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˗ˏˋ A Golden Child ˎˊ˗ Jacaerys Velaryon

jacaerys velaryon x targtower fem!reader [part six of a golden cage series. it is highly recommended you read the series before this part. ] words: 18.7k. synopsis: “you'll scarcely have time to become a swordswoman before you're a wife.”

notes: we're going to pretend it hasn't been almost a year since the last update. so here's the longest one yet to make up for it. this was a heavy labor to write, and its a bit plot-heavy in the beginning, but i hope you enjoy it nonetheless. also i use a high valyrian translator, so it could be wrong but idc. & soz there are so many warnings on this, but pls read them before you continue. you are reading at your own risk w this story!!!

warnings: brief mentions of r having targaryen hair color & purple eyes. canon-typical violence/blood/injury. angst. discussion of death. mentions of pregnancy/childbirth & stillbirth. emotional complexities & unreliable narrator. daemon is a dick!. themes of blood supremacy (targaryens lmao). premonition & foreshadowing. sex as coping mechanism. alluded spoilers for f&b (but only if you already know where to look). survivor’s guilt & angst. religious trauma. depictions of eating/fear of poisoned food. foreshadowing. heavy SMUT; dry-humping. heavy petting. discussions of sex/virginity. handjob. fingering. light choking (?). high valyrian as foreplay. pretty blatant blasphemy. r & jace are possessive & horny. emotional whiplash. a lot of fluff actually !

previous. series masterlist.

THE TASTE OF JACAERYS LINGERS UPON YOUR LIPS, EVEN AS BELLS OF WAR RING OVERHEAD.

Peals of them, sullen and solemn as they resonate – an aching cavern, struck with sonorous calls. Beckoning even from within the throat of the Dragonmont, they strike black-slated bones and vibrate deep within settled ribs. Gulls shed from the cliffs outside the great mouth in startled hundreds, fluttering felled leaves from some low-rooted and time-thickened tree, and you watch their wings fall and catch the wind again, over and over, round and round, as your she-dragon shifts restless beneath you.

Plumes of smoke-choked breath come, drifting into the abyssal Mont overhead your braid-laced hair. A leathered palm pressed to the most fevered patch of her scales, warmth seeps slow through your glove and up into your chest; and just a breath deeper in the cavern’s throat, Vermax answers her half-formed call with a rumble of his own.

A high-carrying whistled gust carries your eyes skyward.

The wind has changed whilst you and Jace were hidden from the world.

Seeking you even here, nestled in the cave’s dark, it snakes its fingers through the fissures in the Mont’s belly, catching at your cloak, dragging loose tresses across a heated flush that yet clings traitorously to your cheeks. The chill of this newly reckoned wind greets you rathter knowing, you think; a small cruelty from the gods, perhaps, a reminder to your iniquitous ways that there lies still a whole world beyond meadowcliffs and all your smaller, gentler woes.

Jacaerys rests upon Vermax to your right now, a gentle roll of High Valyrian curling over his lips as he caresses the dragon’s neck. And you remain, a thief of such private a moment; watching through dewy pleasure-laced lashes as he murmurs to his steed some boyish thing, a smirk in dimpled shadow.

Struck only by the sudden crack of the tolling bells once more – a reminder of your minutes-long tardiness to the summons of the Queen – you shake yourself from such girlish stupor, turning instead to unhook yourself from the dyed leather saddle beneath you. It is a small few whispers of your own soothings in your dragon’s shared tongue before you stretch cramped muscles, feeling a faint warm tremor of your thighs as you prepare yourself to dismount.

Bells wail once more, high above, and you purse your lips in some curb of unease. War can wait, Jacaerys had said.

You’ve been a fool to believe him.

He swings from his own saddle first and, as keepers take ancient crack of rein, turns to escort you from your own. You relent the sliding descent from leather to scale, breath hitching only as those larger palms grasp firmly round your waist, the warmth of him through your riding leathers lasting scarcely longer than a breath before your boots find stone.

You catch, in one quick upward glance, that blooming flush coloring his own throat; and there’s a strange little satisfaction in the sight, some foolish thing that warms beneath your breast despite the nerves and wind and dreadful summons.

It is only once you’ve crossed the torchlit cavern floor toward the facade of the Mont that you find your whole shame, returned to you in the vision of your sworn guard still posted, awaiting you at the end.

Polished in the dull gleam of the cavern’s torched light, his glint of Queensguard armor catches your warped visage; you offer the man a sheepish, half-chastized curtsy of shame, well aware you’d slipped his watch entirely only two hours past with nothing more than a turned cloak and your dragon’s thundering wings.

“Ser,” comes your greeting, jittery as a freshborn doe. If your guard remains displeased by your insolent disappearance this morning, his visage gives nothing of it save but the slide of eyes once – then twice – through the lacking distance between your arm and the crowned Prince’s. It is a half-step then, late and damning, cheeks cooling only in the howl of windchill.

You climb to the castle together, you and Jacaerys, discarded leathers and reins trailing loose; Abovehead mottled clouds stir, bruising themselves something awful along the shoreline. The day, well past its apex, as begun to sour - it is more than once that you must turn your head against the sharper gusts that come, the closer you get to the castle’s walls.

Only once you cross through the fortressed heart and reach the council doors – soothed skirts, hastily mended hair, flushed glances – does the lightness in your chest finally eclipse itself by a low, coiling dread. Swayed upon your feet, you feel that blackened thing dive deep, pooling empty in your belly and lurking round for something to sink its teeth into.

Though, perhaps mercifully, the hinges groan their long lament, and you are swallowed into smoke-thick, sallow early afternoon light before you’ve the chance to linger on your fear.

The war chambers leak heavy and sickened: Mottled day now seeps through the high windows, painting all tones of skin within in a biliously unnatural pallor, some spoiled vintage gone bad in its cask.

Riding skirts whisper across stone alongside the straight pace of your intended as you enter in your tardy shame; though it appears that your entrance goes almost wholly unnoticed, to your surprise.

The council lies ahead, three seats empty – for Lord Corlys carries away across the tides to Driftmark this morn, and the other two will soon be occupied by yourself and Jacaerys. Yet the others, it seem, are gathered entirely grim, bent low over sharp discussion you catch only in broken pieces as you near.

“B-but it is a lie.”

Queen Rhaenyra’s voice comes to you as you approach, voice conjuring your attention and Jace’s in kind, alarmed only so much as forethought dread might allow.

She is a sight this morning – in the pallor she truly glows, countenance rendered in a stunned disbelief, mouth remained parted upon her words as though suddenly struck by an unseen hand.

Fear sinks lower into your gut at the air about the chamber; beneath you, footsteps stutter to a slow.

Jacaerys’ hand brushes the back of yours faintly as he rounds his chair, a touch which, only a half a minute past, might have sent heat blooming traitorously beneath your skin once more; though it is left now only with coldness in its wake. You both take up seats beside each other, quiet as shadows.

“Having lost my own son,” the Queen continues, not so much as batting an eye at the lateness of her son and half-sister, “that I would inflict such a thing upon – upon Helaena, of all people? Upon an innocent?”

This ceases your blood entirely.

Struck as the very bells which have since ceased their wailing and shocked into a stupor, your eyes dart to the cup which sits untouched before your place; Though two cupbearers wait beyond the door, and pitchers of wine line the whole long wartable before you, you find yourself only staring into the dark, shadowed emptiness pooled at its bottom.

Helaena. A nameless horror rises within your throat, clawing viciously for breath as the cup seems to suddenly glisten, the bottom of it thick and darkly rubied, pooled in blood and shadow before your very eyes.

Helaena.

Desperate, your burning gaze flies to Jacaerys, landing upon a visage similarly struck in rigidity, his own kind of consternation tightening slowly upon his expression as the laces of a corset.

In no less than a breath, his gaze meets your own; and for one long, shuttered moment, the dark shadow ever-looming low upon your backs suddenly crushes the both of you at once, some cloaked and hooded thing since risen from where it’d coiled in the chamber’s shadows of casted stormcloud, sinister and hungry as it has ever been.

An embarrassing thing, private as it is between you - to escape for only an hour and half from duty, to rebel in such lustrous bliss - only to be yanked so wholly back into the vicious churn of blood and ash, death riding so easily upon the heels of any such attempt at peace.

Your eyes tear from Jacaerys, spilling your mind into a chasmed pit beneath you, his voice churning again and again in your mind – war can wait, war can wait, war can wait – but it cannot, it hasn’t, and Helaena’s lost a child now, her innocent boy, all the while you have traipsed around in some meadow, golden and stupid and ignorant, defiling yourself so sweetly with the Crown Prince–

“Are you suggesting,” The Queen’s voice comes honed sharp in edge, pulling you from your own spiral as she rises, stalking round the table towards Ser Alfred, “that my grief drove me to order the murder of a child?”

Laments of rain have begun to weep along the pressed panes behind you, casting their teared-shadows along the edge of the Painted Table, raining misery over the Crownlands and the coasts alike.

At the very intonation of the Queen’s question comes some reply, voices spiraling down the whirlpool of noise ricocheting in your ears; and yet here you sit, remained in the basest instincts from your girlhood: still and peaceful as a early summerdew rose in your chair. Even as that festering, vicious hate builds and builds, bittering the remnants of honeyed almonds upon your tongue and turning the shadows in the bottom of your cup into clotted garnets beneath sickly emerald glass.

A child returned for a child, then.

Torchlight flickers in the dullness of your peripheral. And this, strange as the gods, is the very thing that conjures the night before; a blade flashed, pointed down a nose so regal and calm; and then, in the aftermath of such sparked ire and tamped pride, a glinting bobble, down the dark-licked path of night.

There had been a figure, last night, swallowing itself toward the clotted village just beyond the castle’s looming watch. Hooded, such a gait that it had struck you and Jacaerys both in a moment – who do you suppose walks at such an hour?

Your spine straightens in your seat. There you’d stood, not fifteen hours past, watching the flickering orange lilt its way toward where the tide swallows away small flecks of fishing boats come each morning. And you’d let it dissolve into the dark of the pier, returning to the foolishness of a lovesick – or, perhaps, merely lonely girl, whimmed easily by the company of a handsome man and the concern of a fresh cut palm.

A churn of memories, all miniscule in the grandness of what has happened, though still you recall the glint of a sword; Queensguard armor splattered hot with the dark blood of a serpented handmaid; words, half-thrown toward Baela, of going to visit the prisoner. And late, in the night past… it had been rather odd, hadn’t it?

It is only intuition, surely, which lifts your eyes to Daemon.

He has not spoken once since your arrival, an uncommon feat for a man so instigative and, when time calls for it, vitriolic; instead he reposes becalmed within his chair, set in his countenance some odd satisfaction, an expression far too knowing to carry any such grief or shock at all.

He is no peaceful man, this you know.

No, you foolishly excuse, heartbeat kicking in your ribs. Surely not.

But the thought has already taken root, dark and patient in the hardened steel of your gut, echoing the seastorm outside as it throws itself violently against the chamber casements.

Soon enough the council turns to concerns of retaliation and preemption; Aside you comes the proposition from the Queen’s son himself – Vermax, you catch, and King’s Landing – and pitched as it is with such restless desire, that fiery instinct to do something, anything, in the face of peril and ultimate kin-war. Fierce and sharpened for it, still it comes from the very same lips which had told you not an hour past that war can wait; an irony struck near cruel to you, something bitter dancing along your tongue.

The Queen denies him before he has even finished speaking, as she has done countless councils before.

You watch his lips stitch closed, restless as your own palm to hold a blade though you know not how to wield it – you watch his jaw lace tight in frustration, though you say nothing. The urge needles at you, to reach across the chasm left between you and Jacaerys and place your palm over his fresh-bandaged one, the one that’d splayed so easily over your thigh not an hour past.

You do not.

And so it is an impossible distance that the next hour reaches you; voices to murmurs, maps only blurred colors, scrape of chairs and intake of breath dissolved into the bloodbeat of your ears and the rush of weeping sky beyond the keep. All the while, that empty Sept looms across the island; those great wonderful beasts stir restlessly throughout the moors and mountains alike; and a chasm looms still, of a dead little boy at your feet.

In your reeling mind, desperate to place blame so it might not find itself pointed at you, horror gives way first to suspicion; then suspicion, to certainty.

And it is anger, kicked up like plumes of dust in a stableyard, which levies your reproachful attention upon only Daemon.

IT IS MIDDAY WHEN YOU FIND YOURSELF A MOMENT FOR FRESH AIR.

It does not come, however, as the solace you had hoped. The storm has long since dragged itself eastward beyond the Narrow Sea, left only of its carcass looming still overhead – light spills low and sickly through cloud-sheets, low-bellied with rain not yet fallen. A bruise ,festered above your head; whispers of old moss molded along wet stone, disturbed each time the wind whips its breath from the sky onto the island.

You rest there, both palms upon the damp balustrade, allowing the chill to seep into your bones from where your bare skin greets it as you watch the green below.

There, along the outer bailey’s yard far below, Jacaerys and Joffrey stand caught in fogged light; silhouettes first, red and black, blurring in oscillating blinks by wisps of mist that drift in sheets off the castle walls. Joffrey lifts a crossbow nearly half his own height to his shoulder; Jacaerys circles behind him, patient in elbowed adjustments, nudging one boot a little farther apart with the toe of his own. And though their lips part and words are surely passed, the wind steals, as it oft does; only their laughter survives the wind’s climb to your ears.

Joffrey looses a bolt, and it strikes wide and off-target in notched iron upon rotting wood; you watch Jacaerys ruffle his head with a grin instead of revealing any kind of disappointment, retrieving another quarrel before the younger boy can perhaps apologize in his embarrassment.

You smile, though only for a moment; The curve of your lips dissolves itself of its own accord, even as you watch the brothers a while longer; for soon enough, the space breaks open a horrible absence between the pair them.

And that bluer lamb, once again in your mind: screams swallowed of wailing wind and massive maws, teeth longer and sharper than blades, piercing through a half-cut scream; Lucerys arrives there, between them – not as he died, but instead as he lived, laughing with his restless limbs and sea-brightened dark eyes. A shove there, shouldering Joffrey aside to insist he might strike the target first, snickering something secret up to Jace as he aims. Hitched of breath, you press shut your lids against the seamisted breeze.

When your eyes returns, the yard is once again missing the middle boy, the one to complete that golden triptych of firstborns.

Time, a thing rather generous to the living, has become miserly with the dead – it folds Luke closed into the lines of history like a wildbloom pressed tight between its pages, seeping its colors through, preserving his beauty only by denying him another season to grow.

Your head bows, briefly.

In the pressing squeeze of your palms to your own eyes, color blooms: red and purple and swimming, winding together until all the war’s small ghosts crowd close together beneath the Stranger’s cloak. In your sleep-starved mind they have long since bled together past separating. You no longer know whether it is Lucerys or Jahaerys’ wet coughs choking your mind; if it is Rhaenyra’s agony or Helaena’s; whether the face haunting your mind as you fight for sleep is your sister’s or Elina’s or the handmaiden with her scarred wrist – all of them wearing, in such dreams, the very same hollowed and accusing stare, be it in green or blue or violet.

A grasp at the rough edge of stone, fingers bite at the sharp sting; bitten raw and red to the nailbeds, they tremble faintly.

Abovehead a gull soars, darkened by that chasmed sky, and you find yourself envious of it. Baela will take to that same open sky again soon, as will Rhaenys, and perhaps Daemon, too; And you, as ever, will remain here: kept gilded, dressed up and caged so prettily for spectacle. All in the name of war, it seems.

The wind toys with the silver clasp gathered beneath your throat, drawing from it the faintest chiming note as it taps against its twin. But somewhere behind you, rain-darkened gravel shifts.

The footsteps then come intent, nearly furied, a torch lit that might only be tamped out with force alone.

There are some gaits, you know, that the mind can recognize as readily as a voice. Perhaps this is why all the bottled resentment then rises up through your throat, crawling little serpent it is, licking its forked tongue upon your own and forcing your red-drenched gaze to whirl upon the man crossing past.

Pierced upon dismal afternoon air, black riding leathers are a sore to light-brightened eyes, even in the mist of torrential weeping sea; a sickeningly familiar travel cloak of threaded silver hemming – and beneath its hood, the pale tresses of paled gold.

And you, so dissimilar to your Usurper brother in so many ways and yet all the same when matters of sharp tongues and foolish decisions arise, speak before you might think it over.

“Off so soon, Uncle?”

A whip of gaze in the wind, slighted as though some previous ire has laced through him in a wrath of fury: Daemon glances toward you, lit already with something you know not in name or shape. Rather odd, how much peril can reside inside so idle a glance.

“Yes.”

Here the wind screeches down blackened cliffs, and two princes shoot bolted arrows of steel through rotting wood below. Across the dragonbridge lies a smoldering cave, where the Bloodwyrm churns in restless wait, and you stand before the Rogue Prince with brightly accusing eyes.

“I ride for the Riverlands. Harrenhall.” A sharpening of eyes, always so quick to thread a needle, blunt or not, in aim of the short fuse which lies under your skin. “I imagine you missed the Queen’s orders at council this morning, being otherwise… occupied.”

A humourless breath escapes your lips as they curl with mistrust, grown from shadows and too many passing whims of your uncle before you. “How convenient.”

If the slight barb nestles itself within his skin, he gives no sign of it; forearms instead come to rest beside you, choosing the sharper moment instead of a passing one. A stirred cloak, resting wide as though remembering those years so long passed, when the entire fortress and its battlements belonged to him. Too much of that old claim lives still within the gaze he gives the stones, and it stokes the lit wildfire burning through you still.

“You would not be faulted, of course,” he says, “if your thoughts have been elsewhere.”

It is a turned gaze, you realize, that he now levies upon the yard below, where those two figures of dark curls fuss over a particularly wrenched bolt of iron.

“The island appears wholly consumed by your wedding, it seems, now that the Queen’s advanced the date.”

And know as your might that your uncle has come to the battlement this afternoon with a vexation of his own, and duelly that he so often attempts to bring out your fierceness with sharper jabs; still, it is a poorly settled sentiment to your tempter.

A wedding; he imagines you should be preoccupied with your wedding, as though the castle is not still stained black and glistening with blood, as though these days the wind does not have ears and the serpents of the shadows sapphire eyes.

Incensed, your spine lifts from the balustrade. “Believe it or not, uncle, I find celebration a rather difficult feat to stomach these days.”

“Do you?” he muses just as soon, mirth spilt from lips half-quirked. An amethysted gaze remains upon the yard below. “I confess I had imagined the opposite – it seems you and Jace have discovered a surprising number of shared interests, as of late.”

The muscles beneath your cheek tighten, an ache of ground teeth; it is a small betrayal, a fleeting clench at the hinge of jaw, though Daemon’s eyes are made for such failures. You watch them catch your slip, and watch too as a glimmer passes through them, sunlight passing water, unreadable save for cruel amusement drawn from vexation.

The wind shoulders through a blunt thing, carrying weeping seaspray and sulphuric smoke lingering in ash and darkness long since laid to rest on the island.

“A pity that I shall miss it.” Words, drifting idly upon the wind. Far below, waves hurl themselves against Dragonstone's black cliffs until they burst white upon the rock. “I’ve always enjoyed a wedding.”

A blatant mockery in his tone, your tightened jaw only furthers itself, wrung with discontent at the turn of the discussion. A burning thing, as it is, that he dare speak so lightly with you, though here he stands, a man not hours past some scheme of his own; low whispers, glinting knives. You know not how, yet, though still you know the boy’s death somehow lies at his feet, as so many others do, too.

Grasped once more, a seeping forlorn aches in your bones; fingers press into the chill bite of the stone, tracing how years of sea and wind have sunk their teeth into the skin of the castle, moisture gathering in carved grooves to live in nestled cold. A rooted thing, it seems, in the cages of your heart.

“You will be missed, Uncle,” you say, empty words upon empty ears, the both of you well aware of the farce as it is given.

A bended mouth, though his gaze remains on that churning sea. “No doubt. Allow me to give my congratulations now, then. I imagine matrimony will become you far better than piety ever managed to.”

A dig, masqueraded pitifully as jest; so full of pride as you are, it still whittles away the resolve you’ve kept since that dreadful celebratory feast nights ago, and a bright spark of disdain flares in you.

Piety. Your lament is wordless, shivering in frustration; you can only watch as Daemon, still laced in that unknowable cockiness, a vitriol threaded through the very silver tresses whipped round his head, turns to stalk away once more. To the Riverlands.

Trailing his figure as he takes two steps forward, you consider the anger churning in your chest; that very same anger that had burst you from the Dragon Pit that fated day, hardly a moon-and-half’s turn ago.

Your eyes follow your uncle as he starts off once more toward the bridge to the Mont.

True as it is: you cannot weep for every drop of blood spilled in war. Bitter as battled ash it sits in the back of your mind, though it soon stirs, catching spark and igniting a horrible new feeling within your breast, crawling itself up your throat until smoke clouds your tongue, flooding your mouth. Vengeance, it tastes like.

Daemon has nearly reached the bend in your path when you call out again, alive with the thrumming fear that the blood in your veins runs greener than red, that the instincts inherited from your mother will always drown out the fire inherited from your father.

“Not much of a farewell!” Your voice comes sharp and not wholly empty of accusation as you stalk forward, a viscious thing in your heart, cornered hounds and lashing beasts. “You speak fondly of ceremony, but …” you glance about, lifting your brows. “I see no banners, no horns, no pages.” Your chin lifts, accusation plain now upon your visage if not in your words. “Only that hood.”

Now he stops entirely, though his back remains toward you.

There is something horrible and bright burning in your throat. “Are you quite certain you’re bound for the Riverlands, Daemon?Or did one child not suffice for the Rogue Prince?”

Silence lives in the breaths following, despaired only until the wind kicks, stirring your own cloak against the wet gravel.

Daemon turns and, in three languid paces, he carries himelf back across the crushed ground; a rather composed countenance still, though fire has been drawn against flint in his eyes, a perilously unloosed restraint.

As sudden as you see that glint, you realize quite suddenly that he could very easily strike you. You would not be particularly surprised, in this instant, if he did. The instinct of it, a hand to your cheek, laces itself through your muscles; shoulders stiffened, one heel slipped half a pace backward toward balustrade. A lick of seawind cold across your cheeks, the stone nips little mocking bites upon your spine.

When he speaks to you at last, his voice has rotted enough to run soft, lamenting in your resolve that it frightens you all the more for its gentle stillness.

Worse, his words come in feigned casualty.“You’ve done a good service to our island these past moons, ensuring its Sept does not gather too many cobwebs.”

A mistrust in his sudden shift of topic, a confession of his guilt laid in of itself – though still, your hackles raise completely, a terse jaw aching low in your throat as he nearly sneers into his next words.

“I wonder if the Maiden still favors unwed princesses, even when they sneak off to empty chambers with the Crown Prince.”

Struck as you are, he only continues, the blade nestled well within the soft underturn of bellied composure; and he twists. He twists well.

“Do you imagine, each time you kneel before her candles, that the Mother turns her gaze aside–” a huff, so horribly impious from cruel lips, “–that she does not see hands lift your unwed skirts atop your Queen’s wartable, nor how eagerly you let them?”

You ought to strike him, instead.

Shame sears vicious beneath your cloak, so treacherous a thing, lashing at your throat and heating your cheeks. Your rash affront comes in a sharp glare, haunted by the chains of faith which insist virtue and suffering are sisters; that a woman’s goodness is measured only by much of herself she is willing to deny.

That Daemon, of all people, should judge carnal sin; the thought nearly coaxes you to laugh in bitter irony.

Instead your chin tilts against salted air, a breath lanced into your lungs in a ditched effort to garner any mustered calm.

“It surprises me,” comes your tone, forced into measure, “to hear you concern yourself with the judgment of gods.” The lick of salted sea upon your lips, a faint wickedness grows in that vicious part of you, that shadowed girl forever lingering in the instincts of your eldest brother - so ready to bite, if only to feel bitten back. “Here I thought you believed blood answers only to blood. Even if it’s that of innocent little boys.”

A sharpened flash of gaze; a blade descended, a poison dropped, Daemon’s voice comes hastened.

“Tell me,” he leans close enough you might smell the licorice of his breath, the musk and smoke clinging to his riding leathers. “What exactly is it you think you know, girl?”

In his eyes live the oldest of tales: wolves dressed in the skin of sheep, men smiling with blood still warm upon their palms.

He stalks nearer to you, a spider upon its silken deathpath, sharpened pikes lying in wait below a tall looming height. “Do you imagine I climbed the highest tower of Maegor’s Holdfast, blade between my teeth, so that I might open the boy’s throat with my own hand?” A piercing thing, his glare. “Do you take me for a common butcher, niece?”

“No, uncle.” Your mocking ditch comes cold as breath, paled in the seawind. “Though I find it rather trying, to imagine you’ve ever done much at all that hasn’t served only yourself, in the end.”

An implication, plain as day.

A heartbeat passes, pulsing in silence in which he only stares upon your own countenance; so set and laced with the gilded gentleness awarded a girl kept in many cages – of red and of slate, of gold and steel, glittering with rubies and dripping with thick blood.

“When your brother slew Lucerys,” Daemon begins once more, inquiring as he is hushed in blackened whisper, “did he pause?”

The waves along the island throw themselves upon the shore, breaking over and over like the crack of great marrowed bones. And Daemon, cruel as he ever has been, only presses the wound further; blood of grief, rushing in a gleaming river between you. “Even for a breath, do you imagine he agonized over the boy’s innocence?”

A howling thing, the wind, hurling sheets of seaspray sidelong into your lashes, setting the loose damp strands of Daemon’s hair about; the wildgrass mourns, too, billowing along the moors in a sorrowful sea, whipping round the scent of ash and soil, storms long drowned upon the horizon.

“And when he sent poison meant for your own cup,” Daemon still yet presses, one hand on the stone and one brushing Dark Sister, “did your brother pause to wonder whose lips might touch it instead?”

The words open that which you have spent the day trying to bury; A tightness lacing your throat, freshened memories of the night past only burrowing deeper, becoming part of both your marrow and blood. I’m scared, she’d whispered to you in those last moments. It hurts.

“No,” you say, expecting some meek thing of sorrow; instead you find your voice harder than the salt grown in the northern seas, nearly chastised in your grief, furied in your disdain as it scrapes your throat.

Daemon watches you, perhaps surprised in his own right by the strength found there. “No.” He repeats, only now sounding at all accorded. “Because this is not a tourney, nor any song for children. Wars have never concerned themselves with such trivial things as innocence.”

And in his won silence, that mirrored amethyst gaze drifts with yours, tracing the cloudwall dark upon the horizon, ever-tumultuous at the throat of the Western world, this country your blood has ruled for generations.

His voice has gone calmer than you’ve heard him speak to you perhaps ever, and you find that you loathe him all the more for it. You would almost prefer his anger – or that earlier blunt discourtesy – for at least that itself has the decency to burn, and then you could truly hate him for it.

But hatred is a simple thing, and this is not.

Far below, the yard has been near swallowed by the creeping misted fog, so that only small figures move against gray stone. And there Jacaerys stands with crossbow in arm, a figure plucked out of the fog and misery as easy as breath finds your lungs each day, as your heart beats each moment, as your eyes climb awake each morn.

“It will be fire and blood that carries the crown, and it is our duty to make certain the fire burns in the right direction.”

“Our duty,” you repeat him, struck with thoughts of headdresses and vows, of dragons trembling in the sky and the fortnights you’ve since spent wasting away as everyone else carried the flames; of his sliding eyes and wily whims, rogue as he’s always been and storming in sheer self-warrant toward the Riverlands.

Mistrust lingers where hate cannot, and you glance sidelong at him through salt-frosted lashes as he speaks once more.

“You have long since proven your viciousness, Princess,” he says to the sea before you, “It is odd that you, of all people, should feign a righteous cause for a bloodless one.”

There is no answer, after all, that conjures itself upon your lips.

You’ve tired speaking to him, anyways.

Half-buried in stubborn pride, your lips purse as he turns, resuming his stalk toward the Dragonmont. Dark fall of cloak catches once more by the restless wind until, little by little, he becomes no more than shadow, another ghost upon the island.

You remain where you are long after he has gone, leant against the stone, watching the brothers below laugh in a foreign harmony; and you find yourself thinking – beyond the bay and the reach of your eyes and the gray churn of the relentless cold sea – of your sister.

YOU ARE SUMMONED TO THE QUEEN’S APARTMENTS JUST BEFORE SUNSET.

The castle wears its age reluctantly at such an hour – fortress-hard and fortress-cold; though in these gentler moments, a honey-gilt light seeps in through the passing casements of worn glass, melted down from the day’s spent storms, churning the sea to seared amber where it bleeds across stone beneath your feet. You cross into the castle’s heart silently and watch that light breathe something like beauty back into the corners where shadows have lingered for far too long.

The scent of the Queen’s favored incense sticks finds your nose before your shoes cross through the doors to her chamber – smoke curling round the corridor in soft breaths, sighing so strangely in odds against the frenzied heaviness that has gripped the island these last days. It strikes you as almost obscene, passing servants who lay fresh runners and light new tallows, as though the world does not weep ash and trail kin’s blood along the walls of a keep not half a day’s ride from here.

When you cross within her apartments, Queen Rhaenyra stands beside the casement overlooking the sea. The western sky breaks itself apart upon her visage, the dying daylight bleeding gold into copper and then crushed violet; A hundred small bruises the gods have left upon the face of a grieving queen.

The Prince, too, stands beside his mother.

And, as you pause just past the threshold, you watch them for a moment; here, where no council lies about them, allowing them a respite to linger merely as mother and son, hands gesturing over parchments and extinguished wax seal signets as they speak quietly with one another. It seems they have not yet noticed your presence.

Jacaerys ducks his head for her and lets her smooth some curl gone rather unruly at his brow; Her palm lingers a moment at his cheek, thumb tracing the tired hollow beneath his eye, and he hardly reacts to such a familiar touch.

Something horribly lonely stirs in your stomach, then, as you think of your mother’s own hands – nails always torn to shreds, cold more often than warm in those waning days of childhood; Yet you remember quite well the nicer things, too, so rare as they were: soothing ruddied cheeks, proudly grazing over well-sewn embroidery, pressing lips quick to crowns in passing.

You had not thought to miss it until this very moment – watching a woman who is not your mother offer it so freely to someone who is not, after all, so very different a boy than you are a girl.

With a thickened swallow, you lean further round the threshold, and Jacaerys finds you finally through the silhouetted chamber light. His mother’s gaze follows quite soon.

“There you are,” the Queen says your name, such an invitation that your feet ignore the hesitation rooted beneath your feet. “Come.”

Warmer is the chamber once the heavy door settles closed behind you; fresh peat has been laid upon the hearth recently, its resin sweetening the air beneath the drifting incense as you cross into the light. Jacaerys straightens at your approach; you catch, briefly and through heated cheeks, the flex of his hands at his sides before he stills them.

“Princess,” He offers it almost chillingly, his gaze lingering a fraction longer than courtesy strictly requires before lowering respectfully, bowing first to the Queen then to you. “I shall leave you both to it.”

When he crosses to take leave, drawing his scabbard from its rest upon her drawing table to refasten it along his hips, it is a brief glimpse between you once more that pulls your heart’s strings like birds fluttering within a cage.

It is gone with him in an instant, and you and the Queen both watch the closed door a moment after he’s gone.

When beckoned by pat of pale palm along the settee, you obey her summons; skirts pressed to knees, your own dampened palms press to smooth them habitually beneath you, worried and unsure where precisely your hands ought to rest.

The silence unfurls – a stretched thing of mild discomfort which drags its talons across the dying light of her apartments. For a moment, too, she merely watches the fire shift above the iron grate; the distant rumble of dragons greets dusk and restless sea beyond the castle, and somewhere far off, fishing boats return to their clustered docks.

“I wished to speak with you this eve,” the Queen begins, a sudden thing, the sound shearing in half the curtain of blanketed quiet that’d since placated your mind, “because I imagine you have already seen the House begin its preparations.”

You nod, little else afforded now that your heart has climbed to your throat. A short breath swirls past her lips, something half-nerved in its resolution.

“You and Jacaerys are to be wed in three days’ time.”

Lashes hardly flutter, only a small, dropping thing low in your stomach. You’ve assumed as much already, if not observed it in the hurried whispers of servants carrying folded silk down the corridors, the rushes cleaned and the banners strung up along the great halls – not to disregard Daemon, of all people, and his words by past afternoon.

Unsurprising as it comes, still grows within you a seed of melancholy, blooming itself rather lonely in your heart, to have learned of your own marriage’s hastening secondhand. Ever the branch of olives.

A tilt of graceful head, and your gaze’s line is caught in her own from its dance among the hearth’s flames. “You understand why.”

“I do.”

There is no pretending otherwise; such a particulence that you were the one, indeed, who planted the suggestion not days past in council, though unintentional as it was – and then begged to the gods in some secret plea whispered between lips glossed and spent from shared bedsheets, Jacaerys desperate as he gets when honeyed with what lies between your thighs: You, sister of the Usurper; I, the son of the Queen.

As we were meant to.

In the far distance, the evening tide labors still against black rock; that remembered tumultuous battle, laving itself, wringing out unto jagged cliffs.

The Queen’s fingers trace the ring upon her other hand, and you take your own palm into grasp, picking lightly at the skin in that old, inherited habit. Though still, your gaze turns back towards the dying sunlight of the casement.

Already, far below, you know it’s begun – servants crawling the outer yard like ants upon some sugary hill of evening-lit sunpath, measuring spaces for long tables, rolling fresh barrels towards the great cellars, stringing crimson and black silk between pillars; And just beyond the castle walls, there lie the villages scattered across the island.

There, mothers stand in sea-rotted cottage doorways, hands still damp from washing linens, children put to the fields or the sails with their fathers - all of them heralded to Queen’s decree, a royal invitation traveled mouth to mouth. You think, too, of those beyond the Narrow Sea, those crowded within Flea Bottom’s twisting alleys and those shacked harbor shanties along the Harbor of Blackwater Bay, whose lives are squeezed by the fist of empty baskets and emptier stomachs.

How horribly diligent it all is, to throw a feast whilst the realm is starves itself in two.

Firewood shifts sudden in the hearth’s grate, spitting small amber glints which vanish into the chamber’s dark corners.

“I have wondered, these past days,” she begins once more, turning that ring slow between her fingers, “whether I have watched fear begin to claim you.”

Ah, you think. That shadowy serpent snickers cruelly from the shadows just then, lurking through the folds upon your sleeves and snaking through your trembling lips, slithering its way right into your very heart. You steele yourself against its force, only batting your eyes once.

You hesitate to answer her, for sake of your warbling throat and, indeed, by the absolution that she is correct. A fortnight ago, you’d have countered, likely, with something as passionately fierce as you’ve always been. Though this eve, what comes from you is only raw truth.

“It has not, My Queen. Though, I admit, I have…struggled,” you murmur, “with guilt.”

You cast away thoughts of severed heads upon stone, boys with swallowed screams, girls with bloody eyes, curly-haired princes with lips of sugar and heart of fire; and your lips, spitting lies of misplaced affection though begging for such wanton attention in the same breaths.

Raw comes your shame, scraped of your throat, some scrambling desperation for comfort within a strained, horribly chasmed sisterhood, so stringent and absent. Still, you cannot help yourself, weakened by the fiery gaze of her attention upon you.

“I do not know what I am, underneath it all, if not guilty.” you admit. “I was–I was born for it, I think – the Gods made me for it. If they make anything at all.”

Your words fall ugly and heavy upon the incense-thick room, and you find your cheeks ashamed – for she regards you, then, with something horribly akin to those memories of your passing youth, rare glimpses of terse words between your mother and her, curl of lip and sharp of glances, pitying and raw and horrid, festered friendship staled by blood since dried and wounds never healed. What does she see now, when she looks at you, besides your own mother?

A child, perhaps. A foolish girl with seven shadows at her back, with emerald pulsing in her veins and a cowering heart at the bending blows of sin. The great hearth’s mouth spits embers near your satined knees, and her incense silvers the air. In catch of dying, red-soaked sunbeam, her face paints itself spectral, older beneath her eyes though strangely tender, nearly younger everywhere else.

“Sister,” she says then, and the word strikes something stark and lonely in your chest, drawing your gaze to her own, now lit with fire and that desperate clawing need that still so restlessly lives within you. “Look at me.”

Eyes find hers, and it is in a flash that you find such violet a gaze as you’ve ever sought in every looking glass, each mirror from youth to now, though in hers live something sharpened in a turn of breath. Only in a moment does she lift a glinting hand, smoothing a loose tress from your braided temple.

“You are a Targaryen.”

Breath hitching, though in your mind’s eye comes a thousand flames, a burning glint of steel unseen but promised, some odd singe as you swallow down the heat crawling up your throat.

Her huff comes swallowed, perhaps exasperated but tamped by a Queenly – or motherly, if you might recognize such a thing – resolve to cease your girlish, weakened words.

“You were not born to spend your life wondering whether you are worthy of what has been placed in your hands. The Gods did not give our blood to us so that we might tremble before it.”

And that violet stare does not leave yours, nor does the palm now cupping your cheek, grazing the intricate clips of gold woven through braids at your ear; A small thing stirs, churning at rest deep within your heart. The turn of a flame in its brazier, you feel that fire pulsing through your very veins, licked with glory and singing with the dragon which lies nested deep and burning across the island.

Breath floods your chest sharp, even, licked with flames.

A nod comes hardened, and in another flash – that same vengeance which broils your very skin at the memory of Daemon’s sharp eyes, you feel yourself shed any softness which has inhibited you yet, shelled by grief but hardened all for it.

“I came to your cause not out of some mere fledgling rebellion against my mother, or grandsire, or brother,” You murmur; and it is no new thing, though never have you said it without audience, without throne or cell bars between you and her. “But because you are my Queen, by right and blood.”

A chewed lip comes, and then a resoluteness in your spine, a deep breath as you lift your chin to her. “I believe it was Daemon, Your Grace, who wrought the death of the child.”

And a regal hand, ceased of cupping your cheek, instead begins to close – fisted, until knuckles blanch tight beneath skin. There is a very raw anger there, living in the shadows cast along her face in the dying light; and though she says nothing indeed, it dawns upon your harrowed mind, dripping with that same bloodied spill, spiraling a thousand fluttering wings and ancient whispers.

It is enough confirmation as you might need.

A storm whips wrath, churned in your heart – it turns first toward Aegon, such foolish usurption; to Aemond and his slithery cups and sharp-whetted mind, that great maw of Vhagar; to your grandsire and his own oily ways – the blood of a Hightower is thick with ambition, after all – and indeed, toward every hand that has pushed the realm’s war nearer, Daemon no less than them.

At last, your voice comes scarcely above the crackle of peat upon the hearth. “What becomes of him now?”

A violet gaze turns toward the casement, where the last embers of sunset surrender themselves to evening beyond the Narrow Sea. Sought somewhere beyond the glass, out where dragons disappear into cloud and men sew wrath into glory, she finds her answer on quiet tongue.

“He must choose his own path.”

YOU LAST NO LONGER THAN A FEW MINUTES ALONE IN YOUR CHAMBERS ONCE YOU RETURN THAT EVENING.

You find yourself alone at last hours later – returned from the first of many appointments with the royal seamstresses, well past the hour the sun surrendered wholly to that abyssal dark. It had been a triad of women who kept you there in the Queen's solar, circling you in a dizzying braid of sharpened pins, measuring cords coiled into silvered little serpents about shoulders, murmuring in the foreign tongue of shorthanded menders.

You had said nothing much when the robes had been presented – drenched in gold and red, ancient as the very blood in your veins. An empty gaze, you’d given the wedding fabrics; oddly hollowed by the sight of piled jewels and gold declaring the surviving power of House Targaryen to be worn upon your own shoulders in three days' time.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that the moment you find yourself alone, returned at last to your chambers, you feel a horrible itching beneath your own skin, some need to claw free of an evening spent as ornament rather than woman.

It is empty, in your chambers.

Empty, and still far too clean. Fresh linens and light furs dress your bed, folded and tucked away of the recent memories lingering in the shadows – a futile thing, to tuck them so harshly, when you know well you’ll thrash them off within the hour of firstsleep. Worse enough lies, before the bedpost, a thicker rug; woven through with beautiful greens and charcoal blues, ornate and wonderful, though still you know why it lays so precariously upon your floor, and you remember all too well which stains linger beneath it.

Trembling hands pour yourself wine, crossed to the sideboard instead of to the bellstrings to call for your handmaids. You coax into your cup perhaps more than propriety would recommend, a reckless part of you not even listening to the fear in your mind of poison; and you glimpse its dark glittering surface as you tilt it past your tongue, the taste thick and nearly ironed in blood as you spend the next few moments draining its contents entirely, unceasing until the burn of it licks your throat and heats your cheeks.

It does nothing much to ease the restlessness sitting low in your chest, though.

Glancing about, breath falls from parted lips. You cannot bear this room: a scrubbed, tidy silence presses in on you, even through one more half-cup of wine – and only once its contents are gone do you cross to your door, meaning to send the guards for your handmaidens, or perhaps anything that might carry you out of your own mind for an hour.

Though, as you pull open the oak, you are struck with a vision of days past – a lifetime ago, measured by heartbeats and nerves.

Jacaerys stands just beyond your door, once again, one hand raised an inch from where the wood had been.

The memory of it, indeed – I can’t bear this, he’d said, before dropping to his knees to taste you right here, upon that very chair behind you – would conjure some flutter of nerves in of itself; however you remain suddenly struck by the wine dancing warmth across your chest, and you blink something rather shocked from your visage.

“Oh–” His hand drops as though burned; visage painted with the same startled flush that warms your neck. “I’d – I was just about to knock.”

“Oh,” you echo him, rather foolishly, spurring a moment in which neither of you moves to close the space of the doorway, caught in a rather rigid standoff of propriety; you, grasping oak as though to shield yourself from the fluttering in your stomach and he, blinking slow as lips purse handsomely in the lick of torchlight.

A glanced check sidelong, towards the guard stationed just beside your chamber door; though stalwart eyes remain resolutely forward, a man well-enough compensed to see nothing. Jacaerys remains tall and dark in the hall’s bright torchlight, shadows breathing round a cut jerkin, white of a tunic beneath catching moonlight even here in the windowless hall.

“My Prince,” is what you manage, and even that comes out thinner than you’d hope, fluttering somewhere at the end like a sparrow loosened of the branch beneath her.

He, too, swallows faintly, cheeks creeping with a rather handsome flush. “Have I interrupted your evening?”

You, a touch too suspiciously, shake your head. “No,” you admit nontheless, soothing your palms along your skirts, relieved you’d at least kept half your hair done from the day, lest you look wholly undone. You can only hope the remnants of your drunken wine do not linger upon your cheeks. “You’ve rather rescued it, actually.”

You hadn’t meant to admit such a thing, though he blinks only once, a tight-laced smile across his lips before a breath breaks loose between them – almost flattered, or perhaps ennerved.

“I’ve… just asked for supper to be brought to my chambers,” he informs you, albeit stiffly in a sliding glance toward the guard once more. “I thought – well, I asked it prepared for two, if you’ve no other plans. I was hoping to have a moment alone, at last.”

At last. As though this morning wasn’t stolen away in its entirety from duty, spent instead with rudded cheeks and hitched breaths, the remnants of his fingers still aching sweetly along the muscles of your thighs, even tonight.

“I’d be honored, my Prince,” you say at length, a touch too proper – enough so to garner some sided glance of perplexion from the armored man who has, at length, heard the rather colloquial digs and conversations carried between you and Jace as of late. You disappear in some whispered promise of swiftness, fingers catching in laces as you work yourself a sheen of sweat fastening your own corset the best you can, smoothing yourself in the lookingglass before slipping out of your chambers to Jacaerys’ waiting presence, stooped in low conversation with the man beside the oak.

It is with some odd flip in your stomach and beneath the watch of your posted guard that you take Jacaerys’ offered arm and let him guide you down the hall.

HIS CHAMBERS ARE AS WARM AS YOU REMEMBER, AND SMELL WONDERFULLY OF HIM.

Faint spiced incense threads similarly through the rushes and the very air of his quarters as you cross into them as they do his own mothers – though here there lies a warmer thing, unnameable as it is unlearnable and belonging only to him, a thing that cannot be bottled nor borrowed nor bought from any merchant in Essos.

Your eyes fall first upon the small store of his sideboard, upon which lies a horribly cracked old volume of sea charts, spine bent and pages weighted open by a smooth grey stone you suspect he'd plucked from the shoreline below the castle. Aside it lies a half-finished carving of some winged creature, abandoned upon the sill with shavings peeled from it, curling white as petals over a knife still faintly dusted with it. Across the room lies hearth, bright with fresh peat, and a fine table laden near the casement, dressed for you both with roasted trout, cracked plume of fresh dark bread, and a small mountain of figs.

Before either of you makes to sit, a quiet boy enters – one of Jace’s stewards, you assume, though you have not yet learned his name – and, after the briefest of introductions, takes a small portion from each dish in turn. You stand close beside Jace and watch him do it, something tight and melancholy pulling low in your chest at the sight; the boy eats each bite plainly, dutifully, remaining a long moment afterward to ensure that time would not curdle in a throat same as poisoned tea; you stare at him, at the sweet blue of his eyes, tracing the veins which lie deep beneath his skin for any trace of purpled veins, until Jacaerys’ chin dips in grateful dismissal. You watch him press a pouch into the boys palms with a sickened twist; and you wait until the door has wholly shut before either of you speaks at all.

“You needn’t have.”

It is a poor thing with which to fill the silence, and Jacaerys gives you no answer.

Instead, he draws your chair from beneath the table, a scrape of wooded leg to scrubbed stone, awaited by his patience until you have settled yourself before he takes his place beside you. Burning gold catches the glistening curls of coiled umber, licks a shimmering amber into the surface of the wine already waiting upon the table; he pours for you first, then himself, and your fingers curl around the stem of your cup.

A superstitious thing, how your gaze slides suspiciously into the contents, watching the red depths within it for any lurking Stranger or curling glint of greened foe; and perhaps an effort given in a weakness to stare into the unseeing wine rather than him, watching the flames tremble there in miniature.

But hunger is an easier thing to answer than the quiet between you, so eventually you reach for the trout.

Smoked and lovely in its herbed warmth, wild rosemary clings to its flakes; and, in grace of your own bite, soon does Jace reach for his own. A stiffness lives there, in the quiet with which he takes his own bites: straightness of spine and careful turn of wrist, despite that ravenous way he’s eyeing the meal set before you both. The wine has grown warmer than you expected, or perhaps you drink it too quickly; a rooted heat through your chest at your own earlier indulgences, though now it seeps further, glinting pleasantly through your eyes.

Though, familiar as your own palm, a weight falls round your shoulders – a cloaked sullenness, as you finally register what, indeed, hinders Jace’s own meal this evening.

Unremarkable, perhaps – though you remark it still; the faint edging of the wrap tied across his palm, the calm of Maester Gerardys later yet in the eve past, when he’d cleaned the cut, words of training-yard accidents falling from your betrothed’s lips. And you, a mare-legged thing of shame in your own right, had watched, downturned, as Gerardys pressed salve and dried herbs along the reddened seam of split skin, sealing the reapings of your own wounded pride deep, deep into Jacaerys’ flesh.

He has taken his knife in his other hand, tonight, for discardance of pain, some new thing to navigate in an ocean of trials. It comes to you as a thread, drawn tight enough through cloth to rip; and the echo of blood seeps down his closed fist once more where it lies plainly upon the table, slow as wax.

Your own palm tightens round your cup, feeling both fragiled and punched by the beat pulsing in your throat.

“I’m sorry.”

Coiled behind teeth, the words spring into the quiet, crackling hearth swallowed only of your fluttering whisper.

Jacaerys, to his hunger or perhaps humbleness, does not glance up – though the knife slows where it prods flaked fish, and lashes tangled gently in a flick of confusion. Your swallow is heard loud within your own ears, the tightness of it choking you on the way down. “For last night,” you add, though you think you need not.

Full comes a rush of quiet, and only then does amber meet you again, a balm to your tendered disposition and warmed so soft it nearly melts – sturdy, in some way you’ve never been yourself. He is so very kind, you think, and it hurts you all the more.

His lips dance faintly, a small breath of relief as words slip past, honeyed and gentler than you deserve.

“Skoros iksis aōhon iksis ñuhon.”

It comes to you as the stars, freckled along the face of the sky each night; simple only in its honesty, a ghosted memory of wounds past. What is yours is mine.

Struck by that ease – that inherent strength by which Jacaerys strides his grace, his duty, his sorrow, his fate – you sit with cheeks heated, some twist of admiration and affection. You will suffer for it, you think once more.

It lives there, warm, treacherously aching, unfurling beneath your breastbone. A save at grace, as you sip further on your wine, ignoring hard the low thrumming beneath you, that churning thing that licks heat along you at the very thought of him, and you.

He remains handsome as always, softer in the light of his own chambers – perhaps nervous still by your presence. It had been a formal enough invite to supper that you’d wondered, as he escorted you through the halls, if it were a seed planted by his mother in hopes to garner some sort of connection.

The thought brings a small flare of sweetness across your lips, and you finish your meal in such gentle company, quiet only for your shared hunger, wine dissolving undertongue and eyes sparing increasingly unsubtle glances toward visages, and lips, and throats, and hands.

It is nearly a mad scramble – unspoken as it is laid plain in held, molten gazes – to finish the meal; and only once your emptied steel plates reflect firelight do you give in to the words which have loomed above you both since the very moment your eyes first met this evening.

“I imagine your mother spoke with you as well,” Your tongue is laced wine-warm, loose as your heartbeat to his warm visage. “Of the date.”

Indeed at the mention, something odd settles within the chamber, curling low and waiting, no particular shadow, yet the settling of frost along a casement; He finishes his own wine in one last, unhurried swallow.

“She did.” His jaw works faintly, though you find no such discontent in his visage, a thing of restless fingers and warmed eyes. “Three days is rather not a long time.”

There are many things that swim within your mind just then, stretching across some private depth of yearning to reach your tongue yet falling short of it regardless. You only clear your throat, a rather nervous cling to your lips as you fight for some measly ounce of priority. “I confess I did not expect it moved quite so soon.”

“Nor I.” He exhales, some restlessness building visibly behind his composure now, gentle and kind as he remains, that shared flame of temper so very settled between you this eve. “Though I understand the reasoning of it well enough.” A clearing of his throat. “I cannot fault her for it.”

Conflictions rise in the dancing flames of his gaze; he himself steps on tipped toes around some shell of your own temper, or perhaps some respect for the shadows of grief which have clung to you in the past days. And so your voice comes small but not unkind, and echoed by a shake of glittered-gold chains strewn through your tresses.

“I do not think either of us fool enough to hope our wedding will make the coming war gentler,” you admit, pressing nails against the woven embossing of your cup. “But I find it still an honor, to share such a duty. And…After…”

Struck by the vision of him – drenched in firelight, chin rested upon palm with a low pout of lip – your tongue falters altogether.

Perhaps a poor time to do so – for the word you end upon comes with too many ghosts trailing behind; cloying sighs, pressed hips, wandering hands, mouths upon heat-fevered skin; and that word lies heavy between you with such implications, though you’d meant indeed the longer after – of fate, and war, and fire.

Still comes a lift of his brow, and there upon his lips the faintest tilt – a breath of amusement, a gasping breath of sunbreak through clouds. Faint as it is, still it dissolves any remained discomfort lurking in the shadowed gloom looming outside the chamber doors.

You cannot help but stare at Jacaerys. He, undaunted as ever, only stares back.

Moments pass in these few heartbeats, a thing of burning, blistering yearning, buried so deep you nearly tremble at its stirring. Cold stone and bloodied steel, those whispered words reclaim your mind far too sweetly for the heaviness about you, the weight bearing you both. Winning wars with words; You make it sound so very romantic.

You’re drowned in such half-thoughts just as Jacaerys rises from his seat suddenly.

A surprising thing, you nearly startle.

“Jace?” You call to his retreating frame; A cool seep in the lapse of warmth from his presence aside you, you shift in discomfort. He crosses his chamber in a quick several strides, footfall whispering against rush and stone, and some nerves dance light across your stomach.

Rather boyish, the suddenness of it – as though some thought seized upon with the same bright impatience you have seen in him since childhood shared – and you trace his silhouette with drawn brows. His voice comes then at distance; murmured through the coiling shadows, your heart skips in your breast.

“There is something I wish to give you.”

Beyond the casement, evening lurks over Dragonstone in low, bruising clouds, and you watch him move with no little curiosity.

He stops upon the long oak chest resting beneath the window, where the flickering tallowwax breathes rims of light along the leaded glass; and there he bends briefly to slowly reveal something wrapped in thinned charcoal linen.

Knelt by knee before you as he returns, he does not reclaim his seat. Settling instead upon the rushes beside your chaise, you watch in awe as the candlelight, as always, favors him so – a gilded thing of natural grace and handsomeness, your betrothed glances up into your eyes with a small, half-nerved smile.

“I had meant to wait until after our wedding,” he says, breathless; A small grace of movement along his lips, tainted only faintly with melancholy. “But after last night… I thought that I’d rather you have it now.”

His fingers linger upon the gauzy cloth rather than draw it away, and in such delay comes the kick of old, fluttery creatures stirring light beneath your ribs – anticipation, dread, and some third thing of affection tangled between the two.

Lithe fingers, long and dutiful, unlatch the box of fine dark leather and at last he undoes the clasps. Your breath catches soundless in your throat as Jacaerys removes what he means to gift you.

The blade sings in the hearthlight.

Eyes catch upon its burning, how it dances along thin paled silver, a flickering glint of roaring beasts within the reflection of flames. Seven heavens.

For a good few breaths, you can do nothing at all but look.

“I asked the smith to alter the balance,” Jacaerys says into the quiet, voice grown curiously distant beneath the rushing in your own ears. “For a smaller hand.”

Words scarcely reach you – your eyes travel instead along the length of the blade.

It is a whisper of beauty. Where the flattened steel darkens, so flutters the faintest delicacy of engraved lines, gentle as they cross and re-cross one another – the silken breath of a spider’s web after morning dew, caught in steel and stilled there forever. And there, lower still, flutter tiny winged creatures; rising in spiraling clusters along the edge, paper-thin wings overlap until they dissolve into the layered scales of a dragon, fastened dark round the pommel.

Your eyes leak with emotion, though your brows draw – laced in confusion and some resonant disbelief. Jacaerys, knelt before you still, watches you carefully.

“I know you miss her.”

His words are scarcely louder than the emptied Sept across the island.

“Helaena.”

A tightening of throat. Choked only by feeling, you shutter in an inhale – nothing of affront, nothing of indifference, and your vision swims as you glance down upon the blade, tracing the fluttery things dancing along its grip.

When the light catches from Jace’s hearth once more, it sets the whole sword ablaze, wings and web and steel altogether, swallowed in the same cleansing burn, that devouring gold. Shadows dance in the movement, and something shifts, far past the corners of the chamber; a figure you do not turn to see.

You only see him – knelt and waiting, a boy grasping at stillness and sureness though his hands betray the faintest tremor where he grips the scabbard beneath the blade.

“I remembered the embroidery you keep beside your bed, the one worked with butterflies, and the web.” His voice, quieter now, threading into the hush left behind by her name. “You told me she stitched it for your nameday. I thought…”

Brows stitch, a knit thing as he wets pinked lips through the aching pause.

“Perhaps part of her ought to remain by your side, for whatever this war is to ask of us.”

Your eyes, stinging like that old wound – scarred thin as paper, sewn with the sluggish attempt of self-preservation, in some effort to conceal the softest parts of yourself. So intricate, this blade. Half a fortnight’s work, at least – though this observation lingers unmoored in your mind, as though from someone else’s skull entirely.

In your silence Jace continues, some note of anxiety bleeding through tilted syllables.

“You said it yourself last night. You’ll scarcely have time to become a proper swordswoman before you become a wife.”

A gentle turn of head; rueful, as though he laments and blames himself somehow at the mere thought.

“But I do not wish you to enter either fate empty handed,” He swallows, thick enough that you watch the graceful slope of his throat move. “Our marriage, the war beyond it.”

And looming still as fate is at his words, still you cast such horrors aside in your mind, stilled with the disbelief of the kindness given to you after only such strife.

“You deserve something that only belongs to you.” His fingers tighten round the scabbard, a nervous little thing, knuckles paled. “Something that was made so that it could be only yours.”

It is a very long moment that you remain there, sitting quiet with watery eyes and a cage of breathless ribs, unwilling to speak for fear of loosing the tears that have wholly gathered your lash line. And so there you sit, frozen in that very way you used to as a girl; a horrible calm, long enough so that you watch him begin to mistake it for something colder than it is.

First comes the smallest faltering, living there in the corners of his mouth; then, to your horror, a drawing back of hope between his eyes. Shoulders, strong as they are, loosen their straightness; his eyes fall to the blade, a cleared throat spearing the silence between you.

“I have overstepped.”

It leaves his tongue over shamed lips – chin still so princely and proud even now, though shrinking – and humiliation gathers plain along his lashline, blooming pink in the apples of his cheeks.

“I see it now. Forgive me, it was a foolish thought, and a more foolish time to attempt it besides,” he murmurs, attempting a smile which reaches nowhere except for the very innards of your heart, panging there sharply.

“A sword is hardly a bridal gift, besides.”

Already he is reaching down into the case, erasing both his own disappointment and shame as from his visage he wishes not to burden you with it, “I’ll commission something more suitable. Jewels, perhaps, you look quite lovely in amethyst.” A breath. “I truly ought to have known better, princess. I only thought–”

“Jacaerys–”

Your hand finds his before the clasps can close, before the sword can vanish back into velvet and shadow and become merely a dream. His fingers still beneath your own at once, flexing as though unnerved by your touch, though you do not let him pull away.

Amber searches up into your own blistering gaze. A pounding in your throat, a heartbeat gone traitorous; you shake your head faintly, understanding only now that your tears have begun a slow descent – trailing the apples of your cheeks, warm against the heat already lingering there.

A helpless thing, the look you give him.

“You have not overstepped.” It comes out warbling, unsteady as a chick fallen from its nest, though still you draw breath enough to steady it. He, looking terribly lost, only blinks away his own glistening lashline, the humiliation still sitting beautifully, cruelly upon his visage.

“You needn't save my pride,” he starts, frayed as it finishes, “You’ve not said a single word since I gave it you. It’s truly alright, I was foolish, and–and wished to gift you something kind – not make you weep.”

So wretchedly sincere his voice is, you cannot help the fluttering wet laugh that escapes your lips; drifting as it does, no less true for the tears which slip alongside it. Horrible, to weep before such beauty. You suppose you cannot help it – indeed you have never been able to help much of anything, where Jacaerys is concerned.

“Forgive me,” A shaking murmur, breath dragged through a nose gone thick with emotion, “I have only said nothing because I cannot find words large enough.” A pause lingers, and you laugh again, rather giddy by the sight of the blade caught in a glint of his eyes. “I feel a bit foolish for it, really.”

There relieves some of the tension easing from his shoulders, though he still regards you carefully; expecting your kindness, perhaps, to be refusal still.

Your eyes fall helplessly once more to the glinting virgin steel.

Gifts have forever been bestowed upon the daughters of kings. You have never lacked for jewels, nor gowns, nor harps strung silver, nor books stacked to the rafters. But this blade was fashioned with the thought of only you; no other daughter, no other name, only yours – pressed into steel by a smith who does not know you, but guided by the thoughts of a man who does.

Your eyes lift again to find him. An anxious hope lives there, impossible to disguise no matter how he tries; And a boyish thing he’s become, beneath soft light and shed duty both – no duties nor war, only a man knelt on rushes, waiting to be told he has done well.

“It is the most thoughtful gift anyone has ever given me.” A breath, delicate over shared air. The words taste quite pitiful beside the enormity of what you mean; though your neck flushes warm regardless as you watch a smile grace across his lips.

And as the tide to the shore, sun to the moon, the stars to the sky – helpless, you are, when you give him your own smile in return. “I don’t believe there are enough words in any tongue to thank you for it, Jacaerys.”

The fire you so adore returns, lit low but bright, within his gaze. “You truly like it?”

Another ache draws through your chest, this one sweeter; What a dear, impossible fool – that he cannot yet see how wholly your heart has begun to lean his direction, seems nearly past believing. You only press your lips together, a small smile helplessly lacing the corner of your mouth once more.

“Entirely,” you breathe, dragging at last one trembling fingertip along a wing worked into the guard; flames dance there on the blade, warmed by fire, nearly pulsing beneath your touch.

A heat of another sort warms your cheeks then, as you glance to him.

“I regret that I have nothing worthy to place in your hands, yet.” A small laugh escapes you, boldened despite yourself. “You’ve left me feeling very poorly prepared, Jacaerys, in rather more ways than one.”

Warmth claims his own visage at that – so handsome there in firelight, wholly stirred by your honesty – and something fluttering and sweet stirs low in your own belly at the sight of him: knelt so close, still waiting on your every word as though you are truly something worth the waiting.

“You owe me nothing. Truly.” He smiles, so horribly earnest it nearly wounds. “I only wanted–”

Gods, stop it, you think helplessly, some nerves and denial clawing through you as you lean toward him instead, closing the small breath between you.

It is a quick thing, overcome all at once by the evening in this small collapsing moment; wine lingers pleasant on your mouth, muddling faint and warm behind your eyes, too – and still you find yourself wrapped in some affection, some ravenous want, far too large to be met by anything so small as words.

So you press into him as much as the space allows, enough so to draw laughter from plush lips, so pleased in a curve against your mouth.

“Careful,” he warns through that gentle laugh, “I’m still holding your blade.”

Your blade.

The very words make you kiss him only sounder, until you cognize what indeed he’d said in full and draw back, cheeks hot and desire tingling loose and tantalizingly reckless through you. In the drop of your gaze you find the sword clasped gentle in his uninjured hand, curved against you so that if it were to cut, it would draw his blood first. Always his, first.

Your cheeks creep in a small thing of embarrassment; and he chides you with a mock-solemn grin, setting the blade carefully into its casing on the table at last. “You’d think that a woman who has only just received her first proper blade might recall the importance of keeping better track of it.”

A smile pulls at your lips, shamed though lit enough to tease him in return. “I believe my swordhandling instructor rather distracted me from that particular lesson. I can hardly be blamed.”

Delighted by such jesting, Jace’s eyes fall to your mouth, tracking the dart of your tongue as it wets your lip. You do not miss how his focus stays there, even as he speaks. “Ah, a shame. He’s a poor instructor, clearly.”

“Mmm, dreadful,” you murmur, pulling his mouth to your own. His lips are glossed now with your own attention, sweet and biting as he chases the leant curve of your grin. “I’m afraid he’s proven to be quite distracting altogether. I shall have to find a new one, I suppose, else I’ll never learn a thing with my new blade.”

Jacaerys hums some low protest against your lips, pawing rather greedily along your waist, drawing a coil of hunger up through you that certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with steel.

“I would not recommend that,” he says, flat-right, certain. “I’ve grown rather attached to the position, myself.”

When you kiss him again, it is guided by your hand grasped along his jaw; a dragging thing, not lacking in eagerness but perhaps in patience.

It takes only moments for him to coax you up onto your feet in his own haste, the two of you stumbling backward in a myriad of laughter and poorly-shuddered desire, whispers of avoidance shed near the door; and his hearth is stoked high, enough so to draw a sheen of glisten across your clavicle beneath his thumb, the churning embers casting gold across the whole small room as you push him, eagerly, toward the settee.

Your lips hardly part in your stumble, save for the instant he falls back against the cushions – and you give no pause at all in following him down, poise abandoned entirely, grace abandoned willfully, every last careful thing between you cast away into the hearth’s swallowing flames, the searing want to draw your knees to either side of his hips overtaking you entire.

Come to cage you in his arms, your own palms drag greedy over the planes of him; sturdy of shoulder, the tense of muscles along his chest and stomach when you shift atop his thighs. Pooling between you is the sheer heat of your desire, and he kisses you hungrier now, though no less tender – hand find your waist knowingly, so unlike the sharp and half-spiteful touches of your very first few nights together. Now, it is all fervor, laced in sheer, wholly-known want.

“Three days,” you sigh into his mouth, “and we will be married.”

No longer quite so apprehensive by the number as you had been at the start of the evening; now that the memory of his body presses so firmly against yours has returned, though no less than hours ago you last came together, you have become utterly bewitched by the taste of him, the smell of him, the feel of him.

“Three.” He agrees against your bitten bottom lip, teeth pressing a smile there. “Suddenly it seems a dreadfully long span of time.” A confession of his own, low, “I confess I am rather eager for it.” His touch slips lower, down the line of your spine, palming the curve of you with a boldness that startles a soft gasp loose from your throat; his teeth catch gentle at your lip once more, tugging enough to conjure some hot, thrumming desire coursing through you. He has not touched you with such unconcerned intent in some time now – memories of sweet-brushed lips in the Sept, his gentled hands in the meadow this very morn – and you find the sudden absence of gentleness, for sake of his desperation, brings only a fiercer rush of hunger through you. “More than merely the ceremony, if I dare speak so far out of line.”

A gentle unmeant slap of your palm to his shoulder, playful more than any real chastising thing – for his words only bring you a rather shivering bout of arousal, aching as you are to feel him now, yet anticipating, as you are, for your wedding night so very near.

“Are you so eager, Jacaerys? I couldn’t quite tell,” You tease, a faint hum. Pulled back from his mouth, instead you regard his face; a roll of your hips against his, relished the hitch of breath snagged sharp in his chest, the shiver of pleasure such a small cruelty draws between you both.

In firelight, he glows beautifully; abyssally warm eyes, plush kiss-bitten lips parted on a whined breath of shattered composure. His palms – one still wrapped in that damning gauze, protecting the fresh wound along its length – grasp you once more from your backside, coaxing you to move against him again; so pleased and cocky his visage grows, in the sight of your clear pleasure.

“Yes.” He does not look away from you as he says it, though color rises faint along his cheekbones despite his own boldness. “I only didn't think it wise to say so plainly, given… Everything else weighing on us both, these days.”

A numbed thing pangs faint at the back of your mind, those shadows of duty and guilt, all which the gods demand lurking in the corners of the room – but you cast them gently aside, if only for this eve. A chosen thing, his company – and the warmth of his hands a balm of pleasure where they palm along the curves of you, so very bold, this man, for one so near panic only moments ago.

The thrum of a heart, loud enough he must hear it against your neck; You confess to him, shroud in the firelight, knelt upon him with hands folded against his chest. “I find that I, too, have thought of it rather often myself.” Your wedding night, you mean, and the admission – though not the first time discussed between you, and certainly nowhere close to the most vulgar of secret whispers spilled among you – still coaxes a great heat to your cheeks.

A palm comes, then, to cup your chin; and a smile, grown handsome along his visage, helpless as he then dips to press a kiss to your cheek, and then lower, to the curve of your jaw, his lips finding at last the shell of your ear.

“The gods have blessed me, I think,” he murmurs low as his lips catch your lobe, teeth grazing the jewelry decorating your ear – and the mention of gods drives something fierce and nearly spiteful through you, churning hot and syrupy as the want already pooled between your thighs.

And sneaky as it tries, relentless in its shaming, you are struck by that well-worn voice at the edge of your mind, dressed in Septa’s robes and your mother’s disapproving eyes both: sin, it whispers, it is a fatal sin, to want a man more than you have ever wanted the Mother’s mercy or the Father’s judgment–

But the voice is foolish, for it does not know you. You are a Targaryen, after all.

And you have knelt before the Seven your whole life, lit candles for the Mother’s grace, murmured supplication to the Warrior before councils; mornings upon mornings of your life, spent with your knees pressed cold to stone floors, seeking comfort that never answered you back.

You feel lips at your jaw and shiver wholly at how easily they know you. Jacaerys always answers you back.

Dizzying in its sudden rush, a thrill of gold and flame lashes through you, a revelation as Jace tugs you closer still, until your arousal lines with his own plainly enough to draw twinned, helpless gasps. No holy murmur of septs, nor any needling pressure of chaperoned prayer, has ever brought you truer devotion than this right here; the way you know that you’d kneel for him gladly; how his desire, as you feel it press against your hips, and his pleasure, as you hear it sing through his sighs, feel far closer to grace than anything the Faith has ever failed to give you in twenty-some years of asking.

Then let it be nothing.

Hungry and bright, your pleasure aches – a cant of your hips forward to chase where you feel him now, sturdy and pressing into you, twitching beneath the fine tailor of his breeches. Lips graze lower still, teeth catching briefly on the skin-warmed necklace which hangs at your throat.

Your lips part, fainted by lacked breath. “Jaelan ao, Jacaerys.” I want you.

His grasp upon you, tightened enough to draw a rush deep within your belly – your words seep into his blood, drawn taut as the fabric at your hips; and he groans, head dropping back dramatically against the settee’s edge. Your smile curves fond in your amusement, and when he looks at you again there is such open, pleased melodrama that you cannot help the laugh that escapes you.

“I am sure to go mad,” he proclaims then, thumbs soothing over the gathered fabric at your hips. The signet he wears on his right one glints dark and gold in the night, and your fingers tumble to card through the coiled hair at his nape. “Waiting for this. For you.”

You feel it too, in truth – that very same mad, gathering want, more relentless than you’ve felt even before, wine-warm and reckless as you perch so debauched upon his lap. Your gaze traces the curls, fallen loose and few scattered dark across his brow, throat bared where his collar has long since been tugged free of its dutiful lacing, cheeks flushed high with wine and want both; and his eyes so molten, lie entirely upon you.

“You will fare no better than I shall,” you admit, and mean it entirely as he drags your hips along the strained length of his own hunger once more. He lets out a soft breath, no less than a sigh; in a cast of his head back against the upholstery once more in his own shivering desire, you think that you’ve never once seen a prince look so made for such a sight.

He seems keen to use less words after this, though there is nothing solemn about his sudden quiet; instead grows that wicked satisfaction he conjures whenever he believes himself clever, eyes grazing in a heated trail down the curves of you, hooking low to absorb the glide of your hips along his own.

Pleasure courses through you at such a stare, craving the way your mind shuts off at his touch, how easily you might lose yourself in him.

This is not, of course, the first time you have used each other so; anger and grief, those familiar twin tides that have delivered you both so many times to each other’s sheets. It is a tide, washing upon you both as he grasps you closer yet – grief begets anger begets want – and you wonder, in the colder corners of your mind, if you kiss him to forget, or forget only so that you might kiss him, and whether his hungered hands upon you are in some comfort or conflagration.

Though, perhaps it matters not. You and him have always been as such – two sides of the same mad coin.

Drawn back, your gaze hooks upon glittering eyes already looking up at you, blown wide and dark, lust-drunk enough to steal little breath you had left to lose from your lungs. And further, some hard and gleaming thing, a burning silver glint, some certain possession which you saw not minutes past upon a blade of your own.

Your hands fall to grasp his shoulders in a sudden drench of raw desire.

“You–you gave me a sword,” you revel then, a bewildered gasp of both allegation and adoration, spilling loose from lips bitten and hungry, “Iksā ribazmoqitta”. You’re mad.

A low sound comes from him, startled so very rough and pleased, fingers stuttering against you for half a moment before resuming their maddeningly wonderful guidance upon your hips.

“Nyke gōntan, s-se iksan.” Jacaerys’ voice has now thickened – I did, and I am – and whatever command he so held frays away beneath his own trembling pleasure, drawing you harder upon the strain of him as you sigh against the heat-thick air of the chamber. “Has it truly moved you so wholly, Princess?” he hums, eyes not daring to cease yours for even a moment; and it is perhaps that contact of unceasing eyes which curls pleasure up through you so fiercely. He hums once more. “Tell me, gevie.”

“You’ve driven me mad,” you admit, breathless and sighed, hips canting forward to drag the warmth of your aching cunt against the line of his cock, sighing a breathy thing when his lashes flutter, too. “And to see you knelt there before me – gods, Jace–”

He has always rather enjoyed, you think, hearing his name from your lips like this – at first out of some cruelty, maybe – though now it seems only to steal the very last dredge of control he’s been clinging to, one hand rising from your hip to gather a fist of your hair, guiding your mouth to his own in a shuttered breath. His tongue slides along your own – spiced wine and figs and hunger – and you feel your thighs begin to tremble with poorly contained desire when your hand slides low, over heaving chest and strained ridge of stomach, to the band of his breeches.

A groan against your spit-laced lips, parted only on a soft breath of Jace’s own as your palm presses, just so, upon the straining of his cock against you.

A mangled attempt of your name comes then, as your hand finds him properly at last, curling along the shape of him through the fabric. Splayed across your hip, his other hand twitches and seizes, lips drawn in a heady groan from somewhere deep in his chest.

Hips jerk hard into your palm before he can master himself.

“Eager,” you murmur, perhaps to yourself; though in your own urge both to please and to explore, and indeed boldened by the vision of him so undone, you slip your hand to unlace his breeches. A quick, shaking desire, gently nudging away his chivalrous efforts to aid you; and soon enough, your palm dives past fabric and finally to his cock.

“Gods–”

It tears loose from him ragged, forehead dropping to yours, breath coming fast and uneven against your mouth. Soon as your grasp finds him – startlingly warm beneath your palm, heavy, leaking with desire – you begin a slow bob of your wrist, enough so that his eyes roll heavenward, some swallowed noise dying in the sharp angle of his bared throat.

To your surprise, his hand tightens along your hip to guide the roll of you against him, even as his own hips buck up hard to meet your fist. A frantic rhythm builds soon – lost of control and care, merely chasing the searing pleasure that melts between you, rolling over like magma spilt from ancient throat of volcano.

It is only after a moment of fluttered pretty lashes and ruddy pleasure-laced cheeks that Jace seems to catch up to his body, clarity roving through his gaze in a bout of shivers as you twist your wrist, readjusting against him to feel the pulse of his pleasure once more. His hand drops from your hair at last, trailing down instead to claw at your skirts viciously.

Any less entrenched in such molten desire, you’d laugh a cruel thing – though his palm is now searching, deft and quick, for the end of your skirts. He finds them and snakes, voracious and knowing, all the way up your thigh and to your womanhood; jolts of pleasure course through you. It is with a pleasure-laced smirk that his other palm comes, tugging your thighs only further apart upon him, your hand stuttering in its motions at the sudden sensation.

In a pleasure-laced daze, Jacaerys swipes his thumb to gather the slick of your arousal upon his fingers, a hum low from his own bruised lips, coming to press to your chest. Your head falls back, tresses tumbling your spine as you loose a moan into the firethick chamber.

A gentle press against the pearled bundle of your nerves, still sensitive enough from the morning past, your thighs quiver once more. In a moment of some wicked vengeance, your thumb finds the sweet beads of precum along him, leaking his pleasure and spreading along his length as you draw a faster, tighter rhythm.

You do not expect how quickly it undoes you, his and your own hands working so horribly in tandem upon each other – chasing and giving, staring in a hooked contest of gaze upon the other’s visage to trace the sheer pleasure there.

After a crueler tease of his palm against your aching heat, you find yourself falling forward – and landing your palm, without any true thought behind it, upon the base of his throat. He goes rigid beneath you at once, eyes casting back until you see the sweet white of them, lips parted in a stuttered gasp.

“Fuck,” a sudden gasp, nothing at all like his usual careful speech, and you can feel the full-body shudder of it beneath your palm, how it vibrates and how his throat works hard around a swallow of pleasure.

Chasms of melted amber, his eyes blow wide and find yours again; and a grasp rises quick, finding your wrist where it rests at the base of his throat – not to pull it away, but instead to hold it there, right against the racing thrum of his pulse, as though he wants nothing more than the weight of your hand exactly where it is. Beneath your palm, you are driven mad; for his heartbeat – you tremor, a thing of unfounded belief – his pulse beats exactly in time with your own.

His huff is one of flushed ecstasy, lashes low-lidded, lips curved nearly vain in his pleasure. “Gaomagon daor vīlībagon ziry, Sodjisto.”

Do not fight it.

A flutter from you, feeling his words vibrate through his throat – the growing sensation of pressure builds within you by the breath, drawing a small noise from the back of your throat. Your gaze roots low upon the sheen of pleasure coating his exposed neck, enviously watching the flames of the hearth behind you to lick up his throat, imagining the blood thrumming beneath it, so jeweled and blessed with fire. Your wrist flicks faintly, swiping once more along the length of him if only to see the goosepimples rise beneath his tunic. Gods. Your whimper is swallowed, gaze hooked upon the warmth of him. “J-Jace–”

“Jur–” he interjects, wrecked around your mother tongue, a shivering thing as his hips buck impossibly hard into your fist, cheeks painted a beautiful red.

“Jurnegon rȳ nyke,” he finally spits, voice curling sharp round the words. Look at me.

Your eyes fly to his own from where they’d watched that sunkissed throat swallow around his own words, meeting that wild, glinting hunger.

Your own tongue, rendered helpless to the ministrations upon your body, shivering in ecstasy as he strokes tighter against you, your own fist moving quicker still, the sounds of your pleasures echoing in harmony across the hearth-lit chamber.

In a ditch of self-gathering, your gaze flicks to the wall – where the shadow of you both entwined, dragging hips hard together, licks across the stone. Gods.

“Gaomagon jāre,” Jace nearly groans then – keep going – and you do, thumb swiping once more over him, pulling a true moan from him.

It is then that two fingers slide along your heat and press, agonizingly slow, into your aching core. A hums against the long-moaned sigh you loose, his mouthing lips shushing so gentle along your throat until he fills you wholly with his fingers, just as he had that very morning.

A gasp drips from your lips then, sore only in that you have ached for him, as though each moment you are not against him, each breath Jacaerys is not within you, leaves your body empty and hungry, craving for his return.

You answer that ache with your own hand, emboldened, setting a pace from memory of his gasped pleasures, nights ago upon the mattress just now over his shoulder. His composure, that sweet and admirable thing: frayed and severed to threads beneath your palm. His hips buck up hard to meet you; a sound tears loose from his throat, nowhere close to princely, certainly something so pure and lovely and ragged that it draws a clench of arousal around you, too – squeezing where his fingers match your own pace. You feel the whole of him trembling now, strung taut, a bowstring drawn beautifully tight.

His other hand, trembling, rises to grasp your jaw, drawing your visage to stare directly into his own. “K-kostilus, ȳdra daor keligon–” please, don’t stop–

It is all within you not to cast his hand away this very moment and take him deep within you now, gasping as you are, as he is – the two of you trembling and breathing heavy against one another. But you must wait, you remind yourself, recalling that night that now seems so long ago, tangled in the bed of your chambers, Jace’s words whispered low and bruised; For your honor, and… for ours.

And so you don’t stop, yourself nor him – not even when his thumb slides to conjure that great tide within you, nor when his other hand flies to your hip, fingers digging hard enough into your flesh to surely leave marks, nor when your name breaks from him twice in a row, ragged and unrecognizable as anything princely, anything composed. He is beautiful like this, wrecked and open and entirely yours, curls damp at his temple, throat working around sounds he does not seem able to stop himself from making anymore, the vibrations of them against your trebling hand.

“I–I’m close, I–” he starts and yet cannot finish it, hips stuttering hard beneath your palm.

“I know,” you murmur into his mouth, and then in a lick of something wicked, you tilt your head until your lips brush his ear, your fist tightening gently as he throbs in your grasp, the slide of your hand slickened with shared desire.

“Jurnegon rȳ nyke, sir,” you tell him. Look at me, now. Your lips pull back as you add, “jaelan naejot ūndegon ao.” I want to see you.

And he does.

With a widened, ripping gaze toward your own, he goes rigid beneath you, back bowing off the settee, one hand fisting hard in the fabric at your hip and the other stumbling to continue pleasuring you. A slide of your own ecstasy, cascading into shivers – his lips spill a low enough sound you nearly mistake it for a moan, though in the tapering of his tongue you find your own name, laid between you as a prayer, some desperate thing.

The tense of him reaches his fingers deep within you, still; curled in a groan, they reach a spot within you that drives your heartbeat to gallop, nearing a precipice so delicious you nearly whimper. He spills himself over your palm, hot and wanting; breath caught in his throat, lashes lace low-lidded and pleased.

In a moment of lapsed breath, his fingers slip from you wholly; a small gasp at the loss, though his head falls back against the upholstery, still trembling in aftershock. Chest heaving in the moments after his high, you watch him come back to himself, tension draining from his shoulders inch by inch, until at last his eyes open again and find you above him, flushed and pleased and watching him with an open fondness you make no attempt, now, to hide.

Your own pulse still races; your pleasure guided and then unintentionally withdrawn, lies coiled near its crest in a teasing pulse, drawn back as tides leave the shore.

It is a small move – merely a shift of knees, a regain of purchase – though this alone is enough for Jace’s hands to find your hips, steadying you there above him again.

“Stay just like this,” he murmurs then, voice still rough from his own undoing, though it’s gained back its certainty besides. “Let me look at you a moment.”

Slicked with your previous pleasure, his fingers trail slow up the inside of your thigh, dragging up your skirts enough so to bare you before him upon his lap, a shameful thing drawing dizziness to your head. With a shutter, your hand slides to brace against his chest just to stay upright, breath already stuttering once more when his fingers finally find your weeping entrance once more.

His fingers, so torturous now in his own languid afterglow of pleasure, nearly conjure stars through your gaze, and he presses lips to your jaw before drawing back, gazing up at you in a molten heat.

It is a strong thing, his gaze – and with it comes the shivering roves of heat across your sweat-licked throat, blooming over your cheeks and ears, feeling so very flushed and bare above him in the firelight despite your dress still laced across your chest. In a moment of shyness, or whatever else you might conjure when being so eaten by such a gaze, you press your legs draw together instinctively, closing round his thighs.

A strong grasp comes quick, nudging apart the meat of your thigh with a fast grasp; Jace’s brows furrow, eyes remaining upon yours as his voice dips low.

“Don’t,” he says, “I want to watch you, now.”

Shivers take you, after that. He holds none of the earlier restraint, distracted as he was by his own canting pleasure; his teasing pace dies, replaced with vigor and a strong rhythm, stretching you with a curled motion as though to beckon you closer still. Lips glossed and kiss-bruised, he murmurs things sweet and sickeningly coy only to watch your face with near fascination each time, rendering you helpless as his wrist picks its pace. The sound of your pleasure echoes sweet and quick of breath through his chamber, another hand coming to encourage the bucking of your hips against him, chasing the pleasure you seek.

You begin quiet at first, then less so; for his name comes in sighs between hitches of pleasure, toes curling as your nails grasp hard into the front of his loosened tunic.

“Pretty girl,” he murmurs then, words slipping so sudden that it makes your spine arch, “Could watch you forever, like this. Iksis ziry sȳz?” Is it good?

“Jace–” you mean it as a warning as his had been, half-swallowed in a plea, and he only presses closer in answer, fingers curling deliciously into you, reaching a spot so sweet your spine bows into him; and his mouth finds your throat, teeth grazing sharp over the same spot his lips had claimed earlier.

He says your name low to this, followed by words so sonorously reverent – how well you look like this, all his, how many times he’s imagined exactly this, all the ways he’s dreamt of having you to himself – until the words dip and sway into sensation and the pleasure becomes too much, a sharp and quick crest as you tremble upon his lap, thighs burning, knees aching deliciously.

It is a buck of your hips, grinding the heel of his palm into your most sensitive, aching core, that your eyes cast themselves back, rolled toward the ceiling.

Your sight is swallowed wholly when you reach your crest.

“I have you,” he whispers against your skin as you keen, feeling him so steady beneath you even as you come apart above him, one hand fisted in the fabric at his shoulder, the other snaking for grasp upon the curve of his arm, grasping tight.

His name breaks from your lips, moaned into the junction of his neck and shoulder, lips petaling the sweat-sweet skin there.

He keeps you there, fingers still sweet and coaxing within you, wringing out your pleasure and holding you tenderly down upon his lap until the waves of it cease gently into a wonderful, low hum. Your cheek is still pressed to the tacky skin of his neck once the familiar ache of your limbs comes for you once more, a reminder of such irresisted and repetitious sin between you.

You collapse against him wholly once his fingers leave you; arms snake round you at once to gather you close, one hand smoothing slow up your spine as your breathing gradually steadies against his chest, a stutter in your breath as you listen to the thrum of his pulse. A kiss comes tender and sweet to your temple; unhurried, nose dragged along the side of your head lazily to press his lips, once more, to your brow.

“Gods,” he whispers against your hair, right at the embelleshings of your temple – once beautiful, now loosened by his grasp in moments past. A laugh tumbles from your lips and onto the side of his neck. Turning your chin, you press a kiss chastely to his lips – though it grows in both heat and small laughter shared between you after a moment, so dazed and bewildered as you both have been rendered.

You really are exhausted, you realize – such little sleep in the last handful of days has left you delirious, less it all comes from the soothing of Jace’s palm now over the crown of your head and his lips pressing across your whole visage in small pecks. You could, indeed, fall asleep right then.

And yet some persistent thing still needles beneath your exhaustion, a looming shadow that creeps upon you now that the fire between you has subsided – a thing which has trailed you since girlhood, curling patient through your dreams.

The thought comes quick and horrible past the lessened guard of your mind, and you stiffen all the more for it: The death of Helaena’s boy has bought you your marriage, in simplest terms. And you fear, in the weakest, most true corner of your heart, what joy might cost you next.

But Jacaerys is warm and so very alive beneath you. His arms, heavy with pleasure and something sweeter yet, pulls you only closer, unfolding your legs to slide you across his lap instead. And it is with his fingers pressing into the soreness of your tightened muscles, and the quiet conversation that blossoms between you then – stubborn-rooted as any weed that has ever split stone to reach the sun – that you kiss Jacaerys and share whispers with him until you are both warm and soft as spent candlewax yourselves.

It is not much longer before the fire burns down too far to properly hold back the chill, and Jacaerys – perhaps in some final careful gesture toward propriety before the wedding, or due to the downturned eyes of your guard, awaiting still outside his chambers – walks you back through darkened halls, neither of you hurrying, your steps dragging slow and reluctant over old stone worn smooth by a hundred years of other such partings.

In one hand he cradles your palm, entirely undaunted now by your guard’s steady presence some paces behind; in the other, he cradles beneath his arm the dark box, wrapped once more in its linen. He surrenders both only once you have reached your door.

“Sleep well, Princess,” he murmurs, pressing the words into a kiss against your brow, warm as a coal set gentle to rest in ash.

“You too,” you whisper, cheeks warming further as he slides your gift back into your own arms, your guard’s eyes cast dutifully elsewhere toward the dark of the corridor. You lean forward once more before he can properly go, sending him off with a chaste kiss pressed to the small, familiar dimple carved into his cheek.

It is only once your handmaids have come and gone again – dressing you down for sleep, combing the day’s tangles and gossip from your hair not once but twice, all the while trading grins and girlish, breathless questions after what the box might hold, what the prince is like away from duty, if you’ve let him kiss you yet – that you finally take the sword out to turn its blade slow within your hands once more.

The candlelight catches the wings, glinting gold and silver in winking turns; and in glint of dead emberlight, for only a moment, the blade catches something else, too.

There, just within the thin light of the blade’s cool reflection, you catch the visage of a girl – hair bled of all its colour, eyes gone violet, draped in the pale gold wedding robes of Old Valyria; and there, from her stomach blooms a dyed red, churning deeper and deeper as spilt rubies. A shadow falls, then, from some looming height – speared upon the burning hiss of a sharpened flame.

A stuttered breath brings your eyes to blink fiercely, fear rooting itself cold through everywhere you were just so very warm.

Your pulse rights itself once your gaze returns to it – for it is only your own reflection that you have caught, foolishly; only warped strange by the blade’s dark polish – mistaken in a moment’s trick of madness, or pleasure, or perhaps too much wine.

You curse the wine first, and then the lingering sensation of Jacaerys still upon your skin; With a half-mad gaze of awe, you tenderly fold the sword back into its bed of dark velvet, placing it upon your dressing table before crossing at last toward your own waiting bed.

You do not sleep with your sword far from reach that night.

You do not think, after everything, that you ever will again.

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