince’s needs may be many things. Bathing. Dressing. Mending. Reading. Listening. Keeping silent. And . . .” She paused, just long enough to let the unsaid hang between them like incense.
Alicent kept her eyes on the Mother’s flame. “My son is . . . singular.”
“He is,” the septa agreed, and there was no judgment in it, only the tired recognition of a woman who had heard too many confessions about princes.
“Aemond is not Aegon,” Alicent went on. “He does not tumble into bed with the first pretty face that laughs at him. He does not drink until his wits float away like leaves on the Blackwater. He is dutiful. He is disciplined.”
Her mouth tightened. “—he is also young, and he is a dragon.”
“A dragon is not made gentler by giving it a girl to hold,” the septa warned.
“Nor is it made gentler by leaving it alone with its own fire.” Alicent turned, at last, and fixed the septa with a look that had cowed lords twice the woman’s age. “You think I am blind to the dangers. I am not asking you to deliver a lamb to a wolf.”
The septa’s eyes flicked to the altar again, as if she expected the Warrior to climb down and correct them both. “Then what are you asking, Your Grace?”
Alicent let out a slow breath. The truth was a thorn. She could hold it, but it would prick.
“I am asking for an anchor,” she said. “Something small and steady, something that will pull him back when his temper rises. Someone who will soothe his moods without flattering his pride. Someone who will remind him, quietly, of who he is, and what he owes.”
“The Faith offers prayer for that,” the septa said.
“The Faith offers prayer for everything,” Alicent replied, too bitter, and then she caught herself and dipped her head, a gesture half apology, half penitence. “Forgive me. I do pray. I pray until my knees ache. Yet my son’s heart does not live in the sept. It lives in the training yard, and in council chambers, and in the dark corners where men talk when they think no one listens.”
“Spies,” the septa said.
“Call them what you like.” Alicent’s fingers brushed the edge of her sleeve. “The court is poisoned with whispers. My husband. . .” She stopped. Viserys’s name would not sit comfortably on her tongue today; it felt like a sin to speak of him as he was, and a lie to speak of him as he had been. “The king’s health is failing. The realm looks for cracks in the walls. They will test us. They will test him.”
“Aemond is strong,” the septa said.
“He is strong enough to break himself,” Alicent answered.
Silence settled again, thick and heavy. Somewhere deeper in the sept, a novice coughed, and the sound echoed like guilt.
The septa drew her sleeves tighter. “You ask for a girl of eight-and-ten. From where would you take her? A noble house? A mother would not surrender her daughter lightly.”
“Not a noble,” Alicent said at once. A noble girl would come with kin, and kin came with demands, and demands came with debt. “I want no house behind her. No lord father who thinks his blood entitles him to my son’s ear. No ambitious brother sniffing at the chance to climb. She must have . . . clean hands.”
“Clean hands,” the septa repeated, and her lips pressed together. “Meaning orphaned.”
Alicent did not flinch. “Meaning unclaimed. Meaning grateful.”
The septa’s eyes sharpened. “Gratitude can curdle into resentment.”
“Resentment curdles when people believe they deserve more,” Alicent said. “This girl will know she has been chosen. She will be clothed. Fed. Sheltered. She will have a place in the Red Keep, which is more than most girls ever see. And she will understand that her fortune depends upon her discretion.”
“There it is,” the septa said softly. “Discretion.”
Alicent’s throat tightened. “If my son takes comfort where he should not, if he grows fond of someone he should not—” She broke off. The Mother’s candle guttered, and she steadied it by instinct, as if she could steady the world the same way.
The septa did not move, but her voice gentled. “Your Grace. The Faith teaches us that love is the sweetest mercy and the cruelest trial.”
“Love is a weakness men use against women,” Alicent snapped, and immediately regretted it. She had learned that lesson young, learned it at her father’s knee and in the king’s bed and in the smiles that turned to knives. “No. Let me say it plainer.”
She then forced herself to meet the septa’s eyes. “Aemond is . . . capable of devotion. Terrible devotion. If he chooses, he chooses wholly. I would rather his whole heart be bound to duty than loosed in some foolish passion.”
“And a handmaid will bind him to duty?” the septa asked, not unkindly—simply skeptical.
“A handmaid will bind her to duty,” Alicent corrected. “And she will bind him to routine. To someone depending upon him in small ways, daily ways. A cup of water at night. A cloak when rain threatens. A voice that says, ‘My prince,’ instead of ‘My love.’”
Her mouth twisted as she finished. “—titles are leashes. They matter.”
The septa’s expression was unreadable. “Men can slip leashes.”
“Then find me a girl who will not encourage him to,” Alicent said. “No wide-eyed romantic who thinks a prince is a song and not a storm. No girl hungry for tales of gallantry. I want someone practical. Someone who understands service. Someone who has served already—washing linens, scrubbing floors, caring for younger children. A girl who knows obedience.”
The septa’s hands emerged from her sleeves, pale and veined. “Obedience, yes. But obedience without fear is rare. And fear is a wicked foundation.”
Alicent’s laugh was short, humorless. “—and yet every hall in Westeros is built on it.”
“Not the sept,” the septa said, a touch of steel beneath the linen.
Alicent inclined her head, conceding the point as one concedes to the Father’s judgment: you may not like it, but you cannot deny it. “Then call it reverence, if you prefer. She should revere him. And she should revere the Faith. I will not have some sly little thing who prays to foreign gods under my roof, or whispers blasphemy into my son’s ear.”
“Nor would I,” the septa said, and for the first time, there was warmth in her voice. “If she comes from us, she will have been raised with the Seven. She will know the prayers, the fast days, the proper modesties. She will know what is expected of a woman.”
Alicent’s fingers curled. And what is expected of a man? she almost asked. She did not. That was not a question a queen asked a septa unless she wished to start a sermon that would last until dawn.
Instead, she said, “I want her loyal to him first.”
The septa’s brows rose. “Not to you.”
Alicent held her gaze without blinking. “To him.”
A beat, and then another. Candlelight swam between them.
“And if his needs become . . .” the septa began again, careful as before, “more than what you speak of. If he grows . . . intimate.”
Alicent felt her cheeks heat, and she hated that even after years of marriage, the Faith could still make a woman feel like a girl caught with her hand in the honey pot.
“He is a prince of the blood,” she said stiffly. “Men have appetites.”
“And women bear the consequence of them,” the septa replied, mild but merciless.
Alicent swallowed. He is not Aegon, was nestled on the tip of her tongue, but a man's cock is no different regardless of whose thighs it dangles between. And so, she said:
“Then choose a girl strong enough not to break.”
The septa’s expression softened, briefly, almost imperceptibly. “Strong enough not to break, and young enough to bend.”
Alicent did not answer that. She could not, not honestly.
She stepped closer to the altar instead, as if the Seven might absolve her simply for proximity. “I am not asking you to send her to him tonight,” she said. “This will be . . . arranged properly. She will be trained. In comportment. In household duties. In what is expected in royal chambers.”
Her voice then lowered. “And in what is not to be spoken of beyond them.”
“A vow,” the septa said. “Like the Silent Sisters?”
“Not so dire,” Alicent said, though the thought came unbidden: dire keeps secrets. “—but yes. A vow of discretion. And I would like you, someone of the Faith, to oversee it. So it carries weight.”
“The Faith does not like to bless arrangements made for sin,” the septa warned.
Alicent’s smile was thin. “The Faith blesses kings who have slain their kin, knights who have broken oaths, and lords who keep whores. The Faith blesses war when it must. Do not tell me it cannot bless a girl’s service to a prince.”
The septa’s eyes were not unkind, only tired. “You speak like a woman who has had to make peace with many ugly truths.”
Alicent’s hands trembled once, betrayed her, then stilled. “I speak like a woman keeping her children alive.”
That, finally, moved the septa. Not pity, as a septa’s pity was often poison, but understanding, the rarest currency at court.
“There is a girl,” she said slowly. “Not yet eight-and-ten, but near enough. She has been in our sights since she was small. Her mother is a serving wench at Harrenhall, her father a dockhand taken by fever. She is quiet. Sharp-eyed. Good with her hands. She can mend fine seams and scrub stone alike. She does not chatter.”
Alicent’s pulse quickened despite herself. “Does she pray?”
“Every morning,” the septa said. “And every night. Not because she is watched. Because she wishes it.”
Alicent let out a breath she had not realized she was holding. “And her beauty?”
The septa blinked, as if surprised by the question, though she ought not to have been. “Beauty is a dangerous gift.”
“So is ugliness,” Alicent said. “Aemond will not be soothed by someone he finds repellent. And he will not be satisfied by someone he cannot be proud to have at his side.”
She hesitated, then added, more quietly, as if to keep the Faith from hearing, “Yet if she is too lovely, men will look at her. And I do not want . . . eyes.”
“There is a middling sort of pretty,” the septa said, almost wry. “The kind that pleases without provoking.”
Alicent’s mouth quirked, the ghost of a smile. “Find me that kind.”
The septa studied her for a long moment, as if weighing Alicent’s soul the way merchants weighed coin. “If I bring her to you,” she said, “you must promise me something.”
Alicent stiffened. “Promises are slippery things.”
“Then swear it on the Mother,” the septa said, gesturing to the candle. “Swear the girl will not be punished for your son’s sins.”
Alicent’s jaw tightened. There was the trap, the truth hidden beneath the linen.
“Aemond is not cruel,” she said.
“He is a prince,” the septa replied. “Princes are taught that other people’s bodies are . . . convenient.”
Alicent’s fingers hovered over the Mother’s flame again. This time, she did not steady it. She let it waver.
“I will not have her beaten,” Alicent said at last. “Nor cast out for a man’s appetite.” The words tasted strange, too righteous, too soft, and yet she meant them, in the way one means a thing one cannot fully control.
“If she serves faithfully, she will be protected.”
“And if she becomes with child,” the septa pressed, voice low as confession.
Alicent’s stomach tightened. She saw it in a flash—the girl swollen, the court whispering, Otto’s face like carved ice, Aegon laughing, Helaena looking away, Rhaenyra’s faction sharpening their smiles into knives. She saw scandal, and blood, and the future tipping.
“If she becomes with child,” Alicent said, carefully, each word placed like a stone in a wall, “then the matter will be handled within the family. Quietly. No cruelty. No . . . desperation.”
She swallowed.
“I am not my father. I do not throw girls away like spoiled fruit.”
The septa watched her, searching for a lie. If she found one, she did not name it. “Very well,” she said. “I will speak to the girl. And I will pray on this.”
“Pray hard,” Alicent murmured.
The septa’s gaze lifted to the Stranger’s dark candle. “I always do.”
Alicent turned back toward the altar, toward the seven faces that watched and judged and never answered. For a heartbeat, she allowed herself to be only a woman kneeling in stone shadows, asking gods who had never known childbirth or politics to spare her son from becoming the monster the realm expected him to be.
Then the queen in her rose again, spine straight, voice steady.
“Bring her to me,” Alicent said. “And may the Seven forgive us both.”
The septa’s lips moved soundlessly, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in resignation.
“Amen,” she whispered, and the candles shivered as if something unseen had passed between them.
The girl arrived at the Red Keep before dawn, when the sky was the color of old bruises, and the castle smelled of damp stone and sleeping hearths.
A guard escorted her through corridors that wound like a serpent’s spine, past tapestries of dragons and hunts and half-forgotten kings, past braziers whose coals glowed as if some small beast lay breathing in the ash. She kept her eyes lowered as she’d been taught, though she could feel the castle watching.
Everything in the Red Keep watched. The walls had eyes where the mortar cracked; the air had ears where the draft slipped through.
Her shoes made almost no sound upon the cold floor. That pleased the guard, or perhaps displeased him; men were often uncertain what to do with quiet girls.
They brought her to a solar that smelled of lavender and beeswax and something sharper—rosemary, perhaps, or the mere ghost of it. The door opened without a knock. Ah. That alone told her she was not in a place where knocking mattered.
Queen Alicent Hightower sat near the window where the first pale light crept in, her hands folded, her back straight as a spear. Her gown was dark green, the color of deep forests where sunlight died. A crown rested on her head, simple today, but crowns did not need jewels to be heavy, especially for the Green Queen.
A septa stood behind her, and two ladies hovered near the hearth like moths afraid of flame. The queen’s gaze lifted, and the girl’s stomach tightened in a way that was not fear exactly, but the awareness that fear would be wise.
“Come closer,” Alicent said.
The girl stepped forward and dropped to her knees because kneeling was safer than standing. She bowed her head.
“What is your name?” the queen asked.
The girl hesitated. Names were a kind of armor. Names could be taken.
“I . . . am called . . ." She nearly said the name her mother had given her summers ago, somewhere close to the Gods Eye, but the septa had warned her the night before:
In the Red Keep, you may be called what they wish you to be. Answer gently.
So she swallowed and said, “. . . whatever Your Grace commands.”
Alicent’s mouth did not smile, yet something about her eyes sharpened, as if she found that answer . . . useful. “You are not a whipped dog,” the queen said softly. “You may speak.”
The girl’s fingers curled against her skirt. “I am called—” She stopped herself again. A stumble, a foolish thing, and foolishness was blood in shark water.
Alicent watched her with a queen’s patience, which was not kindness but endurance.
Her name came out in a breath later, voice small and shaky.
The queen nodded as if the name mattered less than the way it was given. “How old are you?”
“Eight-and-ten come the harvest."
“And your parents?”
“Father is dead, Your Grace. My mother is no one special.” The words came out flat, practiced, a truth she had learned to say without bleeding. It tasted bitter on her tongue; she willed her shoulders to remain straight.
Alicent’s eyes flicked to the septa, a silent exchange. The septa gave the faintest nod.
“What did you do at Harrenhal?” the queen asked.
“I served,” the girl said, because service was the only honest answer that didn’t invite another. “I scrubbed floors, I washed linens, I mended. I kept the little ones from running wild. I learned my prayers.”
“Recite one,” Alicent commanded, quick as a lash.
The girl did not pause. “Maiden, keep me gentle. Mother, keep me strong. Father, keep me just. Warrior, keep me brave. Smith, keep my hands true. Crone, keep my eyes open. Stranger—” Her tongue tripped, just for a heartbeat, on the last.
Alicent’s gaze went colder. “Finish.”
The girl forced the words out. “—Stranger, keep me humble, for I am dust in the end.”
Silence, thick enough to choke on.
Alicent leaned back in her chair, studying her as if the girl were a cloth being measured for a gown. Her eyes drifted over her hands—red at the knuckles, neat nails—over her posture—straight, but not proud—over her face.
Not too lovely, as the septa had promised. Pretty enough, though. There was something in the curve of her mouth that might soften a room, something in her eyes that might hold steady when others flinched.
The queen’s gaze lingered there, and the girl felt as if she were being weighed in a market.
“You understand what a handmaid is,” Alicent said, not a question.
The girl nodded once. “To dress and tend and fetch and keep a chamber as Your Grace commands. To be silent when silence is needed. To be swift when swiftness is needed.”
“And to be loyal,” Alicent said.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“To whom?”
The girl’s mouth went dry. The septa had warned her, too, about this. Loyalty in the Red Keep was a ladder with missing rungs. “To Prince Aemond,” she finally said.
Alicent’s eyes held hers. Held, and held. A trap set in silk.
“And if I command you otherwise?” the queen asked quietly.
The girl’s pulse pounded in her throat. If she said to you, she would fail the test. If she said to him, she might be signing something she did not understand. So she chose the narrowest bridge.
“I would obey Your Grace,” she said, “but I would never betray Prince Aemond.”
Alicent’s expression didn’t change, but something eased in the room—as if the air itself exhaled.
“One of you will be disappointed someday,” the queen said, almost to herself.
The girl kept her head bowed. She did not ask which.
Alicent stood. When a queen rose, everyone around her rose too, like grass pressed by the wind. She stepped closer, and the girl could smell her—lavender and rosemary and candle smoke, and beneath it all the iron tang of worry.
“You will go to my chambers first,” Alicent said. “You will be taught how to move in the Keep without becoming gossip’s meal. You will learn what doors are opened, and which are never touched. You will learn what to say, and more importantly, what not to.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And you will not think yourself clever,” Alicent added, voice still soft, but sharp enough to cut. “Clever girls die quickly in this castle. Quiet girls live longer.”
The girl nodded, throat tight.
Alicent’s fingers lifted, briefly, and tilted the girl’s chin up, just enough to see her face properly in the morning light. It was intimate in a way that made the girl’s skin prickle; not tenderness, not cruelty . . . possession, almost. The way one inspects a dagger before sliding it into a sleeve.
“You do not look like trouble,” Alicent said.
The girl did not know what answer was safe, so she said nothing.
Alicent released her. “We will see,” she added, as if speaking to the Seven rather than to the girl. Then she turned to one of her ladies. “Bring her something decent. Not finery. Plain. Clean. And have her hair kept back.”
The lady curtsied. “As you command, Your Grace.”
Alicent’s gaze returned to the girl one last time, and for a flicker of a heartbeat, something human passed through it—fatigue, perhaps. Or the ache of choices made too young.
“You may rise,” the queen said.
The girl stood, hands folded as she’d been taught. Her knees ached from the stone.
Alicent walked to the window, looking out at the waking city as if she could read the day’s dangers in the smoke and rooftops. When she spoke again, it was to the septa, but the girl heard it all the same.
“He trains at sunrise,” Alicent said.
The septa’s voice was quiet. “Today?”
Alicent’s mouth tightened. “Today.”
The girl felt it then, like the first distant rumble of thunder before the storm breaks. This was not a slow easing into service. This was being placed in the path of something moving fast and heavy.
Alicent turned from the window, her silhouette cut sharp against the grey dawn.
“Go,” she commanded the girl, and then, as if remembering herself, as if remembering the Faith and Harrenhal and the pretense of gentleness, she added one last thing:
“Do not fear him.”
The girl’s lips parted before she could stop herself. “Is he. . . cruel, Your Grace?”
Alicent stared at her for a long moment. In that look were court, crown, motherhood, and the knowledge of what dragons did when cornered.
“No,” the queen said at last. “Not by nature.” The way she said it was worse than yes.
“And yet,” Alicent continued, voice a thread drawn taut, “—a dragon does not always know the measure of its own fire.”
The girl bowed her head. “I understand, Your Grace.”
Alicent’s eyes lingered on her, unreadable.
“See that you do,” she said.
They dressed the girl in a plain gown of pale wool and a simple apron, the kind servants wore, not ladies. Her hair was braided tight and pinned back so no loose strand could invite a wandering hand. One of the queen’s attendants, an older woman with a mouth like a locked chest, showed her how to walk the corridors properly: not too fast, not too slow, eyes lowered but not blind.
“You’ll learn the Keep quick if you want to keep your skin,” the woman muttered as they moved.
The girl swallowed. “Yes.”
They passed men-at-arms with spears and sleepy eyes, passed maids with baskets of laundry, passed a boy carrying chamber pots who glanced at her like she was fresh meat for rumor.
The older woman snapped, “Eyes down,” and the boy scuttled away.
Down a stair, through a narrow passage, and then the air shifted—cooler, sharper, tinged with sweat and oil and steel. The sounds changed too: the ring of metal, the grunt of exertion, the bark of orders. Training yard.
The older woman stopped at the archway and caught the girl by the wrist.
“Listen,” she hissed, close enough that her breath warmed the girl’s ear. “You will not stare. You will not smile. You will not flinch. Princes don’t like flinching.” Her fingers tightened, hard. “And you will not speak unless spoken to. Not by him. Not by anyone.”
The girl nodded once, throat dry.
The older woman released her like she was something sticky. “Good. Now . . . there.”
She pushed the girl a step forward.
And there, in the early light, Prince Aemond Targaryen moved like a blade unsheathed.
He was shirtless, hair pale as moonmilk, tied back from his face. A sword moved in his hands as if it belonged there, as if it were simply another limb. His skin glimmered with sweat. His posture was flawless. His strikes were clean, precise, punishing.
A man twice his age backed away under the onslaught, panting. Aemond did not pant. He did not even look strained.
Then his head turned.
It was subtle—just the smallest shift, as if some instinct had tugged at him. His gaze swept the archway.
And found her.
The girl’s heart lurched.
His remaining eye, cold as polished stone, pinned her in place. He did not smile. He did not frown. He simply looked, as if seeing her were a new piece on a board he already meant to win.
Aemond’s sword slowed, not stopping, just . . . slowing. His opponent took the chance to breathe. Aemond did not give it to him. He finished the exchange with a sharp movement that would have taken the man’s head if the blade were live steel.
Then, without breaking his gaze from the girl, Aemond lowered his sword.
The yard fell quiet in the way it did when a predator lifted its head.
Aemond’s voice carried without effort, low, controlled, too young to be so calm.
“Who is that?”
No one answered fast enough.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. His gaze stayed on her as if the world had thinned down to one point.
He took one step forward.
Then another.
The girl forced herself not to move, not to flinch, not to do anything that could be called an invitation.
Aemond stopped a few paces away. Close enough that she could smell sweat and leather and something clean beneath it—soap, perhaps, or cold air.
He looked her over the way his mother had, measuring. Assessing. Deciding. His voice dropped a fraction. “You’re new.”
“Yes, my prince,” she managed, and her voice sounded too small in the open yard.
Aemond’s gaze flicked to the older woman beside the archway, then back. “My mother sends gifts now.”
The older woman stiffened as if struck.
The girl held her breath.
Aemond’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, but not warmth. A blade’s idea of a smile. “And what,” he asked softly, “is your purpose?”
Aemond waited as if time belonged to him. The yard seemed to still beneath his gaze—men-at-arms pausing mid-shift, steel lowered a fraction, the morning air held in the throat of the day.
The girl stood where she had been placed, hands folded, posture straight in the way servants learned when they were watched. Her mouth was dry. The stone beneath her shoes felt colder than it ought.
“My purpose is to serve, my prince,” she said.
Aemond’s remaining eye did not flicker. He looked her over with unsettling thoroughness, as if reading a page and deciding where the lies were inked. Plain wool. Hair braided tight. No jewelry. No soft hands disguised under perfume and powder. She had been scrubbed clean of anything that might be called vanity, and still she did not look meek.
“To serve,” he repeated, tasting the words. “That is what servants say when they wish to sound obedient.”
“I am obedient,” she answered, the phrase coming out too quickly.
“Cautious,” Aemond corrected, quiet as a knife sliding free. “That is not the same.”
Heat crept into her face. She despised it at once—how easily the body betrayed what the mind would hide.
Aemond tilted his head, as if noting the flush with the same interest he might note a bruise.
“Look at me.”
It was not shouted. It was not cruel. That was the worst part. His voice was controlled, almost indifferent, as if this were a simple thing, like raising a visor.
Slowly, she lifted her gaze.
He was closer than she had thought. Shirtless still from training, sweat catching the grey light, pale hair tied back. His jaw was set in the hard line of a boy who had been forced to become a man by loss and sheer mockery. The eyepatch was neat and dark; the scar above it was neither.
His one eye pinned her where she stood.
“You do not tremble,” Aemond observed.
“Should I, my prince?” The words escaped before prudence could catch them.
A murmur moved through the yard like wind through dry grass.
Aemond’s mouth curved, barely. Not warmth. Something colder that had learned the shape of amusement.
“Most do.”
Ser Criston Cole cleared his throat. White cloak, white armor, the Morning’s own mirror. “My prince. We were—”
“We will continue,” Aemond said, without looking away from her.
Ser Criston’s jaw tightened. He fell silent. The master-at-arms obeyed, and that obedience spoke louder than any rebuke.
Aemond’s gaze dipped, not to her face now, but to her hands.
“Show me.”
For a moment, she did not understand. Then she did, and her stomach tightened. “My prince?”
“Your hands,” he said, patient as a man tightening a strap. “Hold them out.”
She did, palms up.
He did not touch her. Not yet. He leaned in slightly, studying what the Motherhouse could not scrub away: the faint calluses at the base of her fingers, the small nicks where needle and thread had bitten, the roughness that came from lye water and stone floors and hard work done without thanks.
“A working girl,” Aemond murmured. “Not a court ornament.”
She did not know whether to be relieved or offended. Perhaps both. Relief was safer.
“Can you sew?” he asked.
“Yes, my prince.”
“Can you lace a doublet properly?”
“Yes.”
“Can you keep your mouth shut?”
The question was so casually asked that it might have been about fetching water. The men nearby shifted, unsettled. Even servants understood what a prince truly asked when he asked about silence. “Yes, my prince.”
Aemond’s gaze lifted again, slow and deliberate.
“And can you keep secrets?”
The morning felt colder. Somewhere beyond the yard, a raven called, harsh as laughter.
She held his eye as long as she dared. “Yes, my prince.”
He watched her a moment longer, as if deciding whether that yes had bones.
“Why?” Aemond asked.
The word struck harder than the rest. Why was a question for confessions, not courtyards? She chose the narrowest truth she could carry without breaking. “Because it is safer.”
Aemond studied her as if she had offered him a blade and he was judging its edge. Then, unexpectedly, he gave a low, brief sound—almost a laugh, though it held no joy. “Honest,” he said, as if the word itself amused him. “Or clever enough to pretend.”
She did not answer. In the Red Keep, an answer was often a rope.
Aemond straightened. The yard breathed again, as if released.
“What is she called?” he asked, turning his head a fraction toward the older woman who lingered at the archway.
The woman’s mouth worked. “My prince, she . . . she has no family name.”
Aemond’s gaze returned to the girl. “No family name,” he repeated. “Then you will be called what I choose.”
A chill slid down her spine. Names were a kind of claim, and dragons were specific about claims.
His voice remained even. “You will come to my chambers after you have been instructed. You will bring water, cloth, needle, and thread.”
“Yes, my prince.”
“And you will not be late.”
“I will not.”
Aemond’s mouth tightened. It might have been approval. It might have been displeasure that she had not said my prince again. With him, small things could matter.
He lifted his sword. The blade caught the weak sunlight and flung it back in a hard, bright line.
“Go,” he said.
Then, as if granting her a single coin to remember the exchange by, he added, quietly, for her alone though half the yard strained to hear—
“—you did not shame yourself.”
And then he turned away, as if she were already decided, already placed, already part of the day’s order.
Ser Criston snapped commands again. Steel rang. Training resumed, but it sounded different now . . . more watchful, as if even the swords had learned caution.
The girl backed away without haste, without hurry, without offering the yard the satisfaction of her fear. Behind her, she could feel the prince’s eye like a mark between the shoulder blades.
Chapter Two | Wherein Prince Aemond Makes His Preferences Known
Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
Summary:
“And if he speaks to you as though you are more than a handmaid,” she said, “ . . . you will remember you are not.”
Warnings: nothing.
WC: 5.4k
Notes: Sweetling gets her name. Happy readings.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
The Red Keep had a way of swallowing handmaids whole.
Not with teeth, as dragons did, but with corridors and rules and the slow, patient hunger of stone.
A servant might enter by one door and be unmade by another—ground down by whispers, by glances, by the ceaseless press of great folk who never once bothered to learn a small name.
It had been only some days since the queen’s choice was made, yet already the little handmaid felt as if she had lived a year and a hundred more within those walls.
She had learned where the floors creaked and where they did not; which turns of stair were watched by guards who fancied themselves gallant, and which by guards who fancied themselves wolves. She had learned that there were doors in the Red Keep that stood open for lords, and doors that opened only for rumor.
Most of all, she had learned that a prince’s chambers were not simply chambers. No. They were a battlefield without banners.
On the seventh morning after her arrival, when the sky hung low and sullen above Blackwater Bay, she was taken from the servants’ passageways and brought, not to Prince Aemond’s door, but to the antechamber outside the Queen’s apartments. The message had come down through two maids and a steward, each one passing it as though it were hot coal.
Be swift. Be clean. Be silent.
None of them would look her in the eye.
The woman who received her wore the queen’s colors, though she was no lady of high birth. Her gown was fine wool, well-cut but unadorned, and a ring of keys hung at her belt like a mace. Her hair had gone iron-grey, pulled tight into a knot. She looked as if she had been carved from the same stern wood as the door behind her.
“Stand there,” the woman said, pointing to a spot where the rushes were thinnest and the floor least forgiving.
The handmaid obeyed.
The woman studied her without haste. In that gaze was neither warmth nor cruelty—only judgment, the sort a cook might give a chicken before deciding how to carve it.
“You are the one,” she said at last.
The little handmaid did not ask what she meant. In the Red Keep, asking was often how one stepped into a snare.
“I am called Lady Rylene by those who want favors,” the woman went on. “—And Mistress Rylene by those who don’t. You may call me mistress.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Mistress Rylene’s eyes flicked over her braid, her clean apron, the plainness of her. “You’ve learned to present yourself as you ought. That is good. You will learn more.”
The handmaid waited.
Rylene stepped closer until her shadow fell across the handmaid’s shoes. “The queen has given you to Prince Aemond. That does not make you his equal, nor his companion, nor his plaything.” Her voice did not rise, yet it struck like a rod. “—It makes you useful. If you remain useful, you may remain alive.”
The handmaid’s throat tightened. “Yes, mistress.”
“Do not say yes so quickly,” Rylene snapped. “Only foolish handmaids answer before they understand. And foolish handmaids in this castle are eaten.”
She was no foolish handmaid, the little handmaid decided, and quickly swallowed and lowered her gaze.
“That is the first rule,” Rylene said. “Eyes lowered. Always. You may look where you are going and no further. If a prince commands your eyes, you obey. If a prince does not, you do not tempt him with boldness.”
Rylene turned as she spoke, pacing like a septa delivering a sermon. Her keys chimed faintly at her hip.
“Second: speech minimal. You will speak when addressed. You will answer what is asked. You will not prattle. You will not explain yourself into trouble. You will not tell stories. The Red Keep is full of ears, and ears love a handmaid who fills them.”
The handmaid nodded once, careful not to nod too eagerly.
“Third: never linger,” Rylene continued. “You will enter, you will perform the task, you will leave. The more time you spend in a man’s space, the more he imagines you belong there. And when men begin imagining, they begin taking.”
Rylene stopped her pacing and looked back at the handmaid, as if to make certain the words had landed properly.
“Fourth: you will not accept gifts.” Her mouth tightened. “No ribbon. No coin. No sweetmeat pressed into your palm by some laughing lordling. No trinkets. Nothing. Not from knights, not from squires, not from princes.”
The handmaid’s hands curled faintly at her sides. “Not even—”
Rylene’s eyes flashed. “Not even. If you are given something, you take it to me. If you are offered something, you refuse. If you are forced to take it, you bring it to me. Do you know why?”
The handmaid hesitated. “Because . . . it could be—”
“—a leash,” Rylene cut in. “A story. A debt. A way to make you look bought.” She stepped closer again.
“In this castle, a gift is never only a gift.”
Rylene’s fingers rose and tapped the handmaid’s apron once, sharply, as if punctuating a ledger. “Fifth: never be alone with him without permission.”
The handmaid felt the blood creep up her neck. She kept her eyes down.
Rylene watched her face with the cold attention of a hawk. “Do not blush. Blushing is for handmaids who still believe men must be gentle because the Faith tells them to be. Men are gentle when it pleases them. When it does not, they are not.” She gave a short, humorless breath. “And princes are men who have never been told no.”
The handmaid’s stomach tightened quite uncomfortably.
“You will not go behind a closed door with Prince Aemond unless it is known you have gone,” Rylene said. “If he calls for you at a strange hour, you will fetch a witness—another servant, a guard, a page—someone whose eyes can later say, yes, she went in, yes, she came out, yes, she was not dragged.”
The handmaid’s mouth went dry at that last word.
Rylene lowered her voice, and in that lowering was more menace than shouting. “Because if you go in alone, and you come out with your hair undone and your mouth swollen and your dress crooked—do you think they will ask what happened?”
The handmaid did not answer. The answer was a pit.
“They will not,” Rylene said. “They will decide. They will decide you are wanton or ambitious or stupid. They will decide you tempted him, or tricked him, or spread your legs for coin.” Her keys chimed softly as she shifted her weight. “And if his temper turns upon you—if he speaks one sharp word—do you think anyone will stand between a prince and a handmaid?”
The handmaid’s fingers went cold.
Rylene leaned in, close enough that the handmaid could smell rosemary oil on her skin, and something older beneath it—tiredness, perhaps, or the bitter tang of knowledge.
“They will blame you for what men do,” Rylene said, quiet as prayer. “Even when the men are princes. Especially when the men are princes.”
The handmaid’s throat worked. She forced herself to breathe.
Rylene straightened and looked past her, toward the door to the queen’s rooms. “Sixth: never be seen as special.”
The handmaid frowned faintly before she could stop herself.
Rylene caught it instantly. “You do not understand.” She did not ask. She did not wait. “If you are special, you are noticed. If you are noticed, you are spoken of. If you are spoken of, you are used. Some will try to pull you close to reach him. Some will try to push you down to hurt him. And some will do both.”
The handmaid lowered her gaze again, chastened.
“The safest servant is the one the court forgets,” Rylene said. “Forgettable. Quiet. Neat. Present only when needed, like a towel or a cup.”
She paused. “Do you think you can be that?”
The handmaid had no choice but to say yes, yet Rylene had warned her against quick yeses. So she swallowed and said, careful and plain, “I will try, mistress.”
Rylene’s eyes narrowed, as if weighing sincerity. Then she gave a small nod, almost approving.
“Good,” she said. “Trying is all you may claim. The rest is not yours.”
Rylene turned and lifted a hand. The door behind her opened, not by her, but by another—a younger maid who slipped out like a shadow. Rylene did not spare the maid a glance. It was a lesson all its own.
“You will go now,” Rylene said. “You will serve him today.”
The handmaid’s pulse quickened despite herself. “Yes, mistress.”
Rylene’s hand shot out and caught her wrist. Not hard enough to bruise, but hard enough to remind.
“One more thing,” Rylene said. “Prince Aemond has preferences.”
The handmaid went still.
Rylene’s eyes held hers for the first time, direct and unblinking. “He likes quiet. He likes order. He likes obedience that does not whine for praise. He likes a servant who does not shake.” Her mouth tightened. “And he dislikes being watched like a beast in a pit.”
The handmaid’s tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. “I will remember.”
“You will,” Rylene said. “Because if you do not, you will learn by blood.”
She then released her thin little wrist. “Now go. And mind your steps. The prince trains early, and he does not enjoy waiting.”
The handmaid curtsied, then turned and walked as she had been taught: neither hurried nor slow, her hands still, her eyes lowered, her breath kept quiet in her chest. Behind her, Mistress Rylene spoke once more, almost as an afterthought.
“And if he speaks to you as though you are more than a handmaid,” she said, “ . . . you will remember you are not.”
The handmaid did not look back.
She only nodded once and let the corridor swallow her whole.
She found herself in the passages that belonged to the royal family—wider, cleaner, the air sweeter with beeswax and heated herbs. Guards stood like carved men at turns and doors. They did not look at her, not fully, yet she felt their attention as a physical thing.
At Prince Aemond’s door, a boy page waited, thin as a reed, clutching a folded cloak. He glanced at her, then away, then back again, as if curiosity fought fear behind his eyes.
“You’re late,” the boy whispered.
Her heart jolted. “I—”
The door opened.
Not wide. Not sudden. Only enough to show a slice of lamplight and the edge of a man’s shadow.
Aemond’s voice came from within, low and even. “Come in.”
The handmaid stepped forward, and the page scurried aside as if the threshold itself might bite him.
She crossed into the prince’s chambers carrying what she had been told to bring—water, a clean cloth, a needle, and a thread tucked in a small bundle—each item a talisman of usefulness. The room smelled of smoke and oiled leather. A fire burned low. A candle stood at the desk beside a book left open, its pages marked with a strip of dark ribbon.
Prince Aemond stood near the hearth, half turned, his hair loose about his shoulders as pale as torchlight. He wore a simple tunic, dark and severe, the cut of it clean as a sword line. The eyepatch was in place. His posture was perfect, as if even in solitude he refused to slouch.
He did not greet her.
He looked at her.
“Close the door,” he said.
Her stomach tightened at once, as if Mistress Rylene’s warning had become a hand at her throat. Yet the door was already half shut behind her; to leave it open would be strange, perhaps insulting.
She did as commanded, careful, quiet.
When the latch clicked, the sound seemed too loud.
Aemond watched her hands as if he could read the whole of her intent in the way her fingers moved.
“You were taught,” he said.
It was not a question, yet she answered as if it were. “Yes, my prince.”
“By whom?”
“Mistress Rylene.”
Aemond’s mouth tightened faintly at the name, as though he disliked the taste of it. “And what did Mistress Rylene teach you?”
The handmaid hesitated, remembering: speech minimal. Yet he had asked. She must answer.
“That I am to keep my eyes lowered,” she said, “—and my speech minimal. That I am not to linger. Not to accept gifts. Not to be alone with you without permission.”
Aemond’s gaze sharpened, a blade finding its edge.
“And?” he prompted.
The handmaid’s throat tightened. “That I am not to be seen as . . . special.”
Aemond was still for a long moment. The fire popped softly, spitting a single ember that died on the stone.
At last, he said, “Lift your eyes.”
The handmaid obeyed.
His remaining eye fixed on hers, steady and merciless. Not cruel—worse than cruel. Intent.
“Do you think yourself special?” Aemond asked.
She did not know which answer would damn her.
“No, my prince,” she said, because denial was safer than ambition.
Aemond stepped closer, one slow step, then another, until he stood within arm’s reach. The warmth of the hearth was nothing beside the heat of his presence.
“Good,” he said softly. “Do not become so.”
Then, as if he had grown bored of that line of thought, his gaze dropped to the bundle in her hands.
“Needle and thread,” he said.
“Yes, my prince.”
“Bring it here.”
She moved to the desk as quietly as she could. The ribbon in the book stirred in a draft. Aemond’s attention lingered on the strip of cloth for only a heartbeat before it returned to her hands.
He held out his arm.
The handmaid froze.
Aemond’s brow lifted. “You are told not to shake,” he said, mild as morning. “And yet you hesitate.”
“I . . . beg pardon, my prince,” she managed.
He did not repeat himself. He only held his arm out, patient as a man waiting for a blade to be placed properly in his palm.
At the cuff of his tunic, a seam had come loose—small, almost nothing. The sort of thing a servant might mend without mention. Yet he had chosen to mention it, to call her in, to watch.
She set the bundle down with careful hands and took up the needle.
“Sit,” Aemond said.
Her heart lurched again. “My prince—”
His eye narrowed. “Sit. You cannot sew standing.”
That was true. It was also not the way things were done. A servant did not sit while a prince stood over her. Mistress Rylene’s rules rang in her skull like bells.
Aemond watched her wrestle with them, expression unreadable.
“You were told never to be alone with me without permission,” he said. “And yet you are here.”
“I was sent,” she said, voice smaller than she wished. “It is known.”
Aemond’s mouth twitched, almost a smile, but colder. “So it is.”
He pulled a chair out with his boot and nudged it toward her.
The handmaid sat.
Aemond did not. He remained standing, close, looking down as she bent to her work. She threaded the needle with hands that refused to tremble, though her pulse hammered hard enough she thought he might hear it.
“Do you know what I dislike most?” Aemond asked, quietly, as she took the first stitch.
She kept her eyes on the fabric. “No, my prince.”
“People who speak for me,” he said. “People who decide what I want without asking.”
The needle slid through the cloth. The thread pulled tight. The handmaid’s mouth went dry . . . she could feel the shape of the trap in his words.
Aemond’s voice remained calm. “My mother chose you. Mistress Rylene instructs you. Every soul in this castle has a rule ready for your throat.” He leaned closer, enough that his shadow fell over her hands. “But you have not asked me a single thing.”
The handmaid’s fingers steadied the seam. “What would you have me ask, my prince?”
Aemond was silent for a moment, as if amused by the carefulness of the question. Then he said, “Ask what I prefer.”
The thread drew through again.
The handmaid lifted her gaze, only a fraction, enough to show obedience, not boldness. “What do you prefer, my prince?”
Aemond’s eye held hers.
“I prefer,” he said slowly, “that you do not fear me.”
The words were simple. The way he spoke them was not.
The handmaid’s breath caught, barely.
Aemond’s gaze dropped to the seam she was mending, to the steady movements of her hands. “And I prefer,” he added, “that you do not let others put their fear into you.”
She swallowed. “They warned me of . . . of rules.”
“Rules,” Aemond repeated, as if the word were a dull blade. “Did they warn you that the rules change when a prince grows displeased?”
Her stomach turned.
Aemond’s voice softened, almost gentle, though gentleness from him felt like a blade held carefully.
“Mistress Rylene told you not to accept gifts,” he said. “If I give you something, will you refuse me?”
The needle paused mid-stitch.
The handmaid forced it through the cloth anyway, because stopping would be seen. “I would . . . bring it to Mistress Rylene.”
Aemond’s mouth curved again, ever so faintly. “So you would.”
He stepped back, just enough for her to breathe.
“Finish,” he said.
She did, and tied the thread off with neat, small knots. When she lifted the cuff, he held his arm steady without looking away from her face.
The mend was perfect. Invisible, almost. A seam restored as if it had never been torn.
Aemond looked down at it, then back at her.
“That will do,” he said.
The handmaid began to rise at once, instinct driving her to put distance between herself and the closed door.
“Wait,” Aemond said.
She stopped, halfway up, poised like a deer hearing the snap of a branch.
The ribbon lay across Prince Aemond’s fingers like a narrow tongue of night. It was no jeweled trinket, no bright coin meant to dazzle a servant girl into gratitude. It was plain enough to be mistaken for nothing at all—dark cloth, frayed at one end, as if it had been torn from some larger length and kept only because it had once been useful.
That made it worse.
The handmaid stared at it as if it might strike.
“My prince,” she began, but the words failed her.
A ribbon was a small thing, small and painfully insignificant. A ribbon was also a hundred things, depending upon who offered it and who received it, and what the witnesses later wished to believe.
Aemond’s eye did not leave her face. “Take it.”
Mistress Rylene’s voice rang in her skull, sharp as a bell: You will not accept gifts. If you are given something, you take it to me. If you are offered something, you refuse.
The handmaid’s hands remained at her sides. “I . . . am not permitted.”
Aemond’s mouth tightened by a fraction. “Permitted.”
“Yes, my prince.” Her throat was dry, yet she forced the words out carefully, because carefulness was the only armor she had. “Mistress Rylene instructed me—”
“I know what she instructed,” Aemond cut in, calm as frost. He took a single step closer, the ribbon still held out, as if he had all the patience in the world to watch her struggle.
“I asked what you will do.”
The handmaid felt the room narrowing around her. The closed door seemed louder now, the latch a reminder. If she refused him, she risked displeasing a prince. If she accepted, she broke the rules that were meant to keep her alive.
Her gaze dropped to the ribbon again. Dark. Plain. Yet it had marked his place in a book. That alone made it intimate—small, quiet intimacy, the sort no one noticed until it was too late.
She tried to find a path between the stones.
“If my prince commands it,” she said, carefully, “then I will obey. But . . . I will bring it to Mistress Rylene, as I was told.”
Aemond stared at her for a long moment, as if deciding whether this answer pleased him or merely amused him. The fire hissed softly as sap in the logs heated. Somewhere distant, a raven cried.
“You think,” Aemond said at last, “that obedience is a thing with one face.”
The handmaid did not answer. She had learned that questions from princes were not invitations.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “How many rules did she give you?”
“Six,” the handmaid said. “Perhaps more, if counting the smaller ones.”
“And which did she speak of most?” he asked.
She hesitated. “The . . . ones that keep me safe.”
Aemond’s mouth flickered—almost a smile, but without warmth. “Safe.”
He turned the ribbon once between his fingers. “Did she tell you what to do when the rules contradict each other?”
The handmaid's heart thudded. “No, my prince.”
“Then I will tell you,” Aemond said softly. “When the rules contradict, you obey the one who can kill you quickest.”
The words were delivered with such calm certainty that for a heartbeat, she could not breathe. It was not a threat spoken in anger. It was a simple statement of the world as he understood it—steel, fire . . . blood.
Aemond held the ribbon closer still.
“Take it,” he repeated.
The handmaid's fingers twitched before her will could stop them. She reached out.
Aemond did not release it at once. For a moment, both of them held it—his hand above, hers below—cloth stretched between fingers like a taut line. Close enough that she could see the faint scarring on his knuckles from training, the pale mark of old pain.
His voice dropped, low enough that it felt meant for her alone.
“This is not a gift,” Aemond said. “It is a tool.”
Her brows knit slightly.
“It marks my place,” he went on. “When I read, I do not enjoy hunting for what I have already learned. I prefer order.”
He watched her face as he spoke, measuring. “You will keep it. When I leave a book open, you will place it where it belongs. When I close it, you will mark my place. You will not lose it.”
Her fingers tightened around the ribbon. Understanding came with relief, and relief with shame. She had feared a thing that was, on its face, nothing more than a servant’s work.
Yet she had also understood correctly.
In the Red Keep, nothing was what it seemed.
“Yes, my prince,” she said.
Aemond released the ribbon. It fell fully into her palm, light as a feather and heavy as a stone. She felt it there like a brand.
“You will not bring it to Mistress Rylene,” he added, as if noticing her earlier words at last.
The handmaid's stomach tightened. “My prince—”
Aemond’s gaze hardened. “You will not. This belongs to my chambers.”
“Yes, my prince,” she said, because there was no other answer.
He watched her a moment longer, then turned away as if the matter were decided. As if she, too, had decided.
“Now,” Aemond said, moving back toward the hearth, “tell me what else she warned you of.”
The handmaid hesitated, caught by the shift. It sounded like interest. It was not. Interest could be a blade, and he wielded it well.
“She warned me not to linger,” she said slowly. “Not to speak too much. Not to be seen as . . . special.”
“And what do you think that means?” Aemond asked, without looking at her.
Her throat worked. “That if I am noticed, people will talk. And if they talk—”
“They will decide a story,” Aemond finished for her, quiet as a closing door. He turned then, his eye fixed on her again. “And if the story displeases them, they will punish the nearest thing they can reach.”
The handmaid thought of Mistress Rylene’s words: They will blame you for what men do.
She swallowed. “Yes, my prince.”
Aemond studied her as if she were a map of a land he meant to conquer without losing men.
“You are frightened,” he said.
It was not a question.
The handmaid's fingers curled around the ribbon. “I would not—”
Aemond took one step forward. “Do not lie.”
The bluntness of it struck her harder than any shout might have. The Faith preached against lying, but in the Red Keep lies were bread.
“I am,” she admitted, barely above a whisper.
Aemond’s face did not change. Yet something in him seemed to settle, as if he preferred fear named rather than disguised.
“Good,” he said quietly. “Fear keeps you sharp.”
She blinked.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “Did she tell you not to be alone with me?”
“Yes.”
“And yet you are,” Aemond observed.
“It is known I came,” she said quickly. “The page saw. The guards—”
Aemond’s mouth tightened. “The guards see much and say little.” He tilted his head. “Do you know what they would say if I told them you came willingly?”
The handmaid's blood drained from her face.
Aemond watched that too. The prince watched everything.
“They would say you were a whore,” he said, as if reciting a lesson. “Or an ambitious little thing. Or a foolish girl who thought herself special.”
She could not speak. Her mouth had gone numb.
Aemond took another slow step closer, stopping within arm’s reach again, as he had in the yard days before. His voice did not rise. It did not need to.
“They will blame you,” Aemond said softly, as if confiding a secret. “Because blaming me would be dangerous. Blaming you is easy.”
Her fingers tightened around the ribbon until the cloth bit her skin.
Aemond’s gaze dropped to her hand and the ribbon there, then lifted again. “This,” he said, nodding toward it, “is why you will learn my preferences.”
The handmaid forced out a breath. “Your . . . preferences, my prince?”
Aemond’s mouth curved faintly. “Yes.”
He reached out—not to touch her, but to tap the ribbon once with one finger, a gesture so light it might have been mistaken for nothing if anyone else had done it.
“I prefer quiet,” he said. “You have that.”
His finger rose to indicate her braid, pinned tight. “I prefer order. You are neat.”
His hand fell back to his side. “I prefer obedience that does not beg for approval. You do not chatter.”
He held her gaze, unblinking. “And I prefer a servant who learns quickly.”
The handmaid's pulse hammered. “I am trying to learn, my prince.”
Aemond nodded, as if that pleased him.
“Then learn this,” he said, voice a shade colder. “You will not let Mistress Rylene frighten you into stupidity.”
Her brows drew together before she could stop them. “She was warning me—”
“She was warning you so you do not ruin yourself,” Aemond said, and there was a thin edge of impatience now. “But she does not know my chambers. She does not know what I require.” His eye sharpened. “And she does not decide what you do when you are here.”
The room felt smaller again.
She found her voice with effort. “My prince . . . I do not wish to displease you.”
“You will displease me,” Aemond said plainly. “Everyone does, sooner or later.”
He then leaned in slightly, close enough that his shadow swallowed her trembling hands. “The question is whether you will do it through ignorance… or will.”
Oh, but she stared at him, caught between fear and a strange, grim clarity. His honesty was a cruel thing. Yet it made the world make sense.
Aemond straightened.
“Go,” he said abruptly, as if dismissing the air itself. “And remember what I told you.”
The handmaid’s body moved before her mind could catch up. She curtsied, the proper depth, low and slow until her knees gave a slight protest, before turning towards the door. Her fingers found the latch, clumsy now from the tension in her arms. She opened it and just about slipped out into the corridor—
Aemond’s voice stopped her.
“—and one more preference, m’lady,” he said.
She halted, half turned, fingers still on the latch.
M’lady.
The corridor beyond lay quiet, pale with morning light, as if nothing in the world waited there but chores and footsteps. Behind her, the chambers held their own darker warmth—the hearth’s low breath, the scent of oiled leather, the hush of a prince who did not need to raise his voice to command.
She looked back.
He watched her as he had watched her hands, as he had watched her fear: patiently, precisely, with an attention that made even stillness feel like movement.
“You have no family name,” Aemond said.
It was neither a question nor an accusation. It was simply a fact he had tasted and found wanting. She swallowed the slight wince that threatened to crawl up her spine.
“My prince,” she murmured, uncertain.
Aemond’s gaze slid to the ribbon in her palm. “That will remain here,” he said. “You will keep it for my books.”
“Yes, my prince.”
His eye returned to her face. “And you will not be called girl in my hearing.”
The words struck oddly. Not kindness, not mercy—preference, as he’d said. A tidy correction, like mending a seam.
She stood very still. “As you command, my prince.”
Aemond took a step closer, slow, and for the first time, there was something almost contemplative in him, as if he were weighing a blade’s name before engraving it into steel.
He did not ask what she had been called at Harrenhal. He did not ask what her mother, whoever the woman might be, had whispered over her cradle moons ago. Those were softer names, names that belonged to other lives. Aemond had little use for other lives.
“You will be called Sweetling,” he said at last.
The chamber seemed to tighten around the word.
It was not the sort of name a drunken lord might sling at a serving girl with a grin. It was not lewd. It was not gentle. Coming from him, it sounded like something claimed, something set down in place and expected to remain there.
Her throat went dry. “My prince . . .”
Aemond’s mouth tightened faintly, not displeased, but watchful. “Do you object?”
She did not know what objection might cost. She did not know what acceptance might invite. “It is . . . not for me to object,” she then said carefully.
Aemond’s gaze held hers. “That is not what I asked.”
The fire popped, and the sound made her flinch inwardly, though her body remained still. She felt her pulse in her tongue.
“No,” she managed. “I do not object.”
Aemond’s eye narrowed, as if sifting truth from obedience.
“Good,” he said quietly. Then, as if the matter were as simple as the ribbon, he reached out and tapped her palm once—right where the cloth lay. Not a caress. Not comfort. A small, precise touch meant to mark the moment.
“Sweetling,” he repeated, as though testing how it sat on his tongue. “You will answer when I call you so.”
“Yes, my prince,” she, Sweetling, said, and the words came out steadier this time.
Aemond stepped back, satisfied—or as near to satisfied as he ever seemed.
“In the halls, you may be nothing to them,” he said. “Here, you will be what I name you.”
The meaning of it settled heavily in her chest. Not affection. Not safety. A place.
She turned toward the door again.
“And Sweetling,” Aemond added.
She stopped, unable not to.
His voice was low, even, terrible in its calm.
“Do not let them put another name upon you,” he said. “Not whore. Not schemer. Not—” His mouth tightened, as if the word itself bored him with its commonness. “—girl.”
She swallowed. “I will try, my prince.”
Aemond’s eye sharpened. “Try harder.”
“Yes, my prince—”
—and nearly collided with a serving handmaid carrying a tray of warmed wine and bread outside the prince’s chambers.
The serving handmaid, a plain maiden with hair of an onyx shade, recoiled, eyes widening, then darting past her shoulder to the door as if she could see through it.
The handmaid, Sweetling, felt the heat rise in her face.
The serving handmaid’s lips parted, as if to speak.
Sweetling said nothing.
Mistress Rylene’s rules echoed: speech minimal, never linger.
She moved past quickly, head down.
But as she walked away, she felt the serving handmaid’s stare like a hand on her back—felt it cling, felt it sharpen into something that would, by suppertime, become a whisper.
A ribbon in her palm. A closed door at her back. A blush on her cheeks. 'Sweetling' on the Prince Aemond’s tongue.
In the Red Keep, that was all the rumor ever needed.
Only when he had gone did she let herself look down at the bandages again, white against her reddened skin, and at the little pot of salve sitting on the table like a thing smuggled in from some gentler story.
She closed her fingers round it carefully. Not tenderness, she told herself. No.
Only a prince making his preferences known.
Ha.
Warnings: nothing.
WC: 9.3k
Notes: Sweetling gets her name. This chapter was originally posted on AO3. I highly suggest following the story there, as this chapter has been posted there since last week.
Sorry for the silly delay; I dished out a 43-page assignment this weekend for one class, and my brain was absolutely fried.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
Sweetling learned quickly that lye was a crueler master than most men.
Men shouted. Men struck. Men reached with greedy hands and named the reaching want, or right, or sport. Men could be watched, if a girl were wise enough and quick enough and had not yet grown so tired she mistook danger for peace.
Lye did not shout.
Lye only ate.
It lived in the washwater brought up in steaming pails from the lower kitchens and laundries, where shirts and smallclothes and table linens were boiled, beaten, and turned white by force. It took its due in silence. A woman would plunge in her hands pink and whole and pull them out flayed raw at the knuckles, the skin tight and reddened and smarting as though some invisible creature had gone to gnawing there. The older washerwomen wrapped rags round their fingers when they could spare them. The younger ones learned to bear it or else weep into the steam.
Sweetling did neither.
She stood at the long trough with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, the morning already damp and close around her, and worked the prince’s linen through the hot water with the care one gave to sacred cloth. Aemond Targaryen did not favor lace or foolish ornament, but what he wore must be spotless all the same, and sharply kept besides. His tunics were dark, his undershirts pale, his stockings plain. He liked order in all things. That much she had learned soon enough.
So she scrubbed.
Around her, the laundry room breathed and sweated. Steam crawled up the stone walls. Girls bent over tubs with their hair stuck to the backs of their necks. Wooden paddles slapped wet linen. Somewhere, a woman coughed, deep and wet. Somewhere else, another laughed too loudly at something not worth the laughter. The place smelled of soap, wet wool, mildew, old stone, and the sourness of human labor. Even belowstairs, the Red Keep had its own perfumes.
“Mind that seam,” one of the laundresses muttered beside her. “Royal cloth tears like pride. Easy enough to damage, hard to mend.”
Sweetling murmured that she would mind it. She always minded, however, for her hands were red already. By midday, they would be worse.
The first sting came and went unnoticed. So did the second. It was only when she reached for another shirt and the wet cloth rasped against the inside of her fingers that she felt the true hurt of it. She did not flinch. Flinching won no comforts. She only turned her hand beneath the water and saw where the skin at the base of her thumb had gone raw and glossy, rubbed near through.
It was not the first place.
The heels of both palms were roughened from the stone steps and the carrying of pails. Two fingers on her right hand were cracked at the joints, and one small split had opened at the side of her forefinger where yesterday’s work had not yet quite dried into a scab before today’s began afresh.
Sweetling curled her fingers and went on.
There was no use in bringing such hurts to anyone. Mistress Rylene would have called them the wages of service. The older maids would have laughed and told her she still had soft hands for a girl out of Harrenhal. The septa would have spoken of patience. The queen perhaps would not have noticed at all.
And the prince—
She pushed that thought away with the shirt into the water.
Aemond had eyes for everything. That was plain. Yet to be seen by such a man was not the same as being spared. Dragons saw sheep well enough before they burned them.
So she scrubbed.
The washwater stung worse with every plunge.
By the time the bells marked the afternoon, the skin over her knuckles had gone a bright, angry pink, and the small cut on her finger had split again wide enough to bead a thin crescent of blood before the water chased it pale.
She turned her hand quickly beneath the suds so none might remark upon it.
“Girl,” barked old Marra from the far side of the room, broad as a brewer’s cask and twice as red in the face, “you’ve left the wringing half done on that stack.”
Sweetling moved at once. “Yes.”
“Not yes. Do it.”
Sweetling bit back the rest and crossed to the bench where the wet linen lay in a pale heap like drowned things. She set her hands to twisting, and the fire shot up to her wrists. Her jaw tightened. She kept twisting. It was only linen. It was only skin. Yet when she finished and reached for the basket, her fingers failed her once, and a folded shirt slid from her grasp and dropped into a puddle darkening the floor.
Marra snorted. “Seven save us from dainty little creatures.”
Sweetling stooped to retrieve it before the older woman could.
“I said I’ve got it,” another voice put in, sharper, younger.
A servant girl not much older than Sweetling nudged in beside her and snatched up the shirt. Bessa, her name was. Bessa of the crooked front tooth and the quick eyes that always seemed on the hunt for either jest or weakness.
“I’ve got it,” Bessa repeated, and handed it over with a look too knowing by half. “Wouldn’t want his princely smallclothes taking the dust.”
Sweetling took the shirt. “Thank you.”
Bessa’s grin flashed. “You touch enough of his things now, I hear.”
Sweetling said nothing.
That only made the other girl bolder. “Closed doors and private summons. Fine work if a maid can get it.”
Marra barked a laugh at that, though whether at the jest or at Sweetling’s silence was hard to say.
Sweetling bent to the basket. “Mistress Rylene says loose tongues are whipped quicker than slow hands.”
Bessa clicked her tongue. “Hear her. Little sermon.” Yet she backed off all the same.
That was the way of it in the Keep. A girl need not accuse. She needs only remind another of a greater mouth somewhere above them all.
Sweetling gathered the linen and escaped as soon as the work allowed. Not to rest. Rest was for ladies with cushions and old men with titles. She had still to carry the folded washing up the back stairs and deliver the prince’s things to the press room off his chambers, where another maid kept the garments sorted by use, color, and season.
By then, her hands burned so fiercely that the linen seemed rough as burlap.
She did not complain.
She had been Sweetling scarcely long enough to grow used to the name, and already she understood that a handmaid too quick to complain was no handmaid for a prince.
The press room was cooler than the laundry, though only just.
It sat two turns down from Prince Aemond’s own apartments, near enough for convenience and far enough to keep the lesser servants from forever crossing his threshold. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, crowded with folded shirts, dark tunics, cloaks brushed clean of dust, spare hose, belts, gloves, and riding leathers smelling faintly of horse and oil. A narrow window admitted a grey blade of light. Dust danced in it like drifting ash.
Sweetling set the basket down upon the worktable and began to sort.
Small motions hurt the worst. Great labor numbed a body; neat labor reminded it where all the wounds lay. Folding shirts made the skin at her knuckles pull tight. Smoothing cuffs made the cut on her finger sting. When she reached for the last of the prince’s undertunics, her hand betrayed her altogether, and she hissed softly through her teeth before she could stop it.
“Does it pain you so much?”
She started so hard the garment slipped from her fingers.
Prince Aemond stood in the doorway.
He had come without sound, or else she had lost the ears for hearing any footfall but her own. He wore black that day, black wool trimmed in darker black, severe as a maester’s ink and far better cut. His silver hair was bound back from his face. The patch sat smoothly over the ruined eye, and the eye that remained was on her at once.
Sweetling dropped into a curtsy deep enough to make her smarting palms brush her skirts. “My prince.”
He did not bid her rise at once. He looked from her face to the table, from the table to the basket, from the basket to her hands, which she had clasped together too quickly and too tightly in a poor effort to hide them.
“What pains you?” he asked again.
“Nothing, my prince.”
Aemond stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
Not hard. Not meaningfully. Yet the click of the latch seemed to sharpen all the air.
“Show me.”
The word was quiet. Quieter than kindness would have been. Kindness invited denial. Command did not.
Sweetling hesitated a heartbeat too long.
Aemond’s mouth tightened. “Must I ask twice each time?”
“No, my prince.” She unfolded her hands.
The redness was uglier in the cool light. Raw skin stood out at the base of her thumbs and along two fingers. The cracks at her knuckles had whitened with soap and opened pink at the centers. One still held the faintest dried line of blood.
Aemond said nothing.
That frightened her more than anger might have.
His gaze lingered on her palms, then lifted to her face. “From the laundry.”
“Yes, my prince.”
“They put you to lye.”
Sweetling wet her lips. “There was washing to be done.”
“That was not my question.”
“No.” She swallowed. “Yes, my prince.”
Aemond’s jaw shifted once.
He came nearer. She fought the urge to close her hands again. A servant who snatched herself out of sight invited more looking, not less.
“Did you think to bind them?”
Sweetling blinked. “With what?”
A faint impatience crossed his face. “Cloth.”
“There is not always spare cloth belowstairs.”
“Then tear some.”
She could not help it; the answer slipped out before caution caught it. “And be called wasteful?”
Aemond stilled.
For one terrible beat, she thought she had gone too far. Mistress Rylene had warned her of that as well: even truth could sound like insolence if spoken with poor timing to the wrong ears.
Yet the prince only studied her.
At last, he said, “Who oversees the laundry today?”
“Marra, my prince.”
“Marra.” He rolled the name once, as if committing not the woman herself but the inconvenience of her existence to memory. Then his gaze dropped again to Sweetling’s hands. “And no one thought fit to spare these.”
These.
Not your hands. Not you. These, as he might say of a saddle girth worn thin or a page of vellum damp-spotted by careless storage.
Sweetling did not know why that made the breath catch in her chest.
“It is common enough,” she said, to fill the silence before it grew teeth. “For laundries.”
“I did not ask whether it was common.”
“No, my prince.”
He extended his hand.
She stared at it.
Aemond’s voice cooled a degree. “Do you intend to make me drag you here by the wrist?”
Sweetling placed one hand in his.
His palm was warm and dry and callused in different places than hers. Sword-calluses. Rein-calluses. Pen-calluses as well, she thought suddenly, remembering the ribbon and the books and the long fingers that turned pages with more care than most men gave prayer. He turned her hand over once, then the other. Not gently, not roughly. Efficiently. His thumb brushed the rawness at the heel of her palm, and she almost shivered, not from softness but from the sharpness of the pain where he found it precisely.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “How long?”
“My prince?”
“How long have they looked so?”
“Some days.”
“And you said nothing.”
“There was nothing to say.”
At that, he released her so abruptly she almost thought she had angered him after all.
“There is always something to say,” he said. “Especially when silence makes work worse.”
Sweetling lowered her eyes. “I did not think—”
“No,” Aemond said. “You did not.”
The rebuke landed hard. Yet there was something strange beneath it, something not quite contempt. Annoyance, yes. But annoyance like a man finding rot in wood he meant to use, rather than annoyance at the wood for rotting.
He turned toward the door.
“Remain here,” he said.
Sweetling looked up before she could stop herself. “My prince?”
Aemond had already opened the door. Over his shoulder, he said, “If you touch so much as one more wet cloth before I return, I shall know you have either no sense or no wish to keep the use of your fingers.”
Then he was gone.
Sweetling stood in the little room of folded black and white linen, staring at the empty doorway as if it might explain itself.
Remain here. Not fetch this. Not bring that. Not do not tell Mistress Rylene. Only remain.
She remained.
Outside, footsteps passed. Voices murmured. Once she heard some distant laugh from down the corridor, then the rattle of armor, then silence again. In the press room, the light shifted by degrees. Her palms throbbed. She turned them upward and studied them as if they belonged to some other girl less used to labor than she liked to pretend.
What was he about?
That question had no safe answers.
Aemond Targaryen was not a man grown, not yet, but there were times he wore his youth like armor and times he seemed to have none. He spoke too plainly for court, and too carefully for kindness. He named things others preferred smeared over with courtesy. He could unsettle with a glance better than some men could with a scream.
Sweetling did not know whether to fear most the moments he seemed cruel or the ones he did not.
When the door opened again, she straightened at once.
The prince entered with a small stoppered pot in one hand and a strip of clean linen in the other.
Sweetling stared.
Aemond shut the door with his heel and came to the table. He set both items down between them as if placing tools for some ordinary task.
“Salve,” he said. “Sit.”
She did not move.
His eye lifted to hers. “Do you begin every instruction with confusion?”
“My prince. . . ” She looked at the pot, then at him. “This is not necessary.”
Aemond’s expression went flat. “I was not under the impression that necessity required your consent.”
Sweetling flushed. “That is not what I meant.”
“Then mean something else.” He nudged the chair out from beneath the worktable with his foot. “Sit.”
Slowly, she obeyed.
The prince took up the pot and unstoppered it. The room filled at once with the scent of herbs—comfrey, perhaps, and beeswax, and something sharper green beneath. Not the rich perfumes ladies favored. This smelled of kitchens and gardens and healing rooms. A useful smell.
“It will sting,” he said.
Sweetling looked from the salve to his face. “You mean to do it yourself?”
Aemond’s mouth twitched, faint and humorless. “Do you see another pair of hands in the room?”
She nearly said I have my own, but held the words back just in time.
He noticed anyway. He always noticed. “You may use them poorly enough alone,” he said, “but I prefer not to have blood on my linens.”
There it was.
Not tenderness. Order.
Not mercy. Maintenance.
Something in her eased and hurt all at once.
Aemond dipped two fingers into the salve and took her right hand before she could think better of yielding it. The ointment was cool. The first touch of it to the split skin made her bite the inside of her cheek.
“I told you it would sting,” he said.
“Yes, my prince.”
He spread the salve with careful economy, no more pressure than needed, no less. His hands were deft. That surprised her, though it should not have. A man so exact in one discipline would be exact in others. He worked the ointment into the cracks at her knuckles, into the rubbed places at the heel of her hand, over the bright, angry skin at the base of her thumb.
Sweetling sat rigid as carved wood.
Aemond glanced up once. “If you flinch each time, we shall be here until moonrise.”
“I am trying not to.”
“That is evident.”
He took her other hand.
This one was worse. The prince frowned at the raw patch beneath the forefinger where the skin had nearly peeled away.
“You scrub too hard.”
“The stains do not lift for gentleness.”
Aemond made a soft sound that might have been agreement or irritation. “Then someone else may scrub. You are not useful to me half-lamed.”
Useful.
Again that curious almost-nothing, colder than pity and somehow kinder than it had any right to be.
He finished with the salve and took up the strip of linen, tearing it cleanly in two narrower lengths. “Hold still.”
He bound one hand and then the other, wrapping the cloth across the worst of the rawness and around her palms, leaving her fingers free enough to move. The bindings were neat and snug, better done than some maesters’ dressings she had seen in poorer halls.
“You’ve done this before,” she said before she could stop herself.
Aemond tied off the second strip and sat back a little. “Everyone at court bleeds. Some merely do it more decoratively.”
Sweetling did not know whether she was permitted to smile at that. She kept her mouth composed.
The prince replaced the stopper on the pot.
“You will keep this,” he said, pushing it toward her. “Use it after washing. And before. Twice daily.”
Her eyes dropped to the little pot. It looked expensive, though perhaps that was only because anything whole and useful seemed dear belowstairs.
“I cannot take this.”
Aemond’s face chilled at once. “Cannot?”
“Mistress Rylene said—”
“I am aware,” he cut in, and now impatience showed plain. “Must every other sentence in this castle pass through that woman first?”
Sweetling went still.
Aemond leaned one hand on the table between them. “Listen carefully. This is not a trinket. It is not lace, or a ring, or sugared almonds meant to turn your head. It is salve. For your hands. So that my servant may perform her duties without ruining herself into clumsiness.”
The last word he spoke with faint disdain, as though clumsiness were the true sin here.
“You will keep it,” he went on. “If Rylene asks, tell her I ordered it. If she dislikes that, she may bring her complaint to me.”
Sweetling’s throat tightened. “My prince. . . she will think—”
“I do not care what she thinks.” His voice went very soft. “And neither, for this, will you.”
He straightened. The moment changed with it, drew shut like a curtain.
“When you return to the laundry,” he said, “you will not put your hands in lye again today.”
“I must finish—”
“You must obey.”
She bowed her head. “Yes, my prince.”
Aemond considered her a moment longer, then added, almost carelessly, “I will have Marra told that I require you elsewhere. If she grumbles, let her. Old women and dogs both bark at closed gates.”
It was so unexpected an image that Sweetling looked up too quickly, and this time she could not quite stop the flicker in her eyes.
Aemond saw it. Of course he did.
For the barest instant, something shifted at the corner of his mouth—not softness, never that, but the shadow of satisfaction at having surprised something honest out of her.
Then it was gone.
He moved to the door and opened it. Before stepping through, he said without turning, “And Sweetling.”
“Yes, my prince?”
“Do not mistake this for indulgence.”
The words should have struck cold. Instead, they landed warm in some wounded place she had not meant to keep open.
Aemond went on, “Raw hands catch on cloth. Torn cloth wastes time. I dislike wasted time.”
“Yes, my prince,” she said, because that was what he required.
Only when he had gone did she let herself look down at the bandages again, white against her reddened skin, and at the little pot of salve sitting on the table like a thing smuggled in from some gentler story.
She closed her fingers round it carefully. Not tenderness, she told herself. No.
Only a prince making his preferences known.
Ha.
The bandages were the worst of it.
Not because they hurt. They did not. The salve had cooled the fire in her palms to a dull, manageable ache, and the linen Prince Aemond had wound about her hands kept the worst of the rubbing from the air. She could flex her fingers now without feeling as though the skin would split open anew. The hurt was still there, but quieter.
It was the whiteness that doomed her.
Fresh linen showed. Fresh linen always showed in a place like the Red Keep, where every rag had a history, and every whole thing belonged to someone above you. A servant with clean wrappings on both hands looked tended to. A tended servant invited questions. Questions were only gossip before they found a mouth mean enough to sharpen them.
Sweetling knew all that before she ever stepped back into the lower passages.
Even so, when she left the press room with the little pot of salve hidden in the pocket sewn into the side of her skirt, she half hoped no one would mark the change. The hope died young.
A boy with a basket of trenchers was the first to stare. His gaze dropped to her hands and lingered a heartbeat too long before he remembered himself and hurried on.
Then a scullion girl looked. Then an old woman carrying ripe, fat onions. Then one of the spit boys, all elbows and soot, whistled low under his breath and grinned a gap-toothed grin she would have liked to slap from his face if her hands had been less precious all at once.
By the time she reached the laundry again, she could feel the eyes before she crossed the threshold.
The room was hotter than before. Steam rolled thick as morning fog above the troughs. Someone had opened one of the high shutters, but the air that came through was mean and damp, smelling of river and smoke. Wet linen slapped wood. A kettle hissed. Women bent to their labor like penitents at prayer.
And then they straightened, one by one, as she came in.
Not all of them. Not fully. But enough.
Marra saw her first. Marra always saw first. The old laundress was planted near the far vat, red-armed and broad-backed, her grey hair escaping its knot in damp curls that clung to her temples. Her little eyes narrowed.
“Well,” Marra said, loud enough for three rooms to hear, “look what’s been mended.”
There were chuckles at that.
Sweetling kept her face still. “Prince Aemond required me elsewhere.”
“As I live and breathe,” Marra said, “did he.”
A younger laundress snorted into a sleeve she was wringing. Bessa did not bother hiding her grin at all.
Sweetling moved toward the bench where her work had been left in an untidy stack. “What remains?”
Marra’s gaze dropped to the bandages. “Not that.”
There was another little burst of laughter.
Sweetling stopped. “My prince said I was not to put my hands in lye today.”
That sharpened the room faster than a shout.
Some servants loved nothing better than hearing a command repeated from noble lips, especially when it arrived in the mouth of someone too low to enjoy speaking it. It was indecent in its way, like seeing a beggar wear velvet. Not because velvet ceased to be velvet, but because everyone must stare at how strangely it sat.
Marra planted both fists on her hips. “Did he?”
“Yes.”
The old woman looked her up and down as if measuring not the truth of the thing, but the insolence required to bring it. “And did His Grace also tell you to come back down here and stand in my way?”
“No.”
“Then use the wits the gods denied you less of than your tongue and get to folding.” Marra jerked her chin toward a stack of dried linen near the window. “That needs no lye.”
Sweetling crossed at once and bent to the task.
Folding was kinder to her hands, though not kind. The bandages brushed the cloth with each turn, and the linen beneath them warmed quickly. Still, it was work she could do, and work made a shield if not a wall. She kept her head bowed, her fingers careful, and tried to become what Mistress Rylene had once advised every servant to be: forgettable, neat, useful as a cup left waiting on a tray.
But the Red Keep did not forget what it found amusing.
Bessa wandered near after a time with a basket on her hip and mischief all over her face.
“That’s fine wrapping,” she said. “Cleaner than what the infirmary gives to kitchen girls.”
Sweetling folded a shirt. “Then perhaps you should burn your hands on purpose.”
Bessa gave a bark of laughter. “There’s a tongue after all.”
Sweetling regretted the answer at once. Wit was a luxury for girls with fathers or dowries or at least enough meat on their bones that a beating would not show too much. She lowered her gaze further.
Bessa leaned closer. “Did he bind them himself?”
The question was soft. Too soft.
The shirt in Sweetling’s hands seemed suddenly louder than thunder.
“No.”
It was not wholly a lie, she told herself. Not in spirit. Not in safety. He had not done it as a kindness. He had done it as a command. The distinction mattered. It had to.
Bessa studied her profile for a moment, then clicked her tongue. “Bad liar.”
Sweetling set the folded shirt atop the pile. “And you are too curious.”
Before Sweetling could answer, Marra’s voice came cracking through the steam. “Bessa, if your fingers are idle, I’ll give them a pot to scrub through.”
Bessa rolled her eyes and moved off. Yet she did not move far. No one ever moved far from a scent of scandal.
Sweetling folded two more shirts, then a tablecloth, then a stack of small squares meant for a lord’s face or a lady’s spills. Around her, the murmuring began in earnest, not directed at her, which would have been easier, but angled just beside her hearing, where each half-heard word did more work than an accusation shouted plain.
“. . . lucky little thing . . . ”
“. . . or unlucky, if he’s took an interest . . . ”
“. . . not that one, she’s too cold in the face for it . . . ”
“. . . cold girls melt quickest . . . ”
“. . . hush, fool, walls have ears . . . ”
The walls did. The floors did. Sometimes even the rushes seemed to.
Sweetling kept folding.
At Harrenhal, she had learned that mockery could be outwaited if one made no gift of one’s humiliation. Mockers grew hungry. They wanted color in the cheeks, wetness in the eyes, tremor at the mouth. They wanted the sweetmeat of visible injury. Deny them that, and often they turned to easier sport. Often. Not always. She counted herself quite a lucky girl, for she had her mother to protect her from wagging tongues and sharp-eyed vultures.
Alas, but Alys, her mother, was not here.
Marra came herself when the room had been simmering long enough.
The old woman seized a linen sheet from Sweetling’s stack and held it up to the light as if inspecting the work, though the sheet was fine and they both knew it.
“Tell me,” Marra said, “do princes hand out bandages to every maid they work raw, or are you favored above the rest?”
The room quieted.
It did not still. Laundry rooms never stilled. Water still steamed, cloth still dripped, someone somewhere still coughed. Yet the listening in the room tightened so sharply Sweetling could almost feel it gathering behind her ears.
She kept her eyes on the sheet in Marra’s hands. “My prince said my hands were needed for his service.”
Marra barked a laugh. “And what service is that?”
Heat rose beneath Sweetling’s skin. It would have been better had Marra struck her. Bruises could be hidden. This was a stripping. A making-public. The old woman wanted the room’s laughter like a dog wants blood from a torn rabbit.
“I am his handmaid,” Sweetling said.
“That you are.” Marra lowered the sheet. “And what sort of handmaid gets coddled for a little lye?”
The word coddled pricked harder than it should have. It made of the bandages something soft, something foolish, something chosen by weakness. Sweetling’s fingers curled beneath the linen wrappings. But, before she could speak, another voice cut across the room.
“The sort a prince names.”
Mistress Rylene stood in the doorway.
She had a talent for appearing as if summoned by the worst possible thought. Tall, straight-backed, severe in her plain dark gown, with her ring of keys at her hip and disapproval worn like another layer of cloth, she seemed less a woman than a judgment passed down in shoes.
The room bent around her at once. Backs lowered. Eyes dropped. Even Marra lost some measure of her breadth.
Rylene stepped inside, her gaze passing over the vats, the wet heaps, the women, and last of all, Sweetling.
“Who speaks Prince Aemond’s mind in this room?” she asked.
No one answered.
“Marra?” Rylene said.
The laundress gave a stiff shrug meant to seem smaller than it was. “No one, mistress. We were only—”
“You were only forgetting yourselves.” Rylene came farther in. “A common disease belowstairs. It spreads quickest among women with too much spit and too little sense.”
A few heads bowed lower.
Sweetling did not look up. She did not dare. Still, she could feel Rylene’s attention like a ruler laid across the shoulders.
“At whose order are those wrappings there?” Rylene asked.
The question was for Sweetling.
“At Prince Aemond’s, mistress.”
“And the salve?”
Sweetling’s breath caught. So. He had told her.
“At Prince Aemond’s,” she repeated.
Rylene let the silence lengthen.
Then, “Show me.”
Sweetling set down the towel she had been folding and untied the outer knot of one bandage enough to peel back the cloth from the heel of her palm. The rawness there had gone less angry already, the salve having done its quiet work. Even so, the skin looked thin and sore.
Rylene inspected it without softness.
When she spoke, it was to the room. “This servant’s hands were damaged in the prince’s service. The prince chose to preserve their use. That is all any of you need to know.”
The words snapped through the steam like a banner cracking in hard wind.
Not kindness. Preserve their use.
Sweetling nearly looked up then, hearing in Rylene’s mouth the same hard framing Aemond himself had used. For one strange moment, she wondered which of them had taught the other that language, or whether people sharpened by the same court simply came to cut alike.
Marra grunted. “No one said otherwise.”
Rylene turned her head. It was a small movement. It made Marra look suddenly very mortal.
“You implied much,” Rylene said. “Imply it again, and you may finish your years gutting fish on Dragonstone where the wind can carry your opinions out to sea.”
A maid near the far vat choked on a laugh and smothered it into a cough.
Marra’s mouth worked. “I meant no offense.”
“Then let meaning and speech make each other’s acquaintance at last.”
The rebuke landed. Even Bessa looked impressed.
Rylene’s gaze returned to Sweetling. “Bandage that hand again.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Sweetling rewound the cloth, fingers clumsy now from being watched too hard. When she had finished, Rylene crossed the room and, to Sweetling’s great surprise, took the stack of folded linens in hand herself. She checked the edges. The corners. The neatness.
“They are acceptable,” she said.
It was the nearest thing to praise Sweetling had yet heard from her.
Rylene set the stack down. “You will leave the laundry.”
Sweetling blinked. “Mistress?”
“Prince Aemond has altered your duties for the remainder of the day. You are to inventory the press room, see which garments require mending, and make note of what must be replaced before the next turn of the moon.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Those tasks require eyes. Not lye. They might sound the same, but they are, indeed, quite different in nature.”
There was no mistaking the source of the phrasing now. Aemond’s hand lay on the command even where he was absent.
Sweetling bowed her head. “Yes, mistress.”
Rylene looked at the others. “As for the rest of you—if any tongue in this room makes a sport of the prince’s household, I will know. And if I know, the queen may know. You may decide for yourselves how pleasant that would be.”
That bought her silence at last.
Not loyalty. Not goodwill. But silence was worth more.
Rylene turned and went out as sharply as she had come, leaving the room pressed flat behind her.
No one spoke for the space of three breaths.
Then Marra spat into the rushes.
“Off with you, then,” the old laundress muttered, not daring more while the echo of Rylene still hung in the doorway. “Go count his stockings.”
Laughter tried to rise at that and failed.
Sweetling gathered herself, not the folded linen this time, but only the small measure of composure that remained her own. She took up the basket meant for the upper rooms and left the laundry without haste.
It was only in the passage beyond that she let herself breathe properly.
The corridor felt cold after the steam. Her bandaged hands seemed too bright in the dimness. She flexed them once and felt the linen pull at her skin, snug and real.
Count his stockings, Marra had said.
Yet it was not mockery that stayed with Sweetling as she climbed the back stairs. It was the room’s silence after Rylene spoke, and the shape of the thing settling inside her.
A prince’s notice could shield.
A prince’s notice could also mark.
She had known that, in theory, as one knew that wildfire burned green or that dragons cast great shadows. Knowing a thing at a distance was not the same as standing close enough to feel the heat. Prince Aemond had not been gentle. He had been exact. He had not comforted. He had corrected. Yet his correction had rippled outward through the keep at once, bending labor, drawing eyes, stiffening spines, altering the day itself.
That was power.
And because it had touched her, however lightly, others would now look for the bruise of its fingers.
At the turn of the stair, Sweetling paused beside a narrow arrow slit where the light came in thin and colorless from the bay. Below, the water was iron-grey. Gulls wheeled and cried. Far off, somewhere in the yards, steel rang against steel.
Training.
She imagined him there in black and silver, moving with that merciless economy of his, as if every stroke meant to punish waste itself. She imagined those same hands fastening linen round her own and calling it nothing. She imagined his voice: Do not mistake this for indulgence.
Her mouth tightened.
No, my prince, she thought. I am beginning to think it is something worse.
Then she climbed the rest of the way.
The press room kept better company than the laundry.
Linen did not smirk. Doublets did not whisper. Cloaks hung where they were placed and did not lean together afterward to decide what they had seen. Sweetling had not known, until that day, how grateful a girl might be for the society of folded cloth and polished buckles and shelves that minded their own business.
She shut the door behind her and stood for a moment with her back against it, breathing in the room’s cooler air.
Wool, cedar, lamp oil, and leather.
And beneath it, fainter, Prince Aemond.
Not perfume, for he wore none. Not any sweetness that clung to courtiers and their silks and their powders. His things smelled clean, severe, and used—black wool aired by wind, leather darkened with saddle soap, steel oil from belts and scabbards, beeswax from candles burned low beside books, and something sharper that might have been him alone, like cold iron warmed by the hand.
Sweetling pushed herself off the door at once, disliking the thought as soon as she had it.
There was work.
Work was safer than noticing.
She set the basket down on the long table by the narrow window and began the inventory Mistress Rylene had named for her. Shirts first. Undershirts, riding shirts, finer linen for court, plainer for training. Then stockings, dark and pale. Tunics by weight and season. Spare points and ties in a small wooden box. Gloves. Belts. One pair of riding leathers that wanted cleaning at the knees, where dust from the yard had dried into pale smears.
The task suited her. It asked for eyes and memory and neat hands, all things she possessed in better measure than boldness. She counted beneath her breath, then counted again to make certain, for a servant who miscounted a prince’s belongings could find herself accused of theft, stupidity, or both. She noted a cuff frayed on one black undertunic, two missing hooks from a dark grey over-robe, and a loose seam near the lining of a cloak too heavy for spring yet not put away entirely, as if the prince disliked trusting the season to keep its word.
That, she thought, sounded like him.
At the far end of the shelf, she found a pair of gloves stiff with old wear, the fingertips marked darker where reins had rubbed. Aemond’s left glove was always the more worn. She had noticed that already. Men favored their sword hand or their writing hand. Aemond favored whatever hand the world had not yet thought to watch.
She set the gloves aside for oiling.
Her own bandaged hands moved more slowly than usual, but the pain no longer ruled them. The salve did its work quietly, the way kind things must in a place like this if they meant to survive.
Kind things, she thought, and then corrected herself at once.
No.
Useful things.
She flexed her fingers once and reached for a folded undertunic on the upper shelf.
Something slipped free and drifted down, brushing her wrist like a moth.
Sweetling started and caught it before it touched the floor.
A ribbon.
Dark, narrow, plain enough to be mistaken for any scrap of binding cloth but for the care with which it had been folded once upon itself before being tucked between the garments. Not new. Not fine. Frayed at one end, as though torn away from some longer length.
The sight of it struck her strangely.
She had seen it before.
Not on the shelf. In his hand.
The prince’s fingers with the dark strip draped across them, his voice quiet and implacable: Take it.
Her own refusal, dry-mouthed and terrified.
Sweetling stood very still with the ribbon lying across her bandaged palm.
Why had he kept it?
Why here?
A careless servant might have left such a thing tucked in with the linen, but nothing about Aemond’s belongings felt careless. Even his disorder had the look of a chosen disorder, as though each object had earned the place where it waited.
She turned the ribbon over once between her fingers. Plain cloth. No embroidery. No scent. Nothing a court lady would fight to own, no jewel to mark a favor, no token a fool would brag of receiving. That made it mean more, not less. Small things endured because no one feared them until too late. Sweetling refolded it carefully and stood on her toes to place it back where she had found it. Not hidden. Not displayed. Exactly as before. Then she took her hand away as though the shelf had grown hot.
The Keep had rules enough for every hour of the day, yet none for this: what to do when a prince’s notice lingered in little scraps and changed the shape of a room.
She returned to the inventory.
Outside, feet passed from time to time in the corridor. A page ran by once, too fast, earning a barked reprimand from some older servant farther off. Two guards exchanged a few low words at the turn. Somewhere distant, a door opened and shut with measured weight. Life in the upper passages went on: quieter than belowstairs, cleaner, and no less full of listening.
Sweetling had nearly reached the last shelf when she heard it.
Not a word. A laugh.
A woman’s laugh, softened by distance and stone, but edged with the mean delight of someone feeding on a morsel too fresh not to taste again. Another voice answered, lower. A man this time. Then the woman said, clear enough through the door for the shape if not each syllable—
“—bandaged by his own hand, I heard.”
Silence followed. Then the man gave a short sound, half scoff and half amusement.
Sweetling froze where she stood.
The voices moved on.
Her stomach sank.
So soon.
Mistress Rylene had silenced the laundry, but silence in one room was only that. A story did not need legs if it had enough mouths to carry it. She could almost see how it had gone already, passing from steam to stair to corridor to pantry to guard-post, growing as it went. A bandage became a touch. A touch became a favor. A favor became a private fondness. Before nightfall there would be girls belowstairs swearing she had sat on the prince’s knee and boys abovestairs wagering which of them would be cast off first, her or his temper.
Sweetling shut her eyes briefly.
Rylene had warned her. Aemond himself had warned her. They will decide a story.
And now they had.
The first true fear was not fear for herself, though that came near enough. It was the thought that he would hear.
Aemond Targaryen did not strike her as a man who enjoyed becoming a jest.
She had just begun counting belts when the latch clicked.
The sound was slight. It sent a bolt through her all the same.
She turned at once.
Prince Aemond entered without page, guard, or heralding servant. He had changed since the yard. The black training leathers were gone. He wore a dark tunic plain enough for ease, but cut close through the shoulders, with silver fastening at one cuff and none at the other. His hair, still faintly damp at the temples, had been drawn back again. There was a fresh stillness to him, the sort men wore after washing blood or sweat from themselves and finding their thoughts no gentler for it.
His eye went first to the table, then the shelves, then the basket, then to her.
Sweetling curtsied. “My prince.”
Aemond shut the door. “How far have you got?”
The question startled her with its plainness. Not why are you pale? Not have they spoken? Only work first, as if work were the most trustworthy language between them.
“I have counted the shirts, hose, gloves, and belts,” she said. “There are two frayed seams, one missing pair of hooks, and a riding pair that wants oil.”
Aemond came farther in. “Show me.”
She did.
He looked where she indicated and not elsewhere, listening with the exact attention he gave everything that mattered to him. When she named the garments, he touched each only once, fingertips brief and sure. He seemed to know the state of his possessions already and required from her not discovery but proof that she knew it too.
At the gloves, he paused.
“These,” Sweetling said, “have hardened at the fingers.”
“I know.”
“I thought oil might soften them.”
Aemond glanced at her. “It might.”
Not praise. Not dismissal. Only acknowledgment, which, from him, felt more dangerous than either.
He moved to the next shelf. His hand stopped on the dark undertunic where the ribbon lay hidden among the folds. Sweetling felt the pause as though it had occurred in her own body.
Aemond’s finger rested on the cloth a moment longer than needed.
Then he looked at her.
“Who has spoken to you since you left the laundry?”
The room seemed to narrow by an inch.
Sweetling lowered her eyes, then lifted them again because he hated evasion more when he could smell it. “Mistress Rylene.”
“I am aware of Rylene.” His voice cooled. “Who else?”
She hesitated.
Aemond’s face did not change. That was somehow worse. Anger one could brace for. Stillness was a blade kept sheathed for later.
“Some in the laundry spoke,” she said carefully. “And in the corridor. . . I heard voices.”
“What voices?”
“I do not know who they were.”
“That was not my question.” His eye fixed on her. “What did they say?”
The words seemed ridiculous when spoken aloud. Shame always did. It turned itself silly at the mouth, though it felt sharp enough inside to draw blood.
Sweetling clasped her bandaged hands before her. “They said. . . ” Her throat tightened. “That I had been bound by your own hand.”
Aemond stood without moving.
A less observant soul might have thought him unmoved. Sweetling had learned enough by then to know that with him, stillness often meant the opposite. Something in his jaw set harder. His fingers withdrew from the shelf and closed once at his side. “And that amused them,” he said.
It was not a question.
“Yes, my prince.”
Aemond looked toward the door as though he might see through wood and stone to the precise throats that had shaped the sound.
“Of course it did,” he said softly.
There was no heat in it. None. The lack of heat chilled her more than anger would have. Men in rages struck wide. Cold men chose.
Sweetling found herself saying, “Mistress Rylene silenced the room.”
“I did not ask whether she did her duty.”
“No, my prince.”
He began to walk again, once from shelf to window and back, not pacing in any common fretful way but moving as if thought itself required a line to travel. “I told Marra you were required elsewhere.”
“Yes.”
“I told Rylene what had happened.”
“Yes, my prince.”
“And still the keep found sport.”
He stopped by the table. “It never takes long.”
The last was spoken almost to himself.
Sweetling watched his profile and thought, absurdly, that he looked older in silence than in speech. Boy and prince sat uneasily in him at times, as if the world had forged one over the other and not waited for the cooling. In that moment, it was the hardest metal she saw.
“I am sorry,” she said.
His head turned sharply. “For what?”
The question caught her. “For causing—”
“You caused nothing.” The words came so quickly they nearly cut hers in half. Aemond’s eye narrowed. “Do not make the mistake of claiming blame simply because others are eager to hand it to you.”
Sweetling stared at him.
He seemed to realize what he had said only after it was spoken. Or perhaps he realized its nakedness. His mouth hardened at once.
“This,” he amended, with deliberate contempt, “is exactly why I told you not to mistake correction for indulgence. You are in my household. If they chatter over a bandage, they chatter over my order.”
My order.
There it was again. The wall was set back in place stone by stone. Yet she had heard what came before it, and once heard, it could not be unheard.
Aemond saw that she had heard. Of course he did.
His expression cooled another degree. “Do not look at me as though I have said something tender.”
“I was not, my prince.”
“You were.”
She lowered her gaze at once because the wretched thing was that she had been.
Aemond exhaled through his nose. A humorless sound, near a laugh, and nowhere close. “You are very poor at deceit for a girl who means to survive court.”
“I had thought myself better at it.”
“That is because no one has examined your efforts properly.”
There was, buried very deep in the dryness of it, the ghost of mockery aimed not to wound but to unsettle her into steadiness. It nearly worked. A corner of her fear loosened despite itself.
Aemond noticed that too.
“Good,” he said. “Keep enough wit to hear me now.”
Sweetling straightened.
“The story will spread faster because it is small,” he said. “Small stories are easier to carry. No one need prove them. They only need to enjoy them.” He moved closer, stopping at the edge of the table. “So we will give them nothing else.”
“We?”
His brow lifted.
Sweetling could have bitten out her own tongue. “Beg pardon, my prince.”
Aemond ignored the apology. “You will do precisely as you were doing before. No shrinking, no hurrying, no skulking down side passages as though guilt has put weight in your shoes. Shame invites pursuit.”
The bluntness of it struck true. She had already thought to take the servants’ darker ways at supper, to hide the bandages in her apron, to become smaller if she could.
Aemond went on, “And if anyone speaks to you plainly, you will answer plainly. ‘The prince ordered salve. My hands were damaged in service. That is all.’ Can you remember so much?”
“Yes, my prince.”
“If they press?”
“I say no more.”
“Good.”
He looked at her hands then, at the white strips crossing her palms. “How badly do they pain you?”
The question came too naturally to be for show.
Sweetling answered before caution could dress the truth. “Less.”
His eye flicked up to hers. “Less.”
“The salve helped.”
Aemond was silent for half a beat.
Then, in a tone drier than dust, “One would hope salve could distinguish itself from lamp grease in at least that regard.”
It was so unexpected she nearly smiled.
Nearly.
His gaze sharpened at once. “Do not grin. I am not performing mummery for you.”
“No, my prince.”
But there had been something there. Not softness. Never softness. The harsher, stranger thing that lived where softness might have been in another man.
Aemond turned back to the shelf, lifted the dark undertunic, and from within its fold withdrew the ribbon.
Sweetling’s breath caught.
He held it between two fingers, looking not at it but at her. “Do you know why I kept this?”
“No, my prince.”
“Because you refused it.”
The answer struck harder because it was quite simple.
Aemond let the ribbon hang. “Most people take what a prince offers before they have thought whether taking will choke them later. You did think. Poorly, perhaps. Fearfully, certainly. But you thought.”
Sweetling could find no safe answer to that.
He went on. “That makes you rarer than you ought to be.”
The ribbon disappeared into his fist.
“And therefore more troublesome.”
There. The wall again. Yet this time she heard the mortar being mixed.
“My prince,” she said slowly, “if it displeases you that I refused—”
“It displeases me,” Aemond said, “that everyone in this keep imagines my smallest gesture must mean what theirs would mean.” His voice flattened. “I gave you cloth because I wished to see whether you knew the difference between a favor and a leash.”
Sweetling blinked.
Aemond’s gaze did not soften. “You did.”
The room went quiet enough for her to hear the sea wind scratching faintly at the narrow pane.
At last, she said, “Then why offer it at all?”
The question was out before she could stop it.
A prince might have rebuked her. Another man might have smiled. Aemond did neither. He seemed, instead, to consider whether the insolence was real or merely the tax exacted by honesty.
Finally, he said, “To know.”
“To know what?”
“Whether you could be warned and still think.” His mouth tightened. “Or whether you were only another trembling creature waiting to be told which hand to kiss.”
Sweetling did not know what to do with that, so she did what she always did when bewilderment threatened to show in her face.
She reached for work.
“There are still the winter cloaks to count,” she said.
For one beat, two, she thought she had gone too far.
Then something altered at the corner of Aemond’s mouth. Not a smile. Something leaner and stranger. Approval wearing armor.
“Yes,” he said. “There are.”
He set the ribbon on the table between them, not offering it this time, merely placing it there as one might place a knife to see whether another knew to touch the handle and not the edge.
“Count them.”
Sweetling did.
She crossed to the far shelf and began naming the cloaks one by one: black wool lined in fur, grey travel cloak, a lighter riding mantle, one rain-dark cape still smelling faintly of horse and weather. Aemond remained where he was at first, then moved to the table and listened. Once or twice, he corrected her count before she reached the end, not because she had erred but because he already knew. That too seemed like him: to test accuracy by possessing it in advance.
At the fourth cloak, she realized the room had eased.
Not safely. Never that. But into some more dangerous, more intimate steadiness, where silence no longer meant only fear.
When she finished, Aemond said, “The rain cloak is missing a fastening.”
Sweetling checked. It was.
“Yes, my prince.”
“You did not see it.”
“No.”
“See it next time.”
“Yes, my prince.”
He lifted the ribbon from the table and tucked it once more into the fold of the undertunic. “And Sweetling.”
She looked up.
His eye rested on her bandaged hands. “Tomorrow you will not go near the laundry.”
The command startled her. “My prince, if Mistress Rylene—”
“I will speak to Rylene.”
“That will make them talk more.”
Aemond’s face changed then, only slightly, but enough.
“Yes,” he said. “It may.”
For the first time since entering, he sounded not surprised by the keep’s malice but tired of it. Not tired enough to yield. Only tired in the way one might be tired of a wound that reopened each time rain came.
He looked toward the door.
“Let them,” he said at last. “They were going to, whatever I did.”
The truth of it struck her quiet.
Aemond’s hand rested briefly on the table, long fingers spread against the wood. “The difference,” he said, “is that I do not mean to let them decide what happens next.”
Then he straightened, and the softness of honesty vanished as though it had never dared show itself at all.
“You will finish the inventory,” he said. “Leave the list on my desk. If the salve is gone before the cuts close, you will ask for more.”
Sweetling stared. “Ask?”
Aemond’s brow arched. “Do you know another way to acquire things without theft?”
The dryness of it nearly undid her again.
“I meant. . . ” She stopped. “Yes, my prince.”
“Good.” He moved to the door, then paused with his hand on the latch. Without turning, he added, “And if you hear them laugh again—”
Sweetling waited.
Aemond’s voice came cool as ever. “Remember that servants live on stories because they possess so little else. I would not envy them their diet.”
Then he was gone.
Sweetling stood in the press room among his ordered things and the fading echo of him, her hands wrapped in linen and no steadier than before, only changed. Outside, the Keep still breathed and muttered and fed itself on whispers. It would do so tomorrow as well, and the day after. A bandage had become a story. A story would become a weapon. She knew that now.
Yet as she turned back to the shelves and began again to count what remained, another thought followed close behind it, lean and dangerous as a shadow with one eye.
Aemond Targaryen might despise being misunderstood, but let it be known that he despised surrendering the meaning of his own acts even more. And gods help the fool who mistook that for gentleness.
Chapter Eight | Wherein a Dragon Keeps What He Has Chosen
Pairing: Aemond Targaryen x handmaid!reader
Summary:
Prince Aemond Targaryen did not know how to court.
Warnings: Erotic undertones. Nothing too abnormal regarding ASOIAF/HOTD writing.
WC: 12.7k
Notes: Reworked my writing style a little bit. Hopefully it reads more like . . . I’m the one writing it? As an apology for the unplanned mini-hiatus, here's a juicy chapter with some courting, hehe.
Posted first on my AO3.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
The rain had gone on until dawn, needling at shutters and drowning the gutters, drawing filth down the steep streets in brown ribbons that emptied toward the Blackwater.
When the clouds thinned at last, the city did not shine but instead steamed. Every roof and alley and crooked stair breathed up a sour ghost of wet ash, horse dung, fish rot, and old smoke, and from the windows of the Red Keep the whole of King’s Landing seemed a great beast pretending sleep while one yellow eye remained open beneath its lid.
Sweetling had not slept enough to dream.
That was mercy, perhaps. Dreams might have been worse. Dreams would have given him to her without walls or warnings or Mistress Rylene’s sharp eyes. Dreams would have put her back in his chamber, back upon the bed with rain on the glass and the prince between her thighs, his hair pale against the dark folds of her robe, his hands pinning not cruelly, no, never cruelly, but with that dreadful certainty of his, as if every part of the world he touched must learn its place beneath his fingers. Dreams would have made a song of his mouth; waking made a sin of it.
So she was grateful for the little sleep she had been given, wretched though it was. A pallet beneath the eaves, a blanket that smelled of damp wool, one arm tucked under her cheek, the other folded tight against her stomach as if she might hold herself together by force. Twice she had woken with her hand between her thighs, fingers lightly damp from her wetness, before shame caught her wrist and dragged it away.
Once she had woken with his name behind her teeth, unsaid but warm, like milk kept too near the hearth.
Aemond.
Not my prince—not that safe little bridge of words built for servants and crossed by fear.
Aemond, bare and dangerous, a name without armor.
By the time Mistress Rylene sent for her, Sweetling had washed her face in water so cold it made her gasp and braided her hair tighter than piety. She chose the plainest gown she owned, which was not much of a choosing, for all her gowns were plain: pale wool, mended at one cuff, apron clean enough to pass beneath a stern eye. She tied the apron strings twice and tucked the dark ribbon deep inside her sleeve, where it lay against her wrist like a pulse that did not belong to her.
Rylene waited in the linen room with a basket of folded towels and the expression of a woman who had woken to discover the gods had not improved overnight. “You look pale.”
Sweetling lowered her eyes. “I am well, mistress.”
“That was not the same answer.”
“No, mistress.”
Rylene’s mouth tightened. “Good. You still know when you are caught.”
The linen room was cool after the closeness of the dormer where the younger maids slept, but even here the damp had found them. The folded cloths held the faint chill of rain, the cedar chests smelled sharper than usual, and the little water had crept beneath the western wall and darkened the stone in a crooked line. Rylene had placed a rag there to catch it. Even floods, in Rylene’s world, were expected to behave usefully.
She pointed to the basket. “Her Grace wants those taken to the sewing room. You will sit with the others until I call for you. You will sew what you are given. You will not look dazed. You will not smile at nothing. You will not touch your mouth.”
Sweetling’s hand had already begun to rise. She lowered it at once.
Rylene saw. “You will especially not do that.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“And if Jeyne speaks?”
Sweetling’s stomach tightened at the name. “I will answer little.”
“You will answer nothing that feeds her.”
“That may be hard. She feeds on air.”
Rylene stared at her.
Sweetling felt heat rise in her face. “Forgive me.”
“No.” Rylene turned back to the shelf and took down a packet of green thread. “That was nearly wit. Dangerous, but not hopeless.” She put the thread atop the towels. “Take this as well. Her Grace’s women are short of that shade.”
Sweetling reached for the basket. Rylene’s hand closed over the handle first.
The older woman did not soften. Her face was too skilled for that, all hard lines and housekeeper’s severity. Yet her voice, when it came, had lowered into something less easily named.
“Was he gentle?”
Sweetling’s fingers curled at her sides.
There were answers that might have pleased Rylene more: "Yes, mistress." "No, mistress." "He was as princes are." It meant nothing." "It will not happen again." Lies, each of them, neat as folded napkins and just as useful for hiding stains until someone lifted the cloth.
She thought of Aemond’s mouth at her breast through the linen, the hot drag of his tongue and the sharp graze of teeth that had made her clutch at his hair as if drowning. She thought of his hand covering her mouth when pleasure made her foolishly loud, his voice at her ear, low and rough with command. Quiet. She thought of him stopping, again and again, not because wanting had left him, but because it had not.
“He tried to be,” she finally managed.
Rylene’s fingers loosened on the basket.
For a time, neither woman spoke. Beyond the closed door, the Keep stirred into morning: footsteps in the passage, a boy coughing, the dull thump of a chest being dragged somewhere it did not wish to go. At last, Rylene gave the basket to Sweetling’s hands.
“That is something,” she said, eyes flicking to Sweetling’s sleeve, where the ribbon slept hidden. “—not enough, but something.”
The sewing room had already begun to sharpen itself by the time Sweetling entered.
Six women sat about the long table by the windows, their heads bowed over cloth, their needles flashing in the watery light. The room smelled of beeswax, damp wool, rosemary oil, and the faint sourness of too many women made to sit too near one another with too little affection between them. A brazier glowed near the hearth, not warm enough to banish the cold, only warm enough to make a person resent it. On a stool beside the wall, a heap of mending waited like the dead after battle.
Jeyne looked up first.
Of course she did.
Her gaze went to Sweetling’s face, then to her mouth, then to the basket in her hands. It lingered at her sleeve a heartbeat too long, though the ribbon could not be seen. Jeyne had a way of looking for hidden things that made one feel half-stripped before she had found so much as a loose thread.
“Sweetling,” she said, sweet as spoiled pears. “How rested you look.”
Sweetling crossed to the table and set down the basket. “You are kind to say so.”
Jeyne’s smile twitched. She had wanted embarrassment, denial, perhaps a blush, as courtesy displeased her. Courtesy gave little meat to chew.
One of the older women, Meredyth, glanced up from a torn cuff. “Sit, child. Her Grace has asked for the smallclothes sorted and mended before noon, and I have but two hands, whatever Rylene thinks.”
Sweetling sat.
Work saved her for a little while; it had always done so. Work asked the body simple questions and accepted simple answers. A torn seam needed closing, a missing hook wanted replacing, and silk wanted a gentler hand than linen, leather a sharper needle, wool patience enough to hide the mend. If one gave work what it asked, it did not wonder why one’s mouth felt tender or why one’s thighs pressed together beneath the table each time memory moved.
The first hour passed with the thin peace of discipline. Sweetling mended two undersleeves and a linen coif. She sorted ribbons by shade and width and helped Meredyth turn the hem of one of Alicent’s green morning gowns, the fabric soft enough to make her roughened fingertips feel clumsy. No one spoke much. Rain slid down the glass. Somewhere below, steel rang in the yard, and Sweetling’s needle paused only once before she made herself continue.
Aemond would be training—that was what he did when his mind disliked itself. He put a sword in his hand and made his body suffer order until thought eventually bowed to it.
Jeyne noticed the pause.
“Does the sound trouble you?” she asked.
Sweetling did not lift her eyes. “Steel seldom troubles those not standing before it.”
“How brave.”
“How observant.”
Meredyth made a small choking noise and pretended it was a cough.
Jeyne’s lips thinned. “You have grown bold.”
“Have I?”
“Some girls do, once they think themselves favored.”
At that, the room changed, though not loudly. Sewing rooms were not battlefields, though Sweetling thought women could have taught knights a great deal about bloodless killing. The needles instead slowed, and the older hens kept their eyes down with the careful innocence of those who wished to hear without being called witnesses.
Sweetling set her needle through the cloth, drew the thread tight, and only then looked up. “I have been warned against thinking myself favored.”
“By whom?” Jeyne leaned slightly forward. “The prince?”
Sweetling smiled, only a little.
Rylene had told her not to feed the girl. Aemond had told her shame invited pursuit. Alicent had warned her that wanting was a danger in both directions. There were too many voices in her head now, and all of them sounded certain. Sweetling was not certain. She was only tired of being eaten in small bites.
“By women wiser than you,” she said.
The room went very still.
Jeyne’s face colored, not much, but enough. Before she could answer, though, the door opened, and Queen Alicent stepped inside. The effect was immediate—needles stopped and backs straightened. Even Jeyne lowered her gaze so quickly that it must have pained her pride. Alicent wore dark green, as she often did, but no crown. Her hair was pinned beneath a veil, auburn and copper where the weak morning light found it. She looked neither angry nor pleased, and that was how one knew to be careful.
“Continue,” Alicent said.
No one continued.
The queen’s eyes moved over them and settled, inevitably, on Sweetling. “Bring the basket, Sweetling, and follow me.”
Sweetling rose, gathering the basket at once, though she could feel Jeyne watching with a look that had become narrow and bright. The queen turned without waiting to see if she would be obeyed, as queens did not wait for gravity either; it was simply expected to remember itself in their presence.
Alicent led her not to the solar, but to a smaller chamber adjoining it, where the windows looked down toward the inner yard. It was a room for quiet work and quieter conversations, furnished with two chairs, a narrow table, a carved screen, and enough candles to prove the queen feared shadows less than she feared being overheard. A little statue of the Mother stood in an alcove, hands outstretched in eternal mercy. Someone had dusted her poorly, and grey lay in the folds of her stone gown.
Alicent shut the door.
Sweetling curtsied. “Your Grace.”
“Do not perform obedience so quickly that it becomes another kind of hiding,” Alicent said.
Sweetling remained low, startled into stillness.
The queen sighed, one hand rising to rub at the corner of her temple. “Rise.”
She did.
Alicent crossed to the window and glanced down. Sweetling followed her gaze before she could stop herself.
The yard below was slick from rain. Ser Criston Cole stood near the sanded ring with his white cloak thrown back, dark hair damp at the temples. Across from him, Aemond moved with a practice sword in hand, black leather molded close to his lean body, silver hair tied back, the eyepatch stark against his face. He looked smaller from above and no less dangerous. Distance only made his precision clearer: each turn, each strike, each step placed carefully in the mud as if he resented the ground for being imperfect and meant to correct it with his feet.
Alicent watched him for a long moment. “He has always preferred the yard after he has done something foolish, I have learned.”
Sweetling’s hands tightened on the basket.
The queen glanced at her. “You need not defend him.”
“I was not going to.”
“No?” Alicent’s mouth curved without humor. “Then there is hope for you after all.”
Below, Aemond struck Criston’s shield hard enough for the sound to climb the stones and enter the room like a rebuke—again, then again, and again a third time. Criston said something Sweetling could not hear, and Aemond answered with another blow.
“He is angry,” Sweetling breathed.
“He is often angry.”
“This is different.”
Alicent looked at her then, fully, and Sweetling realized too late that she had spoken as one who knew. A servant might notice whether a prince wanted hot wine or cold, whether a cloak sat poorly, whether a tray came back untouched; a servant should not know the varieties of his anger. Yet, to her surprise, Alicent did not scold her. She only looked . . . tired.
“Yes,” the queen said. “It is.”
Sweetling lowered her eyes. “Forgive me, Your Grace.”
“I am beginning to despise that word from your mouth, child.”
Sweetling looked up, startled.
Alicent turned from the window. “Forgiveness is for sins. Mistakes are different. Dangers are different still. You must learn which is which, or every man in this castle will hand you guilt and call himself merciful for letting you carry it.”
The words settled too heavily to be only about Sweetling.
Below, steel rang again.
Alicent drew in a breath, folding her hands before her. The gesture was queenly, pious, perfectly composed, and Sweetling could see where the thumb worried at the side of one nail. “My son gave you a choice,” she added a moment later.
Sweetling felt the ribbon hidden in her sleeve as if it had heard its name.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And you used it poorly.”
Heat rose in her face, but not only shame. “I used it.”
Alicent’s gaze sharpened.
Sweetling nearly bent beneath it, nearly apologized, nearly became again the quiet thing everyone found easier to place. She did not. The ribbon in her sleeve seemed to grow heavier, a strip of cloth and a warning both. “He told me to understand the risk,” she croaked out. “—I did not understand all of it. I still do not, but I understood enough to know I was choosing.”
Alicent went still at that, and, oh, even the room seemed to hold its breath, and the rain seemed to quiet at the window.
“You speak like him now,” the queen said at last.
Sweetling did not know whether that was an accusation or grief. Perhaps both.
“No, Your Grace,” she said. “I speak because he listens. There is a difference.”
Something moved over Alicent’s face, too quick to name. Pain, perhaps, or memory. She glanced back toward the yard, where Aemond had lowered his sword and stood with his head bowed, listening to Criston. He did not look contrite. Aemond Targaryen, Sweetling suspected, would rather be flayed than appear contrite. But he did listen. Gods help her, he listened even when he disliked every word.
“Listening is not yielding,” Alicent said.
“No.”
“And wanting is not love.”
Sweetling’s fingers tightened on the basket handle. “No.”
“Do you know what love is?”
That question was worse because it was horribly gentle.
Sweetling thought of her mother’s hands at Harrenhal, red and split, tucking crusts into her pocket when she thought her only daughter did not see. She thought of Mistress Rylene bolting the door and asking hard questions so no softer lie could kill her later. She thought of Aemond’s mouth at her skin, yes, but also of his hand stopping when he had felt her fear sharpen. She thought of the way he had cleaned her fingers with grim care, as if dignity were another wound he could bind if he worked quietly enough.
“No,” she said. “But I know what it is not.”
Alicent turned from the window. “That may be the more useful lesson.”
Below, Aemond’s head lifted.
Sweetling could not have said how she knew he had found her. The window was high, the glass warped, the morning grey. Yet suddenly his face angled toward the queen’s chamber, and though distance blurred the detail of his eye, she felt the weight of it pass through rainlight and stone.
Alicent saw it too.
A bitter little smile touched the queen’s mouth. “Dragons notice when something has been taken from their hoard.”
“I am not gold, Your Grace.”
“No.” Alicent’s eyes remained on her son. “You are worse. Gold does not look back.”
Sweetling should have lowered her gaze. She did not. Aemond stood below like a black mark against wet sand, Criston speaking unheard beside him, the yard and castle and whole hungry court arranged between them. He did not move, and neither did she.
Then Alicent stepped aside, breaking the line of sight.
Sweetling blinked as if waking.
“You will return to the sewing room,” the queen instructed. “You will finish what you were given. Tonight, you will sleep where Rylene tells you to sleep. If my son sends the ribbon, you will bring it to me first.”
Sweetling’s heart lurched. “Your Grace—”
Alicent’s expression hardened. “Do not mistake protection for theft.”
Sweetling swallowed.
“Aemond will,” Alicent added, quieter. “That is why I say it to you.”
The truth of it burned. Aemond would see the queen’s hand in the matter and call it interference. He would call it worse than that, perhaps. He would think his choice had been made another leash, his restraint made a thing his mother could hold up to the light and judge for flaws.
“He will be angry,” Sweetling said.
“He is already angry.”
“At me?”
Alicent’s eyes softened just enough to hurt. “At wanting something that can be hurt.”
Sweetling looked down.
For a while, there was only the muffled sound of the yard and the small breath of candleflame. Then Alicent came closer and, with a carefulness that startled them both, touched the side of Sweetling’s face. Not the mouth, not where Aemond had marked her with heat and hunger, but the cheek, as brief as a blessing.
“I chose you for him,” she mumbled. “I chose him for you because I believed he was not like his older brother. Perhaps, somewhere deep inside me, I still believe that to be true. That is my sin, and my burden. Do not make it easy for the court to turn it into yours.”
Sweetling curtsied, because if she did not bend somehow, she thought she might weep.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And Sweetling?”
She looked up.
“If you love him one day, do not tell him first.”
The words struck strangely, like prophecy given in a sewing room by a queen who had learned too young what became of girls who handed their hearts to powerful men and waited for gratitude.
“Why?” Sweetling asked before she could stop herself.
Alicent’s mouth tightened. “Because Targaryen men like to believe love is another name for surrender. Make him learn otherwise.”
By evenfall, the Keep had become all corners.
Sweetling felt watched in every passage. Jeyne’s silence followed her worse than what speech would have done. The kitchen boys laughed too suddenly when she passed. One guard outside the eastern stair looked at her sleeve, not her face, and she wondered who had told him about the ribbon, or whether the whole castle had simply learned to look for whatever she wished hidden. Even Meredyth, who had been kind in a careless way, pressed a heel of bread into Sweetling’s hand at supper and said, “Eat, child,” with such pity that Sweetling nearly hated her for it.
Mistress Rylene took one look at her and sent her to the upper press room with a ledger.
“Count what needs counting,” Rylene said. “Write what needs writing. Do not think if you can help it. You do that poorly when tired.”
“Thank you, mistress.”
“That was not kindness.”
“No, mistress.”
Rylene’s eyes narrowed. “Now you are mocking me.”
“A little.”
For a moment, Rylene looked as though she might crack the ledger over Sweetling’s head. Instead, she thrust it into her arms. “Go before I remember how much easier you were when frightened of everyone.”
Sweetling went.
The press room was dim and cold, a narrow chamber of shelves and hooks and cedar chests, but she welcomed it as one might welcome an ugly old friend. Cloth did not pry, boots did not gossip, and spare sword belts did not wonder whether a prince had put his mouth on a handmaid until she forgot which gods she was meant to pray to. The rain had stopped entirely now, leaving the window glass filmed with grey. Beyond it, the sky lowered toward night.
She lit one lamp, then another, and opened the ledger.
For a while, numbers kept her sane. Three black tunics fit for council. Two for riding. One torn past repair at the inner sleeve. Four undershirts of fine linen. Six plainer. Gloves: two pairs court, one pair riding, one pair training stiffened at the fingers. She wrote in a neat hand, pausing only to warm her fingers near the lamp when the cold made the ink drag.
At the back of the second shelf, tucked where it should not have been, she found the dark ribbon. Not the one in her sleeve, no. This one was folded once around a small twist of parchment and tied in a plain knot. Sweetling stared at it for several breaths before touching it, her heart beginning to beat so hard she felt foolishly certain the shelves must hear.
The parchment bore no seal—that was the first thing. No seal meant no command, and no command meant choice. Aemond had remembered his own rule. That made her throat tighten more than a command would have.
She untied the ribbon with careful fingers and unfolded the note. The words were few, written in the sharp, severe hand she had seen on lists and labels and once on a correction he had made to a history book’s margin as if the long-dead maester might yet be shamed into accuracy:
Come if you choose. Bring the ledger. Leave if you wish.
Sweetling read it once, then again. By the third reading, she hated him a little.
Not because he had summoned her, but because he had not. Not because he had made it hard to refuse, but because he had made refusal possible, and possibility was its own cruelty. If he had sent his seal, she could have obeyed and blamed obedience. If he had sent nothing, she could have sat in the press room and blamed restraint. Instead, he had put the knife in her hand and asked whether she meant to cut bread or herself.
She folded the note, tucked it beneath the ledger’s cover, and remained where she was until the lamp burned low enough to smoke.
Before, Rylene had said. Decide before you leave whatever room you stand in. Not in the passage. Not at his door. Not after seeing his face.
Sweetling stood in the press room and decided . . . then she took up the ledger and went.
She did not go alone—that was the price of choosing with open eyes. At the stairs, she found a page half-asleep with a tray and gave him a look stern enough to borrow from Rylene. “You will walk with me to Prince Aemond’s door.”
The boy blinked. “Why?”
“Because I asked plainly and could instead ask Mistress Rylene.”
He stood at once.
Together they crossed the upper passage, the boy carrying his empty tray like a shield, Sweetling carrying the ledger, her sleeve closed over the ribbon. The guards outside Aemond’s chambers looked at her, looked at the page, and said nothing. That was better than a surprise and a smile. One of them knocked.
“Enter,” came Aemond’s voice.
The page fled the instant the door opened, though, to his credit, he did not run until Sweetling had crossed the threshold.
Aemond stood by the hearth. He wore black, because of course he did, the tunic unlaced at the throat, his hair falling loose over one shoulder. A book lay open on the table, forgotten. Behind him, the fire had sunk into a red bed of coals, painting one side of his face in warm shadow and leaving the other pale as carved bone. He looked first at the ledger in her hands, then at her sleeve.
“You found it,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You came.”
“Yes.”
His eye moved over her face, searching for fear, obedience, resentment, anything he might name and therefore master. Sweetling stood still and let him look. She had chosen before the door; that did not mean she was not afraid.
Aemond seemed to know that too.
“Did you show my mother?”
“No.”
His jaw tightened. “You were told to.”
“Yes.”
A dangerous silence opened between them.
Sweetling held the ledger tighter. “You told me to come if I chose. I chose. If that displeases you, I can still leave.”
For a moment, she thought he might laugh—not with humor, but with disbelief, perhaps, or with anger. Instead, he looked at her as he had in the sept when she named him a prince, like it was both a wound and a warning.
“It does not displease me,” he finally said.
The room seemed to tilt.
Sweetling breathed once, carefully. “Good.”
Aemond’s mouth twitched. “You sound relieved.”
“I am not so proud as you.”
“No one is.”
The answer should not have warmed her. It did anyway, because there was dryness in it rather than cruelty, and because he had let her stand near the door without closing the distance by force of will alone. She brought the ledger to the table and opened it. “Rylene sent me to count your garments.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. One tunic is torn past repair.”
“I know.”
“Then why keep it?”
Aemond came to stand across from her. “Because it is mine.”
“That is not always reason enough to keep a ruined thing.”
His eye sharpened, and Sweetling looked down at the page too late.
“You have been speaking with my mother,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Many things.”
“Sweetling.”
The name held a warning. She looked up. “She said if I loved you one day, I should not tell you first.”
Aemond went utterly still.
There. She had done it. Found the tender place beneath armor and pressed her thumb to it, not gently enough. The air in the chamber tightened. Fire popped in the hearth. Beyond the door, a guard shifted his weight, leather creaking faintly.
At last, Aemond said, “And do you?”
“No.”
His face did not change, but she saw the blow land, and she hated herself for seeing it. She hated him a little for making the truth look like injury.
“No,” she said again, softer. “I do not know you enough for that—”
His gaze held hers, hard and bright.
“—but I want to,” she added.
The words seemed smaller once spoken, smaller and more dangerous. Aemond looked at her for so long that she felt the flush begin at her throat and climb. He saw that too, as his eye dropped, briefly, to the place where heat colored her skin above the collar of her gown.
“You came to discuss garments,” he mused.
“I brought the ledger.”
“So you did.”
Neither of them looked at it.
Aemond moved toward the hearth, where he took up the iron poker and stirred the coals with unnecessary attention. Sparks climbed and vanished. “My mother will think I have corrupted you.”
Sweetling’s hands rested on the open ledger. “Have you?”
He turned his head, and the look he had should have frightened her. It did, but not enough to matter.
Aemond set the poker aside. “Not yet.”
The words moved through her like heat under a door.
He crossed the room then, slow enough that she might step back if she wished, proud enough that he would not ask twice. Sweetling remained where she was. When he stopped before her, he did not touch her at once. That, she was learning, could be worse than touch. His restraint had become another hand upon her, invisible and patient.
“Show me the ribbon,” he said.
She drew it from her sleeve and laid it across her palm.
Aemond looked at it. Then at her.
“You understood.”
“That I could refuse?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“And yet?”
She closed her fingers around the cloth. “And yet.”
His breath changed. Barely. Enough.
When he touched her, it was only to take her hand. His fingers closed over hers and the ribbon together, the same as before, but this time he lifted her knuckles to his mouth. The kiss he placed there was so controlled, so almost formal, that for one foolish moment Sweetling might have believed herself safe from wanting.
Then his lips lingered.
Her breath caught.
Aemond’s eye lifted to hers over their joined hands. “There is the trouble,” he murmured.
“What?”
“You grow soft before I have done anything.”
Sweetling’s face burned. “You have done things.”
His mouth curved. “Not tonight.”
The lie of that was in his hand, his mouth, the space he had stolen between one breath and the next. Sweetling wanted to say so. She wanted to sound bold and clever. Instead, she looked at his mouth and forgot half her anger.
Aemond saw. He always saw. He released her hand only to touch her throat, two fingers beneath her chin, tilting her face up. “If I kiss you now, will you tell me it was your choice?”
“Yes.”
“If I stop?”
“I will hate you.”
That surprised him; in truth, it surprised her more. Then Aemond laughed quietly, once, a dark and low sound that felt dragged from somewhere he kept locked. It was not happiness. Sweetling did not think he knew what to do with happiness, but it was something near pleasure, and nearer still to wonder.
“Honest little thing,” he murmured, his gaze drifting down her body slowly enough to be indecent without a single touch.
The words undid her more thoroughly than praise.
Aemond bent and kissed her.
It was not like the corridor. Not that first mistake, rough with anger and surprise. It was not like the night before either, when hunger had opened beneath them and swallowed every rule whole. This kiss was slower, and because it was slower, it was more dangerous. His mouth took time with hers, and he kissed the corner first, where he had once begun, then the lower lip he had seemed to make his enemy, then the mouth entire, deepening by degrees until Sweetling’s hands had risen to the front of his tunic and stayed there, not pushing, not pulling, simply holding on.
Aemond’s hand slid from her chin to her cheek, then back into her hair, finding the pins there with swift impatience. One came loose, then another, until her braid slackened under his fingers.
Sweetling broke the kiss just enough to whisper, “Rylene will know.”
“She knows everything, my love. It must be very tiring.”
A laugh escaped her into his mouth.
The sound changed him. She felt it in the hand in her hair, in the sudden tightening of his fingers at her waist. His next kiss was harder—not careless, no, but closer to the edge of it, his tongue parting her lips, his body pressing hers back against the table until the ledger crumpled beneath her palms.
“My list,” she gasped.
“I know what I own.”
“Proud.”
“Yes.”
His mouth found her throat then, and Sweetling’s breath went uneven at once. He kissed as if learning an argument by heart: beneath her ear, the side of her neck, the tender place where pulse betrayed her. His hand came to her waist, then her hip, fingers spreading over plain wool as if it were silk made only for him. When his teeth grazed her skin, she shivered hard enough for the table to shift.
Aemond stopped.
She opened her eyes.
He was watching her with that terrible attention, his mouth close to her throat, his breath warm where his teeth had been. “Fear?”
“No.”
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Want?”
The word struck low, and Sweetling swallowed. “Yes.”
His eye darkened.
For a heartbeat, she thought he would lift her onto the table and make a ruin of the ledger and perhaps of them both. She wanted it with a suddenness that frightened her, wanted his hands beneath her skirts and his mouth where the memory of him still lived, wanted to hear the restraint break in his breathing again.
Aemond did not move. Then, slowly, he stepped back.
Sweetling stared at him, flushed and bewildered. “Why?”
His jaw tightened. “Because you said yes as if it surprised you.”
“That is cruel.”
“No.” He looked toward the door, then back at her, and the hunger in him had not lessened. It had only been leashed so tightly that she could see the strain of it. “Cruel would be teaching you too quickly to stop being surprised.”
Her throat tightened.
There were many kinds of want, and Sweetling was learning. Some had teeth, and some oddly had patience. This one, however, stood before her in black wool with her loosened hair caught on his fingers and chose, visibly, not to devour.
Aemond reached past her and turned the ledger right side up. His voice, when it came, was rougher than before but steady enough to be proud of itself: “Read me what needs replacing.”
Sweetling almost laughed. She almost wept. In the end, she looked down at the ruined page and smoothed it with both hands. “One black tunic,” she said, though her voice trembled. “Two hooks. One pair of riding gloves, if my prince can be persuaded that sentiment is not the same as usefulness.”
Aemond’s mouth twitched.
“Careful,” he huffed. “That sounds near to wit.”
Sweetling looked up through the loosened fall of her hair.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I shall try to be duller.”
This time, when he smiled, it was small and sharp and gone almost at once.
But she still saw it, and because she had chosen before the door, because the ribbon lay between them on the table, because want had not made him forget the shape of restraint, Sweetling smiled back and kept reading until the candles burned low.
Prince Aemond Targaryen did not know how to court.
That was not to say he knew nothing of desire. Desire was simple enough, or had been before Sweetling.
Men made it vulgar because men made most things vulgar when given enough wine, enough privacy, and enough certainty that no one weaker would be believed afterward. Aemond had seen desire dressed in silk and paint, in perfumed chambers where women laughed with practiced throats and men forgot themselves cheaply. He had seen his brother stagger toward it night after night with the appetite of a starving dog and the gratitude of one who meant to bite the hand that fed him. He had seen lords buy desire, boast of it, hide from it, name it sport, name it weakness, name it anything but what it was when it had teeth in them.
He knew that kind. It bored him. It had always bored him, even when his body had been young enough to answer before pride could forbid it.
Sweetling had made the matter insulting.
She had done nothing artful to manage it; that was perhaps the worst of it.
There had been no practiced glance through lashes, no painted mouth shaped for conquest, no little songs of false reluctance such as court ladies sometimes wore under their smiles when they wished to be pursued and wished everyone to know they had been pursued unwillingly enough to be flattered. Sweetling had come to him plain, frightened, dutiful, too honest when cornered, and too stubborn when warned. She mended seams, counted gloves, and kept his ribbon in her sleeve as if it were a live coal, and when he touched her, her breath went thin with want before she had the sense to hide it.
Aemond found, to his profound displeasure, that he preferred wanting when it did not know how to flatter him.
He discovered his ignorance of courtship on the third evening after she came to his chamber by choice and read from the ledger until the candles guttered low. He had not sent for her since, though not because he repented. Repentance was a word septons gave to men who feared the consequences of being themselves. Aemond did not repent wanting her, nor touching her, nor the exact memory of her hair loosened over his table while her mouth trembled between defiance and invitation. He did not repent the rain-wet night when he put his mouth to her until she forgot every careful title in her head and spoke his name like it had been pulled from somewhere beneath prayer.
He did, however, resent the court’s claim upon the meaning of it.
The Keep had begun doing what the Keep did best: scenting warmth and coming hunting for smoke.
Aemond heard the small changes before anyone was foolish enough to put them into words before him. The pause of the guards when Sweetling passed, the smothered laugh below the stair, and the way his mother’s eyes followed his hands whenever Sweetling stood near him, as though Alicent expected lust to leap visibly from his fingers and coil around the girl’s throat. Mistress Rylene’s shadow appeared in more doorways than usual, severe and silent, her keys announcing her presence like a gaoler’s warning.
Jeyne, the sour-mouthed little viper from his mother’s rooms, had learned to lower her gaze whenever he came near, which meant she was either frightened or waiting. Aemond distrusted frightened people less than waiting ones.
So . . . he did not summon Sweetling.
He made the absence deliberate enough that everyone could see it and no one could accuse him of hiding her. He sent his mending through pages, asked for warmed water from other maids, and received his supper with the door open and his guard posted in clear view. He trained until his body ached sweetly with exertion and his thoughts still returned, traitorous, to the way Sweetling’s thighs had tightened about his shoulders. He read histories of Valyria and remembered none of them, except that dragonlords had once taken what they pleased because the world had not yet learned to tell dragons no. He went to the sept twice, not to pray, but because the memory of her among the candles irritated him less than the memory of her in his bed, which meant he had perhaps grown ill.
On the fourth evening, he decided this was absurd.
A prince might not know how to court.
He did know how to conduct a campaign.
He began with territory.
Sweetling was in the old press room when the first order reached her, carrying with it the full weight of Prince Aemond’s seal and none of the mercy of the ribbon. She had been sorting a small heap of garments sent down from the queen’s rooms: two sleeves, one torn hem, a length of green silk that wanted cleaning, and a child’s glove so tiny it could only belong to some noble visiting brat who had already lost its pair. The room was quiet, blessedly empty save for dust, cedar, and the soft scrape of her needle through cloth. Quiet had become precious to her, as it asked no questions and did not smile like Jeyne.
The page arrived breathless, red in the face, and holding a folded note as though it might hatch.
“Mistress Rylene says this is for you,” he said.
Sweetling looked up. “From Mistress Rylene?”
The boy’s eyes darted toward the door. “From the prince.”
Her needle stopped.
For one foolish, heated instant, her body answered before her mind understood anything at all. A flush rose beneath her collar. Her fingers tightened around the child’s glove. The ribbon in her sleeve seemed to wake, though the note bore a seal and therefore no choice at all.
She took it carefully. “You may go.”
“I was told to wait.”
“By whom?”
He swallowed. “The prince.”
Of course.
Sweetling broke the seal and unfolded the note.
You will no longer mend for my mother’s household while my own work is unfinished. Report to my outer chamber at once, with needle, thread, and your ledger. The page will remain in the corridor. A guard will witness your arrival. If Mistress Rylene objects, she may bring me the objection herself.
The words were plain, severe, perhaps even practical, if one ignored the violence of their intent. Sweetling read them twice, and by the second reading, her mouth had gone dry.
He was not asking her to come to him in secret; he was not sending ribbon; he was not coaxing, pleading, or dressing want as gentleness. No. He was doing something far worse: he was making his attention official.
The page shifted from one foot to the other. “Are you coming?”
Sweetling folded the note. “Have you ever known Prince Aemond to enjoy being kept waiting?”
“No.”
“Then do not ask foolish questions.”
The boy looked offended enough to be human and frightened enough to be useful. Sweetling gathered her basket, tucked the note beneath the ledger, and followed him into the corridor.
By the time she reached Aemond’s door, the Keep had already begun to notice. It was impossible that it had not. Prince Aemond’s page leading his handmaid openly through the upper passage at dusk, with a guard stepping aside before she reached the threshold, was not a thing the walls would swallow quietly. A maid carrying rushes stopped too abruptly at the corner. One of Alicent’s women turned her head as if some sound behind her had called. Farther down the passage, Jeyne stood with a silver tray in her hands and her eyes narrowed.
Sweetling did not lower her gaze.
That was the mistake, perhaps, or the victory. In the Red Keep, they often looked alike until blood decided the matter.
The guard knocked once and opened the door.
Aemond stood inside near the table, dressed in dark green.
The sight of it struck Sweetling strangely. He wore his mother’s color seldom enough that it always meant something when he did. On him, green did not look gentle or pious; rather, it looked like war beneath torchlight, deep and rich and sharp at the edges. His hair was bound back with black leather, and the eyepatch cut its hard line across the ruined side of his face. The sapphire was hidden, but she felt it all the same, that cold blue absence beneath leather and pride.
His gaze moved over her once.
“My prince,” she said, curtsying.
“Sweetling.”
Her name in his mouth entered the room before she did.
The page remained in the corridor, exactly as ordered. The door was left open wide enough for a witness, though not so wide that anyone beyond could see more than the edge of the table and the prince standing still as judgment. Aemond had arranged the stage with infuriating precision.
Sweetling stepped inside. “You sent for me.”
“I did.”
“You sealed the note.”
“I wished to be understood.”
She looked up. “You were.”
His mouth curved faintly, not warm and not cold, but alive. “Good.”
On the table lay a dark tunic, a riding glove, a belt with one silver fastening loosened, and three shirts folded with such neatness that she suspected he had placed them himself for appearance rather than need. The ledger sat open beside them, already turned to a blank page. He had made the work real; that was like him. Aemond could build a snare out of honest materials and still look offended if anyone called it a trap.
Sweetling came to the table and set down her basket. “Which first?”
“The glove.”
She took it up, studying it for a moment. The seam along the thumb had split. It was a simple repair . . . much too simple for a royal summons under seal.
Aemond watched her face as she noticed.
“You object,” he said.
“I did not speak.”
“You object quietly.”
Sweetling threaded the needle. “Then perhaps my quiet is becoming too loud.”
“It has been for some time.”
Her fingers faltered only slightly. His eye still caught it.
The door remained open. The page stood beyond it, staring at some fascinating patch of wall with the strained determination of a boy trying not to die of curiosity. A guard’s armor shifted. There were witnesses. Safety, of a kind. Aemond had given her that. He had also put her in full view and made the whole court look where he wished it to look.
She began to sew.
“Your mother will hear of this,” she said.
“My mother hears of rain before the clouds gather.”
“And Mistress Rylene?”
“Will disapprove.”
“She does that well.”
“She has had much practice.”
Sweetling’s mouth threatened to betray her. She kept it down and pulled the stitch through the leather. The glove was stiff beneath her hand, warm still from wear, though that may have been her imagination making a fool of her. Aemond stood near enough that his scent reached her with the faint heat from the hearth: leather, steel oil, smoke, the clean severity of him beneath it all. She did not look at his hands, as looking at his hands had become dangerous. She saw them anyway in memory, pushing her robe from her shoulders, fitting over her breast, spreading her open with obscene care while his voice told her to be quiet.
The needle pricked her thumb. Sweetling hissed through her teeth.
Aemond’s hand closed around her wrist before the second drop of blood could rise.
The page in the hall turned his head.
Aemond did not look away from Sweetling. “Clumsy.”
“It was a needle, not a spear.”
“You bled.”
“It happens.”
“To soldiers and fools.”
“Which am I?”
His eye darkened with interest. “That depends on how often you intend to challenge me before witnesses.”
The page found the wall very fascinating again.
Aemond released her wrist but did not step back. He took the glove from her hand, set it aside, and reached for a cloth from the table, the movement so briskly practical that for a moment she almost forgot to breathe. He pressed the cloth to her thumb, not tenderly, not roughly, but with the exact pressure required— no more, no less.
“This,” Sweetling murmured, “—will also be spoken of.”
“Let it.”
The answer came too quickly.
She looked at him then. Aemond’s face was calm, but calm with him was rarely peace. It was a blade polished before battle. He held the cloth to her thumb while the open door yawned at her back and the corridor listened with every stone it possessed.
“You are doing this on purpose,” she murmured.
“Yes.”
No denial and no dance—only the word, plain as steel. Her pulse rose as a result. “Why?”
Aemond’s thumb pressed lightly over the cloth, feeling for whether the bleeding had stopped. “Because they have already decided there is something between us. I prefer that they understand they did not discover it first.”
The room tightened.
Sweetling stared at him, heat climbing up her throat with such force she wished she could blame the hearth. “You are . . . impossible,” she breathed.
“You came.”
“You ordered me.”
“You enjoy saying that as if it absolves you of appearing.”
“My prince—”
“Aemond.”
The correction slipped across her skin, and the page’s shoulders stiffened in the corridor. Sweetling’s eyes flicked toward the door. Aemond saw, his mouth tightened, and for the first time since she entered, impatience showed plainly. Not with her, no, but with witnesses, the necessity for all this, and with the world’s insistence on existing where he had not invited it.
He released her hand and took one measured step back. “Finish the glove.”
Sweetling obeyed because obedience gave her something to do with the heat in her body. She sewed with careful hands, aware of his gaze, of the open door, of the guard, of the little smear of her blood on the cloth he had laid beside the ledger. The mend took longer than it should have because he had unsettled her and because some traitorous part of her liked being unsettled by him in ways that made danger feel braided with hunger.
When the glove was done, she set it down. “There.”
Aemond inspected the seam. “Adequate.”
“High praise.”
“Do not grow drunk on it.”
She glanced up before she could stop herself. His eye held hers, and there it was again: the faint edge of satisfaction when he drew something honest from her. Aemond’s amusement often wore armor and carried a dagger like a usual Targaryen.
He lifted the glove. “You will keep this with my riding leathers. Not belowstairs.”
“That is not my place to decide.”
“It is mine.”
“Your mother—”
“My mother has many gowns and many anxieties. Neither governs my gloves.”
Sweetling bit the inside of her cheek to keep her smile from showing; it did not help, because her mouth curved before she could stop it.
Aemond saw, and the room changed around that small thing. His gaze dropped to her mouth with an intensity that made the open door feel both a blessing and a torment. He did not move closer, and yet, her body stupidly remembered too much of him; distance had become merely another way he touched her.
The guard beyond the door cleared his throat.
Aemond’s eye lifted, cold at once.
“Close it,” he said.
Sweetling’s breath caught.
The guard looked in. “My prince?”
“The outer door. Leave the page by the stairs. You will remain outside.”
The guard hesitated only the fraction of time required for self-preservation to argue with curiosity, then obeyed. The page was sent away with a whispered command, and the door closed with a soft, final sound that seemed to pass through Sweetling’s ribs. Aemond turned back to her.
“No witness now,” she said, and hated the unevenness in her voice.
“No.”
“You arranged them first.”
“Yes.”
“Then dismissed them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He came toward her slowly, and because the table stood at her back, she did not retreat. She could have moved aside. He left room for it, and that almost made the heat worse.
“Because courtship requires witnesses,” he said. “Want does not.”
The word courtship struck her so strangely that she nearly laughed. She did not, because his face held no jest. Aemond Targaryen had said courtship as though speaking of siege engines or weather signs, as if it were a practice he had studied from inadequate books and decided to improve by force.
“Is that what this is?” she demanded.
His gaze moved over her, unhurried and indecent in the restraint of it. “Poorly done, I gather.”
“Terribly.”
His mouth twitched. “You wound me.”
“I doubt it.”
“No.” He reached out and touched the loose end of her braid where it lay over one shoulder. He did not pull. He only held the tail between two fingers, rubbing the dark strands once as if testing the texture of silk, which he refused to name silk. “You do.”
The words were low; they found some foolish place in her and pressed there.
Sweetling’s hands rested on the table edge behind her. “You should not say things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because I will think you mean them.”
Aemond’s face stilled.
There were silences that hid things and silences that revealed them. This one was the latter. He looked at her as if she had shifted an unseen piece on a board he had thought entirely under his own hand.
“I mean what I say,” he said.
“No.” Her voice came softer than she wished. “You say true things when they are useful. That is not the same.”
His fingers tightened slightly in her braid. “You have grown bold indeed, love.”
“You keep listening.”
Aemond bent his head, and he stopped close enough that his breath warmed her cheek, but he still did not kiss her. “You accuse me of causing my own trouble.”
“You began that long before me.”
That earned a sound from him, low and almost amused, though the hunger beneath it ruined any claim to levity. His mouth brushed the corner of hers, so light it could have been withheld had her body not answered with a shiver.
“Aemond,” she breathed.
“There.”
He sounded pleased and angry at once.
His hand left her braid and slid to the back of her neck. The first true kiss came hard enough to make her fingers grip the table. It was not the polished sort of kiss singers lied about, all moonlight and sighs. It had impatience in it, and claim, and the rough edge of a man who had spent four days turning want into strategy only to discover the campaign ended the instant her mouth opened beneath his. Sweetling kissed him back before she could pretend wisdom. He made a sound against her lips, low in his throat, and pressed closer until the table bit into the backs of her thighs.
The ledger crumpled under one of her hands.
He lifted her onto the table in a single movement.
Ink jumped in its pot. A belt buckle slid to the floor with a dull clatter. Sweetling gasped, and he caught the sound with his mouth, one hand at her waist, the other braced beside her hip among needles and thread and his half-mended things. His body settled between her knees as if it had always meant to belong there. The green wool of his tunic brushed against her gown, and she could feel the heat of him through layers, and the knowledge of it went through her sharply enough that she clutched at his shoulders.
“Doors,” she managed between kisses.
“Closed.”
“Guards.”
“Outside.”
“Your mother.”
“Not here.”
“Rylene—”
“Very much not here.”
That startled a laugh out of her, breathless and ruined. Aemond’s mouth stilled against hers. His eye opened, fixed on her with something that made the laugh die into a softer sound.
“I like that,” he said.
“What?”
“When you forget to be afraid of me.”
The words struck through the heat and found the tender place beneath it.
Sweetling looked at him, close enough to see the faint damp shine his mouth had left on hers reflected in his own expression. He did not look soft—he looked hungry and pleased in a way that should have frightened her more than it did. He looked like a dragon prince who had discovered laughter might be taken from her the same way gasps could, and meant to become expert in both.
“I do not forget,” she said.
“No?”
“I remember and stay anyway.”
His face changed.
That was the thing about Aemond. He could be all hard edge and cold poise, and then a few words, rightly placed, would strike him somewhere human and make him furious with whoever had seen it happen. For a heartbeat, he only stared, then his hand moved to the laces at her throat.
“Say that again,” he said.
She should not have. The danger had teeth enough already. But Sweetling had begun to understand that fear did not always mean retreat. Sometimes it meant standing still and watching the dragon lower its head to your hand, knowing the jaw could close whenever it wished.
“I remember,” she whispered, “—and stay anyway.”
Aemond kissed her throat. He put his mouth to the place where her pulse had betrayed her and bit just enough to make her nails dig into his shoulders. The pain was small, and the pleasure that followed was not. It slipped under her skin like wine, hot and spreading, until she had to press her lips together to keep from making a sound loud enough for the guard outside.
Aemond noticed and smiled against her skin.
“Quiet,” he murmured.
The word should not have done what it did to her. It did it anyway.
His fingers worked the top laces of her gown loose, not fully, not enough for ruin, but enough for his hand to slide beneath wool and linen and find the warm curve of her breast. Sweetling’s breath broke. His palm closed around her with possessive care, thumb dragging once over the nipple until it hardened under the thin shift. Her head tipped back despite herself. He watched her as he touched her, and the watching was almost worse, that precise attention, the sense that he was learning the map of her reactions as seriously as he learned histories and battle lines.
“You are very easy to read here,” he said.
Her face burned. “Then stop reading.”
“No.”
His mouth came down over the place his thumb had tormented, cloth between them, heat soaking through linen. Sweetling’s hand flew to his hair. The first pull of his mouth made her arch; the second made her bite the inside of her lip hard enough to taste blood. Aemond felt the change in her and looked up, displeasure cutting through want.
“Do not hurt yourself to spare a guard embarrassment.”
“You told me quiet.”
“I did not tell you to bleed.”
He sounded angry. It should not have warmed her . . . and it still did.
Before she could answer, he kissed her again, deeper, his tongue pushing past her lips, and she realized the taste of blood had reached him. Something in him roughened at it. His hand tightened at her waist. He kissed her until her mouth softened, until the sharpness faded, until she clung to him not for balance but because the alternative was falling inward.
Then he drew back just enough to speak.
“I have decided something.”
Sweetling blinked, dazed. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“Must you?”
“Yes.”
His seriousness might have made her laugh if he had not still had one hand beneath her gown. “What have you decided?”
“That you will have a new gown.”
The words were so far from what she expected that she stared at him.
Aemond’s thumb moved again, slow and deliberate, and her body betrayed her with a shiver before her tongue could find sense.
“I have gowns,” she said.
“You have sacks with sleeves.”
“They are servant gowns.”
“You are my servant.”
“And therefore?”
“Therefore, you will not look as though you belong to any hand that happens to send you carrying towels.”
Sweetling’s breathing had not steadied. “That sounds very much like being seen as special.”
“It is.”
“Rylene will skin me.”
“She may attempt to skin me first. It will give her exercise.”
“Aemond.”
He liked it when she said his name in warning; she could tell that for certain. His mouth shifted, and his thumb stilled only to let his palm fit more fully to her breast.
“They will speak anyway,” he said. “If you are plain, they will say I hide you. If you are well dressed, they will say I flaunt you. If you walk alone, they will call you reckless. If you walk witnessed, they will call you managed. I am finished allowing cowards with baskets and keys to decide the shape of my intentions.”
“Baskets and keys,” she repeated. “You have named nearly every woman in my life.”
“Then they should be flattered by my accuracy.”
Despite herself, she smiled. He watched it bloom and then, without warning, bent and kissed the smile from her mouth with such focused hunger that she forgot to be clever.
This was his courtship, then. Not flowers, not songs, not ribbons offered in gardens beneath the lying mercy of moonlight. Aemond Targaryen courted like he fought: by claiming ground, naming threats, arranging witnesses, dismissing them, and putting his mouth exactly where restraint had worn thinnest. He would give her a gown because the Keep had given her rumors. He would make her visible because others had tried to make her shameful. He would touch her in secret and mark her in public, and gods help her, some part of Sweetling understood the dreadful romance of it.
Not sweetness. It was never that small, often faint, feeling. No. It, instead, was a dragon laying treasure at the mouth of a cave and daring thieves to count it.
His hand left her breast and moved to her hair, loosening the braid fully now. Pins fell, one striking the table and rolling toward the edge. He caught it without looking and set it beside the ledger.
“You are impossible,” she whispered again.
“You repeat yourself when disordered.”
“You cause disorder.”
“Yes.”
He kissed the side of her neck, then beneath her jaw. “You may refuse the gown.”
The words came against her skin.
Sweetling’s eyes half closed. “May I?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be unbearable if I do?”
“Yes.”
There it was. Truth, armed and unashamed. She laughed once, softer this time, and the sound broke into a gasp when his teeth found the tender skin below her ear.
“Then what choice is that?”
“The only kind most people ever have,” he said. “A real one with consequences.”
She drew back enough to see his face.
He let her. That mattered, because he let her look at him while his hand rested at her waist and her gown sat loosened at the throat and the ledger of his garments lay crushed beneath her. He let her see the wanting and the pride, the impatience, the anger at his own patience, the strange fierce care he would never call care because the word had too much softness in it, and softness made him suspicious.
“What color?” she asked.
His eye darkened with satisfaction.
“Green,” he said.
“Your mother’s color.”
“Our color.”
Sweetling’s breath caught.
Aemond heard it. “Yes,” he said, answering the sound rather than any question. “Let them choke on that too.”
The brazenness of it should have frightened her out of her senses. It did frighten her, oddly enough, as sense did not follow. Instead, heat gathered low in her belly, a terrible molten answering. His color . . . household . . . his name for her. The ribbon and the gown, to add. Witnesses arranged like pieces on a board, and behind every move, the same unspoken thing: he would not have her hidden like a shame he had visited after dark.
“You are making me a banner,” she said.
“No.” His hand slid down her side to grip her hip. “Banners are for men too far away to see the blood.”
“And what am I?”
His gaze moved over her, and when he answered, his voice had gone very low.
“Close.”
Sweetling closed the distance herself.
Aemond took the kiss as if she had handed him a weapon. His restraint went ragged at the edge, and he dragged her nearer until her body pressed fully to his, the table beneath her, his hips between her thighs, the hard line of his want unmistakable through cloth. She made a sound against his mouth, and this time he did not tell her to be quiet. His hand slid under her skirt, not high enough, never high enough, but enough that his fingers found the bare skin above her stocking and held there, hot and possessive, while his mouth worked over hers with an intensity that made the room seem to shrink around them.
Outside the door, a guard shifted again.
Aemond stopped with visible effort. His forehead rested briefly against hers, his breath rough enough to be its own confession. Sweetling’s hands were in his hair now. She did not remember putting them there.
“You should go,” he said.
She almost struck him. He saw that too, and the corner of his mouth lifted, cruel with satisfaction.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
“No.”
His hand moved once, higher under her skirt, thumb pressing into the soft flesh of her thigh—not where she ached, but close enough to make the ache sharpen. He held her there and watched her face as the shock of it took her.
“No,” he repeated. “You hate leaving.”
That was worse because it was true.
Sweetling’s lips parted. He looked at them. For a moment, the entire world balanced on the breadth of his restraint, and she knew if she said his name again in the wrong tone, if she shifted her knee against him, if she took his hand and guided it higher, the guard outside and Alicent’s warnings and Mistress Rylene’s keys might all become distant, irrelevant things.
Aemond knew it too.
He withdrew his hand.
The loss was sharp enough to make her feel foolish.
He set her properly on the floor and drew her loosened laces together without tying them fully, just enough to preserve decency. Then he gathered her fallen pins, one by one, and placed them in her palm.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “Rylene will take you to the seamstress.”
Sweetling looked at the pins in her hand. “You have already arranged it.”
“Yes.”
“With whose coin?”
His expression suggested the question was insulting enough to be entertaining. “Mine.”
“And if I refuse?”
“I will keep the cloth until you stop being foolish.”
She shook her head, but her mouth had betrayed her again. She was smiling. He looked satisfied in the grim, restrained way of a man who had won a small battle and was already planning the next.
“What exactly is your intention?” she asked.
Aemond reached past her and took up the mended glove.
“To ensure,” he said, “—that when they speak of you, they know whose wrath they invite by speaking poorly.”
“That is not courtship.”
“No?”
“No. That is a threat.”
“At court, the distinction is ornamental.”
Sweetling stared at him, then laughed despite herself, low and incredulous. He watched it with such hunger that the laughter faded into warmth.
Aemond came close once more, not touching now. He had made a discipline of not touching her, and it was intolerable.
“My intention,” he said, voice dropping, “—is that you understand I am not ashamed of wanting you. I am not ashamed that you come to my chambers. I am not ashamed that I know the sounds you make when you try to be quiet, or that you look at my mouth as though you have remembered it all day.”
Her face flooded with heat.
He did not spare her.
“I am not ashamed,” he continued, “—that I mean to have more. I am only displeased that the court thinks itself entitled to make a cheap little song of it before I have chosen the tune.”
Sweetling’s hand tightened around the pins until the points bit her palm.
Aemond took her wrist, opened her fingers, and removed the pins before she could prick herself properly. His eye narrowed in annoyance. “You are determined to bleed in my rooms.”
“You are determined to make me.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?”
His gaze held hers.
The air between them changed at once. Sweetling knew it, felt it in the softening of her own mouth and the way his attention dropped there like a blade finding the exposed seam. She had meant defiance; her body had translated it into an invitation.
Aemond leaned in until his lips brushed her ear. “Or the next blood spilled in my chambers will be on my sheets, and my babe in your belly.”
Sweetling shivered as he then stepped back before she could decide whether to curse him or pull him down.
“Go,” he said.
She stood there, breathing too quickly, hair half-loosed, gown laced poorly, mouth warm from his, and thought very seriously of refusing.
Aemond’s expression sharpened as if he heard the thought.
“Sweetling, love.”
It was a warning, a command, and, Gods help her, an almost plea, if one were foolish enough to seek tenderness in a dragon’s throat. She gathered the ledger to her chest. “Aemond.”
His name came out steadier this time, though not steady enough. He heard everything wrong with it and everything right.
He opened the door himself.
The guard outside straightened at once, then looked very hard at nothing. Sweetling stepped into the corridor with what remained of her composure arranged about her like a cloak after battle. Her hair was not as neat as it had been. Her lips were certainly not. The ledger was wrinkled, the mended glove lay in her basket, and there would be talk before supper and worse by morning.
Aemond stood in the doorway behind her, making no effort to hide that he had been close enough to ruin her.
“Guard,” he said.
“My prince?”
“Escort her to Mistress Rylene.”
Sweetling turned her head sharply.
Aemond looked down at her, face calm, eye bright with satisfaction and threat.
“And inform Mistress Rylene,” he added, “—that my handmaid is to be fitted tomorrow in green.”
The guard’s jaw tightened with the effort not to react. “As you command, my prince.”
Sweetling stared at Aemond. He stared back as though daring her to challenge him in the hall, before witnesses, with her hair undone by his own hand. She should have hated him more. She curtsied instead, low enough for obedience, slow enough for insolence. When she rose, his eye had darkened in a way that made her stomach turn warm.
“My prince,” she said.
His mouth barely moved. “Sweetling.”
Then the guard led her away.
The corridor seemed longer than before and twice as full of listening. Two maids turned at the far stair, a page saw her and nearly dropped the candles he carried, and somewhere behind a half-open door, a woman inhaled softly, savoring scandal before it had cooled. Sweetling kept walking. At the turn, she looked back once.
Aemond remained in his doorway, green-clad and pale-haired, one hand resting against the frame as if he owned not only the chamber behind him but the hall before it, the tongues within it, the fear moving through it, and the girl being escorted from it with kiss-warmed lips and a prince’s command draped over her like cloth not yet sewn.
By the time Sweetling reached Mistress Rylene, the older woman had already heard enough footsteps, enough silence, enough change in the air to look up from her ledger with murder in her eyes.
“What,” Rylene said, “—has he done now?”
The guard cleared his throat. “Prince Aemond commands that his handmaid be fitted tomorrow in green.”
The room went very quiet at those words. Rylene’s gaze moved from the guard to Sweetling’s hair, then to her mouth, then to the wrinkled ledger clutched against her chest. Her eyes closed briefly, as if she were praying for patience or considering whether murder could be made to look like a household accident. When she opened them, Sweetling expected fury.
Instead, Rylene sighed.
“Of course he does,” she said. “The boy has discovered courtship and chosen siegecraft.”
Sweetling pressed her lips together.
It was a mistake. Rylene saw the smile before it vanished.
“Oh, do not you dare look pleased,” the older woman snapped. “Green. Seven save us. He may as well hang a bell from your neck and call the court to supper.”
“He said they would speak anyway.”
“He would. Men adore creating disasters and then congratulating themselves for naming the weather.”
The guard wisely took his leave.
Rylene shut the door behind him and rounded on Sweetling fully. “Did he touch you?”
Sweetling’s face betrayed her before she answered.
Rylene made a sound of profound disgust. “That means yes.”
“Not—” Sweetling stopped. There were no safe distinctions. Aemond’s mouth at her throat, his hand beneath her skirt, the heat of him pressed between her thighs. Not enough to be ruined, perhaps, but more than enough to be true. “Yes.”
“Did you wish it?”
Sweetling peeked down at the ledger. “Yes.”
Rylene muttered something that was either a prayer or a wish for Aemond to fall into a well.
“He left the door open first,” Sweetling said.
Rylene looked up sharply.
“He had a page and a guard witness my arrival, then he closed the door. When I left, he called the guard and sent me here with an escort. He wants it seen.”
“Of course he wants it seen. That is the siegecraft.” Rylene rubbed a hand over her face, suddenly looking older. “A hidden girl can be called shame. A visible girl must be explained. He intends to force the court to explain you on his terms.”
Sweetling had understood some of that; however, hearing Rylene say it made it heavier.
“And the gown?” she asked.
“The gown is a banner,” Rylene said. “Oldtown levies green when it calls their banners to war, child.”
Sweetling thought of saying that Aemond had rejected the same word. She did not. Rylene would not care for the nuance, and Sweetling was beginning to suspect the two of them were both right in different, dangerous ways.
“Will Her Grace forbid it?”
Rylene’s mouth tightened. “Her Grace will hate it. That is not the same.”
Sweetling sat slowly on the edge of a chest. The ledger lay in her lap, its wrinkled pages full of counts that no longer seemed to matter. “Should I refuse?”
Rylene gave her a long, hard look.
“Do you want to?”
Sweetling had no answer that would save anyone.
The older woman’s face softened by half a degree, which on Rylene looked like surrender. “Then do not lie to me. We have too much trouble already.”
Sweetling touched the edge of the ledger. “I want to know what it is like.”
“To wear green?”
“To be wanted without being hidden.”
Rylene went still.
There were truths that belonged to girls and truths that belonged to women who had once been girls. This one crossed the room and settled between them like a candle neither wished to blow out. At last, Rylene said, “It is intoxicating.”
Sweetling looked up.
“It is also expensive,” Rylene continued. “And I do not mean coin.”
“I know.”
“No. You have been told. That is not knowing.” Rylene came closer, and her severity returned because severity was the shape her care knew best. “But perhaps you will learn whether I permit it or not. So you will learn with your eyes open, your laces tied properly, and your hair pinned like you have sense.”
Despite herself, Sweetling laughed once.
Rylene pointed at her. “Do not laugh. I am furious.”
“Yes, mistress.”
“And tomorrow, when that seamstress measures you, you will stand still. If Jeyne speaks, you will become deaf. If any man comments, you will become stone. If Prince Aemond looks pleased with himself, you will not encourage him.”
“That may be difficult.”
“I did not ask whether it would be difficult. I asked that you grow a spine somewhere above your hips.”
Sweetling’s face burned. “Mistress.”
“Oh, now you blush.”
Rylene turned away, muttering darkly about dragons, princes, and the general uselessness of men raised too near swords. But when she took the ledger from Sweetling’s lap, her hand paused briefly over the wrinkled page.
“He is being reckless,” Rylene said.
“Yes.”
“He is being arrogant.”
“Yes.”
“He is being possessive in a manner that will make half the Keep dream of being you and the other half dream of ruining you.”
Sweetling’s throat tightened. “Yes.”
Rylene looked at her. “And still?”
Sweetling thought of Aemond in green, of his fingers in her hair, of his voice saying I am not ashamed with such hard, vicious clarity that shame itself seemed to step back from him. She thought of the gown not yet made, the court not yet whispering, the danger not yet fully bloomed. She thought of the door opening first, closing after, and being opened again by his own hand.
“Still,” she said.
Rylene held her gaze a long moment.
Then the older woman sighed, deep and weary. “Gods help me, I liked you better when you had no courage.”
By the Hour of the Bat, the ribbon had not come.
Sweetling told herself this was relief.
Warnings: Explicit sexual content (titty sucking & fingering; nothing regarding vaginal sex, we're building up to that).
WC: 9.3k (I think).
Notes: Smut. The bane of my existence. I'm not good at smut, particularly smut styled in an ASOIAF/medieval period. It's beyond difficult to make it work, because saying "—sheathe thy veiny sword between mine scalding loins" is just . . . not hot.
Posted first on my AO3.
His Handmaid's Tales | AO3 Version
dividers: #enchanthings
By the Hour of the Bat, the ribbon had not come.
Sweetling told herself this was relief.
She lay on her narrow pallet in the little chamber she shared with two other serving women, listening to rain skitter against the shutters and Bessa snore softly from the far bed. The air smelled of damp wool, lavender soap, and the onion broth someone had eaten too quickly before sleep. Her hands rested folded atop her blanket like a corpse’s.
The ribbon lay beneath her pillow.
She had hidden it there after supper. Then taken it out. Then hidden it in her sleeve. Then in the small pocket of her spare apron. Then beneath the pillow again, because apparently she had become the sort of girl who could not be trusted with cloth.
It had not come because he had not sent it.
Good, she thought.
Then: coward.
Then, horrified at herself: ungrateful fool.
He was doing what he had promised. He was letting her choose. He was not pressing. Not summoning. Not sending a seal that would force Alicent’s hand and hers together. Not making a spectacle of restraint so that she might praise him for it.
He was behaving honorably.
Sweetling turned onto her side and stared at the dark.
Honor, she decided, was extremely inconvenient.
Bessa snorted in her sleep and rolled over.
From the pallet nearest the door, an older maid muttered something about goats.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
Aemond’s mouth waited there.
She opened them.
“No,” she whispered into the dark.
Bessa snored.
Sweetling slid one hand beneath the pillow and closed her fingers around the ribbon.
It was cool at first. Then warmed quickly.
A choice.
That was the trouble. Choices were heavier than commands. A command could be obeyed while one kept some little injured place within blameless. A choice belonged to the chooser. It could not be set down later at a prince’s feet, or a queen’s, or a gods’. If she went to him, she would be going because she wished to. Not because of duty and not because of fear. But because she wanted the danger badly enough to name it.
Sweetling lay very still for a second more, then she sat up.
The room remained dark. Bessa breathed on. The older maid muttered again. Rain kept its counsel.
Sweetling slipped from bed and drew on her plain robe over her shift. Her feet found cold stone, and she stood for a moment with the ribbon clutched in one hand and her own heartbeat making war in her throat. Before, she told herself. Decide before you leave the room. She looked at the door.
“I choose,” she whispered.
No one heard.
That was just as well.
Sweetling tucked the ribbon into her sleeve and stepped into the corridor.
She did not go to Prince Aemond’s chambers.
Not yet.
First, she went to the linen room, because even foolishness required order. She lit one small lamp. She took up a basket and placed within it two clean cloths, a needle case, black thread, a pot of salve, and one of the prince’s shirts with a loose tie she had deliberately not finished after supper because some new, sly part of her had apparently learned strategy from dragons.
Then she stood in the warm little pool of lamplight and waited.
A corridor away, footsteps passed.
A guard coughed.
The castle breathed.
Sweetling took the ribbon from her sleeve and laid it atop the folded shirt.
Not sent by him. Sent by her. A warning—a question—a confession in cloth. She lifted the basket. By the time she reached the turn before his apartments, her courage had become a thin, bright thing, liable to snap. The guard outside Aemond’s door straightened when Sweetling stopped before him.
“The prince did not summon you,” he said.
“No.”
His eyes dropped to the basket. Then to her face.
She hated him for seeing the heat there.
“I bring mending,” she said.
“At this hour?”
“Yes.”
The guard’s mouth twitched.
Sweetling lifted her chin by a fraction. “You may announce me, or you may explain to Prince Aemond on the morrow why you turned away his handmaid with his linen unfinished.”
The guard stared. Then, very wisely, he knocked.
Aemond’s voice came from within. “What?”
The guard opened the door only enough to speak through. “My prince. Your handmaid.”
Silence.
Sweetling’s grip tightened on the basket.
Then Aemond said, “Send her in.”
The guard stepped aside, and Sweetling crossed the threshold.
Aemond stood by the desk, one hand braced on its edge, a letter open beneath his palm. His hair was loose. He wore no outer tunic, only a dark shirt unlaced at the throat and black breeches tucked into boots he had not bothered to remove. Candlelight made him sharper. Lonelier.
His eye went first to her face.
Then to the basket. Then to the ribbon lying on top. The whole room seemed to still. Sweetling shut the door behind her. Aemond did not move.
“You were not summoned,” he said.
“No.”
“You were told the risk.”
“Yes.”
His gaze pinned her. “And yet.”
Sweetling crossed the room on legs that felt much too mortal for what she asked of them. She set the basket on his desk, careful not to disturb the letter beneath his hand. Then she picked up the ribbon and held it out.
Aemond looked at it.
He did not take it.
“You send my own warning back to me?” he asked.
Her pulse beat everywhere. “No.”
“What, then?”
Sweetling swallowed.
Her mouth had gone dry. Of course it had. All her grand courage had carried her to the edge of speech and then abandoned her there like a faithless knight.
Aemond waited.
He could be patient when cruelty would have been easier. She wished he would stop proving that. It made everything worse.
“I choose the risk,” she said. “Again. I shall continue to choose the risk, again and again.”
Aemond’s face changed, enough that she noticed it. He came around the desk slowly, knuckles dragging across the wood. “Do not say that because you think I wish to hear it.”
“You do wish to hear it.”
His mouth tightened.
Sweetling held the ribbon between them. “But that is not why I said it.”
He stopped before her. “Why, then?”
Because I wanted to know whether you would let me come to you.
Because I wanted you to know I could.
Because all day I have been praying for gentleness and thinking of your hands.
Because I am frightened, and I came anyway.
She said, “Because I wanted to.”
Aemond closed his eye. Only for a moment. When he opened it, the hunger there had gone quiet. He took the ribbon from her hand and set it on the desk.
“Then we begin again,” he said, and then he kissed her as if he had been starving in silence.
There was no sweetness at first, no shy fumbling courtship such as girls whispered about over laundry tubs when the older women had gone. Sweetness came later in songs, polished clean by singers who had never stood in a prince’s chamber after midnight with a ribbon hidden in their sleeve and the door shut soft behind them. This was hunger made careful. This was a hand at her waist that could have bruised, and did not. This was his mouth taking hers with such deliberate restraint that Sweetling understood, with a sudden bright terror, that gentleness was not the opposite of danger. Sometimes it was danger held by the throat.
She had stepped into his hand, and he had taken that as an answer enough to begin, but not an answer enough to forget.
Even as he kissed her, even as his fingers tightened through the plain wool of her robe and drew her nearer until her basket pressed awkwardly against the edge of the desk, he kept a measured space between their bodies, no more than a breath, no less than a warning. Sweetling felt that space more keenly than she would have felt his weight. It invited. It asked. It made her choose again with every inch.
Her hands found his sleeves. Black cloth, warm beneath her palms. He wore no rings tonight, no jeweled ornament, nothing but the severe fastening at his cuffs and the leather belt at his waist. Somehow, that plainness made him worse. Less prince, more man. Less court, more body. Aemond Targaryen with his hair unbound and falling against her cheek, with his breath catching when she did not pull away, with his mouth hot and exacting and already learning the shape of hers.
He broke the kiss before she did.
Sweetling had not known she was clinging until his mouth was gone, and her fingers tightened as if to call it back.
Aemond looked down at her hands, then up at her face.
“You came here,” he said.
Her lips felt swollen. “Yes.”
“Not summoned.”
“No.”
“With that.” His gaze flicked to the ribbon lying on the desk where he had set it, dark against pale parchment. “And with mending.”
She remembered the basket then. The shirt inside. The needle case. The little coward’s excuse she had carried with her so she could pretend to herself that she had not crossed half the sleeping Keep because she wanted to be kissed again.
Her cheeks heated.
Aemond saw, of course. His eye sharpened with that cool, unbearable pleasure he took in every honest betrayal of her face.
“Were you going to mend my shirt?” he asked.
“If it needed mending.”
“It does not.”
“I thought it might.”
“You lie poorly after being kissed.”
Sweetling lowered her gaze, but he caught her chin before it could fall too far. His fingers were firm beneath it, not painful, merely refusing her escape.
“No,” he said. “You do not get to hide from the answer and enjoy the question.”
That made her breath catch, which was answer enough to darken his gaze.
Aemond bent, not to kiss her mouth this time, but the corner of it. Then beneath it. Then the place where her jaw softened toward her throat. The kisses were not hurried; he put them down one by one, as if each had a use and he meant to discover it. Sweetling stood very still under them, eyes half-lidded, fingers gathering black cloth at his sides. When his mouth found the pulse beneath her ear, her breath escaped her in a small sound she could not call back.
He stopped.
Not withdrew. Stopped.
His mouth remained against her skin. She felt the stillness of him before she understood it: the sudden lock of his shoulders, the halt of his breath, the hand at her waist gone fixed, as if he had taken himself by force and held.
Sweetling opened her eyes.
“Aemond?”
He lifted his head just enough to look at her. The candlelight made a blade of his cheek, a shadow of his scar, a dark pool of his remaining eye. His mouth was parted. Not much. Enough.
“Say it again,” he said.
She swallowed. “Aemond.”
The hand at her waist flexed once.
“Again.”
“Aemond.”
He kissed her then with something rougher in him, though still not careless. It was not the controlled lesson of the sept, nor the restrained answer at the threshold. It was hotter, deeper, his tongue pressing into her mouth as if patience had thinned and the taste of her had become an argument against every rule he had set himself. Sweetling answered without meaning to. Her mouth opened for him. Her hands slid from his sleeves to his shoulders, and when she rose onto her toes, chasing him, Aemond made a low sound against her lips.
That sound ruined more of her than any touch had.
It was not princely. Not composed. Not measured. A breath of want, caught too late.
Sweetling pressed closer.
This time, he let her.
The space between them disappeared. Her body met his through wool and linen and black cloth, softness against hard line, trembling against restraint. He was warm. Warmer than she expected. She had thought dragons might feel like fire, but he felt like a man who had trained until heat lived in his blood and then stood too long alone with it. His chest rose hard against hers. His belt brushed her stomach. One of his thighs came between the folds of her robe, not forcing, only there, and the pressure of it made her fingers dig into his shoulders.
Aemond broke the kiss with a quiet curse in High Valyrian.
She did not know the word, but she understood its shape.
“Sweetling,” he said, and it was nearly a warning.
“Yes?”
His mouth twitched, though there was no amusement in it now. “Do not answer me so sweetly when you know what you do.”
“I do not know.”
That was true enough to make him still.
Her face burned as she forced herself to meet his eye. “Not as much as you think.”
Aemond looked at her for a long moment, and the hunger in him changed again. It did not lessen. Gods, no. It deepened, became heavier, more dangerous because it had found tenderness and did not know whether to devour it or kneel before it.
“You came to my chamber at night,” he said.
“I did.”
“You brought my ribbon back.”
“Yes.”
“You told me you chose the risk.”
“Yes.”
“And still you would have me believe you innocent?”
“No,” she whispered. “Only not practiced.”
His hand rose to her face. The backs of his fingers touched her cheek, then turned, knuckles brushing down the side of her throat. The path was slow enough that she felt every place before and after it, each inch of skin waiting its turn. He reached the tie of her robe and stopped.
“Then we will practice honesty first.”
Her pulse beat hard against his hand. “Honesty?”
“If you want my mouth,” Aemond said, voice low, “you will say so. If you want my hands, you will say so. If you want me to stop, you will say that too. Not with frightened eyes. Not with silence. With words.”
Sweetling’s throat tightened. A fine thing, words. Useful things, in theory. She had spent a life learning which words to swallow, which to soften, which to bury entirely. The Red Keep had taught her that speech was dangerous, that a handmaid survived by becoming a shadow with hands. And now here was the prince, the most dangerous man in the room, demanding that she stand in the candlelight and name what she wanted of him.
It felt obscene before she had even spoken.
Aemond’s thumb brushed the knot of her robe. “Do you want my mouth again?”
Her lips parted. No sound came.
His gaze did not leave hers.
“Sweetling.”
“Yes,” she managed.
“Where?”
The word went through her like a spark dropped into dry rushes. Her hands tightened where they rested against him. She could have said on my mouth. That was safe. True. Already known. But his thumb was still at her throat, and his body was still against hers, and the want in her had become a creature with claws.
“My neck,” she whispered.
Aemond’s eye darkened.
He did not smile. That would have been easier to bear. Instead, he inclined his head as if she had answered correctly in some private lesson and bent to her throat.
The first kiss was soft enough to make her ache.
Then his lips parted.
The wet heat of his mouth closed over the place she had offered, and Sweetling’s head tipped back before she could stop it. He kissed her throat, then sucked lightly, enough to pull a gasp from her, enough to make her fingers slide up into his hair without asking. He allowed it. More than allowed it; she felt his breath change when her fingers tightened in the pale strands. Aemond’s hand came up behind her neck, supporting, guiding, holding her exactly where he wanted her while his mouth moved down to the hollow above her collarbone.
Her robe had loosened. She did not know whether by his hand or hers. The cord hung slack, the wool gaping enough that cold air touched the thin shift beneath. Aemond’s mouth paused at the edge of exposed skin.
“Hands?” he asked.
It took her a moment to understand.
Then the understanding nearly undid her.
He was asking.
Again.
Not because he did not want. She could feel the want in him, against her, hard and unmistakable. Not because he was gentle by nature, as his mother had said, he was not cruel by nature, both women speaking as if nature were a thing that mattered once power entered the room. He asked because he had chosen to make himself ask, and the effort of it showed in the set of his jaw.
Sweetling’s fingers trembled in his hair.
“Yes,” she said. “Your hands.”
“Where?”
Her shame rose up hot and useless.
Aemond lifted his head. “You came all this way to become shy?”
That should have angered her. It did, a little. Enough to give her spine back.
“My waist,” she said.
His hands went there at once, fitting over her through the robe, large and warm and sure. A simple touch. Almost proper, if one were blind and charitable. But there was nothing proper in the way he drew her closer, nothing courtly in the way his thumbs moved inward, finding the curve beneath her ribs, measuring the smallness of her against the span of his hands. Sweetling’s breath shook. Aemond watched it happen, then bent and kissed her again, as if her reaction had pleased him past patience.
The kiss turned hungry quickly.
This time, when he backed her toward the desk, she went with him. Parchment crinkled beneath the basket. A letter slid to the floor, and neither of them looked at it. Aemond’s hands remained at her waist until the edge of the desk met the backs of her thighs, then one hand shifted, palm pressing flat beside her hip as he leaned over her. The other slid up, not to her breast, not yet, but to the open edge of her robe.
“May I?”
The words were quiet. Roughened.
Sweetling’s heart knocked once, hard.
“Yes.”
Aemond drew the robe open.
Only that.
Only wool parting from wool, the plain garment falling wider over the desk behind her, leaving her in the thin shift she had worn beneath. Yet Sweetling felt more naked in that moment than if he had stripped her bare. Candlelight passed through the linen where it pulled over her breasts and waist. She saw his gaze move over her, not greedily, not at first, but with terrible concentration, as if he meant to remember the sight correctly.
Then greed came.
She saw it enter him.
His eye lifted to hers, almost accusing. “You wear this beneath your robe?”
“It is only a shift.”
“It is nearly nothing.”
“It is what I sleep in.”
Aemond’s gaze dropped again. “I know.”
The answer was too quick, too dark. Sweetling’s breath caught.
He had imagined it, then.
The thought of him alone in this chamber, severe and composed before others, imagining her in thin linen and undone braids, sent a shameful little heat through her belly. Aemond saw that too. His mouth parted faintly.
“What is that look?” he asked.
She shook her head.
His hand caught her jaw, not hard, but with enough command to halt the lie before it formed. “Words.”
“You thought of me,” she said, barely audible.
The pad of his thumb touched the corner of her mouth. “Often.”
No embroidery. No denial. Often.
Sweetling felt the room tilt.
“And how did my prince think of me?” she asked before she could lose her courage.
Aemond went utterly still.
For one heartbeat, she thought she had gone too far. Then his thumb moved over her lower lip, dragging it down a fraction, and his eye fixed on the small parting of her mouth with such heat that her knees would have weakened had the desk not been behind her.
“Do not ask questions you are not prepared to have answered.”
“I am trying to learn.”
His gaze snapped back to hers.
Ah, that pleased him.
It was there and gone, a spark beneath black water.
Aemond lowered his mouth to her ear. “I thought of you on your knees.”
Her breath stopped.
“Not like that,” he murmured, and now there was a trace of cruelty in his softness, not enough to wound, enough to make her feel the blade. “Not yet. I thought of you kneeling to mend a cuff. Kneeling to gather fallen parchment. Kneeling because servants kneel when told, and every fool in this castle thinks obedience is the same as surrender.”
His hand slid from her jaw to her throat, thumb resting just beneath her chin.
“I thought of how often you lower your eyes when you wish to look. How carefully you hold your tongue when you wish to answer. How still you make yourself when fear passes through you, as if stillness makes you safe.” His mouth brushed her ear. “And then I thought of making you less still.”
Sweetling’s hand closed around his sleeve.
Aemond kissed the side of her neck. “There. That was the thought.”
“You are cruel,” she whispered.
His mouth paused.
“Sometimes.”
The honesty of it chilled and warmed her both.
“Are you cruel now?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
His answer came against her skin.
“Hungry.”
His hand moved at last to her breast.
Over the shift first, palm settling with firm, almost reverent pressure. Sweetling gasped. Her body arched before she could command it otherwise, and Aemond caught the movement with his mouth at her throat, sucking once, harder than before. The ache that answered between her thighs shocked her into silence. She had known wanting in little ways, in flushed cheeks and restless nights, in the memory of kisses that made her press her knees together beneath blankets.
This was different. This was want with teeth.
Aemond’s thumb found the shape of her nipple through the linen.
Sweetling made a sound she had never heard from herself.
His hand stilled.
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Fear?”
She swallowed. “Some.”
His eye lifted. “Enough to stop?”
“No.”
The word came fast. Too fast. She blushed, and his mouth curved against her skin.
“And want?” he asked.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
His thumb moved again, slow over the stiffened peak.
“Yes.”
Aemond kissed her with a groan caught low in his throat. The sound was almost angry. His hand closed more fully over her breast, kneading through the linen, testing, learning. He was careful at first, maddeningly so, until she arched into his palm and his control slipped enough for his fingers to tighten. The sharper pressure sent heat racing through her. She clutched at him and heard herself whisper his name.
That did something to him.
His mouth dragged from hers to her jaw, then down. He bent, and for one dizzying moment, Sweetling did not understand what he meant to do until his lips closed over her breast through the shift.
She cried out softly.
The linen dampened under his mouth. Heat, pressure, the scrape of teeth barely there. Aemond sucked her through the thin fabric, one hand braced at her back to keep her from slipping off the desk, the other holding her breast to his mouth. Sweetling’s fingers twisted in his hair. Her head fell back. The chamber blurred to candlelight and rain and the obscene wet warmth of his mouth pulling at her like he meant to draw the soul out through her skin.
Aemond lifted his head only far enough to look at her.
Her hand remained tangled in his hair, fingers gone tense where they had caught and held him to her. The linen clung wetly to the shape of her, transparent where his mouth had worked it, and beneath the damp cloth her nipple stood hard and dark against the fabric. Sweetling’s eyes were unfocused, her lips parted, her fingers still twisted deep in his hair as though she had forgotten she could let go.
He looked at her hand first.
Then at her mouth.
He had had his mouth between her legs the night before.
“Sweetling,” he said, and her name came low, roughened against the edge of his restraint.
She swallowed. “Aemond.”
He had already made her cry out into the storm. He had already learned how she broke and how she trembled after, how quickly shame rose behind pleasure and how fiercely she tried to gather herself back into modesty once it was done. This was not the first opening of some forbidden gate. That gate had already yielded to him, and gods help them both, she had walked through it willingly. Tonight felt different because of that. Less discovery, more return.
Less accident . . . more answer.
“You pull harder when you forget to be ashamed,” he said.
Sweetling’s blush came at once, warm and furious, spreading from throat to cheek. “I did not mean—”
He bent again, but not to her breast this time. His mouth found the other through the thin linen, slow and possessive, and Sweetling’s head tipped back with a little helpless sound she tried too late to bite down.
Aemond’s hand slid behind her, broad palm braced against the small of her back to hold her where he wanted her. He did not rush—that, somehow, was worse. He sucked her through the fabric with lingering attention, dragged his tongue over the stiffened peak until her nails scraped lightly at his scalp, then caught her gently with his teeth and made her gasp his name again.
“There,” he murmured against her. “That one.”
“What?”
“The sound.” His mouth moved to the damp edge of her shift, pushing it aside with the bridge of his nose rather than his hands, as though he meant to keep the act slow enough for her to stop him if she wished. “You make it when you forget to be ashamed.”
Her face burned hot. “I do not.”
Aemond lifted his head.
The look he gave her was flatly disbelieving, and somehow that almost made her laugh. Almost. It died before it could become sound, smothered by the heat in his gaze.
“You are a poor liar after I’ve had my mouth on you,” he said.
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep proving it.”
His hand slid from her waist to her thigh, gathering the thin shift upward by inches. He did not duck his head between her legs as he had the night before. He did not lower himself to his knees and feast until she came apart over his tongue, though the memory of it moved between them like a third presence in the room. She felt it in the way his eye darkened when her knees parted around him, in the way his mouth, still wet from her breast, curved with private knowledge.
“Do you expect my mouth to be there again?” he asked.
The wickedness of it stole the breath from her.
Sweetling’s gaze flew to his. “Aemond.”
“Is that yes or rebuke?”
“It is—” She swallowed, dignity in ruins. “It is your name.”
His expression sharpened, pleased despite himself. “So it is.”
His thumb traced the inside of her knee. Not higher. Not yet. The restraint of it was cruel because it was deliberate, because she could see how easily he might have moved differently and chose not to. He watched the place where his hand rested against her bare skin, then looked back at her face.
“I remember how you tasted,” he said quietly.
Sweetling closed her eyes.
“No,” he said.
They opened at once.
“There. That is better.” His thumb slid higher, slow as sin. “You do not get to hide from what you already gave me.”
“I gave?” she whispered.
His eye lifted. “Did you not?”
The question struck softer than a command and deeper than a kiss. The night before, he had asked. Again and again, in that severe way of his, as if words could make a wall strong enough to keep both of them from ruin. He had made her say what she wanted, made her answer fear and want separately, made her understand that surrender and permission were not the same thing.
Sweetling’s throat tightened. “I did.”
Aemond’s hand stilled on her thigh.
His eye searched her face. He brought her hand back to his jaw and held it there, as if the touch were something he had decided to endure and wanted more of in the same breath.
So she touched him.
Only that.
Only her fingers against his cheek, the slight rasp of new-shaved skin beneath her fingertips, the hard set of his mouth easing by a fraction he would have denied if she named it. He looked almost angry with the tenderness of it. Sweetling understood. Tenderness was not safe for either of them. It stripped more cleanly than desire. Desire could be called weakness, appetite, sin; tenderness asked what a person might become if they were held and not used.
Aemond turned his face enough to press his mouth to her palm.
Her heart clenched.
Then his teeth closed lightly against the tender heel of her hand. The softness vanished into heat. For a breath, the hunger in him changed shape. It did not lessen. It became more dangerous, more focused, as though the truth had given him something to hold and something to break himself against.
He kissed her then, not gently, not at first. His mouth took hers with the heat he had left on her breast, and Sweetling tasted rain, candle smoke, and the faint salt of his skin. She opened for him because she wanted to, because she had learned the shape of his kiss and wanted it deeper. His tongue slid against hers; his hand tightened at her thigh; her body, traitorous and honest, rolled toward him.
Aemond groaned.
It was low. Almost swallowed. But she heard it, and hearing it made her bold.
Her hands left his hair and lowered her hand to the front of his tunic, fingers brushing the dark cloth where the fastenings sat. “Last night, you stopped.”
“Yes.”
“You did not let me touch you long.”
Aemond’s jaw flexed.
“You said it would be another night.”
“I did.”
“And is this another night?”
The room seemed to still.
Rain whispered at the shutters. The candlelight bent in the draft. Beneath her fingers, his breath went shallow and controlled, each rise of his chest too measured to be natural. Sweetling’s own courage faltered beneath the weight of his stare, but she did not take the question back. It had cost too much to ask.
Aemond leaned closer, one hand braced beside her hip on the desk. “Do you know what you are asking?”
“No,” she said, because he had taught her better than lying. “Not wholly.”
His eye darkened with something more dangerous than desire.
“Then ask what you mean,” he said.
Sweetling swallowed.
Her hand slid lower, not to his belt yet, only to the place where his tunic ended, and the leather began. She could feel the heat of him even through the cloth. Feel how still he had made himself. The control in him was frightening. The wanting beneath it more so.
“I want to touch you,” she said.
Aemond’s mouth parted slightly.
For one breath, nothing happened. Then he closed his eye, just once, as if gathering the words inside him before they could come out as a command rather than an answer.
“When you touched me last night,” he said, “you did it because I guided you.”
“Yes.”
“If you touch me tonight, it will be because you choose to.”
“I know.”
“No.” His eye opened. “You know the words. That is not the same.”
Sweetling’s temper sparked, small and bright beneath the heat in her face. “Then teach me the difference, if you are so determined to lecture me half-naked on your desk.”
Silence.
Then Aemond laughed.
It was quiet, low, gone almost as soon as it came, but it was real. The sound caught Sweetling so wholly off guard that her own mouth softened into an answering smile before she could stop it. Aemond looked at that smile as if it were the most inconvenient thing in Westeros.
“You will be the death of someone,” he said.
“Hopefully not me.”
His amusement faded, but not into coldness. “No. Not you.”
The promise was too grim to be sweet. Still, it settled warm somewhere beneath her ribs.
He took her hand, the same hand that had hovered uncertainly at his belt, and placed it flat over the leather buckle. Sweetling stared at her fingers there.
Aemond did not help this time.
The difference was immediate. Last night, he had guided her through the first shock of it, taken her wrist, and shown her the shape, movement, and pressure that pleased him. Tonight, he made her reach for knowledge herself. It was cruel in the way honesty could be cruel. It was also exactly what she had asked for.
Her fingers worked the buckle loose. Slowly. Too slowly, perhaps, because Aemond’s breath grew rougher above her. The leather came free, then the ties beneath. Her hands trembled once at the threshold of it, and Aemond’s gaze snapped to her face.
“Stop there if you wish.”
The words made her look up.
He meant it. Again, curse him; he meant it. His pride hated the offer. His body hated it more . . . yet he gave it.
Sweetling shook her head.
His eye narrowed.
She remembered. “I do not wish to stop.”
“Good.”
The word sounded almost pained.
She drew him free with less surprise than last night but no less awe. The sight of his cock still stole the sense from her for a moment—the hard, flushed length of him, heavy in her palm, hot against her skin. He was pale in thickness and a bit darker at the tip, a soft pink that nearly matched her lips. Aemond watched her face so intently she felt the flush spread from her cheeks down her throat to where her shift hung loose and damp from his mouth.
“You are warm,” she said foolishly.
His mouth twitched. “Was I meant to be stone?”
“No,” she whispered. “Only you seem it sometimes.”
“That is because stone is rarely asked what it wants.”
The words came too quietly. Too bare.
Sweetling looked up.
Aemond seemed to regret them at once. His face hardened, the prince returning like armor drawn over skin, but she had heard the man beneath. She had felt his heart. She leaned forward and kissed the place beneath her palm.
Aemond’s breath caught.
Not much.
Enough.
His hand moved to the back of her neck with dangerous speed, not hurting her, but holding her there as if the kiss had struck somewhere he did not know how to defend. Sweetling pressed another to his chest, then another, her mouth warm against him through the open tunic. She did not know what she was doing. Not truly. But she knew what he had done to her: the deliberate learning of her body, the way he had followed every breath and tremor until she could no longer pretend she was not being known. Perhaps this was the same. Perhaps it could be.
Aemond’s fingers tightened in her hair.
“Sweetling.”
She looked up at him from beneath her lashes, mouth still close to his skin.
The sight seemed to undo something in him.
He bent and kissed her, hard enough that she had to brace one hand behind herself on the desk. His other hand returned to her breast, but no longer content with damp linen. He tugged at the neckline of her shift until the fabric slipped low, baring her properly to candlelight.
Sweetling sucked in a breath and almost covered herself.
Aemond caught both her wrists in one hand.
“No.”
The word was firm, but not angry. A command, yes, but one that waited on her face. His gaze moved down to her bare breasts, and this time there was nothing between his mouth and her. Nothing to soften the sight of his hunger. Nothing to save her from the way he looked at her, as if the court, the crown, the gods, the rain, all of it had become less real than the small, trembling lift of her chest.
“You are lovely,” he said.
It sounded almost resentful.
Sweetling’s eyes stung. “You say it as though it displeases you.”
“It does.”
That surprised a laugh out of her, breathless and shy. “Why?”
“Because I have enough trouble.”
Then his mouth closed over her bare breast.
The laugh broke apart into a moan.
Aemond’s hand released her wrists so he could grip her waist, holding her steady as his tongue circled the stiffened peak. The first touch was wet and hot and direct enough that her spine arched. He sucked slowly, then harder, drawing at her until pleasure pulled tight from her breast to the deep ache between her thighs. His teeth scraped with just enough edge to make her gasp his name, and when she did, he answered with a low sound against her skin that she felt more than heard.
He did not rush.
That was the cruelty of him—the devotion of him. He gave the same attention to her breasts that he had given to the rest of her the previous night, as if no part of her body deserved to be passed over simply because he had already learned another. He tasted one nipple until it was swollen and wet from his mouth, then crossed to the other with maddening patience, his hand kneading what his lips had left behind. Sweetling’s shift sat bunched beneath her breasts, her robe open around her, her thighs parted around the hard line of his body. She had never felt so exposed. She had never felt so held.
Her hands went to his shoulders.
This time, she did not ask.
Aemond’s mouth curved against her breast.
“Good,” he murmured.
The praise—if praise it was—settled low and hot inside her. She hated how badly she liked it; hated worse that he knew.
His hand slid beneath her shift again, over her hip, across the soft lower curve of her belly. Sweetling’s breath quickened before he reached where she wanted him. Aemond paused.
“Already?” he asked.
“You are being cruel.”
“I have barely touched you.”
“You know what you are doing.”
That pleased him.
Gods help her, it pleased him.
His fingers slipped beneath the edge of her smallclothes and found her wet.
They both went still.
Aemond shut his eye for one brief moment, as if some disciplined part of him needed darkness to survive the discovery. Sweetling watched his face while his fingers rested against her, not moving yet, only feeling the slick heat she could not hide. The night before, she might have died of shame beneath such attention. Tonight, shame still burned, but it no longer stood alone.
She wanted him to know.
That was the terrible part.
Aemond opened his eye. “You are not frightened of this now.”
“I am frightened.”
“Not of my hand.”
Her lips parted.
No answer came.
He was right.
The fear lived elsewhere now: in the door; in the whispers; in the queen’s quiet gaze, Rylene’s warnings, and Jeyne’s mean little smile.
Not here. Not exactly. Not with his hand between her thighs and his mouth still warm from her breast.
“No,” she admitted.
His expression shifted. Hunger, satisfaction, and something like wonder made darker by pride.
“No,” he repeated.
His fingers moved.
Sweetling bowed forward with a broken breath, forehead nearly touching his shoulder.
He stroked her slowly at first, parting her with the kind of care that made the intimacy worse. He knew her now. He knew what made her hips lift, knew where to press, knew that circling too softly made her impatient and circling too firmly made her clutch at him with both hands. He knew because he had learned it from her body the night before, and now he used that knowledge without the clumsiness of first discovery.
She made room for him.
That, too, he noticed.
His mouth brushed her temple. “There she is.”
The words were soft, almost fond, and filthy for all that.
Sweetling turned her face into his shoulder. “Do not say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“As though you have been looking for her.”
His fingers slowed.
For a moment, only rain spoke.
Then Aemond said, “I have.”
The answer entered her more deeply than his touch.
She lifted her head. His face was close, too close for either of them to pretend. His eye moved over her features as if searching for the line between what she could bear and what he wanted to take. His fingers were still under her smallclothes, slick against her, but his attention had gone to her mouth.
“I thought of you today,” he said.
Sweetling’s breath caught. “When?”
His mouth curved faintly. “Often.”
“Doing what?”
The question came before shame could stop it.
Aemond’s eye darkened.
“You ask dangerous questions after midnight.”
“You answer them better after midnight.”
That earned her a look sharp enough to cut silk.
Then he kissed her, and while he kissed her, his fingers slid lower, one pressing slowly inside. Sweetling gasped into his mouth. Not surprise, not the way she had the night before. Recognition. Her body clenched around him as if welcoming a known trespass. Aemond felt it and groaned softly, his composure slipping again, just enough for her to feel powerful and endangered all at once.
He moved his finger inside her with slow, deep strokes, his thumb working above in the rhythm he had discovered before. Sweetling’s hands found his open tunic, pushing it wider, needing skin beneath her palms. He let her. More than let her. He shifted closer, giving her access to the hard plane of his chest, the lean cut of muscle beneath pale skin, the heat of him. She touched him clumsily, greedily, while his hand ruined her. His breath thickened when her nails dragged lightly over his ribs.
“You like that,” she whispered.
Aemond’s eye flashed to hers.
The answering pride in her own voice seemed to surprise them both.
His fingers withdrew almost fully, then pressed back in with a second alongside the first.
Sweetling’s pride vanished into a moan.
Aemond’s mouth found her breast again, sucking hard as his fingers worked inside her, and the room turned molten. Desk beneath her. Maps crushed under her palms. Rain at the windows. His hair against her skin. His hand was between her thighs. His mouth at her breast. Her own hands learning the shape of him with growing desperation. She was not new to pleasure now, but knowing did not make it smaller. Knowing made it worse because she could feel where he was leading her, and she still went willingly.
Her hips began to move with his hand.
Aemond lifted his head.
He watched.
The look on his face made her burn hotter than the touch itself. Not because he seemed amused. He did not. Not because he seemed gentle. He did not. He looked fiercely attentive, almost reverent in the most dangerous way, as if her pleasure were a thing he had summoned and now meant to master without breaking.
“Do not stop,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened. “I had not planned to.”
A laugh almost escaped her, but his thumb pressed more firmly and it became a whimper instead.
Aemond kissed her mouth, her jaw, the side of her throat. “That is it. Let me feel it.”
The words were too much. His voice was too close. Sweetling clutched at him, body tightening around his fingers, pleasure coiling low and bright. She knew the edge now, and knew the terrible swelling rush before it. Her thighs shook around his hand.
“Aemond.”
“I know.”
He did not take her maidenhead. He did not push toward what he had promised would not be tonight. Instead, he made the denial into another kind of torment. He touched her where she was already swollen and slick, pressed and circled and stroked until she shook against him, all while he thrust into her hand with harsh, controlled movements that grew less controlled each time she moaned. His mouth returned to her breasts, dragging the shift lower now, baring one to the candlelight so he could close his lips over her skin without linen between them.
Sweetling cried out.
Aemond’s free hand rose at once to cover her mouth, but his lips did not leave her breast. The double claim of it—his hand silencing her, his mouth drawing pleasure from her, his body straining into her touch—sent her nearly senseless. She tasted salt and skin against his palm. Her eyes stung, not with pain, not with sorrow, but with the intensity of being held in so many ways at once.
“Quiet,” he murmured against her breast.
She nodded, though both of them knew obedience would soon fail her.
His fingers moved faster.
Pleasure climbed in her again, familiar now and no less frightening for it. She knew the crest. Knew the bright, impossible edge of it. Last night he had pulled her over it with his mouth. Tonight he brought her there with one hand while the rest of him trembled for what he had not yet allowed himself to claim.
Sweetling’s hand moved desperately around him. She wanted to give him that same loss. Wanted to see his control break and know she had done it. Wanted, with a sudden fierceness that startled her, to be the reason Aemond Targaryen forgot himself.
His breath caught against her skin.
“Sweetling.”
The warning in her name made her pulse leap.
She tightened her grip as he had shown her last night, twisting on the upward stroke, thumb brushing the place that made his hips jerk harder into her hand.
Aemond groaned.
It was not loud. The storm outside might have swallowed it. But she felt it in his chest, in his mouth at her breast, in the sudden rough pressure of his hand between her thighs. That sound undid her. Pleasure broke hard and sudden, wringing a muffled cry as her body tightened beneath his fingers. Aemond kissed the sound from her mouth, then dragged his lips back down to the breast he had dampened earlier, taking it again through the linen while his hand worked between her thighs. Sweetling nearly lost her grip on him.
His teeth grazed her, his tongue soothed the same place, and pleasure folded in on itself—his mouth at her breast, his fingers below, his hard length in her hand, all of it too much to keep separate.
Her release took him with it.
His head bowed against her shoulder. His hips drove once, twice into her hand, control shattering in tight, restrained pulses as he spilled over her fingers with a sound bitten nearly in half by pride. Sweetling held him through it, dazed and shaking, her cheek pressed to his hair, her own pleasure still moving through her in faint aftershocks.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke.
Rain tapped at the window.
The candle guttered.
Parchment lay crushed beneath them, maps of kingdoms ruined by the weight of a handmaid’s hip and a prince’s poor restraint.
Aemond removed his hand from her mouth slowly.
Sweetling drew a breath that trembled on the way in.
He did not lift his head at once. That was the strangest part. He remained bowed against her, mouth near the bare curve of her breast, hair falling over her loosened robe, breathing as if the world required effort. Sweetling’s clean hand rose, hesitated, then settled on the back of his head.
He went still.
She stroked his hair once.
“Aemond?”
“Do not,” he said.
Her hand froze. “Do not what?”
His voice came low against her skin. “Make it gentle yet.”
The words hurt in a place she could not name.
Not because he rejected gentleness. Because he recognized it and feared what shape it might demand of him.
Sweetling resumed stroking his hair anyway.
Aemond said nothing.
After a moment, his hand closed around her wrist—not pulling her away, only holding her there.
Afterward, Aemond cleaned her fingers himself.
Sweetling protested at once, because there were limits to what a girl could survive with her dignity intact, and apparently having a prince kneel between her knees to tend to the evidence of his pleasure was very near one of them.
“I can do it,” she said, mortified.
“I know.”
He did not give her the cloth.
She sat on the edge of his desk with her shift pulled properly into place and her robe tied loosely enough to be a lie. Her hair was half fallen from its braid. Her mouth felt swollen again, though less from being taken by surprise than from being kissed too thoroughly for too long. Her knees still trembled whenever she shifted. Aemond stood before her with a damp cloth in hand, his own clothing restored with irritating efficiency, though his hair and breathing had betrayed him enough that she did not feel entirely conquered.
He took her hand.
The warm cloth passed over her palm, between her fingers, along each knuckle with the same grim care he gave wounds and weapons. He did not make a spectacle of it. That made it more intimate, not less. Sweetling watched his face as he worked. His expression was severe, almost distant, but the set of his mouth had softened in ways he likely did not know. Or knew and hated.
“You are thinking,” he said.
“I am often thinking.”
“Not always wisely.”
She almost smiled. “No.”
His gaze lifted to hers. “What?”
The question was too direct. She looked at their hands instead.
“Last night,” she said carefully, “afterward, I thought I would feel ruined.”
Aemond’s hand stilled around hers.
Sweetling felt the room tighten.
“And did you?” he asked.
“I felt frightened. And ashamed. And pleased.” She swallowed. “The pleased part frightened me most.”
His thumb moved once over her cleaned palm. “And now?”
She should have lied. Not because he would fail to catch it, but because honesty had begun to feel like undressing more thoroughly than desire had managed.
“Now I feel foolish,” she said.
Aemond’s face hardened.
Sweetling shook her head before he could speak. “Not because of you. Because I thought knowing what your mouth could do would make me less helpless to it.”
The corner of his mouth shifted.
Ah. There was that flicker of wickedness. He tried to hide it and failed poorly enough that, despite herself, Sweetling laughed under her breath.
Aemond’s eye narrowed. “You find your helplessness amusing?”
“I find your pride amusing.”
“My pride?”
“You look pleased enough to start a war over it.”
“I have started no wars over your thighs.”
“Yet.”
The word escaped before she understood how bold it was.
Aemond went still.
Sweetling’s laughter vanished.
For half a heartbeat, she thought she had ruined the ease between them. Then his gaze dropped to her mouth, slow and dark, and she realized the danger was not anger.
“No,” he said softly. “Not yet.”
The heat that went through her was immediate and devastating.
He finished cleaning her hand, then set the cloth aside with more force than necessary. That, too, pleased her. Aemond Targaryen, undone by a handmaid saying one foolish word. She would have liked to keep that knowledge folded somewhere secret, pressed between the pages of herself like a stolen flower.
His hand came to her chin, tipping her face up.
“You grow bold after midnight,” he said.
“You told me you disliked half-courage.”
“I did.”
“I am trying to be obedient.”
His mouth curved.
“Liar.”
This time, the word was almost fond.
Sweetling did not know what to do with almost fond. Fondness seemed far more dangerous than lust. Lust had at least been named in warnings. Fondness came quietly, wearing no heraldry, and set itself beside a girl before she realized there was room for it.
Aemond seemed to sense the same danger, for he stepped back and turned toward the basin.
“You will return by the west stair,” he said. “Not the lower passage.”
Sweetling gathered the edges of her robe, pulling herself back into order piece by piece. “You said that last night.”
“And you remembered?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She slid from the desk, and her knees nearly betrayed her. Aemond caught her elbow at once.
They both looked down at his hand.
It should not have mattered after everything else. Yet this touch was different. Public enough in shape to be innocent, private enough in timing to undo her.
“I can walk,” she said.
“I did not ask whether you could.”
“No. You merely grabbed me.”
“I kept you from falling.”
“I was not falling.”
“You were considering it.”
That startled another laugh from her, softer this time. He watched it in the way he watched things he meant to understand and disliked needing. His hand remained at her elbow.
“Aemond,” she said.
The name altered the room again.
He released her slowly.
Sweetling reached for the basket she had brought, only to find that it had been knocked half beneath the desk. The shirt inside remained unmended. The needle case had spilled open, black thread looping over the floor like some little shadow-snake. She stared at it.
Aemond followed her gaze.
“The mending,” she said.
His mouth twitched. “Yes. That grave purpose for which you came.”
“I did come with mending.”
“You came with an excuse.”
She bent quickly to gather the thread, because if she looked at him her face would show too much. “It was still mending.”
“You mended nothing.”
“That is not true.” She tucked the needle case into the basket with unnecessary care. “Your patience was in tatters.”
Aemond stared at her.
Then, impossibly, he laughed again. This one lasted even less than the first, but it warmed her all the same. It made him look almost startled at himself afterward, as if she had somehow stolen the sound from him rather than earned it.
Sweetling straightened with the basket in hand, her smile small and traitorous.
“Do not look so pleased,” he said.
“I am not.”
“You are.”
He sent her away with one final kiss.
The corridor beyond was cold enough to make her shiver. She walked as he had told her, west stair, Maegor’s tapestry, eyes lowered but not blind. No one stopped her. No one saw enough to matter. Beneath her sleeve, the ribbon brushed her pulse with every step.
By the time she reached her narrow bed, the castle had gone quiet in the strange way living beasts went quiet before dawn. She undressed without lighting a candle and slid beneath her blanket with shaking legs and a mouth still warm from his.
Bessa snored softly from the far pallet. The older maid near the door muttered in sleep. Sweetling lay on her back and stared into the dark. She had crossed into his chamber as a handmaid with a basket; she had returned as something else. Not beloved, maybe, and not safe. Not ruined, though the court would name her so if it knew.
Not wife, not whore, not lady, not lamb.
His, if she gave it. Hers, if she chose it.
Between those two truths, sleep came for her at last, dark and deep and full of dragons.
